Out of This World: A fictionalized true-life adventure

This is a [[book Review by Joy Wood of Sonia Johnson and Jade DeForest’s “Out of This World: A fictionalized true-life adventure” (1993) ISBN 1-877617-10-5

Sonia Johnson was born into a Mormon family in Utah, and practised and lived as a Mormon until she was excommunicated in her early forties for being uppity. She fought to have the ERA ratified, ran for President, had a lesbian relationship, set up and lived in the Wildfire community and wrote four books about her experiences. “Out of This World” is her fifth book and this time she wrote with her lover Jade DeForest (and be advised the word ‘lover’ is defined differently by them) about their lives after the community disbanded and the pair continued to live at Wildfire. The main theme of this book is the sadomasochism of everyday life in this 5,000-year-old (p2) patriarchal society in which we live. Johnson and DeForest wanted not only to understand but to overcome the difficulties which had made Wildfire and all the other feminist communities fail. As Johnson put it in 1982, “I want to change the world” (p1)

Johnson no longer wished to put her energy into trying to change the patriarchal system (p2-3). Rather, she wanted to ‘remember’ a time before that system came into effect and put her energy into recovering that way of living. “To me, that doesn’t feel like dropping out; it feels like finally dropping in – to the only thing that matters.” (p3) To Johnson, “protesting, voting, marching, resisting…[are] worse than useless, they’re dangerous. They actually promote what it is we’re fighting against. They’re collaborative” (p20) and DeForest adds, “power and control are antithetical…the message we give when we protest, not just to the guys in control but to ourselves as well, is that they’re strong and we’re weak – just the opposite of what we think we’re saying. The very act of protesting is an admission that we accept the myth of their power, of their right to be in charge. It’s bowing to their assumptions.” (p21)

DeForest claims that, “the prognosis for women’s communities is poor because it isn’t enough to get…out of [the patriarchal] system. To succeed, we have to get [the patriarchal] system out of us. And we haven’t.” (p4) She explains that her and Johnson want, “total anarchy, wildness, and freedom – what we’re doing at Wildfire is examining our every thought and act for evidences of sadomasochism; that is, for the need to control and for the feeling of well-being – the rush – we get from doing it. What we’ve discovered is that almost everything we think or do is underwritten by s/m, down to the tiniest, most seemingly insignificant.” (p4) She continues, “Women say they know that before communities can succeed everyone needs to do a huge interior clean-up: toss out addictions, attachment to…institutions, incest trauma, self-hatred, and the victim mentality that prevents so many of us from taking strong hold of our lives. But too few realise that in the end, what this all boils down to is getting rid of the need to control and be controlled – the universal sadomasochistic pattern of human life.” (p4)

Johnson agrees, “Even though I was writing a book on relationships, I watched myself doing Ship behavior with everyone there [ie caring for the ‘relationShip’ rather than the actual people within that entity, as if it were a real person rather than an idea]…..I think communities fail because everyone’s doing relationships with everyone else all the time: making rules and commitments, compromising, having expectations, making assumptions, being passive aggressive, doing things to get others’ approval or attention…..One thing we know about relationships: they fall apart. Since communities are great pots of seething relationshipness, they fall apart, again and again. And they’ll continue to until women figure out for themselves the standard equation: patriarchy = sex = relationships = sadomasochism = control = nonfreedom = destruction.” (p4-5) “Relationships make intimacy impossible, their very nature demands lies and pretense…..the excitation of the chase, the seduction, and the capture; the excitation of the daily conquest and defeat; the sadomasochistic pleasures of dependence, of owning someone else’s body, time, energy, and attention, of desires to control or to rescue, or to be controlled or rescued; the illusion of belonging, of being secure, of being accepted; jealousy, resentment, and vengefulness that makes us feel ‘alive’ in the time-honored s/m mode…..[this is] how it turns out for every one of us, whether we have the courage to face it or not: ownership, bondage, loss of self, anesthesia, boredom, jealousy, heartache. Vastest, deepest, most miserable sadomasochism.” (p24-25) Needless to say this is not the type of love Johnson means when she refers to her friends as ‘lovers’. Johnson also says, “group decisions don’t work. First, there’s no way to make them that pleases everyone. That leads to the second: someone always has to compromise, and compromise inevitably causes resentment. Third, group decisions keep us from knowing what we each individually want. Fourth, they keep us from taking personal responsibility for getting it…..When there are no group decisions, each one of us has to take personal responsibility for getting what we want…..Consensus doesn’t work either, at least not among women who are trying to be non-hierarchical because it always happens that some women’s opinions are valued above others. It also implies that a decision must be made, and decision-making assumes linear time and the necessity of control. All this is sadomasochistic/sexual/patriarchal stuff. We can stay out of sadomasochism only by doing what we want…..If we simply hold out, a third…fourth, a fifth a sixth, or more [option will present itself.]” (p33-34) “[T]he women’s movement isn’t about women’s winning equal rights or equal pay or important corporate and government positions; all that does is prove that women can pass as men…..what’s going to make the only significant difference is women’s changing how we feel about ourselves, returning to the knowledge and love of ourselves and one another that predates the advent of [patriarchy.]” (p37) Johnson asserts that all transactions in patriarchy are controlling. She wants “peerness” (p59) not hierarchy and she and DeForest devise experiments to try to get out of their patriarchal minds. One set of experiments involved touch. DeForest’s Hopi friend Chenoa had often touched herself and her friends and when Chenoa had touched DeForest the latter had sometimes felt uncomfortable (p61-62). Johnson posited that that was because in our society “anything more than a little hug or peck on the cheek is sex,” (p60) and “Every touch has its price. It’s never free…..if we refuse to barter…we won’t ever get touched…..Touch in [patriarchy] is exploitative and dishonest. So of course we can’t find real intimacy through it. Intimacy requires integrity, and there is no integrity in sex because it’s conditional, because it’s never honest, because it means everything but itself.” (p63-64) Johnson and DeForest decided instead that if they felt like touching, they would, with no expectation or obligation and if the other didn’t want to be touched it was up to her so say so. This was one way they could practice not conforming to patriarchy whilst not missing out on touch but not having to do sex. They would do it because it felt good to them and not because they wanted anything from the other person. Johnson explains to DeForest, “A perfect example of unconditional touch going on here…I love petting this dog. I could do it for hours and hours, almost indefinitely. Because it’s safe. Because I know she doesn’t think I’m coming on to her. Because I know she isn’t going to try to do sex with me. There’s infinite freedom in that knowledge.” (p83) ‘”No woman fears touch,” Chenoa said. “She fears what it might mean: sex, abuse, pain, manipulation.”’ (p85) Says Johnson “[S]ex and relationships [are] at the core of most women’s misery…if they’re so natural, why can’t we do them?…..What would we do without them – not just romantic ones, but relationships with parents and siblings and children as well? Since the whole social organization of planet earth is based on relationships, I realized that the world as we have come to know it would totally disappear. And though I wanted patriarchy gone, I wasn’t at all sure that if it went, there would be anything left.” (p100) Doing sex in patriarchy according to DeForest and Johnson means “Hierarchy, competition, comparison, exchange – all that” (p104) so for their second experiment they incorporated touching all over, into their touching experiments, because otherwise they’d be accepting the mainstream definition of sex if they treated certain parts of their body as only for sex (p92-93).

Another ongoing experiment they tried was to be kind to themselves when they made a mistake, “We all come down hard on ourselves. When we make mistakes, it would do us good to tell ourselves, ‘You’re so adorable!’ instead of flogging ourselves to death.” (p73) Shame was another thing they tackled, particularly about the body, eg bodily functions (p30, p121, p234, p241, p248, p251-254, 271), the appearance of the body (p269) eg body hair (p225), breast (p229) and vulva (p271) and anus (p272, p292) and body (p334) size and shape, and shame about behaviour (p237, p327, p328-330) and status (p237, 242)

Gift economy was something they also thought would help them live outside of the patriarchal mindset (p145-147). Johnson divorced her four children so that she could break the relationships she had with them (p164-175) She believes the mother-child relationship is “[c]ompletely and unavoidably hierarchical, slavery for everybody. Parents ‘own’ their children and in turn are ‘owned’ by them: my kids, my mom, my dad. Owning other human beings, being owned – this is physical, spiritual, ethical, emotional slavery.” (p165) “We take on our kid’s burdens, and by doing so , lower the quality of our own lives and make users of them. Without meaning to, of course. I’m not blaming anyone – us or them. It’s the institution of motherhood that forces us into this behaviour.” (p175) Johnson believes that before patriarchy appeared, there were no families “nothing was ever relational, ever dependent upon anything or anyone else, always only itself, having complete power and integrity in itself. Since we did not ‘relate’ – meaning we were constitutionally unable even to conceive of sadomasochism/hierarchy/sex – an idea such as family would have been meaningless…..To think of another person as ‘ours’ would have been so alien that we couldn’t have understood it. Children born to any of us…belonged to no one. They were absolutely free from birth…children were only cared for by woman who wanted to do it, and not exclusively by those women who had given birth to them…..[W]hen there we are finally living in a world where no one has to do anything, where she does only what she wants, those jobs that are now considered mundane and dreary won’t be. When there is no coercion, no one ‘in charge’ telling us what we have to do, then…there will easily be dozens of women who want to care for a child. Because they have choices. And also because the children will be very different.” (p176) [And here, I am reminded of Jean Liedloff’s Continuum Concept – JW] “There is no frazzled mother to make you feel as if you’ve done something wrong by needing her attention. No woman ever attending to you out of feelings of guilt or responsibility because, outside of relationships and sadomasochism, such concepts and feelings can’t exist.” (p177) “Love and freedom are inextricable. So we haven’t loved anyone, including ourselves, during our 5,000 years of captivity. We’ve felt pity, need for approval, responsibility, kindness, caring, dependency, jealousy, fear of loss – all kinds of feelings patriarchy has taught us to call love. But never love, not since [patriarchy began.]” (p177) Johnson defines “sex as sadomasochism…meaning that it occurs everywhere, not just in the bedroom between consenting adults. Sex is hierarchy, someone on top, someone on the bottom. This happens in business, in government, in education, in all relationships.” (190) So another experiment DeForest and Johnson did often was “trapping and exposing” their sadomasochistic thoughts. (p199) They catch themselves in the act of “figuring out ways to occupy either top or bottom – both places have their unique satisfactions” (p199) and their aim is to weed out hierarchy, passive aggression (p200) and one-up-man-ship. Every little example helps them recognise it the next time it happens, “The little things add up to be us. The only way we know to feel good about ourselves is in comparison with, at the expense of, someone else.” (p200) They are learning to ask for what they want up front instead of in a devious way. (p200-201)

People go into therapy in order to make their relationships work but ‘relationshipping’ is the problem (p256-257). If I’m upset and I tell you about it, “If we were just talking about it…you’d listen to me but you wouldn’t feel guilty, or responsible for my feelings, and wouldn’t think you had to do something about them. Since I’d know you weren’t going to take my problem on, I’d take responsibility for solving it and talk only about what I myself could do…..Your treating me like a competent adult would help me to be one.” (p257) Johnson and DeForest were shocked by the ubiquity of faking in sex and relationships, “Faking of any kind of enjoyment – of meals she prepares or movies we see together or each other’s parents or children or friends or pets – destroys closeness. Relationships demand that we fake, all the time. Sex demands that we fake all the time. That’s the only condition upon which we can have either of them. That’s why I state unequivocally that sex and intimacy, relationships and intimacy, are antithetical, that they can’t exist in the same place at the same time. Sex and relationships destroy intimacy.” (p257)

“Expectations are dangerous and destructive. They set us up for disappointment and failure, and they encourage us to try to control others. So we should expect nothing. But we should hope everything. Hope is pure positive energy with no strings attached, no control. So if I hope for something that I don’t get, there’s no disillusionment, no disappointment, no blame, no misery. I can live in hope every moment and be happy. I can’t live happily for a second with expectations. Expectations eat you up.” (p223)

Part of creating their own world is to give up any harmful substances and common allergenics: meat, caffeine, sugar and dairy products, processed foods, chemical additives (p31-32), alcohol (p306). DeForest had a patient once who “was a bacteriologist and had just completed a seven-year study. She had three groups of subjects: carnivores, lacto-ovo vegetarians…and vegans…..Her conclusion after seven years of testing the feces of people in these three groups was that whereas the feces of those in the first two groups always contained several forms of harmful bacteria, the feces of the vegans contained none. She concluded that any and all animal products are dangerous to human health.” (p274) The ‘treat’ to your body is to care for it. For example, using alcohol as a ‘treat’ is contradictory, “coping mechanisms like those are not harmless. They keep us from facing the truth, that our lives are intolerable. The hideousness of our lives is what we have to change.” (p307).

So much for a brief outline of the 355-page book and the ideas in it. I’d now like to put forward a few questions and topics for discussion.

On page 62, Johnson and DeForest are discussing touch and relationships. How women love to touch and be touched but in patriarchy, touch is always conditional, you’ll be able to obtain touch if you negotiate it, if you agree to have sex, or stay the night or get married. It occurs to me that teenagers are pushed into sex because once a child is past a certain age they are no longer encouraged to kiss and hug. Parents begin to tell their children that they’re too big for that sort of thing now, or boys are told it’s too sissy and girls, who can have very intense close relationships, are suddenly discouraged from holding hands, etc. Because of our conventions, just about the only way to obtain touch for a teenager is to have sex. They no longer have touch at home, or with their peers of the same sex. Adults are allowed to touch their children and cuddle them, small children are allowed to approach their parents too, but teenagers are left out in the cold. In our society small children might share a bed, but older children and adults no longer do, unless it is in a sexual encounter.

Johnson and DeForest point out that in our society not only certain behaviour is arbitrarily deemed sexual, but certain body parts, so even if you are allowed to touch, ie shake hands, certain parts of the body are off limits; again, excepting sexual encounters (p92-3).

Coral, a black friend of DeForest’s, said “we can talk racism until we piss pennies and we aren’t going to change one damned thing. It’s an inside job.” (p184) and Johnson agreed with her (p185). Coral said you can’t legislate against feelings; furthermore, if “I’m loving myself, then what you or anyone else thinks of me can’t affect me. And if I’m not, if I’m racist and sexist myself, then I’m going to think you’re racist and sexist no matter what you say or do. Since it’s inside me, my fighting something outside me – your bigotry – isn’t going to make any difference in my feelings. Except that the harder I try to change you, the madder I’ll get at you because I’ll still be feeling shitty. To put it simply, I can’t experience what isn’t already me.” (p185) I partly understand this, but somehow it smacks to me of blaming the victim. Blaming the victim is also what I think when I read Johnson strongly dismissing criticism of a therapist who had an affair with her patient (p338-339)

After reading this book I did realise that I feel scared and angry and humiliated a lot of the time, often to do with shame around bodily functions. I applaud Johnson and DeForest’s efforts to overcome shame, and the bravery and ingenuity they display in doing so with their experiments. However, sometimes I wonder if they are going too far, being abusive to themselves by making themselves go through such things. Are they just kidding themselves they are getting over shame, and maybe making themselves tougher and harder rather than overcoming it, in other words are they actually suffering it or inflicting it on themselves until they are numbed to it. I’m not sure. At one stage, they were trying to overcome their conditioned shame around urination, “[f]rom the time we’re infants we’re told that urine is dirty and dangerous, and we’re strongly discouraged from touching it or getting it on ourselves. It’s one of society’s strictest taboos.” (p171). DeForest used not to be able to use public toilets, even in her schooldays, but now she is over this. Their experiments involved “thinking of something about the body that was difficult to do, doing it, and then asking themselves what would be harder and doing that. Then, after they tried that, what would be even harder, and so on, until they were totally at ease with that particular part of the body or that bodily function.” (p271) They could now urinate in each other’s presence with no problem, and they had gradually got to the stage where they could watch the other one watching them urinate but, when asking themselves what would be a bigger challenge, on p271 they decide firstly to have someone touch their urine whilst they were urinating and then get into the shower together and urinate on each other. I wonder if this is necessary, is it going too far; is it, in their meaning of the word, “sex”? What puzzled me was that the hardest part for Jean was not that she would be urinated on, or would be urinating on her friend, but that she had read that some people find that highly arousing and she was afraid she might become sexually aroused while doing it. (p271-272) It seems to hinge around their realising that sex in patriarchal society is both very exploitative and ubiquitous whilst at the same time very limiting, in that only particular proscribed things are ‘recognised’ as sex but at the same time certain things are deemed sex whether individual people find them so or not. Limits are thereby put on human contact so that certain behaviours which could be comforting or friendly are arbitrarily now taboo except in a sexual context. After thinking further, in this particular experiment I think DeForest’s point was that because, in our society, urine is thought of as dirty and sex is thought of as naughty the two have become linked, where people will feel sexually aroused simply because they think they are doing something naughty or dirty. DeForest didn’t want to become sexually aroused only because she’s doing something supposedly shameful. She didn’t want shame to be the element that awakens or heightens her sexual excitement, as she’s aiming to dissolve her feelings of shame about the body and all its functions.

Another query I have is on p295 when they discuss inviting someone to lunch. DeForest and Johnson are explaining to their friend Clare that they don’t tell each other things like that because they are not in a relationship so they don’t need to check in with each other what they are doing. Clare says it’s simply politeness to inform someone you’re living with if you invite someone over, and I’m inclined to agree with Clare, particularly if the other person is the one who usually cooks. (cf p305 for DeForest and Johnson’s explanation.)

Another thing that I found contradictory were their discussions afterwards when DeForest lost her temper but it was not until the following day they were able to clear the air (p347-350). I felt that Johnson hadn’t been helpful. Johnson maintained she was not being hierarchical, not relationshipping, and DeForest fully agrees with her. I’m not convinced, however. It appears Johnson was trying to treat DeForest as an adult and allow DeForest to realise in her own time that she had been ‘acting the martyr’ and being passive aggressive but the previous night when DeForest had tried to make up without being up-front about it it had made Johnson feel sick. I wonder why she didn’t say so at the time, especially since earlier on they said they had been “doing an experiment to keep as aware as we can of when we try to control each other, when we use sadomasochism to feel better than someone else, to be on top. The instant we recognize it, we go right to the other and tell her about it. We talk about it, and somehow that takes some of the ‘oomph’ out of it. We’ve also agreed to point it out if we see the other doing it without awareness because recognizing it is absolutely necessary for ultimately getting rid of it.” (p284) Maybe they had decided in the meantime that they would trust the other person to realise when they were relationshipping without the other having to “point it out”. Nevertheless, I don’t see how DeForest could have known her manipulative actions were making Johnson feel sick without the latter telling her. Indeed, DeForest assumed on that occasion that Johnson was still angry about earlier events when she made no response whatsoever (favourable or not) to DeForest’s overtures.

In summary, is it a good idea to prioritise your own happiness and forget about other people’s or is it merely going to the other extreme? In other words, is thinking solely of our own wants merely a reaction against our current conditioning of always thinking of others before ourselves? After all, even if we persist in thinking we know what is best for someone else, we have to admit that people often get it wrong when they treat us that way! And is the whole idea of breaking our conditioning unrealistic, or is it worth working towards even if it can never be wholly achieved?

Further, getting rid of hierarchy in society, in personal relations, and particularly in the thoughts we have about both ourselves and others, will make us happier. As it was pointed out to me during the discussions at the Forum, however, a great deal of trust is needed for us to open up to others. To show vulnerability can lead to being open to reproach or even abuse, with your straightforward words and actions later being used against you.

Credit

• Joy Wood presented at the London Anarchist Forum Meeting Sat 28th April 2007 rampART Centre E1 London [1]