Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!elroy!ucla-cs!uci-ics!tittle
From: tittle@ics.uci.edu (Cindy Tittle)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Can a man be a feminist?
Summary: To see is to know, to do is to understand
Message-ID: <17823@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 89 21:09:47 GMT
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: gazit@cs.duke.edu (Hillel Gazit)
Organization: Duke University CS Dept.; Durham, NC
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Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu

About ten years ago Ellison wrote an article which is related to the
subject of this debate.  My position is similar to his, and he is a
much better writer.


                     Introduction to
            Lonely Women Are the Vessels of Time

                    by  Harlan  Ellison

"Had this really weird, essentially ugly evening at the University of
Rochester (New York) last April.  Several persons of a genetically
female persuasion had maneuvered the otherwise sane and exemplary U.
of Rochester Women's Caucus into an attempt to ban the film version of
my story "A Boy and His Dog" on the grounds that it was violently
sexist and anti-female.

I'm not going to go into all that.  It was a night that only
reaffirmed my conviction that the mass of humans, male and female
alike, are what the late Bruce Elliott called "genetic garbage."  Ugly
statement.  I won't argue the point.  All I wish is that *you* had
been there.  Kee-rist!  Madness.

It's mentioned here solely to keynote the point that for a writer in
Our Time, trying to write as honestly and evenhandedly as he or she
can, it is impossible to write *anything* that doesn't infuriate one
pressure group or another, large or small.  Even if one cares
passionately and believes in the validity of some Movement, one can
be, at best, only a fellow traveler; and that smacks of sycophancy.
So either the writer avoids writing any damned thing that might
affront, or gets past a kind of universal knee-jerk Liberalism and
cops to the truth that we are all pretty much alike, male and female,
black and white, young and old, ugly and lovely.  Pretty much alike in
our ownership of human emotions, needs, drives, failings.  And try to
write about the human heart in conflict with itself as truly as one
can.

And if that means stomping on the feet of men or women belonging to
this ethnic or cultural group or that... well, I've never thought for
a moment I was going to die with the reputation of being one of
America's most beloved figures. It ain't in the cards.  I'd rather be
honest than chic, anyway.  (He said, looking over his shoulder)."

                                    *

"The arts serve purposes beyond themselves; the purposes of what they
dramatize or represent at that remove from the flux which gives them
order and meaning and value; and to deny these purposes is like
asserting that the function of a handsaw is to be hang above a bench
and that to cut wood is to belittle it."
     ----    Richard P. Blackmur, A critic's Job of Work