It seemed not so much vicious as funny and sad.

One of the younger boys from the school was standing in the middle of the room, masturbating furiously, his eyes fixed intently on a large, full-colour wall poster of a wide-open vulva with a sassy feminist slogan underneath about men not being required. I saw a light on in the women’s hut and went to have a look. Then one night I was in the Free School late. I talked to the 12 and 13-year-old boys about the historical struggle of women and the universal need to respect others. The woman who ran the women’s hut repeatedly shouted at us that we were a bunch of bourgeois hippy adventurers, that it was typical male aggression again, an appropriation of women’s space again, and told us to deal with it. Though they locked up every night, each morning the hut had been broken into, and although nothing was ever taken, they were sure that the boys from the Free School were the culprits. The Free School was a thorn in the side of the Women’s Group. As the deserted landscape of the moon was beautiful when Neil Armstrong’s camera panned across its uninviting surface.Īt the same time as these visual feasts were going on in the Women’s Group hut on a disused Freightliner site, I was working in the hut next door, involved in running a Free School for a bunch of criminally inclined, school-refusing kids who had been threatened with being taken into care. We swooned: ‘Ah, it’s so beautiful.’ Actually, it wasn’t. The achieved vision was generally accompanied by gasps of appreciation as if a great work of art had been unveiled for the first time before your very eyes. Though it seems odd, on those grounds, that we didn’t also require a personal view of our anuses, the goal was a sighting of the cervix, a seeing into the very core: a conflation of geography, biology and mythology. At the time it was clear that there was no chance of getting in touch with your self unless you had witnessed what nature had so perversely, so patriarchally, hidden from your view. Consciousness-raising began, as it always must, by peering into the heart of darkness. It was considered to be an essential encounter with the centre of your being. For many women in the 1970s, the response to the exhortation ‘Know thyself’ took the form of specula, hand mirrors, torches and a group of comrades who would angle the looking glass and beam just right so that, reclining on your elbows, you could look down through your bent legs and see what really lay between them.

The Story of V by Catherine Blackledge