Bunny Luv Carrots?” I was sixteen or seventeen, and my show-and-tell contribution to our hippie free-school pornography class was a plastic package of a smiling lady bunny making affectionate goo-goo eyes at a very well-endowed carrot, which she happened to be cuddling. The idea was to find “soft porn” in the marketplace, examples of capitalism’s warped and persistent use of Eros. Our teacher wore a giant silver ring of finely wrought coupling couples and multiples. She had a masters degree in public health, hailed from the Bronx, but came to us via Berkeley. She had long braids, exotic earrings, and a tremendous laugh, and she normally served as our improvisational theater games teacher (a class always held at the beach). When I first saw her, I thought she was the coolest grown-up I’d ever seen.
Marcia made a significant contribution to what we now (somewhat longingly) refer as the “sexual revolution,” that wondrous burst of innocent hedonism.
Some of the parents, however, weren’t so cool. Our pornography class didn’t last beyond one meeting. It went the same way as our “garbaging” class (known these days as “dumpster diving”). We’d liberate discarded produce from the dumpsters of upscale supermarkets in La Jolla, usually resulting in wonderful ratatouille. (In those days, I thought only rich people ate eggplant.) However both classes were a little too extreme for even liberal free-school parents. What they didn’t know was both classes grew out of conversations I had with Marcia. Looking back, I realize that these aborted classes represent my first real collaboration with a grownup, on grown-up terms. I was a student and she was a teacher and it didn’t matter one bit. We bounced things off each other’s minds and generally enjoyed doing it.
But I didn’t want to write about Marcia Wexler Kerwit, not this way, not as an obituary.
Marcia, a pioneering, life-long advocate for women’s health and sexual know-how, passed away on December 4th, at Berkeley’s infamous, leftie-filled Strawberry Creek Lodge. She died of an unfortunate constellation of illnesses. Her health, normally so well served by qigong and Chinese herbs, local produce, fresh eggs, and fermented goat milk products, suddenly inverted and became a black hole of doom that sucked the vitality from her very marrow. I watched, appalled, as her physical being distorted, ballooning and withering in unaccountable ways. “I hate this!” she wailed. And I, like other friends, could only help with the little matters while the biggest one of all bore down upon her.
Aside from being one of my oldest and dearest friends, and one of the people who influenced me as I became a sexologist, Marcia made a significant contribution to what we now (somewhat longingly) refer as the “sexual revolution,” that wondrous burst of innocent hedonism. As one of the pioneers of the feminist women’s health movement, Marcia helped establish women’s clinics and self-help groups. She was part of a kind of sexual health “underground railroad” of forbidden knowledge: home menstrual extraction, gynecological self-exams, the fitting of cervical caps...
Along with Carol Downer, Rebecca Chalker, Suzann Gage, Lorraine Rothman, and others, Marcia collaborated on A New View of a Woman’s Body: A Fully Illustrated Guide by the Federation of Feminist Women’s Health Centers. These women did fervent, ground-breaking research into the structure of female genitals and sexual organs. Gage’s drawings first exposed the true structure of the clitoris, in direct contradiction to the Masters and Johnson assignment of much clitoral structure to a vaginally-based “orgasmic platform.” A New View... is now a classic, though less well known than Our Bodies, Our Selves. Subsequent books on women’s sexuality, including Chalker’s own, The Clitoral Truth: The Secret World at Your Fingertips
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