Oh, I can sense some people’s blood pressure rising already.
RAW (as his name is popularly acronymized), what a forward thinker! He broke down what was imprinted on his psyche by society and religion and encouraged others to do the same: Just listen to what his fans say:
“With all the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously question any and all thoughts they hold dear.”
“His book Prometheus Rising melded model agnosticism to Leary’s 8-circuit model of the brain to create a system that taught people how to deconstruct dogmatic personal belief systems.”
“Written during 1968-69 by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, at that time both editors at Playboy, the Illuminatus trilogy has gone on to become one of the great classics of the last decade.”
“In conversation, you realised how liberating his brand of agnosticism is. By not believing in anything he was free to examine everything.”
“Wilson, I think I can say without doubt, was to me, one of the most influential and positive authors and thinkers, his ideas about what we as a species are capable of opened many doors that I would not otherwise have known existed, and put new light and a new way of perceiving on a few that I knew about already.”
Wow! Sounds like a really sharp guy, who would totally subvert the dominant paradigm whenever possible, and with his knife-sharp wit tear apart all aspects of dogma and illogical human behavior, including, you know, the patriarchy and its constant, soul-wearying oppression of women? Especially since his wife was in the women’s liberation movement at the time he was just beginning to write all these ground-breaking books and he could not possibly have escaped learning about the misery and pain the patriarchy causes women?
Let’s look through RAW’s most popular work, Illuminatus, shall we, to see what a dynamic, fresh, and interesting view he had of women, of how fully human he viewed them in comparison to men.
*ruffles through* Well of the cast of characters so far, one has to get to page 20 before you even find a woman with a speaking line. She is a very young woman married to a much older man, who, it is explained, “rescued” her from the miserable hell of prostitution and drug abuse. This “rescue” apparently has made her so grateful she spends her days lying around being his willing, adoring sex toy.
About 25 pages later is a brief flashback scene with a woman in it who is completely enamored with one of the heroes of the novel for “giving” her this really awesome orgasm. They go on for several paragraphs about the totally awesome spiritual, mind-blowing effects having sex with him had on her.
Next begins a several page long conversation between a woman and the man who pimps her out. She clearly loathes him, her inner monologue reveals he beats her and she thinks he is disgusting.
Next women are mentioned only by reference to their marriages to world leaders in a paragraph he repeats three times, for comic effect, describing the world leaders of three different nations (the implication being that such men are all the same, no matter what culture they come from.) Aside from describing their alpha male tendencies and ages, he feels compelled to say of these men “although he had been impotent with his wife for ten years now, he generally achieved orgasm in the mouth of a skilled prostitute within 1.5 minutes.”
The first of the ten chapters closes with another brief flashback to the woman mentioned earlier, who is still going on about how great it was to be borked by the hero.
And then – suddenly and without warning – we find a woman in the second chapter who is not totally defined by her relationship with men! A woman of color even, her inner monologue portraying her having deep, subversive, compelling thoughts and… oh wait… then she begins waxing poetical about “her man”, a white man no less, whom she has just heard is dead, and how great it was when they had sex, and how hard life was for him since white men have no tribe and are therefore all lonely and crazy, and how special she felt that he deigned to pick her, a lowly brown woman, to “love”.
Next we see a young schoolteacher who is held up as an example of the oppressiveness of society when she is shown to be ignorant by a young, white, male student.
Next we find an ultra-repressed uber-Christian right wing woman, who, it is pointed out to us, simultaneously holds the same beliefs as the “orthodox feminists” that “male supremacy and orgasms” are both part of a conspiracy. In fact her ultra-right wing terrorist organization was founded as an offshoot of women’s lib, with a mission based totally around destroying adult bookstores AND sex education programs, because, you know, those are TOTALLY the same thing.
Some pages later we find a woman ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING. She breaks a rather pathetic young stoned man out of jail, using explosives and guns, as part of a mission for some strange society of which she is a member. Shortly after they reach safety she begins to – what else? – aggressively come on to him, even though she doesn’t think he’s good enough for her. She argues with him, hits him, and gives him a blow job.
We go back to the ultra-right wing woman whom, it is revealed, is desperate to find a way to have an orgasm. This is, it is implied, behind her nasty, hateful, anti-sex politics. She reminicses about the one time she nearly did have an orgasm – while being rather coldly and harshly screwed by a mean old man. Thus ends the second chapter.
Toward the begining of the third chapter is a bit character, a female librarian, who is confused by the vast conspiracy that is the point of the book. She in musing how awful some of the occult books she comes across are because there are people having SEX inside. I mean, YUCK. Because librarian women are all, as we know, repressed and repelled by sex.
No women appear except in passing conversation for a while, then we have a satanic ritual in which a woman – young, red haired, and conventionally considered sexy – is being used as an altar and must lie there waiting for whoever gets chosen to have sex with her. Of course she becomes very excited under the clumsy, inexpert fumblings of the young man chosen to do so.
Skip forward to the end of the chapter where a white, British man is lying in bed with his dark-skinned, south American lover and she is explaining some local native deities to him. He gets up to go into the next room and comes back to find her lying dead with her throat cut.
This is just a third of the way through the book.
Does it get any better?
No.
These are the women in RAW’s “masterpiece”. A young woman rescued from prostitution by an old man and who now shows her appreciation by being sexually ready for him at all times; the girlfriend of a counter-culture hero who talks only about how wonderfully he’s expanded her horizons by having sex with her; a whore who is portrayed as a bitter, sullen victim; wives of important men who are either boring or ugly and can’t even get them aroused enough to have sex; “skilled” prostitutes who can make world leaders have orgasms in a fairly short amount of time; a woman of color who loves a white man and feels lucky to have been “chosen” by him from her lowly position in the world even as she feels sorry for the burdens he carries by virtue of being a white man; a clueless, ignorant schoolteacher keeping down a deserving young white man; a repressed, frigid right-wing woman who surely would relax her politics if any man was bold enough to properly rape her into an orgasm; a cool, radical woman who aligns herself with the counter culture and who therefore (of course!) wants sex so much she practically FORCES it on young men around her; a repressed librarian; a woman who doesn’t even speak, being used merely as a sexual tool by satanists; and a dark-skinned woman who explains things to the poor ignorant white male lover, only to end up with her throat slit to help advance the plot.
This is what passes, even today, in the “counter-culture”, as a liberatory, ground-breaking, mind-blowing masterpiece. All my “cool” libertarian, alternative friends were horrified when they heard that poor RAW was going broke from medical bills at the end of his life and they roused themselves to donate to his family, a collective effort so great that on his website he and his family effusively thanked his fans for their generosity.
RAW died about the same time Andrea Dworkin died. Was her illness widely publicized? Were her medical bills talked about on a public website, prompting people who loved her writings to appeal to compassion for this groundbreaking writer of masterpieces and give just a little bit to help her out in her dying days? Did anyone in the “counter culture” express sympathy or concern for her pain?
No. It was with sickening frequency I saw these same people CELEBRATING her death. Overjoyed that the bitch, the cunt, the harpy was dead. Celebrating what a great world we would live in now that one of the old guard sex-hating feminists had finally had her inconvenient voice silenced by death.
And that is the kind of human compassion, open-mindedness, and freedom from dogma he and followers of his “liberatory” philosophy have.