etc. — that our bodies and souls are seared through with the
effects of it.
I suggest to you that any commitment to nonviolence which
is real, which is authentic, must begin in the recognition of the
forms and degrees of violence perpetrated against women by
the gender class men. I suggest to you that any analysis of
violence, or any commitment to act against it, which does not
begin there is hollow, meaningless— a sham which will have,
as its direct consequence, the perpetuation of your servitude. I
suggest to you that any male apostle of so-called nonviolence
who is not committed, body and soul, to ending the violence
against you is not trustworthy. He is not your comrade, not
your brother, not your friend. He is someone to whom your
life is invisible.
As women, nonviolence must begin for us in the refusal to
be violated, in the refusal to be victimized. We must find alternatives to submission, because our submission—to rape, to assault, to domestic servitude, to abuse and victimization of
every sort—perpetuates violence.
The refusal to be a victim does not originate in any act of
resistance as male-derived as killing. The refusal of which I
speak is a revolutionary refusal to be a victim, any time, any
place, for friend or foe. This refusal requires the conscientious
unlearning of all the forms of masochistic submission which
are taught to us as the very content of womanhood. Male
aggression feeds on female masochism as vultures feed on carrion. Our nonviolent project is to find the social, sexual, political, and cultural forms which repudiate our programmed submissive behaviors, so that male aggression can find no dead
flesh on which to feast.
When I say that we must establish values which originate in
sisterhood, I mean to say that we must not accept, even for a
moment, male notions of what nonviolence is. Those notions
have never condemned the systematic violence against us. The
men who hold those notions have never renounced the male
behaviors, privileges, values, and conceits which are in and of
themselves acts of violence against us.
We will diminish violence by refusing to be violated. We
will repudiate the whole patriarchal system, with its sadomasochistic institutions, with its social scenarios of dominance and submission all based on the male-over-female model,
when we refuse conscientiously, rigorously, and absolutely to
be the soil in which male aggression, pride, and arrogance can
grow like wild weeds.
7
L esb ian P rid e
For me, being a lesbian means three things—
First, it means that I love, cherish, and respect women in
my mind, in my heart, and in my soul. This love of women is
the soil in which my life is rooted. It is the soil of our common
life together. My life grows out of this soil. In any other soil, I
