Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

As the most obvious male Christ figure of our time, he

should know.

C H A P T E R 5

Woman as Victim:

Suck

We move from the straight literary pornography o f our

forebears, represented by Story of O and The Image, into

another realm, that o f the sex newspaper, born o f the

hip culture (or, as we like to think, counter-culture),

post sex revolution (Freudian, Reichian, Mailerian,

Brucean, Ginsbergian), post pot, post acid, post pill:

post Them and into the world o f Us. We move into the

realm o f here and now, our own turned-on, liberated

time and space, into the social world for which we are

responsible. Since we seek in that world freedom as

women, defined in radical terms, achieved through a

concretely lived lifestyle, newspapers like Suck, Oz, and

Screw are important. Playboy is Them —no doubt Kissinger and Sinatra sleep with it tucked under the pillow.

But the counter-culture sex papers are created by

people who inhabit our world (freaks, drug users, radicals, longhairs, whatever the appropriate term might be), people who share our values, our concerns — people

who talk o f liberation. The counter-culture sex papers

would be a part o f our community and so we are

obliged, if we are a community, to approach them critically and seriously, to ask what they bring to us and what they take from us.

75

76

Woman Hating

“Us” —who are we? Jerry Rubin says that we are the

Children of Amerika. Eldridge Cleaver calls us the

Children of BLOOD. It is our parents, Amerika,

BLOOD, who through their moral bankruptcy and

genocidal ways have forced us from the womb onto the

streets of the nation. It is our parents, Amerika,

BLOOD, whom we refuse to be, whose work we refuse

to do. We are the survivors of Flower Power, now adult,

with our own children. We are the tribes of Woodstock

Nation, now in Diaspora, roaming the whole earth. We

are the New Left, wounded, in disarray. We are not

yet extinct, and we are not nearly finished. Our past

is only prologue.

Generally we are between 24 and 35 years old; have

used acid, mescaline, psilocibin, etc., with some frequency; use grass and hashish often with no mystification; have probably used cocaine, amphetamines, or barbiturates at some time; have frequent sexual relations, many of which are absolutely casual; reject the nuclear family and seek forms of community antagonistic to it. We are the people who listened to Leary, Ginsberg, Bruce. Politically we are radicals. Some of