The Female Eunuch (37 page)

of affection, became insulting, and is now only mildly offensive.
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Unfortunately the enfeeblement of abuse by hysterical overstate-

ment is not the commonest phenomenon in the language of woman- hatred. Many more terms which originally applied to both men and women gained virulence by sexual discrimination. The word
harlot
did not become exclusively feminine until the seventeenth century. There is no male analogue for it in the era of the double standard. The word
bawd
applied to both sexes until after 1700, and the word
hoyden
is no longer applicable to men. Originally a
scold
was a Scots invective—now it means, predictably, a nagging woman.
Witches
may be of either sex, but as a term of abuse
witch
is solely directed at women. A
chit
was originally the young of a beast, came to mean a child, and nowadays means a silly girl.

Class antagonism has had its effect on the vocabulary of female status. Lower-class distrust of airs and graces has resulted in the ironic applications of terms like
madam, lady, dame
and
duchess
, which is fair exchange for the loading of dialect names for women with contemptuous associations, as in
wench, quean, donah, dell, moll, biddy
and
bunter
(once a rag-picker, but now invariably a prostitute). The most recent case in which contempt for menial labour has devised a new term of abuse for women is the usage of
scrubber
for a girl of easy virtue. If such linguistic movements were to be charted compre- hensively and in detail, we would have before us a map of the de- velopment of the double standard and the degradation of women. As long as the vocabulary of the cottage and the castle are separate, words like
wench
and
madonna
do not clash; when they do both concepts suffer and woman is the loser. The more body-hatred grows, so that the sexual function is hated and feared by those unable to renounce it, the more abusive terms we find in the language.

When most lower-class girls were making a living as

domestics, struggling to keep clear of the sexual exploitation of the males in the household, the language of reprobation became more and more concerned with lapses in neatness, which were taken to be the equivalent of moral lapses. The concept of sluttishness or slatternliness with its compound implication of dirt and dishonour gave rise to a great family of nasty words, like
drab, slut, slommack, slammerkin, traipse, malkin, trollop, draggle-tail
. The word
slattern
itself withdrew the male portion of its meaning and became exclusively feminine.

The most offensive group of words applied to the female popula- tion are those which bear the weight of neurotic male disgust for il- licit or casual sex. The Restoration, which reaped the harvest of puritan abuse of gay women, invented a completely new word of unknown derivation to describe complaisant ladies, the ubiquitous
punk
. The imagery of venereal disease added a new dimension to the language: diseased women were
fireships, brimstone, laced mutton, blowens, bawdy baskets, bobtails
, although the vestiges of sensual inno- cence hung around long enough to endow us with obsolete terms like
bed-fagot, pretty horsebreaker
, as well as loving-ironic use of words like
whore
and
trull
, which were not always wholly bitter in their application. More familiar terms in current usage refer to women as receptacles for refuse, reflecting the evaluation that men put upon their own semen, as
tramp, scow, scupper
or, most contemporary, the hideous transferred epithet
slag
. Even these words fade from vivid- ness: women themselves use a term like
bag
indiscriminately, al- though they would recoil from the unequivocal original
douche-bag
, or rhyming slang
toe-rag
.

Perhaps words like
pig, pig-meat
or
dog
are inspired by the sadness which follows unsatisfactory sex: they too lose their efficacy from wide usage as the word
beast
did, and must constantly be replaced. The vocabulary of impersonal sex is peculiarly desolating. Who wants to ‘tear off a piece of ass’? ‘get his greens’? ‘stretch a bit of

leather’? ‘knock off a bit of belly or crumpet’? ‘have it away’?

It would be unbearable, but less so, if it were only the vagina that was belittled by terms like
meat, pussy, snatch, slit, crack
and
tail
, but in some hardboiled patois the woman herself is referred to as a
gash
, a
slot
. The poetical figure which indicates the whole by the part is sadly employed when indicating women as
skirts, frills, a bit of fluff
or a
juicy little piece
.

These terms are all dead, fleshy and inhuman, and as such easy to resent, but the terms of endearment addressed to women are equally soulless and degrading. The basic imagery behind terms like
honey, sugar, dish, sweety-pie, cherry, cookie, chicken
and
pigeon
is the imagery of food. If a woman is food, her sex organ is for con- sumption also, in the form of
honey-pot, hair-pie
and
cake
-or
jelly-roll
. There are the pretty toy words, like
doll
and
baby
or even
baby-doll
. There are the cute animal terms like
chick, bird, kitten
and
lamb
, only a shade of meaning away from
cow, bitch, hen, shrew, goose, filly, bat, crow, heifer
and
vixen
, as well as the splendidly ambiguous expression
fox
, which emanates from the Chicago ghetto. The food terms lose their charm when we reflect how close they are to coarse terms like
fish, mutton, skate, crumpet, a bit on a fork, cabbage, greens, meat
and
bread
, terms more specifically applied to the female genitalia but often extended to the female herself. Who likes to be called
dry-goods
, a
potato
, a
tomato
or a
rutabaga
?

There used to be a fine family of words which described without reprobation or disgust women who lived outside the accepted sexual laws, but they have faded from current usage. Flatly contemp- tuous words like
kept-woman
and
call-girl
have taken over the field from
adventuress, woman of the world, woman of pleasure, mistress, in- amorata, paramour, courtesan, mondaine
. When Frank Zappa launched the mythology of the
groupie
as high priestess of free love and the group grope, he meant the term to remain free from

pejorative colouring,
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but despite the enormous buildup less than six months later most of the women who hung around musicians treated the appellation as an insult. It is the fate of euphemisms to lose their function rapidly by association with the actuality of what they designate, so that they must be regularly replaced with euphem- isms for themselves. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that
fiancée
which commonly in the permissive society means
mistress
will itself become a tabu word unless ideology should miraculously catch up with behaviour.

The most scathing vilification of immoral women does not come from men. The feminine establishment which sees its techniques of sexual bargaining jeopardized by the disregard of women who make themselves
cheap
is more vociferous in its condemnation. Too often the errant women abuse themselves with excessive shame and re- crimination, degrading themselves more in their own estimation than they do by their behaviour. The compulsiveness of this behav- iour is the direct result of repressiveness in education: women are drawn to sexual licence because it seems forbidden and exciting, but the price they pay for such delinquency is too heavy. The result is functional nymphomania, described in Nathan Shiff’s
Diary of a Nymph
. A woman in this situation refuses to take responsibility for her own behaviour and instead attributes her deeds to a paraself which takes over. She cannot choose between one sexual partner or another because her will is in abeyance, so that her course is set for self-destruction. Shiff’s heroine Christine describes sex as filthy and

low, and yearns to feel free from it, to ‘be clean again’.
5
The same

self-denigrating syndrome appears in a type of letter which appears regularly in the correspondence columns of women’s magazines. ‘I feel so low and ashamed…’; ‘I was so disgusted with myself I found I couldn’t respond to my husband’s love. Now it is worse. I have read about V.D. and am terrified I could have been infected…’ ‘I have always loved my husband but three years ago I had a

sordid affair which he forgave…I have again been strongly tempted by another man…’; ‘I know it is impossible to change my past, but

I have learned my lesson and regretted ever since what happened…’
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None of the replying matriarchs inquires why the affair was so sor- did, why it must be regretted, what lesson it was that was learnt, why shame is so disproportionate or what the woman is really de- scribing when she speaks of temptation. Instead, all sagely counsel that the woman continue to accept her guilt and find expiation in renewed self-abnegation. In ‘true romance’ stories women mercilessly vilify themselves for quite minor infractions of the sexual code—‘It was so horrible I feel I shall never be clean again. Never. I’m too awful to live. I felt utterly ashamed. I hardly knew this man. How

could I be so cheap?’
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For educated girls the most telling gibe is that of
promiscuity
, a notion so ill-defined that for practical purposes we must decide that a girl is promiscuous when she thinks herself to be so. Gael Greene’s conversations with college girls revealed that while they tolerate sex between people who are ‘in love’, any other kind was promiscuity, an imagined disease so powerful in its effects that according to Dr Graham B. Blaine it is the commonest reason for their seeking psy-

chiatric help.
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Girls who pride themselves on their monogamous

instincts have no hesitation in using the whole battery of sex-loathing terms for women who are not. They speak of the ‘campus punch- board’ or ‘an old beat-up pair of shoes’, revealing their unconscious

fidelity to the notion that for women sex is
despoiling
and
using
.
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The

last word on the pernicious power of the notion of promiscuity was uttered by Jim Moran, battling the double standard in
Why Men Shouldn’t Marry
: ‘Use of this word [promiscuity] has but one redeem-

ing feature. It identifies the user as a pro-virginity, problem-ridden, puritanical prunt.’
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Moran addressed his words chiefly to men: they ought to be more urgently heeded by women. If women are to

be better valued by men they must value themselves more highly. They must not allow themselves to be seduced while in a state of self-induced moral paralysis, trusting to the good-will of the seducer so grudgingly served. They must not scurry about from bed to bed in a self-deluding and pitiable search for love, but must do what they do deliberately, without false modesty, shame or emotional blackmail. As long as women consider themselves sexual objects they will continue to writhe under the voiced contempt of men and, worse, to think of themselves with shame and scorn.

Low regard for the sexual object extends even into the words which denote the simple fact of femaleness. Female and
woman
are not polite terms: I was told as a little girl always to employ the word
lady
or
young lady
. Squeamishness results in ludicrous formulae like
the opposite sex
. Contempt for women can be discerned in a purer form in the use of female terms as abuse for pusillanimous or incom- petent men. ‘You girl,’ say the Londoners, in a tone of the deepest contempt. Feminists might like to consider the gratuitous attribution of the female sex to unspecified objects and creatures, as in this headline which identified the Loch Ness Monster as female, ‘If Nessy’s there
she’s
got a sonar shock coming.’ Perhaps we can deduce the latent motive for the attribution from the sadism of the context. Young and pretty women may delude themselves about the amount of abuse meted out to women, for as long as they remain so they escape most of it. It is easy to pretend that wolf-whistles are gestures of genuine appreciation and that compliments are genuine praise, which they are not. Pretty women sometimes chafe under the effects of the universal supposition that they are morons, but in general it seems easier to exploit male illusions. A woman has only to depart from the stereotype to find herself subjected to all kinds of discrimination and insult, although she may minimize it still for her own mental health. A woman who is not pretty is a
bag
. There

are a few half measures in popular

imagery. A woman who is unacceptably fat is gross, undesirable, ridiculous. A woman who is undesirably thin is scraggy, scrawny and so on. If her legs are not lovely they are awful. If her body sug- gests too much strength and agility she is hard, tough, unfeminine. If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.

The stereotype of the sex object is only one of the stereotypes used to mask the realities of female humanity. Even this type is not free from abuse. A certain kind of male imagines that women are all the time flaunting themselves to inflame his senses and deny him, in order to build up their deficient egos. He imagines that women get away with outrageous exploitation of male susceptibility. The fol- lowing extracts appeared in a book of sex instruction republished recently in England, called
Sane and Sensual Sex
.

Man does not (as woman may well think) always like to see her stark naked. He is not necessarily mad keen to see her in scanties or panties or bra. He does not lose his head when her skirt blows up in a high wind, showing all she’s got on. He does not enjoy the generous breasts spilling from the top of her dress or forcing their way through her tight sweater. He does not revel in the sight of her bottom swaying, hinged to her hips or inside her skirt that flares all around her, revealing a multitude of frothy petticoats.