Tags

  • Published on

    A Lesbian Take on "The Bonobo Sisterhood"

    Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews
    Image description
    "The Bonobo Appropriation."  There, I fixed it. 
     
    What am I talking about? I’m talking about The Bonobo Sisterhood: Revolution Through Female Alliance, a new book by Diane L. Rosenfeld.

    I'm not happy with it. Read on...
     
    The book is a passionate plea for women to model ourselves after the bonobos, a species of great apes. They are the last of the great apes to be scientifically described, because they weren’t recognized as a separate species until 1929. The bonobos began to get a lot of press during the Second Wave, because, unlike females from other species of great apes-- including humans, the bonobo females are empowered. They are not stalked, threatened, battered, raped, or murdered by the males. Their culture and their species are peaceful.
    Image description
    Dr.Rosenfeld, founding director of the Gender Violence Program at Harvard Law School, rightfully identifies the bonobos as a species from whom we have much to learn. In fact, she urges women to be “bonobos,” to hear the “bonobo call” of our sisters in distress, to subscribe to the “Declaration of Unified Independence from Patriarchal Violence” and the “Preamble to the Bonobo Sisterhood Constitution.” The entire book appears to be an homage to female bonobos and a call to us humans to reverse our evolutionary course away from the path of the patriarchally violent chimps and in the direction of the bonobos.

    Rosenfeld’s credentials on the subject of violence against women are impressive: She was the  first Senior Counsel in the Office on Violence Against Women at the United States Department of Justice, and before that she was an Executive Assistant Attorney General at the Illinois Attorney General’s Office. She’s got a law degree the university of Wisconsin and a secondary law degree from Harvard.  Her research areas include “Title IX and campus sexual assault prevention and response; prevention of intimate partner homicide; and addressing commercial sexual exploitation of women and girls.”[from the Harvard Law website]
    Image description
    She has spent a long time studying what happens to us, and she has spent a long time studying the jurisprudence that enables perpetrators and betrays us into their hands over and over. I am, frankly, in awe of her focus and her activism.

    What I am not in awe of is her appropriation of the bonobo. Her book is, frankly, homophobic.  What sets these female apes apart from all the other great apes is their sexuality. Take a look:

    “More often than the males, female bonobos engage in mutual [that is "same-sex"] genital-rubbing behavior, possibly to bond socially with each other, thus forming a female nucleus of bonobo society. The bonding among females enables them to dominate most of the males. Adolescent females often leave their native community to join another community. This migration mixes the bonobo gene pools, providing genetic diversity. Sexual bonding with other females establishes these new females as members of the group.” [Wikipedia]

    And how did this amazing adaptation arise, you ask? Well...

    “Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo 'is maybe half' that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is 'three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks.' In scientific literature, the female–female behavior of bonobos pressing genitals together is often referred to as genito-genital (GG) rubbing. This sexual activity happens within the immediate female bonobo community and sometimes outside of it. Ethologist Jonathan Balcombe stated that female bonobos rub their clitorises together rapidly for ten to twenty seconds, and this behavior, ‘which may be repeated in rapid succession, is usually accompanied by grinding, shrieking, and clitoral engorgement;’ he added that it is estimated that they engage in this practice ‘about once every two hours’ on average." [Wikipedia]
    Image description
    Tribadism once every two hours, all day, every day.  Females across the board preferring sex with each other to sex with males. Every two hours. Yeah, that would definitely change the culture, not to mention the course of history.

    Dr. Rosenfeld makes absolutely ZERO mention of bonobo sexuality, except to note that the females, as a result of their remarkable sisterhood, have empowered themselves to have sexual autonomy. In other words, she puts the cart before the horse and then eliminates the horse altogether.

    Understandably, that cart is not going anywhere.

    Without female-to-female sexual bonding there is no bonobo sisterhood, no powerful alliance to counter male aggression, no acceptance of females into new tribes, no intergenerational female bonds.

    Her omission is no oversight. It flies in the face of primatology and common sense. This evolved, large, frontally-located clitoris is the engine that drives the female bonding. In fact, primatologist Franz de Waal notes in his book Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist that the levels of oxytocin, the “love drug,” are higher in the urine of female bonobos after sex with another female... higher than after sex with males. Enhanced oxytocin production has been seen as a hormone to facilitate childbirth, but it is probable that it significantly enhances bonding.
    Image description
    Dr. Rosenfeld wants to have her cake and eat it. She wants the bonobo empowerment, but  she wants it to happen in heteropatriarchy. In fact, she wants it to prop up heteronormativity. She wants to lift up the culture of bonobos as a model for human culture. She wants to write a best-selling book on the thesis that all women need to do is understand the potency of female bonding in order to emulate it. She doesn’t want to have to lose any readers by bringing up the persistent, round-the-clock, same-sex, genital activity that is the single most obvious, unique, and prominent behavioral trait of the female bonobos.

    Because if she did, she might have to acknowledge that this same-sex activity among females, most notably among lesbians, does indeed lend itself to unique female bonding. Lesbian history shows us over and over how lesbian women have confronted males, established alternative all-female institutions, led the fight for feminist social reforms, and developed counter-cultural narratives to challenge the patriarchy.
    Image description
    Dr. Rosenfeld would have her readers believe that the bonobos were a species whose females achieved autonomy through mystically evolved feminist brains instead of enormous clitorises. She wants us to believe that heterosexual women can train themselves to think like them, and form alliances as enduring and as powerful as theirs just by using their heads.

    This attitude is hugely disrespectful to the millions of women across the millennia who have not wanted to be terrorized and abused. Every woman knows that it is males who perpetrate and aggress against us and against our children, especially our daughters. If the solution was as simple as reading a book about the power of female alliances, I’m sure that book would have been written in hieroglyphs and those alliances would have been made centuries ago.

    There is another omission in Rosenfeld’s book. She fails to note that even though chimp culture is patriarchal and the male chimpanzees will attack and batter female chimpanzees, there are no records of the males murdering the females. In fact, humans are the only great ape species that murders its females. After all, how anti-evolutionary can you get... murdering the mothers of the tribe? So, how is it that the chimps don’t murder the females?

    Well... Chimpanzees are sexually segregated. The males prefer the company of males, and the females prefer the company of females. Females do not go off with male partners and live in isolation with them. The females stay together, raise their offspring together, and sleep together within earshot of each other. When they do mate, it is in the open and in daylight, where other chimps can witness and intervene.
    Image description
    But the female bonding of the chimps is not mentioned either. Advocating separatism would certainly alienate a heterosexual readership participating in a culture of monogamous pair-bonding.

    The solution to male violence against women is not cherry-picking primate outcomes and mistaking them as starting points. The solution is not as simple as “sisterhood.”  If she had consulted with lesbians, studied our sexual bonding and alliances, she would have understood that our culture constitutes a resistance movement. It comes at a price.That price is precisely the stigma that Rosenfeld hopes to avoid with the unscientific omissions in her thesis.

    I am reminded of the fable of the drunk person who is looking for their lost keys under the lamppost, when they dropped them somewhere in the dark. Rosenfeld’s search is a cheerful one, and positivity abounds. Lots of light. This won’t be hard at all. We just need to wake up to this new idea.  But the key to solving male violence lies outside the glow of the heteronormative, patriarchal lamppost. I would submit, considering the bonobo example, that heteronormativity is itself a patriarchal concept. Historically, it has never worked in our favor. The key to female autonomy lies in the culture and history of lesbians. The bonding is in the body, and it always will be.
    Rosenfeld is extremely knowledgeable about the laws that hold women back. She advocates for changes in the laws around self-defense that acknowledge the patriarchal threats to women, that give us the right to participate in collective self-defense. She advocates for changes in conspiracy laws that acknowledge the ways that male alliances enable large-scale sexual abuse. And finally, she advocates for believing women as credible witnesses.

    And yet she gaslights her readers, throwing lesbians under the bus, and arguing for the "logic of the bonobo sisterhood," when that very logic rests on a foundation of immediate gratification: seeking maximum sexual pleasure and finding it with other females.  The bonobo alliances are effect, not cause.

    Rosenfeld has an whole section on the subject of compliance sex, excoriating it and expressing a longing for a social system that precludes unwanted sex.  The sad truth is that  her book is itself an artifact of compliance sex culture.

    Self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians. Alliances to protect women and children? Collective self-defense? Check out the history of lesbians in any reform movement for women. Check out our history with female-only educational institutions, with the WAVES and the WAACs (female-only military branches), with the battered women's shelters, the rape crisis lines, the suffrage movement on two continents. Refusal of compliance sex? We are the champions. In fact, our resistance to unwanted sex is the source of our stigma. The very stigma that this book so rigidly and so glaringly enforces.

    The Bonobo Sisterhood is a Trojan horse of a book, and I am calling the author to account for her damaging, disingenuous, homophobic, science-denial omissions and her appropriations.
    Picture
  • Published on

    Remembering Wilma Mankiller (1945-2010)

    Civil Rights In Memoriam Women's History
    Originally published in Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism, Summer 2010, Northampton, MA.
    Picture
    Image description
    “Prior to my election, young Cherokee girls would never have thought that they might grow up and become chief.”--Wilma Mankiller
     
    Wilma Mankiller, the first female Chief of the Cherokee Nations died on April 6, 2010. She served as their Principal Chief from and 1985 to 1995.
     
    Her story contains and reflects the history of her people, retracing archetypal paths of displacement and homecoming. And her story is the story of a powerful woman—negotiating motherhood and intimate partnerships in a patriarchal landscape, meeting and overcoming resistance to serving in a leadership position. It is also a story of a person living with disabilities, both congenital and accident-related. Mankiller’s lifework was a steady demonstration of what could be possible, for an individual, for a community, for a nation. As her best-selling autobiography emphasizes, political and personal resistance require an understanding of place, knowledge of one’s history, spiritual roots, and a love of one’s people.
    Image description
    Mankiller’s father was Charley Mankiller, a Cherokee, and her mother, Irene, was of Dutch-Irish descent, but acculturated to Cherokee life. She had ten siblings and grew up on her father’s allotment, near Rocky Mountain, Oklahoma. She remembers her first ten years at “Mankiller Flats” with affection. She and her siblings would walk three miles each way to school, but, in Mankiller’s words, “I didn’t know the difference between being poor and having money until one day at school. A little girl… saw my flour-sack underwear while we were in the outhouse. She ran and told some other girls, and they all teased me about it. That was really the first time I had any inkling we were different.”
     
    In 1950, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) came up with a plan for dealing with what they termed “the Indian Problem.” This new policy, ominously called “termination,” had been hatched by Dillon S. Myer, the then-commissioner of the BIA. His credentials for the job? He had been the director of the Japanese War Relocation Authority that, during World War II, had implemented the internment of Japanese-American citizens in camps in California. As Mankiller notes in her autobiography, “The Cherokees and other native tribes should have recognized that the assorted Trails of Tears of our ancestors served in large part as models for the removal of the Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americas in the 1940’s.”
    Image description
    On August 1, 1953, Congress adopted a resolution making Indians “subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States…”
     
    This policy became the excuse for breaking up Native communities and putting tribal lands, no longer non-taxable, on the market. Mankiller’s family was offered the option of “relocation” to a large, urban city. Her father, having been taken from his home as a boy and forced to attend an Indian boarding school, was reluctant to leave his land, but eventually became persuaded that moving to San Francisco would offer a better future for his children.
     
    Mankiller remembers this government facilitated relocation as her own personal “Trail of Tears”—referring to the infamous forced relocations from 1831 to 1838 of five autonomous tribes living in the Deep South. Four thousand of the 15,000 “relocated” Cherokee died from exposure, starvation, and disease during this forced march to Oklahoma.
     
    “No one pointed a gun at me or at members of my family. No show of force was used. It was not necessary… I learned through this ordeal about the fear and anguish that occur when you give up your home, your community, and everything you have ever known to move far away to a strange place. I cried for days, not unlike the children who had stumbled down the Trail of Tears so many years before. I wept tears … tears from my history, from my tribe's past. They were Cherokee tears.”
    Image description
    The better life that the Mankillers had been promised turned out to be low-paying factory jobs and housing in an urban ghetto. Feeling neglected by her parents, who had their hands full supporting the large family, Mankiller became a rebellious teenager, running away to her grandmother’s ranch near Modesto. She had to run away five times, before her family finally allowed her to stay. She credits her year on the ranch as a turning point in her life, where she took an active role in the farm, shadowing her tough and outspoken grandmother.
     
    At the end of this year, she moved back in with her family, who were now living in Hunter’s Point, an area near the shipyards that had been settled by African American families fleeing the Dust Bowl. By 1960, Hunter’s Point was a neighborhood filled with racial tension and gang violence. Mankiller writes how her years on these “mean streets” began to shape her perception of the world: “The women are especially strong. Each day they face daunting problem as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their children, but of the whole community.”
    Image description
    After high school, Mankiller moved in with her sister, taking a job as a clerical worker. She met an Ecuadoran student from an aristocratic family, and after a dizzying summer courtship, they flew to Reno to get married. Mankiller was seventeen. A year later, she gave birth to a daughter, and then two years later, she had a second daughter. She began to take classes at a community college and then, through a minorities educational opportunity program, she entered San Francisco State University. By the mid-1960’s the Bay Area was exploding politically and culturally. Mankiller describes taking her daughters to Haight-Ashbury: “…I think the people of the Haight had to be as curious about us as we were about them. My daughters wore shiny patent-leather shoes and little-girl dresses, and I looked like what I was at the time, a young housewife who liked to observe… but was unwilling to get fully involved.”
     
    What changed all that was the Indian occupation of Alcatraz Island in the fall of 1969. The island had been occupied briefly five years earlier by a group of Sioux, as a symbolic act of reclamation. In a hundred-year-old Sioux treaty, the US government had agreed that any male Native American older than eighteen, whose tribe had been party to the treaty, could file for a homestead on abandoned or unused federal property. As the island had been declared surplus federal property since the closing of the penitentiary in 1963, Native American activists were claiming their right to take possession.
    Image description
    In October 1969, a fire of suspicious origin gutted the American Indian Center in San Francisco. In an act of protest, fourteen Native Americans landed on Alcatraz and claimed it in the name of “Indians of All Tribes.” Within a day, the Coast Guard arrived to escort the protesters off the island, but ten days later, nearly a hundred activists returned—this time with provisions, and the occupation lasted for nineteen months. During this time, Mankiller would visit the island with her daughters, running support for four of her siblings and their children who had joined the protest. In her words, “The occupation of Alcatraz excited me like nothing ever had before. It helped to center me and caused me to focus on my own rich and valuable Cherokee heritage.”
     
    Mankiller was also feeling the effects of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and against her husband’s wishes, she bought herself a car and began driving to tribal events up and down the coast. She took a job directing the Native American Youth Center in East Oakland and began volunteering with the Pit River people in Northern California, helping them with their fierce battle to regain tribal land from a utility company. Meanwhile, her brother Richard had gone to Pine Ridge and participated in the shoot-out at Wounded Knee.
     
    Mankiller separated from her husband and moved with her daughters to Oakland. Her husband, after picking up nine-year-old Gina for a trip to the circus, informed Mankiller that he would not be returning her. After an agonizing year of separation, he finally brought Gina back, and Mankiller, afraid that he would try to abduct her daughter again, decided it was time to go home to Oklahoma.
    Image description
    “I looked to the east, where the sun begins its daily journey. That was where I had to go, not to heal for a few weeks after a marital squabble, not to lay a loved one to rest and then leave again—I had to go back to stay.”
     
    She finished her degree in social work and was hired to work for the Cherokee Nation as an economic stimulus coordinator. Her daughters were adapting to their new school, Mankiller was building her home on ancestral lands, and everything seemed on track—and then tragedy struck. She was in a car accident that crushed her face, her legs, and broke her ribs. Worst of all, her best friend had been the driver of the car that hit her, and she had not survived her injuries. The accident required two months’ hospitalization and seventeen surgeries, and it became another turning point.
     
    Having come so close to dying—“walking into the spirit world,” as she put it—Mankiller began to turn toward the Cherokee spiritual path, seeing herself as “the woman who lived before and the woman who lives afterward.”
     
    Shortly after this, she was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis and underwent surgery for removal of her thymus. Drawing on the strength of her ancestors and of present-day Cherokee medicine people, she regained her health, returning to her work “with a fury.” She founded the Cherokee Nation Community Development Department and managed the self-help construction project of a sixteen-mile water pipe that revitalized an impoverished Native community.
    Image description
    The project affirmed her belief that the Cherokee people had the capacity to solve their own problems, and it also brought her together with the man who would become her life partner and best friend—Charlie Soap, a full-blooded Cherokee who worked with the tribal Housing Authority.
     
    In 1983 she was asked to run for deputy chief of the Cherokee Nation. Stunned by the sexism she encountered, Mankiller was accused of being an affront to God, and of making the Cherokees a national laughingstock. She even had foes within her own campaign, but she managed to win the election. In 1985, when the Principal Chief was called to Washington, she inherited his office for the remainder of his term, and then ran on her own for Principal Chief and was elected for two more terms. The Cherokee Nation membership is currently 290,000, making it the second largest tribe in the country, after the Navaho. Mankiller was not only the principal guardian of Cherokee tradition and customs, but she managed a budget of seventy-five million dollars. She saw that much of this income went into health care, education, and job training.
    Image description
    Mankiller had been diagnosed in her twenties with polycystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that ran in her family, and in 1990, she underwent an operation to replace one of her affected kidneys. Her brother Don was the donor.
     
    In 1995, she made the decision to retire from public office, but she remained a force in tribal affairs, offering counsel and mediation. Later she taught as a guest professor Dartmouth College. In 1998, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton. Mankiller’s health problems continued to escalate, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer and lymphoma. In 2010, the cancer metastasized to her pancreas, and she died on April 6, at the age of sixty-four.
     
    Mankiller wrote, “Western movies always seemed to show Indian women washing clothes at the creek and men with a tomahawk or spear in their hands, adorned with lots of feathers. That image has stayed in some people's minds. Many think we’re either visionaries, ‘noble savages,’ squaw drudges or tragic alcoholics. We’re very rarely depicted as real people who have greater tenacity in terms of trying to hang on to our culture and values system than most people.” Her courageous life of leadership and activism has given the world a visible alternative to the racist stereotypes.
    Picture
  • Published on

    Terri Lynn Jewell: In Memoriam

    Civil Rights In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History Reviews
    Originally published in  Womanist Theory and Research, Spring/ Summer 1996, Athens, GA and and off our backs, May 1996.
    Picture

    Terri Lynn Jewell 1954-1995

    Image description
    Terri Lynn Jewell, a self-described "Black lesbian feminist poet and writer," died on Sunday, November 26, 1995, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Jewell's work has appeared in more than 300 publications, including Sinister Wisdom, Woman of Power, Sojourner, Kuumba, The American Voice, Calyx, The African-American Review, and The Black Scholar. Her writings have also appeared in the anthologies Riding Desire and A Lesbian of Color Anthology. Her calendar of Black women's history, Our Names are Many, is scheduled for publication by Crossing Press in 1996, and at the time of her death she was editing a collection of Black lesbian poets.

    Jewell was the editor of The Black Woman's Gumbo Ya Ya (Crossing Press, 1993), an anthology of quotations by Black women. In her introduction, she writes: "This collection was born out of my personal need for affirmation as a Black woman. I needed a coping mechanism for the growing conservatism in this nation... We are all here, calling out to and reaching one another, gathering at one another's feet and sharing the sustenance that has kept us alive and moving in the directions we must go."
    Image description
    The quotations she selected are a testimonial to the values she expressed in her life and in her writing:

    "There's nothing neat and tidy about me, like a nice social revolution. With me goes a mad, passionate, insane, screaming world of ten thousand devils
    and the man or God who lifts the lid off this suppressed world does so at his peril."     - Bessie Head

    "From my own study of the question, the colored woman deserves greater credit for what she has done and is doing than blame for what she cannot so soon overcome." - Fannie Barrier Williams

    "... victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage...
    What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that
    comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an
    unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is
    the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible."     - Paula Giddings
    Image description
    "The woman who takes a woman lover lives dangerously in patriarchy."
    - Cheryl Clarke

    "If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings, and deeds of black women, experiences that make the realities of being black in America look very different from what men have written." - Mary Helen Washington

    "Being a black woman means frequent spells of impotent, self-consuming
    rage."     - Michele Wallace

    "... I know that we must reclaim those bones in the Atlantic Ocean... All those people who said "no" and jumped ship... We don't have a marker, an
    expression, a song that we all use to acknowledge them... we have all that
    power that we don't tap; we don't tap into the ancestral presence in those
    waters."    - Toni Cade Bambara

    "A Home where we are unable to voice our criticisms is not a genuine Home.
    Nor is a genuine Home one where you assimilate, integrate and disappear.
    For being invisible is the same as not being at Home. Not being at Home
    enough to be precisely who you are without any denials of language or
    culture."    - From the Introduction to Charting the Journey
    Image description
    "I am both Black and a woman... And yet I am continually asked to prioritize my consciousness; is race more important; is gender more important? Which is more severe, etc.? The fallacy lies not in struggling with the answer, in trying to figure out which is the correct answer for the group at hand, but the fallacy lies with the question itself."- Patricia Hill Collins

    "We exist as women who are black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle - because, on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world."- Michele Wallace

    "... right to life is not inherent, but is by grace of... an enemy. I think that
    those who so loudly proclaim perfect freedom call out triumphantly before
    being out of the difficulty."    - Mary Shadd Cary
    Image description
    "Homophobia divides black people as political allies, it cuts off political growth, stifles revolution, and perpetuates patriarchal domination."- Cheryl Clarke

    "Manasa lambda manify: atao mafy, rovitra; atao malemy, tsy afa-tseroka." (Like washing thin fabric: wash it hard and it will tear; wash it gently and you will not get the dirt out.) - Malagasy proverb

    "One of the greatest gifts of Black feminism to ourselves has been to make it a little easier simply to be Black and female. A Black feminist analysis has enabled us to understand that we are not hated and abused because there is something wrong with us, but our status and treatment is absolutely prescribed by the racist, misogynistic system under which we live."- Barbara Smith

    "After distress, solace." - Swahili proverb
  • Published on

    Marilyn Monroe's Shoes

    Child Abuse Rape Women's History
    Originally published in Matrifocus: Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman, Beltane 2006, vol. 5-3.
    Picture

    Marilyn's scarlet satin, rhinestone-encrusted stilettos by Salvatore Ferragamo. Selling Price: $48,300

    Image description
    Much of what the media portrays as women's sexuality looks suspiciously like dissociative identity disorder.  Marilyn Monroe's seductive behaviors, for example, bear more resemblance to those of a captive child appeasing an adult perpetrator than those of a grown woman engaging in an empowering and mutually satisfying sexual interaction.  And, indeed, why wouldn’t they? 
     
    The pop cultural icon for female heterosexuality spent her childhood in eleven foster homes and one orphanage.  Eleven foster homes.  One orphanage.   By her own account, she was a survivor of multiple episodes of child sexual abuse.  Her mother?  Mentally ill and committed to an asylum. Shortly after Marilyn’s fifteenth birthday,  her legal guardian Grace McKee brokered a so-called marriage for her.  In other words, Marilyn Monroe was legally prostituted as a teenager.  Before she was twenty-five, she had already made three attempts at suicide; by thirty-six, she was dead.  Marilyn called her first husband “Daddy,” she called second husband (Joe Dimaggio) “Pa,” and she called third husband (Arthur Miller) “Pops.”  Apparently it wasn’t just her heart that belonged to daddy.
    Image description
    But this profoundly traumatized woman who died such a tragic, early death has become, not a symbol for a movement against child sexual abuse, but an icon of female sexuality.  What does it say about popular culture that its sex goddess was a desperately unhappy, suicidal,  incest survivor with dissociative identity disorders —  a woman who was  raised homeless, abandoned by one female guardian and prostituted by another?   Can anyone really believe that Marilyn Monroe’s sexuality existed independent of her personal history —  that it was not intimately connected with behaviors learned during a childhood in which she was perpetually at the mercy of strangers, and that, rather than being an attribute of empowerment, it was more the strategy of impotence?
    Image description
    What have been described as “seductive behaviors,” were, in fact, an aggregate of cues developed in a perpetrator-victim scenario, and it is instructive for women to note the universality of this code among males who choose to read them at face value.  Ask these same men to imitate Marilyn Monroe’s facial expressions, postures, or speech patterns, and they will be quick to tell you how ridiculous, how childish, how undignified  they feel. 

    Apparently behaviors that are seen as natural and even desirable for women, are read as degrading and absurd for men.  The mystique of femininity or the bald facts of dominance?   The sexual behavior for women that patriarchy wants to idealize is identical to that of an enslaved child. 
     
    At a recent auction of her personal belongings, a pair of Marilyn’s rhinestone-encrusted, stiletto-heel pumps was sold  for $48,000.   A high price to pay for shoes, but cheap compared to the cost of walking in them.
  • Published on

    A Poem for Rachel Crites

    Child Abuse In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism Lesbian History
    Copyright 2007 Carolyn Gage
    Originally published on the Ugly Ducklings Campaign Website, 2007
    The Virginia Medical Examiner ruled on Monday, [February 5, 2007] the two missing Montgomery County girls died of carbon monoxide poisoning, and it was an act of suicide.
     
    ... there were no empty bottles of pills or alcohol, but investigators did find the keys turned in the “on” position and the car had run out of gas.
     
    He said authorities later found the bodies of two females in the car's front seats.
     
    Loudoun County investigators confirmed early Saturday that the victims were Rachel Samantha Smith, 16, of the 14000 block of Platinum Drive in Potomac, and Rachel Lacy Crites, 18, of the 600 block of Gate Stone Drive in Gaithersburg.
     
    The two went missing Jan. 19. ---MyDeathSpace.com
     
    Picture

    And she said,
    “Wherever I end up laying . . .
    I want to stay with my true love . . .
    With my true love . . .
    Next to her.”

    She said:

    “This is my choice.”
    She said.
    “This is my choice.”
    “I’m sorry.”

    And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry. And I’m sorry.

    I’m sorry for every sorry time you had to hear “gay” like it was something
             bad.
    I’m sorry for every sorry time they called you dyke and didn’t mean that you
             were fierce, and strong, and true to loving women.
    I'm sorry for the sorry Catholic church that called you a sinner.
    I’m sorry for all the sorry teachers who never taught you how natural, how
              normal it is for women to love women and for girls to love girls, and
              that many of the most brilliant, most daring, most courageous women
              in history were lesbians.

    I’m sorry.

    And if it was up to me,
    I would bury you,
    Bury you with your true love,
    And her with you.

    And I’m sorry for the suffocation
    That had nothing to do with CO2.
    And I’m sorry for the long, slow freezing
    That had nothing to do with temperature.
    And I’m sorry they took so long,
    Took too long,
    To locate you.

    Because they’ll never find you now.

    And if it was up to me,
    I would bury you,
    Bury you with your true love,
    And her with you.

    And on the stone, I’d carve
    Your last words
    In deep granite gashes,
    Too deep to wear away,

    Those sorry words
    You left
    To a sorry world
    Rachel, I would carve,

    “I’m sorry.”
  • Published on

    Caitlin Allen: In Memoriam

    In Memoriam Lesbian Feminism
    Originally published in Lesbian Connection, 2013
    Picture
    Caitlin Allen died Thursday, March 14, 2013 at the age of thirty-nine on her farm up in Starks, Maine.
     
    She was an artist, a farmer, a farrier, a landscaper, and a carpenter. She moved to Maine from Pittsburgh in 1995 with her then-partner and lifelong friend Darlene Clute. They both worked with Woodfords and Community Partners, assisting developmentally disabled adults.
     
    In 2000, she and her partner Jen Gilmore bought a small home in Starks, Maine. They remodeled this home and a few years later traded up to a farm with 30 acres and a barn. In addition to an assortment of cats and dogs, Barking Dog Farm would have horses, chickens, goats, turkeys, ducks… and a cow. Caitlin and Jen began a craft business, making homemade wooden lamps, and Caitlin also started an internet business of painting portraits of people’s animals. Together they launched their carpentry business, named “Women Do It Better.”
    Picture
    Caitlin participated in her local Big Sister program, and she would take her “little sister” on camping trips and trail rides. Her two nieces, Ariel and Mackenzie, adored her, and Mackenzie wrote in her journal: “Aunt Katy I have gotten all of my inspiration from you to be an artist now. I am following in your foot steps.”  Caitlin loved animals, especially horses, and was a skilled farrier. She could trim the hooves of the horses others were afraid to approach. Caitlin also wrote children’s books and played guitar, writing and singing her own songs.
     
    She was actively engaged with lesbian culture, and she and Jen made the journey one year to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. She would contribute articles and artwork to Maize: A Country Lesbian Magazine. For several years she was a member of the Feminist Spiritual Community in Portland, Maine, participating in weekly rituals.
     
    She attended the University of Maine at Farmington and was working toward completing prerequisites for veterinary school when she became overwhelmed by conditions later diagnosed as Complex PTSD.
     
    Caitlin was endlessly curious about the world she lived in, tremendously loyal and generous to her friends and neighbors, community-minded, and creative. She will be deeply missed by all who knew her.