Individual petty jealousies and leaderless group bullying were frightening and ugly. “Mean girls” envied and destroyed excellence and talent; in short, they ate their most gifted leaders.
Feminists who had left the Left brought with them its tactics of intimidation and interrogation.
Many radical lesbians were lesbian supremacists who demanded primacy in terms of victimhood. Some also outed other women in cruel and public ways.
Thus, right at the beginning of paradise, trouble rumbled both overhead and beneath our feet. Trouble drove many a good feminist far, far away, but many of us who could still taste paradise on our tongues remained for the duration.
The psychologist Naomi Weisstein told me that within three years of its formation, the Chicago Women’s Liberation Rock Band turned on her in pretty much all the familiar feminist ways. The Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, which she had helped found in 1969, had already trashed her as a “star” and demanded that she surrender her speaking engagements to less eloquent speakers. Band members followed suit, and, fraught with envy and untold hidden agendas, the band disbanded in 1973.
Here’s what they were thinking: if all women were supposed to be equal, then no woman should be more appreciated or better known than any other.
Although unacknowledged, the trashing of the late 1960s and 1970s was ultimately the psychological reason our mass radical movement ground to a halt. The ideological disputes played out in breathlessly vicious ways. But it didn’t stop me. Luckily, I was blessed with the ability to remain connected to women on both sides of many of our major wars.
--Phyllis Chesler, A Politically Incorrect Feminist: Creating a Movement with Bitches, Lunatics, Dykes, Prodigies, Warriors, and Wonder Women (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018), e-book.
No comments:
Post a Comment