Women are told from their infancy and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, ‘outward’ obedience and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain for them the protection of man…
Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘The Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, p.33
Felice—a summer affair that will last forever.
Miss Lentheric is a love affair. It really is the most romantic new perfume and you’ll never know what you’ve missed if you don’t try some.
Aqua Manda. Two words to change your life.
Now that she must flatter herself, the market throngs with products with which she can caress herself.
From clove-spiced Zanzibar…to the early dew of Burma…the world over, more girls use Lux than any other soap. Beautiful girls, with beautiful complexions. Lux lather, you see, is specially enriched with the cream of natural oils…made milder to keep your skin soft and smooth the natural way. So join the world’s most beautiful women…
The advertising for hair colouring is always made with an eye on the escapism of women, a new, crazy you will result, new possibilities will open up. Even your bath can become a romantic ritual:
New Dew brings Alpine magic to your bath. Like a flower, newly awakened by the dew. Fresh, lovely and ready to greet the day. That’s how you feel each time you bath in New Dew…Just two capfuls of this fragrant green essence is all you need to drift lazily away to nature’s world of flowers and freshness.22
But the supreme adventure is still falling in love; although that unwordly excitement is past women still insist on reliving it. It is the only story they really want to hear. I saw a young wife, of a few months at the most I should judge, on a vaporetto in Venice with her husband, intently reading a fotoromanzo while her husband tried vainly to chat with her and caress her. The fantasy was even then more engrossing than the reality. Women’s magazines treat the same story over and over again, changing the setting, inventing more and more curious combinations of circumstances to vary the essential plot; but falling in love, the kiss, the declaration and the imminent wedding are the staple of the plot. Other stories treat ancillary themes, of adultery, of delusion and disappointment, or nostalgia, but the domestic romantic myth remains the centrepiece of feminine culture.
Sexual religion is the opiate of the supermenial. A particularly naïve letter to a women’s magazine made this unusually clear.
Have you ever thought how much modern inventions are ruining romance? There’s no need for her to darn his indestructible nylon socks or iron his drip-dry shirt. What man will pick up a dropped paper hanky or wheel an overloaded trolley basket? There’s no need to help a mini-skirted girl on to a bus, and her gas cigarette lighter always works.23
Romance sanctions drudgery, physical incompetence and prostitution (for the cigarette lighter situation is more likely to incommode street walkers than anybody else). If Miss S. A. of Rhiwbira is right romance must be doomed, but there is not as much indication of that as I would demand if it is to serve as a ground for optimism. Female clothes are much more romantic now than they were in the years of austerity, and if mini-skirts have increased mobility, false hair and eyelashes and false modesty in the way of wearing those mini-skirts have inhibited it again. Even a book as flat and documentary as Groupie embodies the essential romantic stereotype in Grant, the masterful lover who supplants all Katie’s other fucks. He tells Katie when she may call, how long she may stay, commands her to make the bed and perform all his other requirements without demur and she loves it.24 She persuades herself that this is love-in-disguise, like it was with Lord Worth and Grant Jarvis, and ends the book on a hopeful note, waiting for him to return from America and go on ordering her about. The book is based on experience, and often positively dreary in its fidelity, but the character of Grant is a genuinely unconscious falsification of the original. If female liberation is to happen, if the reservoir of real female love is to be tapped, this sterile self-deception must be counteracted. The only literary form which could outsell romantic trash on the female market is hard-core pornography. The titillating mush of Cartland and her ilk is supplying an imaginative need but their hypocrisy limits the gratification to that which can be gained from innuendo: by-pass the innuendo and you short-circuit the whole process. I and my little friends swapped True Confessions back and forth because we were randy and curious. If you leave the Housewives’ Handbook25 lying about, your daughter may never read Cartland or Heyer with any credulity.
The Object of Male Fantasy
Little children of both sexes read adventure stories. The very little ones read unisexual adventure with both heroes and heroines. The older read segregated stories of all-girl or all-boy exploits. Verisimilitude means that the writers of girls’ stories cannot exclude male characters, but they do exclude all sexual or love interest, from their pre-pubescent readers. For boys the exclusion of sex entails the exclusion of all female characters. I can still remember the disgust felt by all of us in the eighth grade when the films of the Biggles stories included a love interest as a concession to dating couples. Puberty ends the young girl’s hearty fantasies of being, say, Pony rescuing Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody by skipping a stone across a river on to the pate of an Indian archer only to snatch the archer from alligators’ jaws two frames later,1 and initiates her in the passive excitements of the infantilized heroine of romance. For boys broaching manhood the dominant fantasy of adventure simply expands to include woman as exploit: sex is admitted as a new kind of prowess or hazard. Because novelty is an essential character of adventure so we may expect the sex interest to be superficially diversified, racially, physically, and perhaps socially, but nevertheless the patterns of gratification are simple, and seem to fall into two patterns, the Great Bitch and the Poison Maiden.
The Great Bitch is the deadly female, a worthy opponent for the omnipotent hero to exercise his powers upon and through. She is desirous, greedy, clever, dishonest, and two jumps ahead all the time. The hero may either have her on his side and like a lion-tamer sool her on to his enemies, or he may have to battle for his life at her hands.
…unconditional surrender was her only raw meat. A Great Bitch has losses to calculate after all if the Gent gets away. For ideally a Great Bitch delivers extermination to any bucko brave enough to take carnal knowledge of her.2
Mailer’s Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly is carefully constructed to embody as many of the features of the type as possible in one single manifestation. In describing her Mailer is not entirely detached, his narrator still murmurs in the heavy American dream; the power of the book is derived from this tension between the surgeon and his wound. The deadly strain of sex as exploit, the tireless self-proof which makes communication impossible, the imaginary but genuine killing battle of the sexes is what Stephen Rojack escapes from, but his escape makes continuation of the book impossible. In contemporary sexual myth there are no alternatives, unless we heed the thin self-satisfied voice of the hippies. The most important fact about Deborah is the aspect mentioned first: all the descriptions of Spillane’s and Fleming’s women as expensive, classy, rich, top-drawer and so forth are eclipsed by Mailer’s insane hyperbole. The context and the understatement ought to give the game away, although feminists like Kate Millett persist in assuming that Mailer is a cretin.3
I met Jack Kennedy in November 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date and it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz.4
Which must be taken to mean that Rojack is an all-American hero moving in the Grace Kelly/Jacqueline-Lee-Bouvier enclosure, with a cock more interesting in every way than anything Scott Fitzgerald could put words to. The imagery of war and sex is inextricably confused. The enemy is a faggot to be blasted to a bloody pulp below the waist; pain is a clean pain, a good pain, ev
idence of good clean destruction, no rot, for of rot life is born. The womb smells of rot, for the source of life is despair for barren Rojack, whose very mind is an arsenal. Deborah is not only war, she is sport.
…she’d been notorious in her day, picking and choosing among a gallery of beaux: politicians of the first rank, racing drivers, tycoons, and her fair share of the more certified playboys of the western world, she had been my entry to the big league.5
The physical attributes of this creature are those of the opulent tigresses of thriller literature. Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer would not recognize the lithe, full-breasted, very tall, amazing-haired female toughs who blast the heroes at a mere flash. Mailer is less stilted but the attributes are typical.
She was a handsome woman, Deborah, she was big. With high heels she stood at least an inch over me. She had a huge mass of black hair and striking green eyes…She had a large Irish nose and a wide mouth which took many shapes, but her complexion was her claim to beauty, for her skin was cream-white and her cheeks were coloured with a fine rose…6
We are not far from those extraordinary springing women with slanting eyes and swirling clouds of hair who prowl through thriller comics on the balls of their feet, wheeling suddenly upon the hero, talons unsheathed for the kill. Their mouths are large, curved and shining like scimitars: the musculature of their shoulders and thighs is incredible, their breasts like grenades, their waists encircled with steel belts as narrow as Cretan bull-dancers’.7 Ian Fleming devises women who drive cars well or are clever horsewomen or marks-men.8 Deborah is the most exciting kind of female competent, a killer.
…She was an exceptional hunter. She had gone on Safari with her first husband and killed a wounded lion charging ten feet from her throat, she dropped an Alaskan bear with two shots to the heart (30/06 Winchester)…Often as not she fired from the hip, as nicely as pointing a finger.9
What is the fate of Deborah’s tribe of deep-chested, full-breasted, narrow-hipped, dancer-legged anti-heroines? In less self-conscious mythology they submit to the hero’s iron cock to be battered by his animal vigour into dewy softness and submission, even if they are man-haters like Pussy Galore. This is Tiger Mann subduing Sonia Wutko:
Her mouth was a hot, wet thing of such demanding passion that it itself was a fuse that ignited one explosion after another. Her mouth melted against mine, a torch that could nearly scream unless it was choked off, her entire body an octopus of emotion that demanded and demanded and when it was satisfied for a short time was almost content in a relaxation close to death itself.
But I wouldn’t give her that relaxation. She asked, she got. She wanted to see what a tiger was like, and now she had to find out. She knew the depth of the canines and the feeling of being absorbed because she was only a woman in the lust of a horrible hunger and in that frightening sunlight she knew for the first time what it was like to live as one.10
Adventure-sex is a matter of pyrotechnics, explosives, wild animals, deep-sea diving, rough riding. The ideal sexual partner gives promise of a good tussle and the more animosity she harbours the better. It is clear from the imagery of the Spillane passage that the proper fate of the Great Bitch is death, either the metaphoric death of orgasmic frenzy and obliteration, or actual death, which Mailer’s hero metes to his savage wife by strangling. She asked, she got.
She smiled like a milkmaid and floated away and was gone. And in the midst of that Oriental splendour of landscape, I felt the lost touch of her finger on my shoulder, radiating some faint but ineradicable pulse of detestation into the new grace. I opened my eyes, I was weary with a most honourable fatigue, and my flesh seemed new. I had not felt so nice since I was twelve. It seemed inconceivable at this instant that anything in life could fail to please.11
Killing your woman is like killing a bear or a legendary monster: manhood sneaks out from under the domination of sex, escapes from addiction. It is a man’s world once more. The culture of a nation in which men are segregated and educated in a Spartan regime of exertion, sport and cleanliness is bound to reflect this element, but it is frightening to consider what its repercussions must be in ordinary unwritten day-to-day transactions between the sexes. Mike Hammer’s Velda is a great Bitch, but she runs (something currishly) for her master and kills for him, bringing her prey home to lay at his feet. Her reward is Hammer’s sexual abstention from her: ostensibly she is being saved up for a proper reward in some future realm where even Hammer might accept domesticity, but actually sexual intercourse with Velda would mean her destruction. Hip filmgoers laughed at the extraordinary collection of phallic weaponry which James Bond carried with him, catching the director’s joke that every gadget was another form of cock, but they might not have laughed so hard if they had reflected that the converse is equally true, that the penis has become a weapon.
The penis-weapon is used aggressively on the Great Bitch: in the case of the Poison Maiden it is used defensively. The Poison Maiden of An American Dream is called, appropriately enough, Cherry. She is pure, to all intents virgin as her name implies:
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.12
Achieving first love with the Poison Maiden is like the Siege Perilous. 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 inhabited before her by her sister, killed because of the maleficent supermale, Shago (!) Martin. The precious moments Rojack spends with her there are threatened by the imminent return of the black enchanter. He is ostensibly a singer, but what a singer! ‘…you were glowing when he was done, the ear felt good, you had been dominated by a champion.’13
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 category 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,14 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 g
oing down an elevator shaft, as if I were afraid for my life. And I felt a stirring of the testicles as if they knew independently that this woman would swing them into action.15
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
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 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.’16
The Female Eunuch Page 20
