I guess Heart made the entry discussed below private for the time being until she decides what she wants to do with it. In other words, maybe someone wants an opportunity to rewrite history but that isn't going to happen. Here are most of the comments in that little trainwreck so we can all take a look see and decide for ourselves. You can clearly see this Satsuma person being antagonistic toward Heart's regular/loyal readers (see the post she made with all the smiley faces), and Heart supports her and tells the loyal readers to consider Satsuma's point of view being an oppressed dyke and all.
PS, I kind of fell in love with Sis!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
Call me the contrarian here, but I don’t believe men intend to change at all. That’s a given in my book.
We women are the ones who have changed so dramatically.India rose up against England, and they did it cleverly.
South African men rose up against white South African men, and then when Black South African men took over, they only had two women in the cabinet. Winnie Mandela was raped in prison, Nelson was not. Now rape and horror against women in South Africa is a natioal tragedy.
No, men don’t change at all. They pay lip service, but they have no interest in the freedom of women. I don’t even think men know what love is. I think they selfishly and cleverly intend to enslave women until we put a stop to it.
What the problem is is women supporting the evil of patriarchy, that’s what the problem is.
Women have not walked out of the catholic church, for example, even though it blatantly discriminates against women.
I am horrified that women have children at all — a sure receipe for poverty. If divorce is so common now, that means almost all heterosexual women who marry and have children will be single mothers. And I hate dealing with issues of children, child care or the boredom of this straight world.
The more we believe men will change, the less work we will do with the women who are so deluded by patriarchy.
I know, I have it easy. I was a lesbian feminist from the day I was born. I never engaged in any activity that would put me at risk under the personal terror regimes known as women actually “living” with these monsters.
I love the phrase Not My Nigel! It always amuses me to meet the wives of my really sexist colleagues. Smart women, women with black belts in karate, yet they have no idea what their husbands do to oppress women in the office day after day, no idea at all.
I am proudly anti-children. I never liked children even when I was one. When women marry and have children their brains go into decline. They stop reading and studying with intensity, and I have watched this with my own highly intelligent sister-in-law.
Why do women keep doing these things? Why do straight women listen to male supremacy from pulpits across America?It boggles the mind.
Women are 53% of the U.S. population, and if we wanted change it would happen tomorrow. That’s why men are always attacking feminism, and always degrading lesbians with their pornographic minds.
A friend recently got an email from a gay man talking about a spiritual issue. Somehow, when she printed out the email, it also had an attachment from a gay male sex website. He didn’t mean to have this attachment sent along with the email, but it was a real window into the secret minds of men.You know the type — Daddy looking for “son” to discipline.That’s how common their secret lives are!
Maybe I’m the only lesbian on earth who still believes that the very act of women having sex with men is a desecration of the female soul. I’d love to have an entire conference with feminists who never had sex with men, to see if the energy would be different. I don’t have any sympathy for my enemy, and no illusion that men will change or that they are good. They aren’t good, they don’t voluntarily stand up against sexim in all male groups, and they believe they own the world. Then you have the collaborators… the arrogance of straight women and their silly slavelike worlds! Angry enough to spit on this world!
I could not fathom the venom of the anti-gay religious right, until one day I realized that they were truly affraid that if lesbian self was not punished constantly under heteroterrorism, women really would sexually reject men entirely. We wouldn’t be 1.4% of the world’s population, we would actually be maybe 30-70%.
As a lesbian, my taxes go to heterosexual idiots who have no money for children to begin with. I’m getting a little sick of funding at every turn the “heterosexual lifestyle.”
Hard liner that I am, that is my furious no compromise position in the world! ‘Even if I were the only one, I would still be a radical lesbian feminist,” Mary Daly.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
"I am proudly anti-children. I never liked children even when I was one. When women marry and have children their brains go into decline. They stop reading and studying with intensity, and I have watched this with my own highly intelligent sister-in-law."
Well, sometimes that happens. But I have 11 of them, you know? And I never stopped reading and studying with intensity, and my brain did not go into decline.
Just sayin!
I hear your frustration though. It’s hard to watch women give themselves, their bodies and lives, to men who really don’t love them, and that happens all the time. It’s ridiculously frustrating to clean up the messes men make in women’s lives and then to watch them go back to the men who hurt them. It’s hard to watch women struggle to raise the children they had, thinking they wanted to be moms, when a lot of the time they found out they aren’t good moms and wouldn’t have been moms if they had known what they know now, but now there are no options for them, not really, but to raise the children they had, often alone. It’s hard to watch women, het or lesbians, because lesbians do it too, defending the indefensible in what men (and women, for that matter) do.
I try to focus on all the reasons women make the really bad choices they make. I’ve made many bad choices, believing at the time that I was doing the right thing. We don’t know what we don’t know– you know? We are on our own paths, our own journeys, doing the best we can as female persons in a world that hates us and wants to kill us. There is so much in our world that conspires to blind our eyes, not just the eyes of women, but the eyes of men as well. Even those of us who want revolution rarely have the first idea as to how to go about making it, and especially when we are young.
It’s easy for me, honestly, to agree with most of what you have written there, Satsuma. But I’m 55 years old and have learned what I know in the school of hard knocks, have I ever. Thirty years ago, I wouldn’t have seen it. Not 20 years ago either.
I try to keep that in mind when faced with the really rotten choices and decisions women make in their lives. But yeah, I understand the frustration.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
I know it must be sort of disappointing to be encountering someone like me, who gets it — because I really do get it — with my particular history, my life. But I get it *because* of my life. That’s what feminism is about, I think, in large part–it gives us, as women, words with which to describe our lived realities and experiences as women under male supremacy. It gives us tools to make sense of what we may have known in our lives long before we had words to describe our experiences. And it gives us a supportive community of women who will stand with us, believe us, when we tell our own truths. Our is the only movement, Gloria Steinem said, where the older its members are, the more radical they are. That’s because we have to keep living under male heterosupremacy, have to keep resisting it, keep seeing how resistant it really is to our freedom.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by E. K. "Kitty" Glendower
By E. K. "Kitty" Glendower
1." I am proudly anti-children. I never liked children even when I was one. When women marry and have children, their brains go into decline. They stop reading and studying with intensity, and I have watched this with my own highly intelligent sister-in-law."
Perhaps your words may go over better if you say some women who have children, or the women you have met. I am married and have children and my brain is not in decline, if anything it is more alive than it has ever been. I have not stopped reading and studying with intensity, in actuality, I did not begin studying and reading until I had children. It was my children, my girl children who woke me out of a slumber. It was my children who made me feel, think, sense, employ my instincts, to first protect me so I could protect them. If we are going to divide women, elevated some as superior because some were lesbians from birth and some did not lay with a man to have a child then we must tally the points in all honesty and see which woman is truly the superior woman. However, I don’t recommend that type of pissing contest because it reeks of patriarchy.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Mary Sunshine
By Mary Sunshine
Maybe I’m the only lesbian on earth who still believes that the very act of women having sex with men is a desecration of the female soul.
No you’re not.
I’ve always felt that way. From the time I was a small child. I think that’s the female child’s natural reaction to the idea of fucking and being fucked.
Then the world closes in and tells her that the only way for her to go forward as a “woman” is to fuck for men (or a man).
Most of us don’t see any way out, and we do it. Dissociate from our bodies to have the “life” that we think we need to have.
Sometimes I think it’s a miracle for a young woman, (or a woman of any age) to realize that she doesn’t have to do that.
Mary
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
Perhaps your words would go over better if you gave your highly intelligent sister-in-law a hand now and again, or even more frequently?
And you could learn a lot by observing those children who share your genes grow.
But I too am if not anti-children, just wish I’d had the sense to know myself better, then. Then, I thought you had to have children.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
I am once again, barely literate. It’s because, as Satsuma says, I’m heterosexual and a parent. And old and have no money to buy ergonomic equipment so I keyboard in pain and rage.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
Well, I am presenting a point of view that is almost never heard anywhere these days, and I am an adament person on the subject of female autonomy.
My sister-in-law lives in another state, and her decline in abilities is significant. She’ll be so far behind when her children are in school, that very likely her income will never catch up. She will be dependent on this marriage. My brother is not a bad person at all, but this economic weakness that is so “normal” makes me shudder.
Now I know Sis is trying to be helpful about lending my sister-in-law a hand, but she is in a state and a city that is dreadful, and I don’t do childcare or menial work of any kind. I spend hours a day writing very seriously, and also working to the best of my abilities. Distractions will prevent me from doing this work, and I avoid them. I am very sorry about your condition Sis, and when I hear these stories I feel even more driven to try to tell young women not to do these things.
How I serve women is I demand that they become economically successful. I mentor probably over 74 women of all ages, to make sure they won’t be poor and they will continue in their studies and careers. Some of these women are elderly, and I protect them and guard their assets as if they were my own.
In fact, I am being so BLUNT here to get through to young women who come on here and read this. If I can get through to just a few young women, then I feel I will have made the world better. Heart said that it took a long time for her to get at these truths, and they were not easy to discern 20 years ago. Or even at age 30. We are not so far apart in age; I’m only five years younger, but somehow, even at age 9 or 10 or 13 I saw a very different social reality.
At 13 I was reading Thomas Jefferson and Karl Marx, at 14 or so I was the only girl in shop classes, and had to fight tooth and nail against those boys to stay. I always got straight A’s in every shop class I ever took. I smile when I add oil to my car– when the hood is up, nice men always come running offering to help. Politely I tell them “no, I can do this myself.” They see themselves as being nice to a “helpless” female, but those shop classes helped me.
I dreamed of going to Washington D.C. to work for the U.S. Senate, and in sixth grade, I got my first briefcase. I was the only girl in the entire school who had one. Yes, straight girls thought that was very funny. Boys didn’t make fun of it for some reason. I told myself that someday, I’d take that very briefcase with me to Washington and climb the capitol steps carrying it. I was not wasting my time dating boys or worrying about any connection to them at all. I did not go to the stupid prom nor was I interested in the dumb things straight girls did back then.
Every aspect of straight girls superficial lives made me ill. If they were smart, I liked them, if they fussed about make-up and boys, I secretly felt pity for them.
Now I paid a huge social price for this seriousness. Boys thought they could beat me up and make fun of me, but I had such anger that drove me, that my physical strength was huge. That anger would cause me to defend myself, only for me, I wanted to choke the life out of them, and the fear was so great on their part, that they left me alone. I was going to kill them if they didn’t. This is a great source of pride to me, even to this day. Driven, angry and determined… Straight women fear this kind of anger because they fear truly feeling anything at all. If they felt, they’d have to see male supremacy close up, and they still hide from this. They still go to fundamentalist churches, they still back up male supremacy, and they still annoy the hell out of me for doing this.
Just how does patriarchy go on? Ask yourself who enables it? (I hate 12-stepish type words but these seems appropriate here).
I know, these words will drive straight women nuts, but you make me crazy with your servile man pleasing ways! Don’t lie here, you do wait on men, you do kow tow to them, and I bet none of you have ever knocked an oppressor out cold in a fight in self-defense. You smile and laugh when men belittle you, you give up your minds to serve children, and then you wonder how men have such an incredible amount of time to create an atom bomb. How did Freud come up with his “brilliant theories”? How did Tolstoy write his great novels?
How did Leonardo Da Vinci paint the last supper? How you should ask yourself, how did men get all this power, and do all these things? THEY DIDN”T DO CHILD CARE!!!
I hate it when women get older and live in poverty, and I do everything in my power to give women the tools not to have this happen. It is an uphill battle to get through to women because they get so conned by the economics men have created for themselves.
You don’t see women producing the kind of quality literature or technological advances precisely because they do take steps outside the work force. It is horrifying for me to see this.Now don’t go whining “but my aunt Sally did…” despite having 20 children by the age of 21… you all know what the statistics are, and you all know that the highest paying professions do require a lot of time and dedication. Many of the very best jobs require an incredible amount of travel too.
As for scoring points, no I’m not scoring them. I am simply telling you all that from a very early age, I demanded a level of freedom that most women don’t think about until later in life.I don’t see straight women ever asking lesbians many questions, and most of you are completely out of it when it comes to radical lesbian consciousness. You just are out of it, and get threatened by BLUNT words. Goddess of 10,000 faces, straight women get so mighty flustered with anti-child opinions.
Remember, I’m not trying to persuade you to do anything at all. I am simply presenting one radical lesbian feminist life and opinion, and if you want to read and learn from this great. If you are horrified by it, that’s ok too.
There is this idea that even all lesbians have had relationships with men, and I’m here to tell you that this need not happen ever. Women are conned into sexual slavery to men, and I’m here to say that you actually can be in total rebellion against any male control in any home in America.
It’s a very radical position to say that women should NEVER have sex with men, and I mean NEVER. The very act of this is colonization of the worst order. Straight women are going to squwak about this, but really I have to listen to straight women blathering about their relationships to men all the time, and I hate this.
No children, no men, and a drive and ambition to achieve on my own no matter what. How did I get this way? I got this way because I would not bow to social pressure, conformity or public opinion. I wanted to rule my life with no compromise, and the feminist movement itself meerly provided me with a political / social ideology that helped me to understand why the thought of male colonization was so incredibly ugly, and why it was that women were so enslaved in every culture in the world, for all of recorded his-tory.
I actually don’t believe most (not all) but most women actually do achieve their highest intellectual potential if they are taking care of children. To me, I just can’t stand to see women with children at all. The distractions, the prattle, the servile nature of this work is intolerable to watch.
And I believe a lot of women need to see this choice so that they know as a radical lesbian feminist you will triumph. You may intensely dislike the heterosexual world and all it stands for, but you will show by example that women indeed have the real choice to avoid the oppressors as much as is humanly possible, and the greatest oppression women face is in their own home.
You can’t police the home very well. O.J. Simpson, our favorite Los Angeles whipping boy, did not hit or abuse his buddies on the golf course. No he waited to do this to Nicole in their home.
This will be very threatening words to most straight women out there, and no doubt lesbians will whine a bit too — It’s tough, it’s not accomodating, but it is my truth and I intend to tell it from the roof tops so women know there are the determined driven and deadly serious lesbians out there who won’t kow tow or coo coo or shuffle around this issue.
Now I have bluntly told women for decades that child rearing is about slavery, and that it will put you in great danger for poverty, or a lower standard of living, and this is particulary true for women who get divorced. Women are just too economically dependent on men, and this freaks me out.
Girls are constantly pressured to have sex at younger and younger ages. For some reason when I was young, I felt an absolute rage at this female oppression, a total revulsion at the idea of sex with men, or even living in the same home with them.
This was not because my biological family was rotten, poor, wife beating, alcoholic or anything out of the ordinary. But something in that structure made me sad that my Mom never achieved as much as she could because she was taking care of four young children. My father and mother were very well educated and encouraged me in my dreams, and still there was something decidedly wrong with the whole picture.
I want to put this blunt post out there, because I want women to be serious about buidling up a strong economic and intellectual life. I want them to put energy into the fight for freedom, not in service to children.
It is a selfish motive. I want my freedom, and I’m tired of women cooking and cleaning for the enemy. My sexist colleagues are well cared for by their wives, and they are probably in complete denial about how their husbands treat women in our office. Not overt stuff, just the condescending tone of voice men so love to use to women. You know what I’m talking about.
I want women to have a real choice and not a socially mandated choice by goddamn heterosexuality. This is really a crime against women in my opinion. Straight women can yelp and wail, but that’s my rather harsh worldview. I don’t expect you to understand one word of any of this, and I certainly don’t depend on public approval in any way, but that’s just it for me.
No I am not a liberal feminist, or a feminist who supports all the issues revolving around children. I moved to a neighborhood with terrible schools, because I did not want to deal with children at all, even the sound of them. And most certainly I can’t bear the sight of women with children, while their arrogant husbands carve out careers in science or finance or the arts– yes men achieve because they delegate as much slave labor as they can to women. And women fall for this trap again and again and again.
It is just a horrifying picture to me. What if the liberation of women — finally — really was dependent on women giving up this role completely? What if the very survival of the world required women’s full time ADULT deadly serious attention right now? What if the end of poverty was all about women getting real about what a “family” really is all about?
What if that happened? If I hear one damn woman come on here and whine “Oh the human race would end” … don’t even try that with me, because I know there are millions of very cowed women who will always do this work. Believe me, even lesbians are having babies these days!!! The next generation of poor women in the making!!
Wow, I do get passionate here! But at least some woman out there won’t be able to say they weren’t warned, or that “they never knew.” I don’t want women to ever go through life and not know they can have incredible success and happiness as a radical lesbian feminist, who’s loving every minute of the greatest fight for freedom the world has ever known.
I am a freedom fighter, and this is what I believe is required in this struggle against a clever and evil enemy, who is so good at con jobs, and so clever at seducing intelligent women into being slaves of “their own choosing.” Men are laughing at women, you can hear their laughter and their gloating on radio, on T.V. and just about anywhere where they have power. They believe they can really turn back the clock on feminism, and young women in particular are really falling for the bait once again.
Bait.
Comment on ENDA and “Gender Identity”: A Feminist, Woman-Centered Response by womensspace
By womensspace
I think if some of us — a lot more of us — don’t put female persons first, then female persons will not be free. I am committed to the wellbeing of female-persons, and unapologetically so.
I do, though, think men can change. Yes, it’s an old argument in radical/lesbian feminist circles. Can men change? Is there any hope for men? Are they naturally ___________?
Despite what I’ve been through in my life, despite what I know men to be capable of, I think men can change. I’ll go a step further and say I think men *have* changed, in my lifetime, because of feminism. And I think they will continue to change. I don’t think a Y chromosome equals/predestines/predetermines violence/rape/mayhem/cruelty/woman-hatred in the person who has the Y chromosome. I think a Y chromosome means that the person who has it is going to be treated, from birth, as though he is entitled to certain things and that that makes his reality, his experience of the world and of people and animals, different from mine and all female persons’.
My 29-year-old son is getting married in January to his beautiful and wonderful and amazing girlfriend of many years. He is *so lucky* and I am so lucky that she will be in my life. She is an only child, and the wedding is going to be formal and elaborate. We all got together this past weekend, the families and the wedding party, my sons’ friends and his fiance’s friends, their partners and babies, etc.
I was watching my sons’ friends, whom I’ve known since he was a teenager. Two of them are married with babies. I was sitting next to one of them and holding his little son, 10 months old, tiny little dude, because he was born very early. He was actually one of a set of twins, and his brother died at birth. He was in the hospital for a long time. But he’s catching up. Though he’s tiny for his age, he is quite sturdy and was “standing” on my lap, chewing my necklace, grabbing my hair, and so on, very active. I was talking to his dad who was explaining everything that had happened during his wife’s pregnancy and her and the baby’s long hospital stay. He told me about the heart problems his son had had, all the ins and outs. After a bit he went and got a bottle for his son and held him and fed him quite tenderly, as we continued our discussion of pregnancy and birth and babies and doctors and his son’s development and so on.
That’s new. That is a change, in my lifetime.
I grew up in a household in which the men and boys did not, as a rule, care for the babies. They might hold them for a minute or play with them, but they didn’t feed them, change their diapers, and they didn’t educate themselves about child development, pregnancy, birth, etc. That was women’s work.
The husband with whom I had seven children, in the 19 years I was married to him, probably changed a diaper less than five times, in the course of raising nine children together, because I had two babies when I met him. He *never* cooked a meal, ever, or fed a child. Never. And would not have. That was women’s and girls’ work– to feed the children, themselves, and *him*.
But these young men, these friends of my sons and daughters– they are different. There has been a global, sea change, in the U.S. around the issue of caring for children. Yes, there’s a long long way to go. Yes, it is disgusting the way some men expect medals for doing what women have always done because it was expected. Yes, it is disgusting that some women go ga-ga-goo-goo because a man is taking care of his own child, as though that is extraordinarily… I don’t know. Selfless or something. And yes, there are plenty of men who pretend to be great dads in public and don’t do a damn thing at home.
Be all that as it may, nevertheless, men have changed. In my lifetime. I see it. There’s a long way to go, but I still see it. Even pretending to be a good dad in public while being a shitty dad at home is a big change. It means there is social pressure on men to *be good and attentive and nurturing dads*. That is an important change.
And I believe it will continue. That’s not where my own heart is, i.e., my own life is not about getting men to change, see the light. I don’t think I or any woman can do that, meaning get men to change. Men have to change because they decide to, want to and encourage each other to. But I think as feminist women we can be proud of the fact that the general consciousness of the population in the U.S. has been raised. I think we can be proud of the way the bar has been raised so far as certain kinds of male behaviors. Of course the progress is not what any of us would like to see. We still live, in general, in a misogynist, sexist, male heterosupremacist world. I oppose all of the mechanisms which allow for its continuance, including the traditional family, civil marriage, and so on, and that is part of my own focus as a feminist. Still and all, pessimistic as I generally am, I do find reason to continue to hope, and plenty of reason for feminists to be proud.
So I am not one who thinks that men qua men are doomed to be _______________. I think they can, and should, change and I look for them to continue to change, and I think they will continue to.
While in my moments of rage and bitterness, and I still have those from time to time, I do feel as though I wish all women would leave all men behind and forget about them and stop pouring all of that amazing women’s energy into their relationships with men — because I do believe that most of what passes for love in het relationships is actually traumatic bonding — I don’t think women are desecrating themselves in having relationships with men. I also don’t think that partnering with men, even bad men, means a woman doesn’t have good sense. There’s a saying in ex-cult-member circles: “Nobody ever joins a cult.” And, nobody ever does. People trust. They believe. They risk. A beautiful picture is painted for them of this community of love to which they are invited, and they step over the threshhold, and then they find that they have been deceived. They have been lied to. They are actually a member of a cult. But they never knowingly or intentionally joined it; it was bait and switch. I don’t think they should be targeted for judgment or recriminations of any kind. The cult leaders, those who benefit directly from leading the cult, are wholly to blame for the way they destroy peoples’ lives and lie to them.
It’s no different for women. Nobody ever marries an abuser. She trusts. She risks. She loves. A beautiful picture is painted for her of a loving relationship, and she walks into it with so much hope, and learns too late, after she is trapped and ensnared, that she was lied to, not just by her husband but by the whole world, and now she is alone to make sense of the prison she is living in. I don’t think we blame her for trusting, or risking or loving. She was doing the best she knew how to do in the circumstances she found herself in, and she deserves our support in getting free. And our continued dedication to finding more and more ways to keep women from becoming similarly ensnared.
Well, this is long. I do, in fact, think radical lesbian feminism and separatism are amazingly beautiful and inspiring, no question. I think, though, that it is wrong headed to judge or blame women for the choices they make in this messed up world, no matter their choices. I think believing men can’t change is also counter productive and wrong headed and just not true.
So, those are my thoughts at the moment.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
Oh I agree completely about economic self-sufficiency. I don’t have it and I can’t now change that. It’s very hard.
But why are you blaming your sister-in-law? You might want to turn your fine radar on your brother a bit more thoughtfully and examine his role here.
And if you are too brilliant to do women’s work, then start sending your sister a cheque every month from your men’s work career so she can hire competent child care for long enough to meet with intellectual peers or take a graduate level seminar.
Keep writing!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by funnie
By funnie
Wow, I do get passionate here! But at least some woman out there won’t be able to say they weren’t warned, or that “they never knew.” I don’t want women to ever go through life and not know they can have incredible success and happiness as a radical lesbian feminist, who’s loving every minute of the greatest fight for freedom the world has ever known.
I am a freedom fighter, and this is what I believe is required in this struggle against a clever and evil enemy, who is so good at con jobs, and so clever at seducing intelligent women into being slaves of “their own choosing.” Men are laughing at women, you can hear their laughter and their gloating on radio, on T.V. and just about anywhere where they have power. They believe they can really turn back the clock on feminism, and young women in particular are really falling for the bait once again.
*******Whooooooooa. Swap out “radical evangelical Christian” for “radical lesbian feminist” and “Satan” for “men,” and it’s positively SPOOKY how many times I’ve sat through this same exact sermon. EXACT!
Right down to the speaker making a point about washing her (his back in the day, obv!) hands when it comes to rtake responsibility for how a message is delivered and received, by saying that we’re at war and now at least nobody can claim, from her future hellpit, that HEY, she just NEVER KNEW about the freedom she was turning her back on!
And right down to foolish young women being “seduced” by the “clever and evil enemy, who is so good at con jobs” into being “slaves of ‘their own choosing’,” (nooooooooo!) and the gloating laughter of The Enemy as the female youth all go wantonly astray according to the evil plan, and…and…
Absolutely SPOOKY, I am telling YOU! Happy Halloween, y’all!!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by CoolAunt
By CoolAunt
I only made it through maybe the first third of that last diatribe but couldn’t stomach any more so I stopped reading. It reads like the typical conservative Republican by-the-bootstraps, you-too-can-live-the-American-dream, money-as-measure-of-success bullshit. Blaming the poor and disadvantaged for being poor and disadvantaged because they could have done what you’ve done but didn’t is the kind of smug callousness that one would expect to hear on conservative radio programs. Even the class of the working poor, those who will perpetually be poor while working those pesky menial jobs that ultimately keep the rich rich, is somewhat represented by the hordes of women whose fate and function is that of breeder so that there will always be a human race and more females to keep the mentor mentoring.
Spooky Halloween stuff? I can see that. I was thinking, however, of something more Christmassy (is that a word?), along the lines of, “Are there no orphanages? Are there no soup kitchens?”
I thought that feminists are supposed to be pro-woman, realizing that women - all women - are human beings, not just a select few women.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Branjor, no, women do not have to accept responsibility. Not sooner. And not later. Whether a woman does or doesn’t is completely up to her. Most women never do.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by branjor
By branjor
I don’t completely agree with you , but I will leave it alone for now.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
My words are merely the messenger. I question women being so unconcerned about their welfare while they “take care” of everyone else.
Yes, it is a radical lesbian feminist hard line political message, and yes, I get annoyed at straight women for being 53% of the population, and still falling for this nonsense.
As for bootstraps, I did have to work harder than the average person, and I had to deal with incredible homophobia on the part of straight women and men.
So I don’t really get along with straight women or men for that reason, and I get sick of straight women expecting me to do their work.
My feminism is about changing this system, and you can call me a fundamentalist all you want. But I have staked out my territory.
I do see straight women as very cowardly and afraid of confrontation. I do see them as colluding in their own oppression.
They make a lot of mistakes in believing that someone else will take care of them, someone else will do the work of planning for the future, someone else will….
I can tell women again and again to be more focused and to stop doing work that pays so badly, and to insist on more.
Recently I had a meeting with a very successful business woman who was still way undercharging her clients for her work. All I did was ask her to raise her prices from $25 dollars per hour to $75-$150. She was very afraid to do this, but I told her she had nothing to lose in quoting these prices to a brand new potential client. She did this. It was hard for her, she was scared, but she did it, and she got the $75 per hour.
I am a very concrete and strategic thinker, and when I see the position of women so stuck in lower paying jobs, and lives of such intellectual deprivation, that I wonder why they are making these choices.
It really amazes me. Yes, I am saying that women are not children, they do have choices and they do have personal power. As lesbian feminists we have been talking about this for decades now, decades women!
You can attack the messenger, but you really have to question the system you are in. I meet straight women all the time who can chatter for hours about nothing. They have this incredible fear of serious discussion, they don’t know anything about the war in Iraq, they don’t even vote because it would be too confrontational — a direct quote from the woman who works next to me!
You have to wonder at this unwillingness to take a hard look at the economy, and about women’s place in it.
I can tell you right now, that I have no expectations of straight women ever putting themselves out there for the rights of lesbians, even though we often do the hardest political work. Just think Susan B. Anthony or the life of Mary Daly, for example. How did women even get the right to vote they now squander?
I don’t think straight women are ever accustomed to being challenged in their “choices.” It’s this la la land they live in that is mystifying.
Even Heart with the 11 children is unfathomable. She would not choose that life now, but all this information was widely available in 1975. How women break free and get a political consciousness is very interesting to me. No men ever abused me in a home. No man raped me. I beat up a few attackers, but they came out the worse for this not me. I was a radical feminist because I looked hard at the day to day life of women.And on some level, I was indifferent to public opinion. I’d get so bored by straight women, that their lives were never very interesting to me.
I know this sounds bad, but often straight women still bore me to death, and I like to do a little blogging to tell them that they are bores and cowards. Yes, you are. Not all of you, but so many of you that it makes me wonder what is going on.
I often wonder why the lives of women that so horrifed me in 1972 guided me in the life I live today. Why I wouldn’t accept the lot of women, why I didn’t feel I could trust the system and so I had to create a system that worked for me.
Self-reliance is very important to me, and I don’t expect help from governments and certainly not from straight women. They are pretty useless as far as fighting for the rights of lesbians, but I have fought for their rights in the workplace, and I give them the tools to stop undercharging for their services. It’s what I do.
Take it or leave it. I have not “converted’ from one ideology to another, I have had a consistent political belief that women have to really change radically, and men aren’t going to do anything to make this possible.
You can have a much better life than most women “settle” for, and if that’s a “spooky” proposition so be it. Just don’t do the things that will put you into a position of being a Sis in the end.Don’t do it. Don’t have those children at a young age, don’t settle for badly paid jobs, and stop being so tolerant of men and so contemptuous of radical lesbians. We certainly didn’t create this system, and we certainly didn’t get ahead marrying men.
No we didn’t. Self-reliance is absolutely essential to survival in the straight world. It’s not Republican to not want to live in poverty, and to want to achieve greatly in the world. I didn’t want to settle for the standard of living most straight women settle for. Straight women, without their straight marriages, would be in one hell of a lot of trouble financially–not all straight women, but more than you’d care to imagine.
I could have told all of this to Heart in 1975 or even 1972. I could have told this to Sonia Johnson when she was in the Mormon church. How can we speed up the process of women not having to wait so long to get what it is we’re dealing with?
I have no interest in the reproductive rights, the birth control the this the that. I have no interest in children or caring for them. But I am interested in women’s control of their own destiny, and I am concerned that so many young women are having children at young ages, never knowing what this will do to them later.
What can you tell women? Stop! Read the words of a hard line radical lesbian feminist, yes it is a diatribe to straight women, but at least it has a hell of a lot more passion than the words of straight women about make-up, children or a day at the spa. My words have more integrity than the women who go on reality T.V. and act like colonized zombies.
My diatribes are simply a response to all I hate about the straight world and the sickening vapid lives that many women settle for. Go into any major department store and look at the counters of expensive make-up. Look at the women with this stuff plastered to their faces. Look at the number of women who do this every day. Look at the masks they wear!
You should feel sick that this isn’t challenged as much as it needs to be. Look at the self-satisfaction and hatred of lesbian women who dare to challenge these women’s lives.
We challenge straight women. We’re not the nice women, we’re the radicals. We are a small minority who accomplish a lot, so you can go out again and make life easy for the sexists of the world.
Someone has got to get tough here, or we’ll be stuck on the nice button till the end of time. Call me the fundamentalist, but what do you call the men in power? Someone aids and abets them, someone cooks Jerry Falwell’s food, someone buys all the right wing christian books, someone goes to all those right wing churches, and it isn’t just men.
Why do women support this system? After 30 years they’re still doing it. Is it brainwashing? Is it a fear of having to make your own way in the world without male subsidy?
Why do you find these blunt words so objectionable in the world that is out there, the world that colonizes women and the world that creates the department stores and the shopping malls that women flock to?
And why do straight women so oppress lesbians? Why are straight women so afraid of us, and so unwilling to even say the word “lesbian” in public?
It’s pretty sad, but it happens. I have no answers because it is impossible for me to understand why women do these things against their own economic self interest. Please explain oh goddess of the universe. Should I put a damnd smiley face here?
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by CoolAunt
By CoolAunt
Most women don’t even realize that they’re cutting deals. They’ve never even pondered that things - the choices they’re given - could be any different than they are. They don’t even realize that they live under patriarchal rule, within a patriarchal system, and that their choices are limited by that system. They just think that the way it is is the natural order of things and can’t imagine that it could be and should be different.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Hey, Satsuma, you know, a lot of het women bore me to death, as well, but so do a lot of lesbians, you know? There are also plenty of radical feminists who are het women and they don’t for a moment bore me! They’re out there, honestly. And women who defy all of the labels, including “lesbian” and “het.” And women who won’t disclose for political reasons (good ones). I’d hate for this to end up being about whether het women are smarter/better educated/less boring or whether lesbians are!
Recently I had a meeting with a very successful business woman who was still way undercharging her clients for her work. All I did was ask her to raise her prices from $25 dollars per hour to $75-$150. She was very afraid to do this, but I told her she had nothing to lose in quoting these prices to a brand new potential client. She did this. It was hard for her, she was scared, but she did it, and she got the $75 per hour.
I just wrote a news article relevant to this for this issue of oob, so you all get a sneak peak.
In the early 90s a business professor at one of the big elite universities got complaints from a bunch of women students who said that they were all still teaching assistants while male students who had started the same time they did were teaching. This was important because of references, curriculum vitaes, etc. So she and a colleague poked around and found out that the reason the men were teaching and the women weren’t was, the men *asked*. The women expected to get a memo or something. It didn’t occur to them to ask for the positions.
That experience got this prof doing a bunch of research and studies on why women don’t advance the way men do, etc. A really central thing she discovered that proved out over a number of studies was, women had good reason for *not asking*– when they asked, they were often resented and turned down! What the studies showed was that when a man and woman asked for the same kinds of things — more pay, promotions, a certain job — as opposed to accepting an offer that was given to them, the men were looked upon favorably for making the request but it didn’t work that way for women. They were thought to be not nice, aggressive, all sorts of negative things, just because they asked for what they want. This is something most women know in their bones, if they aren’t consciously aware of it yet, that to ask for what they want may cause the people they are asking to turn on them, to think poorly of them.
This is one of *so many* phenomena built into the system– things women know on some level. It’s easy to say, “Well, women should learn to be assertive and ask for what they want.” But a lot of times, that backfires, because of sexism.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
And for what it’s worth, Satsuma, I appreciate much of what you’ve said. It’s true, it’s hard to hear, but it’s also true that women can take it or leave it. We hear so much of the garbage, just as you describe, once in a while it’s really good to be provoked some.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
Yes, I know there is no win-win to this. I just need to put cards on the table, and I want to share from my experience that you can be very aggressive and not very nice, and still you’ll get results.
Now I don’t intend to treat people badly, and I am certainly diplomatic in how I describe a lot of things. But mean and tough are not bad traits. They are honest feelings. You don’t have to charm people, or kow tow, or even care all that much if you are perceived as “too aggressive.” Goddess, all lesbians are often thought to be this by genteel straight women. Just by walking into a room we’ll set their hetero teeth on edge.
Just being an intensely introspective person once caused men and women to say, “Why do you have a mean look on your face, or why don’t you smile more?” I was lost in thought, and quite happy, but my blank faced was perceived as threatening somehow.
There are structural reasons women don’t advance as quickly as men. I know that rejection is a very hard thing to take. It’s very scary for women.
My brother in law never once had a woman ask him out on a date. I was very surprised to hear this many years ago. This young man was a very wonderful caring person, very positive, and even handsome, but he had terrible luck dating women.
I felt powerless to help him, because I knew nothing of how hetersexuals date, nor do I have much clue about dating period. It never really interested me.
I knew he was a good person, I’d known him since he was eight. But still women never asked him out, even though he would have loved to be asked. Once he said, “Women have all the power in a dating relationship.” Wow, I couldn’t believe this, but it was a sincere comment coming from him.
So rejection is something men endure. They ask women out, they get rejected a lot of times.
Rejection is a part of success. It is a part of a learning process, and if women know this, they can really learn about this.
Since I have been out in the public sphere for a very long time, I think I forgot about rejection. I go through a lot of it as a lesbian, and as a woman who doesn’t conform and in my profession.
But what I’ve discovered is I am not for everyone. For every group I join or movement I participate in, there will be a very few people who will totally love me, many who won’t care one way or the other, and a few who will hate me on sight.
I have grown adept at detecting the feeling of homophobia in a room, or of feeling it in a restaurant. Now when people hate me on sight, it doesn’t mean much to me. It simply means that I need to move on, and not try to deal with the automatic haters. They may make a mistake because I am a very loyal friend to people, and I make mistakes by rejecting straight women who wear make-up and high heels– I tend to write them off too quickly, so I miss out on good friendship opportunities as well. It’s all a process.
One of my favorite games with my gay guy friends is telling stories of favorite restaurants and our favorite food we love to cook. This holds an endless fascination for me, because I so love to eat and drink with good friends. I’m the happiest person in the world across a dinner table. Anyway, we all brought up a restaurant yesterday, and I told them how much I loved it. But then I said, “For some reason, I felt uneasy there, slightly on edge, but nothing bad happened.” I revealed how I felt silly about this feeling but it was very strong. What did they think about the same place? One man said my feelings were correct, it was a homophobic place, and then he told me more about the demographics of the community it was located in.
This “nothing bad happens” feeling is strong in me, so I know how important it is to deal honestly with rejection.
You may not get the first T.A. position at a university, and men certainly don’t bend over backward to help women get ahead– whatever “ahead” really means, but you do have to realize that rejection in and of itself is a process. It is not the end of the road but the beginning of a journey.
Yes, it is not win-win with these ideas. Critiquing women and not 100% cheerleading around them, will set feminist teeth on edge.
I must admit, CoolAunt is very right. It’s hard for a fish to even know what water is. Maybe the very experience of being lesbian in a straight world at a time when nobody talked about “homosexuality” made me more aware of some oppressive force out there. Maybe nothing about straight life appealed to me, and that is why I went my own way. Maybe I just had a harsher temper and got into more fights with boys when I got really mad. Or maybe I was a little taller or physically stronger than a lot of women.
Whatever it was, I knew what the water was, and somehow I believed that I could be the metaphoric fish out of water, and evolve into a land creature.
So our job is to still try to tell women about patriarchy. It is still about trying to uncover what can work best for us.
I appreciate all your comments really, even if I get annoyed or mad at them, and a lot of the time I really love them.
I knew I had to go out and change the world, and I was lucky to have had a band of very creative lesbian feminists out there to do it with. With nothing we created the first rape crisis center in a foreign country, and we taught each other editing skills, and I had wonderful conversations about finance.
There really was nothing in the way of lesbian anything at my college. Nothing at all in 1975, but my imagination took me far.Mary Daly once said she wanted to take her mind and throw it as far as it could go, and this was a life journey that I loved.
Whatever the “feared” rejection was, or the “feared” attacks by men, I simply kept on going. And then, after all the hard work and slow starts and failures and rejections, something changed. Suddenly, well not so suddenly, life got a whole lot easier.
The tough early going led to incredible success later. I may have struggled in my youth, but the stubborn traits I had all along were great as I got older. I felt very proud of the body of feminist work I did, very proud. We did so much “first this” the first that that even I can’t remember my own life.
I forget the triumphs, and maybe I remember the frustrations and get mad again. Feminism is about anger after all, and lesbian feminism is about applied explosive anger. That is a part of what it is to be revolutionary. When women are not allowed a great deal of anger, we are oppressing ourselves. Yes, I get very angry at straight women, and they are very bad to out radical lesbians. We don’t mix very well, but there also breakthroughs and friendships and all kinds of things.
Just about anything is possible, but I do have a right to my anger and my angry assessment of what straight women do in the world. It is easy to feel no sympathy or compassion sometimes. I admit both these things don’t come easily to me ever. I try, but I do have a stubborn senes of revulsion at a lot of things women do. I know its bad, but I honestly do.
Maybe it’s a little bit how a person born into terrible poverty feels when he or she becomes wealthy. You begin to forget why it is that the others remained poor, and you forget that you did something differently for reasons even you are unaware of.
All I know is, I took feminism and applied it. I studied the enemy, and learned how it worked its tactics against women. I also realized I was indifferent to the many things women really cherish. Women really do love to have children, and they also love malls and make-up, just as much as I love talking about restaurants and great wines with my buddies.
In many ways, I think I love the freedom of single gendered worlds more than the integrated worlds of men and women together. I loved aesthetics and a discussion of a fine cigar, just loved this. But I would bore a lot of women out there, but men would be engaged.
I saw a new world because my lesbian sisters were with me, and still I deal with the tragedy of one of my friends who just died last Saturday. She couldn’t overcome drug addiction, and it did her in. She was a lesbian, age 53 or so. She and I had a special friendship, we’d quote Coleridge and William Blake together, we loved smoking jackets and Sherlock Holmes– and we never knew who we were going to “pretend to be” was she Holmes to my Watson, or was I Watson to her Holmes.
All I know is we had such fun, and most of the other women in our circle considered her a hopeless drug addict and alcoholic, but I asked her about her life, and I learned she was one of the most well educated women there. The drugs got her in the end, but she never had a bad word to say about anybody.My radical feminism just baffled her, because she’d always say, “Hey Holmes, I’m just an aging hippie, I’m for peace, love and happiness…” and that’s who she was.
A lot of death can make you very angry. I hate it when my friends die, and I hate feeling that patriarchy is winning.
I’m a sore loser. Some people even called me a sore winner. I have to laugh at my own extreme nature at times. I’m am the extremist, the person who can’t stand to have women lose.
I should have faith that women are coming to consciousness worldwide. We truly really are! We have more power and we do have patriarchy on the run, just as Martin Luther King had all the white supremacists on the run. They could dump ice cream on the heads of civil rights activists, but in the end, Blacks do get to eat at “white” counters.
Women do have huge enrollments in Harvard Law and Medical school, and they do high level political commentary on the aire.46 single women own their own homes, and that’s something I helped them achieve over the past 15 years of working with them.
I had a persistence with women that I could “lend” them, a dogged nature that brings very good results in the world of investing. Straight women will have secure retirements, simply because I care more about than they do. If I can get to them soon enough, this can happen.
Will radical lesbians and straight women get along very well overall. Probably not, but then probably yes.
All I know is, we’re all trying to tell our truths here, and we have a great moderator, who is long suffering at times. We have great conversation and good arguments.
Our life experiences can dictate our political realities at times.
I see the world through my radical lesbian feminist journey. A woman who did very little of anything that women normally do.I did a lot that very few young women bother to do.
It made me very different and very determined, and I’m happy with the way things turned out. I see always a better world.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by funnie
By funnie
I’m not hostile to radical feminism, lesbian feminism, spearatism, or radical lesbian separatism. On the contrary, I like them very much, in no small part because they grapple in interesting and potentially revolutionary ways with complicated questions about *how* one can best love and support women given the toxic soup of patriarchy.
But one thing they *don’t* do is attempt to strategize about how to live a radical separatist life while still being able to secure access to misguided women in order to let them know the good news and attempt to convert them to the cause. Radical lesbian separatism isn’t about how best to persuade women to save themselves, how to get them to relinquish all ties to their current lives, to pick up their collective crosses, and to follow one woman’s vision of what separatism, properly done, should look like.
Women who love women don’t use women’s honesty and willingness to share as though their lives as lived have no value other than to create scarecrow material: “don’t do the things that will put you into a position of being a Sis in the end.Don’t do it. Don’t have those children at a young age, don’t settle for badly paid jobs, and stop being so tolerant of men and so contemptuous of radical lesbians.”
I’m sorry that I offended you when I said that your intolerant evangelism struck me as so very similar to what I have personally witnessed fundamentalist men do to shame women about their lack of abilities and capacity (over and over and over). I didn’t think I would offend you that much; I was being a bit lighthearted, trying to avoid getting “into” very much conversation about it, as I find your posts provoking but not provocative. Also, you generally seem to enjoy having your actions perceived as being the hallmarks of male-dominance-derived power-acquisitional strategies.
I’ve let the comments of your posts stand, uncorrected, several times. I don’t understand how you can be so pro-economic-emplowerment and yet entirely convinced that employment protections for women are nothing feminists should want to engage with, since “the law” is patriarchal. Money is, too, and women certainly can’t have it both ways - accessing salaries that can make them independent without being able to force at least SOME level of formal equality in their workplaces. Your beliefs, as expressed, are some ill-thought-out cafeterial plan of what YOU find expeditious, unfortunately expressed as though no woman can be a radical, a lesbian, a separatist, or all three, unless her tray matches yours.
I’m glad that I know that’s not what the shit *is,* because otherwise I’d be pretty resistant to it, for all the wrong reasons.
I know that women who love women talk to women who are not openly hostile as if they actually care how their messages are received.
I may struggle with actually being able to *execute* that myself, sometimes, but I DO know that’s the goal, and I know not to trust anyone who excuses the way that she uses women’s lives and vulnerabilities in order to shame them and hold them “responsible” based on the fact that we’re engaged in some sort of “war.”
Women have always been at war, and will continue to be until we’re free. It’s not a blank check, it’s not a tactic-justifier, it is situation-normal, for women. So the first thing we have to do is to drop the crisis paradigm that “justifies” us treating each other so shabbily, IMO.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by E. K. "Kitty" Glendower
By E. K. "Kitty" Glendower
Well I don’t appreciate it, because if I want to be abused I can turn on the tellie, or talk to a man in the street.
Satsuma talks like an abuser to me and I know for a fact young women will turn a deaf ear to her type of rhetoric. You know how I know, because I have two young women, born and bred from my womb. My womanly womb, and fed by my womanly breasts.
For one, her logic is flawed and unreasonable and reeks of a hatred for humanity—women specifically. In order to make her hypothetical situation work she claims all women who have children will suffer poverty, yet, in order to dismiss a possible defense, which, some can rightfully accuse her of wanting to end the human race, because that is what will in fact happen (hypothetically) if women stopped having children, she asserts that no such thing will ever happen. So what she needs to happen to prove her point will but what others need to happen to prove their point will not. So to make her argument seem sound she has an omnipotent eye that will favor her hypothetical but also one that will dismiss someone else’s hypothetical. It is bullshit. It is bullshit, and patriachal to assume that women would only have children to please a man or for a man. What? No woman could want a child just because she may want a child? Can she only exist for a man? I done plenty, plenty of things in my life for me, not for a man.
It amazes me that no one has called her on her elitist bullshit, which again is completely patriarchal. That is, that menial work is beneath her and only scholarly pursuits are held in esteem. That my friend is a patriarchal value. No one can convince me that there are not people who enjoy serving others, enjoy doing the duties that are other than academic. Work that has been traditionally deemed women work, thus called menial is viewed as menial because society has placed that value on that work. However, I consider that work the glue that holds society together. Let some highfalutin fool wallow in their trash, their dirty dishes, their soiled clothes and all other things that are far too menial for their precious hands to touch and let’s see how quickly they are vanished from this earth because of unsanitary conditions. Let’s see how a book will protect the highfalutins from staph, e coli, or any other nasty little germ that will in fact invade their space if they continue to be too good to soil their hands and clear it away.
Another aspect about her little screed that is abusive, is how she is focusing on women in an abusive matter. All the bastard ass fucking rapist men in this world and she is compelled to let women know how fucked up they are. Tell me, for the love of a got damn god/dess, what fucking woman don’t know how much she has fucked up? Do tell me that? What woman does not know this. Yet, Ms. savior, which sounds to me like another Mister man, is coming down to the little old women folks and telling them how fucked up they are. Yeah, well you know what? Tell me something I don’t know already. In the meantime, I love my children, because I don’t hate humanity, and I’m not a sociopath that wants humanity annihilated so I can feel like somebody now. I want the world to last, and for people to last. For women to last.
And let’s not forget the superior tone, “I’m have not been abused, I’ve not been raped, I’ve have not been…………” Right, and last I heard addicts love counseling from people who don’t know what a high or an addiction feels like.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Sorry for the out of order posts to this thread; some were in the spam queue so I had to unspam.
I’ve got a lot going on today and haven’t been able to read all the new posts. I just skimmed, really, the last several, and I’ve got to go out again in a few minutes.
I think what you’ve both said is really good, Kitty and funnie. I have a lot to say, too, but I’m too busy, and I’m having the experience that by the time I sit down to respond, there are so many new posts that the response I’d formulated isn’t relevant or current anymore, there are all these new posts to read, don’t have time, argh.
I really like this:
funnie: I may struggle with actually being able to *execute* that myself, sometimes, but I DO know that’s the goal, and I know not to trust anyone who excuses the way that she uses women’s lives and vulnerabilities in order to shame them and hold them “responsible” based on the fact that we’re engaged in some sort of “war.”
And I love this:
Kitty: What? No woman could want a child just because she may want a child? Can she only exist for a man? …snip…
It amazes me that no one has called her on her elitist bullshit, which again is completely patriarchal. That is, that menial work is beneath her and only scholarly pursuits are held in esteem. That my friend is a patriarchal value. No one can convince me that there are not people who enjoy serving others, enjoy doing the duties that are other than academic. Work that has been traditionally deemed women work, thus called menial is viewed as menial because society has placed that value on that work.
So true. I loved being pregnant, loved childbirth, loved breastfeeding. I am an earth mother type of person, one of those women to whom conceiving and bearing children was enjoyable and uncomplicated. Being pregnant, bearing my children, breastfeeding were bright spots, for me, in the years I lived with abusive men. They gave me hope, love, inspiration, they kept me wanting to live and thrive when I might have given up otherwise, beyond all that, they were and are human beings and it was a privilege for me to be part of their lives and their worlds. I love and deeply respect children and far more now than I did when I had my first. Life has taught me to value the children in the world and in my own life. Which is another post, another thread, I am saying, I loved having my babies, all 11 of them, even though, were I to start again, I would definitely not have 11!
I also cannot get excited about accumulating riches. That’s not me. I don’t like anything about capitalism, about accumulating wealth, for so many reasons I don’t have time to write about now. I especially do not like the exchange economy which most of the world celebrates and which is all patriarchy understands. I want a whole new paradigm, a gift economy, not one in which patriarchy decides what has value and tells you how much of your life you will give for it. Because that’s what gives rise to what you’ve described there, Kitty, patriarchy deciding nurturing and creating relationships has no value whereas kicking a thick piece of pigskin around a stadium is worth billions of dollars. Total bullshit.
Well, there is so so much to say and I have to go again and don’t have time.
Satsuma, everyone, I would like our interactions here to be characterized by respect for each woman. The women who comment here are the smartest feminists on the internet, no matter what their lives, backgrounds, realities are. This is a fact. We all have very good reasons for what we have done in our lives and for the way we now see things, and that is something I hope each woman will keep in mind as she is writing.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
I don’t see how my logic is flawed. I simply don’t subscribe to the worlds straight women take for granted.
Of course I am an elitist and always have aspired to be one. I wanted to throw my mind as far as it could go. You sqwauk over my refusal to do menial work, but I’m merely not wasting time on things that don’t interest me. Women were always chiding Mary Daly for being an elitist or for not speaking to working class women. I think what they were really getting at is they didn’t like her radical lesbian feminist brain in full throttle. They felt intimidated by her degrees and by her message. If Mary Daly is an elitist, then I’m in very good company.
I aspire to intellectual achievement for its own sake, because the ideas are there and because the books are there. I share my knowledge with women who show interest in bettering themselves, and I don’t waste time on the air heads out there.I suppose air head is a mean phrase, but empty headed women kind of make me crazy.
Women often play dumb when they aren’t. Lesbians can pick up on this pretty quickly.
Reading and study is my highest value. I’m not interested in a lot of things people do, but I have intense interest is a few things. I don’t believe women will ever get out of slavery until they stop making excuses, and stop acting like vicitms.
Just know you are in patriarchy and do your best to overthrow it in large and small ways.
If you have children in America today, you really are setting yourself up, and you should know this in advance. I will not support your children, because I don’t see you really advocating for lesbian rights much at all. I’m not interested in children, but their economic impact is huge on women.
Unfortunately, a lot of women discover all of this too late, way too late. If you read the letters of women in “Lesbian Connection” you’ll know what I’m talking about.
I don’t expect to pursuade you, I am just describing my life.
Do I care if laws are changed or not? It’s helpful to have more laws so women can win in courts of law. Do I think the law is effective for me as a radical lesbian feminist? The answer is not really.
I don’t believe there are many legal protections for me at all in the world, and I don’t worry about it much.
An anti-discrimination law can easily be turned into “reverse discrimination” and often is. Patriarchy is a clever player in the game of life, and most women aid and abet this clever creature, never quite knowing what they are doing out there.
It just happens.
It’s hard to take a lot of my words, because you’re so accustomed to the “nice” feminism that is “non-threatening” but feminism is very threatening, and when you don’t take it seriously, I can assure you men do.
Do I get fed up with women not taking action more, yes, I get mildly annoyed.
Radical lesbian feminism is about truth telling, about the truth that individual radical lesbian feminists dare to tell. Most lesbians I think just stay away from heterosexual women’s reality and form groups of their own.
In early feminism, straight women and lesbians worked together, but I believe a lot of straight women now even dislike being called “feminists.” Can you imagine black men being ashamed of their great civil rights movement and being afraid of calling themselves civil rights advocates or activisists?
This fear of feminism is something the mainstream media has always tried to fuel. Do I have much interest in mainstream women, no to tell you the truth I don’t.
It is painful for women to hear that they are responsible for their lives, and that they must decide to reject or embrace freedom. They can decide if they believe men are waging a war on women or not. They can decide if the patriarchs are trying to make women FEEL guilty for all the abortions they have. Someone is funding right wing women, and it sure as hell isn’t radical lesbians! Remember we’re supposed to be poor, and wear flannel circa 1978. That’s a little in joke by the way. “By the way” is fully spelled out here. I don’t like Internetisms very much.
It’s up to women to change what they dislike about the world, and it’s up to women not to pretend things they don’t believe in.
I don’t like children and never have. Perhaps don’t like is too strong a word, but anything having to do with children I’m not interested in, as a political issue anyway.
My feminism is tough and rather heartless at times, just as I’m tough and rather heartless in how I see straight women’s lives in this country. Straight women’s fear of lesbians is quite strong, and they expect us to do a lot of their work for them.
I believe all women should exercise their pride muscles, their power, and their extreme opinions as much as possible. Lesbian feminism is about extremes. It’s not even really about compromise.
Just ask Sonia Johnson about how she refuses to cook for people, or about how she decided that she didn’t want to be in her children’s lives anymore. Maybe she has changed her mind since her last book, so who knows, but I found those words so inspiring. Wow, I don’t have to do that work anymore either! I don’t have to pretend to be interested in hetero families and their endless babbling about “family.” Yuck.
It is radical even to this day to say you will not bow, scrape or curry to the great P . A. T. (trying for a little play on patriarchy, but invention fails me now.)
Get all riled up at my posts. Get mad mad mad, and then get really mad at the people behind this woman controlling social system of ours. I’m not your problem, you are your own problems for accomodating too much and demanding too little out of life. Way too little in my opinion. You could all be so much better, and you will be, just keep working at it.
Do I care if you agree with me or not? No, I don’t. Do I write for that special woman out there who really will get excited by these ideas, yes I will. The very select few who really need to hear this stuff, not for the masses but for the very very few.
What patriarchy does is it makes women too accomodating, too willing to pretend, a little too nicey nice. “Nice” that word that women are when they feel powerless around bad men, for example.
The reek of niceness that women wear like expensive perfume is distasteful to me.
It is a great social taboo to say that you are bored with children, that you will not do housework, and that the lives of a lot of heterosexuals really horrify you. But I’m really horrified when I read about the lives of ordinary women.
I can’t help it, I go into shock when I read Sis or when I found out Heart was in a cult and had 11 children. Shocked that women still do these things in this day and age. I know I’m a little naieve, I live in a very rarified world, so these things really get to me.
That’s just me. I’m only 1.4% of the world’s population according to a recent book called “The First Sex” by an anthropologist whose name escapes me at the moment. She compiled data on lesbians who have never had sex with men, and it is 1.4% of the world’s population. Now that’s an elitist if there ever was one, or perhaps a great rarity in the world.
We have a special point of view, a unique take on life. Maybe I don’t make excuses for myself, because I haven’t had to make the compromises many women in this country make.
I didn’t have to placate relatives in order to survive. I didn’t have to be with people I completely disliked at holidays to “keep the peace” in the family. I just bet that is not the case with many of you. You do have to keep the peace, and you do have to dull down your ideas, and you do make incredible compromises when you live with men. You just do.
You do get angry at me for holding women accountable for the worlds they are in. Yes, women you are adults, and no you are not victims. You are responsible for your destiny good or bad. You can’t blame men for your problems, but you can hold men accountable for THEIR actions.
You can give up too easily because you are rejected for a job automatically handed to men. What would have happened if I had done that? If I had caved at the first sign of danger or aggression out there? I wouldn’t have gotten very far with the great lesbian support network that straight women fight tooth and nail for. Yet, you expect me to pay for your children.
Don’t shame or blame the victim you say. I say, are you adults or not? You do need a kick in the butt every now and then. Especially straight women who are so fearful of feminism, but so lap it up in the benefits that lesbians fought for. Yes, that’s right, who do you think did all this stuff and helped get these laws passed and supported the very first women’s studies classes at major universites? Who do you think did all that?
We weren’t afraid of a little name like “feminist.” Geez, we were proud of politics, proud of our great battles, and I fondly remember all the wonderful arguments we had over everything.
I don’t know if the next generation is up to this battle. After women got the right to vote, the next group just pooped out.We do this again and again and again throughout history.
Young women fear radical feminism because it’s in patriarchy’s interest to turn you into objects, and to make you feel fear.It’s not that they mean to be rather lazy, it’s just that patriarchy has adapted to the protests of women at entry level positions. You can now get an equal entry level wage at many companies now. It is only later in life that you’ll see what happens.
Women are once again going back into the home, and men remain unchanged in their career focus. Men do this, because they believe women will just cop out, or drop out, or get some useless degree that won’t pay jack.
Men are tireless in their unchanging selves this way. Perhaps even these beasts of burden would like to do child care, or they’d like women to really go for it in the big world.
Yes, we do see true partnerships — Hillary and Bill being a good one. Bill doing pay back for his wife having his back while the radical right attempted to kick him out of the White House. I think I admire their dedication, even if Bill was a jerk in his sexual exploitation of women. It’s really hard to say, but I do know he is helping his wife break the ultimate glass ceiling.
The flawed lives and struggles of the First heterosexual couple I have a soft spot for. It is very hard for heterosexual women to move forward and to get power in this way. Very hard for women to get on the campaign trail, very hard indeed.
How do I end this thing? Yeoww, my mind wanders a bit.
I hope to annoy more of you again. And I also hope that the select “Elite” few will see into my words and dream big.
Dream big women! You’re not victims you’re adults now. Take 100% responsibility for your lives and minds, and you’ll see amazing progress. Take charge!!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Cool Aunt
By Cool Aunt
“The fight is its own reward,” says the wealthy woman.
When, Satsuma, was the last time you went hungry? …that you had to hide your car from the repo man? …that the power was shut off due to lack of payment? …that you came back to your roach-infested apartment in a part of town that even the cops are afraid to drive into to find your possessions on the curb and a notice of eviction on the front door, just above the lock that your key no longer opens?
These things happen to women. They happen to single women, lesbian women, women with no kids. Mostly, they happen to women who have children living with them and who are helpless without their mothers. When mother is helpless herself, she has to do whatever is necessary, sell out to the patriarchy, sell her soul, even. The same for women who are alone and without children. They must eat, too, and find shelter from the elements and predators.
That they all aren’t as educated as you or even as educated as I am isn’t a character flaw or a sign of their stupidity or foolishness. That they aren’t all aware that when they sell out and play the game by the rules under the patriarchy in which they live hurts all women because it hurts feminism isn’t some silly weakness or carelessness on their part. Even those who sell out to survive and know that their selling out hurts feminism don’t do it because they don’t care. They do it because, if they don’t, they may very well die in the streets of starvation, illness, accident or murder.
Your lack of empathy, Satsuma, is very much apparent. Men and abusers, if there’s a difference between the two, lack empathy, too. It’s the source of their intolerance and contempt of everyone except themselves, most of all women. I suspect that lack of empathy is the reason that your comments read like theirs, full of intolerance and contempt for everyone except yourself and others who are exactly like you.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
I started with nothing, and worked hard. I struggled against male supremacy and snotty straight women.
My first investment was $25 into a mutual fund. I worked long hours for very low wages, and built from there. I did a few things differently than most women out there — I studied the market since high school, and I didn’t marry men or have children. I just kept my eyes on the prize so to speak.
I take wealth accumulation very seriously because I don’t want the inferior medical care, the homophobic doctors and the heterosexual oppressors having that kind of power over me. Heterosexuals take a huge bite out of my taxes to support their children… it’s called the public school system. Every day I watch as these ill mannered children go to school and waste everyone’s time — the graffiti, the disrespect for teachers, the poor parenting and on it goes.
In one neighborhood, the kids study in the libarary after school, and you see great progress.
You’re right, I guess I don’t have much empathy for straight people. I did realize that I had to do things for myself. I pay more for health care because I don’t get hetero couple discounts.
Don’t forget, I studied how the patriarchy works. It has its predictable qualities, but the one thing that is constant about patriarchy is that it tries to con women into working for no wages “heterosexual child rearing and marriage” or very low wages. The key to the game is to not stay in the low wage jobs forever. “Paper or plastic” is what people who don’t study have to say on the job. Women who have children as teenagers will set themselves up for poverty. I can tell women again and again not to do these things.
But they don’t listen.
Your post is filled with a lot of errors. No quotes from books, no interest in money or investments, just an attack on me for working hard. I suppose I could baby you, and say oh poor women, you are so oppressed. Yes, women are oppressed, but you need not stay that way. You do have to face all kinds of obstacles just as I did. You just do.
To this day, I use my library card to check out books constantly. You too can get a library card, it’s free to all people in most American cities. So do the work and stop your complaining. It just doesn’t cut it for me.
Read “Women and Money” by Suze Orman, and learn the language of wealth. It’s there for every woman who really want this. But you do have to work and read.
I didn’t expect the law to change to support fully lesbian civil rights. I actually have fewer civil rights than immigrants to America who have the right to marry, and the right to public access.
Now why would I want to choose poverty and a bad money management plan just to prove I hadn’t sold out to whom?It’s my money, I earned it and saved it, I studied how to invest it. I worked in school daily to get an education. I had trouble in math, trouble reading, plus I had to deal with bullying heterosexual boys, and air head hetero girls.
That didn’t stop me. Wow, the whining. What is it? You have access to the very same books I do. Why don’t you read them? Stop getting angry at me as a lesbian who wants self determination in a hetero controlled world.
Sometimes women just feel threatened by everything. You do have choice in the world. I won’t say it is easy, but I did see so many girls in my high school long ago goofing around, not showing up for classes, getting pregnant, and they still had time for incredible homophobia. I vowed that I wouldn’t let those girls stand in my way. And I wouldn’t allow the boys to do that either.
Women are told again and again to stay in school, not marry early, and make sure they learn about money. But they don’t listen.
The first apartment I moved into had roaches in it. I didn’t even buy any cars until I was much better established in the world. I sacrificed in low income jobs for years, to create savings and begin investments. So get to work!
In this country, anyone can save money, anyone can read a money management book, and the daily Wall St. Journal and any other financial publications you care to read. Subscribe to them or get them a few days old from someone you know.
If you are poor, you won’t be forever. Just as I once had no money and started out with nothing.
I did a few things differently from most women. I learned a few languages. I read on Friday nights at the libarary while others went to parties. I paid my dues. Pay your dues, and you’ll be on the road to freedom.
You can crab all you want, but this is what you need to do. Now go do it or stop complaining!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Aletha
By Aletha
You know, Satsuma, you are not totally clueless, except about certain things, like the lives of heterosexual women. You think you are so radical, and women like you are responsible for all the progress women have made. That would be laughable if it were not so insulting. I do not find you especially radical. Extreme, yes, but not radical. Your citing of Bill and Hillary Clinton as a true partnership is a case in point. It is hard for me to imagine what the word partnership means to you if you think that relationship is a good example of it. I liked that turn of phrase Funnie used, provoking but not provocative. I think your kind of rhetoric is the kind the patriarchy laughs at behind our backs. It is not threatening to the status quo, because it helps men keep us divided and conquered. I do not expect you to agree with that assessment, and do not care.
I hardly think anyone on this blog needs your advice about how to stand up to men. Men allow some women to succeed in the corporate world as tokens. Whether that applies to you, I really have no idea. Regardless, your all-seeing wisdom has some serious holes in it. You seemed to think a few days ago the courage of posters on this blog was due to it being women-only space. If you had read the About page carefully, you would have realized Heart was referring to her bulletin boards, which have been down for months. Also, nine comments above yours was one from a man who posts here occasionally, Mr. Rich. Did you think the Mr. was a joke, or did you miss that somehow? Heart moderates this blog carefully. That is why women feel free to speak so boldly here, even with the occasional comment she allows from a friendly man or transsexual.
I believe lesbians and heterosexual women can work together, and have accomplished some things because of that collaboration. I have no problem with most lesbians I have encountered, in real life or online. There have been exceptions, those who think they are so radical and those poor straight women just do not get it, desecrated lost souls slaving away to support the status quo. Get a clue, Satsuma. Heterosexual women can dream just as big as you can. Some even have partners supportive of that, and no, I do not mean men like Bill Clinton. I imagine his great welfare deform plan was no big deal for you, no skin off your back, right?
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by CoolAunt
By CoolAunt
Satsuma, you commented in another blog post at this site that men talk too much and talk at women, not with us and never listening to us. The words *pot, kettle, black* come to mind.
Aletha, I get what you’re saying and I agree. I don’t care for how most of us here have been stereotyped in these discussions by one lesbian feminist therefore I won’t stereotype all lesbian feminists based on this mercifully brief yet irritating experience.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
I am not holding up Bill Clinton as a paragon of virtue, but I am saying that Bill and Hillary do work together as a political team, and this is unusual in American politics.
What is rather different about them is that they have supported each other in the quest for elected office. No former first lady ever ran for Senate and won, for example.No former first ladyeven ran for president to my mind.
Electoral politics does reflect a certain change in the social status of women. It’s not the be all and end all, and certainly the Clinton administration was not perfect.
What I admired about them was they really went out and met the gay and lesbian community. They may have stumbled around on the “gays in the Military” issue, but they did bring it up, and they did try. I give points to people for trying.
Welfare reform is a very complex issue. I did a study awhile back between poor neighborhoods and middle class neighborhoodswithin a 10 mile radius of my own house — grocery store prices, apartment rents, access to good libraries etc. What I found out, was that poor neighborhoods actually charged more for many of the same services, including rent.
I wondered what prevented poor people from leaving what was actually a more expensive place, and there were many complex reasons, but one of the main reasons that I learned from my interviews with people, was that they were afraid of middle class people.
This intrigued me, because as a lesbian, I have to be around heterosexuals a lot. Groups of heterosexual women can be just as exhausting to be around sometimes as stright men.
So everywhere I go in daily life I will be well out of my usual comfort zone.
I find your words rather insulting that “men allow women to succeed in the corporate world as tokens.” Well no,men don’t allow one thing or the other. My work is judged strictly on its productivity. If I don’t produce I am out. That means I have to be far more entreprenurial than the average American.
I took a lot of classes on my own, and no, I don’t have any particular status in my company. Most of those men play golf together or have lunch together, but they ignore the women in the office.
The thing is you have to focus on what activities will work for you. If I had listened to all the things men say about women “can’t” do this or that I would have gotten nowhere.
Women had to file so many lawsuits and change so many laws to break down barriers. It takes a long time to do these things. What distinguishes me is my persistence, and also I really don’t listen to heterosexual women calling me an elitist or whatever, because I won’t dumb down for people.
I won’t do the “poor so and so” I simply provide concrete strategies for women to do better than they usually do in life.If I were a corporate sell out, I would work exclusively in markets that would pay me about 10 times what I make trying to help a lot of women get their economic acts together.
But I do want women to do things like open a retirement account that their own company will match, for example. Women will have plans that they don’t even access. They won’t even read about their own benefits package many times.I actually have to tell them to do this!
This self-defeating behavior is really amazing to watch. It happens. Not all the time, but it happens often enough to make me really wonder sometimes.
I wasn’t paying much attention to Mr. Rich. There are a lot of posts here, and it’s sometimes hard to keep up.
What I do notice is that there is not much concrete strategy on what to actually DO. That’s why I suggested that women buy the movie that Catherine Crouch made on ‘The Gendercator” and show it in homes, collect the money and send it to the film maker so that her art gets out there in the lesbian community. Even though several venues banned her work because of transgender protest, we don’t have to rely on other’s distribution systems.
I was happy to see that Heart posted the address to order the movie and its price, which is very reasonable. $25 for the movie, holding a screening in your home and raising perhaps $100-$250 dollars for the film maker will make her a nice return on her movie. If we calculate the lost income she experienced as a result of being banned at a few film festivals, we can know how many lesbians can show X number of filming, to create a system where we are more in control of distribution.
You just have to sit down, do the math, and reach the people.
As for spaces being woman only, none of them are on the Internet. But you can tell by the content of the writing whether there is a strong lesbian presense on a site. You can tell by the what books are cited, what issues come up, and what information is available. So I’d say that most of this site is about the issues of concern to me as a lesbian. By women only, I mean the quality of the information itself, and the level of education of the people on it.
There are a lot of factors obviously.
My job is to not go into “whine” mode but to say what has actually worked for many lesbians I know. It certainly isn’t the only answer out there, but it is my authentic lesbian answer. I don’t have much affinity for many of the heterosexual women’s issues out there. It just isn’t of much interest to me, but I do know why women stay in poverty. That I do know.
Sometimes feminists have a rather poor understanding of economics and numbers. They have inaccurate analysis of what works economically or not.
For example, there isn’t one capitalism but many. Second, there is a mixture of both the exchange economy and the gift economy, which I think all of us participate in in a variety of ways. Sonjia Johsnon advocated a gift economy, but I rather suspect that she charges guests at her bed and breakfast just the way any straight man would at his bed and breakfast.
You have to look at what people actually do.
Most women get stuck in class envy, or they get angry when some women are more educated. I value education very highly, and I enjoy reading complex things, because it challenges my mind.
When I see poverty, its chief characteristic is an incredible lack of curiosity. I know this from my own relatives who are very improverished.
Rather than railing at me for being the messenger of what really works worldwide for women, you can actually decide where you want to be in life. Women have many choices, and it is up to us to excersize them.
I agree with you, heterosexual women and lesbians can work together, but I am not going to put your issues over my own. I’m just not going to waste my time. I want to focus on my attention on things of interest to me, and I don’t want to waste my time on things that are of little interest.
Heterosexual women in my experience did not advocate strongly enough for the worlds of lesbians. I find a certain weakness there.
You saw a lot of lesbians working for abortion rights for example, but I didn’t see the same reciprosity on other issues.Gay and Lesbian marriage, not a peep from all the straight women I knew. I have a certain ambivilence about this, because my lesbian strength comes from being outside the hetero system. I won’t ever attend marriage ceremonies, for example.
It’s just something I noticed.
I guess I just get bored with heterosexual women who whine and make excuses for themselves. I can assure you, when I was younger, there was absolutly nothing in the way of support for lesbian anything. Nothing. It would be hard for you as a heterosexual woman ever to imagine that high schools are about heterosexual indoctrination, for example. Or college campuses are filled with “entertianment” for wild heterosexual youth.
The downside was my complete invisibility in these social structures, the upside is I didn’t have as many distractions coming at me, and so I was able to study harder, rather than party mindlessly. There was no issue with birth control or dealing with men on a personal level. I was able to become as smart as I wanted to be without some idiot boyfriend getting threatened.
Maybe it’s why I do have so little empathy for straight women a lot of the time… not all of the time, but many times I guess. There is a certain distance I feel from you. I feel distance when heterosexual women call me elitist for wanting a very high level of achievement in my life. Sorry, but I do.
I can’t settle for crumbs when I could have a fine meal. I can’t settle for the rather pathetic and uninfomred economic analysis that passes for wisdom in even the feminist world.
I just can’t get excited about women and their children. Sorry to upset people but it bores the living daylights out of me. It’s just what I really feel. I won’t pretendinterest — that’s the ultimate male tactic on women — forcing women to give all their attention to men. Women go along with this. The giggle giggle, tee hee and listen to men, even when I’m pretty sure they don’t feel much interest at all. They just do this. It’s a hetero woman knee jerk thing. Sometimes I think they are not aware of this, but that’s ok That giggle giggle of teenage girls makes me nuts.
My bottom line is I employ specific tactics with specific women to get results. I apply radical lesbian feminist theory and combine it with global economic analysis to analyze things, to think up solutions.
I bring together lesbians nationwide for a variety of projects to the benefit of all concerned. There are lots of things I do, but I don’t advertise these things to the general public.
I respect critique based on knowledge. Whatever economic system women advocate, and actually they have very vague ideas in this area most of the time, I look at its effectiveness.
I question the choices young women make, because bad choices can have worse consequences. Lesbians challenge the baby making machine that is so much a part of heterosexual reality… from the endless attention to abortion and birth control to the silly collusion in the so-called “sexual revolution.”
My life as a radical feminist led to great reward precisely because I was free of that personal heterosexual system. I lived outside that box, and was not a part of its customs. This isolation from my own people in my youth gave rise to my resourcefulness of which I am very proud. And I’m not going to let any heterosexual woman ever get away with using elitist as an insult to me. It is a badge of honor to be above average in a world where women “settle” and you know how women settle for things.
No one is preventing women from reading and applying knowledge. A critique of capitalism is hypocritical, because most people don’t know what it is. I guess they really want a welfare state, and that most certainly is not very appealing to me. I wouldn’t want my income taxed heavily for what will inevitably be heterosexual programs at my own expense.
I don’t want to pay for the heterosexual system out of my own pocket, and I don’t trust straight women to really get out there full bore for lesbian programs. You won’t do it, I know and you know it, so I’ll create the things that work for me.
Well this is kind of long sorry folks. I try to be brief and clever like my gay brothers, but it doesn’t work. I’m long winded — a windbag instead of a godbag? Funny huh?
P.S. Every time I go back to correct spelling or grammar mistakes, the over right function kicks in. I don’t like such poor writing out there — stubborn pride I guess. Is there a way to deal with this?
Sometimes I can do it right, but I think it works before I get to the very end of the text.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
I’m just wondering how long Heart is going to allow these women-hating posts to make it on blog. If they were being made by a man (if…?) they wouldn’t be here would they.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Hey, Sis. I feel bad that your sense is that Satsuma’s posts are woman-hating. I understand why you see them that way, completely, believe me. I don’t, though. And I wouldn’t compare what Satsuma is writing here with what a man would write, because Satsuma is a woman. Now hear me out. Come on, it’s me, Heart. Give me a listen.
xxxooo
I know what Satsuma is saying is troubling and hard to read for some. I see today though that possibly she may be taking that into account a bit more, and I appreciate that.
The reason I’m okay with what she’s saying is, she really and truly is speaking out of a woman-centered reality and position, and I see that. What she says resonates, in particular, with lesbians, and particularly those who have been lesbians and lesbian feminists for all of their lives. I obviously am not the expert on that, and wouldn’t completely trust my hunches there, so to be sure I was reading everything right, I e-mailed five good friends in the above category, i.e., lesbian women who had been lesbians all of their lives — never partnered with men, lesbian centered. Those who have responded to me so far have generally said something like, well, I might have said some things a little differently, but yeah, I have to say, what she says resonates with me (or some variation thereof). Some were wildly positive! Heh. Wry heh.
The lives and realities of all-of-their-lives lesbians have been *way* different from the lives and realities of those of us who took up with men as young women. Way, way different. I wouldn’t have understood that or recognized that 10 or even five years ago, but I’ve learned some things. One reason I didn’t understand 10 years ago is, lesbian voices are silenced, so almost nobody besides lesbians does get it.
Lesbians are silenced silenced silenced. Relentlessly. Lesbian voices are made to be invisible. They are made invisible deliberately, by males, in society and culture, in organizations, in politics, government, and they are made invisible unintentionally (and sometimes intentionally, too!) by progressives, feminists, and GLBTQ. Lesbian lives, lesbian realities have been *so* discounted, and in *so* many ways, it would be hard for me to even begin to describe all of the many ways I have learned about, become aware of, and honestly, I’m tearing up sitting here at my desk at work thinking about it, because the injustice is so grievous and wrong, and it so deeply harms all women — all all all — so much so, you feel like standing on the rooftop and screaming about it, but all that would get you is taken to some institution or jail somewhere.
Lesbians like Satsuma don’t have anyone to rely on or to take care of them and never have the way women partnered with men have. Not ever. From the time they were very, very young they knew that they were on their own– always. Most of the time, they didn’t have the support of anybody– not families, not parents, not churches, not the workplace, not the laws of the land, obviously, none of the institutions of male heterosupremacy. They were not able to marry or enjoy the financial and other benefits of marriage, like social acceptance or to have their relationships and families recognized and affirmed. Whatever they have, they had to build for themselves, from scratch, no safety nets of the type most of us who have partnered with men or lived as het women for however many years — however hideous our lives with men have been and mine has sure been hideous — have. Het women are recognized as deserving certain things from the men they partner with and from the surrounding culture as well. They receive a certain societal and cultural recognition which to some degree they can rely upon when men abandon them, betray them or abuse them. Lesbians are recognized as apostates and infidels who must be punished, and whatever harm befalls them they are believed to deserve.
One turning point in my own education happened at my first festival in Michigan. I went to one of Davis’s workshops and she had invited two other women to participate. One of them was exactly my age. She described having grown up in the South and knowing she was a lesbian from the time she was about 14, 15 years old. In time a lesbian relative took her under her wing. They would go to lesbian bars together– in those days bars were the only real meeting places for lesbians. She described the way that with regularity, the police would sweep in, arrest all of the lesbians who “looked like men,” would take them to jail, where they would be beaten and raped. Dear god, very hard to type this. Then they’d just be jailed, for however long these haters felt like jailing them and nobody cared. The woman described the ways they would try to find to get out of jail. For a while she had been partnered with a prostituted woman, who would have sex with the local judge in order to get him to order the jailed women released.
Did any of you het women know about this? Or that things like this happened to lesbian women? This was the first time I had ever heard of it. I started to cry and it feels like I cried for days, for my whole Festival, off and on. I was so moved and so enraged. That was the first of many such stories I was to hear, listening to lesbians. If they’ve lived as lesbians all their lives and they are older than 40, especially, they will have these stories.
Things like this happen to het women under certain circumstances– when they are white and partnered with black men in the U.S., when they are women of color partnered with men of color, and when they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if this did happen, at the very least, someone would recognize the injustice. Men would speak up on the women’s behalf, whether white men or men of color. Het women who had some measure of power (usually because of their connections to men) would speak up on the women’s behalf. Not so with lesbian women. Males have occasionally declared open season on them and nobody cared. Het men didn’t care, and het women didn’t care. And didn’t know. And if they knew, figured oh well, what do they think they are doing anyway, they should have known better.
But this kind of thing — and there’s so much, many books could be written, many, many, but who would publish them!? — creates a *very* different lived experience than the experience of living as a het woman. With respect to those of us who have partnered with men — however horrible that experience — lesbians are marginalized. They know this and of course, it is invisible to women who have partnered with men because that’s how privilege works. You have the luxury of not recognizing that you have it.
Satsuma is speaking as an older woman out of this very different lived experience. She sees things about het women that het women don’t see. That’s also the way privilege works– those who do not have it know a lot more about those who do than the other way around. What she has to say and to offer is important and valuable, even where there are disagreements or someone might think she’s wrong. In order to be female-centered feminists, we have to pay heed to the voices and lived realities of female persons. Even when what they have to say is really hard to hear. What we are hearing when we listen teaches us about the way women are affected by the fact that some take up with men and some do not. We’re hearing what happens to women who do not and what happens to women who do. The conflicts which arise are rooted in the issue of women’s loyalties to specific men, loyalties to men being a hugely important “glue” which holds male heterosupremacy together. Even when it seems like het women are being wrongly or unjustly blamed, it makes sense to look closely at the way loyalties to men divide women against one another.
Well, I could go on and on. This is what I have for now.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
I don’t see these posts as speaking from a lesbian perspective. They don’t represent any of the thoughtful loving and radical feminist lesbians I know. These posts are coming from a woman hater named Satsuma. And I’m logging off.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
One more thing I wanted to say.
Satsuma is giving every woman here the benefit of the doubt. If you’ll recall that discussion we had a while back, we give the benefit of the doubt when we take the risk of engaging with those who have not experienced the specific marginalization and terrorism we have experienced. We are trusting, and risking, that they will “get it.” It was justicewalks who wrote about that somewhere, and it might have been on private boards, but she was saying that when a woman of color engages white women about racism, that *is*, in fact, giving the benefit of the doubt. She wouldn’t engage you if she didn’t think you’d get it. She hopes that you will. I dunno. I have learned so much from lesbian women who have taken the risk of engaging me, who have given me the benefit of the doubt. I think that grappling personally with the issues raised by lesbians’ lives and realities, facing up to what it means to have partnered with men, is critical to deepening our awareness of what it means to be female in a world that hates females. We have to go there, I think, for the sake of all female persons.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by funnie
By funnie
I appreciate your considered post, Heart. I feel, though, that I’ve made an effort to not be overly provoked by Satsuma’s posts. She presumes, in her writing, that stupid het women will take offense to her bold speaking (or what have you) but what *I* take offense at is that she thinks I DO take offense at it and that it’s okay to call me stupid.
I understand being discriminated against. Very well. And I have no problem with the rage that can make somebody feel. Rage is good. It can be productive. But sometimes it’s destructive, and when you’re talking about heterosupremacy, which IS SEXISM, it’s entirely destructive to aim that ire against women. Period.
Because while straight women can access some privilege through men, being paired with men IS NOT privilege. It hurts women far more often than not, and even when it’s somehow “beneficial” it means serving men’s interests or being punished. How is that a privilege? It isn’t.
Satsuma ignores the reality of heterosexuality - she calls it enslavement and then treats women who are therefore so enslaved as being responsible for harms perpetrated against her. Maybe some have done that, I don’t know. I’m willing to believe it, for sure. But I’m not willing to be treated as though *I* have. Not because I’m unwilling to examine any privilege issues I have, because we’ve had interesting discussions about that sort of thing. But because women being punished for the harms of sexism doesn’t advance the cause of women…and it’s not in me to pretend that it does.
Women are guilted into feeling responsible for all sorts of injustices. Sometimes we may be at fault. But, even recognizing my race privilege and why a man would do it, I won’t let a black man call me a white bitch. I’ll be happy to talk to him about white privilege, but THAT is unacceptable.
It’s okay to draw lines regarding acceptable treatment WRT people who may have less privilege. And I think the time to draw that line with Satsuma (at least for me) is now.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Sis, but what about the fact that lesbian women I contacted, directly, via e-mail, say Satsuma’s posts *do* resonate for them?
Of course it doesn’t sound like “most lesbians”. Most lesbians are civil and nice and don’t unnecessarily rock the boat because there’s no point. And media portrayals of lesbians are an atrocity. And most lesbians do care about all women, especially feminists, so they do their best to get along, go away when it gets too troublesome, bite their tongues, and so on. But this is a feminist blog, this is “Women’s Space,” and that is in part what we’re here to do, rock one another’s boats?
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Mary Sunshine
By Mary Sunshine
Hi Heart,
One of my beefs with Satsuma is that by her logic, any never-het Dykes who are living in poverty have only themselves to blame.
I find that profoundly misogynistic and lesbian-hating.
All of the never-het dykes and separatists that I have known know the lesbian oppression that they have lived with all their lives is more intense than that of the lesbians-come-lately, and Marilyn Murphy, a deceased lezsep sister used to describe herself. They have described that to us with much pain and passion , and that has led to my own understanding of that issue.
And yet, I have never encountered any never-het Dykes who have vilified het women with the apparent misogynistic glee as Satsuma has done here.
Julia Penelope is a brilliant, brilliant lezsep and radlezfeminist pioneer who was fighting all those battles before Satsuma was born. She is / was widely published, and in her writings has expressed vehemently her disagreement with the kind of scapegoating in which Satsuma is indulging. Julia was at that time referring to the so-called BattleAxe Dykes (BevJo, Linda Strega, and Ruston), whom I used to know personally. Well, the Battleaxe Dykes really, really got into the het-hating diatribes, and many can still be found out there still in print-only les/fem journal archives.
But nothing that BattleAxe ever wrote comes close to the pure misogynistic hatred expressed here by Satsuma.
I find Satsuma to be way short on the symbolic logic, and long on the arrogance and misogyny.
Heart, if you need a senior never-het Dyke word on the subject of Satsuma, email Julia Penelope (who is also the editor of “Out of the Class Closet: Lesbians and CLASSISM”.)
Also, I am taking a moratorium on reading here until I hear that Satsuma is gone.
She really, really needs to start her own blog and put a link to it here. Such a smart, smart girl as satsuma surely couldn’t have any trouble with wordpress.
She is using the traffic that your blog gets to vent her sadistic spleen against women and lesbians. She could just as easily post her venom to other blogs, but then she wouldn’t have such a high profile on those blogs as she has here. She knows what she is doing.
I will be taking a moratorium on reading your blog, Heart, until I hear that Satsuma has gone.
Sis, thanks for speaking up.
This whole thing has affected me, a woman with decades of experience in the lesbian feminist and lesbian separatist communities, really badly. To the extent that I need to leave, for that sake of my own well-being.
Mary
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
I do accept her experience and sympathize completely. But just as with an abusive mentally ill person I know, I understand the source of the abusive personality, but that does not mean I have to take the abuse. Thanks but no thanks. I’m topped right up with abuse for quite sometime.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
funnie: Because while straight women can access some privilege through men, being paired with men IS NOT privilege. It hurts women far more often than not, and even when it’s somehow “beneficial” it means serving men’s interests or being punished. How is that a privilege? It isn’t.
How is this different from saying something like the following:
Because while white women can access some privilege by being white, being white IS NOT privilege. Because women are still subject to sexism.
Being paired with men can be a miserable existence. Nobody knows that better than me, one of whose husbands tried to kill me and went to prison for life for it. But I think we have to think more deeply than that, to the broader, systemic kinds of marginalization. I think lesbians love their lives and wouldn’t trade places with het women for a nanosecond. Just as people of color love their lives and wouldn’t change places with white people. Just as women love our lives and wouldn’t change places with men. None of that changes, though, the difficulties and systemic injustices involved in being female/a person of color/lesbian compared with being male/white/het.
We don’t compare the bum in the gutter with Oprah. We compare the male bum in the gutter with the female bum in the gutter. We don’t compare the brutalized het woman with Ellen. We compare the brutalized het woman with the brutalized lesbian woman and compare what each will have in terms of resources and help. I think that’s the only way to do any kind of accurate analysis.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Mary Sunshine
By Mary Sunshine
Heart,
Having read your posts made since I made mine, I have to say that what Satsuma is doing isn’t “engaging”. It’s battering. It’s beleaguring. And it’s exploiting you and your blog.
Mary
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
And yet, I have never encountered any never-het Dykes who have vilified het women with the apparent misogynistic glee as Satsuma has done here.
Yeah, I don’t like that either. Although I have found it kind of humorous, i.e., having children makes women stupid, but here I am with 11. I know who am, you know? I don’t have to take that in.
I know what you’re talking about re Julia Penelope (whom I love). There’s also a much beloved (to me) essay written by also lesbian-come-lately Robin Morgan about the so-called “Lesbian Vanguard” and everything that is wrong with “vanguard-itis.” Round and ’round we go, you know?
One reason I haven’t rushed to conclusions about Satsuma is, she doesn’t have a blog. She’s not one of the bazillion people who has come here apparently friendly at first, then progressed to spamming my blog with all sorts of stuff to drive traffic to their own blog. That tells me she came here simply wanting to participate.
But of course, I’m listening to you women, my sisters, Mary and Sis. I’m paying attention. It’s hard to make these decisions when women you dearly love are deeply divided. I’m doing my best.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Satsuma
By Satsuma
Just what is woman hating about suggesting that women take their lives seriously?
I’m telliing you to take life seriously, and I’m meerly reporting on one lesbian life.
You all have lives, you all can write. Just do it!
Yes, I’m tough on all of this, because I don’t see what good being wishy washy or too touchy feely or whatever is.
Just ignore my posts if you don’t like this. I don’t read everything on here either. I am intrigued by opposite opinions.
You all take way too much way too personally.
I told you my goal was not about mindlessly agreeing with you all, I am simply challenging you.
A lot of men simply write off women, and don’t even bother to criique anything.
I just don’t buy it.
Now if you want to write some contrarian ideas, then do it. I am happy that you are. But censorship Sis, wow, now that really is anti-feminist. That really is about preventing lesbian speech.
Don’t expect me to be too “easy” on heterosexual women. You can be wonderful and whimpy, and sometimes I just have to laugh because you are all unaccustomed I think to any lesbian commentary.
I’m not deliberately being difficult here, I am just telling my truth to the best of my ability. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it is concrete. It has its own logic.
You all know what women need to be doing out there. There are a million ways to have a feminist ideal, and a practical feminist reality. Lesbians are not all alike. Straight women aren’t all alike — this is a given women.
I am generalizing here based on what I see in the world, and what I see in the lives of straight women. What do straight women often call lesbians — everything we say that is a critique of a very oppressive heterosexual system is — we’re like men. That’s the common hetero insult, and I’ve heard it a million times.
When I was the only woman in an investment study class, other women said I was just like a man for wanting to study this subject. I never thought of investments as being either male or female, they were about math and analysis.
When I gave a speech on investments in front of a feminist group I was called “a male hetero immitator” I think that was the phrase back then. That speech was in 1980 I think, and the 80s became a stock market powerhouse. A lot of my friends from back then are very poor, when they had the same jobs I had, made the same income, but the one thing they didn’t do was invest… to start small and build. They attacked me for advocating that women get involved with money. It was very “anti-feminist” back then to even talk about this.
But I didn’t listen to this at all. I wanted my money to work harder for me, because I already had to work harder than men, and harder than a lot of straight women. Long hours, Saturdays, weekends… you name it. I was a very boring nerdlike lesbian, before the word nerd was associated with wild Silicon Valley success stoires little smiley to placate the masses out there :-)
We will have some things in common everyone, but we are supremely different. So I was just different in many odd ways…
Now what do you all want to do to better your lives? What ideas do you have? Stop this nonsense about me personally, I want you to address the idea that women can do _______.
It doesn’t matter what you do, just make it about things that are personally challenging and worthwhile to you.
“if they were being made by a man…. they wouldn’t be here…” This is a typical quote advocating the censorship of a lesbian who is speaking up for herself. I don’t ever think heterosexual women should not have a voice, or that they should not be here. But the minute I challenge you all in such a direct way, out come the censorship demands.
This is what heterosexuals do all the time to lesbians and gay men. Try to shut us up. And that’s ok, you have a right to say this. I don’t say shut up, but I can and do say whether or not I am interested in the particular issue at hand.
We all have to focus on a certain body of information. We’ll have common goals and different goals.
Why would I be so concerned with my own economic welfare?Did you ever wonder why this is so PERSONALLY important to me? Take some guesses here.
Do you think I have friends who need my help? You better believe it. I not only work for my own benefit, but I have many obligations to my lesbian sisters. I take this very seriously.
Why do I get frustrated when women settle for so little! Is it because I’m a heartless “male immitator” no it’s because believe it or not, I deeply care, and I hate to see women slogging away for low wages, or doing things that really will harm themselves.
Would you just sit there while some woman injects heroine in her arms? Would you just sit there and not say what is important for women’s self-determination just because it appears to be “elitist” or “woman hating” or whatever insult you care to level at me.
Just think about this! You can be annoyed, but annoyed at what? Because I point out a valid critique of heterosexual women or the system of heterosexuality? It is a system, and you have to have some awareness of its power. I don’t expect you to know that much about it, just as I don’t expect to know that much about what heterosexual women go through in daily life. We can know much, but ultimately we are not able to completely be in the heads of others– about what racism FEELS like, or what starvation FEELS like, or what recovering from a terrible right wing woman oppressing cult really FEELS like. But we can share and discuss and get clues.
There is give and take and choice here. This is a powerful site because women dare to speak up and really get into very sophisticated legal ideas, and commentary on women’s spaces, and there is real passion here. It is a site that a heterosexual ally set up. That’s right, Heart is an ally to all women. I’m just a crummgeon in comparison. I’m not blessed with great compassion and mercy. It’s hard work for me. Sometimes I falsely associate compassion with a call for women to be a servant ‘caring” class yet again, and this really horrifies me. I question what women are told to be, what qualities are “assigned” to us.
It’s what I like about all of you— you have real passion, but you get overly mad at me for wrong reasons. Will I not speak up on an area of expertise that I have developed over 30 some odd years. Now that doesn’t make sense at all.
What I deeply admire about Heart’s site is here devotion to the authors I revere as sacred texts. That was my first delight in coming here. Then what I loved was how much I was learning about things that had happened at Michigan and in Vancouver, and in women’s lives in general that I had missed out on hearing about.
The last time I heard women talking about Michigan was maybe way back in the 80s. Believe it or not, I forgot about it, and Heart made me realize how wonderful Michigan is.
It brought a lot of happiness to me, and I also connected it to my childhood experiences of listening to my cousins and gradeschool friends describe Disneyland to me. Being a midwestern child, Disneyland might well have been in China!
So these Disneyland tales were so wonderful, because they seemed like the Arabian Nights. Magic.
Then one day, when I had become an adult I went to Disneyland. It was really fun, don’t get me wrong, but somehow I felt a loss. The stories had actually been about my connection to my beloved cousins and my gradeschool friends, but the real Disneyland was a pale immitation.
So Heart and the great Michigan controversies had been a treasured part of lesbian and feminist lore. Every year there was a big issue at Michigan, and this is a treasury to me.
But I can see that the more I tell my truth, the more it conflicts with yours. And that’s just the way life is.
What is your truth and why do you care about it?
Are my ideas really just like right wingers? Or are they a lesbian interpretation of a lesbian’s concern with what taxes do to me?
Is my advocacy of economic power for women wrong to tell about? Is my honesty about what I really like and dislike such a trial to you all?
What I am is sincere about my life. A lesbian has a right to pride, because we get so attacked all the time. We are a very small minority. I am simply delighted to have succeeded in life because the theory of radical lesbian feminism worked so well for me. Long ago, before a lot of you even were feminist, radical lesbian writing was rare. Lesbian opinions were not easy to find. All the things I tried to do were attacked by a lot of straight women… not all (don’t get feathers flying here) but a lot of straight women thought it was fine and dandy to trash lesbians and call us “like men” perhaps because many lesbians (not all) but many were indifferent to femininity.
We really disliked make-up and dresses. It wasn’t the only thing we disliked about many (not all) straight women, but a lot of them. Radical lesbian feminists and straight women weren’t in the same groups a lot of the time.
In my experience, I was not in intergated political groups on this level at all. Spiritually I didn’t meet with straight women either. We formed lesbian communities and groups, and stayed in them.
I had a few close straight women friends, but they never had children. We were united in our activism for democratic party candidates. And we campaigned together for some of the first women to achieve state and national offices in America.
My first political campaign was for a woman school board candidate in my hometown. She was straight and I’ll always love the opportunity I had to do this when I was a teenager.
So what are all of you really annoyed about? That I don’t like you? I don’t even know who you are. That I speak up and don’t sugar coat ideas?
Really, this site is powerful because it is about the individual truths women tell here.
Lesbians ( a lot of us, not all ) really are very different from straight women. I even personally think my brain is wired differently. The science is not in on this yet, but I do feel I respond to life in a very different way compared to a straight woman.
It’s hard to put my finger on it. I suppose it would have to be a kind of metaphor. A poem might describe the delight of lesbian mind in a straight female world. I’ll have to think about this. Perhaps we could have a lesbian only discussion of how our brains work? Who knows, anything is possible here!
One of the things lesbians can teach straight women, is to not be so sensitive to valid criticism of heteronormative society.There is this false thing called “blame the victim” or even the idea that women are victims. The word “victim” needs to be used carefully in my opinion. I remember the days when people were called “AIDS victims” and my gay brothers hated this phrase! They were not victims, they were brave heros!We were heros and heronies to each other back then.
Do I feel distaste for heterosexual social worlds? Yes, I do many times. I really like heterosexual women as colleagues and business women. But I don’t really have a passionate interest in the social lives of heterosexual women a lot of the time. We support each other as business people, we help each other in the world, but I am more comfortable in the public spherer with working women in general.
I just don’t identify with stay at home Moms or women. It’s not that I think they are bad, it’s just that I don’t relate very well to this life, kind of like I don’t relate to jocks or football fanatics or people who play golf. I don’t relate to hard rock or large stadiums filled with yelling happy people. I relate to reserved tickets and lovely concert stages and opera lovers everywhere. I relate to an elderly gay man who is a piano teacher, and I revere our musical discussions. He is a lovely cultured gentleman and I adore him.
I love my gay brothers who are kind of the male extended family to me. I love my straight sisters in our great projects together. I love my “power lunches” with straight women in my industry and our big discussions about GDP in America and abroad. I thrill to their presentations and ideas! I LOVE ‘EM to pieces! This is a true love affair between straight women and lesbians! Odd to you all, but fun for me.
If I say, I am bored with children, this sets feathers aflying. Aren’t all women supposed to love children and be interested in them? Well no I’m not. Sorry but I’m not.
Heterosexual women will have hurt feelings if I say this. It just is going to happen. Even Heart will be hurt a little bit or a lot by my words, but I still go into shock at the thought of having 11 children. I know I know, I’m still in shock over this.I should “get over this girl” but it affected me deeply, and I don’t know what to think! So I’m trying to deal with this bit of information, and I’m simply still in the shocked stage of human development here. To use a phrase my African American sisters use that I LOVE — “I’m just saying.”
It’s honest shock, not dislike of her personally. I admire Heart greatly because she is so great at moderation.
It’s an art form and she is an incredible diplomat in a world that is very brutal… radical feminism is a very contenious political ideology. The fights ARE the biggest! It’s knock down drag out!
Wow, did we have it out with straight feminists in the late 70s and early 80s! It made political battles of today seem like tiddley winks!
Believe it or not, I have very fond memories of this, because it was the beginning of my lesbian feminist self. It was how I trace my political development as a free woman. I treasure my personal memories of things that will probably never be written up in this history books, our lesbian feminist political past will seem so ugly to straight women, that you will once agains say “Heart, kick this bold kick butt Dyke off this site, she’s woman hating!! She “acts” like a man. Oy vey, that one dates back to 1972 — I get that all the time.
I don’t act like the type of woman you personally feel comfortable with, and I don’t just dull down my words. I don’t placate and play nice nice. I just don’t.
As a lesbian feminist, I shouldn’t even bother anymore to explain my life to straight women. You’re not going to like or respect my life, because I just hate heterosexual culture and norms. I know I’m supposed to LOVE everyone equally, but I am selective. First I have to lead with what I REALLT FEEL, then I test the hetero waters… then sometimes I try to be tactful somewhat. Tact is not an easy thing to me. I’m emotional like an opera, my voice comes out like Pavarotti, who I deeply identify with. Don’t ask me why. A lesbian sister gave me my first free opera ticket around 1988. She was a cellist in the opera orchestra! Wow was I impressed! My first opera had Pavarotti as the lead. La Boheme, and Pavoratti was a terrible actor. He’d just stand all 500 punds of him center stage and out would come this incredible voice.
That’s an inner me I think
If you were married to men, and now struggle you’re just not going to like me very much.
For the longest time, I had nothing at all. No community, no women’s history, no women’s music, and no lesbian only spaces. There was nothing, nothing and more nothing!
We created our own spaces out of nothing and with nothing.We had no money, and no “connections” and no public support of any kind. None. All we had was each other and a dream so big, that it surprises me even now that we dared to dream it.
The one thing I’m going to call you on Sis, is your call for my censorship! That is just unacceptable to me. How dare you try to silence me! Now that is real lesbian feminist attacking in my opinion. Imagine me saying you shouldn’t write.
Your words aren’t all that engaging, but I do respect YOUR right as a woman to write anything you want. It’s not my favorite stuff here, but it does motivate me to work harder so that other women don’t end up like you did. You will make me work harder for my women clients, and pay attention more.
So thank you for motivating me to serve women better.
I’m a pretty complex person actually. Contradictory, inflamatory, loving, funny, a real pain in the butt, anger provoking… name call attracting… That’s just good old old school lesbian feminist me.
It’s really my delight to write here. I enjoy it because I view you as peers — when you act like it, and cute whiners when you don’t. I enjoy a good old fight! And I enjoy having a light bulb of connection go off at something I read here.
I never know exactly what will come up for me, but I respect you all and encourage you to be as big as you can be for your own self. Be as brave or as reserved as you want to be.
Be as hetero irritating as you want to be — straight woman immitating smile going right at you all!
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
True confessions.
I’ve been in these discussions in the past, responding as some of you women I love are, really pissed off to the point of going away. I was once memorably told, by someone I love who is my good friend today, that my defenses of het women and my arguments amounted to saying het women could or should “fuck their way to freedom.” And a lot of similarly horrible stuff. Ow. We went away from each other for a long time then, a bunch of us. But, for the most part, we worked it out over time.
Those arguments from years ago resulted in my creating a certain, I don’t know, ability to not take things personally when they are coming from someone I believe really does care about women, who is a woman herself. As opposed to, for example, someone with an axe to grind or who is being a pissy asshole out of pettiness or vindictiveness or who is being otherwise psychotic in some way. Or who is male and therefore stands to benefit from hurting or dividing women against one another.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
I will say though that it’s these discussions that get me thinking I’m going to go “No Comments” on my blog!
Honestly.
I want to ask everybody here to consider the effect of their words on women reading. I am trying to derail the trainwreck, if possible. Otherwise I am going to have to (1) edit out all insults; (2) stop approving comments completely for a while on this topic.
Somehow we’ve got to get better at dealing with this kind of conflict in feminism or we’re just going to go round and round forever. We have to learn the lessons of the early years, somehow, because this is a very old argument, the movement has been here and been here and been here.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Branjor
By Branjor
As a lesbian who has never been het or partnered with a man I want to say THANK YOU to Heart for your post above. What Satsuma says resonates with me too, though I would not have said it in exactly the same way as she did.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by ekittyglendower
By ekittyglendower
I always trust my instincts and to tell me not to is what?
I am reading an abuser here.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Kitty, no way would I tell you or any woman not to trust your gut. I will tell you to honor your gut. That’s what I do. If our guts tell us differently, well, I don’t know. I have no answers for that.
Other than to say I do honor every woman here and believe what she tells me about herself and her own life.
I appreciate your weighing in Branjor.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by ekittyglendower
By ekittyglendower
Here is the message I’m reading,
Lesbian-smartHeterosexual woman-stupidLesbian-Takes her life seriouslyHeterosexual woman-squanders life
On and on and on…..
end conclusion:
Lesbian=superiorHeterosexual woman =-inferior.
And it is spoken here of all places. And it is spoken in absolutes. Absolutes arrived at by one person’s experience.
Sis come have tea with me, we shall hug, since hugging is too touchy feely around here.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by pisaquaririse
By pisaquaririse
“Somehow we’ve got to get better at dealing with this kind of conflict in feminism or we’re just going to go round and round forever.”-Heart
I’ve only been a reader on this thread.The nooks and crannies of arguments can snag the world into messes.
I wonder if it might be constructive to ask commenters (in a separate thread?) what does feminism call for in the way if resolution/peace? If it calls for it/desires it at all? It seems to me there has been a great deal of dissension among feminist blogs as of late and I am concerned/conflicted as to how this affects movement and progression for women. At some point, don’t we have to agree on *something* besides being “pro woman” as this label, broken down, runs the gamut?
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Okay, there are five comments I am reluctant to approve now because they are heat-, not light-generators. Only pisaquaririse got approved.
Come on, women. I want us to continue but I want it to be productive and less-trainwreck-producing-of instead of more.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by funnie
By funnie
Oh wait, one more thing. The crux of my earlier post was this:
“…when you’re talking about heterosupremacy, which IS SEXISM, it’s entirely destructive to aim that ire against women. Period.”
I just wanted to say that I arrived at this opinion by revisiting and re-revisiting a lot of the anger I had at women for behaving in ways that I viewed as having persecuted me:
* Being “weak and stupid” and trying to force that behavior on me
* Limiting their options by having lots of children and then trying to force both the children and the reduced options on me
* Pairing off with men and being encircled by some protection that I, as a single woman who intended to always remain that way, was not allowed to access, and using that to their advantage against me
And so on and so on, I have my complaints that I could list - very painful and salient ones - against girly-girls, fundies, Enforcers of all kinds, patriarchal apologists…and so on.
And (you may even remember) I used to TALK about how much that pissed me off. I used to SAY all manner of unkind things about *these women* because of the way I was *treated because of patriarchy.*
And I’m glad I don’t do that now. Not because I’m refraining from talking that way, but because I’m able to not *think* that way. I’m able, finally, to talk to women in those lifestyles and mindsets that I was so, so alienated from for my whole entire life, that made me feel so, so bad about myself, and so alone in general, and not-woman, even, and not-lovable, and so forth…I can talk to women who are virtual stand-ins for the women and girls who did that to me, and I can relate to them. I understand them, I understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, I’m not patronizing or scolding OR excusing them…I’m just finally realizing that it’s simply *not about* them, *not about* what they did.
Women’s pain under patriarchy, including that of lesbians, just ISN’T ABOUT women, and I can’t not-say that when someone acts as though it is. Even if it’s only women’s hands that have ever hurt her and women’s voices that have ever criticized her. It’s still a misdirection to blame women. Blame patriarchy.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
It’s different because white privilege has nothing to do with sexism.
I think that it does, and that our other disagreements might have something to with this basic one.
For a woman partnered with men to say she has no privilege pretty much ends the discussion, regardless of Satsuma’s participation here. There’s nothing I can do about that, other than to say that I think it’s an important discussion and curtailing it by saying het privilege doesn’t exist seems unfortunate to me.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Everyone else, this is what one lesbian who is truly and really giving you the benefit of the doubt is like. I’m letting you in on my inner life, and also how I really do see straight women — insulting as that often might seem.
See… this. As women, do we want to know how we come off to one another or not? Is it supposed to be about keeping it all to ourselves?
I’m not asking rhetorically, I’m really asking. Do we really want to know one another, across our differences? Or not?
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
funnie: And (you may even remember) I used to TALK about how much that pissed me off. I used to SAY all manner of unkind things about *these women* because of the way I was *treated because of patriarchy.*
And I’m glad I don’t do that now.
I do remember.
This is part of the issue here. Satsuma is, I think, fairly new to the internet/blogosphere. She doesn’t have the long history the rest of us have in working through all of these issues to some sort of resolution. She’s been away from feminism and isn’t exercised the way most of us here are, which is something I’ve taken into consideration.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Women’s pain under patriarchy, including that of lesbians, just ISN’T ABOUT women, and I can’t not-say that when someone acts as though it is. Even if it’s only women’s hands that have ever hurt her and women’s voices that have ever criticized her. It’s still a misdirection to blame women. Blame patriarchy.
Yeah, funnie. I agree with you completely about this.
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
Satsuma, reading your comments I’m getting the idea you think the readers/commenters here are all het. I agree that it’s het women who are mostly arguing with you, but a long-time radical feminist lesbian separatist has argued with you, too, fairly intensely: Mary Sunshine. She is quite a bit older than you and has been around the lesbian block for a long time. And I think she raised some good points that I would like to see you address? There are zillions of other lesbians who read and post here but they are mostly reading right now. Can’t say I blame them!
:/
Heart
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by Sis
By Sis
I thought I was the only het woman posting in reponse to Satsuma. Oh Kitty too.
So now Heart you’ve got it all over the blogosphere that het women are attacking a poor dyke here.
Fuck you.
Comment on Men, Boys, Sons — Something I Wrote to Someone I Love by womensspace
By womensspace
All right, that’s it. Sis, that is way over the top.
I’m closing the thread to further comments. I am going to have a nice cry. And then decide how I will proceed from here.
Since when have I ever deserved that, Sis? When?
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Thanks for saving this before Heart dropped it down the memory hole, like most exchanges on her blog in which women strongly disagree.
Disagreeing = unladylike, censored ;)
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