Cunt (24 page)
Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
Circulation for the first issue of
W.I.G.
was five thousand.
Circulation for
W.I.G.
’s fourth issue was fifty thousand.
For a market that does not exist, fifty thousand consumers is a pretty heady figure,
considering
W.I.G.
sales are dependent upon word of mouth in lieu of national advertising and promotion.
Stores do not have a section for magazines such as
W.I.G.
because it is by, for and about women, on our terms.
Our culture does not provide a place for that.
There is—
literally—
no place for products of this kind.
A small amount of research in American history illuminates how just about every “right”
and “freedom” people of color and white women achieved was the result of economics.
The Civil War was not about compassion and decency, it was about real estate. The
alleged “rights” of “land settlements bestowed” upon Native tribes are also real estate.
Granting white women and people of color the “right” to vote was about creating a
class of peon workers who were less able to grumble over the poor pay and working
conditions when they had such a glorious “right” as casting ballots that placed a
variety of white men in office.
Hoop dee doo.
In our society’s time-tested economic model, men make and women consume. Our fingernail
polishes, snowboards, vacuum cleaners, computers, clothes—pretty much most of our
stuff—was manufactured by male-dominated and -owned companies. Utilities and credit
card companies claim yet another portion of our income for the male producers that
make stuff for us ladies.
Accordingly, one of our most promising stakes of power is our indisputed role as consumers.
As consumers, we exist.
This is a resource that is presently part of our reality.
Exploit the fuck out of it.
Time and money are power.
Conscious decision-making about the expenditure of both nourishes a market that is
somehow considered “fledgling,” although it represents 51 percent of the population.
Many phallocentric religious organizations, from the Promise Keepers to the Church
of Latter Day Saints heartily extol the benefits of keeping money in the community
of the brethren.
Patriarchal society never has to bother preaching the benefits of keeping the money
with the men because, at present, there’s no place else for it to go.
In the marketplace of the patriarchy, the “competition” tends to be people living
in Mexican, Latin American, South African and Southeast Asian communities (often referred
to as “guerrilla terrorists”), fighting for the right to live on the planet with an
identity other than that of expendable factory worker-slaves.
It sounds terribly ideological to say women’s power as consumers is a major economic
stronghold, but it seems the most promising strategy that does not involve retreat.
Cuntlovin’ Consumerism is a matter of research and potential inconvenience.
It requires no thought to amble to the Mega Food-O-Rama and buy a name-brand loaf
of bread. Finding a bakery in your community that is owned by a woman struggling to
bring up three children by herself may take a bit of phone work. Because this baker
does not produce and distribute on the massive scale of Wonder Bread, her product
will be of higher quality and nutritional value, but it may also be more expensive.
Cuntlovin’ Consumerism is a matter of common sense.
When it becomes the custom to visit only women gynecologists, naturopaths and midwives,
the clientele of male doctors will fluctuate precariously, and cuntcare will eventually
become the sole women-dominated field in the medical industry outside nursing.
Cuntlovin’ Consumerism is a matter of commitment.
The only women-owned bookstore you know of is twenty-five miles away from your house.
Once a month, you and your friends make a special trip to this store instead of bopping
into the local Mega-Book-O-Rama whenever you happen upon disposable income.
Try this experimental test.
You will need a sheet of gold stars to conduct it properly.
Stand in the middle of your kitchen. Scan every single appliance, work of art, food
product, fixture and piece of furniture in the room. Place everything in one of three
categories:
- Definitely/probably produced by women or a woman-run corporation.
- You aren’t sure.
- Definitely/probably produced by men or a male-run corporation.
Every time your vision rests upon something that falls into category #1, put a gold
star on it. After you have perused the contents of every cupboard and drawer, count
up the number of gold stars.
Unless you have already researched the matter and actively sought out products made
by women, your kitchen will not be very golden starry.
Conduct this experiment in every room of your house.
Now, live your life from this day forward with the objective of filling your home
with as many gold stars as possible.
The day you got gold stars on most all of your stuff will be the last day of the patriarchal
age as far you, the consumer, are concerned.
An investment is a portion of capital (money or time) that is spent now for bigger,
better results later.
There are a number of different kinds of investments.
One is the personal investment. This is where you buy a coffee maker that you set
before you go to bed, so that in the morning, you will have time to do yoga, which
in turn, centers you for the day ahead and subsequently helps you make optimal decisions
that improve the quality of your life day by day.
Another investment is the pain-in-the-ass-job investment. This is where you sacrifice
X amount of time each and every week Whoring yourself at some meaningless job in order
to finance your life so you can, say, finish your book.
Yet another kind of investment, the kind we’re concerned with here, is a group investment.
This involves getting your women friends or family members together and figuring out
how much capital you have, collectively, to invest.
First you determine how much time you have to invest in your investment group.
Then you figure out money and resources.
If each of you has five dollars, and there are ten of you, that is fifty dollars.
The amount of money you have is not important.
What is important is how you answer the following question:
How can we make this fifty dollars into one hundred dollars?
This is the beginning of a Cuntlovin’ Investment Portfolio.
The best way to have a productive investment group is to exploit the resources you
already have available to you, rather than expending energy looking for the resources
you imagine are necessary. I’m gonna say this again in a few moments because it’s
a fundamental rule here.
Perhaps two women in your group are seamstresses, one has an industrial sewing machine
in her closet, another inherited a garage full of fabric from her great-grandmother,
you happen to be a genius at computer design and the remaining three are very talented
songwriters and musicians.
Hmmmm.
Seems like the eight of you should be able to bring all those things together in a
lucrative manner.
How?
I
haven’t the faintest clue.
That is where the brilliance of your investment group comes in.
An investment group meets on a regular basis and focuses energy on the process of
making collective capital experience gains.
Your group may decide to start a business, play the women-owned companies that have
gone public on the stock market, present an investment proposal to your local woman-run
record company, have bake sales or throw huge, elaborately themed parties where you
charge people to get in.
Once again, I underscore the following: The challenge for an investment group is exploiting
the resources you have readily available. This yields
much better
results than agonizing over how to make something out of a good, but presently inaccessible
idea.
When an investment group gets enough capital, it pays dividends to the group’s members,
which helps improve the quality of life; it re-invests or loans money to woman-run
businesses or production companies; it starts a scholarship fund or buys an entire
city block to provide housing to young women athletes, scholars and artists who are
fighting like the devil to survive and fulfill dreams at the same time.
Time and money are power. ,
When women pro-actively seize both, we take power.
Every iota of power women claim and use to the advantage of our sisters brings the
destructive patriarchal age that much closer to its timely, timely, timely end.
It has been a long time, but the Goddess is waking up from her nap.
She’s yawning, stretching her muscles and scratching her big beautiful butt. Rest
assured, the Goddess has a thing or two to say about man as the maker. When the Goddess
gets the sleep out of her eyes, I daresay my face won’t have many opportunities to
get all ugly about cultural atrocities like Kevin Costner movies.
But my sister will probably always remind me I’m a lucky hooker.
P.S.
You’re a Big Cunt now.
You find out who Mammon is.
the end
The end of this book came to me in a message from an old woman in a dream. What follows
is a verbatim account of this dream, written in my journal directly after waking up.
In Dream that woke me up.
I am a thirteen-or-so-year-old Latino boy. I am freaking out in some room that feels
like a place where the community gathers, but it’s not a church. I—the young boy—am
angry beyond orange, beyond red, beyond white. People are futilely trying to physically
restrain me. Some white men have served an unnamed injustice to my people.
Mi familia.
I want to kill. I want their blood to stain my hands. I want to pull their hearts
from their chests. No one can control me.
An old woman walks into the room. All attention falls upon her. I feel her black eyes
bore into my being, but still, I thrash and fight to get to the white men, outside
the place where I am.
The old woman walks directly up to me. She takes my wrists in her hands, and my strength—which
has defied every woman, child and man in the room—is useless against her.
Holding my wrists, she gently brings my arms down to my sides and begins to cry, oh,
she cries from the depths of every soul that has ever graced this planet.
Through her tears, she calmly, soothingly whispers, “Don’t you know, don’t you know,
only our stories can fight against these men. Only our words. You must say, ‘Excuse
me, sir, but I would like to tell you this story about my grandmother.’ And the man
will listen, our words will enter his heart, and kill his power from the inside.”
She stares into me.
“Only our stories. Only our words.”
She continues crying as she says all this, she is crying for ancestors, for grandchildren,
for all the civilizations which have been decimated.
Her crying is in my body.
My sleeping, dreaming body.
Her crying storms through the core of my heart. Her crying,
the feeling,
not the sound, her crying wakes me up.
There are no tears on my face.
Her crying is inside me.
This is the message from the old woman with black eyeballs that swallow you in love
and make you understand there is nothing to fear.
Blessed Be.
Grandmother.
Cunt.