us seek to develop radical forms of community, to live
good, simple, natural lives. Some of us engage in explicitly political actions —opposing illegitimate wars, resisting the uses of illegitimate authority —we wonder
how to kill pigs without becoming pigs, we are immersed in the
and we simultaneously seek to develop alternatives to
those forms. There are diminishing numbers of peace
freaks among us (totally committed to nonviolent revo-
Woman as Victim:
77
lution) and quite a few roaring anarchists. We are, at
least in our Amerikan manifestation, white, children
o f privilege, children o f liberals and reformists. We
were brought up in pretty, clean homes, had lots o f
privacy, friends, companionship from family and peers.
We are unbelievably well educated —we went to fine
suburban schools (mostly public) where we experienced
physical and intellectual regimentation which we found
unbearable; we went to the best colleges and universities (mostly private) where we studied anthropology, Freud, Marx, Norman O. Brown, and Marcuse too,
with the finest minds who, it turned out, were chicken
shit when it came to applying egalitarian principles in
the classroom or outside o f it. T h e universities where
we studied all o f these disembodied ideas continued
doing defense work for the Amerikan government. We
have had our share o f disaster and despair: the acid
tragedies, the Weatherman tragedies, the needle tragedies. Many o f us have known jail, and we have all seen friends die. We are older than we ever thought we
would be.
What it comes down to is this: through the use o f
drugs, through sexual living out, through radical political action, we broke through the bourgeois mental sets which were our inheritance but retained the humanism crucial to the liberalism o f our parents. O ur goals are simple enough to understand: we want to
humanize the planet, to break down the national structures which separate us as people, the corporate structures which separate us into distinct classes, the racist structures which separate us according to skin color;
to conserve air, water, life in its many forms; to create
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Woman Hating
communities which are more than habitable—communities in which people are free, in which people have what they need, in which groups of people do not accumulate power, or money, or goods, through the exploitation of other people. So when we look at a sex newspaper, made by people like us, we demand that
it take some positive step in the direction we want to
go: we demand that it incorporate our radical attitudes,
the knowledge that acid and other parts of our lifestyle
have given us. And, most importantly, we refuse to
permit it to reinforce the dual-role sexist patterns and
consciousness of this culture, the very patterns and consciousness which oppress us as women, which enslave us as human beings.
