laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the w ay
great numbers of boys and men had always wanted— lots of girls
who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it aw ay.
The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued
for and even organized for and even provided political and economic resources for abortion rights for women. The Left was m ilitant on the issue.
Then, at the very end of the sixties, women who had been radical in counterculture terms— women who had been both politically and sexually active— became radical in new terms: they became
feminists. T hey were not Betty Friedan’s housewives. T hey had
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 macher enters a room full of machers, accompanied
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 really mind-blowing to hear some young male ‘revolutionary’—supposedly dedicated to building a new, free social order to replace this vicious one under which we live—turn around
and absent-mindedly order his ‘chick’ to shut up and make supper or wash his socks— he's talking now. We’re used to such attitudes from the average American clod, but from this brave new radical? ” 8
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
not stopped yet. Especially significant has been their change of
heart and politics on abortion. The right to abortion defined as an
intrinsic part of the sexual revolution was essential to them: who
could bear the horror and cruelty and stupidity of illegal abortion?
The right to abortion defined as an intrinsic part of a woman’s
right to control her own body, in sex too, was a matter of supreme
indifference.
Material resources dried up. Feminists fought the battle for decriminalized abortion— no laws governing abortion—on the streets and in the courts with severely diminished male support. In 1973,
the Supreme Court gave women legalized abortion: abortion regulated by the state.
If before the Supreme Court decision in 1973 leftist men expressed a fierce indifference to abortion rights on feminist terms, after 1973 indifference changed to overt hostility: feminists had the
right to abortion and were still saying no— no to sex on male terms
and no to politics dominated by these same men. Legalized abor
tion did not make these women more available for sex; on the contrary, the women’s movement was growing in size and importance and male sexual privilege was being challenged with more intensity, more commitment, more ambition. The leftist men turned from political activism: without the easy lay, they were not prepared to engage in radical politics. In therapy they discovered that they had had personalities in the womb, that they had suffered