Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics

and sensitivity, multiple orgasms, erotic sensitivity all over the

body (which needn’t— and shouldn’t—be localized or contained genitally), in tenderness, in self-respect and in absolute mutual respect. For men I suspect that this transformation

begins in the place they most dread— that is, in a limp penis. I

think that men will have to give up their precious erections

and begin to make love as women do together. I am saying

that men will have to renounce their phallocentric personalities, and the privileges and powers given to them at birth as a consequence of their anatomy, that they will have to excise

everything in them that they now value as distinctively “male. ”

No reform, or matching of orgasms, will accomplish this.

I have been reading excerpts from the diary of Sophie Tolstoy, which I found in a beautiful book called Revelations: Diaries of Women, edited by Mary Jane Moffat and Charlotte Painter. Sophie Tolstoy wrote: And the main thing is not to love. See what I have done by loving him so deeply! It is so painful and humiliating; but he thinks that it is merely silly. “You say one thing and always do another. ”

But what is the good of arguing in this superior manner, when

I have nothing in me but this humiliating love and a bad temper;

and these two things have been the cause of all my misfortunes,

for my temper has always interfered with my love. I want nothing but his love and sympathy, and he won’t give it to me; and all my pride is trampled in the mud; I am nothing but a miser­

able crushed worm, whom no one wants, whom no one loves, a

useless creature with morning sickness, and a big belly, two rotten teeth, and a bad temper, a battered sense of dignity, and a love which nobody wants and which nearly drives me insane. 2

Does anyone really think that things have changed so much

since Sophie Tolstoy made that entry in her diary on October

25, 1886? And what would you tell her if she came here

today, to her sisters? Would you have handed her a vibrator

and taught her how to use it? Would you have given her the

techniques of fellatio that might better please Mr. Tolstoy?

Would you have suggested to her that her salvation lay in

becoming a “sexual athlete”? Learning to cruise? Taking as

many lovers as Leo did? Would you tell her to start thinking

of herself as a “person” and not as a woman?

Or might you have found the courage, the resolve, the conviction to be her true sisters—to help her to extricate herself from the long darkness of Leo’s shadow; to join with her in

changing the very organization and texture of this world, still

constructed in 1974 to serve him, to force her to serve him?

I suggest to you that Sophie Tolstoy is here today, in the

bodies and lives of many sisters. Do not fail her.

3

R em em bering the W itches

I dedicate this talk to Elizabeth Gould Davis, author of The

First Sex, who several months ago killed herself and who toward the end of her life was a victim of rape; to Anne Sexton, poet, who killed herself on October 4, 1974; to Inez Garcia,

thirty years old, wife and mother, who was a few weeks ago

sentenced in California to five years to life imprisonment for

killing the three-hundred-pound man who held her down while

another man raped her; and to Eva Diamond, twenty-six years

old, whose child was taken from her five years ago when she

was declared an unfit mother because she was convicted of