By aurora linnea

From where I stood as a girl, “women’s culture” looked like living death. Soap operas, diets without end, chick flicks, bodice-ripper romance novels, housework. The nerve centers of this culture were the shopping mall and the supermarket. It was clear to me that “women’s culture” was a slum and the idea that my life might be spent sunk there – as if held captive inside some Cathy comic strip, agonizing over an eternally imminent swimsuit season – was too ghastly to stomach. Four years at an expensive liberal arts college expanded my conception of “women’s culture” to include burlesque performances and semi-nude self-portraiture. These options notwithstanding, I decided to jump ship and swim for dignity on maler shores. 

What I did not know then was that the “women’s culture” I’d absorbed and rejected as wretched was a sham. It was men’s invention, not women’s. I did not know that buried beneath the stacks of Ladies’ Home Journal were the remains of a women’s culture actually created by women, rather than prescribed by men. Borne of the determined brilliance of feminists and lesbians and lesbian feminists especially, this women’s culture had been a radiant webwork of women’s bookstores, record labels, back-to-the-land communes, potlucks and discos, community resource centers, presses, and poetry readings. In response to the everyday atrocities of male power, women founded rape crisis centers and shelters and women’s health clinics. A different, no less significant form of sanctuary was to be found at the women’s music festivals that erupted across the U.S. through the 1970s into the 1990s. 

In The Disappearing L, lesbian-feminist historian and longtime festival attendee Bonnie Morris describes the women’s music festival environment as almost otherworldly, unlike anything women – and lesbians in particular – could imagine or experience within the confines of the manmade malestream culture: 

[Women] could walk freely at night, unafraid. They understood that their lives, beliefs, and primary relationships had value. During that one week or two each summer, that annual semicolon of dignity, they ‘recharged’ for the fresh onslaught of challenges to come in the new year. Festivals also offered them glimpses of how society could be. 

By the time I reached womanhood in the late noughts, little was left of the culture built and sustained for decades by my feminist foremothers. The bookstores had closed. The publishing collectives had ceased printing. My college feminist philosophy course was taught by a man. If there were lesbian potlucks, they were conducted covertly. Women artists in my circle were hungry to collaborate with males, viewing “women’s art” as a dead-end ghetto. I was as guilty of this as anyone. I spent so much time among men, dying to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, off my radar, women’s music festivals were on the decline: the crowds dwindling, the organizers targeted for anti-feminist anti-female backlash, the male scribes who chart Official History busily rewriting the record to ensure the cultural innovation of a generation of women would be relegated to the ash heap. 

MichFest 

For forty years, thousands of women from the world over congregated in the forest for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival each summer, as workers, organizers, performers, vendors, and attendees. I never made it to Michigan myself but when reading women’s tales of the festival the word that comes up again and again is utopia.  Multiple stages made room for all genres of music and performance, while the grounds were a women’s village of workshops, vendors, affinity group tents, daycare services, and “the largest intentionally designed disabled camping facilities in the United States.” From its maiden year in 1976, MichFest would become one of the longest-running women’s music festivals, the largest, and the most radical in its woman-centered politics. It was probably also the most famous—until it became infamous. 

There is a legend behind the infamy. Once upon a time in 1991, a self-proclaimed “transsexual leatherdyke” named Nancy Jean Burkholder was asked to leave the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, having been identified as male. Since the intention of the festival was to create autonomous space for “womyn-born womyn,” more commonly known as females, Burkholder’s maleness posed a problem. From the expulsion of Burkholder, it was extrapolated that the festival had a policy of excluding so-called “transsexual sisters.” Such persons, it was said, were refused admittance. MichFest co-founder and producer Lisa Vogel repeatedly asserted that there was no such exclusionary policy in place, that in spite of the festival’s female-only aim, the actual policy was to “never question any woman’s gender.” Burkholder was the sole “transwoman” ever expelled in the history of the festival. But no matter. MichFest organizers defended their intentions. They did not concede to male demands to disavow their commitment to female-only space. When men make demands, they expect women to comply. 

In 1994, “Camp Trans” set up outside the gates of MichFest to protest discrimination against “transwomen.” Creative and thoughtful crusaders for justice that they were, Camp Trans activists adopted such tactics as spray-painting “REAL WOMEN HAVE DICKS” on the festival kitchen tent. As the 20th century lurched into the 21st and the Internet surged unto its present-day life-devouring dominance, the activists took to the web to widen their reach. They promoted economic boycotts of MichFest-affiliated artists. They called for public apologies from women who’d performed at the festival, no matter how many moons ago. They circulated blacklists which placed participants and attendees at risk of job termination and social death. Protesters compared the festival to a KKK rally and threatened to burn it down. As oppressive TERFs wantonly victimizing ultra-vulnerable “transwomen,” the women of MichFest were accused of “pathetic and perverted behavior” as a “loosely organized collective with a message of hate.” In 2013 the Indigo Girls – probably the most visible U.S. lesbians after Ellen DeGeneres – denounced the festival, saying they’d never play again until it abandoned its female-only stance. The following year  LGBTQ+ powerhouses like the Human Rights Campaign, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights would join in the boycotts and public shaming of MichFest. 

Bonnie Morris writes, “The festival that had once represented the ultimate in radical awakening to female identity was now recast as the pathetic refuge of ‘TERFS.’” When Lisa Vogel announced that the 2015 MichFest would be the last, the news was celebrated online as a great victory for human rights, social justice, whatever. Most of the smaller women’s festivals had already folded by then; MichFest was a hold-out, the last prominent symbol of feminist and lesbian women-only culture—and so it drew a massive merciless initiative bent on its obliteration. MichFest wasn’t dying fast enough, so the clever boys found a way to kill it. 

Men are why we can’t have nice things. 

Ugly, Hairy, Man-Hating Lesbians

To paraphrase Andrea Dworkin, women’s culture is hated because women are hated. Although economic boycotts no doubt hurt MichFest, the real death blow was defamation, the replacement of reality with a manmade image of festival culture as “shameful and retrograde”; the women involved as “hatemongering,” behind the times, pitiful. Picture this: a bunch of cranky old unshaven dykes out in the woods singing along to shitty folk music. The men snigger. Could it get any worse? 

It is the easiest thing in the world to launch a smear campaign against women. Universal misogyny has already done most of the work for the aspiring slanderer; he’s got millennia’s worth of woman-hating material to draw from, and a public predisposed to despising his target. The stereotypes employed to caricature women’s music festivals are none other than those hurled at women down the ages whenever we’ve landed ourselves on Daddy’s bad side. We misbehave, tumble off the Good Girl pedestal, and the men bawl us out as unattractive mentally deranged bitches, not nice at all. Women’s culture is textbook female misbehavior.  Women made something for themselves, set their own boundaries, displayed a distinct disinterest in having men around— all actions implying unnervingly low levels of slavish devotion to men. Hence women’s culture is labelled “man-hating.” Man-hating women are bad because hatred is bad, hatred is mean. In addition to being mean//bad, man-hating women must be ugly, because the only reason a woman would hate men is if men aren’t fucking her properly—because she’s ugly. If not ugly, presumably man-hating women are sexually repressed; why else wouldn’t they be having sex with men? And, in any case, women not having sex with men are pointless, because being sexual objects for men is the be-all and end-all of female existence. Ergo, women’s culture is a bastion of man-hating women tainted by meanness, ugliness, sexual repression, and pointlessness. Failing to be sexy to men, females are boring no-account goons. Such has been the subtext of much malestream sneering at women’s culture. 

(Lest we forget: “TERF” is “man-hater” refit for the 21st century. In neither usage nor connotation do the terms differ.) 

Women’s culture has also been consistently derided as “out of date.” Every good misogynist knows that women don’t age well—the same goes for women’s culture. No longer fresh-faced and nubile, women and everything we do becomes doddering, trivial, dull, tragically unhip. A tad smelly. Yellowed at the edges. Associated with aging women, women’s culture is mocked along the same lines older women are. “Old Ladies” are conservative, narrow minded, crotchety; they can be sweet if cooing over grandkids or they can be hags, but mostly they are superfluous. It is due to misogynist “Old Lady” stereotypes that “the most radical women in America,” as Morris laments, could be “recast as the progressive LGBT movement’s embarrassing traditionalists.” While male elders and dead guys tend to earn greater respect with age (or years deceased), older women are promptly put out to pasture, their cultural contributions deemed of no lasting value and discarded. All that’s left for such dinosaurs to do is “evolve out of existence to make way.” 

(Or better yet the old biddies could just croak already and spare us all the tedium of their chattering on about “the good old days.” The coolest daughters murder their mothers, or didn’t you know?) 

// 

Through slander, the malestream installs a schism. Like the Cathy comic travesty of “women’s culture” that spooked me out of female solidarity as a girl, the bad joke men have made of true women’s cultural institutions like MichFest functions as a deterrent. Its endgame is to drive women apart. 

Because ours is a woman-hating society, women are trained into the same misogyny men are. If anything it is deeper in us—for we must learn to hate ourselves. When men signal to us that particular women are truly awful, we are inclined to believe them. Most women will not affiliate with women men put in the pillory. Most women will strive to stay on men’s good side, because it is in siding with men, women are taught, that we can be saved. Men are our saviors and it is only through them that we can escape our own shameful innate female horribleness and earn provisional access to the “real world” of human significance and value. (That “real world,” of course, is the one made and ruled by men.) Joining up with men is the only way for women to become “real.” We can become neither really significant nor really successful slumming it with other females. As Janice Raymond explains, “Women are assimilated by the hetero-relational ideology that men are a woman’s greatest adventure. Women learn not to expect a lively future with women.” Other women have nothing to offer us. We await rescue by Prince Charming. 

To retain the male support that seems our ticket into the “real world,” we are required to distance ourselves from other women. Through mockery men point out to us which women we should hate and dutifully we hate them. Oh no, not me, I’m not like her! And we prove it by siding with the boys. Laughing at their jokes. Parroting their cheap shots. Often, the Bogeywomen chosen for Good Women to deride are revolutionary females working to “save” themselves and their sisters, without men’s help. Misogynist ridicule of women’s culture is a tool of male domination: it scares women away from the rebels.

The pressure to steer clear of older women is particularly intense. Women are encouraged to scissor those intergenerational ties as if they were umbilical cords coiled around our necks, to hate our mothers. Older women are the bearers of our history, which we are not supposed to disinter from the trash heap of misogynist myth. The men endeavor to conceal our history from us. One strategy is to refuse to record it; another is to isolate us from the older women who could fill us in. “Women, for far longer than any other structured group in society, have lived in a condition of trained ignorance, alienated from their own collective experience through the denial of the existence of women’s history,” writes Gerda Lerner. Cutting an oppressed people off from their history is a standard element of genocidal campaigns. There’s even a term for it: cultural genocide. The group’s common ground of wisdom, ritual, and tradition is extinguished to dissolve the connective tissue of group solidarity. Not so long ago in North America, indigenous children were seized from their families by white colonists and imprisoned in boarding schools, where they were systematically “educated” out of their own tribal heritage. Children were stripped of their cultural history to ensure that their cultures would have no future. Estranged from themselves and each other, the oppressed and the colonized lose that foundational resource without which political resistance is impossible: the sense of a collective. 

Men attack the legacy of women’s culture to enforce gynocidal amnesia, to deny us our history, the sisterhood that grounds our movement, the knowledge of how much we have achieved and all that we’ve created. 

Because what we created once we can create again. And that is what men are afraid of. Patriarchy could not survive a female mass uprising. Male power depends on women’s isolation from other women. Men need women in an amnesiac haze, divided and compliant. Women’s culture and the women-only spaces at its heart are sacred enclaves in which it becomes possible for women to re-learn love and respect for our sisters and for ourselves. What we created once we can create again—and we are creating it now. It is a cruelty that MichFest was snuffed out, but events like the Michigan Framily Reunion and the We Want the Land Coalition, a diverse board of MichFesties fundraising to secure the Land for future generations of women and girls, rises up from the ash; we continue to move forward, to find one another and gather to grow strong united in our organized resistance against ecocidal capitalist white male dominion. We are resurrecting women’s culture today not out of nostalgia, but because we cannot go on without it—if men need women far apart, what could be more urgent than our coming together? 

aurora linnea is a radical lesbian (eco)feminist writer living at the ocean’s edge in the region of North America colonizers dubbed “Maine.” She strives to contribute to the global feminist struggle to end male dominion through poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to the necrophilic patriarchal empire presently destroying life on earth.

Featured Photo of Falcon River and sisters at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. To hear WLRN’s April Neault read aurora’s piece aloud, take a listen here.