Good Sex Illustrated (12 page)

Corporal equality:

“
Seen from the back, you look a lot alike!
(says Mom to Jean and Sylvie).

Sexual equality:

Sylvie sighs, “And all I have is a slit! No penis, no testi
—…
um, like you said…”

“But yes, my darling, you have sex organs, too. Hidden inside your plump little tummy!… You’ll never have a penis, just a canal, the vagina.”

“Oh, I’ve got a vagina!” says Sylvie, very happy with herself…
” Mental equality:

“So my little girl has the gift of logic?” notes Dad with pleasure. “You’re right, my little blue kitten.”

Equality in the face of puberty:

Jean: “
I’ll have a beard and a moustache!”

“After that, I’ll be a man!”

“You’ll be as proud as a peacock…”

“You are already… You’re producing a little bit of male hormone.”

Sylvie:
puts on her most miserable look and murmurs, “I’m a girl, not a woman…” Mom consoles her: “Puberty comes earlier for girls… you’ll become a woman…”

“Will I have a bust?”

“Your breasts will start growing at around twelve, darling, I promise you!” Jean swiftly retorts, “Be careful! Dad said that it was a weird period of time…”

“…Sometimes, during it, little girls are not as pretty,” says Dad gently. “Their skin gets oilier, they often get pimples, blackheads…”

“Oh, great,” moans Sylvie, discouraged.

Social equality for little girls:

“I’m going to high school, too, next year! And I’ll take courses!” explodes Sylvie. “And I’ll even be an engineer like Dad!”

Social equality for women:

“You see
(says Dad),
Mom succeeded at doing something very difficult but yet indispensable… She knew how to keep her femininity intact while working at a man’s job. She works as much as I do, but”—adds Dad with tenderness—“she preserves a privileged place for love and pleasure.”

This compendium truly discourages all commentary. I’d prefer to first paraphrase and invert a few passages, to do better justice to their idiocy:

“Jean sighs: ‘And I have no slit! No vulva, no clito—…um, like you said…’”

“But you do, my little red chicken, you have sex organs, too, hanging from the outside of your plump little tummy!… You’ll never have a vagina, only a tube, the penis.”

“‘Oh, all I’ve got is a penis,’ says Jean, full of shame. He put on his most miserable look: ‘I’m a little boy, not a woman…’ Mom consoles him: ‘Puberty comes later for boys… You won’t be as pretty, you’ll have pimples, blackheads.’”

“I won’t have a bust?”

“Your testicles are going to get bigger, but I can’t promise you. Still, you’ll have a beard, a moustache.”

“Oh, great!” moans Jean, discouraged.

“You see,” says Mom, “Dad failed at something that was indispensable, and yet easy… He didn’t know how to keep his virility intact, and he’s working at a very idiotic job. Not only did he work less than me, but”—Mom adds angrily—“he didn’t devote any place to love or pleasure.”

Such a portrait of your average forty-year-old French person seems curiously close to reality to me; however, all I wanted to do above was write the opposite of what Dad expects from Mom. In inverting that eulogy for the ideal woman, I could have fabricated a negative male monster of the kind that exists nowhere: but I ended up with a family kind of father. The conclusion to draw from this is obvious enough.

And it’s very dear as well that the finest principles of sexual equality are only hypocrisy and a lie, because of the extent to which we remain attached to the pro-birth obsession. The burden ofprocreation isn’t the same for men as it is for women: from the moment a woman has to be a mother, that overwhelming biological servitude will continue to be exploited to the nth degree by the male and by the sexual order.

From then on, freedoms, the easing-up society allows women, won’t do away with the old slavery; they will add to it, and the woman will have the right to work, vote, have an abortion, provided that she first fulfills her old roles: baby-maker, caretaker of the home, bottom-wiper, cook, slattern, maid for the children and Dad’s whore.

“Can a woman live and work without having a child?”

“
Of course, but that’s a new idea
,” answers Dad, who moves on immediately to praising his own wife, his model wife, because she’s a “mom” despite her “man’s job,” and because her professional responsibilities don’t prevent her from allowing herself to get fucked by Dad and only by Dad and only when he wants to.

All women who work (and who don’t belong to the well-to-do middle class of the
Encyclopedia
) know that this mixture of sexual submission, domestic servitude and salaried slavery is “difficult,” and desperately live it every day.

But as for it being “indispensable,” really, that’s asking a bit much. A woman who is alone and childless has the right to exist, “of course”; nevertheless, in the sauce of motherhood and marriage in which we swim, she’ll seem—and perhaps think she is—a woman deprived of all true happiness. As neither wife nor mother, she loses no chains; on the contrary, she has lost the most precious thing she had: her “femininity.”

The little girl being indoctrinated will listen—since you must be objective—to a description of the self-sufficient woman: a creature who’s hard-hearted, frosty, austere, undesired, too “modern.” The childless woman isn’t a woman, the childless couple is living a greattragedy, the single mother, in fact, doesn’t exist. What’s left? The “real” woman, beautiful, fulfilled, bursting with happiness, showered with praise—the one who arouses men’s “affection,” the respect of patriots and the interest of employers: the married mom who works.

The entire
Encyclopedia
is devoted to that ploy: yes, it says, you “can” be free sexually; but if you want to be happy, balanced, well accepted by others, it’s better to give up on it. You love gilt, garlands? Only cages have them around here—whereas freedom is only grief, frustration, loneliness. That’s how things are: up to you to “choose.”

The lot of the mother, as opposed to that ticket to religion, the single person, will appear to be female happiness par excellence, because the only way that the body, sex, growth, amorous pleasures, the social future of girls is presented is as a function of motherhood. And in order to demonstrate this more clearly to little girls, the authors have no qualms about rectifying women’s anatomy. Delighted at having “just a vagina,” Sylvie would probably be even “happier” to have a clitoris: but as incredible as it may seem, our doctors haven’t deigned to tell her.

The vagina is academic intercourse, a husband, procreation; the clitoris, as everyone knows, is about jerking off, orgasm without the male and without a cock, lesbianism—in short, what allows you to come without being either lover, spouse or mother. That’s why it’s excised in many paternalist societies; invariably the sexologists, whose only standard is “nature,” but who retouch it without scruples as soon as it disturbs the sexual order, inveigh against the clitoris and expel it to its niche as a small satellite of great vaginal pleasure. Sexual “information” for preadolescents must not name an appendage that is so suspect and so dangerous.

For the same reason, the book has disregarded the female orgasm, and we saw that earlier. Dad is lying on Mom, he “ejaculates,”and that’s “orgasm.” Certainly this must be an egalitarian protocol, because the husband and wife have “found” the movement of coitus “together”… But, just as all other situations and all other means of female pleasure are censored, young female readers will come to the conclusion that for a woman, having an orgasm is merely helping yourself to a bit of male pleasure—waiting for a man, a husband, to climb on top of you and “instinctively” do what’s described in the book. It’s that or nothing.

And even though clitoral masturbation plays an enormous role in French conjugal life (Dad sticks it to her and then goes to sleep, Mom jerks off after), we pass over it in silence. This doesn’t keep it from existing, but for mothers and daughters masturbation will remain disgraceful, shameful, squalid and not nice. That’s all that counts in the eyes of “science.”

In compensation, there will be long, poetic descriptions of pregnancy and its physical pleasures. Mom sighs:

“I remember a symphony by Mozart. It was four or five months before Jean was born. I was at the concert with Dad, and Jean moved inside me for the first time… I told Dad, who squeezed my hand hard, very hard. He looked at me, very moved… We’d become ‘three,’ and I’ll never be able to forget that feeling of total fulfillment.”

There’s not a bodice button left unpopped in this scene of refined emotion, this unique moment in love, this panegyric in a tone of middle class good taste; a pulp romance writer couldn’t do any better. Little girls will wet their drawers. Becoming with foal—this is the “fulfillment” of women who are loved, this fine tale informs them. It’s more like a cow’s happiness—whom, apparently, we also make listen to Mozart in the barn so that it will have more milk. Modern agriculture is blessed with such refinements.

Juliette, it must be remembered, “wants” the baby she’s carrying; this desire even makes her “blush.” The relationship between the mother and the fetus is in fact only admitted with propriety; she is in love.

“My baby keeps awfully quiet… That night, on the other hand, I was entitled to a few heel kicks…’’

“He’ll play rugby!” declares Jean, riotously happy.

“I stroked my stomach, to show him a sign of friendship.
” Invariably, the baby is a boy: once more, “complementarity” is the gauge for success—all the more because pregnancy will be less attractive if you have to impose it on yourself only to reap the second-rate human product known as a girl. And Sylvie marvels at the fact that you can have such a well-lodged lover all to yourself:

With infinite gentleness the little girl places her hand on Juliettes “big belly”: “He moved!”she says.

“He’s getting rowdy… He needs a bit more space, he’s chosen a position that he’ll hardly change until birth.”

“With his head in back, or sitting on his little bottom?”

A strange perversion instilled in little girls, this desire to have a little boy moving in their bellies. (“Do you have to move?” Jean was asking in relation to coitus.) Meanwhile, any fears that could be inspired by delivery will be dismissed:

“And aren’t you just a tiny bit afraid?” says Sylvie, surprised. “Why would I be afraid?” answers Juliette.
“I know everything that will happen, and I won’t be alone. My husband will be with me.
” Once more, husband-love-baby form but one affective knot that is the desirable itself.
Boy or girl, what’s the difference?
Sylvie was saying: and she was demanding to be an engineer “like Dad.” Too bad that the book, in fact, only teaches her to be pregnant like Mom.

Before I was pointing out that in this work meant for children older than 10 and younger than 14, the boys were represented by a kid of 11, who is prepubescent and mentally backward. But for the girls, the authors have dared even more: their heroine, with all of her 9 years, isn’t even old enough to read the manual in which she appears.

Such brazen infantilizing allows them, quite probably, to neglect the questions that a 12- or 13-year-old heroine would have asked. These young readers’ presence is only Sylvie’s future; the adolescence they’re experiencing is only a “discouraging” but faraway nightmare for our little girl. And what’s more, it was very convenient for the girl to be her brother’s younger sibling and not the older one: in this way, the hierarchy of the sexes is respected and, in fact, even decency; as for “equality,” it will be taught as a duty of compassion, a kindness that the boys, because of their superiority, will impose upon themselves in their behavior toward the girls—those disabled idiots who will enjoy male freedom on the sole condition that none of their privileges are changed.

Jean is “already a man”; as for Sylvie, she’s neither man, woman, boy (except “from the back”), nor girl: she’s a blue kitten with a ditorectomy, who splashes around in her rustic ingenuousness, and whose
most cherished dream
is to have “a bust” so she can place a brat on it.

Women and girls, who are omnipresent in the form of uteruses, stand aside in a very small corner of the picture as soon as it’s a question of pleasure. Even the kind for prisoners: masturbation. The subject is broached by a dialogue between father and son; Mom shuts up;
Sylvie listens to the conversation absent-mindedly
— she herself has no “sex organs” to “touch,” so…

Though a fraction of the French middle class, in their acceptance of certain “liberal” principals, tolerate the fact that theirchildren jerk off, the prohibition against pleasure-for-one remains, as we know, very much in force; experienced by all those whom a more overly repressive generation has educated, masturbation is kept in a zone of silence and guilt. Nevertheless, the old excuses for forbidding masturbation are obsolete, and if they do survive, no one advertises it, apart from those in a parochial milieu. The avantgardists of repression come close to opposing such Catholic hypocrisy: a truce for the witch hunt, they say, we’ve got more dangerous enemies. But they let the religious zealots devote themselves to their repressive little rubbish, the way you resign yourself to the fact that an old man who has regressed into childhood spills his soup, smells of urine and plays with his pooh. We liked the Christian order so much that we can easily pardon it its senility, and then, after all, that piece of furniture still comes in handy a bit at times, it distracts the adversary.

As for the
Encyclopedia
doctors, their indirect condemnation of masturbation certainly is the most perverted, the most obnoxious that I was able to read:

“Dad, the other day I saw a big guy from eighth grade who was writing on the door of a locker:
Hurray for pleasure for one.
It made some other guys in my class laugh, but I didn’t understand. Is there a pleasure for one?”