When she had sucked the marrow from my bones
And languorously I turned to her with a kiss,
Beside me suddenly I saw nothing more
Than a gluey-sided leather bag of pus!
Baudelaire
If we but seriously consider the nature and qualities of the generality of the sex, even in all ages from the fall of man to this present, we may well perceive that they have not only been extremely evil in themselves; but have also been the main instruments and immediate causes of Murder, Idolatory, and a multitude of other hainous sins, in many high and eminent men…
‘A Briefe Anatomie of Women’, 1653, p.1.
…Then I crossed my chin around her neck, squeezing her tight. She went into such fear she became happy. Then from the radio the song ‘Everyone has gone to the Moon’ began playing. I said ‘Do you know where we’re at?’
She said ‘Make love to me.’
In a rage I said, ‘YOU bitch,’ and I turned cold and rolled over and listened to the music…Sometimes during the night, as I would roll over face up, I would see her to my left, laying with her eyes wide open as if she were dead. This helped me to go back to sleep. She wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to go for a walk one time. I said, ‘Go. Lock the door behind you.’
I don’t like women, I despise them. I no longer try to please women. I’m mad if they’re around for very long. I feel as though I could call them in and dismiss them.6
We are conceived somewhere between pissing and shitting, and as long as these excretory functions are regarded as intrinsically disgusting, the other one, ejaculation, will also be so regarded. The involuntary emission of semen during sleep is called a nocturnal pollution: the substance itself is viscous and stringy, whitish and acrid, like a more disgusting form of snot, if you regard snot as disgusting. Human beings have extraordinary ways of escaping their conditioning, so that one may see a bowler-hatted gentleman on the train absently picking his nose and eating what he finds there, but if we recall him to full consciousness, deep embarrassment, shame, humiliation, disgust and even loathing may result. It is easy when picking a path through the wilderness of sexual mores to fall foul of the slough of disgust, for a shameful and compulsive activity can be pushed away by attributing all the shame and all the compulsion to the partner.
The woman tempted me, and I did eat.
When a man is ashamed to masturbate, and instead waylays women for the sake of finding sexual release, the shame that should attach to the masturbatory activity, not significantly different in such a case except that the friction was provided by a female organ and the ejaculation may occur in the vagina, is referred to the woman. The man regards her as a receptacle into which he has emptied his sperm, a kind of human spittoon, and turns from her in disgust. As long as man is at odds with his own sexuality and as long as he keeps woman as a solely sexual creature, he will hate her, at least some of the time. The more hysterical the hatred of sex, the more extravagant the expression of loathing. It is not necessary to quote medieval restrictions on the admission of women to church and the sacraments to demonstrate this, although the examples have the value of being striking and incredible. In the Renaissance, some attempt was made to understand the emotion and the effects of lust.
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till in action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof—and prov’d, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos’d; behind a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this Hell.7
Shakespeare was right in equating the strength of the lust drive and the intensity of the disgust that followed it. The first manifestations of syphilis in Europe were much more spectacular than the present operations of the disease: the ignorance about the nature of the contagion also helped to colour attitudes towards sex. It is not rare to find in medieval poets a picture of healthy animal enjoyment like the naïve pride of the Wife of Bath in the way that she made her husbands swink. For many humanists the pleasure itself became dubious, and the chase after the sexual object was seen as delusive, even when the lady proved complaisant, for the pleasure was not equal to the fantasms of the lust-stirred brain. But the more the neo-platonists sought to devalue sex, sense and sensory information, the more empiricism flourished, and the more sexual desire, distorted, sublimated, or perverted, burst out in odd manifestations. The end of Shakespeare’s poem is still troubled by desire, the very fury of the syntax is evidence of lust’s continuing power. Disease, idealism, disgust could not ultimately conceal the libidinous energy of the Elizabethans, who were after all still forced to excrete semi-publicly, to go mostly unbathed, to eat food that our senses would find of the rankest, so that they could not have managed to exist if they had been afflicted with anything like the degree of fastidiousness which characterizes twentieth-century man.
Post coitum omne animal triste est. The Romantics developed the suggestion which had always been present in erotic writing, that actual sexual pleasure was necessarily inferior to the heated imaginings of lust, into a complete statement of the superiority of unheard melodies to heard ones. The great love affairs were those truncated by death, or those never enjoyed because of some other embargo. The mind-body dichotomy, which they might have imagined they derived from Plato, was actually established in the sensibility of Europeans, then justified by Descartes. The Romantic taste for the moribund heroine is itself a manifestation of sexual disgust and woman-hatred. Imagining a female dying is tantamount to killing her: immolated on the altar of mortality, she can be enjoyed with a fearful exaltation. The Byronic great lover wasting away with the awful fires of a forbidden love which racked his brain, curled his lip and fed the dull flame in his eye, vitiated the pleasures of all actual events in a dream of what could never be. The act of undying adoration to the unenjoyed was effectively only the rejection of the enjoyed. Even a poet as now as Dylan has two kinds of female character in his imagery—the sad-eyed lady of the lowlands, the girl from the north country, who is inviolate and inviolable, to kalos, and the others who are human, confused and contemptible. This crude version of romanticism underlies the distinction between two kinds of girls which prevails almost universally in our community, especially in those quarters where avant-garde sexual morality has not succeeded in disguising or banishing disgust as an improper and neurotic feeling. Any woman who goes to bed with a man for the first time knows that she runs the risk of being treated with contempt. Her chosen lover may leave or may turn his back on her immediately after his orgasm, and fall, or pretend to, asleep; he may be laconic or brusque in the morning: he may not call again. She hopes that he will not discuss her disparagingly with his friends. The words used to describe women who are not unwilling to have intercourse with men who are eager to have intercourse with them are the transferred epithets of loathing for sex undignified by aesthetic prophylaxis and romantic fantasy. For many in this space, falling out of love means the fading of the aura, and the assertion of the bald facts of sexual relationship.
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia sh(its)!8
I am inclined to believe that this admission of moral superiority which ordinary men are so ready to yield (to women), is a bribe of compliment and gallantry to quiet the sex under the deprivation of substantial privileges which would really place them on an equality with men: especially as I find that those men who are personally most polite to women, who call them angels and all that, cherish in secret the greatest contempt for them.
J. McGrigor Allen,
‘The Intellectual Severance of Men and Women’, 1860, p. 23
Sophisticated men realize that this disgust is a projection of shame and therefore will not give it any play, but because they have been toilet-trained and civilized by the same process as the total victims of disgust and contempt, they still feel the twinges. They still say ‘Fuck you’ as a venomous insult; they still find cunt the most degrading epithet outside the dictionary. Cunt-lapping, mother-fucking, and cock-sucking are words to provoke a sense of outrage. Being forced to play the role of a woman in sexual intercourse is the deepest imaginable humiliation, which is only worsened if the victim finds to his horror that he enjoys it. There is no way of assessing the extent of this feeling in a civilized community like our own: people tend to minimize it for their self-esteem’s sake but nobody feels embarrassed about admitting disgust attendant on promiscuity, although it might be argued that if sex is a good thing it ought not to become disgusting if done often, or with different people. The sophisticated argument is that promiscuity devalues sex, makes it commonplace, impersonal and so forth, but the kind of depression felt by men forced by circumstances to be more or less promiscuous, like travelling musicians, is really still the same old disgust. Very few men who have slept around casually are able to converse humanely with the women who have extended their favours. Many a woman sorrowfully reflects that her more recherché sexual techniques, her more delicate apprehensions of her polymorphous partner’s needs, her very sexual generosity has directly entailed her lover’s eventual revulsion and estrangement. We may find a key to sexual outrage and murder in the inability of men to shed their inhibitions with the fine woman who is good enough to marry, and their terror and disgust at what the repressed desire eventually forces them to do. The worst aspect of prostitution is that many a prostitute must undergo the bestial rituals which civilized men find necessary for sexual release. Many prostitutes claim this as their social function. The unfortunate girls found strangled with their own stockings and raped with bottles are the victims of male fetishism and loathing, and yet no woman has ever cried out after such an outrage on her sex, ‘Why do you hate us so?’, although hate it clearly is.
Some of the shock and alarm caused by Last Exit to Brooklyn was occasioned by the guilt of readers who recognized the phenomenon of the brutalization of Tralala in the hideous plausibility of her end: if morgue doctors revealed what horrors end up on their slabs we might have worse evidence of the survival of cunt-hatred in our society.
more came 40 maybe 50 and they screwed her and went back on line and had a beer and yelled and laughed and someone yelled that the car stunk of cunt so Tralala and the seat were taken out of the car and laid in the lot and she lay there naked on the seat and their shadows hid her pimples and scabs and she drank flipping her tits with the other hand and somebody shoved the beer can against her mouth and they all laughed and Tralala cursed and spit out a piece of tooth and someone shoved it again…and the next one mounted her and her lips were split this time and the bood trickled to her chin and someone mopped her brow with a beersoaked hand-kerchief and another can of beer was handed to her and she drank and yelled about her tits and another tooth was chipped and the split in her lips was widened and everyone laughed and she laughed and she drank more and more and soon she passed out and they slapped her a few times and she mumbled and turned her head but they couldn’t revive her so they continued to fuck her as she lay unconscious on the seat in the lot and soon they tired of the dead piece and the daisychain broke up and they went back to Willies the Greeks and the base and the kids who were watching and waiting to take a turn took out their disappointment on Tralala and tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerked off on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying among the broken bottles, rusty cans and rubble of the lot and Jack and Fred and Ruthy and Annie stumbled into a cab still laughing and they leaned toward the window as they passed the lot and got a good look at Tralala lying naked covered with blood urine and semen and a small blot forming on the seat between her legs as blood seeped from her crotch…9
Punished, punished, punished for being the object of hatred and fear and disgust, through her magic orifices, her cunt and her mouth, poor Tralala. Women are never instrumental in crimes of sexual loathing, even when they are enacted upon the bodies of men. The implications of this state of affairs have got to be understood by any movement for female liberation.
Cunt-hatred has survived in our civilization in myriad small manifestations, most of which would be steadily denied by the manifesters. The deep aversion for beaver in pin-ups evinced by the selection of poses which minimize the genital area is partly motivated by a disgust for the organ itself. Women of considerable experience, like the authoress of Groupie, who delight and glory in their skill at fellatio feel, in Miss Fabian’s words, that cunnilingus must be less groovy and would not require it of any man who was making love to them.10 Other women are embarrassed by cunnilingus, and feel sure that men must find it disgusting. Despite my own intentions, I often feel this way myself, and I cannot pretend that this is altogether because it is too intimate a proceeding, or too impersonal. Vaginal secretions are the subject of a vast folklore; the huge advertising campaigns for deodorants and sweeteners of the vulvar area deliberately play upon female misgivings about the acceptability of natural tastes and odours. One vaginal deodorant is even flavoured with peppermint to provide an illusion of freshness and inhumanity. Others are mentholated. The vagina is described as a problem preventing some of the niceness of being close. The excessive use of douches with chemical additives is actually harmful to the natural balance of organisms existing in the vagina, and yet no doctor has dared to denounce it openly. Women desirous of coming to terms with themselves, and of understanding how far they are from actually doing so, might consider their own reactions to the suggestion that they taste their own vaginal secretions on their fingers, or that they taste themselves fresh on the mouth of a lover. Despite my own proselytizing attitude, I must confess to a thrill of shock when one of the ladies to whom this book is dedicated told me that she had tasted her own menstrual blood on the penis of her lover. There are no horrors present in that blood, no poisons; I would suck a bleeding finger, I would not scruple to kiss a bleeding lip, and yet…The only cure for such superstitions is base empiricism, innocently undertaken.
Repressed disgust for female genitalia is why the many causes of vulvar itches and inflammations are seldom properly investigated, and many women treat themselves ineptly for conditions which they regard as chronic and nervous or moral in origin, until they become incapable of treatment. Cases of incurable trichomonal infection are all due to a combination of fear, superstition and doctors’ sloppiness. Penile disorders can be as trivial and risible as athlete’s foot, and so can vaginal ones. In each case, examination ought to be performed. The fictitious association of prurigine vulvae with excessive sexual desire is an additional reason why female itching is not taken seriously. Along with the fantasy of the flaming itch of the voracious vagina go other notions of the proper coloration and conformation of the nymphae which influence even doctors’ conceptions. The cunt of a fresh and virtuous woman is thought to be pink and soft, the clitoris hardly protuberant, the membrane of the labia to be smooth and thin. The purplish tinge of dark-skinned women is suspect, and the ruvidity of the labial tissue is taken to indicate excessive excitation, self-abuse or indulgence.
The Female Eunuch Page 27