by Lise Weil




Several nights ago, on Facebook of all things, I happened on the news that the writer Christa Wolf had died—on December 1, in Berlin, at the age of 82. I am still reeling from the shock, not just the shock of her death but the shock of my not having known about her death for over six weeks. How could this have happened? Christa Wolf, originally of the GDR, is a writer whose words I have lived by, more or less consciously, for almost thirty years. No other living writer did as much to shape my literary consciousness and political imagination. The only book I possess that’s as beat-up as my copy of To the Lighthouse is her novel The Quest for Christa T (Nachdenken uber Christa T.). The Reader and the Writer is a close second. Passages from her novels and essays still return to me on a weekly basis. Not only that, she used to make regular appearances in my dreams. How could she have passed from this world without my having a clue?? This despite the fact that I regularly, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, immerse myself in the information-drenched world of cyberspace. (Now that I know of her death of course I’ve been drowning in blogs, commentaries, obituaries, interviews). How did this vital piece of information fall through the cracks?

 I subscribe to U.S. and Canada-based feminist listserves, where deaths of literary figures in the U.S. and Canada are fairly well covered—though occasionally there are cracks here as well. But what of writers on another continent?  I’m talking about women writers of course and most particularly feminist writers.  Thirty, twenty, maybe even ten years ago a women’s magazine or newspaper would have brought me news of an important death (there was a feminist press then and it knew no borders). Or if not that a friend who had read it in one of those papers. There were gatherings then, often centered around books, if I hadn’t already found out from a newspaper or a friend it would certainly have come up at one of them.

 I don’t know how we’re all supposed to keep track of these deaths, today, the deaths of the feminist writers whose imaginations have rocked our worlds. No doubt there are fans of the great visionary Quebec writer Louky Bersianik in Europe, Australia, even in the U.S., who have no idea that she died also in December, two days after Wolf in fact, at the age of 81. Beyond keeping track of these deaths, how are we supposed to mourn them, dispersed as we all are?

 “Literature today must be peace research,” Wolf pronounced in her Buchner Prize speech. More than any other writer I know, she showed me what it is to be a writer of conscience.

***

For Christa Wolf, prose was an instrument of conscience and self-knowledge, a means of stirring up the hardened deposits of history, of laying bare lies and buried truths. She was a master diagnostician of the darkness of the 20^th-century. ”The main aim of my work in recent years has been the question of what it is that has brought our civilization to the brink of self-destruction” she once said in an interview. She understood that that self-destructiveness had its roots in dissociation: “How one could be there and not be there at the same time, the ghastly secret of human beings in this century,” she wrote in Patterns of Childhood [in Australia published as A Model Childhood], a novel in which she tried to comes to terms with a Nazi childhood. And later: “Sin in our time consists of not wanting to know the truth about oneself.” Countering that dissociation, which Wolf saw at work everywhere, was one of her self-appointed tasks as a writer. The words spoken by Christa T. in her early and best-known novel The Quest for Christa T. could just as easily have come from her:  “We must know what has happened to us . . .One must know what happens to oneself.” (“Hope begins,” Wolf once said in an interview, “when one faces reality, when one simply sees what is.”) 

 “In the age of universal memory loss,” Wolf wrote in Patterns of Childhood [A Model Childhood], “we must realize that complete presence of mind can be achieved only when based on a clear past.” Always as a writer her project was to remove blinders, her own and others’, to make herself and the reader aware of blind spots, to see clearly. The relentless questioning that characterized her narrative voice was often directed at herself (the authorial “I” and the narrative “I” often appeared to be identical); she seemed always ready to expose her own failings, to open up even her rawest wounds for closer inspection. In the aftermath of the response to What Remains (Was Bleibt), a novella about the day in the life of a GDR writer whose every move is monitored by state secret police agents, she would try to come to terms with the fact that for three years, as a young woman, she herself worked for the Stasi.

As an East German writer, Wolf took social engagement as matter of course. “I can’t abstract myself from [society],” she once said in an interview. “It is this sense of always being touched by what touches society, although it sometimes drives me to despair, that is the source, amongst other things, of my creative drive.” At a time when, Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, unfettered capitalism seems to be the model towards which all societies are leaning, it is bracing to read a writer for whom an alternative existed. “We East Germans had a vision, a utopia,” she once wrote, and even after reckoning with the abuses of the regime she continued to cling to that vision. Beginning with the collection of essays The Reader and the Writer, published in 1968, Wolf would develop a body of writing about writing marked by a steadfast refusal of alienation and a fervent wish that literature be effective, be useful, that it might help to bring about a more livable world, “help ensure that the things of this earth endure.” She considered hers an “aesthetics of resistance.”

In the 1980’s, Wolf’s social critique, along with her poetics, took a feminist turn. In the process of researching the figure of Cassandra for her novel of that name that appeared in 1983, she began to study archaeology and ancient matriarchal cultures. Travelling to Crete, she was amazed and outraged to discover that women were the original seers, prophets and poets, that their powers had been usurped by priests of Apollo who took over the temple at Delphi, that women were subsequently either excluded or turned into objects. She began to consider the implications of the fact that for two thousand years women were barred from any significant role in shaping culture. “Does it seem misguided. . .to believe,” she wrote, “that if women had helped to think `thought’ over the last two thousand years, the life of thought would be different today?” 

Wolf’s Cassandra is a feminist parable. Even as her Cassandra comes to understand that the Trojan war, far from being an aberration, is deeply symptomatic of patriarchal consciousness, and that “we have no chance against a time that needs heroes,” she begins to feel a deep kinship with women from other layers of society. Wolf’s own feminist awakening is traced in her Frankfurt lectures, which later appeared as essays accompanying Cassandra. In terms of narrative, she writes in these essays, the necrophilia of patriarchal cultures is to be seen in the “strictly one-track-minded approach—the extraction of a single ‘skein’. . . a blood-red thread extracted from the fabric of human life, the narrative of the struggle and victory of the heroes, or their doom.” To these one-track stories Wolf suggests that we oppose something she calls “the living word”: “This word would not longer produce stories of heroes, or of antiheroes, either.  Instead, it would be inconspicuous and would seek to name the inconspicuous, the precious everyday, the concrete. . .Perhaps it would greet with a smile the wrath of Achilles, the conflict of Hamlet, the false alternatives of Faust.” 

In a speech she gave in 1980 on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize (later published in a book of essays called The Author’s Dimension), Wolf indicted Western culture for its devaluing of women as sources of knowledge and insight, its idolatry of scientific thinking, its inner emptiness.  And she raised the question of the fate of literature, and of language itself, in a highly technologized world which increasingly seems bent on its own destruction. “Shall it then, the language of literature, fail us?” she asked. Her answer to this question comes in the following passage, and hinges upon the taking up a “simple, quiet word” – verkehrt (upside-down, reversed).  These words, I believe, ring truer than ever today.

“The condition of the world is reversed, we say tentatively, and notice: it is true. We can stand behind this sentence.  The word is not beautiful, only right, and it is thus a rest for our ears, which have been torn by the clamor of great words, a little relief too for our conscience, disturbed by too many false, falsely-used words.  Could it perhaps be the first word of another accurate language which we have in our ears but not yet on our tongues? Perhaps from it could develop. . .a chain of other equally accurate words which would express not only a negative of the old but an other, timely sense of values. . .  So that we can again speak to one another, and tell each other stories, without having to be ashamed.”

(Translation above is by Myra Love. I prefer it to Jan van Heurck’s in part because of the resonance of “reversed” with Mary Daly’s notion of “reversal.” Other translations are by the translators cited below.) 

REFERENCES

Christa Wolf, The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories. Tr. Joan Becker (New York: International Publishers, 1977)

Christa Wolf, A Model Childhood. Tr. Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)

Christa Wolf, The Author’s Dimension: Selected Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Christa Wolf, Cassandra: A Novel and four Essays. Tr. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994)

The Fourth Dimension:Interviews with Christa Wolf. tr. Hilary Pilkington with introduction by Karin McPherson (London: Verso, 1988).

 

Lise Weil lives in Montreal and teaches in Goddard College's IMA program. She was founder and editor of Trivia: A Journal of Ideas and later Trivia: Voices of Feminism. She has just completed a memoir, In Search of Pure Lust.

 

I think it is agreed by all parties that whoever could find a fair, cheap and easy method of making poor girls useful members of the economy, would deserve so well of the public, as to have her statue erected as preserver of the nation. To this end, I propose a method inspired by Milton Friedman. Let us recognise that the influence of Friedman’s deregulation thesis on third way social engineering is so profound that we can now say that the Chicago School of economics is the pinnacle of right-minded left wing practice. For example, George Papandreou, the president of Socialist International, is currently deregulating the Greek economy. While some might call him an undertaker, a cannibal, and a pimp, we in the progressive Left know such hysterical accusations come from wowsers.

What a tragedy for humanity that Milton Friedman did not follow up his Capitalism and Freedom (1962) with Capitalism and Sexual Freedom.

Thankfully, however, deregulation produces a sexually liberated market place. We now enjoy the seductive interpellations of a self-regulated corporate culture that promotes incessant sex industry style fucking: from children’s films and baby wear to real estate and shampoo adverts, everything is bubbling with the promise of sexual excitement. At the local brothel, young women sell their bodies to all kinds of men for different and diverse sexual practices. Or I can stroll into an adult.com chain shop and buy magazines showing women laughing with delight, as they are hogtied and given a vigorous triple penetration. Or at the deli near the local high school I can buy magazines full of smiling barely legal teens captioned ‘Cum on my braces!’. With a tap of my varnished nail, my PC ejaculates a load of porn — bestiality, incest, gonzo, BDSM, Lolita. Newspapers are full of adverts for self-reliant individual female sex workers.

Yet we have not gone far enough. We are in the infancy of our sexual freedom as a nation and it is the responsibility of the Left to see to it that progress is made. The sex industry should be free of any state control and the Left, in the interests of liberty, equality and fraternity, should embrace a range of laissez-faire policies immediately.

I say to you: it is time the Left stood shoulder to shoulder with the sex industry and said ‘yes we can!’

More needs to be done so that those who are at risk from welfare dependency can chose to become self-reliant consumers.

I am talking, of course, of those poor girls who come from sexually and physically violent homes, intermittently attend financially irresponsible state schools, only to spend their lives drifting miserably through the expanding secondary labour market. These girls often end up on sole parent benefits with numerous children to feed. It is time the Left encouraged these poor girls to embrace the choice of a self-empowering life in the sex industry.

Can the Left argue with any credibility that sex work shouldn’t be promoted as a viable career option for these unfortunate girls? Recently I heard that one girl had finished high school and was earning $3 an hour in a cafe. If sex work were de-stigmatised to be a job like any other, she could be earning $150 an hour. Instead of labouring for years in dead-end jobs, with the burden of debt on her young shoulders, she could be paying those university fees, saving for that $200,000  or so she will need as a deposit on a modest home.

Here are merely some of the socio-economic benefits of a deregulated sex industry.

• The sex industry builds social cohesion by providing a healthy outlet for male sexual needs of all kinds. In the interests of public health and safety it is vital that the Left defend the right of the sex industry to fully penetrate the private and public sphere. Let us face facts. Although decades of scientific feminist research argue that the sex industry practices and promotes violent woman hating, circumstantial evidence suggests feminists make these claims because they are man-haters.

• We must offer brothels the choice to corporatize their business. By gentrifying the sex industry we enhance the social status of sex work.

• Within working-class areas pornography corporations should be approached as industry partners in state sex education projects. Brothel owners and pimps might select students for job training in year 10. Already groomed for such work by the sex industry’s colonisation of their life worlds, this opportunity to professionalize their knowledge will be eagerly embraced by poor girls.

• Student unions could actively place girls within the sex industry, formalising an already growing trend for poor students. The sex industry will support the higher education sector by increasing retention rates for the poor that in turn will lead to increased corporate/university profits.

• Australia should be marketed internationally to sex tourists. Currently many Australian men go to places like Cambodia for unregulated sex industry business— it is time we reversed the trend.

• The unemployed, the homeless, the entire standing reserve of at-risk and vulnerable girls should undergo training in various aspects of sex work and be thoughtfully placed in the industry. There will be no need for exit paths — rather old workers of 30 will be offered promotion to pimp. 

• Female run pornography companies and sex industry venues would enhance gender equality. 

• Much research has been done on the negative impact of our image-obsessed culture. Yet here too is where the sex industry can help us. As Marx wrote: ‘I am ugly, but I can buy the most beautiful woman. Which means to say that I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness, its repelling power, is destroyed by money’.[1] Surely then, the sex industry, which offers attractive girls to ugly men for money, will enhance men’s self-esteem, which will in turn radiate outwards as a benevolence towards others, such as women, perhaps. 

As the sex industry requires lithe bodies, many girls will be motivated to halt their descent into obesity in the interests of personal profit. Thus the sex industry will address the epidemic of youth obesity in Australia. Other issues facing disadvantaged girls, such as mental illness, rural suicide rates, social isolation, drug use, and anti-social behaviour will be eradicated by the therapeutic and financial benefits of belonging to the sex industry community. Cyber bullying through sexting will no longer have social purchase once society teaches the young to embrace pro-sex industry identities. The words ‘whore’, ‘ho’ and ‘pimp’, already terms of endearment among the young, will be further accepted as compliments.

This sincerely felt proposal should merit the originator a Humanist of the Year award, not to mention substantial research funding from the sex industry. Might I remind readers that it is the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day? Although the communist wowser Clara Zetkin instigated this day we have now reached a moment in history where we can more accurately see that economics never lies. 

(With apologies to Dr Jonathan Swift)

[1] Marx, Early Writings, Penguin. 1975, p. 377.

This blog was written in response to a discussion about Big Porn Inc at the Feminist Forum series held at the University of Melbourne on 13 September.

Congratulations to those involved in researching and writing Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry edited by Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray (Spinifex). You are now able to educate readers on the ‘pornification’ of our society and you have shared information to enable the public to make informed choices regarding their use – or not – of porn.

 

There are some implications in the book that I would like to qualify.

 

One chapter of the book, ‘Pornography as Sexual Authority: How Sex Therapy Promotes the Pornification of Sexuality’ by Meagan Tyler refers to sex therapists as a single category irrespective of credibility of each individual. As a specialist counselling psychologist and an accredited sexual therapist, I am aware that so many ‘pretenders’ are calling themselves sexual therapists. Most of these pretenders are affiliated in some way with the porn industry and seek to both normalize and legitimize porn by linking it with therapeutic associations but we must not permit that to happen by allowing the pretenders legitimacy.  

 

I have been a sex therapist for 25 years and I have never once promoted porn! My peers and I have undertaken rigorous standards for academic preparation, supervised training and meet strict guidelines for ethical practice and professional conduct to achieve accreditation. I educate my clients to make informed choices based on their values and ethics, including their understanding of human rights issues of the porn industry. This does not apply to porn stars turned ‘therapists’. Potential clients can guarantee a therapist is accredited by confirming their credentials before they decide to book a session.

 

Accredited therapists undertake psychoeducation around sexuality and relationships with their clients. This facilitates clients to express their sexuality in a joyful and creative manner reflecting their cultural and physical realities, where porn use has little attraction for them. One of the issues I have with porn is that it is boring; predictable and disrespectful. Ethical sex therapists enable sexual expressions that are the antithesis of porn – never boring; never predictable and always respectful. This is what the best of us do!

 

Accredited sexual therapists treat both men and women who are addicted to porn but we never allow them to use their addiction as an excuse to harm others.

 

As a feminist and activist, I do not believe that all men are predators and all women are victims.  There are a growing percentage of men who now suffer ‘small penis syndrome’ as an outcome of pornography. It is not unusual for teenage boys to tell me that a girl refuses to have sex with them “with that penis” because their favourite porn stud has a much bigger penis. Porn has educated men that they are a life support system for a penis, that there is only one size, EXTRA LARGE and it should be hard for up to two hours and be able penetrate every orifice on both humans and animals.