“Bras & Rubbers in the Gutters” by Hattie Gossett (High Risk)

Missives from Rape Culture

Like most porn loving college students, I hated Andrea Dworkin. She represented everything wrong with feminism – puritanical, man-hating, essentialist, etc. Mostly, she wanted to take away my porn. As I grew up and realized that my youthful beliefs were mostly stupid, I warmed to feminism and the multitude of voices within feminism, including Dworkin. I didn't actually read her until #Metoo exposed dozens of rape happy men, getting away with their crimes due to systems set up to protect them.

Andrea Dworkin was a clear-headed powerful writer who saw modern society as a sickness that thrived on hating women. Even her anti-porn arguments made sense in a Pavlovian way. If a man is masturbating to porn depicting incest and rape, what is that doing to his moral compass? Porn is only the tip of a shitty iceberg constantly reinforcing the message that women are meant to be slaves and objects and any deviation is slapped down with violence.

It's not hard to see examples. Roman Polanski still has defenders. Brooke Shields said that she didn't want to have sex before she was ready and comedians including Johnny Carson spent months mocking her. How dare she declare sexual autonomy? Women were so rare in movies that we needed the Bechdel Test to notice. Eighties movies from Ghostbusters to Revenge of the Nerds treated sexual harassment and even rape as funny.

Andrea Dworkin wasn't a TERF. She didn't hate men. She ran away from an abusive husband who could have killed her and used her personal experiences to inform her politics. Andrea Dworkin was certainly not the man-hating scold of my imagination. If I have any criticism, I can't read too much of her work. I mostly agree, but she's exhausting.

Hattie Gossett comes from the same era of feminism. She feels very much like the lone voice of caution in a book of libertines. Every sections states that while the Sexual Revolution was a great time for men, it didn't necessarily help women. In fact, it made things worse.

The first section is about a woman who thought that she could be sexually free as soon as she turned forty. For years, she lived with the fantasy of being a middle aged sexual dynamo. After 40, no one would care enough to call her a slut. A woman in her forties is just having fun. She would have free and casual sex with any man, ages 18 to 60. Only when she turned forty, she found more restrictions. She gets to have sex with one young guy but then AIDS becomes a thing and men never put on condoms. Anyone can get AIDS, so she spends her fiercely free 40s celibate.

Sexual freedom is an illusion.

The second section is the angriest. It's called “boys game – she asked for it” and it brings up everything from rape to Robert Chambers murdering Jennifer Levin after sex. She then reminds the readers that not every man gets to play that game. Most Hispanic and black man cannot hire Alan Dershowitz to destroy their victim's reputation. The last section is a series of questions about whether people deserve to have happy sex and if you would have sex if you were homeless.

Unfortunately, the three sections aren't really stories and they aren't poems. They are just manifestos without capitalization. Hattie Gossett called herself a womanist because she also talked about racism. Like bell hooks, she didn't use capitalization because...I don't know. I would look it up, but I'm sure it sounds really smart but is ultimately stupid. If you ever went to college, you probably took a class with a Communist professor or an agenda pushing TA, so you heard it. Her most famous poem is entitled “is it true what they say about colored pussy?” It's a terrible poem that makes the same points about how sexism is even worse when it's racist.

Check out this passage announcing its importance -

i mean just look at what black pussies have been subjected to alone
starting with ancient feudal rape and polygamy and clitoridectomy and
forced child marriages and continuing right on through colonial
industrial neocolonial rape and forced sterilization and experimental
surgery

Colonial industrial neocolonial? Really?

Hattie Gossett was not a good writer but she still has an impressive resume. She was an editor on Essence and she helped to launch other careers. Like Ana Maria Simo, she was one of those people in the art scene with a reputation better than her art. She's still praiseworthy. She worked hard to get tenure and artist-in-residence roles at prestigious universities. Certainly creating one of the first courses at Rutgers dedicated to black women writers is nothing to sneeze at.

However, her work is suited more to college students than the general public. It's the kind of preachy writing that announces itself and makes the rich white readers feel like they understand poor black people. Ultimately, she repeats the same points in the same way.

I'd rather read Dworkin.

Hattie Gossett is currently in bad health. I took care of my mother in this time and money definitely helped so please donate to her gofundme.

I’m not really selling her well, but neither is High Risk. Her own books may be better.

I also published books like She Nailed a Stake Through His Head.