So how was everybody's blue moon?

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cBIVabiuR0]

Shulamith Firestone was the sort of person who arrives but once in a blue moon. A rebel and a rowdy, an articulate and effective revolutionary, a frustrated-cum-far-seeing visionary, a bold and brash and truly gifted writer.

Incarnated into a world where, when in 1967 she and other women coalesced into a women's caucus at a Very Serious anti-war/civil-rights "lefty" confab sponsored by the National Conference for New Politics, they were told that their resolution (for equitable marital and property laws, "complete control by women of their own bodies," etc.) was not important enough for floor discussion. (Dismissed and discarded, these women, as purveyors of lilliputian "identity politics," we shall presume.)

When Firestone and four other women then surged onto the stage—sorta like BLM at 2015 NN—National Conference for New Politics Director Willam F. Pepper literally patted Firestone on the head, and said: "Cool down, little girl. We have more important things to talk about here than women's problems."

And that was pretty much it, for Firestone, with the establishment "left."

A bigger, public break came in 1969, when Firestone and other women were again given the back of the left male hand—and worse—at the "new left's" Counter-Inaugural to Richard Nixon's swearing-in. Firestone there never made it to the stage, because the woman preceding her, Marilyn Webb, was howled down with cries of "Take her off the stage and fuck her!," "Fuck her down a dark alley!," and other pleasantries.

Ten days later, Firestone published in the New York radical weekly the Guardian, an open letter which said, among other things:

We have more important things to do than to try to get you to come around. You will come around when you have to, because you need us more than we need you. . . . The message being: Fuck off, left. You can examine your navel by yourself from now on. We’re starting our own movement.

Firestone then went on to found what was known, back in the day, as "radical feminism." Creating, with Ellen Willis, the Redstockings. As well as New York Radical Women, the New York Radical Feminists, etc. All outfits that bloomed vigorously for a time. Before they succumbed to the late-60s/early-70s penchant among radical political groupings for voraciously eating their own. Meanwhile her periodicals Notes From The First Year, Notes From The Second Year, and Notes From The Third Year introduced into the collective consciousness such truths as "the personal is political" and "the myth of the vaginal orgasm."

She was quite creative:

In March 1969 Firestone organized the nation's first abortion speak-out, at Judson Memorial Church, on Washington Square. She persuaded twelve women to talk about experiences that were then regarded as shameful secrets: contraceptive devices that failed, back-alley operations, the anguish of giving up a baby for adoption . . . [T]he groups that Firestone had founded, and a host of offshoots, were making headlines with confrontational protests and street theatre. They disrupted state abortion-law hearings in Albany; occupied restaurants that wouldn't serve "unescorted" women; conducted a "Burial of Traditional Womanhood," in Arlington National Cemetery (the deceased wore curlers); released dozens of white mice to wreak havoc at a bridal fair at Madison Square Garden; held an "ogle-in" on Wall Street, to dole out some payback to leering men; and, most notorious, hurled brassieres, high heels, pots and pans, copies of Playboy, and other "instruments of female torture" into a Freedom Trash Can at the Miss America pageant, in Atlantic City.

In 1970 Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex, a book that transforms lives to this day, one that, correctly, identified where both Marx and Freud got it wrong, and then, kindly, worked to salvage them, even as it transcended them.

"Marx was on to something more profound than he knew," Firestone wrote, "when he observed that the family contained within itself in embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the society and state."

Firestone observed, correctly, that Marx and Freud had "not carried their analyses far enough. Marx and Engels had failed to recognize that what [Firestone] called sex-class—the domination of men over women rooted in biology—both provided the model for, and offered additional support to, domination by economic class as well as by race. She drew on Freud to argue that sexual repression was at the root of sociocultural malaise, and insisted that the true emancipation of women would require both an end to sexual repression and the emancipation of children."

Kate Millett, whose book Sexual Politics appeared in the same year as Dialectic, said: "I was taking on the obvious male chauvinists. Shulie was taking on the whole ball of wax. What she was doing was much more dangerous."

Even before Firestone's book was published, it began seriously and permanently re-directing minds—at William Morrow, Dialectic's publisher:

Meanwhile, Dialectic was stoking a small revolution at the Morrow offices. The female employees began asking questions: Why were all the secretaries and publicists women? Why were the few female editors underpaid? "We started having lunchtime meetings behind closed doors," Sara Pyle, an assistant in the publicity department at the time, told me. "We all stopped wearing our little heels and skirts." What made the women at Morrow "go a bit nuts," Pyle said, was the book's unvarnished radicalism. "Firestone took Marx further and put women in the picture," she said. "This was our oppression, all laid out." And not just women's oppression. The book's longest chapter, "Down with Childhood," chronicled the ways that children's lives had become constrained and regulated in modern society. "With the increase and exaggeration of children's dependence, woman's bondage to motherhood was also extended to its limits," Firestone wrote. "Women and children were now in the same lousy boat."

The liberator for Firestone was the right to be loved for oneself, not as part of a patronage system "to pass on power and privilege." She was trying to imagine a "home" where "all relationships would be based on love alone," a world, to quote the last words of the book, that allows "love to flow unimpeded."

"Love to flow unimpeded." The woman a wellspring of Eros. Who meanwhile urged the urgent necessity of permanently retiring sex roles, procreative sex, gender, childhood, childbirth, monogamy, the nuclear family, capitalism, government.

"Instead of beauty and power occasionally," Firestone saw. "I want to achieve a world where it's there all the time, in every word and every brushstroke, and not just now and then."

Clearly, with an agenda like that, she could not hope to achieve it in her lifetime—particulary when stuck amuck a shiveringly retrovert ur-time/ur-place where such honored foghorns of the "left" as Stokely Carmichael were out there smugly braying that "the only position for women [in the movement] is prone."

So, shortly after the publication of Dialectic, Firestone withdrew from any and all semblance of "politics." And returned to painting.

And, in the fullness of time, and while still in her 20s, succumbed to schizophrenia. Where she remained for the rest of her life, until her death, at age 67, in August of 2012.

She wrote a book from it, Airless Spaces, published in 1998, and it is as clear and as aching and as important as Dialectic:

She could not read. She could not write. She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLBjtP9galg]

This is probably the best of the more compact tellings of Firestone's story. It is no hagiography, as Firestone was no hagio. (To wit: "Firestone ran afoul of [] egalitarianism. She was impatient with 'scut work,' her former comrades recall; she 'refused to collate,' and 'wouldn’t type.' The author and former Ms. editor Robin Morgan still sounds annoyed when she talks about the time that a few of the women decided to clean a meeting space, and Firestone said, 'I'm an intellectual—I don't sweep floors.'") And, I think, the primary reason I'm bringing this old, dead, radical, near-forgotten woman to yer-all's attention this morning, is that, in recently re-reading that piece, I was struck, hard, by this extended passage:

In 1970, in a contribution to Notes from the Second Year, titled "Woman and Her Mind," Meredith Tax argued that the condition of women constituted a state of "female schizophrenia"—a realm of unreality where a woman either belonged to a man or was "nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void with no work to do and no felt identity at all." By mid-century, Elaine Showalter noted, in The Female Malady, scores of literary and journalistic works had defined schizophrenia as a "bitter metaphor" for the "cultural situation" of women. It was this state of affairs that the radical feminists had set out to change, only to find themselves doubly alienated. The first alienation was a by-product of their political vision: radical insight can resemble the mind-set described by the clinical psychologist Louis Sass, in Madness and Modernism, when he wrote that the schizophrenic is "acutely aware of the inauthenticities and compromises of normal social existence." The second alienation was tragic: alienation from one another.

Medical researchers have long puzzled over schizophrenia's late emergence (it was first diagnosed in 1911, in Switzerland) and its prevalence in the industrial world, where the illness is degenerative and permanent. (In "primitive" societies, when it exists at all, it is typically a passing malady.) In 2005, when Jean-Paul Selten and Elizabeth Cantor-Graae, experts on the epidemiology of schizophrenia, reviewed various risk factors—foremost among them migration, racism, and urban upbringing—they found that the factors all involved chronic isolation and loneliness, a condition that they called "social defeat." They theorized that "social support protects against the development of schizophrenia."

The second-wave feminists had hoped to alleviate this isolation through the refuge of sisterhood. "We were like pioneers who'd left the Old Country," Phyllis Chesler, a feminist psychologist and the author of Women and Madness, told me. "And we had nowhere to go back to. We had only each other." That is, until the movement's collapse. Last fall, as I interviewed New York's founding radical feminists, the stories of "social defeat" mounted: painful solitude, poverty, infirmity, mental illness, and even homelessness. In a 1998 essay, "The Feminist Time Forgot," Kate Millett lamented the lengthening list of her sisters who had "disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion or vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale," or who fell into "despairs that could only end in death." She noted the suicides of Ellen Frankfort, the author of Vaginal Politics, and Elizabeth Fisher, the founder of Aphra, the first feminist literary journal. "We haven't helped each other much," Millett concluded. We "haven't been able to build solidly enough to have created community or safety."

I think there may be something to the notion that "radical insight can resemble the mind-set described by the clinical psychologist Louis Sass . . . when he wrote that the schizophrenic is 'acutely aware of the inauthenticities and compromises of normal social existence." And that those with radical insight can likewise be subject to "social defeat."

And I know that these here intertubes cannot surmount the latter. For, as the wizard Werner Herzog has, correctly, wisely, observed:

[T]he more technical instruments, the more instruments of communication we have—and we have the cell phones and e-mail and radio and television and whatever, interactive this and cyberspace that—the more instruments we have, and the more we use them, the more solitary we become. And I'm speaking solitary in a deep human way. We are not isolated, but we are deeply, deeply solitary. And the huge explosive evolution of tools of communication makes us more lonesome than we have been ever before.

And an interesting study came out recently about lonesome people.

One long-held theory has been that people become socially isolated because of their poor social skills—and, presumably, as they spend more time alone, the few skills they do have start to erode from lack of use. But new research suggests that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the socially isolated. Lonely people do understand social skills, and often outperform the non-lonely when asked to demonstrate that understanding. It’s just that when they’re in situations when they need those skills the most, they choke.

Choking in social situations can of course be obviated by living among, and imbuing the lessons of, cats.

For cats are intensely social creatures. With very involved and intricate relationships. Anyone who really knows cats knows this. And so they are good practice, cats, before a human goes out to bumblingly, accidentally, Clouseau-like, spill drinks on other humans, in social situations.

Cats get such bad press. Why is this? Beats me.

For instance, cats are, in truth, extremely loving and affectionate creatures. It is just that, if the love and affection is not returned, their little hearts can very easily break. And do not so easily mend.

And it is then that they become "aloof." "Stand-offish."

But that is not what a cat is. That is what a human did, to a cat.

Kinda just like sorta what humans do, with and to each other.

There is such an enormous mountain of bollocks out there about cats. But, fortunately, more and more of these false and necrotic bollocks, they are being satisfyingly snipped, with—yea, verily—each passing day.

As the always-at-least-a-day-behind Science Men, they have recently quantified how cats wish to be petted. And also sussed out what cats mean when they speak.

This is a good start.

Next the Science Men will need to understand that cats are tool-using animals. A designation dull-witted Science Men currently confer only upon chimps and (just fairly recently) corvids. Cats, however, are fully capable of using tools, and will do so whenever it suits them. I have known this for years, and will here provide photographic proof. Below is a series of images depicting a cat of my acquaintance using his teeth and hands to do what I do in raising a latch to open a window. This cat decided that I should not solely be in charge of when he comes and goes: he should be in charge of that himself. And so, he took charge.

This same cat is also not bound by what humans think of as "space" and "time." And for this—yes—there is also photographic proof. Below are two images documenting the extreme and unnatural googlyness of this animal's eyes. As can clearly be seen, he is able to project these orbs into wherever, and whenever, he so wishes.

This is, indeed, at first, unnerving. But—trust me—one can get used to it.

You can even, if you become cat enough, mimic such otherness. Below, for instance, is my hand, transparent. This is not supposed to happen. In this universe. But it does. And: behold: photographic proof.

Heretofore no one has been exposed to any of this astounding mind-bendingness. Because we cats prefer to remain private. We are not the least bit interested in going on YouTube or Morning Joe. Our sort of wonderment, it is really not any other muggerbugger's business. "Things," as Heraclitus—a documented cat—said, "keep their secrets."

Now, of course, cats—like Shulamith Firestone—are far from without sin.

Take, for instance, that thing where a cat moves to gracefully leap from the floor to a table. But somehow misses. And flails awkwardly to the ground. The cat then immediately and powerfully transmits to all and every that this boner never in fact occurred. It was not embarrassing; no one can laugh. And the cat begins vigorously washing its fur with its tongue. This is known in Science Men-land as "displacement behavior." And the cat then wanders off, to find another cat, to cuff in the face.

The human equivalent of this behavior is how and why humans engage in Wrong acts ranging from stupid petty domestic quarrels, to thermonuclear wars.

And then there are the Science Men who claim cats infect humans with schizophrenia. It's always something . . . .

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs7X3Jk5KOc]