The Dog Collar Murders by Barbara Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

simply sad.
    “Sisters,” she began, and her tone was infinitely weary and yet warm. “I wish I could tell you how much of what I have heard and seen here at this conference today has disheartened and distressed me. There was a time once—years ago now—some of you may not even remember it—when to say you were a feminist was something to be proud of. You knew what it meant. It meant standing up and speaking out against the things that hurt you and hurt other women. It meant being laughed at and jeered and dismissed by men. But not caring. Because you knew what you were up against. You knew what the odds were and that they were stacked against you. They had been stacked against you for centuries. Yet this time you believed that you—with the help of hundreds of thousands of other women—that this time, at this precise historical moment—you would manage to change the world.”
    Loie’s voice had been gradually building up, but now it sank again, despondent and almost wistful. In spite of myself I felt drawn into the mood of it, hypnotized by the soft, almost elegiac quality of her voice.
    “In those days—oh, it seems like a million years ago now, doesn’t it?—it seemed so easy to talk about ‘sisterhood.’ We knew what sisterhood meant and we knew who our enemy was. Our enemy was the patriarchy, in all its various forms, the patriarchy that had dominated our lives for all those many thousands of years. In spite of what some women—the revisionist historians—now say, we never divorced issues of race and class from our analysis of women’s oppression. How could we? After all, many of us had come from the civil rights and student or peace movements and it is clear that things are always worse for poor women and women of color. It’s just that we found, and hundreds of women found, that traditional assumptions about the nature of power were no longer sufficient to explain what we saw in our daily lives—which was systematic subordination of women’s rights to the male desire for power and control.”
    Loie’s voice dropped again and now the sadness was that of someone who has been very deeply betrayed. “Yes, in those days the world was a simpler place. We knew who our friends were, we knew who our enemies were. But increasingly it has become apparent that women who were once our friends are now our enemies. (Loie looked meaningfully in the direction of some leather-jacketed women down right.) They are women who have, instead of turning their backs on pornography, chosen to embrace it, to pretend that their degradation or their imposition of degradation on others is based on choice, on ‘consent.’ They have eroticized their subordination and called it ‘freedom.’ These women have allied themselves with male-identified heterosexual women leftists, with male civil libertarians and pornographers, and with gay men, to fight us on the very issues it once seemed we all agreed on.
    “I don’t deny that it hurts. It hurts politically—and it hurts personally—to have former colleagues, women you thought were feminists, turn against you and revile you in public. I’m sure that on many occasions a lot of us have thought of just giving up. It often seems just too hard to be attacked from both sides.
    “So why don’t I just give up? Why don’t all of us just give up? We’re never going to see the end of abuse against women in our lifetimes, so why not just give up now, why not call it a day and just say, I’ve done what I could but they were stronger, better funded, had better connections. Why not just accept that there has always been rape, pornography, prostitution and violence against women and be done with it? Why not just accept that every time, for the rest of our lives, when we go to a film, open a book or magazine, turn on the TV, that there is more often than not going to be some image or some incident that confirms male power over women, that confirms that women exist to be used by men? Why