Monster
Listen. I’m really slowing dying inside myself tonight. And I’m not about to run down the list of rapes and burnings and beatings and smiles and sulks and rages and all the other crap you’ve laid on women throughout your history (we had no part in it — although god knows we tried) together with your thick, demanding bodies laid on ours, while your proud sweat, like liquid arrogance, suffocated our very pores — not tonight.
I’m tired of listing your triumph, our oppression, especially tonight, while two men whom I like — one of whom I live with, father of my child, and claim to be in life-giving, death-serious struggle with — while you two sit at the kitchen table dancing an ornate ritual of what you think passes for struggle which fools nobody. Your shared oppression, grief, and love as effeminists in a burning patriarchal world still cannot cut through power plays of maleness.
The baby is asleep a room away. White. Male. American. Potentially the most powerful, deadly creature of the species. His hair, oh pain, curls into fragrant tendrils damp with the sweat of his summery sleep. Not yet, and on my life if I can help it never will be “quite a man.” But just two days ago on seeing me naked for what must be the five-thousandth time in his not-yet two years, he suddenly thought of the furry creature who yawns through his favorite television program; connected that image with my genitals; laughed, and said, “Monster.”
I want a women’s revolution like a lover. I lust for it, I want so much this freedom, this end to struggle and fear and lies we all exhale, that I could die just with the passionate uttering of that desire. Just once in this my only lifetime to dance all alone and bare on a high cliff under cypress trees with no fear of where I place my feet. To even glimpse what I might have been and never never will become, had I not had to “waste my life” fighting for what my lack of freedom keeps me from glimpsing. Those who abhor violence refuse to admit they are already experiencing it, committing it. Those who lie in the arms of the “individual solution,” the “private odyssey”, the “personal growth,” are the most conformist of all, because to admit suffering is to begin the creation of freedom. Those who fear dying refuse to admit they are already dead. Well, I am dying, suffocating from this hopelessness tonight, from this dead weight of struggling with even those few men I love and care less about each day they kill me.
Do you understand ? Dying. Going crazy. Really. No poetic metaphor. Hallucinating thin rainbow-colored nets like cobwebs all over my skin and dreaming more and more when I can sleep of being killed or killing. Sweet revolution, how I wish the female tears rolling silently down my face this second were each a bullet, each word I write, each character on my typewriter bullets to kill whatever it is in men that built this empire, colonized my very body, then named the colony Monster.
I am one of the “man-haters”, some have said. I don’t have time or patience here to say again why and how I hate not men but what it is men do in this culture, or how the system of sexism, power dominance, and competition is the enemy — not people, but how men, still, created that system and preserve it and reap concrete benefits from it. Words and rhetoric that merely gush from my arteries when grazed by the razoredge of humanistic love. Enough. I will say, however, that your, men, will have to be freed, as well, though we women may have to kick and kill you into freedom since most of you will embrace death quite gladly rather than give up your power to hold power.
Compassion for the suicidal impulse in our killers ? Well, on a plane ride one, the man across the aisle, who was a World War Two paraplegic, dead totally from the waist down, wheeled in and out of the cabin, spent the whole trip avidly devouring the newspaper sports pages and then sports magazines, loudly pointing out to anyone who would listen (mostly the stewardesses) which athlete was a “real man.”
Two men in the seats directly behind me talked the whole time about which Caribbean islands were the best for whoring, and which color of ass was hotter and more pliant. The stewardess smiles and served them coffee. I gripped the arms of my seat more than once to stop my getting up and screaming to the entire planeload of human beings what was torturing us all — stopped because I knew they’d take me for a crazy, an incipient hijacker perhaps, and wrestle me down until Bellevue Hospital could receive me at our landing in New York. (No hijacker, I understood then, ever really wants to take the plane. She/ he wants to take the passengers’ minds, to turn them inside out, to create the revolution 35,000 feet above sea level and return to the takeoff country with a magical flying cadre and, oh yes, to win.) Stopping myself is becoming a tactical luxury, going fast.
My hives rise more frequently, stigmata of my passion. Someday you’ll take away my baby, one way or the other. And the man I’ve loved, one way or the other. Why should that nauseate me with terror? You’ve already taken me away from myself with my only road back to go forward into more madness, monsters, cobwebs, nausea, in order to free you — men — from killing us, killing us.
No colonized people so isolated one from the other for so long as women. None cramped with compassion for the oppressor who breathes on the next pillow each night. No people so old who, having, we now discover, invented agriculture, weaving, pottery, language, cooking with fire, and healing medicine, must now invent a revolution so total as to destroy maleness, femaleness, death.
Oh mother, I am tired and sick. One sister, new to this pain called feminist consciousness for want of a scream to name it, asked me last week “But how do you stop from going crazy?” No way, my sister. No way. This is pore war, I thought once, on acid.
And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons. I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason than that you came wailing from the monster while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power to break her spell. Well, we must break it ourselves, at last. And I will speak less and less to you and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand: witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings, schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs, poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent this freedom.
May my hives bloom bravely until my flesh is aflame and burns through the cobwebs. May we go mad together, my sisters. May our labor agony in bringing forth this revolution be the death of all pain.
May we comprehend that we cannot be stopped. May I learn how to survive until my part is finished. May I realize that I                             am a                             monster. I am                 a                 monster. I am a monster.
And I am proud.
Robin Morgan - Monster (1970).













