All loves are born and die, and when they end there is always the one who suffers the most, sometimes only one side, the one who loved sincerely, the other maybe not, maybe he was lying. E we women on the left really believed in love, wholeheartedly: naively we thought we were the darlings, we believed the promises, even those that blatantly appeared false. Carla Lonzi already reminded us half a century ago that the left had sold us 'to the hypothetical Revolution', and even overseas, Feminists were raising the issue of 'Dual Militancy'. E everywhere, the Left, born within a male paradigm of thought, has behaved like the worst narcissistic male: lies, abandonments and returns, threats, beatings and caresses, betrayals.
On a collective level we experienced the same toxic relationship that so many of us have experienced in our individual lives with their men: but when a blunder is shared it is harder to see, we convince ourselves among ourselves that outside of that embrace that wears us down there can be nothing, indeed there is a nothingness that troubles and frightens us, and we alone cannot venture into that forest which, as all fairy tales teach us, is a place of risk and challenge, but also of personal growth.
When the crumbs came to us we all partied, then it wasn't true that we didn't count for anything, we weren't the old throw-away slippers.
But at some point you have to open your eyesespecially when the adultery is so big and so blatant that it is no longer possible to pretend nothing is wrong and to show meek smiles: and with whom did this ultimate betrayal take place? Precisely with whom we raised and nurtured, tenderly, motherly: when the left was hopelessly macho (Lidia Menapace warned us here too) it was we who supported and welcomed the homosexual movement first and then the transsexual movement. Those males appeared fragile, sorrowful, reassuring, sexually non-threatening, sincere friends and convinced allies in the battles against the hated patriarchy. And even those who demanded to live serenely with a feminine name and a suffered and reconstructed body, what harm did they do to us, what threats could they present to us?
Well, in that very world there, where we felt at home, safe, protected and relaxed, a strange, colourful but aggressive, militaristic (though not grey-green) movement was born, and many of our old comrades have turned against us. So many of those male accomplices of our confidences and battles against the hated patriarchy have changed front, the male alliance on the left has become a pact of steel in the name of common ideals told as progressiveBut behind this ideal plan broods an ancestral broth of animosity, envy, millenary resentments, unexpressed desires towards our sexed bodies and our capacity to give Life. The males have made a blockade among themselves against us, something they have known how to do brilliantly for millennia, and have literally pulled the earth from under our feet.
Brilliant, have even created neo-women: the traditional ones, that is us, are outdated: everyone is a woman, everyone can be a woman, problem solved. Something doesn't add up, what about us?
Obviously Those of us still painfully in love with this left wing betrayal do not want to see it, they can't, they are blind and deaf, and maybe they become accomplices in this surreal sham to deny reality, waving as a bogeyman and as the only alternative to this toxic love that keeps us bound and wears us down the black world of a right-wing that frankly doesn't scare anyone anymore. As in, a symbolic husband we have to have, a male ideology to refer to, to which we attach ourselves for life and to which we devote our best energies.
E if instead we tried to be on our own? To take our children, our things, our world and 'spiral away', as Mary Daly used to say? Is it so bad among the rest of us? Loose of bonds, free, breathing?
Anna Perenna
