One of the most joyful experiences of being in this sisterhood is hearing each sister’s story of how they came to it themselves. Our most childish enemies like to write us off as a cry-circle of mutually reinforcing trauma, even if that is their euphemism for “grievances festering from a King’s rejection.” But our stories aren’t told through our scars. Some sisters came to us through logical deduction. Their sharp reasoning saw no other workable outcome for them. Some carry themselves as if they’d been born for the sisterhood. Some were brought here by their moms. Some are here ironically; they haven’t left, but I’m not sure if it’s still ironic or not. We sisters are legion, but we are sopping wet with multitudes.
Occasionally I’m asked for my own story. I wouldn’t say that my conversion to the sisterhood was instantaneous or entirely sensible. There’s nothing in my memory that could be called an epiphany calling me straight away to the gynorevolutionary mentality. But I do believe a seed was planted some time in childhood that set me on a certain course from which I could never turn away if I wanted to. I believe it was about middle school when they began teaching Greek mythology. Inevitably we are taught the myth of Prometheus. Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the Olympians and gave it to humanity, and who was punished with eternal torment by Zeus for doing so.
Prometheus is a convenient archetype for proponents of the Enlightenment. Through his efforts all progress was possible. The “fire” he gave us could stand in for anything: reason, culture, science, whatever. “Wasn’t he [this totally fictional character of a dead religion] brave?” asked our Language Arts teacher. “Wasn’t he so thoughtful?” Leaving aside the absolute meaninglessness of calling anything “thoughtful,” I wasn’t as taken with him as she was. I thought of raising my hand to object but then thought better of it. I was changed but not a troublemaker quite yet. And all I could add was “I think Prometheus was a cruel dick, and was aware he was being a cruel dick” with nothing more to go on.
The revelation stewed in my mind for several more years. It was intent to articulate itself over time, with the hoarding of experience and keen observance. It was the advent of late-night premium cable, where discreet visual delicacies with names like Passion Cove, Motel Passion, Passion Driving School, and Horny Bankruptcy Court, that everything was made plain.
The fire Prometheus gave us was symbolic in both its spread and its resilience. Prometheus’s fire is pornography.
If I had said this upon my discovery I would have been laughed at, and very likely medicated into oblivion. I speak now because it can’t be avoided since pornography has become so oppressive. It truly is the fire that keeps spreading and won’t stop. It moves from house to house—very cleverly today, through whatever radiopoison that propels our wi-fi—corrupting and degrading their occupants.
But why blame the internet or Cinemax when we know deep down that those were the logical outcomes and that pornography, from Prometheus’s hand to our mouths, was always so? Why do we acknowledge men? It was pornography that taught us. Why do we let them house us and dwell in those houses with us? Pornography. Why do we fuck at all? Yep … pornography.
Just when the pornographic world we know took its complete and irreversible form is one which no single theory satisfies. Though a wise sister who taught one of my earliest women’s studies courses had a compelling one that sticks with me.
This sister didn’t adhere to the ancient matriarchy theory as such, but she did think the earth was once an Edenic (or a Lilithian) state populated predominantly by women. If men were there, they were smaller in number and of a reduced, almost animalistic state that fed off the blood of our pets, like a Chupacabra.
The wise sister would speak in ethereal. mournful tones of how both intimacy and replenishment of the population could be achieved not through “sex” as we know it but by something she called “mutual understanding.” It was when a joyful woman would ask for consent to softly touch the clavicles of a sad woman and, with additional consent, to boop her on the nose with her slightly moistened index and middle fingers. The sad woman would then throw up in her mouth a little, signifying that the fertilization had taken place. As they hummed in unison, a fully developed infant woman rose up between them, cradled on the head of a large mushroom.
The wise sister thought that this idea was corrupted through innocent error. A fully formed nearly human man could have been produced by “mutual understanding” between two sad women. An attempt to reverse this by having two joyful women engage in “mutual understanding” just caused both to internally hemorrhage. With the repetition of these tragic errors, the population leveled off, and human men were a fact. Here, a shitty Promethean figure made his move, debasing our bodies to subsist on the same urges and desires that so defined and crippled the men. Our species, our world, became pornographic.
It saddens me to retell this tale, and it saddens me all the more when I retell it to other sisters. They ask, “How can we go back?” To which I nod woefully saying, “We can never go back.” We are, to borrow and archaic masculine term, damned from that paradise. What we’re left with is this presently bigender earth polluted by smut. More depressing still, making the world unigender is not going to magically wipe pornography’s sticky resin off of it.
The legacy males leave behind in the gynopocene is a world where almost nothing can be undertaken or enjoyed purely limited to their own function or potential; it must all be suffused with brutal sensuality and avaricious desire. Toasting bread is pornographic. Riding the bus to work is pornographic. Watching women’s basketball is pornographic. Even doing taxes is somehow pornographic. It shows just how incapable men were at coping with basic, simply enjoyable things. How sick they seem in retrospect. But befitting their petty nature, men will not free us from this feeling. That would mean conceding defeat. Just coping is not an option; we must be proactive.
One of the regrettably divisive debates currently raging among the sisters is whether or not the female pornographic mind exists. My position is always the same: if it exists, it must be found; if it does not exist, it must be created. It’s the unfortunate application with which we shall revarnish the preexisting male stains. Just as every rotten culture has its counterculture, all smut must contend with counter-smut.
We can’t fight Prometheus’s fire, but we can out-accelerate it with fire more to our liking. What that fire is going to look like and the exact force of its heat, I’m not sure, it’s not even up to me alone. We must search within ourselves collectively to fill the pornographic world with new, more sinuous and nuanced, perhaps silken, pornography. Every sister must be called upon to become a pornographer. There will be a pornographer conscription out of which a whole army will be assembled. It will be one of the great works projects of our era, a resounding echo of the WPA or the CCC or whatever. Sisters working hand in hand, patching over disused holes and widening others, replenishing shorn grass to resilient strength and fullness, smoothing over neglected wear and tear unless that’s something more than a handful of sisters are fine with.
I am confident that we will succeed and engender a less pornographically male existence. Will that, in the end, mean pornography conveyed in gentle showers as opposed to raging torrents? Sure. Will it make “baking a tart” less rife with moist foggy decadence? Very hopefully, yes.