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everything simpler—for the liar—than it really
is, or ought to be.

In lying to others we end up lying to ourselves.
We deny the importance of an event, or a per-
son, and thus deprive ourselves of a part of our
lives. Or we use one piece of the past or present
to screen out another. Thus we lose faith even
with our own lives.

The unconscious wants truth, as the body does.
The complexity and fecundity of dreams come
from the complexity and fecundity of the un-
conscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The
complexity and fecundity of poetry come from
the same struggle.

RPN WG WP NE

An honorable human relationship —that is, one
in which two people have the right to use the
word “love” —is a process, delicate, violent,
often terrifying to both persons involved, a pro-
cess of refining the truths they can tell each
other.

It is important to do this because it breaks down
human self-delusion and isolation.

It is important to do this because in so doing we
do justice to our own complexity.

It is important to do this because we can count
on so few people to go that hard way with us.

CONPROP RPN PRIV RPN

| come back to the question of women’s honor.
Truthfulness has not been considered important
for women, as long as we have remained physi-
cally faithful to a man, or chaste.

We have been expected to lie with our bodies:
to bleach, redden, unkink or curl our hair, pluck
eyebrows, shave armpits, wear padding in vari-
ous places or lace ourselves, take little steps,
glaze finger and toe nails, wear clothes that
emphasize our helplessness.

We have been required to tell different lies at
different times, depending on what the men of
the time needed to hear. The Victorian wife or
the white southern lady, who were expected to
have no sensuality, to “lie still”; the twentieth-
century “free” woman who is expected to fake
orgasms.

We have had the truth of our bodies withheld
from us or distorted; we have been kept in
ignorance of our most intimate places. Our in-
stincts have been punished: clitorectomies for
“lustful” nuns or for “difficult” wives. It has
been difficult, too, to know the lies of our com-
plicity from the lies we believed.

The lie of the “happy marriage,” of domesticity
—we have been complicit, have acted out the
fiction of a well-lived life, until the day we
testify in court of rapes, beatings, psychic cruel-
ties, public and private humiliations.

Patriarchal lying has manipulated women both
through falsehood and through silence. Facts
we needed have been withheld from us. False
witness has been borne against us.

And so we must take seriously the question
of truthfulness between women, truthfulness
among women. As we cease to lie with our
bodies, as we cease to take on faith what men
have said about us, is a truly womanly idea of
honor in the making?

ORGP DA ND
Women have been forced to lie, for survival, to
men. How to unlearn this among other women?

“Women have always lied to each other.”
“Women have always whispered the truth
to each other.” Both of these axioms are
true.

“Women have always been divided against
each other.” “Women have always been in
secret collusion.” Both of these axioms are
true.

In the struggle for survival we tell lies. To bos-
ses, to prison guards, the police, men who have
power over us, who legally own us and our
children, lovers who need us as proof of their
manhood.

There is a danger run by all powerless people:
that we forget we are lying, or that lying be-
comes a weapon we carry over into relation-
ships with people who do not have power
over us.

RPN RPN WG RPN RPN

| want to reiterate that when we talk about
women and honor, or women and lying, we
speak within the context of male lying, the lies
of the powerful, the lie as a false source of
power.

Women have to think whether we want, in our
relationships with each other, the kind of power
that can be obtained through lying.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,”
for centuries by the refutation of our experience
and our instincts in a culture which validates
only male experience. The truth of our bodies
and our minds has been mystified to us. We
therefore have a primary obligation to each
other: not to undermine each other’s sense of