Lost in Lesbian Nation « The Thinking Housewife

Lost in Lesbian Nation

September 23, 2010

Jill Johnston and Dick Cavett

SCOTT M. writes:

The passing of Jill Johnston has conjured up some bitter memories of my melancholy college years. As an idly curious 19-year-old, I attended one of Johnston’s “lectures” at the student union at the University of Kansas not long after her book, Lesbian Nation, was making a splash in the fetid wading pool of what was known in those days as the “counter-culture.” Her very presence on a university campus was an admission by those in power that the “long march through the institutions” would be allowed to proceed apace, and that gratuitous freakishness could now be marketed as a stimulant. As Lady Gaga and many others have since learned, this is an irresistible enticement to those who are already convinced that they are freaks, and, that there will never be a home for them in the world until the norms are dismantled for everyone.

I was more spooked than stimulated. While Johnston managed to make some remarks, dating from her earlier days as a literary critic, about Henry James and whether he could be forgiven for being male by having acquired through a rumored physical injury a possibly female sensibility, the proceedings soon deteriorated into an occasion to share the grievances of one who had been the girl who preferred playing basketball to flirting with boys, and was now the writer who preferred the logorrheal rad-dyke fever swamps to serious scholarship, Of course, she had obviously never been all that serious about living in the real world to begin with, if the real world was one she would have been expected to share with men. “All women are lesbians, ” she said, at one point. This was met with a delirious eruption from a cheering section of slovenly and uniformly obese harridans who were the first people I had ever encountered who seemed to be publicly celebrating their own loathsomeness.

During the question-and-answer period, one very timid and stuttering man asked, “If all women are lesbians, d-d-does that mean that all m-m-men are homosexuals? ” It was 36 years ago, but I remember her answer as if it were this morning: “I only care about women. I don’t care what men do with each other. However, I just learned that my son, who is now thirteen, has joined a gay commune. I’m pretty happy about that!”

The week before I decided, after a period of psycho-social duress, to take a semester off to return to my hometown to recuperate, there was a photograph on the cover of the University Daily Kansan of a corpulent female in overalls in the middle of the street by the student union, her tongue protruding from her mouth like an unmoored gland as she brandished a bouquet of roses. She was confronting a female motorist and, according to the caption, was “expressing her displeasure” at her potential customer’s unwillingness to purchase the flowers, which were being sold to raise money for “Lesbian Solidarity International,” or some such timely organization. (And, as I write this, I remember that there was a child in the car with the driver.) I was convinced that this bizarre image, and its appearance on the front page of a student newspaper, could only mean that an indulgence was being granted to ugliness in the name of tolerance, and that the world had become a much uglier and more hateful place as a result.

— Comments —

Fred writes:

“I was convinced that this bizarre image, and its appearance on the front page of a student newspaper, could only mean that an indulgence was being granted to ugliness in the name of tolerance, and that the world had become a much uglier and more hateful place as a result.”

The Democrats are opposed to female beauty. Not me, the sight of a beautiful woman is one of the joys of my life.

Of course, some women are plain, or “homely” as my mother taught us to say. But we were also taught that beauty is as beauty does — the beauty is there for those who have eyes to see it. And the beauty of a woman might be only seen be one man — well, then, he’s the one.

We used a different word for men — handsome. We might say someone was good looking whether it was a man or a woman. And men were lucky and still are lucky in that they can be ugly and still be handsome in a rugged kind of way.

Man do have some advantages, here and there. But over all, in God’s grandest scheme, we are not His favored gender. He loves us all, in that kind of love which is not equal, but completely fulfilling.

Laura writes:

Not all women are beautiful and beauty fades. If God favors women, he only favors some of them, and if beauty is the highest token of His esteem, He is not worth worshipping.

Fred writes:

“But over all, in God’s grandest scheme, we are not His favored gender.”.I think I was being too clever in my writing of this sentence. It is literally true — that men are not God’s favored gender — but women are not favored either, and I did not intend to suggest that.

God loves us all and each one of us He loves.

Being too clever is a writer’s fault. It is best to write in the plainest and most direct manner, but then we are tempted to add flourishes, and that can easily lead to confusion.

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Posted by Laura Wood in Uncategorized

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