THE FEMALE EUNUCH
Germaine Greer

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

Copyright © Germaine Greer 1970, 1971

Introduction © Hadley Freeman 2020

Germaine Greer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover illustration by John Holmes

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007205011

Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008436186

Version: 2020-09-30

Dedication

This book is dedicated to LILLIAN, who lives with nobody but a colony of New York roaches, whose energy has never failed despite her anxieties and her asthma and her overweight, who is always interested in everybody, often angry, sometimes bitchy, but always involved. Lillian the abundant, the golden, the eloquent, the well and badly loved; Lillian the beautiful who thinks she is ugly, Lillian the indefatigable who thinks she is always tired.

It is dedicated to CAROLINE, who danced, but badly, painted but badly, jumped up from a dinner table in tears, crying that she wanted to be a person, went out and was one, despite her great beauty. Caroline who smarts at every attack, and doubts all praise, who has done great things with gentleness and humility, who assaulted the authorities with valorous love and cannot be defeated.

It is for my fairy godmother, JOY with the green eyes, whose husband decried her commonsense and belittled her mind, because she was more passionately intelligent, and more intelligently passionate than he, until she ran away from him and recovered herself, her insight and her sense of humour, and never cried again, except in compassion.

It is for KASOUNDRA, who makes magic out of skins and skeins and pens, who is never still, never unaware, riding her strange destiny in the wilderness of New York, loyal and bitter, as strong as a rope of steel and as soft as a sigh.

For MARCIA, whose mind contains everything and destroys nothing, understanding dreams and nightmares, who looks on tempests and is not shaken, who lives among the damned and is not afraid of them, a living soul among the dead.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition

Introduction

Summary

Body

Gender

Bones

Curves

Hair

Sex

The Wicked Womb

Soul

The Stereotype

Energy

Baby

Girl

Puberty

The Psychological Sell

The Raw Material

Womanpower

Work

Love

The Ideal

Altruism

Egotism

Obsession

Romance

The Object of Male Fantasy

The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage

Family

Security

Hate

Loathing and Disgust

Abuse

Misery

Resentment

Rebellion

Revolution

Revolution

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition

Twenty years ago I wrote in the Introduction to The Female Eunuch that I thought that the book should quickly date and disappear. I hoped that a new breed of woman would come upon the earth for whom my analysis of sex oppression in the developed world in the second half of the twentieth century would be utterly irrelevant.

Many new breeds of woman are upon the earth: there are female body builders whose pectorals are as hard as any man’s; there are women marathon runners with musculature as stringy and tight as any man’s; there are women administrators with as much power as any man; there are women paying alimony and women being paid palimoney; there are up-front lesbians demanding the right to marry and have children by artificial insemination; there are men who mutilate themselves and are given passports as statutory females; there are prostitutes who have combined in highly visible professional organizations; there are armed women in the front line of the most powerful armies on earth; there are full colonels with vivid lipstick and painted nails; there are women who write books about their sexual conquests, naming names and describing positions, sizes of members and so forth. None of these female phenomena was to be observed in any numbers twenty years ago.

Women’s magazines are now written for grown-ups, and discuss not only pre-marital sex, contraception and abortion, but venereal disease, incest, sexual perversion, and, even more surprising, finance high and low, politics, conservation, animal rights and consumer power. Contraception having saturated its market and severely curtailed the money to be made out of menstruation, the pharmaceutical multinationals have at last turned their attention to the menopausal and post-menopausal women who represent a new, huge, unexploited market for HRT. Geriatric sex can be seen in every television soap opera. What more could women want?

Freedom, that’s what.

Freedom from being the thing looked at rather than the person looking back. Freedom from self-consciousness. Freedom from the duty of sexual stimulation of jaded male appetite, for which no breast ever bulges hard enough and no leg is ever long enough. Freedom from the uncomfortable clothes that must be worn to titillate. Freedom from shoes that make us shorten our steps and push our buttocks out. Freedom from the ever-present juvenile pulchritude on Page 3. Freedom from the humiliating insults heaped on us by the top shelf of the newsagents; freedom from rape, whether it is by being undressed verbally by the men on the building site, spied on as we go about our daily business, stopped, propositioned or followed on the street, greasily teased by our male workmates, pawed by the boss, used sadistically or against our will by the men we love, or violently terrorized and beaten by a stranger, or a gang of strangers.

Twenty years ago it was important to stress the right to sexual expression and far less important to underline a woman’s right to reject male advances; now it is even more important to stress the right to reject penetration by the male member, the right to safe sex, the right to chastity, the right to defer physical intimacy until there is irrefutable evidence of commitment, because of the appearance on the earth of AIDS. The argument in The Female Eunuch is still valid, none the less, for it holds that a woman has the right to express her own sexuality; which is not at all the same thing as the right to capitulate to male advances. The Female Eunuch argues that the rejection of the concept of female libido as merely responsive is essential to female liberation. This is the proposition that was interpreted by the brain-dead hacks of Fleet Street as ‘telling women to go out and do it’.

The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood. Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it. Freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Freedom from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom of speech and freedom of belief. Most of the women in the world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten. The Female Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor women as freedom.

The sudden death of communism in 1989–90 catapulted poor women the world over into consumer society, where there is no protection for mothers, for the aged, for the disabled, no commitment to health care or education or raising the standard of living for the whole population. In those two years millions of women saw the bottom fall out of their world; though they lost their child support, their pensions, their hospital benefits, their day care, their protected jobs, and the very schools and hospitals where they worked closed down, there was no outcry. They had freedom to speak but no voice. They had freedom to buy essential services with money that they did not have, freedom to indulge in the oldest form of private enterprise, prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to consumerism, or else freedom to starve, freedom to beg.

You can now see the female Eunuch the world over; all the time we thought we were driving her out of our minds and hearts she was spreading herself wherever blue jeans and Coca-Cola may go. Wherever you see nail varnish, lipstick, brassieres and high heels, the Eunuch has set up her camp. You can find her triumphant even under the veil.

Introduction

The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, five years before the Sex Discrimination Act was passed in Parliament, and six years before the Domestic Violence Act. Back in 1970, married women didn’t do their own tax returns because their income was seen as belonging to their husband; health clinics demanded that a married woman obtain permission from her husband before fitting her with a coil; single women struggled to get mortgages; and if your husband raped you he would not be prosecuted because, according to the law, by marrying him you consented to have sex with him, whenever, wherever and however he so pleased.

This was the world that The Female Eunuch – and its author, Germaine Greer – burst into like a thrillingly disruptive shooting star, and the effects of both the book and the writer are still being felt today. Books had certainly been written about feminism before – from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792 to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1964. But The Female Eunuch arrived among them like an intimidatingly cool new kid who arrives in school unexpectedly one day, and by lunchtime everyone is copying her mannerisms, so overawed they don’t know whether they love her or loathe her. It is hard to imagine a feminist book written today that isn’t in some way influenced by The Female Eunuch, even if the author professes to detest Greer.

Let’s not make any bones about this: Greer did not come here to be liked. ‘Hopefully this book is subversive. Hopefully it will draw fire from all the articulate sections of the community,’ she writes at the beginning of The Female Eunuch. Her hopes were fulfilled: the book was subversive, and it did draw fire – and so does she, still. Greer is the most famous, most instantly recognisable feminist in the world, and her renown is not something that has ever seemed to cause her much unhappiness. You don’t agree to go in the Big Brother house, and then storm out calling it a ‘fascist prison’, if you abhor attention. Greer has enjoyed the glories that have come with her success, from posing naked in an erotic magazine to a youthful affair with Martin Amis; true to form, in 2015 she released the 30,000-word love letter she wrote to him 40 years earlier, professing herself to be ‘helpless with desire’ for him. Whatever else anyone wants to say about Greer – and they have said pretty much everything over the past half-century – no one can say she didn’t know how to enjoy herself.

Greer was never part of the traditional feminist group, or, indeed, any group at all. She was and remains feminism’s naughty, troublemaking sister – the Lydia Bennet to Gloria Steinem’s Elizabeth. While her contemporaries were getting bogged down in the notoriously boggy politics of 1970s feminism, Greer was otherwise engaged hanging out with the Rolling Stones and having her vagina photographed. If you want to see what Greer very much wasn’t interested in, read Nora Ephron’s 1972 essay ‘Miami’, about the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), although it actually becomes about the power struggles between, on the one side, Friedan, and, on the other, Steinem and Bella Abzug, via the deadening media of NWPC meetings in ‘airless, windowless rooms decked with taffeta valances and Miami Beach plaster statuary’. Greer is, characteristically, pretty dismissive of Friedan et al in The Female Eunuch – like I said, she did not come here to make friends. But then, she is not an activist, as Friedan and Steinem were and are. She would describe herself as an academic, but, really, she is an iconoclast.

Rereading The Female Eunuch in 2020, it’s still very easy to see why it caused such a sensation in its time, even if its influence has in some ways worked against it. Her arguments about how body-shaming is used to oppress women are so familiar that they appear in most women’s magazines on a monthly basis. But it was Greer who wrote about it, if not first, then certainly with the most thrilling rage and passion. Feminist tracts aren’t known for their humour, but, my God, The Female Eunuch is funny: ‘If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby,’ she declares. Greer is famously erudite, and the book is studded with literary references. But The Female Eunuch is the only book I know of that leaps from Charles M. Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’ cartoon to Strindberg’s The Dance of Death to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House in one single sentence.

The humour in The Female Eunuch is born out of searing, fearless rage, and few write anger better than Greer. ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hate them’ is probably the most famous line in the book. But to my mind, the most powerful comes a few pages later: ‘Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men: following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.’

And yet, The Female Eunuch is not ultimately a sad or even an angry book. It is a joyful book, in which Greer ecstatically imagines a still-yet-to-be-realised utopian future for women, in which they are freed of the shackles of femininity and patriarchy, where they enjoy sex gloriously and raise their children collectively, visited occasionally, and only if necessary, by the fathers of their offspring. That feminism has yet to achieve this, and has failed to save so many women from femininity, disappointing sex and themselves, is not Greer’s fault. But it is part of the reason her book still packs such an astonishing punch.

Greer is unfashionably clear on how women need to achieve liberation. Hers is a feminism that is miles away from today’s incarnation, which celebrates all women’s choices and sees censure as patriarchal. Greer has no time for such niceties, and she is uncompromising on what women need to do to lead fulfilling lives: not be tied down by a man or children, not wear certain clothes, not accept femininity on any level. In today’s feminist landscape, in which sex work is fiercely defended as just another form of work, The Female Eunuch feels, in many ways, like it’s not just from another era, but another planet.

That’s not the only theory of Greer’s that will feel out of lockstep with modern consensus. Her more recently voiced thoughts on trans people, insisting ‘I don’t think surgery will turn a man into a woman’, have led to her being no-platformed by students. But her opinions are hardly a shock, given Greer’s decades-long abhorrence of the idea of an innate gender and the artifice of femininity. In The Female Eunuch, she writes about April Ashley, one of the first British people to have gender reassignment surgery, and sees her as being as much of a victim as any natal woman: ‘As long as the feminine stereotype remains the definition of the female sex, April Ashley is a woman,’ Greer declares. It may not be the kind of acceptance trans rights activists today campaign for, but Greer was engaging with issues of gender versus sex long before many of them were born. And given that she emerged in an era in which men could abuse women with impunity, it is not surprising that some of her generation might be sceptical about the idea that gender identity trumps physical reality. That many people today think differently is, ironically, thanks in part to Greer, who wrote so powerfully that women should be able to define themselves.

It is a profoundly narcissistic endeavour to read books from the past and expect them to reflect the morals of the present day. But from a 2020 perspective, there are some shocking clangers in The Female Eunuch, about sexuality (‘Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role’) and race (‘That most virile of creatures, the “buck” negro …’ she wrote, invoking a popular cliché of the time.) Anyone who defends Greer for her work in feminism, as I do, without acknowledging her – to put it mildly – more problematic sides is helping neither themselves nor her. There is an oddly Freudian tendency among young women to trash the feminists from the generation before, a kind of mother-killing, a means for the new generation to make room for themselves (although, ladies, please: there’s always room.) Figurehead feminists are especially vulnerable to expectations of perfection, and any infractions result in them being flung overboard.

I have never understood this hardline approach of rejecting everything about a person because you object to some things about them. And what a waste it would be to discard her, because Greer was right – so thrillingly right – about misogyny and self-loathing, and the lies women were and are sold about what constitutes a good life. Greer was and is far from perfect, but learning to accept female imperfection is the moral of this book. Just like her book, she is astonishing, brilliant, absurd, infuriating, incendiary and part of the canon forever.

Hadley Freeman, 2020

Summary

‘The World has lost its soul, and I my sex’

(TOLLER, Hinkemann)

This book is a part of the second feminist wave. The old suffragettes, who served their prison term and lived on through the years of gradual admission of women into professions which they declined to follow, into parliamentary freedoms which they declined to exercise, into academies which they used more and more as shops where they could take out degrees while waiting to get married, have seen their spirit revive in younger women with a new and vital cast. Mrs Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, leader of the Six Point Group, welcomed the younger militants and even welcomed their sexual frankness. ‘They’re young,’ she said to Irma Kurtz, ‘and utterly unsophisticated politically, but they’re full of beans. The membership of our group until recently has been far too old for my liking.’[1] After the ecstasy of direct action, the militant ladies of two generations ago settled down to work of consolidation in hosts of small organizations, while the main force of their energy filtered away in post-war retrenchments and the revival of frills, corsets and femininity after the permissive twenties, through the sexual sell of the fifties, ever dwindling, ever more respectable. Evangelism withered into eccentricity.

The new emphasis is different. Then genteel middle-class ladies clamoured for reform, now ungenteel middle-class women are calling for revolution. For many of them the call for revolution came before the call for the liberation of women. The New Left has been the forcing house for most movements, and for many of them liberation is dependent upon the coming of the classless society and the withering away of the state. The difference is radical, for the faith that the suffragettes had in the existing political systems and their deep desire to participate in them have perished. In the old days ladies were anxious to point out that they did not seek to disrupt society or to unseat God. Marriage, the family, private property and the state were threatened by their actions, but they were anxious to allay the fears of conservatives, and in doing so the suffragettes betrayed their own cause and prepared the way for the failure of emancipation. Five years ago it seemed clear that emancipation had failed: the number of women in Parliament had settled at a low level; the number of professional women had stabilized as a tiny minority; the pattern of female employment had emerged as underpaid, menial and supportive. The cage door had been opened but the canary had refused to fly out. The conclusion was that the cage door ought never to have been opened because canaries are made for captivity; the suggestion of an alternative had only confused and saddened them.

There are feminist organizations still in existence which follow the reforming tracks laid down by the suffragettes. Betty Friedan’s National Organization for Women is represented in congressional committees, especially the ones considered to be of special relevance to women. Women politicians still represent female interests, but they are most often the interests of women as dependants, to be protected from easy divorce and all sorts of Casanova’s charters. Mrs Hunkins-Hallinan’s Six Point Group is a respected political entity. What is new about the situation is that such groups are enjoying new limelight. The media insist upon exposing women’s liberation weekly, even daily. The change is that suddenly everyone is interested in the subject of women. They may not be in favour of the movements that exist, but they are concerned about the issues. Among young women in universities the movement might be expected to find strong support. It is not surprising that exploited women workers might decide to hold the government to ransom at last. It is surprising that women who seem to have nothing to complain about have begun to murmur. Speaking to quiet audiences of provincial women decently hatted and dressed, I have been surprised to find that the most radical ideas are gladly entertained, and the most telling criticisms and sharpest protests are uttered. Even the suffragettes could not claim the grass-roots support that the new feminism gains day by day.

We can only speculate about the causes of this new activity. Perhaps the sexual sell was oversell. Perhaps women have never really believed the account of themselves which they were forced to accept from psychologists, religious leaders, women’s magazines and men. Perhaps the reforms which did happen eventually led them to the position from which they could at last see the whole perspective and begin to understand the rationale of their situation. Perhaps because they are not enmeshed in unwilling childbirth and heavy menial labour in the home, they have had time to think. Perhaps the plight of our society has become so desperate and so apparent that women can no longer be content to leave it to other people. The enemies of women have blamed such circumstances for female discontent. Women must prize this discontent as the first stirring of the demand for life; they have begun to speak out and to speak to each other. The sight of women talking together has always made men uneasy; nowadays it means rank subversion. ‘Right on!’

We may safely assert that the knowledge that men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial and will always be so until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.

John Stuart Mill

The organized liberationists are a well-publicized minority; the same faces appear every time a feminist issue is discussed. Inevitably they are presented as the leaders of a movement which is essentially leaderless. They are not much nearer to providing a revolutionary strategy than they ever were; demonstrating, compiling reading lists and sitting on committees are not themselves liberated behaviour, especially when they are still embedded in a context of housework and feminine wiles. As means of educating the people who must take action to liberate themselves, their effectiveness is limited. The concept of liberty implied by such liberation is vacuous; at worst it is defined by the condition of men, themselves unfree, and at best it is left undefined in a world of very limited possibilities. On the one hand, feminists can be found who serve the notion of equality ‘social, legal, occupational, economic, political and moral’, whose enemy is discrimination, whose means are competition and demand. On the other hand there are those who cherish an ideal of a better life, which will follow when a better life is assured for all by the correct political means. To women disgusted with conventional political methods, whether constitutional or totalitarian or revolutionary, neither alternative can make much appeal. The housewife who must wait for the success of world revolution for her liberty might be excused for losing hope, while conservative political methods can invent no way in which the economically necessary unit of the one-man family could be diversified. But there is another dimension in which she can find motive and cause for action, although she might not find a blueprint for Utopia. She could begin not by changing the world, but by re-assessing herself.

It is impossible to argue a case for female liberation if there is no certainty about the degree of inferiority or natural dependence which is unalterably female. That is why this book begins with the Body. We know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what we might have been. The dogmatism of science expresses the status quo as the ineluctable result of law: women must learn how to question the most basic assumptions about feminine normality in order to reopen the possibilities for development which have been successively locked off by conditioning. So, we begin at the beginning, with the sex of cells. Nothing much can be made of chromosomal difference until it is manifested in development, and development cannot take place in a vacuum: from the outset our observation of the female is consciously and unconsciously biassed by assumptions that we cannot help making and cannot always identify when they have been made. The new assumption behind the discussion of the body is that everything that we may observe could be otherwise. In order to demonstrate some of the aspects of conditioning a discussion follows of the effects of behaviour upon the skeleton. From Bones we move to Curves, which is still essential to assumptions about the female sex, and then to Hair, for a long time considered a basic secondary sexual characteristic.

Female sexuality has always been a fascinating topic; this discussion of it attempts to show how female sexuality has been masked and deformed by most observers, and never more so than in our own time. The conformation of the female has already been described in terms of a particular type of conditioning, and now the specific character of that conditioning begins to emerge. What happens is that the female is considered as a sexual object for the use and appreciation of other sexual beings, men. Her sexuality is both denied and misrepresented by being identified as passivity. The vagina is obliterated from the imagery of femininity in the same way that the signs of independence and vigour in the rest of her body are suppressed. The characteristics that are praised and rewarded are those of the castrate – timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and preciosity. Body ends with a look at the way in which female reproduction is thought to influence the whole organism in the operations of the Wicked Womb, source of hysteria, menstrual depression, weakness, and unfitness for any sustained enterprise.

The compound of induced characteristics of soul and body is the myth of the Eternal Feminine, nowadays called the Stereotype. This is the dominant image of femininity which rules our culture and to which all women aspire. Assuming that the goddess of consumer culture is an artefact, we embark on an examination of how she comes to be made, the manufacture of the Soul. The chief element in this process is like the castration that we saw practised upon the body, the suppression and deflection of Energy. Following the same simple pattern, we begin at the beginning with Baby, showing how of the greater the less is made. The Girl struggles to reconcile her schooling along masculine lines with her feminine conditioning until Puberty resolves the ambiguity and anchors her safely in the feminine posture, if it works. When it doesn’t she is given further conditioning as a corrective, especially by psychologists, whose assumptions and prescriptions are described as the Psychological Sell.

Because so many assumptions about the sex of mind cloud the issue of female mental ability, there follows a brief account of the failure of fifty years of thorough and diversified testing to discover any pattern of differentiation in male and female intellectual powers, called The Raw Material. Because the tests have been irrelevant to the continuing conviction that women are illogical, subjective and generally silly, Womanpower takes a coherent expression of all such prejudice, Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character, and turns all the defects which it defines into advantages, by rejecting Weininger’s concepts of virtue and intelligence and espousing those of Whitehead and others. As a corrective to such a theoretical view of how valuable such female minds might be, Work provides a factual account of the patterns that the female contribution actually takes and how it is valued.

The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern. This has meant the distortion of our concepts of Love. Beginning with a celebration of an Ideal, Love proceeds to describe some of the chief perversions, Altruism, Egotism, and Obsession. These distortions masquerade under various mythic guises, of which two follow – Romance, an account of the fantasies on which the appetent and the disappointed woman is nourished, and The Object of Male Fantasy, which deals with the favourite ways in which women are presented in specifically male literature. The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage records the rise of the most commonly accepted mutual fantasy of heterosexual love in our society, as a prelude to a discussion of the normal form of life as we understand it, the Family. The nuclear family of our time is severely criticized, and some vague alternatives are suggested, but the chief function of this part, as of the whole book, is mostly to suggest the possibility and the desirability of an alternative. The chief bogy of those who fear freedom is insecurity, and so Love ends with an animadversion on the illusoriness of Security, the ruling deity of the welfare state, never more insubstantial than it is in the age of total warfare, global pollution and population explosion.

Draw near, woman, and hear what I have to say. Turn your curiosity for once towards useful objects, and consider the advantages which nature gave you and society ravished away. Come and learn how you were born the companion of man and became his slave; how you grew to like the condition and think it natural; and finally how the long habituation of slavery so degraded you that you preferred its sapping but convenient vices to the more difficult virtues of freedom and repute. If the picture I shall paint leaves you in command of yourselves, if you can contemplate it without emotion, then go back to your futile pastimes; ‘there is no remedy; the vices have become the custom.’

Choderlos de Laclos, ‘On the Education of Women’, 1783

Because love has been so perverted, it has in many cases come to involve a measure of hatred. In extreme cases it takes the form of Loathing and Disgust occasioned by sadism, fastidiousness and guilt, and inspires hideous crimes on the bodies of women, but more often it is limited to Abuse and ridicule, expressed by casual insult and facetiousness. Rather than dwell upon the injustices suffered by women in their individual domestic circumstances, these parts deal with more or less public occasions in which the complicated patterns of mutual exploitation do not supply any ambiguous context. There are many subjective accounts of suffering to be found in feminist literature, so Misery deals with the problem on a broader scale, showing how much objective evidence there is that women are not happy even when they do follow the blueprint set out by sentimental and marriage guidance counsellors and the system that they represent. Although there is no pattern of female assault on men to parallel their violence to women, there is plenty of evidence of the operation of Resentment in bitter, non-physical sexual conflict, usually enacted as a kind of game, a ritualized situation in which the real issues never emerge. This unconscious vindictiveness has its parallels in more organized and articulate female Rebellion, in that it seeks to characterize men as the enemy and either to compete with or confront or attack them. In so far as such movements demand of men, or force men to grant their liberty, they perpetuate the estrangement of the sexes and their own dependency.

Revolution ought to entail the correction of some of the false perspectives which our assumptions about womanhood, sex, love and society have combined to create. Tentatively it gestures towards the re-deployment of energy, no longer to be used in repression, but in desire, movement and creation. Sex must be rescued from the traffic between powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral, to become a form of communication between potent, gentle, tender people, which cannot be accomplished by denial of heterosexual contact. The Ultra-feminine must refuse any longer to countenance the self-deception of the Omnipotent Administrator, not so much by assailing him as freeing herself from the desire to fulfil his expectations. It might be expected that men would resist female liberation because it threatens the foundations of phallic narcissism, but there are indications that men themselves are seeking a more satisfying role. If women liberate themselves, they will perforce liberate their oppressors: men might well feel that as sole custodians of sexual energy and universal protectors of women and children they have undertaken the impossible, especially now that their misdirected energies have produced the ultimate weapon. In admitting women to male-dominated areas of life, men have already shown a willingness to share responsibility, even if the invitation has not been taken up. Now that it might be construed that women are to help carry the can full of the mess that men have made, it need not be surprising that women have not leapt at the chance. If women could think that civilization would come to maturity only when they were involved in it wholly, they might feel more optimism in the possibilities of change and new development. The spiritual crisis we are at present traversing might be just another growing pain.

Revolution does little more than ‘peep to what it would’. It hints that women ought not to enter into socially sanctioned relationships, like marriage, and that once unhappily in they ought not to scruple to run away. It might even be thought to suggest that women should be deliberately promiscuous. It certainly maintains that they should be self-sufficient and consciously refrain from establishing exclusive dependencies and other kinds of neurotic symbioses. Much of what it points to is sheer irresponsibility, but when the stake is life and freedom, and the necessary condition is the recovery of a will to live, irresponsibility might be thought a small risk. It is almost a hundred years since Nora asked Helmer ‘What do you consider is my most sacred duty?’ and when he answered ‘Your duty to your husband and children’, she demurred.

I have another duty, just as sacred … My duty to myself … I believe that before everything else I’m a human being – just as much as you are … or at any rate I shall try to become one. I know quite well that most people would agree with you, Torvald, and that you have a warrant for it in books; but I can’t be satisfied any longer with what most people say, and with what’s in books. I must think things out for myself and try to understand them.[2]

The relationships recognized by our society, and dignified with full privileges, are only those which are binding, symbiotic, economically determined. The most generous, tender, spontaneous relationship deliquesces into the approved mould when it avails itself of the approved buttresses, legality, security, permanence. Marriage cannot be a job as it has become. Status ought not to be measured for women in terms of attracting and snaring a man. The woman who realizes that she is bound by a million Lilliputian threads in an attitude of impotence and hatred masquerading as tranquillity and love has no option but to run away, if she is not to be corrupted and extinguished utterly. Liberty is terrifying but it is also exhilarating. Life is not easier or more pleasant for the Noras who have set off on their journey to awareness, but it is more interesting, nobler even. Such counsel will be called encouragement of irresponsibility, but the woman who accepts a way of life which she has not knowingly chosen, acting out a series of contingencies falsely presented as destiny, is truly irresponsible. To abdicate one’s own moral understanding, to tolerate crimes against humanity, to leave everything to someone else, the father-ruler-king-computer, is the only irresponsibility. To deny that a mistake has been made when its results are chaos visible and tangible on all sides, that is irresponsibility. What oppression lays upon us is not responsibility but guilt.

The revolutionary woman must know her enemies, the doctors, psychiatrists, health visitors, priests, marriage counsellors, policemen, magistrates and genteel reformers, all the authoritarians and dogmatists who flock about her with warnings and advice. She must know her friends, her sisters, and seek in their lineaments her own. With them she can discover cooperation, sympathy and love. The end cannot justify the means: if she finds that her revolutionary way leads only to further discipline and continuing incomprehension, with their corollaries of bitterness and diminution, no matter how glittering the objective which would justify it, she must understand that it is a wrong way and an illusory end. The struggle which is not joyous is the wrong struggle. The joy of the struggle is not hedonism and hilarity, but the sense of purpose, achievement and dignity which is the reflowering of etiolated energy. Only these can sustain her and keep the flow of energy coming. The problems are only equalled by the possibilities: every mistake made is redeemed when it is understood. The only ways in which she can feel such joy are radical ones: the more derided and maligned the action that she undertakes, the more radical.

The way is unknown, just as the sex of the uncastrated female is unknown. However far we can see it is not far enough to discern the contours of what is ultimately desirable. And so no ultimate strategy can be designed. To be free to start out, and to find companions for the journey is as far as we need to see from where we stand. The first exercise of the free woman is to devise her own mode of revolt, a mode which will reflect her own independence and originality. The more clearly the forms of oppression emerge in her understanding, the more clearly she can see the shape of future action. In the search for political awareness there is no substitute for confrontation. It would be too easy to present women with yet another form of self-abnegation, more opportunities for appetence and forlorn hope, but women have had enough bullying. They have been led by the nose and every other way until they have to acknowledge that, like everyone else, they are lost. A feminist elite might seek to lead uncomprehending women in another arbitrary direction, training them as a task force in a battle that might, that ought never to eventuate. If there is a pitched battle women will lose, because the best man never wins; the consequences of militancy do not disappear when the need for militancy is over. Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it. It is not a question of telling women what to do next, or even what to want to do next. The hope in which this book was written is that women will discover that they have a will; once that happens they will be able to tell us how and what they want.

The fear of freedom is strong in us. We call it chaos or anarchy, and the words are threatening. We live in a true chaos of contradicting authorities, an age of conformism without community, of proximity without communication. We could only fear chaos if we imagined that it was unknown to us, but in fact we know it very well. It is unlikely that the techniques of liberation spontaneously adopted by women will be in such fierce conflict as exists between warring self-interests and conflicting dogmas, for they will not seek to eliminate all systems but their own. However diverse they may be, they need not be utterly irreconcilable, because they will not be conquistatorial.

Hopefully, this book is subversive. Hopefully, it will draw fire from all the articulate sections of the community. The conventional moralist will find much that is reprehensible in the denial of the Holy Family, in the denigration of sacred motherhood, and the inference that women are not by nature monogamous. The political conservatives ought to object that by advocating the destruction of the patterns of consumption carried out by the chief spenders, the housewives, the book invites depression and hardship. This is tantamount to admitting that the depression of women is necessary to the maintenance of the economy, and simply ratifies the point. If the present economic structure can change only by collapsing, then it had better collapse as soon as possible. The nation that acknowledges that all labourers are worthy of their hire and then withholds payment from 19.5 million workers cannot continue. Freudians will object that by setting aside the conventional account of the female psyche, and relying upon a concept of woman which cannot be found to exist, the book is mere metaphysics, forgetting the metaphysical basis of their own doctrine. The reformers will lament that the image of womanhood is cheapened by the advocacy of delinquency, so that women are being drawn further away from the real centres of power. In the computer kingdom the centres of political power have become centres of impotence, but even so, nothing in the book precludes the use of the political machine, although reliance on it may be contra-indicated. The most telling criticisms will come from my sisters of the left, the Maoists, the Trots, the IS, the SDS, because of my fantasy that it might be possible to leap the steps of revolution and arrive somehow at liberty and communism without strategy or revolutionary discipline. But if women are the true proletariat, the truly oppressed majority, the revolution can only be drawn nearer by their withdrawal of support for the capitalist system. The weapon that I suggest is that most honoured of the proletariat, withdrawal of labour. Nevertheless it is clear that I do not find the factory the real heart of civilization or the re-entry of women into industry as the necessary condition of liberation. Unless the concepts of work and play and reward for work change absolutely, women must continue to provide cheap labour, and even more, free labour exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favour.

This book represents only another contribution to a continuing dialogue between the wondering woman and the world. No questions have been answered but perhaps some have been asked in a more proper way than heretofore. If it is not ridiculed or reviled, it will have failed of its intention. If the most successful feminine parasites do not find it offensive, than it is innocuous. What they can tolerate is intolerable for a woman with any pride. The opponents of female suffrage lamented that woman’s emancipation would mean the end of marriage, morality and the state; their extremism was more clear-sighted than the woolly benevolence of liberals and humanists, who thought that giving women a measure of freedom would not upset anything. When we reap the harvest which the unwitting suffragettes sowed we shall see that the anti-feminists were after all right.

Body

Gender

It is true that the sex of a person is attested by every cell in his body. What we do not know is exactly what that difference in the cells means in terms of their functioning. We cannot even argue from the observed difference in the cells to a significant difference in the tissues composed of those cells. To make any assumptions about superiority or inferiority on this basis is to assume what is very far from being proved. Perhaps when we have learnt how to read the DNA we will be able to see what the information which is common to all members of the female sex really is, but even then it will be a long and tedious argument from biological data to behaviour.

It is an essential part of our conceptual apparatus that the sexes are a polarity, and a dichotomy in nature. Actually, that is quite false. The animal and vegetable worlds are not universally divided into two sexes, or even into two sexes with the possibility of freaks and indeterminate types; some lucky creatures are male and female by turns; some fungi and protozoa have more than two sexes and more than one way of coupling them. The degree of distinguishability between the sexes can vary from something so tiny as to be almost imperceptible to a degree of difference so great that scientists remained for a long time ignorant of the fact that species classified as distinct were in fact male and female of the same species. Nazi anthropologists maintained that the secondary sexual characteristics are more highly developed in more highly evolved species, pointing out that Negroid and Asiatic types frequently had less defined secondary characteristics than Aryans.[1]

In fact many simple forms of life are more strikingly differentiated sexually than humans are. What we do notice however is that the differentiations between the human sexes are stressed and exaggerated, and before justifying the process we must ask why.

We can see the differentiation which is essential to human sex if we magnify a body cell so much that we can see the chromosomes, say 2,000 times. Along with forty-five other chromosomes in the male body cell, there is one tiny one, called the Y-chromosome. It is not in fact a sex chromosome at all, and because of its isolation it has peculiar problems.

Since mutation within a chromosome can only be tested in different combinations when they can be freely distributed by crossing over, suppression of crossing over prevents mutations occurring within the Y-form being so tested. Since crossing over does not occur, the Y cannot undergo any structural interchange by means of interchange of parts. The Y-chromosome, therefore, during its evolution, would come to lose its effectiveness in the matter of sex determination and its place would be taken by the autosomes interacting with X.[2]

The autosomes are the chromosomes which are neither X nor Y, and of them there are twenty-three pairs in the body cells. Female sex is assured by the presence alongside them of a pair of chromosomes which look exactly like them, but are in fact sex-determining, and are designated as XX. Instead of an XX pair added to his twenty-three pairs of autosomes the male has XY. The Y-chromosome has a negative function: when a Y-carrying sperm fertilizes an ovum, it simply reduces the amount of femaleness which would result in the formation of a female foetus. Along with his maleness, the foetus then inherits a number of weaknesses which are called sex-linked, because they result from genes found only in the Y-chromosome. Strange deformities like hypertrichosis, meaning excessive growths of hair mainly on the ears, horny patches on hands and feet, bark-like skin and a form of webbing of the toes are some which are less well-known than haemophilia, which is in fact the result of a mutant gene in the X-chromosome which the Y-chromosome cannot suppress, so that it is transmitted by females, but only effective in males. Colour-blindness follows the same pattern. About thirty other disorders are to be found in the males of the species and seldom in the females for the same reason. There is much evidence that the female is constitutionally stronger than the male; she lives longer, and in every age group more males than females die although the number of males conceived may be between ten and thirty per cent more. There is no explanation for the more frequent conception of males, for female-producing spermatozoa are produced in the same number as male-producing ones. It is tempting to speculate whether this might not be a natural compensation for the greater vulnerability of males.[3]

While woman remains nearer the infantile type, man approaches more to the senile. The extreme variational tendency of man expresses itself in a larger percentage of genius, insanity and idiocy; woman remains more nearly normal.

W. I. Thomas, ‘Sex and Society’, 1907, p. 51

Recently, criminologists have come up with another disconcerting observation about the Y-chromosome. They found that there was a high proportion of males with the XYY-chromosome, that is an extra Y, among those men in prison for crimes of violence, and it seemed to be linked to certain deficiencies in mental ability.[4]

The development of the sexual characteristics is not simply determined by the chromosomes: these constitute the primal difference, but the development of the different physical characteristics involves the whole endocrinal system and the interaction of various hormones. Women have been made especially aware of their hormones because of the use of synthetic hormones in the contraceptive pill; as usual when such notions are popularized, the function of the hormones has been too simply described. In fact, the full range of activity of hormones is very imperfectly understood. In tampering with the delicate and fluctuating balance of female hormones, physicians have had to admit that they have produced alterations in non-sexual and non-reproductive functions which they did not expect. It is difficult enough to understand the simple mathematics of genes and chromosomes: when it comes to the chemistry of hormones, the processes are much more difficult to trace. We know that the male hormone, testosterone, induces the growth of male sexual characteristics, and that it is linked somehow with the other male hormone, androgen, which stimulates the growth of muscle, bone and guts. The secretion of androgen is under the control of the pituitary interstitial cell hormone, as is the female hormone oestrogen which is very like it. Both sexes produce both; all we know is that if we give oestrogen to men their secondary sexual characteristics become less evident, and if we give androgen to women the same happens. For some functions oestrogen needs the help of the other female hormone, progesterone. All of our secretions have complementary and catalytic reactions: almost every investigation of these turns up new chemicals with new names. Despite the haphazard bombardment of women with large doses of hormones in order to prevent conception, the commonest attitude towards them among those who know is one of respect and wonder. The search still goes on for a pill which will inhibit only the function essential to conception, and women ought not to feel confident until it is found.

The sex of a child is established at conception because each spermatozoon contains one Y- and one X-chromosome, and the mature ovum contains one X. The specialized chromosome causes the primary difference, but the development of sexual features grows out of specialized chemical substances in the chromosomes. Up to the seventh week the foetus shows no sexually differentiated characteristics, and when sexual development begins it follows a remarkably similar pattern in both sexes. The clitoris and the head of the penis look very alike at first, and the urethra develops as a furrow in both sexes. In boys the scrotum forms out of the genital swelling, in girls, the labia. If we examine the tissue in these analogous sites we see that it is in fact different, although women do have tissues similar to the male tissues in different sites.[5]

Nature herself is not always unambiguous. Sometimes a girl child may have so well-developed a clitoris that it is assumed that she is a boy. Likewise, many male children may be underdeveloped, or their genitals deformed or hidden and it is assumed that they are girls. Sometimes they accept their sex as described, and regard themselves as defective members of the wrong sex, assuming the behaviour and attitudes of that sex, despite special conflicts. In other cases, some sort of genetic awareness creates a problem which leads to investigation and the right sex of the child is established.[6] Some, like little girls born without vaginas, are wrongly considered neuter; others having the XXY construction are considered women without ovaries. Some of these difficulties can be resolved by cosmetic surgery, but too often surgeons perform such operations for peculiar motives, when scanning the body cell structure would reveal that no congenital abnormality is present. Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role, and ought not to be treated as genetic and pathological, but the prejudiced language of abnormality offers the homosexual no way of expressing this rejection, so he must consider himself a freak. The ‘normal’ sex roles that we learn to play from our infancy are no more natural than the antics of a transvestite. In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desirable, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by referring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. Frenchmen may well cry ‘Vive la différence’, for it is cultivated unceasingly in all aspects of life. It is easiest and most obvious to consider that deliberately induced deformity as it is manifested in the body and our concepts of it, for whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies.

Bones

Just how much sex in there is a skeleton? When archaeologists state categorically that half a femur comes from a twenty-year-old woman we are impressed with their certainty, not the less so because the statement, being a guess, is utterly unverifiable. Such a guess is as much based in the archaeologists’ assumptions about women as anything else. What they mean is that the bone is typically female, that is, that it ought to belong to a woman. Because it is impossible to escape from the stereotyped notions of womanhood as they prevail in one’s own society, curious errors in ascription have been made and continue to be made.

We tend to think of the skeleton as rigid; it seems to abide when all else withers away, so it ought to be a sort of nitty-gritty, unmarked by superficial conditioning. In fact it is itself subject to deformation by many influences. The first of these is muscular stress. Because men are more vigorous than women their bones have more clearly marked muscular grooves. If the muscles are constrained, by binding or wasting, or by continual external pressure which is not counterbalanced, the bones can be drawn out of alignment. Men’s bodies are altered by the work that they do, and by the nutriment which sustains them in their growing period, and so are women’s, but women add to these influences others which are dictated by fashion and sex-appeal. There have been great changes in the history of feminine allure in the approved posture of the shoulders, whether sloping or straight, drawn forward or back, and these have been bolstered by dress and corsetting, so that the delicate balance of bone on bone has been altered by the stress of muscles maintaining the artificial posture. The spine has been curved forwards in the mannequin’s lope, or backwards in the S-bend of art nouveau or the sway-back of the fifties. Footwear reinforces these unnatural stresses; the high-heeled shoe alters all the torsion of the muscles of the thighs and pelvis and throws the spine into an angle which is still in some circles considered essential to allure. I am not so young that I cannot remember my grandmother begging my mother to corset me, because she found my teenage ungainliness unattractive, and was afraid that my back was not strong enough to maintain my height by itself. If I had been corsetted at thirteen, my rib-cage might have developed differently, and the downward pressure on my pelvis would have resulted in its widening. Nowadays, corsetting is frowned upon, but many women would not dream of casting away the girdle that offers support and tummy control. Even tights are tight, and can cause strange symptoms in the wearer. Typists’ slouch and shop-girl lounge have their own effect upon the posture and therefore upon the skeleton.

Most people understand that the development of the limbs is affected by the exercise taken by the growing child. My mother discouraged us from emulating the famous girl swimmers of Australia by remarking on their massive shoulders and narrow hips, which she maintained came from their rigorous training. It is agreed that little girls should have a different physical education programme from little boys, but it is not admitted how much of the difference is counselled by the conviction that little girls should not look like little boys. The little girls look so pretty doing their eurhythmics, and the boys so manly when they chin themselves.[1] The same assumptions extend into our suppositions about male and female skeletons: a small-handed skeleton ought to be female, small feet are feminine too, but the fact remains that either sex may exhibit the disproportion.

Medical students learn their anatomy from a male sample, except where they are explicitly dealing with the reproductive functions. They learn that as a rule the female skeleton is lighter and smaller, and the bone formation more childlike than the male. This last is an observation which is frequently made about the whole female body, that it is infantilized or pedomorphic while the male body is aged, or gerontomorphic. This description, far from implying any defect in female development, implies an evolutionary advantage in greater elasticity and adaptability. We can assume nothing whatever about physical strength or mental ability from it.[2]

The difference between the childish type and the aged type must not be exaggerated: in fact there is a wide range of variation possible, without any hint of a functioning abnormality. Such categorization represents an effort to identify a tendency. In our search for distinctions to justify the inequalities in the male and female lot we have not only overstated the general difference but invented particular differences which do not exist, like the extra rib which is still widely believed to exist in women. It is assumed that the female pelvis, the seat of the most marked differentiation in the bone structure of the sexes, is quite different from the male. In fact the difference is one of comparative dimensions and angle of tilt: the basic design is common.[3] Well-bred sedentary women tend to have larger pelves than hard-working or poorly nourished women and in them the sexual difference is exaggerated by influences not connected with biological sex, but with the sociology of sex.[4] The prejudice that narrow pelves are inefficient in childbirth is unfounded; deformation in either direction will affect the efficiency of the mechanisms of the pelvis. Most people do not judge sex like archaeologists; when the actual sexual organs are hidden, the sex type is revealed by superficial characteristics, but even curves take their toll of the patient unseen bones, bearing them up, thrusting them out, wobbling and waggling them. Shall these bones live?

Curves

When the life of the party wants to express the idea of a pretty woman in mime, he undulates his two hands in the air and leers expressively. The notion of a curve is so closely connected to sexual semantics that some people cannot resist sniggering at road signs. The most popular image of the female despite the exigencies of the clothing trade is all boobs and buttocks, a hallucinating sequence of parabolae and bulges.

The female body is commonly believed to be enveloped in insulating fat, just so that she is more cuddly, Nature and Hugh Hefner being alike bawds in this traffic. It is true that women wear much fewer and lighter clothes than men do, but it is not so easy to determine whether the layer of fat results from the necessity to insulate such exposed portions or predates it. Men’s habit of wrapping their nether quarters in long garments has resulted in a wastage of the tissues which can be seen in the chicken legs which they expose on any British resort beach.[1] Men have subcutaneous fat as well as women, but women build up larger deposits in specific sites. In fat people most of the fat is accumulated in the subcutaneous layer: what the pseudo-fact that women have subcutaneous fat really means is that women ought to be fatter than men. Historically we may see that all repressed, indolent people have been fat, that eunuchs tend to fatten like bullocks, and so we need not be surprised to find that the male preference for cuddlesome women persists.[2]

The most highly prized curve of all is that of the bosom. The actual gland that forms the base of the breast is a convex structure extending from the second rib to the sixth beneath: the fat which gathers around it and forms the canyon of cleavage is not itself a sexual characteristic; in cases where the owner of huge breasts is not fat elsewhere the phenomenon is usually caused by endocrine derangement. The degree of attention which breasts receive, combined with the confusion about what the breast fetishists actually want, makes women unduly anxious about them. They can never be just right; they must always be too small, too big, the wrong shape, too flabby. The characteristics of the mammary stereotype are impossible to emulate because they are falsely simulated, but they must be faked somehow or another. Reality is either gross or scrawny.

The finest bosom in nature is not so fine as what imagination forms.

Gregory, ‘A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters’, 1809, p. 64

A full bosom is actually a millstone around a woman’s neck: it endears her to the men who want to make their mammet of her, but she is never allowed to think that their popping eyes actually see her. Her breasts are only to be admired for as long as they show no signs of their function: once darkened, stretched or withered they are objects of revulsion. They are not parts of a person but lures slung around her neck, to be kneaded and twisted like magic putty, or mumbled and mouthed like lolly ices. The only way that women can opt out of such gross handling is to refuse to wear undergarments which perpetuate the fantasy of pneumatic boobs, so that men must come to terms with the varieties of the real thing. Recent emphasis on the nipple, which was absent from the breast of popular pornography, is in women’s favour, for the nipple is expressive and responsive. The vegetable creep of women’s liberation has freed some breasts from the domination of foam and wire. One way to continue progress in the same direction might be to remind men that they have sensitive nipples too.

The next curve in the joker’s hourglass is the indentation of the waist. The waist is exaggerated in order to emphasize the outward curve of breast and buttock: it is hardly a natural phenomenon at all. In all those eras when it was de rigueur women have had to wear special apparatus to enforce it, and, in much the same way that a heap of brass rings really does elongate Bantu ladies’ necks, the waist came to exist. Nineteenth-century belles even went to the extremity of having their lowest ribs removed so that they could lace their corsets tighter. One native tribe of New Guinea uses tight girdles for both men and women, and the flesh tends to swell above and below the ligature, so that men have hourglass curves too. If we may take the imposition of tight corsets on ‘O’ as any guide, we might assume that the tiny waist is chiefly valued as a point of frangibility for the female frame, so that it gratifies sadistic fantasies.[3]

Buttock fetishism is comparatively rare in our culture, although Kenneth Tynan did write a connoisseur article for a girlie mag on the subject not so long ago.[4] Sub-pornographic magazines still carry advertisements for girdles with built-in cushions for inadequate arses, but generally the great quivering expanses of billowing thigh and buttock which titillated our grandfathers have fallen into obloquy.[5] Instead, the cheeky bottom in tight trousers, more boyish than otherwise, attracts the most overt attention. Girls are often self-conscious about their behinds, draping themselves in long capes and tunics, but it is more often because they are too abundant in that region than otherwise.

There is a kind of class distinction in sexual preferences. The darling of the working class is still curvy and chubby, but the fashionable middle class are paying their respects to slenderness, and even thinness. For women, there is one aspect which is common to both situations: demands are made upon them to contour their bodies in order to please the eyes of others. Women are so insecure that they constantly take measures to capitulate to this demand, whether it is rational or not. The thinnest women either diet because of an imagined grossness somewhere or fret because they are not curvaceous: the curviest worry about the bounciness of their curves, or diet to lose them. The curvy girl who ought to be thin and the thin girl who ought to be curvy are offered more or less dangerous medications to achieve their aims. In each case the woman is tailoring herself to appeal to a buyers’ market; her most exigent buyer may be her husband, who goes on exacting her approximation to the accepted image as a condition of his continuing desire and pride in her.

Every human body has its optimum weight and contour, which only health and efficiency can establish. Whenever we treat women’s bodies as aesthetic objects without function we deform them and their owners. Whether the curves imposed are the ebullient arabesques of the tit-queen or the attenuated coils of art-nouveau they are deformations of the dynamic, individual body, and limitations of the possibilities of being female.

Hair

The schoolboy who wrote to the Sunday papers asking why his headmaster was so agitated by the brown stuff that he had growing down his neck and on to his collar was being disingenuous. When men began to grow their hair in our generation they were not acting motivelessly, as they afterwards tried to maintain. Their hair was a sign that they did not accept the morality of the crop-haired generation of bureaucrats which sired them. By growing their hair they managed to up-end some strange presupposition about its sexual significance, for many young men sported full heads of tossing curls and long glossy tresses which their sisters tried vainly to emulate. The old supposition that women grew thicker and longer hair on their heads than men could did not die painlessly.[1] The long-haired men were called freaks and perverts, and the women resorted to immense cascades of store-bought hair to redress the balance. While they built up the hair on their heads and festooned their eyelashes they were resolutely stripping off every blade of hair in their armpits and on their arms and legs. When the summer brought the freaks out in the parks and gardens in singlets, they noticed that many of them had smooth arms and chests and scant beard; instead of understanding what this proved about the maleness of hairy chests, they took it to be further proof that these men were degenerates. Not so long ago Edmund Wilson could imply a deficiency in Hemingway’s virility by accusing him of having crêpe hair on his chest.

The fact is that some men are hairy and some are not; some women are hairy and some are not. Different races have different patterns of hair distribution. That most virile of creatures, the ‘buck’ negro, has very little body hair at all. Some dark-skinned Caucasian women have abundant growth of dark hair on their thighs, calves, arms and even cheeks; eradication of it is painful and time consuming, yet the more clothes women are allowed to take off, the more hair they must take off.

The rationale of depilation is crude. Sexuality is quite falsely thought to be an animal characteristic, despite the obvious fact that man is the most sexually active of the animals, and the only one who has sex independently of the instinctual reproductive drive. In the popular imagination hairiness is like furriness, an index of bestiality, and as such an indication of aggressive sexuality. Men cultivate it, just as they are encouraged to develop competitive and aggressive instincts, women suppress it, just as they suppress all the aspects of their vigour and libido. If they do not feel sufficient revulsion for their body hair themselves, others will direct them to depilate themselves. In extreme cases, women shave or pluck their pubic area, so as to seem even more sexless and infantile. Mind you, if even Freud could consider that pubic hair was a screen supplied by some sort of physiological modesty, this shaving could also figure as a revolt. The efforts made to eradicate all smell from the female body are part of the same suppression of fancied animality. Nowadays it is not enough to neutralize perspiration and breath odours; women are warned in every women’s magazine of the horror of vaginal odour, which is assumed to be utterly repellent. Men who do not want their women shaved and deodorized into complete tastelessness are powerless against women’s own distaste for their bodies. Some men on the other hand take a pride in smelliness and hairiness, as part of their virile rejection of prettiness. There is a mean between the charm of a half-cured goatskin and the glabrous odourless body of the feminine toy, which is the body cared for and kept reasonably clean, the body desirable, whether it be male or female.

Sex

Women’s sexual organs are shrouded in mystery.

It is assumed that most of them are internal and hidden, but even the ones that are external are relatively shady. When little girls begin to ask questions their mothers provide them, if they are lucky, with crude diagrams of the sexual apparatus, in which the organs of pleasure feature much less prominently than the intricacies of tubes and ovaries. I myself did not realize that the tissues of my vagina were quite normal until I saw a meticulously engraved dissection in an eighteenth-century anatomy textbook.[1] The little girl is not encouraged to explore her own genitals or to identify the tissues of which they are composed, or to understand the mechanism of lubrication and erection. The very idea is distasteful. Because of this strange modesty, which a young woman will find extends even into the doctor’s surgery, where the doctor is loath to examine her, and loath to expatiate on what he finds, female orgasm has become more and more of a mystery, at the same time as it has been exalted as a duty. Its actual nature has become a matter for metaphysical speculation. All kinds of false ideas are still in circulation about women, although they were disproved years ago: many men refuse to relinquish the notion of female ejaculation, which although it has a long and prestigious history is utterly fanciful.

Part of the modesty about the female genitalia stems from actual distaste. The worst name anyone can be called is cunt. The best thing a cunt can be is small and unobtrusive: the anxiety about the bigness of the penis is only equalled by anxiety about the smallness of the cunt. No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse-collar: she hopes she is not sloppy or smelly, and obligingly obliterates all signs of her menstruation in the cause of public decency. Women were not always so reticent: in ballad literature we can find lovely examples of women vaunting their genitals, like the lusty wench who admonished a timid tailor in round terms because he did not dare measure her fringed purse with his yard:

You’l find the Purse so deep,

You’l hardly come to the treasure.[2]

Another praised her shameful part in these terms:

I have a gallant Pin-box,

The like you ne’er did see,

It is where never was the Pox

Something above my knee …

O ’tis a gallant Pin-box

You never saw the peer;

Then Ile not leave my Pin-box

For fifty pound a year.[3]

Early gynaecology was entirely in the hands of men, some of whom, like Samuel Collins, described the vagina so lovingly that any woman who read his words would have been greatly cheered. Of course such books were not meant to be seen by women at all. He speaks of the vagina as the Temple of Venus and the mons veneris as Venus’s cushion, but he abandons euphemism to describe the wonders of the female erection:

… the Nymphs … being extended do compress the Penis and speak a delight in the act of Coition … The use of the blood-vessels is to impart Vital Liquor into the substance of the Clitoris, and of the Nerves to impregnate it with a choyce Juyce inspired with animal Spirits (full of Elastick Particles making it Vigorous and Tense) … The Glands of the Vagina … being heated in Coition, do throw off the rarified fermented serous Liquor, through many Meatus into the Cavity of the Vagina, and thereby rendereth its passage very moist and slippery, which is pleasant in Coition … The Hypogastrick Arteries do sport themselves in numerous Ramulets about the sides and other parts of the Vagina, which are so many inlets of blood to make it warm and turgid in the Act of Coition.[4]

Collins’s description is an active one: the vagina speaks, throws, is tense and vigorous. He and his contemporaries assumed that young women were even more eager for intercourse than young men. Some of the terms they used to describe the tissues of the female genitalia in action are very informative and exact, although unscientific. The vagina is said to be lined ‘with tunicles like the petals of a full-blown rose’, with ‘Wrinckle on wrinckle’ which ‘do give delight in Copulations’. The vagina was classified as ‘sensitive enough’ which is an exact description. They were aware of the special role of the clitoris, in causing the ‘sweetness of love’ and the ‘fury of venery’.

The Vagina is made so artificial (affabre is his word) that it can accommodate itself to any penis, so that it will give way to a long one, meet a short one, widen to a thick one, constringe to a small one: so that every man might well enough lie with any Woman and every Woman with any Man.

‘The Anatomy of Human Bodies epitomized’, 1682, p. 156

The notion that healthy and well-adjusted women would have orgasms originating in the vagina was a metaphysical interpolation in the empirical observations of these pioneers. Collins took the clitoris for granted, as a dear part of a beloved organ; he did not under-emphasize the role of the vagina in creating pleasure, as we have seen. Unhappily we have accepted, along with the reinstatement of the clitoris after its proscription by the Freudians, a notion of the utter passivity and even irrelevance of the vagina. Love-making has become another male skill, of which women are the judges. The skills that the Wife of Bath used to make her husbands swink, the athletic sphincters of the Tahitian girls who can keep their men inside them all night, are alike unknown to us. All the vulgar linguistic emphasis is placed upon the poking element; fucking, screwing, rooting, shagging are all acts performed upon the passive female: the names for the penis are all tool names. The only genuine intersexual words we have for sex are the obsolete swive, and the ambiguous ball. Propagandists like Theodore Faithfull (and me) are trying to alter the emphasis of the current imagery. To a man who had difficulty getting an erection Faithfull wrote:

If you ignore any idea of erection and concentrate your attention on your girl-friend, ignore the clitoris and use your fingers to caress her internally and if you follow such activity by a close association of your sex organs you may soon find that she can draw your sex organ into her vagina without any need on your part for erection.[5]

This sounds like therapeutic lying, nevertheless serious attempts have been made to increase women’s participation in copulation. A. H. Kegel, teaching women how to overcome the bladder weakness that often afflicts women, showed them how to exercise the pubococcygeal muscles and found inadvertently that this increased their sexual enjoyment.[6] What their mates thought of it is not on record. The incontinence resulted from the same suppression of activity that inhibited sexual pleasure; we might find that if we restored women’s competence in managing their own musculature many of their pelvic disturbances would cease, and their sexual enjoyment might correspondingly grow. Of course we cannot do this until we find out how the pelvis ought to operate: as long as women cannot operate it, we cannot observe its action, and so the circle perpetuates itself. If the right chain reaction could happen, women might find that the clitoris was more directly involved in intercourse, and could be brought to climax by a less pompous and deliberate way than digital massage. In any case, women will have to accept part of the responsibility for their own and their partners’ enjoyment, and this involves a measure of control and conscious cooperation. Part of the battle wil be won if they can change their attitude towards sex, and embrace and stimulate the penis instead of taking it. Enlightened women have long sung the praises of the female superior position, because they are not weighed down by the heavier male body, and can respond more spontaneously. It is after all a question of communication, and communication is not advanced by the he talk, me listen formula.

The banishment of the fantasy of the vaginal orgasm is ultimately a service, but the substitution of the clitoral spasm for genuine gratification may turn out to be a disaster for sexuality. Masters and Johnson’s conclusions have produced some unlooked for side-effects, like the veritable clitoromania which infects Mette Eiljersen’s book, I accuse! While speaking of women’s orgasms as resulting from the ‘right touches on the button’ she condemns sexologists who

recommend … the stimulation of the clitoris as part of the prelude to intercourse, to that which most men consider to be the ‘real thing’. What is in fact the ‘real thing’ for them is completely devoid of sensation for the woman.

This is the heart of the matter! Concealed for hundreds of years by humble, shy and subservient women.[7]

Not all the women in history have been humble and subservient to such an extent. It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis in her vagina: the orgasm is qualitatively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of vacancy. The differentiation between the simple inevitable pleasure of men and the tricky responses of women is not altogether valid. If ejaculation meant release for all men, given the constant manufacture of sperm and the resultant pressure to have intercourse men could copulate without transport or disappointment with anyone. The process described by the experts, in which the man dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones, spends an equal amount of time on each nipple, turns his attention to the clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the stages of digital or lingual stimulation and then politely lets himself into the vagina, perhaps waiting until the retraction of the clitoris tells him that he is welcome, is laborious and inhumanly computerized. The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfaction, for it is a matter of psycho-sexual release. Real gratification is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person. Women’s continued high enjoyment of sex, which continues after orgasm, observed by men with wonder, is not based on the clitoris, which does not respond particularly well to continued stimulus, but in a general sensual response. If we localize female response in the clitoris we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male’s response. The male sexual ideal of virility without languor or amorousness is profoundly desolating: when the release is expressed in mechanical terms it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina.

Many women who greeted the conclusions of Masters and Johnson with cries of ‘I told you so!’ and ‘I am normal!’ will feel that this criticism is a betrayal. They have discovered sexual pleasure after being denied it but the fact that they have only ever experienced gratification from clitoral stimulation is evidence for my case, because it is the index of the desexualization of the whole body, the substitution of genitality for sexuality. The ideal marriage as measured by the electronic equipment in the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation laboratories is enfeebled – dull sex for dull people. The sexual personality is basically anti-authoritarian. If the system wishes to enforce complete suggestibility in its subjects, it will have to tame sex. Masters and Johnson supplied the blueprint for standard, low-agitation, cool-out monogamy. If women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.

The organization of sexuality reflects the basic features of the performance principle and its organization of society. Freud emphasizes the aspect of centralization. It is especially operative in the ‘unification’ of the various objects of the partial instincts into one libidinous object of the opposite sex, and in the establishment of genital supremacy. In both cases, the unifying process is repressive – that is to say, the partial instincts do not develop freely into a ‘higher’ stage of gratification which preserved their objectives, but are cut off and reduced to subservient functions. This process achieves the socially necessary desexualization of the body, leaving most of the rest free for use as the instrument of labour. The temporal reduction of the libido is thus supplemented by its spatial reduction.[8]

If women find that the clitoris has become the only site of their pleasure instead of acting as a kind of sexual overdrive in a more general response, they will find themselves dominated by the performance ethic, which would not itself be a regression, if the performance principle in our society included enterprise and creativity. But enterpise and creativity are connected with libido which does not survive the civilizing process. Women must struggle to keep alternative possibilities open, at the same time as they struggle to attain the kind of strength that can avail itself of them.

The permissive society has done much to neutralize sexual drives by containing them. Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before. The orgies feared by the Puritans have not materialized on every street corner, although more girls permit more (joyless) liberties than they might have done before. Homosexuality in many forms, indeed any kind of sex which can escape the dead hand of the institution – group sex, criminal sex, child-violation, bondage and discipline – has flourished, while simple sexual energy seems to be steadily diffusing and dissipating. This is not because enlightenment is harmful, or because repression is a necessary goad to human impotence, but because sexual enlightenment happened under government subsidy, so that its discoveries were released in bad prose and clinical jargon upon the world. The permit to speak freely of sexuality has resulted only in the setting up of another shibboleth of sexual normality, gorged with dishonesty and kitsch. Women who understand their sexual experience in the way that Jackie Collins writes of it are irretrievably lost to themselves and their lovers:

He took her to the bedroom and undressed her slowly, he made love to her beautifully. Nothing frantic, nothing rushed. He caressed her body as though there were nothing more important in the world. He took her to the edge of ecstasy and back again, keeping her hovering, sure of every move he made. Her breasts grew under his touch, swelling, becoming even larger and firmer. She floated on a suspended plane, a complete captive to his hands and body. He had amazing control, stopping at just the right moment. When it did happen it was only because he wanted it to, and they came in complete unison. She had never experienced that before, and she clung to him, words tumbling out of her mouth about how much she loved him. Afterwards they lay and smoked and talked. ‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, ‘You’re a clever woman making me wait until after we were married!’[9]

Miss Collins’s heroine is prudish, passive, calculating, selfish and dull, despite her miraculous expanding tits. When her husband grows tired of playing on this sexual instrument she can have no recourse but must continue to loll on her deflated airbed, wondering what went wrong. There is no mention of genitals: everything happens in a swoon or a swamp of undifferentiated sensation. He labours for her pleasure like a eunuch in the harem. Sex is harnessed in the service of counterrevolution.

Embraces are cominglings from the Head to the Feet, And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret place.

Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl. 69, II. 39–40

What Jackie Collins is expressing is the commonest romantic ideal of the perfect fuck. It shows how deeply we believe in the concept of male mastery. Miss Collins’s heroine was manipulating her mate’s colonizing sexual urge, making him wait, as long as his importunacy lasts, until she is ready. In manipulating his violent impulses she exercised an illusory superiority, for she is tender, sentimental and modest, loving not for her own gratification, but in expression of esteem, trust and true love, until she could civilize him into marriage and the virtuoso sexual performance. The complicated psychic aspect of his love is undervalued; she is still alone, egotistical, without libido to desire him or bring him to new pleasure in her. Jackie Collins and the sex-books show that we still make love to organs and not people: that so far from realizing that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there than when they make love, we are never more incommunicative, never more alone.

The Wicked Womb

Sex is not the same as reproduction: the relation between the two is especially tenuous for human beings, who may copulate when they will, not only when they are driven thereto by heat or an instinctual urge. The difference must be at least partly caused by the fact that human beings have memory, will and understanding to experience the pleasure of sex and desire it for itself. Little girls only learn about the pleasure of sex as an implication of their discoveries about their reproductive function, as something merely incidental. Much more care is taken to inform them about the approaching trauma of menstruation and the awful possibility of childbirth if they should ‘lose control’ or ‘give in’ to sexual urges, than to see that they recognize and welcome these sexual urges in the first place. So the growing girl knows more about her womb than she does about her external genitalia, and not much of what she knows is good news.[1]

Her knowledge of the womb is academic: most women do not actually feel any of the activity of their ovaries or womb until they go wrong, as they nearly always do. Many women, one might say too many women, die of illnesses in organs that they have virtually ignored all their lives, the cervix, the vulvae, the vagina, and the womb. Some of the trouble is caused by late diagnosis of illnesses begun in a trivial treatable way, which stems from the obscurantism falsely dignified by the name ‘modesty’. Since time immemorial the womb has been associated with trouble, and some of the reluctance shown by doctors to attend to anxieties that women feel about their tricky apparatus stems from this atavistic fear. Frigidity for women is regarded as a common condition, resulting from bad luck and bad management; in men impotence is treated with the utmost seriousness. Any trivial lesion on the penis is examined with ostentatious care so that a man need not feel threatened by castration anxieties, but the poor old womb must gush blood or drop out before anybody takes its condition seriously. The clitoris is ignored: a nurse once narrowly missed cutting mine off when shaving me for an operation. Even the much vaunted cervical smears are rarely given in our community. I first managed to get one when I went to the VD clinic in despair because my own doctor would not examine my vagina or use pathology to discover the nature of an irritation, which turned out to be exactly what I thought it was. At the VD clinic cervical smears were given as a matter of course: at the respectable GP’s they were not given at all. The enormous hoo-ha about the strange impalpable results of vasectomy upon the male psyche results from this continuing phallocentricity: the devisers of the pill worried so little about the female psyche that it was years before they discovered that one woman in three who was on the pill was chronically depressed. Exaggerated care for the male apparatus, together with reluctance to involve oneself in serious attention to the womb and its handmaids, is the fruit of centuries of womb-fear, not to be eradicated by political action or yelling at public meetings.[2] Women must first of all inform themselves about their own bodies, take over the study of gynaecology and obstetrics,[3] and, not least, conquer their own prejudice in favour of men doctors.

The most recent form of fantasy about the womb is the enormously prevalent notion of the pathology of hysteria in Europe until the twentieth century. At first it was called the mother, and was thought to be the wandering womb that rose into the throat of a girl and choked her. The most sceptical anatomists, while deploring the arts which quacks and witches used to allay hysterics, believed that the womb was ‘charged with blood and stale seed from whence arise foul and ill-conditioned damps’, developing their own strange theory of pelvic congestion.[4] It was assumed that unmarried women and widows suffered most from hysteria, and that a good husband could fix it. The very seriously discussed but imaginary green-sickness, renamed ‘chlorosis’ by doctors anxious to obscure the folklorish origins of their ideas, came about in the same way.[5] The descriptions of the condition are vivid, and although some of them incorporate symptoms arising from other causes generally we can observe the same hypochondriacal syndromes that are put down to hysteria these days: epilepsy, asthma, breathlessness, flatulence, sensus globi in abdomine se volventis, lassitude, convulsions, painful menstruation. Some doctors really believed that est femineo generi pars una uterus omnium morborum, ‘the womb is a part of every illness of the female sex’. Women were assumed to be by nature subject to the tyranny of the insatiate womb, and to suffer symptoms from which men only suffered if they indulged in excessive self-abuse.[6] Although the repression mechanism was described in various ways, the reaction to that mechanism was taken (as it usually is) to be a ground for continuing it. Women were too weak, too vulnerable to irrational influences to be allowed to control their own lives. When one of my students collapsed in her final examination with cramps and bitter uncontrollable sobbing, the cause was officially recorded as hysteria: the aetiology of her case was particularly important but the word hysteria seemed to supply all the answers.

That the Mother (as they call it) gets into the throat of married women and Maids, is by thousands believed to be a truth; yea, that the string of the Mother is fast in the throat, and that the vein of the Mother is also seated there, which fancy is craftily managed by a certain Woman in this Town, who thereby deceives many innocent women, and marvellously enriches herself.

‘In libellum Hippocrates de virginum morbis’, 1688, p. 73

Although we do not believe in green-sickness any more, since maidens became an essential, if menial, part of the work force, we do believe that old maidens are apt to be consumed and wasted by frustration. Only recently have the other terrifying functions of the womb been publicized and accepted. Husbands are allowed to participate in the mysteries of birth, which need no longer be carried out in a coven of females. Women do not have to be purified or churched after childbearing any more. Attempts are being made to reduce the impression that childbirth is a kind of punishment for women, and to re-educate them in breeding, while the more sinister companions of childbed – puerperal fever and sudden haemorrhage – have been brought under control. Although few men have still to watch in horror while their wives breed themselves through miscarriage and prolapse helplessly to death, we still have not come to terms with the sinister womb. The most pervasive and significant manifestation of that atavistic fear surviving is in the common attitude to menstruation.

Women who adhere to the Moslem, Hindu or Mosaic faiths must regard themselves as unclean in their time of menstruation and seclude themselves for a period. Medieval Catholicism made the stipulation that menstruating women were not to come into the church. Although enlightenment is creeping into this field at its usual pace, we still have a marked revulsion for menstruation, principally evinced by our efforts to keep it secret. The success of the tampon is partly due to the fact that it is hidden. The arrival of the menarche is more significant than any birthday, but in the Anglo-Saxon households it is ignored and carefully concealed from general awareness. For six months while I was waiting for my first menstruation I toted a paper bag with diapers and pins in my school satchel. When it finally came, I suffered agonies lest anyone should guess or smell it or anything. My diapers were made of harsh towelling, and I used to creep into the laundry and crouch over a bucket of foul clouts, hoping that my brother would not catch me at my revolting labours. It is not surprising that well-bred, dainty little girls find it difficult to adapt to menstruation, when our society does no more than explain it and leave them to get on with it. Among the aborigines who lived along the Pennefather river in Queensland the little girl used to be buried up to her waist in warm sand to aid the first contractions, and fed and cared for by her mother in a sacred place, to be led in triumph to the camp where she joined a feast to celebrate her entry into the company of marriageable maidens, it seems likely that menstruation was much less traumatic.[7] Women still buy sanitary towels with enormous discretion, and carry their handbags to the loo when they only need to carry a napkin. They still recoil at the idea of intercourse during menstruation, and feel that the blood they shed is of a special kind, although perhaps not so special as was thought when it was the liquid presented to the devil in witches’ loving cups. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.

Menstruation, we are told, is unique among the natural bodily processes in that it involves a loss of blood. It is assumed that nature is a triumph of design, and that none of her processes is wasteful or in need of reversal, especially when it only inconveniences women, and therefore it is thought extremely unlikely that there is any ‘real’ pain associated with menstruation. In fact no little girl who finds herself bleeding from an organ which she didn’t know she had until it began to incommode her feels that nature is a triumph of design and that whatever is, is right. When she discovers that the pain attending this horror is in some way her fault, the result of improper adaptation to her female role, she really feels like the victim of a bad joke. Doctors admit that most women suffer ‘discomfort’ during menstruation, but disagree very much about what proportion of women suffer ‘real’ pain. Whether the contractions of the womb are painful in some absolute sense or could be rendered comfortable by some psychotherapy or other is immaterial. The fact is that no woman would menstruate if she did not have to. Why should women not resent an inconvenience which causes tension before, after and during; unpleasantness, odour, staining; which takes up anything from a seventh to a fifth of her adult life until the menopause; which makes her fertile thirteen times a year when she only expects to bear twice in a lifetime; when the cessation of menstruation may mean several years of endocrine derangement and the gradual atrophy of her sexual organs? The fact is that nature is not a triumph of design, and every battle against illness is an interference with her design, so that there is no rational ground for assuming that menstruation as we know it must be or ought to be irreversible.

The contradiction in the attitude that regards menstruation as divinely ordained and yet unmentionable leads to the intensification of the female revolt against it, which can be traced in all the common words for it, like the curse, and male disgust expressed in terms like having the rags on. We have only the choice of three kinds of expression: the vulgar resentful, the genteel (‘I’ve got my period’, ‘I am indisposed’), and the scientific jargon of the menses. Girls are irrepressible though: in one Sydney girls’ school napkins are affectionately referred to as daisies; Italian girls call their periods il marchese and German girls der rote König. One might envy the means adopted by La Dame aux Camélias to signify her condition to her gentlemen friends, but if it were adopted on a large scale it might look like a mark of proscription, a sort of leper’s bell. There have been some moves to bring menstruation out into the open in an unprejudiced way, like Sylvia Plath’s menstruation poem.[8] Perhaps we need a film to be made by an artist about the onset of menstruation, in which the implications emerge in some non-academic way, if we cannot manage a public celebration of a child’s entry into womanhood by any other means.

Menstruation has been used a good deal in argument about women’s fitness to undertake certain jobs: where women’s comfort is concerned the effects are minimized – where the convenience of our masters is threatened they are magnified. Women are not more incapacitated by menstruation than men are by their drinking habits, their hypertension, their ulcers and their virility fears. It is not necessary to give menstruation holidays. It may be that women commit crimes during the premenstrual and menstrual period, but it is still true that women commit far fewer crimes than men. Women must be aware of this enlistment of menstruation in the anti-feminist argument, and counteract it by their own statements of the situation. Menstruation does not turn us into raving maniacs or complete invalids; it is just that we would rather do without it.

Soul

The Stereotype

In that mysterious dimension where the body meets the soul the stereotype is born and has her being. She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists to beautify her. The sun shines only to burnish her skin and gild her hair; the wind blows only to whip up the colour in her cheeks; the sea strives to bathe her; flowers die gladly so that her skin may luxuriate in their essence. She is the crown of creation, the masterpiece. The depths of the sea are ransacked for pearl and coral to deck her; the bowels of the earth are laid open that she might wear gold, sapphires, diamonds and rubies. Baby seals are battered with staves, unborn lambs ripped from their mothers’ wombs, millions of moles, muskrats, squirrels, minks, ermines, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, ocelots, lynxes, and other small and lovely creatures die untimely deaths that she might have furs. Egrets, ostriches and peacocks, butterflies and beetles yield her their plumage. Men risk their lives hunting leopards for her coats, and crocodiles for her handbags and shoes. Millions of silkworms offer her their yellow labours; even the seamstresses roll seams and whip lace by hand, so that she might be clad in the best that money can buy.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p. 90

The men of our civilization have stripped themselves of the fineries of earth so that they might work more freely to plunder the universe for treasures to deck my lady in. New raw materials, new processes, new machines are all brought into her service. My lady must therefore be the chief spender as well as the chief symbol of spending ability and monetary success. While her mate toils in his factory, she totters about the smartest streets and plushiest hotels with his fortune upon her back and bosom, fingers and wrists, continuing that essential expenditure in his house which is her frame and her setting, enjoying that silken idleness which is the necessary condition of maintaining her mate’s prestige and her qualification to demonstrate it.[1] Once upon a time only the aristocratic lady could lay claim to the title of crown of creation: only her hands were white enough, her feet tiny enough, her waist narrow enough, her hair long and golden enough; but every well-to-do burgher’s wife set herself up to ape my lady and to follow fashion, until my lady was forced to set herself out like a gilded doll overlaid with monstrous rubies and pearls like pigeons’ eggs. Nowadays the Queen of England still considers it part of her royal female role to sport as much of the family jewellery as she can manage at any one time on all public occasions, although the male monarchs have escaped such showcase duty, which devolves exclusively upon their wives.

At the same time as woman was becoming the showcase for wealth and caste, while men were slipping into relative anonymity and ‘handsome is as handsome does’, she was emerging as the central emblem of western art. For the Greeks the male and female body had beauty of a human, not necessarily a sexual kind; indeed they may have marginally favoured the young male form as the most powerful and perfectly proportioned. Likewise the Romans showed no bias towards the depiction of femininity in their predominantly monumental art. In the Renaissance the female form began to predominate, not only as the mother in the predominant emblem of madonna col bambino, but as an aesthetic study in herself. At first naked female forms took their chances in crowd scenes or diptychs of Adam and Eve, but gradually Venus claims ascendancy, Mary Magdalene ceases to be wizened and emaciated, and becomes nubile and ecstatic, portraits of anonymous young women, chosen only for their prettiness, begin to appear, are gradually disrobed, and renamed Flora or Primavera. Painters begin to paint their own wives and mistresses and royal consorts as voluptuous beauties, divesting them of their clothes if desirable, but not of their jewellery. Susanna keeps her bracelets on in the bath, and Hélène Fourment keeps ahold of her fur as well!

What happened to woman in painting happened to her in poetry as well. Her beauty was celebrated in terms of the riches which clustered around her: her hair was gold wires, her brow ivory, her lips ruby, her teeth gates of pearl, her breasts alabaster veined with lapis lazuli, her eyes as black as jet.[2] The fragility of her loveliness was emphasized by the inevitable comparisons with the rose, and she was urged to employ her beauty in love-making before it withered on the stem.[3] She was for consumption; other sorts of imagery spoke of her in terms of cherries and cream, lips as sweet as honey and skin white as milk, breasts like cream uncrudded, hard as apples.[4] Some celebrations yearned over her finery as well, her lawn more transparent than morning mist, her lace as delicate as gossamer, the baubles that she toyed with and the favours that she gave.[5] Even now we find the thriller hero describing his classy dame’s elegant suits, cheeky hats, well-chosen accessories and footwear; the imagery no longer dwells on jewels and flowers but the consumer emphasis is the same. The mousy secretary blossoms into the feminine stereotype when she reddens her lips, lets down her hair, and puts on something frilly.

Nowadays women are not expected, unless they are Paola di Liegi or Jackie Onassis, and then only on gala occasions, to appear with a king’s ransom deployed upon their bodies, but they are required to look expensive, fashionable, well-groomed, and not to be seen in the same dress twice. If the duty of the few may have become less onerous, it has also become the duty of the many. The stereotype marshals an army of servants. She is supplied with cosmetics, underwear, foundation garments, stockings, wigs, postiches and hairdressing as well as her outer garments, her jewels and furs. The effect is to be built up layer by layer, and it is expensive. Splendour has given way to fit, line and cut. The spirit of competition must be kept up, as more and more women struggle towards the top drawer, so that the fashion industry can rely upon an expanding market. Poorer women fake it, ape it, pick up on the fashions a season too late, use crude effects, mistaking the line, the sheen, the gloss of the high-class article for a garish simulacrum. The business is so complex that it must be handled by an expert. The paragons of the stereotype must be dressed, coifed and painted by the experts and the style-setters, although they may be encouraged to give heart to the housewives studying their lives in pulp magazines by claiming a lifelong fidelity to their own hair and soap and water. The boast is more usually discouraging than otherwise, unfortunately.

As long as she is young and personable, every woman may cherish the dream that she may leap up the social ladder and dim the sheen of luxury by sheer natural loveliness; the few examples of such a feat are kept before the eye of the public. Fired with hope, optimism and ambition, young women study the latest forms of the stereotype, set out in Vogue, Nova, Queen and other glossies, where the mannequins stare from among the advertisements for fabulous real estate, furs and jewels. Nowadays the uniformity of the year’s fashions is severely affected by the emergence of the pert female designers in Britain who direct their appeal to the working girl, emphasizing variety, comfort, and simple, striking effects. There is no longer a single face of the year: even Twiggy has had to withdraw into marketing and rationed personal appearances, while the Shrimp works mostly in New York. Nevertheless the stereotype is still supreme. She has simply allowed herself a little more variation.

The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. Her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her existence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness, and her passivity. If any man who has no right to her be found with her she will not be punished, for she is morally neuter. The matter is solely one of male rivalry. Innocently she may drive men to madness and war. The more trouble she can cause, the more her stocks go up, for possession of her means more the more demand she excites. Nobody wants a girl whose beauty is imperceptible to all but him; and so men welcome the stereotype because it directs their taste into the most commonly recognized areas of value, although they may protest because some aspects of it do not tally with their fetishes. There is scope in the stereotype’s variety for most fetishes. The leg man may follow mini-skirts, the tit man can encourage see-through blouses and plunging necklines, although the man who likes fat women may feel constrained to enjoy them in secret. There are stringent limits to the variations on the stereotype, for nothing must interfere with her function as sex object. She may wear leather, as long as she cannot actually handle a motorbike: she may wear rubber, but it ought not to indicate that she is an expert diver or water-skier. If she wears athletic clothes the purpose is to underline her unathleticism. She may sit astride a horse, looking soft and curvy, but she must not couch over its neck with her rump in the air.

The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. The white man turned the white woman into a weak-minded, weak-bodied, delicate freak, a sex pot, and placed her on a pedestal; he turned the black woman into a strong self-reliant Amazon and deposited her in his kitchen … The white man turned himself into the Omnipotent Administrator and established himself in the Front Office.

Eldridge Cleaver, The Allegory of the Black Eunuchs, ‘Soul on Ice’, 1968, p. 162

She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p. 66

Because she is the emblem of spending ability and the chief spender, she is also the most effective seller of this world’s goods. Every survey ever held has shown that the image of an attractive woman is the most effective advertising gimmick. She may sit astride the mudguard of a new car, or step into it ablaze with jewels; she may lie at a man’s feet stroking his new socks; she may hold the petrol pump in a challenging pose, or dance through woodland glades in slow motion in all the glory of a new shampoo; whatever she does her image sells. The gynolatry of our civilization is written large upon its face, upon hoardings, cinema screens, television, newspapers, magazines, tins, packets, cartons, bottles, all consecrated to the reigning deity, the female fetish. Her dominion must not be thought to entail the rule of women, for she is not a woman. Her glossy lips and matt complexion, her unfocused eyes and flawless fingers, her extraordinary hair all floating and shining, curling and gleaming, reveal the inhuman triumph of cosmetics, lighting, focusing and printing, cropping and composition. She sleeps unruffled, her lips red and juicy and closed, her eyes as crisp and black as if new painted, and her false lashes immaculately curled. Even when she washes her face with a new and creamier toilet soap her expression is as tranquil and vacant and her paint as flawless as ever. If ever she should appear tousled and troubled, her features are miraculously smoothed to their proper veneer by a new washing powder or a bouillon cube. For she is a doll: weeping, pouting or smiling, running or reclining, she is a doll. She is an idol, formed of the concatenation of lines and masses, signifying the lineaments of satisfied impotence.

Her essential quality is castratedness. She absolutely must be young, her body hairless, her flesh buoyant, and she must not have a sexual organ. No musculature must distort the smoothness of the lines of her body, although she may be painfully slender or warmly cuddly. Her expression must betray no hint of humour, curiosity or intelligence, although it may signify hauteur to an extent that is actually absurd, or smouldering lust, very feebly signified by drooping eyes and a sullen mouth (for the stereotype’s lust equals irrational submission) or, most commonly, vivacity and idiot happiness. Seeing that the world despoils itself for this creature’s benefit, she must be happy; the entire structure would topple if she were not. So the image of woman appears plastered on every surface imaginable, smiling interminably. An apple pie evokes a glance of tender beatitude, a washing machine causes hilarity, a cheap box of chocolates brings forth meltingly joyous gratitude, a Coke is the cause of a rictus of unutterable brilliance, even a new stick-on bandage is saluted by a smirk of satisfaction. A real woman licks her lips and opens her mouth and flashes her teeth when photographers appear: she must arrive at the première of her husband’s film in a paroxysm of delight, or his success might be murmured about. The occupational hazard of being a Playboy Bunny is the aching facial muscles brought on by the obligatory smiles.

Discretion is the better part of Valerie

though all of her is nice

lips as warm as strawberries

eyes as cold as ice

the very best of everything

only will suffice

not for her potatoes

and puddings made of rice

Roger McGough, ‘Discretion’

So what is the beef? Maybe I couldn’t make it. Maybe I don’t have a pretty smile, good teeth, nice tits, long legs, a cheeky arse, a sexy voice. Maybe I don’t know how to handle men and increase my market value, so that the rewards due to the feminine will accrue to me. Then again, maybe I’m sick of the masquerade. I’m sick of pretending eternal youth. I’m sick of belying my own intelligence, my own will, my own sex. I’m sick of peering at the world through false eyelashes, so everything I see is mixed with a shadow of bought hairs; I’m sick of weighting my head with a dead mane, unable to move my neck freely, terrified of rain, of wind, of dancing too vigorously in case I sweat into my lacquered curls. I’m sick of the Powder Room. I’m sick of pretending that some fatuous male’s self-important pronouncements are the objects of my undivided attention, I’m sick of going to films and plays when someone else wants to, and sick of having no opinions of my own about either. I’m sick of being a transvestite. I refuse to be a female impersonator. I am a woman, not a castrate.

April Ashley was born male. All the information supplied by genes, chromosomes, internal and external sexual organs added up to the same thing. April was a man. But he longed to be a woman. He longed for the stereotype, not to embrace, but to be. He wanted soft fabrics, jewels, furs, make-up, the love and protection of men. So he was impotent. He couldn’t fancy women at all, although he did not particularly welcome homosexual addresses. He did not think of himself as a pervert, or even as a transvestite, but as a woman cruelly transmogrified into manhood. He tried to die, became a female impersonator, but eventually found a doctor in Casablanca who came up with a more acceptable alternative. He was to be castrated, and his penis used as the lining of a surgically constructed cleft, which would be a vagina. He would be infertile, but that has never affected the attribution of femininity. April returned to England, resplendent. Massive hormone treatment had eradicated his beard, and formed tiny breasts: he had grown his hair and bought feminine clothes during the time he had worked as an impersonator. He became a model, and began to illustrate the feminine stereotype as he was perfectly qualified to do, for he was elegant, voluptuous, beautifully groomed, and in love with his own image. On an ill-fated day he married the heir to a peerage, the Hon. Arthur Corbett, acting out the highest achievement of the feminine dream, and went to live with him in a villa in Marbella. The marriage was never consummated. April’s incompetence as a woman is what we must expect from a castrate, but it is not so very different after all from the impotence of feminine women, who submit to sex without desire, with only the infantile pleasure of cuddling and affection, which is their favourite reward. As long as the feminine stereotype remains the definition of the female sex, April Ashley is a woman, regardless of the legal decision ensuing from her divorce.[6] She is as much a casualty of the polarity of the sexes as we all are. Disgraced, unsexed April Ashley is our sister and our symbol.

To what end is the laying out of the embroidered Hair, embared Breasts; vermillion Cheeks, alluring looks, Fashion gates, and artfull Countenances, effeminate intangling and insnaring Gestures, their Curls and Purls of proclaiming Petulancies, boulstered and laid out with such example and authority in these our days, as with Allowance and beseeming Conveniency?

Doth the world wax barren through decrease of Generations, and become, like the Earth, less fruitfull heretofore? Doth the Blood lose his Heat or do the Sunbeams become waterish and less fervent, than formerly they have been, that men should be thus inflamed and persuaded on to lust?

Alex. Niccholes, ‘A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving’, 1615, p. 143–52

Energy

Energy is the power that drives every human being. It is not lost by exertion but maintained by it, for it is a faculty of the psyche. It is driven to perverted manifestations by curbs and checks. Like the motive force that drives the car along the highway, when it meets with an obstacle it turns to destructive force and shakes its source to pieces. It is not too hard to point out to the averagely perceptive human being that women have plenty of the destructive kind of energy, but far fewer people see that women’s destructiveness is creativity turned in upon itself by constant frustration. Nervous diseases, painful menstruation, unwanted pregnancies, accidents of all kinds, are all evidence of women’s energy destroying them. It extends beyond them wreaking havoc with the personalities and achievements of others, especially their husbands and their children. That is not to say that women must hate all their relatives, but that if children are presented to women as a duty and marriage as an inescapable yoke, then the more energy they have the more they will fret and chafe, tearing themselves and their dependants to pieces. When children are falsely presented to women as their only significant contribution, the proper expression of their creativity and their lives’ work, the children and their mothers suffer for it.

The pure animal spirits which make both mind and body shoot out, and unfold the tender blossoms of hope, are turned sour and vented in vain wishes, or pert repinings, that contract the faculties and spoil the temper; else they mount to the brain, and sharpening the understanding before it gains proportional strength, produce that pitiful cunning which disgracefully characterizes the female mind and I fear will characterize it whilst women remain the slaves of power.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.378

… we are only happy so long as our life expands in ever widening circles from the upward gush of our early impulses …

Herbert Read, ‘Annals of Innocence and Experience’, 1940, p.55

Although many people will see the justice of this description of the perversion of female energy, they will not so easily see that the solution does not lie in offering adult women other alternatives besides home and children and all that. The adult woman has already established a pattern of perversity in the expression of her desires and motives which ought to fit her for the distorted version of motherhood: it will not disappear if she is allowed alternatives. Any substituted aim is likely to be followed in a ‘feminine’ way, that is, servilely, dishonestly, inefficiently, inconsistently. In most cases women are not offered a genuine alternative to repressive duties and responsibilities: most would happily give up unskilled labour in a factory or the tedium of office work for the more ‘natural’ tedium of a modern household, because their energies are so thwarted by the usual kinds of female work that they imagine even housework would be a preferable alternative. Women who are offered education are offered a genuine alternative, in so far as they are offered genuine education, a rare commodity in these days of universal induction. And yet, when they were offered education at first the result was not the creation of an instant race of superwomen. This is one contemporary’s account of the first female undergraduates, and university teachers will recognize a familiar phenomenon:

At lectures women students are models of attention and industry; perhaps they even apply themselves too much to carrying home in black and white what they have heard. They generally occupy the front seats because they enter their names early and then because they arrive early, well before the beginning of the lectures. Only this fact is noticeable, that often they merely give a superficial glance at the preparations that the professor passes around; sometimes they even pass them on to their neighbours without even looking at them; a longer examination would hinder their taking notes.[1]

What this rather prejudiced observer noticed is real enough: the girls were diligent, even too diligent, but their efforts were expended on mistaken goals. They were anxious to please, to pick up everything that they were told, but the preparations handed around by the lecturer were the real subject of the lecture, and in that they were not interested at all. Their energy is all expended on conforming with disciplinary and other requirements, not in gratifying their own curiosity about the subject that they are studying, and so most of it is misdirected into meaningless assiduity. This phenomenon is still very common among female students, who are forming a large proportion of the arts intake at universities, and dominating the teaching profession as a result. The process is clearly one of diminishing returns: the servile induce servility to teach the servile, in a realm where the unknown ought to be continually assailed with all the human faculties; education cannot be, and has never been a matter of obedience. It is not surprising then that women seldom make the scientific advances, but rather serve men as laboratory assistants, working under direction: it is merely a continuation of the same phenomenon that we observed in their undergraduate days. By the time they have come to apply for entrance to a university the pattern of their useless deflection of energy is already set. In the very great majority of cases they have not retained enough drive to desire to qualify themselves any further; the minority who go to university do so too often as a response to guidance and pressure from their mistresses at school, still not knowing what the real point is, still not interested in developing their own potential, at most hoping for a good degree and a qualification to join the Cinderella profession of teaching. The degree of satisfaction gained by women following this pattern is very slight; we are not surprised to find that many of them think of even their professional life either as a stop-gap or an indirect qualification for marriage.

All the blanket objections to women in professions may be understood as ways of stating this basic situation. They appear to be the judgements of prejudice, and, in so far as they adduce no other cause than sex, we must admit that they are. However, unless feminists admit that the phenomena described by critics of women’s performance in industry, offices, schoolrooms, trade unions and in the arts and sciences are real, they must fail to identify the problem, and therefore to solve it. It is true that opportunities have been made available to women far beyond their desires to use them. It is also true that the women who avail themselves of opportunities too often do so in a feminine, filial, servile fashion. It must be understood that it will not suffice to encourage women to use an initiative that they have not got, just as it is useless to revile them for not having it. We must endeavour to understand how it is that women’s energy is systematically deflected from birth to puberty, so that when they come to maturity they have only fitful resource and creativity.

In speaking of energy, I have had to use terms like resource, application, initiative, ambition, desire, motive, terms which have a masculine ring, because they convey marginal meanings which are incompatible with femininity. It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student’s desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role. In fact the chief instrument in the deflection and perversion of female energy is the denial of female sexuality for the substitution of femininity or sexlessness. For, no matter which theory of the energy of personality we accept, it is inseparable from sexuality. McDougall called it élan vital, Jung and Reich called it libido, Janet called it tension, Head called it vigilance, Flügel called it orectic energy.[2]. All the terms amount to the same thing. One of the errors in the traditional theory is that it presupposes a sort of capitalist system of energy, as a kind of substance which must be wisely invested and not spent all at once.[3] In fact, as we ought to know from the concept of energy we have derived from physics, energy cannot be lost but only converted or deflected. Freud saw that repression employs energy which might otherwise be expressed in creative action: what happens to the female is that her energy is deflected by the denial of her sexuality into a continuous and eventually irreversible system of repression. The women students expended as much energy taking notes and being early and attentive to lectures as their male counterparts did in exploring the subject: in the laboratory they expended it by dropping things and asking silly questions, fussing and fumbling. Male energy is contoured and deformed too, but in a different way, so that it becomes aggression and competitiveness. The female’s fate is to become deformed and debilitated by the destructive action of energy upon the self, because she is deprived of scope and contacts with external reality upon which to exercise herself.

The degree and essential nature of any human being’s sexuality extends into the highest pinnacle of his spirit.

Nietzsche

Energy is the only life and is from the body … Energy is eternal Delight.

Blake

The acts of sex are themselves forms of inquiry, as the old euphemism ‘carnal knowledge’ makes clear: it is exactly the element of quest in her sexuality which the female is taught to deny. She is not only taught to deny it in her sexual contacts, but (for in some subliminal way the connection is understood) in all her contacts, from infancy onward, so that when she becomes aware of her sex the pattern has sufficient force of inertia to prevail over new forms of desire and curiosity. This is the condition which is meant by the term female eunuch. In traditional psychological theory, which is after all only another way of describing and rationalizing the status quo, the desexualization of women is illustrated in the Freudian theory of the female sex as lacking a sexual organ. Freud may not have intended his formulations to have been taken as statements of natural law, but merely as coherent descriptions of contingent facts in a new, and valuably revealing terminology; nevertheless he did say:

Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concept of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, it would also be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or women, and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.[4]

If we are to insist on the contingency of feminine characteristics as the product of conditioning, we will have to argue that the masculine-feminine polarity is actual enough, but not necessary. We will have to reject the polarity of definite terms, which are always artificial, and strive for the freedom to move within indefinite terms. On these grounds we can, indeed we must reject femininity as meaning without libido, and therefore incomplete, subhuman, a cultural reduction of human possibilities, and rely upon the indefinite term female, which retains the possibility of female libido. In order to understand how a female is castrated and becomes feminine we must consider the pressures to which she is subjected from the cradle.

Baby

When a baby is born it has remarkable powers; it can stand upright, move its head about, its toes are prehensile, and its hands can grasp quite strongly. Within hours these powers fail, and the child must laboriously relearn skills it orginally had. Nowadays we do not swaddle children so that they are transformed to rigid cigar-shapes which Mother can dispose of as she pleases, but we still treat a baby as a cross between a doll and an invalid. The initial struggles to move are quickly controlled by the nurse who applies the iron clutch on the back of the neck and the bottom which holds baby motionless. He may not be swaddled but he is put to bed and wrapped up tight. This process is somehow known not to be awfully good for him, for premature and weak babies are not subjected to it. It is in fact the cheapest and easiest way of insuring against heat loss: we might profitably wonder how the humidi-cribs and overhead infra-red heaters which are used in special cases have influenced the formation of the child’s psyche, and then how the child reacts to the eventual swaddling which will take place as soon as he is strong enough.

Throughout the whole animal kingdom every young creature requires continual exercise, and the infancy of children, conformable to this intimation, should be passed in harmless gambols, that exercise the feet and hands, without requiring every minute direction from the head, or the constant attention of a nurse … The child is not left a moment to its own direction, particularly a girl, and thus rendered dependent – dependence is called natural.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, pp.83–4

My mother groaned, my father wept;

Into the dangerous world I leapt,

Helpless, naked, piping loud,

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.[1]

Energy does seem diabolical to us, because our whole culture is bent on harnessing it for ulterior ends: the child must be civilized; what this means is really that he must be obliterated. From the beginning he is discouraged from crowing and exercising his lungs at any time or in any place where it might inconvenience the conduct of adult intercourse. The new baby has enormous curiosity, and an equal faculty for absorbing information, but he spends all of it on specially constructed environments, featuring muted sounds, insipid colours, and the massive, dominating figure of Mother. The intense absorption of the baby in one human being, whose familiarity gradually becomes indispensable to him, is a necessary factor in the development of the character which is considered normal in our society. The prejudice against the substitution of any other person or number of persons for the omnipotent mother is very strong indeed. Even if the researches of Dr Jaroslav Koch in Prague, who has kept babies in a special free environment with the result that they can climb ladders at eight months, were to prove beyond doubt that the child’s acquisition of all faculties is retarded ten-fold or a hundred-fold by the role he must play as Mother’s product, her toy and her achievement, his conclusions would be ignored by a culture which insists upon mother-domination as a prerequisite for character formation.[2] The child’s attention must be weaned away from exterior reality on to an introverted relationship of mutual exploitation which will form the pattern of his future compulsions. Every marriage re-enacts the Oedipal situation: children growing without any idea of the symbiosis of mother and child might be promiscuous or not, but they would not display the kind of obsessive behaviour in their relationships which suggests security and permanence.

The babies did not go towards the things which it was supposed would have pleased them, like for example, toys; neither were they interested in fairy stories. Above all they sought to render themselves independent of adults in all the actions which they could manage on their own; manifesting clearly the desire not to be helped, except in cases of absolute necessity. And they were seen to be tranquil, absorbed and concentrating on their work, acquiring a surprising calm and serenity.

Maria Montessori, ‘Il Bambino in Famiglia’, 1956, p.36

‘I have no name:

I am but two days old.’

What shall I call thee?

‘I happy am,

Joy is my name.’[3]

The newborn baby is not conscious of any distinction between himself and everything he sees. He is first conscious of his ego when some wish of his is not gratified, and by frustration and confusion he finds the difference between himself and his mother.[4] Thus the first act of the ego is to reject reality, to adopt an inimical and anxious attitude to it. This sense of separateness and limitation inside the self is carefully fostered in our culture, to become the basis of our egotistic morality, which acts not from understanding and feeling the repercussions of action upon the community because of the continuity between the self and the rest, but by laws and restrictions self-imposed in a narcissistic way. The child’s internal monitor must be set up, his conscience, better named his anxiety and his guilt. This process may fail or take a wrong turning very early on. Autism and other forms of disturbance make their appearance in children very early, and they are made the basis for rejection and segregation of the children away from the batches who are accepting their conditioning without difficulty. The high incidence of these troubles in gifted children would seem to indicate a correlation between the strength of the child’s energy and the effect of the curbing upon it: for that such children can show any signs of ability at all is itself remarkable. It used to be the case that disturbed children were drilled and disciplined into order, and merely kept in special institutions where their failure to adapt was treated as a congenital pathological condition. It took a very gifted and courageous woman to penetrate these asylums, and begin reversing the processes of conditioning so that these children could start again on a less disastrous course.

Montessori’s methods were so obviously successful that they have been made the basis of most infant schooling in England and Europe, but the significance of her insights as criticisms on the bringing up that children are subjected to outside school and in the crucial years before school has not been understood. As a result primary schooling is so far ahead of other forms of education in this country that new crises occur in the relationship between school and home, and between the junior school and the senior schools. In opening up the classroom so that her retarded children could run it, Montessori created a situation which was necessarily unique. There are intrepid schoolmistresses in England who move about undisciplined classrooms, listening to the children when they stand up to communicate to the group the results of their own inquiry, but most school-mistresses are too nervous to invite fruitful disorder, most classrooms are too crowded to tolerate such methods, and most schools have not the money for books and the other resources of such study. Even at university level I have found it impossible so far to run a research laboratory which would be a similarly spontaneous cooperative effort. Montessori tells moving stories of how the children expressed their corporate respect for a royal visitor, of how one child, having been told of an earthquake in Southern Italy, wrote upon a board, ‘I am sorry I am so small’, so that she thought he had failed to accept what he had heard, until he added the extra clause which explained that he would have liked to help, and so wrote his first ever compound sentence. Her children progressed beyond the usual achievements of their own age groups, but I guess that if follow-up studies had been made of their problems of adjusting in a world which cannot use spontaneity and cooperation the picture might have been more depressing. Montessori’s basic assumption is simple, but radical:

A single fact lies at the source of all deviations, viz., that the child has been prevented from fulfilling the original pattern of his development at the formative age, when his potential energies should evolve through a process of incarnation … thus welding the acting personality into unity. If this unity is not achieved, through the substitution of the adult for the child or through a want of motives of activity in his environment, two things happen: psychic energy and movements must develop separately, and a ‘divided man’ results. Since in nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself, and this is especially true in the cases of energies, these energies since they have to work outside the scope designated for them by nature become deviated … They have become deviated above all because they have lost their object and work in emptiness, vagueness and chaos. The mind that should have built itself up through experiences of movement, flees into fantasy.[5]

The flight into fantasy is sanctioned in our culture, because it is part of the limitation of self-development which we call civilization. Although some aspects of it, like fetishism and masturbatory practices, are deplored, in general it is seen as a necessary and even pleasant concomitant of repression. Whole theories of art have been built up on the assumption that the proper function of art was to provide a harmless fantasy expression of tendencies which would otherwise have been destructive or anti-social.

So far we have not adduced anything about the repression of psychic energy in children which would apply to girls more than to boys, for both are treated in the same way up to a certain age. Discrimination does begin fairly early, however, despite the staunch refusal of British educators to distinguish between boys and girls in their primary schooling. Some baby girls are still dressed in pink rather than blue, are put into frilly, fragile dresses and punished for tearing and soiling them. Some have their hair curled up and bows put in it, and are told that they are pretty and Daddy’s girl and so on. Even for the little girls who have rompers and no fuss with hair and Curly-pet and other infantile cosmetics, a system of rewards and encouragements begins to operate fairly early on. No one wants to bring up a child who doesn’t know what sex he is, and in default of any other notion of female sexuality the styles of femininity are inculcated almost imperceptibly from the beginning. The baby soon discovers how to be coy and winsome, how to twist Daddy around her little finger.[6] When little boys discover the advantages of coyness they are eventually shocked out of them when their baby curls are shorn, but the little girl is praised and encouraged to exploit her cuteness. She is not directly taught how to do it, she simply learns by experience. It is an odd reflection that while we hear voices raised in protest against the destruction of innocence occasioned by showing sex films in the junior school, no voice is heard exclaiming at the awfulness of being flirted with by a three-year-old.

For little boys, a time eventually comes, soon or late, when the umbilical cord is finally broken, and the relationship with Mother becomes more distant. Where that does not happen, as it does not in strong matriarchies like the Jewish family, the result is what Philip Roth lamented in Portnoy’s Complaint:

Ma, ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! ‘Alex,’ you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner – and don’t get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes – ‘Alex,’ you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone ‘loafer’ jacket, ‘the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his napkin in his little lap like that.’ Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw – and exactly what the training programme was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings.[7]

What happens to the Jewish boy who never manages to escape the tyranny of his mother is exactly what happens to every girl whose upbringing is ‘normal’. She is a female faggot. Like the male faggots she lives her life in a pet about guest lists and sauce béarnaise, except when she is exercising by divine maternal right the same process that destroyed her lusts and desires upon the lusts and desires of her children.

Little boys can get out of their mother’s way, eventually want to and are encouraged to. Little girls are not. It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.[8] A girl is early introduced to her menial role, as her mother teaches her household skills (mirabile dictu!) and her recoil from external reality is reinforced by the punishments she gets for wandering off on her own. While little boys are forming groups and gangs to explore or terrorize the district,[9] she is isolated at home, listening to tales of evil-minded strangers. Her comparative incarceration is justified in the name of protection, although the home is the most dangerous place there is. She is taught to fear and distrust the world at large, for reasons which are never clearly stated. As a form of forearming this forewarning is notoriously unsuccessful. Sexual desires are not so lacking in resource that they cannot attack little girls as they go upon those errands and journeys that are sanctioned by Mother. When a little girl who missed her bus rang her mother from the bus-stop one evening, so spending the sixpence that would have been her fare for the next one, her mother told her to walk home because she didn’t have the car. The child went on her way weeping and terrified, and was accosted by a smiling stranger who abducted, raped and strangled her. The commonest result of the dark warning system is that when little girls do meet an exhibitionist or do happen to talk to a stranger who does something odd to them, they are too frightened and guilty, as well as too worried about the effect on their parents, even to tell them. It is a contributing factor in the pattern of child violation that little girls think of themselves as victims, and cannot even summon the energy to scream or run away. Because they are prevented from understanding the threat, they can have no adequate defence. The bitterest irony is that the child violators are themselves products of the same clumsy conditioning.

While little boys are learning about groups and organizations, as well as the nature of the world outside their homes, little girls are at home, keeping quiet, playing with dolls and dreaming, or helping Mother. At school they use their energy to suppress themselves, to be good and keep quiet, and remember what they are hearing and doing. At home they perform meaningless physical rituals, with no mental activity attached to them. So the sensual and intellectual are even more widely separated in them than they are in their brothers. If the sensual retains its hold, they prefer to work with their hands, cooking, sewing, knitting, following a pattern designed by someone else. The designers, the master-cooks and the tailors are men. If women become ‘intellectuals’ they are disenfranchised of their bodies, repressed, intense, inefficient, still as servile as ever. Some geniuses have broken right through the chain reaction and have seen it for what it was, but most creative women bear the stamp of futility and confusion even in their best work. Virginia Woolf saw some of the way, but it cost her too much; George Eliot was one of the few who burst right through her straitjacket. The difference may have been one of the energy of the psyche, or of intelligence, or simply that Eliot was plain and Virginia was graceful and lovely. Whatever the case, the foundations of the conflict were laid in their infancy.

Girl

I would not be doing justice to girls if I were to imply that they accepted all their enculturation without a struggle. The heaviness of maternal pressure in little girls to be neat and sneaking is very often met with the same degree of resistance. The growing girl may refuse to keep her room neat, may insist on mucking about with boyish affairs, even to the extent of joining a male group and fighting to maintain her place in it by being twice as tough as any of the boys. She may lose all her hankies and hair-ribbons, rip her knickers climbing trees, and swear and swagger with the best of them. This is patronizingly referred to as going through a difficult phase, but we may find evidence of the duration of this kind of resistance over years and years, until puberty delivers the final crushing blow. The tomboy as this energetic rebel is pejoratively called may be of any age from five to fifteen; she may not be a tomboy all the time, either because she enjoys the coddling that neat, pretty little girls get, or because she has come to realize that it is advantageous to operate in the favoured way, or because she is simply denied opportunity or incentive to discover how vigorous she could be. Generally it is the little girls who are given presents of pretty things and spoilt and flattered who capitulate to the doll-makers earliest. The pattern of reward is kept up: at first it might be sweets and dolls’ clothes, then dresses and shoes, and even the occasional perm and eyelash dyeing, and then pretty clothes for being seen at weekends in, outings, movies and all that.

A girl whose spirits have not been dampened by inactivity, or innocence tainted by false shame, will always be a romp …

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.87

However, even the little girl who gives in to the pressures applied by her mother and the rest of the feminizers is subjected to conflicting influences. At school her pretensions to jewellery and cosmetics are severely frowned on. She is required to do some form of physical exercise for a fixed period every week, despite Mother’s notes pleading all kinds of delicacy and indisposition. She is given responsibilities, made to join in team efforts, all activities which, if her feminization is proceeding at good pace, she finds very unattractive. She would rather gossip and giggle with her confidantes in a corner of the playground than play soft-ball, even if soft-ball is a feminized form of a masculine sport. She does not like to get sweaty and dirty. Although her teachers praise her manners and her neatness, they lament her increasing dullness, and she may even feel the contempt of the more ‘masculine’, that is, active, girls in her class. She may be reviled as a cissy, a sook, a teacher’s pet, a namby-pamby, a sneak.

But if Mummy’s darling has trouble at school, the successful and active members of the school community run into trouble at home. Out of school, there is not the scope for team activity and adventure that school provides. Housework seems intolerable, and domestic conflicts can become a source of serious anxiety, so that many a teacher has discovered that a good pupil comes back from the summer holidays changed beyond recognition, principally by the abrasion of her training at home. As she grows older she finds her activities more severely curbed; innocent exertions are ruled out because she is ‘too big for that sort of thing now’. Sometimes she feels that she is being catapulted into a sort of shameful womanhood, and resists desperately, to the point of regressing into infantile and destructive behaviour. She may become unaccountably sullen or clumsy, long before the approach of puberty makes such changes explicable. Many of the changes thought to be intrinsically connected with puberty are actually connected with the last struggles of the little girl to retain her energy. The primary school has educated her as a person, making no distinction between boy and girl. We may expect the conflict to arise when she moves up to the junior school to find that, as a capitulation to womanly objections about the imposition of the masculine model of education on to girls, she has the unenviable options of studying dressmaking, domestic science and so forth. The bitter irony of having been inducted into a masculine-contoured form of education is counterpointed by the inclusion of these fatuous subjects in her regimen. Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching-bag of civilization.

Girls sometimes wish they were boys – You can see what man does – His work is wonderful – What is greater than man’s work? Man – Who made the man? – Made by mother’s training – Abraham Lincoln’s mother – Great responsibility to train future President – Cannot tell what any child may become – No greater work than child training – The wife may think the husband’s work greater than hers – Her work monotonous and tiresome – So is business – Women’s work is not less than a man’s – What Ruskin says about the wife – Man’s success dependent upon woman – His health depends on his wife’s cooking – The fate of a nation may depend upon a wholesome meal – If both man and woman were in business life would lose much brightness – Woman makes social life – Moral life – Keeps man thinking – Values of home education – Daniel Webster’s table manners – Woman embroiders man’s life – Embroidery is to beautify – The embroidery of cleanliness – Of a smile – Of gentle words.

Summary of Mary Wood-Allen, ‘What a Young Girl Ought to Know’, 1928 (cited verbatim)

The pre-pubescent girl, however sluggish and confused she may seem to the disenchanted observer, is a passionate creature. The conflicts that she is daily and hourly suffering absorb much of her energy, but she still has enough left to thrill to stories of adventure and achievement and to identify with heroes, male and female alike. Her sexuality is fundamental to these responses, just as it is to her actual genital practices. In the primary school, one may find this excited interest in an innocent and open form, sometimes quite sensual. I remember being warmly kissed once on a visit to a school in Manchester by a horde of little girls and boys, who flung their arms around my neck and snuggled into my fur, pressing questions and gifts indiscriminately. The classes of eleven- and twelve-year-olds that I taught in Australia could generate extraordinary intensity which had its expression in lots of odd ways, sometimes in crushes and rapt idealism, and sometimes in peculiar and deflected experiments within the playground community. Sometimes they could perform wonders of orchestrated cooperation in presenting their little plays and projects, or devising ways to recognize a birthday or thwart the school administration. More often they flagged or fell to quarrelling. Most often the authorities intervened because the classes had got too noisy, or because school routine was in danger of disruption. Gradually the scope for embracing, experiencing and expression was being limited as the pattern of submission, rejection and all the rest that is meant by adaptation was imposed.

It was remarkable that in view of the conflict and the relentless enculturation to which they were subjected, these girls retained so much of their childhood energy and love. Some of its expression was specifically sexual, as the psychologists are prepared to admit, although they insist that the pre-adolescent girl’s sexuality is masculine, clitoral and so forth.[1] So they grossly misinterpret the typical adolescent passion for horses as a reflection of the immature girl’s penis envy. The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey! What the young rider feels is not that the horse is a projection of her own physical ego, but that it is an other which is responding to her control. What she feels is a potent love calling forth a response. The control required by riding is so strong and subtle that it hardly melts into the kind of diffuse eroticism that theorists like Dr Pearson would have us believe in. For many girls who are beginning to get the picture about the female role, horse-riding is the only opportunity they will ever have to use their strong thighs to embrace, to excite and to control. George Eliot knew what she was doing when she described Dorothea Brooke’s passion for wild gallops over the moors in Middlemarch. It is part and parcel of her desire to perform some great heroism, to be free and noble.

Those little girls who wrote passionate love-letters to each other and to me in the schools where I taught had no conscious understanding of their own passionate and amorphous feelings. Because of the taboos on their expression of these intense feelings, they became miserably agitated, sometimes hysterical, sometimes desperate and ridiculous. The feeling was expressed in a distorted fashion, like suppressed laughter, and so it was easily scorned and reviled. The reaction of most teachers to ‘that sort of thing’ is terribly destructive. I have even witnessed the public reading of a child’s love poem, accompanied with sneers and deprecating gestures, as a punishment, while the little authoress stood impassive, feeling the iron enter her soul, waiting for the blessed time when she could escape to the lavatory and enjoy the obscenity of tears. However liberal a teacher may be she early discovers that the rigid embargo imposed upon physical contact between teacher and pupil must be observed, because the last flame of sexual energy is only destructive and can only be corrupted, given the wider context and the socializing function of the school. It is an aching nerve in the education situation and will remain so, must remain so, unless our whole sexual orientation is radically changed. To defy it piecemeal can only produce ever greater suffering.

The girl who directs her passion towards her peer is in a better situation than the girl who loves her teacher. It is usual to explain such deep and lasting attachments as the seduction of one girl by another who is especially aggressive, and sexually mature, or as transferred longing for the mother whose closeness is being withdrawn as sexual maturity and oedipal rivalry become pressing prognoses, or simply as the desire to confide sexual curiosity and share forbidden knowledge.[2] It is dangerous to admit that inseparable girls are often fascinated by each other, deeply altruistic and cooperative, and often genuinely spiritual, as well as utterly sexual if not literally genital. If we dignify these relationships by the name love, without patronizing diminutions, we imply a set of anti-social corollaries which cannot be allowed. Learning to dissemble these feelings, among the strongest and the most elevated that she will ever feel, is a squalid but inevitable business. However innocently one girl caresses the body of another, she cannot escape the necessity of furtiveness which she intuits right from the birth of her love. Gradually she learns to consider her own feelings in the light of the common appraisal of them and to ridicule and disown them. Such loss is enormous, and brings her much further on the way to the feminine pattern of shallow response combined with deep reserve. From the frank sharing of another’s being she turns to the teasing and titillation of dating, which all the world condones. I can remember a scene with my mother when she discovered a letter written by me to my lover at school, a girl who introduced me to Beethoven by playing his sonatas to me in a dingy annexe where we retreated at every spare moment, who held my hand while we sang harmonies of Palestrina and Pachelbel in the crack school choir, and pretended I was George Sand and she was Chopin, and vice-versa, a girl who was obliterated by puberty and would end up singing in the chorus of Damn’ Yankees. Mother was screaming that I was unnatural: to stem her flow, I repeated what I had read in the Sunday Supplements, that it was an adolescent homosexual phase, and I was through it anyway. I expiated that pusillanimous, lying betrayal of myself and my love for weeks. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.