Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  51 It would be important to enlist the support of sex workers in this endeavour, since men (currently) have the means to buy their way out of sexual privation (something the cheerless incel brigade seems to have forgotten). Financial compensation will be offered to female sex workers, to sustain them through the furlough.

  52 Lesbians need not participate in the sex strike. They can protest in other ways. Gay sex in both genders will be unaffected by the strike, or might even enjoy a surge in popularity. That is beyond our control. The purpose of the strike is male sexual privation, not female. Heterosexual women will have to handle this temporary hiatus as best they can. I don’t agree with Andrea Dworkin, though, that feminism precludes heterosexuality. It’s time for the fun to begin, not end! (Once all three strikes have succeeded.)

  53 Lysistrata, by Aristophanes (411 BCE), in Lysistrata and other Plays, translated by Alan H. Sommerstein (2002). Spike Lee’s fun and moving musical Chi-Raq (2015), transposing Lysistrata to the gun-filled streets of the South side of Chicago, bolsters the idea that sex can still be used as a major bargaining tool today.

  54 Chris Knight writes about sex strikes in his spectacular book on prehistory, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (Yale, 1991). Women held a sex strike in Nicaragua in the 1530s, as a protest against slavery, and Igbo women in Nigeria have often scared men with their sex strike power. More recently, the tactic was used in Liberia to protest against the vicious civil war (2003), in Naples in protest against dangerous, illicit fireworks on New Year’s Eve (2008), in Kenya (2009), and in Ukraine (2010). The Strike of Crossed Legs worked in Pereira, Colombia (2006/2011), in protest against gang warfare: ‘We want them to know that violence is not sexy.’ Pereira’s murder rate, at the time the highest in Colombia, dramatically declined as a result. In 2011, women in Barbacoas, Colombia successfully used a sex strike to ensure long-awaited road repairs were done. And it was utilised in the Philippines (2011), Belgium (2011 – proposed at least, by a socialist senator, if not implemented), Togo (2012), Sudan (2014), and Tokyo (2014), when women threatened not to sleep with any man who supported the corrupt governor Yōichi Masuzoe, who’d proclaimed that women should never hold top roles in government because they’re nutty when they have a period (he was later ousted for his misuse of public funds, which he could not blame on menstruation). Femen too has sometimes advocated sex strikes. And a sex strike added an extra dimension to a protest against the Russian presence in Ukraine (2014), publicised with the slogan ‘Don’t Give It To A Russian’.

  55 The vulva’s mythic significance as the basis and origin of all human life makes vaginal display the perfect antidote to the male death-lust. In ancient history, women resorted to vaginal display both as a fertility rite and as a form of protest. According to Catherine Blackledge, Raising the Skirt, women in Greek mythology used this method to subdue Bellerophon, who was threatening to flood the Xanthian plain. In addition, ‘making derogatory remarks about female genitalia is punishable by vaginal display en masse… in [parts of] Africa’. In a rare acknowledgement of female sexuality, Sheela-na-gigs, those exaggerated ancient and mediaeval stone carvings of women pulling their vulvas wide open (surely a remnant of prehistoric mother-goddess cult symbols), were added to buildings to ward off evil and promote fertility. Femen activists not only use upper-body nudity to shame men, but sometimes go bottomless as well.

  56 Scotland voted in November 2020 to become the first country in the world to provide free menstrual products to all who need them. But there is progress elsewhere too: Canada, Australia, India, Colombia, Malaysia, Nicaragua, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Lebanon, Trinidad and Tobago, and a number of US states have stopped taxing period products.

  57 At a small Bloomsday celebration at the Irish consulate in Edinburgh on June 16, 2014, I noticed that all the men there were standing around scowling, while the women tried to be genial. This wasn’t because the men were having a lousy time (the Guinness was really flowing), they’re just LAZY. (What would Joyce have made of it?!) Men really need to acknowledge how threatening the male scowl is. They need to start learning how to adjust their faces into more frequent displays of beneficence. Is it fair for women to do all the giggling and smiling and buttering-up, forever trying to make everybody feel comfortable? Why should we, after what we’ve been through? It’s MEN who make everybody uncomfortable, so it’s they who should make more of an effort to be friendly. Sheesh, do we have to explain every little thing? Just as they can learn not to walk menacingly down a dark street behind a lone woman, they can also master the art of smiling.

  58 Husband remarks encouragingly that, once the aims of all three strikes have been realised, capitalism will be kaput.

  59 The Mea Culpa Declaration: ‘I, the undersigned, confess to having, consciously or not, overtly or not, been part of a worldwide conspiracy that has constrained women’s lives through centuries of violence, repression, distress, and discouragement. I recognise that this treatment of women has been a ploy in a power game – the result of male cowardice, stupidity, perversity, cunning, and corruption – and that the status of men has been artificially exalted by it.

  I acknowledge that vast numbers of women have been unfairly treated throughout the era of male rule. I therefore apologise for any tyrannical behaviour of my own, and that of other men, and pledge to do my utmost to correct the problem, and prevent such injuries, insults, and injustices from ever occurring again.

  I apologise too for stubborn male resistance over centuries to women’s ideas, thoughts, decisions, and remarks –in the home, at work, in business, in the arts, in education, and in government. In light of the loss of valuable female input over centuries, I now agree to abide by the decisions women make, without resorting to mindless criticisms and the usual reflex contradictions and derision, no matter how wacko or whimsical the ideas expressed by women may seem to me to be.

  I renounce male power and privilege, on the grounds that they were unsportingly won, and I wish to relinquish all remaining economic, social, and political advantages I may have obtained, either as a mere consequence of being male, or because of my active participation (now regretted) in misogynist behaviour and acts of patriarchal terror, either overt or underground.

  In aid of this, I have transferred, or will transfer and continue to transfer, my financial resources to a woman or women, no strings attached. By such means, I hope to see a societal shift and foster a more humane environment in which women and children are less likely to be mistreated or maligned. It is my hope that the handover of power and property to women will ultimately transform and benefit people, animals, and the natural world, as well as ensuring a future for thought, languages, nature, culture, and the arts.

  I believe in the pleasure principle, and therefore renounce the male work ethic as an indecency imposed by men who wished to profit off the subjugation of others. I hereby renounce male privilege and assert the inalienable right of all creatures to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’

  SIGN HERE: ____________________________

  A SPELL OF PATRIARCHY

  In the days before Covid, when thought ranged free and queuing wasn’t lethal, I was standing in line at a cheese shop, contemplating our dependence throughout life on milk, mothers’ milk (and all the other kinds, like cow, goat, sheep, buffalo, almond, oat and soya), when it occurred to me that the Hitchcock movie I’d just watched, Spellbound,1 is really about sexual harassment. It’s not about Gregory Peck’s ridiculous psychological problems; it’s really about women’s problems – with men. It’s a #MeToo movie from seventy-five years ago. Whether he meant it this way or not, Hitch was ahead of his time. Maybe his conscience was bothering him?

  Notoriously keen on hiring blonde actresses, for personal and pragmatic reasons – blondes at the time were box office gold – Hitchcock was no feminist hero. He used (some would say abused) some of the most famous blondes around: Grace Kelly, Carole Lombard, Eva Marie Saint, Tippi Hedren, Joan Fontaine, Do
ris Day, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, and Ingrid Bergman. Oddly, he settled on Hedren for both The Birds and Marnie, an awkward actress at best, brittle and shaky. But still – a blonde. Yet, for all his Pygmalionic tendencies, and for a guy who spent so much time just trying to scare people, Hitchcock’s portrayals of women can sometimes be surprisingly generous and sympathetic.

  He also really knew how to make a movie, at least most of the time – his flop/gem ratio is pretty impressive. I had largely forgotten Spellbound when I saw it again, and enjoyed every minute. Though completely absurd, it’s now joined my list of Hitchcock must-haves, along with North by Northwest, The Lady Vanishes, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, Mr & Mrs Smith, and The 39 Steps. I can watch The Birds, too, even Marnie, once in a while, but they’re pretty awful. And Psycho is just a joke – what a mess, with that mom and the rocking chair and all. The murder in the shower, a cheap stunt, frightened me every time when I was young, but you already know Janet Leigh is doomed as soon as you see her in her underwear. That amount of vulnerability is code for victim.

  For discussion purposes, we could call Bergman and Peck by their fictional names in Spellbound, out of respect or something: Dr Petersen and Dr Edwardes. But at this stage of the game, who really thinks of them as anything but Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck? So, to Bergman. She plays a psychoanalyst, and she’s not half bad at it. The job really seems to suit her. She could’ve helped even Hitchcock. She’s not just well-trained and studious, she’s bursting with snappy put-downs that help her thread her way through the forest of obnoxious men she’s up against.

  Hitchcock was such a sucker for proclamations about psychology, many priceless jewels of corniness are on display in his work. Psycho ends with one, just to make things feel even more ridiculous than they already did. Spellbound begins with one, and it’s a classic of the genre, informing us earnestly that psychoanalysis ‘treats the emotional problems of the sane’. The only trouble with this assertion in this movie is that most of the characters in Spellbound really are out of their minds. The shrinks are as wacky as the patients.

  One principle of psychoanalysis is that what’s buried deep in the unconscious will pop out in some way, no matter how well you try to repress it. It’s a process of opening locked doors in the subconscious. Actual doors open for Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound – not professionally, natch, but in her head, when she starts to fall in love with Gregory Peck. To be fair, this was 1945, the bumpy start of psychoanalysis’ heyday. Hollywood was full of shrinks (and locked doors, too, come to think of it). But the real craziness buried in Spellbound is not the libido, romantic love, mental collapse, nor the mysterious source of Peck’s baffling complexes, but misogyny. The movie veers off from Peck’s mental disorder to become an examination of everyday sexism: what it’s like to be a woman tormented by men. For, wherever Bergman goes, she’s under male scrutiny, if not direct attack.

  On the surface, the story concentrates on Gregory Peck’s mixed-up identity and amnesia and phobias and fainting spells and stuff, but you soon sense that Peck’s psychological disintegration is by the by. The movie is told from Bergman’s point of view, and what’s really memorable about it are the difficulties she faces (Hitchcock was probably one of them). You can tell Peck doesn’t matter much, by the way the three sensationalised crises of his life are handled so breezily. They turn out to be ‘MacGuffins’ (not a new fast-food breakfast item, but Hitchcock’s word for the intentional distractions he liked inserting in his movies). What matters here is Bergman. Of course. I mean, you get Ingrid Bergman on screen, the movie’s going to be about Bergman!

  Here is a woman rising fast in a male-dominated profession. Dr Petersen is the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of psychoanalysis, a whizz-kid, and analytically sensitive up the wazoo. Hitchcock awards Bergman’s character some genuine heroism as a career woman. She’s so beautiful that her colleagues seem reconciled to having a female in their midst. But they don’t like it, and they’re constantly making gendered digs about her. They seem to have all the time in the world to mess her around. One pest likes to criticise her for her apparent asexuality. Because she rejects him, he accuses her of frigidity, that old salve to the male ego. He says touching her is like embracing a textbook, laddishly warns, ‘Your lack of human and emotional experience is bad for you as a doctor. And fatal for you as a woman.’ But Bergman’s ready with the cutting riposte: ‘I’ve heard that argument from numerous amorous psychiatrists who all wanted to make a better doctor of me.’ Touché.

  She seems to be the only professional in the whole institution. She has to be – her colleagues are all lazybones and chauvinists who tell her things like ‘The mind of a woman in love is operating on the lowest level of the intellect,’ and ‘You’re an excellent analyst, but rather a stupid woman.’ Why don’t you quit harassing her, you jerks? Just go straitjacket somebody or something. She’s the best shrink in the place! It’s pretty amazing Bergman ever gets a thing done, with all these malingerers hounding her. But she does, and she appears to be a genuinely good analyst: she takes on Peck of all people – a bundle of nerves, suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome, amnesia, and PTSD, not to mention a crippling fear of whiteness and black stripes – and she ‘cures’ him.

  Hitchcock’s ideas on psychology are amusing throughout. They’re highly physical – with him, it’s never just about people’s thoughts, there’s always some violent dramatic experience at the heart of things, which has to be exposed. He equates neuroses with constipation and treatment is all about administering a good fig syrup of flashbacks. What’s required, emetically, is for the patient to fully remember the trauma and expel it. So, to get well, Gregory Peck has to relive the three incidents that have cumulatively unhinged him – firstly, a childhood blunder, in which his brother got impaled on a fence after Peck accidentally pushed him off a wall; secondly, an injury during WWII, caused when he was an Air Force pilot and his plane was shot down; and finally, the quite recent sight of his psychiatrist skiing off a snowy peak to his death. (I don’t know why anyone skis. Bergman herself has to ski later in the movie, very riskily, so as to stir memories in Peck. But she’s Swedish, so she’s good at it.)

  Bergman’s task is to figure all this out, and fast (before Peck ends up in prison), and she can do it too, but not without alienating every man she encounters – even Peck, though he’s crazy about her. In their first encounter, she tries to draw a picture on a white tablecloth with the tines of her fork and Peck goes all woozy. We don’t know why yet, except that the marks she makes are strikingly vulval in shape. Peck’s aversion to the drawing adds a telling note of misogyny to his other quirks. Making things even more suggestive, he tries to rub the lines on the cloth out with a knife, the blunt blade urgently nudging the notional labia. The perfect start to a great romance!

  Before she sorts Peck’s pecker out, I mean his psyche, Bergman falls in love with him in a big way: the movie’s full of kissing scenes. This development mixes interestingly with the therapeutic job at hand. One minute, she’s wondering why the pinstripes on her bathrobe freak him out, the next they’re kissing. One minute they’re deftly evading the police at Penn Station, next they’re necking again. And along the way, Peck’s contempt for women bubbles up whenever Bergman pokes her nose too skilfully into what’s bugging him. ‘If there’s anything I hate, it’s a smug woman!’ he snarls. She pooh-poohs this sort of remark as the inevitable annoyance an analyst rouses in the wary patient. She’s undeterred, intent on being professional. But she’s hurt. Falling in love is actually full of pain. This doesn’t get mentioned enough.

  Everywhere Bergman goes, sexual harassment follows. As Grace Kelly says in Rear Window, ‘I’d say she’s doing a woman’s hardest job: juggling wolves.’ Spellbound is the story of one woman up against a wall of male authority, from the outside world of male doctors and male cops to her troubled love object. Peck suddenly disappears from the psychiatric facility, fleeing the police. He only tells Bergman the name of the hotel in New York he�
�s heading for. She rushes there, hoping to catch a glimpse of him in the lobby. An addled lech immediately hits on her, smoking his cigar right in her face and squeezing her into a corner of the couch. Peeved but perky, Bergman asks him, ‘Do you mind not sitting on my lap in public?’

  A hotel detective rescues her from this guy, and then deposits his own load of sexist preconceptions on Bergman. He somehow jumps to the conclusion that she’s a sweet innocent teacher in search of her runaway husband. He’s made the whole scenario up for himself. Bergman plays along with his fantasy simply to get hold of Peck’s room number. Later, when the detective realises he’s been had, he’s affronted – having been charmed at first by her teacherly naïveté, he now feels slighted by her craftiness. Humiliated. Men are so touchy.

  As many a #MeToo accuser has charged, merely by speaking to men, or working with them, or treating them, or loving them, women potentially provoke the most terrible retributions. There’s even a hint of domestic violence in Spellbound. Early on, Peck threatens to ‘biff ’ Bergman for prodding him with too many questions. And later, when they’re staying at her old teacher’s house, Peck seems sorely tempted to slit her throat. Why else is he so stirred by the sight of an open razor, why so drawn to stand menacingly over the sleeping Bergman, soft and helpless in the bed?

  ‘He was dangerous,’ her kindly mentor confirms the next day, having quietened Peck with a dose of bromide in his milk. Ah, yes, milk, that distinctly female secretion! White as snow, white, Snow White,2 white, white… aaagh! Peck’s not good with anything white, yet he drinks up his spiked milk like a good boy. What pops uncontrollably out of Hitchcock here is, on the one side, the mammalian female creating and nurturing life (also insightfully analysing people for free), and on the other, the male urge to kill somebody, anybody, for no good reason. These opposing forces battle for control of the love affair, and the movie, if not the whole society.