The Female Eunuch (26 page)
leaving her alone for the day were a little less mechanical. Sooner or later she sees her courting as a seduction; she may blame her husband for it but in fact she engineered the seduction herself. What love seemed to be in her head, all electric lips and dreaming of him wide awake in her bed, it never really was at all. She sees that she was a silly romantic girl. Now she finds that marriage is a hard job. Her romanticism becomes, if it has not already become, escapism. She treats herself to little romantic things like perfumes which her husband does not even notice. Romance is now her private dream. 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.
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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 an- cillary 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.
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Romance sanctions drudgery, physical incompetence and prosti- tution (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.
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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 grati- fication to that which can be gained from innuendo: by-pass the in- nuendo 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’ Handbook
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lying
about, your daughter may never read Cartland or Heyer with any credulity.
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 al- ligators’ jaws two frames later,
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and initiates her in the passive ex-
citements of the infantilized heroine of romance. For boys broaching manhood the dominant fantasy of adventure simply expands to in- clude 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.
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Mailer’s Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly is carefully con- structed 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 sur- geon 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, al-
though feminists like Kate Millett persist in assuming that Mailer is a cretin.
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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.
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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, evidence 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.
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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 col-
oured with a fine rose…
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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’.
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Ian Fleming devises
women who drive cars well or are clever horsewomen or marks- men.
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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.
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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.
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Adventure-sex is a matter of pyrotechnics, explosives, wild anim- als, 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.
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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 ordin- ary 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: ostens- ibly 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: