Sex As a Form of Ideological Activity
Clad in a tight miniskirt and knee-high Italian boots, Dohrn burst onto the scene at Columbia, where she helped arrange bail bonds. Everyone who met her—every man, at least—seemed mesmerized. “Every guy I knew at Columbia, every single one, wanted to fuck her,” remembers one SDSer, and Dohrn knew it. She liked to wear a button with the slogan CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN. She and JJ were immediately smitten with each other. “Bernardine would be arguing political points at the table with blouse open to the navel, sort of leering at JJ,” an SDSer named Steve Tappis recalled. “I couldn’t concentrate on the arguments. Finally, I said, ‘Bernardine! Would you please button your blouse?’ She just pulled out one of her breasts and, in that cold way of hers, said, ‘You like this tit? Take it.’” Another SDSer, Jim Mellen, recalled, “She used sex to explore and cement political alliances. Sex for her was a form of ideological activity.”2 Yet even many SDS women soon idolized Dohrn. Everyone “wanted to be in her favor, to be like her,” a Weatherman named Susan Stern said years later. “She possessed a splendor all her own, like a queen . . . a high priestess, a mythological silhouette.”
In the summer of 1968, buoyed by her sudden popularity, Dohrn mounted an out-of-left-field bid to become SDS’s “inter-organizational secretary”—one of three coequal leadership positions—and, to widespread surprise, won election at the national convention that June. More than a few found her too beautiful to take seriously. When one questioner asked whether she was in fact a socialist, Dohrn took a moment, looked the man square in the eyes, and memorably replied, “I consider myself a revolutionary communist.” ...
Many of the brightest SDSers, including several who would achieve prominence in Weatherman, swung by that autumn to crash, drop acid, and ogle Dohrn as they listened to JJ’s rambling, amphetamine-fueled soliloquies on Che and Debray and every other revolutionary topic imaginable. ...
“Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun,” Rudd snarled at Dohrn during one Weather Bureau meeting. “Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”
