The Female Eunuch (27 page)

I had an orgasm with you. I was never able to before…Never before. Every other way, yes. But never, Stephen, when a man was within

me, when a man was right inside me.
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Achieving first love with the Poison Maiden is like the Siege Per- ilous. Cherry is surrounded by threatening creatures, mostly the nightclub heavies who sit around her as she sings in a dive in the Village, negroes,

prizefighters of ill-repute, detectives and harpies, who are killed by bullets fired at them from Rojack’s brain. Her apartment was inhab- ited before her by her sister, killed because of the maleficent super- male, Shago (!) Martin. The precious moments Rojack spends with her there are threatened by the imminent return of the black en- chanter. He is ostensibly a singer, but what a singer! ‘…you were glowing when he was done, the ear felt good, you had been domin-

ated by a champion.’
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Other knights who had frequented this lady had run; only Rojack will make a stand, nothing but his mighty penis against a crazy nigger with a switchblade. He wins, of course. The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine cat- egory of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in
A Farewell to Arms
, or the Grecian Urn,

the ‘tension that she be perfect’ means that she must die,
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leaving

the hero’s status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutal tolerance.

The extent to which the traits of adventure sex can be found in real life, or rather injected into life because they are part of a man’s preoccupations, can be judged from the fantastic outpourings of that sexual Munch-hausen, John Philip Lundin. The authenticity of his book,
Women
, as in some sense an autobiography is attested by an introduction signed by R. E. L. Masters. The first chapter delineates a favourite male fantasy, the cash value of female charms. Whether they be married to rich men, working as hostesses in high-class clubs, as ‘models’ or simply walking the streets, women are believed to be cashing in all the time. Lundin’s exploit is the getting of what other men must buy, and dearly, for free. Of course, he is no ponce sweating over a prostitute’s pleasure for his keep. He is a lover equal to the expectations of the professionals. Husbands are paying

customers or, more tersely, suckers. As a permanent free-loader Lundin is always in peril, and his women all have the excitement of the Poison Maiden as well as the sporting prowess of the Great Bitch. His greatest affair, accepting his own criteria, was with Florence, the boss’s wife, and it follows the classic pattern of sexual exploit which we find in male literature. The flash is struck at first sight and the symptoms are typical.

No electric spark that ever hit me when I got into the way of an electric short ever hit me as powerfully as seeing Florence. My heart was pounding, my blood shot through my veins as if I had a fever, and a lump squeezed itself between my windpipe and my aorta. My stomach was going down an elevator shaft, as if I were afraid for my life. And I felt a stirring of the testicles as if they knew inde-

pendently that this woman would swing them into action.
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The risks of a clandestine adultery are deliciously exacerbated by Florence’s extraordinary heat and the fact that the gross cuckoldy husband has certain ‘boys’ who protect his interests. Lundin is eventually driven off. Because she is universally desirable many other men are in love with her, a prime requisite of male fantasy, for the exploit must be hailed by other men. Florence manages to persuade her husband’s boys to drive her to see Lundin, and they have a passionate reunion in the back seat of the car. When the boys demand similar favours and threaten blackmail, she hotfoots to Mexico, where she marries another sucker, a millionaire, naturally. She leaves him to fly to yet another savage

Love, for too many men in our time, consists of sleeping with a seductive woman, one who is properly endowed with the right distribution of curves and conveniences, and one upon whom a permanent lien has been acquired through the institution of marriage.

Ashley Montagu, ‘The Natural Superiority of Women’, 1954, p.54

guardian, her harpy mother. Her enduring position as Lundin’s only love is ensured when she finds she has cancer and goes back to her first rich husband: ‘Somehow I’ve known ever since I was told she

was dead that my life will never be complete without her.’
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The quite ersatz notion of the complete life is essential to male notions of falling in love. Men do not hope to find a daughter in the way that women hope to find a new father, nor do they hope to find a mother. They hope for a woman who will be the ‘answer to it all’, ‘who can fulfil my needs for understanding, companionship and excitement’. Basic to the demand is an inflated notion of the capacity of the man in question for desire (need), excitement, companionship, and understanding. The man is the given: his mate must be equal to him, or adaptable. The exciting woman of fantasy is the one who creates the desire and releases virile potential by the mere sight of her, and the sight of all in the room gaping at her. One aspect of the fantasy is reflected almost invariably in behaviour in the pleasure which men get from being seen with a woman whom other men covet. The extent to which this pleasure may be developed is indic- ated by the extremity of the device invented by James Jones in
Go to the Widowmaker
to reveal Lucky Videndi’s superlative desirability and Grant’s security in holding her. Having refused to join a nude bathing party, she waits until the others and her husband are all out of the water and then

Lucky suddenly got up and walked down into the water. She lay down and half-crawled, half-paddled out a short distance, all of her under but her head…suddenly she stood up, her arms over her head in a classic ballet pose. She had taken off her suit and was completely nude. The water seemed to pour off her in slow motion as it were, and there she was in all her glorious sensuality, the lovely white breasts and lean rounded hips making the other, skinnier girls look mechanical and asexual. Her arms still up, and not quite knee-deep in the water she did a series of classic ballonné fouetté, a real pas de bourré directly towards them, all beautifully done. It was a move- ment which…gave the impression of opening the

crotch up completely, and she must have chosen it deliberately. There was a hush of stillness from the shore…The champagne-col- oured hair had not gotten wet and it flashed about her as she moved

like white gold.
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It is small wonder that Grant is besotted with such a creature, es- pecially as she has the added athletic grace of being able, when lovemaking, to put both feet behind her head. It is certainly some kudos to be able to
need
a woman like that. To make the point clearer, Lucky Videndi describes herself as an author-fucker, and the man she falls in love with is an author, so her continued presence by his side enhances his professional prestige.

Has anyone else a husband like mine? He was attracted to me because I am a long-legged brunette. Now, after six years of marriage, he feels like a change and pines for a bosomy blonde. He has not run off or been unfaithful.

Instead, I now have a long, silky blonde wig, and a chest

-expander for daily exercises.—V. Ladbrooke, Essex.

P.S. If I get a guinea I shall put it towards a ‘pop-singer’ wig for him!

Petticoat, 15 November 1969

In Mailer’s words she is his entry
into the big league
. As long as we have these patterns of woman as challenge, we are dealing with subpornographic literature pandering to an impossible fantasy, which, because of the intimate relationship between potency and fantasy, has a tendency to obtrude into actual sexual behaviour. Women may be frigid because the requirements of romance are not satisfied but men too quail at the lack of excitement which domest- icity affords.

I cannot live with you, It would be life,

And life is over there Behind the shelf.
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The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage

Loveless marriage is anathema to our culture, and a life without love is unthinkable. The woman who remains unmarried must have missed her chance, lost her boy in the war or hesitated and was lost; the man somehow never found the right girl. It is axiomatic that all married couples are in love with each other. Sympathy is often

The art of managing men has to be learned from birth. It is easier as you acquire experience. Some women have an instinctive flair, but most have to learn the hard way by trial and error. Some die disappointed. It depends to some extent on one’s distribution of curves, a developed instinct, and a large degree of sheer feline cunning.

Mary Hyde, ‘How to Manage Men’, 1955, p.6

expressed for those people, like kings and queens, who cannot be solely directed by Cupid’s arrow, although at the same time it is ta- citly assumed that even royal couples are in love. In the common imagination nuns are all women disappointed in love, and career- women are compensating for their failure to find the deepest happi- ness afforded mankind in this vale of tears. But it was not always believed even if the normality of the idea persuades us that it must have been. The mere mention of Cupid’s arrow ought to remind us that there was a far different concept of love which prevailed not so long ago, a concept not only separate from pre-nuptial courtship, but quite inimical to marriage. Even in the brief lifetime of the concept of nuptial love it has not always

been the same idea: many of the defenders of marriage for love in the sixteenth century would be horrified if they could know the de- gree of romanticism and sexual

I am 39 and have been submitting to corporal punishment from my husband ever since we married 15 years ago.

We have both treated this matter of punishment as a normal sort of proceeding. It was not until recently, when we saw some letters in ‘Forum’ that we realized there were people who had guilt complexes about spanking their mates.

Our ideas are quite simple. My husband happens to believe that in marriage the husband should be the boss. I agree with him and I recognize that wrong-doing should be punished. We both think that the simplest, most convenient, most effective and most natural way for a

man to punish the faults of his woman is to spank or whip her; but not too severely, certainly not brutally.

Letter in ‘Forum’, Vol. 2, No. 3

passion with which their ideal is now invested. Gradual changes in basic assumptions have obscured the traces of the development of the myth of falling-in-love-and-getting-married; demographic in- formation about its early stages is hard to come by. Acknowledging all these uncertainties with due humility we may embark upon a speculative exploration.

It is by now commonplace to point out that in feudal literature romantic love was essentially anti-social and adulterous. The discus- sions of de Rougemont and his ilk are well-known, at least in their

gist.
1
The term ‘courtly love’ has become a cliché of historical criti-

cism. The tales of Guinevere and Iseult were the product of the minority culture of the ruling class, at which the serfs and yeomen must have marvelled when they heard them recounted in song and folk-tale. They were the product of the feudal situation in which a noble wife was a wife only when her warrior husband was at home

(which with any luck was seldom), otherwise she ruled a community of men, many of them young and lusty, with the result that they entertained fantasies about the unobtainable to whom they could not even address their advances. She exploited their servility, which was the original of chivalry, and may or may not have served her own lusts by them. To her husband she was submissive and offered him her body as his fief. Victorian scholars exclaimed in horror at

the description of marital love given in tracts like
Hail Maidenhad
,
2

and joyously acclaimed the Protestant reformers for bringing the first breath of ‘fresh air into the cattle shed’ of marital theory.
3
The

monkish author of the fourteenth-century tract
Hail Maidenhad
put it to the virgins he was addressing that if they really liked reading in Latin, illuminating manuscripts, embroidering (not antimacassars and guest towels but precious vestments and magical tapestries which are now among the finest art treasures of European museums), and writing poetry and music, then they were better off in the all- female society of a convent, where they were not surrounded by the bustle and brutality of a barracks, condemned to dangerous child- birth and the rough caresses of a husband too used to grappling with infidel captives and military whores to be aware of their emo- tional and sexual needs. He did not say but we might infer that the loves of clerks and nuns were more likely to be satisfying than the infatuation of young squires and the endless exacerbation of unful- filled desire which is the whole motive force behind Provençal minstrelsy. Rabelais combined the elements of medieval humanist fantasy of sexual and intellectual adjustment in his jolly secular

monastery of Theleme.
4
Rattray Taylor has listed the period as a

matrist one, and however dubious his classification may ultimately be it is true that the influence of women upon the character of medi-

eval civilization was great,
5
and appears greater when we consider

that all culture which was not utterly ephemeral was the culture of a tiny minority. It is perhaps significant that most of the women who made a

valuable contribution to medieval culture were either religious or women living in celibacy within or after marriage, like Hilda, Queen Edith, the sainted Margaret, her daughters Matilda and Mary, and Lady Margaret Beaufort.

The amorous character in the feudal castle was the young squire, not eligible for knight-service until he was twenty-one. His beardless youth and beauty were most often described as effeminate for he was long-haired, dressed in embroideries, skilled at musical perform- ance with voice and instrument, and at dancing, and penning poetry. It was inevitable that a lad torn from his mother’s breast to serve first as page and then as squire should yearn for the affection of his liege-lord’s wife. The exigencies of adolescent flesh ensured that he would suffer sexual aches and pains and naturally he attached them to his beloved lady-image. It was a submissive, tearful, servile pos- ture; once he attained his majority and came to know the permissive society of the battlefield, this compulsive feeling became more intel- lectual and less immediate as he became more manly, less effeminate and perforce less sexually obsessed. The situation was full of hazards. The lord’s wife was often closer to her fellow vassal in age and temperament; he was certainly more attractive to her physically than her gruff stranger husband. If she should fall from grace and com- promise the legitimacy of her heirs the only outcome was disaster. Divorce was impossible, adultery was punishable by death be it the husband’s
crime passionel
or the sentence of the law. The community attempted to exorcize this deep fear by externalizing it. Stories of ill-fated passion were cautionary tales. Love was a blight, a curse, a wound, death, the plague. Sex itself was outlawed, except in desire of issue. The chastity belt and its attendant horrors are reminders of the intense pressure built up in such a situation. The body-soul dichotomy which characterizes medieval thought operated to protect the status quo. Servant girls and country bumkins were debauched without mercy, while the passion for