The Female Eunuch (36 page)
J. McGrigor Allen, ‘The Intellectual Severance of Men and Women’,
1860, p. 23
admitting disgust attendant on promiscuity, although it might be argued that if sex is a good thing it ought not to become disgusting if done often, or with different people. The sophisticated argument is that promiscuity devalues sex, makes it commonplace, impersonal and so forth, but the kind of depression felt by men forced by cir- cumstances to be more or less promiscuous, like travelling musicians, is really still the same old disgust. Very few men who have slept around casually are able to converse humanely with the women who have extended their favours. Many a woman sorrowfully reflects that her more recherché sexual techniques, her more delicate appre- hensions of her polymorphous partner’s needs, her very sexual generosity has directly entailed her lover’s eventual revulsion and estrangement. We may find a key to sexual outrage and murder in the inability of men to shed their inhibitions with the fine woman who is good enough to marry, and their terror and disgust at what the repressed desire eventually forces them to do. The worst aspect of prostitution is that many a prostitute must undergo the bestial rituals which civilized men find necessary for sexual release. Many prostitutes claim this as their social function. The unfortunate girls found strangled with their own stockings and raped with bottles are the victims of male fetishism and loathing, and yet no woman has ever cried out after such an outrage on her sex, ‘Why do you hate us so?’, although hate it clearly is.
Some of the shock and alarm caused by
Last Exit to Brooklyn
was occasioned by the guilt of readers who recognized the phenomenon of the brutalization of Tralala in the hideous plausibility of her end: if morgue doctors revealed what horrors end up on their slabs we might have worse evidence of the survival of cunt-hatred in our society.
…more came 40 maybe 50 and they screwed her and went back on line and had a beer and yelled and laughed and someone yelled that the car stunk of cunt so Tralala and the
seat were taken out of the car and laid in the lot and she lay there naked on the seat and their shadows hid her pimples and scabs and she drank flipping her tits with the other hand and somebody shoved the beer can against her mouth and they all laughed and Tralala cursed and spit out a piece of tooth and someone shoved it again…and the next one mounted her and her lips were split this time and the bood trickled to her chin and someone mopped her brow with a beersoaked hand-kerchief and another can of beer was handed to her and she drank and yelled about her tits and another tooth was chipped and the split in her lips was widened and every- one laughed and she laughed and she drank more and more and soon she passed out and they slapped her a few times and she mumbled and turned her head but they couldn’t revive her so they continued to fuck her as she lay unconscious on the seat in the lot and soon they tired of the dead piece and the daisychain broke up and they went back to Willies the Greeks and the base and the kids who were watching and waiting to take a turn took out their disap- pointment on Tralala and tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerked off on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying among the broken bottles, rusty cans and rubble of the lot and Jack and Fred and Ruthy and Annie stumbled into a cab still laughing and they leaned toward the window as they passed the lot and got a good look at Tralala lying naked covered with blood urine and semen and a small blot forming on the seat between her legs as blood seeped
from her crotch…
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Punished, punished, punished for being the object of hatred and fear and disgust, through her magic orifices, her cunt and her mouth, poor Tralala. Women are never instrumental in crimes of sexual loathing, even when they are enacted upon the bodies of men. The implications of this state of affairs have got to be understood by any movement for female liberation.
Cunt-hatred has survived in our civilization in myriad small manifestations, most of which would be steadily denied by the manifesters. The deep aversion for
beaver
in pin-ups evinced by the selection of poses which minimize the genital area is partly motivated by a disgust for the organ itself. Women of considerable experience, like the authoress of
Groupie
, who delight and glory in
their skill at
fellatio
feel, in Miss Fabian’s words, that cunnilingus
must be
less groovy
and would not require it of any man who was making love to them.
10
Other women are embarrassed by cunnilin-
gus, and feel sure that men must find it disgusting. Despite my own intentions, I often feel this way myself, and I cannot pretend that this is altogether because it is too intimate a proceeding, or too im- personal. Vaginal secretions are the subject of a vast folklore; the huge advertising campaigns for deodorants and sweeteners of the vulvar area deliberately play upon female misgivings about the ac- ceptability of natural tastes and odours. One vaginal deodorant is even flavoured with peppermint to provide an illusion of freshness and inhumanity. Others are mentholated. The vagina is described as a
problem
preventing some of the niceness of being close. The ex- cessive use of douches with chemical additives is actually harmful to the natural balance of organisms existing in the vagina, and yet no doctor has dared to denounce it openly. Women desirous of coming to terms with themselves, and of understanding how far they are from actually doing so, might consider their own reactions to the suggestion that they taste their own vaginal secretions on their fingers, or that they taste themselves fresh on the mouth of a lover. Despite my own proselytizing attitude, I must confess to a thrill of shock when one of the ladies to whom this book is dedicated told me that she had tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover. There are no horrors present in that blood, no poisons; I would suck a bleeding finger, I would not scruple to kiss a bleeding lip, and yet…The only cure for such superstitions is base empiricism, innocently undertaken.
Repressed disgust for female genitalia is why the many causes of vulvar itches and inflammations are seldom properly investigated, and many women treat themselves ineptly for conditions which they regard as chronic and nervous or moral in origin, until they become incapable of treatment. Cases of incurable trichomonal
infection are all due to a combination of fear, superstition and doc- tors’ sloppiness. Penile disorders can be as trivial and risible as ath- lete’s foot, and so can vaginal ones. In each case, examination ought to be performed. The fictitious association of
prurigine vulvae
with excessive sexual desire is an additional reason why female itching is not taken seriously. Along with the fantasy of the flaming itch of the voracious vagina go other notions of the proper coloration and conformation of the nymphae which influence even doctors’ concep- tions. The cunt of a fresh and virtuous woman is thought to be pink and soft, the clitoris hardly protuberant, the membrane of the labia to be smooth and thin. The purplish tinge of dark-skinned women is suspect, and the ruvidity of the labial tissue is taken to indicate excessive excitation, self-abuse or indulgence.
On the basis of arbitrary assumptions about the coloration and conformation of the nymphae, doctors in America at the turn of the century discovered hundreds of cases of habitual self-abuse and
treated them in the most barbarous fashion imaginable—by clitorectomy.
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Such a remedy for male masturbation has never been
suggested, and yet in many cases castration of women was actually practised. In terms of the crudest physiology the practice was inex- cusable, for the nerves which supply the clitoris also supply the rest of the anovaginal area and masturbation, if it was occurring at all or as much as the doctors said, and if it was having the deleterious effects on the whole organism which they fantasized, such as neur- asthenia, anorexia, aberrations in blood pressure, debility and so forth, could quite naturally have been transferred to other areas. The only persuasive motivation for such therapy (for
reason
it cannot have) is cunt-hatred. The infibulation of girls in some primitive tribes also has this punitive and defensive function.
The universal lack of esteem for the female organ becomes a defi- ciency in women’s self-esteem. They are furtive and secretive about their own organs and their
functions, but more appallingly there is the phenomenon of the woman who seeks degradation by consorting with her ‘inferiors’ and inviting her lover to abuse her. A very amusing Italian film was built around the story of a rich woman who made love to her chauffeur when drunk, begging him, ‘Chiamami tua serva!’ Many of the vile and cruel things which men do to women are done at women’s instigation. The most appalling evidence of cunt-hatred can be found in the cases of introduction into the vagina and the
urethra of dangerous objects, by women themselves.
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The earliest
gynaecological case-histories contain examples of women who intro- duced needles and bodkins into the bladder and managed thereby to kill themselves. Even the pioneers of gynaecology were not de- luded by their protestations that freakish accidents had occurred. When surgery was in its infancy such abuse was usually fatal. Even now cases of such violence performed upon the self are not altogether rare. Many menstrual disorders derive from inability to accept wo- manhood and its attendant processes. Many a silly girl swallowing Epsom salts and gin and parboiling herself in a hot bath is not so much endeavouring to procure abortion as punish herself for her female sexuality. Self-loathing is an important factor in nympho- mania which is usually compulsive self-abasement. Pop psychology
refers to it in jargon as having a low self-image.
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Women are so brainwashed about the physical image that they should have that, despite popular fiction on the point, they rarely undress with éclat. They are often apologetic about their bodies, considered in relation to that plastic object of desire whose image is radiated throughout the media. Their breasts and buttocks are always too large or too small, the wrong shape, or too soft, their arms too hairy or too muscular or too thin, their legs too short, too hefty, and so forth. Not all the apology is fishing for compliments. They are actually apologizing. The compliment is actually necessary reassur- ance that inadequacies do not exist, not merely
reassurance that these inadequacies do not matter. The woman who complains that her behind is droopy does not want to be told, ‘I don’t care, because I love you,’ but ‘Silly girl, it’s a perfect shape, you can’t see it like I can.’ It is a commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fab- ricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste. Soft lighting, frilly underwear, drinks and music, might help to get away with palming off an inferior bill of goods, which under harsh light and quite naked could too easily be disgusting. The universal sway of the feminine stereotype is the single most important factor in male and female woman-hatred. Until woman as she is can drive this plastic spectre out of her own and her man’s imagination she will continue to apologize and disguise herself, while accepting her male’s pot-belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, baldness and other ugliness without complaint. Man demands in his arrogance to be loved as he is, and refuses even to prevent the development of the sadder distortions of the human body which might offend the aesthetic sensibilities of his woman. Woman, on the other hand, cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.
On 18 December 1969, in the case of Regina versus Humphreys, Mr Frisby QC accused the defence of attempting to show that Miss
Pamela Morrow, whom the defendant was charged with having raped, was a ‘flippertigibbit’.
1
It seems incredible that twentieth-
century lawyers should accuse a girl of being a foul fiend from hell,
the same that rode upon Poor Tom’s back in
King Lear
and bit him so cruelly.
2
The meaning of the word has declined into a pale shadow
of its former force, perhaps because of its indiscriminate use in witch- hunts, but its derivation remains a fact. The element of witch-hunt is never far from trials in which not quite virginal girls are required to give evidence against Members of Parliament and there may have been more to Mr Frisby’s use of the term than he was aware, but we may follow this pattern of the debilitation by indiscriminate use of terms of the greatest reprobation. The word
hag
used also to apply to a direct satanical manifestation of peculiar grisliness; now it simply means a woman who isn’t looking her best.
Hag-ridden
meant the condition of a soul who had been tormented by diabolical spirits in his sleep, and not a husband who had been nagged at. The ineffec- tualness of the victims of such abuse eventually defused the terms of abuse themselves:
termagant
began its history in the
chansons de geste
as a word meaning a mahometan deity, now it too means a nagging woman. Indiscriminate application has weakened the force of
broad
, originally derived from
bawd
, and
hoyden, wanton, baggage
, and
fright
(originally a horrifying mask) as well as
tart
, which began as a cant term