The Dialectic o f Sex
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191
T w o developments are occurring simultaneously:
women are rejecting the female role, and life is being
created in the laboratory. Unless the structure is totally
transformed, we can expect that when women no longer
function as biological breeders we will be expendable.
As men learn more and more to control reproduction,
as cloning becomes a reality, and as the technology o f
computers and robots develop, there is every reason
to think that men as we know them will use that control and technology to create the sex objects that will gratify them. Men, after all, nave throughout history
resorted to gynocide as a stratagem o f social control,
as a tactical way o f attaining/maintaining power. That
is the simple, compelling reality. T here are only two
other options: women must seize power, or we must
accomplish the transformation into androgyny.
T h e freedom o f those who are capable o f biological
reproduction from that work (which is simply a form
o f physical labor) is entirely congruent with androgynous community. Only in the concentration-camp world o f polarity must one expect that development to lead to
gynocide. T h e social processes here stand naked: if
women must seize power in order to survive, and somehow manage to do that, power will most probably shift without being transformed; if we can create androgynous community, we can abandon power altogether as a social reality —that is the final, and most important,
implication o f androgyny.
As for children, they too are erotic beings, closer
to androgyny than the adults who oppress them. Children are fully capable o f participating in community, and have every right to live out their own erotic im
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Woman Haling
pulses. In androgynous community, those impulses
would retain a high degree of nonspecificity and would
no doubt show the rest of us the way into sexual self-
realization. The distinctions between “children” and
“adults, ” and the social institutions which enforce those
distinctions, would disappear as androgynous community develops.
Conclusion
Nothing short of everything will really do.
Aldous Huxley, Island
The object is cultural transformation. The object is
the development of a new kind of human being and a
new kind of human community. All of us who have ever
tried to right a wrong recognize that truly nothing short
of everything will really do.
The way from here to there will not be easy. We
must make a total commitment —no longer to take
refuge in the scenarios of man-woman violence which
are society’s regulators, no longer to play the male-
female roles we have been taught, no longer to refuse
to know who we are and what we desire so that we need
not take responsibility for our own lives. We must
refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist —marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil. We must refuse to
submit to the fears engendered by sexual taboos. We
must refuse to submit to all forms of behavior and relationship which reinforce male-female polarity, which nourish basic patterns of male dominance and female
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submission. We must instead build communities where
violence is not the main dynamic o f human relationship,
where natural desire is the fundament o f community,
where androgyny is the operative premise, where tribe
based on androgyny and the social forms which would
develop from it are the bases o f the collective cultural
structure —noncoercive, nonsexist. As Julian Beck
wrote, the journey to love is not romantic. As many have
written, the journey to freedom is not romantic either —
nor is the way known precisely and for all time. We
begin here and now, inch by inch.
You do not teach someone to count only
up to eight. You do not say nine and ten
and beyond do not exist. You give people
everything or they are not able to count at
all. There is a real revolution or none at
all.
Pericles Korovessis, in an interview
in Liberation, June 1973
The Revolution is not an event that takes
two or three days, in which there is shooting and hanging. It is a long drawn out
process in which new people are created,
capable of renovating society so that the
revolution does not replace one elite with
another, but so that the revolution creates
a new anti-authoritarian structure with
anti-authoritarian people who in their
turn re-organize the society so that it becomes a non-alienated human society, free
from war, hunger, and exploitation.
Rudi Dutschke, March 7, 1968
There is a misery of the body and a misery
of the mind, and if the stars, whenever we
looked at them, poured nectar into our
mouths, and the grass became bread, we
would still be sad. We live in a system that
manufactures sorrow, spilling it out of its
mill, the waters of sorrow, ocean, storm,
and we drown down, dead, too soon.
. . . uprising is the reversal of the system, and revolution is the turning of tides.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
AFT ERWORD
The Great Punctuation Typography Struggle
this text has been altered in one very serious way. I
wanted it to be printed the way it was written —lower
case letters, no apostrophes, contractions.
I like my text to be as empty as possible, only necessary punctuation is necessary, when one knows ones purposes one knows what is necessary.
my publisher, in his corporate wisdom, filled the
pages with garbage: standard punctuation, he knew his
purposes; he knew what was necessary, our purposes
differed: mine, to achieve clarity; his, to sell books.
my publisher changed my punctuation because book
reviewers (Mammon) do not like lower case letters,
fuck (in the old sense) book reviewers (Mammon).
W hen I say god and mammon concerning the
writer writing, I mean that any one can use words to
say something. And in using these words to say what
he has to say he may use those words directly or in-
directly. I f he uses these words indirectly he says what
he intends to have heard by somebody who is to hear