fought out on the streets against the Viet Nam War; some of them
were old enough to have fought in the South for black civil rights,
and all had come into adulthood on the back of that struggle; and
lord knows, they had been fucked. As Marge Piercy wrote in a
1969 expose of sex and politics in the counterculture:
Fucking a staff into existence is only the extreme form of
what passes for common practice in many places. A man can
bring a woman into an organization by sleeping with her and
remove her by ceasing to do so. A man can purge a woman for
no other reason than that he has tired of her, knocked her up,
or is after someone else: and that purge is accepted without a
ripple. There are cases of a woman excluded from a group for
no other reason than that one of its leaders proved impotent
with her. If a
by a woman and does not introduce her, it is rare indeed that
anyone will bother to ask her name or acknowledge her presence. The etiquette that governs is one of master-servant. 5
Or, as Robin Morgan wrote in 1970: “We have met the enemy and
he’s our friend. And dangerous. ” 6 Acknowledging the forced sex
so pervasive in the counterculture in the language of the counterculture, Morgan wrote: “It hurts to understand that at Woodstock or Altamont a woman could be declared uptight or a poor sport if
she didn’t want to be raped. ” 7 These were the beginnings: recognizing that the brother-lovers were sexual exploiters as cynical as any other exploiters—they ruled and demeaned and discarded
women, they used women to get and consolidate power, they used
women for sex and for menial labor, they used women up; recognizing that rape was a matter of utter indifference to these brother-lovers—they took it any way they could get it; and recognizing
that all the work for justice had been done on the backs of sexually
exploited women within the movement. “But surely, ” wrote Robin
Morgan in 1968, “even a male reactionary on this issue can realize
that it is
and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks—
It was the raw, terrible realization that sex was not brother-sister
but master-servant—that this brave new radical wanted to be not
only master in his own home but pasha in his own harem—that
proved explosive. The women ignited with the realization that they
had been sexually used. Going beyond the male agenda on sexual
liberation, these women discussed sex and politics with one another—something not done even when they had shared the same bed with the same man—and discovered that their experiences had
been staggeringly the same, ranging from forced sex to sexual humiliation to abandonment to cynical manipulation as both menials and pieces of ass. And the men were entrenched in sex as power:
they wanted the women for fucking, not revolution: the two were
revealed to be different after all. The men refused to change but
even more important they hated the women for refusing to service
them anymore on the old terms— there it was, revealed for what it
was. The women left the men— in droves. The women formed an
autonomous women’s movement, a militant feminist movement, to
fight against the sexual cruelty they had experienced and to fight
for the sexual justice they had been denied.
From their own experience— especially in being coerced and in
being exchanged— the women found a first premise for their political movement: that freedom for a woman was predicated on, and could not exist without, her own absolute control of her own body
in sex and in reproduction. This included not only the right to
terminate a pregnancy but also the right to not have sex, to say no,
to not be fucked. For women, this led to many areas of sexual
discovery about the nature and politics of their own sexual desire,
but for men it was a dead end— most of them never recognized
feminism except in terms of their own sexual deprivation; feminists
were taking aw ay the easy fuck. T hey did everything they could to
break the back of the feminist movement— and in fact they have
