For Lesbians Only

^[1]3,620 words

If you’ve ever wondered about what’s actually being taught in Women’s Studies classes, perhaps the truth might come as a surprise. Radical feminist writings in general tend to be soaked in bile, especially those written for initiates of The Sisterhood. (Some of this stuff makes Thunderbolt, a Ku Klux Klan periodical, seem like William Freaking Buckley’s National Review in comparison.) One can find an interesting sample in For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology ^[2]. This compilation was published by Onlywomen Press. As far as I can tell, this was not a print-format precursor of Onlyfans.

The book was first published in 1988 and was reprinted in 1991, but has faded into obscurity since the days I first beheld this treasure in a university library. It’s about time to shine some light on this tome at last and give it the attention it deserves. Weighing in at just under 600 pages and representing 82 monographs from various contributors, I can’t do justice to it in its entirety. Still, of this rich tapestry of gems, I hope to at least bring out the shine of a few of its brilliant facets.

Lesbian separatism in context of Second Wave feminism

What is feminism? That’s hard to pin down, since there’s no universally accepted definition. Most people would say that it has to do with women’s equality, or with the decent treatment of women. Those who advocate this and thereby call themselves feminists develop a personable public face for the movement. Still, those positions aren’t radical, since society already approves of their position in general. If it’s a status quo understanding of the present-day consensus, then even calling it feminism seems rather dated.

Note that there’s a motte-and-bailey ^[5] dynamic at work here. There’s something more to feminism under the surface than merely the desire for equality and human rights; a lot more. Much unlike mainstream conservatism and its “always punch right” strategy, Leftist movements tend to have a radical vanguard that pulls the mainstream masses their way. Feminism is no exception. There’s a side to it that the public doesn’t always see.

In its present form, feminism depends on dialectical ratcheting ^[6] and has no particular endpoint. After every last demand in the lengthy Declaration of Sentiments from 1848 was granted, what was left to be done? Eventually Second Wave feminism began, moving the goalposts. The first stirrings were in the 1950s, but it kicked into high gear during the next decade, becoming one more feature of 1960s blowhard politics. Since then, there was considerable crusty froth emerging from Second Wave feminism’s ideological cauldron. This becomes much more apparent when examining some of the subterranean currents in which various radical figures operated.

And so it came to pass that a number of factors were setting trends with Second Wave feminism behind the scenes. One of these was hardcore cultural Marxism ^[7], which was viciously determined to turn women into a radicalized class and divide society against itself. Then there was a lesbian subgroup, the proponents of which we’ll hear from shortly. A third factor was Zionism ^[8]. Other than that were the crazies. Some notable feminists just weren’t playing with a full deck, such as Valerie Solanas, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millett, and others. (Even so, that doesn’t prevent them from being regarded as esteemed pioneers of The Movement. The ravings of these lunatics — and I’m being quite literal here — are used to indoctrinate coeds in Women’s Studies classes under the guise of scholarship.) There was considerable overlap between these four categories. The Sisterhood of the time was quite a henhouse of loony birds. From their toxic ideological slop emerged the aforementioned crusty froth.

While tons of Agent Orange were being dropped on Vietnam, the radical feminists back home were similarly poisoning the social environment. (The difference is that the Agent Orange program stopped and is now regarded as a terrible mistake.) Even so, most people at the time had no idea of the full extent of what was happening. Outside of activist circles and Women’s Studies classes, one was unlikely to stumble across unfiltered radical feminism. The problem is that eventually the ideas did get around by gradual acceptance in academic and media circles, ultimately damaging the formerly amiable relations between the sexes.

What, then, of lesbian separatism? One hears little about this outgrowth of radical feminism nowadays, but it seems to have been a thing for a hot minute. Granted, its cultural significance during that era rated in importance somewhere between pet rocks and kid-lib, but work with me on this. In concept, their goal wasn’t so extraordinary; anyone with the inclination and the means can buy up property and form a planned community. They like what they like, so why not? The countercultural communes set up during the 1960s and ‘70s usually didn’t last long — including theirs — but it’s hard to blame them for trying.

Regarding the For Lesbians Only anthology, this was a political testament by American and Canadian lesbian separatists. What really distinguishes the text is that it’s an unfiltered look into what radical feminists believe and what their mentality is like. Although lesbianism is the cutest form of deviancy, some of them were ruining the pink paradise of passion with their crabby attitudes and moldy politics. If your idea of lesbians involves two women tenderly kissing, that’s not always how it works! It will soon become clear that for some of them, it has little or nothing to do with sexuality and is much more a remarkably tedious political pose.

The Woman-Identified Woman

The first monograph is a long tirade ^[11] by a New York City outfit called the Radicalesbians. (For decades, the Big Apple was a hotbed for this kind of thing; I’ll spare you the history lecture about its various splinter groups.) If your daughter attends a Women’s Studies class, your precious darling might get the following as assigned reading. If she registers anything but approval, she’ll risk getting an F. It begins:

A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society cares to allow. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with her self. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as a personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppression laid on her by the most basic role of her society — the female role.

As it happens, I featured that one in Deplorable Diatribes ^[12], remarking that “If that’s their public statement, then it’s hard to imagine what these harpies talked like in private!” More of my wiseass commentary follows:

So if you thought a lesbian was just a woman who delights in the soft caresses of other women, these types of feminists had other ideas. They took it upon themselves to make up a new meaning for the word, in accordance with their crabby dispositions. There’s nothing in the above about sultry Sapphic sensuality, is there? Neither is there anything like it elsewhere in that charming manifesto. For them, that seems to have been an afterthought, at the very most. The definition they gave is more like a chick who lives in a constant state of dyspepsia. (There are pills for that.) It’s little wonder, then, that one of the symbols for lesbian feminism is a battle axe. At the very least, they should thank men for inventing their vibrators.

Judging by the Radicalesbians’ transcendental petulance, I would suppose their batteries had run out long ago. So they boldly faced The Patriarchy, sticking out their tongues and yelling “Fuck you, Dad!”

Relating to Dyke Separatists/Hints for the Non-Separatist Lesbian

Here we have a print version of what, in the fullness of time, has become a common type of eyesore online ^[13]. Specifically, someone types up a laundry list of imperious demands for other people to follow when interacting with her very special in-group. We’ll be right on it, mkay?

• Do not try and defend the “humanity” of some men to a separatist. It’s a waste of her time; she’s probably already heard your argument hundreds of times and does not want to hear it again!
• Do not tell a separatist “Yeah, I hate men too except for my father/brother/son/cousin/ex-husband/faggot friend . . . He’s really an exception, he’s really okay.” She doesn’t want to hear about him or how you like him! Every male who has violated a female was loved and nurtured by some womon somewhere who thought of him as special.
• Do not protest in dismay or horror when we say pricks/puds/smegma/ for whom are commonly referred to as men & boys. Maybe you think these terms are “inhuman,” “extreme,” “horrendous,” “unfair.” The crimes that men and boys have committed against womyn and girls are inhuman, horrendous and unforgivable. We name our enemy accordingly.

A dozen more of these snippy particulars follow. In case you haven’t caught on, a womyn is y strynge bybe who cyn’t spell to syve her life.

It Has to Do with Apples

A contribution by Sarah Grace explains how separatism is something of a family tradition:

My grandmother, Rivke, was a separatist of the first degree and lived her life adamant that she remain one. It wasn’t exactly my brand of separatism. Hers dealt with gentile vs. Jew; mine has to do with men, but nonetheless . . .

Rivke emigrated to the United States from Munkach, Hungary, in 1901, at the age of eighteen. Her family settled in Sharon, Pennsylvania, and it was there she met Mandel, fell in love and married him twelve days later. Her life, and his, was totally centered around and involved with Jews. Rivke would have nothing to do with ‘goyim,’ her term for non-Jews. I can remember quite clearly her hatred and disdain for them.

I’ll add that Munkács was located in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and is now part of Ukraine and called Mukachevo. While it was still an eastern outpost of Imperial Bohunkia, it was the birthplace of an ultra-Orthodox sect that is now centered in Brooklyn. It’s entirely possible that Rivke belonged to it, perhaps informing her peculiar attitude.

Her disdain took various forms.

After an airplane crash, for instance, she would read the list of dead. If there were no Jewish names, she would dismiss the whole incident as trivial and no great loss. Jewish names on the list, on the other hand, evoked sorrow and often tears.

Although that much does seem rather churlish, Sarah Grace said that Rivke had reasons for her behavior rooted in persecution. On the other hand, could genetics have something to do with that colossal ‘tude? More of the same follows, and I had to wonder: If the old lady disliked “goyische” society so much, why didn’t she leave America and move to Israel? Surely she would’ve been happier there. Sounds like a win-win, right?

x-tra insight

The following is from a contributor who goes by flyin thunda cloud, rdoc. I’m not sure what the “rdoc.” stands for, what’s up with the orthography, or why she doesn’t like capital letters. Me thinkum two-spirit squaw not English teacher.

i often have found myself (especially recently), defending my separatist stance, az i am a dyke of coloua & i do reside in the south, i used to identify myself az a black dyke, now since i’ve been delving into my & many otha sistahs of coloua, i identify az Jamaican west indian & cherokee (native amerikan). i really want to address an emotionally charged subject, from the view that i see/hear/feel from.

the issue of my separatism came up again wif a womin of coloua who did not personally feel that she need to link with her native amerikaness. she tole me she felt very hurt because i made the statement that yes i am a dyke of coloua, but i cannot go home runnin to’ mommy or daddy if the shit wears completely thin and none of my dyke friends want anything to do wif me. being of coloua and separatist iz a heavy duty thing especially if you live in the south, because az this dyke tole me, it’s expected of you to work on issues that affect the general (if you want to identify wholly az afro-amerikan, which i don’t) issues, such az housing for blacks/jobs/the economy, etc. . .

it seems to me that so many of my sistahs of coloua (in particular black, amerikan born) forget the lies the black man tole in order to get us to believe that we (my black sistahs older than me) were submitting/compromising no part of us, by allowing our cunts to be pierced by dark penises, filling us full of poison & many unwanted babies, during the so-called black revolutionary (or so many thot) time, late 60’s early/middle 70’s.

Does this lady win the intersectionality high score, or what? Following that, flyin thunda cloud, rdoc. had some far more intemperate things to say about black men. Actually, it’s rather hard to disagree with her about that.

For Women Who Call Themselves Lesbians: Are You Thinking of Getting Pregnant?

One major barrier to the sustainability of lesbian separatism, of course, is that children don’t come from a cabbage patch. The anthology has an entire chapter about this angle of homosexual family values: “Lesbians as Mothers: Stubborn Questions,” addressing the contentious subject. (For the sake of truth in advertising, a more appropriate chapter title would’ve been “Lesbians Who Make Exceptions as Mothers.”) One entry was the following bit of crabbiness:

Well, your decision affects all of us and there are some things we’d like to say about it.

BECOMING A MOTHER DOES NOT MEAN . . .

1. . . . that you are really normal at last.
2. . . . that you are now finally a real
3. . . . that you are a loving, unselfish individual.

14 line items are listed in all, and then:

BUT BECOMING A MOTHER DOES MEAN

1. . . . that you will be treated with more respect and privilege in the world.
2. . . . that you will be treated with more respect and privilege among Lesbians.
3. . . . that this increased privilege will be at the expense of Lesbian non-mothers.

Items 18, 19, and 20 predict that any boys “statistically will very likely be” sex offenders. That sounds like remarkably fuzzy math to me. Item 21 warns “that you will be playing with sperm, which is a heterosexual act (and offensive to most Lesbians),” and the next “that the process of being pregnant and giving birth is also a heterosexual act.” I wonder how the writer of this thing thought she got into the world in the first place. Was there a star in the east? Mercifully, only two more items remain on that list.

Remembering: A Time I Will Be My Own Beginning

This one gets right down to business:

Lesbian separatism is, for me, the ongoing action of every lesbian feminist who will be her own beginning, I will be my own beginning: I remember myself, my body, my world as a source.

Integral to remembering is man-hating: A difficult stance because it requires a fidelity to what is real in ourselves. Through philosophical reflection that constitutes a vital aspect of my own rememberment, I will show how man-hating is an element of lesbian separatism.

I was beginning to wonder about that. What follows is a long ramble with lengthy digressions about Greek mythology. Sigmund Freud might’ve had something to say about penis envy, perhaps with justification.

Popular Separatist-Baiting Quotes and Some Separatist Responses

This one contains a list of talking points, which in the digital world is pretty well-worn. It was written by a San Francisco outfit called SEPARATISTS ENRAGED PROUD AND STRONG, which they adapted from a poster called “When You Meet a Lesbian: Hints for the Heterosexual Womon.” That sounds rather like another laundry list of imperious demands for other people to follow when interacting with her very special in-group.

For reference, there’s a convenient answer if someone raises the objection, “How can you hate that little boy — he’s just a baby?” There are seven other items, including the following one that did not age well among the Leftoids: “He’s not a man, she’s a transsexual, and she identifies as a lesbian.”

The “separatist response” to that is the following:

Cutting off their balls and taking female hormones does not make men into womyn!! The presence of a prick &/or XY chromosomes disqualifies one from being a womon. A womon is much more than the mere absence of these. And

A PRICK CANNOT BE A LESBIAN!

Careful there — treating biology as if it’s something real is “hate speech” these days. If only these birds could’ve seen what was coming ^[16] — hoo doggie!

Journal Entry

Elana Dykewomon gets a number of mentions in the text. For example, the anthology promises us the following:

Linda Shear explores the possibilities of our emerging music; Elana Dykewomon believes a new Lesbian language with new letters is emerging from our Separatist space.

The final monograph in the collection is an item called “Journal Entry” by Ms. Dykewomon which details what all this might involve. I’ll attempt to reproduce the beginning faithfully in its stylistic quirks:

i start to have a vision of the thing i mean . . . yes, my jewish story has stuff in it i dont want pricks to know or read/ and yes, i would like it to be in the jewish lesbian anthology — i want to be counted as a jewish lesbian among lesbians in the way i want and i want jewish lesbians to hear what i have to say/ and i think and think about all the questions — some of ego, some of advertisement — all the contradictions

 but spacing out i thought i saw

for a second a letter from the other alphabet

the one i secretly dream i am participating in making all the english words of my jewish story boiling down into one flaming new letter

(not unlike a letter from the hebrew alphabet — but totally changed)

— and i saw all the english words of my fat story boiling down into one soft, round, folding letter —

Interesting. Is this soft, round, folding letter meant to be pronounced, or licked? A few more paragraphs follow in this particular stream of consciousness about the proposed lesbian alphabet for her new language. (Should it be called Lesbonics, perhaps?) Unlike Tolkien’s Elvish, the project never really got off the ground, nor will it.

This is because Elena Dykewomon shuffled off this mortal coil last year. Jim Goad provided a touching eulogy ^[17] for this departed Sapphic muse. I suppose that at best, her otherworldly abode might be an eternal lesbian commune with an ever-bountiful cucumber garden. But if Heavenly Father does not grant her mercy, her spirit will be eternally imprisoned inside a pickle jar at that commune that nobody can open because there aren’t any men around.

Biographical blurbs

Wrapping up this tidal wave of bile, the end matter includes brief self-descriptions by the contributors. Some describe entities such as the C.L.I.T. Collective (the Collective Lesbian International Terrors ^[19] Collective), the Gorgons, and the Gutter Dyke Collective. I’ll feature a few of the individual contributors. First up is from Billie Luisi Potts:

I am a forty-eight year old lesbian feminist from a New York City, U.S.A. Jewish working-class background. I am a writer, herbalist, gardener, crystal-healer, tarot-reader, mother, potter, onetime goatkeeper (over 17 years), anti-discrimination, anti-war, anti-nuclear, anti-sexual exploitation, pro-lifeforce, pro-woman, activist. Currently I research and train in the field of health effects of computer-mediated work, particularly the effects on women, and VDT ergonomics. Since the writing of ‘Jewish Separatism/Lesbian Separatism’ I have survived the Reagan eighties, life, loss, and familial death in Miami, mainly through the help of womon-loving friends. I still attempt in my work to fertilize future revolutions by creating womon-magic, and juggling computer chips, healing plants, airport sojourns, and matrix crystals. My vision and politics are intact, my strategies changed.

Billie’s biblio follows. Ms. Potts’ contribution to the anthology, “Owning Jewish Separatism and Lesbian Separatism,” was written in the year 9982. (That’s the same as 1982 AD, but adding eight thousand years to backdate the calendar to an imagined prehistoric gynocentric paradise. Maybe that’s to commemorate the time that the cavemen granted women’s suffrage and ratified the Equal Rights Amendment.) Compared to some of the other specimens, this (((New Age goatkeeper))) seems like quite a sweetheart.

One of the other specimens is a horrid professor who got paid to indoctrinate classroom after classroom of impressionable college girls in her toxic misandrist ideology, all under the aegis of academia.

Mary Daly is a Positively Revolting Hag who teaches Feminist Ethics in the Department of Theology at Boston College.

Hey, at least that’s truth in advertising. Her bibliography follows.

Then there’s the bio for the author of “It Has to Do with Apples” and “Some Thoughts on Separatism.” You may recall that the former describes her interesting grandmother with the endearing habit of reading casualty lists after a plane crash to see if there was anyone Jewish and therefore worth crying about:

Sarah Grace is a 51-year-old Jewish lesbian who came out in 1979 after 24 years of marriage and six children, five of them male. “Out there” she works with retarded adults, but her real work is the journey she’s chosen to her own power and spiritual witchy center.

She lived with a man for nearly a quarter century, had six kids, and then switched to muff diving? Who says people can’t change their orientation?

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