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
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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,
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
