Allen Ginsberg
The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave,
what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.
We are bom into a sex role which is determined by
visible sex, or gender.
We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth
into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.
In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct
consequence o f the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.
Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven.
There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex
there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there.
We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that
death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex,
the body. We recognize the body as the source of our
suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women,
bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role
which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any
real self-becoming or self-realization.
Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood
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Onceuponatime: The Roles
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models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes
us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil
will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending,
then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we
forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince
searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic
prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as
the substratum o f male-female relation — the terror
remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to
be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified o f the
wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts o f memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively
evil.
Terror, then, is our real theme.
The Mother as a Figure of Terror
Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the
woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on
which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.
George Gilder,
Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good
queen who sat at her window and did embroidery.
She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in
her life —and 3 drops o f blood fell from it onto the
