We had wanted to exceed ourselves, to transform ourselves. Instead we found ourselves striving for collective salvation by individual suicide. There was no questioning of methods, no discussion of strategy, no confrontation of leadership. In our frenzied state of mind, any confusion, any hesitation would hold back the Revolution. We had developed too much guilt and, as professional revolutionaries, too much contempt for the people we were trying to reach to actually build anything. So we tried to lose ourselves in frenetic activity. It was all laid down for us: "I don't care what the form is, as long as we keep the motion going."
A woman who used to be in Sundance described their style well: "Despite our nive intentions to build ourselves into new men and women, we found our lives falsely divided into daytime political organizing and night-time attempts to escape the unthinking robots we had become. After evangelistic meetings to organize dormies, after chaotic meetings full of shoutdowns and bullshit, after scary and whirlpool demonstrations the pattern was the same: go home and get drunk, get stoned, get fucked: but by all means forget. Don't discuss the day's activities, how you felt or what you learned. Escape it, release your tensions. Be prepared for tomorrow's repeat performance."
Later we realized how desperate we had been, and how that desperation had been used, how afraid and unable we were to face ourselves, what we were and what we had to become. We realized that SLF had brought into being a way of life designed to keep us from anger, from love, from strength, from freedom, from all but the illusions of those things. We were bound together by weakness, hysteria, and desperate need.
But we realized thiese things pretty late in the game. Sundance had already arrogated to themselves the right to define our lives and the category of "revolutionary." Their white male arrogance assured them of their perfect right to do so. And they were rich in capital: mastery of the jargon, access to money, media and movement contacts.
Still, it was not until the Roach Tavern incident tht we fully realized what it meant to be a woman living and working in a male-created, male-defined movement.
The Roach Tavern was a bar popular with Seattle bikers and the Sundance crew; a "movement bar" that held SLF benefits and proudly displayed a sign reading: "This is a man's bar. Women will be tolerated only if they refrain from excessive talking."
When a small group of independents, Radical Women, were threatened and assaulted after tearing down this sign, they took their complaintys about SLF's patronage of the bar to the only people who had the power to do anything about it: Sundance. The Sunance men deplored Radical Women's tactics. "After all, fascism is going to come down soon," one leader philosophised, while writing off half the human race, "we can't afford to alienate the bikers."
We stayed in SLF, but we began trying very hard to develop an alternative. Talking with other women, we agreed that the problem was not merely that women did the organizing while men made the speeches. Our humanity was denied to us. The professor could talk about the availability of a woman for his bed and joke, "Well, boys, I guess it'll take a gang rape for this one."
The "woman question" became a topic of conversation for the men, but with the carefully drawn distinction between women's liberation - liberals and manhaters - and truly revolutionary women, those who were fighting for the real (white male) revolution.
The realization hit us that our oppression and liberation was peripheral to the things our "brothers" talked about and did. The reality of our lives was peripheral to their revolution.
And we began to realize we could not trust them to fight for anyone's liberation. One leader could fuck a sixteen-year-old virgin, give her the clap, not tell her, and leave her. And he couldn't understand what he had done: "I don't see how you can be oppressing someone when you're socking it to them." Another leader was only a little more sophisticated in his approach. When asked what male chauvinism was about, he responded, "It means you don't treat your girlfriend like a sexual object." A third would threaten a woman: "You bitch! I'd like to smash your face in. You're not oppressed. Men are oppressed. We're the ones tht are dying in Vietnam and rotting in the jails."
pp. 119-21
To be continued