The Sex War sits on all our backs. It has been much longer lasting than the Vietnam War and has involved more combatants. I want it to stop. But each of us carries scar tissue from wounds received in the Sex War. Because of this I doubt my capacity to think straight about the Women’s Liberation movements.

It helps to remember that the Sex War is a by-product, at least in our country, of capitalism. The slave-owning mentality is capitalist in origin. Women have been owned and are owned by men. It is not unnatural if in return they have tried to own men. To own or be owned is a contradiction among friends.

Romanticism is the consolation of the slave. It is a half-world in which a middle-class woman can console herself by imagining she is somebody else. Bitter-sweet fictions. Men of course can do the same.

In a film of the Thirties, the Russian revolutionary woman comrade visiting Paris falls in love with a French sentimentalist. The film producers want their audience to count it a good thing. She says that when she first saw a certain photograph she noticed only its silver frame. After falling in love she is jealous of the woman in the photograph that stands on her man’s desk.

When she noticed the silver frame she had eyes to see through the capitalist fiction. The cost of the frame might have paid for a month’s lodging for people dying of exposure in Paris. The silver may have been mined at the page 404 cost of the death of miners. The frame means slavery. When she ceases to notice it she has entered the consuming romantic fiction of owning and being owned. A truthful film would have been about the silver frame and would have expressed and exposed the romantic fiction.

I do not deny that there are Communist fictions.

I value the polarity of the sexes. It does add a dimension to life. Polarity need not in itself imply subjugation. If in a certain tribe a menstruating woman is obliged to go into the bush and live in a separate hut and converse with the Moon Goddess, her subjugation is to the rites of the tribe, not necessarily to men. Women themselves may have originated this particular rite. Menstrual blood is counted a tapu substance. Men produce semen, also a tapu substance. There are ambivalences connected with this. Both men and women produce shit.

A Maori war party would bite the bar of the communal latrine before setting out on an expedition, to absorb the sacred power that accompanies what is ritually unclean. It made them more powerful warriors. Perhaps the woman’s periods of seclusion gave strength to her spirit.

Polarity is like a tree with two branches. Slavery is the vine that chokes the tree. If they cannot be separated, I would prefer to see tree and vine go together to the bonfire rather than to see slavery remain.

Roles may be interchangeable. When Germaine Greer swears at the press, perhaps she has bitten the bar of the communal latrine. The reason men fear aggressive women so much is because aggression involves a withdrawal of the tenderness women can give them. The child fears the angry mother. But a tenderness poisoned by unwilling role-playing is a tenderness not worth having.

When we cease to own women they may or may not choose to be our companions. If they do so choose, I will be glad about it. Friendship is not possible without equality. A woman dehumanised by her social oubliette is no more herself than a man who has grown grey hairs while massaging the boss’s anus with his tongue. It is a drag to be a slave-owner owned by a slave or not owned by her. It is a drag to feel guilty as a possessor of the oppressing phallus.

A long while ago I learnt my first lesson in the Sex War. Boasting after school among primer children of my own age, I used the world ‘Hell’. One little girl officiously told the teacher next day, ‘Miss Brown, Jimmy Baxter was swearing.’

I took the wrong meaning from that lesson. I took it that women could not be trusted. Not entirely humorously it set my course for the future.

The meaning I should have taken was that women are a subjugated group who tend to curry favour with the bosses on account of their extreme page 405 vulnerability. The Sex War always starts with real experiences that are interpreted in the wrong way.

Twelve easy steps to demoralise a girl:

When her demoralisation is complete, you can blame her for having become a neurotic idiot, and claim that her condition is clear proof of the inherent inferiority of women.

I woke up from an early morning coma in a students’ flat in Palmerston, and these words swam into my otherwise entirely foggy brain – ‘They have to cut off the right tit to pull the bowstring. They keep the left tit to feed the child.’

Later on I realised that my subconscious mind had delivered me a code message about Women’s Lib., in terms that related to the legendary Amazons. page 406 I could see then why the Women's Lib. members have in some degree to defeminise themselves. It’s no good grumbling about it. Militancy has always been achieved at a cost. I hope they do keep one breast for a possible child. The milk from it would be sweeter because it would be the milk of a free woman.

George Jackson, the black Communist who was killed by racist guards in San Quentin prison, wrote once that there are three kinds of racist – the self-accepting racist, the self-accusing racist and the unconscious racist. He said that the self-accusing racist, despite his good intentions, was useless except at the fringes of the movement.

I do not think I am either a self-accusing or a self-accepting male supremacist. Women have educated me out of it by demanding that I see life through their eyes. I may be an unconscious male supremacist. The cure for this is to love my women friends and put my head on the block on their account. Then guilt vanishes and joy begins.

‘Divide and rule’ is the slogan of every authoritarian. It works very well through the Sex War. In a given family the husband is a slave who has to thrust his tongue a yard up the boss’s arse to keep his job. Naturally he is a most unsatisfactory marriage companion. He hates his wife because he feels she is the cause of his slavery. Once he is married he has no chance of escape from the capitalist society that owns him.

She may hate him in return because she has to stay in a well-furnished dungeon and do boring jobs and rear disturbed children and get no thanks for it. She will also hate him because his misery communicates itself to her, and she has been taught by capitalist teachers that marital love, not revolution, is the magic that takes away the misery of being a slave. ‘If he really loved me,’ she thinks, ‘he would be happy with me and make me happy.’

It does not trouble the slave-owner in the least if the slaves hate one another. Divorces, quarrels, smouldering rage – all these are grist to his mill. The Sex War is a valuable safety valve. It makes it much less likely that the slaves will turn their aggression against him.

The female slave is the cow from whom the business firms extract most of their milk. She contains the garden of neurosis that they cultivate assiduously so that it will bear them a crop of dollar bills. They unload their junk on her – powders, paints, three-piece suits, boots, bras, belts, false eyelashes, liquids that make you smell, liquids that take away your smell, pills, vaginal sprays, page 407 ointments and TV sets. Through the TV sets they bombard her night and day with advertisements.

The female slave is the pivot of the capitalist culture. By example and word she educates her children in slavery. They learn that property is security. And they learn to hate her as the agent of the culture that turns them into slaves.

In the sentimental TV story Mrs X— is waiting for her husband George to return from work. She is thirty-five years old. Despite the magical gifts provided by the firms she is showing her age. Her husband has been neglecting her. She fears he has taken up with a younger woman.

There is a happy ending. George X— comes with a bunch of roses. He has remembered their wedding anniversary. At the end of the story they are plainly getting ready to climb into the sack together.

In fact there is no happy ending. Mrs X— has a problem whether her husband loves her or not. Her problem is that her environment is turning her into an idiot neurotically dependent on the care and approval of one other human being. The only answer to her problem is a cultural revolution.

I can well understand why a fair proportion of the members of Women’s Lib. may be Lesbian in temperament. The Sex War leaves so much scar tissue that both men and women protest by way of celibacy or by way of homosexuality. Homosexuality may mean a tender and responsible friendship among equals with some physical and genital expression of love.

Heterosexuality may often seem more like working on the Burma Road or being involved in a street accident. This is not to deny that some people will be homosexual in temperament whatever their social environment. But men should understand perfectly well the Lesbian outlook. Who else can the ordinary Kiwi open his heart to except other men? He has learnt not to trust his bitter or sentimental slave. He is guilty in her presence because he knows he can’t make her happy. Among slaves happiness is a fiction.

Germaine Greer said to the Playboy interviewer that she preferred a clitoral orgasm with a full cunt to the same kind of orgasm with an empty cunt. This is Amazonian talk. It has to be. How is she to fight her battles except in a militant fashion? She said, ‘I have to be brassy. If the Press pisses on me, then I piss on the press. Most women are much shyer than I am.’

In the middle class, street language is the property of men. It is not so among the poor, or among rural Maoris in this country. There the women can talk as they like.

Ladies don’t swear. But to be a lady is to be in chains. It is to be a half-person with a road-block established in the subconscious mind. One notices that Germaine Greer is the reverse of stupid. I think she avoids ladyhood to avoid stupidity.

There is no reason whatever to suppose that people, because they use street language, are incapable of adult moral choices. Germaine Greer’s explosive feminism may owe itself indirectly to the dark cold climate of a convent education forcing her to become herself or else to be a theological parrot ashamed of its female feathers.

A man friend gave me a Women’s Lib. badge to wear. He said, ‘You can only have it if you wear it where I do.’ He wore it pinned to his fly.

I wore it for a day or so. Then my son said to me, ‘You wouldn’t wear it there in front of Ngahuia. She’d castrate you.’

Ngahuia is the member of the Women's Lib. movement in New Zealand whom I know and love best. She is a warrior. My son was right. The gesture could be taken as a sign of male supremacism. I took the badge off and put it in my top pocket, next to my heart.

My man friend was expressing the feelings of Men’s Lib. I want to see Men’s Lib. and Women's Lib. fight side by side as friends in a common revolution.

This morning I saw my grandchild Steff in profile when she came into the room just after I had woken up. I said to my wife, ‘Thank God she’s not beautiful.’

‘I thought it was every woman’s ambition to be beautiful,’ my wife said.

Of course she was right; and every man’s as well, in a slightly different way. But the statement can be put in two forms –

‘It is every woman’s ambition to become her mask’; or, ‘It is every woman’s ambition to become herself.’ The two forms of the statement have an almost opposite meaning. Steff’s face happens at times to have the beauty of a mask. This troubled me although she might later find the mask useful for warrior purposes. But the ambition to become one’s mask is an ambition to die.

To become oneself is probably the secret aim of every human being. Friends are needed who will accept the man or woman who has reached that terrible terminus, or who is still travelling there.

I saw an old warhorse of the Feminist Movement appear in a TV interview. It was extremely moving. She must have been well into her eighties. But she was careful not to rubbish the young comrades, these girls in leather jackets. They might be unladylike. But she knew the revolutionary rules. She was not going to betray any comrade by criticising her in front of the male supremacists.

Let the young ones follow the lead we gave,’ she was saying. ‘Temperance. We always kept our foundation in Christian principles.’

She might remember a dear comrade long underground whose love had been of the Sapphic kind. Memories of fire and honeydew. Love at the barricades is a very bright star indeed. But if Titokowaru had survived into page 409 old age, would he have discussed with the pakeha robbers his relation with the men who died at Te Ngutu O Te Manu? One does not throw one’s pearls before the proven swine. Of course she was right. But now even the swine are learning something.

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