Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 203

We should also consider that the intellectual scaffold that supported the persecution of the witches was not directly taken from the pages of philosophical rationalism. Rather, it was a transitional phenomenon, a sort of ideological bricolage that evolved under the pressure of the task it had to accomplish. Within it, elements taken from the fantastic world of medieval Christianity, rationalistic arguments, and modern bureaucratic court procedures combined, in the same way as in the forging of Nazism the cult of science and technology combined with a scenario pretending to restore an archaic, mythical world of blood bonds and pre-monetary allegiances.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 202

Indeed, there is no evidence that the new science had a liberating effect. The mechanistic view of Nature that came into existence with the rise of modern science "disenchanted the world." But there is no evidence that those who promoted it ever spoke in defense of the women accused as witches. Descartes declared himself an agnostic on this matter; other mechanical philosophers (like Joseph Glanvil and Thomas Hobbes) strongly supported the witch-hunt. What ended the witch-hunt...was the annihilation of the world of the witches and the imposition of the social discipline that the victorious capitalist system required. In other words, the witch-hunt came to an end, by the late 17th century, because the ruling class by this time enjoyed a growing sense of security concerning its power, not because a more enlightened view of the world had emerged.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 201

With the persecution of the folk healer, women were expropriated from a patrimony of empirical knowledge, regarding herbs and healing remedies, that they had accumulated and transmitted from generation to generation, its loss paving the way for a new form of enclosure: the rise of professional medicine, which erected in front of the "lower classes" a wall of unchallengeable scientific knowledge, unaffordable and alien, despite its curative pretenses.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 191-192

For women, then, the 16th and 17th centuries did inaugurate an age of sexual repression. Censorship and prohibition did come to define their relationship with sexuality. With Michel Foucault in mind, we must also insist that it was not the Catholic pastoral, nor the confession, that best demonstrate how "Power," at the dawn of the modern era, made it compulsory for people to speak of sex. The "discursive explosion" on sex, that Foucault detected in this time, was in no place more powerfully exhibited than in the torture chambers of the witch-hunt. But it had nothing in common with the mutual titillation that Foucault imagines flowing between the woman and her confessor. Far outstripping any village priest, the inquisitors forced the witches to reveal their sexual adventures in every detail, undeterred by the fact that they were often old women and their sexual exploits dated back many decades. In an almost ritual manner, they forced the alleged witches to explain how in their youth they were first taken by the devil, what they had felt upon penetration, the impure thoughts they had harbored. But the stage upon which this peculiar discourse on sex unfolded was the torture chamber, and the questions were asked between applications of the strappado, to women driven mad by pain, and by no stretch of the imagination can we presume that the orgy of words the women thus tortured were forced to utter incited their pleasure or re-oriented, by linguistic sublimation, their desire. In the case of the witch-hunt--which Foucault surprisingly ignores in his History of Sexuality--the "interminable discourse on sex" was not deployed as an alternative to, but in the service of repression, censorship, denial. Certainly we can say that the language of the witch-hunt "produced" the Woman as a different species, a being sui generis, more carnal and perverted by natre. We can also say that the production of the "female pervert" was a step in the transformation of the female vis erotica into vis lavorativa--that is, a first step in the transformation of female sexuality into work. But we should appreciate the destructive character of this process, which also demonstrates the limits of a general "history of sexuality" of the type Foucault has proposed, which treats sexuality from the perspective of an undifferentiated, gender-neutral subject, and as an activity presumably carrying the same consequences for men and women.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 170

Witch hunting was also instrumental to the construction of a new patriarchal order where women's bodies, their labor, their sexual and reproductive powers were placed under the control of the state and transformed into economic resources. This means that the witch hunters were less interested in the punishment of any specific transgressions than in the elimination of generalized forms of female behavior which they no longer tolerated and had to be made abominable in the eyes of the population. That the charges in the trials often referred to events that had occurred decades earlier, that witchcraft was made a crimen exceptum, that is, a crime to be investigated by special means, torture included, and it was punishable even in the absence of any proven damage to persons and things--all these factors indicate that the target of the witch-hunt--(as is often true with political repression in times of intense social change and conflict)--were not socially recognized crimes, but previously accepted practices and groups of individuals that had to be eradicated from the community, through terror and criminalization. In this sense, the charge of witchcraft performed a function similar to that performed by "high treason" (which, significantly, was introduced into the English legal code in the same years), and the charge of "terrorism" in our times. The very vagueness of the charge--the fact that it was impossible to prove it, while at the same time it evoked the maximum of horror--meant that it could be used to punish any form of protest and to generate suspicion even towards the most ordinary aspects of daily life.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 169

What fears instigated such concerted policy of genocide? Why was so much violence unleashed? And why were its primary targets women?...

It must be immediately stated that, to this day, there are no sure answers to these questions. A major obstacle in the way of an explanation has been the fact that the charges against the witches are so grotesque and unbelievable as to be incommensurable with any motivation or crime.¹² How to account for the fact that for more than two centuries, in several European countries, hundreds of thousands of women were tried, tortured, burned alive or hanged, accused of having sold body and soul to the devil and, by magical means, murdered scores of children, sucked their blood, made potions with their flesh, caused the death of their neighbors, destroyed cattle and crops, raised storms, and performed many other abominations? (However, even today, some historians ask us to believe that the witch-hunt was quite reasonable in the context of the contemporary belief structure!)

12. There is also evidence of significant shifts in the weight attributed to specific accusations, the nature of the crimes commonly associated with witchcraft, and the social composition of the accusers and accused. The most significant shift, perhaps, is that in an early phase of the persecution (during the 15th-century trials) witchcraft was seen predominantly as a collective crime, relying on mass gatherings and organization, while by the 17th century it was seen as a crime of an individual nature, an evil career in which isolated witches specialized--this being a sign of the breakdown of communal bonds brought about by the increasing privatization of land tenure and the expansion of commercial relations in this period.

[Endnote on page 211]

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 142-143

Eradicating these practices was a necessary condition for the capitalist rationalization of work, since magic appeared as an illicit form of power and an instrument to obtain what one wanted without work, that is, a refusal to work in action. "Magic kills industry," lamented Francis Bacon, admitting that nothing repelled him so much as the assumption that one could obtain results with a few idle expedients, rather than with the sweat of one's brow.

Magic, moreover, rested upon a qualitative conception of space and time that precluded a regularization of the labor process. How could the new entrepreneurs impose regular work patterns on a proletariat anchored in the belief that there are lucky and unlucky days, that is, days on which one can travel and on which one should not move from home, days on which to marry and others on which every enterprise should be cautiously avoided? Equally incompatible with the capitalist work-discipline was a conception of the cosmos that attributed special powers to the individual: the magnetic look, the power to make oneself invisible, to leave one's body, to chain the will of others by magical incantations.

It would not be fruitful to investigate whether these powers were real or imaginary. It can be said that all precapitalist societies have believed in them and, in recent times, we have witnessed a revaluation of practices that, at the time we refer to, would have been condemned as witchcraft. Let us mention the growing interest in parapsychology and biofeedback practices that are increasingly applied even by mainstream medicine. The revival of magical beliefs is possible today because it no longer represents a social threat. The mechanization of the body is so constitutive of the individual that, at least in the industrialized countries, giving space to the belief in occult forces does not jeopardize the regularity of social behavior. Astrology too can be allowed to return, with the certainty that even the most devoted consumer of astral charts will automatically consult the watch before going to work.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 141

What died was the concept of the body as a receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as "irrational" was branded as crime. This state intervention was the necessary "subtext" of Mechanical Philosophy. "Knowledge" can only become "power" if it can enforce its prescriptions. This means that the mechanical body, the body-machine, could not have become a model of social behavior without the destruction by the state of a vast range of pre-capitalist beliefs, practices, and social subjects whose existence contradicted the regularization of corporeal behavior promised by Mechanical Philosophy. This is why, at the peak of the "Age of Reason"--the age of scepticism and methodical doubt--we have a ferocious attack on the body, well-supported by many who subscribed to the new doctrine.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 104-105

Did workers in Europe know that they were buying products resulting from slave labor and, if they did, did they object to it? This is a question I would like to ask them, but it is one which I cannot answer. What is certain is that the history of tea, sugar, rum, tobacco, and cotton is far more significant than we can deduce from the contribution which these commodities made, as raw materials or means of exchange in the slave trade, to the rise of the factory system. For what traveled with these "exports" was not only the blood of the slaves but the seeds of a new science of exploitation, and a new division of the working class by which waged-work, rather than providing an alternative to slavery, was made to depend on it for its existence, as a means (like female unpaid labor) for the expansion of the unpaid part of the waged working-day.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 102-103

It is no exaggeration to say that women were treated with the same hostility and sense of estrangement accorded "Indian savages" in the literature that developed on this subject after the Conquest. The parallel is not casual. In both cases literary and cultural denigration was at the service of a project of expropriation. As we will see, the demonization of the American indigenous people served to justify their enslavement and the plunder of their resources. In Europe, the attack waged on women justified the appropriation of their labor by men and the criminalization of their control over reproduction. Always, the price of resistance was extermination. None of the tactics deployed against European women and colonial subjects would have succeeded, had they not been sustained by a campaign of terror. In the case of European women it was the witch-hunt that played the main role in the construction of their new social function, and the degradation of their social identity.

The definition of women as demonic beings, and the atrocious and humiliating practices to which so many of them were subjected left indelible marks in the collective female psyche and in women's sense of possibilities. From every viewpoint--socially, economically, culturally, politically--the witch-hunt was a turning point in women's lives; it was the equivalent of the historic defeat to which Engels alludes, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), as the cause of the downfall of the matriarchal world. For the witch-hunt destroyed a whole world of female practices, collective relations, and systems of knowledge that had been the foundation of women's power in pre-capitalist Europe, and the condition for their resistance in the struggle against feudalism.

Out of this defeat a new model of femininity emerged: the ideal woman and wife--passive, obedient, thrifty, of few words, always busy at work, and chaste. This change began at the end of the 17th century, after women had been subjected for more than two centuries of state terrorism. Once women were defeated, the image of femininity constructed in the "transition" was discarded as an unnecessary tool, and a new, tamed one took its place. While at the time of the witch-hunt women had been portrayed as savage beings, mentally weak, unsatiably lusty, rebellious, insubordinate, incapable of self-control, by the 18th century the canon has been reversed. Women were now depicted as passive, asexual beings, more obedient, more moral than men, capable of exerting a positive moral influence on them. Even their irrationality could now be valorized, as the Dutch philosopher Pierre Bayle realized in his Dictionaire Historique et Critique (1740), in which he praised the power of the female "maternal instinct," arguing that it should be viewed as a truly providential device, ensuring that despite the disadvantages of childbirthing and childraising, women do continue to reproduce.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 98

[W]hile in the upper class it was property that gave the husband power over his wife and children, a similar power was granted to working-class men over women by means of women's exclusion from the wage...

This policy, making it impossible for women to have money of their own, created the material conditions for their subjection to men and the appropriation of their labor by male workers. It is in this sense that I speak of the patriarchy of the wage. We must also rethink the concept of "wage slavery." If it is true that male workers became only formally free under the new wage-labor regime, the group of workers who, in the transition to capitalism, most approached the condition of slaves was working-class women.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 92

The criminalization of women's control over procreation is a phenomenon whose importance cannot be overemphasized, both from the viewpoint of its effects on women and its consequences for the capitalist organization of work. As is well documented, through the Middle Ages women had possessed many means of contraception... The criminalization of contraception expropriated women from this knowledge that had been transmitted from generation to generation, giving them some autonomy with respect to child-birth. It appears that, in some cases, this knowledge was not lost but was only driven underground; yet when birth control again made its appearance on the social scene, contraceptive methods were no longer of the type that women could use, but were specifically created for use by men... [B]y denying women control over their bodies, the state deprived them of the most fundamental condition for physical and psychological integrity and degraded maternity to the status of forced labor, in addition to confining women to reproductive work in a way unknown in previous societies.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 63-64

1. The expropriation of European workers from their means of subsistence, and the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans to the mines and plantations of the "New World," were not the only means by which a world proletariat was formed and "accumulated."
   
   
2. This process required the transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force. Most of all, it required the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the "witches."
   
   
3. Primitive accumulation, then, was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as "race" and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.
   
   
4. We cannot, therefore, identify capitalist accumulation with the liberation of the worker, female or male, as many Marxists (among others) have done, or see the advent of capitalism as a moment of historical progress. On the contrary, capitalism has created more brutal and insidious forms of enslavement, as it has planted into the body of the proletariat deep divisions that have served to intensify and conceal exploitation. It is in great part because of these imposed divisions--especially those between women and men--that capitalist accumulation continues to devastate life in every corner of the planet.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 49-50

Ultimately, this mounting class conflict [in the 13th to 15th centuries] brought about a new alliance between the bourgeoisie and the nobility, without which proletarian revolts may not have been defeated. It is difficult, in fact, to accept the claim, often made by historians, according to which these struggles had no chance of success due to the narrowness of their political horizons and the "confused nature of their demands." In reality, the objectives of the peasants and artisans were quite transparent. They demanded that "every man should have as much as another" (Pirenne 1937: 202) and, in order to achieve this goal, they joined with all those "who had nothing to lose," acting in concert, in different regions, not afraid to confront the well-trained armies of the nobility, despite their lack of military skills.

If they were defeated, it was because all the forces of feudal power--the nobility, the Church, and the bourgeoisie--moved against them, united, despite their traditional divisions, by their fear of proletarian rebellion. Indeed, the image that has been handed down to us, of a bourgeoisie perennially at war with the nobility, and carrying on its banners the call for equality and democracy, is a distortion. By the late Middle Ages, wherever we turn, from Tuscany to England the the Low Countries, we find the bourgeoisie already allied with the nobility in the suppression of the lower classes. For in the peasants and the democratic weavers and cobblers of its cities, the bourgeoisie recognized an enemy far more dangerous than the nobility--one that made it worthwhile for the burghers even to sacrifice their cherished political autonomy. Thus, it was the urban bourgeoisie, after two centuries of struggles waged in order to gain full sovereignty within the walls of its communes, who reinstituted the power of the nobility, by voluntarily submitting to the rule of the Prince, the first step on the road to the absolute state.

[Citation references Henri Pirenne's Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe.]

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation pages 21-22

A history of women and reproduction in the "transition to capitalism" must begin with the struggles that the medieval proletariat--small peasants, artisans, day laborers--waged against feudal power in all its forms. Only if we evoke these struggles, with their rich cargo of demands, social and political aspirations, and antagonistic practices, can we understand the role that women had in the crisis of feudalism, and why their power had to be destroyed for capitalism to develop, as it was by the three-century-long persecution of the witches. From the vantage point of this struggle, we can also see that capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the old order. Capitalism was the response of the feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave "all the world a big jolt." Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle--possibilities which, if realized, might have spared us the immense destruction of lives and the natural environment that has marked the advance of capitalist relations worldwide. This much must be stressed, for the belief that capitalism "evolved" from feudalism and represents a higher form of social life has not yet been dispelled.

[The phrase "(to give) all the world a big jolt" paraphrased from Thomas Müntzer's Open Denial of the False Belief of the Godless World on the Testimony of the Gospel of Luke, Presented to Miserable and Pitiful Christendom in Memory of its Error, 1524]

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 17

This is what occurred in the 19th century, when the responses to the rise of socialism, the Paris Commune, and the accumulation crisis of 1873 were the "Scramble for Africa" and the simultaneous creation in Europe of the nuclear family, centered on the economic dependence of women to men--following the expulsion of women from the waged work-place. This is also what is happening today, as a new global expansion of the labor-market is attempting to set back the clock with respect to the anti-colonial struggle, and the struggles of other rebel subjects--students, feminists, blue collar workers--who, in the 1960s and 1970s, undermined the sexual and international division of labor.

It is not surprising, then, if large-scale violence and enslavement have been on the agenda, as they were in the period of the "transition," with the difference that today the conquistadors are the officers of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are still preaching the worth of a penny to the same populations which the dominant world powers have for centuries robbed and pauperized. Once again, much of the violence unleashed is directed against women, for in the age of the computer, the conquest of the female body is still a precondition for the accumulation of labor and wealth, as demonstrated by the institutional investment in the development of new reproductive technologies that, more than ever, reduce women to wombs.

Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation page 10

By the end of 1986...I left Nigeria, in body if not in spirit. But the thought of the attacks launched on the Nigerian people never left me. Thus, the desire to restudy "the transition to capitalism" has been with me since my return. I had read the Nigerian events through the prism of 16th-century Europe. In the United States, it was the Nigerian proletariat that brought me back to the struggles over the commons and the capitalist disciplining of women, in and out of Europe. Upon my return, I also began to teach in an interdisciplinary program for undergraduates where I confronted a different type of "enclosure": the enclosure of knowledge, that is, the increasing loss, among the new generations, of the historical sense of our common past. This is why in Caliban and the Witch I reconstruct the anti-feudal struggles of the Middle Ages and the struggles by which the European proletariat resisted the advent of capitalism. My goal in doing so is not only to make available to non-specialists the evidence on which my analysis relies, but to revive among younger generations the memory of a long history of resistance that today is in danger of being erased. Saving this historical memory is crucial if we are to find an alternative to capitalism. For this possibility will depend on our capacity to hear the voices of those who have walked similar paths.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man page 203

Consider:

You ought to be interested in politics.

Politics is baseball. Politics is football. Politics is X "winning" and Y "losing." Men wrangle about politics in living rooms the way Opera Fan One shouts at Opera Fan Two about Victoria de los Angeles.

No squabble between the Republican League and the Democrat League will ever change your life. Concealing your anxiety over the phone when He calls, that's your politics.

Still, you ought to be interested in politics. Why aren't you?

Because of feminine incapacity.

One can go on.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man pages 140-141

We would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them.

Shrill . . . vituperative . . . no concern for the future of society . . . maunderings of antiquated feminism . . . selfish femlib . . . needs a good lay . . . this shapeless book . . . of course a calm and objective discussion is beyond . . . twisted, neurotic . . . some truth buried in a largely hysterical . . . of very limited interest, I should . . . another tract for the trash can . . . burned her bra and thought that . . . no characterization, no plot . . . really important issues are neglected while . . . hermetically sealed . . . women's limited experience . . . another of the screaming sisterhood . . . a not very appealing aggressiveness . . . could have been done with wit if the author had . . . deflowering the pretentious male . . . a man would have given his right arm to . . . hardly girlish . . . a woman's book . . . another shrill polemic which the . . . a mere male like myself can hardly . . . a brilliant but basically confused study of feminine hysteria which . . . feminine lack of objectivity . . . this pretense at a novel . . . trying to shock . . . the tired tricks of the anti-novelists . . . how often must a poor critic have to . . . the usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism . . . denial of the profound sexual polarity which . . . an all too womanly refusal to face facts . . . pseudo-masculine brusqueness . . . the ladies'-magazine level . . . trivial topics like housework and the predictable screams of . . . those who cuddled up to ball-breaker Kate will . . . unfortunately sexless in its outlook . . . drivel . . . a warped clinical protest against . . . violently waspish attack . . . formidable self-pity which erodes any chance of . . . formless . . . the inability to accept the female role which . . . the predictable fury at anatomy displaced to . . . without the grace and compassion which we have the right to expect . . . anatomy is destiny . . . destiny is anatomy . . . sharp and funny but without real weight or anything beyond a topical . . . just plain bad . . . we "dear ladies," whom Russ would do away with, unfortunately just don't feel . . . ephemeral trash, missiles of the sex war . . . a female lack of experience which . . . .

Q.E.D. Quod erat demonstrandum. It has been proved.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man page 94

The game is a dominance game called I Must Impress This Woman. Failure makes the active player play harder. Wear a hunched back or a withered arm; you will then experience the invisibility of the passive player. I'm never impressed--no woman ever is--it's just a cue that you like me and I'm supposed to like that. If you really like me, maybe I can get you to stop. Stop; I want to talk to you! Stop; I want to see you! Stop; I'm dying and disappearing!

SHE: Isn't it just a game?
HE: Yes, of course.
SHE: And if you play the game, it means you like me, doesn't it?
HE: Of course.
SHE: Then if it's just a game and you like me, you can stop playing. Please stop.
HE: No.
SHE: Then I won't play.
HE: Bitch! You want to destroy me. I'll show you. (He plays harder)
SHE: All right. I'm impressed.
HE: You really are sweet and responsive after all. You've kept your femininity. You're not one of those hysterical feminist bitches who wants to be a man and have a penis. You're a woman.
SHE: Yes. (She kills herself)

Joanna Russ, The Female Man page 70

(Performing the difficult mental trick of trying on somebody else's taboos.)

Joanna Russ, The Female Man pages 65-68

I'm a victim of penis envy (said Laura) so I can't ever be happy or lead a normal life. My mother worked as a librarian when I was little and that's not feminine. She thinks it's deformed me. The other day a man came up to me in the bus and called me a sweetie and said, "Why don't you smile? God loves you!" I just stared at him. But he wouldn't go away until I smiled, so finally I did. Everyone was laughing. I tried once, you know, went to a dance all dressed up, but I felt like such a fool. Everyone kept making encouraging remarks about my looks as if they were afraid I'd cross back over the line again; I was trying, you know, I was proving their way of life was right, and they were terrified I'd stop. When I was five I said, "I'm not a girl, I'm a genius," but that doesn't work, possibly because other people don't honor the resolve. Last year I finally gave up and told my mother I didn't want to be a girl but she said Oh no, being a girl is wonderful. Why? Because you can wear pretty clothes and you don't have to do anything; the men will do it for you. She said that instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can't imbibe someone's success by fucking them. Then she said that in addition to that (the pretty clothes and so forth) there is a mystical fulfillment in marriage and children that nobody who hasn't done it could ever know. "Sure, washing floors," I said. "I have you," she said, looking mysterious. As if my father didn't have me, too. Or my birth was a beautiful experience et patati et patata, which doesn't quite jibe with the secular version we always get when she's talking about her ailments with her friends. When I was a little girl I used to think women were always sick. My father said, "What the hell is she fussing about this time?" All those songs, what's-its-name, I enjoy being a girl, I'm so glad I'm female, I'm all dressed up, Love will make up for everything, tra-la-la. Where are the songs about how glad I am I'm a boy? Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, pleasing The Man, interesting The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgment for The Man, changing your decision for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. "I never had a thought that wasn't yours." Sob, sob. Whenever I act like a human being, they say, "What are you getting upset about?" They say: of course you'll get married. They say: of course you're brilliant. They say: of course you'll get a Ph.D. and then sacrifice it to have babies. They say: if you don't, you're the one who'll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you're exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don't make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk? I went to a Socialist--not really Socialist, you understand--camp for two summers; my parents say I must have gotten my crazy ideas there. Like hell I did. When I was thirteen my uncle wanted to kiss me and when I tried to run away, everybody laughed. He pinned my arms and kissed me on the cheek; then he said, "Oho, I got my kiss! I got my kiss!" and everybody thought it was too ducky for words. Of course they blamed me--it's harmless, they said, you're only a child, he's paying you attention; you ought to be grateful. Everything's all right as long as he doesn't rape you. Women only have feelings; men have egos. The school psychologist told me I might not realize it, but I was living a very dangerous style of life that might in time lead to Lesbianism (ha! ha!) and I should try to look and act more feminine. I laughed until I cried. Then he said I must understand that femininity was a Good Thing, and although men's and women's functions in society were different, they had equal dignity. Separate but equal, right? Men make the decisions and women make the dinners. I expected him to start in about that mystically-wonderful-experience-which-no-man-can-know crap, but he didn't. Instead he took me to the window and showed me the expensive clothing stores across the way. Then he said, "See, it's a woman's world, after all." The pretty clothes again. I thought some damn horrible thing was going to happen to me right there on his carpet. I couldn't talk. I couldn't move. I felt deathly sick. He really expected me to live like that--he looked at me and that's what he saw, after eleven months. He expected me to start singing "I'm So Glad I'm A Girl" right there in his Goddamned office. And a little buck-and-wing. And a little nigger shuffle.

"Would you like to live like that?" I said.

He said, "That's irrelevant, because I'm a man."

I haven't the right hobbies, you see. My hobby is mathematics, not boys. And being young, too, that's a drag. You have to take all kinds of crap.

Boys don't like smart girls. Boys don't like aggressive girls. Unless they want to sit in the girls' laps, that is. I never met a man yet who wanted to make it with a female Genghis Khan. Either they try to dominate you, which is revolting, or they turn into babies. You might as well give up. Then I had a lady shrink who said it was my problem because I was the one who was trying to rock the boat and you can't expect them to change. So I suppose I'm the one who must change. Which is what my best friend said. "Compromise," she said, answering her fiftieth phone call of the night. "Think what power it gives you over them."

Them! Always Them, Them, Them. I can't just think of myself. My mother thinks that I don't like boys, though I try to tell her: Look at it this way; I'll never lose my virginity. I'm a Man-Hating Woman and people leave the room when I come in it. Do they do the same for a Woman-Hating Man? Don't be silly.

She'll never know--nor would she credit if she knew--that men sometimes look very beautiful to me. From the depths, looking up.

There was a very nice boy once who said, "Don't worry, Laura. I know you're really very sweet and gentle underneath." And another with, "You're strong, like an earth mother." And a third, "You're so beautiful when you're angry." My guts on the floor, you're so beautiful when you're angry. I want to be recognized.

I've never slept with a girl. I couldn't. I wouldn't want to. That's abnormal and I'm not, although you can't be normal unless you do what you want and you can't be normal unless you love men. To do what I wanted would be normal, unless what I wanted was abnormal, in which case it would be abnormal to please myself and normal to do what I didn't want to do, which isn't normal.

So you see.

Joanna Russ, The Female Man pages 45-46

"Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away.

"What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera--well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?

"Let go, ------," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch).

"Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.

No, no, keep on being ladylike!

"Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.

"Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away.

"Right on, sister," he said.

So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of his book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leather--excuse me--volume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)

"Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!"

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned page 229

The astronomers have functioned bravely in the past. They've been good for business: the big interests think kindly, if at all, of them. It's bad for trade to have an intense darkness come upon an unaware community and frighten people out of their purchasing values. But if an obscuration be foretold, and if it then occur--may seem a little uncanny--only a shadow--and no one who was about to buy a pair of shoes runs home panic-stricken and saves the money.

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned page 210

...a super-evil thing that is exploiting us. By Evil I mean that which makes us useful.

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned page 58

[T]he gods must tell us what we want them to tell us.

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned pages 6-7

I conceive of one inter-continuous nexus, in which and of which all seeming things are only different expressions, but in which all things are localizations of one attempt to break away and become real things, or to establish entity or positive difference or final demarcation or unmodified independence--or personality or soul, as it is called in human phenomena--

That anything that tries to establish itself as a real, or positive, or absolute system, government, organization, self, soul, entity, individuality, can so attempt only by drawing a line about itself, or about the inclusions that constitute itself, and damning or excluding, or breaking away from, all other "things":

That, if it does not so act, it cannot seem to be;

That, if it does so act, it falsely and arbitrarily and futilely and disastrously acts, just as would one who draws a circle in the sea, including a few waves, saying that the other waves, with which the included are continuous, are positively different, and stakes his life upon maintaining that the admitted and the damned are positively different.

Our expression is that our whole existence is animation of the local by an ideal that is realizable only in the universal:

That, if all exclusions are false, because always are included and excluded continuous: that if all seeming of existence perceptible to us is the product of exclusion, there is nothing that is perceptible to us that really is: that only the universal can really be.

Charles Fort, The Book of the Damned pages 4-5

It is our expression that nothing can attempt to be, except by attempting to include something else: that that which is commonly called "being" is a state that is wrought more or less definitely proportionately to the appearance of positive difference between that which is included and that which is excluded.

But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese. Mouse and a bug: no two things could seem more unalike. They're there a week, or they stay there a month: both of them are only transmutations of cheese. I think we're all bugs and mice, and are only different expressions of an all-inclusive cheese.

Or that red is not positively different from yellow: is only another degree of whatever vibrancy yellow is a degree of: that red and yellow are continuous, or that they merge in orange.

So then that, if, upon the basis of yellowness and redness, Science should attempt to classify all phenomena, including all red things as veritable, and excluding all yellow things as false or illusory, the demarcation would have to be false and arbitrary, because things colored orange, constituting continuity, would belong on both sides of the attempted border-line.

As we go along, we shall be impressed with this:

That no basis for classification, or inclusion and exclusion, more reasonable that that of redness and yellowness has ever been conceived of.