• $50 million in cuts to the Maternal and Child Health Block Grant that “supports state-based prenatal care programs and services for children with special needs.”

• $1 billion in cuts to programs at the National Institutes of Health that support “lifesaving biomedical research aimed at finding…

Foreword II

Cunt is a necessary book, one of the most important books in print today, not only for bio and trans-women, as it obviously is, but for men-folk and dyke boys as well. And it is important not only for those whose cunts or other body parts or lives have been scarred by the deathly culture in which we find ourselves immersed. When you count rape survivors, domestic violence survivors, those who love those survivors, wage slaves, survivors of public or private education, all of us now living on a planet which is being killed before our eyes, it certainly encompasses more or less all of us. Cunt is also for those who, against all odds, may actually retain shreds of their original sanity.

Cunt is a celebration, not only of cunts but of all life. Cunts are life, as are pricks, kneecaps, elbows, fingernails, the tails of tadpoles, redwood needles, and the sandy red soil we taste between foreteeth and tongue. Cunt explores this life, rolls this life gently between fingertips, more gently across the soft skin of lower belly, and more gently still between still-softer thighs. The book tells us—whole or scarred—how to live, as life tells us how to live, as our bodies tell us how to live, as fingertips, elbows, pricks, and cunts tell us how to live. As the soil tells us how to live. They’re all the same. Only different.

I first read Cunt last year, long after it had changed the lives of many people. It took me a day. I picked it up as the sun cleared the trees to the southeast, and didn’t put it down till the book was done and the sun was well on its way back down the blue hill above. It was a day that changed my life. I have read the book several times since, and each time have learned more about the women in my life, more about my own life, more about life in general. And I’ve learned about the culture, about the way men are trained to terrorize women and children. And I’ve learned what women, and children, are doing about that.

We may as well acknowledge that we’re all fucked.

I don’t mean this in the delightful sense of lovers coming together, meeting in the middle of their hearts and minds and bodies, but in the sense that we’re in far more trouble than words—even words as powerful as Inga Muscio’s—can say. Wild salmon are disappearing, as are great apes, coral reefs, native earthworms, wild forests, wild places of all stripes. Last week two more huge chunks of Antarctica fell into the sea. Dioxin contaminates polar bear fat, and it contaminates mother’s milk. Three corporations control more than 80 percent of the beef market, and seven corporations control more than 90 percent of the grain market. Military scientists have placed computer chips in the brains of rats, and can force the creatures to go left, right, backward, forward by pushing buttons on keyboards. Imagine the fun the scientists would have if they figure out how to do this with women’s hips.

We’re fucked. We all know the numbers. We know that twenty-five percent of all women in this culture are raped within their lifetimes, and another nineteen percent have to fend off rape attempts. Which means of course that unless one guy is excruciatingly busy, an awful lot of men are rapists. We know that as many as forty-four million American women have been molested by relatives, with twelve million of those molested by their fathers. We know also that 565,000 American children are killed or injured every year by their parents or guardians.

We know, too, that there are more slaves in the world today than came across on the Middle Passage. And we know that in the 1830s a slave in the American South cost between $500 and $1000, the equivalent of $50,000 to $100,000 today. And now a slave costs about $50, making them not even a capital but a simple expense, to be used up and thrown away.

We’re fucked.

This is where Cunt comes in. If we’re so fucked, one might reasonably ask, why not just go ahead and off ourselves? Cunt gives the answer (as do our cunts, pricks, elbows, kneecaps, and as do all the wild and free creatures on the planet): life is good. Life is really, really good. Not mediated life. Not televisions, cars, stereos, jobs, professional sports, colognes, perfumes, skyscrapers, steel, asphalt, brick, mortar. But life. Waking up with the sun on your face. Tasting your lover’s sweat. Smelling their scent. Stubbing your toe, petting a dog, french-kissing a tree (but only if the tree agrees), helping your mother plant her garden, feeling your body grow heavy at the end of a hard day, and waiting to catch up to your dreams.

But to merely reside in the sensual as the world burns isn’t good enough. Nor is it good enough merely to mourn the losses both inside and out. Both of these are necessary, but not sufficient. And here Cunt helps again. If things are so bad, one can also ask (this time unreasonably, I think), why not just withdraw into the sensual, why not just party (or cry)? Because, I think Cunt makes clear, this question reveals nothing neither more nor less than an inability to love. If you’re in love, with your life, with your body, with your lover, with the tree outside your door, with the world that gives rise to all of these, the fact that we’re all deeply, deeply fucked doesn’t matter a damn to your actions: if you’re in love, you act to protect your beloved.

In the end, Cunt is about love, as are cunts, pricks, elbows, as is the soft flesh of puppies’ ears, as are the spines of thistles and the sharp edges of blades of grass.

If we are to survive, we must reclaim our planet from those corporations which—and people who—are destroying it. But even before this, we must reclaim our own bodies and our hearts from that same grasp. Cunt helps us do that, helps us find our way back to our cunts, pricks, elbows, kneecaps, and perhaps most important of all, our hearts.

—Derrick Jensen
May 2002

sihuehuet, siguanaba.

If Men Could Menstruate

by Gloria Steinem

“Living in India made me understand that a white minority of the world has spent centuries conning us into thinking a white skin makes people superior, even though the only thing it really does is make them more subject to ultraviolet rays and wrinkles.

Reading Freud made me just as skeptical about penis envy. The power of giving birth makes “womb envy” more logical, and an organ as external and unprotected as the penis makes men very vulnerable indeed.

But listening recently to a woman describe the unexpected arrival of her menstrual period (a red stain had spread on her dress as she argued heatedly on the public stage) still made me cringe with embarrassment. That is, until she explained that, when finally informed in whispers of the obvious event, she said to the all-male audience, “and you should be proud to have a menstruating woman on your stage. It’s probably the first real thing that’s happened to this group in years.”

Laughter. Relief. She had turned a negative into a positive. Somehow her story merged with India and Freud to make me finally understand the power of positive thinking. Whatever a “superior” group has will be used to justify its superiority, and whatever and “inferior” group has will be used to justify its plight. Black me were given poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “stronger” than white men, while all women were relegated to poorly paid jobs because they were said to be “weaker.” As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, “Oh no, that’s women’s work.” Logic has nothing to do with oppression.

So what would happen if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?

Clearly, menstruation would become an enviable, worthy, masculine event:

Men would brag about how long and how much.

Young boys would talk about it as the envied beginning of manhood. Gifts, religious ceremonies, family dinners, and stag parties would mark the day.

To prevent monthly work loss among the powerful, Congress would fund a National Institute of Dysmenorrhea. Doctors would research little about heart attacks, from which men would be hormonally protected, but everything about cramps.

Sanitary supplies would be federally funded and free. Of course, some men would still pay for the prestige of such commercial brands as Paul Newman Tampons, Muhammad Ali’s Rope-a-Dope Pads, John Wayne Maxi Pads, and Joe Namath Jock Shields- “For Those Light Bachelor Days.”

Statistical surveys would show that men did better in sports and won more Olympic medals during their periods.

Generals, right-wing politicians, and religious fundamentalists would cite menstruation (“men-struation”) as proof that only men could serve God and country in combat (“You have to give blood to take blood”), occupy high political office (“Can women be properly fierce without a monthly cycle governed by the planet Mars?”), be priests, ministers, God Himself (“He gave this blood for our sins”), or rabbis (“Without a monthly purge of impurities, women are unclean”).

Male liberals and radicals, however, would insist that women are equal, just different; and that any woman could join their ranks if only she were willing to recognize the primacy of menstrual rights (“Everything else is a single issue”) or self-inflict a major wound every month (“You must give blood for the revolution”).

Street guys would invent slang (“He’s a three-pad man”) and “give fives” on the corner with some exchenge like, “Man you lookin’ good!”

“Yeah, man, I’m on the rag!”

TV shows would treat the subject openly. (Happy Days: Richie and Potsie try to convince Fonzie that he is still “The Fonz,” though he has missed two periods in a row. Hill Street Blues: The whole precinct hits the same cycle.) So would newspapers. (Summer Shark Scare Threatens Menstruating Men. Judge Cites Monthlies In Pardoning Rapist.) And so would movies. (Newman and Redford in Blood Brothers!)

Men would convince women that sex was more pleasurable at “that time of the month.” Lesbians would be said to fear blood and therefore life itself, though all they needed was a good menstruating man.

Medical schools would limit women’s entry (“they might faint at the sight of blood”).

Of course, intellectuals would offer the most moral and logical arguements. Without the biological gift for measuring the cycles of the moon and planets, how could a woman master any discipline that demanded a sense of time, space, mathematics— or the ability to measure anything at all? In philosophy and religion, how could women compensate for being disconnected from the rhythm of the universe? Or for their lack of symbolic death and resurrection every month?

Menopause would be celebrated as a positive event, the symbol that men had accumulated enough years of cyclical wisdom to need no more.

Liberal males in every field would try to be kind. The fact that “these people” have no gift for measuring life, the liberals would explain, should be punishment enough.

And how would women be trained to react? One can imagine right-wing women agreeing to all these arguements with a staunch and smiling masochism. (“The ERA would force housewives to wound themselves every month”: Phyllis Schlafly)

In short, we would discover, as we should already, that logic is in the eye of the logician. (For instance, here’s an idea for theorists and logicians: if women are supposed to be less rational and more emotional at the beginning of our menstrual cycle when the female hormone is at its lowest level, then why isn’t it logical to say that, in those few days, women behave the most like the way men behave all month long? I leave further improvisation up to you.)

The truth is that, if men could menstruate, the power justifications would go on and on.

If we let them.”