Woman Hating (3 page)

Onceuponatime: The Roles

Death is that remedy all singers dream of

Allen Ginsberg

The culture predetermines who we are, how we behave, what we are willing to know, what we are able to feel.

We are born into a sex role which is determined by visible sex, or gender.

We follow explicit scenarios of passage from birth into youth into maturity into old age, and then we die.

In the process of adhering to sex roles, as a direct consequence of the imperatives of those roles, we commit homicide, suicide, and genocide.

Death is our only remedy. We imagine heaven. There is no suffering there, we say. There is no sex there, we say. We mean, there is no culture there. We mean, there is no gender there. We dream that death will release us from suffering—from guilt, sex, the body. We recognize the body as the source of our suffering. We dream of a death which will mean freedom from it because here on earth, in our bodies, we are fragmented, anguished—either men or women, bound by the very fact of a particularized body to a role which is annihilating, totalitarian, which forbids us any real self-becoming or self-realization.

Fairy tales are the primary information of the culture. They delineate the roles, interactions, and values which are available to us. They are our childhood models, and their fearful, dreadful content terrorizes us into submission — if we do not become good, then evil will destroy us; if we do not achieve the happy ending, then we will drown in the chaos. As we grow up, we forget the terror—the wicked witches and their smothering malice. We remember romantic paradigms: the heroic prince kisses Sleeping Beauty; the heroic prince searches his kingdom to find Cinderella; the heroic prince marries Snow-white. But the terror remains as the substratum of male-female relation — the terror remains, and we do not ever recover from it or cease to be motivated by it. Grown men are terrified of the wicked witch, internalized in the deepest parts of memory. Women are no less terrified, for we know that not to be passive, innocent, and helpless is to be actively evil.

Terror, then, is our real theme.

The Mother as a Figure of Terror

Whether “instinctive” or not, the maternal role in the sexual constitution originates in the fact that only the woman is necessarily present at birth. Only the woman has a dependable and easily identifiable connection to the child —a tie on which society can rely. This maternal feeling is the root of human community.

George Gilder,
Sexual Suicide

Snow-white’s biological mother was a passive, good queen who sat at her window and did embroidery. She pricked her finger one day —no doubt an event in her life —and 3 drops of blood fell from it onto the snow. Somehow that led her to wish for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood of the embroidery frame.”
¹
Soon after, she had a daughter with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as ebony. ”
²
Then, she died.

A year later, the king married again. His new wife was beautiful, greedy, and proud. She was, in fact, ambitious and recognized that beauty was coin in the male realm, that beauty translated directly into power because it meant male admiration, male alliance, male devotion.

The new queen had a magic mirror and she would ask it: “Looking-glass upon the wall, Who is fairest of us all? ”
³
And inevitably, the queen was the fairest (had there been anyone fairer we can presume that the king would have married her).

One day the queen asked her mirror who the fairest was, and the mirror answered: “Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, But Snow-white fairer is than you. ”
⁴
Snow-white was 7 years old.

The queen became “yellow and green with envy, and from that hour her heart turned against Snow-white, and she hated her. And envy and pride like ill weeds grew in her heart higher every day, until she had no peace.... ”
⁵

Now, we all know what nations will do to achieve peace, and the queen was no less resourceful (she would have made an excellent head of state). She ordered a huntsman to take Snow-white to the forest, kill her, and bring back her heart. The huntsman, an uninspired good guy, could not kill the sweet young thing, so he turned her loose in the forest, killed a boar, and took its heart back to the queen. The heart was “salted and cooked, and the wicked woman ate it up, thinking that there was an end of Snow-white. ”
⁶

Snow-white found her way to the home of the 7 dwarfs, who told her that she could stay with them “if you will keep our house for us, and cook, and wash, and make the beds, and sew and knit, and keep everything tidy and clean. ”
⁷
They simply adored her.

The queen, who can now be called with conviction the
wicked
queen, found out from her mirror that Snow-white was still alive and fairer than she. She tried several times to kill Snow-white, who fell into numerous deep sleeps but never quite died. Finally the wicked queen made a poisoned apple and induced the ever vigilant Snow-white to bite into it. Snow-white did die, or became more dead than usual, because the wicked queen’s mirror then verified that she was the fairest in the land.

The dwarfs, who loved Snow-white, could not bear to bury her under the ground, so they enclosed her in a glass coffin and put the coffin on a mountaintop. The heroic prince was just passing that way, immediately fell in love with Snow-white-under-glass, and bought her (it? ) from the dwarfs who loved her (it? ). As servants carried the coffin along behind the prince’s horse, the piece of poisoned apple that Snow-white had swallowed “flew out of her throat. ”
⁸
She soon revived fully, that is to say, not much. The prince placed her squarely in the “it” category, and marriage in its proper perspective too, when he proposed wedded bliss —“I would rather have you than anything in the world. ”
⁹
The wicked queen was invited to the wedding, which she attended because her mirror told her that the bride was fairer than she. At the wedding “they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead. ”
¹⁰

Cinderella’s mother-situation was the same. Her biological mother was good, pious, passive, and soon dead. Her stepmother was greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. Her ambition dictated that her own daughters make good marriages. Cinderella meanwhile was forced to do heavy domestic work, and when her work was done, her stepmother would throw lentils into the ashes of the stove and make Cinderella separate the lentils from the ashes. The stepmother’s malice toward Cinderella was not free-floating and irrational. On the contrary, her own social validation was contingent on the marriages she made for her own daughters. Cinderella was a real threat to her. Like Snow-white’s stepmother, for whom beauty was power and to be the most beautiful was to be the most powerful, Cinderella’s stepmother knew how the social structure operated, and she was determined to succeed on its terms.

Cinderella’s stepmother was presumably motivated by maternal love for her own biological offspring. Maternal love is known to be transcendent, holy, noble, and unselfish. It is coincidentally also a fundament of human (male-dominated) civilization and it is the real basis of human (male-dominated) sexuality:

[When the prince began to search for the woman whose foot would fit the golden slipper] the two sisters were very glad, because they had pretty feet. The eldest went to her room to try on the shoe, and her mother stood by. But she could not get her great toe into it, for the shoe was too small; then her mother handed her a knife, and said,

“Cut the toe off, for when you are queen you will never have to go on foot. ” So the girl cut her toe off, and squeezed her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince. Then he took her with him on his horse as his bride....

Then the prince looked at her shoe, and saw the blood flowing. And he turned his horse round and took the false bride home again, saying that she was not the right one, and that the other sister must try on the shoe. So she went into her room to do so, and got her toes comfortably in, but her heel was too large. Then her mother handed her the knife, saying, “Cut a piece off your heel; when you are queen you will never have to go on foot. ”

So the girl cut a piece off her heel, and thrust her foot into the shoe, concealed the pain, and went down to the prince, who took his bride....

Then the prince looked at her foot, and saw how the blood was flowing....
¹¹

Cinderella’s stepmother understood correctly that her only real work in life was to marry off her daughters. Her goal was upward mobility, and her ruthlessness was consonant with the values of the market place.
^*
She loved her daughters the way Nixon loves the freedom of the Indochinese, and with much the same result. Love in a male-dominated society certainly is a many-splendored thing.

*This depiction of women as flesh on an open market, of crippling and mutilation for the sake of making a good marriage, is not fiction; cf. Chapter 6, “Gynocide: Chinese Footbinding. ”

Rapunzel’s mother wasn’t exactly a winner either. She had a maternal instinct all right—she had “long wished for a child, but in vain. ”
¹²
Sometime during her wishing, she developed a craving for rampion, a vegetable which grew in the garden of her neighbor and peer, the witch. She persuaded her husband to steal rampion from the witch’s garden, and each day she craved more. When the witch discovered the theft, she made this offer:

... you may have as much rampion as you like, on one condition — the child that will come into the world must be given to me. It shall go well with the child, and I will care for it like a mother.
¹³

Mama didn’t think twice —she traded Rapunzel for a vegetable. Rapunzel’s surrogate mother, the witch, did not do much better by her:

When she was twelve years old the witch shut her up in a tower in the midst of a wood, and it had neither steps nor door, only a small window above. When the witch wished to be let in, she would stand below and cry “Rapunzel, Rapunzel! let down your hair!”
¹⁴

The heroic prince, having finished with Snow-white and Cinderella, now happened upon Rapunzel. When the witch discovered the liaison, she beat up Rapunzel, cut off her hair, and cloistered her “in a waste and desert place, where she lived in great woe and misery. ”
¹⁵
The witch then confronted the prince, who fell from the tower and blinded himself on thorns. (He recovered when he found Rapunzel, and they then lived happily ever after. )

Hansel and Grethel had a mother too. She simply abandoned them:

I will tell you what, husband.... We will take the children early in the morning into the forest, where it is thickest; we will make them a fire, and we will give each of them a piece of bread, then we will go to our work and leave them alone; they will never find the way home again, and we shall be quit of them.
¹⁶

Hungry, lost, frightened, the children find a candy house which belongs to an old lady who is kind to them, feeds them, houses them. She greets them as her children, and proves her maternal commitment by preparing to cannibalize them.

These fairy-tale mothers are mythological female figures. They define for us the female character and delineate its existential possibilities. When she is good, she is soon dead. In fact, when she is good, she is so passive in life that death must be only more of the same. Here we discover the cardinal principle of sexist ontology—the only good woman is a dead woman. When she is bad she lives, or when she lives she is bad. She has one real function, motherhood. In that function, because it is active, she is characterized by overwhelming malice, devouring greed, uncontainable avarice. She is ruthless, brutal, ambitious, a danger to children and other living things. Whether called mother, queen, stepmother, or wicked witch, she is the wicked witch, the content of nightmare, the source of terror.

The Beauteous Lump of Ultimate Good

What can it do? It grows,
It bleeds. It sleeps.
It walks. It talks,
Singing, “love’s got me, got me. ”

Kathleen Norris

For a woman to be good, she must be dead, or as close to it as possible. Catatonia is the good woman’s most winning quality.

Sleeping Beauty slept for 100 years, after pricking her finger on a spindle. The kiss of the heroic prince woke her. He fell in love with her while she was asleep, or was it because she was asleep?

Snow-white was already dead when the heroic prince fell in love with her. “I beseech you, ” he pleaded with the 7 dwarfs, “to give it to me, for I cannot live without looking upon Snow-white. ”
¹⁷
It awake was not readily distinguishable from it asleep.