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November, 2005 Champion of Eros and enemy of Thanatos you are not. So quickly you gave away the game, attacks on Stalin and Mao page one. There would be no whole story allowed in your books, only stream-of-consciousness evasion, selective silence, a long compendium of facts strung together to create ambivalence. Did you think your fancy "biophilia" could cover it up--the under-handed trick, your deal with Death? That we would not notice who doubled the life expectancy of their peoples, who nurtured a billion people but also who opposed that? Did you really think you could make a billion people go away into your dream of a Demon? That we would not notice foot-binding, arranged marriage, sky-high infant mortality and the solution for those? Did you really think we were going to give Catharine MacKinnon the credit for moving to abolish pornography when Mao actually accomplished it? You think you run down that kind of accomplishment by a selective story about Ding Ling, the story that leaves out what she was for and a story which even her Liberal biographer does not believe anymore? Did you think we didn't notice you made her out to be a simple victim? And who was it that led a movement for cooking and cleaning to be publicly divided tasks? And for that matter, do you know who opposed it? Yes, we think you do know, and we think you know that Ding Ling was rehabilitated when prostitution and clothing differentiation came back to China with a vengeance, but why are you silent then? You spent more time dreaming your Demon than talking to us about conditions for wimmin in China--way more. You went to life's school in the 1960s and you ran with the men into politics. Unlike your international sisters struggling for food and land, you did not. You were educated, the first to get close to equality and the top of the humyn heap. You need it to be true, a leader appearing with a legion of wimmin to lead. You need it to be true that Ding Ling did more for wimmin than Mao. But it isn't. 400 pages on supposed feminism and all you gave us was just a selective story about Ding Ling, the kind which makes you silent and in complicity with the single largest patriarchy, a country when Ding Ling regained favor, female infanticide was so extensive it put females on the road to being the world minority. You of all people educated and interested in these questions should have more to say and we're on to you: we know you know it but pretend not to. We've seen it before, in the labor movements. Yes, the national liberation struggle in China did more for wimmin than any struggle anywhere in the world for wimmin you've mentioned, and you know it, but you try to fool Third World wimmin. At that unique historical moment when you appeared well-fed and educated in the millions, many of your brothers gave up "saving the world," mostly with no pretense. It is you, uniquely placed sister who are the first to try selling out another way. I say it is you. Surely you did have forerunners. "Anarchist feminists" in China served as police informers in Mao's youth. Wimmin led activity in the KKK after the Civil War. But often these were poorly educated people or highly isolated educated people. They lacked the critical mass, the generation. The views of the quirky minority are so very interesting--when we look at forerunners. But for you it is different. There was a whole generation of wimmin with something in the air when you appeared. And they had leaders like you, wimmin who could write and publish books on their own conditions. You the gender bureaucrat appeared. And your job was not to pull the wool over the eyes of other wimmin peers as your forerunners sometimes were able. No, your geographically closest sisters were too educated and bourgeois for that. Your first job was to speak for your generation of wimmin and then if possible pull the wool over the eyes on uneducated Third World wimmin, with grants from Rockefeller and the like. No stock-broking, aluminum-foil selling or barbeque sauce line for you. You make your living another way don't you. We know what it is when a union official is on the company's payroll, why Panama's Noriega was on CIA payroll--the words for that flow forth rapidly from educated tongues everywhere: traitor, puppet, labor bureaucrat. When your brothers denounced national liberation, they just gave up politics, but after you denounced national liberation in principle as violence you called for "social security," "rape crisis centers," "domestic violence centers," "Ms." or even international non-governmental organizations dedicated to the conditions of wimmin, but we still know what you are and how what you do parallels the co-optation of the labor movement. Lucky for us, your departure was gradual and followed historically well-worn tracks at first. Your sister spied on us at communist conferences and took money from that truly pure and independent womyn named Rockefeller selectively elided from history. Had it not been for that, many of us might not have known what hit us, because you had the advantage of surprise, the unique historical appearance of the well-fed and educated womyn, someone in a position to separate wimmin's needs from other needs that she no longer had. Did men compartmentalize you or were you already compartmentalized the moment you appeared in history? Yes, we know what you mean about radical men from the 1960s who look back with too much reverence. But we see you for what you are as well, and the answer is not far from "Leave it to Beaver." We hope you noticed that your last words in the 2001 edition were wrong, you know the part about the Vietnam generation's victory and influence. Just as you were writing those words, Bu$h was preparing a war without UN sanction, so much for your disdain for national liberation and so much for your overly inflated sense of the imperialist country anti-war movement. Imagine a labor movement which raised questions: should the work day be lengthened to 20 hours perhaps or should we shorten it to 8? Did it happen that way, do you really think? How the hell did they settle on 8? Am I lacking in sufficiently sexy ambivalence to ask? And so those men informed by that movement coming to you are some kind of "hypocrite" Man-in-waiting for going beyond merely asking questions? Maybe you're not sure if it should have been 8 or 20, that being a theorist's preoccupation and you being officially, certifiably "ambivalent," so as to avoid your brothers' flaws. Why is it that you are so uncomfortable going beyond asking questions? You did tell us 20 million starve to death each year. Why didn't you tell us who did the most to eliminate starvation and the other largest causes of premature death? Would it be unsexy to have the answer to a question? Maybe you are afraid of commitment? And I thought it was the oppressor who was afraid of commitment. I always thought it was He who is the slut. Why did you have to invent the story of your Demon Lover? Stalin, Mao, Taliban, Sharon, Bush, Carlos-- all terrorists, all bad. Wimmin are a little different you say and you point to the gender gap in voting for Republicans and Democrats. Wimmin may be different, but you are not so different than what you claim to reject. What bothers you about the Other is that He is definite. Most terribly of all, he of the Radical genus is still definite. How can it be that he with no power, the son is still definite? You convince yourself that because he is the son, he will be the Man, no explanation required. But then again, when does it start, age 1, 2 or 4? 8? And if a boy can become the Man, why can't the girl? So your 2001 edition still does not admit that Cory Aquino was a terrorist against peasants, but you admit that Thatcher is the Man, and you may in fact serve as witness to the 1960s transition from adolescence to becoming the Man-in-waiting. What a lazy cop-out. If you don't like the son, who said you had to be with him? Why must you blame everything you don't like about politics on the persyn you are talking politics with? The 1960s were a lot of things, but I don't remember hearing about any wimmin-have-to-stay-with-men movement. But when you left your Radical brothers, what did you do? Did you form Radical sisters organizations? Ah, you say, not only did I form Radical sisters organizations, I organized more Radical sisters, the ones who will save the world! Funny why you had to revamp your whole ideology just to leave your brothers. It tells us you were not that worked out to begin with, not that we blame you being a few years removed from the 1950s. Was it really necessary to silence Mao's feminist accomplishments just to get back at your imperialist country brothers? Oh really, oh pseudo-feminist you think no one listens and no one watches you, but we do. We know that to our faces you bring Catharine MacKinnon and blast Liberalism, but as soon as we turn our backs, you're there tabling for the Democrats, and if need be denying it later. This ambivalence extends to the most theoretically consistent of all of your generation of pseudo-feminism--MacKinnon herself. At least you are consistent with yourselves: you know your politics mobilizes no powerful force so you rely on the Democratic Party status quo. To our faces you say you are going to boycott Westinghouse and other militarist corporations, but when we turn our backs we know you are going to serve on the boards of charities with those same corporations to help perfume their images. You'll chalk it up to ambivalence and opposition to Marxist discipline. We're beginning to think you're just hitting on us with these postures. To our faces, you denounce some wars and make us think you've done your homework enough to know what imperialism is, but you provide the justification for bombing the Taliban. See, you should have dealt with them sooner you say when 9/11 hits. So we smell an opportunist, or to put it the uneducated Third World man's way, a slut. Then you wonder why all your '60s brothers had to sleep with you to trust you. Ambivalence is sexy isn't it? If you criticize all men and appeal to all with phony Eros, you are available to all. It's that hint of availability, available for missions in Afghanistan and available for Democratic Party fund-raisers. Ambivalence is inconsistency and inconsistency is the sister of complicity. You have not transcended patriarchy: you have adapted to it and done it with a generalized ideology that you dare not name: it is Liberalism. Even your talk of Eros is doubly dubious. You use it as a lure to men to selectively conserve institutional violence. Otherwise you would not have settled on merely questioning all. You would have chosen the best choice, the 8 hour demand instead of the 23 hour one. In the same manner your pacifism is of the false kind. There are so few consistent pacifists--Quakers and hard-core anarchists. Even so, pacifism favors those who already have the preponderance of military power. Likewise, emphasizing wimmin's suffering favors some nations more than others. You found that Palestinian wimmin are suffering as wimmin. No kidding. So in the midst of war with Hitler, Stalin was bad for wanting wimmin to produce more children. Oh no you say, they could just give up fighting Hitler and then they would have no right to ask for sacrifices from wimmin either. Likewise when Palestinian men want more children to make up for those lost to I$rael, you claim wimmin's oppression as principal and thus build a road to collaboration with the oppressor. Yet an even-handed approach to I$raeli and Palestinian wimmin will not result in an even-handed reduction of oppression, not even gender oppression. You expect us not to notice who your even-handed approach benefits. Yet if I$raeli wimmin were really wimmin, and especially if they were principally wimmin as you say, they would have ended the war long ago for the benefit of their Palestinian sisters forced to bear so many children, not to mention for their own benefit as wimmin. Actually, we of the desperate revolutionary sort need to believe that you exist more than you know. But we need to know there is a feminist movement totally independent of Democrats and corporate charities, not just a wing of imperialism found in the urban areas of the northern region of the united $tates. You probably know your politics are irrelevant in the South, where they have a tad more belief in the "family." We look with longing and hope to white feminist publications. The publication we have the greatest hope for recently did what we are used to: grab our attention with 20 or 30 pages of discussing MacKinnon and Dworkin, followed by a headline for the "lipstick Jihad." The international news is likewise liberal feminism and not a word about who is torturing whom sexually in Abu Ghraib. Why is it that this publication can never escape the black-hole of liberal-radicalism we wonder and then we remember the glorifying of "ambivalence." In the same publication we have an amazing breakdown of pornography with all the facts. No dopes these who know very well how Internet got so popular--through pornography. Did I tell you they have a website nonetheless? We are told that technology itself comes always on the back of pornography. Then we look at the machine label on the publication and we wonder, why is it that these wimmin talk such a line and then machine-label the mail? Are they only consistent with their theory when it comes to dealing with radical men or the progressive Democrats they blast for working with Larry Flynt? Inconsistency is complicity. You think by posing to our face with MacKinnon you can conjure something for us, but you don't anymore. We know where you've been in the meantime! How is that? Do I put it in sexually competitive enough language to be clear? Instead of blasting all technology and all Internet and even all pornography, maybe we need a more defined and less ambivalent theory to avoid "hypocrisy" if that is really the worst thing. But even supposing this publication had a consistent line, there is another question. Why so few wimmin read it. Here's the question leading to all the other inconsistencies. For if feminist publications could succeed so well, there would be less crawling to Democrats and charities. But noticing the small readership calls into question the very idea that there is a gender oppressed mass to be led by feminist leaders. One Barbara Lee justifies your bashing Bush instead of imperialism you tell us and after all, you distrust fundamentalism and can't aid your Mideast sisters without bashing it here. It just makes us suspect there are no gender oppressed adults in the oppressor nation and that is the real reason a simple straight-forward radical feminism has limited appeal. That is where we are right now. By now we know that alleged feminists come to us hoping to drag us to the Democratic Party. We eventually learn not to be confused by mere posturing; even though these postures leading to imperialism are the newest of the bunch. You are willing to throw up some rhetoric about opposing wars and pornography, and so you hope we'll excuse the rest. In your hardest left posture, you expect us to get down on RCP=U$A for working with Hustler magazine, yes, we admit, the worst of the worst. But this brings us back to the chicken-and-the-egg and selective complicity. How is it possible to oppose pornography and support Democrats? All the pro- Democrat "alternative" publications like the Village Voice need pornography money, big time. Haven't you ever looked at their ads? Did you pass over it all in oblivious silence? The Republicans have Fox News. The firebrand Democrats live off porn money. Why does Bill Clinton get his way with the same liberal feminist wimmin who would be all over men without power if they did the same thing? We might even wonder how much reduced our already limited monopoly capitalist media would be without pornography money! What is more, the feminist publications and MIM publications combined do not add up to much readership. How can we blast the RCP=U$A and Larry Flynt when our sisters would only be running to other wings of the pornography industry embedded with the Democratic Party? Surely we would love to blast the RCP=U$A and Larry Flynt as you ask, but who would listen? Where would be the social force to make such a movement stick? Been there, done that: there is no social force for that inside u.$. borders. It's much better to write off adult females in the united $tates as men and compete where we can compete. The Taliban is more likely to rethink and go in a feminist direction than the Amerikan womyn is. This question goes beyond the leaders but also to the readers. Sadly enough even if we did work out a feminist deal with the most promising Amerikan feminist publications, there would still be no readers to compare with Larry Flynt alone. Instead of addressing this with every breath they take, they are worsening the problem with reliance on traditional Democratic Party channels and even flirting with neo-cons on Afghanistan. You want to complain about getting published in Hustler, but really what is so different about getting published in the New York Times, not to mention the Village Voice? So we've thrown in the towel on that: there's too much opposition and that can't be changed before seizing state power and outlawing production for profit. We're not going to write anything for Larry Flynt, because we believe in independence of institutions, not just relying on the bourgeois media to create public opinion, but if he puts our articles in his magazine because of our independent effort, we're not going to complain. So to return to the Demon Lover you conjured and why you conjured Him. It seems that Carlos was a "Lothario" but other "terrorists" had trouble with wimmin and others were impotent. Did it trouble you that you could analyze the sex lives of all the radicals but no precise story would arise, just your discontent that sounded like a bunch of concatenated Interpol files? Did it not seem inevitable to you that with an approach so broad you would always find something but never anything coherent? Perhaps I should attack you persynally for getting control of a child and then becoming more conservative--is it not a story older than capitalism itself? But we don't do that: we have a policy saying don't expect to be on the CC if you have a child to care for. That's as far as it should go. Now I'm going to tell you again why Radical men bother you so much. It sticks in your craw, because his strategy is different than yours and still seems to "work." He lays down something definite though out of favor; yet you used to find him attractive. In contrast, you have developed "ambivalence" as your strategy and think you have discovered something. Being definite with power seems like a formula for attracting wimmin known through the ages. The trouble is that so is being definite without power according to you. When womyn has no power, she has ambivalence. How then can men in the same position not have ambivalence? That's what's eating you. The discovery of the Demon Lover is really the discovery of the ages-old 'ho condition of womyn--her difficulties of relating to power except through him. It's only the more obvious when we see the solution to the Demon Lover offered-- ambivalence and self-love. It's not self-love followed by decisiveness but self- love followed by ambiguity. I say maybe you subconsciously want to be sexy to all, but there could be another reason for wanting wimmin to be ambiguous: fear that they are too stupid to make any but the worst decisions if informed and told to make decisions: "So the mother will clitoridectomize her daughter--that her daughter may be marriageable and not starve to death. And so the 'liberated' wife will become sole breadwinner, support her husband, and call it modernity. And so the mother will avert her eyes when her husband slips his hand between their daughter's legs, and disbelieve the daughter's cries. . . . and so women batter children as they themselves are battered." Would it be too hard to say that maybe wimmin who make wrong decisions as individuals or as a group in a certain situation are just evil? Is that why it would be better to be ambivalent, so as to avoid having to be in that situation where we earn some severe criticism? Let's just call a spade a spade: if she batters her children she's the worst sort of Man. In Iraq and Afghanistan prisons, the Amerikan female is torturing the male child and justifying it with sexual outrage at patriarchy which she has joined. So for all this you say better not be in a glass house and throw stones, but you're wrong. There are a hundred million Amerikan female enemies of the oppressed. We should get used to saying it instead of choosing ambivalence. Andrea Yates is scum, but I noticed your extended fantasies about wimmin being more repressed by the u.$. state than men. When a man walks down the street he has a better statistical reason for believing he will be murdered by the persyn behind him than a womyn walking down the street does. And when a child walks down the street he has a better chance of being killed by a womyn than by a man. So perhaps we should accept that fear is a gender role and question it, repeatedly, to death. More evidence of this is your chapter stating there are no revolutionary wimmin except dupes of men. They are all "tokens" you say, though oddly enough one of the so-called terrorist groups you cite has been variously referenced as 40% to a majority wimmin--the "Shining Path." In the creation of a movement before the eradication of patriarchy, it is pointless to blame the Radical man for something that the womyn must figure out for herself. The fact that she sees politics through a relational lense is her problem and it is a problem. "Leave it to Beaver" must be left behind and this sacrifice at least in the thinking department is a sacrifice made by both privileged males and females. Whether males and females stay together as couples should not depend on using the male as the prism for thought. There should be other reasons for staying together and there is no crime in thinking maybe there aren't any reasons for couple life at all, better that than going through the motions and making him the thought machine and interface to the public. Our critic says feminism is "interconnectedness" or "connectivity" and we are guilty of "compartmentalization," but in patriarchy and the hands of the pseudo- feminists "interconnectedness" and relational thinking are words for cover-up. We can see it when political questions are transferred to individual men and not wimmin's own political activity. How much critique would disappear if it did not start from the position that she is nothing and all activity must go through Him. Want to be on a Central Committee and think you deserve it but men are holding you down to keep you coffee-making, secretarial sex-slaves? Then form your own Central Committee. Why do you have to completely change your ideology? Does it not make you suspect that you have an ulterior motivation? We may go deep down into the pseudo-science of evolutionary psychology with this metaphor, but young imperialist country womyn opposes radical definition, because her own well-being in her gender aspect or conditions in normal life is tied up with availability to many men or people, especially in Liberal society where that is allowed as a matter of choice. The subconscious and greatest mechanism of gender oppression reduction in the imperialist system as it exists is widening the search for a partner. It is the same with widening the search for an employer who may pay more for work in better conditions. More realistically, it is more like widening our search for countries to send us cheap coffee, bananas etc. This search is a privilege not available to everyone in the world. The super-exploited don't have a real choice of employers and the oppressed gender generally does not have choice either. Most younger children cannot even comprehend the choice. In fact, in spite of many pretenses and an occasionally Westernized veneer, sometimes the privilege of choosing a mate does not even exist among adults in industrialized parts of Asia. So when we see wimmin arguing for "choice," there is truth to the Third World reactionary charge of "slut" behind that. There are many reasons to favor abortion, but when we see choice raised up as the main thing we know we have tapped into a major pillar of adjustment to Liberal patriarchy. Being pro-choice appeals to teenage boys no doubt and that is the real Eros factor, but as a solution for womyn's oppression it represents an adaptation, not a challenge to patriarchy. Abortion choice allows wimmin the ability to choose the least oppressive partner in a lifestyle fashion. She won't be tied down with any one father of her baby if she does not want. Other backward systems opposing the Liberal one often arrange marriage and are even more oppressive. This brings us a great problem in the West every time something like the Taliban comes up in political discussion. For Amerikan man, "choice" and the Taliban brings up the likelihood of being drafted to fight a war and going to prison for opposing it a la Patriot Act type repression. For womyn, it scares her into submission to Liberal patriarchy. The whole choice discourse in the man's hands is one of Eros and not having the mandatory call- up, but in the womyn's hands it is for war--the choice to serve in the military and torture Third World people, the lack of choice available to her "sisters" in Afghanistan that justifies war. For us, these are the principal questions of our conditions now and they vary by gender. In this sense, what we should be ambivalent about are the imperialist factions, because it may be better to have an anti-choice president who will not use that reason to bomb Afghanistan--that Afghans do not respect abortion rights. Because imperialism has preserved semi- feudalism and made use of the reserve army of unemployed in backward societies, this is a more or less permanent feature of our strategic problems until imperialism is smashed. What we have to understand is that putting the emphasis on individidual choices by wimmin among male oppressors is a favor to the imperialist patriarchy in particular and has a built-in logic of war on the Third World. This is not recognized, because privileged womyn has been told she is oppressed in the gender aspect. If the entire Third World were thought of as privileged men with their harems, this problem would be clearer, because wimmin are not allowed the "choice" that men are in that situation. So if wimmin suddenly had that "choice" of building a harem they would realize they are not gender oppressed anymore and rather share more with gender oppressors on an international scale. Unfortunately, nothing so clear is in sight. The truth is that imperialist country men have not gone beyond "choice" either in their level of privilege in gender questions. The economics of males and females in the imperialist countries are similar enough that their choices available on the international scale are also rather similar. For example, u.$. citizenship confers on imported spouses whether male or female. When the imperialist country male radicals capitulate to the comforts of the status quo it is obvious at this historical moment. When females sell out, the option remains of raising gender to the principal contradiction as an excuse for selling out. What must be understood is that young Western womyn has a particular privilege as a group bound up with her gender conditions and not just her class and nation--a particular privilege that leads her to defense of Liberalism. She cannot be materialist and definite and instead takes up spirituality, witchcraft, romance novels and equally trashy pseudo-feminist fiction--all for the same reason, her sexual strategy of availability underneath her ambivalence. No free agent baseball, football or basketball player wants to give up "choice" of employer; even though such players may be millionaires many times over. So it is with wimmin defending their choice as the root of political ambivalence and even war against the Third World. So in dealing with the imperialist country Radical man, the emphasis by the Demon Lover conjurer has to go in a nihilistic way on how he has not surrendered his patriarchal privileges; even though, being a revolutionary and not a Liberal, he never claimed that he could have in the current system. He never claimed he could change the mode of production without revolution, nor national oppression without national liberation, but the Demon Lover conjurer must lie and say he said he could eliminate gender oppression before system-wide change. In truth, the white male revolutionary cannot really abandon being white or from the upper class on the global scale either. That's not in his control. If radical white man had surrendered his patriarchal privileges, it would come up for question why she does not surrender hers. Ironically, the altruistic white male radical of the 1960s was siding with a people who often did not have the privilege of choice in gender questions. Whether it is Afghanistan or possibly forthcoming hotspots India and Nepal, questions like arranged marriage are still in the air thanks to lack of Maoist revolution in these places. The more the white male radical tried to identify with the sacrifices of the revolutionary in the Third World, the more he found himself giving up his normal "choices." Yet, when he did so, he could not sink any lower than a certain level except through death, a valid point by the Demon Lover conjurer, who only leaves out that such deaths added up to a doubled life expectancy in China's Revolution. After all, there is still patriarchy even where there is arranged marriage--so short of death, the male can only sink so low in his privilege. At the same time, the conjurer of the Demon Lover also knows she does not really sink that low either, but if she does sink she has to wonder how much people give up for their revolutions. Rather than entertain that she herself may be gender privileged and hence Liberal for that reason, she prefers to believe she is pacifist, even while she consistently acts on behalf of an imperialist party connected to countless wars. The truly infantile of politics say that it is hypocritical to go to the store to buy a pair of pants produced by the exploitive capitalist system. Yet we know these 1960s wimmin writers know better than that. They did not call the 1960s men hypocrites for engaging in exchange on a daily basis by going to the store to buy milk and eggs. When pseudo-feminists attack men for the equivalent in gender relations, they reveal that their original analysis of exchange was wrong too or Liberal, seeing exchange as something to be fixed within the current mode of production. To many reformist-minded females, this seems to "put off" problems too long, but properly understanding what can be done now and what can't is the only thing that allows consistency toward the question of complicity. When white men activists smoked pot and didn't get arrested while their Black brother activists did get arrested, again, did white womyn call the white radical men hypocrites? (Today's version is crack versus powder cocaine.) No, either she approved the arrests of Blacks like some chauvinist or racist Liberals do or she realized that was a group level problem unaffected by the lifestyle question of smoking pot or not. And for that matter, the arrest rate of wimmin abusing drugs is a tiny fraction of that of men, despite your claim of a double standard against wimmin on the question: the double standard opposes men on drugs as more dangerous to society than wimmin on drugs. Yet in contrast with class and nation questions, when Radical man wants sex in a "compartmentalized" way or does something wrong on gender questions, she calls him a hypocrite and abandons her ideology instead of slightly rewriting the whole ideology without that man or men as a group. Then the question becomes one of altruism and whether womyn should lean on her existence as oppressed gender to drive her politics. The Demon Lover now must appear as someone who is not altruistic, someone like Carlos who has many lovers who take care of him or someone who has a secretary or someone who incoherently enjoys "free love" and leaves wimmin hurting etc. The fact is it could be anything: the man could be asexual and too busy for sex for years on end, but there would always have to be something that a Liberal would find to justify Liberalism. I've seen organizations burst asunder because of how he "looked at her," "you know." In fact, a key to this sort of subjective analysis is that there be no average statistic known anywhere. How many lovers does the average man have compared with the "terrorist." How many average hours doing dishes and cleaning house does the radical take compared with others etc. In the Liberal individualist method, it's always individual snippets of individual stories, even if impressively concatenated for 400 pages. This is the only way that it is possible to avoid a group analysis and preserve the idea that the Demon Lover is actually worse than other lovers taken instead of being just another ho-hum lover in a patriarchal system. The snippets must be selective for ambivalence purposes and to allow selective complicity. The one thing we agree with you on: the Demon Lover is normal. The trap is that behaviors generated by the Liberal system justify a Liberal answer in the minds of the pseudo-feminist. When a man does something under the Liberal system only possible in a Liberal bourgeois system--secretaries, prostitutes, pornographic magazines--or even just break up, the Liberal womyn still concludes that Liberalism is the solution. Because the last generation of feminism has spent its time looking at this and because they've had their chance to read MacKinnon, we can not say that this is unconscious. This mystery disappears when we realize that Liberalism is always most consciously advocated by those in dominant position, those who can handle individual competition. Liberalism is especially the choice of those females secure in ability to find a mate and other gender questions relative to other females. The Demon Lover boils down to a choice of two roads. The horribly vexing thing to you about a tiny minority of radical white men is their altruistic appearance inside the Empire. So will you go as wives to the Decembrists or will you doubt that these are Decembrists? And why should you care in the first place: is it masochism? To the allegedly oppressed gender of the oppressor nation the dirty secret that she does not want to handle is that he actually seems to limit his choices of wimmin available by being definite yet out of power. The more serious he is, the more security plays a concern. That's not to mention that there might be more direct ways to money and buying permanent or contract services of wimmin than sitting around preparing incendiary devices in your house or reading dead and gone writers like Marx and Lenin. At the very least, she cannot imagine a similar strategy working for her: she gains confirmation when the men ask that she sleep with them or be gone as 1960s men did in the midst of armed struggle. It's not as bad as arranged marriage but there is some kind of limitation that young womyn places on herself sexually to be trusted in that context and the conjurer of the Demon Lover tells us she did not want those men she was around in the days of glorious armed struggle. So is it not men asking the oppressed to be more oppressed, to give up the "choice" she already has? And in reverse, are radical men really able to give up their patriarchal choices even if they wanted to? What happens to the man that does give up some patriarchal lifestyle privileges? Could he be other than crucified and patriarchy still survive? What happened at that point of the discussion was really the fault of wimmin feminist theorists, not the men who could not be expected to perceive the problem before the wimmin did. At that point, there needed to be a clear alternative of lesbian or asexual separatist Maoism while wimmin sorted out their ideological commitments and interconnectedness. Because such an alternative was not theorized much less in place in the late 1960s, the reaction that occurred went straight over to Liberalism--real patriarchy with a vengeance. It did not have to be a choice between having sex with men involved in armed struggle or fronting for the Democratic Party, but that is how it ended up breaking down. Late in the game there was the "Women's Committee against Genocide," a tantalizing thought in itself but too late. The other road of dealing with the Demon Lover was not taken. It would have involved admitting the 'ho condition of womyn fully. It would have forced the admission that flawed as they were radical men were in fact not taking the most direct route to control of wimmin, if only because their particular class and nation strategy for revolution disallowed it. The road not taken would have brought out Amerikan womyn's gender privilege, but it would not have required joint work or joint security with lesbians or heterosexual men by heterosexual or asexual wimmin. It seems that at her height, protected by monogamy, one womyn felt most secure and did the most revolutionary work. So at a persynal level, we question whether her commitment to Eros started as a genuine feeling for Marcuse's line or whether this was a posture subsequently devised for appearance-sake. It seems that in fact avoiding sex was a major preoccupation and her criticism of Susan Stern was phrased as of her organization but pertained to behavior that predated her organization's existence. In a country where numbers of revolutionaries are small it may be hard to see this, but there is a question of principle involved when a womyn sees a couple as the center of revolutionary work and she sees that as superior to the collective simply as the easiest means to avoid having sex. In this she shares common ground with pro-life activist wimmin who are housewives and mothers trying to minimize sex. We can be fine with that as long as it does not transfer to other areas and result in minimizing revolutionary unity. However flawed one's comrades may be, they are better than no revolutionaries at all. It would seem that the choice some wimmin want is not dealing with men, not just not sleeping with a particular one as in "choice." Fragmented Maoist groups split along gender and sexual orientation lines are better than none though, so we hope to see that happen before we see people go over to fronting for Democrats. Why there cannot be an asexual separatist wimmin's Maoist cell instead of counterrevolution is one question where the long term task is creating public opinion and where no unified assault on power is imminent. Even where a coordinated assault is necessary, there may be one persyn in a cell assigned to deal with other cells. The truly backward have-it-both- ways punch from pseudo-feminism is saying that these radical men would have power over wimmin as leaders in their communist system. On the one hand, we are told that radical men must be evaluated based on their lifestyles now--hence the lengthy persynal details about individual men told by the pornographer-author of the Demon Lover. On the other hand, if radical men are going to come to power any minute anyway, it would seem that more attention needs to go to the system they are bringing and this would undercut the pseudo-feminist claims about what needs to be evaluated. Either the pseudo-feminist encourages an evaluation of lifestyle because she believes Liberalism is relatively permanent or she gives more accord to systemic changes. She should not be allowed to claim only the negative aspects of both, but in evading Mao and advances for wimmin in China, that is exactly what the misleader spreading false consciousness among Third World wimmin does. The bottom line is an unmeasured claim to be for life while the others oppose it: "What every so-called revolution has done, killing in men the artists of living they might have been, killing in women the artists of living they were, killing the art of of living." This is lifestyle pre-politics, appropriate for those like you with predetermined lifespans averaging the highest in the world. It is your politics that stands on the side of death, against the doubling of life expectancy. It is your politics not Mao's in charge of Afghanistan where life expectancy is in the low 40s, because of the revolution they did not have against imperialists and warlords.
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