NEW YORK — On March 25, Gloria Steinem turns 91, which feels like as good an excuse as any to revisit one of those old New York blood feuds from back when public arguments still came printed on paper and smelled like ink, nicotine, and bad intentions.
In the early 1970s, Gloria was calling Al Goldstein a chauvinist and SCREW a filthy engine of female objectification, and Al, being Al, did not respond with a symposium, a white paper, or a wounded little statement from his publicist. He answered the way he always answered: loudly, crudely, and with all the tact of a brick through a church window.
In SCREW #210, dated March 12, 1973, that little war of words flowered into one of the paper’s most notorious counterpunches, the centerfold headlined “Pin the Cock on the Feminist.” Sure it was juvenile, mean, and vulgar, but it was pure old-school SCREW: not an argument so much as a dirty grenade rolled under the hem of the women’s movement. If you saw the FX series, Mrs. America, you caught the TV version of the feud. The real thing was uglier, funnier, and much more alive.
The caption read:
You know what’s behind all this Women’s Lib foolishness nowadays, right? Penis envy, that’s what. You don’t have to be some long-haired intellectual Jew like Freud or Jung to figure that out! All this talk about “equal” rights and “equal” opportunities for broads, it all just boils down to the simple fact that they want to be men. They want that six magic inches of schlong between their legs, and they’re so dissapointed they can’t have it, and men can’t give it to them, that they carry on caterwauling about male chauvinism and sexist “oppression” until it makes your ears hurt. They’re not satisfied any more with giving men handjobs and blowjobs, pretending just for a minute that they own that old shimmering staff, no, they want to dress in britches and hold down men’s jobs and make the kind of money men make, just so they can pretend like they’ve got cocks of their own.
Keeping this in mind, then, you’ll be doing the Ms. gang a real favor if you’ll cut out the cocks alongside the picture of old Gloria here, a flattering likeness, wouldn’t you say? and take turns trying to pin the thrilling things over her horrid gash. Just what she always wanted!
But of course, that’s not enough to keep this Women’s Lib fad from proliferating. It’s high time us men stopped sitting around listening to the likes of Gloria Steinem and Jill Johnston and Bella Abzug calling us a bunch of male chauvinists, and did something about it. Fuck ’em! Grab the nearest chick you find spouting that Women’s Lib horseshit, and give her a good dose of stiff dick. Give her the old whang-ola right where she squats and jazz her so full of spunk she won’t be able to piss for a week without crying out in mingled pain and ecstasy. Sit her down on a good length of flesh pipe, stuff her up to the gills with the old Tube Steak, she won’t be tail-assing around shooting off her mouth once she’s bit down on High John The Conqueror Root, no sir! Well-fucked women do not whore around a hell of a lot. Do the world a favor. Fuck a lady today.
SCREW #210 (March 12, 1973)
But here’s the part the tasteful retrospectives, prestige dramas, and professional myth-makers like to leave locked in the glove compartment: SCREW was never in the business of objectifying women instead of everybody else. We objectified everybody. Equally. That was the whole filthy point. Men, women, gay, straight, black, white, interracial, whatever combination of lust, vanity, commerce, exhibitionism, and human bad judgment the city could cough up, SCREW was printing it before half the moralists and career feminists even knew how to say the words out loud without swallowing their own teeth. We ran sex, gay sex, interracial sex, all kinds of sex, and we did it in a town where plenty of the respectable people now pretending to remember history were still busy fainting at the sight of honesty.
So yes, Al and Gloria spent years treating each other like opposing counsel in the filth trial of the century. But in the long run, they were both circling the same dangerous American idea: nobody gets to shut up the other side just because they hate the sound of it. And yes, we’re telling it our way because we’re men. Relax, honey.
That’s the joke.
