Breaking The Taboo Against Women Loving Women

by Peggy Luhrs

Since Persephone was taken from Demeter, patriarchal society has done its best to break the bonds between women. Patriarchy demands that women give primacy to men. It implicitly and explicitly forbids woman loving, whether this be the love of one woman for another, for herself, or for her sex. Understanding the nature, reasons and uses of this taboo leads to an understanding of the centrality of lesbians to any movement to improve the status of women.

I use the example of the Demeter/Persephone myth to underscore the fact that the first bond broken by patriarchy is the mother/daughter bond. That bond is the emotional basis for women loving women. All of us first learn love from our mothers, but society has insisted that women deny this bond and give their love exclusively to men. Lesbians are women who have, among other things, broken these rules.

In this male supremacist world, all things female are devalued. This is a suicidal course for the race and, indeed, late patriarchy distinguishes itself by its capacity to annihilate not only the human race, but the entire planet. Mother Earth is an entity perceived as female and therefore routinely subject to rape and abuse. This global ideology translates on the personal plane to a taboo against woman loving.

First and foremost, women are inculcated with a sense of self-hatred. Growing up in a world where things male are overvalued and things female undervalued cannot help but leave women feeling like inferior beings. If a woman somehow escapes this conditioning, the first signs of self-assertion will surely bring her lessons in the selfishness and unacceptability of such behavior.

Organizing with women, as I have for the last fifteen years, has convinced me that the most effective stumbling block to our liberation is the internalized self-hatred that comes from living in a woman-hating world. If we have such a hard time valuing ourselves, how can we change society's evaluation of us? Women constantly put men first in a way men never do for women, no matter how heterosexual they are.

Lesbians break the taboo against women bonding and deny the imperative that a man should be the first interest of every woman. For this heresy, they are severely punished by the family, state, church, and the priests' heirs, the psychiatrists.

More subtly, their entire existence is erased in the culture. They are labeled unnatural (as are spinsters) and they are said to wish to be men. While lesbians may wish more access to the world (which is considered male), they prefer being women.

We are not to love ourselves; it is selfish for a woman and self-respecting for a man. We are not to love our sex: that's strident for a woman and normal for a man. We are not to love another woman; that is unnatural, perverse and insurrectionary. Men are not to love other men homosexually either, because that is perceived as playing a female role and therefore degrading.

Lesbianism is the strongest and most overt expression of women bonding we have. The repression of lesbians reflects the degree to which women in general are kept down.

Women are socialized in heterosexuality to insure that they continue to see their work as their natural realm, so that their unpaid work at home will be mystified. Lesbians contradict this conditioning and challenge the prevailing economic system's use of women.

Women usually do the housework, even if they work themselves, and are expected to be emotionally supportive of men as well. Many conversations with women, as well as my own experience, convince me this kind of emotional support is rarely reciprocal. Lesbians offer this kind of support to each other and can enable themselves and each other to do other work.

Defining women's role as naturally to serve men is the major reason lesbians are labeled as unnatural. Virginia Woolf wrote that men wish women to "reflect them back at twice their size." Lesbians refuse to do this and are disdained for their refusal.

Whenever women begin to bond, despite their socialization, men have done their best to stem the tide of independent women. As Carol Smith Rosenberg points out in her book "Disorderly Conduct": "The years before and after WW I saw women's greatest professional visibility and political activism ... Neither before nor since have women been so political -- and so politically successful. They battled for Peace, suffrage, child labor and protective labor, for birth control and sexual liberation."

She then notes, "During these same years, male politicians, aided by male physicians, sex reformers and educators launched a concerted political attack condemning female friendships as lesbian and separate female institutions -- educational or political -- as breeding places for 'unnatural' sexual impulses. These attacks constituted an integral part of the 1920's assault on feminists and radicals."

This is still going on, in ever new and subtle forms.

Few political strategies are as old or effective as Divide and Conquer. All dominant groups use it to retain power. In a nutshell, this is the basis of the taboo against women bonding. If women were united, self-affirming, women loving feminists, male supremacy, with its attendant privilege, would quickly collapse.

This is not to blame women for their current status. Men have used economic sanctions, labeling, and all the power of the church, state and family to police women into their male defined role. They have used rape and brute force as well. The forces ranged against us are tremendous and it is a tribute to women's amazing creativity that we have survived and progressed despite such odds.

The system of heterosexual hegemony is so normative and institutionalized that women often enforce it for men. This is the saddest and perhaps most effective way of keeping women divided. It is the impetus behind this article.

As a feminist, I know the reasons men wish to label me unnatural and erase my existence. It is much harder to experience the same treatment from women, when one knows they are acting against their own ultimate self-interest and the selves of all women.

Recently I read the following:

"From the beginning of the women's movement to the present day, a significant number of homosexual women assumed the leadership in the numerous struggles and ... through their energy awakened ... the average woman to awareness of their human dignity and rights. Considering the contributions made to the women's movement by lesbians for decades, it is amazing that the large and influential organizations of the movement have never lifted a finger to improve the civil rights and social standing of their numerous (lesbian) sisters."

The date of this quote is 1904!

It could be Vermont and the current ERA struggle, the situation is the same. Lesbians have done so much of the work in the women's movement and every struggle for women's rights, yet their sisters have usually not responded in kind and, worse yet, have denied or censured lesbians out of their own fear.

The right is waging a homophobic campaign against the passage of the ERA. Representing male supremacy, they use the same tactics. Homosexuality is a scapegoat issue, trotted out to obscure their real agenda, which is economic. The money behind STOP-ERA is right-wing money protecting its interest in the heap labor pool that women provide. This is the real issue that so far neither side has addressed.

Some of the women in the pro-ERA forces are so lesbian-phobic as to give the right a real advantage. If we are to be beaten with the club of homophobia and our own side holds the same club, are we not aiding and abetting the opposition?

The right functions on fear and the antidote to that is not defensiveness, but courage. I'm proud to be an unnatural, selfish, strident woman. I recognize those epithets as misogynist censures and tributes to my effectiveness. I'm proud of lesbians. It takes courage to live a life with so little social support and many economic and social sanctions against it.

Lesbianism represents one way of replacing the woman bond that patriarchy has done its best to destroy. It is a real achievement.

If lesbians can have the courage to live our lives and support the women's movement, surely our sisters in the fight for women's rights can have the courage to support lesbians.