The Female Eunuch (15 page)

Weininger has more serious charges though:

A woman cannot grasp that one must act from principle; as she has no continuity she does not experience the necessity for logical sup- port of her mental processes…she may be regarded as ‘logically in-

sane’.
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It is true that women often refuse to argue logically. In many cases they simply do not know how to, and men may dazzle them with a little pompous sophistry. In some cases they are intimidated and upset before rationalization begins. But it is also true that in most situations logic is simply rationalization of an infra-logical aim. Women know this; even the best educated of them know that argu- ments with their menfolk are disguised real-politik. It is not a contest of mental agility with the right as the victor’s spoils, but a contest of wills. The rules of logical discourse are no more relevant than the Marquess of Queensberry’s are to a pub brawl. Female hard- headedness rejects the misguided masculine notion that

men are rational animals. Male logic can only deal with simple issues: women, because they are passive and condemned to observe and react rather than initiate, are more aware of complexity. Men have been forced to suppress their receptivity, in the interests of domina- tion. One of the possible advantages of the infantilization of women is that they might after all become, in the words of Lao-Tse, ‘a channel drawing all the world towards it’ so that they ‘will not be severed from the eternal virtue’ and ‘can return again to the state of

infancy’.
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If only the state of women were infancy, and not what

we have reduced infancy itself to, new possibilities might be closer to realization than they seem. When Schopenhauer described the state of women as
moral infancy
, he was reflecting not only his preju- dice against women, but also against babies. The failure of women to take logic seriously has serious consequences for their morality. Freud adds the gloss to Weininger’s text:

I cannot evade the notion (though I hesitate to give it expression) that for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is in men. Their superego is never so inexorable, so imper- sonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women—that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the great exigencies of life, that they are more often influenced in their judgements by their feelings of affection or hostility—all these would be amply accounted for in the modification of the formation of their superego…We must not allow ourselves to be deflected from such conclusions by the denial of the feminists, who are anxious to force us to regard the two sexes

as completely equal in position and worth.
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The circularity of this utterance is quite scary. After all, are the sexes equal in position and worth or not? What is position? What is worth? He promises to explain unsubstantiated deficiencies in the female character by an unsubstantiated modification in an unsub- stantiated entity, the superego: if physiology is destiny Freud is

anxious to invent a physiology of the mind. If judgement had not been separated from feeling so unnaturally in the Nazi officers pre- sumably they would not have carried out orders so crisply. What kind of a criticism is it to say that women are less stoical than men? After two world wars stoicism seems to have outlived its value. If women have been denied moral responsibility by male ‘justice’ and dubbed angels while they were treated with contempt, it is likely that they will have formed their own conclusions about the mon- strous superego and illusory morality of men. Protestant Europe has set for itself an unattainable morality of integrity in defiance of heavenly mercy, the unaided conscience bowed by full and unending responsibility for all actions, despite the partiality of knowledge and infirmity of will which characterize human action. Freud saw the results in his own community but he could not postulate an altern- ative to guilt and neurosis. The chief mainstay of such religion is the capacity of the ego to continue repression. Women may be bad at keeping up the cycle of the organism punishing itself, but that too may be an advantage which involves less delusion than its opposite.

The feeling of identity in all circumstances is quite wanting in the true woman, because her memory, even if exceptionally good, is

devoid of continuity…women if they look back on their earlier lives, never understand themselves.
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My colleague Nathan Leites, Ph.D., has concluded after a review of the literature that the term ‘identity’ has little use other than as a fancy dress in which to disguise vagueness, ambiguity, tautologies, lack of clinical data, and poverty of explanation.

Robert Stoller, ‘Sex and Gender’, 1968, p.x

On Weininger’s evidence the ego is ersatz, consisting of the memory of the self which exists at any particular time. He remarks with horror that if you ask a woman

about herself, she understands it to be her body. She does not seek to define herself by asserting her image of her merit, her behaviour. Man has a temporal notion of identity, which is falsifiable, woman a simple spatial one. ‘Here you are’ said the white buttons Yoko Ono gave away at her exhibition. It seems important after all. Perhaps woman, like the child, retains some power of connecting freely with external reality. Weininger seemed to think so. ‘The absolute female

has no ego.’
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The primal act of the human ego is a negative one—not to accept reality, specifically the separation of the child’s body from the mother’s body…this negative posture blossoms into negation of self

(repression) and negation of the environment (aggression).
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What a blossoming! If women had no ego, if they had no sense of separation from the rest of the world, no repression and no regres- sion, how nice that would be! What need would there be of justice if everyone felt no aggression but infinite compassion! Of course I am taking advantage of the masters of psychology, bending and selecting their words like this, but what else can they be for? We cannot allow them to define what must be or change would be im- possible. Whitehead and Needham looked forward to a new kind of knowledge which would correct the insanity of pure intelligence,

‘a science based on an erotic sense of reality, rather than an aggress- ive dominating attitude to reality’.
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If wisdom might not be incom-

patible with a low sense of ego, then charity seems in the mystical definitions of it to be dependent upon such a corrosion of separate- ness: the greatest myth of Christianity is that of the mystical body.

To heal is to make whole, as in wholesome; to make one again; to unify or reunify; this is Eros in action. Eros is the instinct that makes for union, or unification, and Thanatos, the death instinct, is the in-

stinct that makes for separation or division.
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Weininger’s disgust for Eros and his devotion to Thanatos drive him to state women’s comprehensiveness

more fully. Believing him we might think we had been saved already:

This sense of continuity with the rest of mankind is a sexual character of the female, and displays itself in the desire to touch, to be in con- tact with the object of her pity; the mode in which her tenderness expresses itself is a kind of animal sense of contact. It shows an ab- sence of that sharp line that separates one real personality from an-

other.
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Poor Weininger finally cut himself off altogether in a last act of fealty to death. The immorality of individualism is obvious in an age when loneliness is the most pernicious disease of our over- crowded metropolises. The results of parcelling families in tiny slivers living in self-contained dwellings has defaced our cities and created innumerable problems of circulation and cohabitation. The sense of separateness is vainly counteracted by the pressure for conformity without community. In most of the big cities of the world the streets are dangerous to walk upon. Woman’s oceanic feeling for the race has little opportunity for expression; it is grotesquely transmogrified in organized works of charity, where her genius for touching and soothing has dwindled into symbolic attitudinizing. Weininger’s repugnance for animal contact is still universal among the northern

Might the cleavage between the subjective

andobjectivehavebeenbadlymade;mighttheoppositionbetweena universe of science—entirely outside of self—and a universe of consciousness—defined by the total presence

of self to self—be untenable? And if realistic analysis fails will biology find its method in an ideal analysis of the psychomathematical type, in Spinozistic intellection? Or might not value and signification be intrinsic determinations of the organism which could only be accessible to a

new mode of ‘comprehension’?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Structure of Behaviour’, p. 10

races. Even crushed against his brother in the Tube the average En- glishman pretends desperately that he is alone. Psychoanalysis, the most obscenely intimate contact of all, is not hallowed by any physical contact. Latterly, special classes form in church halls in arty suburbs, so that men and women can recover their sense of reassur- ance by touch. Too late for Weininger.

The intellectual pressure to make the whole world whole again has come from mystics like Lao-Tse, scientists like Whitehead and Needham and Merleau-Ponty, and as brilliant speculation from Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Borges. Their words were not specifically addressed to women, because all of them felt that the polarity of the sexes was the basic alienation of man from himself, but none of them would reject the idea that their words were a special encouragement to women to undertake the work of saving mankind. Perhaps my treatment of their highly sophisticated arguments has been brutal, but reverence before authority has never accomplished much in the way of changing things. In inventing a new mythology one must plunder all sources, letting the situation into which the ideas fall serve as their crucible. Most of the defects pointed out by critics of women are simply the results of their having been sheltered from the subtler and more effective types of enculturation which their society lavished upon its male leaders. The strengths they have are of sheer ignorance.

Dominant ideas need not always be so obvious for them to exert just as powerful an organizing influence on the way a person thinks and approaches a problem. Old and adequate ideas, like old and adequate cities, come to polarize everything around them. All organization is based on them, all things are referred to them. Minor alterations can be made on the outskirts, but it is impossible to change the whole structure radically and very difficult to shift the centre of organiza-

tion to a different place.
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Facing this problem, Edward de Bono devised a series of exercises to develop the faculty he called lateral

thinking. Lateral thought is the kind which produces ideas and in- ventions, rather than demonstrable solutions to specific problems. It is the kind of problem solving which would not get you good marks for method in an examination, and is nevertheless right. It cannot be duplicated by a computer, which only has to learn what it is fed and a method to deal with it. In fact lateral thinking is a one- dimensional analogue of the child’s modes of thought. A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.

The prevailing criticism of the female soul can best be explained by the male battle to repress certain faculties in their own mental functioning. Women possessed in abundance those qualities which civilized men strove to repress in themselves, just as children and savages did. The value of such criticism is in the degree to which it reveals the severity of the contouring of the ideal personality, that is to say, male criticism of the female mind is revealing only of the male himself. Men in our culture crippled themselves by setting up an impossible standard of integrity: women were not given the chance to fool themselves in this way. Women have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn of civilization so they have never been able to pretend that their masks were anything but masks. It is a slender case but perhaps it does mean that women have always been in closer contact with reality than men: it would seem to be the just recompense for being deprived of idealism.

For a Tear is an Intellectual thing,

And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King, And the bitter groan of a Martyr’s woe

Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow.

Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl.52

If women understand by emancipation the adoption of the mas- culine role then we are lost indeed. If women can supply no counter- balance to the blindness of male drive the aggressive society will run to its lunatic extremes at ever-escalating speed. Who will safe- guard the despised animal faculties of compassion, empathy, inno- cence and sensuality? What will hold us back from Weininger’s fate? Most women who have arrived at positions of power in a man’s world have done so by adopting masculine methods which are not incompatible with the masquerade of femininity. They still exploit the sadomasochistic hook-up of the sexes, in which ‘we have only

the choice of being hammer or anvil’.
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Wanda wore feminine clothes

to add poignancy to her torture of Gregor, just as Mrs Castle made sure that she looked attractive when she went to berate the workers as a criminal and irresponsible element in society. It is up to women to develop a form of genuine womanpower against which the Om- nipotent Administrator in frilly knickers cannot prevail.

There is much to suggest that when human beings acquired the powers of conscious attention and rational thought they became so fascinated with these new tools that they forgot all else, like chickens hypnotized with their beaks to a chalk line. Our total sensitivity became identified with these partial functions so that we lost the ability to feel nature from the inside, and more, to feel the seamless unity of ourselves and the world. Our