life, do my work, use my body? how, then, do I want to
be, in all my particulars?
standard form s are imposed in dress, behavior,
sexual relation, punctuation. standard form s are imposed on consciousness and b eh avior— on know ing and exp ressin g— so that we will not presum e freedom , so
that freedom will appear — in all its particulars — impossible and unworkable, so that we will not know what telling the truth is, so that we will not feel com pelled
to tell it, so that we will spend ou r time and our holy
hum an energy telling the necessary lies.
standard form s are sometimes called conventions,
conventions are m ightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrum ent o f the Law, an u nfeeling guard pun ching his fellow man hard in the belly.
I am an anarchist. I dont sue, I dont get injunctions, I
advocate revolution, and when people ask me what
can we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken the
fabric of the system wherever you can, make possible
the increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write I
try to extend the possibilities of expression.
. . . I had tried to speak to you honestly, in my own
way, undisguised, trying to get rid, it’s part o f my obligation to the muse, of the ancien regime o f grammar.
. . . the revisions in typography and punctuation
have taken from the voice the difference that distin
Afterword
201
guishes passion from affection and me speaking to
you from me writing an essay.
Julian Beck, 1965, in a foreword
to an edition of The Brig
BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION.
Muriel Rukeyser
there is a great deal at stake here, many writers
fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for
the writer? freedom o f invention, freedom to tell the
truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new
structures.
(the burden o f proof is not on those who presume
freedom, the burden o f p roof is on those who would
in any way diminish it. )
what is at stake for the enforcers, the doorkeepers,
the guardians o f the L aw —the publishing corporations,
the book reviewers who do not like lower case letters,
the librarians who will not stack books without standard
punctuation (that was the reason given Muriel Rukeyser
when her work was violated)—what is at stake for them?
why do they continue to enforce?
while this book may meet much resistance— anger,
fear, dislike—law? police? courts? —at this moment I
must write: Ive attacked the fundaments o f culture,
thats ok. Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok. Ive
attacked every heterosexual notion o f relation, thats
ok. Ive in effect advocated the use o f drugs, thats ok.
Ive in effect advocated fucking animals, thats ok. here
and now, New York City, spring 1974, among a handful
o f people, publisher and editor included, thats ok. lower
case letters are not. it does make one wonder.
202
Woman Hating
so Ive wondered and this is what I think right now.
there are well-developed, effective mechanisms for
dealing with ideas, no matter how powerful the ideas
are. very few ideas are more powerful than the mechanisms for defusing them, standard form —punctuation, typography, then on to academic organization, the
rigid ritualistic formulation of ideas, etc. —is the actual
distance between the individual (certainly the intellectual individual) and the ideas in a book.
standard form is the distance.
one can be excited about ideas without changing at
all. one can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without
changing at all. people are willing to think about many
things, what people refuse to do, or are not permitted to
do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.
reading a text which violates standard form forces
one to change mental sets in order to read. there is no
distance. the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar, forces one to read differendy—not to read about different things, but to read in different ways.
to permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think
about different things, but to think in different ways.
that work is not permitted.
If it had been possible to build the Tower o f Babel
without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.
Franz Kafka
The Immovable Structure is the villain. Whether
that structure calls itself a prison or a school or a fac
Afterword
203
tory or a family or a government or The World As It
Is. That structure asks each man what he can do for it,
not what it can do for him, and for those who do not do
for it, there is the pain of death or imprisonment, or
social degradation, or the loss of animal rights.
Judith Malina
this book is about the Immovable Sexual Structure,
in the process o f having it published, Ive encountered
and I now testify, as so many have before me, that the
Immovable Structure aborts freedom, prohibits invention, and does us verifiable harm: it uses our holy human energy to sustain itself; it turns us into enforcers, or outlaws; to survive, we must learn to lie.
T h e Revolution, as we live it and as we imagine it,
means destroying the Immovable Structure to create
a world in which we can use our holy human energy to
sustain our holy human lives;
to create a world without enforcers, doorkeepers,
guards, and arbitrary Law;
to create a world —a community on this planet—
where instead o f lying to survive, we can tell the truth
and flourish.
N O T E S
Chapter 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles
1 The Brothers G rim m , Household Stories (New York: Dover
Publications, 1963), p. 213.
2 Ibid., p. 213.
3 Ibid., p. 214.
4 Ibid.
5Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7Ibid., p. 216.
8 Ibid., p. 221.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
II Ibid., p. 124.
12 Ibid., p. 72.
13 Ibid., p. 73.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 74.
16 Ibid., p. 85
17 Ibid., p. 220.
18 Ibid., p. 85.
19 Ibid., p. 92.
Chapter 3. Woman as Victim: Story of O
1 Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 108, unsigned.
- Pauline Reage, Story o f O (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. xxi.
3 Ibid., p. 80.
206
Woman Haling
4 Ibid., p. 93.
5 Ibid., p. 187.
6Ibid., p. 32.
7 Ibid., p. 106.
8 R obert S. d e R opp, Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in M an and
Animals (New York: Dell Publishing C om pany, 1969), p. 134.
Chapter 4. Woman at Victim: The Image
‘J e a n d e B erg, The Image (New York: G rove Press, 1966), p.
137-
2 Ibid., p. 19.
3 Ibid., p. 47.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., p. 10.
6 Ibid., p. 11.
7 Ibid., p. 9.
8 Ibid., p. 42.
9Eliphas Levi, The History o f Magic (London: R ider a n d C om pany, 1969), p. 263.
10 Ibid., p. 265.
" J e a n d e B erg, op. cit., p. 11.
11 Ibid., p. 135.
13
The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. J o h n C ohen (New York: Ballan-
tine Books, 1967), pp. 296-97.
Chapter 5. Woman at Victim: Suck
1 The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen (New York: Ballan-
tine Books, 1967), p. 245.
2 Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy, I Change I Am the Same
(n. d. ).
3 Suck 6.
4 Ibid.
5 Suck 4.
6
Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
" 7 Ibid.
19 Suck 2 .
11 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Suck 3.
Chapter 6. Gynoclde: Chinese Footbinding
I Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History o f a Curious
Erotic Custom (New York: W. Rawls, 1966), p. 39. Mr. Levy’s book is
the primary source for all the factual, historical information in this
chapter.
2Ibid., p. 112.
3 Ibid., pp. 25-26.
4 Ibid., p. 26.
5 Ibid., pp. 26-28.
6 Ibid., p. 141.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., p. 182.
" 9
Ibid., p. 89.
10 Ibid., p. 144.
II Ibid., pp. 144- 4 5 -
Chapter 7. Gynoclde: The Witches
1 Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft (London: Tandem,
1969 ). P- 66.
2 H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth o f Feminine E vil (London: Methuen and Co., 1966), p. 111.
3Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1971), p. 63.
4 Ibid., p. 65.
5 Ibid., pp. 66-67.
6 Hays, op. cit., p. 147.
7 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum,
trans. by M. Summers (London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 29-30.
8 Ibid., Table of Contents.
9
Ibid.
10 Ibid., Preface.
11 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 183-84.
208
Woman Hating
12 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 123.
13 Ibid., pp. 114-15.
14 Ibid., pp. 115-16.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., p. 117.
17 Ibid., p. 118.
18 Ibid., pp. 119-21.
19 Ibid., p. 112.
20 Ibid., pp. 122-23.
21 Hays, op. cit., p. 151.
22 Ibid., p. 153.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 89.
25 T h e Holy Bible (Philadelphia: N ational Bible Press, 1954), p. 8.
26 M ichelet, op. cit., p. 68.
27 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 161.
28 H ughes, op. cit., pp. 9 7 -9 8 .
29 Gillian T indall, A Handbook on Witches (New York: A theneum ,
1966), p. 99.
30 H ughes, op. cit., p. 156.
31 Ibid., p. 130.
Chapter 8. Androgyny: The Mythological Model
1 M. E sther H ard in g , Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem
(L ondon: R ider an d C om pany, 1971), pp. 35-36.
2 Ibid., p. 36.
3 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: H a rp e r Sc Row, i960), p. 23.
4 The Secret o f the Golden Flower, in tro d u ctio n by R ichard W ilhelm
(L ondon: R outledge, 1962), p. 12.
5A g eh an an d a B harati, The Tantric Tradition (G arden City:
D oubleday an d C om pany, 1970), pp. 18-19.
6 Ibid., p. 200.
7Jo se p h C am pbell, The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology (New
York: Viking, 1969), p. 109.
8 Ibid., p. 105.
9Jo sep h C am pbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton:
Princeton U niversity Press, 1968), p. 154.
Notes
209
10 Midrash, Rabbah, 8: 1.
11 Harding, op. cit., pp. 282-83.
Chapter 9. Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community
1 Mary Jane Sherfey, M. D., The N ature and Evolution o f Female
Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 43.
2 Ann Oakley, Sexf Gender and Society (New York: Harper Sc Row,
1972), p. 24.
3 Sherfey, op. cit., pp. 50-51.
4 Oakley, op. cit., p. 30.
5 Robert T . Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in H um an
Reproduction (Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973), p. 139.
6 Sherfey, op. cit., p. 50.
7 Ibid., p. 173.
8 Francoeur, op. cit., p. 139.
9 Ibid., p. 140.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 197.
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