Right-wing Women

figure whom they wanted to protect from racist pogroms. Rape

was seen as a racist ploy: not something real in itself used in a

racist context to isolate and destroy black men in specific and strategic w ays, but a fabrication, a figment of the racist imagination.

The girls were idealistic because, unlike the boys, many of them

had been raped; their lives were at stake. The girls were idealists

especially because they believed in peace and freedom so much that

they even thought it was intended for them too. They knew that

their mothers were not free—they saw the small, constrained,

female lives—and they did not want to be their mothers. They

accepted the boys’ definition of sexual freedom because it, more

than any other idea or practice, made them different from their

mothers. While their mothers kept sex secret and private, with so

much fear and shame, the girls proclaimed sex their right, their

pleasure, their freedom. They decried the stupidity of their mothers and allied themselves on overt sexual terms with the longhaired boys who wanted peace, freedom, and fucking everywhere.

This was a world vision that took girls out of the homes in which

their mothers were dull captives or automatons and at the same

time turned the whole world, potentially, into the best possible

home. In other words, the girls did not leave home in order to find

sexual adventure in a sexual jungle; they left home to find a

warmer, kinder, larger, more embracing home.

Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number

of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group

sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of

gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck

had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred—it

occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed

with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because

heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to

be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream

for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy

that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality

based on what men and women had in common, what the adults

tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a

sexual community more like childhood— before girls were crushed

under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence:

transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the

adults who made w ar not love. It was— for the girls— a dream of

being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling

equality, not the traditional male dominance.

Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make

it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man,

did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the