The Female Eunuch (35 page)

Paul Schilder, ‘Goals and Desires of Man’, 1942, p. 41

The man who described all this to me assumed that all men felt disgusted by sex afterwards. He was sure that coldness evinced by men after intercourse was actually repulsion. He could not remember even having disgust-free sex, except with one woman. It is too easy to decide that this is a unique case of a special kind of fastidiousness. It has grown out of the felt loss of human dignity which is the product of boredom and restriction. Where a reasonable degree of affluence entails fewer unaesthetic elements in sexual encounters disgust may be lessened, but as long as sex is furtive and dirty some deep ambivalence to the object of

sexual attentions must remain. In extreme cases it may even cause impotence in marriage, because a wife is not to be degraded.

When Freewheelin’ Frank told Michael McClure in 1967 that he no longer thought ‘dirty or filthy’ of women since taking LSD, he was not telling the whole truth. The rebellion of the Hell’s Angels reversed traditional aesthetic values so that they imposed the most repugnant sexual rituals upon themselves as a celebration of disgust:

When we talk about eating pussy we make it sound as dirty and vulgar as possible—to make someone barf. Angel mamas are nym- phomaniacs who will do anything related to sex. The Angel mama at the time is menstruating, on her period, and real bloody. It is considered the nastier she is, the more class is showed by the member who goes down on her in front of everyone—at least six mem- bers—and how he goes about it, while everyone witnesses…Some- times a member has been known to barf when bein’ hassled to do

this.
2

Eldridge Cleaver became a rapist when he came out of San Quentin, ‘consciously, deliberately, wilfully, methodically’.

Many whites flatter themselves with the idea that the negro male’s lust and desire for the white dream girl is purely an aesthetic attrac- tion, but nothing could be farther from the truth. His motivation is

often of such a bloody, hateful, bitter and malignant nature that whites would really be hard pressed to find it flattering.
3

It is a vain delusion that rape is the expression of uncontrollable desire or some kind of compulsive response to overwhelming attrac- tion. Any girl who has been bashed and raped can tell how ludicrous it is when she pleads for a reason and her assailant replies ‘Because I love you’ or ‘Because you’re so beautiful’ or some such rubbish. The act is one of murderous aggression, spawned in self-loathing and enacted upon the hated other. Men do not themselves know the depth of their

hatred. It is played upon by inflammatory articles in the magazines designed for morons with virility problems which sell for high prices in transport cafés: ‘Eager Females: How they reveal themselves’, writes Alex Austin in
Male
and proceeds to describe a number of harmless mannerisms, like slipping a shoe off, and showing a hearty appetite (for food) which indicate

When she had sucked the marrow from my bones And languorously I turned to her with a kiss, Beside me suddenly I saw nothing more

Than a gluey-sided leather bag of pus!

Baudelaire

concealed goatishness in women.
4
Barry Jamieson describes the

underhand tactics of ‘The Willing Cheater: Your Wife’s Best Friend’ in
Stag
.
5
The object of such articles is to imply that the world is full

of liquorish sluts in flimsy disguises, who will welcome the most unceremonious advances despite their prissy denials. Such women are
available, easy, pushovers
. Whatever they

If we but seriously consider the nature and qualities of the generality of the sex, even in all ages from the fall of man to this present, we may well perceive that they have not only been extremely evil in themselves; but have also been the main instruments and immediate causes of Murder, Idolatory, and a multitude of other hainous sins, in many high and eminent men…

‘A Briefe Anatomie of Women’, 1653, p.1.

get, they have deserved. Acting upon this kind of imagined discrim- ination, a certain kind of man whispers obscenities to women passing on the street and laughs at their humiliation and confusion which he construes as evidence that they are guilty of the secret bestial desires

that he has touched upon. More often women do not catch the muttered message but the tone of voice and the leer are unmistak- able. Men who appraise women with insolent stares in buses and subways and chink the change in their pockets are communicating the same hate-filled innuendo. Whatever delusion it is that persuades men to follow oblivious women up and down crowded city streets derives from this same assumption of animal heat and appetite for degradation hidden under a demure exterior. The lust of loose wo- men is undifferentiated, a remorseless itch, which after the initial susceptibility of male response to female demand is deeply incon- venient and disgusting. The articles I have named also contain de- scriptions of escape routes from entanglement with such hot bitches. However much women might want to reject this vision of their sex and sexuality it is nevertheless true that the Hell’s Angels report no lack of Angel mamas, who actually turn out to take on the whole of a Chapter, despite the fact that the status angel women are the ‘old ladies’. There are women who seek degradation as diligently as men seek to deal it to them, although their motivation is vastly different from the fantasy of
Male
and
Stag
, and their number very much less then is implied by the fantasy. Freewheelin’ Frank’s public image worked so well that he encountered more than his fair share, and the result was what we might expect.

…Then I crossed my chin around her neck, squeezing her tight. She went into such fear she became happy. Then from the radio the song ‘Everyone has gone to the Moon’ began playing. I said ‘Do you know where we’re at?’

She said ‘Make love to me.’

In a rage I said, ‘
YOU
bitch,’ and I turned cold and rolled over and listened to the music…Sometimes during the night, as I would roll over face up, I would see her to my left, laying with her eyes wide open as if she were dead. This helped me to go back to sleep. She wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to go for a walk one time. I said, ‘Go. Lock the door behind you.’

I don’t like women, I despise them. I no longer try to please

women. I’m mad if they’re around for very long. I feel as though I could call them in and dismiss them.
6

We are conceived somewhere between pissing and shitting, and as long as these excretory functions are regarded as intrinsically disgusting, the other one, ejaculation, will also be so regarded. The involuntary emission of semen during sleep is called a nocturnal
pollution
: the substance itself is viscous and stringy, whitish and acrid, like a more disgusting form of snot, if you regard snot as disgusting. Human beings have extraordinary ways of escaping their condition- ing, so that one may see a bowler-hatted gentleman on the train ab- sently picking his nose and eating what he finds there, but if we recall him to full consciousness, deep embarrassment, shame, humiliation, disgust and even loathing may result. It is easy when picking a path through the wilderness of sexual
mores
to fall foul of the slough of disgust, for a shameful and compulsive activity can be pushed away by attributing all the shame and all the compulsion to the partner.

The woman tempted me, and I did eat.

When a man is ashamed to masturbate, and instead waylays wo- men for the sake of finding sexual release, the shame that should attach to the masturbatory activity, not significantly different in such a case except that the friction was provided by a female organ and the ejaculation may occur in the vagina, is referred to the woman. The man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon, and turns from her in disgust. As long as man is at odds with his own sexuality and as long as he keeps woman as a solely sexual creature, he will hate her, at least some of the time. The more hysterical the hatred of sex, the more extravagant the expression of loathing. It is not necessary to quote medieval restrictions on the admission of women to church and the sacraments to demonstrate this, although the examples have the value of being striking and incredible. In the Renaissance, some

attempt was made to understand the emotion and the effects of lust.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till in action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof—and prov’d, a very woe; Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this Hell.
7

Shakespeare was right in equating the strength of the lust drive and the intensity of the disgust that followed it. The first manifesta- tions of syphilis in Europe were much more spectacular than the present operations of the disease: the ignorance about the nature of the contagion also helped to colour attitudes towards sex. It is not rare to find in medieval poets a picture of healthy animal enjoyment like the naïve pride of the Wife of Bath in the way that she made her husbands swink. For many humanists the pleasure itself became dubious, and the chase after the sexual object was seen as delusive, even when the lady proved complaisant, for the pleasure was not equal to the fantasms of the lust-stirred brain. But the more the neo- platonists sought to devalue sex, sense and sensory information, the more empiricism flourished, and the more sexual desire, distorted, sublimated, or perverted, burst out in odd manifestations. The end of Shakespeare’s poem is still troubled by desire, the very fury of the syntax is evidence of lust’s continuing power. Disease, idealism, disgust could not ultimately conceal the libidinous energy of the Elizabethans, who were after all still forced to excrete semi-publicly, to go mostly unbathed, to eat food that our

senses would find of the rankest, so that they could not have man- aged to exist if they had been afflicted with anything like the degree of fastidiousness which characterizes twentieth-century man.

Post coitum omne animal triste est
. The Romantics developed the suggestion which had always been present in erotic writing, that actual sexual pleasure was necessarily inferior to the heated imagin- ings of lust, into a complete statement of the superiority of unheard melodies to heard ones. The great love affairs were those truncated by death, or those never enjoyed because of some other embargo. The mind-body dichotomy, which they might have imagined they derived from Plato, was actually established in the sensibility of Europeans, then justified by Descartes. The Romantic taste for the moribund heroine is itself a manifestation of sexual disgust and woman-hatred. Imagining a female dying is tantamount to killing her: immolated on the altar of mortality, she can be enjoyed with a fearful exaltation. The Byronic great lover wasting away with the awful fires of a forbidden love which racked his brain, curled his lip and fed the dull flame in his eye, vitiated the pleasures of all actual events in a dream of what could never be. The act of undying ador- ation to the unenjoyed was effectively only the rejection of the en- joyed. Even a poet as
now
as Dylan has two kinds of female character in his imagery—the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, the girl from the north country, who is inviolate and inviolable,
to kalos
, and the others who are human, confused and contemptible. This crude version of romanticism underlies the distinction between two kinds of girls which prevails almost universally in our community, especially in those quarters where avant-garde sexual morality has not succeeded in disguising or banishing disgust as an improper and neurotic feeling. Any woman who goes to bed with a man for the first time knows that she runs the risk of being treated with contempt. Her chosen lover may leave or may turn his back on her immediately after his orgasm, and fall, or pretend to,

asleep; he may be laconic or brusque in the morning: he may not call again. She hopes that he will not discuss her disparagingly with his friends. The words used to describe women who are not unwill- ing to have intercourse with men who are eager to have intercourse with them are the transferred epithets of loathing for sex undignified by aesthetic prophylaxis and romantic fantasy. For many in this space, falling out of love means the fading of the aura, and the asser- tion of the bald facts of sexual relationship.

Oh!
Caelia, Caelia
, Caelia
sh(its)
!
8

Sophisticated men realize that this disgust is a projection of shame and therefore will not give it any play, but because they have been toilet-trained and civilized by the same process as the total victims of disgust and contempt, they still feel the twinges. They still say ‘Fuck you’ as a venomous insult; they still find
cunt
the most degrad- ing epithet outside the dictionary.
Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking
, and
cock-sucking
are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it. There is no way of assessing the extent of this feeling in a civilized community like our own: people tend to minimize it for their self-esteem’s sake but nobody feels embar- rassed about

I am inclined to believe that this admission of moral superiority which ordinary men are so ready to yield (to women), is a bribe of compliment and gallantry to quiet the sex under the deprivation of substantial privileges which would really place them on an equality with men: especially as I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.