So, it’s finally happened. Russell Brand, comedian-turned-radical-political-podcaster, is being called out internationally about an alleged, decades-long history of sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior toward women and girls. He was called out by an investigative article in the UK’s Sunday Times and a documentary exposé on Channel 4.
 
Here’s the Wikipedia condensed version:

Now, here’s the thing. Russell Brand has been in active recovery from substance abuse disorder—including alcohol and heroin, since he went into rehab in 2002. He’s been clean and sober for more than two decades, and he has shared publicly and generously about his journey in recovery. His book, Recovery: Freedom From Our Addictions, was a best-seller. In 2005, he entered rehab in the US for sex addiction, and since then, he has been very open about the harms of pornography. In his autobiography he wrote about having drawn up an extensive ‘victims list’ of women he had “wronged” as a result of his sexual addiction.

In addition he has shared his history of sexual abuse. When he was a little boy, he was sent to a tutor who, according to Brand, "when I got a question right – by way of congratulation – stuck his finger up my arse and felt my balls."  He told his mother, who told his father, and the tutoring stopped, but nothing was ever done. When he was a teenager, his father took him on an Asian "sex tourism" holiday, and his father rented a prostituted woman to "teach him to be a man." The father stayed in the room to watch.  According to Brand, he was advised to leave his childhood abuse out of the book, but, he wrote, "The reason I left it in was because I thought, if in Chapter Four you see this happen, when in Chapter Twelve, I'm rampaging round having it off with prostitutes, you might see a corollary."

All of this is to say, I believed in Brand's recovery. My first reaction to The Times account was, "Oh, my god! He’s going to own it! He’s going to do something that none of these predators have ever done before! He’s going to model 12-Step accountability, and he’s going to do it on a public stage!  He’s going to walk his talk and set an example for the world!"

My second reaction reinforced my first:   "He's no Harvey Weinstein! He's no Bill Cosby!  The man has reinvented himself!"

Russell Brand is no longer a man-boy, mommy-shocker, BBC clown-prince, bad-boy comedian. He’s a political commentator, and an extremely competent one. He has rebranded himself as a whistleblower who is not afraid to take on the government as well as huge corporations. Some consider him the king of conspiracy theories, but, whenever I have watched his podcast, he brings the receipts, posting and citing all of his sources. Impressive. Oh, and he has attracted something like seven million followers… He is actually giving mainstream media a run for the money.

An example: There is a memorable video on Youtube of Russell Brand receiving an award at the 2013 Gentlemans’ Quarterly [GQ] Annual Man of the Year ceremony.  This ceremony is sponsored by Hugo Boss, a leading global fashion and lifestyle company. Boris Johnson, then-mayor of London, has just made a joke about the Labour Party’s lack of support for the war in Syria. So, now Brand takes the stage and says:
 
“This environment is not designed for sincerity, you realize… We will struggle if we start bringing sincerity into the situation… I’m glad to grace the stage where Boris Johnson has just made light of the use of chemical weapons in Syria, meaning that GQ can now stand for “genocide quips.” I mention that only to make this next comment a bit lighter, because if any of you know a little bit about history and fashion will know that Hugo Boss made the uniforms for the Nazis, but… and the Nazis did have flaws, but, you know, they did look fucking fantastic…”

It is you who are being called to account for your past perpetration. Like the fashion giant, you are just wanting everyone to move on and celebrate who you are today. But, there were very real victims in your past collusion with a toxic, profoundly misogynist culture. And this time, Mr. Brand, it is we the people who have the receipts. There are dozens of videos of your comedy act, your hosting, your game show participation where you parade your history of misogynist predation as if it was a joke. There are videos of you grabbing, groping, kissing women. All of which are criminal acts, you realize. And then there are the women who were part of the BBC investigation. In the week following the publication of the story, there have been a half-dozen more who have come forward. And then there is the video clip from a talk show where you brag about having just exposed yourself to a woman in a bathroom minutes before going on air. In that encounter you called her by a name that was not hers and insisted you were going to continue calling her that and that you were going to "f*** her." She was terrified. It made a great joke on air.

Surely, with all that yoga, meditation, chanting, healthy lifestyle, recovery proselytizing, and especially with all of that whistleblowing, you are going to take responsibility for your actions... After all, you have made millions--millions!—by calling out the sleazy tactics of public figures who are trying to evade public accountability!

We are looking to you not to use the same-old, same-old, banal, corporate playbook of denial, lawyering up to intimidate and discourage potential witnesses, deflecting, and—of course—throwing the women and girls under the bus. We are looking to you not to take the easy way out, the rich man’s way out—which, of course, is to retraumatize your victims by discrediting them. Surely, you’re not going to play the victim, to pretend that these women are all gold-diggers or vindictive exes.  One of them was sixteen when you were thirty!  Surely you are not going to trash the child that she was!

Surely, with all of this, Mr. Brand, you are going to show up and own everything… You can’t possibly be that big of a phony and a hypocrite, can you?  Surely, now, with two daughters of your own, you can’t model this kind of misogyny? With all your pride about your working-class background, you can’t lean into the classism behind “out-lawyering” your victims? Surely, with two decades of sharing your recovery with the public, now that it’s crunch time, you’re going to “walk the talk,” aren’t you…?  Mr. Brand…?  Aren’t you…?

No, he's not.
 
And, actually, in anticipation of this kind of exposure, Brand has already been hiring high-power attorneys to threaten former alleged victims who have attempted to go public with their personal stories of rape and predatory behavior. He’s not owning a damn thing. He appears to feel completely entitled to retraumatize these women with legal threats.

Given the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the article went to press, Brand chose not to. Instead, he made his own video on September 16:

“Obviously, it’s been an extraordinary and distressing week, and I thank you very much for your support and for questioning the information that you’ve been presented with… But amidst this litany of astonishing rather baroque attacks, are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute… These allegations pertain to the time when I was working in the mainstream, when I was in the newspapers all the time, when I was in the movies. And as I've written about extensively in my books, I was very, very promiscuous… Now, during that time of promiscuity, the relationships I had were absolutely always consensual… What I seriously refute are these very, very serious criminal allegations…”

Brand is revealing his defense strategy: The watchwords will be “promiscuity” and “consensual.” He is parsing his words to avoid libel. He says the “relationships” were consensual. He is not saying anything about the alleged acts. In fact, he has been accused of assault and rape within these relationships. These acts are criminal even if they transpire between married couples. He is leaning into the word “promiscuity,” which is defined as “characterized by many transient sexual relationships.” It’s also defined as “implying an undiscriminating or unselective approach.” “Promiscuity” would indicate that the only one harmed is himself, for dating women not in his league.  These words, “promiscuity” and “consensual” have been carefully chosen to counter the multiple charges of criminal behavior.

Predation, not promiscuity.  Nonconsensual, not consensual. According to the women coming forward, he ambushed women, he assaulted them, he propositioned them in the most intentionally vulgar and demeaning ways. He resorted repeatedly to coercive tactics, including emotional abuse, manipulation, physical intimidation, and force.

In addition to minimizing the allegations in his video, Brand  characterizes the professional investigation as some kind of conspiracy of “news media making phone calls and sending letters to people I know.” That’s actually what’s known in journalism as “research.” He goes on to say that it feels to him like a “serious and concerted agenda to control these kinds of [alternative] spaces and these kinds voices.” Then, to clarify, he adds, “And I mean my voice along with your voice.”  Summing up, he again qualifies his actions as promiscuous and consensual, but absolutely not criminal.   

After this, he went silent for a week as more women came forward and more criminal allegations were made. And then the hammer dropped: Youtube demonetized his channel. What does that mean? It means he can no longer earn ad revenue off his videos on that platform. (It’s estimated that he was making a million a year off Youtube ad revenue.)  In addition, his management company dropped him, his publisher is suspending any planned publications, and the remaining dates on his current tour have been postponed.

On September 22, Brand issued his second response video. In this video he is actively deploying his defense strategy: a full-throttle call to the faithful to support him as the victim of a massive, international, corporate witch-hunt that will soon engulf us all:

"By now, you're probably aware that the British government has asked big tech platforms to censor our online content and that some online platforms have complied with that request. What you may not know is that this happens in the context of the online safety bill which is a piece of UK legislation that grants sweeping surveillance and censorship powers and it's a law that's already been passed."

Yes, every citizen in the UK has reason to be very wary of this legislation. And, yes, Russell Brand has many corporate enemies. He is absolutely posing a threat to mainstream media. He is a consummate showman, and he brings that A-game to his podcast. He makes traditional broadcasters look like sleepwalkers. And his numbers (seven million) are insane. Yes, there are many powerful people who would like to see him taken down.

And, none of that invalidates the allegations by these ten women of decades-long sexual assault, rape, grooming, and predatory behavior... much of which is actually documented.

Back to this second video:  Brand directs his followers to move over to the platform Rumble, which will now be his primary platform. (Rumble has not demonetized him.) He outlines the topics of of his future broadcasts: the Trusted News Initiative he referenced earlier, the "deep state" and corporate collusion,” big pharma, media corruption and censorship. At the end, he begs his followers to stay with him as he needs them “now more than ever and more than I ever imagined I would.”

He made no mention of the allegations. It's now all completely about a global conspiracy to shut down his broadcast. 

Unquestionably, the stakes are extremely high for Brand. A public amends would be a confession of crimes, and, as of yesterday, he is already the subject of a police investigation. He stands to lose his wealth and spend the rest of his life in prison.

But the stakes are very high for his victims, and these are not just the women coming forward. The victims are also cultural. How many males modeled themselves on Brand, because they saw it worked. They saw him lifted up and richly compensated as a stud. They saw his rape jokes garnering huge laughs. How many women were silenced and disbelieved in the culture for whom he was a figurehead? 

The UK has no statute of limitations for sex crimes. Does Russell Brand want to become the test case for challenging that?  Does he want to see the UK adopt the kind of time limits for prosecution we have in the US? Because every victim in the US can tell you that these limits only protect the perpetrators. Many criminals move away from the person they used to be when they committed their crimes. Some go on to do good work. Does this mean they are no longer accountable? Brand, consistent with his perpetrations, is now marshaling his forces to set a rape culture precedent in the UK of non-accountability.

I want to say very clearly that Russell Brand is not in recovery from sex addiction. He's taken the playbook of rape culture to a new low in the last two weeks. And if his 12-Step sponsors are endorsing his decision to lawyer-up, to lie, to deny, to deflect, and to do everything he can to discredit his victims, then they are violating their own recovery just as he is violating his.

Mr. Brand, I call you out on your hypocrisy and your ongoing perpetrations. You, yes you, are part of one of the most heinous conspiracies in human history, the conspiracy to degrade, exploit, and subjugate women and girls. Your recovery is a complete sham, and however you attempt to justify your actions to yourself, all of your good works have now been utterly co-opted as part of your criminal cover-up, and they will be remembered in that light. We see you.

Originally published in off our backs women’s newsjournal, vol. 37, no. 2/3, 2008, Washington, DC.

Anna Politkovskaya was murdered last week [October 7, 2006]—executed, actually. Someone followed her into the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow, shot her four times: twice in the chest, once in the shoulder, and a final shot to the head. The pistol, its serial number filed off, was left next to the body, the sign of a contract killing.
 
Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist whose fearless, behind-the-scenes coverage of the Chechen war had exposed human-rights abuses in Russia’s southern province of Chechnya, where tens of thousands have been killed during two Kremlin campaigns. She documented not only the brutality of the conflict, but also the massive corruption and moral corrosion that was occurring at all levels and on both sides. She was not afraid to name names, and, on at least one occasion, to print the official’s phone number, inviting her readers to register their disgust personally.

In the months before her murder, she had been focusing on the Moscow-backed, Chechen Prime Minister Ramsan Kadyrov. In fact, just two days before her murder, on Kadyrov’s thirtieth birthday, she made him the subject of her last radio interview. The date was significant because it marked the day Kadyrov met the age eligibility requirement to stand for the post of president. Politkovskaya was well-aware of this fact and of his aspirations when she chose to accuse him of torture.
 
"Right now I have two photographs on my desk. I am conducting an investigation about torture today in Kadyrov’s prisons, today and yesterday. These are people who were abducted by the Kadyrovtsi [members of Kadyrov’s personal militia] for completely inexplicable reasons and who died… " (Politkovskaya/ RFE)  
 
At this point, the interviewer suggested that perhaps these were individual cases, representing only a small percentage of abuses. Politkovskaya responded in no uncertain terms:

"I’d like to call attention to the fact that we talk about “individual cases” only because these people aren’t our loved ones – it’s not my son, my brother, my husband. The photographs that I’m telling you about, these were bodies that had been horribly tortured. You can’t reduce this to a small percentage—it’s an enormous percentage." (Politkovskaya/ RFE)
 
Politkovskaya was as unequivocal regarding the Chechen prime minister:
 
"Kadyrov is the Stalin of our times. This is true for the Chechen people. He’s a coward armed to the teeth and surrounded by security guards… Personally I have only one dream for Kadyrov’s birthday: I dream of him someday sitting in the dock, in a trial that meets the strictest legal standards, with all of his crimes listed and investigated."(Politkovskaya/ RFE)
 
Was Politkovskaya’s assassination a response to this broadcast? Certainly she had been aware of the danger. Kadyrov had publicly vowed to murder her. According to her, “He actually said during a meeting of his government that Politkovskaya was a condemned woman.” (Hearst) But journalism is a dangerous profession in Russia. Twenty-three journalists had been killed there between 1996 and 2005, many in Chechnya, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. At least twelve have been murdered in contract-style killings since Putin came to power. (AP)

Her unfinished, final article was published a week after her murder by the biweekly, independent Novaya Gazeta, her paper for the last seven years. The story included testimony from a Chechen torture victim and still photos from a video, which, according to the paper, said showed Chechen security forces beating two young men, apparently to death.
 
The mystery is not so much that Politkovskaya was killed, but where she found the courage to continue working in the face of so much danger. After all, she had been receiving death threats since 1999, when she first began documenting human rights abuses in Chechnya. (WiPC) Members of her family had been threatened. A few months before her murder, unknown assailants tried unsuccessfully to break into a car her daughter, Vera, was driving. As the obituary in the Guardian comments,

"She had already used up several of her nine lives as a reporter. She had been locked in a hole in the ground by Russian troops and threatened with rape, kidnapped, and poisoned by the FSB [former KGB] on the first flight to Rostov after the Beslan school siege in 2004… Her husband left her. Her son pleaded with her to stop. Her neighbors, cowed by the attentions of the FSB in an upmarket street in central Moscow, shunned her."(Hearst)
 
Who was this woman Anna Politkovskaya? Where did she find her courage? Was she super-human, immune to threats of torture and death?
 
Certainly, she could have chosen a different life. Born in 1958 in New York, the daughter of United Nations diplomats from the Ukraine, she had a privileged background and dual citizenry. After graduating from Moscow University in 1980, she wrote for the national daily Izvestia before switching to the smaller, independent presses. She had a husband and two children. Never envisioning herself as a war correspondent, Politkovskaya stated, “I was interested in reviving Russia’s pre-revolutionary tradition of writing about our social problems. That led me to writing about  the seven million refugees in our country. When the war started, it was that that led me down to Chechnya.” (Hearst)

Her first book,  A Dirty War: A Russian Reporter in Chechnya, published in 1999, told horrifying anecdotes of human rights abuses perpetrated by the Russian military. This was followed three years later by A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, where Politkovskaya continued to put a human face on the horrors of war. Her latest book, Putin’s War: Life in a Failing Democracy, was published last year. According to  The New York Times, it was “a searing portrait of a country in disarray and of the man at its helm.”
 
But professional drive cannot explain the courage of Politkovskaya. There must have been something more, something deeper.
 
There are some clues in her account of the Moscow theatre hostage crisis in 2003, when renegade, Chechen hostage-takers, requested her as a negotiator. They had seized a theatre and were holding 850 people hostage. Unlike the sparse and impersonal accounts of her torture in 2000, this report is surprisingly subjective:
 

Ultimately, the only thing that she was able to negotiate was permission to bring some water and juice to the hostages who had neither eaten nor drunk in two days. Early the next morning, Russian special forces stormed and gassed the theatre, killing forty-two of the hostage-takers and 129 hostages.
 
But what her account demonstrates is that, shaking and barely able to stand, she was human and terrified. At the same time, she could not ignore the verbal harassment of her companion on this dangerous and humanitarian mission. In what might seem to others a minor point under the circumstances, she is scrupulous about setting the record straight, and in doing so, recovers her spiritual poise. Her focus is on the suffering of those caught in the middle of the conflict, the hostages—and especially the children. But her sympathy for the hostages does not keep her from quoting with empathy her captors’ words, “You never give our children any food during mopping operations, so let yours suffer, too.” (Politkovskaya)
 
That was the power and the genius of Potlitkovskaya—her ability to hold onto the larger context of governments, political parties, military campaigns, while at the same time focusing on the often-contradictory details of individual experience and accountability. It was this focus on the immediate suffering, the outrage of the moment, that was the hallmark of her journalism—and possibly the secret behind her tremendous courage.

References:  

Associated Press. “Russian Reporter Killed in Moscow.”  7 October 2006
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061007.wrussian- journo1007/BNStory/International/home
 
Hearst, David. “Anna Politkovskaya: Crusading Russian Journalist Famed for her Exposés of Corruption and the Chechen War.” The Guardian 9 October 2006  http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1890838,00.html
 
Maineville, Michael. “The Silencing of Anna Politkovskaya.” Spiegel Online 13 October 2006 http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,442392,00.html
 
Politkovskaya, Anna. “Inside a Moscow Theater with the Chechen Rebels.” International Women’s Media Foundation, http://www.iwmf.org/features/anna
 
Politkovakay, Anna, interviewed by RFE/RL. “Russia: Anna Politkovskaya’s Last Interview.” Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty 9 October 2006 http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2006/10/fc088b08-0cbd-4800-b2ff-f00f5494fa5e.html
 
Smith, Becky. “Independent Journalism Has Been Killed in Russia.” The Guardian 11 October 2006
http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1896806,00.html
 
Writers in Prison Committee, International PEN. “International PEN Statement on the Murder of Russian Writer and Journalist, Anna Politkovskaya.” International Freedom of Expression Exchange 7 October 2006 http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/78140

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Summer 2010, Northampton, MA.

“Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”--Wilma Mankiller
 
Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nations died on April 6, 2010. She served as their Principal Chief from and 1985 to 1995.
 
Her story contains and reflects the history of her people, retracing archetypal paths of displacement and homecoming. And her story is the story of a powerful woman—negotiating motherhood and intimate partnerships in a patriarchal landscape, meeting and overcoming resistance to serving in a leadership position. It is also a story of a person living with disabilities, both congenital and accident-related. Mankiller’s lifework was a steady demonstration of what could be possible, for an individual, for a community, for a nation. As her best-selling autobiography emphasizes, political and personal resistance require an understanding of place, knowledge of one’s history, spiritual roots, and a love of one’s people.

Mankiller’s father was Charley Mankiller, a Cherokee, and her mother, Irene, was of Dutch-Irish descent, but acculturated to Cherokee life. She had ten siblings and grew up on her father’s allotment, near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. She remembers her first ten years at “Mankiller Flats” with affection. She and her siblings would walk three miles each way to school, but, in Mankiller’s words, “I didn’t know the difference between being poor and having money until one day at school. A little girl… saw my flour-sack underwear while we were in the outhouse. She ran and told some other girls, and they all teased me about it. That was really the first time I had any inkling we were different.”
 
In 1950, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came up with a plan for dealing with what they termed “the Indian Problem.” This new policy, ominously called “termination,” had been hatched by Dillon S. Myer, the then-commissioner of the BIA. His credentials for the job? He had been the director of the Japanese War Relocation Authority that, during World War II, had implemented the internment of Japanese-American citizens in camps in California. As Mankiller notes in her autobiography, “The Cherokees and other native tribes should have recognized that the assorted Trails of Tears of our ancestors served in large part as models for the removal of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americas in the 1940’s.”

On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted a resolution making Indians “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States…”
 
This policy became the excuse for breaking up Native communities and putting tribal lands, no longer non-taxable, on the market. Mankiller’s family was offered the option of “relocation” to a large, urban city. Her father, having been taken from his home as a boy and forced to attend an Indian boarding school, was reluctant to leave his land, but eventually became persuaded that moving to San Francisco would offer a better future for his children.
 
Mankiller remembers this government facilitated relocation as her own personal “Trail of Tears”—referring to the infamous forced relocations from 1831 to 1838 of five autonomous tribes living in the Deep South. Four thousand of the 15,000 “relocated” Cherokee died from exposure, starvation, and disease during this forced march to Oklahoma.
 
“No one pointed a gun at me or at members of my family. No show of force was used. It was not necessary… I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you give up your home, your community, and everything you have ever known to move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. I wept tears … tears from my history, from my tribe's past. They were Cherokee tears.”

The better life that the Mankillers had been promised turned out to be low-paying factory jobs and housing in an urban ghetto. Feeling neglected by her parents, who had their hands full supporting the large family, Mankiller became a rebellious teenager, running away to her grandmother’s ranch near Modesto. She had to run away five times, before her family finally allowed her to stay. She credits her year on the ranch as a turning point in her life, where she took an active role in the farm, shadowing her tough and outspoken grandmother.
 
At the end of this year, she moved back in with her family, who were now living in Hunter’s Point, an area near the shipyards that had been settled by African American families fleeing the Dust Bowl. By 1960, Hunter’s Point was a neighborhood filled with racial tension and gang violence. Mankiller writes how her years on these “mean streets” began to shape her perception of the world: “The women are especially strong. Each day they face daunting problem as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their children, but of the whole community.”

After high school, Mankiller moved in with her sister, taking a job as a clerical worker. She met an Ecuadoran student from an aristocratic family, and after a dizzying summer courtship, they flew to Reno to get married. Mankiller was seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, and then two years later, she had a second daughter. She began to take classes at a community college and then, through a minorities educational opportunity program, she entered San Francisco State University. By the mid-1960’s the Bay Area was exploding politically and culturally. Mankiller describes taking her daughters to Haight-Ashbury: “…I think the people of the Haight had to be as curious about us as we were about them. My daughters wore shiny patent-leather shoes and little-girl dresses, and I looked like what I was at the time, a young housewife who liked to observe… but was unwilling to get fully involved.”
 
What changed all that was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the fall of 1969. The island had been occupied briefly five years earlier by a group of Sioux, as a symbolic act of reclamation. In a hundred-year-old Sioux treaty, the US government had agreed that any male Native American older than eighteen, whose tribe had been party to the treaty, could file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. As the island had been declared surplus federal property since the closing of the penitentiary in 1963, Native American activists were claiming their right to take possession.

In October 1969, a fire of suspicious origin gutted the American Indian Center in San Francisco. In an act of protest, fourteen Native Americans landed on Alcatraz and claimed it in the name of “Indians of All Tribes.” Within a day, the Coast Guard arrived to escort the protesters off the island, but ten days later, nearly a hundred activists returned—this time with provisions, and the occupation lasted for nineteen months. During this time, Mankiller would visit the island with her daughters, running support for four of her siblings and their children who had joined the protest. In her words, “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.”
 
Mankiller was also feeling the effects of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and against her husband’s wishes, she bought herself a car and began driving to tribal events up and down the coast. She took a job directing the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland and began volunteering with the Pit River people in Northern California, helping them with their fierce battle to regain tribal land from a utility company. Meanwhile, her brother Richard had gone to Pine Ridge and participated in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee.
 
Mankiller separated from her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. Her husband, after picking up nine-year-old Gina for a trip to the circus, informed Mankiller that he would not be returning her. After an agonizing year of separation, he finally brought Gina back, and Mankiller, afraid that he would try to abduct her daughter again, decided it was time to go home to Oklahoma.

“I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay.”
 
She finished her degree in social work and was hired to work for the Cherokee Nation as an economic stimulus coordinator. Her daughters were adapting to their new school, Mankiller was building her home on ancestral lands, and everything seemed on track—and then tragedy struck. She was in a car accident that crushed her face, her legs, and broke her ribs. Worst of all, her best friend had been the driver of the car that hit her, and she had not survived her injuries. The accident required two months’ hospitalization and seventeen surgeries, and it became another turning point.
 
Having come so close to dying—“walking into the spirit world,” as she put it—Mankiller began to turn toward the Cherokee spiritual path, seeing herself as “the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.”
 
Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis and underwent surgery for removal of her thymus. Drawing on the strength of her ancestors and of present-day Cherokee medicine people, she regained her health, returning to her work “with a fury.” She founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department and managed the self-help construction project of a sixteen-mile water pipe that revitalized an impoverished Native community.

The project affirmed her belief that the Cherokee people had the capacity to solve their own problems, and it also brought her together with the man who would become her life partner and best friend—Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who worked with the tribal Housing Authority.
 
In 1983 she was asked to run for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Stunned by the sexism she encountered, Mankiller was accused of being an affront to God, and of making the Cherokees a national laughingstock. She even had foes within her own campaign, but she managed to win the election. In 1985, when the Principal Chief was called to Washington, she inherited his office for the remainder of his term, and then ran on her own for Principal Chief and was elected for two more terms. The Cherokee Nation membership is currently 290,000, making it the second largest tribe in the country, after the Navaho. Mankiller was not only the principal guardian of Cherokee tradition and customs, but she managed a budget of seventy-five million dollars. She saw that much of this income went into health care, education, and job training.

Mankiller had been diagnosed in her twenties with polycystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that ran in her family, and in 1990, she underwent an operation to replace one of her affected kidneys. Her brother Don was the donor.
 
In 1995, she made the decision to retire from public office, but she remained a force in tribal affairs, offering counsel and mediation. Later she taught as a guest professor Dartmouth College. In 1998, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Mankiller’s health problems continued to escalate, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and lymphoma. In 2010, the cancer metastasized to her pancreas, and she died on April 6, at the age of sixty-four.
 
Mankiller wrote, “Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we’re either visionaries, ‘noble savages,’ squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We’re very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.” Her courageous life of leadership and activism has given the world a visible alternative to the racist stereotypes.

Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder.  Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction.  And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? 
 
The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage.  Eleven foster homes.  One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse.  Her mother?  Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday,  her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her.  In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager.  Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead.  Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.”  Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.

But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality.  What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal,  incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders —  a woman who was  raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history —  that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?

What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value.  Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified  they feel. 

Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men.  The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child. 
 
At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold  for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.

 Originally published in Trivia: A Journal of Women’s Voices , Issue 7/8, September 2008.

A few years ago, I wrote about Marilyn Monroe’s traumatic childhood—which included being raised by a single mother who was repeatedly institutionalized for mental illness, placement in multiple foster homes, multiple incidents of child sexual abuse, and being legally prostituted at fifteen in a brokered marriage. Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead. I made the argument that a woman who could have been a poster child for post-traumatic stress syndrome was being celebrated, instead, as an icon for adult female sexuality:
 
"What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value. Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe ‘s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified they feel. Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men. The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?  The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child."
 

Xaviera Hollander’s memoir is similarly illuminating.
 
In 1972, The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander burst onto the scene, becoming an international bestseller and launching its author into instant celebrity. The book seemed to offer proof positive that the so-called “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960’s had indeed succeeded. The publisher crowed, “Far from the conventional image of the prostitute, Xaviera is well-read, articulate, fluent in half-a-dozen languages, and bursting with charm and joie de vivre.”
 
In the book, Hollander recounted in titillating prose her experiences as a prostitute and then as a madam in New York City. It didn’t hurt sales that her appearance corresponded with the stereotype of the “blonde bombshell,” and the fact that she was from the Netherlands lent her an air of European sophistication. Hollander was lauded as a completely liberated woman whose apparently insatiable sexual appetite was nothing more than the natural expression of a healthy libido. The one episode in the book where she was beat up and very nearly murdered by a john is treated as an unfortunate and fluke event, in what was otherwise consistently characterized as an empowering and fulfilling profession.
 
The Happy Hooker sold fifteen million copies, and was made into a movie starring Lynn Redgrave. Hollander went on to write a sex advice column for Playboy, and several more books about her sexy escapades. Then, in 2002, she published a memoir that was very different from her other books. Titled Child No More, this book did not make any best-seller lists or attract any movie deals. It was, in fact, a Holocaust memoir.

Few people who remember the heyday of the Happy Hooker know that she spent the first two years of her life interned in a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. Here is her story:
 
Hollander’s mother, an Aryan, was living in Germany with her family in the 1930’s, when Hitler came to power. She became engaged to a Jewish friend of the family, but, panicking at the wedding, she ran away. A gang of Nazi teenagers cornered her on the street, beat her and stoned her, shaved her head and forced her to wear a sign with the words “Jew whore.” Her family, shocked and terrified, smuggled her into the Netherlands. Here she met and married a Jewish doctor, who was the head of a hospital in Indonesia. Their courtship had been brief, and even before they left for Surabaya, Hollander’s mother discovered that her new husband was a notorious womanizer.
 
In June 1943, Hollander was born, and two months later, she and her mother were taken to a Japanese concentration camp. Her father had already been taken prisoner. Hollander’s mother had the option of going to a camp for Aryan women, where conditions were not so brutal, but she refused to be separated from her daughter, and chose to join the Jewish women with their children.
 

Hollander was able, as an adult, to reunite with a fellow child-survivor from the camp, a woman who had been six years old at the time of her imprisonment. It seems that some of Hollander’s information about her experiences may have been augmented by what her friend could also remember.
 
Hollander recounts how she saw soldiers repeatedly caressing and fondling her six-year-old companion, who was being prostituted by her mother for food. She remembers how all the women had to crouch down “like frogs” in front of the soldiers:
 
"The women were obliged to accept all kinds of humiliation; the slightest sign of disobedience was punished with mindless severity. A favorite practice was for the man to thrust his fingers into the sides of a woman’s mouth and then tear it open from cheek to cheek, leaving a bleeding gash where there had been a mouth. As more and more savage soldiers took over guard duties, there were many who took delight in inflicting torture for its own sake. They would rip open mouths without even the justification of an act of disobedience or a glance of defiance, just as they would inflict beatings as the whim took them." (Hollander, p. 54)

Food was scarce at the camp, and the women and children were all suffering the effects of malnutrition. Some of them were starving, and women attempted to barter with smugglers for any extra provisions they could get. One woman, caught with contraband for her starving child, was burned alive. Hollander’s mother, who had smuggled diamonds into the camp by hiding them in her vagina, was also caught. She was beaten and left for dead among piles of corpses. Managing to survive, it was weeks before she was able to return to her daughter.
 
Hollander describes what may be her most intact memory:
 
"One image survives of me, a lonely, frightened child sitting on a tiny suitcase containing everything I owned, sobbing in terror as a squad of soldiers marched past, each sporting three or four watches stolen from the women, shouting strange words at the top of their voices. Kirei, kirei: bow down, bow down!  There was the uncanny sight of a group of women, bowing and frog-squatting, while on the other side of a barbed wire fence, rifles at the ready, these frightening men strode by. I burst into an uncontrollable torrent of tears. Where was my mother? No one came to dry my tears. An orphan has to look after herself. "(Hollander, p. 59)
 

Meanwhile, Hollander’s father, whom she barely met, was interned in a different camp. Also caught smuggling food, he was beaten, tortured on a bamboo rack, and subjected to electrical shock administered to his genitals.
 
The war ended and the camps were liberated, but before Hollander and her mother were reunited with her father, she suffered another traumatic experience. Climbing a dead tree, she took a fall that resulted in her groin being impaled with a dead tree branch. Taken to the hospital, she remembers there were two doctors, who playfully told her to choose which one would treat her.  Unknowingly, she chose her own father. He also failed to recognize her. 
 
He apparently performed surgery on her torn vulva, and Hollander’s memories of this episode are bizarre. She remembers his “hypnotic power,” as “magic seemed to flow from his hands as they brushed my most private region.” Whether he was sexually inappropriate or she was overlaying previous trauma memories, she would write, “… there was that peculiar attraction at first sight. And in the years that followed, the precocious eroticism his loving, skillful hands had aroused in me would develop into a powerful emotion, little short of obsession.” (Hollander, p. 71)

Such were the formative years of the “Happy Hooker:” imprisonment in a concentration camp where all the males were enemies,foreigners, and sadists, constant witnessing of torture and murder of utterly subordinated women, separation from her mother, starvation, and then an episode of genital trauma associated with incestuous affect.
 
How much of her eagerness to please men sexually could be attributed to a post-traumatic, generalized Stockholm Syndrome? Was the peculiar form of mouth torture that she noted a result of women not smiling enough at their degradation, of not appearing “happy” enough at their sexual violation?  Hollander noted that, in the camps, it was clear that some women were not starving and were visibly better off than others. Later, she would understand that these were the women who were prostituting themselves.  How deep an impression did that information make? Could her celebrated hypersexuality have been a response to inappropriate sexualization as a toddler—either in the camp or at the hands of a father whose lack of sexual boundaries was a constant source of conflict in his marriage?
 
In Hollander’s own words, “A child’s character is like clay, and my confinement in that hell behind the bamboo wall certainly molded my character.”

Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Issue 2, Spring 1999, Northampton, MA.

In the last issue of Rain and Thunder, Barbara Louise's plea for donations to provide permanent housing for “The Dinner Party” was published. “The Dinner Party” by Judy Chicago, a symbolic commemoration of women in history, is probably the most famous work of Second Wave feminist art in the world. From 1974 to 1979, Chicago researched the biographies of women that were just coming to light in the newly-created departments of Women's Studies. She designed a triangular table for the thirty-nine “guests,” each represented by a place setting complete with an individually designed place mat and plate.  Inside the table, was the “Heritage Floor,” where tiles bearing the names of nine hundred and ninety-nine more women honored those not chosen for seating at the table.
 
“The Dinner Party” was a massive work, engaging the minds, hearts, and hands of dozens of women. It marked a reclaiming not only of aspects of women's history, but also of women's traditional arts, which had been considered “crafts” by a male dominant art world.
 
“The Dinner Party,” as with all works of art, represents the vision of its maker—a vision specific to an individual, to a place, and to a time. That time was the beginning of the Second Wave, when the movement was dominated by the interests of white and predominantly middle-class women. That place was the US, a country still struggling to catch up to the upheavals caused by the social revolutions of the 1960's. And that woman was Judy Chicago, a white woman eagerly embracing the discoveries, values, and comeraderie of that early Second Wave and courageously using her feminism to challenge the male hegemony of the commercial and academic art world. It was a time when sisterhood was powerful, but multi-culturalism was not.

Since 1979, the women's movement has undergone changes, including a radical critique of the classism, racism, and Eurocentrism of its earlier agenda and constituency. As African American studies became more feminist-friendly and women's studies became more multi-cultural, consciousness about the marginalization of women of color in so-called “women's history” was raised. Curricula that may have appeared to be racially inclusive in the 1970's is now, in light of two decades of scholarship and publication by and about women of color, seen as painfully tokenizing.
 
“The Dinner Party” is an accurate reflection of the racial imbalance that characterized women's studies two decades ago, and critiques of the work that charge it with racism are valid. In a photograph commemorating the dozens of artists who contributed their work to the project, there is not one face that appears to be African American. Ironically, the book in which this photograph is published is titled The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage.
 
The only African American woman invited to sit at the table is Sojourner Truth. Not just a token at “The Dinner Party,” Truth was also used as a token by the predominantly-white Suffrage Movement. The cause for which she labored stood to benefit white women more immediately than women of color, and perhaps it is for this reason that she was the first woman of color to come to mind when Chicago was drawing up her seating arrangements. Perhaps the work of women like Fannie Lou Hamer or Harriet Tubman was seen as too specific to African Americans to warrant the one place at the table with so many white women.

In addition to calling attention to her token presence, African American critics of “The Dinner Party” have raised objections to the plate design for Sojourner Truth. The other dinner guests have plates whose designs represent fanciful abstractions on the theme of the vulva, but Truth's plate is distinctly “other” and “exotic,” in that it has stylized human faces, not vulvas, on it. Critics have noted a “mammy-esque” treatment of the African American woman's face on this plate, which was overtly designed to represent an African mask and the agony of enslavement.  This refusal to ascribe a vulva design to Sojourner Truth has been read as a racist denial of, or discomfort with, the African American woman's sexuality, a flip-side—or perhaps overreaction—to the traditional stereotype of Black women as oversexed.
 
Chicago does include the names of other Black women among the 999 names on the floor tiles, but this roster is still dominated by white women of European background.
 
The only First Nations woman at the table is Sacajawea, again a collaborator with white—and, this time, colonial—interests. Although the goddesses represented at the table are multi-cultural, the actual historical guests do not include any Latinas or Asian women.  
 
Where do we go from here? Should we abandon “The Dinner Party” to the warehouse where it has been ignominiously stowed all these years—a response not to its lack of racial inclusiveness, but to its aggressive feminist content. Do we, for the good of some supposedly overriding cause, gloss the racism inherent in the token presence of women of color at the table?

Is it possible for a work of art to be considered great, when, at the same time, it reflects and perpetuates racist values?
 
To answer this question, it might be instructive to turn to the words of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, whose work as an English professor at an Ivy League university has compelled her to grapple with a canon of “great works” by almost exclusively white authors. In her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination, she shares with us her discoveries about what she calls “African Americanism,” or “the ways in which a nonwhite or Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US:”
 
American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen. Americans did not have a profligate, predatory nobility from which to wrest an identity of national virtue while continuing to covet aristocratic license and luxury… For the settlers and for American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasions for exercises in the absence of restraint, the presence of restraint, the contemplation of freedom and of aggression; permitted opportunities for the exploration of ethics and morality, for meeting the obligations of the social contract, for bearing the cross of religion and following out the ramifications of power.

In other words, Morrison contends that racist depictions are not just oversights or unfortunate lapses on the part of the white artist to be circumvented like potholes in a road, but rather that these distorted characterizations inform the entire canon of values embodied in the work, being the very key to understanding the construction of the white artist's identity!
 
What does this mean for 1990's feminists approaching “The Dinner Table” today? It means that we should not flinch from confronting the treatment of women of color in the work. Far from shying away from these embarrassing seating arrangements, we should make them the centerpieces of our critical understanding of the work and of the movement it represented. The absence of women of color at the table is more than an unintentional oversight. It is a necessity for a feminist identity that informed and defined the entire guest list. Sojourner Truth's position at that table, according to Morrison's theory, provides the key to understanding the myths, the terrors, the denials, the strengths, the failures of that early feminist movement. The artist's unwillingness to grant, or inability to conceive, a symbolic vulva for a Black woman may be central to an entire definition of Western sexuality, of white women's sexual identity.  Adopting Morrison's perspective and approach, one could argue that the Black and the First Nation's women's place at the table, and the exclusion of the Latina and Asian woman, could be the most historically significant aspects of “The Dinner Party.”
 
White radical feminists have vacillated between stonewalling and scapegoating when confronted with racist artifacts of the early Second Wave. Neither is a constructive strategy, and I suggest that we take Morrison's teaching to heart and begin to find ways to talk about our history that neither glosses over or trashes this very mixed heritage. A step in this direction would be to incorporate an acknowledgment and historical contextualizing of the racist treatment of women of color in any description of “The Dinner Party,” and especially in any press release designed to raise money for housing the project. As Morrison reminds us, “A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal' but also 'race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist."

[Originally published in Hard Jobbin’: Women’s Experiences of the Workplace, Ride the Wind Press, Beausejour, Manitoba, 2003]


I led a double life when I worked on the second floor of J.C. Penney's. By day
I was a simple store clerk, a sensitive young woman far from home and going
through a painful divorce. By night and on weekends, I was a dangerous politico, a rabid anti-war protester, a hippie, a radical feminist, an enemy of the
people.

If my co-workers suspected me of leading a secret life, it was probably one
more in line with their experience. On the second floor of Penney's, women
did not leave their husbands for trivial reasons, and certainly never within the
first eighteen months of the marriage! I am sure they assumed I was covering
some shameful and traumatic episode when I gave my pitifully naive and inadequate explanation that I had simply grown tired of being married. It would
have gone without saying on the second floor that I was protecting my shame
at having discovered some adulterous affair—either that or I could not bring
myself to name the horrors my brute of a spouse had inflicted during one of
his periodic bouts of drunken debauchery.

In fact, my husband had been a thoroughly nice man. It was I who had been
difficult. I left, because I could no longer bear who I had become in comparison with this consistent, earnest, successful, conscientious, and nice man.

Nor would my co-workers have understood my desire to escape the confines
of home and family. Far from wanting a house of my own, I was actively engaged in eliminating every possession of mine that I could not fit into a backpack— with the exception of my sewing machine, bought on that second floor of J.C. Penneys and resting, even as I type this memoir, not ten feet from the computer.

It was the summer of 1973. I was twenty-one, Nixon was still President, The War was still going on in Southeast Asia. I was living in Boulder, Colorado, where I had been living since the fall of 1971, when I had followed my recently-graduated husband west to his new fellowship in a doctoral program in clinical psychology. A good wife, I had dropped out of school in order to work at J.C. Penney's selling piece goods.

It would be at J.C. Penney's that I became initiated into the mysteries of my tribe. Working on the second floor, I was surrounded by housewares, sewing machines, clothing for infants and toddlers, fabric and notions—and women.

There was not a man who worked on the entire floor.

Irene Manther ran the piece-goods department. She had moved with her husband from Wyoming to Colorado in a horse-drawn wagon, which gives you some idea of her age, and our age, and the speed at which global technological colonization was advancing. And yet, for all her pioneer crossing in the shadow of the Great Divide, in nearly fifty years of service, Irene had been unable to traverse that gulf that lay between management and staff, between men and women in the corporate world. Her lack of promotion was considered a scandal, a source of whispered rage in the no-man's-land of the second floor.

I did not share her rage. I was unable then to understand women's desire to have any part of a position defined by and necessitating congress with men. I considered the second floor of J.C. Penney's to be some kind of heaven. If the price of being overlooked by men was low wages, so be it. Irene Manther was like a goddess to me, presiding over a vast and colorful matriarchate. Through her capable hands flowed miles and miles of fabric, rivers of textiles containing the iridescent visions of women crossing into, and then crossing out of our department, crocheting us briefly into the web of their conversations, snagging our opinions on their projects, and then hooking away as they knitted, knotted, braided, tatted, embroidered, pieced, patched, and wove themselves into the world beyond the second floor.

We sold these women the soft cotton flannel for their babies' rompers, the denim and broadcloth for their children's playclothes, the silks and satins for their daughters' prom dresses, the lace and nylon net for these daughters' bridal gowns, the linen for the tablecloths, the gingham check for the kitchen curtains, the fake fur for the stuffed animals, the discounted cotton floral prints for their housedresses, the polyester doubleknit for their new-fangled pantsuits, the cotton batting and fiberfill for their quilts, the nylon tricot for their lingerie.

The women seldom sewed for their menfolk. It went without saying that men's clothing required too much fuss, what with tailoring, french seams, buttonholing, fly-fronts, cuffs, padding, lining. Most of their husbands and sons wore blue jeans, uniforms, or business suits anyway. Cheaper to buy, and, besides, the men were always so self-conscious, worrying all the time about what other men might think of them. No, it was better all around just to buy them the ready-mades downstairs. They preferred it that way.

The section "Men and Boys" in the pattern books was modest, statutory even, and always toward the back. It was the elegant gowns, the riotously bright sundresses, the voluptuous loungewear sashaying and strutting across the pages that courted our attention when we stood before the long counters with the pattern books as large as Manhattan phone directories.

The women who sewed back then were good homemakers. They practiced thrift and industry. It was never admitted, never even hinted at, that this might have been a form of art, a creative act, a mode of self-expression. No, these were women sewing for their families, saving money, making do. And as we ran the rainbow fabrics through their hands, and held the bolts up next to them, suggesting braids, and rick-rack, buttons, appliqués, bead-work, we never for a moment acknowledged, even to ourselves, that the women we helped were pleasuring themselves.

And over it all presided Irene Manther. There was not a question about clothing construction for which she did not know the answer. She had sewn it all. There was no quilt pattern she couldn't sketch by heart, no fabric stain for which she didn't know a recipe, no body deformity for which she couldn't make adjustments. Irene was even practiced in the lost art of "turning a suit," that Depression-era economy that involved taking apart the seams of a man's suit and reassembling it again with the worn side of the fabric facing in.

Irene had seen the skirts ascend from the instep to the ankle, then shimmy up the knee. She had seen them plummet to mid-calf, only to scramble up again, this time boldly cresting the knee to establish various base camps along the thigh, in anticipation of a final bid for the summit. Irene had seen shoulders go bare, then shoulders go square; bustlines puffed out like powder pigeons, then flattened down like pancakes, then nosed out like torpedoes, and now assuming the anatomically correct, if sartorially nondescript, contours of human breasts at long last out of harness. Irene had witnessed waistlines cinched in with corsets, then dropped loose to the hips, then smoothed over with girdles, then gathered in with waistbands, then raised up to the breasts, and now riding back down on the hips with bell-bottom jeans.

Irene had lived through two wars to-end-all-wars, and the Bomb, and the Depression, and Korea, and the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the Women's Liberation Movement, and Vietnam. Through it all she had raised children and grandchildren and seen them married and buried. Irene had milked cows and churned butter and split wood and broken horses and barn-raised and she had come through all of these changes to sell piece goods on the second floor of J.C. Penney's where there weren't any men, and where she would never be a manager.

I felt safe in Irene's matriarchate, and safety had been rare in my experience. Raised in terror, I have spent most of my life trying to prevent what had already happened. Now, at twenty-one, I was in the process of going through a divorce, and on the verge of having to take responsibility for my life—a staggering proposition for someone whose whole prior focus had been resistance. J.C. Penney's provided a refuge for me, an oasis of pure sensory experience in a post-traumatic world where every experience seemed freighted with the moral weight of a life-or-death decision, and yet which was, at the same time, eerily unreal.

For eight precious hours a day, I could be present for these bolts of sensuous fabric. It was safe to define myself in relation to them. The demands were not complex. I would move between these parti-colored islands, allowing my hands to trail over the satiny bolt ends that hung like bright flags into the aisles. When a careless customer had disturbed the arrangements of these pennants, it was my job to restore symmetry. I would reach my hand up under the loose fabric, as if running my hand up the smooth thigh of a woman, then in a deft and impersonal gesture, flip the fabric up over the bolt end and wedge it back into the soft and yielding space between the other fabrics.

It had also been my job to restore order to the spool rack. The spools of thread were displayed on a tall metal frame with sloping dividers, where they beckoned to the children like a giant busy-box while their mothers selected patterns and passed the time of day with the clerks. The threads were arranged by color in the dividers, and it was a great game to the children to see how many they could put in the wrong dividers before their mothers noticed what they were doing.

I had my own game that I played as a keeper of the spools. I would try to see how many I could sort by color without checking the dye number stamped on the end. As many of the hues were similar, especially the blues, this posed something of a challenge to my powers of discrimination.

Sorting spools was an aesthetic, a kinesthetic job, and one of my co-workers was as fond of it as I. Her name was Bobbi, and she would try to beat me to it, especially if there were other tasks, like marking remnants, less to her liking. I enjoyed Bobbi. She was not quick like Irene, but soothing and rhythmic in her movements. My own biorhythms would slow whenever I found myself transiting her orbital.

On the nights when I closed the register with Bobbi, she would insist on examining all the nickels and all the pennies. She was a coin collector, and in those days buffalo nickels were still fairly common. She would always buy them from the till. I was never clear exactly what markings Bobbi was looking for on the pennies, but in her methodical way, she would turn and look at them all. In what appeared to me to be the constricted stream of Bobbi's life, she was clearly panning for gold. Still expecting to stumble across the mother lode, I could not appreciate the ritualistic value of Bobbi's actions, which lay entirely apart from the capture of precious metals.

Women were making quilts in Boulder. Sometimes they would bring as many as a dozen bolts of fabric to the counter, from which they would ask us to measure only a quarter of a yard apiece. Of course, this must have seemed unspeakable dilettantism to a woman like Irene, whose quilts I imagined to have been meticulously pieced together from the scraps and rags carefully hoarded during an era when nothing could be taken for granted.

Women who considered themselves not clever enough to work outside the home, would stand at our counter and perform split-second mathematical calculations in their head as they figured for selvedge, for nap, for shrinkage; making allowance for alterations, customizing patterns by combining features from other patterns. And some of them, the old-timers like Irene, worked without patterns at all, using old newspapers or no paper at all.

Everything in the women's world is ritual, and the fabric department was no different from the beauty parlor or the baby shower in this respect. We spoke about sewing, but this was only the most superficial aspect of our communication rituals. Like bees inspecting new arrivals at the hive, we stroked each other gently with a thousand psychic feelers; taking readings, checking orientation. As Irene explained the intricacies of pattern-alteration, she would be teaching, approving, exchanging. We were the keepers of the flame, we women. We were the ones who were responsible for the well-being of the children, for seeing that we and that they survived. Our communications, no matter how trivial, were all informed by this shared understanding, and here on the second floor of Penney's we were not compelled to restrict the dimensionality of our language, as women always must in the presence of men.

The island I live on has a “barter-and-swap” Facebook page, which many of us bargain-hunters read on the the regular. One day, an intriguing request popped up, and it gave me pause. It was from a school librarian in one of the towns on the island. She was producing a “Human Library” day at her middle school, and she was looking for volunteers to be the "resources," if you will, in this one-day library. Specifically, she was looking for folks with identities and experiences outside of the ordinary… folks who could enhance the kids’ understanding of diversity from a first-person-narrative perspective.

Like many lesbians of my generation, public schools have not been especially welcoming or safe spaces for us. I have had my share of negative experiences, including one in which my lesbian theatre company was involved in a “national priority” ACLU lawsuit, because the composer for a musical I produced had been fired from a public school teaching job because of her affiliation with my theatre. This was the late 1980's, and in that state it was still legal to fire gay and lesbian teachers, but here's the catch:  This teacher had been fired for merely being associated with a lesbian theatre company... hence the ACLU's interest. They saw it as a legal foot in the door, because it broke Constitutional law.  (For a quick refresher on the relevant Bill of Rights clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”) The case, which was against a school district, a local arts council, and the state arts organization, did eventually  settle after an aggressive, state-wide PR campaign. It was a victory of sorts, but my valiant little theatre company had dragged so viciously through the homophobic mud, it was necessary for me to close it and move to another state. (Thank the Goddess, it was before the Internet and viral hate campaigns!)

But, dear reader, the universe is generous in its offers for do-overs, and this was mine. I volunteered. I actually had two identities that would qualify me for the project: I was a lesbian and I was autistic. For reasons that were part boredom from forty years of coming-out and part trauma from the ACLU thing, I chose to apply as autistic and undiagnosed. The other three human library books were a woman with an eating disorder, an immigrant who had spent time in a refugee camp, and a Jewish woman who had grown up in a small town where she had been the only Jew among her peers.  We were assigned to a classroom, where would talk about our lives and answer questions for thirty minutes, and then a new group of students would rotate in. Each of us would give our presentation three times. So this is what I said:

“I’m Carolyn Gage, and I am autistic. I was not diagnosed until very late in my life, and I’m going to talk about what was going on for me when I was a child. 
 
I was given a doll when I was a very little girl--I believe six, or maybe even younger. Her name was Ginny, and I immediately recognized that she was a queen. She looked something like Glinda from the Wizard of Oz. Ginny was wise, and she was good, and she was very powerful. I was intensely engaged with Ginny  and her story, which I was making up as I went along, but which I experienced more as getting to know her. 

Word got out that I liked dolls, and family and friends began to give me all kinds of dolls on my birthday and for Christmas. I would inherit the neighbors’ outgrown dolls. My collection would eventually include over fifty dolls, and my cousins built me a dollhouse that was four feet high and six feet wide, with four floors, an attic and a dungeon.  It was basically a stack of boxes with doors cut between them.  For me, it was a palace. It had a  a chest of jewels in the dungeon; it had a garden terrace with a fountain; it had an attic garret for the servants. Yes, there was a full contingent of servants right out of the fairy tales: scullery maids, and grooms, and footmen in livery... It made no difference that I didn’t know what they did or even what livery was.
 
I would play with the dolls for six to eight hours at a stretch. When most little girls played with dolls, they would change up the outfits or hold miniature tea parties. When Barbie came along about five years later, little girls could put her in her car and drive her to the beach. My idea of playing with the dolls was very, very different. My dolls were engaged in complex plots involving abductions, and magic, and murder, and illicit romance... There were always four or five subplots going on, and the lives of the servants were as intensely dramatic as those of the court. In fact, the heroine of the castle was a rescue doll whose hair had been pulled out and whose body had been vandalized with ink.  She was a doll of mystery, greatly favored by Ginny and the Powers that Be. Her name was Pat, and it was only later, as an adult, I realized that the avatar of my youth had been a survivor and a gender-non-conforming lesbian. ,

There was something else I was doing in the dollhouse. I was plotting an escape from reality. My family was not well. My mother was a practicing alcoholic, as was my brother--who, like me, was on the spectrum. My father was a sex/pornography addict with scary and confusing dissociative disorders. I was terrified of him. He was a tyrant, and, from what I experienced as a child, he was never called into account for his malevolence.  None of us could ever mount a successful revolution, and any signs of resistance were met with cruelty and sometimes violence.  BUT... in the dollhouse, amid all the epic dramas, goodness and innocence would eventually prevail. To that point, the females always won, and matriarchy would always carry the day. Unlike my father, the perpetrators in my stories would be killed, banished, or won over by good. My dollhouse kept my belief in justice alive. It was an alternative world, and, quite frankly, one that I preferred to inhabit... which I manage to do, as much as possible. The dolls were my true family and my dearest friends.

And now a word on “hyperfocus.”  That is a word applied to us autistic folks when we are passionate about some subject or activity, when we are able to devote our entire attention to said subject or activity for long periods of time with a high degree of concentration. It might be snakes, or magic tricks, or collecting coins… but it is something from which we derive immense satisfaction, which is why we focus our attention on it. Our special interest will trump every other activity or interest in our lives. Quite simply, nothing can compare.  Neurotypical people, who are not autistic, feel like there is something wrong with that... something a little too much about our special interests. Hence the word "hyperfocus." (In the bad old days, our special interests were even more insultingly characterized as "obsessions!") From my perspective, I think there is something sad about people who are not blessed with their very own, highly personal wellspring of profound satisfaction. They seem to suffer from a condition of  "hypo-joie-de-vivre," for which they compensate with excessive and superficial socializing. Neurotypicals don't hold the monopoly on pseudo-scientific name-calling.
 
So, anyway… my so-called hyperfocus. My mother had noticed my intense relationship with the dollhouse and with the dolls. Worried that it was going to crowd out everything in my life, she made me pack up the dolls every summer, in the hopes I would go outside and play with the neighborhood kids... you know, "be normal."  Yes, I would go outside, but I had an emergency kit of miniature dolls. I would go into the woods with a copy of Peter Pan and enact the entire book down by the creek.

When I turned thirteen and was entering high school, she came down to my bedroom, which was in the basement, and she told me that I was now too old to play with dolls,  and that it was time to pack them up for good. For me, this was like having your mother tell you that it’s time to murder your fifty best friends. I was profoundly upset and I began to cry hysterically. She was shocked by this and told me that I could go upstairs and that she would pack up the dolls without me.
 
And what do you think happened? Yes, I was lost. It’s like when you pull the centerboard out of sailboat…  You can’t set a course anymore. The boat just blows around and very likely will capsize. It’s also like losing your compass. There’s no more “north” anymore. All directions are the same and equally meaningless. No centerboard and no compass, I wandered and I also went whichever way the wind blew. I copied my friends. I tried to please other people.  My mother wanted me to get married, so when I was eighteen I got engaged, and three months after I turned nineteen, I walked down the aisle. I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to do with my life. But, never mind. It didn't matter. There had been this massacre of the imagination. My entire tribe had been wiped out.

I didn’t find my way again until I was thirty years old, and I went to college to get a degree in theatre. It had taken me seventeen years to find my way back to the dollhouse, and some of those years were very hard and very dangerous, because of autism but also because I had lost my centerboard and my compass.  And some of those years were fun and easy, because I was pretending to be someone fun, and I found myself in circumstances that were easy. But the main thing was that I wasn’t being myself. And for the folks who knew me and loved me during that era, this does not in any way mean I am not so grateful to have had you in my life, or that I don't love you. I believe that several of you actually saved my life. But, in spite of that love...  I was still far, far from home.
 
So, at thirty, I was back in the dollhouse. Back making up stories and bringing characters to life. I was an actor and a director, and for a little while I taught theatre classes, but eventually, I found that my true calling was being a playwright.... which was what I had been doing in the dollhouse. And I have now been a professional playwright for more than forty years. I have written over a hundred plays that are published in nine collections of my work. I have toured all over the US, and some in Canada, and in Europe, and I have met a whole lot of really wonderful and interesting people. I have had a great life. Full of challenges, but always rich in meaning.

The moral of the story is my mother didn’t need to worry about me. My special interest was going to give me a life... the life I was meant to have. It wasn’t the life she had planned for me, but it was the one I wanted.

So I want to tell you another story. Yes, it is connected to the dollhouse, so put a pin in that. We'll get back to it. This is a story about Beatrix Farrand, who was a landscape gardener here on Mount Desert Island. (She didn't like to use the word "architect" for what she did.) I don’t know if she was autistic or not… Back in her day very, very few autistic women were ever diagnosed, but she did have a thing about which she was passionate and to which she devoted her life, full-time, and even over-time... as in, “hyperfocus.” It was designing and executing gardens. She designed a lot of them here on Mount Desert Island. She designed Abbey Rockefeller’s garden, which  you can still visit. And she designed her own garden down on the Shore Path in Bar Harbor.  She had inherited a cottage and some acres there. It was named Reef Point, and Beatrix wanted to create an internationally famous garden where people could come from all over the world to  appreciate the beauty of the plants and of the Maine coast. She also collected a huge library of books about landscape gardening that she intended to make available to folks who were serious about gardening.

So, this is the important part of the story:  Her land went right down to the ocean, with rocky cliffs and huge boulders, and huge firs and spruce trees. When you looked out at the ocean, you would be looking through these trees, and she loved that view. And so do I. It's very specific to Maine. And Beatrix thought the natural landscape around the house was spectacular.  Now, some of her clients wanted their homes to look like the European homes of rich people with huge flat lawns all planted in grass, that would extend right to the edge of the water. And they wanted gardens that would have these geometrically laid out garden beds, in squares and diamonds with short little hedges around them and a fountain in the middle. And the way you built a garden like that was by cutting down most of the trees and pulling out all those big rocks, and then bulldozing the whole thing completely flat and planting it with grass. And the plants in those gardens would come from all over the place, and only a few of  them would be native. And everyone’s garden kind of looked the same.

But Beatrix had a little saying, and it went something like this:  She said “Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”  What did that mean? It meant take a good look at those gorgeous trees and those huge rocks that are so unique to this island, and all those dips and bumps in the ground… and then make a design that works around them. Maybe put in some native plants around some of the rocks, to draw the eye. Maybe even add some trees to make the skyline a little more balanced… but you start with what's already there, the ground. You don’t start with your plan, and then bring in the chainsaws and bulldozers.
 
So my mother had a plan for me, but she didn't take into account what my ground was.  Or maybe she did, and she thought if she packed up all the dolls and ripped apart the plywood of the dollhouse—if she bulldozed who I was—then her plan would work. And I guess it did... for a while.  I was married for a year. And then I just went drifting. But eventually, after seventeen years,  I began to evolve a plan, or a series of plans, that would fit the ground of who I was, an autistic person with a definite special interest. 

Why am I telling you this? Because lots of people throughout your life will have plans for you. Your parents... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. They love you, and it's natural for them to have some idea of how they think your life should be. Your teachers, your friends, your partners... they may all have vague or definite plans for you.  But sometimes--most times--they don't really see the ground of who you are. Or they see it, but they don't "get it." They think the trees block the view, and the rocks are hard to mow around. Your ground won't work with the plan they have in mind.  But your job is to understand your ground: what is you and what isn't you, what probably  isn't going to change, what you love, what makes you the happiest in the world. And no matter how weird that is, if it's your special interest, you can probably make a great life out of it.

Why? Because you will do that thing long after everyone else has clocked out and gone home. You will do it on weekends. You will do it on holidays. You will do it for low pay or no pay. And in time,  you will probably stand out, because you will be working harder, smarter, better than everyone else, because of that so-called "hyperfocus."  You may not see the plan now, but trust the passion. It's a gift. These are the years you should be learning your ground, appreciating it, standing up for the beauty of it and your right to inhabit it.

So, if you take away anything from what I've said today, I hope it's this:  t

“Fit the plan to the ground, not the other way around.”

Frans de Waal, Dutch primatologist extraordinaire, has written a book that I found important enough to write a blog about. It’s titled Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist.
 
        Calm Down...
 
And before you go all ape on me, let me say that Dr. de Waal does not justify human gender relations, nor does he think that things are fine as they are. He tells us upfront that the whole idea of one sex being mentally superior receives zero backing in modern science. Male supremacy is not a natural order among primates. In fact, he tells us, typical primate society is, at heart, a female kinship network run by older matriarchs. But, on the other hand, de Waal is not a proponent of neo-creationism either. He is clear that humans are subject to the laws of nature, and that evolution did not screech to a halt when humans arrived. Humans are animals, and—specifically—we are primates. Hence the relevance of studying and understanding primate behaviors.

Right out of the gate, de Waal disabuses readers of the false notions and the bad science that have taught us that our closest primate relatives are chimpanzees. In fact, the bonobos—also in the ape family—are equally as close, having split off from the family tree at the same time as the chimps—namely, two million years ago. (We humans split off six million years ago.) Yes, it’s true that chimps are aggressive, territorial, and that the males rule. On the other hand, the bonobos are peaceful, sex-loving, and the females dominate.  We humans are just as likely to take after them, evolutionarily speaking. So why have the chimps gotten so much more press than the bonobos?  Well, the chimp was discovered first, and bonobo behaviors challenge all the central tenets of patriarchy. Also, anyone filming a documentary about bonobos has to contend with their ongoing and unrestrained sexual activity. In terms of popular science, that’s a serious PR issue. 
 
But… back to the point of this blog: De Waal believes that the best way to achieve gender equality is to learn more about our primate biology and not to sweep it under the rug. Now, HOLD UP!
 
Yes, I am well aware that those who are seeking gender equality often find biology inconvenient. Yes, I understand that it can be politically expedient to downplay sex differences. And yes, I also understand how science has been and still is hijacked by ideology. I wrote an entire play about the pseudo-science of eugenics and how it has been historically embraced by genocidal regimes seeking to justify their atrocities. [In McClintock's Corn] And… at the same time, I am of the generation that zealously pursued and still pursues a biological basis for homosexuality and transgender identity in our bids for mainstream acceptance. So… it is with caution that I share the author’s conviction that “Instead of giving ideology precedence over science, we first need to get the science of gender in order. Ideally, we’d study this topic free from ideology.” The operative word here is “ideally,” but is that even possible, given the power of implicit bias? Maybe not, but I feel it’s worth a try, and, hence, this blog.

De Waal’s disclaimers:  He is looking at human behavior that is related to primate behavior, and in doing that, he is going to look at the literature on human behavior. He does not trust self-reports, but prefers the studies of tested and observed actual behavior. Omissions, he warns, will include: economic disparity, household labor, access to education, and cultural rules for attire. Now, obviously, these are huge influencers in the ways that gender plays out in human societies, but they are not universal for other primates… hence the omission. And, yes, I still think his book is valuable.
 
So enough taxiing down the runway. Let’s get to it…
 
                                                   Nature or Nurture?
 
So, right out of the gate, “Is it nature or nurture?”
 
Many humans assume that we socialize our children via the toys we select for them. But de Waal comes to a different conclusion from studying young primates: Play cannot be dictated. Confronted with a pile of random toys, young female primates overwhelmingly prefer plush toys and young males are attracted to things with wheels. Given a toy train, a young female will swaddle it and carry it around like a baby. According to the author, there is “consistency in finding a sex difference in the preferences for toys typed to their gender,” and he concludes that “the strength of this phenomenon points to the likelihood of a biological origin.” Notice the extreme carefulness of the language here. He must know the same people I do.  One of the most dramatic differences is in the play itself. The males enjoy roughhousing, but the females do not. They enjoy a form of play that has a storyline. Because of this, the two sexes practice segregated play.

So, does this mean nature trumps nurture? De Waal answers the question with another question: “Is a percussive sound made by the drummer or the drum?” Obviously, the answer is “both,” because on their own neither makes the sound. One could say the environment “plays” on our genes, as it were. This is “interactionism,” which assumes a dynamic interplay between genes and environment. Interactionism is not popular, because it does not offer easy answers. I’m going to say that again: Interactionism is not popular, because it does not offer easy answers.
 
“Every human tendency, regardless of whether we rate it as natural, can be amplified, weakened or modified by culture. If the gallons of ink spilled on the biological basis of altruism, homosexuality, and intelligence has taught us anything, it’s that every human trait reflects an interplay between genes and environment.”
 
Okay, let’s take language.  Adopted babies will speak the language of their adoption… obviously a cultural/environmental phenomenon. On the other hand, human language faculty is unique among primates, and that uniqueness is biological. So… nature and nurture.
 
Another quick example:  The Pill. It changed the biology of females so radically, that the entire cultural playing field was and still is (I hope) permanently reshaped.

Here’s another useful term: “learning predisposition.” What that means is being programmed to learn certain things at a particular time in our life. Like the way baby ducklings imprint. At a young age, they learn to identify with the species to which their mother belongs and follow her around—an obvious plus for survival. But when the mother duck is absent, these ducklings can imprint on a human caregiver, or a dog, or a goose, which may be less adaptive, but does result in a plethora of adorable Youtube videos. 
 
By the way, primate infants are extremely vulnerable, and newborns will die within twenty-four hours without intensive caregiving. Yes, males could provide some of this caregiving, especially with older babies, and sometimes they do take on that role with orphaned chimps… but there is only one sex that is 100% guaranteed to be present at the time of birth: the female. (Because, duh, she’s having the baby. Also, human fathers are the only primates who understand the mechanics of biological fatherhood. The concept is lost on male chimps and bonobos.) Because of this, it’s an obvious choice on the part of evolution to equip females with built-in “learning predispositions” for caregiving. “No person currently walking the earth could have gotten here if it weren’t for ancestors who survived and reproduced. No exceptions. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. Their genes are not in the gene pool.” (Consider the offspring of a female with a genetic makeup completely lacking in maternal predispositions. Brilliant as she might be, her offspring are not likely to survive, and her brilliance dies with her… unless she can write for a species that can read.)
 
The author makes the point that human gender roles are subject to similar “learning predispositions,” but, at the same time, he notes, “Roles may not be biological, certainly in all their details, but they are culturally acquired with a speed, eagerness, and thoroughness that hints at a biologically driven process.” Interactionism. See, we can get through this.

We just looked at maternal caregiving.  What about other expressions of gender? Let’s look at neuroimaging studies. (“Neuroimaging” means producing images of the brain by noninvasive techniques. It enables studies of a living brain, as opposed to dissection.) So… neuroimaging studies of humans indicate that imitating people of one’s own sex activates reward centers in the brain. Primate science. Evolution equipped our young with a feel-good bias to conform to the gender associated with their sex. Why? Because in primate societies the roles for males and females are very different throughout their lives. We know from studies that male chimps and bonobos strive for status and territory. We know from studies that the female apes protect and nurture their young for years. (See above.) And we also know that ideology has nothing to do with it. We know this is about sex at birth. It’s about preservation of the gene pool, which means optimizing the chances for the offspring to survive. And primate babies, including humans, take a long time to grow up.
 
“Children self-socialize via selective attention, imitation, and participation in particular activities and modality of interaction.” In primate societies, for example, chimp daughters watch and learn how their mother’s extract termites (to eat). This is a sex-segregated skill related to their role as feeders and nurturers of their offspring. Likewise male chimp infants seek male models. At first glance, teaching and learning may appear to be purely cultural and not biological in origin, but let’s not forget those internal reward centers for same-sex imitation. Primates are wired to copy those with whom they bond and identify, i.e., the members of their sex. The drummer and the drum.

De Waal notes that most differences across the sexes are bimodal (either male or female) but differences between genders present across a spectrum. Our current culture has become deeply polarized around this issue. We either want to staple a rigid set of gender roles firmly to biological sex, which is overwhelmingly bimodal, or else we want to flow with the fluidity of gender and downplay biological sex altogether, declaring it to be irrelevant. We do this at our peril, because in patriarchy, this approach has disastrous consequences for females. The consequences of gender role enforcement are also disastrous. But this is what we do, because interactionism is hard.
 
Also, science hasn’t always been scientific. Like many of us, science has found interactionism too hard. It has tended to ignore sex differences for a long, long time. In other words, ignore women. Finally, mercifully, this is starting to change. This neglect has been catastrophic for women, from barbaric male-dictated birthing practices, to male-modeled crash test dummies, to failure to study the impact of medications and vaccines on women’s reproductive systems. Remember thalidomide and the courageous woman in the FDA who, at great risk to her career, insisted on fetal studies of the drug before she would license it? Turns out thalidomide was responsible for a nightmare array of birth defects, and the horror of it was that it was being prescribed specifically as a sleep sedative to pregnant women who were struggling with insomnia related to the pregnancy!

So humans are animals. We share at least 96% of the same DNA as chimps and bonobos. In fact, we are so close in DNA that some have suggested that our genus should be merged with that of chimps and bonobos. We aren’t fond of this fact.  We tend to focus on the tip of the genetic iceberg—the ways in which we differ from the great apes—instead of the huge amount we have in common with them. But if we want to be scientific—as in biology, medicine, and neuroscience—we need to study the entire iceberg. And the human brain, although relatively large, barely differs from an ape brain in structure and neural chemistry. Again, why I wanted to blog about this book.
 
                     Red Hot Contemporary Gender and Orientation Topics
 
So what does a primatologist have to say about one of the hottest gender topics in contemporary culture… transgender identity?
 
First, De Waal notes that he has observed a female chimp whose behaviors might be considered analogous to that of a trans boy.  He describes his observations of this chimp, who, from an early age, imitated male behaviors and preferred the company of male peers. Throughout her life, this female remained somewhat of an outsider to both genders, because she never became a mother, but she was not included in the male hierarchy either. This was, in part, because she, unlike the males, did not exhibit violent behaviors. In spite of these differences, the tribe had no problem accepting her. Side note: There are no reported instances of rejection for sexual orientation or gender expression among primates… oh, except, for us.

 Being a scientist, De Waal puts forward a theory about the science of transgender identity and behavior: “One speculation is that in a fraction of human pregnancies, the body takes off in a different direction than the brain. A fetus’ genitals differentiate into male and female during the first few months of pregnancy, whereas the brain differentiates by gender in the second half of pregnancy… Gender identities are probably shaped in the womb from hormonal exposure. Experience after birth seems to have little impact. This could explain why no amount of conversion therapy, combined with prayer and punishment, changes the minds of transgender persons… Not every human trait is malleable.”
 
Here, he is actually drawing on science. Human brains are not gender neutral. Again, nature or nurture?  Are our brains different because of hormones or experiences? Or both? Currently we don't know, but it’s a thoroughly established fact our brains are sexually dimorphic. What does that mean?  Sexual dimorphism is the “systematic difference in form between individuals of different sex in the same species.” Specifically, some parts of the male and female brain differ from each other in size or appearance. And before you accuse me of “neurosexism” or come at me about “lady brains,” there are more than 20,000 scientific articles documenting sex difference in human brains. Should it be unthinkable that this dimorphism might have some evolutionary connection?  I’m going to keep an open mind on the subject, and I found De Waal’s speculation interesting.

So what about homosexuality? The bonobos, as noted, are extremely sexually active, and their partnerings are often with members of the same sex. In fact, three quarters of bonobo sex could not result in procreation (same-sex, too old, or too young partners). Interestingly, the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but possibly its bonding function in some primates is significant. (Footnote: As De Waal points out, there are no species other than humans that are truly "homosexual," as in exclusively attracted to members of one's own sex. And, yes, that includes those famous male penguins at the Central Park Zoo.)

What about the chimps?  Same-sex partnering among chimps was thought to be rare until recently. Today it is reported as frequent. What changed? Definitions and attitudes.  Today studies include sociosexual behavior, which is defined as “physical interaction involving contact with the anogenital region except for mating/copulations."  In the past, these behaviors had been dismissed as  “reassurance” or “reconciliation,” or “gestures.” Today they are acknowledged to be sexual.

Nature or nurture? The author explores the literature about brain studies exploring structural differences in the brains of gays and lesbians. He sites the work of Ivanka Savic and Per Lindström, who were studying human brain symmetry, which has no relationship to behavior, is fixed at birth, and is not altered by life experiences.  Their work indicates that sexual orientation may be forged in early infancy or even in the womb. But the primate culture of the great apes certainly doesn't discourge same-sex partnering.

                                         Violence Against Women
 
Much of de Waal’s focus is on primate violence in general, and, human violence against females in particular. Studies show that primates resolve conflicts, sympathize with each other, and seek cooperation. Both human children and primates demonstrate spontaneous altruism without enticements. Bonobos are taken as proof that violence is not hard-wired in, and most of the time both chimps and bonobos live in harmony. That actually goes for humans, also. Philosopher Mary Midgeley, who wrote about the relations of humans and animals, notes that humans are ultra-social, with communal values, even though we have a body of literature by men and for men depicting us as greedy individualists with only a veneer of goodness.  Propaganda?
 
There are no confirmed reports of bonobos killing each other, but there are many cases where chimps have ganged up and murdered male members of their tribe, sometimes brutally. Remember, the bonobos are sexy, peaceful, and female dominant. Male chimps also commit infanticide, and female chimps copulate widely to ensure protection of the young. Yes, these females have sex for excitement, attraction, adventure, and pleasure, but always behind it lies the threat of infanticide. If a male is bonded with the female through sex, he is less likely to murder her baby. (Again, he has no notion of fatherhood.) And, sadly, we have to include humans as among the species that commit infanticide. (Others include lions, dolphins, bears, prairie dogs, and owls. I know… dolphins?) Our infanticide? Step-fathers murder step-children with more frequency than the biological fathers. War is a large-scale scenario where the older father figures routinely send out the younger males to kill other younger males and to be killed. Why? Less competition for these aging males.
 
Female chimps receive more favors when they are in estrus, which is marked by highly visibile swelling of their genitalia. They barter sex for favors. The female bonobos, on the other hand, never threatened with infanticide or male violence, simply claim what they want, which happens to be an enormous amount of sex… with both males and females.

The author notes that female sexuality among both species is as proactive and enterprising as that of the males… but for different evolutionary reasons. And here is a fascinating side note about the bonobos:  During sex, the male will stop thrusting and dismount  if the female is avoiding eye contact or signals boredom by yawning or grooming. The bonobos demonstrate a clear grasp of the female’s right to change her mind. Sigh.

Which takes us back to the subject of human male violence against females: “If there is one aspect of social life that is gender-biased, it is physical violence. Males are its overwhelming source, and it applies equally to most other primates.” Statistics show that 22.1% of women and 7.4% of men have been victims of male violence. 13.5% of all human homicides are male-perpetrated, sex-based hate crimes against women. HOWEVER, these stats don’t take into account the massively under-reported incidence of “domestic violence.” With this epidemic murder of females, humans really stand out from other primates, even the chimps. 

Chimps do physically abuse and harass females, but they do not rape or murder them . And, of course, the male bonobos learn early that they will get the you-know-what slapped out of them by the adult females if they even THINK about messing with them. Also, the bonobo females travel together and sleep within earshot of each other, both of which are huge curbs to male violence. Groups of both bonobos and chimps are sex-segregated: “Males and females dwell in different worlds, each with its own set of issues.” Among primates, males compete with males and the females compete with females. (Among the chimps, the male bonding is stronger and they prefer it.) The sexes only meet occasionally and mating is done in the open, where others can interfere.
 
On the other hand, humans integrate the sexes into a single framework… often the “nuclear home.”  This arrangement facilitates male control and abuse. (This level of sex integration is relatively recent, having intensified during the Industrial Age.) The author reminds us that during COVID, where people were compelled to isolate within their homes, reports of domestic violence tripled.

So, rape.  Male orangutangs rape, and so do male ducks. Oh, and male scorpion flies. And then, of course, human males. What percentage of men are rapists?  Speculation varies… 1 in 5? 1 in 10? 1 in 20?  The frequency and prevalence of rape are staggering in our species. Some will say that rape is an evolutionary “adaptive strategy” to maximize fertilization, but if this is so, then why is it so extremely rare among all the species on earth? And it’s not “adaptive.” If it were, there would be no raping of girls, wives, post-menopausal women, or males. But here we are… Furthermore, tribal studies show an intolerance of the behavior, because in tribes there is physical proximity of kin, less female dependence on men, and less male bonding. Possibly, if chimps were forced out of tribes and into suburban cages with a lone female partner, they would begin to rape and murder females. Nature or environment?
 
But De Waal is careful to point out that biology is not irrelevant in considering violence against women. Sons, as he says, are not daughters. Sons will grow up more prone to violence. Sons will have more bodily strength.

Let’s take a sec with this, because it’s a huge part of the current gender controversies. Are human males stronger? So… “constitutional body strength.”  1% of women can lift 110 pounds directly off the ground. Two thirds of men can. Hand grip strength is another test that bypasses athletic training and fitness. 90% of young females fall short of 95% of men. Significant and documented difference.    
BECAUSE this is true, De Waal posits, we need to teach emotional skills and attitudes, and we need to offer healthy outlets for aggression. And, I would add, a good long look at alternate living arrangements that ensure safety for women and children.

                                                  How Primates Interact
 
Among chimps and bonobos, the males are pack animals, while the females prefer serial one-on-one friendship. The boys enjoy quarrels about rules, but quarreling ends the game for girls. They distance themselves from adversaries, while the males adopt a “nothing personal” attitude. In fact, male opponents actually seek each other out.
 
All social mammals practice reconciliation. Among chimps, 47% of the males reconcile. Only 18% of the females do. The males are opportunistic and keep their options open. Four out of five female conflicts go unreconciled. In sum, the males are good at making peace. The females are good at suppressing conflict. On the other hand, female bonobos don’t hold grudges and can actually make up in the middle of a fight. In conflict, two female chimps will be screaming in anguish. When male chimps fight, only one party screams—the loser.
 
Sadly, we resemble male-bonded apes more than the matricentric bonobos. Also sadly, primate dimorphism tends to stick in our subconscious. We respect height, muscularity, and low voices. (I’ve seen that in theatre for decades.) How can we change this? De Waal recommends an appreciation for the evolutionary roots of these biases, not a denial of them. Amen. Hence the blog.

                                                            Mothers
 
Some observation of primate motherhood: “Maternal attachment is the mother of all bonds.” The maternal bond in primates is the crucible for evolution of social intelligence.
 
And here we run into the traditional sexism of scientists. They have historically considered altruism to be a “puzzle,” insisting that animals have no reason to worry about others. Obviously, they were discounting mothers with infants, which is, in De Waal’s words, insane.  Female primates care for babies. Female juvenile primates are three-to-five times more apt to do mothering, which decreases infant mortality. Duh. Maternal care goes far deeper than prejudice and gender expectation. Females have more emotional empathy, but the same amount of cognitive empathy as males.
 
Primates respect motherhood. Female status changes when are pregnant. Also primates offer support for miscarriages. Motherhood is a really big deal, biologically speaking. 

                                              Power vs. Leadership
 
Both female chimps and female bonobos demonstrate leadership. Also, a small male chimp can outrank larger and more powerful males in the hierarchy. Why aren’t these dynamics more documented in the literature?  Because: 1) Males are more flamboyant. 2) Males are violent. 3) As noted, bonobo documentaries are X-rated and less broadcast. 4) Researchers tend to equate social dominance with physical dominance. This is a grave mistake, because it omits networking, personality, age, strategic skills, and family connections… huge factors in leadership, and skill sets at which females excel. Prestige, rarely taken into account in these studies, is defined as a power that comes from being admired. The power of prestige can be enhanced with age, even as physical prowess declines.
 
The dominant male may keep the tribe together, but the alpha males teach the young males boundaries and impulse control. The presence of these alpha males actually suppresses production of hormones among the other males.

                                                         Summing Up
 
We are primates through and through.
We navigate a world of primarily two sexes.
We can never fully disentangle the cultured category of gender from the biological one of sex—and the bodies, genitals, brains, and hormones that come with it.
 
We have not escaped forces of evolution.
 
And here are my own thoughts in summation: Denial of these tenets leads us further and further away from effective strategies, policies, and coalitions to resolve issues of justice and equity, which require interactionism. Which is both hard and necessary.
 
 

One of the gifts—one of the many gifts—of women’s spirituality has been the spiral. [Take out my slinky] This is a visual aide. One of the gifts of women’s spirituality has been the spiral.  Other spiritual traditions had given us the star, and the triangle, and the cross, and the circle.  And now we have the spiral.
 
I like the spiral, because it explains my experience. It’s the difference between looking at life in two dimensions or three dimensions.
 
Now, for instance, [hold the collapsed slinky pointing at them] if you look at the spiral in two dimensions this way, it looks like a circle. And any point on the spiral will look like it’s on the circle. In other words, like you keep ending up exactly where you started. Which is how some people, self included, have felt about our relationships. But it’s not really back where you started. It may be the same location on the circle, but it’s much farther along on the spiral. [extend] Like this.
 
Okay, now hold it like this [stretch it out sideways], and look at it like this, in two dimensions, and it looks like a zig-zag line that goes up and then down and then up and then down. Kind of a bipolar thing—up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong.  If this is your career, these are promotions and firings. Or if it’s your money, these are the Dow Jones averages. If it’s relationships, these are the honeymoons and these are the breakups. “How’s your relationship?” “Oh, it’s going great.” “Oh, we’re back in counseling.”
 
Well, I couldn’t get too excited about the circle [demonstrate] or the number line [demonstrate]. But then, like I said, women’s spirituality gave me the spiral. Now, I have a whole new three-dimensional model for understanding my life and my relationships. [elongate and rotate]

Now I can see that I am moving forward like a line, but the ups and downs are gone. They don’t have this linear up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong bi-polarism anymore. I can see that the ups and downs both move me forward, and moving forward, not up or down or in circles is what it’s about. You see, the spiral is actually a series of revolutions, so when we use this model, our lives are seen as a series of progressive revolutions. Progressive revolutions. I like the way that sounds better than “ups and downs.” “How’s your relationship?” “Oh, progressive and revolutionary… and yours?”
 
Progressive revolutions. [do the slinky] And this brings me to the topic of this afternoon’s lecture: Slinkies. Kidding. “When Sex Is Not the Metaphor for Intimacy.” I’m going to be talking about lesbians who have chosen and who are choosing not to practice genital sex in their primary relationships. And I will be talking about the spiritual dimension of that choice, which may even be in the fourth dimension.
 
So what does this have to do with a slinky?
 
Well, depending on where you are in your own spiritual journey, you may feel that the whole idea of lesbian relationships without sex is a throwback to repression and denial, a reactionary return to oppressive stereotypes about women in general and lesbians in particular. This topic might feel like something you’ve struggled against, or outgrown, or worked through, or put behind you. [collapse the slinky] It might look like back to square one, reinventing the wheel, “here we go again.”  But I am asking you to remember that we’re on the spiral today, not the circle. The subject may be a familiar one, but today we’re coming at it from a revolutionary perspective. [expand the slinky] We are not going to be spinning or reinventing wheels.
 
This is a subject that may feel very threatening, too. [stretch the slinky] If not being sexual is good, then being sexual must be bad—or, if sex is a good thing, then not having it must be bad. But I’m asking you to remember that we’re not on the number line, either: no up/down, win/lose, good/bad, right/wrong. We’re on the spiral—and that means nothing but progressive revolutions. [rotate] You may have passed through this position, you may pass through it again. You may have had a negative experience with it, or a positive one, or a confusing one. You may not return to it in this lifetime. You may return to it once or several times. You may choose to stay in it.  And you may spiral through it today during this lecture and find some new ways to evaluate the last time you or your partner were there, or pick up a few things from this loop to spin you forward to a new position on your journey.
 
 So let’s take a look at some of America’s recent progressive revolutions. We had a huge one in the 1960’s. Several actually. The ‘60’s saw the flowering of the Civil Rights Movement, and the birth of the anti-war movement, the United Farmworkers Union, the Black Panthers, La Raza Unida, the American Indian Movement, the Gay Liberation Front. It saw the beginnings of the environmental movement, and the Second Wave of feminism. And it was also the decade of what the media called the Sexual Revolution, a radical overturning of sexual mores, made possible by the widespread availability of birth control pills.

Forty years later, we are in the middle of another revolution of the spiral, in which the movement for lesbian and gay rights has come of age. For the first time in American history, we are visible in mainstream politics and culture. This revolution is one that has spiraled back to some of the territory covered by the 1960’s sexual revolution, with lesbians now reclaiming our sexuality with a vengeance. Denying that any aspect of sexuality is off-limits or the exclusive prerogative of males, lesbians have been very noisy about sado-masochism, dildos, harnesses, vibrators, pornography, role-playing—you name it, lesbians do it.
 
But in our insistence that we will not be silenced or censored sexually ever again, are we silencing and censoring a voice that may well be on the cutting edge of our next revolution? I think we are, and I am here to make a case for that voice being heard.  It is the voice of the lesbian for whom sex is not the primary metaphor for intimacy.
 
I am a dramatist, which is to say a storyteller, and so, not surprisingly, when I sat down to write this lecture, I began to look for the stories.  And I found three of them, three stories about women who customized their relationships to accommodate their spiritual missions—whether that mission was about personal commitment, spiritual activism, or realizing a dream. Each of these women lived or is living a spiritually radical life in which the choice to practice non-genital intimacy is or was the key element responsible for her success.
 
The first woman I want to talk about will be one familiar to many of us today. Her name is Karen Thompson, and she is the sheroic woman who fought for eight and a half long years for the right to bring her partner Sharon Kowalski home, after Sharon suffered a traumatic brain injury as a result of car accident in 1983.  Karen had to battle her partner’s homophobic and deeply ableist parents for guardianship in a legal system that repeatedly refused to recognize the legitimacy of a lesbian partnership ― all the while her partner was suffering from inadequate treatment and care, and during a nightmarish period of three years in which she was not allowed to visit Sharon at all.

Prior to the accident, Karen and Sharon had only been partners for four years—hardly a long-term relationship. If the celebrity relationship expert was encouraging breakups over differences regarding sexual practices, what must she have thought of a woman who had tabled her entire career, revised all of her life goals, spent all of her savings, and given up her privacy to dedicate her life to fighting for the right to be solely financially, physically, and emotionally responsible for a woman with overwhelming needs, who could no longer perform most of the functions of an able-bodied person, and whose brain no longer functioned like an able-bodied brain?

It occurred to me that we, as a culture of lesbians, should have made Karen Thompson our expert on lesbian relationships.  Her comprehension of the power of love, the spiritual dimension of it, and the awesomeness of its responsibility utterly eclipsed the sound-byte clichés of the so-called relationship expert.
 
Today Karen Thompson lives in what she calls a “family of affinity.” She describes her process in forming it: “I was on the road, speaking and fund-raising, and between that and my teaching job, I literally lost who I was. I was wishing my life away from one court hearing to the next. I finally realized that, to survive, something had to change. I had to give myself permission to move on with my life. I didn’t know if I was ever going to see Sharon again, and if I didn’t, was this the way I was going to live the rest of my life? I made the decision that I would start dating and be open to another relationship, but that I would never walk away from Sharon. Whoever came into my life would have to understand that my commitment to Sharon was a lifetime commitment. Sharon and I would always be a package deal. If anyone could learn to love me, they would have to love us both.”
 
Patty Bresser had known Sharon and Karen before the accident. This is an important point, because it meant that Sharon would be able to remember her. Because of her short-term memory loss, she would never be able to recognize or become familiar with anyone she met after the accident. Patty and Karen began to live together, and Patty worked to build a relationship with Sharon before Sharon came home. When Karen asks Sharon if they should send Patty back to Connecticut, Sharon always says, “No.”
 
Karen’s relationship with Sharon is a model for customizing the definition of intimacy. Karen is careful to include her relationship with Sharon in any definition of her relationship to Patty. She uses the expression “family of affinity” because it includes Sharon. She refuses to privilege the sexual relationship over the non-sexual one, but she also refuses to infantilize Sharon by referring to the caretaking relationship as a guardianship. Patriarchy has no simple term for these relationships. “Partners” and “couples” imply twosomes. “Family” means birth or adoption. “Lover” connotes sexual activity. None of these define the very intimate dynamic between Patty and Karen and Sharon. They are a family of affinity. That is a family of choice based on their love and commitment toward each other. It is simply beyond the closed circles and binaries of the patriarchal model.
 
So that is what Karen Thompson is doing today. And what about the celebrity expert on lesbian relationships?  I understand that she has left the community and married a man.
 
This first relationship deals with disability as a sexual issue. The disability movement has worked long and hard—and rightfully so—to dispel the notion that people with disabilities have no sexuality. Lesbian culture has been supportive of this effort to re-educate. I am thinking of Tee Corinne’s erotic photographs two decades ago of nude lesbians who use wheelchairs, and the many anthologies of lesbian erotica that always include stories by women with disabilities.
 
But, again, in the rush to join the sexual revolution, are we silencing or muting an important voice?  Disability can be one of the reasons why lesbians choose asexual partnerships. There are many medical conditions that render sexual activity painful or onerous, or just plain low-priority.  Sex drive can be lowered or eliminated by certain medications, by depression, or by treatments or syndromes associated with fatigue. Sometimes sexual activity can result in a neurological backlash or a fatigue hangover. There can be many reasons why sex as a metaphor for intimacy might need to be re-examined in light of disability.

When sex is accepted as the universal metaphor for intimacy, which is certainly the message we get from every aspect of the mainstream and even lesbian popular culture, it becomes the criteria for a relationship as well as the index for how well the couple is doing. The disabled woman may feel a need to either fake an interest in sex or resign herself to a life without primary intimacy, which may well mean without family. These are poor choices for an able-souled woman who longs for partnership. And what does it mean when our primary cultural metaphor for intimacy requires disabled women to lie or be excluded? I would like to suggest that the relationship model of the sexual couple on perpetual honeymoon is an unrealistic and oppressive model, and one that does not take into account the ever-present possibility that either partner—or both—can become disabled in any number of ways, for any number of reasons, at any time.
 
Karen threw out that model in order to hold onto her love. Refusing to see her situation as an either-or, martyrdom-or-abandonment binary, she created a third option, the “family of affinity,” honoring an ongoing commitment to intimacy in light of the fact that sexual expression was no longer the appropriate metaphor for this intimacy.  Where a “family of affinity” may not meet the needs of women with less severe disabilities than Sharon, it certainly suggests a flexibility about the metaphor for intimacy.
 
Well, if sex is not the index for intimacy, then what is? In one of her poems, Marianne Moore has written that the greatest indicator of deep emotions is restraint.  Restraint… What about that? What about substituting restraint instead of passion as the measure of love in a relationship? Sounds good to me.  Passion may be little more than an index of hormonal activity, emotional neediness, or conditioned response. Restraint, on the other hand, shows up when the needs of one partner conflict with the needs of the other on the proving ground of a relationship.
 
Restraint means sitting with uncertainty, confusion, and anger to the very boundaries of your comfort zone, and even beyond, in the faith that there will be a way, that there will be a light, that there will be grace at the end of the day. I am sure the world will never know the most courageous part of Karen Thompson’s eight-year struggle. We can all read about the court cases and the fights with social service agencies, but we will never know the hours and days and months of Karen’s most significant work—the questioning of her actions, of her motives, of her sanity—an inquiry into the very foundations of what it means to love and what it means to have a commitment—and also into the deep metaphysics of what it means to be human, of who we are and what our life means when we lose our achievements, our intellect, our mobility, our hobbies, our habits, our ability to communicate—when our appearance is altered, our perceptions, our personality, our sexuality—what is the essence that remains? Most of us will have to wait until we die to answer that question. Karen Thompson lives in the grace and challenge of answering that question every day.
 
[Slinky] Let’s get back on our spiral, and this time we’re going to travel back into the past. This time we’re going to visit a lesbian whose decision to practice non-sexual intimacy had its roots in a political and historical reality.

We’re traveling back almost a hundred years to 1862, to Philadelphia. We’re visiting a house on Erie Street, a house where twelve to twenty African Americans, mostly women, are living communally. It is a Shaker house, and the leader, or “eldress” is Rebecca Jackson. Her partner, another African American woman, is named Rebecca Perot and she lives with her. When Rebecca Jackson dies at the age of seventy-one, Perot will change her name to Rebecca Jackson, Junior and take over the spiritual leadership of the community.
 
The two Rebecca’s lived together, worked together, and slept together in a celibate relationship for thirty-five years, and Rebecca Jackson’s commitment to Rebecca Perot was integral to her commitment to liberation and to spirituality.
 
Rebecca Jackson’s life spanned a period of tremendous social upheaval for African Americans.  Born in 1795, she lived in a world of contradictions.  She was a free Black woman in a country where enslavement was legitimized by a white government. She was a woman preacher at a time when most of the churches banned women from the pulpit. She was a married woman who would not put her husband above her spiritual calling at a time when obedience was one of the marriage vows for women. And she preached the sinfulness of marital sex when the prevailing theology taught sexual submissiveness as a sacred duty of women in “holy matrimony.”
 
Like Karen Thompson, Rebecca Jackson did not start out her life as a radical activist. She, too, underwent a series of progressive revolutions.
 
Her mother having died when she was thirteen, Rebecca was sent to the home of her older brother Joseph Cox, a widower with six children and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal, or AME, Church. She lived with her brother until she was forty-one, managing his household, raising his children, and working on the side as a seamstress. During these years, she married Samuel Jackson, who had been a tenant in her brother’s house, and after the marriage, they continued to live with the brother. Jackson’s writings indicate that, prior to her spiritual awakening, she had been a traditional housewife and care giver.
 
Her awakening was catalyzed by a betrayal. In 1831, she discovered that her brother, who had reneged on his agreement to teach her to read, was altering the wording in letters she dictated to him.  When she confronted him, he rebuked her with a vehemence that reduced her to tears. But, in the very moment of her shame and humiliation, she heard the voice of a radical new consciousness. She described how this voice came to her and told her “the time shall come when you can write.” In obedience to this inner voice, she picked up her Bible and began to pray. To her amazement, she discovered that she could read. This was one of Rebecca’s first “gifts of power,” as she called her spiritual experiences and visions. She was to receive many over the next four decades.

Rebecca Jackson pledged absolute obedience to this inner voice, and as she continued to listen and obey, she found herself, like Karen Thompson, being led further and further away from the traditional values with which she had been raised.
 
Rebecca Jackson was being called to preach, a calling that scandalized her minister brother. Because women were not allowed to preach in AME churches, she became an itinerant preacher, holding renegade “Covenant Meetings,” typically comprised of women. Eventually the power of her preaching began to attract whites as well as blacks, and men as well as women. She began to receive invitations to preach in other towns, and was even, on occasion, invited to speak in a church.
 
African American spirituality has always been deeply engaged with questions of liberation, and Rebecca Jackson’s engagement with these questions included the added dimension of gender.
 
One of Rebecca’s most astounding revelations—the one that became the cornerstone of her philosophy of liberation and the principal text of her preaching was that sexual intercourse was—and I quote here from her autobiography—“of all things the most filthy in the sight of God, both in the married and unmarried, it all seemed alike.”
 
Now, before we jump to conclusions about Rebecca’s Puritan values or sexual repression, let’s remember that we are on a spiral here, and we have to look at her revelation in the context of her being an African American woman in the early decades of the 19th century.
 
The history of the African American woman is a history of ongoing, horrifying, universal, nearly inconceivable sexual torture and violation. The case can be made that rape, not lynching, should be the metaphor for race oppression in this country. Because she was enslaved, and because the law deemed the “fruit of her womb” to be the property of her owner, regardless of paternity, the African American woman was sexually abused not only to gratify her white enslavers’ sexual appetites and domination impulses, but also to increase his so-called property. She was paired off with African American males on the basis of genetic traits, and she was also prey to every white male with whom she came into contact. Being considered chattel, she had no recourse to law, and an enslaver could hardly take issue with a sexual assailant of any color whose actions might increase his so-called property. Captive African American women suffered from serial pregnancies, sometimes as many as fifteen and twenty. In the words of one planter, “An owner’s labor force doubled through natural [his words] increase every fifteen years.” The violation done to a woman by forcing her to bear and nurture unwanted children is neither recorded as “work,” nor as “punishment” or “torture,” but it was all three.
 
Pregnancy was a risky business in the 18th and 19th centuries, and these serial pregnancies took their toll in terms of child mortality, insanity, suicide, and exhaustion. The enslaved woman had absolutely no recourse when faced with sexual violation. Any displays of resistance to white rapists were met with violent reprisals, to herself and to her family. If she protested assault by an enslaved man, she risked loss of support within the community of captives. She had access neither to medicine, doctors, or hospitals. To add to the inconceivable horror of this situation, the captive woman had no control over her children at all. She could not protect them from torture, rape, slave labor, murder, sale at auction, or transport.
 
But it is important to remember that, in terms of sexual vulnerability, the so-called “free” African American woman in the early 19th century was almost as vulnerable as her enslaved sister. The majority of jobs for Black women were domestic service jobs, and because of this, most African American women were compelled to work in the homes of white families, where they were usually isolated from other workers, and where opportunities for rape were plentiful. When domestic servants were raped or sexually harassed, they had no recourse except to quit the job. Publicizing their violation would only redound in charges of slander or loose morals.

And, finally, all married women—white or Black—in the early 19th century were legally slaves to their husbands. Historically, they could not own property, collect their own wages, or own their own children. They could not vote, hold elected office, or serve on juries—a key point in the prosecution of rapists. They were banned from educational and career opportunities. Jobs open to them were menial and low-paying. And they could not deny their husbands sexually.
 
A wife was compelled by law to submit to her husband’s sexual demands, regardless of how untimely, unwelcome, repellant, or brutal. Husbands had the legal right to batter their wives, wife-beating being considered humorous and a form of “discipline.” What we today would call marital rape was considered a wifely duty in the 19th century. Refusal to comply with a husband’s sexual demands was grounds for divorce, with the attendant loss of children, property (her husband was entitled to everything that was hers when she married him), shelter, and financial support.
 
As with the more overt enslavement of women, marriage was likely to result in serial pregnancies when the number one cause of death for women was from complications in childbirth. Perpetual motherhood for the duration of her childbearing years—for women of all races—resulted in poverty and overwork for married women—again increasing mortality rates for both mother and children. The only form of birth control available to these women was the extended visits to friends and relatives.
 
Rebecca’s own experiences and observations had taught her that so-called free women were enslaved by their relations with men, and that heterosexuality was not only the ideology, but also the mechanism of their oppression. Her discovery would be elucidated more than a century later by poet and author Adrienne Rich in her classic feminist essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
 
But Rebecca Jackson lived in an age before women’s studies and feminist theory. Seeking support for her revelation, she turned to the one text available to her: the Bible. And here she found the passages that supported her preaching:

• I Timothy: “She shall be saved in childbearing, if she continues in faith and charity and holiness, with sobriety.”
  
• I Corinthians: “He that is married careth for the things of this world, how he may please his wife.” 
• Luke: “The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But they that are accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage.”
  
• I Corinthians: “She that is unmarried careth for the things of the Lord, how she may be holy, both in body and in spirit.”

 
When Jackson preached the gospel of celibacy in marriage, she did so with considerable scriptural authority. She argued that man’s sexuality was more unnatural than that of animals, otherwise why was it not practiced, as the animals practiced theirs, in the light of day? Describing the sexuality of animals as taking place in an orderly fashion in “times and seasons,” she decried the sexuality of men which took place in “confusion, in fear, in shame, in darkness, through lust, and to gratify themselves, by the influence of the Devil and not to multiply the earth and glorify their Maker.” According to Jackson, “In this respect they have fallen below the beasts, for these know times and seasons, and after that they remain still, until the time of nature’s season returns. And in that, they answer the end of their creation more than man.”
 
It is important to understand that Rebecca Jackson was a powerful and persuasive speaker, and that what she was advocating was nothing less than an uprising of enslaved women. And married women were eager to embrace a doctrine that gave divine sanction to their natural aversion to compulsory sex and childbearing. Far from being dismissed, the threat posed by Jackson’s preaching was taken very seriously by the men in the communities where she was fomenting revolution. Her autobiography Gifts of Power makes frequent mention of the “persecutions” with which she was met. Although she does not elaborate, the narrative suggests that, on more than one occasion, these so-called persecutions took the form of conspiracies against her life.
 
Preaching overt liberation from gender roles in marriage was only a first step in the evolution of Jackson’s radical spirituality. Over the years, her vision and her imagery became increasingly matriarchal.

This is from her “Letter to a Friend in Christ:”
 
"My very dear and well beloved Sister, whom I love in the Gospel of Christ and Mother... by which we are made able to see eye to eye in the Gospel through the spiritual womb of our Spiritual Mother... Now we thirst for the living waters of eternal life. And this is the Milk of the Word, which we draw from the breast of the Bride, the Lamb’s wife. He is the Word, She is the Milk. He is the Bridegroom, She is the Bride. We who draw Her breast, have the deep things of God, which will compass the men of worldly wisdom about to their confusion, through a virgin life."
 
Rebecca left her husband in 1836, when she was forty-one. Sources indicate this was the same year in which she made the acquaintance of Rebecca Perot, although they did not begin to develop their relationship until about seven years later. What little we know about their relationship is found in the recorded visions of both women published in Gifts of Power.
 
Here is Rebecca Jackson’s description of a vision of Rebecca Perot:
 
“I saw Rebecca Perot coming in the river, her face to the east, and she aplunging in the water every few steps, head foremost, abathing herself. She only had on her undergarment. She was pure and clean, even as the water in which she was abathing. She came facing me out of the water. I wondered she was not afraid. Sometimes she would be hid, for a moment, and then she would rise again. She looked like an Angel, oh, how bright!”
 
And here is an interesting vision that could be read as a lesbian subversion of the so-called Fall of Eve:
 
“After I laid down to rest, I was in sweet meditation. And a beautiful vision passed before my spirit eye. I saw a garden of excellent fruit. And it appeared to come near, even onto my bed, and around me! Yea, it covered me. And I was permitted to eat, and to give a portion to Rebecca Perot, and she ate, and was strengthened.”
 
And what of Rebecca Perot’s visions? Well, here’s one of them:
 
“I dreamt that Ann Potter and Rebecca Jackson and myself were in England. And Ann Potter took us to the Queen, and she crowned Rebecca King and me Queen of Africa. I then saw Africa with all her treasures of gold, together with all her inhabitants, and these was all given into our charge.”
 
These two women encouraged each other to indulge in ecstatic and empowering visions that celebrated their love in sensuous and Afro-centric metaphors, and that challenged each other to experience themselves as favored daughters of a beneficent female deity.
 
Later the two Rebecca’s embraced Shakerism, a utopian, communal religion based on principles of celibacy. After several years of struggle against the racism of the white Shakers, and her own personal struggles with the leader of that community, the Rebecca’s received authorization to found their own community for African Americans in Philadelphia.
 
Obviously, Rebecca Jackson and Rebecca Perot reflected the values and experiences of Black women living in a country where enslavement was still practiced. But I think that their visions and their choices have much to say to any woman who has experienced loss of sexual autonomy—through child sexual abuse, rape, harassment, or sexual pressures within a chosen relationship.
 
I am including this story of Rebecca Jackson, because it is one that gives a historical context to an individual’s perception of sex. Since the birth control pill freed sexuality from an automatic association with pregnancy risk, there has been a concerted effort on the part of the popular media to represent sexuality as apolitical and ahistorical. It is, in fact, neither.
 
Our sexual experiences do not occur in a cultural, social or political vacuum. My generation remembers when marital rape was still legal, when date rape was simply a “bad date,” when sexual harassment was called teasing and the problem defined as women’s poor sense of humor. We remember the time before rape crisis lines, rape victim advocates, before battered women’s shelters. We remember when abortion was illegal, when incest was considered extremely rare, a subject for offensive jokes about Appalachia.
 
Times have changed, but where my generation remembers the brothels of Vietnam, and the mass suicides of raped women in Bangladesh, the rising generation has memories of Bosnia and the ongoing and rising sexual slavery throughout Asia—a slave traffic supported by both heterosexual and gay male Western businessmen and entrepreneurs.
 
Our experiences of sex also occur within a context of our sexual histories. The Women’s Action Coalition estimates that approximately 33% of girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen by someone within the family. 25% of girls are sexually abused before the age of eighteen by someone outside the family. Building on studies of post-traumatic stress disorder of Vietnam War veterans, psychologists have begun to develop a whole new field of research and theory based on the effects of trauma. This has led to specific research into the effects of child sexual abuse on the development of the child. Symptoms and syndromes that used to be lumped together under “hysteria” or “borderline personality,” are now classified as Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The abused child is now understood to have symptoms similar to those of war captives and torture survivors, only with more severe consequences, because the trauma occurred when they were children, without adult understanding of their situation or skills for coping with it. The understanding of Complex PTSD is just now beginning to enter the public discourse. And high time, too. I believe that this will be part of the next revolution, and that trauma studies will inevitably lead to a new area inquiry, “intimacy studies.”

I want to spend just a minute on some of the ways in which children process sexual abuse, because this has a lot to do with how survivors experience sex as an adult. The child is dependent upon parental figures and, to a certain extent, on all adult authority figures, for her survival. Knowledge that parents or adults are dangerous or dishonest can be life-threatening to the child, and the child’s mind develops elaborate strategies for protecting her against this taboo information. Some children repress the memories entirely, and sometimes permanently. Some women recover these memories, often in their late twenties or early thirties. Retrieval of these memories radically alters the sexual patterns and behaviors of the survivor, and some therapists mistakenly insist that the behaviors of the survivor prior to their recovery of the trauma memories—behaviors that may well have been hypersexual and dissociative—constituted the “authentic” sexuality of the client. The therapist may mistakenly direct her energy toward getting the survivor to return to these behaviors, when, in fact, they may have been syndromes of the trauma from which she is attempting to recover!
 
Some children undergo a process called “fusion with the perpetrator” during sexual abuse. Because they don’t understand what is being done to them—often not even having words for it, and because it is too dangerous to experience their violation at the hands of their care giver, they will identify with the perpetrator and his arousal during the abuse. This can result in tremendous confusion for the survivor later in life. She may find herself aroused by scenarios involving her own pain, trauma, or humiliation, or she may find that she can become aroused only in the role, play-acted or real, of a perpetrator. Her fantasies and/or her sexual practices may run completely counter to her spirituality and her core politic—and yet, she may find it is difficult or even impossible to achieve the same kind of arousal with roles or fantasies more consistent with her values.
 
Fusion with the perpetrator is similar to the downloading of pornographic files into a computer, only the computer is the psyche of the child victim. Just as a computer virus can contaminate files and programs in the host computer, this involuntary importation of overwhelming sexual and emotional adult material can pre-empt and corrupt the child’s natural development of her own sexuality. This projected affect from the perpetrator can become hard-wired into the child’s psyche, where it may reside, more or less intact, as she begins to mature sexually. This kind of hard-wiring can be very difficult to take apart or rebuild later on. Imagine the pain and frustration of the woman with an evolved politic and spirituality, who, in her most intimate relationship, finds the program of some invasive pornographic perpetrator running—a program that she never intentionally imported, and one that is counter to everything she stands for and has fought against in the other areas of her life.
 
This woman will not find help with her dilemma in a popular culture that is insisting sex is apolitical and ahistorical, that tells her, “if it feels good, do it.” What if what feels good, feels bad? Then the culture says, learn to disconnect the politic and the spirituality that make it feel bad. Orgasm at any cost! For some women, this advice sounds suspiciously like the perpetrator’s agenda, and it is to be achieved through the same technique: the woman’s spontaneous dissociation.
 
Dissociation is another survival strategy for abused children. In repression, the child splits off the taboo memory. In dissociation, she splits off the taboo parts of herself—the parts that she was not allowed to express as a child. She may have split off all of her rage, so that most of the time she appears to be incredibly easy-going and non-confrontational, but when something triggers her, she can go into shockingly abusive behaviors. She may not have been allowed to set boundaries, and so most of the time she might appear to be a generous and devoted care giver—and then, one day, she is gone with no looking back.
 
I’m not talking about Multiple Personality Disorder, where the survivor has developed a number of discrete personalities, with their own histories, names, and behaviors, and where the survivor is amnesiac about the actions she performs in one persona when she is in another. Women with dissociative identity disorders remember their behaviors, but they are often unable to understand them or be accountable for them. They feel shame and confusion about their inconsistencies, and many women with dissociative identity disorders have histories of serial failures in their intimate relationships.
 
Dissociative sexual behaviors are extremely common among survivors of child sexual abuse. These can include hypersexuality, emotional absence, dependence on drugs or alcohol, or childlike passivity during sexual encounters. They can include rage or abusive behaviors. Sometimes sexual activity will trigger somatic memories, and a survivor can experience the physical sensations with or without the emotional states that occurred at the time of her abuse. Many survivors cannot become aroused without alcohol, drugs, or intense role-playing.
 
Much of what the media portrays as women’s sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder. Marilyn Monroe’s behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a molested child trying to appease a male authority figure than an adult woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction. And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? Our pop cultural icon for female sexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage. Eleven foster homes. One orphanage.  By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse. Shortly after her fifteenth birthday, her legal guardian brokered a so-called marriage for her. In other words, Marilyn Monroe she was legally prostituted as a teenager. She made three attempts at suicide before she was twenty-five, and several more throughout the rest of her life. Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband Joe Dimaggio “Pa,” and she called third husband Arthur Miller “Pops.” Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.
 
But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality. What does it say about male dominant culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal incest survivor who had dissociative identity disorders and who eventually killed herself?  Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality was a transcendent phenomenon, somehow existing apart from her history of trauma, developed in a cultural vacuum? It was not. Her sexuality was no different from that of millions of survivors of child sexual abuse all over the world.  At a recent auction of her personal affects, a pair of Marilyn’s stiletto-heel pumps was sold for $48,000.  A high price to pay for shoes, but the price is much higher for the woman who attempts to walk in them. And maybe that’s the point.

“Hypersexuality” is a term you will never see in the popular media, although it’s all over the literature about post-rape and post-incest syndromes.  It has been suggested that sexual dissociation is so rampant in female populations that dissociative disorders have come to define what is considered normative sexual behavior for women.
 
Healing from dissociative states requires awareness and conscious integration. It means learning to identify when one is dissociated, learning which situations and dynamics trigger the flight into dissociation, and learning how it feels to stay present.  It means going back and experiencing the frozen grief and displaced rage. Healing from sexual abuse, contrary to the books on lesbian sexuality, does not necessarily result in a renewed interest in sex. The survivor who no longer relies on dissociation to enable her sexual activity, may have become unwilling to indulge in the fantasies and scenarios that so clearly are not of her choosing, but that are necessary for her to achieve orgasm. She may have stopped repressing or censoring the disruptive somatic memories, so that sex is physically painful. She may become aware that this metaphor is so contaminated with traumatic associations, she is not able or maybe even not willing to redeem it as a metaphor for intimacy. She may have come to feel so trusting of her partner that, for the first time in her life, she is free to bring all of who she is into her most intimate moments, and this supreme gift of showing up with all of herself may be the very thing that precludes sexual activity. How painful for this woman to discover that her partner preferred her dissociative behavior!
 
Sexuality is learned. It is imperative that we begin to ask where we learned it and what were the motives of our teachers, before we accept these lessons as part of our identity and allow them to determine the shape of our lives and of our intimacy. Sexuality is not apolitical or ahistorical. In fact, sex may be the most political lesson of our lives, a primer for understanding the meaning of invasion, occupation, colonization. What more powerful tool for a colonizer to possess than the ability to cross the wires for pain and pleasure in a subject people at the very command headquarters of the central nervous system? What percentage of a population would one need to torture and brainwash in order to colonize the whole? What does it mean that 33% of girls are survivors of sexual torture, and many—or even most—have to some degree formed an identity around identification with and protection of the perpetrator?
 
We do not know whether or not Rebecca Jackson was a survivor of sexual abuse, but we do know from her writings that her overwhelming quest for liberation for Black women and her courageous confrontation of the facts of the historic sexual violation of Black women were too great for her to see any value in reclaiming sexuality as a metaphor for intimacy. In fact, it was part of her spiritual quest for liberation to keep the abuse of sexuality always in the front of her preaching and her mission. Instead of rehearsing scenarios of domination and enslavement with her partner, she chose to construct visions of goddesses, of healing, of abundance. For followers of Rebecca Jackson, the primary metaphor for intimacy was the consummate respect for the chastity of the women they loved, a chastity that was a metaphor for the physical autonomy and integrity that had been so historically, so perpetually, so painfully, and so violently wrenched from her people. The greatest gift Rebecca Jackson could bring to her beloved Rebecca Perot was the conceptual restoration and celebration of her virginity, most rare and most treasured—an almost inconceivable symbol of liberation for an African American woman in the 19th century. And still a rare, treasured, and almost inconceivable symbol for freedom for any women of any color in the 21st century.
 
Hard subject.  We are talking about millennia of denial. Time for a slinky break. [slinky] Breathe. [breathe]
 
This is going to be our last trip together. This time we’re going to enter the Twilight Zone.  [sound effects and slinky]  We are. Only it’s a true story. We are traveling back about thirty years, to a parking lot in California. It is the parking lot of the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles. There are two white women getting ready to take a five-day vacation trip up to Napa Valley. One of the women is a blonde and the other is a redhead. The car is packed with food, clothing, and cameras. The gas tank is filled for a five-day adventure.  Remember that. It’s an important point. The two women get into the car.
 
This is the blonde woman’s description of their trip:
 
"We discovered some wonderful places. We explored the old missions around Santa Barbara. We were mostly alone as we traveled up the coast, with just the quiet trees looking down over the misty sea. Eventually, I remember tall, tall mountains looking down into magical valleys. To me, it was like stepping right in to the Old Testament. We were swept up in the spirit of the place… We were both just marveling at the overwhelming feeling of the place. And then, suddenly, we came back to our senses and found we were still in the parking lot at the Bel Air Hotel. I don’t understand it. It was five days later, and it appeared we hadn’t moved. Our luggage was still intact. The same gas was still in the tank. And our food was still warm. I don’t expect you to understand, because even Judy and I have never been able to explain this experience. Maybe it was just something we both needed desperately. I do know that this was shortly before I went into a very dark depression. And maybe God was preparing me for this. I felt so close to him during this sort of spiritual trip that we took. Then in my darkest days soon afterward, he seemed so far away that I couldn’t find him. But, maybe, through this journey, he had instilled in me an extra bit of strength, so that I could hold on. I’ll never be sure. I do know that both Judy and I can still recall certain moments from that trip. And they seem to come back at the times when we need it the most."
 
The two women who took this spiritual trip together have been in a primary relationship for more than forty years. They met in third grade, and they remained best friends throughout their school years, years in which the blonde girl was scapegoated as a slut because of her large breasts and flashy clothes. The redhead, the daughter of an abusive and alcoholic widower, was hired out as child to do field work side-by-side with adult males. After high school, the redhead enlisted in the military, and the blonde began a career as a performer. When the redhead got out of the service, she came to live with the blonde, and has been living with her ever since—except for a brief period of time when a crisis in their relationship drove the redhead to re-enlist.  It was quickly apparent to both that they had made a terrible mistake, and the blonde, by then rich and famous, used her political connections to get the redhead honorably discharged.

The two women travel together, they create art together, they work together, they play together, they share a bed, and—as the Bel Air story makes obvious—they share a very deep and very personal spirituality. They do not have sex with each other, but the blonde has made a point of telling the press that she sleeps naked.  These days, when asked if they are lesbian, the blonde woman will reply, “You can call me that if you want to.”
 
Some lesbians would not call them that. The blonde has a husband, a man she married as a teenager, who lives with both women in a separate part of the house. The blonde also has had a history of heterosexual affairs from time to time, but always with the understanding that these would not jeopardize either her marriage or her primary relationship with the redhead.
 
The blonde is Dolly Parton and the redhead is Judy Ogle. Now, I realize “Dolly Parton” is the last name that might come to mind when one thinks of lesbians or celibacy. Dolly Parton has become a cultural icon for heterosex, and she has, through cosmetic surgery and extreme dieting, turned her body into a pornographic caricature.
 
So why am I talking about her in the same breath with the likes of Karen Thompson and Rebecca Jackson? Because she so beautifully exemplifies the problem of definitions that come up whenever we try to talk about lesbian relationships.
 
The language and models that we have for our relationships reflect a male dominant culture and its interests—or obsessions. These do not serve us lesbians well. This is a quotation from the book Boston Marriages: Romantic But Asexual Marriages among Contemporary Lesbians, edited by Esther Rothblum:
 
"Because women’s sexuality is socially constructed by men, contemporary sexologists are inclined to demand genital proof of sexual orientation. Before labeling her as bisexual or lesbian, most researchers expect a woman to have had genital relationships with other women. Feminists have pointed out some serious shortcomings with this assumption. Female bisexuality and lesbianism may be more a matter of loving other women than of achieving orgasm through genital contact… The absence of genital juxtaposition hardly drains a relationship of passion or importance."
 
I am talking about Dolly Parton today, because she is an example of a woman who has had to customize her intimacy in extreme ways to negotiate a superstar career in a patriarchal culture that makes it extremely difficult for any woman to realize even small dreams.
 
Dolly Parton was a hillbilly woman, and where my generation of lesbians associated freedom with flannel shirts and work boots, for Dolly, those constituted the uniform and symbol of her oppression. Poor and poorly educated, she was a smart and ambitious woman. And she knew that her only way out of the constriction of poverty and compulsory heterosexuality/motherhood was through exploiting her sex appeal, a patriarchal common denominator that crossed all class lines. Short, tight skirts and sparkly, spangly tops to her were symbols of mobility, of ambition, of glamour, of big cities, of travel and adventure. Dressing with what were to her power symbols, she gained the unearned reputation of being a slut in her community. But outside her community, the manipulation of these symbols proved to be very effective.
 
Her marriage to Carl Dean, a working-class man, when she was still a teenager was another career move, in that he was able to support her while she was building her career. More importantly, her marital status enabled her to market her sexuality as a commodity while retaining the respectability and protection of marriage. It also enabled her to share her home openly with Judy.  Dolly Parton is very open about her affairs, and about the fact that she does not see Carl Dean very frequently, never travels with him, and does not share her professional life with him. Asked if she believes in living together before marriage, she quips that she does not believe in living together after marriage. Carl Dean accepts Judy as part of the family, rotating the tires on her car and changing the oil.
 
Had Dolly looked to Carl Dean for undying passion or companionship, she would have divorced him long ago. Had she attempted to live as a single woman, her affairs would have been regular features on the covers of the tabloids, and she would never have been able to walk the fine line between sex symbol and the wholesome purveyor of family entertainment and proprietor of “Dollywood.” Had she lived in an exclusive partnership with Judy, the only albums she would have been allowed to record would have been with Olivia Records, a company not even founded until Dolly was over forty.

It’s interesting to read the words that Dolly uses to describe her relationship to Judy: “pure,” “sweet,” “innocent,” “fun.” In her world, sex is a metaphor for power, glamour, performance, an altered and manipulated state of arousal, commercialism, artificiality—something not so pure, not sweet, not so innocent, and, possibly, not so fun. It might be worth considering that the kind of spiritual odyssey that Dolly and Judy experienced was a result of the fact that they had never invested their intimacy in sexual practices, which, although they may become more refined in terms of technique, remain relatively static in terms of transformative growth. Maybe it was specifically this investment in other forms of intimacy that allowed them to channel their love into what appears to have been another dimension altogether.

Dolly’s choices reflect the kind of splitting required of women in patriarchy. She maintains separate relationships for all the functions of her life as a woman whose ambition has always been to be a superstar. That she did not end up like Marilyn Monroe may have something to do with the protection and stability she has experienced in her personal life, through her marriage to Carl Dean and her ongoing intimate, sleep-in, companionship with Judy. Both Judy and Carl Dean met her and loved her before she became famous. Dolly Parton chose not to privilege her sexual relationships as the place where she would entrust her primary intimacy, and possibly this is one of the biggest secrets to her success. Where Marilyn made the fatal mistake of identifying with her image, Dolly is open and articulate about how her body is a costume and her public persona an act. Maybe she is able to do that, because Judy, who knew her as a child, holds her identity, and Dolly always comes home to Judy.  
 
So there is no language to describe Dolly Parton’s relationships. Who benefits from that? Quoting again from Boston Marriages, “The language available to describe reality, particularly such a fundamental aspect of reality as relationships, serves as a method of social control.” That is such a powerful statement in considering this topic, it bears repeating:  “The language available to describe reality, particularly such a fundamental aspect of reality as relationships, serves as a method of social control.”  Rothblum goes on to say, “If we can’t say it, it’s hard to think it, and even harder to enact it. That standard question of all political analysis, Who benefits? serves us well here.”  Who benefits? “Who benefits from our not making commitments outside of a sexual context? Who benefits from our limited ability to value nonsexual intimacy? From the poverty of our language of intimacy? What kinds of intimacy would we describe and value, what kind of commitments would we make and honor, if we based our definitions of relationships in the reality of experience?”
                                                                             
Mary Daly, radical lesbian philosopher and all-round rabble-rouser, has given us a new lexicon for bespeaking ourselves into being, and one of the expressions she coined was “pure lust,” which she describes as “the desire to share pleasure.”  Surely that is the emotion that defines Karen Thompson’s ongoing care of Sharon Kowalski, that describes the sharing of visions between the Rebeccas Perot and Jackson, and that would characterize the fourth dimensional spiritual journey that Dolly Parton and Judy Ogle took from the parking lot of the Bel Air hotel.  This “desire to share pleasure” allows us the freedom to define for ourselves what those symbols of pleasure will be, and in doing that, we honor the possibility that our politic, our intellect, our creativity, and our spirituality may have greater gifts of intimacy than a sexuality so influenced by conditions out of our control and inimical to our interests.
 
[slinky]  Time for us all to get back to our own highly individual, highly unique progressive revolutions. It is my hope that the journey we took today will enhance our appreciation for our current location on the spiral—wherever that may be—and En-courage all of us to feel more freedom and more confidence in respecting the great wisdom of our bodies and customizing our metaphors for intimacy.