By aurora linnea

In September I had the privilege of attending Women’s Declaration International USA’s inaugural political convention,“Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement.” The convention was held from September 23-25th at the Dupont Circle Hotel in downtown Washington, D.C. For three days the hotel’s glitzy chandelier-lit ballroom was transformed into a nerve center of feminist rebellion, as over one hundred women from across the United States descended on the nation’s capitol, brought together by our shared commitment to one simple goal: the total liberation of all women and girls. What follows are my reflections as one woman among the many. 

FRIDAY

After my flight was pushed back not once or twice but three times and I’d accepted that I would be lingering in airport delay purgatory far longer than seemed entirely humane, I decided to make productive use of my internment by checking up on the news. Iran was burning: the women had set their country on fire. A week earlier, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini died in state custody after being beaten by Iran’s morality police, who had arrested her for “improper hijab.” Her scarf was too loose; some of her hair could be seen, in violation the government’s dress code for women. Morality police were witnessed hitting Amini over the head with their batons. The young woman fell into a coma and days later she was dead. When news of her death became public, women flooded the streets of Tehran in protest against the Iranian regime’s religious autocracy and patriarchal tyranny. I watched videos of women tearing off their hijabs and burning them in mass demonstrations, dancing around the flames. The Iranian government condemned the protests as “riots” and were coming down hard to snuff out the resistance. (As I write this, three weeks later, the official death count approaches two hundred. Some say it’s much higher.) Yet the women remained in the streets, their chants of “jin, jiyan, azadi” – “woman, life, freedom!” – rising with the smoke as the fires they started raged from city to city. 

Women burn their hijabs to protest the killing of Mahsa Amini 

How auspicious, I thought, that I should be en route to a convention called “Reigniting the Women’s Liberation Movement, ” while thousands of miles to the east, our Iranian sisters were at it in full force: demanding liberty, they set the paraphernalia of patriarchal oppression ablaze. I wondered what outrage would be required to spur us – the women of the U.S., for whom the cage of male dominion has been so comfortably arranged, by contrast – to take such incendiary action? What would be our spark? What did we need to burn? 

The evening’s program was already underway when, hours late and downgraded to a state more sedated than seditious, I shambled into the Dupont Circle ballroom. Entering that ballroom was a surreal experience. I had not been expecting anything quite so luxurious, nor did I expect to see Phyllis Chesler’s head projected on the wall, shivering with glitch and crimsonly aglow, like the Great and Powerful Oz. All that was lacking were the torches and fog machine. 

Friday night’s plenary featured pioneers of U.S. feminism’s “second wave,” women who had led the first consciousness-raising groups (Kathie Sarachild), founded the movement’s first national newsletters and journals (Jo Freeman), established the first women’s health centers and abortion clinics (Merle Hoffman), and penned some of women’s liberation’s most oft-cited classic texts (Phyllis Chesler). One speaker, Twiss Butler, was even responsible for having hurricanes changed from having all female names to a more balanced alternation between female and male. These women’s theorizing, organizing, and activism laid the foundation for our movement today, and what a welcome reassurance it was to know they’re still right here with us. It has become a disspiriting norm for women who defy patriarchal popular opinion – whether we’re opposing prostitution or affirming female biological reality – to be told that we are not feminists at all. We are informed that we are actually covert fascist lowlifes who have co-opted feminism as a pretense for sowing hatred and violence, presumably out of pure malice. That so many luminaries of the ‘70s feminist vanguard share our viewpoint indicates otherwise. What it suggests, I’d venture, is that we are not nazi imposters, but that, as was printed on our nametags for the convention, “we are our mothers’ daughters.” The feminism we have inherited is not the diluted, gutless and invertebrate man-pleasing pap that patriarchy underwrites and passes off as feminism today. It is a principled, political feminism. Men don’t like it nearly so much as the other stuff. 

Our mothers’ daughters though we may be, we cannot expect to be respected for our authenticity. We are painfully aware of how unpopular real feminism has become, with even the mothers themselves derided. A poignant reminder of this came when Jesika Gonzalez, founder of the TERF Collective, offered a moving tribute to Peggy Luhrs, who died in February. Luhrs was a lesbian feminist activist long at the forefront of the feminist, anti-war, and environmental movements where she lived in Burlington, VT. She had helped to found Burlington’s first support services for victims of rape and domestic violence. From 1985 to 1995, Luhrs served as the executive director of the Burlington Women’s Council. She had participated in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp and taught ecofeminist theory at Vermont’s Goddard College and for decades, Luhrs hosted a weekly feminist program on local public access television. She helped establish a women’s land! She built her own damn house! The mind reels straining to conceive of a more stellar feminist resume than Peggy Luhrs’. Surely, considering her lifelong commitment to feminism, Luhrs ought to have been revered as an authority on the subject. Surely her perspective on any given women’s issue was due at least a modicum of respect. But because she failed to defer to a “feminism” that centered male delusions and desires and was not drinking the genderist Kool-Aid, Peggy Luhrs was denounced and shunned by former political allies. After her death, the “progressive” VT weekly newspaper Seven Days  published a hit piece masquerading as a memorial that cast Peggy as paranoid and bitter. Her anger, the author implied, was a symptom of her obsolescence; her arguments against transgenderism were the unintelligible ravings of a madwoman. 

In a woman-hating culture, feminist credentials are worth less than nothing. They do not buy women status or regard. Under male dominion, it is men who have the power to define what feminism is allowed to be, just as they have the power to define what a woman is. If the men don’t like what we’re doing then we’re doing it wrong and they’ll send in their lackeys to beat us down. It hurts, but if we are going to do the real as-women-for-women work real feminism demands, we cannot expect to be respected, to preserve our reputations, to stay comfortable or even safe. The closer our struggle draws us to the rotted heart of male dominion, the more we will find ourselves despised. This is not without its advantages—because the more we are despised, the more clearly we can see who our true sisters are. For once, I was in a room full of them. 

SATURDAY 

Saturday was nonstop, its agenda including plenaries on radical feminist structural analysis, women’s writing, and grassroots organizing; while breakout sessions narrowed in on reproductive freedom, the sexploitation industry, lesbian spaces, and consciousness raising. Crammed as the day was with structured activity, there was little time left for mingling. Still, the spare interstices and interludes between events allowed for small moments of spontaneous wonder to slip in. My starstruck awe when Dr. Melissa Farley, the prominent anti-prostitution researcher, sat down at my breakfast table. Learning that Lierre Keith’s oft-mentioned “giant dogs” are in fact the dogs of my dreams, the whitest, fluffiest, most immense and majestic dogs ever to exist: Great Pyrenees. Snippets from conversations that could only happen at a feminist onference: is capitalism an outgrowth of patriarchy, or are the two separate systems, and does it really matter? is it possible for a woman to succeed within patriarchal institutions without selling out to male power? is yoga ill-advised for women because it was intended for male bodies? 

But of course it was not all dreamy dog talk and idyllic female bonding. The status of women, domestically and around the world, is ghastly—and it looks to decline even further before it gets better. We know the threats; I don’t need to rehash them here. And of all these threats, perhaps the ghastliest – in terms of out-and-out foulness, at least – is pornography. Pornography is difficult to stomach, which makes it difficult to address. Fortunately, Dr. Melissa Farley and Reduxx’s Genevieve Gluck have the guts of steel required to resist the urge to look (or run) away. Both focused on pornography for their breakout session on “Feminist Opposition to the Sex Industry.” Farley spoke about her “National Rampage Against Penthouse” campaign with Nikki Craft in the mid-80s, during which she was arrested 13 times in nine states for acts of civil disobedience. 

The National Rampage Against Penthouse hits Indiana, 1984. 

Inspiring as it was to hear Farley recall she and Craft’s two-woman anti-pornography tour across the U.S., Genevieve Gluck’s fast-forward to the present porn culture horrorshow put on sobering display the reality that, in spite of the hard work and courage of creative, dedicated women like Farley and Craft, pornography has grown only more disastrous since the relatively “innocent” days of Penthouse. Porn has infected everything, while the violence of its content has intensified. Gluck detailed how an online culture saturated with what amounts to torture porn impacts girls growing up immersed in it. She showed TikTok videos of teenagers exhibiting their masochistic “kinks”: a girl pouting for the camera as she flashed the bruises on her neck, another girl lifting her shirt to show the knife marks beneath her breast. Gluck told us how eroticized violence is being sanitized and normalized through the language of “play,” whereby choking is “breath play,” and burning someone with a lit match becomes “fire play.” As Gluck ushered us through a mercifully warpspeed tour of the atrocity exhibition that is porno-patriarchal sexuality, one woman at the back of the room called out, “We’re all going to die! There’s no hope, we’re all dead.” Nervous laughter flickered through the room. A Robert Jensen quote came to mind: “Pornography is what the end of the world looks like.” 

After a lunch-hour review of nonviolent resistance strategies presented by Lierre Keith, we heard from Genevieve Gluck again, this time in conversation with Phyllis Chesler for the plenary on women’s writing. Early in her talk Gluck mentioned that, prior to concentrating her efforts on documenting the connections between transgenderism, pornography, and pedophilia, she had wanted to be a poet. She had also wanted to write a science-fiction novel, but, observing the world crumbling into crisis-level dissolution around her, she could not finish a draft. The emergency was simply too acute for her to justify committing her energies to making stuff up. I write poetry and fiction and I get it; in my conversations with myself about these endeavors, the question, “what’s the point of this?” is a staple. Perhaps selfishly, then, I am troubled by the idea that there is no place in our movement for creative work. Is art frivolous? Is it hopelessly bourgeois? We chewed over this question at my table. One woman spoke about the role of zine fairs in her political awakening. Another woman told us how Riot Grrl had brought her into feminism. I was thinking about Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro’s Womanhouse, the performance-art protests of Suzanne Lacey, Susan Griffin’s exquisite poetics, the shattering novels of Andrea Dworkin. Can memes really suffice as a substitute? The women around the table agreed that there was value in creative work, in its power to enliven and energize our activism, and to foster the feminist culture that sustained organizing needs for foundation. We missed poetry readings, zines, punk rock shows; we did not want to leave them behind. 

And we have not, I am happy to report. This was made clear Saturday night, when the extraordinary young lesbian actress Amanda Wagner closed out the day’s events with her performance of Carolyn Gage’s The Second Coming of Joan of Arc (1994). The play recoups “St. Joan” from the male-serving myth inside which she’d been snared and summons her back to female reality, as an angry young woman loath to submit to the inanities of life as a “girl” or “lady,” as a survivor of misogynistic abuse, and as a lesbian. She is tortured for refusing to be broken by men, like all noncompliant women are tortured: driven out of her body, isolated from other women, raped. Wagner’s performance was tender, self-assured. When I glanced around the room, I saw women silently weeping, wiping away tears as they watched the stage. Art can do that. 

SUNDAY 

Sunday’s plenaries delved into women’s leadership, ethical communication, and the history of women’s communities. Breakout sessions addressed “misogynoir” and effective legislative advocacy, as well as offered explorations of the harms of gender ideology with women who formerly identified as “trans.” 

I attended the session “Misogynoir and Radical Feminism,” presented by WDI USA board member Lorraine Nowlin and Dr. Suzanne Forbes-Vierling, a clinical psychologist and long-time community organizer. Both are black women. “Misogynoir” is defined as the hatred and prejudice directed at black women in particular, within the black community as well as in the white-supremacist U.S. society outside it. Nowlin and Forbes-Vierling focused their presentation on misogynoir within the black community, drawing on examples like the canonization of black male pimps as folk heroes and the trope of the “strong black woman.” The subtext of “strong black woman imagery” is that, whatever violence and venom is hurled at them, black women can take it, because they’re tough. A takeaway insight for me was Forbes-Vierling’s concept of “double patriarchy”: the way in which black women are oppressed first within black patriarchy, and then a second time within the white-supremacist patriarchal system. If white women are confined within one manmade birdcage, to paraphrase Marilyn Frye, then black women live in a birdcage inside a birdcage. Forbes-Vierling’s diagramming exposed with greater clarity black women’s unique position than any buzzwordy “intersectional” theorizing I’ve sifted through. 

After lunch we embarked on an investigation into “ethical communication,” though the real subject turned out be not so much ethics or communication as women’s interpersonal difficulties. Women were especially eager to probe this topic, and the discussion dragged on and on. I was surprised by how many women older than myself expressed genuine bemusement that working with women could be tough. Is it so mystifying, after all? Women are socialized away from direct confrontation: rampant passive-aggression results. Directing our rage at men in power is frightening and so we aim it at safer targets: other women. In patriarchal society only a few fetishized token women are allowed to thrive; seeing this, we learn that only one “final girl” survives, and thus we compete more readily than we collaborate. 

The solution is no less simple. Be patient with other women. Have empathy, understanding that none of us come into this work unscathed. Do your best to be kind. And when quarrels turn toxic, don’t let yourself get dragged down into the slime. Lierre Keith offered sage advice to this end: we each have only one life; don’t waste it fighting on the Internet. 

For the culminating session in the ballroom, we were asked to imagine what victory would look like, discuss our visions with the women at our table, and then present our small-group victory sketch to the room. Imagined victories ranged from the concrete – legislation to prohibit the medicalization of gender-nonconforming children, for example – to the more idealistic, e.g., an end to women’s programmed, enforced participation in heterosexual intercourse. I struggled with this activity, because, to me, victory is what you call it when there’s nothing left to fight. It looks like a vast forest sprawling green and lush, where a wolf can nurse her pups in peace. It looks like a woman who was never molested, raped, prostituted, whose female body is not a source of fear or suffering, who does not doubt her worth or place on this earth. 

A mother wolf and her pups, frolicking victoriously. 

Victory is freedom, grace; it is something beautiful. Which is why I was dismayed by the ugliness of some of the visions laid out by the panelists. There were repeated references to castration, and one woman told us that since the Y chromosome was the problem, victory would be a world without men. She envisioned reproduction via techno-parthenogenesis or captive breeding programs involving “small, docile males” easy to control. Male infanticide was proposed, a touch shyly. In a 1977 essay, Andrea Dworkin called what this woman was talking about “the most pernicious ideology on the face of the earth.” Men have made themselves destroyers and it is tempting to reduce their brutality to biological destiny, and to revere females as superior by nature. But to the extent that we indulge in this theory, we become a female supremacist movement rather than one for women’s liberation, and we descend down a course set by the worst of men. For, as Dworkin warned, belief in the biological superiority of one group over another is where genocide begins. 

To destroy male fetuses in the womb, to mutilate men’s sexual organs—these are not visions of victory, but of vengeance. They are neither radical nor redemptive. Surely we needn’t set our sights so low. 

And I do trust that our dreams are of finer stuff than revenge. Because alongside the squalid talk of castration and eugenics, there flickered a more radiant vision of victory, one that imagined a unified front of women organized in political resistance resolved to say NO to male power, and with that resounding NO, the women save the world. Is that not radical feminism’s highest potential, after all? To deliver life on earth from Man’s reign of terror. 

So we’ve had a weekend to kindle our vision, sisters. Now let us fan the flames. 

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.