Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
Women choose to be catty, cruel, prejudiced, competitive or jealous of each other
partly because we grow up learning that negative behavior towards women is perfectly
acceptable, and partly because it is a difficult task to see ourselves in our perceptions.
Seeing ourselves requires effort and commitment.
This unwillingness to see ourselves is greatly exacerbated by the fact that we, quite
often, do not see even a remote semblance of ourselves in the images of women commonly
found in our society. The women presented to us in ads, TV shows, movies and music
videos are powdered and coiffed under standards set by male associations of what is
and isn’t beautiful.
As a result, many women are scornful and lay blame on women who work in any of these
false-image-creating industries. But women who base identity and economic security
on a specific standard of “beauty” exist in an industry that is rife with cuntfear.
Women choose to work under self-esteem-corroding conditions such as these because
cuntfear is highly valued in our society and corporations are willing to pay women
exorbitant sums of money for glorifying illusions of beauty men can deal with.
One of my dearest friends used to be one of them fancy übermodels. This experience
psychologically damaged her to the degree that I know she would be terribly hurt if
I stated her name. I spent a weekend with her a few years ago and she dug out her
modeling portfolio for me to look at. The photographs showed this totally posh babe
being either sporty, babyish, scary or spicy. I would never, ever, ever,
never
have recognized my dear friend as the woman presented in her portfolio. “They made
me,” she said, “That was my ‘talent’: allowing the people who run companies to make
me look the way they wanted me to look.” When my friend told photographers at shoots
that she was interested in photography, they laughed at her. After she quit modeling—and
used all that money she saved up as a tidy little nest egg—she became a successful,
award-winning art director, designer and photographer.
It doesn’t get anybody anywhere to diss models, actresses, dancers and women in general
who identify with this male-made standard of beauty. If real images of powerful women
being cuntlovin’ and beautiful are what women want, the advertising, television, motion
picture and music industries must first be infiltrated and revolutionized from the
inside out.
It is less
directly
painful to
ourselves.
to respond negatively to women than to honestly figure out what other women represents
inside of us that we either dislike, fear, wish we “possessed,” or are afraid to love.
Another one of my friends used to be almost pathologically uncool about large women.
She was rail thin and readily admitted her own fear of being “fat” was the problem.
Once she told me, “I think, in a way, I’m jealous because fat women
potentially
love themselves no matter what society says, and I, obviously, do not.”
After this conversation, I bought her a bunch of postcard reproductions of paintings
depicting large, voluptuous women in erotic poses. She put some of them up in her
bathroom. As time passed, her attitude about women and body image started evolving,
and she also gained weight. These positive images of women aided her in developing
a new, healthier perspective, but it was her own courage to be honest with herself
that really spurred along positive change in her life.
It is nice to get in the habit of consciously stopping yourself from wishing ill-tidings
to a woman, and ask, “What of myself do I see here?” When you can honestly respond
to that question without perpetuating self-judgement or nastiness, you is a cuntlover
on high.
Adding to the acrimonious nature of growing up in a society that breeds destructive
behavior is the fact that the United States is home to more ethnicities than can be
found in any other single country on the entire planet. Most nations have the relative
luxury of having a population of a few distinct races. I have a friend who is Chinese
and Greek, with smatterings of Swiss, Chicana and East Indian blood. She grew up speaking
Mandarin and English. I know Korean-Jews and African-American Irish folk. America’s
ethnicity is the whole kit ’n caboodle, all mixed up in every imaginable combo.
Our national cultural heritage is gloriously schizophrenic.
The result of living as women in an acrimonious, multiethnic nation is a subconscious
negative preoccupation when dealing with each other. It thus quite naturally escapes
us that while we are so preoccupied, we forsake our collective power of sheer mass.
This is a bummer for a number of reasons.
American women cannot so much as stand on the same escalator without the presence
of discord—much less design and implement cuntlovin’ economic and legal systems, run
huge cuntlovin’ corporations and make sure all of our children are loved, protected,
fed, clothed, educated and tucked into bed with a sleepytime story that has a happy,
cuntlovin’ ending.
A significant portion of the acrimony we honor is rooted in economics.
White people took away the home of Native people who lived on this land since The
beginning. White people said, “Sorry, it’s this thing called economics, and your home
since The Beginning is now on our property.”
White people stole African people from one place and took them to another, far, far
away. White people said, “Sorry, it’s this thing called economics and you are not
a human being anymore, you are our property.”
White people snagged Mexico and named it things like “Southern California,” “New Mexico”
and “Texas.” White people said, “Sorry, it’s this thing called economics, and we’ll
grudgingly let you live here but you hafta remember: It’s our property.”
White people corralled all the Japanese people who were born in this country same
as anybody else. White people said, “Sorry, it’s this thing called economics and what
was your property yesterday is our property today.”
So I figure right off the bat: A lot of women in America were raised by mothers who
have good, solid-assed reasons for entertaining acrimonious vibrations towards
Las Blancas.
Good.
Solid-assed.
Reasons.
There is a saying.
It goes, “If you don’t face the past, you hafta keep living it.”
White women are not readily compelled—much less forced—to face the past. In a white-dominated
society, women of color are not generally accorded this option. At some point in life,
all children realize skin color plays a major role in one’s destiny of survival in
this society. Little white girls learn that skin color is a non-issue when one is
white. Little girls of color, however, must, at some point, grapple with
why
skin color affects destiny so dramatically. This often leads to facing the past.
I do not think it is culturally healthy or cuntlovin’ that facing the past is not
everyone’s
responsibility.
One day my friend Harper handed me a piece of paper. She said, “I wrote this at work
this morning,” as if it might perhaps be a things-to-do list. But it wasn’t a things-to-do
list at all, and I asked her if I could put it in my book.
It is a fascinating Sunday, or at least seems like it should be. I have been reading
Essence
magazine (the first time in a few years) and something in it inspired me to think
of new projects to work on. One is the idea of where you come from, and if you can
really go far without establishing in truth—or just in any manner—that sense of belonging
somewhere. Like when that man from India was so insistent about asking where I am
from, and I ended up at slavery, and I think it was the first time I
really felt
slavery. I mean, I recognized that some of my ancestors had been slaves, but until
that day I hadn’t felt connected to it past the color of my skin and feeling disgust
at the mistreatment and the scope of the cruelty that humans have inflicted on each
other—and also embittered in that slaves weren’t even allowed the consideration to
be recognized as human beings by the colonizers or slavery owners. It was like remembering
the tiny pieces of scenes, sound bites and music from the mini-series Roots that I
viewed before my bedtime as a child ... a sort of far away horror story. In history
lessons this story became worse, with descriptions of the tools used for torture,
the neckbrace with bells to keep track of slaves who’d tried to escape, the length
of the ships, the number of those herded into the holds, the vomit, the smell, the
disease, the death and the wounds—and sometimes mentioned, the note of survival, that
continual note of survival that is allowing me to write these words. And more than
that note of survival—also my denial and my ability to avoid the remembering because
of the pre-recognition of how it makes me sick about humanity in general.
I know I do this about many atrocities.
It wasn’t until that day, on my way to Seattle, at a gas station with the two East
Indian men I barely knew, as my friend pumped gas, that one of the men asked me where
I was from, and I said, “Iowa and D.C.” And he said, “No, where are you FROM?” And
I said, “Iowa and D.C.” And he said, “No, where are you FROM?” And I said , “Iowa
and D.C.” I explained how I was born in Iowa but had grown up mostly in D.C. “No,
ORIGINALLY,” he said. Finally understanding that he perhaps made no assumptions that
I was a descendant of black slaves, I started to explain there was this thing called
slavery in this country and ... But he was very insistent and interrupted me. “Yes,
but YES, WHERE ARE YOU FROM,
your people?”
And I said, “Africa and Germany, but
I don’t know,
exactly.” As my friend—a white friend—returned to the car, the conversation ended.
An uncomfortable silence surrounded me as the conversation turned to the tourist sites
in Seattle. I felt lost. I realized this man I had spoken to very likely
knew
what his family was doing in the 1400s. He knew where he was from and where he was
grounded, all those miles away from his home. I had just always accepted that I was
black in America, and to me, that meant being of questionable mixed heritage, as diverse
as the skin tones that defined blackness to me. But this acceptance had never brought
me to that question of where I am FROM. And to come to that question in a car at a
gas station somewhere between Olympia and Seattle on some random gray day left me
silent and lost and feeling the reality of postcolonialism and the reality of the
slave trade for the first time in my life.
It is a source of great sadness that my friend is forced to identify with such an
ugly treatment of her people in history. If you ever get into reading history, though,
you see how pretty much all cultures on the planet have pasts filled with bloodshed,
rape, war, enslavement, torture and other symptoms of a destructive patriarchy encroaching
on and dominating everybody else.
There is much sadness in this world.
If you have the courage to ask, Rigoberta Menchu, Sojourner Truth, Wilma Mankiller,
Jacqueline Woodson, Mary Crow Dog and Kathy Acker will tell you:
There is much sadness in this world.
During the ’60s and ’70s Steve Biko was one of the leaders in South Africa’s Black
Consciousness movement. In the biography Biko, by Donald Woods, I found that Black
Consciousness and cuntlove share many of the same basic principles. Biko, as quoted
in Woods, writes, “Many would prefer to be color-blind; to them skin pigmentation
is merely an accident of creation. To us, it is something much more fundamental. It
is a synonym for subjection, an identification for the disinherited.” (Woods, 1979,
37)
I can relate to this because the presence of estrogen in my body is a synonym for
subjection and identification for the disinherited.
However, America was colonized by male and white people.
All women
experience alienation due to the overwhelming
male
standard based in this history. Women of color experience alienation for the overwhelming
white
standard, too. I consider it perfectly acceptable to expect men of all ethnicities
and classes to educate themselves and take responsibility for their individual role
in women’s oppression. I likewise consider it perfectly acceptable to expect white
women of all classes to take responsibility for our individual role in the oppression
of women of color. Women of color
have no call
to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate,
learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective
and voice presented to the general public is white.
Still and too, acrimony between white women and women of color is but one of many
pits in our potentially delicious cherry pie. Within each tribe, racial acrimony is
present. Acrimony is a way of general socialized American life until you decide you
don’t want it that way no more. All races of people are divided and isolated from
one another.
It is the house that Jack built.
Chinese women might harbor negative stereotypes about Filipina women, who may not
think nice things about Jewish women, who might grow up thinking ill of Moslem women,
who may think lesbians are the scourge of the earth, who might think women married
to Promise Keepers are the incarnation of evil, who may think teenagers who get abortions
should be sentenced to hard labor at juvey.