148
Woman Hating
two hundred people were burned as werewolves. There
were endless stories of farmers shooting animals who
were plaguing them in the night, only to discover the
next morning that a respectable town matron had been
wounded in precisely the same way.
Witches, of course, could also fly on broomsticks,
and often did. Before going to the sabbat, they an-
nointed their bodies with a mixture of belladonna and
aconite, which caused delirium, hallucination, and gave
the sensation of flying. The broomstick was an almost
archetypal symbol of womanhood, as the pitchfork was
of manhood. Levitation was considered a rare but
genuine fact:
As for its history, it is one of the earliest convictions, common to almost all peoples, that not only do supernatural beings, angels or devils, fly or float in the
air at will, but so can those humans who invoke their
assistance. Levitation among the saints was, and by the
devout is, accepted as an objective fact. The most famous instance is that of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose ecstatic flights (and he perched in trees) caused embarrassment in the seventeenth century. Yet the appearance of flight, in celestial trance, has been claimed all through the history of the Church, and not only for
such outstanding figures as St. Francis, St. Ignatius
Loyola, or St. Teresa.. . . In the Middle Ages it was
regarded as a marvel, but a firmly established one.
. . . It is not, therefore, at all remarkable that witches
were believed to fly. . . [though] the Church expressly
forbade, during the reign of Charlemagne, any belief
that witches flew. 31
With typical consistency then, the Church said that
saints could fly but witches could not. As far as the
Gynocide: The Witches
149
witches were concerned, they trusted their experience,
they knew that they flew. Here they aligned themselves
with Christian saints, yogis, mystics from all traditions,
in the realization o f a phenomenon so ancient that it
would seem to extend almost to the origins o f the religious impulse in people.
We now know most o f what can be known about
the witches: who they were, what they believed, what
they did, the Church's vision o f them. We have seen the
historical dimensions o f a myth o f feminine evil which
resulted in the slaughter o f 9 million persons, nearly
all women, over 300 years. T he actual evidence o f that
slaughter, the remembrance o f it, has been suppressed
for centuries so that the myth o f woman as the Original
Criminal, the gaping, insatiable womb, could endure.
Annihilated with the 9 million was a whole culture,
woman-centered, nature-centered —all o f their knowledge is gone, all o f their knowing is destroyed. Historians (white, male, and utterly without credibility for women, Indians, Blacks, and other oppressed peoples as they begin to search the ashes o f their own pasts) found the massacre o f the witches too unimportant to
include in the chronicles o f those centuries except as a
footnote, too unimportant to be seen as the substance
o f those centuries —they did not recognize the centuries o f gynocide, they did not register the anguish o f those deaths.
Our study o f pornography, our living o f life, tells
us that the myth o f feminine evil lived out so resolutely
by the Christians o f the Dark Ages, is alive and well,
here and now. Our study o f pornography, our living
o f life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned
150
Woman Hating
alive at the stake, the belief in female evil is not, the
hatred of female carnality is not. The Church has not
changed its premises; the culture has not refuted those
premises. It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth,
to destroy it and the institutions based on it.
Part Four
ANDROGYNY
When the sexual energy of the people is
liberated they will break the chains.
The struggle to break the form is
paramount. Because we are otherwise contained in forms that deny us the possibility
of realizing a form (a technique) to escape
the fire in which we are being consumed.
The journey to love is not romantic.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
We want to destroy sexism, that is, polar role definitions o f male and female, man and woman. We want to destroy patriarchal power at its source, the family; in
its most hideous form, the nation-state. We want to
destroy the structure o f culture as we know it, its art,
its churches, its laws: all o f the images, institutions, and
structural mental sets which define women as hot wet
fuck tubes, hot slits.
Androgynous mythology provides us with a model
which does not use polar role definitions, where the
definitions are not, implicitly or explicitly, male = good,
female = bad, man = human, woman = other. A ndrogyny myths are multisexual mythological models. T hey go well beyond bisexuality as we know it in the scenarios
they suggest for building community, for realizing the
fullest expression o f human sexual possibility and
creativity.
Androgyny as a concept has no notion o f sexual
repression built into it. W here woman is carnality, and
carnality is evil, it stands to reason (hail reason! ) that
woman must be chained, whipped, punished, purged;
that fucking is shameful, forbidden, fearful, guilt-
153
154
Woman Hating
ridden. Androgyny as the basis of sexual identity and
community life provides no such imperatives. Sexual
freedom and freedom for biological women, or all persons “female, ” are not separable. That they are different, and that sexual freedom has priority, is the worst of sexist hypes. Androgyny can show the way to both.
It may be the one road to freedom open to women,
men, and that emerging majority, the rest of us.
C H A P T E R 8
Androgyny:
The Mythological Model
It is a question o f finding the right model. We are bo rn
into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed: Cinderella, Snow-white, Sleeping Beauty; O, Claire, Anne; romantic love and marriage;
Adam and Eve, the Virgin Mary. These models are the
substantive message o f this culture —they define psychological sets and patterns o f social interaction which, in our adult personae, we live out. We function inside