Going Too Far Read Online Free PDF Page A

long way, baby? Hardly.
    These arms have held the vomitous shudderings of a sister-prostitute undergoing forced jail-withdrawal from her heroin addiction. These eyes have wept over the suicide of a sister-poet. These shoulders have tightened at the vilifications of men—on the street, in the media, on the lecture platform. These fists have clenched at the reality of backlash against us: the well-financed “friends of the fetus” mobilizing again to retake what small ground we have gained in the area of abortion; the rise in rape statistics (not only because more women are daring to report rapes, but also because more rapes are occurring). This stomach has knotted at the anonymous phone calls, the unsigned death threats, the real bombs planted in real auditoriums before a poetry reading or speech, the real bullet fired from a real pistol at the real podium behind which I was standing. (Those who have power over our lives recognize the threat we pose—even when we ourselves do not.)
    And yes, these fingers have knotted versions of “correct lines”—to strangle my own neck and the necks of other sisters.
    I have watched some of the best minds of my feminist generation go mad with impatience and despair. So many other “oldie” radical feminists have been lost, having themselves lost the vision in all its intricacy, having let themselves be driven into irrelevance: the analytical pioneer whose “premature” brilliance isolated her into solipsism and finally self-signed-in commitment for “mental treatment”; the theorist whose nihilistic fear of “womanly” emotion led her into an obfuscatedstyle and a “negative charisma”—an obsessive “I accuse” acridity corrosive to herself and other women; the fine minds lost to alcohol, or to “personal solutions,” or to inertia, or to the comforting central-committeeist neat blueprint of outmoded politics, or to the equally reassuring glaze of “humanism,” a word often misused as a bludgeon to convince women that we must put our suffering back at the bottom of the priority list. Some of these women never actually worked on a tangible feminist project—storefront legal counseling or a nursery or a self-help clinic—never had or have now lost touch with women outside their own “feminist café society” circles. Such alienation from the world of women’s genuine daily needs seems to have provoked in some of my sister “oldies” a bizarre new definition of “radical feminist”; that is, one who relentlessly assails any political effectiveness on the part of other feminists, while frequently choosing to do so in terms of personalities and with scalding cruelty. After so many centuries of spending all our compassion on men, could we not spare a little for each other?
    I’ve watched the bloody internecine warfare between groups, between individuals. All that fantastic energy going to fight each other instead of our opposition! (It is, after all, safer to attack “just women.”) So much false excitement, self-righteousness, and judgmental posturing! Gossip, accusations, counter-accusations, smears—all leapt to, spread, and sometimes believed without the impediment of facts. I’ve come to think that we need a feminist code of ethics, that we need to create a new women’s morality, an antidote of honor against this contagion by male supremacist values.
    I’ve watched the rise of what I call “Failure Vanguardism”—the philosophy that if your group falls apart, your personal relationships fail, your political project dissolves, and your individual attitude is both bitter and suicidal, you are obviously a Radical. If, on the other hand, your group is solidifying itself (let alone expanding), if you are making progress in your struggle with lover/husband/friends, if you have gained some ground for women in the area of