Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "The Lady Vanishes: Where is the Nicole Brown Simpson Story?" in Revolution, She Wrote (pp. 190-192). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
First Published: Freedom Socialist, January 1995
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
I ASKED YOU IN MY last column to send me queries about socialism. Among the responses (thank you, and please keep them coming!) was this topical interrogatory: What does a socialist make of the O.J. Simpson story?
I thought you’d never ask, and the answer depends on the defining fact that I am a socialist feminist. That means, in addition to seeing the world as an historic panorama of many different, evolving social systems, I see life in terms of my own vivid and traumatic experiences as a female.
Hence, the " O.J Simpson case," in my view, is atrociously misnamed. Goddamit, it was Nicole Brown Simpson and her Jewish friend Ronald Goldman who were slaughtered — twice obliterated, in fact, first by murder and then by the media obsession with O.J. The corpses are the disposables of a culture that adulates and indulges celebrities while ignoring and defaming the women these pampered superstars torture and destroy.
We hear so little about Brown Simpson and Goldman. We are deluged with video footage of the misogynist terrorist who almost certainly dispatched them.
I HAVE PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE of this male type. I have not felt the panic and helplessness of Brown Simpson as she pleaded for protection from O.J. But I have been battered, by ex-husband Richard Fraser, who assaulted me twice while I was asleep and once during a minor argument. He also socked my son, for no reason whatever.
Those attacks were devastating. I’d never been slugged before (except by hardcore Stalinists), and I was paralyzed by confusion and disbelief.
But I had internal resources, born of feminism. Once over the shock, I discovered to my vast delight that I could hit too. And that was the end of that. Bullies are cowards.
The affront to a woman’s sense of self when she is beaten by an intimate is incalculable. It can utterly shatter a personality — or it can engender a fightback reflex.
My counter-violent response was a private revolutionary act, yet one common to millions of women. That is why our "second sex" identifies so passionately not just with the feminist pioneers who launched a thunderous movement, but also with down-to-earth heroes like Thelma and Louise who stood up for their rights and retaliated in kind when they were degraded.
CONVENTIONAL SEXIST WISDOM blames the female victim for the revolting behavior of ego-deficient males. Deplorably, this bigotry is quite rampant on the Left, especially in ultra-"radical" groups like the Spartacist League. So-called socialist men, and women, too, buy the canard that "she asked for it," "she drove him to it," blah blah. Poor pugilistic man. He’s the martyr after all.
This attitude is a sick denial of the essence of liberating, humanistic, anti-chauvinist Marxist thought, and a triumph of sexual fascism over socialist ethics.
And this contempt for women has carved a great gulf between leftists and feminists. Sexist revolutionaries have much to answer for: the spawning of a vast dichotomy between two movements whose logic demands integration.
Life has taught me not to expect too much from most men in parties other than my own Freedom Socialist Party. But I am particularly appalled at the women in feminism-impaired organizations who ape the patriarchal venom of the men.
I appeal to women radicals who sneer at feminism to let go of your psychological dependence on males as the first principle and your self-identification as "the other." Forge a rapport first of all with yourselves and your sex. lf you can do that, you will become the best and most sensitive exponents of class militancy and inter-race solidarity.
And I appeal to honest radical men to learn to elevate the question of women’s status to the top ranks of fundamental social and human issues, where it belongs.
To view reality through the bifocals of socialism and feminism is hardly schizoid. Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, August Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, George Sand, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Daniel De Leon, Olive Schreiner and uncountable other feminist radicals felt deeply that to understand the nature of a given society and gauge its degree of civilization, you must study the status of women and racial minorities.
WOMEN OF ALL ETHNIC GROUPS must demand justice for and information about Nicole Brown Simpson because that is how we fight for justice for ourselves. And men must support this principled female gender-bonding. As Rabbi Hillel said, "If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" You can never be for others until you are for yourself.
Don’t beg the cops for help, ladies. Stand and deliver. Be the master-mistress of your own fate — for self-defense is revolutionary empowerment.