revelations o f the harmony o f being, o f which the rose,
for initiates, was the living floral symbol. 9
T h e rose became for Christian mystics “a rose o f light
in the center o f which a human figure is extending its
arms in the form o f a cross. ” 10 However, the official
Church, in its unending struggle against carnality and
nature, posited the rose as a symbol o f both in opposition to the lily, which represented purity o f mind and body. The Image takes a stand on the side o f official
Christianity by using the rose as an instrument o f pain
and blood-letting.
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The photographs which Claire shows to Jean
de Berg are also overflowing with symbolic importance.
The photographs are a series of conventional sadomasochistic poses. They chart the torture and mutilation o f a victim, in this case Anne, and culminate in what is apparently the brutal stabbing, the actual death, of
the victim. Together they reveal a woman’s preoccupation with her own body, a narcissism which is concretized in the last photograph, which is of Claire herself, faceless, caressing her own cunt. This narcissism is a
flaw which defines woman, and to atone for it a woman
must, in the glorious tradition of O, consent to and
participate in her own annihilation. Such is the scenario
which permits her a Christian salvation, which redeems
her o f the sin of Eve and the subsequent sin of her own
self-love. The photographs are “really nothing more
than religious pictures, steps along the way of a new
road to the cross. ” 11 The road, however, is an old one,
well traveled, and if the cross is difficult to reach via
this particular road, it is only because the bodies of
martyrs other than Anne and Claire lie piled so deep.
It is only too obvious that the tortured, mutilated
woman who appears first as Anne, then as the more
impersonal victim of the photographs, and finally
in a dream of Jean de Berg’s as a dead body “pierced by
many triangular stab wounds in the most propitious
areas” 12 is the secular Christ of cunt and breast, Eve’s
fallen, lustful, carnal descendant, the victim who, unlike
Jesus, is suffering for her own sins, the criminal whose
punishment scarcely equals the horror o f her crime.
That crime, of course, is biological womanhood. Jesus
died for us once, the crucifixion he suffered sufficed, we
Woman at Victim: The Image
73
are told, for all time. Anne, Claire, O, all will be forced
spread-eagle on the cross until death releases them, and
then again. No cruelty will ever be proper atonement
for their crime, and thus set the rest o f us free.
Christianity has one other image o f woman, Mary,
the Madonna, the Virgin Mother. Jean de Berg dreams
o f Claire as the Madonna shortly before he beats and
fucks her. Surely that demonstrates the psychic significance, in a sexist culture, o f the Madonna figure.
Just as Anne on the cross was a profanation o f the
sacred nature o f women, so is the concept, the Lie,
o f a virgin mother, separate from her cunt, separate
from nature, innocent by virtue o f the abandonment
o f her real, and most honorable, sexuality.
T he worship o f virginity must be posited as a real
sexual perversion, crueler and more insidious than
those sex models condemned by the culture as perverse.
T h e Christian institutionalization o f that worship,
its cultivation and refinement, have aborted women in
the development and expression o f natural sexuality by
giving credence to that other: woman as whore. T h e
dualism o f good and evil, virgin and whore, lily and
rose, spirit and nature is inherent in Christianity and
finds its logical expression in the rituals o f sadomasochism. The Christian emphasis on pain and suffering as the path to transcendence and salvation is the very
meat o f most sadomasochistic pornography, just as the
Christian definition o f woman is its justification. Lenny
Bruce expressed it very simply when he said this:
I understand that intellectually — that a woman
who sleeps with a different guy every week is a better
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Woman Haling
Christian than the virgin. Because she has the capacity
to kiss and hug fifty guys a year. And that's what that
act is —kissing and hugging. You can’t do it to anyone
you’re mad at. If you’re just a bit bugged with them,
you can’t make it.
So that chick who's got that much love for all her
fellowmen that she can make it with fifty guys a year—
that’s intellectually; but emotionally, I don’t want to
be the fifty-first guy. Cause I learned my lesson early,
man. The people told me, “This is the way it is, Virgin
is Good, Virgin is Good. ” Yeah, that’s really weird. 13
As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he
should know.
C H A P T E R 5
Woman as Victim:
Suck
We move from the straight literary pornography o f our
forebears, represented by Story of O and The Image, into
another realm, that o f the sex newspaper, born o f the
hip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture),
post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,
Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pill:
post Them and into the world o f Us. We move into the
realm o f here and now, our own turned-on, liberated
time and space, into the social world for which we are
responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as
women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a
concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, and
Screw are important. Playboy is Them —no doubt Kissinger and Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow.
But the counter-culture sex papers are created by
people who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals, longhairs, whatever the appropriate term might be), people who share our values, our concerns — people
who talk o f liberation. The counter-culture sex papers
would be a part o f our community and so we are
obliged, if we are a community, to approach them critically and seriously, to ask what they bring to us and what they take from us.
75
76
Woman Hating
“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are the
Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the
Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,
BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and
genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the
streets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika,
BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuse
to do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult,
with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock
Nation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. We
are the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are not
yet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our past
is only prologue.
Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have
used acid, mescaline
, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency; use grass and hashish often with no mystification; have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, or barbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations, many of which are absolutely casual; reject the nuclear family and seek forms of community antagonistic to it. We are the people who listened to Leary, Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some of
us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live
good, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitly political actions —opposing illegitimate wars, resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonder
how to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersed in the process of revolution, we learn the skills of revolution, we resist all forms of current authority
and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to
those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace
freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-
Woman as Victim: Suck
77
lution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, at
least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children
o f privilege, children o f liberals and reformists. We
were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots o f
privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.
We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine
suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced
physical and intellectual regimentation which we found
unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private) where we studied anthropology, Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too,
with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chicken
shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in
the classroom or outside o f it. T h e universities where
we studied all o f these disembodied ideas continued
doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We
have had our share o f disaster and despair: the acid
tragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies. Many o f us have known jail, and we have all seen friends die. We are older than we ever thought we
would be.
What it comes down to is this: through the use o f
drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism o f our parents. O ur goals are simple enough to understand: we want to
humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color;
to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create
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Woman Hating
communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people. So when we look at a sex newspaper, made by people like us, we demand that
it take some positive step in the direction we want to
go: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes,
the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestyle
have given us. And, most importantly, we refuse to
permit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns and
consciousness of this culture, the very patterns and consciousness which oppress us as women, which enslave us as human beings.
Suck is a typical counter-culture sex paper. Any
analysis of it reveals that the sexism is all-pervasive,
expressed primarily as sadomasochism, absolutely the
same as, and not counter to, the parent cultural values.
Suck claims to be an ally. It is crucial to demonstrate that
it is not.
The first issue of Suck appeared in Amsterdam,
Holland, in 1969. It continues to be printed in Amsterdam because Dutch police do not confiscate pornography or imprison pornographers. It was started by two Amerikan expatriates. Suck is entirely about sex,
that is, its pages contain pornographic fiction, technical
sexual advice (how to suck cock or cunt, for instance),
letters from readers which reveal personal sexual histories (mostly celebrational), and photographs o f cunt, cock, fucking, sucking, and group orgying. The newspaper appears irregularly —when there is enough
Woman as Victim: Suck
79
money and material for publication. Suck is confiscated
in England and France with some vigor.
Suck has made positive contributions. Sucking is
approached in a new way. Sucking cock, sucking cunt,
how to, how good. Sperm tastes good, so does cunt. In
particular, the emphasis on sucking cunt serves to
demystify cunt in a spectacular way —cunt is not dirty,
not terrifying, not smelly and foul; it is a source o f
pleasure, a beautiful part o f female physiology, to be
seen, touched, tasted.
T he taboo against sucking goes very deep. Most of
the actual laws against cocksucking and cuntsucking
relate to prohibitions against any sexual activity that
does not lead to, or is not performed for the purpose
o f effecting, impregnation. Sucking as an act leading
to orgasm places the nature o f sexual contact clearly —
sex is the coming together o f people for pleasure. T he
value is in the coming together. Marriage does not
goal. Suck treats sucking as an act o f the same magnitude as fucking. That attitude, pictures o f women sucking cock, men sucking cunt, and all the vice versas,
discussions o f the techniques o f sucking, all break down
barriers to the realization o f a full sexuality.
Cunnilingus and fellatio (sucking by any other name
. . . ) are still crimes. The antifellatio laws, in conjunction with sodomy laws, are sometimes used against male homosexuals (lesbians are not taken seriously enough
to be prosecuted). Given the selective enforcement o f
the laws, the shame that attaches to the forbidden acts,
and the fact that acts o f oral lovemaking represented
Woman Hating
in words or in pictures are generally deemed obscene,
sucking must be seen in and of itself as an act of political
significance (which is certainly wonderful news for depressed revolutionaries). In this instance Suck takes a relevant, respectable stand.
(Important digression. As late as October 1961,
Lenny Bruce was arrested because in one o f his routines
he used the verb “to come" and talked about cock-
sucking. He was arrested for the crime of obscenity.
Bruce described the bust:
I was arrested for obscenity in San Francisco for using
a ten letter word which is sort of chic. I’m not going to
repeat the word tonite. It starts with a “c. ” They said
it was vernacular for a favorite homosexual practice —
which is weird, cause I don't relate that word to homosexuals. It relates to any contemporary woman I know or would know or would love or would marry. 1
Bruce was busted in San Francisco (obscenity), Philadelphia (possession), Los Angeles (possession), Hollywood (obscenity), Chicago (obscenity), and not permitted to enter England or Australia. As late as 1964
Bruce was busted for obscenity in New York City, in
1965 he was declared a legally bankrupt pauper, and
on August 3, 1966, he died in Los Angeles. )
Suck also makes a contribution in printing pictures
of cunt, though here the praise must be severely qualified. Photos o f cunt are rare. All the rest we have seen —
siliconed tits, leering smiles, Playboy's version of pubic
hair. But having seen a remarkable movie by Anne
Severson and Shelby Kennedy2 in which a fixed camera
catalogues the cunts of many different women, all ages,
Woman as Victim: Suck
81
races, with all sorts o f sexual experience, one gets a
comprehension o f the superficiality o f the Suck cunt
photos. Imagine a catalogue o f still photos o f people’s
faces —the colors, textures, indentations, the unique
character o f each. It is the same with cunts, and it would
be fine if Suck would show us that. It does not.
Germaine Greer once wrote for Suck — she was an
editor—and her articles, the token women’s articles,
were sometimes strong; her voice was always authentic.
Her attempt was to bring women into closer touch with
unaltered female sexuality and place that sexuality
clearly, unapologetically, within the realm o f humanity:
women, not as objects, but as human beings, truly a
revolutionary concept.
But Greer has another side which allies itself with
the worst o f male chauvinism and it is that side which, I
believe, made her articles acceptable to Suck's editors
and Suck acceptable to her. In an interview in the Am erikan Screw, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine:
‘I am a W hore, ’ ” she stated:
Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could
ball everyone —the fat, the blind, the foolish, the impotent, the dishonest.
We have to rescue people who are already dead.
We have to make love to people who are dead, and
that’s not easy. 3
Here is the ever popular notion that women, extending our role as sex object, can humanize an atrophied world. T he notion is based on a false premise. Just as
the pill was supposed to liberate women by liberating
us sexually, i. e., we could fuck as freely as men, fucking