The Female Eunuch

Although many people will see the justice of this description of the perversion of female energy, they will not so easily see that the solution does not lie in offering adult women other alternatives besides home and children and all that. The adult woman has already established a pattern of perversity in the expression of her desires and motives which ought to fit her for the distorted version of motherhood: it will not disappear if she is allowed alternatives. Any substituted aim is likely to be followed in a ‘feminine’ way, that is, servilely, dishonestly, inefficiently, inconsistently. In most cases women are not offered a genuine alternative to repressive duties and responsibilities: most would happily give up unskilled labour in a factory or the tedium of office work for the more ‘natural’ tedium of a modern household, because their energies are so thwarted by the usual kinds of female work that they imagine even housework would be a preferable alternative. Women who are offered education are offered a genuine alternative, in so far as they are offered genuine education, a rare commodity in these days of universal induction. And yet, when they were offered education at first the result was not the creation of an instant race of superwomen. This is one contemporary’s account of the first female undergraduates, and university teachers will recognize a familiar phenomenon:

At lectures women students are models of attention and industry; perhaps they even apply themselves too much to carrying home in black and white what they have heard. They generally occupy the front seats because they enter their names early and then because they arrive early, well before the beginning of the lectures. Only this fact is noticeable, that often they merely give a superficial glance at the preparations that the professor passes around; sometimes they even pass them on to their neighbours without even looking at them; a longer examination would hinder their taking notes.[1]

What this rather prejudiced observer noticed is real enough: the girls were diligent, even too diligent, but their efforts were expended on mistaken goals. They were anxious to please, to pick up everything that they were told, but the preparations handed around by the lecturer were the real subject of the lecture, and in that they were not interested at all. Their energy is all expended on conforming with disciplinary and other requirements, not in gratifying their own curiosity about the subject that they are studying, and so most of it is misdirected into meaningless assiduity. This phenomenon is still very common among female students, who are forming a large proportion of the arts intake at universities, and dominating the teaching profession as a result. The process is clearly one of diminishing returns: the servile induce servility to teach the servile, in a realm where the unknown ought to be continually assailed with all the human faculties; education cannot be, and has never been a matter of obedience. It is not surprising then that women seldom make the scientific advances, but rather serve men as laboratory assistants, working under direction: it is merely a continuation of the same phenomenon that we observed in their undergraduate days. By the time they have come to apply for entrance to a university the pattern of their useless deflection of energy is already set. In the very great majority of cases they have not retained enough drive to desire to qualify themselves any further; the minority who go to university do so too often as a response to guidance and pressure from their mistresses at school, still not knowing what the real point is, still not interested in developing their own potential, at most hoping for a good degree and a qualification to join the Cinderella profession of teaching. The degree of satisfaction gained by women following this pattern is very slight; we are not surprised to find that many of them think of even their professional life either as a stop-gap or an indirect qualification for marriage.

All the blanket objections to women in professions may be understood as ways of stating this basic situation. They appear to be the judgements of prejudice, and, in so far as they adduce no other cause than sex, we must admit that they are. However, unless feminists admit that the phenomena described by critics of women’s performance in industry, offices, schoolrooms, trade unions and in the arts and sciences are real, they must fail to identify the problem, and therefore to solve it. It is true that opportunities have been made available to women far beyond their desires to use them. It is also true that the women who avail themselves of opportunities too often do so in a feminine, filial, servile fashion. It must be understood that it will not suffice to encourage women to use an initiative that they have not got, just as it is useless to revile them for not having it. We must endeavour to understand how it is that women’s energy is systematically deflected from birth to puberty, so that when they come to maturity they have only fitful resource and creativity.

In speaking of energy, I have had to use terms like resource, application, initiative, ambition, desire, motive, terms which have a masculine ring, because they convey marginal meanings which are incompatible with femininity. It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student’s desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role. In fact the chief instrument in the deflection and perversion of female energy is the denial of female sexuality for the substitution of femininity or sexlessness. For, no matter which theory of the energy of personality we accept, it is inseparable from sexuality. McDougall called it élan vital, Jung and Reich called it libido, Janet called it tension, Head called it vigilance, Flügel called it orectic energy.[2]. All the terms amount to the same thing. One of the errors in the traditional theory is that it presupposes a sort of capitalist system of energy, as a kind of substance which must be wisely invested and not spent all at once.[3] In fact, as we ought to know from the concept of energy we have derived from physics, energy cannot be lost but only converted or deflected. Freud saw that repression employs energy which might otherwise be expressed in creative action: what happens to the female is that her energy is deflected by the denial of her sexuality into a continuous and eventually irreversible system of repression. The women students expended as much energy taking notes and being early and attentive to lectures as their male counterparts did in exploring the subject: in the laboratory they expended it by dropping things and asking silly questions, fussing and fumbling. Male energy is contoured and deformed too, but in a different way, so that it becomes aggression and competitiveness. The female’s fate is to become deformed and debilitated by the destructive action of energy upon the self, because she is deprived of scope and contacts with external reality upon which to exercise herself.

The degree and essential nature of any human being’s sexuality extends into the highest pinnacle of his spirit.

Nietzsche

Energy is the only life and is from the body … Energy is eternal Delight.

Blake

The acts of sex are themselves forms of inquiry, as the old euphemism ‘carnal knowledge’ makes clear: it is exactly the element of quest in her sexuality which the female is taught to deny. She is not only taught to deny it in her sexual contacts, but (for in some subliminal way the connection is understood) in all her contacts, from infancy onward, so that when she becomes aware of her sex the pattern has sufficient force of inertia to prevail over new forms of desire and curiosity. This is the condition which is meant by the term female eunuch. In traditional psychological theory, which is after all only another way of describing and rationalizing the status quo, the desexualization of women is illustrated in the Freudian theory of the female sex as lacking a sexual organ. Freud may not have intended his formulations to have been taken as statements of natural law, but merely as coherent descriptions of contingent facts in a new, and valuably revealing terminology; nevertheless he did say:

Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concept of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, it would also be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessarily of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or women, and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.[4]

If we are to insist on the contingency of feminine characteristics as the product of conditioning, we will have to argue that the masculine-feminine polarity is actual enough, but not necessary. We will have to reject the polarity of definite terms, which are always artificial, and strive for the freedom to move within indefinite terms. On these grounds we can, indeed we must reject femininity as meaning without libido, and therefore incomplete, subhuman, a cultural reduction of human possibilities, and rely upon the indefinite term female, which retains the possibility of female libido. In order to understand how a female is castrated and becomes feminine we must consider the pressures to which she is subjected from the cradle.

Baby

When a baby is born it has remarkable powers; it can stand upright, move its head about, its toes are prehensile, and its hands can grasp quite strongly. Within hours these powers fail, and the child must laboriously relearn skills it orginally had. Nowadays we do not swaddle children so that they are transformed to rigid cigar-shapes which Mother can dispose of as she pleases, but we still treat a baby as a cross between a doll and an invalid. The initial struggles to move are quickly controlled by the nurse who applies the iron clutch on the back of the neck and the bottom which holds baby motionless. He may not be swaddled but he is put to bed and wrapped up tight. This process is somehow known not to be awfully good for him, for premature and weak babies are not subjected to it. It is in fact the cheapest and easiest way of insuring against heat loss: we might profitably wonder how the humidi-cribs and overhead infra-red heaters which are used in special cases have influenced the formation of the child’s psyche, and then how the child reacts to the eventual swaddling which will take place as soon as he is strong enough.

Throughout the whole animal kingdom every young creature requires continual exercise, and the infancy of children, conformable to this intimation, should be passed in harmless gambols, that exercise the feet and hands, without requiring every minute direction from the head, or the constant attention of a nurse … The child is not left a moment to its own direction, particularly a girl, and thus rendered dependent – dependence is called natural.

Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, 1792, pp.83–4

My mother groaned, my father wept;

Into the dangerous world I leapt,

Helpless, naked, piping loud,

Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.[1]

Energy does seem diabolical to us, because our whole culture is bent on harnessing it for ulterior ends: the child must be civilized; what this means is really that he must be obliterated. From the beginning he is discouraged from crowing and exercising his lungs at any time or in any place where it might inconvenience the conduct of adult intercourse. The new baby has enormous curiosity, and an equal faculty for absorbing information, but he spends all of it on specially constructed environments, featuring muted sounds, insipid colours, and the massive, dominating figure of Mother. The intense absorption of the baby in one human being, whose familiarity gradually becomes indispensable to him, is a necessary factor in the development of the character which is considered normal in our society. The prejudice against the substitution of any other person or number of persons for the omnipotent mother is very strong indeed. Even if the researches of Dr Jaroslav Koch in Prague, who has kept babies in a special free environment with the result that they can climb ladders at eight months, were to prove beyond doubt that the child’s acquisition of all faculties is retarded ten-fold or a hundred-fold by the role he must play as Mother’s product, her toy and her achievement, his conclusions would be ignored by a culture which insists upon mother-domination as a prerequisite for character formation.[2] The child’s attention must be weaned away from exterior reality on to an introverted relationship of mutual exploitation which will form the pattern of his future compulsions. Every marriage re-enacts the Oedipal situation: children growing without any idea of the symbiosis of mother and child might be promiscuous or not, but they would not display the kind of obsessive behaviour in their relationships which suggests security and permanence.

The babies did not go towards the things which it was supposed would have pleased them, like for example, toys; neither were they interested in fairy stories. Above all they sought to render themselves independent of adults in all the actions which they could manage on their own; manifesting clearly the desire not to be helped, except in cases of absolute necessity. And they were seen to be tranquil, absorbed and concentrating on their work, acquiring a surprising calm and serenity.

Maria Montessori, ‘Il Bambino in Famiglia’, 1956, p.36

‘I have no name:

I am but two days old.’

What shall I call thee?

‘I happy am,

Joy is my name.’[3]

The newborn baby is not conscious of any distinction between himself and everything he sees. He is first conscious of his ego when some wish of his is not gratified, and by frustration and confusion he finds the difference between himself and his mother.[4] Thus the first act of the ego is to reject reality, to adopt an inimical and anxious attitude to it. This sense of separateness and limitation inside the self is carefully fostered in our culture, to become the basis of our egotistic morality, which acts not from understanding and feeling the repercussions of action upon the community because of the continuity between the self and the rest, but by laws and restrictions self-imposed in a narcissistic way. The child’s internal monitor must be set up, his conscience, better named his anxiety and his guilt. This process may fail or take a wrong turning very early on. Autism and other forms of disturbance make their appearance in children very early, and they are made the basis for rejection and segregation of the children away from the batches who are accepting their conditioning without difficulty. The high incidence of these troubles in gifted children would seem to indicate a correlation between the strength of the child’s energy and the effect of the curbing upon it: for that such children can show any signs of ability at all is itself remarkable. It used to be the case that disturbed children were drilled and disciplined into order, and merely kept in special institutions where their failure to adapt was treated as a congenital pathological condition. It took a very gifted and courageous woman to penetrate these asylums, and begin reversing the processes of conditioning so that these children could start again on a less disastrous course.

Montessori’s methods were so obviously successful that they have been made the basis of most infant schooling in England and Europe, but the significance of her insights as criticisms on the bringing up that children are subjected to outside school and in the crucial years before school has not been understood. As a result primary schooling is so far ahead of other forms of education in this country that new crises occur in the relationship between school and home, and between the junior school and the senior schools. In opening up the classroom so that her retarded children could run it, Montessori created a situation which was necessarily unique. There are intrepid schoolmistresses in England who move about undisciplined classrooms, listening to the children when they stand up to communicate to the group the results of their own inquiry, but most school-mistresses are too nervous to invite fruitful disorder, most classrooms are too crowded to tolerate such methods, and most schools have not the money for books and the other resources of such study. Even at university level I have found it impossible so far to run a research laboratory which would be a similarly spontaneous cooperative effort. Montessori tells moving stories of how the children expressed their corporate respect for a royal visitor, of how one child, having been told of an earthquake in Southern Italy, wrote upon a board, ‘I am sorry I am so small’, so that she thought he had failed to accept what he had heard, until he added the extra clause which explained that he would have liked to help, and so wrote his first ever compound sentence. Her children progressed beyond the usual achievements of their own age groups, but I guess that if follow-up studies had been made of their problems of adjusting in a world which cannot use spontaneity and cooperation the picture might have been more depressing. Montessori’s basic assumption is simple, but radical:

A single fact lies at the source of all deviations, viz., that the child has been prevented from fulfilling the original pattern of his development at the formative age, when his potential energies should evolve through a process of incarnation … thus welding the acting personality into unity. If this unity is not achieved, through the substitution of the adult for the child or through a want of motives of activity in his environment, two things happen: psychic energy and movements must develop separately, and a ‘divided man’ results. Since in nature nothing creates itself and nothing destroys itself, and this is especially true in the cases of energies, these energies since they have to work outside the scope designated for them by nature become deviated … They have become deviated above all because they have lost their object and work in emptiness, vagueness and chaos. The mind that should have built itself up through experiences of movement, flees into fantasy.[5]

The flight into fantasy is sanctioned in our culture, because it is part of the limitation of self-development which we call civilization. Although some aspects of it, like fetishism and masturbatory practices, are deplored, in general it is seen as a necessary and even pleasant concomitant of repression. Whole theories of art have been built up on the assumption that the proper function of art was to provide a harmless fantasy expression of tendencies which would otherwise have been destructive or anti-social.

So far we have not adduced anything about the repression of psychic energy in children which would apply to girls more than to boys, for both are treated in the same way up to a certain age. Discrimination does begin fairly early, however, despite the staunch refusal of British educators to distinguish between boys and girls in their primary schooling. Some baby girls are still dressed in pink rather than blue, are put into frilly, fragile dresses and punished for tearing and soiling them. Some have their hair curled up and bows put in it, and are told that they are pretty and Daddy’s girl and so on. Even for the little girls who have rompers and no fuss with hair and Curly-pet and other infantile cosmetics, a system of rewards and encouragements begins to operate fairly early on. No one wants to bring up a child who doesn’t know what sex he is, and in default of any other notion of female sexuality the styles of femininity are inculcated almost imperceptibly from the beginning. The baby soon discovers how to be coy and winsome, how to twist Daddy around her little finger.[6] When little boys discover the advantages of coyness they are eventually shocked out of them when their baby curls are shorn, but the little girl is praised and encouraged to exploit her cuteness. She is not directly taught how to do it, she simply learns by experience. It is an odd reflection that while we hear voices raised in protest against the destruction of innocence occasioned by showing sex films in the junior school, no voice is heard exclaiming at the awfulness of being flirted with by a three-year-old.

For little boys, a time eventually comes, soon or late, when the umbilical cord is finally broken, and the relationship with Mother becomes more distant. Where that does not happen, as it does not in strong matriarchies like the Jewish family, the result is what Philip Roth lamented in Portnoy’s Complaint:

Ma, ma, what was it you wanted to turn me into anyway, a walking zombie like Ronald Nimkin? Where did you get the idea that the most wonderful thing I could be in life was obedient? A little gentleman? Of all the aspirations for a creature of lusts and desires! ‘Alex,’ you say, as we leave the Weequahic Diner – and don’t get me wrong, I eat it up: praise is praise, and I take it however it comes – ‘Alex,’ you say to me all dressed up in my clip-on tie and my two-tone ‘loafer’ jacket, ‘the way you cut your meat! the way you ate that baked potato without spilling! I could kiss you, I never saw such a little gentleman with his napkin in his little lap like that.’ Fruitcake, Mother. Little fruitcake is what you saw – and exactly what the training programme was designed to produce. Of course! Of course! The mystery really is not that I’m not dead like Ronald Nimkin, but that I’m not like all the nice young men I see strolling hand in hand in Bloomingdale’s on Saturday mornings.[7]

What happens to the Jewish boy who never manages to escape the tyranny of his mother is exactly what happens to every girl whose upbringing is ‘normal’. She is a female faggot. Like the male faggots she lives her life in a pet about guest lists and sauce béarnaise, except when she is exercising by divine maternal right the same process that destroyed her lusts and desires upon the lusts and desires of her children.

Little boys can get out of their mother’s way, eventually want to and are encouraged to. Little girls are not. It is agreed that ‘girls take more bringing up’ than boys: what that really means is that girls must be more relentlessly supervised and repressed if the desired result is to ensue.[8] A girl is early introduced to her menial role, as her mother teaches her household skills (mirabile dictu!) and her recoil from external reality is reinforced by the punishments she gets for wandering off on her own. While little boys are forming groups and gangs to explore or terrorize the district,[9] she is isolated at home, listening to tales of evil-minded strangers. Her comparative incarceration is justified in the name of protection, although the home is the most dangerous place there is. She is taught to fear and distrust the world at large, for reasons which are never clearly stated. As a form of forearming this forewarning is notoriously unsuccessful. Sexual desires are not so lacking in resource that they cannot attack little girls as they go upon those errands and journeys that are sanctioned by Mother. When a little girl who missed her bus rang her mother from the bus-stop one evening, so spending the sixpence that would have been her fare for the next one, her mother told her to walk home because she didn’t have the car. The child went on her way weeping and terrified, and was accosted by a smiling stranger who abducted, raped and strangled her. The commonest result of the dark warning system is that when little girls do meet an exhibitionist or do happen to talk to a stranger who does something odd to them, they are too frightened and guilty, as well as too worried about the effect on their parents, even to tell them. It is a contributing factor in the pattern of child violation that little girls think of themselves as victims, and cannot even summon the energy to scream or run away. Because they are prevented from understanding the threat, they can have no adequate defence. The bitterest irony is that the child violators are themselves products of the same clumsy conditioning.