Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

116

Woman Hating

itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,

and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the

body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,

creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of

lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as

any backward nation. Indeed, the effects o f that prescribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any

area of human possibility is left untouched by it.

Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of

herself. ” The male response to the woman who is made-

up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these

oppressive grooming imperatives.

The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos

surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation

(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The

body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint

and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop

mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a

respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.

BEAUTY HURTS

C H A P T E R 7

Gynocide: The Witches

It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion

of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that

God will never permit such a thing to

happen.

Malleus Maleficarum

It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark

Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the

social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The

learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.

The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the

Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only

democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a

democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even

crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations

of the flesh and the Kingdom o f Heaven, a layer o f dirt,

lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and

to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,

it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those

diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place

— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics o f leprosy, epileptic convulsions, 118

Gynoclde: The Witches

119

and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly. T he Black Death is thought to have killed 25

percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds

to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some

towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,

crying for help and words were all they got: You have

sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will

suffer so much the less torment in the life to come.

Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers

for the dead. 1

H unger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,

may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and

hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church

had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation

which were vivid in the Christian imagination were

modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.

T he Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devil

underwent as many transformations as the snake has

skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic

theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one

religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,

intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,

Woman Hating

vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the

old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old

practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.

Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent

some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to

hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the

local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed

to continue their traditional vocations of healing the

sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often

transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be

embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became

St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan

gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —

shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross.

But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare

as well. The peoples o f northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal

totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered

to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy o f the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control o f animals. In the later neolithic agricultural

stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply

predominated.

Gynocide: The Witches

121

Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently

dancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Ar-

riege. Early religions actively worshiped animals, and

in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts, sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal) were parts o f the rites. T h e magician-priest-shaman became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and

apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal

(even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached

to his girdle). T here he stood, replete with horns and

hooves—the primitive deity, attributes o f him echoing

in the later deities Osiris, Isis, Hathor, Pan, and Janus.

His worship was assimilated into the phallic worship o f

the northern sky-thunder-warrior gods (the influence

o f which can be seen in Druidic practices). These pagan

rites and deities maintained their divinity in the mass

psyche despite all o f the Church’s attempts to blacklist

them. Some kings o f England were converted by the

missionaries, only to revert to the old faith when the

missionaries left. Others maintained two altars, one

devoted to Christ, one to the horned god. The peasants

never played politics—they clung to the fertility-magic

beliefs. Until the 10th century, the Church protested

this willful “devil worship” but could do nothing but

issue proclamations, impose penances and fasts, and, o f

course, carry on the unending struggle against nature

and the flesh.

This was a serious business, for the end o f the world

was believed to be imminent. For good Christians, prep­

122

Woman Hating

arations to depart this earthly abode included renunciation of all hedonistic activities (eating, dancing, fucking, etc. ). St. Simon Stylites, in his attempt to avoid the crime of being human, fled to the desert where he

erected a pillar on which he mortified his flesh for most

of his 72 years. He was tempted throughout by visions

of lascivious women. Indeed, it required starvation,

incessant prayer, and flagellation to be visited by lascivious women in those days and still lead the perfect Christian life.

The extremeness of the Church's ascetic imperatives

invited a reciprocal debauchery. The nobility, when

not out butchering, enforced that most curious of

customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape

of newly wed peasant women. The Crusaders brought

back spices and syphilis from the East —that summing

up their knowledge of Arab culture. The clergy was

so openly corrupt and sensual that successive popes

were forced to acknowledge it. “By 1102 a church council had to state specifically that priests should be degraded for sodomy and anathematized for 'obstinate sodomy. ' ” 2 Bishops and cardinals were also known to

fuck around: “A typical example is that Bishop o f Toul

. . . whose favorite concubine was his own daughter

by a nun o f Epinal. " 3 The monasteries and cloisters

were rampant with homosexuality, but nuns and monks

did occasionally get together for heterosexual fucking.

Until the 12th century, there were basically three

kinds of relationship to the Church. There were the

ascetics who fled the cities to roam like beasts in the

wilderness and emulated St. Simon, who made a pig-sty

his home when not on the pillar. The ascetics mortified

Gynocide: The Witches

123

the flesh while awaiting cataclysmic destruction and

eternal resurrection. There were the nobility, the

clergy, and the soldiers, who delighted in carnal excesses o f every sort, and the serfs who went on breeding because it was their only outlet and because the nobles

encouraged increases in the number o f tenants. T h e

last group, crucial to this period, were the heretics.

In the 12th century various groups, viewing the abominations o f Christianity with increasing horror, began to voice openly and even loudly their skepticism. These

sects played a prominent role in shaping the Church’s

idea o f the Devil.

T h e Waldenses, Manicheans, and Cathari were the

principal heretical sects. It is said that “the Waldenses

were burnt for the practices for which the Franciscans

were later canonized. ” 4 T heir crime was to expose and

to mock the clergy as frauds. For their piety they

suffered the fate o f all heretics, which was burning.

More influential and more dangerous were the Manicheans, who traced their origins to the Persian Mani who had been crucified in a . d. 276. T h e Manicheans

worshiped one God, who incorporated both good and

evil, the ancient Zoroastrian idea. T h e Cathari, who

were equally maligned by the Christians, also worshiped

the dual principle:

. . . the chief outstanding quality of the Cathari was

their piety and charity. They were divided into two

sections: the ordinary lay believers and the Perfecti,

who believed in complete abstinence and even the

logical end of all asceticism — the Endura —a passionate

disavowal of physical humanity which led them to

starvation and even apparently to mass suicide. They

124

Woman Haling

adopted most of the Christian teaching and dogma of

the New Testament, mixed with Gnostic ritual, using

asceticism as an end to visions and other-consciousness.

They were so loyal to their beliefs that a John of Toulouse was able to plead before his judges in 1230 ...

“Lords: hear me. I am no heretic; for I have a wife and

lie with her, and have children; and I eat flesh and lie

and swear, and am a faithful Christian. ” Many of them

seem, indeed, to have lived with the barren piety of

the saints. They were accordingly accused of sexual

orgies and sacrilege, and burned, and scourged, and

harried. Nevertheless the heresy flourished, and

Cathari were able to hold conferences on equal terms

with orthodox bishops. 5

The Holy Inquisition, in its infancy, exterminated the

Cathari, tried to exterminate the Jews, and then went

on to exterminate the Knights Templars, the Christian

organization of knighthood and conquest which had

become too powerful and wealthy. It had become independent of clergy and kings, and had thereby incurred the wrath of both. With these experiences under its expanding belt, the Inquisition in the 15th century

turned to the persecution o f those most heinous o f all

heretics, the witches, that is, to all of those who still clung

to the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe.

The Manicheans and Cathari had, in order to account for the existence of good and evil (the thorniest of theological problems), worshiped good and evil both.

The Catholics, not able to accept that solution, developed a complex theology concerning the relationship between God and the Devil, now called Satan, which rested on the weird idea that Satan was limited

in some specific ways, but very marvelous, all of his

Gynocide: The Witches

125

machinations, curses, and damnations being “by G od’s

permission” and a testimony to G od’s divine majesty.

Here we have the Catholic version o f double-double

think. Through the processes o f Aristotle’s famous

logic, as adapted by St. Thom as Aquinas, which was

the basis o f Catholic theology, it now became clear

that not to believe in the literal existence o f Satan was

tantamount to atheism. T h e evil principle, articulated

by the Manicheans and Cathari, was absorbed into

Catholicism, along with the horned figure o f the old

pagan cults, to produce the horned, clawed, sulphurous,

black, fire and brimstone Satan o f the medieval Christian iconographers.

Later Calvin and Luther also made their contributions. Luther had more personal contact with Satan than any man before or since. He proclaimed Satan

“Prince” o f this earthly realm and considered all earthly

experiences under his domination. Luther and Calvin

agreed that good works no longer counted —only divine

grace for the elect was sufficient to ensure entrance into

the Kingdom o f God. Thus Reformation Protestantism

obliterated the small measure o f hope that even

Catholicism offered. Calvin himself was a voracious

witch hunter and burner.

Although the Protestants contributed without modesty and with great enthusiasm to the witch terror, we find the origins o f the actual, organized persecutions,

not unexpectedly, in the Bull o f Innocent V III, issued

December 9, 1484. The Pope named Heinrich Kramer

and James Sprenger as Inquisitors and asked them to

define witchcraft, describe the modus operandi o f

witches, and standardize trial procedures and sen­

126

Woman Hating

tencing. The papal Bull reversed the Church’s previous

position, which had been formulated by a synod in

A. D. 785:

. . . if somebody, deceived by the devil, following the

custom of the heathen, believes that some man or

woman, is a striga who eats men, and for that reason

burns her or gives her flesh to eat, or eats it, he is to

be punished by death. 6

The Church had accordingly for 7 centuries considered

the belief in witchcraft a heathen belief and the burning of alleged witches a capital crime. Pope Innocent, however, secure in papal infallibility and demonstrating a true political sensibility (leading to the consolidation of power), described the extent of his concern: It has indeed lately come to Our ears, not without

afflicting Us with bitter sorrow, that in some parts of

Northern Germany, as well as in the provinces, townships, territories, districts, and dioceses of Mainz, Cologne, Treves, Saltzburg, and Bremen, many

persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi [male] and succubi

[female], and by their incantations, spells, conjurations,

and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and

horrid offenses, have slain infants yet in the mother's

womb, as also the offspring of cattle, have blasted the

produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruit

of the trees, nay, men and women, beasts of burthen,

herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, vineyards, orchards, meadows, pastureland, corn, wheat, and all other cereals; these wretches furthermore afflict and torment men and women, beasts of burthen,

Gynocide: The Witches

127

herd beasts, as well as animals of other kinds, with

terrible and piteous pains and sore diseases, both internal and external; they hinder men from performing the sexual act and women from conceiving, whence

husbands cannot know their wives nor wives receive

their husbands; over and above this, they blasphemously renounce that Faith which is theirs by the Sacrament of Baptism, and at the instigation of the

Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls,

whereby they outrage Divine Majesty and are a cause

of scandal and danger to very many. 7

T o deal with the increasing tide o f witchcraft and

in conformity with the Pope’s orders, Sprenger and

Kramer collaborated on the Malleus Maleficarum. This

document, a monument to Aristode’s logic and academic methodology (quoting and footnoting “authorities”), catalogues the major concerns o f 15th-century Catholic theology:

Question I. Whether the Belief that there are such

Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic

Faith that Obstinancy to maintain the Opposite Opinion

manifestly savours of Heresy (Answer: Yes)

Question III. Whether Children can be Generated by

Incubi and Succubi (Answer: Yes)

Question VIII. Whether Witches can Hebetate the Power

of Generation or Obstruct the Venereal Act (Answer:

Yes)

Question IX. Whether Witches may work some Presti-

digitatory Illusion so that the Male Organ appears to

128

Woman Hating

be entirely removed and separate from the Body (Answer: Yes)

Question XL That Witches who are Midwives in Various Ways Kill the Child Conceived in the Womb, and Procure Abortion; or if they do not do this, Offer

New-born Children to the Devils (Answer: Yes)8

The Malleus also describes the ritual and content of

witchcraft per se, though in the tradition of paternalism indigenous to the Church, Sprenger and Kramer are careful not to give formulae for charms or other dangerous information. They write “of the several Methods by which Devils through Witches Entice and Allure the

Innocent to the Increase of that Horrid Craft and company” ; “of the Way whereby a Formal Pact with Evil is made”; “How they are Transported from Place to

Place”; “Here follows the Way whereby Witches copulate with those Devils known as Incubi, ” 9 etc. They document how witches injure cattle, cause hailstorms and tempests, illnesses in people and animals, bewitch men,

change themselves into animals, change animals into

people, commit acts of cannibalism and murder. The

main concern of the Malleus is with natural events,

nature, the real dynamic world which refused to conform to Catholic doctrine —the Malleus, with tragic wrong-headedness, explains most aspects of biology,

sexology, medicine, and weather in terms of the demonic.

Before we approach the place of women in this most

Christian piece of Western history, the importance of

the Malleus itself must be understood. In the Dark

Ages, few people read and books were hard to come by.

Yet the Malleus was printed in numerous editions. It was

Gynocide: The Witches

129

found in every courtroom. It had been read by every

judge, each o f whom would know it chapter and verse.

T h e Malleus had more currency than the Bible. It was

theology, it was law. T o disregard it, to challenge its

authority (“seemingly inexhaustible wells o f wisdom, ” 10

wrote Montague Summers in 1946, the year I was born)

was to commit heresy, a capital crime.

Although statistical information on the witchcraft

persecutions is very incomplete, there are judicial records extant for particular towns and areas which are accurate:

In almost every province of Germany the persecution

raged with increasing intensity. Six hundred were said

to have been burned by a single bishop in Bamberg,

where the special witch jail was kept fully packed. Nine

hundred were destroyed in a single year in the bishopric of Wurzburg, and in Nuremberg and other great cities there were one or two hundred burnings a year.

So there were in France and in Switzerland. A thousand people were put to death in one year in the district of Como. Remigius, one of the Inquisitors, who was

author of Daemonolatvia, and a judge at Nancy boasted

of having personally caused the burning of nine hundred persons in the course of fifteen years. Delrio says that five hundred were executed in Geneva in

three terrified months in 1515. The Inquisition at

Toulouse destroyed four hundred persons in a single

execution, and there were fifty at Douai in a single

year. In Paris, executions were continuous. In the

Pyrenees, a wolf country, the popular form was that

of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned

two hundred. 11

It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in

England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even

130

Woman Haling

fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure

for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,

but the most responsible estimate would seem to be

9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have

been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when

one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at

the end of the 13th century computed the number of

the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,

Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated

the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio o f women to

men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1

and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.

Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from

becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime:

since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” 12 Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the

Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of

Christ, women remained what they had always been in

Judeo-Christian culture:

Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in

Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head

of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of

Gynocide: The Witches

131

a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon

than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among

much which in that place precedes and follows about a

wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but

little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John

Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry

(S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to

friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary

evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!. . . Cicero in his second

book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead

them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads

them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is

avarice.. . . When a woman thinks alone, she thinks

evil. 13

T he word “woman” means “the lust o f the flesh. As it

is said: I have found a woman more bitter than death,

and a good woman subject to carnal lust. ” 14

Other characteristics o f women made them amenable to sin and to partnership with Satan: And the first is, that they are more credulous.. . . The

second reason is, that women are naturally more

impressionable, and more ready to receive the influence of a disembodied spirit.. . .

The third reason is that they have slippery tongues,

and are unable to conceal from their fellow-women

those things which by evil arts they know; and since

they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner

of vindicating themselves by witchcraft.. . .

. . . because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we

may add to what has already been said the following:

132

Woman Hating

that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it

is not surprising that they should come more under the

spell of witchcraft.

For as regards intellect, or the understanding of

spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature

from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of

the authorities, backed by various examples from the

Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually

like children. 15

Women are by nature instruments of Satan —they are

by nature carnal, a structural defect rooted in the

original creation:

But the natural reason is that she is more carnal

than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was

formed from a bent rib, that is, rib of the breast, which

is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And

since through this defect she is an imperfect animal,

she always deceives.. . . And all this is indicated by

the etymology of the word; for Femina comes from Fe

and Minus, since she is ever weaker to hold and preserve

the Faith. And this as regards faith is of her very nature.... 16

. . . This is so even among holy women, so what must it

be among others? 17

In addition, “Women also have weak memories, ” “woman will follow her own impulse even to her own destruction, ” “nearly all the kingdoms of the world have been overthrown by women, ” “the world now suffers through

the malice of women, ” “a woman is beautiful to look

upon, contaminating to the touch, and deadly to keep, ”

Gynocide: The Witches

133

“she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit

. . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18

Women are most vividly described as being “more

bitter than death” :

And I have found a woman more bitter than death,

who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and

her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the

devil.. . .

More bitter than death, again, because that is

natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which

arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it

of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment

for sin.

More bitter than death, again, because bodily death

is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling

and secret enemy. 19

and also:

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not

speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men

are caught not only through their carnal desires, when

they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their

face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of

serpents.. . . And when it is said that her heart is a

net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns

in their hearts.. . .

To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,

which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there

are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth

thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth

of the womb. 20

134

Woman Hating

Here the definition of woman, in common with the

pornographic definition, is her carnality; the essence

of her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition, is her malice and avarice. The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing

with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of

the womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about male

potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men

have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed

as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.

The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils

stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men —

seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the

evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:

The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard.

A nightly visit from a beautiful or frightful being who

first exhausts the sleeper with passionate embraces and

withdraws from him a vital fluid: all this can point

only to a natural and common process, namely to

nocturnal emissions accompanied by dreams of a more

or less erotic nature. In the unconscious mind blood is

commonly an equivalent for semen. 21

To be dreamed of often ended in slow burning on the

stake.

The most blatant proof of the explicitly sexual nature of the persecutions, however, had to do with one of the witches' most frequent crimes: they cast “glamours”

Gynocide: The Witches

135

over the male organ so that it disappeared entirely.

Sprenger and Kramer go to great lengths to prove that

witches do not actually remove the genital, only render

it invisible. If such a glamour lasts for under 3 years,

a marriage cannot be annulled; if it lasts for 3 years or

longer, it is considered a permanent fact and does annul

any marriage. Catholics now seeking grounds for divorce should perhaps consider using that one.

Men lost their genitals quite frequently. Most often,

the woman responsible for the loss was a cast-off mistress, maliciously turned to witchcraft. I f the bewitched man could identify the woman who had afflicted him, he

could demand reinstatement o f his genitals:

A young man who had lost his member and suspected

a certain woman, tied a towel about her neck, choked

her and demanded to be cured. “The witch touched

him with her hand between the thighs, saying, ‘Now

you have your desire. ’ ” His member was immediately

restored. 22

Often the witches, greedy by virtue o f womanhood,

were not content with the theft o f one genital:

And what then is to be thought of those witches who in

this way sometimes collect male organs, as many as

twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a

bird’s nest or shut them up in a box, where they move

themselves like living members and eat oats and corn, as

has been seen by many as is a matter of common report? 23

How can we understand that millions o f people for

centuries believed as literal truth these seemingly idi­

136

Woman Hating

otic allegations? How can we begin to comprehend that

these beliefs functioned as the basis of a system of ju risprudence that condemned 9 million persons, mostly women, to being burned alive? The literal text of the

Malleus Malef icarum, with its frenzied and psychotic

woman-hating and the fact of the 9 million deaths,

demonstrates the power of the myth of feminine evil,

reveals how it dominated the dynamics of a culture,

shows the absolute primal terror that women, as carnal

beings, hold for men.

We see in the text of the Malleus not only the fear of

loss of potency or virility, but of the genitals themselves — a dread of the loss of cock and balls. The reason for this fear can perhaps be located in the nature of

the sex act per se: men enter the vagina hard, erect;

men emerge drained of vitality, the cock flaccid. The

loss of semen, and the feeling of weakness which is its

biological conjunct, has extraordinary significance to

men. Hindu tradition, for instance, postulates that men

must either expel the semen and then vacuum it back

up into the cock, or not ejaculate at all. For those Western men for whom orgasm is simultaneous with ejaculation, sex must be a most literal death, with

the mysterious, muscled, pulling vagina the death-

dealer.

To locate the origins of the myth of feminine evil

in male castration and potency fears is not so much to

participate in the Freudian world view as it is to accept

and apply the anthropologist's method and link up

Western Judeo-Christian man with Australian, African,

or Trobriand primitives. To do so is to challenge the

egotism which informs our historical attitude toward

Gynocide: The Witches

137

ourselves and which would separate us from the rest o f

the species. T here is nothing to indicate that “civilization, ” “culture, ” and/or Christianity have in any way moderated the primal male dread o f castration. Quite

the contrary, history might even be defined as the study

o f the concrete expression o f that dread.

T h e Christians in their manifold variety were continuing the highly developed Jewish tradition o f misogyny, patriarchy, and sexist suppression, alternatively

known as the Garden-of-Eden-Hype. T h e Adam and

Eve creation myth is the basic myth o f man and woman,

creation, death, and sex. T here is another Jewish legend, namely that o f Adam-Lilith, which never assumed that place because it implies other, nonsexist, nonpatri-archal values. T h e Genesis account o f Adam and Eve in

Eden involves, according to Hays, three themes: “the

transition from primitive life to civilization, the coming

o f death, and the acquisition o f knowledge. ” 24 As Hays

points out, Adam has been told by God the Father that

if he eats from the T ree o f Knowledge he will die. T h e

serpent tells Eve that she and Adam will not die. T h e

serpent, it turns out, told the immediate truth: Adam

and Eve do not keel over dead; rather, they know each

other carnally.

Sex is, biblically speaking, the sole source o f civilization, death, and knowledge. As punishment, Adam must go to work and Eve must bear children. We have

here the beginning o f the human family and the work

ethic, both tied to guilt and sexual repression by virtue

o f their origins. One could posit, with all the assurance

o f a Monday-morning quarterback, that Adam and Eve

always were mortal and carnal and that through eating

138

Woman Hating

the forbidden fruit only became aware of what their

condition had always been. God has never been very

straightforward with people.

Whether the precise moral of the story is that death

is a direct punishment for carnal knowledge (which

might make guilt an epistemological corollary) or that

awareness of sex and death are coterminous, the fact of

man knowing and feeling guilt is rooted in the Oedipal

content of the legend. In a patriarchy, one does not

disobey the father.

Adam’s legacy post-Eden is sexual knowledge, mortality, guilt, toil, and the fear of castration. Adam became a human male, the head of a family. His sin was lesser than Eve’s, seemingly by definition again. Even

in Paradise, wantonness, infidelity, carnality, lust, greed,

intellectual inferiority, and a metaphysical stupidity

earmark her character. Yet her sin was greater than

Adam’s. God had, in his oft-noted wisdom, created her

in a way which left her defenseless against the wiles of

the snake —the snake approached her for that very

reason. Yet she bears responsibility for the fall. Doubledouble think is clearly biblical in its origins.

Eve’s legacy was a twofold curse: “Unto the woman

He said: ‘I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail;

in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire

shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ’ ” 25

Thus, the menstrual cycle and the traditional agony of

childbirth do not comprise the full punishment —patriarchy is the other half of that ancient curse.

The Christians, of course, like Avis, trying harder,

seeing in woman the root of all evil, limited her to

breeding more sinners for the Church to save. No won­

Gynocide: The Witches

139

der then that women remained faithful adherents o f the

older totemic cults o f Western Europe which honored

female sexuality, deified the sexual organs and reproductive capacity, and recognized woman as embodying the regenerative power o f nature. T h e rituals o f these

cults, centering as they did on sexual potency, birth,

and phenomena connected to fertility, had been developed by women. Magic was the substance o f ritual, the content o f belief. T h e magic o f the witches was an

imposing catalogue o f medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge o f telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion,

hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew

the medicinal nature o f herbs and developed formulae

for using them. T he women who were faithful to the

pagan cults developed the science o f organic medicine,

using vegetation, before there was any notion o f the

profession o f medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous

physician o f the Middle Ages, claimed that everything

he knew he had learned from “the good women. ” 26

Experimenting with herbs, women learned that those

which would kill when administered in large doses

had curative powers when administered in smaller

amounts. Unfortunately, it is as poisoners that the

witches are remembered. The witches used drugs like

belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and

hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development

o f analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all

medical help for births, were consulted in cases o f impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners o f euthanasia. Since the

Church enforced the curse o f Eve by refusing to permit

140

Woman Hating

any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to

the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they

could. It was especially as midwives that these learned

women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and

Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic

Faith than mid wives. ” 27 The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not

have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus.

It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor

pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her

husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and

intention both.

The origins of the magical content of the pagan cults

can be traced back to the fairies, who were a real, neolithic people, smaller in stature than the natives of northern Europe or England. They were a pastoral

people who had no knowledge of agriculture. They

fled before stronger, technologically more advanced

murderers and missionaries who had contempt for

their culture. They set up communities in the inlands and concealed their dwellings in mounds half hidden in the ground. The fairies developed those

magical skills for which the witches, centuries later,

were burned.

The socioreligious organization of the fairy culture

was matriarchal and probably polyandrous. The fairy

culture was still extant in England as late as the 17th

century when even the pagan beliefs of the early witches

had degenerated into the Christian parody which we

associate with Satanism. The Christians rightly recognized the fairies as ancient, original sorcerers, but

Gynoclde: The Witches

141

wrongly saw their whole culture as an expression o f the

demonic. T here was communication between the fairies

and the pagan women, and any evidence that a woman

had visited the fairies was considered sure proof that

she was a witch.

T here were, then, three separate, though interrelated, phenomena: the fairy race with its matriarchal social organization, its knowledge o f esoteric magic

and medicine; the woman-oriented fertility cults, also

practitioners o f esoteric magic and medicine; and later,

the diluted witchcraft cults, degenerate parodies o f

Christianity. T here is particular confusion when one

tries to distinguish between the last two phenomena.

Many o f the women condemned by the Inquisition were

true devotees o f the Old Religion. Many were confused by Christian militancy and aggression, not to mention torture and threat o f burning, and saw themselves as diabolical, damned witches.

An understanding o f what the Old Religion really

was, how it functioned, is crucial if we want to understand the precise nature o f the witch hunt, the amount and kind o f distortion that the myth o f feminine evil

made possible, who the women were who were being

burned, and what they had really done. T he information available comes primarily from the confessions o f accused witches, recorded and distorted by the Inquisitors, and from the work o f anthropologists like Margaret Murray and C. L'Estrange Ewen. T h e scenario o f the witchcraft cults is pieced together from those sources, but many pieces are missing. A lot o f

knowledge disappears with 9 million people.

T h e religion was organized with geographic integ­

142

Woman Hating

rity. Communities had their own organizations, mainly

structured in covens, with local citizens as administrators. There were weekly meetings which took care of business —they were called esbats. Then there were

larger gatherings, called sabbats, where many covens

met together for totemic festivities. There may have

been an actual continental organization with one all-

powerful head, but evidence on this point is ambiguous.

It was a proselytizing religion in that nonmembers were

approached by local officials and asked to join. Conditions of membership in a coven were the free consent of the individual, abjuration of all other beliefs and

loyalties (particularly renunciation of any loyalty to the

new Catholic Faith), and an avowal of allegiance to the

horned god. Membership was contractual, that is, a

member signed an actual contract which limited her

obligations to the cult to a specific number of years,

at the end of which she was free to terminate allegiance.

Most often the Devil “promised her Mony, and that she

would live gallantly and have the pleasure of the

World. . . ” 28 The neophyte’s debts probably were paid

and she no doubt also learned the secrets of medicine,

drugs, telepathy, and simple sanitation, which would

have considerably improved all aspects of her earthly

existence. It was only according to the Church that she

lost her soul as part o f the bargain. And, needless to

say, it was the Church, not the Devil, which took her life.

Once the neophyte made the decision for the

horned god, she went through a formal initiation, often

conducted at the sabbat. The ceremony was simple.

The initiate declared that she was joining the coven

of her own free will and swore devotion to the master

Gynocide: The Witches

143

o f the coven who represented the horned god. She was

then marked with some kind o f tattoo which was called

the witches’ mark. T h e inflicting o f the tattoo was painful, and the healing process was long. When healed, the scar was red or blue and indelible. One method particularly favored by the witch hunters when hunting was to take a suspected woman, shave her pubic and other

bodily hair (including head hair, eyebrows, etc. ) and,

upon finding any scar, find her guilty o f witchcraft.

Also, the existence o f any supernumerary nipple, common in all mammals, was proof o f guilt.

T he initiate was often given a new name, especially

if she had a Christian name like Mary or Faith. Children, when they reached puberty, were initiated into the coven — parents naturally wanted their children to

share the family religion. T he Inquisition was as ruthless with children as it was with adults. T here are stories o f children being whipped as their mothers

were being burned —prevention, it was called.

T he religious ceremony, which was the main content o f the sabbat, included dancing, eating, and fucking. T he worshipers paid homage to the horned

god by kissing his representative, the master o f the

coven, anywhere he indicated. T he kiss was generally

on the master’s ass —designed, some say, to provoke the

antisodomy Christians. That ritual kiss was possibly

placed on a mask which the costumed figure —masked,

horned, wearing animal skins, and probably an artificial

phallus —wore under his tail. T h e disguise conjures up

the ancient, two-faced Janus.

T he witches danced ring dances in a direction opposite to the path o f the sun, an ancient, symbolic

144

Woman Hating

rite. The Lutherans and Puritans forbade dancing because it evoked for them the spectacle of pagan worship.

After the dancing, the witches ate. Often they

brought their own food, rather in the tradition of picnic lunches, and sometimes the coven leader provided a real feast. The Christians alleged that the witches were

cannibals and that their dinner was an orgy of human

flesh, cooked and garnished as only the Devil knew how.

Actually, the supper common to all sabbats was a simple

meal of pedestrian food.

The whole notion of cannibalism and sacrifice has

been stubbornly, persistently, and purposely misunderstood. There is no evidence that any living child was killed to be eaten, or that any living child was sacrificed. There is evidence that sometimes dead infants were ritually eaten, or used in ritual. Cannibalism,

and its not so symbolic substitute, animal sacrifice, was

a vital part of the ritual of all early religions, including the Jewish one. The witches participated in this tradition rather modestly: they generally sacrificed a

goat or a hen. It was the Christians who developed and

extended the Old World system of sacrifice and cannibalism to almost surreal ends: Christ, the sacrificial lamb, who died an agonizing death on the cross to

ensure forgiveness of men’s sins and whose followers

symbolically, even today, eat of his flesh and drink of

his blood — what is the Eucharist if not fossilized cannibalism?

The final activity of the sabbat was a phallic orgy —

heathen, drug-abetted, communal sex. The sex of the

sabbat is distinguished by descriptions of pain. It was

said that intercourse was painful, that the phallus of the

Gynocide: The Witches

145

masked coven leader was cold and oversized, that no

woman ever conceived. It would seem that the horned

figure used an artificial phallus and could service all

the celebrants. T h e Old Religion, as opposed to the

Christian religion, celebrated sexuality, fertility, nature

and woman's place in it, and communal sex was a logical

and most sacral rite.

T h e worship o f animals is also indigenous to nature-

based religious systems. Early people existed among

animals, scarcely distinct from them. Through religious

ritual, people differentiated themselves from animals

and gave honor to them —they were food, sustenance.

There was a respect for the natural world — people were

hunter and hunted simultaneously. T heir perspective

was acute. T hey worshiped the spirit and power they

saw manifest in the carnivore world o f which they were

an integral part. When man began to be “civilized, ” to

separate himself out o f nature, to place himself over

and above woman (he became Mind, she became Carnality) and other animals, he began to seek power over nature, magical control. The witch cults still had a

strong sense o f people as part o f nature, and animals

maintained a prime place in both ritual and consciousness for the witches. The Christians, who had a profound and compulsive hatred for the natural world, thought

that the witches, through malice and a lust for power

(pure projection, no doubt), had mobilized nature/animals into a robotlike anti-Christian army. T h e witch hunters were convinced that toads, rats, dogs, cats,

mice, etc., took orders from witches, carried curses from

one farm to another, caused death, hysteria, and disease. They thought that nature was one massive, crawl­

146

Woman Hating

ing conspiracy against them, and that the conspiracy

was organized and controlled by the wicked women.

They can in fact be credited with pioneering the politics

of total paranoia —they developed the classic model for

that particular pathology which has, as its logical consequence, genocide. Their methods of dealing with the witch menace were developed empirically— they had a

great respect for what worked. For instance, when they

suspected a woman of witchcraft, they would lock her

in an empty room for several days or weeks and if any

living creature, any insect or spider, entered that room,

that creature was identified as the woman's familiar,

and she was proved guilty of witchcraft. Naturally,

given the fact that bugs are everywhere, particularly

in the woodwork, this test of guilt always worked.

Cats were particularly associated with witches. That

association is based on the ancient totemic significance

of the cat:

It is well known that to the Egyptians cats were

sacred. They were regarded as incarnations of Isis

and there was also a cat deity.. . . Through Osiris

(Ra) they were associated with the sun; the rays of the

“solar cat, ” who was portrayed as killing the “serpent

of darkness” at each dawn, were believed to produce

fecundity in Nature, and thus cats were figures of

fertility.. . . Cats were also associated with Hathor,

a cow-headed goddess, and hence with crops and

rain.. . .

Still stronger, however, was the association of the

cat with the moon, and thus she was a virgin goddess —

a virgin-mother incarnation. In her character as moon-

goddess she was inviolate and self-renewing. . . the

circle she forms in a curled-up position [is seen as] the

symbol for eternity, an unending re-creation. 29

Gynocide: The Witches

147

T h e Christians not only converted the horned god into

Satan, but also the sacred cat into a demonic incarnation. T h e witches, in accepting familiars and particularly in their special feeling for cats, only participated in an

ancient tradition which had as its substance love and

respect for the natural world.

It was also believed that the witch could transform

herself into a cat or other animal. This notion, called

lycanthropy, is twofold:

. . . either the belief that a witch or devil-ridden person

temporarily assumes an animal form, to ravage or

destroy; or, that they create an animal “double” in

which, leaving the lifeless human body at home, he or

she can wander, terrorize, or batten on mankind. 30

T h e origins o f the belief in lycanthropy can be traced

to group rituals in which celebrants, costumed as animals, recreated animal movements, sounds, even hunting patterns. As group ritual, those celebrations would be prehistorical. The witches themselves, through the

use o f belladonna, aconite, and other drugs, felt that

they did become animals. * The effect o f the belief in

lycanthropy on the general population was electric: a

stray dog, a wild cat, a rat, a toad —all were witches,

agents o f Satan, bringing with them drought, disease,

death. Any animal in the environment was dangerous,

demonic. The legend o f the werewolf (popularized in

the Red Riding Hood fable) caused terror. At Labout,

*

For a contem porary account o f lycanthropy, I would suggest The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), pp. 170-84.

148

Woman Hating

two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There

were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who

were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the

next morning that a respectable town matron had been

wounded in precisely the same way.

Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,

and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they an-

nointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and

aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave

the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost

archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was

of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but

genuine fact:

As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the

air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their

assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the

devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for

such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius

Loyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it was

regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.

. . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches

were believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expressly

forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief

that witches flew. 31

With typical consistency then, the Church said that

saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the

Gynocide: The Witches

149

witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,

they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves

with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,

in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it

would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.

We now know most o f what can be known about

the witches: who they were, what they believed, what

they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the

historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which

resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly

all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that

slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed

for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original

Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.

Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,

woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to

include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a

footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance

o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.

Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells

us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely

by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,

here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living

o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned

150

Woman Hating

alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the

hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not

changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those

premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,

to destroy it and the institutions based on it.

Part Four

ANDROGYNY

When the sexual energy of the people is

liberated they will break the chains.

The struggle to break the form is

paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility

of realizing a form (a technique) to escape

the fire in which we are being consumed.

The journey to love is not romantic.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in

its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to

destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,

its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, and

structural mental sets which define women as hot wet

fuck tubes, hot slits.

Androgynous mythology provides us with a model

which does not use polar role definitions, where the

definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,

female = bad, man = human, woman = other. A ndrogyny myths are multisexual mythological models. T hey go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios

they suggest for building community, for realizing the

fullest expression o f human sexual possibility and

creativity.

Androgyny as a concept has no notion o f sexual

repression built into it. W here woman is carnality, and

carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that

woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;

that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-

153

154

Woman Hating

ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and

community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual

freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.

It may be the one road to freedom open to women,

men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.

C H A P T E R 8

Androgyny:

The Mythological Model

It is a question o f finding the right model. We are bo rn

into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;

Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the

substantive message o f this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns o f social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside

the socioreligious scenario o f right and wrong, good

and bad, licit and illicit, legal and illegal, all saturated

with shame and guilt. We are programmed by the culture

as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous

way through the scientist’s maze, and that programming

operates on every level o f choice and action. For example, we have seen how the romantic ethos is related to the way women dress and cosmeticize their bodies and

how that behavior regulates the literal physical mobility

o f women. Take any aspect o f behavior and one can

find the source o f the programmed response in the cultural structure. Western man’s obsessive concern with metaphysical and political freedom is almost laughable

in this context.

155

156

Woman Hating

Depth psychologists consider man the center of his

world —his psyche is the primary universe which governs, very directly, the secondary universe, distinct from him, of nature; philosophers consider man, in

the fragmented, highly overrated part called intellect,

the center of the natural world, indeed its only significant member; artists consider man, isolated in his creative function, the center of the creative process, of the canvas, of the poem, an engineer of the culture; politicians consider man, represented by his sociopolitical organization and its armies, the center of whatever

planetary power might be relevant and meaningful;

religionists consider God a surrogate man, created

precisely in man’s image, only more so, to be father

to the human family. The notion of man as a part of the

natural world, integrated into it, in form as distinct

(no more so) as the tarantula, in function as important

(no more so) as the honey bee or tree, is in eclipse, and

that eclipse extends not over a decade, or over a century, but over the whole of written history. The arrogance which informs man’s relation with nature (simply, he is superior to it) is precisely the same arrogance which informs his relationship with woman (simply,

he is superior to her). Here we see the full equation:

woman = carnality = nature. The separation of man

from nature, man placing himself over and above it, is

directly responsible for the current ecological situation

which may lead to the extinction of many forms of life,

including human life. Man has treated nature much as

he has treated woman: with rape, plunder, violence.

The phenomenological world is characterized by its

diversity, the complexity and mutuality of its interac-

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

157

tions, and man’s only chance for survival in that world

consists o f finding the proper relationship to it.

In terms o f interhuman relationship, the problem is

similar. As individuals, we experience ourselves as the

center o f whatever social world we inhabit. We think

that we are free and refuse to see that we are functions

of our particular culture. That culture no longer organically reflects us, it is not our sum total, it is not the collective phenomenology o f our creative possibilities —it possesses and rules us, reduces us, obstructs the flow o f

sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even

into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to

natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in

interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change

ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally

defined beings. We must find ways o f destroying the

cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must

discover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual being

and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent

natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.

Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world

we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;

prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,

governments contemptuous o f their people, people

filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,

rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition

158

Woman Hating

gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,

want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those

phenomena mark the distance between civilized man

and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social

patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced

way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how

it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment

when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable

humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence

was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and

social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then

imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had

with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even

know much of what happened before people made

pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps

would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have

(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part

of the natural world, not set over against it; when men

and women, male and female, were whatever they were,

not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into

castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined

whole.

In recent years, depth psychologists in particular

have turned to primitive people and tribal situations

in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of

male and female. The most notable effort was made by

Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable

as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

159

have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as

archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined

as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and

embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is

defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.

Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal

values (particularly the need for complex organization)

inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a

feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or

mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical

thought. O f course, biological women are ruled, it

turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued

over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but

that would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jung

never questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.

In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,

M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and a

Patron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study o f mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint o f women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this

160

Woman Hating

imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery

connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),

Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church:

But if she will stop long enough to look within, she

also may become aware of impulses and thoughts

which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes

but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed

feminine being within her. For the most part, however,

a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own

nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.

And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros

which is within her, and the world without, and

through her own womanly adaptation to the world

to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of

the nonhuman feminine principle. 1

Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”

Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian

point of view.

It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance

that male and female are pitted against each other and

that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open

to male and female, men and women, when they meet:

These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent

on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and

women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.. . . So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed. 2

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

161

These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,

embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure o f reality. T hey are polar opposites; their mode o f interaction is conflict. T hey cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values”

are other. (Women have never understood that they

are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) T here is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male

and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two

halves o f the same whole. One is not superior, one is not

inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,

ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the

other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is the

so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia

of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,

physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologically women. Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminine

evil.

T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or

erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes

from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f

human sexuality. The essential information which

would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which

162

Woman Haling

describe the creation of the first human being as male

and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the

wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct

a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories

all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.

With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. * But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture

are gross perversions of original creation myths which

molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-con-

scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths

all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception

uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,

male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The

myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real

cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised

by a culture which posits other values, and though

those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been

ostracized and persecuted.

With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is

myth, and why does it have such importance? The best

definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,

Dreams, and Mysteries:

*

It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when people

began to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percent of the whole o f human history.

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

163

What exactly is a myth? In the language current during the nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anything that was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam,

or the invisible man, no less than the history of the

world as described by the Zulus, or the Theogony of

Hesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many another

cliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this,

too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, according to primitive Christianity, everything which could not be justified by reference to one or the other

of the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ”

But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged us

to go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christian polemics against the pagan world. We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the

myth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” and

archaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to

express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred

history; that is, a transhuman revelation which took

place at the dawn of the Great Time.. . . Being real

and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently, repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token, a justification, for all human actions. In

other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass

at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior. 3 [Italics added]

I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect.

It is not only in primitive and archaic societies that

myths provide this model for behavior —it is in every

human society. T he distance between myth and social

organization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, in

advanced technological societies, but myth still operates

164

Woman Hating

as the substructure of the collective. The story of Adam

and Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moon

and Mars, and the Christian version of the primitive

myth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the most

technologically advanced communications media.

What are the myths of androgyny, and how do we

locate them behind the myths of polarity with which we

are familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yin

and yang.

Yin and yang are commonly associated with female

and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that

it appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free description of phenomena, describes cosmic movement as cyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang

(masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin

(female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identifications reduce the concepts too often to conceptual polarities: they are used to fix the proper natures of

men and women as well as the forces of male and female.

These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based

on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that

(1) all people are composed of both yin and yang,

though in the man yang properly predominates and in

the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male

and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally

vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one

looks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation of

yin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half of

the universe.

The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,

are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an

already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

165

Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called

The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted

meanings o f yin and yang:

Out of the Tao, and the Tai-chi [“the great ridge

pole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principles of reality, the one pole being the light (yang) and the other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). Among

European scholars, some have turned first to sexual

references for an explanation, but the characters refer

to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the

north side of a mountain and the south side of a river.

. . . Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennants

and, corresponding to the character of yin, is the south

side of a mountain and the north side of a river. Starting only with the meaning of “light” and “dark, ” the principle was then expanded to all polar opposites,

including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang

have their common origin in an undivided One and

are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang

appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin

as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it

is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the

basis for these ideas. 4

Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological

sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night

which then slowly changes into day. When men began

conceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, the

phenomena o f light and dark were an obvious starting

point. My own experience is that night and day are

more alike than different —in which case they couldn't

possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has

reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are

more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.

166

Woman Hating

Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually

female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and

misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We

know that at one time men were hunters and women

were planters. Both forms o f work were essential and

arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength

and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men

hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that

they could not run, go without food for long periods of

time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It

is probable that very early in human history women

also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival

of the species that they develop into planters — first to

supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant

and woman mortality. We see that the first division of

labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the

man in the process of impregnation, women were invested with a supreme magical power, one which engendered awe and fear in men. As they developed skill in planting, they embodied even more explicitly fertility, generation, and of course death. The overwhelming mana of women, coupled with the high mortality which went along with childbirth, could well have led

to practices of protection, segregation, and slowly

increasing social restriction. With pregnancy as the

one inevitable in a woman’s life, men began to organize

social life in a way which excluded woman, which limited her to the living out of her reproductive function.

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

167

As men began to know power, that power directly related to the exclusion o f women from community life, the myth o f feminine evil developed and provided justification for laws, rites, and other practices which relegated women to pieces o f property. As a corollary, men developed the taste for subjugating others and

hoarding power and wealth which characterizes them

to this very day.

Returning to yin and yang, what is crucial is the

realization that these concepts did not originally attach

to sex. In more concrete terms, the Great Original (first

being) o f the Chinese chronicles is the holy woman T ’ai

Yuan, who was an androgyne, a combined manifestation o f yin and yang. Primacy is given to the feminine principle here (the gender o f the noun is feminine) because o f woman’s generative function.

Am ong the Tibetan Buddhists, the so-called male-

female polarities are called yabyum; among the Indian

Hindus, they are called Shiva and Shakti. In the Tantric

sects o f both traditions, one finds a living religious cult

attached to the myth o f a primal androgyne, to the

union o f male and female. One also finds, not surprisingly, that Tantric cults are condemned by the parent culture with which they identify. T h e culminating religious rite o f the Tantrics is sacramental fucking, the ritual union o f man and woman which achieves, even if

only symbolically, the original androgynous energy.

This is the outstanding fact when one looks at yabyum

and Shiva-Shakti:

The Hindu assigned the male symbol apparatus to the

passive, the female to the active pole; the Buddhist did

168

Woman Hating

the opposite; the Hindu assigned the knowledge principle to the passive male pole, and the dynamic principle to the active female pole; the Vajrayana Buddhist did it the other way around. 5

The explanation for this major difference, this attachment in one case of the feminine to the passive and in the other of the feminine to the active, is that these

attachments were made arbitrarily. 6 Two convictions

vital to sexist ontology are undermined: that everywhere the feminine is synonymous with the passive, receptive, etc., and so it must be true; that the definition of the feminine as passive, receptive, etc., comes from the visible, incontrovertible fact of feminine passivity, receptivity, etc.

In Hindu mythology, as opposed to Judaic mythology, the phenomenological world is not created by god as something distinct from him. It is the godhead

in manifestation. As Campbell describes it: “. . . the

image of the androgynous ancestor is developed in

terms of an essentially psychological reading of the

problem of creation. ” 7 In a description of that androgynous being, we find: “He was just as large as a man and woman embracing. This Self then divided himself into

two parts; and with that there was a master and a

mistress. Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage

Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. ” 8

In Egypt one of the earliest forms of moon deity was

Isis-Net, an androgyne. The Greek Artemis was androgynous. So is Awonawilona, chief god of the Pueblo Zuni. The Greek god Eros was also androgynous.

Plato, repeating a corrupted version of a much

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

169

older myth, describes in Symposium 3 types o f original human beings: male/male, male/female, female/

female. These original humans were so powerful that

the gods feared them and so Zeus, whose own androgynous ancestry did not stop him from becoming the Macho Kid, halved them.

T h e Aranda o f Australia know a supernatural being

called Numbakulla, “Eternal, ” who made androgynes

as the first beings, then split them apart, then tied them

back together with hemp to make couples. It is essentially this story that is repeated throughout the primitive world.

Certain African and Melanesian tribes have ancestral images o f one being with breasts, penis, and beard.

Hindu statues which show Shiva and Shakti united participate in the same devotional tradition —we perceive that they are united in sexual intercourse, but it is

also possible that they represent one literal androgynous body.

T here are still devotional religious practices which

harken back to the mythology o f the primal androgyne

— Tantra, for instance, in both its Tibetan and Indian

manifestations, clearly participates in that tradition.

Possibly the rite o f subincision, practiced in Australia,

is similarly rooted in androgyne myth. Subincision is the

ritual slitting open o f the underside o f the penis to form

a permanent cleft into the urethra. T h e opening is

called the “ penis womb. ” Campbell notes that “T h e

subincision produces artificially a hypospadias resembling that o f a certain class o f hermaphrodites. ” 9

T he drive back to androgyny, where it is manifest, is

sacral, strong, compelling. It is interesting here to

170

Woman Haling

speculate on the incest taboo. The Freudian articulation

o f what the Oedipal complex is and means serves the

imperatives of a patriarchal culture, of Judeo-Chris-

tian morality, and remains largely unchallenged. But

the earliest devotional mother-son configurations are

those of a Mother/Goddess and her Son/Lover. The

son is lover to the mother and is ritually sacrificed at a

predetermined time (mothers don’t have to be possessive). This sacrifice is not related to guilt or punishment—it is holy sacrifice which sanctifies the tribe, does honor to the offering, and is premised on cyclic fertility patterns of life, death, and regeneration. These rites, associated with the worship of the Great Mother

(the first corruption of the Great Original, or primal

androgyne) involved ritual intercourse between mother

and son, with the subsequent sacrifice of the son. At

one time both a son and a daughter were sacrificed, but

as the daughter became a mother-surrogate, the son

was sacrificed alone. This sacralized set, Mother/God-

dess-Son/Lover, and the rituals associated with it, are

postandrogyne developments: that is, men and women

experienced separateness (not duality) and attempted

to recreate symbolically the androgynous state of mind

and body through what we now call incest. If it is true

that the implications of the androgyny myths in terms

of behavior run counter to every Judeo-Christian, or

more generally sexist, notion of morality, it would follow that incest is the primary taboo of this and similar cultures because it has its roots in the sexually dynamic

androgynous mentality. Indeed, it is not surprising

to discover that early versions of the Oedipus story do

not end with Oedipus putting his eyes out. Sophocles

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

171

leaves Oedipus overcome with fear, guilt, and remorse,

blinded and ruined. In the earlier Homeric version,

Oedipus becomes king and reigns happily ever after.

Freud chose the wrong version o f the right story.

Even Jewish mythology provides a primal androgyne. Here is the substance o f a cultural underground most directly related to us. According to the Zohar,

the first created woman was not Eve but Lilith. She was

created coterminous with Adam, that is, they were

created in one body, androgynous. T hey were o f one

substance, one corporality. God, so the legend goes,

split them apart so that Lilith could be dressed as a bride

and married to Adam properly, but Lilith rebelled at

the whole concept o f marriage,, that is, o f being defined as Adam ’s inferior, and fled. Lilith was in fact the first woman and the first feminist both. T h e Jewish

patriarchs, with shrewd vengeance, called her a witch.

They said that the witch Lilith haunted the night (her

name is etymologically associated with the Hebrew

word for night) and killed infants. She became symbolic

o f the dark, evil side o f all women. O f course, Lilith,

we know now, made the correct analysis and went to the

core o f the problem: she rejected the nuclear family.

God, however, saw it differently — he had created Lilith

from dust, just as he had created Adam. He had created her free and equal. Not making the same mistake twice, Eve was created from Adam's rib, clearly giving

her no claim to either freedom or equality. It took the

Christians to assert that since the rib is bent, woman’s

nature is contrary to man’s.

How then can we understand the biblical statement

that God created man in his own image —male and fe­

172

Woman Haling

male created he them? The Midrash gives the definitive answer: When the Holy One, Blessed Be He, created the first man, he created him androgynous. 10 There is also

a corresponding Jewish androgynous godhead. The

very word for the godhead, Elohim, is composed of a

feminine noun and a masculine plural ending. God

is multiple and androgynous. The tradition of the

androgynous godhead is most clearly articulated in the

Kabbalah, a text which in written form goes back to the

Middle Ages. The oral Kabbalah, which is more extensive than the written Kabbalah, originates in the most obscure reaches of Jewish history, before the

Bible, and has been preserved with, according to occultists, more care than the written Bible —that is, the Bible has been rewritten, edited, modified, translated;

oral Kabbalah has retained its purity.

The Kabbalistic scheme of the godhead is complex.

Suffice it here to say that god is male and female interwoven. Certain parts are associated with the female, other parts with the male. For instance, primal understanding is female; wisdom is male; severity is female; mercy is male. Special prominence is given to the final

emanation of the godhead, Malkuth the Queen, the

physical manifestation of the godhead in the universe.

Malkuth the Queen is roughly equivalent to Shakti. For

the Kabbalists, as for the Tantrics, the ultimate sacrament is sexual intercourse which recreates androgyny.

Just as the Tantrics are/were ostracized by the rest of

the Hindu and Buddhist communities, so do the main

body of Jews ostracize the Kabbalists. Now they are

considered to be freaks —they have been viewed as

heretics. And heretics they are, for in recognizing the

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

173

androgynous nature o f the godhead they undermine

the authority o f God the Father and threaten the power

o f patriarchy.

It remains only to point out that Christ also had

some notion o f androgyny. In Gospel to the Egyptians,

Christ and a disciple named Salome have this conversation:

When Salome asked how long Death should prevail,

the Lord said: So long as ye women bear children; for

I have come to destroy the work o f the Female. And

Salome said to Him: Did I therefore well in having

no children? T h e Lord answered and said: Eat every

Herb, but eat not that which hath bitterness. When

Salome asked when these things about which she questioned would be made known, the Lord said: When ye trample upon the garment o f shame; when the Tw o

become One, and Male with Female neither male nor

fem ale. 11

In the next chapter I am going to pursue the implications o f androgyny myths in the areas o f sexual identity and sexual behavior, and it would be in keeping

with the spirit o f this book to take Christ as my guide

and say with him: “When ye trample upon the garment

o f shame; when the Tw o become One, and Male with

Female neither male nor female. ”

C H A P T E R 9

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking,

and Community

Nothing short o f everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley, Island

The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman”

are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models

they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human

becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the

female, dead-ended for male and female both. Culture

as we know it legislates those fictive roles as normalcy.

Deviations from sanctioned, sacred behavior are “gender disorders, ” “criminality, ” as well as “sick, ” “disgusting, ” and “immoral. ” Heterosexuality, which is properly defined as the ritualized behavior built on

polar role definition, and the social institutions related

to it (marriage, the family, the Church, ad infinitum)

are “human nature. ” Homosexuality, transsexuality,

incest, and bestiality persist as the “perversions” of this

“human nature” we presume to know so much about.

They persist despite the overwhelming forces marshaled against them —discriminatory laws and social practices, ostracism, active persecution by the state

and other organs of the culture —as inexplicable embarrassments, as odious examples of “filth” and/or

“maladjustment. ” The attempt here, however modest

174

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

175

and incomplete, is to discern another ontology, one

which discards the fiction that there are two polar

distinct sexes.

We have seen that androgyny myths present an

image o f one corporality which is both male and female.

Sometimes the image is literally a man-form and a

woman-form in one body. Sometimes it is a figure

which incorporates both male and female functions.

In every case, that mythological image is a paradigm

for a wholeness, a harmony, and a freedom which is

virtually unimaginable, the antithesis o f every assumption we hold about the nature o f identity in general and sex in particular. T h e first question then is: What

o f biology? There are, after all, men and women. They

are different, demonstrably so. We are each o f one sex

or the other. If there are two discrete biological sexes,

then it is not hard to argue that there are two discrete

modes o f human behavior, sex-related, sex-determined.

One might argue for a liberalization o f sex-based roles,

but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.

Hormone and chromosome research, attempts to

develop new means o f human reproduction (life created in, or considerably supported by, the scientist’s laboratory), work with transsexuals, and studies o f

formation o f gender identity in children provide basic

information which challenges the notion that there are

two discrete biological sexes. That information threatens

to transform the traditional biology o f sex difference

into the radical biology o f sex similarity. That is not to

say that there is one sex, but that there are many. The

176

Woman Haling

evidence which is germane here is simple. The words

“male” and “female, ” “man” and “woman, ” are used

only because as yet there are no others.

1. Men and women have the same basic body structure. Both have both male and female genitals —the clitoris is a vestigial penis, the prostate gland is most

probably a vestigial womb. Since, as I pointed out earlier, there is information on only 2 percent of human history, and since religious chronicles, which were for

centuries the only record of human history, consistently

speak of another time in the cycle o f time when humans

were androgynous, and since each sex has the vestigial

organs of the other, there is no reason not to postulate

that humans once were androgynous — hermaphroditic

and androgynous, created precisely in the image of

that constantly recurring androgynous godhead.

2. Until the 7th week of fetal development both

sexes have precisely the same external genitalia. Basically, the development of sex organs and ducts is the same for males and females and the same two sets of

ducts develop in both.

3. The gonads cannot be said to be entirely male or

female. Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey writes:

In their somatic organization, the gonads always retain

a greater or lesser amount o f the opposite-sex tissue

which remains functional throughout life. 1

4. Chromosomal sex is not necessarily the visible

sex of the individual. It happens that a person of one

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

177

chromosomal sex develops the gonads o f the other sex. *

Gonadal sex and chromosomal sex can be in direct contradiction.

5. Chromosomal sex is not only X X or XY. There

are other chromosomal formations, and not much is

known about them or what they signify.

6. A person can have the gonads o f one sex, and the

secondary sexual characteristics o f the other sex.

7. Men and women both produce male and female

hormones. T h e amounts and proportions vary greatly,

and there is no way to determine biological maleness

or femaleness from hormone count.

8. One hormone can be transformed by the body

into its “opposite, ” male into female, female into

male. In Sex, Gender, and Society, Ann Oakley gives this

example:

. . . the fact that rapidly maturing male adolescents

sometimes acquire small breasts —the substantial increases in testosterone which accompanies puberty

[are] partially metabolised as oestrogen, which in turn

causes breast developm ent. 2

9. It is now thought that the male hormone determines the sex drive in both men and women.

* Question: Can a person with the chromosomal sex o f a male and the

gonadal sex o f a fem ale conceive? I f so, we would have to accept the notion

that men can have children. I would think that such cases do exist in nature,

even though I could find no confirmation that such persons are ferule. Since

anyone who has children is defined as a woman, and chrom osom e tests are

not done routinely, such persons would probably not be discovered except

by accident.

178

Woman Hating

10. The female hormone (progesterone) can have a

masculinizing effect. Dr. Sherfey writes:

We may have difficulty conceiving it, but natural selection has no difficulty using sexually heterotypic structures for homotypic purposes. For example,

progesterone is the “pregnancy hormone” essential

for menstruation and the prolonged pregnancy. It is as

uniquely a “female” hormone as one can be. Yet progesterone possesses strong androgenic properties. It may be used to masculinize female embryos. In 1 960,

Jones (27, 63) demonstrated that progesterone given

to human mothers early in pregnancy to prevent

threatened miscarriages. . . severely masculinized a

female fetus. 3

11. Visible sex differences are not discrete. There

are men with tiny cocks, women with large clits. There

are men with highly developed breasts, women with

almost no breast development. There are men with

wide hips, women with no noticeable hip development.

There are men with virtually no body hair, women with

much body hair. There are men with high voices,

women with low voices. There are men with no facial

hair, women who have beards and mustaches.

12. Height and weight differences between men and

women are not discrete. Muscle structures are not discrete. We know the despair of the tall, muscular woman who does not fit the female stereotype; we know also

the despair of the small, delicate man who does not

fit the male stereotype.

13. There is compelling cross-cultural evidence that

muscle strength and development are culturally deter-

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

179

mined. T here are cultures in which there are no great

differences in somatotype o f men and women:

In one small-scale (“primitive”) society for which there

are good photographic records —the Manus of the

Admiralty Islands — there is apparently no difference at

all in somatotype between males and females as children, and as adults both men and women tend to the same high degree of mesomorphy (broad shoulders

and chest, heavily muscled limbs, little subcutaneous

fat).. . . In Bali, too, males and females lack the sort

of differentiation of the physique that is a visible difference in our culture. Geoffrey Gorer once described them as a “hermaphroditic” people; they have little

sex differential in height and both sexes have broad

shoulders and narrow hips. They do not run to curves

and muscles, to body hair or to breasts of any size.

(Gorer once remarked that you could not tell male and

female apart, even from the front. ) Another source

informs us that babies suck their fathers' breasts as

well as their mothers'. 4

14.

There are hermaphrodites in nature. Robert T.

Francoeur, in Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human

Reproduction, admits:

The medical profession and experimental biologists

have always been very skeptical about the existence of

functional hermaphrodites among the higher animals

and man, though the earthworm, the sea hare, and

other lower animals do combine both sexes in the same

individual. 5

We have seen how deep the commitment to human sexual discreteness and polarity goes —that commitment

180

Woman Hating

makes the idea of functional hermaphroditism conceptually intolerable. It is interesting here to speculate on the perceptions of men like Lionel Tiger ( Men in

Groups) who in effect project human cultural patterns

of dominance and submission on the animal world. For

instance, Dr. Sherfey tells us that “In many primate

species, the females would be diagnosed hermaphrodites if

they were human” (Italics hers. ) 6 Most probably, we often

simply project our own culturally determined modes of

acting and perceiving onto other animals —we effectively screen information that would challenge the notions of male and female which are holy to us. In

that case, a bias toward androgyny (instead of the current bias toward polarity) would give us significantly different scenarios of animal behavior.

Hermaphroditism is generally defined as “a congenital disorder in which both male and female generative organs exist in the same individual. ” 7 A “true”

hermaphrodite is one who has ovaries, testes, and the

secondary sexual characteristics of both sexes. But

this is, it seems to me, the story of a functional hermaphrodite:

The case involved a sixteen-year-old Arkansas girl

who was being operated on for an ovarian tumor. As

is the custom in such surgery, the tissue removed is

carefully examined by a pathologist. In this instance,

signs of live eggs and live sperm were found in different

regions o f the tumor. With the egg and the sperm situated right next to each other in the same organ, Dr.

Timme claimed “there was a great possibility that they

would combine and make a human being. ”. . . The

unique feature. . . would be that the same person

contributed both germ cells. 8

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

181

Parthenogenesis also occurs naturally in women. Fran-

coeur refers to the work o f Dr. Landrum B. Shettles

who

in examining human eggs just after they were removed

from their ovarian follicles. . . found that three out

of four hundred of these eggs had “undergone cleavage in vivo within the intact follicle, without any possible contact with spermatozoa. ” 9

On the basis o f Shettles’ work, Francoeur estimates

that virgin births are a rather common occurrence,

in about the same frequency as fraternal twins and

twice as often as identical twins occur among white

Americans. 10

Seemingly a conservative, Dr. Sherwood Taylor, a

British scientist, “has suggested a much lower frequency

for human parthenogenesis, estimating one case in ten

thousand births. ” 11 However much, however little, it

does occur.

We can presume then that there is a great deal about

human sexuality to be discovered, and that our notion

o f two discrete biological sexes cannot remain intact. We

can presume then that we will discover cross-sexed

phenomena in proportion to our ability to see them. In

addition, we can account for the relative rarity o f hermaphrodites in the general population, for the consistency o f male-female somatotypes that we do find, and for the relative rarity o f cross-sexed characteristics in the general population (though they occur with more frequency than we are now willing to imagine)

by recognizing that there is a process o f cultural selec­

182

Woman Hating

tion which, for people, supersedes natural selection in

importance. Cultural selection, as opposed to natural

selection, does not necessarily serve to improve the

species or to ensure survival. It does necessarily serve

to uphold cultural norms and to ensure that deviant

somatotypes and cross-sexed characteristics are systematically bred out of the population.

However we look at it, whatever we choose to make

out of the data of what is frequently called Intersex, it

is clear that sex determination is not always clearcut

and simple. Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University has basically isolated these six aspects of sex identity:

1. Genetic or nuclear sexuality as revealed by indicators

like the sex-chromatin or Barr-body, a full chromosomal count and the leucocytic drumstick; *

2. Hormonal sexuality which results from a balance that

is predominantly androgenic or estrogenic;

3. Gonadal sexuality which may be clearly ovarian or

testicular, but occasionally also mixed;

4. Internal sexuality as disclosed in the structure of

the internal reproductive system;

5. External genital sexuality as revealed in the external

anatomy, and finally;

6. Psychosexual development which through the external

forces of rearing and social conditioning along with

the individual's response to these factors directs the

development o f a personality which is by nature

sexual. 12

* An object in the cell itself which would seem to determine gender.

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

183

Since there can be total contradiction between/

among any o f the above, since we have discussed some

(by no means all) o f the cross-sexed characteristics o f

human biological functioning, since we recognize hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis as human realities, we are justified in making a radical new formulation o f

the nature o f human sexuality. We are, clearly, a multi-

sexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast fluid

continuum where the elements called male and female are

not discrete *

T he concrete implications o f multisexuality as we

find it articulated in both androgynous mythology and

biology necessitate the total redefinition o f scenarios o f

proper human sexual behavior and pragmatic forms

o f human community. I f human beings are multisexed,

then all forms o f sexual interaction which are directly

rooted in the multisexual nature o f people must be part

o f the fabric o f human life, accepted into the lexicon o f

human possibility, integrated into the forms o f human

community. By redefining human sexuality, or by

defining it correctly, we can transform human relationship and the institutions which seek to control that relationship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we

know now. Sex as community between humans, our

shared humanity, is the world we must build. What

*

T h e notion o f bisexuality is organically rooted to structural polarity

and is inappropriate here for these reasons: the word itself has duality built

into it; one can be bisexual and still relate to the fictions “ male” and “ fem ale"

— to both instead o f to one; one can be bisexual and still relate exclusively to

one role, the masculine or the fem inine, w hether found in men or women.

184

Woman Haling

kind of sexual identity and relation will be the substance of that community?

Heterosexuality and Homosexuality/

There are men I could spend eternity with,

But not this life.

Kathleen Norris

a little zen in our politics a little acid in

our tea, could be all we need, the poof

is in the putting.

Jill Johnston

I have defined heterosexuality as the ritualized

behavior built on polar role definition. Intercourse

with men as we know them is increasingly impossible.

It requires an aborting of creativity and strength, a

refusal of responsibility and freedom: a bitter personal

death. It means remaining the victim, forever annihilating all self-respect. It means acting out the female role, incorporating the masochism, self-hatred, and passivity

which are central to it. Unambiguous conventional

heterosexual behavior is the worst betrayal of our common humanity.

That is not to say that “men” and “women” should

not fuck. Any sexual coming together which is genuinely pansexual and role-free, even if between men and women as we generally think of them (i. e., the biological

images we have of them), is authentic and androgynous.

Specifically, androgynous fucking requires the destruction

* For bisexuality, cf. p. 183.

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

185

of all conventional role-playing, of genital sexuality as the

primary focus and value, of couple formations, and of the

personality structures dominant-active (“ male”) and sub-

missive-passive (“female”).

Homosexuality, because it is by definition antagonistic to two-sex polarity, is closer at its inception to androgynous sexuality. However, since all individual

consciousness and social relationship are polluted by

internalized notions o f polarity, coupling, and role-

playing, the criteria cited above must also be applied to

homosexual relation. T oo often homosexual relation

transgresses gender imperatives without transforming

them.

An exclusive commitment to one sexual formation,

whether homosexual or heterosexual, generally means

an exclusive commitment to one role. An exclusive

commitment to one sexual formation generally involves the denial o f many profound and compelling kinds o f sensuality. An exclusive commitment to one

sexual formation generally means that one is, regardless o f the uniform one wears, a good soldier o f the culture programmed effectively to do its dirty work.

It is by developing one’s pansexuality to its limits

(and no one knows where or what those are) that one

does the work o f destroying culture to build community.

Transsexuality

How can I really care if we win “the Revolution” ? Either way, any way, there will be

no place for me.

A transsexual friend, in a conversation

186

Woman Haling

Transsexuality is currently considered a gender

disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which

contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a “disease” with

a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’s

visible sex and make it consonant with the person’s felt

identity.

Since we know very little about sex identity, and

since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation

of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature

and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization.

More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female

discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency

(see p. 185) as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial

points here. One, every transsexual has the right to

survival on his/her own terms. That means that every

transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation,

and it should be provided by the community as one of

its functions. This is an emergency measure for an

emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises

about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the

social situation of transsexuals will be transformed,

and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no

longer persecuted and despised. Three, community

built on androgynous identity will mean the end of

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

187

transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will

be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes o f sexual identity and behavior.

Transvestism

T h e first time I put on the black silk

panties I got a hardon right away.

Julian Beck

Transvestism is costuming which violates gender

imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually

charged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role is

erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civil

disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming

is part o f the strategy and process o f role destruction.

We see, for instance, that as women reject the female

role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,

the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.

Bestiality

[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a

Jew was regarded as a form o f bestiality,

and incurred the same penances.

G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History

Primary bestiality (fucking between people and

other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.

Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships

between people and other animals) is found everywhere

188

Woman Hating

on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.

Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places

people in nature, not above it.

The relationship between people and other animals,

when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance

is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism

in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was

sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in

the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.

In contemporary society relationships between

people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of

violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore

very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like

horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols

of ideal macho virility.

Needless to say, in androgynous community, human

and other-animal relationships would become more

explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always

share our fate, whatever it is.

Incest

I was cold —later revolted a little, not

much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try

— know the Monster of the Beginning

Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she

care? She needs a lover.

Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

189

T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic

because all human relationships are primarily erotic.

T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,

one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest

taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the

parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces

us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,

or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts

o f other humans who are not our parents and never

will be.

T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:

it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we

place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e

destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.

Th e Family

For if we grant that the sexual drive is at

birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the

total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous

perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;

and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;

then if we did away with the family we

would in effect be doing away with the

190

Woman Hating

repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a

sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one

must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate

to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of

destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.

As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they

will also develop the forms of community appropriate

to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will

be.

Children

The special tie women have with children

is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no

more than shared oppression. And that

moreover this oppression is intertwined

and mutually reinforcing in such complex

ways that we will be unable to speak of

the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.

Shulamith Firestone,

The Dialectic o f Sex

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

191

T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:

women are rejecting the female role, and life is being

created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally

transformed, we can expect that when women no longer

function as biological breeders we will be expendable.

As men learn more and more to control reproduction,

as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f

computers and robots develop, there is every reason

to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history

resorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,

as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. That

is the simple, compelling reality. T here are only two

other options: women must seize power, or we must

accomplish the transformation into androgyny.

T h e freedom o f those who are capable o f biological

reproduction from that work (which is simply a form

o f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world o f polarity must one expect that development to lead to

gynocide. T h e social processes here stand naked: if

women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important,

implication o f androgyny.

As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer

to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic im­

192

Woman Haling

pulses. In androgynous community, those impulses

would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would

no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-

realization. The distinctions between “children” and

“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those

distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.

Conclusion

Nothing short of everything will really do.

Aldous Huxley, Island

The object is cultural transformation. The object is

the development of a new kind of human being and a

new kind of human community. All of us who have ever

tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short

of everything will really do.

The way from here to there will not be easy. We

must make a total commitment —no longer to take

refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which

are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-

female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse

to know who we are and what we desire so that we need

not take responsibility for our own lives. We must

refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to

submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We

must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female

Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

193

submission. We must instead build communities where

violence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,

where natural desire is the fundament o f community,

where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe

based on androgyny and the social forms which would

develop from it are the bases o f the collective cultural

structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck

wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have

written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —

nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We

begin here and now, inch by inch.

You do not teach someone to count only

up to eight. You do not say nine and ten

and beyond do not exist. You give people

everything or they are not able to count at

all. There is a real revolution or none at

all.

Pericles Korovessis, in an interview

in Liberation, June 1973

The Revolution is not an event that takes

two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out

process in which new people are created,

capable of renovating society so that the

revolution does not replace one elite with

another, but so that the revolution creates

a new anti-authoritarian structure with

anti-authoritarian people who in their

turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free

from war, hunger, and exploitation.

Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968

There is a misery of the body and a misery

of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we

looked at them, poured nectar into our

mouths, and the grass became bread, we

would still be sad. We live in a system that

manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its

mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,

and we drown down, dead, too soon.

. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.

Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre

AFT ERWORD

The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle

this text has been altered in one very serious way. I

wanted it to be printed the way it was written —lower

case letters, no apostrophes, contractions.

I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessary punctuation is necessary, when one knows ones purposes one knows what is necessary.

my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the

pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his

purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes

differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.

my publisher changed my punctuation because book

reviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters,

fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).

W hen I say god and mammon concerning the

writer writing, I mean that any one can use words to

say something. And in using these words to say what

he has to say he may use those words directly or in-

directly. I f he uses these words indirectly he says what

he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear

and in so doing inevitably he has to serve mammon.. . .

Now serving god for a writer who is writing is writing

anything directly, it makes no difference what it is but

197

198

Woman Hating

it must be direct, the relation between the thing done

and the doer must be direct. In this way there is completion and the essence o f the completed thing is completion.

Gertrude Stein

in a letter to me, Grace Paley wrote, “once everyone

tells the truth artists will be unnecessary —meanwhile

there’s work for us. ”

telling the truth, we know what it is when we do it

and when we learn not to do it we forget what it is.

form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how the

printed word appears on the page, where to breathe,

where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicating

rhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it

— I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where I

do, instead of letting you discover your own natural

breath.

I begin by presuming that I am free.

I begin with nothing, no form, no content, and I ask:

what do I want to do and how do I want to do it.

I begin by presuming that what I write belongs to

me.

I begin by presuming that I determine the form I

use —in all its particulars. I work at my craft —in all

its particulars.

in fact, everything is already determined,

in fact, all the particulars have been determined and

are enforced.

in fact, where I violate what has already been determined I will be stopped.

in fact, the enforcers will enforce.

Afterword

199

“Whatever he may seem to us, he is yet a servant of the

Law; that is, he belongs to the Law and as such is set

beyond human judgment. In that case one dare not

believe that the doorkeeper is subordinate to the man.

Bound as he is by his service, even at the door of the

Law, he is incomparably freer than anyone at large in

the world. The man is only seeking the Law, the doorkeeper is already attached to it. It is the Law that has placed him at his post; to doubt his integrity is to doubt

the Law itself. ”

“I don't agree with that point of view, ” said K.,

shaking his head, “for if one accepts it, one must accept

as true everything the doorkeeper says. But you yourself have sufficiently proved how impossible it is to do that. ”

“No, ” said the priest, “it is not necessary to accept

everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary. ”

“A melancholy conclusion, ” said K. “It turns lying

into a universal principle. ”

Franz Kafka

I presume that I am free. I act. the enforcers enforce. I discover that I am not free, then: either I lie (it is necessary to lie) or I struggle (if I do not lie, I

must struggle), if I struggle, I ask, why am I not free

and what can I do to become free? I wrote this book to

find out why I am not free and what I can do to become

free.

Though the social structure begins by framing the

noblest laws and the loftiest ordinances that “the great

of the earth” have devised, in the end it comes to this:

breach that lofty law and they take you to a prison cell

and shut your human body off from human warmth.

200

Woman Hating

Ultimately the law is enforced by the unfeeling guard

punching his fellow man hard in the belly.

Judith Malina

without the presum ption o f freedom , there is no

freedom . I am free, how, then, do I want to live my

life, do my work, use my body? how, then, do I want to

be, in all my particulars?

standard form s are imposed in dress, behavior,

sexual relation, punctuation. standard form s are imposed on consciousness and b eh avior— on know ing and exp ressin g— so that we will not presum e freedom , so

that freedom will appear — in all its particulars — impossible and unworkable, so that we will not know what telling the truth is, so that we will not feel com pelled

to tell it, so that we will spend ou r time and our holy

hum an energy telling the necessary lies.

standard form s are sometimes called conventions,

conventions are m ightier than armies, police, and prisons. each citizen becomes the enforcer, the doorkeeper, an instrum ent o f the Law, an u nfeeling guard pun ching his fellow man hard in the belly.

I am an anarchist. I dont sue, I dont get injunctions, I

advocate revolution, and when people ask me what

can we do that’s practical, I say, weakly, weaken the

fabric of the system wherever you can, make possible

the increase of freedom, all kinds. When I write I

try to extend the possibilities of expression.

. . . I had tried to speak to you honestly, in my own

way, undisguised, trying to get rid, it’s part o f my obligation to the muse, of the ancien regime o f grammar.

. . . the revisions in typography and punctuation

have taken from the voice the difference that distin­

Afterword

201

guishes passion from affection and me speaking to

you from me writing an essay.

Julian Beck, 1965, in a foreword

to an edition of The Brig

BELIEVE THE PUNCTUATION.

Muriel Rukeyser

there is a great deal at stake here, many writers

fight this battle and most lose it. what is at stake for

the writer? freedom o f invention, freedom to tell the

truth, in all its particulars, freedom to imagine new

structures.

(the burden o f proof is not on those who presume

freedom, the burden o f p roof is on those who would

in any way diminish it. )

what is at stake for the enforcers, the doorkeepers,

the guardians o f the L aw —the publishing corporations,

the book reviewers who do not like lower case letters,

the librarians who will not stack books without standard

punctuation (that was the reason given Muriel Rukeyser

when her work was violated)—what is at stake for them?

why do they continue to enforce?

while this book may meet much resistance— anger,

fear, dislike—law? police? courts? —at this moment I

must write: Ive attacked the fundaments o f culture,

thats ok. Ive attacked male dominance, thats ok. Ive

attacked every heterosexual notion o f relation, thats

ok. Ive in effect advocated the use o f drugs, thats ok.

Ive in effect advocated fucking animals, thats ok. here

and now, New York City, spring 1974, among a handful

o f people, publisher and editor included, thats ok. lower

case letters are not. it does make one wonder.

202

Woman Hating

so Ive wondered and this is what I think right now.

there are well-developed, effective mechanisms for

dealing with ideas, no matter how powerful the ideas

are. very few ideas are more powerful than the mechanisms for defusing them, standard form —punctuation, typography, then on to academic organization, the

rigid ritualistic formulation of ideas, etc. —is the actual

distance between the individual (certainly the intellectual individual) and the ideas in a book.

standard form is the distance.

one can be excited about ideas without changing at

all. one can think about ideas, talk about ideas, without

changing at all. people are willing to think about many

things, what people refuse to do, or are not permitted to

do, or resist doing, is to change the way they think.

reading a text which violates standard form forces

one to change mental sets in order to read. there is no

distance. the new form, which is in some ways unfamiliar, forces one to read differendy—not to read about different things, but to read in different ways.

to permit writers to use forms which violate convention just might permit writers to develop forms which would teach people to think differently: not to think

about different things, but to think in different ways.

that work is not permitted.

If it had been possible to build the Tower o f Babel

without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.

Franz Kafka

The Immovable Structure is the villain. Whether

that structure calls itself a prison or a school or a fac­

Afterword

203

tory or a family or a government or The World As It

Is. That structure asks each man what he can do for it,

not what it can do for him, and for those who do not do

for it, there is the pain of death or imprisonment, or

social degradation, or the loss of animal rights.

Judith Malina

this book is about the Immovable Sexual Structure,

in the process o f having it published, Ive encountered

the Immovable Punctuation Typography Structure,

and I now testify, as so many have before me, that the

Immovable Structure aborts freedom, prohibits invention, and does us verifiable harm: it uses our holy human energy to sustain itself; it turns us into enforcers, or outlaws; to survive, we must learn to lie.

T h e Revolution, as we live it and as we imagine it,

means destroying the Immovable Structure to create

a world in which we can use our holy human energy to

sustain our holy human lives;

to create a world without enforcers, doorkeepers,

guards, and arbitrary Law;

to create a world —a community on this planet—

where instead o f lying to survive, we can tell the truth

and flourish.

N O T E S

Chapter 1. Onceuponatime: The Roles

1 The Brothers G rim m , Household Stories (New York: Dover

Publications, 1963), p. 213.

2 Ibid., p. 213.

3 Ibid., p. 214.

4 Ibid.

5Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7Ibid., p. 216.

8 Ibid., p. 221.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

II Ibid., p. 124.

12 Ibid., p. 72.

13 Ibid., p. 73.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid., p. 74.

16 Ibid., p. 85

17 Ibid., p. 220.

18 Ibid., p. 85.

19 Ibid., p. 92.

Chapter 3. Woman as Victim: Story of O

1 Newsweek, March 21, 1966, p. 108, unsigned.

- Pauline Reage, Story o f O (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. xxi.

3 Ibid., p. 80.

206

Woman Haling

4 Ibid., p. 93.

5 Ibid., p. 187.

6Ibid., p. 32.

7 Ibid., p. 106.

8 R obert S. d e R opp, Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in M an and

Animals (New York: Dell Publishing C om pany, 1969), p. 134.

Chapter 4. Woman at Victim: The Image

‘J e a n d e B erg, The Image (New York: G rove Press, 1966), p.

137-

2 Ibid., p. 19.

3 Ibid., p. 47.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 10.

6 Ibid., p. 11.

7 Ibid., p. 9.

8 Ibid., p. 42.

9Eliphas Levi, The History o f Magic (London: R ider a n d C om pany, 1969), p. 263.

10 Ibid., p. 265.

" J e a n d e B erg, op. cit., p. 11.

11 Ibid., p. 135.

13

The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. J o h n C ohen (New York: Ballan-

tine Books, 1967), pp. 296-97.

Chapter 5. Woman at Victim: Suck

1 The Essential Lenny Bruce, ed. John Cohen (New York: Ballan-

tine Books, 1967), p. 245.

2 Anne Severson and Shelby Kennedy, I Change I Am the Same

(n. d. ).

3 Suck 6.

4 Ibid.

5 Suck 4.

6

Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

" 7 Ibid.

19 Suck 2 .

11 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Suck 3.

Chapter 6. Gynoclde: Chinese Footbinding

I Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History o f a Curious

Erotic Custom (New York: W. Rawls, 1966), p. 39. Mr. Levy’s book is

the primary source for all the factual, historical information in this

chapter.

2Ibid., p. 112.

3 Ibid., pp. 25-26.

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Ibid., pp. 26-28.

6 Ibid., p. 141.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 182.

" 9

Ibid., p. 89.

10 Ibid., p. 144.

II Ibid., pp. 144- 4 5 -

Chapter 7. Gynoclde: The Witches

1 Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft (London: Tandem,

1969 ). P- 66.

2 H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth o f Feminine E vil (London: Methuen and Co., 1966), p. 111.

3Pennethorne Hughes, Witchcraft (Harmondsworth: Penguin

Books, 1971), p. 63.

4 Ibid., p. 65.

5 Ibid., pp. 66-67.

6 Hays, op. cit., p. 147.

7 Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum,

trans. by M. Summers (London: Arrow Books, 1971), pp. 29-30.

8 Ibid., Table of Contents.

9

Ibid.

10 Ibid., Preface.

11 Hughes, op. cit., pp. 183-84.

208

Woman Hating

12 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 123.

13 Ibid., pp. 114-15.

14 Ibid., pp. 115-16.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 117.

17 Ibid., p. 118.

18 Ibid., pp. 119-21.

19 Ibid., p. 112.

20 Ibid., pp. 122-23.

21 Hays, op. cit., p. 151.

22 Ibid., p. 153.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 89.

25 T h e Holy Bible (Philadelphia: N ational Bible Press, 1954), p. 8.

26 M ichelet, op. cit., p. 68.

27 K ram er an d S p ren g er, op. cit., p. 161.

28 H ughes, op. cit., pp. 9 7 -9 8 .

29 Gillian T indall, A Handbook on Witches (New York: A theneum ,

1966), p. 99.

30 H ughes, op. cit., p. 156.

31 Ibid., p. 130.

Chapter 8. Androgyny: The Mythological Model

1 M. E sther H ard in g , Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem

(L ondon: R ider an d C om pany, 1971), pp. 35-36.

2 Ibid., p. 36.

3 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (New York: H a rp e r Sc Row, i960), p. 23.

4 The Secret o f the Golden Flower, in tro d u ctio n by R ichard W ilhelm

(L ondon: R outledge, 1962), p. 12.

5A g eh an an d a B harati, The Tantric Tradition (G arden City:

D oubleday an d C om pany, 1970), pp. 18-19.

6 Ibid., p. 200.

7Jo se p h C am pbell, The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology (New

York: Viking, 1969), p. 109.

8 Ibid., p. 105.

9Jo sep h C am pbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton:

Princeton U niversity Press, 1968), p. 154.

Notes

209

10 Midrash, Rabbah, 8: 1.

11 Harding, op. cit., pp. 282-83.

Chapter 9. Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community

1 Mary Jane Sherfey, M. D., The N ature and Evolution o f Female

Sexuality (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 43.

2 Ann Oakley, Sexf Gender and Society (New York: Harper Sc Row,

1972), p. 24.

3 Sherfey, op. cit., pp. 50-51.

4 Oakley, op. cit., p. 30.

5 Robert T . Francoeur, Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in H um an

Reproduction (Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973), p. 139.

6 Sherfey, op. cit., p. 50.

7 Ibid., p. 173.

8 Francoeur, op. cit., p. 139.

9 Ibid., p. 140.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

11 Ibid., p. 197.

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Adams, Elsie, and Mary Louise Briscoe, eds. Up Against the Wall,

M other. Glencoe Press, 1971.

Andersen, Hans Christian. The Snow Queen and Other Tales. New

York: New American Library, 1966.

Aries, Philippe. Centuries o f Childhood: A Social History o f Family Life.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962.

Barber, Benjamin R. Superman and Common M en: Freedom, Anarchy,

and the Revolution. New York: Praeger, 1971.

Baring-Gould, William S. and Ceil, eds. The Annotated Mother Goose.

New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1962.

Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan. New York: Scribners, 1950.

Bataille, Georges. Eroticism. London: John Calder, 1962.

Bebel, August. Woman under Socialism. New York: Schocken Books,

1971-

Beck, Julian. The Life o f the Theatre: The Relation o f the Artist to the

Struggle o f the People. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972.

Bharati, Agehananda. The Tantric Tradition. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, 1970.

Black, Jonathan, ed. Radical Lawyers: Their Role in the Movement and

in the Courts. New York: Avon Books, 1971.

Blofeld, John. The Tantric Mysticism o f Tibet. New York: E. P. Dutton,

1970-

Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Our Bodies, Our Selves: A

Book by and fo r Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

-----. The Masks o f God: Oriental Mythology. New York: Viking,

1962.

211

212

Woman Hating

------ . The Masks o f God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking,

1969.

Chadw ick, N ora. The Celts. H arm ondsw orth: Penguin Books, 1970.

C h u rch w ard , Jam es. The Lost Continent o f M u. New York: P ap erback Library, 1970.

C lebert, Jean-P aul. The Gypsies. H arm ondsw orth: P enguin Books,

1967.

C ohen, J o h n , ed. The Essential Lenny Bruce. New York: B allantine

Books, 1967.

C oon, C arleton S. The History o f Man. H arm ondsw orth: Penguin

Books, 1967.

Crawley, Ernest. The Mystic Rose: A Study o f Primitive Marriage and

o f Primitive Thought in Its Bearing on Marriage. L ondon: S p rin g

Books, 1965.

Davies, R. T rev o r. Four Centuries o f Witch Beliefs. L ondon: M ethuen,

1947-

d e B erg, J e a n . The Image. New York: G rove Press, 1966.

De Crow , K aren. The Young Woman's Guide to Liberation: Alternatives

to a H a lf Life While the Choice Is Still Yours. Indianapolis: Bobbs-

M errill, 1971.

D em ing, B arbara. “T w o Perspectives on W om en’s Struggle, ” Liberation. Vol. 17, No. 10, pp. 3 0 -3 8 .

d e R opp, R obert S. Sex Energy: The Sexual Force in M an and Animals.

New York: Dell, 1969.

Dralys, Lord. The Beautiful Flagellants o f New York. New York: G rove

Press, 1971.

D uniw ay, Abigail Scott. Pathbreaking: An Autobiographical History

o f the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States. New York:

Schocken Books, 1971.

Eliade, M ircea. Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries: The Encounter between

Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities. New York: H a rp e r &

Row, i960.

------ . Shamanism: Archaic Techniques o f Ecstasy. P rinceton: Princeton

U niversity Press, 1964.

Farb, Peter. Man's Rise to Civilisation. L ondon: Paladin, 1971.

Ferenczi, S andor. Thalassa: A Theory o f Genitality. New York: W. W.

N o rto n , 1968.

Figes, Eva. Patriarchal Attitudes. G reenw ich, C onn: Fawcett Publications, 1970.

F irestone, S hulam ith. The Dialectic o f Sex: The Case fo r Feminist Revolution. New York: B antam Books, 1972.

Bibliography

213

Fox, Robin. Kinship and Marriage. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1967.

Francoeur, Robert T. Utopian Motherhood: New Trends in Human

Reproduction. Cranbury, N. J.: A. S. Barnes, 1973.

Goldman, Emma. The Traffic in Women and Other Essays on Feminism.

New York: Times Change Press, 1970.

Goode, William J., ed. The Contemporary American Family. Chicago:

Quadrangle Books, 1971.

Green, Richard, M. D., and John Money, eds. Transsexualism and

Sex Reassignment. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.

Greenwald, Harold, and Aron Krich, eds. The Prostitute in Literature.

New York: Ballantine Books, i960.

Grimm, The Brothers. Household Stories. New York: Dover Publications, 1963.

Grogan, Emmett. Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps. New York:

Avon Books, 1972.

Gunkel, Hermann. The Legends of Genesis: The Biblical Saga and

History. New York: Schocken Books, 1964.

Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New

York: New American Library, 1959.

Hansen, Chadwick. Witchcraft at Salem. New York: New American

Library, 1970.

Harding, M. Esther. Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem. London:

Rider and Company, 1971.

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace and

World, 1963.

Hays, H. R. The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil. London:

Methuen, 1966.

Heline, Gorinne. Mysteries of the Holy Grail. San Francisco: New Age

Press, 1963.

Hole, Christina. Witchcraft in England. London: B. T. Bats ford, 1945.

Holzer, Hans. The Truth about Witchcraft. Garden City: Doubleday

and Company, 1969.

Hughes, Pennethorne. Witchcraft. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1971*

Humana, Charles, and Wang Wu. I lie > in Yang: The Chinese Way

of Love. London: Allan Wingate, 1971.

Jacobs, Joseph, compiler. Celtic Fairy Tales. New York: Dover Publications, 1968.

-----. English Fairy Tales. New York: Dover Publications, 1967.

-----. Indian Fairy Tales. New York: Dover Publications, 1969.

214

Woman Hating

------. More Celtic Fairy Tales. New York: D over Publications, 1968.

Jo h n s to n , Jill. Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution. New York:

Sim on a n d Schuster, 1973.

J u n g , C arl G . t ed. M an and His Symbols. New York: Dell Publishing

C om pany, 1971.

J u n g , C. G. Psyche and Symbol. E dited by V iolet S. d e Laszlo. G arden

City: D oubleday 8c A nchor, 1958.

J u n g , C. G., an d C. K erenyi. Essays on a Science o f Mythology: The

Myth o f the Divine Child and the Mysteries o f Eleusis. Princeton:

P rinceton University Press, 1969.

J u n g , E m m a, an d M arie-Louise von Franz. The Grail Legend. L ondon: H o d d e r an d S toughton, i960.

R an ter, R osabeth Moss. Commitment and Community: Communes and

Utopias in Sociological Perspective. C am bridge, Mass.: H arv ard

U niversity Press, 1972.

K raditor, A ileen S., ed. Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the

History o f American Feminism. Chicago: Q u ad ran g le Books, 1968.

K ram er, H einrich, an d Jam es S prenger. Malleus Maleficarum. T ran s.

M. Sum m ers. L ondon: A rrow Books, 1971.

K ronhausen, Drs. Phyllis an d E b erh ard . Erotic Fantasies: A Study

o f the Sexual Imagination. New York: G rove Press, 1969.

Leach, M aria. The Beginning: Creation Myths around the World. New

York: F unk an d W agnalls, 1956.

L ed erer, W olfgang. The Fear o f Women. New York: H a rc o u rt Brace

Jovanovich, 1968.

L egm an, J. Rationale o f the Dirty Joke: An Analysis o f Sexual Humor.

New York: G rove Press, 1968.

Lenin, V. I. The Emancipation o f Women. New York: In tern atio n al

Publishers, 1970.

L’E strange, Ewen C. Witchcraft and Demonianism. L ondon: H eath

C ran to n , 1933.

Lever, J a n e t an d P e p p e r Schwartz. Women at Yale: Liberating a College

Campus. Indianapolis: Bobbs-M errill, 1971.

Levi, Eliphas. The History o f Magic. L ondon: R ider an d C om pany,

1969-

Levi-Strauss, C laude. Totemism. H arm o n d sw o rth : P enguin Books,

1963.

Levy, H ow ard S. Chinese Footbinding: The History o f a Curious Erotic

Custom. New York: W. Rawls, 1966.

Lewis, I. M. Ecstatic Religion: An Anthropological Study o f Spirit,

Bibliography

215

Possession, and Shamanism. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books,

1971-

Loth, David. The Erotic in Literature. New York: Macfadden-Bartell,

1962.

Lowen, Alexander. The Betrayal o f the Body. London: Collier-Mac-

millan, 1967.

Mallet-Joris, Francoise. The Witches. New York: Paperback Library,

1970.

Mancini, J. G. Prostitutes and Their Parasites: An Historical Survey.

London: Elek Books, 1963.

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into

Freud. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Michelet, Jules. Satanism and Witchcraft. London: Tandem, 1969.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City: Doubleday and Company,

1970.

Mitchell, Juliet. Woman's Estate. New York: Pantheon, 1971.

Morgan, Robin, ed. Sisterhood Is Powerful. New York: Vintage Books,

1970.

Morton, Miriam, ed. A Harvest o f Russian Children's Literature.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Murray, Margaret A. The God o f the Witches. London: Oxford University Press, 1970.

------ . The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1962.

Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: A n Analysis o f the Archetype.

Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1963-

Newton, Huey P.. Revolutionary Suicide. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1973.

Nicholson, Irene. Mexican and Central American Mythology. Feltham:

Paul Hamlyn, 1967.

Oakley, Anne. Sex, Gender and Society. New York: Harper Sc Row,

1972.

Ostrander, Sheila and Lynn Schroeder. Psychic Discoveries behind

the Iron Curtain. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.

Peck, Ellen. The Baby Trap. New York: Bernard Geis, 1971.

Perrault, Charles. Classic French Fairy Tales. New York: Meredith

Press, 1967.

The Pillow-Book o f Sei-Shdnagon. Trans. Arthur Waley. London:

Unwin Books, i960.

216

Woman Hating

Pyle, H ow ard. The Story o f the Champions o f the Round Table. New

York: D over Publications, 1968.

The Quest o f the Holy Grail. T ran s. P. M. M atarasso. H arm o n d sw o rth :

Penguin Books, 1969.

Rafiq, B. A. The Status o f Women in Islam. L ondon: T h e L ondon

M osque, no date.

Reage, Pauline. Story o f O. New York: G rove Press, 1965.