The Female Eunuch (6 page)
recommend…the stimulation of the clitoris as part of the prelude to intercourse, to that which most men consider to be the ‘real thing’. What is in fact the ‘real thing’ for them is
completely devoid of sensation
for the woman.
This is the heart of the matter! Concealed for hundreds of years by humble, shy and subservient women.
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Not all the women in history have been humble and subservient to such an extent. It is nonsense to say that a woman feels nothing when a man is moving his penis in her vagina: the orgasm is qualit- atively different when the vagina can undulate around the penis instead of vacancy. The differentiation between the simple inevitable pleasure of men and the tricky responses of women is not altogether valid. If ejaculation meant release for all men, given the constant manufacture of sperm and the resultant pressure to have intercourse men could
copulate without transport or disappointment with anyone. The process described by the experts, in which the man dutifully does the rounds of the erogenous zones, spends an equal amount of time on each nipple, turns his attention to the clitoris (usually too directly), leads through the stages of digital or lingual stimulation and then politely lets himself into the vagina, perhaps waiting until the retrac- tion of the clitoris tells him that he is welcome, is laborious and in- humanly computerized. The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right proced- ures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfac- tion, for it is a matter of psycho-sexual release. Real gratification is not enshrined in a tiny cluster of nerves but in the sexual involvement of the whole person. Women’s continued high enjoyment of sex, which continues after orgasm, observed by men with wonder, is not based on the clitoris, which does not respond particularly well to continued stimulus, but in a general sensual response. If we localize female response in the clitoris we impose upon women the same limitation of sex which has stunted the male’s response. The male sexual ideal of virility without languor or amorousness is profoundly desolating: when the release is expressed in mechanical terms it is sought mechanically. Sex becomes masturbation in the vagina.
Many women who greeted the conclusions of Masters and Johnson with cries of ‘I told you so!’ and ‘I am normal!’ will feel that this criticism is a betrayal. They have discovered sexual pleasure after being denied it but the fact that they have only ever experienced gratification from clitoral stimulation is evidence for my case, because it is the index of the desexualization of the whole body, the substitu- tion of genitality for sexuality. The ideal marriage as measured by the electronic equipment in the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation laboratories is enfeebled—dull sex for dull people. The sexual personality is basically anti-authoritarian. If the
system wishes to enforce complete suggestibility in its subjects, it will have to tame sex. Masters and Johnson supplied the blueprint for standard, low-agitation, cool-out monogamy. If women are to avoid this last reduction of their humanity, they must hold out not just for orgasm but for ecstasy.
The organization of sexuality reflects the basic features of the per- formance principle and its organization of society. Freud emphasizes the aspect of centralization. It is especially operative in the ‘unifica- tion’ of the various objects of the partial instincts into one libidinous object of the opposite sex, and in the establishment of genital suprem- acy. In both cases, the unifying process is repressive—that is to say, the partial instincts do not develop freely into a ‘higher’ stage of gratification which preserved their objectives, but are cut off and reduced to subservient functions. This process achieves the socially necessary desexualization of the body, leaving most of the rest free
for use as the instrument of labour. The temporal reduction of the libido is thus supplemented by its spatial reduction.
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If women find that the clitoris has become the only site of their pleasure instead of acting as a kind of sexual overdrive in a more general response, they will find themselves dominated by the per- formance ethic, which would not itself be a regression, if the perform- ance principle in our society included enterprise and creativity. But enterprise and creativity are connected with libido which does not survive the civilizing process. Women must struggle to keep altern- ative possibilities open, at the same time as they struggle to attain the kind of strength that can avail itself of them.
The permissive society has done much to neutralize sexual drives by containing them. Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearteningly than ever before. The orgies feared by the Puritans have not materialized on every street corner, although more girls permit more (joyless)
liberties than they might have done before. Homosexuality in many forms, indeed any kind of sex which can escape the dead hand of the institution—group sex, criminal sex, child-violation, bondage and discipline—has flourished, while simple sexual energy seems to be steadily diffusing and dissipating. This is not because enlight- enment is harmful, or because repression is a necessary goad to hu- man impotence, but because sexual enlightenment happened under government subsidy, so that its discoveries were released in bad prose and clinical jargon upon the world. The permit to speak freely of sexuality has resulted only in the setting up of another shibboleth of sexual normality, gorged with dishonesty and kitsch. Women who understand their sexual experience in the way that Jackie Collins writes of it are irretrievably lost to themselves and their lovers:
He took her to the bedroom and undressed her slowly, he made love to her beautifully. Nothing frantic, nothing rushed. He caressed her body as though there were nothing more important in the world. He took her to the edge of ecstasy and back again, keeping her hovering, sure of every move he made. Her breasts grew under his touch, swelling, becoming even larger and firmer. She floated on a suspended plane, a complete captive to his hands and body. He had amazing control, stopping at just the right moment. When it did happen it was only because he wanted it to, and they came in com- plete unison. She had never experienced
that
before, and she clung to him, words tumbling out of her mouth about how much she loved him. Afterwards they lay and smoked and talked. ‘You’re wonder- ful,’ he said, ‘You’re a clever woman making me wait until after we
were married!’
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Miss Collins’s heroine is prudish, passive, calculating, selfish and dull, despite her miraculous expanding tits. When her husband grows tired of playing on this sexual instrument she can have no recourse but must continue to loll on her deflated airbed, wondering what went wrong. There is no mention of genitals: everything hap- pens in a swoon or a swamp of undifferentiated sensation. He la- bours for her pleasure like a eunuch in
the harem. Sex is harnessed in the service of counter-revolution.
Embraces are cominglings from the Head to the Feet, And not a pompous High Priest entering by a
Secret place.
Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl. 69, II. 39–40
What Jackie Collins is expressing is the commonest romantic ideal of the perfect fuck. It shows how deeply we believe in the concept of male mastery. Miss Collins’s heroine was manipulating her mate’s colonizing sexual urge, making him wait, as long as his importunacy lasts, until she is ready. In manipulating his violent impulses she exercised an illusory superiority, for she is tender, sentimental and modest, loving not for her own gratification, but in expression of esteem, trust and true love, until she could civilize him into marriage and the virtuoso sexual performance. The complicated psychic aspect of his love is undervalued; she is still alone, egotistical, without libido to desire him or bring him to new pleasure in her. Jackie Collins and the sex-books show that we still make love to organs and not people: that so far from realizing that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally
there
than when they make love, we are never more incommunicative, never more alone.
Sex is not the same as reproduction: the relation between the two is especially tenuous for human beings, who may copulate when they will, not only when they are driven thereto by heat or an instinctual urge. The difference must be at least partly caused by the fact that human beings have memory, will and understanding to experience the pleasure of sex and desire it for itself. Little girls only learn about the pleasure of sex as an implication of their discoveries about their reproductive function, as something merely incidental. Much more care is taken to inform them about the approaching trauma of men- struation and the awful possibility of childbirth if they should ‘lose control’ or ‘give in’ to sexual urges, than to see that they recognize and welcome these sexual urges in the first place. So the growing
girl knows more about her womb than she does about her external genitalia, and not much of what she knows is good news.
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Her knowledge of the womb is academic: most women do not actually feel any of the activity of their ovaries or womb until they go wrong, as they nearly always do. Many women, one might say too many women, die of illnesses in organs that they have virtually ignored all their lives, the cervix, the vulvae, the vagina, and the womb. Some of the trouble is caused by late diagnosis of illnesses begun in a trivial treatable way, which stems from the obscurantism falsely dignified by the name ‘modesty’. Since time immemorial the womb has been associated with trouble, and some of the reluctance shown by doctors to attend to anxieties that women feel
about their tricky apparatus stems from this atavistic fear. Frigidity for women is regarded as a common condition, resulting from bad luck and bad management; in men impotence is treated with the utmost seriousness. Any trivial lesion on the penis is examined with ostentatious care so that a man need not feel threatened by castration anxieties, but the poor old womb must gush blood or drop out before anybody takes its condition seriously. The clitoris is ignored: a nurse once narrowly missed cutting mine off when shaving me for an op- eration. Even the much vaunted cervical smears are rarely given in our community. I first managed to get one when I went to the VD clinic in despair because my own doctor would not examine my vagina or use pathology to discover the nature of an irritation, which turned out to be exactly what I thought it was. At the VD clinic cer- vical smears were given as a
matter of course
: at the respectable GP’s they were not given at all. The enormous hoo-ha about the strange impalpable results of vasectomy upon the male psyche results from this continuing phallocentricity: the devisers of the pill worried so little about the female psyche that it was years before they discovered that one woman in three who was on the pill was chronically de- pressed. Exaggerated care for the male apparatus, together with re- luctance to involve oneself in serious attention to the womb and its hand-maids, is the fruit of centuries of womb-fear, not to be eradic-
ated by political action or yelling at public meetings.
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Women must
first of all inform themselves about their own bodies, take over the study of gynaecology and obstetrics,
3
and, not least, conquer their
own prejudice in favour of men doctors.
The most recent form of fantasy about the womb is the enormously prevalent notion of the pathology of
hysteria
in Europe until the twentieth century. At first it was called the
mother
, and was thought to be the wandering womb that rose into the throat of a girl and choked her. The most sceptical anatomists, while deploring the arts which quacks and witches used to allay
That the Mother (as they call it) gets into the throat
of married women and Maids, is by thousands believed to be a truth; yea, that the string of the Mother is fast in the throat, and that the vein of the Mother is also seated
there, which fancy is craftily managed by a certain
Woman in this Town, who thereby deceives many innocent women, and marvellously enriches herself.
‘In libellum Hippocrates de virginum morbis’,
1688, p. 73
hysterics, believed that the womb was ‘charged with blood and stale seed from whence arise foul and ill-conditioned damps’, developing
their own strange theory of pelvic congestion.
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It was assumed that
unmarried women and widows suffered most from hysteria, and that a good husband could fix it. The very seriously discussed but imaginary green-sickness, renamed ‘chlorosis’ by doctors anxious
to obscure the folklorish origins of their ideas, came about in the same way.
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The descriptions of the condition are vivid, and although
some of them incorporate symptoms arising from other causes generally we can observe the same hypochondriacal syndromes that are put down to hysteria these days: epilepsy, asthma, breathlessness, flatulence,
sensus globi in abdomine se volventis
, lassitude, convulsions, painful menstruation. Some doctors really believed that
est femineo generi pars una uterus omnium morborum
, ‘the womb is a part of every illness of the female sex’. Women were assumed to be by nature subject to the tyranny of the insatiate womb, and to suffer symptoms
from which men only suffered if they indulged in excessive self-ab- use.
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Although the repression mechanism was described in various
ways, the reaction to that mechanism was taken (as it usually is) to be a ground for continuing it. Women were too weak, too vulnerable to irrational influences to be allowed to control their own lives. When one of my students
collapsed in her final examination with cramps and bitter uncontrol- lable sobbing, the cause was officially recorded as
hysteria
: the aeti- ology of her case was particularly important but the word
hysteria
seemed to supply all the answers.