Woman Hating (4 page)

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow-white, Rapunzel —all are characterized by passivity, beauty, innocence, and
victimization.
They are archetypal good women — victims by definition. They never think, act, initiate, confront, resist, challenge, feel, care, or question. Sometimes they are forced to do housework.

They have one scenario of passage. They are moved, as if inert, from the house of the mother to the house of the prince. First they are objects of malice, then they are objects of romantic adoration. They do nothing to warrant either.

That one other figure of female good, the good fairy, appears from time to time, dispensing clothes or virtue. Her power cannot match, only occasionally moderate, the power of the wicked witch. She does have one physical activity at which she excels —she waves her wand. She is beautiful, good, and unearthly. Mostly, she disappears.

These figures of female good are the heroic models available to women. And the end of the story is, it would seem, the goal of any female life. To sleep, perchance to dream?

The Prince, the Real Brother

The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, who dies; the man who eats and drinks and plays and sleeps and thinks and wills; the man who is seen and heard; the brother, the real brother.

Miguel de Unamuno,
Tragic Sense of Life

He is handsome and heroic. He is a prince, that is, he is powerful, noble, and good. He rides a horse. He travels far and wide. He has a mission, a purpose. Inevitably he fulfills it. He is a person of worth and a worthwhile person. He is strong and true.

Of course, he is not real, and men do suffer trying to become him. They suffer, and murder, and rape, and plunder. They use airplanes now.

What matters is that he is both powerful and good, that his power is by definition good. What matters is that he matters, acts, succeeds.

One can point out that in fact he is not very bright. For instance, he cannot distinguish Cinderella from her two sisters though he danced with her and presumably conversed with her. His recurring love of corpses does not indicate a dynamic intelligence either. His fall from the tower onto thorns does not suggest that he is even physically coordinated, though, unlike his modern counterparts, he never falls off his horse or annihilates the wrong village.

The truth of it is that he is powerful and good when contrasted with her. The badder she is, the better he is. The deader she is, the better he is. That is one moral of the story, the reason for dual role definition, and the shabby reality of the man as hero.

The Husband, the Real Father

The desire of men to claim their children may be the crucial impulse of civilized life.

George Gilder,
Sexual Suicide

Mostly they are kings, or noble and rich. They are, again by definition, powerful and good. They are never responsible or held accountable for the evil done by their wicked wives. Most of the time, they do not notice it.

There is, of course, no rational basis for considering them either powerful or good. For while they are governing, or kinging, or whatever it is that they do do, their wives are slaughtering and abusing their beloved progeny. But then, in some cultures nonfairy-tale fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.

Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her picking lentils out of the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.

The father of Hansel and Grethel also had a good heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ”
¹⁸
When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell on their father’s neck. The man had not had a quiet hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel, after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ”
¹⁹
Do not misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the woman. He was a good man.

Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman in the first place, has no emotional connection with his child, does not interact in any meaningful way with her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she is dead and gone, he is a figure of male good. He is the patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.

The roles available to women and men are clearly articulated in fairy tales. The characters of each are vividly described, and so are the modes of relationship possible between them. We see that powerful women are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that men are always good, no matter what they do, or do not do.

We also have an explicit rendering of the nuclear family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive, murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world, female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystallization of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that culture.

CHAPTER 2

Onceuponatime: The Moral of the Story

Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,
Honor the sisters of your friends.

Pieces of ass, a piece of action,
Pieces.
The loneliest of mornings
Something moves about in the mirror.
A slave’s trick, survival.
I remember thinking, our last time:
If you killed me, I would die.

Kathleen Norris

I cannot live without my life.

Emily Bronte

The lessons are simple, and we learn them well.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

The heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.

Men and women are different, absolute opposites.

The good father can never be confused with the bad mother. Their qualities are different, polar.

Where he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake, she is asleep. Where he is active, she is passive. Where she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be destroyed.

It is, structurally at least, that simple.

She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.

Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed. She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is evil. She is evil because she acts.

She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured.

There are two definitions of woman. There is the good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman. She must be destroyed. The good woman must be possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished. Both must be nullified.

The bad woman must be punished, and if she is punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.

Women strive for passivity, because women want to be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.

Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity convinces her that she is bad. The bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.

The moral of the story should, one would think, preclude a happy ending. It does not. The moral of the story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who is good —inert, passive, victimized—and that a good woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.

Part Two

THE PORNOGRAPHY

Among my brethren are many who dream with wet pleasure of the eight hundred pains and humiliations, but I am the other kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape after escape, I dream only of escaping, ascent, of a thousand possible ways to make a hole in the wall, of melting the bars, escape escape, of burning the whole prison down if necessary.

Julian Beck,
The Life of the Theatre

Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a staple of the market place, and where it is illegal it flourishes and prices soar. From
The Beautiful Flagellants of New York
to
Twelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions of fucking, sucking, whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all of their manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point of inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses of men and women?

Literary pornography is the cultural scenario of male/female. It is the collective scenario of master/slave. It contains cultural truth: men and women, grown now out of the fairy-tale landscape into the castles of erotic desire; woman, her carnality adult and explicit, her role as victim adult and explicit, her guilt adult and explicit, her punishment lived out on her flesh, her end annihilation —death or complete submission.

Pornography, like fairy tale, tells us who we are. It is the structure of male and female mind, the content of our shared erotic identity, the map of each inch and mile of our oppression and despair. Here we move beyond childhood terror. Here the fear is clammy and real, and rightly so. Here we are compelled to ask the real questions: why are we defined in these ways, and how can we bear it?

CHAPTER 3

Woman as Victim: Story of O

The
Story of O,
by Pauline Reage, incorporates, along with all literary pornography, principles and characters already isolated in my discussion of children’s fairy tales. The female as a figure of innocence and evil enters the adult world—the brutal world of genitalia. The female manifests in her adult form—cunt. She emerges defined by the hole between her legs. In addition,
Story of O
is more than simple pornography. It claims to define epistemologically what a woman is, what she needs, her processes of thinking and feeling, her proper place. It links men and women in an erotic dance of some magnitude: the sado-masochistic complexion of O is not trivial —it is formulated as a cosmic principle which, articulates, absolutely, the feminine.

Also, O is particularly compelling for me because I once believed it to be what its defenders claim —the mystical revelation of the true, eternal, and sacral destiny of women. The book was absorbed as a pulsating, erotic, secular Christianity (the joy in pure suffering, woman as Christ figure). I experienced O with the same infantile abandon as the
Newsweek
reviewer who wrote: “What lifts this fascinating book above mere perversity is its movement toward the transcendence of the self through a gift of the self... to give the body, to allow it to be ravaged, exploited, and totally possessed can be an act of consequence, if it is done with love for the sake of love. ”
¹
Any clear-headed appraisal of O will show the situation, O’s condition, her behavior, and most importantly her attitude toward her oppressor as a logical scenario incorporating Judeo-Christian values of service and self-sacrifice and universal notions of womanhood, a logical scenario demonstrating the psychology of submission and self-hatred found in all oppressed peoples. O is a book of astounding political significance.

This is, then, the story of O: O is taken by her lover Rene to Roissy and cloistered there; she is fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis —she is programmed to be an erotic slave, Rene’s personal whore; after being properly trained she is sent home with her lover; her lover gives her to Sir Stephen, his half-brother; she is fucked, sucked, raped, whipped, humiliated, and tortured on a regular and continuing basis; she is ordered to become the lover of Jacqueline and to recruit her for Roissy, which she does; she is sent to Anne-Marie to be branded with Sir Stephen’s mark and to have rings with his insignia inserted in her cunt; she serves as an erotic model for Jacqueline’s younger sister Natalie who is infatuated with her; she is taken to a party masked as an owl, led on a leash by Natalie, and there plundered, despoiled, raped, gangbanged; realizing that there is nothing else left for Sir Stephen to do with her or to her, fearing that he will abandon her, she asks his permission to kill herself and receives it. Q. E. D., pornography is never big on plot.

Of course, like most summaries, the above is somewhat sketchy. I have not mentioned the quantities of cock that O sucks, or the anal assaults that she sustains, or the various rapes and tortures perpetrated on her by minor characters in the book, or the varieties of whips used, or described her clothing or the different kinds of nipple rouge, or the many ways in which she is chained, or the shapes and colors of the welts on her body.

From the course of O’s story emerges a clear mythological figure: she is woman, and to name her O, zero, emptiness, says it all. Her ideal state is one of complete passivity, nothingness, a submission so absolute that she transcends human form (in becoming an owl). Only the hole between her legs is left to define her, and the symbol of that hole must surely be O. Much, however, even in the rarefied environs of pornography, necessarily interferes with the attainment of utter passivity. Given a body which takes up space, has needs, makes demands, is connected, even symbolically, to a personal history which is a sequence of likes, dislikes, skills, opinions, one is formed, shaped—one exists at the very least as positive space. And since in addition as a woman one is born guilty and carnal, personifying the sins of Eve and Pandora, the wickedness of Jezebel and Lucre-tia Borgia, O’s transcendence of the species is truly phenomenal.