Who Wants to be Monogamous?

by Sandra Lahire

Dear Spare Rib,

About the December issue:- Monogamy and genital fixations deny ourselves and our creative powers as women. Precious energy is drained from us when we put so much ingenuity into keeping partners to ourselves, low to stave off the fear of “losing” your mate to someone else, how to make yourself helpless in certain respects so that your mate can feel needed  —  it’s all a charade. Animals don’t waste their lives in this way.

We learn that Man is a toolmaker. What a shame that we cannot liberate ourselves from our obsession with contraceptive tubes and dutch caps and penetration. Yes, there were four pages used up on a story called “The Apparatus” which indulged in pseudo-Plath phrases and tired clichés like the spermrugger players on the wet field. Let us take possession of our fantasy worlds and dispel the stinking air of Freud. Only when we move constantly between different friends “helping, listening and hugging” as Veronica Attlotod says in her letter, can we have sensuous games with our whole bodies and selves.

In “The Apparatus” there is no play, not even inspiring word-play. We are locked in some no-woman’s land with spermicide on the bedside table. No hope that the woman has books there, or that she could enjoy painting her life in her own colours, or cooking for the joy to her palette. Her only sensuous outlet is the secret, seedy little genital ordeal between the sheets. The drawings were dreadful and rigid, like sex-shop toys  —  phallus candles and pathetic female dolls which are pencil sharpeners.

I even resent the biology diagram with labels and arrows to parts of me that are alive and pulsing with blood and energy. I mean the “female pelvic organs (side view)” from Our Bodies, Ourselves. It is not ourselves.

But Veronica’s letter warms me. With concern, Sandra Lahire

Published in the “lots more letters” section of Spare Rib, February 1983.