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MARGE PIERCY
don't believe there are greater incidences of rape and impotence
now than in the fifties. I was a bit outside, and people came to me
in crises. It was assumed I would know the abortionist or what to
do. I functioned in that way for years, repository of sexual lore,
like a crazy bank where people left stuff they didn't really want,
to molder and gather slow interest. Then, as now, a great many
women were forcibly raped, and then (as now enforced by the
society and the law but just beginning to be fought by women),
women were ashamed of that violence done to them and believed,
as programmed, that to be violently entered was somehow their
fault. The incidence of male impotence has always been high
among any class of men I've ever known, age, backgrvund, race,
level of education regardless. I suspect from conversations with
much older women that it's held constant since 1910 at least. But
nobody talked about it then. Men did not talk honestly to men,
women did not talk honestly enough to women. Men talked to
women individually but with a mixture of confession, propaganda,
blame laying, and demand.
The myth of the vaginal orgasm (big bang theory of femin–
inity) did enormous damage. It not only produced a generation of
women alienated from their bodies, trained to deny actual plea–
sure and to act out fancied orgasms, but alienated from their
minds, since generally in order to function and "be happy" in
relations with men, women had to believe they were experiencing
"fulfillment" in bed.
Mutually exclusive sex roles divided humanity into winners
and losers, makers and made, doers and done, fuckers and fuckees,
yin and yang, and who the hell wants to be passive, moist, cold,
receptive, unmoving, inert: sort of a superbasement of humanity.
Women still police each other, to keep each other in line, as men
too police women, the range of permissible behavior for women
remaining much narrower than for men. But women policed each
other in the fifties with a special frenzy, being totally convinced
nothing but death and madness lay outside the nuclear family and
the baby-doll-mommy roles. How could we have believed that
when we saw the toll
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death and madness inside the roles?
Even the notion of acceptable beauty was exceedingly
limited and marred a whole generation of women who grew up
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