The Female Eunuch (20 page)
If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-real- izing personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: cer- tainly the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal personalities as having a better perception of reality—what Herbert Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be ex- ploited by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not ego- centred and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared to the present
and not to nostalgia or anticipation. Although they do not serve a religion out of guilt or fear or any other sort of compulsion, the reli- gious experience, in Freud’s term, the
oceanic feeling
, is easier for them to attain than for the conventionally religious. The essential factor in self-realization is independence, resistance to enculturation;
His word pronounced ‘selfishness’ blessed, the wholesome healthy selfishness that wells from a powerful soul—from a powerful soul to which belongs the high body, beautiful, triumphant, refreshing, around which everything
becomes a mirror—the supple, persuasive body, the dancer whose parable and epitome is the self-enjoying soul.
Nietzsche, ‘Thus spake Zarathustra’
the danger inherent in this is that of excessive independence or downright eccentricity; nevertheless, such people are more capable of giving love, if what Rogers said of love is to be believed, that ‘we can love a person only to the extent we are not threatened by him’. Our self-realizing person might claim to be capable of loving everybody because he cannot be threatened by anybody. Of course circumstances will limit the possibility of his loving everybody, but it would certainly be a fluke if such a character were to remain completely monogamous. For those people who wanted to be dominated or exploited or to establish any other sort of compulsive symbiosis, he would be an unsatisfactory mate; as there are many fewer self-realizing personalities than there are other kinds, the self- realizer is usually ill-mated. Maslow has a rather unlooked-for comment on the sexual behaviour of the self-realizer:
Another characteristic I found of love in healthy people is that they have made no really sharp differentiation between the roles and personalities of the two sexes. That is, they did not assume that the female was passive and the male active,
whether in sex or love or anything else. These people were so certain of their maleness or femaleness they did not mind taking on some of the aspects of the opposite sex role. It was especially noteworthy that they could be both passive and active lovers…an instance of the way in which common dichotomies are so often resolved in self- actualization, appearing to be valid dichotomies only because people
are not healthy enough.
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What Maslow expresses may be little more than a prejudice in favour of a certain kind of personality structure, merely another way of compromising between Eros and civilization, nevertheless we are all involved in some such operative compromise. At least Maslow’s terms indicate a direction in which we could travel and not merely a theoretical account of what personality might be like if psychoana- lysis accomplished the aim which it has so far not even clearly de- clared itself or justified to the waiting world, ‘to return our souls to our bodies, to return ourselves to ourselves, and thus to overcome
the human state of self-alienation.’
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It is surprising but nevertheless it is true that Maslow included some women in his sample of self-realizing personalities. But after all it is foreseeable, even if my arguments about the enculturation of women are correct. In some ways the operation of the feminine stereotype is so obvious and for many women entirely unattainable, that it can be easily reacted against. It takes a great deal of courage and independence to decide to design your own image instead of the one that society rewards, but it gets easier as you go along. Of course, a woman who decides to go her own way will find that her conditioning is ineradicable, but at least she can recognize its opera- tion and choose to counteract it, whereas a man might find that he was being more subtly deluded. A woman who decided to become a lover without conditions might discover that her relationships broke up relatively easily because of her degree of resistance to ef- forts to ‘tame’ her, and the opinion of her friends will usually be on the side of the man who was prepared
to do the decent thing, who was in love with her, etcetera. Her promiscuity, resulting from her constant sexual desire, tenderness and interest in people, will not usually be differentiated from com- pulsive promiscuity or inability to say no, although it is fundament- ally different. Her love may often be devalued by the people for whom she feels most tenderness, and her self-esteem might have much direct attack. Such pressures can never be utterly without ef- fect. Even if a woman does not inhibit her behaviour because of them, she will find herself reacting in some other way, being out- rageous when she only meant to be spontaneous, and so forth. She may limit herself to writing defences of promiscuity, or even books about women. (Hm.)
For love’s sake women must reject the roles that are offered to them in our society. As impotent, insecure, inferior beings they can never love in a generous way. The ideal of Platonic love, of Eros as a stabilizing, creative, harmonizing force in the universe, was most fully expressed in English in Shakespeare’s abstract poem, ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’, who
Loved, as love in twain Had the essence but in one
Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen ’Twixt the turtle and his queen: But in them it were a wonder.
The poem is not a plea for suttee, although it describes the mutual obsequies of the phoenix and the turtle. It states and celebrates the concept of harmony, of fusion, melting together, neither sacrificed nor obliterated, that non-destructive knowledge which Whitehead learned to value from the writings of Lao-Tse.
Property was thus appall’d That the self was not the same; Single nature’s double name Neither two nor one was call’d.
Reason in itself confounded, Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither Simple were so well compounded.
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The love of peers is the spirit of commonalty, the unity of beauty and truth. The phoenix and the turtle do not necessarily cohabit, for they are the principle of sympathy which is not dependent upon familiarity. The phoenix renews itself constantly in its own ashes, as a figure of protean existence. The love of the phoenix and the turtle is not the lifelong coherence of a mutually bound couple, but the principle of love that is reaffirmed in the relationship of the narcissistic self to the world of which it is a part. It is not the fantasy of annihilation of the self in another’s identity by sexual domination, for it is a spiritual state of comprehension.
Spirituality, by which I mean the purity of a strong and noble nature, with all the new and untried powers that must grow out of it—has not yet appeared on our horizon; and its absence is a natural con- sequence of a diversity of interests between man and woman, who are for the most part brought together through the attraction of
passion; and who, but for that, would be as far asunder as the poles.
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In fact, men and women love differently, and much of the behav- iour that we describe by the term is so far from benevolence, and so anti-social, that it must be understood to be inimical to the essential nature of love. Our lifestyle contains more
thanatos
than
eros
, for egotism, exploitation, deception, obsession and addiction have more place in us than eroticism, joy, generosity and spontaneity.
‘Love seeketh not Itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.’
So sung a little Clod of Clay, Trodden with the cattle’s feet…
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I have talked of love as an assertion of confidence in the self, an ex- tension of narcissism to include one’s own kind, variously con- sidered. And yet we are told, ‘Greater love hath no man than he lay down his life for his friend.’ At our school we were encouraged to deny ourselves in order to give to others. We ate no sweets and put our pennies in a red and yellow box with a piccaninny on the front for the missions, if we were holy that is. That understanding of love was that it was the negation by abnegation of the self, the forgetful- ness of the self in humility, patience, and self-denial. The essential egotism of the practice was apparent to many of us in the demeanour of the most pious girls, for the aim of the exercise was ultimately to earn grace in the eyes of the Lord. Every such act had to be offered up, or else the heavenly deposit was not made to our account. And yet it was a seductive notion. It picked up on our masochistic tend- encies and linked with fantasies of annihilation. This is the love, we were told, of the mother who flings her body across her child’s when danger threatens, of the mother duck who decoys the hunters from her nest. Noble, instinctive and feminine. All our mothers had it, for otherwise they would not have dared pain
and illness to bring us into the world. Nobody could tell the greatness of a mother’s sacrifices for her children, especially for us who were not even getting free education. Every mother was a saint. The Commandment was of course to love thy neighbour as thyself, but the nuns were fired by the prospect of loving their neighbours more than themselves.
The ideal of altruism is possibly a high one, but it is unfortunately chimeric. We cannot be liberated from ourselves, and we cannot act in defiance of our own motivations, unless we are mother ducks and act as instinctive creatures, servants of the species. We, the children who were on the receiving end, knew that our mothers’ self-sacrifice existed mostly in our minds. We were constantly exhorted to be grateful for the gift of life. Next to the redemption, for which we could never hope to be sufficiently grateful, although we had no very clear idea of why we needed anyone to die for us in the first place, we had to be grateful for the gift of life. The nuns pointed out that the Commandment to love our parents followed immediately upon the Commandments about loving God, and because they themselves were
in loco parentis
and living solely for God and their neighbour we ought to be grateful for that too. But children are pragmatic. We could see that our mothers black-mailed us with self- sacrifice, even if we did not know whether or not they might have been great opera stars or the toasts of the town if they had not borne us. In our intractable moments we pointed out that we had not asked to be born, or even to go to an expensive school. We knew that they must have had motives of their own for what they did with and to us. The notion of our parents’ self-sacrifice filled us not with gratit- ude, but with confusion and guilt. We wanted them to be happy yet they were sad and deprived, and it was our fault. The cry of Port- noy’s mother is the cry of every mother, unless she abandons the role of martyr absolutely. When we were scolded and beaten for making our mothers worry, we tried to point out that we did not ask them to
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concern themselves so minutely with our doings. When our school reports brought reproach and recrimination, we knew whose satis- faction the sacrifice was meant to entail. Was there no opportunity for us to be on the credit side in emotional transactions? As far as the nuns were concerned we were fairly sure that in giving up the world to devote their lives to God and to us they had not given up anything that they had passionately wanted, especially not for us whom they did not know.
But while boy-children might remain relatively detached and cynical about their parents’ motivation little girls eventually recapit- ulate. Their concepts of themselves are so confused, and their cultiv- ated dependency so powerful, that they begin to practise self-sacrifice quite early on. They are still expiating their primal guilt for being born when they bravely give up all other interests and concentrate on making their men happy. Somehow the perception of the real motivation for self-sacrifice exists alongside its official ideology. The public relations experts seek to attract girls to nursing by calling it the most rewarding job in the world, and yet it is the hardest and the worst paid. The satisfaction comes in the sensation of doing good. Not only will nurses feel good because they are relieving pain, but also because they are taking little reward for it; therefore they are permanent emotional creditors. Any patient in a public hospital can tell you what this exploitation of feminine masochism means in real terms. Anybody who has tossed all night in pain rather than ring the overworked and reproachful night nurse can tell you.
In sexual relationships, this confusion of altruism with love per- verts the majority. Self-sacrifice is the leit-motif of most of the mar- ital games played by women, from the crudest (‘I’ve given you the best years of my life’) to the most sophisticated (‘I only went to bed with him so’s he’d promote you’). For so much sacrificed self the expected reward is security, and seeing that a reward is expected it cannot properly speaking be called self-sacrifice at all. It is in fact a kind of commerce, and one
in which the female must always be the creditor. Of course, it is also practised by men who explain their failure to do exciting jobs or risk insecurity because of their obligations to wife and/or children, but it is not invariable, whereas it is hard to think of a male/female rela- tionship in which the element of female self-sacrifice was absent. So long as women must live vicariously, through men, they must labour at making themselves indispensable and this is the full-time job that is generally wrongly called altruism. Properly speaking, altruism is an absurdity. Women are self-sacrificing in direct proportion to their incapacity to offer anything but this sacrifice. They sacrifice what they never had: a self. The cry of the deserted woman, ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ reveals at once the false emotional economy that she has been following. For most men it is only in quarrels that they discover just how hypocritically and unwillingly their women have capitulated to them. Obviously, spurious altruism is not the monopoly of women, but as long as women need men to live by, and men may take wives or not, and live just the same, it will be more important in feminine motivation than it is in male. The mis- understood commandment of Aleister Crowley to
do as thou wilt
is a warning not to delude yourself that you can do otherwise, and to take full responsibility to yourself for what you do. When one has genuinely chosen a course for oneself it cannot be possible to hold another responsible for it. The altruism of women is merely the in- authenticity of the feminine person carried over into behaviour. It is another function of the defect in female narcissism.