Surviving degradation is an ongoing process that gives you
rights, honor, and knowledge because you earn them; but it
also takes from you too much tenderness. One needs tenderness to love - not to be loved but to love.
I long to touch my sisters; I wish I could take away the
pain; I’ve heard so much heartbreak among us. I think I’ve
pretty much done what I can do; I’m empty; there’s not much
left, not inside me. I think that it’s bad to give up, but maybe
it’s not bad to rest, to sit in silence for a while. I’m told by my
friends that it’s not evil to rest. At the same time, as they
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know, there’s a child being pimped by her father with everyone around her either taking a piece of her or looking the other way. How can anyone rest, real y? What would make it
possible? I say to myself, Think about the fourth-generation
daughter who wasn’t a prostitute; think about her. I say,
Think about the woman who asked herself whether or not it
was bad to penetrate a baby with an object and figured out
that it might be; think about her. These are miracles, political
miracles, and there will be so many more. I think that there
will be many more.
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Politics doesn’t run on miracles modest or divine, and the few
miracles there are have the quality of invisibility about them
because they happen to invisible people, those who have been
hurt too much, too often, too deep. There’s a jagged wound
that is in fact someone’s life, and any miracle is hidden precisely
because the wound is so egregious. The victims of any systematized brutality are discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate the pain. When a rapist stomps on
your life, you are victimized, and although it is a social law in
our society that “victim” is a dirty word, it is also a true word,
a word that points one toward what one does not want to
know.
Women used to be identified as a group by what was presumed to be a biological wound - the vaginal slit, the place for penile penetration. There is a 2, 000 year history of the slit’s
defining the person. If a stranger can go from the outside
to the inside, the instrumentality of that action is the whole
purpose of the creature to whom it is done. That area of
the female body has hundreds of dirty names that serve as
synonyms.
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The mystery is why the vagina is such a mystery. Any reference to one of the dirty names elicits sniggers and muted laughs. What are seen as the sexual parts of a woman’s body
are always jokes; anything nonsexual is trivial or trivialized.
For a prostitute, the whole body becomes the sexual part,
as if there were nothing human, only an anatomical use. She
gets to be dirty al over, and what is done to her gets to be
dirty al over. She is also a joke. None of the women I’ve met
in my life has been either dirty or a joke.
Feminists have good reasons for feeling tired. The backlash
against feminism has been deeply stupid. But first there is the
frontlash, the misogyny that saturates the gender system, so
that a woman is always less. The frontlash is the world the
way one knew it thirty-five years ago; there was no feminism
to stand against the enemies of women.
I often see the women’s movement referred to as one of the
most successful social change movements the world has yet
seen, and there is great truth in that. In some parts of the
Western world, fathers do not own their daughters under the
law; the fact that this has transmogrified into a commonplace
incest doesn’t change the accomplishment in rendering the
paterfamilias a nul ity in the old sense.
In most parts of the Western world, rape in marriage is now
il egal - it was not illegal thirty-five years ago.
In the United States, most women have paying jobs, even
though equal pay for equal work is a long way off; and
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Heartbreak
although it is stil true that sexual harassment makes women
migrants in the labor market, the harassment itself is now
il egal and one can sue - one has a weapon.
Middle-class women keep battery a secret and in working-
and lower-class families battery is not suf iciently stigmatized;
nevertheless, there are new initiatives against both bat ery
and the batterer, and there wil be more, including the nearly
universal acceptance of a self-defense plea for killing a
bat erer.
The slime of woman hating comes now from the bot om,
oozing its way up the social scale. There is a class beneath
working and lower class that is entirely marginalized. It’s the
sex-for-money class, the whoring class, the pornography class,
the trafficked-woman class, the woman who is invisible almost
because one can see so much of her. Each inch of nakedness is
an inch of worthlessness and lack of social protection. The
world’s economies have taken to trafficking in women; the
woman with a few shekels is bet er off, they say, than the
woman with none. I know a few formerly prostituted women,
including myself, who disagree.
The women I’ve met are very often first raped, then pimped
inside their own families while they are still children. Their
bodies have no borders. Middle-class women, including middle-
class feminists, cannot imagine such marginality. It’s as if the
story is too weird, too ugly, too unsightly for an educated
woman to believe.
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What comes along with every ef ort to stop the sexual
abuse of women is the denial that the sexual abuse is happening at al , and U. S. women should understand that William Jefferson Clinton and his enabler, the senator, have set women
back more than thirty-five years in this regard. Some women
are pushed up and some women are pushed down. It’s the
women who are down who are paying the freight for al the
rest; the women who have been pushed up even a smidge
have taken to acting as if everything is al right or wil be soon.
Their arguments are not with men or even with subgroups of
men, for instance, pimps. They smile and make nice with the
men. Their arguments are with me or other militants. Being a
militant simply requires fighting sexual abuse - the right of a
rapist, the right of a pimp, the right of a john, the right of an
incest-daddy to use or intimidate or coerce girls or women.
A young woman just out of college says that date rape does
not happen, and the media conspire to make her rich and
famous.
A woman of no intellectual distinction writes a 3, 000-page
book, or so it seems, and she is celebrated - she becomes rich
and famous.
The wealthy wife of a multimil ionaire writes longingly
about being a stay-at-home mother. Feminists, she says, have
made that too hard - as she pursues a golden career writing
(without talent) about how she wants to be home mopping
up infant vomit.
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Heartbreak
A middle-class English feminist of ferocious mediocrity
spends her time charting the eating disorders of her betters.
They are not so evident on the landscape now, but there
were so-called feminists who published in Playboy, Hustler,
and Penthouse and penned direct attacks on feminists fighting
pornography and prostitution. There were women labeled
feminist who wrote pornographic scenarios in which the
so-called fantasies were the rape of other feminists, usually
named and sometimes drawn but always recognizable; one at
least has become a male through surgery - her head and heart
were always right there.
Making fun of the victims was even more commonplace
than making fun of the feminists fighting in behalf of those
who had been raped or prostituted.
It became an insult to be cal ed or considered a victim, even
when one had been victimized. The women in pornography
and prostitution had not been victimized just once or by a
stranger; more often the family tree was a poison tree - sexual
abuse grew on every branch. Only in the United States could
second-class citizens (women) be proud to disown the experiences of sisters (prostitutes), stand up for the predator, and minimize sexual abuse - this after thirty-five years spent
fighting for the victim’s right to live outside the dynamic of
exploitation. “If you’re ignorant to what’s going on around
you, ” said one former prostitute, "or haven’t got the education
to bring yourself out of that, you stay there. And so it
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Basics
becomes from the little go-go dancer to the strip-tease dancer
to the glamorous effect to pornography, [and] coaxing other
women into doing the same thing because I was a strong
woman. Coming from a woman it sounds better, it comes
across better, and I didn’t realize I was doing it until I got the
chance to do some healing. In the long run I was being tricked
into it just like every other woman out there. ”
What does it mean if you cal yourself a feminist, have the
education, and act like a designer-special armed guard to keep
women prostituting?
It is true, I think, that at the beginning, in the early years,
feminists did not and could not imagine women hurting other
women on purpose - being so morally or politically cor upt.
The naivete was stunning; betrayal is always an easier choice.
One follows the patriarchal nar ative by blaming the incest-
mothers, the Chinese mothers who bound their daughters’
feet, the bad mothers in the fairy tales. One did not want to
fol ow the patriarchal nar ative. But is it not the political
responsibility of feminists to figure out the role of female-to-
female betrayal in upholding male supremacy? Isn’t that
necessary? And how can one do what is necessary if one is too
cowardly to face the truth?
The truth of a bad or incapacitated mother is a hard truth
to face. As one woman said, “I was forced to be the head of
the family because my mother couldn’t do it. She was in a
mental institution. ” Another woman said, “My mother was
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Heartbreak
scared for men to be around [because] al my sisters were al
molested by this man, and so she protected us from him, but
a lady came in my life who seduced me and molested me also.
I was twelve, and I thought I was safe. ” So there she was, the
bad mother or the betraying mother or the incapacitated
mother or the unknowing mother; and each had her own sadness or ter or.
Not too many prostituting women got past twelve without
being sexual y abused, and not too many were childless, and
not too many lived lives as teenagers and adults without men
abusing them: “I was into drugs, in the limelights and the
glamorous life, and thought I was bet er than the whores on
the streets ’cause what I did was drove fancy cars and travel
around in airplanes, al this shit, but I was stil in the same pain
as everybody else, [and] instead of using men I started using
women for whatever my needs was. ” The media antifeminists
are not unlike the woman-using prostitutes and the strung-out
mothers - their venom goes in the direction of other women
because it is easier than taking on men. Is this ever going to
stop?
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Immoral
People play life as if it’s a game, whereas each step is a real
step. The shock of being unable to control what happens,
especially the tragedies, overwhelms one. Someone dies;
someone leaves; someone lies. There is sickness, misery, loneliness, betrayal. One is alone not just at the end but al the time. One tries to camouflage pain and failure. One wants
to believe that poverty can be cured by wealth, cruelty by
kindness; but neither is true. The orphan is always an orphan.
The worst immorality is in apathy, a deadening of caring
about others, not because they have some special claim but
because they have no claim at al .
The worst immorality is in disinterest, indifference, so that
the lone person in pain has no importance; one need not feel
an urgency about rescuing the suffering person.
The worst immorality is in dressing up to go out in order
not to have to think about those who are hungry, without
shelter, without protection.
The worst immorality is in living a trivial life because one
is afraid to face any other kind of life - a despairing life or an
anguished life or a twisted and difficult life.
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Heartbreak
kindness rises above mediocrity always, and not to be kind
locks one into an ethos of boredom and stupidity.
The worst immorality is in imitating those who give nothing.
The worst immorality is in conforming so that one fits in,
smart or fashionable, mock-heroic or the very best of the very
same.
The worst immorality is accepting the status quo because
one is afraid of gossip against oneself.
The worst immorality is in selling out simply because one
is afraid.
The worst immorality is a studied ignorance, a purposeful
refusal to see or know.
The worst immorality is living without ambition or work
or pushing the rest of us along.
The worst immorality is being timid when there is no
threat.
The worst immorality is refusing to push oneself where one
is afraid to go.
The worst immorality is not to love actively.
The worst immorality is to close down because heartbreak
has worn one down.
The worst immorality is to live according to rituals, rites of
passage that are predetermined and impersonal.
The worst immorality is to deny someone else dignity.
The worst immorality is to give in, give up.
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Immoral
The worst immorality is to follow a road map of hate
drawn by white supremacists and male supremacists.
The worst immorality is to use anoth
er person’s body in the
passing of time.
The worst immorality is to inflict pain.
The worst immorality is to be careless with another
person’s heart and soul.
The worst immorality is to be stupid, because it’s easy
The worst immorality is to repudiate one’s own uniqueness
in order to fit in.
The worst immorality is to set one’s goals so low that one
must crawl to meet them.
The worst immorality is to hurt children.
The worst immorality is to use one’s strength to dominate
or control.
The worst immorality is to sur ender the essence of oneself
for love or money.
The worst immorality is to believe in nothing, do nothing,
achieve nothing.
The worst immoralities are but one, a single sin of human
nothingness and stupidity. “Do no harm” is the counterpoint
to apathy, indifference, and passive aggression; it is the fundamental moral imperative. “Do no harm” is the opposite of immoral. One must do something and at the same time do no
harm. “Do no harm” remains the hardest ethic.
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Memory
Memory became political on the global scale when Holocaust
survivors had to remember in order to testify against Nazi war
criminals. It had always been political to articulate a crime
that had happened to one and name the criminal, but that had
been on a small scale: the family, the village, the local legal
system. Sometimes one remembered but made no accusation.
This was true with pogroms as well as rapes.
There have been Holocaust survivors who refused to
remember, and there is at least one known Holocaust survivor
who is a Holocaust denier.
It has been hard to get crimes against women recognized as
such. Rape was a crime against the father or husband, not the
victim herself. Incest was a privately protected right hidden
under the imperial robe of the patriarch. Prostitution was a
crime in which the prostitute was the criminal no mat er who
forced her, who hurt her, or how young she was in those first
days of rape without complicity. A woman’s memory was so