The Natural Superiority of Women (20 page)

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Authors: Ashley Montagu

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artificially deformed feet of Chinese women were displeasing to the perpetrators of such deformities, for it was considered beautiful to have feet that peeped like mice from beneath the skirts or trousers of women. The artfulnesses of women of Western civilization possess an elegance of a different kind, for they represent a concocted admission of inferiority. It is a form of feminine wooing of the male. There he sits, this demigod, upon his throne, and all women who appear in his presence must genuflect before him, and they do, or at least most of them do. Men, of course, do everything in their power to constrain women to maintain these artificial obeisances.
The most effective feminine devices to which women resort in dealing with the male are sexual. This is a province that women have made their own. Even Sigmund Freud, that genius in the study of human nature, was badly deceived upon this point, for he mistook the overweening cultural emphasis placed on sex for a biologically motivated function. On the contrary, our preoccupation with sex is one of the unfortunate
social
consequences of the inferior position in which women have been placed by men. Under such conditions sex becomes one of the principal means by which men are able to promote themselves and secure their ends. Sex is, of course, a biological drive; what is not a biological drive, but a cultural development of a means by which the female may find her way about in the world, is the social expression of sex. This development has been constrained by the male. As a consequence, sex has been given an emphasis and value that magnify out of all proportion its real place and importance in the organic scheme of human needs. Socially, sex has become an almost pathologic metastatic growth. Its true beauty and meaning have largely become perverted and deformed to degrading ends and purposes. The true significance of love and sex has become beclouded to such an extent that few people in our culture really understand what it is. Sex is equated with intercourse as an end in itself, and love is confused with sex. Love, for far too many in our time, consists of sleeping with a seductive woman, one who is adequately endowed with the appropriate distribution of curvilinear properties, one upon whom a permanent lien may be acquired through the institution of marriage.
One of the most unfortunate consequences of the fixation on sex in our culture is that marriages are contracted by most

 

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males on the basis of physical attractiveness. It is a matter of prestige with men to acquire for a wife the most attractive female, that is to say, the most superficially attractive. It is not love but what may be called the "fakelore" of loving that reduces tenderness to a physiological exercise. Males in our culture tend to marry objects rather than persons. Marriages contracted upon such a basis are not likely to endure, for physical traits without genuine love have a way of waning with time, while character not only endures but enhances the wonder of marriage. Is it any wonder, then, that with the neglect of character and the emphasis on sex, more than one out of every two marriages in the United States ends in divorce? Think of the many more unhappy marriages there must be which, for one reason or another, never terminate in divorce. It was not merely the desire to be witty that caused George Bernard Shaw to describe contemporary marriage of his day as in many cases nothing more than licensed prostitution. It is a correct description of innumerable modern marriages. Such marriages are the product of a masculine attitude that looks upon the world of women as an open market in which one may trade old models for new.
The first and most fundamental basis for any marriage is character and friendship, and not so much marrying the right person as being the right person. Marriages between persons of character who can be friends tend to last and grow in reward and happiness. It was no less a person then Honoré Balzac who held that marriage was the best school for a man's character that was ever devised. Were people to marry for friendship rather than for that frenzy miscalled "love," but for friendship, for friendship, in a very real sense, is a form of love, and from it, in marriage or partnership, the full florescence of love will grow. Such are not the kinds of marriages or partnerships that man's present view of woman tends to encourage. Hence, men must be held responsible for the present unfortunate state of marital relationships existing between so many human beings who are tragically caught up in a web of punishments for offenses of which both are the innocent victims.
To listen to most men dilating authoritatively on the subject of women is to suffer a positive increase in one's ignorance. When men speak of women, they usually utter the most abject prejudices under the impression that they are truths, pure and simple. As Oscar Wilde remarked, few things are pure, and they

 

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are seldom simple, and of all the impure and unsimple things in this world which befog and bedevil the minds of men, their ideas about women take first place. When toward the end of the fifteenth century the Pontiff-appointed inquisitors drew up their infamous handbook of instructions for dealing with witches, the
Malleus Maleficarum
(1487), or
Hammer of Witches,
in answer to the question, Why were a greater number of witches found in "the fragile feminine sex" than among men? the answer was as simple as it was succinct. Said the authorities, "It is indeed a fact that it were idle to contradict, since it is accredited by actual experience, apart from the verbal testimony of credible witnesses" (Question 6, Part I). And that was all the evidence required. And that, alas, is the kind of evidence on which men have usually based their prejudgments of women. The myth of feminine evil has been illuminatingly examined by H. R. Hays in his book,
The Dangerous Sex .

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It is a sorry story of hysterical fear and hatred. The story of castration and impotence fantasies, the freezing touch of the witch, vaginas equipped with teeth and snapping like turtles, phallic women and succubae, the femme fatale, the virgin-prostitute alarum, the taboos against menstrual blood, the fear of losing male power, all testify to the deep anxiety underlying male attitudes toward women.

One of the most pervasive of myths which men have created concerning women is that women are possessed by sex. As a young Viennese writer, Otto Weininger, put it in 1903 in a famous book on sex and character, "Men possess sex, women are possessed by it." Never was the truth so madly inverted. The truth is that men are possessed by sex, while women possess it. Even among adolescents, as the Purdue study of the American teenager showed, for every girl who admitted "thinking about sex a good deal of the time," there were two boys who did so.
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Telling evidence of the male's obsession with sex is provided by innumerable magazines and other pornographic materials that cater exclusively to the male's needs for sexual titillation. The equivalent erotica for women are minuscule in number. Biological evidence of the hormonally influenced greater aggressive sex drive of the male is curiously observed when a female suffers from a masculinizing disorder produced by excessive secretion of male hormones. When this occurs the female becomes as sexually preoccupied and as aggressive as the male. Removal of the cause of the disorder

 

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(usually a tumor of the adrenal glands) results in a decline in the circulating male hormones, and she returns to her former normal balanced state.
Men, in the cultures of the Western world, not only appear to be, but in fact are, in a chronic state of sex irritation, "erotosaurs," ready to indulge in intercourse with any presentable female at almost any available moment. This is not the case with the female, who has to be psychologically adequately prepared before she is willing to accept the advances of the male. It is a tragic but significant commentary upon our culture that there are vast numbers of men who are unaware of this simple fact. This is understandable because women seem to be so much more preoccupied with sex than are men. The cosmetics, the beauty treatments, the hairstyling, the concern with emphasizing the sexually attractive parts of the body by sexually stimulating kinds and arrangements of apparel, the décolletages, the miniskirts, the cleavages, and the thousand and one other devices calculated to produce similarly stimulating effects prove to the male the greater sexuality of the female. This is, of course, another significant misinterpretation of the facts, again calculated to establish the inferiority of the female, for what the male fails to realize is that the female's very real preoccupation with rendering herself sexually attractive, so that she looks like a movie star, represents nothing more nor less than an expression of the male's power in compelling her to conform to his reactionary requirements.

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In January 1995 the population of the United States was 264 million. Of this number, 49 percent were males and 51 percent females. Thus, there are always more women of marriageable age than men. While these are mostly at the older ages, if women are to find mates, they must make themselves attractive to males, and this by the standards that happen to codify feminine attractiveness at any particular time in any particular culture. In the Western world the criteria are concentrated upon sexual attractiveness, and the female, therefore, adaptively attempts to fit herself to those requirements. The behavior of women in Western culture has largely been conditioned by and represents a response to the behavior or males towards them. Studies carried out as late as 1990 found that the average American male thinks of sex every fifteen minutes. Men have placed a high premium upon sexual attractiveness; the promised dividends are high, and

 

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women, therefore, concentrate on making themselves sexually attractive. But, we repeat, it is the men who are possessed by sex, not the women. Yet there are so few men in our culture who have learned this that as a result, when women behave normally, according to their physiological state and psychological mood, men are inclined to consider them cold and frigid. And this, again, frequently leads to a disastrous dénouement to what might otherwise have been a successful marriage. Infidelity, broken homes, divorce, and suffering on the part of everyone involved, including the children, are a few of the consequences of the perfidious standards that men have set for women. Men frequently condemn women for employing artificial embellishments to make themselves more attractive. Oh, inconsistent male, be consistent in something, and as John Donne urged long ago, "love her who shows her great love to thee, in taking this pains to seem lovely to thee."
Even the diseases that men visit upon women, they saddle by implication upon them, "venereal disease" literally meaning the disease acquired from women. It would be silly, if it were not also offensive, to speak in terms of drawing up a bill of attainder against men for the crimes they have committed against women. These have been for the most part ritualized crimes, crimes that were no more regarded as crimes than a customary day's greeting. On the whole, the motivations of men have been socially ritualized inheritances like any other custom; in other words, the behavior of men toward women has been conditioned by the social heredity represented by their tradition. Men as well as women have been the victims of tradition, and as long as that tradition continues, injustice will continue to be done.
We have already considered some of the social consequences of the fact that the female is capable of being pregnant and a male is not. One of the peculiar consequences of this fact is that, while there can be no doubt that a woman is having a baby, there can be some doubt about the baby's paternity. While a man may be reasonably certain that a child is his, he cannot always be absolutely certain of it. This fact has given rise not only to strict codes of conduct for women but also to mistrust and fear of them. Men find the idea of "betrayal" intolerable, although when men choose to betray the betrayal is called by some more elegant

 

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name. In the eighteenth century Oliver Goldsmith had a revealing solution to this problem in a poignant poem:
When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, isto die.
Naturally, not the man, but the woman had to die. The double standard of sexual morality is immemorially old, as is the suspicion and fear of women. Such mistrust and fear actually revolve about the male's feeling of uncertainty about paternity, and therefore to compensate for his feelings of insecurity, men have created harsh punishments and practices within which to secure the chastity of their women. The operation of infibulation, referred to in the previous chapter, is an extreme example. The medieval chastity girdle represents another; although perhaps less brutal, it was calculated to secure the same end.
In a large proportion of societies adultery was and is punished by death or payment of a heavy penalty, that is, when the adultery is committed by the female. Adultery committed by the male has almost invariably gone unpunished. In some societies even more horrendous punishments than death were threatened or visited upon the adulterous female, death in such cases being but the final release. The stoning to death of women taken in adultery is but one of the more gentle methods with which such women were rewarded. We need not go any further into the inventory of horrors that have been visited upon women for this "crime"; it is sufficient to say that the penalties have been out of all proportion to its heinousness. In the civilized world of today we do somewhat better than our ancestors, though the emotional response of men to the unfaithfulness of their wives tends to be so excessive that one cannot help suspecting that the same ancient motives, at least in part, play a significant role in shaping their reactions. The emphatic paramountcy placed on premarital chastity largely has its origins in male insecurities rather than in concern for the welfare of the female.

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