The Female Eunuch (5 page)
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
Subpornographic 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 oblo-
quy.
5
Instead, the cheeky bottom in tight trousers, more boyish than
otherwise, attracts the most overt attention. Girls are often self-con- scious 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 fash- ionable 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 de- mand, 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 danger- ous 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 ar- abesques 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.
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 under- standing 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 fe- male.
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.
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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 lub- rication 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 specu- lation. All kinds of false ideas are still in circulation about women, although they were disproved years ago: many men refuse to relin- quish 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 wo- man 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 ex- amples 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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Copula- tions’. 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. Lovemaking 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
. Propa- gandists 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 girlfriend, 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.
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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 pubo-
coccygeal muscles and found inadvertently that this increased their sexual enjoyment.
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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 corres- pondingly 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 stimu- late 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
