Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence Author(s): Adrienne Rich Source: Signs, Vol. 5, No.
4, Women: Sex and Sexuality (Summer, 1980), pp. 631-660 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834 . Accessed: 03/12/2013 21:13
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 137.189.204.226 on Tue, 3 Dec 2013 21:13:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence
Adrienne Rich
I
Biologically men have only one innate orientation-a sexual one thatdraws themto women,-while women have two innate orientations,sexual toward men and reproductivetoward theiryoung.1 ... I was a woman terribly vulnerable,critical,using femalenessas a sort of standard or yardstick to measure and discard men. YesIn itsfirst issue (Autumn 1975),Signs:Journal in Culture and Society ofWomen published Carroll Smith-Rosenberg'snow classic article,"The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America." The followingsummer appeared Joan Kelly's "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women's History(Signs:Journal and Society, in Culture vol. 1,no. 4 [Summer 1976]). ofWomen Among scholarlyarticles,these two provided, in different ways,a point of departure for in thisessay. I am deeply indebtedalso to the growingbody of lesbian research mythinking in otherjournals, including Blanche W. Cook's "Female Support Networksand Political 3 (1977): 43-61; and Lorraine Bethel's "'This Infinity of Conscious Activism," Chrysalis Pain': Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female LiteraryTradition," lecturegiven at the Harlem Studio Museum, May 1978, forthcoming inBlack Women's ed. Gloria Hull, Studies, Elaine Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury,N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1980); by several books published in the last few years: Kathleen Barry,FemaleSexual Slavery(EnThe Metaethics of glewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall,Inc., 1979): Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: RadicalFeminism and Nature:TheRoarWoman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978); Susan Griffin, Her (New York: Harper & Row, 1978); Diana Russelland Nicole van de Ven, eds., ingInside Tribunalon Crimes (Millbrae, Calif.: Les FemProceedings oftheInternational againstWomen in sociology, "Lesbian Origins: An Hystorical mes, 1976); and by Susan Cavin's dissertation and Cross-cultural Analysisof Sex Ratios, Female Sexualityand Homo-sexual Segregation versus Hetero-sexual IntegrationPatternsin Relation to the Liberationof Women" (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1978). 1. Alice Rossi, "Children and Work in the Lives of Women" (paper delivered at the of Arizona, Tucson, February 1976). University
in Culture and Society 1980, vol. 5, no. 4] [Signs:Journalof Women of Chicago. 0097-9740/80/0504-0001$01.00 ? 1980 by The University
631
632
Rich
Compulsory Heterosexuality
somethinglike that. I was an Anna who inviteddefeat from men withoutever being conscious of it. (But I am conscious of it. And being conscious of it means I shall leave it all behind me and become-but what?) I was stuck fast in an emotion common to women of our time,that can turn them bitter, or Lesbian, or solitary.Yes, that Anna during that time was ... [Another blank line across the page:]2 The bias of compulsoryheterosexuality, throughwhich lesbian experience is perceivedon a scale rangingfromdeviantto abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible, could be illustratedfrommany other textsthan the two just preceding. The assumption made by Rossi, that women are "innatelysexuallyoriented" towardmen, or by Lessing, thatthe lesbian choice is simplyan acting-out of bitterness towardmen, are by no means theirsalone; theyare widelycurrentin literatureand in the social sciences. I am concerned here withtwo other mattersas well: first, how and women's choice of women as life comrades, why passionate partners, co-workers, lovers,tribe,has been crushed, invalidated,forcedinto hiding and disguise; and second, the virtualor totalneglectof lesbian existence in a wide range of writings, includingfeminist scholarship.Obviis a I feminist there connection here. believe that much theoryand ously is stranded on this shoal. criticism My organizingimpulse is the beliefthatit is not enough forfeminist thought that specificallylesbian texts exist. Any theory or cultural/ politicalcreationthattreatslesbian existenceas a marginalor less "natural" phenomenon, as mere "sexual preference,"or as the mirrorimage of either heterosexual or male homosexual relations, is profoundly Feministtheorycan weakened thereby, whateveritsothercontributions. no longer afford merely to voice a toleration of "lesbianism" as an or make token allusion to lesbians. A feminist "alternativelife-style," of orientationforwomen is long overheterosexual critique compulsory due. In this exploratorypaper, I shall tryto show why. I will begin by way of examples, briefly discussingfour books that have appeared in the last few years,writtenfromdifferent viewpoints and politicalorientations, but all presentingthemselves,and favorably All take as a basic assumption that the social reviewed, as feminist.3
2. Doris Lessing,TheGolden Notebook (New York: Bantam Books [1962] 1977), p. 480. of California 3. Nancy Chodorow, TheReproduction (Berkeley: University ofMothering and TheMermaid and theMinotaur:Sexual Arrangements Press, 1978); Dorothy Dinnerstein, theHuman Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre Adviceto Women (Garden City,N.Y.: English,For Her Own Good: 150 Yearsof theExperts' Doubleday & Co., Anchor Press, 1978); Jean Baker Miller, Towarda New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1976).
Signs
Summer 1980
633
relationsof the sexes are disordered and extremelyproblematic,if not disabling,forwomen; all seek paths towardchange. I have learned more fromsome of these books than fromothers; but on this I am clear: each one mighthave been more accurate,more powerful,more trulya force forchange, had the author feltimpelled to deal withlesbian existenceas and as a source of knowledgeand power available to women; or a reality, with the institutionof heterosexualityitselfas a beachhead of male dominance.4 In none of them is the question ever raised, whetherin a hetdifferent context,or other thingsbeing equal, women would choose is presumed as a "sexerosexual coupling and marriage; heterosexuality In none or explicitly. ual preference"of "mostwomen," eitherimplicitly of these books, which concern themselveswith mothering,sex roles, relationships,and societal prescriptionsfor women, is compulsoryheterosexuality ever examined as an institutionpowerfullyaffectingall even indirectly these; or the idea of "preference"or "innateorientation" questioned. In For Her Own Good: 150 Years of theExperts' Adviceto Womenby Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, the authors' superb pamMidwivesand Nurses: A History Healers, and phlets, Witches, of Women and Disorders: The SexualPolitics are developed into ofSickness, Complaints a provocativeand complex study.Their thesis in this book is that the advice given American women by male health professionals, particularly in the areas of marital sex, maternity, and child care, has echoed the dictatesof the economic marketplaceand the role capitalismhas needed women to play in productionand/orreproduction.Women have become the consumer victimsof various cures, therapies,and normative judgments in differentperiods (including the prescriptionto middle-class
4. I could have chosen many other serious and influentialrecent books, including the Boston anthologies,which would illustratethe same point: e.g., Our Bodies,Ourselves, Women's Health Collective's best-seller(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), which devotesa separate (and inadequate) chapter to lesbians,but whose message is thatheterosexWomen's ualityis most women's life preference; Berenice Carroll, ed., Liberating History: of Illinois Press, 1976), which does not Theoretical and Critical Essays(Urbana: University include even a token essay on the lesbian presence in history, though an essay by Linda Gordon, Persis Hunt, et al. notes the use by male historiansof "sexual deviance" as a categoryto discreditand dismissAnna Howard Shaw, Jane Addams, and other feminists ("Historical Phallacies: Sexism in American Historical Writing");and Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible:Women in EuropeanHistory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin but no materials Co., 1977), whichcontainsthree mentionsof male homosexuality that I have been able to locate on lesbians. Gerda Lerner, ed., The FemaleExperience: An American Documentary (Indianapolis: Bobbs-MerrillCo., 1977), contains an abridgmentof two lesbian/feminist positionpapers fromthe contemporarymovementbut no other documentationof lesbian existence.Lerner does note in her preface,however,how the charge of deviance has been used to fragment women and discourage women's resistance.Linda in America(New Gordon, in Woman's Body,Woman's Right:A Social History ofBirthControl York: Viking Press, Grossman, 1976), notes accuratelythat: "It is not that feminismhas produced more lesbians. There have always been many lesbians, despite high levels of repression; and most lesbians experience theirsexual preferenceas innate . . ." (p. 410).
634
Rich
women to embodyand preservethe sacrednessof the home-the "scientific"romanticization of the home itself).None of the "experts"' advice has been eitherparticularly scientific or women-oriented; ithas reflected male needs, male fantasiesabout women, and male interestin controlling women-particularly in the realms of sexualityand motherhoodfused with the requirementsof industrialcapitalism. So much of this book is so devastatinglyinformativeand is writtenwith such lucid feministwit, that I kept waiting as I read for the basic prescription against lesbianismto be examined. It never was. This can hardly be for lack of information. Jonathan Katz's Gay American tells us that as early as 1656 the New Haven Colony History5 prescribedthe death penaltyforlesbians. Katz providesmanysuggestive and informative documents on the "treatment"(or torture)of lesbians by the medical profession in the nineteenthand twentiethcenturies. Recent work by the historianNancy Sahli documents the crackdownon intense female friendshipsamong college women at the turn of the The ironictitle, ForHer OwnGood,mighthave referred presentcentury.6 firstand foremostto the economic imperativeto heterosexuality and marriage and to the sanctions imposed against single women and widows-both of whom have been and stillare viewed as deviant.Yet, in thisoftenenlighteningMarxist-feminist overviewof male prescriptions for female sanityand health, the economics of prescriptive heterosexualitygo unexamined.7 Of the three psychoanalytically based books, one, Jean Baker Milis written as iflesbians simplydo ler's Towarda New Psychology ofWomen, not exist,even as marginalbeings. Given Miller'stitleI findthisastonishing. However, the favorablereviews the book has received in feminist journals, including Signs and Spokeswoman,suggest that Miller's heterocentricassumptions are widely shared. In The Mermaidand the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and theHuman Malaise, Dorothy Dinnersteinmakes an impassioned argumentfor the sharing of parenting between women and men and for an end to what she perceives as the male/femalesymbiosisof "gender arrangements,"which she feels are and further into violence and self-extinction. leading the species further Apart from other problems that I have with this book (including her men have practicedon silenceon the institutional and random terrorism women-and children-throughout history, amply documented by
5. Jonathan Katz, GayAmerican (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976). History A Mag6. Nancy Sahli, "Smashing: Women's Relationshipsbefore the Fall," Chrysalis: azineofWomen's Culture8 (1979): 17-27. A versionof the articlewas presentedat theThird BerkshireConference on the Historyof Women, June 11, 1976. 7. This is a book which I have publiclyendorsed. I would stilldo so, though withthe above caveat. It is only since beginning to writethis article that I fullyappreciated how enormous is the unasked question in Ehrenreich and English's book.
Signs
Summer 1980
635
and her Russell and van de Ven, and Brownmiller,8 Barry,Daly, Griffin, to the neglectof economic and othermaterial obsession withpsychology I findutterly ahistorical realitiesthathelp to create psychological reality), Dinnerstein'sviewof the relationsbetweenwomen and men as "a collaboration to keep historymad." She means by this,to perpetuate social to life itself.She relationswhich are hostile,exploitive,and destructive sees women and men as equal partners in the making of "sexual arrangements," seeminglyunaware of the repeated strugglesof women to resistoppression (our own and thatof others) and to change our condition. She ignores, specifically, the historyof women who-as witches, seules,marriage resisters, femmes spinsters,autonomous widows, and/or lesbians-have managed on varyinglevels not to collaborate. It is this have so much to learn and on history, precisely,from which feminists whichthereis overall such blanketingsilence. Dinnersteinacknowledges at the end of her book that"femaleseparatism,"though"on a large scale and in the long run wildly has somethingto teach us: "Sepaimpractical," could in women out to learn from scratchset rate, principle undeflectedby the opportunitiesto evade this task that men's presence has so faroffered-what intactself-creative humanness is."9Phrases like "intactself-creative humanness" obscure the question of what the many formsof female separatism have actuallybeen addressing. The fact is that women in every culture and throughouthistory have undertaken the task of independent,nonheterosexual,woman-connectedexistence, to the extentmade possible by theircontext,oftenin the beliefthatthey were the "onlyones" ever to have done so. They have undertakeniteven though fewwomen have been in an economic positionto resistmarriage altogether; and even though attacks against unmarried women have ranged from aspersion and mockeryto deliberate gynocide,including the burningand torturing of millionsof widowsand spinsters duringthe witchpersecutionsof the fifteenth, and seventeenth centuries sixteenth, in Europe, and the practiceof sutteeon widows in India.10 Nancy Chodorow does come close to the edge of an acknowledgmentof lesbian existence.Like Dinnerstein,Chodorow believes thatthe factthatwomen, and women only,are responsible forchild care in the sexual divisionof labor has led to an entiresocial organizationof gender inequality,and thatmen as well as women must become primarycarers forchildrenif thatinequalityis to change. In the process of examining, froma psychoanalytic how mothering-by-women affects the perspective, of and she offers docupsychologicaldevelopment girl boy children, mentationthat men are "emotionallysecondary" in women's lives; that
8. Susan Brownmiller, and Rape (New York: Simon & AgainstOur Will: Men, Women Schuster, 1975). 9. Dinnerstein,p. 272. 10. Daly, pp. 184-85; 114-33.
636
Rich
"women have a richer,ongoing inner world to fallback on.... men do not become as emotionallyimportant to women as women do to men."'' This would carry into the late twentiethcentury Smith-Rosenberg's women's emotional findingsabout eighteenth-and nineteenth-century focus on women. "Emotionallyimportant"can of course referto anger as well as to love, or to that intense mixtureof the two often found in women's relationshipswithwomen: one aspect of what I have come to call the "double-lifeof women" (see below). Chodorow concludes that because women have women as mothers,"The mother remains a primary internalobject [sic] to the girl,so that heterosexual relationships are on the model of a nonexclusive,second relationshipforher,whereas forthe boy theyrecreatean exclusive,primary relationship."According to Chodorow, women "have learned to deny the limitations of masculine lovers for both psychologicaland practicalreasons."'2 But the practicalreasons (like witchburnings,male control of law, and science,or economic nonviability withinthe sexual division theology, of labor) are glossed over. Chodorow's account barely glances at the and sanctionswhich,historically, have enforced or insured constraints the coupling of women withmen and obstructedor penalized our coupling or allyingin independent groups withotherwomen. She dismisses do tend to lesbianexistencewiththe commentthat"lesbian relationships re-createmother-daughter emotionsand connections,but most women are heterosexual" (implied: more mature,havingdeveloped beyond the connection). She then adds: "This heterosexual prefmother-daughter in addition to objectiveeconomic erence and taboos on homosexuality, dependence on men, make the option of primarysexual bonds with other women unlikely-though more prevalentin recent years."'3 The of thatqualificationseems irresistible-butChodorow does significance not explore it further.Is she sayingthat lesbian existence has become more visiblein recentyears(in certaingroups?),thateconomic and other pressureshave changed (under capitalism,socialism,or both?),and that consequentlymore women are rejectingthe heterosexual "choice"? She argues that women want children because their heterosexual rethat in having a child a woman lationshipslack richnessand intensity, withher mother.It seems seeks to re-createher own intenserelationship Chodorow leads us implicitly to be thaton the basis of her own findings, is not a "preference"for women; that, to conclude that heterosexuality the erotic fromthe emotional in a way that for one thing,it fragments women find impoverishingand painful. Yet her book participatesin mandating it. Neglectingthe covert socializationsand the overt forces whichhave channelled women intomarriageand heterosexualromance,
11. Chodorow, pp. 197-98. 12. Ibid., pp. 198-99. 13. Ibid., p. 200.
Signs
Summer 1980
637
pressures ranging from the selling of daughters to postindustrialecoto the images of the televisionscreen, nomicsto the silencesof literature she, like Dinnerstein, is stuck with trying to reform a man-made institution-compulsoryheterosexuality-as if, despite profound emotional impulses and complementarities drawingwomen toward women, there is a mystical/biological a "preference"or heterosexual inclination, "choice" which draws women toward men. Moreover, it is understood that this"preference"does not need to be explained, unless throughthe tortuoustheoryof the female Oedipus complex or the necessityfor species reproduction.It is lesbian sexuality which (usually,and, incorrectly, "included" under male homosexuality) is seen as requiringexplanation. This assumption of female heterosexualityseems to me in itselfremarkable:it is an enormous assumptionto have glided so silently into the foundationsof our thought. The extension of this assumption is the frequently heard assertion thatin a world of genuine equality,where men were nonoppressiveand nurturing,everyone would be bisexual. Such a notion blurs and sentimentalizes the actualitieswithinwhichwomen have experienced sexuality;it is the old liberal leap across the tasks and strugglesof here and which will generate its now, the continuingprocess of sexual definition own possibilitiesand choices. (It also assumes that women who have chosen women have done so simplybecause men are oppressive and emotionallyunavailable: whichstillfailsto account forwomen who continue to pursue relationshipswith oppressive and/or emotionallyunlike motherhood, men.) I am suggestingthatheterosexuality, satisfying needs to be recognized and studied as a politicalinstitution-even, or especially,by those individuals who feel theyare, in their personal experience, the precursorsof a new social relationbetween the sexes. II If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurtureforboth femaleand male children,itwould seem logical,froma feminist perspectiveat least,to pose the following questions: whetherthe search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originallylead toward women; whyin fact womenwould ever redirect thatsearch; why the means of impregnation,and emotional/erotic respecies-survival, lationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent stricturesshould be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyaltyand subservience to men. I doubt thatenough feminist scholarsand theorists have taken the to the societal forces which wrench women's emopains acknowledge tional and erotic energies away fromthemselvesand other women and
638
Rich
fromwoman-identified values. These forces,as I shall tryto show,range from literal physical enslavement to the disguising and distortingof possible options. I do not, myself, assume that mothering-by-women is a "sufficient has cause" of lesbian existence. But the issue of mothering-by-women been much in the air of late, usually accompanied by the view that increased parenting by men would mninimize antagonism between the sexes and equalize the sexual imbalance of power of males over females. These discussions are carried on withoutreferenceto compulsoryheterosexualityas a phenomenon let alone as an ideology. I do not wish to sources of male power. I believe psychologizehere, but ratherto identify in child care on a large numbers of men undertake could, fact, large scale without radically altering the balance of male power in a maleidentifiedsociety. In her essay "The Origin of the Family,"Kathleen Gough listseight of male power in archaic and contemporary societies characteristics to deny women which I would like to use as a framework: "men's ability or to force it to command or sexuality upon them; exploit theirlabor to control their produce; to control or rob them of their children; to confine them physicallyand prevent their movement; to use them as objects in male transactions;to cramp theircreativeness;or to withhold from them large areas of the society'sknowledge and cultural attainments."14 (Gough does not perceive these power-characteristicsas specificallyenforcing heterosexuality; only as producing sexual inequality.)Below, Gough's words appear in italics;the elaborationof each of her categories,in brackets,is my own. Characteristics of male power include: thepowerofmen 1. to deny women [our own] sexuality means of clitoridectomyand infibulation; chastity belts; [by punishment,including death, for female adultery; punishment, denial of including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic the clitoris; strictures against masturbation;denial of maternal and postmenopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; closingof archives pseudolesbian images in media and literature; and destructionof documents relatingto lesbian existence]; 2. or toforceit [male sexuality]upon them [by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; brother-sister incest;the socializationof women father-daughter, idealization to feel thatmale sexual "drive" amounts to a right;15
14. Kathleen Gough, "The Origin of the Family,"in Toward an Anthropology ofWomen, ed. Rayna [Rapp] Reiter (New York: MonthlyReview Press, 1975), pp. 69-70. 15. Barry,pp. 216-19.
Signs
Summer 1980
639
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
of heterosexual romance in art, literature,media, advertising, the harem; etc.; child marriage;arranged marriage;prostitution; and doctrines of orgasm; porvaginal frigidity psychoanalytic nographicdepictionsof women respondingpleasurablyto sexual violence and humiliation(a subliminalmessage being thatsadistic is more "normal" than sensualitybetween womheterosexuality en)]; their to command or exploit their laborto control produce of marriage and motherhood as [by means of the institutions unpaid production; the horizontalsegregationof women in paid employment;the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; enforced male controlof abortion,contraception, and childbirth; whichrobs mothersof sterilization; pimping; female infanticide, daughters and contributesto generalized devaluation of women]; to control or robthem children of their and "legal kidnapping";16enforced [by means of father-right sterilization;systematizedinfanticide;seizure of children from lesbian mothersby the courts; the malpracticeof male obstetrics; use of the motheras "token torturer"17 in genital mutilationor in binding the daughter'sfeet(or mind) to fither formarriage]; to confine them and prevent their movement physically means of as terrorism, [by rape keeping women off the streets; purdah; foot-binding; atrophying of women's athletic capabilities;haute couture, "feminine"dress codes; the veil; sexual harassmenton the streets;horizontalsegregationof women in employment; prescriptions for "full-time"mothering; enforced economic dependence of wives]; to use them as objects in maletransactions [use of women as "gifts";bride-price;pimping; arranged marto facilitate male deals, e.g., riage; use of women as entertainers cocktail waitressrequired to dress for male sexual wife-hostess, call girls, "bunnies," geisha, kisaengprostitutes,sectitillation, retaries]; to cramp their creativeness [witchpersecutions as campaigns against midwivesand female healers and as pogrom against independent, "unassimilated" women;'8 definition of male pursuits as more valuable than female withinany culture, so that cultural values become embodiment of male subjectivity; restriction of female selffulfillment to marriage and motherhood; sexual exploitationof women by male artistsand teachers; the social and economic
16. Anna Demeter,Legal Kidnapping(Boston: Beacon Press, 1977), pp. xx, 126-28. 17. Daly, pp. 132, 139-41, 163-65. 18. Barbara Ehrenreichand Deirdre English,Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Old Westbury, N.Y.: FeministPress, 1973); Andrea Dworkin,Woman Hating (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974), pp. 118-54; Daly, pp. 178-222.
640
Rich
disruptionof women's creative aspirations;'9 erasure of female and tradition];20 and cultural 8. towithholdfrom them knowledge largeareas ofthesociety's attainments [bymeans of noneducation of females(60% of the world's illiterates are women); the "Great Silence" regardingwomen and particularly lesbian existence in history and culture;21 sex-role stereotypingwhich deflects women from science, technology, and other"masculine"pursuits;male social/professional bonding which excludes women; discriminationagainst women in the professions]. These are some of the methods by which male power is manifested and maintained. Looking at the schema, what surelyimpressesitselfis the factthatwe are confronting not a simple maintenanceof inequality and propertypossession,but a pervasiveclusterof forces,rangingfrom physical brutalityto control of consciousness, which suggests that an enormous potentialcounterforce is having to be restrained. Some of the formsby which male power manifestsitselfare more easily recognizable as enforcing heterosexualityon women than are others. Yet each one I have listed adds to the cluster of forces within which women have been convinced that marriage, and sexual orientation toward men, are inevitable, or oppressive comeven if unsatisfying The of their lives. child belt; marriage; erasure of lesponents chastity bian existence (except as exotic and perverse) in art, literature,film; idealization of heterosexual romance and marriage-these are some two exemplifying fairlyobvious formsof compulsion, the first physical has force,the second twocontrolof consciousness.While clitoridectomy Kathleen Barry been assailed by feminists as a formof woman-torture,22 first pointed out thatit is not simplya wayof turningthe young girlinto a "marriageable"woman throughbrutalsurgery:it intendsthatwomen in the intimateproximity of polygynousmarriage will not form sexual with each that-from a male, genital-fetishist other; relationships erotic even in a sex-segregatedsituaconnections, perspective-female excised.23 tion, will be literally
A RoomofOne'sOwn(London: Hogarth Press, 1929), and Three 19. See VirginiaWoolf, Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., [1938] 1966); Tillie Olsen, Silences(Boston: A MagaDelacorte Press, 1978); MichelleCliff, "The Resonance of Interruption," Chrysalis: zine of Women's Culture8 (1979): 29-37. 20. MaryDaly,Beyond God theFather (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), pp. 347-51; Olsen, pp. 22-46. 21. Daly, Beyond God theFather,p. 93. 22. Fran P. Hosken, "The Violence of Power: Genital Mutilation of Females," A FeministJournal Heresies: ofArtand Politics6 (1979): 28-35; Russell and van de Ven, pp. 194-95. 23. Barry,pp. 163-64.
Signs
Summer 1980
641
The functionof pornographyas an influenceon consciousness is a industryhas major public issue of our time,when a multibillion-dollar the power to disseminateincreasingly sadistic,women-degradingvisual But even so-called soft-core images. depict pornographyand advertising women as objectsof sexual appetitedevoid of emotionalcontext, without as a sexual commodityto individual meaning or personality:essentially be consumed by males. (So-called lesbian pornography,created for the male voyeuristic eye, is equally devoid of emotionalcontextor individual most pernicious message relayed by pornographyis The personality.) thatwomen are naturalsexual preyto men and love it; thatsexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentiallymasochistic, humiliationpleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty,if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually "normal," while sensualitybetween women, including erotic mutualityand respect, is "queer," "sick," and either pornographic in itselfor not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage.24 Pornographydoes not simplycreate a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable;itwidens therangeofbehavior considered menin heterosexual whichreiteratively intercourse-behavior acceptablefrom and sexual potential,including stripswomen of theirautonomy,dignity, the potential of loving and being loved by women in mutualityand integrity. In her brilliant A Case of SexualHarassment Women: study, ofWorking Sex Discrimination, Catharine A. MacKinnon delineates the intersection of compulsoryheterosexuality and economics. Under capitalism,women are horizontally inferior segregatedby gender and occupy a structurally positionin the workplace; thisis hardlynews,but MacKinnon raises the question why,even ifcapitalism"requires some collectionof individuals to occupy low-status,low-payingpositions ... such persons must be biologicallyfemale," and goes on to point out that "the fact that male couldpay employers often do not hire qualified women, even whenthey them lessthanmensuggeststhatmore than the profit motiveis implicated" [emphasis added].25 She cites a wealthof materialdocumentingthe fact that women are not only segregated in low-paying, servicejobs (as secretaries, domestics, nurses, typists,telephone operators, child-care workers,waitresses)but that"sexualizationof the woman" is part of the to the economic realitiesof women's livesis the job. Central and intrinsic that women will"marketsexual attractiveness to men, who requirement
24. The issue of "lesbian sadomasochism" needs to be examined in terms of the dominant cultures'teachingsabout the relationof sex and violence,and also of the acceptance by some lesbiansof male homosexual mores. I believe thisto be another example of the "double-life"of women. 25. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Sexual Harassment Women:A Case of Sex of Working Discrimination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 15-16.
642
Rich
tend to hold the economic power and position to enforce their predilections." And MacKinnon exhaustively documents that "sexual harassmentperpetuatesthe interlockedstructure by whichwomen have been kept sexually in thrallto men at the bottomof the labor market. Two forcesof American societyconverge: men's controlover women's sexuality and capital's control over employees' work lives."26 Thus, women in the workplace are at the mercyof sex-as-powerin a vicious circle. Economically disadvantaged, women-whether waitresses or professors-endure sexual harassmentto keep theirjobs and learn to behave in a complaisantlyand ingratiatingly heterosexual manner because theydiscoverthisis theirtruequalificationforemployment, whatever the job description.And, MacKinnon notes, the woman who too decisivelyresistssexual overturesin the workplace is accused of being "dried-up" and sexless, or lesbian. This raises a specificdifferencebetween the experiences of lesbians and homosexual men. A lesbian,closeted on her job because of heterosexistprejudice, is not simplyforced intodenyingthe truthof her outside relationships or privatelife;herjob depends on her pretendingto be not merelyheterosexualbut a heteroin termsof dressingand playingthe feminine, sexual woman, deferential role required of "real" women. MacKinnon raises radical questions as to the qualitativedifferences between sexual harassment, rape, and ordinary heterosexual intercourse. ("As one accused rapist put it, he hadn't used 'any more force than is usual for males during the preliminaries."')She criticizesSusan Brownmiller27 forseparatingrape fromthe mainstreamof dailylifeand forher unexamined premisethat"rape is violence,intercourse is sexuality," removingrape fromthe sexual sphere altogether.Most cruciallyshe argues that"takingrape fromthe realm of'the sexual,' placing it in the realm of 'the violent,' allows one to be against it without raising any of heterosexuality has questions about the extentto whichthe institution defined force as a normal part of 'the preliminaries."'28 "Never is it asked whether,under conditionsof male supremacy,the notion of 'consent' has any meaning."29 The factis that the workplace,among other social institutions, is a place where women have learned to accept male violationof our psychic and physical boundaries as the price of survival; where women have been educated-no less than by romantic literature or by
26. Ibid., p. 174. 27. Brownmiller(n. 8 above). 28. MacKinnon, p. 219. Susan Schecterwrites:"The push for heterosexual union at whatevercost is so intense that ... it has become a cultural force of its own that creates battering.The ideology of romantic love and its jealous possession of the partner as propertyprovide the masquerade for what can become severe abuse" (Aegis:Magazine on [July-August1979], pp. 50-51). Ending Violence againstWomen 29. MacKinnon, p. 298.
Signs
Summer 1980
643
pornography-to perceiveourselvesas sexual prey.A woman seekingto escape such casual violationsalong witheconomic disadvantagemaywell turnto marriageas a formof hoped-for-protection, while bringinginto marriageneithersocial or economic power,thusenteringthatinstitution also froma disadvantaged position. MacKinnon finally asks: What if inequalityis built into the social conceptions of male and female sexuality, of masculinity and femininity, of sexiness and heterosexual attractiveness?Incidents of sexual harassment suggest that male sexual desire itselfmay be aroused by female vulnerability.... Men feeltheycan take advantage,so theywantto, so theydo. Examination of sexual harassment,preciselybecause the episodes appear commonplace, forces one to confrontthe fact that sexual intercoursenormallyoccurs between economic (as well as physical) unequals ... the apparent legal requirementthatviolationsof women's sexualityappear out of the ordinarybefore they will be punished helps preventwomen fromdefiningthe ordinaryconditions of theirown consent.30 Given the nature and extent of heterosexual pressures, the daily "eroticizationof women's subordination"as MacKinnon phrases it,31I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective(suggested by such writersas Karen Homey, H. R. Hayes, Wolfgang Lederer, and most recently,Dorothy Dinnerstein) that the male need to control women sexuallyresultsfromsome primalmale "fearof women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable thatmen reallyfear,not that theywill have women's sexual appetites forcedon them,or thatwomen want to smotherand devour them,but thatwomen could be indifferent to them altogether,that men could be allowed sexual and emotionalthereforeeconomic-access to women onlyon women's terms,otherwise being lefton the peripheryof the matrix. The means of assuring male sexual access to women have recently received a searching investigation She documents by Kathleen Barry.32 extensiveand appalling evidence forthe existence,on a verylarge scale, of internationalfemale slavery,the institution once known as "white but whichin facthas involved,and at thisverymomentinvolves, slavery" women of every race and class. In the theoreticalanalysisderived from her research, Barry makes the connection between all enforced conditions under which women live subject to men: prostitution, marital and brother-sister incest, wife-beating, rape, father-daughter pornogthe sellingof daughters,purdah, and genitalmutilaraphy,bride-price, tion. She sees the rape paradigm-where the victimof sexual assault is held responsibleforher own victimization-as leading to the rationaliza30. Ibid.,p. 220. 31. Ibid.,p. 221. 32. Kathleen Female Sexual n. above). (see unnumbered Barry, Slavery
644
Rich
tion and acceptance of other formsof enslavement, where the woman is to have it to or to have "chosen" her embrace fate, presumed passively, courted it perverselythrough rash or unchaste behavior. On the contrary,Barry maintains,"female sexual slaveryis present in ALL situations where women or girlscannot change the conditionsof theirexistence; where regardlessof how theygot into those conditions, e.g., social economic trust or the pressure, longing for affechardship, misplaced cannot and are where tion,they they get out; subject to sexual violence and exploitation."33 She provides a spectrumof concreteexamples, not in women, only as to the existenceof a widespread internationaltraffic but also as to how thisoperates-whether in the formof a "Minnesota pipeline" funnelingblonde, blue-eyed midwesternrunawaysto Times in Latin Square, or the purchasingof youngwomen out of rural poverty America or Southeast Asia, or the providing of maisonsd'abattagefor of Paris. Instead of migrantworkersin the eighteentharrondissement the victim" or to "blaming trying diagnose her presumed pathology, on the pathologyof sex colonizationitself, the Barryturnsher floodlight ideology of "cultural sadism" representedby the vast industryof poras "sexual of women primarily nographyand by the overallidentification is whose the service of sexual men."34 beings responsibility Barrydelineates what she names a "sexual dominationperspective" sexual abuse and terrorism throughwhose lens, purportingobjectivity, of women by men has been rendered almost invisibleby treatingit as naturaland inevitable.From its pointof view,women are expendable as To long as the sexual and emotional needs of the male can be satisfied. replace thisperspectiveof dominationwitha universalstandardof basic freedom for women fromgender-specific on violence, fromconstraints movement,and from male rightof sexual and emotional access is the political purpose of her book. Like Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology, Barry and other cultural-relativist rationalizations for sexrejectsstructuralist ual tortureand antiwomanviolence. In her opening chapter,she asks of her readers thattheyrefuseall handyescapes intoignoranceand denial. "The onlywaywe can come out of hiding,break throughour paralyzing defenses,is to knowitall-the fullextentof sexual violenceand dominain facingdirectly, tion of women. ... In knowing, we can learn to chart our course out of this oppression, by envisioningand creatinga world which will preclude female sexual slavery."35 "Untilwe name the practice,give conceptual definition and formto in its illustrate life time and those who are most obvious its over it, space, victimswill also not be able to name it or define theirexperience."36
33. 34. 35. 36. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. Ibid., p. 33. 103. 5. 100.
Si.ns
Summer 1980
645
But women are all, in different ways and to different degrees, its and of the with and victims; part problem naming conceptualizing female sexual slavery is, as Barry clearly sees, compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory heterosexuality simplifiesthe task of the procurer and pimp in worldwide prostitution rings and "eros centers,"while, in the privacyof the home, it leads the daughter to "accept" incest/rape by her father,the motherto deny thatit is happening, the batteredwifeto stayon withan abusive husand. "Befriendingor love" is a major tacticof the procurerwhose job it is to turn the runawayor the confused young girl over to the pimp for seasoning. The ideology of heterosexual romance, beamed at her fromchildhood out of fairy tales,television, films, advertising,popular songs, wedding pageantry,is a tool ready to the procurer's hand and one which he does not hesitate to use, as Barry in "love" as an emotion amply documents. Early female indoctrination be a Western but a more universal ideology conmay largely concept; cerns the primacyand uncontrollability of the male sexual drive. This is one of many insightsofferedby Barry'swork: As sexual power is learned by adolescent boys through the social experience of their sex drive, so do girls learn that the locus of sexual power is male. Given the importanceplaced on the male sex drive in the socializationof girlsas well as boys,early adolescence is in a girl's probably the first significant phase of male identification lifeand development.... As a young girlbecomes aware of her own increasingsexual feelings. . . she turns away from her heretofore withgirlfriends. As theybecome secondaryto primaryrelationships also assumes her, recede in importancein her life,her own identity a secondary role and she grows into male identification.37 We still need to ask why some women never, even temporarily, "turnaway fromheretoforeprimaryrelationships" withother females? And why does male-identification-thecastingof one's social, political, and intellectualallegiances with men-exist among lifelongsexual lesbians? Barry'shypothesis throwsus among new questions,but it clarifies the diversity of formsin which compulsoryheterosexuality presentsitself.In the mystiqueof the overpowering, all-conqueringmale sex drive, the penis-with-a-life-of-its-own, is rooted the law of male sex-rightto which as a universalculturalassumptionon women, justifiesprostitution the one hand, while defending sexual slaverywithinthe familyon the basis of "familyprivacyand cultural uniqueness" on the other.38The adolescent male sex drive, which, as both young women and men are
37. Ibid., p. 218. 38. Ibid., p. 140.
646
Rich
foritself or take no for taught,once triggeredcannot take responsibility an answer, becomes, according to Barry, the norm and rationale for adult male sexual behavior: a condition of arrested sexual development. Women learn to accept as natural the inevitability of this"drive"because we receive it as dogma. Hence marital rape, hence the Japanese wife resignedlypacking her husband's suitcase for a weekend in the kisaeng brothels of Taiwan, hence the psychologicalas well as economic imbalance of power betweenhusband and wife,male employerand female worker,fatherand daughter, male professorand female student. The effectof male-identification means the values of the colonizerand actively in internalizing participating carryingout the colonization of one's self and one's sex. . .. Male identification is the act wherebywomen place men above women, status,and importancein most including themselves,in credibility, situations,regardless of the comparative quality the women may bringto the situation.... Interactionwithwomen is seen as a lesser formof relatingon every level.39 What deserves furtherexploration is the double-thinkmany women and utterly free: engage in and fromwhich no woman is permanently However woman-to-womanrelationships,female support networks,a female and feministvalue system,are relied on and cherished, indoctrinationin male credibility and status can stillcreate synapses in thought,denials of feeling, wishfulthinking,a profound sexual and I quote here froma letterI received the day I intellectualconfusion.40 was writing thispassage: "I have had verybad relationships withmen-I am now in the midstof a verypainfulseparation. I am trying to findmy strengththrough women-without my friends,I could not survive." How many timesa day do women speak words like these,or thinkthem, or writethem,and how oftendoes the synapse reassertitself? Barry summarizesher findings: ... Consideringthe arrestedsexual developmentthatis understood to be normal in the male population, and consideringthe numbers of men who are pimps, procurers,membersof slaverygangs, corowners, operators, emrupt officialsparticipatingin this traffic, of brothels and and entertainment facilities, porlodging ployees
39. Ibid., p. 172. 40. Elsewhere I have suggested thatmale identification has been a powerfulsource of white women's racism,and that it has been women who were seen as "disloyal" to male who have actively battledagainstit (Adrienne Rich,"Disloyal to Civilizacodes and systems and Silence:Selected tion: Feminism,Racism, Gynephobia," in On Lies,Secrets, Prose,19661978 [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979]).
Signs
Summer 1980
647
wifebeaters,child associated withprostitution, nographypurveyors, johns (tricks)and rapists,one cannot molesters,incestperpetrators, stunned by the enormous male population enbut be momentarily gaging in female sexual slavery.The huge number of men engaged in these practicesshould be cause fordeclarationof an international emergency,a crisisin sexual violence. But what should be cause for alarm is instead accepted as normal sexual intercourse.41 Susan Cavin, in her rich and provocative,if highlyspeculative,dissertation,suggests that patriarchybecomes possible when the original female band, which includes children but ejects adolescent males, becomes invaded and outnumbered by males; that not patriarchalmaract of male riage,but the rape of the motherby the son, becomes the first domination.The enteringwedge, or leverage, whichallows thisto happen is notjust a simple change in sex ratios; it is also the mother-child bond, manipulated by adolescent males in order to remain withinthe matrixpast the age of exclusion. Maternal affectionis used to establish male rightof sexual access, which,however,must ever afterbe held by force(or throughcontrolof consciousness)since the originaldeep adult extremely bonding is thatof woman forwoman.42I findthishypothesis suggestive,since one formof false consciousness which serves compulsory heterosexualityis the maintenance of a mother-sonrelationship between women and men, including the demand that women provide maternal solace, nonjudgmental nurturing,and compassion for their harassers,rapists,and batterers(as well as for men who passivelyvamwomen accept male posturpirizethem). How manystrongand assertive ing fromno one but their sons? But whateveritsorigins,when we look hard and clearlyat the extent and elaboration of measures designed to keep women withina male sexual purlieu, it becomes an inescapable question whetherthe issue we have to address as feminists is, not simple "gender inequality,"nor the domination of culture by males, nor mere "taboos against homosexualfor women as a means of ity,"but the enforcementof heterosexuality assuringmale rightof physical,economical,and emotionalaccess.43One of many means of enforcementis, of course, the renderinginvisibleof an engulfedcontinent the lesbian possibility, whichrisesfragmentedly to view fromtime to time only to become submerged again. Feministresearch and theorythatcontributes to lesbian invisibility or marginality is
41. Barry,p. 220. 42. Cavin (see unnumbered n. above), chap. 6. 43. For my perceptionof heterosexuality as an economic institution I am indebted to Lisa Leghorn and Katherine Parker, who allowed me to read their unpublished manuscript,"RedefiningEconomics" (1980). See theirarticle:"Towards a FeministEconomics: A Global View," SecondWave 5, no. 3 (1979): 23-30.
648
Rich
actuallyworkingagainstthe liberationand empowermentof woman as a group.44 The assumption that "most women are innately heterosexual" block formanywomen. It and politicalstumbling standsas a theoretical remains a tenable assumption,partlybecause lesbian existencehas been written out of history or catalogued under disease; partlybecause it has been treated as exceptional rather than intrinsic;partlybecause to acmay not be a "preference"at knowledgethatforwomen heterosexuality all but something that has had to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized, and maintainedby force,is an immense step to take if and "innately"heterosexual.Yet the failure you consider yourselffreely is like failingto admit that as an institution to examine heterosexuality the economic systemcalled capitalismor the caste systemof racism is maintained by a varietyof forces,includingboth physicalviolence and as a false consciousness.To take the step of questioningheterosexuality "preference" or "choice" for women-and to do the intellectualand emotional workthat follows-will call for a special qualityof courage in but I thinkthe rewardswill be great: identifiedfeminists heterosexually of the exploring of new paths, the shattering a freeing-upof thinking, in personal relationships. another great silence, new clarity
III
I have chosen to use the termslesbian and lesbian existence continuum has a clinical and limiting because the word lesbianism ring.Lesbianexistence presence of lesbians and our suggestsboth the factof the historical continuingcreation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term to include a range-through each woman's life and lesbiancontinuum experience.; not simply the throughout history-of woman-identified factthat a woman has had or consciouslydesired genital sexual experience withanotherwoman. If we expand it to embrace manymore forms between and among women, includingthe sharing of primaryintensity
44. I would suggest that lesbian existence has been most recognized and tolerated where it has resembled a "deviant" version of heterosexuality; e.g., where lesbians have, like Stein and Toklas, played heterosexual roles (or seemed to in public) and have been chieflyidentifiedwith male culture. See also Claude E. Schaeffer,"The Kuterai Female 12, no. 3 (Summer Berdache: Courier, Guide, Prophetess and Warrior,"Ethnohistory 1965): 193-236. (Berdache: "an individual of a definitephysiologicalsex [m. or f.] who assumes the role and statusof the opposite sex and who is viewed by the communityas but as havingassumed the role and statusof the opposite being of one sex physiologically sex" [Schaeffer,p. 231].) Lesbian existence has also been relegated to an upper-class phenomenon, an elite decadence (as in the fascinationwith Paris salon lesbians such as Renee Vivien and Natalie CliffordBarney),to the obscuringof such "common women" as Woman(Oakland, Calif.: Diana Press, Judy Grahn depicts in her The Workof a Common Diana Press, 1978). Calif.: Adventure Stories to and True (Oakland, 1978) Life
Signs
Summer 1980
649
the giving and of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, receivingof practicaland politicalsupport; ifwe can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the "haggard" behavior identified "wanton,"and "willful," by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings: "intractable," "unchaste"... "a woman reluctantto yield to wooing")45-we begin to and psychology which have lain out of grasp breadths of female history reach as a consequence of limited,mostlyclinical, definitionsof "lesbianism." Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejectionof a compulsoryway of life. It is also a director indirectattack on male rightof access to women. But it is more than these,althoughwe to patriarchy, an may first begin to perceive it as a formof nay-saying act of resistance. It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawomanviolence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existencehas been lived (unlike,say, Jewishor Catholic existence)withoutaccess to any knowledgeof a tradia social underpinning.The destruction of recordsand tion,a continuity, memorabilia and lettersdocumenting the realitiesof lesbian existence mustbe taken veryseriouslyas a means of keeping heterosexuality comfor since what has been from is our women, pulsory kept knowledge joy, as well as guilt,self-betrayal, and sensuality,courage, and community, pain.46 Lesbians have historicallybeen deprived of a political existence through "inclusion" as female versions of male homosexuality. To equate lesbian existence with male homosexualitybecause each is stigmatized is to deny and erase femalereality once again. To separate those women stigmatizedas "homosexual" or "gay" from the complex continuum of female resistanceto enslavement,and attach them to a male our history. Partof the history of lesbian existenceis, pattern,is to falsify to be found a where coherent female comlesbians, obviously, lacking have a kind of shared social life and cause with common munity, homosexual men. But thishas to be seen against the differences:women's lack of economic and cultural privilegerelativeto men; qualitative in femaleand male relationships, differences forexample, theprevalence of anonymous sex and the justification of pederasty among male homosexuals, the pronounced ageism in male homosexual standards of
45. Daly, Gyn/Ecology, p. 15. 46. "In a hostileworld in whichwomen are not supposed to surviveexcept in relation with and in service to men, entire communitiesof women were simplyerased. History tends to burywhat itseeks to reject"(Blanche W. Cook," "'Women Alone StirMy Imaginain Culture tion': Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition,"Signs:JournalofWomen and Society 4, no. 4 [Summer 1979]: 719-20). The Lesbian HerstoryArchivesin New York Cityis one documentson lesbian existence-a projectof enormous attemptto preservecontemporary value and meaning, stillpitted against the continuingcensorship and obliterationof recommunities,in other archivesand elsewhere in the culture. lationships,networks,
650
Rich
sexual attractiveness, etc. In definingand describinglesbian existence I would hope to move toward a dissociation of lesbian from male homosexual values and allegiances. I perceive the lesbian experience as being, like motherhood,a profoundlyfemale experience, withparticular and cannot we oppressions,meanings, potentialities comprehend as long as we simplybracketit withothersexuallystigmatized existences.Justas the term "parenting" serves to conceal the particular and significant of being a parent who is actuallya mother,the term"gay" serves reality the purpose of blurringthe veryoutlines we need to discern,whichare and forthe freedomof women as a group. of crucialvalue forfeminism As the term"lesbian" has been held to limiting, clinicalassociations in its patriarchaldefinition,female friendshipand comradeship have been set apart fromthe erotic,thus limiting the erotic itself.But as we as lesbian existence,as and broaden the of what we define range deepen we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms:as thatwhich is unconfinedto any single part of the body or solelyto the body itself, as an energynot only diffusebut, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether and in the sharingof work; as the empowemotional,psychic," physical, "makes less us eringjoy which willingto accept powerlessness,or those other supplied statesof being which are not native to me, such as resIn another ignation,despair, self-effacement, depression,self-denial."47 of and I women the context, writing work, quoted autobiographical passage in which the poet H.D. described how her friendBryhersupwiththe visonary ported her in persisting experience whichwas to shape her mature work: ... I knew that thisexperience, thiswriting-on-the-wall before me, could not be shared with anyone except the girl who stood so bravelythere beside me. This girl had said withouthesitation,"Go of the on." It was she reallywho had the detachmentand integrity Pythonessof Delphi. But it was I, batteredand dissociated . . . who or granted was seeing the pictures,and who was reading the writing the inner vision. Or perhaps, in some sense, we were "seeing" it for withouther, admittedly,I could not have gone on. together, 48 If we consider the possibility thatall women-from the infantsuckthe her mother's to breast, ling grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensationswhile sucklingher own child, perhaps recallingher mother's
47. Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Out & Out Books Pamphlet no. 3 (New York: Out & Out Books [476 2d Street, Brooklyn, New York 11215], 1979). 48. Adrienne Rich, "Conditions for Work: The Common World of Women," in On to Freud (Oxford: Carcanet Press, 1971), and Silence (p. 209); H. D., Tribute Lies, Secrets 50-54. pp.
Signs
Summer 1980
651
in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf's Chloe and milk-smell who share a laboratory;49 to the woman dyingat ninety, touched Olivia, and handled by women-exist on a lesbian continuum,we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of womanidentification as diverse as the impudent, intimategirl-friendships of or eight- nine-yearolds and the banding togetherof thosewomen of the twelthand fifteenth centuriesknown as Beguines who "shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates... in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans'area of town,"who "practiced Christianvirtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associatingwithmen,"who earned theirlivingsas spinners,bakers,nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed-until the Church forced them to disperse-to live independent both of marriage and of It allows us to connect these women withthe conventual restrictions.50 more celebrated"Lesbians" of thewomen's school around Sappho of the seventhcenturyB.C.; with the secret sororitiesand economic networks reported among Africanwomen; and withthe Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods-communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate theirmarriages and soon lefttheirhusbands-the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tellsus, welcomed the birthsof daughtersand organized successfulwomen's strikesin the silk mills.51It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instancesof marriage resistance: forexample, the typeof autonomyclaimed by EmilyDickinson,a whitewoman genius, withthe strategies available to nineteenth-century Zora Neale Hurston,a twentieth-century blackwoman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendshipswith men, lived self-conventedin her genteel father'shouse, and wrote a lifetimeof Sue Gilbertand a smallergroup of passionate lettersto her sister-in-law such lettersto her friendKate ScottAnthon. Hurston marriedtwicebut soon lefteach husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to
49. Woolf,A RoomofOne's Own, p. 126. 50. Gracia Clark, "The Beguines: A Mediaeval Women's Community,"Quest: A Feminist 1, no. 4 (1975): 73-80. Quarterly 51. See Denise Paulme, ed., Women of CaliforofTropical Africa(Berkeley: University nia Press, 1963), pp. 7, 266-67. Some of these sororitiesare described as "a kind of defensivesyndicateagainst the male element"-their aims being "to offerconcerted resistance to an oppressive patriarchate," "independence in relationto one's husband and with of personal revenge." See also Audre regard to motherhood, mutual aid, satisfaction Lorde, "Scratchingthe Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving," Black Scholar9, no. 7 (1978): 31-35; MarjorieTopley, "Marriage Resistancein Rural Kwangtung," in Women in ChineseSociety, ed. M. Wolf and R. Witke (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uniin Revolution, versityPress, 1978), pp. 67-89; Agnes Smedley,Portraits of ChineseWomen ed. J. MacKinnon and S. MacKinnon (Old Westbury,N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1976), pp. 103-10.
652
Rich
back to Florida, moved in and to Haiti and finally Columbia University out of white patronage and poverty,professionalsuccess, and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastlydifferentcircumstances committedto theirown workand selfhood,and were marriageresisters, were later characterized as "apolitical." Both were drawn to men of intellectualquality; for both of them women provided the on-going fascinationand sustenance of life. If we thinkof heterosexuality as the "natural" emotional and sensual inclinationfor women, lives such as these are seen as deviant, as pathological,or as emotionallyand sensuallydeprived. Or, in more reAnd the cent and permissive jargon, theyare banalized as "life-styles." work of such women-whether merelythe daily work of individual or the activist, collectivesurvivaland resistance,or the work of the writer, the reformer, the anthropologist, or the artist-the work of selfcreation-is undervalued, or seen as the bitterfruitof "penis envy,"or the sublimationof repressed eroticism,or the meaningless rant of a "manhater."But when we turnthe lens of visionand consider the degree to which,and the methods whereby,heterosexual "preference"has actuallybeen imposed on women, not only can we understanddifferently the meaning of individuallives and work,but we can begin to recognize thatwomen have alwaysresistedmale a central factof women's history: tyranny.A feminismof action, often, though not always, without a reemerged in everyculture and in every period. theory,has constantly We can then begin to study women's struggle against powerlessness, women's radical rebellion, not just in male-defined "concrete revolubut in all the situationsmale ideologies have not tionarysituations"52 forexample, the refusalof some women to perceived as revolutionary: produce children, aided at great risk by other women; the refusal to produce a higher standard of livingand leisure for men (Leghorn and Parker show how both are part of women's unacknowledged, unpaid, thatfemaleantiphallicsexualand ununionized economic contribution); itywhich, as Andrea Dworkin notes, has been "legendary,"which,dehas actuallybeen a formof subverand "puritanism," finedas "frigidity" sion of male power-"an ineffectual rebellion,but ... rebellionnonetheless."53We can no longer have patience with Dinnerstein's view that women have simplycollaboratedwithmen in the "sexual arrangements" and in individof history;we begin to observe behavior,both in history or ual biography,that has hithertobeen invisible misnamed; behavior exerted in a of the counterforce whichoftenconstitutes, given the limits these reconnect And we can radical rebellion. time and place, given
52. See Rosalind Petchesky, "Dissolving the Hyphen: A Report on Marxist-Feminist ed. Zillah Eisenstein and theCaseforSocialist Feminism, Patriarchy Groups 1-5," in Capitalist (New York: MonthlyReview Press, 1979), p. 387. 53. Andrea Dworkin,ChainsofIran, ChainsofGrief (Garden City,N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., in press).
Signs
Summer 1980
653
bellions and the necessityfor them withthe physicalpassion of woman for woman which is central to lesbian existence: the erotic sensuality which has been, precisely,the most violentlyerased fact of female experience. has been both forcibly and subliminally Heterosexuality imposed on women, yet everywherewomen have resisted it, often at the cost of social ostracism, and exphysicaltorture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, treme poverty."Compulsory heterosexuality" was named as one of the "crimes against women" by the Brussels Tribunal on Crimes against fromwomen fromtwo very Women in 1976. Two pieces of testimony, different cultures,suggestthe degree to which persecutionof lesbians is a global practice here and now. A report fromNorway relates: A lesbian in Oslo was in a heterosexualmarriagethatdidn't work,so she started taking tranquillizers and ended up at the health sanatorium for treatmentand rehabilitation.... The moment she said in family group therapythatshe believed she was a lesbian,the doctor told her she was not. He knew from"looking into her eyes," he said. She had the eyes of a woman who wanted sexual intercourse withher husband. So she was subjectedto so-called"couch therapy." She was put into a comfortably heated room, naked, on a bed, and for an hour her husband was to ... tryto excite her sexually.... The idea was thatthe touchingwas alwaysto end withsexual intercourse. She feltstrongerand strongeraversion. She threwup and sometimesran out of the room to avoid this"treatment." The more stronglyshe asserted that she was a lesbian, the more violent the forced heterosexual intercoursebecame. This treatmentwent on for about six months. She escaped from the hospital, but she was brought back. Again she escaped. She has not been there since. In the end she realized thatshe had been subjected to forciblerape for six months. (This, surely,is an example of femalesexual slaveryaccordingto Barry's definition.)And from Mozambique: I am condemned to a lifeof exile because I willnot deny that I am a lesbian, that my primarycommitmentsare, and will always be to other women. In the new Mozambique, lesbianismis considered a left-overfrom colonialism and decadent Western civilization.Lesbians are sent to rehabilitation camps to learn throughself-criticism the correctline about themselves.... If I am forcedto denounce my own love for women, if I thereforedenounce myself,I could go back to Mozambique and join forcesin the excitingand hard struggles of rebuildinga nation,includingthe struggleforthe emancipation of Mozambiquan women. As it is, I eitherriskthe rehabilitation camps, or remain in exile.54
54. Russell and van de Ven, pp. 42-43, 56-57.
654
Rich
Nor can it be assumed that women like those in Carroll SmithRosenberg's study,who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundlyfemale emotional and passional world, "preferred"or "chose" in order Women have marriedbecause it was necessary, heterosexuality. in order to have childrenwho would not suffer to surviveeconomically, in order to remain respectable, economic deprivationor social ostracism, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods theywanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been representedas the great female adventure, have obeyed the or ambivalently We may faithfully duty,and fulfillment. our but our institution, sensuality-have not been tamed feelings-and it. is no statistical documentationof the numor contained within There in heterosexual who have remained bers of lesbians marriagesfor most in to the lesbian of theirlives. But a letter Ladder,the early publication, Lorraine Hansberry had this to say: playwright I suspect thatthe problem of the marriedwoman who would prefer withotherwomen is proportionally relationships emotional-physical for men. (A statistic much higher than a similar statistic surely no one will ever really have.) This because the estate of woman being what it is, how could we ever begin to guess the numbersof women who are not prepared to risk a life alien to what they have been taughtall theirlives to believe was their"natural" destiny-ANDtheironly expectationfor ECONOMIC security.It seems to be that that it does not have for this is whythe question has an immensity and honestymay,if she male homosexuals.... A woman of strength chooses, severher marriageand marrya new male mate and society will be upset that the divorce rate is rising so-but there are few places in the United States,in any event,where she willbe anything akin to an "outcast."Obviouslythisis not true fora woman remotely who would end her marriageto take up lifewithanother woman.55 This double-life-this apparent acquiescence to an institution of founded on male interestand prerogative-has been characteristic female experience: in motherhood,and in many kinds of heterosexual behavior,includingthe ritualsof courtship;the pretenseof asexualityby the nineteenth-century wife; the simulationof orgasm by the prostitute, the courtesan, the twentieth-century "sexually liberated"woman. Meridel LeSueur's documentarynovel of the Depression,TheGirl,is a waitressin arrestingas a studyof female double-life.The protagonist, feels herself a St. Paul working-class speakeasy, passionatelyattractedto
55. I am indebted to Jonathan Katz's GayAmerican (n. 5 above) forbringingto History my attentionHansberry's lettersto Ladder and to Barbara Grier for supplying me with Ladder,quoted here by permissionof Barbara Grier.See also copies of relevantpages from the reprinted series of Ladder, ed. Jonathan Katz et al. (New York: Arno Press); and Deirdre Carmody, "Lettersby Eleanor Roosevelt Detail FriendshipwithLorena Hickok," New YorkTimes(October 21, 1979).
Signs
Summer 1980
655
the young man Butch, but her survivalrelationshipsare withClara, an older waitressand prostitute, with Belle, whose husband owns the bar, and withAmelia, a union activist. For Clara and Belle and the unnamed protagonist,sex with men is in one sense an escape fromthe bedrock in the grey,relentless, of daily life; a flareof intensity oftenbrutal misery web of day-to-day existence: ... It was like he was a magnet pulling me. It was exciting and He was afterme too and when he found powerfuland frightening. me I would run, or be petrified, just standingin frontof him like a zany. And he told me not to be wandering with Clara to the Marigold where we danced withstrangers.He said he would knock the shit out of me. Which made me shake and tremble,but it was betterthan being a husk full of suffering and not knowingwhy.56 Throughout the novel the theme of double-life emerges; Belle reminisces of her marriage to the bootlegger Hoinck: You know, when I had that black eye and said I hit it on the cupboard, well he did itthe bastard,and then he saysdon't tellanybody. . .. He's nuts,that'swhat he is, nuts,and I don't see whyI live with him, why I put up withhim a minuteon this earth. But listenkid, she said, I'm tellingyou something.She looked at me and her face was wonderful.She said,Jesus Christ,Goddam him I love him that's why I'm hooked like this all my life,Goddam him I love him.57 After the protagonist has her firstsex with Butch, her women friendscare for her bleeding, give her whiskey, and compare notes. time and I got into trouble. He gave me a little My luck, the first money and I come to St. Paul where for ten bucks they'd sticka huge vet's needle into you and you startit and then you were on your own.... I never had no child. I've just had Hoinck to mother, and a hell of a child he is.58 Later theymade me go back to Clara's room to lie down ... Clara lay down beside me and put her arms around me and wanted me to tell her about it but she wanted to tell about herself.She said she startedit when she was twelvewitha bunch of boys in an old shed. She said nobody had paid any attentionto her before and she became verypopular.... They like it so much, she said, whyshouldn't
56. Meridel LeSueur, The Girl (Cambridge, Mass.: West End Press, 1978), pp. 10-11. LeSueur describes,in an afterword, how thisbook was drawn fromthe writings and oral narrationsof women in the Workers Alliance who met as a writers'group during the Depression. 57. Ibid., p. 20. 58. Ibid., pp. 53-54.
656
Rich
you give it to them and get presents and attention?I never cared foritand neitherdid mymama. But it'sthe onlythingyou anything valuable ... 59 that's got Sex is thus equated with attentionfrom the male, who is charismatic or unreliable.Yet it is the women who make life though brutal,infantile, withoutcausing pain, endurable for each other, give physicalaffection share,advise,and stickbyeach other.(I amtrying through tofind my strength I couldnotsurvive.) LeSueur's TheGirl parallels women-without my friends, Toni Morrison'sremarkableSula, another revelationof female doublelife: Nel was the one person who had wantednothingfromher,who had accepted all aspects of her. ... Nel was one of the reasons [Sula] had driftedback to Medallion. ... The men ... had merged into one large personality:the same language of love, the same entertainmentsof love, the same cooling of love. Whenever she introduced her private thoughtsinto their rubbings and goings, theyhooded shared nothing theireyes. They taughther nothingbut love tricks, but worry,gave nothingbut money. She had been looking all along fora friend,and it took her a whileto discoverthata lover was not a comrade and could never be-for a woman. But Sula's last thoughtat the second of her death is, "Wait'll I tell Nel." And afterSula's death, Nel looks back on her own life: "All thattime,all thattime,I thoughtI was missing Jude." And the loss pressed down on her chest and came up into her throat."We was girls together,"she said as though explaining something."O It was a fine cryLord, Sula," she cried, "Girl, girl, girlgirlgirl!" loud and long-but it had no bottomand it had no top,just circles and circlesof sorrow.60 The Girl and Sula are both novels which reveal the lesbian conto the shallowor sensational"lesbian scenes" in recent tinuumin contrast untarnished Each shows us woman-identification commercial fiction.61 each LeSueur's the end of romanticism; novel) (till by depictsthe competitionof heterosexual compulsion for women's attention,the diffusion in a more conscious form, of femalebonding thatmight, and frustration with love power. reintegrate
59. Ibid., p. 55. 60. Toni Morrison,Sula (New York: Bantam Books, 1973), pp. 103-4, 149. I am called itto myattention indebtedto Lorraine Bethel'sunpublished essayon Sula whichfirst as a novel of woman-identification. 61. See Maureen Brady and Judith McDaniel, "Lesbians in the Mainstream: The vol. 6 (1979). Image of Lesbians in Recent Commercial Fiction,"Conditions,
Signs
Summer 1980
657
IV
Woman-identification is a source of energy,a potentialspringhead curtailedand wasted under the institution of female power, violently of to women's passion The denial of realityand visibility heterosexuality. for women, women's choice of women as allies, life companions, and community; the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to changethesocialrelations of thesexes,to liberate ourselves and each other. The lie of compulsoryfemale heterosexnot just feministscholarship,but every profession, ualitytoday afflicts everyorganizingattempt, everyreferencework,everycurriculum, every relationshipor conversationover whichit hovers. It creates,specifically, a profound falseness, hypocrisy, and hysteriain the heterosexual dialogue, for every heterosexual relationship is lived in the queasy of thatlie. However we chose to identify ourselves,however strobelight we findourselves labeled, it flickers across and distortsour lives.62 The lie keeps numberlesswomen psychologically to trapped, trying fitmind,spirit, and sexuality intoa prescribedscriptbecause theycannot look beyond the parametersof the acceptable. It pulls on the energyof such women even as it drains the energy of "closeted" lesbians-the energyexhausted in the double-life.The lesbian trapped in the "closet," the woman imprisoned in prescriptive ideas of the "normal," share the pain of blocked options,broken connections,lostaccess to self-definition assumed. freelyand powerfully The lie is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer-the romantic-asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attractionis suicidal (e.g., Tristanund Isolde, Kate Chopin's The Awakening)it is still an organic imperative.In the traditionof the social sciences it assertsthat primary love between the sexes is "normal," that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality,and for psychologicalcompletion; that the heterosexuallyconstitutedfamilyis the basic social unit; thatwomen who do not attachtheirprimary to men mustbe, in intensity functionalterms,condemned to an even more devastatingoutsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. Small wonder that lesbians are reported to be a more hidden population than male homosexuals. The black lesbian/feminist critic, Lorraine Bethel, writingon Zora Neale Hurston,remarksthatfora black woman-already twicean outsider-to choose to assume stillanother"hated identity" is problematicindeed. Yet the lesbian continuumhas been a lifelineforblack women both in Africa and the United States.
62. See Russelland van de Ven, p. 40: "... fewheterosexualwomen realize theirlack of free choice about theirsexuality,and few realize how and whycompulsoryheterosexualityis also a crime against them."
658
Rich
Black women have a long traditionof bonding together ... in a Black/women's communitythat has been a source of vital survival information, psychicand emotional support for us. We have a disfolkculture based on our experiences tinctBlack woman-identified as Black women in this society; symbols,language and modes of expression that are specificto the realitiesof our lives. .. . Because Black women were rarely among those Blacks and females who gained access to literaryand other acknowledged formsof artistic expression, this Black female bonding and Black womanhas oftenbeen hidden and unrecorded except in the identification individual lives of Black women throughour own memoriesof our particularBlack female tradition.63 encountered implication Another layer of the lie is the frequently thatwomen turnto women out of hatred formen. Profound skepticism, caution, and righteousparanoia about men may indeed be part of any healthy woman's response to the woman-hatred embedded in maledominated culture, to the formsassumed by "normal" male sexuality, orfindthese mentoperceive and to the or "political" failureevenof "sensitive" does in so "normal" embedded woman-hatred is so Yet culture, troubling. it seem, so profoundlyis it neglected as a social phenomenon, thatmany it until it takes, in and lesbians, fail to identify women, even feminists their own lives, some permanentlyunmistakableand shatteringform. Lesbian existenceis also representedas mere refuge frommale abuses, rather than as an electric and empowering charge between women. I that one of the most frequently find it interesting quoted literarypasin which Colette's is that lesbian on Renee, in The relationship sages of two weak and "the describes image touching melancholy Vagabond, creatureswho have perhaps found shelterin each other'sarms,there to sleep and weep, safe from man who is often cruel, and there to taste themselves thebitter thananypleasure, better akin, frail and offeeling happiness a lesbian is considered Colette often writer; added]."64 forgotten [emphasis her popular reputationhas, I think,much to do with the fact that she writes about lesbian existence as if for a male audience; her earliest under compulsion for "lesbian" novels,the Claudine series,were written her husband and published under both theirnames. At all events,except on her mother,Colette is a far less reliable source on for her writings CharlotteBronte,who understood lesbian existencethan, I would think, that while women may, indeed must, be one another's allies, mentors,
of Conscious Pain" (see unnumbered n. above). 63. Lorraine Bethel, "This Infinity 64. Dinnerstein,the most recentwriterto quote this passage, adds ominously: "But each other what has to be added to her account is thatthese'women enlaced' are sheltering notjust fromwhat men want to do to them, but also fromwhat theywant to do to each violence is a other" (Dinnerstein,p. 103). The fact is, however, that woman-to-woman violence perpetratedand rationalized minutegrain in the universeof male-against-female in every social institution.
Signs
Summer 1980
659
in the female strugglefor survival,there is quite extraand comforters neous delight in each other's company and attractionto each others' of each others' minds and character,which proceeds froma recognition strengths. feminist By the same token,we can say thatthereis a nascent political contentin the act of choosing a woman lover or lifepartnerin the face of But for lesbian existence to realize institutionalized heterosexuality.65 this politicalcontent in an ultimately liberatingform,the erotic choice must deepen and expand into conscious woman-identification-into lesbian/feminism. The work that lies ahead, of unearthingand describingwhat I call here "lesbian existence"is potentially liberatingforall women. It is work that must assuredly move beyond the limitsof white and middle-class Western women's studies to examine women's lives, work, and groupings withinevery racial, ethnic, and political structure.There are differences, moreover, between "lesbian existence" and the "lesbian continuum"-differences we can discern even in the movementof our own lives.The lesbian continuum,I suggest,needs delineationin lightof the "double-life"of women, not only women self-describedas heterolesbians.We need a farmore exhaustive sexual but also of self-described account of the formsthe double-lifehas assumed. Historiansneed to ask at everypoint how heterosexuality as institution has been organized and maintained throughthe female wage scale, the enforcement of middleclass women's "leisure," the glamorizationof so-called sexual liberation, the withholdingof education from women, the imageryof "high art" and popular culture, the mystification of the "personal" sphere, and much else. We need an economics whichcomprehends the institution of with its doubled workload for women and its sexual heterosexuality, divisionsof labor, as the most idealized of economic relations. The question inevitably will arise: Are we then to condemn all heterosexual relationships,including those which are least oppressive? I believe thisquestion, thoughoftenheartfelt, is the wrongquestion here. We have been stalled in a maze of false dichotomieswhichpreventsour as a whole: "good" versus"bad" marriages; apprehending the institution "marriage for love" versus arranged marriage; "liberated" sex versus heterosexualintercourseversusrape; Liebeschmerzversus prostitution; humiliation and dependency. Within the institution exist, of course, of experience; but the absence of choice remains qualitativedifferences the great unacknowledged reality, and in the absence of choice, women will remain dependent upon the chance or luck of particular relationshipsand will have no collectivepower to determinethe meaning and place of sexualityin theirlives. As we address the institution itself, of female resistancewhichhas moreover,we begin to perceive a history
65. Conversationwith Blanche W. Cook, New York City,March 1979.
660
Rich
never fullyunderstood itselfbecause it has been so fragmented,miscalled, erased. It will require a courageous grasp of the politics and economics, as well as the cultural propaganda, of heterosexualityto carryus beyond individualcases or diversified group situationsinto the kind of overview needed to undo the complex power men everywhere wield over women, power which has become a model for every other formof exploitationand illegitimate control. Massachusetts Montague,

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence Author(s): Adrienne Rich Source: Signs, Vol. 5, No.

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence

You might also like