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.
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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
all. one can think
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
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,