Deborah Lipp

Today is International Women’s Day, as well as Blog Against Sexism Day. I had something else vaguely planned for today, but these thoughts started running through my mind late last night.

When I was a teenager, I knew a couple of girls, my own age, who were lesbian separatists. When I first met them, I thought this meant they just wanted to live apart from men. But no! They believed that the human race was originally female. They believed that men were invaders from outer space, who had stolen women’s natural partheogenic abilities to control us. They believed if we could kill off or drive away all men, partheogenesis would reemerge on its own.

Even when I was fourteen, this made my brain hurt. Besides being, y’know, whacky, I thought it was pretty high risk. I mean, what if you did get rid of all the men, and the partheogenesis thing didn’t happen?

But what I want to say here is: That isn’t feminism.

Isn’t.

I’m not saying its wrong for women to want to live separately. Certainly it’s a valid choice for any group of people to live amongst themselves, to form intentional communities, to be separate. But feminism is about how gender is treated in the world, and to separate from the world does not address that. Without the science fiction fantasy, it’s not a viable path for battling patriarchy, or for finding equality, or acceptance, or balance between the sexes.

Separatism is the male catastrophic fantasy of what feminism really is. Every step forward that women take, every effort to own our own bodies, to use our own voices, to express power, activates the male fear that they are about to become unnecessary. All this woman-hatred, all this uterus-control, all this demonizing of feminism, seems to me to come from the fear that if women are empowered, men are destroyed.

Now, the task of feminism is not to soothe male fears. I don’t think we need to be showing our white underbelly to the alpha male to display our lack of threat. That puts us back where we started from, cuddly and nurturing and disempowered. Moreover, it puts us in the business of engaging patriarchal concerns instead of feminist concerns. But I do think that feminism, as I understand it, can be viewed as genuinely empowering to men as well, if men choose to see it. The John Tierneys and Rush Limbaughs and James Dobsons of the world won’t see it, but many good men do, and any man could.

So I’ll say it again. Separatism acts out a patriarchal fear. As such, it is a product of the patriarchy. To me, separatism says women’s voices can’t be heard if men are around. Women can’t be free if men are around. And isn’t that what the patriarchy says?

The combat over reproductive rights is the essential combat of feminism. As my long-ago friends knew, reproduction is the sword that men can hold over women who wish to be free. Fearing they’d lose, they engaged in a fantasy where the combat was magically made to vanish. What my friends didn’t understand is that reproduction is also the sword women can hold over men.

Whoever is free to control reproduction is truly free. Only with reproductive freedom can men and women ever engage as equals. In my fantasy, we are reproducing together, men and women of the same species, with equality.