She's Beautiful When She's Angry Page #6

looking like we were part of the crowd.

And we had a buddy back behind the

curtains who knew how to run the lights.

So the lights went out. (gasps)

And when the lights went out, like

Superman, we removed our blouses

and exposed our Lavender Menace T-shirts.

(all shouting)

JAY:
The audience was completely

surrounded by lesbians.

I was a plant in the audience.

I pulled off my blouse. I had a

Lavender Menace T-shirt underneath.

I said, "I'm tired of being in

the closet in this movement."

BROWN:
Well, nobody knew...

Excuse the Southern expression.

They didn't know whether to sh*t, run or

go blind. They did not know what to do.

JAY:
And finally we took over the stage

and we demanded that issues of

lesbianism be put on the agenda.

And they were.

BROWN:
It really did awaken people.

It was like, "Oh, you

know, you're kinda right."

It was a lot of fun.

Free

Free

WILLIS:
When feminism first erupted,

it was, for me, an extremely erotic moment,

'cause I think for the first time

I saw the possibility of what I was

really being beautiful.

WOMAN:
I'll be your mirror

WILLIS:
I had kind of been

the nerdy intellectual.

I felt that I couldn't be

myself and be attractive to guys.

So the idea that wearing what you felt like

and letting your hair go

wherever it wanted to be

was actually considered attractive

was very exciting.

Radical feminists were

really the first to argue

that women's emotional and sexual needs

should be equally important to men's.

When we started talking about sex,

it turned out that very few of us

had ever even had an orgasm.

Not only that, but we

were faking those orgasms.

And I don't know exactly

how we knew how to fake them.

Because if we'd never had one,

how did we know how to fake it?

(continues)

The dissatisfaction of this

new generation of young women

who were having more sex

than women ever had before,

but not enjoying it particularly.

SHULMAN:
And once we started going on it,

we didn't stop until we were able to demand

a decent sexual experience from our lovers.

I'll be your mirror

Part of what distinguished

the women's liberation branch

from the more middle-aged,

middle-class group

was the interest in sexuality

and personal liberation.

The sexuality stuff was

a little daunting to me.

You know, even at the

NOW conferences later on,

I mean, women, they brought speculums

and they examined each

other's vaginas and stuff.

I was, like... I was not

into that. That was not me.

I was not doing that.

WOMAN:
This is the group's first picture.

This is Wendy, Paula, Esther,

Joan, Me... Vilunya...

Jane, Norma, Pamela,

Ruth, Miriam and Judy.

We look impossibly young.

Why does a women's hormonal system

have to be f***ed around with all the time

when it's very complicated and very

necessary to procreate the species,

when, in fact, it makes much more

sense to have a pill for a male

whose hormonal system

is not as complicated?

People were very fired

up about birth control.

People were having a terrible time,

particularly 'cause it was Massachusetts

and birth control was illegal.

The thing that struck me the most

was that everyone had a doctor story

that they wanted to share,

and some of it was about

getting the information,

but some of it was just

about being patronized.

There was just this sense of,

"Oh, don't worry your pretty

little head about that."

And it was an attitude also.

When I gave birth to my daughter,

she was born around 4:00 in the morning,

and he came in a few

hours later and he said,

"Well, how did you like the job I did?"

- (laughing)

- I go...

Exactly. Exactly.

We then made a list of subjects

that we want information about.

You know, only people in their

20s would have the chutzpah

to make a list from birth to death.

Okay, we need to know about anatomy.

We need to know about birth control.

We need to know about

pregnancy, postpartum, nutrition.

We need to know about exercise. We

need to know about menopause, death.

You know, the whole gambit.

I went to the doctor. I

had an abnormal pap test.

I went home, I wrote about it.

So there was a constant

flow between what you lived,

what you learned, what you give out.

MIRIAM:
So at the point

at which we were ready,

we said, "Well, we're gonna do a course."

We had this material

that we wanted to share.

The first course was on masturbation.

Nobody had ever said that

word out loud at MIT in a room,

and you could hear a pin drop.

Written on the board!

I remember her standing up,

this tall, beautiful woman,

and she's writing about masturbation.

Everybody's like, "Oh, my God." (laughs)

And she had this drawing of a vagina

with all the anatomical parts.

And she started talking about

what our genitals look like.

Whoa, you know.

Never heard or thought about any of this

before, so this was quite compelling.

I remember that after the first session,

everybody said, "Well, we want

to have all the information.

What are those pieces

of paper that you had?"

Everybody wanted copies of each

of the topics of the course.

Then we said, "This is

going to become a book."

We each took the subject that

most involved us personally

and started to learn more about it

so we would have a larger chapter.

VILUNYA:
The first version,

the newsprint version,

sold 240,000 copies.

JOAN:
Suddenly we have this

book, and it's a best seller,

and it was something

no one ever anticipated.

WENDY:
We felt like any money

this book was going to make

came out of women's lives

'cause women needed it,

and so we would use the money

to fund women's health stuff.

PAMELA:
We made our chapters

of these letters that came in

with these personal experiences.

JOAN:
Any anecdote became

material for the book.

What we were saying is we

were a living lab, you know.

That no one knows that

much about women's lives.

I said, "We're gonna

sell a million copies,"

and people laughed.

I thought, no, because

every woman has a body.

It doesn't matter what

class or color you are.

We all have the same anatomy.

Holy cow!

Try not to drool on it, okay?

If Kim finds out I have

this, she'll kill me.

(knocking)

ROXANNE:
My background

was very, very different

from many of the people I

met on the left in general.

My family were sharecroppers from Oklahoma,

and we were very, very poor.

For me, anything negative that

ever happened had to do with class.

I was being put down... even

when men were misogynist,

it was because of class.

I didn't internalize it as because

that's the way they treat women.

So it wasn't until I was at UCLA

I started seeing how stacked

the deck was against a woman.

I got a professor, a young professor.

The first day he met with me he says,

"If I can't f*** you,

I'm going to f*** you."

So I quit.

I quit graduate school.

I burned all my bridges, yeah.

And that's when I flew out

to start a women's revolution.

"I am a revolutionary. I am a feminist.

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