The Female Eunuch (14 page)

Upon her cheek. Through all her being flows A consciousness of happy innocence

And youth more sweet for its impermanence.

Eager to live, yet fearing to be caught

On life’s rude turbulent flood, wise though untaught, Aware of all she is designed to be,

She savours and delays her destiny.
2

This pompous doggerel is not irradiated by one genuine insight. The tradition in which it is written perished ignobly a hundred years or more ago. All that such an opusculum can reflect is young Sarah’s facility in emulation. Nevertheless, the testers do distinguish some tendencies which may be of help to us in understanding what it is that happens to the girl when she is gradually outstripped by her male rivals, and finally leaves school

before reaching any appreciable standard of literacy, or taking a job qualification. Despite the confusion

A Man ought no more to value himself for being wiser than a Woman, if he owes his Advantage to a better Education, than he ought to boast of his Courage

for beating a Man when his hands were bound.

Mary Astell, ‘An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex’, 1721, p.18

between induction and education in the minds of the testers they were able to observe a tendency which goes a long way to explain what eventually diddles girls:

For both sexes there is a tendency for the more passive dependent

children to perform poorly on a variety of intellectual tasks, and for independent children to excel…
3

Children who ‘refuse to accept authority’ do well in a variety of tasks, as do those who resist ‘conformity pressures’.

Mothers who were less nurturant towards daughters during pre- school years had the more academically successful daughters…

For girls by contrast [with boys] the crucial factor in the develop-

ment of IQ appears to be relative freedom from maternal restric- tion—freedom to wander and explore.
4

The failure of women to produce great works of art and all that can be explained in terms of this statement. In so far as she escapes or rejects her conditioning, the little girl may excel in those kinds of intellectual activity that are called creative, but eventually she either capitulates to her conditioning, or the conflicts become so pressing that her efficiency is hampered. Maccoby does not see why the de- velopment of sexuality must have such a deleterious effect on girls’ performance, although

she has earlier quoted McKinnon’s opinion on the relation between repression and mental capabilities.

Repression, McKinnon argues, has a generalized impact upon thought processes, interfering with the accessibility of the individu- al’s own previous experience. An individual who is using repression as a defence mechanism cannot be, to use McKinnon’s term, ‘fluent in scanning thoughts’. McKinnon has evidence that creativity is in fact associated with the absence of repression (as indicated through personality assessment tests) and Barron reports that originality is

associated with ‘responsiveness to impulse and emotion’.
5

From all that has been said, it is apparent that we cannot speak of inferiority and superiority, but only of specific differences in aptitudes and personality between the sexes. These differences are largely the result of cultural and other experiential factors…the overlapping in all psychological characteristics is such that we need to consider men and women as individuals, rather than in terms of group stereotypes.

Anna Anastasi, ‘Differential Psychology’, 1958, pp.497–8

Certainly, McKinnon’s view goes some way towards explaining the gradual fading of the young woman’s hopes, as she takes over the repressive processes that her parents and superiors have demon- strated and continues them on her own behalf. What she began with cannot be proved to be in any way inferior to the raw material of which male genius is fashioned but from what we can observe it seems that girls can only prove that point by open intellectual rebel- lion.

Womanpower

The failure of specially designed tests to reveal any specifically sexual difference in intellectual capacity between males and females is irrelevant as far as those who challenge women’s fitness for certain responsibilities and work are concerned. They think the tests reflect more upon the testers and the method of testing than they do upon male and female. Dr Leavis believed that he could identify a woman writer by her style, even though necessarily all that she wrote must have been a parody of some man’s superior achievement. After all, there was not much wrong with Virginia Woolf except that she was a woman. It could be argued that the tests were specially contoured in an attempt to counteract the effect of sexual conditioning, while real women in the real world are continually conditioned. No adjust- ment of our theoretical opinion of their basic capacity can alter the nature of their achievement. Men complain that they cannot handle women, that arguments with women must be avoided at all costs because they always get the last word mostly by foul means. How ‘like a woman’ they sigh, and all agree. The detection of sex in mind is not only the privilege of the most eminent

Women tend to make their emotions perform the functions they exist to serve, and hence remain mentally much healthier than men.

Ashley Montagu, ‘The Natural Superiority of Women’, 1954, p.54

literary pundits from Dr Leavis to Norman Mailer,
1
it extends to the lowest levels of illiteracy—the schoolboy muttering about ‘bloody girls’. Because the difference is so wholeheartedly believed in, it is also experienced. As a conviction it becomes a motive for behaviour and a continuing cause of the phenomenon itself. It is not to be put aside by rational means. There is of course no reason why women

should limit themselves to logic: we might perversely decide to
ex- ploit
the Ovarian Theory of Mind.
2

One of the fullest statements of the theory of the female soul was set out in
Sex and Character
, a remarkably rigorous and committed book by a mere boy, Otto Weininger, who committed suicide some years after its publication. His brilliant, neurotic life can be taken as an illustration of what dimorphism must eventually accomplish. By disintegrating human nature and building boundaries between warring halves, Weininger condemned himself to perversion, guilt, and early death. He began by identifying women with the body, with unconscious sexuality, and thereafter with passive animalism. As a rational male he condemned such a bestial element. ‘No men who think really deeply about women retain a high opinion of them;

men either despise women or they have never thought seriously about them.’
3

Like Freud, with whom he had much more in common, he thought of women as castrated by nature; because he thought so highly of the penis he thought women did too:

An absolute nude female figure in life leaves an impression of something wanting, an incompleteness which is incompatible with

beauty…
4

The qualities that appeal to a woman are the signs of a developed sexuality; those that repel her are the qualities of the higher mind.

Woman is essentially a phallus worshipper…
5

Weininger thought the dimorphism of the sexes right through, and discovered that, given such a polarity, men

could have no real communion with women, only a highly comprom- ised shared hypocrisy. Valerie Solanas performed the same exercise for women, and found that men covet all that women are, seeking

degradation and effeminization at their hands.
6
She retaliated by

shooting Andy Warhol in the chest. Weininger more honestly made his attempt upon himself and succeeded. Just as Solanas despises men as they present themselves to be and in their failure to live up to their own stereotype, Weininger despises women both because their image is passive and animalistic, and because they are not even genuinely so. Their pretence is brought about by the exigency of the sexual situation which they exploit, hence the duplicity and men- dacity which characterize all their actions. Because woman lives vi- cariously she need take no moral responsibility for her behaviour: because she has no responsibility she has no morality and no ego. Because of the lack of ego and the variety of roles that women ma- nipulate, they have no identity, as one may guess from their willing- ness to give up their names. Woman is never genuine at any period

of her life.
7

The most chastening reflection is that Weininger was simply de- scribing what he saw in female behaviour around him. He could not see that these deformities were what women would one day clamour to be freed from. As far as he could see, women were like that and he did not know what came first, their condition or their character. He assumed that it must have been the latter, because he could not explain their condition any other way.

Political and civic equality of the sexes implies moral equality. It implies the perfectly appalling logical consequence that the morals of women shall in future be the

same as those of respectable Christian Victorian man—at best. That, of course, means the total collapse of Christian morality.

Robert Briffault, ‘Sin and Sex’, 1931, p.132

All the moral deficiences Weininger detected masqueraded in Victorian society as virtues. Weininger is to be credited with describ- ing them properly. Nevertheless his concepts of ego, identity, logic and morality were formed from observation of this same undesirable status quo, and women today might well find that what Weininger describes as defects might be in fact
freedoms
which they might do well to promote. For example:

With women thinking and feeling are identical, for man they are in opposition. The woman has many of her mental experiences as henids (undifferentiated perceptions) whilst in man these have

passed through a process of clarification.
8

‘Definitio est negatio.’ We might argue that clarification is tan- tamount to falsification: if you want to know what happened in a particular situation you would be better off asking someone who had perceived the whole and remembered all of it, not just some extrapolated clarification. How sad it is for men to have feeling and thought in opposition! Eliot argued that the seventeenth century had seen a dissociation of sensibility, so that intelligence no longer served as a direct index of the intensity of feeling but rather under-

mined it.
9
Can it be that women have survived the process which

debilitated the rest of male-dominated western culture? If we can make anything of such a seductive possibility, we must reflect that most educated women have simply been admitted to the masculine academic culture, and have lost their power to perceive in henids. According to Antonin Artaud, Anaïs Nin might have survived even that:

I brought many people, men and women, to see the beautiful canvas, but it is the first time I ever saw artistic emotion make a human being palpitate like love. Your senses trembled and I realized that the mind and body are formidably linked in you, because such a pure spiritual could unleash such a powerful storm in your organism. But in that universal marriage it is the mind that lords over the body and dominates it, and it must end up by dominating it in every way. I feel that there is a

world of things in you that are begging to be born should it find its exorcist.
10

Most of this is nonsense. We might expect the inventor of the theatre of cruelty to see the phenomenon of unified sensibility and spend a paragraph trying to prove the domination of the mind to the point of implying that she needed an exorcist! Artaud’s Mani- chaeism prevented him from seeing that the stimulus of the painting was sensual in the first instance. All that happened was that Nin responded with both mind and body to a sensible and intelligible stimulus. The painting was one and her response was equally integ- rated.

If women retain their experiences in their original unclassified form they may escape the great limitation of specific thought, which was pointed out by A. N. Whitehead in
Adventures of Ideas
.

In the study of ideas it is necessary that insistence on hard-headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking the complexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence

functions. Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for deductions.
11

At a banal level this functioning difference in male and female thought is easily demonstrated: we have only to think of Father mocking Mother for keeping the salt in a box marked Sago, or the frequently celebrated female intuition, which is after all only a faculty for observing tiny insignificant aspects of behaviour and forming an empirical conclusion which cannot be syllogistically examined. Now that most information is not disseminated in argumentative form on the printed page, but is assimilated in various nonverbal ways from visual and aural media, clarification and the virtues of disputation are more and more clearly seen to be simply alternative ways of knowing, and not the only or the principal ones. The take- over by computers of much vertical thinking has placed more and more emphasis on

the creative propensities of human thought. The sudden increase in political passion in the last decade, especially among the generation which has absorbed most of its education in this undifferentiated form, bears witness to a reintegration of thought and feeling happen- ing on a wide scale. In the circumstances any such peculiarity of the female mind could well become a strength.

Unfortunately my own arguments have all the faults of an insuf- ficient regard for logic and none of its strengths, the penalty after all for a Cartesian education. So much for privilege. Here I am, a negro who cannot do the lindy-hop or sing the Blues! Nowadays education itself is changing so that creative thought does not decline with the inculcation of mental disciplines, which are now not taught as ends but simply as means to other ends. Unfortunately, the chief result of the change so far seems to be the reluctance of children to study science, but eventually science itself will become a complete study.