The Female Eunuch

  Girls who seek an alternative to ancillarism in a vocation often dream of acting as a way out. Most of the few women who shaped our century were actresses, if the Sunday Times is to be believed. Michael Croft, director of the National Youth Theatre, warned girls not to seek this alternative. In new plays, he remarked, there are only two female parts to every five male parts. In the profession as a whole there is always four-fifths unemployment, and most of the unemployed are women. And yet, of 4,150 applicants for the Youth Theatre, which had only 200 places to offer, two-thirds were girls.20 For girls who want to exploit their beauty, modelling may seem to offer another way out, but even after training in deportment and the use of cosmetics the aspiring model must get together a composite of good photographs, and hawk it around the agencies.21 The most successful models have been taken up by photographers, a profession dominated by men with a few remarkable exceptions. A model in work will find that she is paid months after she has done the work, no matter how diligently her agency works to collect the money for her; most often she will find that she is not in work, and must resort to more ignoble expedients to make ends meet. Nude modelling for girlie mags pays very well, but the indignities are almost insupportable. Bob Guccione of Penthouse boasts that his girls are put on the pill so that their breasts and buttocks swell, sent to Tangier to suntan, have their teeth capped, have moles removed, are clothed, coifed and manicured at the expense of the magazine, and then paid £200 a day for a week while they are photographed.22 They are persuaded to pose by a mixture of flattery and gin. Ideally, film offers and further modelling ensue; if not, there you are, moleless, straight toothed, suntanned, and swelling, with a thousand pounds to lose through heavy taxation and further investment in the image.

  Female entertainers are unionized, whether they be dancers, singers, or strippers,23 but it is a long row to hoe, and no amount of unionization can guarantee work or regular recurrence thereof. Girls being appraised by prospective employers in these ‘professions’ have horrifying tales to tell, most of which are apocryphal, but I can remember humiliations myself which I had rather not undergo. When I went recently to present myself to the producer of a well-known TV series at his request, or so I supposed, he sneaked in a wet kiss and a clutch at my breasts as an exercise of his power, a privilege which he could not have exacted from any of the men who have appeared on the same programme. I have since instructed my agent to turn down any offer of work from him, but most girls would not be in a position to do that. Nevertheless, a gamble is probably better for the soul than ignominious servitude: a girl who thinks she has real talent for entertaining has really no option but to try it. Most of them eventually acquire a husband at their backs to keep them when they are ‘resting’. The entertainment business has always been cheek-by-jowl with prostitution from the days when leading ladies of Drury Lane and the Comédie Française were also the leading courtesans. Many a prostitute, whether she calls herself a call-girl, a hostess, or a common whore, imagines that she is exploiting the male sex, and perhaps she is as long as she can retain her emotional independence, but the role of the ponce, the impresario of whoring, is too established for us to suppose that prostitutes have found a self-regulating lifestyle. The master ponce of western society is Hugh Hefner, who invented brothels where the whores are only to be looked at, which are brothels just the same. Every Bunny is a B-girl. As an alternative to nursing or outworking, waitressing in rabbit ears and a scut is not conspicuously preferable. The female entertainer is so often exploiting her attractiveness as a sexual object that her situation is a parallel to these. In seeking protection from sexual exploitation she may often find herself more tyrannized over by a minder than she ever would have been by a boss. She may be more than ever a valuable property for someone else, so that even her genuine talent may be obscured in the bally-hoo of the sexual object. It still comes as a surprise to most people to learn that Marilyn Monroe was a great actress, most pitifully to Marilyn herself, which is one of the reasons why she is dead.

  There are, there must be, alternatives to such exploitation. As an academic, I daresay I have found one. I do receive equal pay; I was appointed in preference to male competition and nothing can prevent me from being promoted in the natural course of events. Guiltily I must also admit that I did not toil particularly hard to attain what academic distinction I have. As a female lecturer at a provincial university I have to tolerate the antics of faculty wives, but they are fairly easy to ignore. Probably I had to attain more striking academic distinctions than a man would have had to be awarded my present appointment but I cannot prove this. Perhaps if I had been a man I would have been offered a fellowship at Cambridge. The odds against the average pubescent girl pursuing her education are long, however, because of the loss of enterprise and energy which accompanies female puberty. The prejudice that academic women are neurotic is justified in actual experience if not in theory, but if a girl feels that she can make it there is no reason why she shouldn’t. Teaching in other institutions is still the avocation favoured by intelligent girls, but it is, as teachers will be quick to tell although they are slow to take action about it, a difficult and unrewarding life. Men following this woman-dominated profession found conditions and salaries intolerable and the predominantly female membership of the National Union of Teachers so inert and apathetic that they founded the National Association of Schoolmasters in order to take militant action to improve their situation. The NUT finally followed their lead and rejected the parity swindle, initiating a series of strikes in the winter of 1969—70. Needless to say, all the spokesmen for the union were male—of forty-four members on the executive only four were women.

  A girl who studies medicine will qualify if she works hard enough—but it is true that women patients prefer male doctors and so do men. A girl may qualify as an architect or an engineer and if she can get employers to regard her seriously she may do well. Evidence is that women who learn a trade like electrical engineering or radio operating can find no employment.24 Female chemists and scientists can win the Nobel Prize, if they are researchers, but they are unlikely to become heads of professional research establishments. In chasing all these asexual academic attainments a girl faces one relentless enemy—her family. The constant recriminations, the lamentations that she is missing out on what makes being a girl such fun, on dating and pretty clothes, that she will waste her training by getting married and so forth, the whole tiresome rigmarole, wears down her resistance from day to day. The pressure of home duties which are spared a boy in her situation is not relieved, unless she goes away to study at a distant university, an expedient which may meet with parental disapproval. A girl’s emotional welfare is so much a matter of the demeanour of men towards her that she may jeopardize her academic chances by emotional involvement. I can testify to the wasteful effects of emotional involvement on studying women from personal experience as a tutor in universities. Men may take their pleasures how and where they will or not at all: girls feel rejected without male attention, and degraded by anything less than total involvement, and as long as this is the case they are highly likely to be academic casualties. Girls are seldom brilliant, and men sneak the top honours in the depressing majority of cases, while a girl who wants to enjoy equal opportunity with men in professional matters must not equal them but positively outstrip them because of the initial prejudice against her. If she feels that she must also retain her sexual identity by being feminine the conflict of desires can have radical effects.

  There are success stories about women, and it is time, after such a depressing picture, to tell them. Asha Radnoti graduated with honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, and was offered the usual female employment, teaching, by the Oxford appointments board. She turned down teaching, and jobs at IBM and other management consultants, for a position as analyst in the investment research department of the Prudential. After eighteen months there she went to work for a Canadian investment banking firm as assistant to the investment di
rector, and is now Portfolio Manager for the Castle Britannia Unit Trust Group, with day-to-day responsibility for the investment of more than four million pounds. Miss Ishbel Webster spent twelve years working as a depilator in the Tao Clinic before she patented her own formula for an aerosol depilator called Spray Away. Jennifer Phillips sold her own comedy series Wink to Me Only. Turi Wideroe is the first woman pilot to be employed by a commercial airline. Mrs Nora Rotheroe began as a housemaid in Camden Town, talked her way into a job as a mobile supervisor finding cleaning work and estimating costs for her firm, to the position of a director of Acme, Britain’s largest firm of industrial cleaners, and finally chairman of Multi-Office Services Ltd. Mrs Margot Newlands is first woman director of Thomas de la Rue International. Mrs Margery Hurst is a millionairess and joint chairman of Britain’s biggest secretarial agency, the Brook Street Bureau. Verite Collins invented her own firm of demonstrators and saleswomen for British goods overseas, the Union Jills, and became a company director of the agencies and firms that arrange such trade exhibitions. The clothing industry boasts many canny and creative women, like Mary Quant, Dorothy Tyoran, Sybil Zelker, Gina Fratini, Rosalind Yehuda, Marion Foale and Sally Tuffin, Fiona Browne (Spectrum), Janet Lyle (Annacat), Alice Pollock, Lee Bender, and the redoubtable Biba. Another field in which women have considerable success is journalism and writing generally; the number of female journalists and novelists who have achieved distinction in our age is too great and they are too well-known to need listing here. In television, women have been well-represented, although the present tendency is towards male replacements for Grace Wyndham Goldie, BBC TV current affairs chief, Catherine Dove (Producer of Panorama), and Mary Somerville (Head of Schools Broadcasting). Female news readers have been supplanted by men, and even female producers have failed to proceed up the management ladder, but Yvonne Littlewood still produces light entertainment, Paddy Foy music, Margaret Douglas current affairs and Maggie Dale ballet. After Dame Ninette de Valois at Sadler’s Wells, female producers have open opportunity, and Joan Littlewood is one of the most influential theatrical personalities of our age. Lloyd’s have forty applications on their books after declaring women eligible for entry in February this year, and the Stock Exchange continues to debate the admission of women to the floor, while Miss Muriel Burley, a candidate since 1962, awaits the decision that will enable her to be a partner or begin her own brokerage firm. The first woman judge has been appointed.25

  It seems that woman has more likelihood of success the higher she pitches her sights, and the more uncommon she is in her chosen environment. The highest value is placed by this society upon creativity, either in designing goods for large-scale consumption, or writing advertising copy or novels, or inventing forms of organization geared to current demand. British trade depends upon the export of ideas and expertise and men have no monopoly of either. Neither is incompatible with femininity for even Mary Quant has had her pubic hair shaved into a heart-shape by her adoring husband, if that is what you fancy. One of my favourite stories of female success is that of Mrs Pamela Porter, who owns her own car transporter and drives 1,500 miles a week with three spaniels in the cab for company. The onus is on women, who must not only equal men in the race for employment, but outstrip them. Such an incentive must ultimately be an advantage.

  Love

  The Ideal

  If the God who is said to be love exists in the imagination of men it is because they have created Him. Certainly they have had a vision of a love that was divine although it would be impossible to point out a paradigm in actuality. The proposition has been repeated like a mantra in hate-filled situations, because it seemed a law of life. ‘God is love.’ Without love there could have been no world. If all were Thanatos and no Eros, nothing could have come into being. Desire is the cause of all movement, and movement is the character of all being. The universe is a process and its method is change. Whether we call it a Heraclitean dance or the music of the spheres or the unending galliard of protons and neutrons we share an idea in all cultures of a creative movement to and from, moved by desire, repressed by death and the second law of thermodynamics. Various methods of formulation approximate knowledge of it at any time because the laws which seek to control and formalize such dynamics for the reasoning mind must be reformulated endlessly. Energy, creation, movement and harmony, development, all happen under the aegis of love, in the domain of Eros. Thanatos trudges behind, setting the house in order, drawing boundaries and contriving to rule. Human beings love despite their compulsions to limit it and exploit it, chaotically. Their love persuades them to make vows, build houses and turn their passion ultimately to duty.

  When mystics say that God is love, or when Aleister Crowley says ‘Love is the law’, they are not referring to the love that is woman’s destiny. Indeed, many Platonists believe that women were not capable of love at all, because they were men’s inferiors physically, socially, intellectually and even in terms of physical beauty. Love is not possible between inferior and superior, because the base cannot free their love from selfish interest, either as the desire for security, or social advantage, and, being lesser, they themselves cannot comprehend the faculties in the superior which are worthy of love. The superior being on the other hand cannot demean himself by love for an inferior; his feeling must be tinged with condescension or else partake of perversion and a deliberate self-abasement. The proper subject for love is one’s equal, seeing as the essence of love is to be mutual, and the lesser cannot produce anything greater than itself. Seeing the image of himself, man recognizes it and loves it, out of fitting and justifiable amour propre; such a love is based upon understanding, trust, and commonalty. It is the love that forms communities, from the smallest groups to the highest.1 It is the only foundation for viable social structures, because it is the manifestation of common good. Society is founded on love, but the state is not because the state is a collection of minorities with different, even irreconcilable common goods. Like a father controlling siblings of different ages and sexes, the state must bring harmony among the warring groups, not through love, but external discipline. What man feels for the very different from himself is fascination and interest, which fade when the novelty fades, and the incompatibility makes its presence felt. Feminine women chained to men in our society are in this situation. They are formed to be artificially different and fascinating to men and end by being merely different, isolated in the house of a bored and antagonistic being.

  From the earliest moments of life, human love is a function of narcissism. The infant who perceives his own self and the external world as the same thing loves everything until he learns to fear harm.2 So if you pitch him into the sea he will swim, as he floated in his mother’s womb before it grew too confining. The baby accepts reality, because he has no ego.

  The Angel that presided o’er my birth

  Said ‘Little creature, form’d of joy and mirth,

  Go love without the help of anything on Earth.’3

  Even when his ego is forming he must learn to understand himself in terms of his relationships to other people and other people in terms of himself. The more his self-esteem is eroded, the lower the opinion that he has of his fellows; the more inflated his self-esteem the more he expects of his friends. This interaction has always been understood, but not always given its proper importance. When Adam saw Eve in the Garden of Eden he loved her because she was of himself, bone of his bone, and more like him than any of the other animals created for his delectation. His movement of desire towards her was an act of love for his own kind. This kind of diffuse narcissism has always been accepted as a basis for love, except in the male-female relationship where it has been assumed that man is inflamed by what is different in women, and therefore the differences have been magnified until men have more in common with other men of different races, creeds and colours than they have with the women of their own environment. The principle of the brotherhood of man is that narcissistic one, for the grounds for that lov
e have always been the assumption that we ought to realize that we are the same the whole world over.

  The brotherhood of man will only become a reality when the consciousness of alien beings corrects man’s myopia, and he realizes that he has more in common with Eskimoes and Bengali beggars and black faggots than he has with the form of intelligent life on solar system X. Nevertheless, we are discouraged from giving the name of love to relationships between people of common interests, like footballers and musicians, especially if they are of the same sex. In denying such a description we ignore the testimony of bodies and behaviour. If Denis Law hugs Nobby Stiles on the pitch we tolerate it because it is not love. If Kenny Burell blows a kiss to Albert King on stage we congratulate ourselves on knowing how to take it. The housewife whose husband goes to the local every night does not tell herself that he loves his friends more than he loves her, although she resents it despite herself as an infidelity.

  The arguments about the compatibility of marriageable people stem from a working understanding of the principle of parity in love, but it is very rarely seen that compatible interests at the level of hobbies and books and cinema do not make up for the enormous gulf which is kept open between the sexes in all other fields. We might note with horror those counsels which advise girls to take up their boyfriends’ hobbies in order to seduce them by a feigned interest in something they like. In any event, the man’s real love remains centred in his male peers, although his sex may be his woman’s prerogative. Male bonding can be explained by this simple principle of harmony between similes inter pares, that is, love. On the other hand, female castration results in concentration of her feelings upon her male companion, and her impotence in confrontations with her own kind. Because all her love is guided by the search for security, if not for her offspring then for her crippled and fearful self, she cannot expect to find it in her own kind, whom she knows to be weak and unsuitable. Women cannot love because, owing to a defect in narcissism, they do not rejoice in seeing their own kind. In fact the operation of female insecurity in undermining natural and proper narcissism is best summed up by their use of make-up and disguise, ruses of which women are infallibly aware. Those women who boast most fulsomely of their love for their own sex (apart from lesbians, who must invent their own ideal of love) usually have curious relations with it, intimate to the most extraordinary degree but disloyal, unreliable and tension-ridden, however close and long-standing they may be.