EPIGENETICS AND CULTURAL REINVENTION -- by Maggie Jochild

In 1972, my closeted Lesbian English teacher (RIP, Ms. Duff), one of six teachers in an extremely rural and conservative school of 36 students, responded to our confused emotions about the Vietnam war by assigning us to read Johnny Got His Gun. This was an anti-war novel that she guessed nobody in the community would understand as anti-war, written by Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten whose name she counted on nobody recognizing. That novel had a profound effect on all of us.

For me, the subtle indictment of war was not the compelling part -- I was already a pacifist who had converted my mother from being a Nixon supporter in 1968 to someone who had voted for McGovern in 1972, much to the disgust of my father. In Johnny Got His Gun, a young, ignorant, shallow American man goes jingo-happy into war, only to be all but blown apart by a mine. He loses his legs and arms, and most of his face is destroyed. He is thus deaf and blind, but unbeknowst to his caretakers) his brain is intact. The novel consists of his memory and flashbacks, and his attempts to communicate with the nurses and doctors who "manage" him in the hospital. They regard him as a vegetable, with animal needs (including sexual) but no mind beneath the flesh. And, in truth, his mind is stunted, not by the blast but by his own failure to think. Now, of course, it's all he has left. When he is eventually able to transcend the communication barrier with a nurse, using body slams against the mattress in Morse code, and she responds, he goes mad and that is the end of the book.

Quite the reading for a bunch of isolated 16-year-olds.

What I took away as a message was the precious integrity of my brain and a resolve to fill it with as much knowledge and questioning as I possibly could. Two years later, feminism challenged me to redefine womanhood using no male markers. Concurrently, my generation was defining Lesbian in a radical new way, a definition which has now been overturned by the dominant paradigm. The generation a few years ahead of me had successfully challenged the myth of whiteness as biological reality, and Boomers in general were freed (briefly and incompletely, but enough to set us loose on the streets) from the absolute class drudgery of our working forebears. Reinvention was the name of the game, and we did not disappoint.



As I see it, reinvention demands two prerequisites: You must believe in the malleability of what others label "reality", and you must be willing to understand yourself and your culture well enough to track down the lies. Too many accounts of the Second Wave (both written and pop-cultural) act as if certain key thinkers and publications shaped our emerging belief system. In fact, power went the other direction: A critical mass of us began talking to each other, especially in the form of consciousness-raising groups. We began to recognize matching themes and experiences, and from those we developed theory and practice. Our errors arose from the membership of those conversations -- too white, often dominated by middle-class ethics, and of course First World -- but not from the process itself.

Whether you call it "Biology is not destiny", constructionism, or the persistence of delusion, we rejected the meaning of masculinity and femininity, the conflation of sex with power, the hierarchy of dominance in human social relations, and the equation of appearance with real identity. The dominant culture has rebooted our hard drive, now, and seeks to erase our hard-won comprehensions, often with the gleeful assistance of those who would be better served to act as our allies. But each generation in a patriarchy is forced to learn some lessons all over again. Paula Gunn Allen correctly said "The root of oppression is the loss of memory". (Johnny, do you hear that?) And the wheel always circles back around to a new point on the spiral.



Despite the current cultural emphasis on declaring gender to be rooted in physiology (genitals, hormones, brain configuration) with a hearty jeer at those who just can't get with the program, science itself is consistently proving the sociobiologists wrong. Time and time again. Aside from the basic fact that in a culture where you are labeled with a gender and race at the moment of birth (if not before), there is no such thing as a "control group" who is free from massive conditioning, there is also the often demonstrated fact that physical reality is much more influenced by culture than vice versa. We construct lifelong narratives to bolster whatever it is we believe, and that rewrites our memory. "I was always this way" is a common mantra. And if you say it is true for you, then of course it is. But if I believe my memory of my identity from birth has been molded and remolded by the information and options available to me at the time, not by some "inherent" objective core, then that is true for me also.

One innovative, ground-breaking study of the hippocampus involved using the cultural phenomenon created by London cabdrivers known as The Knowledge. Cabbies who drive the big black hacks of Central London are not permitted to drive until they have had two years of training in The Knowledge, and are able to pass a test on The Knowledge. The final exam for cabbies includes questions of this ilk: A passenger gets in at such and such a corner at a certain time in a particular day. She requests a hotel within a certain price range, within two blocks of a tube station, within one block of an offset printing business for cheap mass copies and also within one block of a dry-cleaners who uses natural chemicals. On the way, she needs to stop at a particular bank's ATM and also get take-out Chinese food from a restaurant which does not use MSG. To find the quickest route, the cabbie will need much more than a memorized map. S/he must access a voluminous knowledge of central London that is under daily revision, incorporating which streets are one-way certain hours of the day, the calendar and attendant festivals, plus minute retail offerings and habits. There is usually only one right answer to such a question, but this is the service London cabbies offer and she must know it to be given her license to hack.

In the study, folks who were planning to become cab drivers were given detailed brain scans before their training and after they had become licensed. In addition, those who had been on the job for set numbers of years were scanned. The study found a direct correlation between exposure to The Knowledge (length of time training and/or driving) and hippocampus size. It was not just a predisposition to being able to retain such a vast memory that made cabbies; it was also a literal expansion of one portion of the brain, a remapping of neural territory beyond previous biological boundaries. Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers



A 45-year breeding experiment involving Siberian foxes has yielded a likewise startling result. The foxes, destined for fur coats, were kept in separate cages but varied greatly as to whether a human could safely approach and interact with them. Selective breeding was done for tameability, pairing less frightened and nonaggressive individuals with each other for offspring. The outcome was not just a permanent change in the domestication of these foxes, who became as friendly and eager for human company as dogs. They also, within the first generation, began to exhibit heretofore unseen variations in physical appearance: Different coat color and texture, dog-like markings, short curly tails and soft floppy ears. It was eventually understood that the adrenal systems of these animals exists in very close proximity to the neural and chemical centers for certain aspects of appearance, and the de-activation of fear and avoidance was affecting nearby structures. This has shed great light onto the likely history of canine domestication and breed diversity -- the very act of "taming" them makes them look different than their parents. And it was handed on to the next generation. Conditioning trumps biology. Genomics

But another study took this a step further. One area we've now mapped on rats' genome is known to govern the behavior of mothering, how well mother rats took care of their babies. A recent study hoped to find out how this was passed on from generation to generation. To the shock of the researchers, they discovered that not only was the behavior learned (i.e., a baby rat taken from a mother who had "bad genes" for mothering and instead raised with a rat with "good genes" for mothering would herself grow up to be a "good mother"), but, startlingly, the genes of a rat raised in a positive mothering environment would physically alter its expression from that of a "bad mother" ancestry into a "good mother" genetic expression. In other words, how you are raised can have a permanent effort not just on culture and conditioning but actual biology itself. Talk about nurture over nature. A Mother's Touch



This whole field of epigenetics is proving that what matters in the long run is not the genes you are dealt at conception, but how those genes are expressed by you individually, and that this expression is not set in stone, even within your lifetime. Further, how well you live, what influences you seek out/allow, will determine the outcome of your offspring and future generations. Epigenetics in Identical Twins

Which brings me to Generation Five. I've had the opportunity to read, hear, and speak intensively with Staci Haines, the founder of Generation Five. She identified our generation as ground zero for the interruption of child sexual abuse as an integral part of American culture. The values inherent in perceiving children as the property and sexual objects of adults (overwhelmingly, that of men) are so deep as to often be indistinguishable from the wallpaper. The emphasis on "stranger danger" instead of the reality that most children will be sexually assaulted by their own family members or trusted adult friends is a last-ditch effort to avoid the nasty secret that male conditioning creates a predisposition to sexual exploitation of children, and female conditioning creates a predisposition to complicity in this behavior.

Staci says bluntly that growing up with abuse reconfigures our brains and leaves us damaged with regard to our ability to connect with other human beings. The effects and patterns of this damage are increasingly recognized, and are quite prevalent in our literature, art, and everyday congress. The denial of those patterns is likewise prevalent. One popular evasion is the association of child predation with "gayness" -- i.e., it's those tortured, fucked up queers who prey on subadults.

Certainly the Catholic Church is pounding home this meme: They claim pedophile priests are secret gays who are drawn to the church because of its access to prey. This is to divert us from the reality that the rigid authoritarianism of Catholicism (and evangelical religiosity of any flavor, and of course Neocon ideology) lends itself to child abuse. There are, in fact, several main sexual orientations, including heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and sexual attraction to those younger than you. Many people carry a mix of these orientations, but one does not preclude the other. And all of them are learned, not inherent. If somebody can "come out", they can with equal integrity "go back in". But the orientation of identifying sexual "charge" with a profound power imbalance is so deeply-rooted and reinforced by our dominant culture that overcoming it is extremely difficult. It's easier to hide the abuse (families are expert at this), deny it as molestation, and continue on until you are stopped. Easier in a practical sense, of course, not spiritual.

Staci is not hopeless about undoing our individual damage or about reversing our cultural training. We are alike in that. All recovery is based on faith and fearless self-examination. What I'm proudest of in my life is that I was part of a small group who named the disease of child sexual exploitation for what it was, a conditioned piece of cultural expression. I don't honestly know how we were that smart and brave. We had a lot of help. In a sense, we had nothing to lose, because defending our families and perpetrators was a dead-end street. I think turning that corner was the making of me, of us. It altered the genes of what will come in future generations. Our numbers will only continue to grow.



In closing, I want to share with you a speech I gave on March 26, 1982 at the Berkeley Women's Center. It was the first time in herstory that someone in Berkeley spoke out about child sexual assault as a societal issue. I was 26 years old, and a member of the Pleiades, who led this gathering. The sister who helped me shape this statement was my friend, Shelley Coleman (known then as Shelley Clearwaters).
"To guess at the effects that incestuous assault has on us, we have to remember what it was like to be a child. We came into this world as strong, trusting, smart, enthusiastic and loving beings, with a sense of our own power and our worth. We looked to learn about the world and our place in it from the older people around us, in whom we had complete trust. We expected from these people confirmation of our belief in ourselves, but this did not happen. In many ways we did not get it.

"Child abuse comes in many forms, and at the base of all of it is the assault in our faith in the world and a denial of what we deserve from the world. Incestuous assault is a violation of our sexual space and of our control over our own bodies by someone whom we know and whom we believe we have reason to trust. It is one of the most awful and dangerous things that will ever happen to us, and it happens during our most vulnerable time in life. It is an extreme betrayal of our trust, and an unforgiveable abuse of power. Someone whom we see as having authority over us and often whom we love, rapes us. By rape I include anything from always watching us get dressed in the morning to making us suck him off or having his prick forced into our little girl vaginas. This rape is usually carried out in secret, goes on over time, is maintained by the explicit or implicit threat of losing our world as we know it, and is always accompanied by some sort of mind-fuck.

"We learn from this rape that no one will protect us against harm. We learn that we have no real power of our own, that we are the property of adult males, and often we learn that our mothers are powerless also. We learn that the primary way people relate to each other is sexually. We learn that sex is love, as much as we will ever get. We learn that this way of relating sexually is to be used as someone’s object, with much desensitization and no consideration of our wishes. We learn that our worst fears will come true, over and over again. We learn to keep secrets, to keep our spirits hidden, and to lie to other women. We learn to see women as victims. We learn to never say no. We learn to be terrified of anger. We learn we are thought of as dirty, and we learn to fear, and we learn that fear and abuse are part of intimacy. We learn to distrust, and we learn how to hide this distrust by numbing out, by being hostile, by being seductive, by forgetting. We learn to be nice at all costs. We learn how to hang onto life when there is no hope. We learn how to be an adult before we have ever really been children. We learn a lot.

"And everything we learn, everything I have said, is a lie: an outrageous lie. These lies are among the first things we learn about the world. They become the building blocks of how we understand the world. To overcome the effects of incest is to turn yourself inside out and begin all over again. It is to see your childhood as a mass of scars and to heal those scars one by one.

"We who are survivors are doing just that, in a wide variety of ways and at our own pace. Some of us do it with friends, lovers and family; some of us do through our art and our work; some of us have therapists; some of us have support groups; and some of us are doing it alone. But we are doing it the best way we know how, and more are joining us every day.

"At the time we were being assaulted, we were victims. We stopped being victims when the assault stopped, but most of us continue to act like victims and to think of ourselves as victims. We stop being victims when we believe that what happened was not our fault. None of it, no matter what happened, no matter how you felt during it, was your fault. When you realize this, you start being a survivor. Most of us here tonight are survivors.

"Some of us do not survive. Some of us die as children or as teenagers or as adult women. Some of us go crazy. Some of us experience a death of the spirit. We have no way of knowing how many of us make it and how many don’t. Some of us marry to get away from home, and trade one right of sexual access for another. Some of us stay celibate all our lives; some of us run away from home. Some of us act out our anger and land in jail or get shot down. Some of us become prostitutes, alcoholics or drug-dependent. Some of us come out as lesbians, and we find that even with women, the specter of the incest is always there. And some of us do find a safe place, but we’ve been operating on a survival level for so long, we can’t see the safety we have reached. We go on acting like we believe the people we love will rape us in some way.

"But there is something after being a survivor. When you have healed – when you no longer find your life being controlled by your reactions to something that happened in your childhood – when you stop waiting for things to get all the way better – you have stopped being a survivor. It is possible to get all the way through, the nightmares, the fears, the reflexes, the paranoia. It is possible for our incestuous assault to be only memories. What we will be after that no one has named yet. Maybe as more of us reach that place we’ll name it. Or maybe it doesn’t need a name. Maybe it’s just as simple as coming home again."

As a closing ritual for this gathering, we asked each woman in the room to speak her name, what she has survived, and to say:
"It's not my fault
I'm bigger than it is
I can help stop it
I am completely lovable"