Reply #76: This is the Center of Things

[Hidden Stillness]

I also believe that sexism, not racism, is the deepest and most oppressive bigotry--it is the one they hang onto with the most viciousness, the phony supremacy they claim with the most obnoxiousness, and the bigotry that remains even after other prejudices are lessened. I believe this will be the big "life-and-death-struggle" between good and evil. I only hope people will not "wimp out" and turn this into an attack on abstract "religion"--I am a deeply religious Lutheran and a radical feminist, and there are examples of religious feminists going all the way back to the "Women's Bible" of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, up to the present and Jane Fonda. Sometimes you have to have the courage to turn and face the male who oppresses and jeers at us all, and speak the truth, with possibly no support. It is the male sex oppressing us, not merely one isolated group of them. Sometimes our worst enemy and threat is a phony "Christian" preacher, sometimes a neo-con capitalist, sometimes a rapist, and the outrageously long line of male lawyers lining up to defend it, but sometimes it is a violent, vulgar--and popular--black male rapper, and if you really want to stick to the principle that may free us all someday, then you can't lose it by refusing to criticize it when the group changes.

By the way, about biology, I remember hearing during the '70s, (when I thought the Great Enlightenment was starting), that they had discovered that all fetuses begin as girls, but then either stay girls throughout the whole pregnancy, or actually "deteriorate" and develop an inferior Y chromosome rather than the original two Xs, and become boys. There was a "National Geographic" special, I think it was, that demonstrated that if you took a microscopic camera and looked inside the penis, there is actually still the small remnant of the original vulva. We are the original, and the male is "Eve's Rib." Now of course, you have to correct all the language that pretends that we are their "offshoot"--hear them whining already?

As soon as we started making real progress during the '70s, you knew the backlash was getting ready, and we have had all the violent, abusive, government-destroying results since--with "returns to the '50s" such as increasing out-of-wedlock births and decreased availability of abortion and sex education, no progress on equal pay, and a totally anti-feminist corporate media "culture." Civilization only advances when women lead. (By the way, it was really nice to read a favorable comment on Yoko Ono by a poster on this thread.)