Things Are Against Us

by Lucy Ellmann

  3 ‘Seen any good dicks lately?’ the exasperated Texas Governor Ann Richards once asked, after listening to yet another man extol at length the exact virtues of some female acquaintance’s body. (The columnist Molly Ivins liked to recount this remark.)

  4 Great Expectations (1861).

  5 Housekeeping (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).

  6 In Persuasion (1818), she satirises Sir Walter’s absorption in both his own beauty and the physical flaws of everyone else. ‘We are not all born to be handsome,’ Mrs Clay cautions helpfully. (Though, soon enough, Austen falls into a trap of her own making, dissing poor plump Mrs Musgrove for the incongruity of being fat and having deep emotions.)

  7 Chatto & Windus (2007). How often do Henry James’s biographers comment on his no doubt flabby tush?

  8 Penguin (1994).

  9 Harcourt, Brace & World (1968).

  10 This word is now highly suspect, usurped by capitalists. As Angela Davis said, ‘Once the word “diversity” entered into the frame, it kind of colonised everything else. All we talk about now is diversity… difference that doesn’t make a difference. It’s not just about diversity, it’s about justice’ (from ‘Audre Lorde: A Burst of Light Symposium’, March 22, 2014 – https://youtu.be/EpYdfcvYPEQ).

  CONSIDER PISTONS AND PUMPS

  We just can’t leave the body alone, can we? We really think of little else. It’s not just our obsession with looks. Nor our abundant revulsion towards bodily functions and what are generally agreed to be bodily defects, such as obesity, disability, and decrepitude. Never mind all that. What’s so bad about revulsion anyway? It’s a natural and rational state of mind.

  No, let’s consider the way that we approach just about anything, the way that almost everything we do or have or think or want relates to the body.1 We are surrounded by things constructed to accommodate the human body: cities, cars, furniture, brooms, books, bookcases, hoovers, dishwashers, ovens, cutlery and crockery, pitchers and pictures, toilets and toilettes. Whole lorries travel from Holland full of flowers, just to please our senses (or used to before Brexit kicked in). Throughout human history, recipes and clothing fashions have swiftly crossed borders too. We organise ourselves around the body politic, bodies of evidence, bodies of water, government bodies, regulatory bodies, even celestial bodies. Body English! So much BODY stuff going on, it’s funny we mostly talk about what’s on our MINDS. But but the brain never stops tabulating what’s happening in the body.

  Linguistically, we refuse to be parted from bodily processes for a second. Everything is fucking this or fucking that, or it’s shitty, nail-biting, vomitous, stomach-churning, toe-curling, piss-taking, back-breaking, nerve-racking, a pain in the neck, and fit for sore eyes.

  We try to stand on our own two feet, put our best foot forward. We’re footloose and fancy-free – until we put our foot in it. Meanwhile, our masters, with feet of clay, step on our toes all the time, and bring the down-at-heel to heel. They don’t tiptoe around either. And the masses are all ears for their soundbites, until things go belly-up.

  These and other coinages like ‘eye-watering’ or ‘down in the mouth’ or ‘one foot in the grave’ show that suffering is a great leveller. That these expressions are ungendered implies an unconscious but kindly craving for sexual equality, a recognition that being human may transcend being male or female. When you get right down to it, male and female bodies still have plenty of stuff in common.

  But consider pistons and pumps. Shafts, cogs, funnels. ‘Male’ and ‘female’ plugs and sockets and computer wires. More than any other part of our anatomy, we equate almost everything with genitalia, and imitate genitalia in the things we make. Our machines are unashamedly coital, just one thing after another either sticking out of something or being thrust into it. And buttons – how we love pressing buttons! It must be some dim collective memory of the G-spot. Every president has to have his or her finger on the Nuclear Button, when they’re not buttonholing some underling about losing their shirts.

  It’s not just guns and missiles that are phallic. In The Grapes of Wrath,2 Steinbeck turns metal farming equipment into something male and malevolent:

  Behind the harrows, the long seeders – twelve curbed iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. … The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died…

  It’s natural enough that we use anatomical analogies. Our thinking sprouts from the sensation of inhabiting a body: you start with yourself and move outward. This habit only gets dicey when the establishment declares one type of body superior to another. Having the wrong genitalia (female) currently means exclusion from clubs and other privileges such as respect, encouragement, leadership roles, cultural, economic, and political power, and many dull meetings. It entitles the bearer to inclusion in menial tasks, for which women, somehow deemed too frail to become business bigwigs or bullfighters or orchestra conductors, are assumed to have limitless stamina, talent, and patience: tasks involving physical mistreatment and onerous low-paid or unpaid labour. To these, women are expected to add sidelines in cake baking, bill paying, oven cleaning, and eyebrow threading.

  The ‘inferior’ genitalia go publicly unremarked, while the ‘superior’ genitals are flattered with all kinds of expensive, official, civic homage and imitation (in the form of towers, turrets, plinths, monoliths, etc.). Since Roman times, the phallus has been especially beloved – while nothing about the womb is celebrated at all, except by Judy Chicago and the knitters of pussy hats. This is really rather strange, given that female anatomy has some pretty showstopping faculties (ovulation, menstruation, conception, gestation, parturition, lactation, and mammoth moping). Unless you’re a seahorse or octopus, or were born by Caesarean, we all emerge from that juncture where two female limbs meet. The vagina is our red-carpet entrance to the living world. Out we come to seek and find (or not).

  In his surrealist autobiographical movie My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin gives vulval symbolism a rare weight by repeatedly likening the fork, or Forks, where the Winnipeg’s Red River merges with the Assiniboine, to the maternal groin, or ‘lap’. At last, a bit of female anatomy hits the big time, symbolically. Rivers make good female emblems, since they flow and brim with life. The Forks is also an ancient meeting point for Indigenous peoples. Many cities besides Winnipeg have been similarly established at the confluence of rivers, for reasons perhaps both vulval and pragmatic. But womanly laps sneak their way into the human consciousness in other ways too, less geological, more literal and abstract: in architecture, in carpentry, in art and textiles; in fissures in stone or the clefts between the branches of trees.

  For Robert Frost, forks made all the difference.

  So, for a moment let’s forget all the impotent phallic symbols so favoured by town planners. The Eiffel Tower can be looked at another way. If you look up its skirts, it becomes a cave, and a monument to the vagina. With its legs outspread in a birthing squat, the Eiffel Tower displays its gaping carnal core to the tourists below. As nineteenth-century engineering’s equivalent of a cancan girl, it’s a flamboyant rival to Rome’s Cloaca Maxima. The Eiffel Tower looks like it has girded its loins and expelled the whole of Paris.

  Sure, men are cocky now, after all their cockeyed, cockamamie cock and bull. The dickheads think they alone have the balls to run the world. Wild ejaculations of respect for testicles spill willy-nilly across the globe. Which brings us to the crotch of the matter: people are rarely acclaimed for having the breasts to do something brave, it’s always got to be balls, cojones – although the grandeur of the scrotal sac, in comparison to breasts, seems highly debatable. In a misogynistic society, one could argue it takes balls to have breasts. As for the vulva, this is only used as a term of abuse. Trump threatened Mike Pence with being seen as a ‘pussy’ if Pence failed to (illegally) overturn the results of the 2020 election: ‘You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.’3 Well, what else is new? They�
��re both assholes.

  Haven’t we had enough seminal insights too? Men are always having those. They avidly disseminate their seminal ideas, in fact set such great store by anything seminal that they sometimes ascribe seminal achievements to women too. The obsession with balls persists, while all the fabulous, life-enhancing, life-generating wonderments of ovaries, Fallopian tubes, placentas, clitorises, labia, both minora and majora, are ignored. Where are the ululations for the uterus, the catchphrases of the snatch, the wit of the slit, in recognition of the crucially productive female groin, lap, funnel, box, spoon and fork? This really gets on my tits. But soon female germinations will be nursed to maturity, through a new fluidity of thought – if we could just egg on female supremacy a bit.

  The ceaseless avoidance of vulval symbols is nuts. Let’s return to the womb – you know you want to. It’s time society was more womb-based. In honour of our new age of free tampons, we need to discharge a heavy flow of labial lingo and symbolism across the land, along with some hot flashes of vaginal ideology. As our emblem, the Statue of Liberty, with her multitudinous motherliness.4 Mother Nature, Mother Hubbard, Mother Goose, mother love, mother vinegar, mother-of-pearl, the mother tongue of the motherland… The ‘Mother of Exiles’ was eulogised by Emma Lazarus, who awarded her an attitude very foreign to our bully-boy times:

  Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

  The gal has a lamp, because motherhood is an enlightening force. That’s why, when your mother fades, darkness falls.

  Motherhood has always been a moral force for good, and proof of women’s importance in the world, whatever men might wish to believe. If most of human history was, as I suspect, matriarchal, human society was originally founded on the exertions of the womb. Birth was a risky but honourable undertaking in prehistory, and women were cherished and respected, not just as potential mothers but for their own sake. What a revolutionary idea. Not repressed, not raped. Respected. Now women are paid less and violated more, and the female body has been ghettoised, strong-armed by machismo.

  Time to put feminine curves back into the body politic. It’s so flat without them! Pence, who calls his own wife ‘Mother’ (an Oedipal mix-up not to be encouraged), got all tangled up over womb contents a few years back when he was governor of Indiana, endorsing an abortion law so extreme that it required all foetal remains to be reported to the government and formally cremated or buried. Noting that their every discharge was now apparently of intense interest to Mike Pence, some women decided to keep him informed of every stage of their menstrual cycle. They heaped him with daily updates on flow, spotting, cramps; and included Trump, once Pence was chosen as his running mate in 2016. This uterine barrage only ended when Twitter suspended the @periodsforpence account. But briefly, the menstrual taboo, which requires women to keep totally shtum all their lives about their periods, and also about the lack of them (menopause), was demolished.

  Well, it’s a start. But we could get more mileage out of female naughty bits than that. We need city councils and cartographers to reclaim the matriarchal world order, inch by inch, with feminising place names. The hell with those little hamlets, Rump and Penice. We need: Womanhattan, Wombburrow, Wombledon, Breechbourne, Breastworthy, Tittsburg, Clitoropolis, Oviductia, Fallopidelphia, Loudmouth, Womenhoe, Uxoriousbridge, and the twin cities of Multiple and Orgasm. America already has the Carolinas, Louise-iana, Georgia, Virginia, and Mary-land. Let’s restore Petticoat Junction, and the adjacent Hooterville. In Britain, there’s Maidenhead, Maidstone, Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Westbourne, Winterborne, Wombwell, Womenswold, Wigglesworth, Witchford, Titford, Thrushelton, Pity Me, Wendy, The Wash, and Crackpot. It’s a start.

  And we’ll always have Lapland. Next stop, the Milky Way (breast is best). Now, I don’t expect a standing ova-tion for this plan. Just let it gestate – it’s pregnant with possibilities.

  __________________

  1 ‘I got my hair, got my head, Got my brains, got my ears…’ (Nina Simone, ‘Ain’t Got No – I Got Life’, Nuff Said, 1968).

  2 Viking Press (1939). A surprisingly matriarchal novel. The theme of maternal power and heroism peaks in the final image of Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a starving man, reminiscent in its turn of Michelangelo’s Pietà (which is also, arguably, matriarchal in essence).

  3 ‘Pence Reached His Limit With Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty’, New York Times (January 12, 2021).

  4 Built coincidentally with the help of Gustave Eiffel.

  THE WOMAN OF THE HOUSE

  It’s all so innocent: you live in a log cabin with the guy you love, snuggle up every night under your home-made patchwork quilts, churn butter, tend animals, bake bread, gather water, milk cows, sweep the floors, beat the rugs, black the stove, regularly refill mattresses with fresh straw, cook stuff, sew stuff, mend stuff, make mock apple pie out of green pumpkins, slap bears on the back (thinking they’re cows), never ever forget to do the dishes, and somehow give birth, all alone, to any number of helpful children. That’s the woman’s point of view.

  The man’s? You perform powerfully outdoors: you hunt, you fish, you farm, you trade furs and news at the general store, and head home afterwards despite blizzards, buffalo wolves, bears, more bears, and tree stumps that look like bears in the dark. Your gun is slow, you think before you shoot, you examine unfamiliar migrating birds with interest, you help anybody you see in difficulty, and you can rustle up a little log cabin any old time. And a well to go with it! In the evenings, after a sturdy meal of bacon, lard, biscuits, and gravy, you either whittle a trinket shelf or take out your fiddle and sing.

  A far cry from the state of the union today, in which the woman works full-time, worries constantly about calories, celebrities and cellulite, and routinely does ninety-eight per cent of the housework while the husband holds down two jobs or none at all and spends his leisure hours assessing porn. The kids go to school, where they are gradually indoctrinated into a society that cherishes men, money, and misinformation over the measliest little bundle of human rights.

  All of this was in train when Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family wandered the American plains in their covered wagon – they just didn’t know it yet. They thought the further west you got, the freer you would be. Or Wilder’s father did anyway. He had a bad case of wanderlust; his wife had more reservations about the pioneering life. Neither believed America, founded on usurpation, desperation, the forlorn ideals of misled emigrants, and the confused philanthropy of forefathers, had been stitched up from the start. But who helps you in a capitalist society when the locusts eat your crops, or fire destroys your homestead, or the bank calls in your loan? Kin, if you’re lucky, and maybe your neighbours. Mostly, you’re on your own – because everybody else is too busy and confused trying to comply with capitalism to think of outsmarting it. In The Grapes of Wrath, the inequities shine out clear as day. There’s only so much anyone else can do for you, however compassionate they may be. If you help each other too much, it strikes of communism, a total no-no in the eyes of most Americans. This is a nation that eats propaganda for breakfast.

  They should all have stayed in Europe! (Wilder’s mother had Scottish ancestry, and her father English). Still, it’s nice to assume, even wrongly, that things might go well. Charles Ingalls, depicted as ‘Pa’ in the Little House books, had a gift for keeping cheerful. When things were tough, he sang his ‘trouble song’ and got even happier. Here’s the deal: you kill, you cook, you eat, you teach, you build, you repair things, you tend your livestock, you hitch up the team, you save lives when need be, and you do it all with a positive attitude or you’re all going to die. This is one of the few situations in which optimism is not a sign of imbecility but a necessity. Or at any rate, it sure comes in handy. Cynicism can slow you down.

  The Ingallses
’ impoverishment is at times severe, but they ride it out with impressive courage and good humour. One winter, Pa has to walk hundreds of miles, in worn-out boots and a thin coat, to find enough work to keep the family alive. On an earlier excursion, he’s blown off course in a blizzard and has to hole up in a snow cave for three days, subsisting on the few pieces of Christmas candy he was bringing home to his girls. This is Depression literature, as was The Grapes of Wrath. When Wilder began publishing these childhood memoirs in the early thirties, Americans were in all kinds of trouble. They knew what she was talking about. And in the current fallout from Covid, Brexit, and a cascade of global financial crises, the Ingalls’ hardships, economy measures, nomadism and other survival tactics sadly have a renewed relevance.

  Her clued-up daughter, the writer and journalist Rose Wilder Lane, warned Wilder there was no market for children’s fiction. But, in need of money, Laura pressed on and between 1932 and 1943 produced a big hit, her eight-volume series of autobiographical novels. Beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, set in Wisconsin, the books, based on Wilder’s experiences as a child, were aimed at a young audience. They’re adventure stories but also catalogue her absorption in nature and the domestic realm. They illustrate the female side of the Western Expansion, and follow a family triumphing against tremendous odds to retain a way of life that incorporated play, music, education, and kindness. Not a bad way to live, on the whole.

  Yes, there are troubling blunders and omissions: the chapter on the minstrel play, for which Wilder’s father wore blackface, is unbearable to read. It is now a chastening record of a tributary of racism that for some time people regarded as merely lighthearted pranks: dressing up as African Americans. And Wilder is not sympathetic enough toward Native Americans either. She’s hardly cognisant of them. She isn’t callous, exactly – leave that to Betty MacDonald in The Egg and I (1945). MacDonald never stops bad-mouthing in the bitterest of terms all the Indians she encountered during her own Western adventure (at the age of twenty, she married the first bloke that came along, and to her surprise he wanted to live on a farm). Macdonald speaks more highly of the local drunks! Wilder, on the contrary, had a humility and innate morality that saved her from outright bigotry. She even admits to some shame about the treaty betrayals, abuse, genocide and displacement of Native Americans that were taking place around her as a child.