From the cover of Black Dialogue Magazine, 1966, San Francisco CA
There is nothing like an idea that's time has come. In 2009, when Marvin X penned and published his now classic 18 page essay in pamphlet form, The Mythology of Pussy and Dick, the sexually conservative so-called Negroes, especially the black bourgeoisie (see E. Franklin's 1962 classic The Black Bourgeoisie) who yet live in the world of make believe and conspicuous consumption as delineated by sociologist and Howard University Professor Dr. Frazier, as well as those neo-colonial elite or tenured negroes yet suffering Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse. Dr.Hare he only wants to hear when they transcend the crisis in the Kingdom of Africana, that mythical kingdom in the world of make believe Frazier taught us about. My daughter calls them the "pseudo conscious!"
The pseudo-consciousness, puritan black radicals condemned Marvin X for the title of his treatise, even though they were taught not to judge a book by its cover. Some of the black radical puritans could not get past the cover title, even when encouraged to do so by their revolutionary comrades. BAM writer Mae Jackson pleaded with Mrs. Amina Baraka to skip the cover and get to the message but she refused even after a 47 year friendship with Marvin X as co-founder of the National Black Arts Movement. The PC women at Howard dismissed the pamphlet because the title objectified women even if only to be provocative to get their attention, but no, the PC women, are so right they wrong as my mentor Sun Ra said of my ultra righteousness when he arranged the musical version of my play Flowers for the Trashman, renamed Take Care of Business, Black Educational Theatre, San Francisco, 1972.
Marvin X and student at Howard University conference on the Black Arts Movement
Howard Cheer Leaders kneel in honor of Colin's stand against police brutality in US
Kwame Toure/, aka Stokeley Carmichael, Howard student of Dr. Nathan Hare
Sociologist Dr. Nathan Hare, removed from Howard University faculty after bringing Muhammad Ali to campus and pursuing his pro boxing career while professing. His behavior was found beneath the dignity of Howard U. academia. Dr. Hare went on to become the first Chair of Black Studies at San Francisco State College/University and sparked the longest student strike in US academic history to establish black and ethnic studies, both terms he coined. After San Francisco State University, none of the 400 black studies departments in America hired him to teach. With two PhDs, was he unqualified or simply too damn black in consciousness?
According to childhood friend and supporter, Rashid Easley, "The Mythology of Pussy and Dick is for the liberation of men and women. Those who are too blind to see it as a document of liberation are now totally unable to understand Harvey Weinstein and the #Metoo Movement.
No matter Marvin's residue of patriarchal addiction, he unequivocally preaches the equality of women and their absolute rights as owners of the bodies and minds."
For sure, the grassroots people, fought over the pamphlet as if it were black gold, said poet Paradise Jah Love. A young man gave multiple copies to his friends and reported to Marvin X, "After reading it, two brothers went to court and won custody of their children."
The consensus of women is that it freed them and made them realize they controlled the power of their wombs, something they were not clear on. After reading the pamphlet with her mother, a 16 year told the author, "I wished I'd read it when I was eight!"
One young man read the MOPD and told Marvin, "After I read your pamphlet, I was ready to get my life together, since I discovered I did not own that which I thought I owned," which is the main message.
Marvin learned his lesson after falling in love with a Crack ho' who taught him she owned her pussy and could give it up to whomever she pleased. Once Marvin understood this, he and ho' became best of friends and he helped her recover from Crack. See his story The Maid, the Ho, the Cook, essays, In the Crazy House Called America.
Meanwhile, in the ho' house, a madam told her girls, "Don't try to leave with my Mythology of Pussy and Dick. Leave my motherfuckin' pamphlet here, bitches!"
Even after Marvin warned people who purchased The MOPD at his Academy of da Corner, 14th and Broadway, downtown Oakland, where he teaches (Ishmael Reed called him Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland), don't let your friends steal it, many came back for another copy two and three times, admitting Marvin had told them their friends would either steal it or simply let them know they were not returning the pamphlet!
Not only youth, but even seniors confessed, "Boy, I hate to admit you taught me something new in that pamphlet!" Well, old dogs can learn new tricks!
And then Marvin X embarked on a national book tour with his provocative and controversial pamphlet, stopping at Grambling University, making a guerrilla run through the cafeteria, then showing up in Jackson, Mississippi at the Jackson State, Grambling football gave, passing out the MOPD at the front gate of the stadium. After soon many people passed through the turnstiles with the pamphlet in their hands, the ticket takers came begging for copies.
And then he arrived at Howard University, Washington, DC, where professors Dr. Tony Medina and Dr. Greg Carr allowed him to lecture in their classes for a week on The Mythology of Pussy and Dick. FYI, Dr. Carr is so magnificent, students are told they cannot graduate from Howard without taking one of his classes. He is also Chair of the African Studies Department. But nevertheless, with a female/male ratio of 14 to 1, what do we suspect is the topic of priority at Howard? Sex, sex, sex, after all the girls come to Howard seeking mates, but imagine their frustration being 14 to 1! In Dr. Tony Medina's class, a female broke down during Marvin's lecture/discussion, sobbing, "I thought I was cute, but when I got here there were 13 other cute girls!"
One day as Marvin X concluded his lecture on the Mythology of Pussy and Dick, a female came up to him before he left the lectern and whispered in his ear, "Dr. X, let me tell you how we deal with Dante: he think he playin' us, but we playin' him:sistas decide who go be wit Dante Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thurday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yes, we sistas work out a schedule to share Dante, but he don't have a clue, think he playin' us but the playa gettin' played! Now that's how we do Dante here at Howard, Dr. X!
For sure, no subject is more powerful than biology, so even though Howard students have great scholars like Dr. Carr, their lectures cannot compete with techno sex messages sent while Dr. Carr is lecturing his heart out, in the fashion of James Brown singing, sweating, dancing, preaching, reading from the text word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, simply because students are busy with text messages to satisfy their carnal desires and basic match making, most often at the urging of their parents, "Girl, go to Howard and find you a Negro that wanna be a doctor. And don't bring no black ass nigguh home to meet me. Find one of dem yella nigguhs, gul!" Of course this color caste prescription further depletes the gene pool for any possible satisfaction of the mythology of pussy and dick! Poor sistas will be lucky to secure any young man for a life mate! 14 to 1! Especially when perhaps 50% of the brothers are gay! Alas, HIV is rampant in DC! Also at other black negro collages and universities.
On another occasion, I was invited to lecture at Morehouse College in Atlanta, but I was instructed to lecture on partner violence and told to say nothing about homosexuality. I accommodated my hosts at Morehouse and and also when I went across the street to speak with the Spelman ladies.
continued
Dr. Nathan Hare on Techno Sex and Sexual Engagement Contracts
Marvn,
My take is in a technocratic society we inevitably become more technocratic, more like the machines we increasingly make and rely on compelling us to jump to the phone or ipod or whatnot and push their buttons to cause them to do things for us or/and allow us to do things – why not also sex? – where everything else is increasingly objectivized, including persons now taken as objects to be manipulated and quantified and studied, taking people as objects and turning them into things is inevitable -- progress -- hence the people pushing it or leading the way are called “progressives.”
In the search of mankind for some guide, science is winning over religion like religion won over magic. Eventually we’ll push a button to breathe or not to breathe, let alone to maximize the efficiency of sex and the apparatus of reproduction once left to the will of God. People who complain are anachronistic and old-fashioned at best. Why not a contract for sex if a contract for non-sex or everything else?
I remember when I forgot and left the marriage license at home and the preacher made me go get it while he paused in and held up the sacred ceremony, before he would perform the marriage; ditto in a church years later in another part of the country when a friend was being married and I was the best man (witness) when he forgot his license to marry. Why not a license for any sex or gender? Except that it hasn’t worked with marriage, but not because it hasn’t been tried.
I remember when I forgot and left the marriage license at home and the preacher made me go get it while he paused in and held up the sacred ceremony, before he would perform the marriage; ditto in a church years later in another part of the country when a friend was being married and I was the best man (witness) when he forgot his license to marry. Why not a license for any sex or gender? Except that it hasn’t worked with marriage, but not because it hasn’t been tried.
Indeed, what seems to be unfolding and foretold by the social philosopher in this post is the coming escalation in the objectivizing and thingification of the human being, where people are seen as things, to be objectified and thingifed and manipulated like machines as we become more and more like machines while controlling others and being controlled by machines. Of course we must have a contract or a license, just as we do a car.
In marriage, man (and woman, the female part of the connection or hookup or plugin) once tried polygamy, but it didn’t work; monogamy, which isn’t working, as we speak; so we may now be entering the early phases of what our friend, the late Eldridge Cleaver no less, called “omnigamy,” the coming marital form wherein everybody will be married to everybody else.
But by then we would have completed what we are going through now and discovered that even a contract or license won’t do us any good, with our only hope being some superhuman recognition that we are all in this together (in the words of the lae great progressives, Ossie Davs and Ruby Dee, instead of being separated by unlicensed and unbridled artificiality and superficial passion taking us decades to recognize, let alone to try to comprehend.
Have a blessed and holy day And don’t forget to pray. For yourselves. Everybody’s always allowing as how they are praying for me. Pray for yourself. Lest you soon have to have a license or a contract with a preacher to pray, lest you use the Lord’s name in vain.
Nathan Hare
Phone: 415-474-1707
Fax: 415-589-7983
Backup: 415 672 2986
