The Female Eunuch (44 page)
market to drop five points, but nowadays, through fear of the Tac- tical Police Force and other forms of establishment reprisal, what is essentially a publicity movement has gone anonymous and under- ground.
After the first rush of derisive publicity women’s liberation has adopted a suspicious and uncooperative attitude to the press, a tactic which has in no way improved their public image or even protected it from figuring so large in Sunday supplements and glossy magazines. In fact, no publicity is still bad publicity, especially when women are so tied to a lifelong habit of careless reading that most of the sneering was lost on them, and where it was not its obvious- ness provoked a certain sympathy for the individuals who were being so grossly ill-treated by the media which were exploiting them. Women were glad to know that ‘something is happening here’, even if ‘what it is ain’t exactly clear’. Every time a statement by a woman seeking liberation, either from taxation which prevents her from practising her profession as a married woman or from sexual dominion and inauthenticity, reaches the newspapers, the response is enormous, and the controversy spreads over several issues, if we
take the article by Vivian Gornick in the
Village Voice
as an example.
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For every woman who writes a letter to the editor there are hundreds who can’t manage it, and every time a male writes in derision and fear the point is underlined a hundredfold. It is to be hoped that more and more women decide to influence the media by writing for them, not being written about. The influence could extend to other media as well, for the enormous belly of daily television must be fed, and if feminist programmes are financed by cosmetic firms so much the better. We might as well let them pay the costs of their own grave-digging. In any case, insulting and excluding reporters is no defence against them; censorship is the weapon of oppression, not ours.
There are many other women’s liberation movements now oper- ating in America, from the university chapters,
which count twenty-five as a large turnout and remain local mani- festations dealing with their own problems, to groups like the Red Stockings, formed when they were jeered by the men at the anti-in- augural demonstration in Washington, who concentrate on conscious- ness-raising in the Marcusian sense, to the 17 October movement of which Anne Koedt and Shulamith Firestone are members, to Cell 55, to Abby Rockefeller’s Boston-based Women’s Liberation move- ment, whose conference last summer was attended by five hundred women who got up at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning to watch a karate demonstration (Rockefeller and Roxanne Dunbar have green belts), to the Congress to Unite Women (which sadly only marshalled five hundred women). The movement is endlessly divided and di- viding but this may be taken as a sign of life, if not power.
In England, Women’s Liberation workshops are appearing in the suburban haunts of the educated house-wife, and in the universities. There is no great coherence in their theory and no particular imagin- ation or efficiency to be observed in their methods. The Tufnell Park Liberation workshop produced a paper called
Shrew
which is badly distributed. After five phone-calls to try and secure back numbers I gave up. When these worthy ladies appeared at the Miss World contest with their banners saying ‘We are not sexual objects’ (a proposition that no one seemed inclined to deny) they were horrified to find that girls from the Warwick University movement were chanting and dancing around the police. They begged them to desist because it was so unladylike and their image was already so shabby, and when the next issue of
Shrew
appeared it contained an official lamentation about the demeanour of these strange women, assuming in pity for their uncouthness that they were Coventry housewives with four children apiece, the very people the Women liberators were anxious to help! In fact, the Coventry chapter is one of the few which are attended by working-class women who tell the privileged girls how it is, a tendency which could
well be followed by other privileged women who have not so far learned to demand anything but the vacuous notion of ‘equal oppor-
tunity’.
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Nevertheless, despite chaos and misconception, the new feminism grows apace. The new Feminist Theatre, sponsored by Red Stockings, fills the Village Gate in New York. Although few women are misled by the red herring of learning male violence as a revolutionary tactic or practising celibacy, wives and mothers did march around the Hudson Street alimony jail with posters announcing that they didn’t want alimony. As Gloria Steinem remarked, the growth of the liber- ation movement has ‘happened not so much by organization as
contagion’.
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The actual movement extends farther and deeper than
the underground organization whose publications are disseminated by the NEFP and Agit-prop, and even wider than Mrs Friedan’s fe- male establishment. An anti-female-liberation motion was over- whelmingly defeated by a predominantly male audience at a univer- sity debate that I spoke at lately, when a similar debate five years ago, although argued much better than this, was roundly defeated. When I addressed a very mixed and uneccentric audience at an adult education centre on Teesside the week before, soft-spoken nervous women spoke in front of their husbands about the most subversive ideas. Nurses are misbehaving, the teachers are on strike, skirts are all imaginable levels, bras are not being bought, abortions are being demanded…rebellion is gathering steam and may yet become re- volution.
Revolution
Reaction is not revolution. It is not a sign of revolution when the oppressed adopt the manners of the oppressors and practise oppres- sion on their own behalf. Neither is it a sign of revolution when women ape men, and men women, or even when laws against ho- mosexuality are relaxed, and the intense sexual connotation of certain kinds of clothes and behaviour are diminished. The attempt to relax the severity of the polarity in law bears no relation to the sway that male-female notions hold in the minds and hearts of real people. More women are inspired to cling to their impotent femininity be- cause of the deep unattractiveness of Barbara Castle’s seamed face and her depressing function as chief trouble-shooter of the Wilson regime than are inspired to compete like she did for man’s distinction in a man’s world. We know that such women do not champion their own sex once they are in positions of power, that when they are employers they do not employ their own sex, even when there is no other basis for discrimination. After all they get on better with men because all their lives they have manipulated the susceptibilities, the guilts and hidden desires of men. Such women are like the white man’s black man, the professional nigger; they are the obligatory woman, the exceptional creature who is as good as a man and much more decorative. The men capitulate.
That women should seek a revolution in their circumstances by training themselves as a fighting force is the most obvious case of confusing reaction or rebellion with revolution. Now that warfare, like industry, is no longer a matter of superior physical strength, it is no longer
significant in the battle of women for admission to humanity. In our time violence has become inhuman and asexual. It is associated with wealth, in the manufacture of sophisticated armaments, in the maintenance of armies of police of all varieties, in the mounting of huge defences which by their very existence precipitate the chaos of war. War is the admission of defeat in the face of conflicting in- terests: by war the issue is left to chance, and the tacit assumption that the best man will win is not at all justified. It might equally be argued that the worst, the most unscrupulous man will win, although history will continue the absurd game by finding him after all the best man. We have only to think of Hochhuth’s attempt to pass judgement on England’s role in the overkill of Germany and the ju- dicious blindnesses of Winston Churchill to recognize this inevitable process. Wars cannot be
won
, as any Englishman ruefully contrasting his post-war fortunes with those of guilty Nazi Europe is confusedly aware. Women who adopt the attitudes of war in their search for liberation condemn themselves to acting out the last perversion of dehumanized manhood, which has only one foreseeable outcome, the specifically masculine end of suicide.
The Boston Women’s Liberation Movement justify their interest in karate on the grounds that women are terrified of physical aggres- sion in the individual circumstance, and need to be liberated from that fear before they can act with confidence. It is true that men use the threat of physical force, usually histrionically, to silence nagging wives: but it is almost always a sham. It is actually a game of nerves, and can be turned aside fairly easily. At various stages in my life I have lived with men of known violence, two of whom had convic- tions for Grievous Bodily Harm, and in no case was I ever offered any physical aggression, because it was abundantly clear from my attitude that I was not impressed by it. Violence has a fascination for most women; they act as spectators at fights, and dig the scenes of bloody violence in films. Women are always precipitating scenes of violence in
pubs and dance-halls. Much goading of men is actually the female need for the thrill of violence. Most fights are degrading, confused affairs: most men do not hit the thing they aim at, and most end up letting themselves get hurt in their own confused masochism. The genuinely violent man does not play about with karate or the Mar- quess of Queensberry’s rules—he uses a broken bottle, a wheelbrace, a tyre lever or an axe. He does not see the fight through, but seeks to end it quickly by doing as much harm as he can as soon as he can. It would be genuine revolution if women would suddenly stop loving the victors in violent encounters. Why do they admire the image of the brutal man? If they could only see through the brawn and the bravado to the desolation and the misery of the man who is goaded into using his fists (for battered-looking strong men are always called out by less obviously masculine men who need to prove themselves). Why can they not understand the deification of the strongman, either as soldier, wrestler, footballer or male model, seeing that his fate so closely approximates their own? If women would only offer a genuine alternative to the treadmill of violence, the world might breathe a little longer with less pain. If women were to withdraw from the spectatorship of wrestling matches, the in- dustry would collapse; if soldiers were certainly faced with the withdrawal of all female favours, as Lysistrata observed so long ago, there would suddenly be less glamour in fighting. We are not houris; we will not be the warrior’s reward. And yet we read in men’s magazines how the whores of American cities give their fa-
vours for free to the boys about to embark for Vietnam.
The male perversion of violence is an essential condition of the degradation of women. The penis is conceived as a weapon, and its action upon women is understood to be somehow destructive and hurtful. It has become a gun, and in English slang women cry when they want their mate to ejaculate, ‘Shoot me! Shoot me!’
The Woman’s Fight (Tune: ‘Juanita’)
Soft may she slumber on the breast of mother earth, One who worked nobly for the world’s rebirth.
In the heart of woman, dwells a wish to heal all pain, Let her learn to help man to cast off each chain.
Woman, oh woman, leave your fetters in the past: Rise and claim your birthright and be free at last.
Mother, wife and maiden, in your hands great power lies:
Give it all the freedom, strength and sacrifice.
Far across the hilltop breaks the light of coming day, Still the fight is waiting, then be up and away.
I. W. W. Songs
Women cannot be liberated from their impotence by the gift of a gun, although they are as capable of firing them as men are. Every time women have been given a gun for the duration of a specific struggle, it has been withdrawn and they have found themselves more impotent than before. The process to be followed is the oppos- ite: women must humanize the penis, take the steel out of it and make it flesh again. What most ‘liberated’ women do is taunt the penis for its misrepresentation of itself, mock men for their overes- timation of their virility, instead of seeing how the mistake originated and what effects it has had upon themselves. Men are tired of having all the responsibility for sex, it is time they were relieved of it. And I do not mean that large-scale lesbianism should be adopted, but simply that the emphasis should be taken off male genitality and replaced upon human sexuality. The cunt must come into its own. The question of the female attitude to violence is inseparable from this problem. Perhaps to begin with women should labour to be genuinely disgusted by violence, and at least to refuse to reward any victor in a violent confrontation, even to the point of casting their lot on principle with the loser. If they were
to withdraw their spectatorship absolutely from male competition, much of its motivation would be gone.
Although many women do not necessarily find themselves attrac- ted to the winners in violent conflicts but prefer to hover over the gallant defeated, in the wider social sense they all prefer winners. An eminent lady professor, addressing an adult education group at a northern university, lamented the fact that male chauvinism pre- vented educated men from dating the equally qualified and very accessible girls at the same institution. The girls could not be expected to hobnob with the less educated, inferior men, and so they went out with no one. But if men are content to spend their leisure time with their intellectual inferiors, why cannot women be so? Women may remark with contempt that men are nine-to-five intellectuals, and can only relax when the heat is off and they can chat with a moron. They play Daddy the all-knowing, and their chosen dates play breathless daughter. By and large the gibe is true. But it is also true that in too many cases female intellectuals are arrogant, aggress- ive, compulsive and intense. They place too high a value on their dubious educational achievements, losing contact with more innocent recreations. They seek a male whose achievements will give value to their own, an ego to replace their own insufficiency, and most men are quick to sense the urgency of the quest. Many men tire of morons easily, but are more deeply repelled by blue-stockings. Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their ‘inferiors’? They would need to shed their desperate need to
admire
a man, and accept the gentler role of loving him. A learned woman cannot castrate a truck-driver like she can her intel- lectual rival, because he has no exaggerated respect for her bookish capabilities. The alternative to conventional education is not stupid- ity, and many a clever girl needs the corrective of a humbler soul’s genuine wisdom. In working-class