The Dialectic of Sex: A Poem for Valentine’s Day
by Michael Novick
I was at this camp
with a bunch of mostly straight Marxists
and I woke up
in the middle of the night
because I
heard a couple fucking.
The man would grunt and groan,
and the woman wail and moan.
I thought of Shulamith Firestone,
who expressed socialism
as technology liberating man from work
and feminism as technology
liberating woman from child-bearing —
restoring Eden:
lifting the curse
of the casting from the Garden,
freeing Eve from pain
and Adam from travail.
I wonder. Will there then be
a heterosexuality
in which women grunt and strain,
and men pant and wail?
Michael Novick is a staffer on Change Links, editor/publisher of Turning The Tide/Journal of Inter-communal Solidarity from Anti-Racist Action-LA/People Against Racist Terror (see httpss://www.antiracist.org) and a member of the Local Station Board of KPFK. He’s a retired teacher and member of United Teachers Los Angeles. If you have never read the late Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, it’s worth your consideration. Also look for these critical appreciations and analyses of that germinal text on women’s liberation from an early socialist-feminist perspective: