The Female Eunuch

Part of the modesty about the female genitalia stems from actual distaste. The worst name anyone can be called is cunt. The best thing a cunt can be is small and unobtrusive: the anxiety about the bigness of the penis is only equalled by anxiety about the smallness of the cunt. No woman wants to find out that she has a twat like a horse-collar: she hopes she is not sloppy or smelly, and obligingly obliterates all signs of her menstruation in the cause of public decency. Women were not always so reticent: in ballad literature we can find lovely examples of women vaunting their genitals, like the lusty wench who admonished a timid tailor in round terms because he did not dare measure her fringed purse with his yard:

You’l find the Purse so deep,

You’l hardly come to the treasure.[2]

Another praised her shameful part in these terms:

I have a gallant Pin-box,

The like you ne’er did see,

It is where never was the Pox

Something above my knee …

O ’tis a gallant Pin-box

You never saw the peer;

Then Ile not leave my Pin-box

For fifty pound a year.[3]

Early gynaecology was entirely in the hands of men, some of whom, like Samuel Collins, described the vagina so lovingly that any woman who read his words would have been greatly cheered. Of course such books were not meant to be seen by women at all. He speaks of the vagina as the Temple of Venus and the mons veneris as Venus’s cushion, but he abandons euphemism to describe the wonders of the female erection:

… the Nymphs … being extended do compress the Penis and speak a delight in the act of Coition … The use of the blood-vessels is to impart Vital Liquor into the substance of the Clitoris, and of the Nerves to impregnate it with a choyce Juyce inspired with animal Spirits (full of Elastick Particles making it Vigorous and Tense) … The Glands of the Vagina … being heated in Coition, do throw off the rarified fermented serous Liquor, through many Meatus into the Cavity of the Vagina, and thereby rendereth its passage very moist and slippery, which is pleasant in Coition … The Hypogastrick Arteries do sport themselves in numerous Ramulets about the sides and other parts of the Vagina, which are so many inlets of blood to make it warm and turgid in the Act of Coition.[4]

Collins’s description is an active one: the vagina speaks, throws, is tense and vigorous. He and his contemporaries assumed that young women were even more eager for intercourse than young men. Some of the terms they used to describe the tissues of the female genitalia in action are very informative and exact, although unscientific. The vagina is said to be lined ‘with tunicles like the petals of a full-blown rose’, with ‘Wrinckle on wrinckle’ which ‘do give delight in Copulations’. The vagina was classified as ‘sensitive enough’ which is an exact description. They were aware of the special role of the clitoris, in causing the ‘sweetness of love’ and the ‘fury of venery’.

The Vagina is made so artificial (affabre is his word) that it can accommodate itself to any penis, so that it will give way to a long one, meet a short one, widen to a thick one, constringe to a small one: so that every man might well enough lie with any Woman and every Woman with any Man.

‘The Anatomy of Human Bodies epitomized’, 1682, p. 156

The notion that healthy and well-adjusted women would have orgasms originating in the vagina was a metaphysical interpolation in the empirical observations of these pioneers. Collins took the clitoris for granted, as a dear part of a beloved organ; he did not under-emphasize the role of the vagina in creating pleasure, as we have seen. Unhappily we have accepted, along with the reinstatement of the clitoris after its proscription by the Freudians, a notion of the utter passivity and even irrelevance of the vagina. Love-making has become another male skill, of which women are the judges. The skills that the Wife of Bath used to make her husbands swink, the athletic sphincters of the Tahitian girls who can keep their men inside them all night, are alike unknown to us. All the vulgar linguistic emphasis is placed upon the poking element; fucking, screwing, rooting, shagging are all acts performed upon the passive female: the names for the penis are all tool names. The only genuine intersexual words we have for sex are the obsolete swive, and the ambiguous ball. Propagandists like Theodore Faithfull (and me) are trying to alter the emphasis of the current imagery. To a man who had difficulty getting an erection Faithfull wrote:

If you ignore any idea of erection and concentrate your attention on your girl-friend, ignore the clitoris and use your fingers to caress her internally and if you follow such activity by a close association of your sex organs you may soon find that she can draw your sex organ into her vagina without any need on your part for erection.[5]

This sounds like therapeutic lying, nevertheless serious attempts have been made to increase women’s participation in copulation. A. H. Kegel, teaching women how to overcome the bladder weakness that often afflicts women, showed them how to exercise the pubococcygeal muscles and found inadvertently that this increased their sexual enjoyment.[6] What their mates thought of it is not on record. The incontinence resulted from the same suppression of activity that inhibited sexual pleasure; we might find that if we restored women’s competence in managing their own musculature many of their pelvic disturbances would cease, and their sexual enjoyment might correspondingly grow. Of course we cannot do this until we find out how the pelvis ought to operate: as long as women cannot operate it, we cannot observe its action, and so the circle perpetuates itself. If the right chain reaction could happen, women might find that the clitoris was more directly involved in intercourse, and could be brought to climax by a less pompous and deliberate way than digital massage. In any case, women will have to accept part of the responsibility for their own and their partners’ enjoyment, and this involves a measure of control and conscious cooperation. Part of the battle wil be won if they can change their attitude towards sex, and embrace and stimulate the penis instead of taking it. Enlightened women have long sung the praises of the female superior position, because they are not weighed down by the heavier male body, and can respond more spontaneously. It is after all a question of communication, and communication is not advanced by the he talk, me listen formula.

The banishment of the fantasy of the vaginal orgasm is ultimately a service, but the substitution of the clitoral spasm for genuine gratification may turn out to be a disaster for sexuality. Masters and Johnson’s conclusions have produced some unlooked for side-effects, like the veritable clitoromania which infects Mette Eiljersen’s book, I accuse! While speaking of women’s orgasms as resulting from the ‘right touches on the button’ she condemns sexologists who

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.[7]

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 qualitatively 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 retraction of the clitoris tells him that he is welcome, is laborious and inhumanly computerized. The implication that there is a statistically ideal fuck which will always result in satisfaction if the right procedures are followed is depressing and misleading. There is no substitute for excitement: not all the massage in the world will ensure satisfaction, 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 substitution 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 performance principle and its organization of society. Freud emphasizes the aspect of centralization. It is especially operative in the ‘unification’ of the various objects of the partial instincts into one libidinous object of the opposite sex, and in the establishment of genital supremacy. 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.[8]

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 performance ethic, which would not itself be a regression, if the performance principle in our society included enterprise and creativity. But enterpise and creativity are connected with libido which does not survive the civilizing process. Women must struggle to keep alternative 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 enlightenment is harmful, or because repression is a necessary goad to human 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 complete 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 wonderful,’ he said, ‘You’re a clever woman making me wait until after we were married!’[9]

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 happens in a swoon or a swamp of undifferentiated sensation. He labours for her pleasure like a eunuch in the harem. Sex is harnessed in the service of counterrevolution.

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.

The Wicked Womb

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 menstruation 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.[1]

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 operation. 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 cervical 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 depressed. Exaggerated care for the male apparatus, together with reluctance to involve oneself in serious attention to the womb and its handmaids, is the fruit of centuries of womb-fear, not to be eradicated by political action or yelling at public meetings.[2] 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 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.[4] 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.[5] 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-abuse.[6] 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 uncontrollable sobbing, the cause was officially recorded as hysteria: the aetiology of her case was particularly important but the word hysteria seemed to supply all the answers.

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

Although we do not believe in green-sickness any more, since maidens became an essential, if menial, part of the work force, we do believe that old maidens are apt to be consumed and wasted by frustration. Only recently have the other terrifying functions of the womb been publicized and accepted. Husbands are allowed to participate in the mysteries of birth, which need no longer be carried out in a coven of females. Women do not have to be purified or churched after childbearing any more. Attempts are being made to reduce the impression that childbirth is a kind of punishment for women, and to re-educate them in breeding, while the more sinister companions of childbed – puerperal fever and sudden haemorrhage – have been brought under control. Although few men have still to watch in horror while their wives breed themselves through miscarriage and prolapse helplessly to death, we still have not come to terms with the sinister womb. The most pervasive and significant manifestation of that atavistic fear surviving is in the common attitude to menstruation.

Women who adhere to the Moslem, Hindu or Mosaic faiths must regard themselves as unclean in their time of menstruation and seclude themselves for a period. Medieval Catholicism made the stipulation that menstruating women were not to come into the church. Although enlightenment is creeping into this field at its usual pace, we still have a marked revulsion for menstruation, principally evinced by our efforts to keep it secret. The success of the tampon is partly due to the fact that it is hidden. The arrival of the menarche is more significant than any birthday, but in the Anglo-Saxon households it is ignored and carefully concealed from general awareness. For six months while I was waiting for my first menstruation I toted a paper bag with diapers and pins in my school satchel. When it finally came, I suffered agonies lest anyone should guess or smell it or anything. My diapers were made of harsh towelling, and I used to creep into the laundry and crouch over a bucket of foul clouts, hoping that my brother would not catch me at my revolting labours. It is not surprising that well-bred, dainty little girls find it difficult to adapt to menstruation, when our society does no more than explain it and leave them to get on with it. Among the aborigines who lived along the Pennefather river in Queensland the little girl used to be buried up to her waist in warm sand to aid the first contractions, and fed and cared for by her mother in a sacred place, to be led in triumph to the camp where she joined a feast to celebrate her entry into the company of marriageable maidens, it seems likely that menstruation was much less traumatic.[7] Women still buy sanitary towels with enormous discretion, and carry their handbags to the loo when they only need to carry a napkin. They still recoil at the idea of intercourse during menstruation, and feel that the blood they shed is of a special kind, although perhaps not so special as was thought when it was the liquid presented to the devil in witches’ loving cups. If you think you are emancipated, you might consider the idea of tasting your menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve a long way to go, baby.