[This unsigned letter refers, we assume, to last month’s Interview with Swami Muktnananda. Its spirit is gratefully acknowledged. We’ve come across yet another passage that illuminates the matter. From Bubba Free John’s Method of the Siddhas:
The dreamer thinks the Guru must look certain ways, say and do certain things, have certain magic powers . . . But the Guru is always performing the awakening act, putting an end to the dream. Therefore, he doesn’t satisfy the seeker. Those that come to be satisfied are offended.]
Ms. Parker failed to take my meaning literally, as I intended. “A cunt with teeth” is exactly what I had in mind — “cunt” not as a synonym for “female,” but as the most beautiful and earthy description I know for what the biologists slanderously call the female reproductive organ. Does that make me a prick? Or may I, even in the new society to which Ms. Parker intends to march me, allow my imagination to slide, thrust, sputter, and bravely continue? What limp desserts shall we otherwise earn — to be assholes, each and every one?
My utmost for your highest!
Your recent article on Oral Health is one of the finest I have read anywhere. I say this not because of the much too generous print you gave to me, but because of the excellent way you have researched and handled the material. I assure you that you are giving your people the TRUTH and that your readers should be most grateful.
Thank you again for your perfect work. All your readers who suffer from dental disease should be grateful for your contribution on their behalf.
“As man becomes spiritually awakened he recognizes that any external inharmony is the correspondence of mental inharmony. If he stumbles or falls, he may know he is stumbling or falling in consciousness.
“One day a student was walking along the street condemning someone in her thoughts. She was saying, mentally, ‘That woman is the most disagreeable woman on earth,’ when suddenly three boy scouts rushed around the corner and almost knocked her over. She did not condemn the boy scouts, but immediately called on the law of forgiveness, and ‘saluted the divinity’ in the woman.”
A friend of a friend sent a couple of issues of your magazine to the Movement for a New Society office for us to look at. I am a writer and am interested in Greensboro and that area of the country, so I read through one issue (March ’76).
I liked the variety of articles, poems, and stories in the magazine. But, I was almost stopped at page one by the inclusion of a letter describing the New Age as “a cunt with teeth.” Obviously, you did not yourselves write this, but to include such a degrading phrase (degrading to women, of course) I think is inexcusable. If we are moving toward “another” society which sees women as people, not objects, mustn’t we actively counter sexist attitudes and values now? Specifically, we must refuse to continue the objectification of women into “cunts.” We must stop referring to things we see as negative as woman-like, female (“bitch”) or parts of women (“cunts”).
This first shock to my consciousness prompted me to read the rest of the magazine with an eye to how many women — as opposed to men were represented in your magazine. It was a bit difficult to identify some of the names, but it looks as though there was substantially more male than female content.
I strongly urge you to be sensitive in the future to the fundamental conditioning we are all fighting.
Toward an egalitarian society.
PS — Or at least couldn’t you have put in an editor’s note about that person’s phrasing????????