Читаем Right-wing Women полностью

war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in

what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction. ” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,

they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:

fucking. The men grew more m anly; the world of the counterculture became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became women— found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his

buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and

hers too)— traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,

turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated

into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose— it turned

out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,

and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was

an intensification of the experience of being sexually female— the

precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for

themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety

of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the

impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. T hey

discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,

ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were

characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex

as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female

fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.

In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and

practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an

issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and

it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not

climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of

and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.

When rape—obvious, clear, brutal rape—occurred, it was ignored,

often for political reasons if the rapist was black and the woman

white. Interestingly, in a racially constructed rape, the rape was

likely to be credited as such, even when ultimately ignored. When

a white man raped a white woman, there was no vocabulary to

describe it. It was an event that occurred outside the political discourse of the generation in question and therefore it did not exist.

When a black woman was raped by a white man, the degree of

recognition depended on the state of alliances between black and

white men in the social territory involved: whether, at any given

time, they were sharing women or fighting territorially over them.

A black woman raped by a black man had the special burden of not

jeopardizing her own race, endangered especially by charges of

rape, by calling attention to any such brutality committed against

her. Beatings and forced intercourse were commonplace in the

counterculture. Even more widespread was the social and economic coercion of women to engage in sex with men. Yet no antagonism was seen to exist between sexual force and sexual freedom: one did not preclude the other. Implicit was the conviction that

force would not be necessary if women were not repressed; women

would want to fuck and would not have to be forced to fuck; so

that it was repression, not force, that stood in the w ay of freedom.

Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftist-

intellectual, did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor

did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of

women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited

that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by

more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere. No

persons were held responsible for forced sex acts, rapes, beatings of

women, unless the women themselves were blamed— usually for

not com plying in the first place. These were in the main women

who wanted to com ply—who wanted the promised land of sexual