(see p. 185) as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial
points here. One, every transsexual has the right to
survival on his/her own terms. That means that every
transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation,
and it should be provided by the community as one of
its functions. This is an emergency measure for an
emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises
about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the
social situation of transsexuals will be transformed,
and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no
longer persecuted and despised. Three, community
built on androgynous identity will mean the end of
Androgyny: Androgyny, Fucking, and Community
187
transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will
be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon o f transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes o f sexual identity and behavior.
Transvestism
T h e first time I put on the black silk
panties I got a hardon right away.
Julian Beck
Transvestism is costuming which violates gender
imperatives. Transvestism is generally a sexually
charged act: the visible, public violation o f sex role is
erotic, exciting, dangerous. It is a kind o f erotic civil
disobedience, and that is precisely its value. Costuming
is part o f the strategy and process o f role destruction.
We see, for instance, that as women reject the female
role, they adopt “male” clothing. As sex roles dissolve,
the particular erotic content o f transvestism dissolves.
Bestiality
[In the Middle Ages] copulation with a
Jew was regarded as a form o f bestiality,
and incurred the same penances.
G. Rattray-Taylor, Sex in History
Primary bestiality (fucking between people and
other animals) is found in all nonindustrial societies.
Secondary bestiality (generalized erotic relationships
between people and other animals) is found everywhere
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Woman Hating
on the planet, on every city street, in every rural town.
Bestiality is an erotic reality, one which clearly places
people in nature, not above it.
The relationship between people and other animals,
when nonpredatory, is always erotic since its substance
is nonverbal communication and touch. That eroticism
in its pure form is life-affirming and life-enriching was
sufficient reason to make bestiality a capital crime in
the Dark Ages, at least for the nonhuman animal; sufficient reason for the English in the Dark Ages to confuse sheep and Jews.
In contemporary society relationships between
people and other animals often reflect the sadomasochistic complexion o f human relationship. Animals in our culture are often badly abused, the objects of
violence and cruelty, the foil of repressed and therefore
very dangerous human sexuality. Some animals, like
horses and big dogs, become surrogate cocks, symbols
of ideal macho virility.
Needless to say, in androgynous community, human
and other-animal relationships would become more
explicitly erotic, and that eroticism would not degenerate into abuse. Animals would be part of the tribe and, with us, respected, loved, and free. They always
share our fate, whatever it is.
Incest
I was cold —later revolted a little, not
much — seemed perhaps a good idea to try
— know the Monster of the Beginning
Womb—Perhaps —that way. Would she
care? She needs a lover.
Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish
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189
T h e parent-child relationship is primarily erotic
because all human relationships are primarily erotic.
T h e incest taboo is a particularized form o f repression,
one which functions as the bulwark o f all the other repressions. T h e incest taboo ensures that however free we become, we never become genuinely free. T h e incest
taboo, because it denies us essential fulfillment with the
parents whom we love with our primary energy, forces
us to internalize those parents and constantly seek them,
or seek to negate them, in the minds, bodies, and hearts
o f other humans who are not our parents and never
will be.
T he incest taboo does the worst work o f the culture:
it teaches us the mechanisms o f repressing and internalizing erotic feeling—it forces us to develop those mechanisms in the first place; it forces us to particularize sexual feeling, so that it congeals into a need for a particular sexual “object” ; it demands that we
place the nuclear family above the human family. T h e
destruction o f the incest taboo is essential to the development o f cooperative human community based on the free-flow o f natural androgynous eroticism.
Th e Family
For if we grant that the sexual drive is at
birth diffuse and undifferentiated from the
total personality (Freud’s “ polymorphous
perversity”) and. . . becomes differentiated only in response to the incest taboo;
and that. . . the incest taboo is now necessary only in order to preserve the family;
then if we did away with the family we
would in effect be doing away with the
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Woman Hating
repressions that mold sexuality into specific formations.
Shulamith Firestone,
The Dialectic o f Sex
The incest taboo can be destroyed only by destroying the nuclear family as the primary institution of the culture. The nuclear family is the school of values in a
sexist, sexually repressed society. One learns what one
must know: the roles, rituals, and behaviors appropriate
to male-female polarity and the internalized mechanisms of sexual repression. The alternative to the nuclear family at the moment is the extended family, or tribe. The growth of tribe is part of the process of
destroying particularized roles and fixed erotic identity.
As people develop fluid androgynous identity, they
will also develop the forms of community appropriate
to it. We cannot really imagine what those forms will
be.
Children
The special tie women have with children
is recognized by everyone. I submit, however, that the nature o f this bond is no
more than shared oppression. And that
moreover this oppression is intertwined
and mutually reinforcing in such complex
ways that we will be unable to speak of
the liberation o f women without also discussing the liberation o f children.
Shulamith Firestone,