feminist blogs in english

image is from here

There once was a woman who lived in a small but traveled village. Most of the travelers were missionaries. They brought the word of their god to the disbelievers. They never spoke directly to her, at her, for they saw that she was a lost cause. What person of great spirit would spend her days dying cloth blue, in such a fashion as to only produce a few finished items across a long season? They knew of her output because villagers would tell them about her if asked, but only with praise for her work. Nevertheless, the god-fearing missionaries scoffed at her methods and thought her either evil or insane. After all, she lived and worked alone. She never married any man nor bore any children. Aside from feeding her animals and tending to her vegetables, she worked only to dye cloth blue. She spoke up when she had to but wasn't known for being a conversationalist. The missionaries fed off village gossip as they made their way out of one and into another, and so took the villagers' regard for her and her general silence as signs of condescension or impudence.

When she collected the cloth initially it was more or less white. The blue dye was the most beautiful rich blue you can imagine or have ever seen. Her process for transforming the cloth, however, was ridiculed by many passers-by. They mocked her because they saw a bit of her process, and they thought it, and her, utterly crazy, ludicrous. They felt she was engaging in activity, every day, that was preposterous and an absurd waste of time, if she wanted "success". It's not that her cloth wasn't, when finished, blue. It's that the process took so long they felt she'd never earn enough to make a living. So although they mocked her, on some level they wished her to be well.

The villagers being busy with their own chores and tasks, never have the time to watch her for more than a few minutes, and they knew from experience that her blue cloth was the best in the village--they had no reason to deride her for any reason. Though they didn't understand her process, they respected it for what it produced. And throughout the village many of them saved their earnings to purchase blue cloth from her. Even some of the travelers had a sense about her product. And some of them, too, bought her cloth, even while they may have muttered something unkind under their breath about her being crazy.

Her process was as follows:

She prepared a pot of very hot water by adding a certain number of handfuls of blue dye which she kept in a bin quite nearby. With a clean branch she stirred until the water was evenly blue--deep, rich, dark blue. To look into the pot, even at noon, was like looking into the depths of night with no moon. She immersed the white cloth fully and let it soak a while, simmering. She then slowly lifted it out with the stick, let it drip over the pot and cool down, and then took it into her hands and wound it tight, rinsing out all excess liquid directly over the pot so all the extra dye-water fell back into the pot for the next immersion of cloth. She wasted nothing.

Once wrung out she shook open the cloth and placed it nearby on a very large round stone, expansive and curved, so that the cloth directly faced the sun as it journeyed across the hot sky.

On the already warm stone, the cloth dried quickly. Was it time to re-soak the cloth? She could get in several dunkings in an hour or two, depending on the intensity of the sun. But for her, no. She left the cloth on that stone for most of the afternoon. Finally she'd take it up and bring it inside at the end of the workday. Any morning she began to work she repeated that process. Back onto the large sunned stone the same soaked, simmered, cooled, and wrung out cloth would go. What the missionaries who passed through her village whispered to one another as they saw the dye in the pot and the cloth on the stone is this, "Doesn't she know that the sun BLEACHES any color at all OUT of the cloth?!?"

She heard them often--some of them wanted her to hear them. Some travelers were so rude as to say it loudly, as if intending to make her feel like a fool. She had little interest in considering the validity of their insults. There was nothing any missionary said that she hadn't heard many times before.

Day after day, travelers passed and whispered or made a point not to whisper, calling her names, calling her dying process crazy.

But back to the cloth. Each day, apparently, the cloth went from wet and blue-ish, to dry and bleached back to white. From day to day there was no noticeable change. She also saw no change, but this didn't stop her for she knew how things worked. For days, weeks, the same cloth went into the pot, was wrung out, and was placed flat on the warm stone to dry, and, it seemed, to be sun-bleached.

From the beginning of one lunar cycle to another, something did change, however. Imperceptibly, the cloth began to hold more of its dye. Incrementally. Over a long period, it shifted from white, to a very pale light blue, to a clearer blue, through the middle hues, and finally ended up a deep rich blue, even at the end of that last days time in the blazing sun. And when that day's work was done, the cloth was no longer white-turning blue. It was, through and through, a blue cloth. You could dig into any fiber and no whiteness would be found. And no amount of sun could bring it back. It was different now than it once was. It has become something new. Blue.

This is a story about radical personal-political-spiritual transformation through practice. The individual practice, let's say if daily, shows no demonstrable change. But over time transformation happens, as long as the actions are repeated in accordance with how one is taught. There isn't one way. I have told you of one way that worked for her. But there are other ways to make something change even in a context where ones ways are mocked and ridiculed.
 
I am contemplating the relationship between ego and the gods of human imagination. And the relationship between men's egos and men's gods. And what, if any, relationship they have to G-ddess, aka She Who Is All.

I am realising from recent conversation with a friend, how the male god sneaks in when one is least inviting him in as a male-specific god. I have watched for a long while how the Male God/Ego is meant to be worshiped, with all other matters placed subordinate to that prime commandment.

A beloved white woman, a lesbian feminist friend I once knew who has since passed on, believed in the power of language-in-life. She grew up with a white male god image and with white male god-language, and chose later to change that to a female G-d/dess in her own imagination but not from her ego. She conjured this G-ddess, who had many faces and many colors from stories of Her from the past. And, also, she grew to make contact with this G-ddess who was revealed to my friend. This felt artificial initially, in the ways, I think, that learning a new language can feel utterly strange and impossible to feel at home in--as if it will never be and can never be a mother tongue. But over time, sure enough, She was realised/experienced by my friend as surely as the old male god once was.

My friend gained strength in this G-ddess, a kind of strength the male god, the only-white god, had not ever provided. The old god took from her and also repeatedly asked a lot of her. He asked her to be submissive to Him, always. To do otherwise, so it was said by the men who worshiped Him, was a sin against Him. She did not believe in anyone being submissive. Nor in a kind of dominance that was practiced in society by white people and by men, throughout the time in which she lived. And she lived through the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement in the U.S., so she saw hate in the faces of many whites and many men who felt threatened by Black men, Black women, and by white women too who wanted justice, not subordination. She noticed how such people, herself included, were called "uppity", as if to strive to reach a level of human stature and standing in a white male supremacist society--a level that white men took for granted and felt fully entitled to, was way to ask for too much to ask for, as well as unnatural and against the white man's god's will.

Her G-ddess did not ask for her to practice either submission or dominance, only to be true to herself by listening deeply to herself, beyond the seemingly ceaseless echos of men's voices. In the depths of her own being was the G-ddess's being and becoming. In the depths of everyone's being, the G-ddess assured her, was the power of the G-ddess of Joy, Love, Wisdom, Peace, and Joy. Also of Rage, Action, Perseverance, and Justice.

The white and male supremacist dualisms taught to her--that to feel rage against injustice is somehow not peace-seeking and joy-bringing, or is and must be some kind of condescension or hatred for whites or for men, was revealed to her as untrue. Most of that only-white male god's knowledge wasn't from any G-d/dess at all. These truths were written in hand by men. Only men, some of whom later became white and pretended their new god always was white. They spoke their truths and put them down as G-d's truth, believing that what their egos conceived and apprehended must be As It Is and As It Should Be. Their egos got in the way of apprehending and appreciating the wisdom of G-d/dess.

Beware the voice of any god that comes in the words written only by men in ancient texts or on Internet web pages, especially ones that proclaim with certainty that lightness is holy and darkness is evil. And remember that in practice, with perseverance, white cloth can be made blue, and can remain blue no matter how long it bakes in the sun.

image of women's liberation march is from here

SUMMARY:
This is a series of posts about the effects of promoting ideas and analyses of gender that are not explicitly connected to the reality of male supremacy. Part 1 discusses children, gender stereotypes, social stigma and status, the problem of turning complex social realities into binaries, and of pretending those binaries aren't enforced. Also, this post poses questions about how race, gender, and sexual orientation are conjoined. Part 2 discusses intergender, transgender, queer, and dominant cultural politic choices in the face of male supremacy. The style is analytic and informal, sociological and autobiographical.

The conclusion of the series of posts will, I hope, make the case that social justice movements dealing with gender (and race and class and sexual orientation) are strengthened by offering up an intersectional perspective and by not playing down the reality of male supremacy.

 For part 1, please click here: An Objective and Subjective Experience of The Gender Hierarchy, Gender Identity, and Radical Social Transformation, Part 1


As an intergender male, I have grown up with a different vantagepoint for observing gendered dynamics--as someone who identified more with girls than with boys as a child, and also as someone who knew I wasn't a girl, or a boy. I liked playing jump-rope with the girls who also liked it--some didn't and some preferred to play the sports boys were encouraged to play.

Because I was labeled a boy both in my family and socially, politically loaded dynamics that reinforce what that means were immediately activated. If one is regarded as a boy it can and too often does mean one is generally regarded as better than or superior to girls, more intelligent, better at athletics, more into playing with trucks and video games, more adventurous by nature, less interested in shopping, the color pink, and dolls, and, sometime later, more sexually aggressive and more interested in "sex" as patriarchy defines and enforces it.

While we may resist it in various ways, our socialisation does, to some degrees, "become us". If I am labeled and treated as white throughout my childhood, socially, that's a different childhood than one where I'm labeled "not-white". Same with gender. Same with sexual orientation. I was labeled white, male, gay (and all the pejorative terms that boys hurl verbally at boys who they think are "gay"), and was out to varying degrees as being Jewish. This located me in the center of some "status circles" and at the margins of others. I felt marginalised and also could tell that I was regarded as "better" than girls, socially--especially and particularly by adult men.

I had a brother and didn't feel it was terribly important that there be two boys in one family, if there were only to be two children, especially. (It seemed a bit redundant, and my brother was het and did ALL the traditional boy things, including having Playboy magazines in his bedroom, to affirm in himself a sense that women existed for him to use, whenever he wanted to use them. That Miss September was "his" as much as she was anyone else's. People rarely consider pornography use to be a training in being a procurer of female prostitutes, but that's one dimension of what pornography teaches het boys: that women are shared, visually violated, jerked off to and on, and are put away when one has had an orgasm. Put away for next time. Sometimes boys share their pornography--their "women" with each other, and they all know damn well what the other boy is going to do with those magazines. So this is also homosocial behavior, where boys bond over the shared use of women in magazines.

Boy-sports and academics was what my brother excelled in, which reinforced a kind of masculinity that wasn't inconsistent with what white middle class suburban society expected of him and valued in him. He had sports trophies in his room. He had grade school awards declaring him outstanding in this and that subject.

I wasn't much interested in being like him. I did fine academically, but never achieved what he achieved. I detested boy-sports, seeing it as a way for boys to bond over physical skills that didn't seem important to me to have in the first place. So I couldn't sink a basket? So what? So I couldn't throw a football the right way? So what?

What I got was that all these things were socially "coded" and that the codes shaped what boys did, how they acted--especially with one another when younger boys, and later with girls when a bit older. Just "being a boy" meant, for example, that girls were [fill in the blank with something usually negative]. This means boys develop identity around "not being girls" sort of like how my identity formed around the idea of "not being like my brother". Except my brother and I had our own dynamics, and the larger ones between boys and girls socially were enforced by media, religion, law and every other major institution in the country.

Feminism challenged those assumptions about what it is to be a girl and a boy. Feminists wanted to raise children without the constraints, and the pro-boy-bias that often made girls feel like they weren't as valuable, and that to have value, they'd have to attach themselves romantically or sexually to a boy, at some point.

Feminism spoke to me because that was already my project--the challenge those stigmas and stereotypes, and that unearned status boys had over girls, generally.

What has only recently occurred to me is that growing up from, say, age seven to age twenty, usually involves a fairly dramatic transgender experience. It isn't usually called that, because most males grow up as boys and grow into becoming men, in part by making choices that keep their identity as such shored up. But from Part 1, and deeper reflection on the males I find attractive, I realised that the more a man looks like he's been injecting T into his body, the less appealing his is to me. But, I'm gay, and so if a man injects estrogen into his body, the physical effects don't necessarily make him more attractive to me. Without injections or surgical interventions, I'm drawn to men who are slight of frame, not very muscular, or  not muscular at all, and have slim hips, a flat stomach--no washboard abs necessary or even desired, and who don't treat women like they are from another planet. I can find a guy VERY attractive physically, but then hear him tell male friends some ridiculously sexist joke and lose all sense of finding him attractive.

I have thought Derek Hough is kind of cute. He's on U.S. TV show Dancing With The Stars, which I usually regret watching, but often do. (Unlike So You Think You Can Dance, which I generally enjoy watching.) But in a segment on TV recently about Hugh Hefner--founder of the Playboy Aesthetic and Empire, I saw a clip of Derek at a Playboy mansion party, and I suddenly felt like "he kind of looks gross". The idea that he'd WANT to be at the Playboy mansion, reinforcing his heterosexuality in many objectifying ways--sharing the gawking at buxom, long-legged women who have had breast implants and who die their hair and paint their faces seemed, well, unappealing.

Sexism in men is not a winning quality, imo. But sexism in men is basically required if a man is to be seen, socially, as "a real man" or "a man's man". That latter phrase SO cracks me up because what better term is there for a gay man than "a man's man"?! Why should such a term apply to the likes of John Wayne and Sean Connery, or, for that matter, Mel Gibson?

Heterosexuality is compulsory in every society I know of, and is delivered by the media as conceptually and universally fused to some absurd notion of it as "natural". What's natural about being attracted to macho men or to women who shave their legs and pull out most of the hair off their faces? Neither of those things are natural at all--both are entirely social and political).

Feminism also challenged the premises on which social-political heterosexuality rests, quite unstably. Feminism has been, for me, the only sustained social justice movement that seeks to identify, analyse, and radically transform systems of power that seek to destroy or exploit women for men's use, profit, and benefit.

What I've seen go on in what is now termed "queer" community are various relationships to the status quo. There are queer people who don't seek assimilation into heterosexual society, and some who seek nothing more than to be considered "just like them"--the ones with the normal, natural, god-approved of sexuality and ways of being gendered.

Which brings me to a more contemporary understanding of being transgender. As noted, I think being a gender involves transitioning from pre-pubescent to post-pubescent, and often on for a few years for males, as their frames change, chests expand, muscle mass increases. I've know many skinny eighteen year old "boys" who, when thirty, hardly resemble their former physical selves. And for those of us who are intersex, intergender, or transgender, adolescence can be a particularly difficult time, in part because an adult form of being sexed is developing in and on our bodies in ways that may make our inner sense of self and physical appearance--the aspects that are difficult to disguise--increasingly at odds.

I understand some transgender people, but not all, to be wanting more internal consonance, or harmony, or peace, within their being. To achieve this, various methods are employed, and most of them are exactly the same ones employed by non-transgender people: figuring out how to walk, stand, use ones arms when talking, how to speak, what to say that sounds appropriately gendered, what to wear, whether or not to wear make-up, how much hair to remove from one's body--and what parts to depilitate, and the list goes on.

The only difference between being transgender and non-transgender, is that the transgender people are stigmatised negatively, while non-trans people are not, at least with regard to choices to "be more like the gender they experience themselves to be".

A problem here is that for people seen as female or as women, there is never any preparation that is sufficient--there is no escaping the stigma of being seen as female or as a woman. So this is not exactly a privilege--to be a female or a woman. It always carries negative associations, and exists socially in space that denigrates all that is seen as female, feminine, and womanly. And similarly, to move towards being a man, if successfully accomplished, is to come into a kind of power and privilege. And that may have been internalised already, depending on one's own internal sense of genderedness.

And that is complicated further by race and class and sexuality. So, for example, I was and am intergender, male, white, raised with middle class U.S. values. And I was never heterosexual and was always attracted to other males: to boys and later to men. And so this cast me as "feminine" and more devalued than, say, my het brother.

What I saw many gay men do in the 1980s was abandon the political project of "remedying the denigration of all things feminine, female, and womanly" and instead embrace masculinity--and all its political misogyny. That's what I saw: the betrayal of women by men in lesbian and gay community. And as I see it, gay men, collectively and systematically, have never made any attempt to give up male privilege and power, and to stand with lesbian women solidly on ground that denounces and rejects male supremacy as unbecoming, as an abomination, as inhumanity.


End of part 2.

photo of Audre Lorde by Lynda Koolish, 1978

This wonderful photograph of Audre Lorde was one of Audre's favorites. As noted in the caption, it was taken by Lynda Koolish in 1978 at the San Francisco conference: Women Against Violence and Pornography in Media (WAVPM), where she delivered the essay below as a speech. This photograph is used here with Lynda's permission graciously granted to me directly. 


Self-defined "Black lesbian feminist mother poet warrior" Audre Lorde is the author of numerous books of poetry and essays as well as her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. She was an outspoken philosopher and social activist challenging the institutions and practices of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other systems of domination and inhumanity. She used her words to rattle the roof, shatter the windows, and crack the foundation of the Master's House.

You can find a compilation of her intensely political-personal poems, including rare alternate versions, in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde, also published by W. W. Norton and Co. in February of 2000. The same publishing house released a comprehensive biography of Lorde in November of 2006. Titled Warrior Poet, it was written by a friend and colleague, Alexis De Veaux, who doesn't spare the reader the more vulnerable sides and rougher edges of a woman determined to cut her way through an overgrown social-political landscape designed to destroy her and anyone else who was out to speak truth to power.

I found a copy of the featured essay online *here* but have corrected typos and type-setting to more closely match the original. In addition to the WAVPM conference in California noted above, the paper was also delivered as a speech at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. It was first published as a pamphlet by Out and Out Books, then again as a pamphlet by Kore Press before finding its way into one of the best collections of radical feminist essays by a single author.

The collection, Sister Outsider, was first published in June of 1984 by Crossing Press. In August of 2007, the same press reissued the text with a new cover and foreword by Cheryl Clarke. The book, containing this essay and several others by Lorde, is a crucial addition to the great legacy of Black and African American literature, a primer on intersectional lesbian politics, and a Western feminist literary classic. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches may be found and purchased currently for as little as one cent used at Amazon.com, but even at the higher price of $11.55 U.S. for a new copy, it is a bargain to be sure.

I have read in the book many times and the wisdom and insight contained therein has yet to be fully absorbed and utilised by me. I recommend that anyone read and relish this book who wishes to deepen and expand their understanding of what it means to be a politically active, socially aware, and intimately responsible humane being.

Nowhere is Lorde's apprehension, comprehension, analysis, and description of what it means to be humane in contexts of oppression and resistance in greater or sharper focus than in this essay. Here she offers us a radically different understanding of an undivided sexual-political-spiritual eroticism. Here is a love-fierce critique of the degraded, displayed, and exploited versions of the "erotic" delivered to us always at too high a price by corporate racist atrocious patriarchal profiteers and pimps.

This essay is a definitive answer to a question often disdainfully politically posed as a way to dismiss the compassionate and outstanding warrior work of so-called Second Wave radical feminists, too often portrayed in the racist media and in academia as only white: "Where's the alternative to what you're so busy criticising?" It's here. Enjoy and grow in the application of this essay to your life. Keep in mind that in this essay "female", as always when speaking about people, means "human". And "human", here, means woman.




There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/ inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. Such a demand incapacitates everyone in the process. For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors bring us closest to that fullness.

The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision -- a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?

The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need -- the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.

As women, we need to examine the ways in which our world can be truly different. I am speaking here of the necessity for reassessing the quality of all the aspects of our lives and of our work, and of how we move toward and through them.

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects - born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives.

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. "What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gun-runner?" the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility. The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic -- the sensual -- those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings.

Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, "It feels right to me," acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply horn. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.

The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.

Another important way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a book- case, writing a poem, examining an idea.

That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.

This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it.

I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colors my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all my experience.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance. The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us,. then we begin to be responisible to our selves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and selfnegation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference-between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

This brings me to the last consideration of the erotic. To share the power of each other's feelings is different from using another's feelings as we would use a kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without the consent of the used is abuse.

In order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized. The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need. But within the european-american tradition, this need is satisfied by certain proscribed erotic comings-together. These occasions are almost always characterized by a simultaneous looking away, a pretense of calling them something else, whether a religion, a fit, mob violence, or even playing doctor. And this misnaming of the need and the deed give rise to that distortion which results in pornography and obscenity - the abuse of feeling.

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience, and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

The erotic cannot be felt secondhand. As a Black lesbian feminist, I have a particular feeling, knowledge, and understanding for those sisters with whom I have danced hard, played, or even fought. This deep participation has often been the forerunner for joint concerted actions not possible before.

But this erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively european-american male tradition. I know it was not available to me when I was trying to adapt my consciousness to this mode of living and sensation.

Only now, I find more and more women-identified women brave enough to risk sharing the erotic's electrical charge without having to look away, and without distorting the enormously powerful and creative nature of that exchange. Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.

For not only do we touch our most profoundly creative source, but we do that which is female and self-affirming in the face of a racist, patriarchal, and anti-erotic society.

[Julian's note: please also click here for this A.R.P. post featuring the audio of her delivering this speech.]

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