The Female Eunuch

by Germaine Greer

  On the basis of arbitrary assumptions about the coloration and conformation of the nymphae, doctors in America at the turn of the century discovered hundreds of cases of habitual self-abuse and treated them in the most barbarous fashion imaginable—by clitorectomy.11 Such a remedy for male masturbation has never been suggested, and yet in many cases castration of women was actually practised. In terms of the crudest physiology the practice was inexcusable, for the nerves which supply the clitoris also supply the rest of the anovaginal area and masturbation, if it was occurring at all or as much as the doctors said, and if it was having the deleterious effects on the whole organism which they fantasized, such as neurasthenia, anorexia, aberrations in blood pressure, debility and so forth, could quite naturally have been transferred to other areas. The only persuasive motivation for such therapy (for reason it cannot have) is cunt-hatred. The infibulation of girls in some primitive tribes also has this punitive and defensive function.

  The universal lack of esteem for the female organ becomes a deficiency in women’s self-esteem. They are furtive and secretive about their own organs and their functions, but more appallingly there is the phenomenon of the woman who seeks degradation by consorting with her ‘inferiors’ and inviting her lover to abuse her. A very amusing Italian film was built around the story of a rich woman who made love to her chauffeur when drunk, begging him, ‘Chiamami tua serva!’ Many of the vile and cruel things which men do to women are done at women’s instigation. The most appalling evidence of cunt-hatred can be found in the cases of introduction into the vagina and the urethra of dangerous objects, by women themselves.12 The earliest gynaecological case-histories contain examples of women who introduced needles and bodkins into the bladder and managed thereby to kill themselves. Even the pioneers of gynaecology were not deluded by their protestations that freakish accidents had occurred. When surgery was in its infancy such abuse was usually fatal. Even now cases of such violence performed upon the self are not altogether rare. Many menstrual disorders derive from inability to accept womanhood and its attendant processes. Many a silly girl swallowing Epsom salts and gin and parboiling herself in a hot bath is not so much endeavouring to procure abortion as punish herself for her female sexuality. Self-loathing is an important factor in nymphomania which is usually compulsive self-abasement. Pop psychology refers to it in jargon as having a low self-image.13

  Women are so brainwashed about the physical image that they should have that, despite popular fiction on the point, they rarely undress with éclat. They are often apologetic about their bodies, considered in relation to that plastic object of desire whose image is radiated throughout the media. Their breasts and buttocks are always too large or too small, the wrong shape, or too soft, their arms too hairy or too muscular or too thin, their legs too short, too hefty, and so forth. Not all the apology is fishing for compliments. They are actually apologizing. The compliment is actually necessary reassurance that inadequacies do not exist, not merely reassurance that these inadequacies do not matter. The woman who complains that her behind is droopy does not want to be told, ‘I don’t care, because I love you,’ but ‘Silly girl, it’s a perfect shape, you can’t see it like I can.’ It is a commonplace observation that women are forever trying to straighten their hair if it is curly and curl it if it is straight, bind their breasts if they are large and pad them if they are small, darken their hair if it is light and lighten it if it is dark. Not all these measures are dictated by the fantom of fashion. They all reflect dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated. Many of the devices adopted by women are not cosmetic or ornamental, but disguise of the actual, arising from fear and distaste. Soft lighting, frilly underwear, drinks and music, might help to get away with palming off an inferior bill of goods, which under harsh light and quite naked could too easily be disgusting. The universal sway of the feminine stereotype is the single most important factor in male and female woman-hatred. Until woman as she is can drive this plastic spectre out of her own and her man’s imagination she will continue to apologize and disguise herself, while accepting her male’s pot-belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, baldness and other ugliness without complaint. Man demands in his arrogance to be loved as he is, and refuses even to prevent the development of the sadder distortions of the human body which might offend the aesthetic sensibilities of his woman. Woman, on the other hand, cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves.

  Abuse

  On 18 December 1969, in the case of Regina versus Humphreys, Mr Frisby QC accused the defence of attempting to show that Miss Pamela Morrow, whom the defendant was charged with having raped, was a ‘flippertigibbit’.1 It seems incredible that twentieth-century lawyers should accuse a girl of being a foul fiend from hell, the same that rode upon Poor Tom’s back in King Lear and bit him so cruelly.2 The meaning of the word has declined into a pale shadow of its former force, perhaps because of its indiscriminate use in witch-hunts, but its derivation remains a fact. The element of witch-hunt is never far from trials in which not quite virginal girls are required to give evidence against Members of Parliament and there may have been more to Mr Frisby’s use of the term than he was aware, but we may follow this pattern of the debilitation by indiscriminate use of terms of the greatest reprobation. The word hag used also to apply to a direct satanical manifestation of peculiar grisliness; now it simply means a woman who isn’t looking her best. Hag-ridden meant the condition of a soul who had been tormented by diabolical spirits in his sleep, and not a husband who had been nagged at. The ineffectualness of the victims of such abuse eventually defused the terms of abuse themselves: termagant began its history in the chansons de geste as a word meaning a mahometan deity, now it too means a nagging woman. Indiscriminate application has weakened the force of broad, originally derived from bawd, and hoyden, wanton, baggage, and fright (originally a horrifying mask) as well as tart, which began as a cant term of affection, became insulting, and is now only mildly offensive.3

  Unfortunately the enfeeblement of abuse by hysterical overstatement is not the commonest phenomenon in the language of woman-hatred. Many more terms which originally applied to both men and women gained virulence by sexual discrimination. The word harlot did not become exclusively feminine until the seventeenth century. There is no male analogue for it in the era of the double standard. The word bawd applied to both sexes until after 1700, and the word hoyden is no longer applicable to men. Originally a scold was a Scots invective—now it means, predictably, a nagging woman. Witches may be of either sex, but as a term of abuse witch is solely directed at women. A chit was originally the young of a beast, came to mean a child, and nowadays means a silly girl.

  Class antagonism has had its effect on the vocabulary of female status. Lower-class distrust of airs and graces has resulted in the ironic applications of terms like madam, lady, dame and duchess, which is fair exchange for the loading of dialect names for women with contemptuous associations, as in wench, quean, donah, dell, moll, biddy and bunter (once a rag-picker, but now invariably a prostitute). The most recent case in which contempt for menial labour has devised a new term of abuse for women is the usage of scrubber for a girl of easy virtue. If such linguistic movements were to be charted comprehensively and in detail, we would have before us a map of the development of the double standard and the degradation of women. As long as the vocabulary of the cottage and the castle are separate, words like wench and madonna do not clash; when they do both concepts suffer and woman is the loser. The more body-hatred grows, so that the sexual function is
hated and feared by those unable to renounce it, the more abusive terms we find in the language.

  When most lower-class girls were making a living as domestics, struggling to keep clear of the sexual exploitation of the males in the household, the language of reprobation became more and more concerned with lapses in neatness, which were taken to be the equivalent of moral lapses. The concept of sluttishness or slatternliness with its compound implication of dirt and dishonour gave rise to a great family of nasty words, like drab, slut, slommack, slammerkin, traipse, malkin, trollop, draggle-tail. The word slattern itself withdrew the male portion of its meaning and became exclusively feminine.

  The most offensive group of words applied to the female population are those which bear the weight of neurotic male disgust for illicit or casual sex. The Restoration, which reaped the harvest of puritan abuse of gay women, invented a completely new word of unknown derivation to describe complaisant ladies, the ubiquitous punk. The imagery of venereal disease added a new dimension to the language: diseased women were fireships, brimstone, laced mutton, blowens, bawdy baskets, bobtails, although the vestiges of sensual innocence hung around long enough to endow us with obsolete terms like bed-fagot, pretty horsebreaker, as well as loving-ironic use of words like whore and trull, which were not always wholly bitter in their application. More familiar terms in current usage refer to women as receptacles for refuse, reflecting the evaluation that men put upon their own semen, as tramp, scow, scupper or, most contemporary, the hideous transferred epithet slag. Even these words fade from vividness: women themselves use a term like bag indiscriminately, although they would recoil from the unequivocal original douche-bag, or rhyming slang toe-rag.

  Perhaps words like pig, pig-meat or dog are inspired by the sadness which follows unsatisfactory sex: they too lose their efficacy from wide usage as the word beast did, and must constantly be replaced. The vocabulary of impersonal sex is peculiarly desolating. Who wants to ‘tear off a piece of ass’? ‘get his greens’? ‘stretch a bit of leather’? ‘knock off a bit of belly or crumpet’? ‘have it away’?

  It would be unbearable, but less so, if it were only the vagina that was belittled by terms like meat, pussy, snatch, slit, crack and tail, but in some hardboiled patois the woman herself is referred to as a gash, a slot. The poetical figure which indicates the whole by the part is sadly employed when indicating women as skirts, frills, a bit of fluff or a juicy little piece.

  These terms are all dead, fleshy and inhuman, and as such easy to resent, but the terms of endearment addressed to women are equally soulless and degrading. The basic imagery behind terms like honey, sugar, dish, sweety-pie, cherry, cookie, chicken and pigeon is the imagery of food. If a woman is food, her sex organ is for consumption also, in the form of honey-pot, hair-pie and cake-or jelly-roll. There are the pretty toy words, like doll and baby or even baby-doll. There are the cute animal terms like chick, bird, kitten and lamb, only a shade of meaning away from cow, bitch, hen, shrew, goose, filly, bat, crow, heifer and vixen, as well as the splendidly ambiguous expression fox, which emanates from the Chicago ghetto. The food terms lose their charm when we reflect how close they are to coarse terms like fish, mutton, skate, crumpet, a bit on a fork, cabbage, greens, meat and bread, terms more specifically applied to the female genitalia but often extended to the female herself. Who likes to be called dry-goods, a potato, a tomato or a rutabaga?

  There used to be a fine family of words which described without reprobation or disgust women who lived outside the accepted sexual laws, but they have faded from current usage. Flatly contemptuous words like kept-woman and call-girl have taken over the field from adventuress, woman of the world, woman of pleasure, mistress, inamorata, paramour, courtesan, mondaine. When Frank Zappa launched the mythology of the groupie as high priestess of free love and the group grope, he meant the term to remain free from pejorative colouring,4 but despite the enormous buildup less than six months later most of the women who hung around musicians treated the appellation as an insult. It is the fate of euphemisms to lose their function rapidly by association with the actuality of what they designate, so that they must be regularly replaced with euphemisms for themselves. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that fiancée which commonly in the permissive society means mistress will itself become a tabu word unless ideology should miraculously catch up with behaviour.

  The most scathing vilification of immoral women does not come from men. The feminine establishment which sees its techniques of sexual bargaining jeopardized by the disregard of women who make themselves cheap is more vociferous in its condemnation. Too often the errant women abuse themselves with excessive shame and recrimination, degrading themselves more in their own estimation than they do by their behaviour. The compulsiveness of this behaviour is the direct result of repressiveness in education: women are drawn to sexual licence because it seems forbidden and exciting, but the price they pay for such delinquency is too heavy. The result is functional nymphomania, described in Nathan Shiff’s Diary of a Nymph. A woman in this situation refuses to take responsibility for her own behaviour and instead attributes her deeds to a paraself which takes over. She cannot choose between one sexual partner or another because her will is in abeyance, so that her course is set for self-destruction. Shiff’s heroine Christine describes sex as filthy and low, and yearns to feel free from it, to ‘be clean again’.5 The same self-denigrating syndrome appears in a type of letter which appears regularly in the correspondence columns of women’s magazines. ‘I feel so low and ashamed…’; ‘I was so disgusted with myself I found I couldn’t respond to my husband’s love. Now it is worse. I have read about V.D. and am terrified I could have been infected…’ ‘I have always loved my husband but three years ago I had a sordid affair which he forgave…I have again been strongly tempted by another man…’; ‘I know it is impossible to change my past, but I have learned my lesson and regretted ever since what happened…’6 None of the replying matriarchs inquires why the affair was so sordid, why it must be regretted, what lesson it was that was learnt, why shame is so disproportionate or what the woman is really describing when she speaks of temptation. Instead, all sagely counsel that the woman continue to accept her guilt and find expiation in renewed self-abnegation. In ‘true romance’ stories women mercilessly vilify themselves for quite minor infractions of the sexual code—‘It was so horrible I feel I shall never be clean again. Never. I’m too awful to live. I felt utterly ashamed. I hardly knew this man. How could I be so cheap?’7

  For educated girls the most telling gibe is that of promiscuity, a notion so ill-defined that for practical purposes we must decide that a girl is promiscuous when she thinks herself to be so. Gael Greene’s conversations with college girls revealed that while they tolerate sex between people who are ‘in love’, any other kind was promiscuity, an imagined disease so powerful in its effects that according to Dr Graham B. Blaine it is the commonest reason for their seeking psychiatric help.8 Girls who pride themselves on their monogamous instincts have no hesitation in using the whole battery of sex-loathing terms for women who are not. They speak of the ‘campus punchboard’ or ‘an old beat-up pair of shoes’, revealing their unconscious fidelity to the notion that for women sex is despoiling and using.9 The last word on the pernicious power of the notion of promiscuity was uttered by Jim Moran, battling the double standard in Why Men Shouldn’t Marry: ‘Use of this word [promiscuity] has but one redeeming feature. It identifies the user as a pro-virginity, problem-ridden, puritanical prunt.’10

  Moran addressed his words chiefly to men: they ought to be more urgently heeded by women. If women are to be better valued by men they must value themselves more highly. They must not allow themselves to be seduced while in a state of self-induced moral paralysis, trusting to the good-will of the seducer so grudgingly served. They must not scurry about from bed to bed in a self-deluding and pitiable search for love, but must do what they do deliberately, without false modesty, shame or emotional blackmail. As lon
g as women consider themselves sexual objects they will continue to writhe under the voiced contempt of men and, worse, to think of themselves with shame and scorn.

  Low regard for the sexual object extends even into the words which denote the simple fact of femaleness. Female and woman are not polite terms: I was told as a little girl always to employ the word lady or young lady. Squeamishness results in ludicrous formulae like the opposite sex. Contempt for women can be discerned in a purer form in the use of female terms as abuse for pusillanimous or incompetent men. ‘You girl,’ say the Londoners, in a tone of the deepest contempt. Feminists might like to consider the gratuitous attribution of the female sex to unspecified objects and creatures, as in this headline which identified the Loch Ness Monster as female, ‘If Nessy’s there she’s got a sonar shock coming.’ Perhaps we can deduce the latent motive for the attribution from the sadism of the context.

  Young and pretty women may delude themselves about the amount of abuse meted out to women, for as long as they remain so they escape most of it. It is easy to pretend that wolf-whistles are gestures of genuine appreciation and that compliments are genuine praise, which they are not. Pretty women sometimes chafe under the effects of the universal supposition that they are morons, but in general it seems easier to exploit male illusions. A woman has only to depart from the stereotype to find herself subjected to all kinds of discrimination and insult, although she may minimize it still for her own mental health. A woman who is not pretty is a bag. There are a few half measures in popular imagery. A woman who is unacceptably fat is gross, undesirable, ridiculous. A woman who is undesirably thin is scraggy, scrawny and so on. If her legs are not lovely they are awful. If her body suggests too much strength and agility she is hard, tough, unfeminine. If she is efficient and capable or ambitious, it is assumed that she has failed to find satisfaction as a normal woman, even to the extent of implying a glandular abnormality or sexual perversion.