It's so beautiful Jenny Diski The Story of V: Opening Pandora's Box by Catherine Blackledge | Weidenfeld, 322 pp, £18.99
For many women in the 1970s, the response to the exhortation 'Know thyself' took the form of specula, hand mirrors, torches and a group of comrades who would angle the looking glass and beam just right so that, reclining on your elbows, you could look down through your bent legs and see what really lay between them.
* * * *
At the same time as these visual feasts were going on in the Women's Group hut on a disused Freightliner site, I was working in the hut next door, involved in running a Free School for a bunch of criminally inclined, school-refusing kids who had been threatened with being taken into care. The Free School was a thorn in the side of the Women's Group. Though they locked up every night, each morning the hut had been broken into, and although nothing was ever taken, they were sure that the boys from the Free School were the culprits. The woman who ran the women's hut repeatedly shouted at us that we were a bunch of bourgeois hippy adventurers, that it was typical male aggression again, an appropriation of women's space again, and told us to deal with it. I talked to the 12 and 13-year-old boys about the historical struggle of women and the universal need to respect others. They grunted 'Yeah'. Then one night I was in the Free School late. I saw a light on in the women's hut and went to have a look. A window had been forced open. One of the younger boys from the school was standing in the middle of the room, masturbating furiously, his eyes fixed intently on a large, full-colour wall poster of a wide-open vulva with a sassy feminist slogan underneath about men not being required. It seemed not so much vicious as funny and sad. Maybe, I suggested the next day to the Women's Group woman, we should see it as a local disagreement only about the manner of celebrating the vagina, and we could have a meeting between the boys and the women to discuss it (excuse me, this was the 1970s). I don't remember the exact outcome, but the Free School and the Women's Group never did get onto a very amicable footing.
* * * *
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/disk01_.html