Book Review: Gossips Gorgons and Crones

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Gossips Gorgons and Crones

Author: Jane Caputi

Date: 1993

Publisher: Bear & Company

ISBN: 1-879181-05-3

Length: 351 pages plus index

Illustrations: several black-and-white photos, drawings, and cartoons

Quote: “[N]uke is frequently meant as a synonym for f**k. A sexually sadistic attack or obliteration is always implicit in the phrase ‘f**k you.’”

This was axiomatic in 1993. Many would like to believe that the feminism of the 1970s accomplished its goals and moved on. This would have been pleasant if true, but no; just weeks after the #MeToo witch hunters tried to apply current social mores to a previous generation’s social behavior, the world saw a half-grown snotboy threaten an older woman who’d been very kind to him with “a sexually sadistic attack or obliteration,” and the so-called feminists of the Undead and Extremely Confused Left actually swarmed in to attack...her. The mind squirbles. Clearly there is still an ongoing need to resume the feminist thought of the 1990s (which publishers were promoting right up to September 2001, at which point they all decided they “needed” to print more war propaganda and drop all other non-required reading).

I’m not sure, though, whether Gossips Gorgons and Crones is the best place to begin. For those who’d been keeping up with Caputi’s reading and thinking, this book represented a valid step forward,around the Lavender Menace (cooptation of feminist groups and activities by homosexuals and the sexually-confused-yet-sex-obsessed; yes, it did destroy women's groups and enterprises), past the blather of Goddess Theology, into “eco-feminism” and antinuclear activism. For those who missed that whole era of thinking and writing, this book may not even be intelligible.

Jane Caputi is best known for her collaboration with Mary Daly on the hilariously incisive Wickedary, a book of radical feminist wordplay. What would a book written in Wickedary vocabulary look like, some readers wondered...Jane Caputi wrote one. In addition to the Wickedary, Caputi’s thought and language refers back to the work of “those thinkers whose writings have most instructed and inspired me: Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldua, Marilou Awiakta, Mary Daly, Andrea Dworkin, Bell Hooks, June Jordan, Robert Jay Lifton, Catharine MacKinnon, Barbara Mor, Diana Russell, Leslie Silko, Monica Sjoo, Alice Walker, and Barbara Walker.” If you’ve read at least one book by each of those authors, you won’t necessarily agree with them or with Caputi, but you’ll understand what she’s saying in Gossips Gorgons and Crones. Otherwise, statements like the introductory remarks on page 17—“In the second part, inspired by the Gossips, I embark with you on our journey, scathingly assessing the sexually abusive practices and beliefs of the nuclear fatherland...”—may not make much sense to you.

I’ve never heard from the majority of what the computer tells me are this web site’s readers. I generally write for The Nephews, to a lesser extent for their mothers; and while I believe the “feminist herstory” of Women’s Literature between 1960 and 1990 needs to be preserved in libraries, I would like to think that young men could afford to skip most of it. (“The Nephews” is a collective name chosen to anonymize a mixed group but, yes, more of them are nephews than are nieces.) The thing about the feminist writers Caputi’s list cited was that, although many of them seemed reasonably fond of their husbands and of their sons, they were always writing in combat mode against sexist “male thought.” They always used words like “fatherland” to imply things like “land where unfit fathers failed either to share with or to provide for the rest of the family.” It was possible, even for sympathetic readers even at the time, to see a name like Lifton’s on the list, and instead of thinking, “Well, he was an old left-wing Greenie,” think “How did he get into that crowd? Did they make him wear a dress?”

Right. The first rule for understanding this book: When Caputi means to include men she’s not casting as enemies, in terms like “thinkers” or “survivors” or “people,” she ignores their gender. When she uses male-gender words, she’s confronting her enemy. “Patriarchal” never means “pertaining to a male elder, or elders, whose wisdom and fairness have won respect,” but always “characteristic of a society that devalues women and young people.” “This man” never refers to a supporter observed at a demonstration, always to a hostile counter-demonstrator. Even “our hero,” in a summary of a TV drama, is necessarily a sarcastic term for a male character who sings “I would die for you” but “was never in any such danger”—Caputi would not use it to refer to, e.g., Lifton.

Got that? A little more grammar and vocabulary may help the young deconstruct and understand that introductory passage:

“Female Powers are returning to our sphere.” (We are learning to show more respect to women.) “It is imperative that we welcome, honor, and face these Powers now journeying toward us.” (The “Goddess Spirituality” crowd are a primary audience for this book.)

“I first conduct a brief survey of the terrain of patriarchal nuclear myth and metaphor.” (The first of the four main sections of this book documents some images of, and writing about, nuclear bombs in pop culture.) “[P]hallocentric associations with the bomb have been insinuated into our consciousness through everyday imagery, particularly in the areas of sexuality and divinity.” (Egocentric, narcissistic men seem to worship the power of nuclear bombs to attack and obliterate things in ways onto which they project sexual sadism.)

“In the second part, inspired by the Gossips, I embark with you on our journey, scathingly assessing the sexually abusive practices and beliefs of the nuclear fatherland.” (The second section discusses some feminist reactions to the observed tendency for men who disrespect women to disrespect the Earth, animals, and one another also.) “The Gossips whisper to us of the magical Powers of language, motivating us to shed the ordained role of the living dead and to become, instead, psychic activists.” (This Wickedary language may be useful; it sure is fun!)

“In the third part, we arrive at the abode of the Gorgon and there find ourselves facing the unfaceable.” (The third section discusses some of the theoretical possibilities that have been imagined for a nuclear holocaust.) “We reconsider patriarchal definitions of knowledge and taboo, finding surprising and even shocking connections between female Powers and nuclear technologies.” (Can feminists use or benefit from the fear nuclear holocaust inspires?)

“In the fourth part, guided by the Crone, we visit the house of the Grandmothers.” (The fourth section raises the point that we’re all growing older, and we’re all going to die, in any case.) “There we envision our participation in a cosmic change of life.” (What if either nuclear winter or the fear of nuclear winter reduced everybody to an equal level of helplessness, the way disease, disability, and death do?) “We contemplate the workings of Chaos in the evolution of human history.” (Toward the end I, Caputi, admit that this is a book of questions and speculations rather than answers. No one really knows what the future may bring.)

It is possible to read this book, sift out Caputi’s left-wing extremism, admire the audacity of her conclusion (imagine a scholarly book facing both uncertainty and mortality! !!!!!), and even find more hopeful uses for her Green-feminist philosophical insights...but it helps a great deal, toward that goal, to be a woman who remembers the same history and read the same books Caputi did. It also helps to have acknowledged uncertainty and mortality a long time ago. For me, the fourth section of this book is not so much intimidating as it is inconclusive. My mind goes, “Yes? We’re mortal; that’s axiomatic. Everything we think, write, plan, and do is about what we do with the little time we have. We’re uncertain; that’s also axiomatic. Everything we think, write, plan, and do is about how we use the little understanding our brains can absorb during the little time we have. Now, what is Caputi proposing to do about all this?” She’s not making very positive or concrete proposals, but then I remember how very brave it is for Humanists to face these two truths that Christians hold to be self-evident: that we don’t know everything, and that we’re going to die. Humanism generally prefers to deny both of these principles.

How relevant is her analysis of the pop culture of disrespect, the line of thought that positively upheld nuclear technology and other abuses of the Earth, rape and child abuse, violence and sadism, as manifestations or even celebrations of manhood? Weren’t most of the nuclear weapons dismantled, others acknowledged to have been fakes all along, and have not humankind as a whole agreed that we don’t need to monkey around with nuclear technology any more?

Not quite so fast, reality warns. Consider the way young women are embracing their “right” to be taken seriously as workers and thinkers while dressing like bimbos, and more power to them for that, but consider the discouraging way a few of them can still be persuaded to whine and moan about their “right” to have abortions (rather than, e.g., proclaiming that non-reproductive sexual expression is every bit as satisfactory as the procreative kind, and, if a woman doesn’t want a baby, moreso). Consider the way a left-wing bully-boy still defaults to “F—you” as a threat/insult when he wants to show extreme ingratitude to a woman older than his mother—and the left-wing “buzz” doesn’t even demand that he grovel before Womankind. Consider how, even though right-wingers aren’t known for their deft use of political “spin,” the right wing didn’t even surge forward to demand that the whole focus of attention immediately shift from “ignorant children whining for gun bans, which they don’t realize would put them in greater danger than they are” to “ignorant boys in howling need of a lesson in respect for women.”

The capacity of Humanity for living and not learning is astounding. Consider, in the context of the Hogg idiot, how even after the thirty-year experiment with a gun ban for private citizens in Washington, D.C., which demonstrated fairly conclusively that people who consent to “gun control” are doomed to be shot down at the leisure of the violent, young people are drivelling about how much safer they think they would feel if the gun ban that had made them targets at school were extended to cover their whole town. Feelings can be very misleading; people die with silly grins on their faces. But perhaps it’s time for young people to remember what violent people do if they really can’t drive a few miles and get firearms: They build bombs.

So, although Jane Caputi’s peculiar way of replying to all the little wormboys who fantasize the male sexual act as a threat of torture and death now reads, even to those who liked this book in 1993, like a nostalgically long-ago inside joke...it’s time somebody picked up this line of thought and reworked it in with current pop culture and language the young can understand. One way or another, the male mind has to be brought up against the fact that women don’t have to be intimidated by the threat of rape. Women can counterattack. Any reference to the male sexual act as other than mutual, consensual, even offered as an act of reverence to the chosen lady, needs to evoke a shrill and scornful chorus of “If you want to keep it, buddy, keep it to yourself.”

(That was a filk I wrote about twenty years ago...the verses and tune are available, but, for contract reasons, not on this web site, and not free of charge.)

Violate the Earth with bombs...what about nuclear winter? Violate the air with pollution...prepare to do a lot of coughing. Violate women, in any way...what Freud thought you always thought women were going to do is not, in fact, something women particularly want to do, but if you really push it, guys, we can. Jane Caputi’s message in Gossips Gorgons and Crones is one the young desperately need, whether their little minds can take it in directly from her book, or not.

Jane Caputi is still alive and teaching so this one is a Fair Trade Book. Buy it here for $5 per book plus $5 per package plus $1 per online payment and, though other sellers may offer lower prices per book, this web site will send $1 to Caputi or the charity of her choice. Additionally, this web site will add at least one and possibly two or three more books, of comparable size, to the same $5 package, so the total price for the same number of books may be a better deal than those other sellers offer...and if the authors of those books are still alive we'll send them or their charities $1 each, too.

(Eventually, when I've closed all those other windows, a Paypal button for this specific book will appear here.)