The reason Oprah’s words resounded Sunday night is because we have been waiting for 16 long, terrifying, inconceivably vicious months for someone of stature, coherence, and heart to speak passionate truth about the values being shredded to corrupt power. She had a world audience, and she had us. No elected Democrat or other politician has had the clarity and willingness to stand up like that. They all need to. If she opened the floodgates, bring it on. What are they waiting for? Why are they so scared, so willing to shave off a commitment to gender and race equality? Let every fucking elected Democrat outshine Oprah in their visions and plans.

During the invasion of Afghanistan in 1990, Laura Bush tried to drum up support by proclaiming, The Taliban are not nice to women. The purpose of the war was not to rethink gender imbalance in the East or the West. The atrocities meted out to women within Islamic fundamentalist religions and regimes were well known and documented. It is a GOOD THING for whatever reasons that attention was paid in even the most cautious form to the terrible misogyny and sexism in Afghan culture. Should that same attention have been directed at all religions and sexist societies? Yes. Did it happen? No. It would have been great if that had happened. Instead the press and opponents of feminism and lots of women who considered themselves feminists focused their attention on how feminism was co-opted by the Bush administration and the oil-hungry corporations financing the government. It surely would have been possible to name Laura Bush’s ploy and also seize the opportunity, as some women did in this period, to go head to head with the Taliban on the issues of mutilating, murdering, raping and forcing into marriage girls and older females. That the emphasis was on the co-optation of feminism and not on the insights and activism of feminists is part of sexist culture. That is how sexism works. Always make something more important than the insights feminists bring to gender inequality, and always find a way to tar feminism as a movement because of the ways it can be cynically invoked.

Here we are again with the “Me-too” movement. The “Me-too” movement is A GOOD THING. It is an outpouring from hundreds of thousands of women desperately frustrated by the cultural turn in our moment, where sexual predators and Nazis and white supremacists have seized power in the US and other parts of the world, regimes that mock and jail as in the case of Putin and Pussy Riot opponents of even the most blatant forms of male supremacy. The “Me-too” movement is not looking at the roots of sexism and male privilege in a systematic way. It can’t. It’s a spontaneous uprising, and the focus is on sexual harassment and sexual predation and sexual misconduct because women have been deeply injured by these practices, because they do not want to collaborate any longer, and because sex will sell any public conversation.

In five minutes the dumbest and least subtle factions of women who consider themselves feminists are making no distinctions between rapists and clodish losers who have power and cop feels. They are advancing sexual shittiness as the most important shittiness in the culture when there are so many other really bad shittiness attached to male supremacy that do not directly involve sex. They are re-inscribing the image of feminism as sex panicky. They are making it easy, as it has always been easy, to turn people off feminism by saying it will take away your orgasms. And they have, alas and surely unwittingly, made the “Me-too” movement a tool of the most reactionary and sexist forces in Congress.

HERE IS WHERE WE NEED TO THINK ABOUT COMPLEXITY. The revelations emerging from women about how the world treats women are good, important, necessary, and a great legacy of the work of the women’s movement for the past 50 or so years. Right on, sisters! It’s not an accident that dumb feminism has attracted the most attention. It is the way sexism works. Find a way to tar feminism as a movement because of the ways it is being cynically invoked. We need to allow ethics reviews to take place. We need to allow due process in situations where laws have been broken. We need to strengthen the legal system in regard to sexual harassment and sexual violence to make sure these crimes are tried seriously and fairly and not as has often been the case dismissed because of, wait for it, sexism.

So, in review, all public outing of sexism, misogyny, and the religious and cultural practices that engender and re-enforce sexual and other forms of violence against women IS A GOOD THING. Victimy, girly forms of feminism are popular with men and mainstream media because they are So what else is new. They don’t rock the traditional gender boat. They are manifestations of yes, sexism. The work remains as it has always been to insert a more radical understanding of feminism into the public conversation. To keep sex sexy. To oppose violence in all of its forms and name their gendered component. To remake the world so female humans and male humans are happier, freer, and not fighting all the time for the right to food, health care, housing, sovereignty over what their bodies wear, and fearless movement in public space.

Number of times I have said, “I’m sorry.” Number of times I have felt sorry. Number of times I have made people feel angry and uncomfortable at dinner parties for directly expressing my views about women. Number of times I have been called “strident” and “aggressive.” Number of times a male person using my tone and language would be termed “strident” and “aggressive” to his face. Number of times I have thought my life was defined by anger. Number of times I have thought I should become softer, kinder, more open to contrasting views. Number of times I really thought this. Number of times friends have recommended Buddhism and meditation to me. Number of times I have thought no one can live an easy life with so much dissent and refusal in them. Number of times I have wondered if I would wind up entirely alone. Number of times I wondered if my outlook would destroy my writing. Number of times I have thought it was funny being stuck in my temperament and also in a world fighting hard against my desire for change. Number of times I have marveled at Rebecca Solnit for her ferocity and seeming nicer-than-me-ness. Number of times I have wondered if some people have more love in them. Number of times I have rewritten conversations in my head all night. Number of times I have felt it does not matter if your views are popular as long as they are yours. Number of times I have wanted to be loved with all my shit. Number of times I have had dreams about this.

After watching a doc about Bob Dylan some years ago.

How to be butch, for small, slender girls and boys. Develop a dead thing in your eyes that people will exhaust themselves trying to light up. Do not smile or articulate your joints. Develop a habit, whatever works for you, don’t give it away easily. Become a place no one wants to go if they are hungry. Feel born to the wrong parents. Love your own irritability. Stare blankly at questions about who you are and what you mean. Smoke. In response to the remark, “No fear, no envy, no meanness,” respond, “No childhood, no memories, no stitches.”

Speaking of extraordinary stylists, one of the books Pup & I read on our day without electricity was by an acquaintance of many NYC years: Laurie Stone’s “My Life As an Animal.” it’s a book filled with magic tricks & sleights of the writing hand. Slants in from every direction, yet manages to tell not all, definitely not all (that’s one aspect of the brilliance of it) but definitely all you need to understand where it comes from while also understanding that you will never really know: That the narrator, who is possibly Laurie Stone, sort of Laurie Stone but not Laurie Stone and possibly trustworthy but never reliably trustworthy is the best kind of womanfriend: there but not there. A bit of a chimera, to call up an animal. Sage but not controlling. So nimble she tricks you into getting it: how life works, how her mind works. If this sounds way too Triquarterly clever, don’t worry. It is Triquarterly clever, but that’s not how it reads unless that’s what you want. If you want the story of a mother and daughter, if you want the story of a fresh relationship that starts up well after reason suggests it should & is held in Hepburn-Tracy-like suspense, if you want to know how to bargain, if you want to know about a lost friendship, that’s what you’ll get. And I don’t know about you but that’s what I always want.

http://evergreenreview.com/read/weekend/

Ellen says, “I was determined to make money. What about you?” I say, “What do you think?” She says, “But you like money.” I say, “People don’t pay much for what I do. A handful of good writers sell enough books to support them. Most writers I know teach at universities.” She says, “As soon as I got married, I wanted a baby. I can’t imagine anything more interesting than watching a brand new being develop, watch them discover their hands, play with their penis, watch their fingers become dextrous enough to pick up a Cherio and put it in their mouth, see them understand that, ‘Lay keppie’ means the same thing as, ‘Lay your head on me’. I really don’t know about your life. When you say, ‘I don’t like babies’, it feels like hitting me with a wet noodle.” I say, “I can see having an interest in their development, but I have no interest in the things you have to do for these tiny humans.” She says, “Does that mean you’re selfish?” I don’t answer. It’s okay she doesn’t understand my life. Who understand their life? My life looks like one of the long walks I take through the city every morning, arriving at a corner and deciding which way to turn, just to see what will happen along the route. Ellen says, “I have lived according to two things Daddy said: ‘Money is only good for one thing: To make your life easier’. And, ‘If money can fix it, it’s not that important’.”

Ellen and I are on her bed. She says, “Mom and I were fighting in Macy’s, and I got on the escalator up. I thought she was behind me, but she was still at the bottom, and we were shouting to each other, as she got smaller. She said, ‘I want to sit on a park bench talking to Sartre’. I said, ‘You cannot make a decision. “Should I buy a sock? Should I sell a stock?” Why would Sartre want to talk to you?” She said, “That is a good question.” I say, “When I’m walking, I often think of calling Mom. It’s like a phantom limb.” I walk by the Time Warner Center every morning, near where she lived. If I called her, she would say, “Do you think I’m smart?” I would say, “Yes.” She would say, “You don’t really think that.” I would say, “Yes, I do.” Ellen says, “Keep me in your pocket when you walk.” I say, “Okay.” She says, “When I was transferring from Boston University to NYU, Dad gave Mom a check. I got on the elevator, and the door closed before she could get in. I went to the fourth floor and waited. People streamed in and out. When she found me and looked at the check, she saw Dad had forgotten to sign it. She said, ‘Oh my god, what should we do’? I said, ‘Sign his name, Ma’. She said, ‘You can do that’? I said, ‘Sign his name’. A week later the bank called Daddy to let him know someone had forged his name. He said it was okay. It was his wife.” She says, “After Daddy died, I would drive to the city to see her once a month. She would cook my favorite foods to take home, flanken and lima beans.” I say, “That’s what Grandma would cook for Mom.” She says, “I would balance her checkbook. She would say, ‘I’m going to run out of money’. I would say, ‘If you live to be 400, you’ll run out of money’. She would say, ‘Are you sure’? I would show her the deposits the same way each time. We’d walk to the Lower East Side and go to the Second Avenue Deli. We’d share a bowl of matzoh ball soup and a tongue sandwich on club with fries. The fries had to be extra crispy. She would say, ‘Oy, this food is grabbing me’. I would say, ‘East slower and talk less’. She complained when the tongue sandwich went from $12 to $18, but she always paid.” She sits up a little taller and says, “She made me get out of the house and go to work. She said, ‘Ellen, take any job, work any hours, but get out of the house’. It changed my life completely.” She leans back. I massage her feet. Chemo has caused neuropathy. She says, “Mom would come out to help me when the kids were small. I once had three children with chicken pox. I called her, and she said, ‘I’ll be right there’.” She sips selzer. It helps with her cough. She says, “Mom had the weirdest color sense, greens and browns.” I say, “She always looked great.” Ellen says, “Yes, with her blond hair and coloring, everything looked good on her. If I wore green, I would turn green.”

Below Mom and Dad young.

Ellen says, “I wish we had been close all our lives.” She squeezes my hand and smooths my hair. We are on her bed. She is breathing okay if she doesn’t move much. She says, “It’s hard to get up from the toilet. My arms are weak or maybe it’s my quads.” I say, “Try using your abdominals.” She says, “Mom kept us apart.” I say, “She did and she didn’t.” Ellen says, “She needed to be the center.” Our mother talked to me about books and to Ellen about family. My sister got married at 21, moved to New Jersey, and had her first baby nine months later. I was 15. In the hospital, my father smiled as if she had invented fire. The year before the family shrink, André, had taken me into his bed and touched me. I had stopped him from going further and told no one. I remember looking through the window at Ellen’s baby, pretending to be happy. Ellen says, “I fought with Mom. You left.” Neither of us wishes we had had the other’s life.

Ellen says, “We are connected by strands of DNA. I can see them, squiggling in different colors, like electricity.” I worshipped her as a child. She was beautiful and slender. Everyone loved her. I can see how my mother found her easier to be with. In a recent interview I told the writer I was a wolf and gave this example: “If there is a pie with unequal pieces, I will take the biggest, even if I don’t want to eat it all.”

I say to Ellen, “You were interested in having children. I have given more thought to friendship than family, and I’m as confused as ever.” We joined forces 13 years ago when our mother became ill. Our mother needed the care of aides all the time, and Ellen and I never fell out. I say, “Maybe we needed to become friends before we could become family again.” She says, “You said something that still bothers me. You said, ‘If Mom leaves all her money to you, will you share it with me?’ How could you think I would take it all?” I say, “I thought I should put it out there. She was capable of anything.” Ellen says, “She was a shit, but she could laugh at herself.”

I say, “Richard says there are waves moving in all the time, and then there are tides. Tides are longer periods. You move out and away. The land and sea part but are still in touch. This is when our tide is coming in.”

She says, “The first six months I saw André, I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t say anything. It was a tug of war to see who would speak first.” She was 18, going to therapy five times a week at $50 a session. She was attending NYU and Parson’s School of Design, and she would see André after her classes. Four months later, our mother began seeing him, too. Two years later, I began. At the time, André was also treating my father’s brother, his wife, and their two daughters. It would turn out he was having sex with dozens of women and female children. On the phone, Richard says to me, “What did you think you were going for?” I say, “I was going to meet André. His name was on everyone’s lips, like the Wizard of Oz.” He says, “But it was therapy. You must have organized a problem.” I say, “I was going to enter the fold. It was bathed in a gold light. Or maybe a green light. The green light of money.”

Ellen says, “After I was married, André would call me. I had one or two kids by then. Someone had cancelled an appointment, and he would say, ’Don’t you have $50?’ I thought, ‘He doesn’t care about me. He cares about money.’” I say, “I think it was both.” I prop myself higher on a pillow and say, “Supposing everyone felt alone and trapped, and they were all carrying around this secret. Supposing they were all as secretly unhappy as André, and everyone was pretending things were fine. This thing they were doing. This man they were trusting they didn’t really trust. He was the manifestation of the way the world can be dark and chaotic and wish to destroy hope.” She says, “I did not cry when he died.” I say, “I wish I knew more about his life.” She says, “He was born in Russia and had nine sisters.” I say, “I wish I could ask what he was thinking.”

Yesterday I spent several hours with my sister on her bed. She has terminal lung cancer, and these are her last months. We talked about sex. She likes thinking about the parts of her life she has loved. She is bothered by a cough and shortness of breath. She has begun a new round of chemo that, best case, will extend her time here.

She has been writing letters to the people she wants to say goodbye to, and they are neatly stacked in a drawer. She said, “I became obsessed with writing. It was focusing to think about my relationship with each person.” She looked off at a small statue of a horse that used to sit in the living room of our parents. She said, “When you read my letter to you, promise me you won’t correct the grammar and spelling.” I said, “I’m a lousy speller.” She said, “The grammar. You will find an ‘ly’ missing.” I said, “I promise.”

This morning I called her and said, “What do you think about posting comments on this stage of your life? Death is a private experience, but it is also a social one, and the way you are dying, as a resolutely secular person and with the benefit of excellent health care, now threatened, are public concerns.” She said, “Okay.” I said, “You will read everything before I post it.” She said, “Fine.” I said, “People will say you are ‘brave’, and I will tell them, ‘No, she is living her death the way she lived her life: eyes open, determining her fate as much as is possible.'”

She is extraordinary, and I have no words for the feelings stirred in contemplation of her exit. So I am not imagining that stage. We are together, and we are living in the moments we have. She is sharing her weed and Xanax with me. She is a good sister.

We have a few requests. Please do not recommend treatments, however well-intentioned your suggestions. Please do not invoke religion or spirituality in any form. Ellen is a cultural Jew who does not believe in god or religion. I am an atheist. We think metaphysics promotes much of the destruction in our world now.

We are comforted by this collaboration and welcome comments of support and other responses to what we share. We like reviewing the past. We recently learned more facts than we had previously known about Andre Glaz, the psychoanalyst who treated us both, sexually molested me, and has turned out to have been a sexual predator on a vast, culty, Jim-Jones scale. Ellen wants to know everything she can while she is here. I love her so much for this and a zillion other reasons.