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    What Did Harriet Tubman Actually Say?

    Women's History
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    Viola Davis has just become the first woman of color to win an Emmy Award as the "best actress in a drama series." This is a historic moment,  and so is the text of  her courageous speech, confronting the massive discrimination against women of color in TV and in films.

    In her speech she delivered these lines, attributing them to Harriet Tubman:

    "I see a line. And over that line, I see green fields and lovely flowers and beautiful, white women with their arms stretched out to me over that line, but I can't seem to get there no how. I can't seem to get over that line."
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    I am blogging today, because I was disturbed by those lines. I believe they are a very loose and inaccurate paraphrasing of a story she told an interviewer for a Boston paper in 1863.  This is the excerpt from that paper, a primary source:

    “She declares that before her escape from slavery, she used to dream of flying over fields and towns, and rivers and mountains, looking down upon them ‘like a bird,’ and reaching at last a great fence or sometimes a river, over which she would try to fly, ‘but it ‘peared like I wouldn’t hab de strength, and jes as I was sinkin’ down, dere would be ladies all drest in white ober dere, and dey would put out dere arms and pull me ‘cross.’”—from an article about Harriet Tubman in The Boston Commonwealth, 1863.
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    Women performing the Adowa, a traditional dance of the Ashanti people from Ghana.

    What's the big deal? The big deal is this:  The quotation in Davis' speech has Tubman referring to "beautiful, white women" stretching out their arms to help her. I do not believe that Tubman would have ever characterized white women that way.

    In the Boston paper, she refers to "ladies all drest in white" who not only stretch out their arms, but pull her across the line. Tubman's ancestors were Ashanti, and white is a sacred color in African tradition. I believe that she was referring to her ancestors, to African women, as her guardians and her saviors. I believe that this vision was so significant, she made a point of talking about it in an interview. I believe she was explaining the secret of her phenomenal success in leading escaping captives out of the South, over and over, never losing a single "passenger." She was teaching us something about a radical spirituality entailing a practice of worship that was not only Afro-centric, but also gynocentric. She relied spiritually on entities who looked like her and who understood her struggle intimately. They promised her that they would see her succeed. 



    [I have written a play about Tubman's militant spirituality, Harriet Tubman Visits A Therapist: ]

    “Arthur’s performance [as Tubman] was so powerful and raw that the audience literally could not stop cheering and clapping at the end.”     --Our Weekly.Com, Los Angeles.

    "... unyielding spiritual poetry that is uplifting and lyrically profound." -- LexGo.com, Lexington, KY.

    "... the distillation and the lyric intensity of poetry."-- Portland Phoenix.

    "The script has the distillation and the lyric intensity of poetry. Harriet’s rejoinders to the therapist jump between sullen, enraged, and reelingly comedic..."     -- Megan Grumbling, The Portland Phoenix, ME.

  • Published on

    The Pill Women Really Want

    Lesbian Feminism
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    It’s here. It’s called Niagra and it’s for Male Respectile Dysfunction… 

    Niagra are shaped, colored and packaged to look exactly like Viagra, and, in fact, the instructions tell women to insert them into their partners’ Viagra boxes, replacing the actual Viagra.

    What do they do? Nothing. Nothing at all.

    And that’s the point. 
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    Because Male Respectile Dysfunction has been a living nightmare for billions of women for centuries. Refusing to accept that women’s lives and anatomies are not designed as extensions of their own agendas, men have continued to promote penetration as “the sex act,” in spite of the fact that women’s vaginas have only about 1000 nerve endings, most of which are non-erotogenic. The neuronal wiring of the vagina has, in fact, evolved not to accommodate the phallus, but the passage of the nine-month-old baby. In spite of the overwhelming personal testimony of countless women and a sea of medical statistics, men have stubbornly persisted in defining the primary act of sex in terms of their own desires. In fact, women who refused to fake orgasms were historically labeled “frigid,” and whole industries arose to treat this non-existent condition.

    But all of this is terribly boring. Read Anne Koedt’s classic, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” That should have laid the entire Viagra thing to rest four decades ago.
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    The point is this: Even young women with young women’s vaginas often are not fans of penetration, and it rarely signals the “main event” in terms of female orgasm. For post-menopausal women, what may have been no more than a nuisance is now a serious imposition. Aging women experience thinning of the vaginal walls and decreased lubrication. Penetration can be intensely painful, creating numerous, small lesions with resultant irritation or even infection.  Fortunately, older men also undergo an aging process that results in difficulty achieving and maintaining an erection. For the first time since infancy, males and females are actually approaching something like sexual compatibility.

    But then along came that blue pill cursed by millions of women around the globe: Viagra. Suddenly, men who hadn’t had an erection in years were making the sexual demands of a teenager.  The mainstream pharmaceutical companies responded with a drug for women… flibanserin. Not surprisingly and unlike Viagra, this is actually a drug that messes with the brain. In fact, it was originally developed as an anti-depressant. Initially, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unanimously voted against recommending approval… because flibanserin was about as effective as a placebo and the side effects were terrifying. Five years later, it was approved over the strenuous objections of women’s health organizations. 
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    I have no doubt that flibanserin will take its place in the list of “treatments” for “female frigidity” that include electroshock medical torture, surgical removal of the clitoris, compulsory therapy including coerced sex with a surrogate, and the usual array of threats that can be used to force women into collusion with male sexual demands: loss of custody, incarceration, loss of shelter, loss of employment… and physical violence.

    So… today, Niagra… with the clever slogan, “For women who give a dam.” 

    Because, sisters, there is not a “dam”  thing wrong with you if you don’t like penetration. There is Respectile Dysfunction going on any time a man insists on perpetrating on your body an act that you do not find pleasurable or welcome. 

    You will find that the only side effects to using Niagra will be increased autonomy, enhanced trust in your relationship to your body, and, in many cases, an aroused curiosity about and willingness to explore lesbianism.
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