The World Split Open (30 page)

the druggy White Panther Party manifesto urged men to “Fuck your woman so hard till she can't stand up. . . .” Five years earlier, the violence of the fantasy would have been unthinkable anywhere in the movement's orbit.

Searching for an explanation, he wrote, “At the heart of the matter were the befuddlements of sex. To be at once the comrades and bedmates of power in an egalitarian climate was unsettling. What was a woman supposed to make of her lover's remark that ‘The movement hangs together on the head of a penis'?”
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But sexual exploitation wasn't entirely new. Even before drugs and casual sex altered the movement, recalled Barbara Haber, some men had thrust women into a specific role. “Women were meant to put up a traveling SNCC leader, and what put up meant was to ‘put out.'”
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By 1965, things had gone too far. In such a sexually charged atmosphere, some women began to feel like Kleenex, rather than cherished lovers. This, above all, explains the splenetic rage that women directed against their movement “brothers.” In addition to the factionalism, violence, vanguardism, and hallucinogenic expectations of “revolution” that help explain the demise of the New Left should be added the fact that the sexual revolution arrived on men's terms.
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For women, the price of sexual freedom seemed so much more costly than for men, especially with abortion still illegal.

Karen Lindsey, an SDS activist, witnessed these cultural changes in the movement. “I'm not sure when the revolution began to hurt,” she
wrote in her essay “Sexual Revolution Is No Joke for Women.” As part of an SDS couple, she had been privy to men's discussions that ridiculed other women:

I listened to the putdown of one of the other woman members who wasn't sleeping with anybody. “The girl with the cast-iron clit,” they called her and I refused to acknowledge the queasy feeling in my stomach as I joined in their laughter and closed my ears to what I didn't want to hear. . . . I'd been pushing myself into “freedom”—into sleeping with men I didn't give a damn about and sometimes wasn't even attracted to, because I'd gotten dependent on the notion of sex as fulfillment and (status). . . . One night, I lay there, suddenly aware that my body was having a great time while my mind was sitting back waiting for the whole thing to be over. The next morning we woke up . . . and I jumped up, chirped, “Well, how about some coffee?” kept up a merry stream of chatter all through breakfast, kissed him good by, and didn't fuck for a year.

It took Lindsey a year to understand her anger.

I realized that the sexual revolution, like the structures it purported to overthrow, was based on myth. Part of the myth was that male sexuality, unlike female romanticism, was based on real, honest, animal lust, and women would have to learn to be as free as men and everything would be fine. But what I had seen in men was . . . the necessity for conquest, for challenge. . . . Male mythology has demanded of men that their sexuality be a function of their control over women, and they have to struggle over that component of their sexuality. God help them. And God help those of us who still have some need for them. It's going to be a hard struggle. But until men change, the sexual revolution is just another ugly, dirty joke, and the women aren't laughing.

The similarities between “establishment” and movement men gradually became less and less clear. A cartoon distributed by the Liberation News Service, a leftist wire service, captured this comparison perfectly:
Two men discuss their lives. The “straight” man, dressed in a suit and tie, gloats, “I come home from the office, rest, my wife gives me something good to eat. She takes good care of my kids all day and to be frank she's a terrific lay.” The counterculture man, wrapped in a long robe, hair flowing to his shoulders, boasts, “My old lady's outta sight, made me beans and fish last night. She's soft and quiet, good for my head. Her sign is Virgo and she's great in bed.” Below the cartoon, two women, one “straight” and one countercultural, both on their knees. The caption beneath them reads, “The Sexual Revolution Is Yet to Come.”
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The new problems created by the availability of the Pill and changing sexual mores didn't affect only movement women. All over the country, women encountered similar experiences. The difference was that movement women, disappointed by the behavior of their male comrades, talked about it, wrote about it, and tried to find some way to challenge what they came to see as a male sexual revolution. Some movement women, for instance, began to realize that the popular slogan “Make Love, Not War” had reinforced movement pressure to say yes. Another slogan promised that “Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No.” What right, young women began to ask, did men have to offer them as rewards for men who refused the draft? One woman worked in one of the GI coffeehouses that had been established at military bases in order to encourage active-duty military personnel to engage in antiwar organizing. Later, she confided, “I felt like a hooker for the anti-war movement.”
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Black women activists also spoke out, condemning black male leaders' insistence that women should not use contraception or have abortions. Black people, these men argued, needed more black warriors for the coming revolution. In response, one black women's group in Mount Vernon, New York, insisted, “Poor black sisters [will] decide for themselves whether to have a baby.” Although they agreed that “whitey” had genocidal motives, they also insisted that the birth control pill gave them “freedom to fight the genocide of black women and children. . . . Having too many babies stops us from supporting our children, teaching them the truth . . . and fighting black men who still want to use and exploit us.” Birth control, they decided, was necessary for them to care for their children, and to ensure they became educated adults. “When Whitey put out the Pill, and poor black sisters spread the word, we saw how simple it was not to be a fool for men any more. . . . That was the first step in our waking up!”
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When black male revolutionaries insisted that women should bear
many “warriors” and never even consider having an abortion, many black women offered strong resistance. “Breeding revolutionaries,” Florynce Kennedy responded, “is not too far removed from a cultural past where Black women were encouraged to be breeding machines for their slave masters.” Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm also denounced such demands as “male rhetoric, for male ears.” “Don't these men know how many women of color die because of illegal abortions?” she wondered.
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In the small groups that young women's liberationists created, they began to share, first with hesitation and then with urgency, their sexual disappointments and delights. In hundreds of “consciousness-raising groups,” women described how often they failed to reach orgasm during sexual intercourse. Robin Morgan remembered when she first admitted to “the faked orgasm”:

I made this absolutely stunning confession and I was convinced that I was the only woman on the planet who had ever been sick enough to do this, but I finally did confess that I actually faked an orgasm with my husband, at which point every woman in the room leaned forward, grinning, and said, “oh you too.”
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In the future, people may wonder why the “faked orgasm” became such an important topic in women's liberation groups. Many young movement men, products of the fifties, had only the vaguest ideas about female sexuality. And daughters of the fifties often knew even less. Initially, sexual experimentation seemed exhilarating, but it didn't take long for young women to realize that
more
sex did not necessarily result in
better
sex. Ignorant of their own bodies, embarrassed to discuss sexual matters, many young women faked orgasm for fear of being labeled with that terrifying accusatory term of the fifties, “frigid.”

Discussions of sex saturated the women's liberation movement. Women constantly revealed secret embarrassments that they had hidden all their adult lives. In Alix Kates Shulman's 1972 novel
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
, the main character realizes that she has been preparing for men's sexual approval since she was a child: “By third grade . . . I came to realize there was only one thing worth bothering
about . . . becoming beautiful.” Shulman, an early member of the group New York Radical Feminists, recalled that the subject of sex “produced a great emotional outpouring of feelings against the way women had been used sexually and revelations of sexual shames and terrors.” In
Loose Change
, Sara Davidson's popular 1977 novel that explored the lives of three Berkeley women in the 1960s, the wife of a movement leader routinely fakes orgasm, but keeps this terrible secret to herself. Afraid that LSD might act as a truth serum, she avoids hallucinogenic drugs. After one druggy dinner on marijuana, she begins cleaning up the kitchen, but her husband says, “‘Leave all that to sit. Let's ball.'” In a scene all too familiar to many young women, Davidson described what followed: “He pushed inside her and it hurt, it burned. When it was over, she stood up and walked to the kitchen.”
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In 1966, psychiatrist Mary Sherfey published an article about female sexuality that challenged the Freudian belief in two kinds of orgasms. Drawing on Albert Kinsey and the research of Masters and Johnson, Sherfey argued that it was the suppression of female sexuality that created civilization's “discontents.” In the same year, Berkeley feminist Susan Lydon wrote “The Politics of Orgasm,” an article that captured the essence of the sexual predicament of many women, not just those in political movements.

Rather than being revolutionary, the present sexual situation is tragic. Appearances notwithstanding, the age-old taboos against conversation about personal sexual experience still haven't broken down. . . . With their men, they often fake orgasm to appear “good in bed” and thus place an intolerable physical burden on themselves and a psychological burden on the men unlucky enough to see through the ruse.
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By the sixties, these women expected to be full and equal partners in the new sexual revolution. One of the earliest activists in a women's liberation group described this process, as well as her own confusion and isolation, in an anonymous essay:

I had been faking orgasm for four years when I encountered the women's liberation movement, and I had not mentioned it to A SINGLE OTHER WOMAN. I carried my sexual inferiority as a dark secret. When the subject of sex initially came up in women's liberation—or should I say when the subject of
sex got liberated—everyone admitted to faking orgasms. . . . What I did . . . was stop faking orgasms after that. I was now permitted—or was it liberated—to have a genuine sexual response—whatever it was.
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In 1968, Shulamith Firestone and then Anne Koedt helped end that silence for good. Firestone's “Women Rap About Sex,” which appeared in
Notes from the First Year
, a thirty-page typed journal written and distributed by the group New York Radical Women, revealed some of the disappointment that had remained hidden behind satisfied smiles. In the same issue appeared Anne Koedt's widely read essay, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” which would become an instant feminist classic.

Koedt denounced Freud's version of the vaginal orgasm and condemned the doctors who freely dispensed a psychiatric diagnosis of frigidity to women who only had “clitoral” orgasms. “The myth of the vaginal orgasm,” Koedt wrote, “was a conspiracy by which men controlled women's highly passionate sexuality.” How, she asked, could a profession whose method was based on scientific observation construct two kinds of orgasms, describing one, the vaginal, as “mature,” and the other, the clitoral, as “infantile,” and then label any woman frigid simply because she failed to reach the “more desirable” kind? In her view, men had prevented women from realizing that the clitoris was the key to female orgasmic stimulation. And if the clitoris were the key to orgasmic stimulation, her argument implied that women could replace men with masturbation, other women, and sex toys.
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“The faked orgasm” soon became a metaphor for sexual exploitation. Koedt's essay provoked countless debates, discussions, and disagreements among feminists. Some years later, for instance, Laura X denounced the sexual revolution as a “hoax” and argued that all the “hullabaloo over the female clitorally stimulated orgasm” had done nothing to improve women's lives. “Men are heard gloating . . . ‘I can make my girl go off like a machine gun'—this decade's version of scalp and bedpost notches.” Some women would disagree with Koedt's conspiratorial view of the origins of the problem. Some would argue that they did, in fact, experience two different kinds of orgasms. Still, no one disputed Koedt's skepticism about male sexual experts or denied the ubiquity of the faked orgasm.
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Attacks against Freudian thought grew fierce. By 1972, Ellen Frankfort would argue in
Vaginal Politics
that Freud had been a product of his repressed Victorian culture and that he had nothing to say to midcentury feminists.

The ubiquity of the faked orgasm also revealed how overwhelming a young woman's need was to please a man, even when she herself was not being satisfied. Stimulation through penetration wasn't always enough. Yet most women feared asking for what they wanted; many didn't know what they needed. After all, women learned from popular and pornographic literature that an aroused woman reached orgasm seconds after penetration. This clearly was not a universal experience. Initially, some groups focused on new sexual positions that might increase women's pleasure. But as one woman asked, “What kind of a ‘revolution' makes women compete in the race for multiple orgasms?” In a “Letter to Dear Sisters,” Micaela Griffo, an early activist, urged women to start defining themselves “sexually because most sex on male terms seems like rape.” Still others urged masturbation as a legitimate way of gaining self-knowledge and sexual independence from men.
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