When Tara Baxter became aware of American Psycho she was, as any feminist would be, disgusted and furious. Unlike many feminists, she felt compelled to do something about it. After her arrest for reading aloud excerpts from the book (in a bookstore where it was for sale), she collaborated with long-time activist Nikki Craft on the essay which follows.
     Their attempts to get the essay published make an interesting story. The national radical-feminist publication off our backs was as unwilling to print it as Baxter's home-town women's newspaper Matrix. Even the radical British feminist magazine Trouble and Strife was uncomfortable with the piece in its entirety (as it appears here) and wanted to make significant cuts.
     In each case, editorial concern focused on the imagery and advocacy of violence by women against men. Editors or collective members suggested that printing it might only "escalate the violence" pandemic among us; one went so far as to call it "hate speech."
     There are several points of interest in this situation. First, I note that the passages quoted directly from Ellis's book are far more explicit, gloating, and hateful than Baxter's brief account of castrating a male assailant. If I were an editor, I would have been more concerned with the ethics of reprinting Ellis's hideous vivisection fantasies at such length, and with their impact on my readers. But in every case, it was the imagery of violence against men which aroused editorial caution.
     At this time when there is strong pressure on feminists to accept a simplistic First Amendment position on anti-woman art and media--when pornographers and other media moguls are winning support by conflating their business interests with artistic freedom and liberalism--it's rare to find a feminist editor or writer willing to take a firm stand against anything at all. This is why I find Craft and Baxter's difficulties so very intriguing.
     There is not one publication or person in a thousand willing to curtail the "rights" of pornographers (straight, gay, or lesbian) to churn out violent and exploitative materials by the hundredweight. But there seems to be a sudden upsurge of moral concern among editors when a woman dares to write about doing violence to men for feminist reasons, out of violent political anger.
     If Baxter and Craft had written an elaborate "erotic fantasy" about a cruel dominatrix and her herd of panting male slaves, their work might not only have seen print by now, but earned them money. Their point, however, was not to entertain or titillate the reader with a few easy paragraphs of hot sex and warm blood. This essay is not a diversion, but an inquiry. It asks us a very disturbing question about justice and vengeance, and whether women will ever have the first without claiming and exercising the second.
     The very possibility of female rage and revenge is frightening and shocking to us--more shocking and frightening than any image of female enslavement, suffering, or death. The oldest and most basic double standard in the world has kept this essay out of the feminist press. The image of a woman killing a man--not for his or the reader's obscure sexual satisfaction, but in cold vengeance--is blasphemy. Even those who defend the worst excesses of pornography as the price of free speech will draw the line, apparently, right here. 

On June 27, 1990, after spending 23 days in jail for tearing up four copies of Esquire Magazine's, "Your Wife: An Owners Manual" issue, Nikki Craft and Friends founded Always Causing Legal Unrest (A.C.L.U.) in Bellingham, Washington. Two days after my eighteenth birthday on March 21, 1991, I founded the Santa Cruz chapter and went to jail too, this time for a Read-In at B. Dalton Bookseller.
     Like many other people of conscience, I was appalled when I read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. It's about a Wall Street yuppie who, in his spare time, murders, tortures, and mutilates women, children, animals, homeless people, and homosexuals. But like many other male media hawks, Ellis reserves his most grisly detail for the recreational killing of women. It's just another "How-To-Kill-Women" manual for that ever-growing special interest group: the good ol,' all-Amerikan misogynists. That's entertainment, after all.
     Ellis writes: "None of this comes close to killing her, so I resort to stabbing her in the throat and eventually the blade breaks off in what's left of her neck. . . Finally, I saw the entire head off and holding the head up like a prize, I take my cock and push it into her bloodied mouth and start fucking it until I come, exploding into it. . ." (Page 304.)
     Ellis' endless psycho-babbling style is self imposing and ego-maniacal. Living and killing vicariously through our protagonist, Patrick Bateman -- Ellis is methodical in his description of everything he wore and ate, his stereo equipment, and the music he listened to. With equal attention to detail, he tells us how he skinned alive, fucked, and killed women. Ellis is a pornographer; and this trashy dime-store novel is not worth the paper it's printed on -- not worth the trees that gave their lives. For me, and others like me, it was not an entertaining novel. For some, unfortunately, it will be.
     Ellis' first two novels were so inept that he needed to write something notably woman-hating to succeed this time. Even Norman Mailer (who parades his woman-hate as much as Ellis does), thinks Ellis is a poor writer. So, just out of curiosity, I ran Ellis' writing through a computer program called the Flesch Index, which guaged in his writing at a whopping "high school" level in readability and writing skill. It may be out of vogue to berate neophyte writers for misplaced commas -- after all, it might kill their desire to write. But in the case of Ellis' borderline skills, his editors at Vintage would have been best to err on the side of a good grammar manual.
     Here's another sample of Ellis' prose: "Her breasts have been chopped off and they look blue and deflated, the nipples a disconcerting shade of brown. Surrounded by dried black blood, they lie, rather delicately, on a china plate I bought at the Pottery Barn on top of the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, though I don't remember doing this. I have also shaved all the skin and most of the muscle off her face so that it resembles a skull with a long, flowing mane of blond hair falling from it, which is connected to a full, cold corpse; its eyes are open, the actual eyes hanging out of their sockets by their stalks. Most of her chest is indistinguishable from her neck, which looks like ground up meat, her stomach resembles the eggplant and goat cheese lasagna at Il Marlibro or some other kind of dog food, the dominant colors red and white, and brown. A few of her intestines are smeared across one wall and others are smashed up into balls that lie strewn across the glass-top coffee table like long blue snakes, mutant worms. The patches of skin left on her body are blue-gray, the color of tinfoil. Her vagina has discharged a brownish syrupy fluid that smells like a sick animal, as if that rat had been forced back up in there, had been digested or something." (Page 344.)
     Reading the book gave me the energy and inspiration to protest it. I asserted my own free speech by organizing a protest and "First Amendment Rights Read-In" outside B. Dalton Bookseller in a Santa Cruz shopping mall. After reading a statement about what I think should be done to Bret Easton Ellis, I started quoting the book out loud to a hostile crowd of blurry-eyed shoppers (some teenage boys applauded during the fuck/murder scenes; and others, oblivious, kept on walking). I wanted to appeal to "responsible" Amerikan consumers to let them know that B. Dalton profits off of the rape, torture, and mutilation of women.
     And hey, guess what I found out -- all these First Amendment yahoos out there get really irritated, and even offended, when you read the contents of these despicable books to 'em. And guess what else I found out -- that free speech (you know, the First Amendment) don't mean much in the capitalists' shopping malls, where leafleting and protesting remains illegal. And guess what else -- I got arrested.
     In keeping with the stated sardonic values of the A.C.L.U. -- that all private property rights infringe on my rights to free speech -- I took one step backwards into the B. Dalton store. I continued reading, ignoring the warning from mall security that, if I didn't leave, I would be arrested. After about forty minutes of reading, a police officer showed up and informed me of my arrest. Out of nervousness, I couldn't stop reading that book, until, of course, the officer took it away, handcuffed me, and charged me with Trespassing.
     Yeah, sure, the charges against me were Trespassing, but we know the society's real intent was to shut me up (a form of censorship) and to transmogrify me into an obedient and compliant female (yet another form of censorship).
     Despite the smile on my face as I was being escorted out of the mall, I was scared as hell. I had never been to jail before -- although, I had been waiting since I was thirteen years old to be arrested. At thirteen, I had seen the documentary Miss or Myth? about the protests of the Miss California pageant (appropriately dubbed "Myth California"). Ann Simonton's and Nikki Craft's use of civil disobedience in that film piqued my already present, teenage rebellion. When I would express my intention of getting arrested to my mother, she would tell me it would cost her $84 a night for me to stay in Juvenile Hall. She'd ask,"Why not stay at the Holiday Inn, instead?" Now, as I get older and wiser, I suspect she was just trying to keep me from beginning a life of crime at a much earlier age.
     Because of my strong belief in the media's influence on people's behavior, I am willing to be arrested to illustrate my convictions (no pun intended). Because of feminist activists like Nikki Craft and Andrea Dworkin I came to believe at a very early age, in radical retaliation against the patriarchy. Amerikan psychos like Bret Easton Ellis (and all men like him) are an integral part of that patriarchy; and they need to be dealt with in a swift and appropriate manner.
     On my way to the Santa Cruz County Jail, my arresting officer struck up a friendly conversation and complimented me on my orderly behavior. Then, amidst obvious routine questions, asked, "Why'd ya do it? What's this book about?" I gave him a brief description of my motives, assuming he wouldn't agree or care to understand. He assured me everything that was said between us was "off the record" (not that that should ever be trusted), and if I wanted to make a statement, he would read me my rights. After exercising my voice for so long reading aloud, I wanted to be quiet for awhile. I declined.
     Once inside the jail, I was searched and my three layers of protective clothing were taken away from me, (I had on four; I was told it gets cold in jail). Then the questions came at me again. Not routine questions, but the genuinely curious ones. The officers were all surprisingly supportive and even laughed when I removed my "Question Authority" T-shirt. "I wore this shirt just for y'all," I quipped as I was carted away to a holding tank. To my surprise, I had my very own toilet, bench, and phone -- that's all.
     My (il)legal advisor, Nikki Craft, advised me to "call home" if I got arrested. I immediately phoned her. After singing a beautiful, operatic rendition of "Happy Birthday" for me, she told me how proud she was of my action, that it validated her life's work. I spent the rest of my five-hour stay in the holding tank, empowered by her words. It works both ways. For over twenty years now, Nikki has been urging us to "break any law that discriminates against women, and to ignore any social custom that keeps women in the place of second-class citizens." I had been one of the women who heeded her words. I was glad for what I did; and furthermore, I was glad I wasn't at the Holiday Inn.
     I was arrested at 3:30 in the afternoon and released at 8:30 in the evening, just in time to watch the action on the 11 o'clock news. I went home and my mother was great. She joked about changing her last name and having a button made that read: "I am NOT Tara Baxter's Mother." We laughed at how absurd the charges were:"You what?! You were arrested for reading a book out loud in a bookstore?!" It did seem pretty silly. My fear subsided -- momentarily.
     The next day, my anxiety returned. After my crime wave was blazed across the front page of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, I wanted to hide in my room for several weeks (and I wasn't even grounded). "I WOULD LIKE TO SEE BRET EASTON ELLIS SKINNED AND TORTURED. -- Tara Baxter, protester," was the larger-than-life pull quote.
     My quote was taken out of context. What I had actually said before that was: "There are better ways of taking care of Bret Easton Ellis than just censoring him. I would much prefer to see him skinned alive, a rat put up his rectum, and his genitals cut off and fried in a frying pan, in front of -- not only a live audience -- but a video camera as well. These videos can be sold as "art" and "free expression" and could be available at every video outlet, library, liquor, and convenience store in the world. We can profit off of Ellis' terror and pain, just as he and bookstores are profiting off of the rape, torture, and mutilation of women."
     While this is how I feel, I knew that not everyone would agree. One local liberal compared me to the Ayatollah Khomeini wanting to have Salman Rushdie killed for his book . . . as if I wielded the power of a world leader.
     My arraignment was three weeks later at the Hall of (alleged) Justice. I requested a jury trial, but my assigned public defender advised me to plead "no contest" to one of the charges of Trespassing. (The prosecutor usually adds several extra unjust charges, then kindly offers to drop one for a guilty plea to the other.) The lawyer, allegedly working on my behalf, proffered that if I just accepted the one year of probation the judge would likely offer me, I could walk out of the courtroom on that day a "free woman."
     In the next year, there are many laws that I intend to break to express myself politically. Probation asserts debilitating limits on activists committed to civil disobedience. It curtails the political expression of those of us who are always causing legal unrest. In 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton expressed a similar sentiment when she asked: "What is physical freedom compared with mental bondage?" I informed my public defender that I would not only refuse probation, but I would not ever promise to obey the law. In fact, I told him, I would break the law at the first available opportunity. (Which I did.)
     I am determined, like Nikki, to remain unrehabilitated -- determined, also, to be a multiple offender. I want to offend misogynists over and over again. My legal representative eventually gave up trying to bring me into line, and informed the prosecutor of my plans. The prosecutor and my representative consulted and negotiated with the judge for what seemed like a long time to me. Occasionally, they'd look over at me with raised eyebrows. I enjoyed being an itsy-bitsy wrench in their wheel of injustice. Feeling unrepentant, I read Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals while I waited.
     Finally, the judge called my name. He didn't even offer me probation, knowing that I would refuse it. Instead, he sentenced me to one day in jail with time served for the five hours I had already done. The judge smiled knowingly and said, "Good luck, Ms. Baxter. I trust we won't be seeing you back here anytime soon." I left that courtroom, knowing I'd be back. He knew it too.
     At first, I felt I had gotten off real light, but after the fact (we all learn from the doing), I have figured out that if real justice had prevailed in that courtroom, I shouldn't have even been convicted (or tried for that matter). Remember, I was arrested for the "crime" of reading a book aloud in a bookstore. Besides, wasn't it Ellis who trespassed onto women's most basic right to live without the constant threat of hate crimes and femicide? Wasn't it Ellis who stomped all over women's autonomy with flagrant disregard for the consequences of his actions?
     Since that fateful day, I've continued my work against misogyny-disguised-as-"art"-or-"speech." I've made friendly visits to five different bookstores in San Francisco, pouring blood on every copy of American Psycho I could get my hands on, (twenty-seven, to be exact).
     I've also paid several not-so-friendly visits to a local Santa Cruz porn store, working with other women to invade male-supremacist space, like the Bellingham chapter of the A.C.L.U. did at their local "masturbation service center." I asserted my free expression by artistically applying white lotion to the video screens located in the private viewing closets -- achieving that "Gee, I came on the screen" look. I also doused the video screens and door handles with blood -- rendering them untouchable. The A.C.L.U. is committed to working to assure that men experience at least a bit of the fear women do.
     One night, at about eleven pm, I took pictures of men going in and out of the porn store, destroying their privacy and anonymity (just as pornography destroys the privacy of all women) and holding them accountable for their contribution to violence against women. One man, clearly terrified by the fact that I took his picture, came at me, demanding that I give him the film. When I refused, he went off, (half-cocked?), grabbed me by the arm and shoulder and threw me up against the porn store wall. I lost my balance and fell into the brick planter in front of the store. My friend leaped between the man and me, so I could escape.
     Three friends of mine, who had gone inside the porn store, immediately came out when they heard me yelling for the guy to back off. He yelled to us, "Oh, you dykes just need a good fuck. That guy up in Montreal killed women just like you bitches . . ." Fortunately, my friends came out of the porn shop just at that moment. I'm lucky that way, sometimes.
     When he thought there were only two of us, he was one tough dude; but when he realized we numbered five, he lost his cool. As if in a dream, we slowly moved to form a semi-circle around him. My friends reached for him, quickly now, they grabbed his arms and legs, and threw him back up against the planter. When I heard how hard his head cracked against the wall, I knew this was going to get really intense. I yanked out my Buck knife and slid my thumb to one side of the four-inch long blade. With one quick movement, I flipped my wrist in a downward motion, and the knife slipped willingly from its sheath. One woman scrambled up onto the planter box and positioned her foot across his throat. She glared down, menacingly, at him, "You know, if they laid all the men on earth end to end so they circled the globe. . ." She snarled, at the same time spitting fiercely, "It might be a pretty good idea to leave 'em that way." By that time, he was shaking so hard he wasn't much good to anyone, least of all, himself. He frantically and impotently kicked at us, but with ease, my friend unzipped his pants. I saw two hands grab his dick, pushing the head down hard against the bricks. I, then, sliced it right off. It was a lot easier to do than I had thought it would be. His eyes widened; he gurgled as blood gushed from where his penis once was. We even thought he liked it -- maybe -- like he knew he deserved it

. . .Well, a bit of good fiction/fantasy never hurt anybody, eh? That's entertainment! In fact, women must begin to dream, to reach into their wildest imaginations to envision what can and should be done to sex offenders, femicidites, and all the misogynists who act out their own hatred against women everywhere, all the time.
     So anyway, what really happened was this: I yelled for him to back off and he threw me up against the wall. My three friends emerged from the porn shop. He lost his cool. We formed a semi-circle around him. Once again, with a cracking voice, he demanded the film back. Not wanting to escalate or engage with this man anymore than we already had, we all kept quiet, except to let him know we had no intention of meeting his demands.
     It was tempting to argue with this jerk (who, ironically, looked just like the boutique store clerk from "A Question of Silence"), but even if he was capable of understanding, we knew that he would never agree with our position. Moments (and I do mean moments) later, we left. Afterwards, one woman in our group said, "Hey, you know when that guy was begging for his picture? It would have been funny to say, ÔJust give us your name and address and we'll send it to ya.'" We all laughed -- even me; but my mind was still full of the assault I had just experienced.
     At eighteen years old, I can understand what Andrea Dworkin means when she says, women are living in a war zone. We get it when we fight back, and we get it when we don't. I'm sick and tired of hearing about women being hurt and victimized. I'm sick of women -- living like hostages or victims of the Stockholm syndrome -- turning the violence and the self-loathing back onto ourselves, and collaborating with the enemy.
     Resistance -- resistance (not visualization) of all kinds (don't listen to Sonia on this point*) -- sends a strong message back to these men: an assertion that women will not tolerate their rapacious ways. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress . . . etc., etc. It's like the raunchy, male-bashing, feminist-rappers, Bytches With Problems' Lyndah -- The Teacher who belts out: "No means No, my brother. Are you deaf in your ear, mother fucker?" And as for the men like Bret Easton Ellis who don't get that message loud and clear . . .
     I have been involved in self-defense for almost two years now, and have co-taught classes for a year. My experience has shown me that women must have access to every option available, including all forms of weaponry. For without access to all our options, we can't ever have real choice. And it's ever so important that when we finally get wise to what's happening, that some of us become shit-kickin', rabble-rousing, trouble-makers: Thelma and Louise-style.
     In my classes, women always ask, terrified, "Well, what if the rapist has a knife?" I think it's long past time that rapists start worrying about whether or not a woman has a gun -- or at the very least, about a woman's willingness and ability to do some serious damage to any man who fucks with her space.
     As long as women are being raped, tortured, and murdered at the rate that we are, it is imperative that we seriously consider all the strategies that decorticate male dominance. One strategy, is refusing to accept violent, exploitative male fantasy wherever it may be expressed -- whether in fiction, art, pornography, in the public sphere, or in our homes. Otherwise we collaborate in our own victimization by remaining silent during this war that men are waging against us.
     The A.C.L.U. is commited to the concept that we must fight back together, so we won't be attacked alone. We advocate relentless resistance -- of all kinds. Furthermore, we urge women to do more than visualize about how to do grave damage to any batterers, rapists, killers and/or child abusers who are within their arms reach.
     If we, women, are to survive as a species, we must learn to fight back, and that means fighting back by any means necessary. Yes, there are more ways than one to skin Bret Easton Ellis, and men like him . . .

Footnote: *In Going Out Of Our Minds, Sonia Johnson insists that, "What we resist persists," (pg. 27). We passionately disagree when she says: "Civil disobedience and resistance are collaborative . . . [and that] in protests we give away our own power, paradoxically giv[ing] it up to the very group we are trying to take power from."She adds: "Since it is apparent that ultimately we cannot use force to stop force, using the powers and deep mind, which are women's terrain anyway, seems the obvious next step." Political activists realize that "Radical action" is more -- much more -- than "changing the way you think." Sonia's self-defense tips literally drive us crazy and out of our minds. She writes: "I actually knocked a man back away from me in a parking lot, with the strength of my eyes focused on him. Knocked him back! Then, you see, since I didn't need to, I didn't hit him."

We encourage women to lash out against all corporations that feed the system that strangles us. One thing women can do is to support the boycott that has been launched against the book's publisher Knopf/Vintage. The two men who are primarily responsible for the publication of American Psycho are: Sonny Mehta, President of Knopf 212-572-2506 and Alberto Vitale, CEO Random House 212-572-2221. Call them now and express how you feel.