Contempt

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Reason has always been an intruder in the area of sexual prejudice. Ruskin, who was by no means a stupid man, has recourse to less intellectual energy in “Of Queen’s Gardens” than anywhere else in his work. In turning his mind toward Lilies it was enough for him to rely on sentiment, a vague nostalgia about the heroic middle ages, and saccharine assertions about The Home. Mill remarks that one of the most tedious and characteristic mental habits of the nineteenth century is its reaction against eighteenth-century rationalism, and its quirk of trusting instead to “the unreasoning elements in human nature.”44 Ruskin’s lecture is a demonstration of this observation. If Ruskin may be said to have a thesis, it is altogether a simpler affair than Mill’s, calculated to stroke rather than ruffle his listeners. Beginning with the rather complacent assumption that the educated middle classes exercise a “kingship” over the “illguided and illiterate,” Ruskin’s task is simply to divide a little section of the realm off for Queens, or as he is pleased to put it, determine “what special portion of this royal authority, arising out of noble education, may be rightly possessed by women.”45 If there was just an element of pandering to social pretension in the industrialists he had addressed as “kings,” Ruskin is unrestrained in the unction he directs toward his female hearers, who “if they rightly understood and exercised this royal or gracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such benignant power would justify us in speaking of the territories over which each of them reigned as ‘Queen’s Gardens.’ “46 In professing that one cannot conclude what the “queenly power of women should be until we are agreed what their ordinary power should be,”47 Ruskin is only saying that the role of upper—and middle-class female is dependent on the nature and abilities of the female herself. Were these equal to the male’s, she could be a full member of the elite, not just the auxiliary he proposes. It was precisely to avoid the danger of sexual equality within this or any other class, that he and his fellows invented the doctrine of the separate spheres and proclaimed it “Nature.” The two great poles of influence in the Victorian period are Mill and Carlyle. Frequently at odds with the rational tradition which Mill represents, Ruskin, following Carlyle, tends to rely more upon emotionalism than reason. And to those under Carlyle’s influence Nature is not only an emotional term, but all too often an eminently convenient gadget which can be directed at random to justify class, absolutism, feudalism, or any other system they choose to endorse. Ruskin was never a democrat like Mil1.48 Instead, he combined moral outrage against the plight of the poor with an excited longing for the heroism and grace he found in aristocratic and medieval revivalism. Yet at his best moments he transcends this snobbery altogether in a splendid compassion for the poor, Biblical in the energy of its denunciation of Philistine avarice.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  When the Furies accuse him of matricide, Orestes dodges responsibility; he acted under orders from the Oracle of Apollo. The Furies refuse to believe “a god of prophecy” would recommend such a crime, so they put the prince on trial, assured that justice will be on their side. They have failed to reckon with patriarchal justice. When Orestes observes that they should have hounded Clytemnestra too for the murder she committed, they reply in all the confidence of the mother-right: “The man she killed was not of her own blood.”126 “But am I of my mother’s?” Orestes sneers. The Furies are appalled: “Vile wretch, she nourished you in her own womb. Do you disown your mother’s blood?”…“Do you deny you were horn of woman?”127 This might appear a difficult allegation to deny, but Greek patriarchy had already formulated a rather surprisingly politicized version of biology which Apollo expounds: The mother is not the parent of the child Which is called hers. She is the nurse who tends the growth Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male. So, if Fate spares the child, she keeps it, as one might Keep for some friend a growing plant… Father without mother may beget… This last statement would seem to be carrying the discovery of paternity, the knowledge of the seed, rather too far. In finding out his own part in the creation of human life, the male, who doubtless once believed that there could be motherhood without a father, has retaliated for his years of ignorance with overstatement. Since the mother’s role is observed, conspicuous, the child emerging from her very body, and the father’s role only inferred, one cannot but feel a certain awkwardness in this total expropriation of fertility. In the event his genetics fail to persuade, Apollo, sounding something like a mountebank, digs out the other card he holds in his sleeve: …We have Present, as proof, the daughter of Olympian Zeus: One never nursed in the dark cradle of the womb; This is the well-known device of hitting upon a quisling to deal the death blow. Athena, born full-grown from the head of her father Zeus, marches on, spoiling to betray her kind: No mother gave me birth. Therefore the father’s claim And male supremacy in all things, save to give Myself in marriage, wins my whole heart’s loyalty Therefore a woman’s death, who killed her husband, is, I judge, outweighted in grievousness by his. This sort of corroboration can be fatal. The Chorus of Furies may cry in vain “O Mother, O Darkness, look on us!” Zeus and the patriarchy have put out the eyes of the Great Mother while this “new” generation of gods “ride rough-shod over Elder Powers,” casting out the old fertility goddesses who preceded the Titans. Apollo even baits them: “You have as little honor amongst elder gods as amongst us, the younger. I shall win.” The trial is rigged; the Furies haven’t a chance.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The third school, which we shall call the school of fantasy, involves itself with a point of view nearly exclusively masculine. It often expresses the unconscious emotions of male response to what it perceives as feminine evil, namely, sexuality. However much this may resemble the old myth of feminine evil, there is something new about it—it is painfully self-conscious. Finding that there was much in its culture it could no longer take for granted, the Victorian period tends to exaggerate and be ill at ease in traditional gestures. In its fantasies of feminine evil there is something so uneasily self-aware that a number of tensions and overtones appear which one had not usually met with before in this convention. The disparity between the good and the evil, chaste and sensuous woman, figures older than Christianity, becomes far more overt than it had ever been previously, partly because the cover of religious sanction afforded by the figures of Eve and Mary had pretty well collapsed. Earlier periods had also cherished two separate and contradictory versions of woman—one vicious, one adulatory. But in no period of Western literature had the question of the sexual politics or of woman’s experience within it grown so vexing and insistent as it did in this. The myth of feminine evil appears more in the poetry of the age than in other literary forms. In the novel feminine evil is too likely to wear the recognizable social and economic garments of prostitution or penury; in prose fiction the sexuality projected upon the female demands the more honest explanation of the whore, the “fallen woman,” the servant seduced: Nancy, Tess, Esther Waters. The more accommodating vehicle of myth which is proper to poetry, deals actually—and rather transparently-with a sexuality the male has perceived in himself, and despising it, casts upon the woman. In the poetry of Tennyson, the myth combines with the other period legend of chivalry, and masculine sensibility weighs the virtuous woman against the vicious woman. We are told that it is the first of whom the poet approves, even if he fails to demonstrate it. Later on in Victorian poetry, there is less and less resort to chivalrous palliation. And with Rossetti and Swinburne, even the eternal need to vent disapproval on the malefic woman begins to disappear. It does so with a curious and highly significant novelty; what was once simply evil and terrifying remains all this, perhaps even more so, but it is now wonderfully attractive as well. The bitch goddess whom Mailer’s Rojack righteously strangles is transformed by fon de siècle into a dazzling apparition before whom a poet like Swinburne is willing to prostrate himself in paroxysms of masochistic ecstasy, and a playwright like Wilde is even willing to go so far as to identify himself with.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The chapter entitled “Gladiatorial,” a wrestling match between Birkin and Gerald, carried out in the luxurious Critch family library, both contestants being naked, is as close as Lawrence cared to come to sodomy. Held back by his own puritan reluctance in such matters he feels safer in flirting, since to his discretion, there is a strong danger of being branded effeminate. As a result, there is always something prurient about the homosexual strain in Lawrence. Though his prose can be as loving a caress to the male body as any of Genet’s, it is never as honest. Moreover, the projected masculine alliance, the Blutbruderschaft, is so plainly motivated by the rather sordid political purpose of clubbing together against women, that this too gives it a perverse rather than a healthy and disinterested character, either as sexuality or as friendship. If Hermione is the female enemy as intellectual rival, Gudrun is the enemy as rival in love. She is a sculptor, Lawrence’s only portrait of the woman as artist. Birkin, a school inspector whom we are to accept as an oracle in such matters, predicts she will fail, and her work is dismissed as “little carvings,” “little things,” hateful subtleties, which are a “sign of weakness.”110 When Gudrun sees Gerald swimming in his ancestral lake and envies his wealth, freedom, mobility, and masculine privilege, we are given to believe that she is a case of penis envy with whom Ursula compares very favorably by accepting their poverty, pointless employment, and close supervision within their father’s home. Ursula escapes all this by accepting Birkin as her husband and leader. For while she is merely an underpaid schoolteacher, Birkin is a superintendent, owns three houses, has a private income, servants, and an automobile. Gudrun, unmarried, continues to practice her art, a free lance and “Glücksritter.” Much is done to persuade the reader that she has made the wrong decision.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Lawrence later became convinced that the miner’s life and the curse of industrialism had reduced this sacred male authority to the oafishness of drinking and wife—and child-beating. Young Paul has been on the unpleasant end of this sort of power, and is acute enough to see that the real control lies in the bosses, the moneyed men at the top. Under industrialism, the male supremacy he yearns after is, in his eyes, vitiated by poverty and brutality, and it grants a noisy power over all too little. This is part of the unfortunately more ignoble side of Lawrence’s lifelong hatred for industrialism. In his middle period he was to concentrate his envy upon the capitalist middle classes, and in his last years he championed primitive societies, where he was reassured male supremacy was not merely a social phenomenon all too often attenuated by class differences, but a religious and total way of life. The place of the female in such schemes is fairly clear, but in Lawrence’s own time it was already becoming a great deal less so. As in The Rainbow, this novel’s real contrasts are between the older women like his mother, who know their place, and the newer breed, like his mistresses, who fail to discern it. Mrs. Morel has her traditional vicarious joys: “Now she had two sons in the world. She could think of two places, great centers of industry, and feel she had put a man into each of them, that these men would work out what she wanted; they were derived from her, they were of her, and their works would also be hers.”44 When Paul wins a prize for a painting at Nottingham castle, she crows “Hurrah, my boy! I knew we should do it!”45 For the rest, she is an eager devotee: “He was going to alter the face of the earth in some way which mattered. Wherever he went she felt her soul went with him. Whatever he felt her soul stood by him, ready, as it were, to hand him his tools.”46 She irons his collars with the rapture of a saint: “It was a joy to her to have him proud of his collars. There was no laundry. So she used to rub away at them with her little convex iron, to polish them till they shone from the sheer pressure of her arm.”47 Miriam’s mother, Mrs. Leivers, also goes a way toward making a god of the young egoist: “She did him that great kindness of treating him almost with reverence.”48 Lawrence describes with aplomb how Miriam idolizes Paul; even stealing a thrush’s nest, he is so superior that she catches her breath: “He was concentrated on the act. Seeing him so, she loved him; he seemed so simple and sufficient to himself. And she could not get to him.”49 Here we are treated not only to idealized self-portraiture but to a preview of the later godlike and indifferent Lawrentian male.

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  “In truth, if boys and girls are born equal, the little girls find themselves in a better situation. In the first place, the young girl is not subjected to the perverting conditions to which we are subjected. She has neither cigarettes, nor wine, nor cards, nor comrades, nor public houses, nor public functions. And then the chief thing is that she is physically pure, and that is why, in marrying, she is superior to her husband. She is superior to man as a young girl, and when she becomes a wife in our society, where there is no need to work in order to live, she becomes superior, also, by the gravity of the acts of generation, birth, and nursing. “Woman, in bringing a child into the world, and giving it her bosom, sees clearly that her affair is more serious than the affair of man, who sits in the Zemstvo, in the court. She knows that in these functions the main thing is money, and money can be made in different ways, and for that very reason money is not inevitably necessary, like nursing a child. Consequently woman is necessarily superior to man, and must rule. But man, in our society, not only does not recognize this, but, on the contrary, always looks upon her from the height of his grandeur, despising what she does. “Thus my wife despised me for my work at the Zemstvo, because she gave birth to children and nursed them. I, in turn, thought that woman’s labor was most contemptible, which one might and should laugh at. “Apart from the other motives, we were also separated by a mutual contempt. Our relations grew ever more hostile, and we arrived at that period when, not only did dissent provoke hostility, but hostility provoked dissent. Whatever she might say, I was sure in advance to hold a contrary opinion; and she the same. Toward the fourth year of our marriage it was tacitly decided between us that no intellectual community was possible, and we made no further attempts at it. As to the simplest objects, we each held obstinately to our own opinions. With strangers we talked upon the most varied and most intimate matters, but not with each other. Sometimes, in listening to my wife talk with others in my presence, I said to myself: ‘What a woman! Everything that she says is a lie!’ And I was astonished that the person with whom she was conversing did not see that she was lying. When we were together; we were condemned to silence, or to conversations which, I am sure, might have been carried on by animals. “‘What time is it? It is bed-time. What is there for dinner to-day? Where shall we go? What is there in the newspaper? The doctor must be sent for, Lise has a sore throat.’

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  When his hungers were appeased I thought to profit from his momentary calm to supplicate him to mitigate my lot. Alas! I was unaware that in such a genius, whereas the delirious interlude stimulates the penchant for cruelty into greater activity, the subsequent reflux does not by any means restore the honest man's pacific virtues to it; 'tis a fire more or less quickened by the fuel wherewith it is fed, but one whose embers, though covered with cinder, burn nonetheless. "And what right have you," Roland replied to me, "to expect me to sweeten your circumstances? Because of the fantasies I am pleased to put into execution with you? But am I to throw myself at your feet and implore you to accord favors for the granting of which you can implore some recompense? I ask nothing from you, I take, and I simply do not see that, because I exercise one right over you, it must result that I have to abstain from demanding a second; there is no love in what I do: love is a chivalric sentiment I hold in sovereign contempt and to whose assaults my heart is always impervious; I employ a woman out of necessity, as one employs a round and hollow vessel for a different purpose but an analogous need; but never according this individual, which my money and authority make subject to me, either esteem or tenderness, owing to myself what I get from her and never exacting from her anything but submission, I cannot be constrained, in the light of all this, to acknowledge any gratitude toward her.

• From My People (2022)

  “I’m Pete Sasser from the journalism school.” Pete had been a student there when I entered, and although I was a journalism major, I had little contact with the students when I was there, and have had almost none since I graduated. Pete said he was on the faculty now, and invited me over to see the new journalism school. I told him that I had heard that the dean had retired, but that I hadn’t known that the old building had been retired, too. We settled on three o’clock, which would leave me time to have lunch with some professor friends and to get from them some suggestions about whom I should see this time around. I had my own ideas about whom I did not want to see. Again, at lunch, I was told how impressed I would be with the changes. One of the group, my former classics professor, Ed Best, had just returned from the University of Alabama, where he had served as a judge in the Miss Homecoming contest. Among the contestants, he told me, were a Japanese girl and a black girl with an Afro, and they both finished in the top three, although Alabama was not ready for either one to reign as queen. “You won’t find anything like that here,” Dr. Best said, “but I do think you’ll find some things have changed.” After lunch, armed with a list of other names and places, I left the Holiday Inn and headed across the street to the first building I had ever set foot in at the university to have a talk with the new acting dean of student affairs, a young white Alabamian named O. Suthern Sims. On my way over, I caught a glimpse of the Kappa Alpha house. It had been one of several trouble spots which I generally tried to avoid. The fraternity brothers of KA could always be counted on to yell at least one mouthful of obscenities if Hamp or I was passing by their house. Most of the time, we pretended to ignore them. But every now and then, they would rile the normally calm, easygoing Hamp, and he would say, “Just look at the way they treat that flag they’re supposed to love so much,” referring to the Confederate flag. “They couldn’t be serious the way they leave it out in all kinds of wind and rain.” Even though it was a symbol of disgust to both of us, I think Hamp would have respected them a little more if they had shown some respect for what they were supposed to cherish. Now, there it was, tattered and rotting, but still flying. Across the street and inside the academic building where Hamp and I had registered for our first classes, Dean Sims was a welcome change from the tight-jawed, closed-minded segregationists who preceded him.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  While a married man, Aaron’s symptoms are an exhausting “withholding of himself,” “something in him that would not give in.”113 His wife confirms the diagnosis: “He kept himself back, always kept himself back, couldn’t give himself.”114 Coolly assuming that sexuality is not only the most important, but even the only significant experience of which woman is capable, Aaron takes great pleasure in depriving her of it: “All his mad loving was only an effort. Afterwards, he was as devilishly unyielded as ever.”115 Of course all this is “agony and horror”116 for a woman to endure “. in those supreme and sacred times which for her were the whole culmination of life and being, the ecstasy of unspeakable passional conjunction, he was not really hers. He was withheld.”117 We are told that this deliberate difficultness only makes him more precious to woman since “her sacred sex passion” is “the most sacred of all things for a woman.”118 Aaron has become the male analogue of what folk culture cans a “cock-teaser.” He has dinner in London with a young woman. The conversation goes like this: Josephine:“Won’t you kiss me?”Aaron:“Nay,” he said.Josephine:“Why not?”Aaron:“I don’t want to.”119Aaron later arrives at Lilly’s bachelor flat, drunk again and infected with influenza, brought on, we are told, because he has permitted himself to be seduced by the same lonely young woman: “I should have been an right if I hadn’t given in to her,” “I felt it go, inside of me, the minute I gave into her. It’s perhaps killed me,” he whines.120 Aaron has reached the point of utter frustration in his relations with women: they continue to refuse him the abject subordination he imagines is his desert as a male. After his latest humiliating experience, which has brought him to the edge of the grave, he resolves to be accessible only to relations with other males. Aaron and Lilly then commence to live in a peculiar domestic bliss, such as Simone de Beauvoir describes in another context as one of the “comedies of love,” a wishfulfilling scene whose scenario dictates that Aaron act as a surly adolescent in need of mothering reassurance. It is characteristic that when Lawrence can portray a male in bed, with another male in attendance, one of the two must be respectably ill, and nursed by the other. Accordingly, Aaron wastes away with a crudely symbolic stoppage of the bowels which only Lilly can cure. He does so in a remarkable manner, and by means of a rubdown, which is the novel’s surrogate for sodomy. It follows another Lawrentian pattern in being a couvade as well:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  A queen bee to desirable males, he is “man enough” to bully his faded and faithful wife. Kangaroo is a bizarre account of D. H. Lawrence’s extramarital fantasies, fantasies which are never to be charged against him, because they fall just short of consummation, while yet satisfying the whole pack of vanities such dreams spring from. The fantasy love object is male and therefore, by Lawrence’s lights, clearly superior to the uninteresting wifely bird in the hand. Yet for all the toying and flirtation, Lawrence is finally too puritanical or too timid to risk the accusation of “unnaturalness”—or more crushing—“unmanliness.” He has his code, and Kangaroo’s kiss is probably the sweeter for being foregone. By an ingenious fantasy solution, he has assimilated his cake, yet cannot be convicted of eating it. But the imaginary and surrogate quality of these relationships convinces us their character is predominantly sexual-political, rather than strong or active homosexual impulse. Nor can love between men ever really be the issue, for Lawrence generally meant only power by the word love, and, during his later period, was actually candid enough to adopt the correct term. V RITUAL The Plumed Serpent records that moment when Lawrence was led to the ultimate ingenuity of inventing a religion, even a liturgy, of male supremacy. Theological underpinnings for political systems are an old and ever-present need, and so in a sense, Lawrence is only being practical. One of the pillars of the old patriarchy was its religion, and as Lawrence was bored with Christianity, suspicious of its egalitarian potential, and quite uninterested in other established creeds, it was inevitable that he should invent one of his own. Yet as he requires only one service of the supernatural, he is content that it assume the blunt form of phallic worship: his totemic penis is alpha and omega, the word improved into Besh. That there is a great deal of narcissism in all this was fairly obvious from the inception of the impulse, and a factor in many of the Blutbruderschaft relations described in earlier novels. His phallic cult enables Lawrence to achieve another goal: by investing the penis with magical powers (which might be slightly harder to substantiate without a religious aura) he has been able to rearrange biological fact. For in the new system, life arises by a species of almost spontaneous generation from the penis, bypassing the womb. Now the penis alone is responsible for generating all the vital forces in the world. When one remembers the powers the womb held for Lawrence in The Rainbow, it is perhaps not so surprising that he should have wished to effect such drastic alterations in the “facts of life.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Just as Genet’s anti-morality is but an inversion of peasant folk-Catholicism—its sense of property, its literal apprehension of theological abstractions (grace, sin, etc.)—so his notions of sex role and rank are the most flat-footed ones available in his culture, quite without Lawrence’s subtlety, archaic in their direct presentation of power and subordination: a vicious and omnipotent supervirility contrasted to a Buttering helplessness and abjection. In his world of prostitution and crime the woman or queen is ruled by force, by violence, and by ostentatious masculine disdain. Her femininity is pure servility, graphically enlarged beyond that bare abstract, almost discreet outline codified and prescribed by Freudianism: “masochism” is simply open self-hatred, “narcissism” a realistic sense of the self as object (vanity is a male prerogative), and “passivity” frankly fear, despair, and resignation. Since the pervasive effect of Genet’s habitual ironic exaggeration is to unmask our common social hypocrisy, the fainter aspersion attached to the feminine by our other authors is enlarged to a candid repugnance everywhere in his work. There is scarcely need to fret over how Genet, a jailbird, may have come in touch with popular Freudianism (itself but a redaction of widespread and durable patriarchal assumptions) when far more remote literary references abound in his work, among them the most sophisticated allusions to the French poets. Dickens is also clearly an influence; the great trial scene in Our Lady of the Flowers is deliberately modeled on Fagin’s sentencing in Oliver Twist.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stones. She was indeed extremely well fed. Very much butchers’ meat, to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids, must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch, why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her; she appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa…Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans, perhaps I ought to say vases and goblets, were rolled here and there on the foreground; a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of certain upholstery smothered the couch, and cumbered the floor.184 This “coarse and preposterous canvas,” this “enormous piece of claptrap,” as Lucy nominates the masturbatory fantasy she perceives in it, is the male dream of an open and panting odalisque, the sheer carnality Boating always in the back of his mind, and can be matched only by its obverse—the image of woman he would foist on the woman herself. Cleopatra is for masculine delectation only, and when Paul catches Lucy contemplating the painting he is deeply shocked: “How dare you, a young person, sit coolly down, with the self-possession of a garçon, and look at that picture?”185 A despot, as Lucy describes him so often, he is deeply offended, even affronted, that a young woman should see what he immediately settles down to gaze at. Paul forbids Lucy to look upon Cleopatra, and forces her to sit in a dull comer and study several mawkish daubs the conventional mind has designed for her:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Genet’s pseudo—or antireligion of homosexuality and crime has a third element in its trinity-betrayal. Although his role calls for perfect loyalty, he delights in the pemdious,40 a subversive even in his own realm, so full of feminine guile that he corrupts and feminizes everything within reach, associating convicts with flowers, transforming the killer Harcamone’s heraldic chains and handcuffs into a network of roses, unmanning superman. Darling was sadly mistaken in his expectation of becoming a “double male.” After a few years with Divine, the mighty pimp is as effeminate as his mistress. Adrien Baillon, a promising young tough, is so infected by a brief cohabitation with Divine that he comes to be “Our Lady of the Flowers,” consents to attend a party in drag, and becomes a girl queen the same night. Under Divine’s influence even Seck Gorgui, her hulking he-man lover, is softened. In the magnificent set piece where the three (Seck, Our Lady, Divine) return bedraggled from their revels through the early morning streets, Seck succumbs to an infatuation with Our Lady. The eternally rejected woman, Divine has already lost her man by the time they catch a cab. Genet, underlining a rare event, first advises us to “bear in mind that a pimp never effaces himself before a woman, still less before a faggot,” and then describes how Seck, who, according to pecking order, should enter the taxi first, permits Our Lady to precede him.41 This unique instance of chivalry is but effeminacy in Seck; a sign of regard for his new favorite utterly out of character in one of his station. Our Lady of the Flowers was composed in prison while Genet was awaiting trial. The book is one long wish-fulfillment. It would seem that malice alone prompted him to invent the fantasy-figure called Marchetti—merely that he might be revenged on this handsome male by condemning him to a life sentence. “The charm that subjugates, the iron hand in the velvet glove,” the absolute “Beauty” which inspires him to gush, “I am touched at the thought of it and could we weep with tenderness over his handsome muscles” is first paraded before us only that Genet may, with stunning acrimony, exterminate it: Marchetti will remain between four white walls to the end of ends…It will be the death of Hope…I am very glad of it. Let this arrogant and handsome pimp in turn know the torments reserved for the weakly.42 Gloating over the fate he has bestowed upon “the pimp, the lady-killer, the hangman of hearts,” Genet addresses his creature with exquisite venom. “Your turn Marchetti…enjoy it as you can, deep in your cell. For I hate you lovingly.”43

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  John Thomas, this active miracle, is hardly matched by lady Jane, mere passive “cunt.” Praise for this commodity is Mellors’ highest compliment to his mistress: “Th’art good cunt, though, aren’t ter? Best bit 0’ cunt left on earth…Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee…Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty 0’ thee, lass.”7 The sexual mystery to which the novel is dedicated is scarcely a reciprocal or co-operative event—it is simply phallic. Mellors’ penis, even when deflated, is still “that which had been the power:” Connie moaning with “a sort of bliss” is its “sacrifice” and a “newborn thing.”8 Although the male is displayed and admired so often, there is, apart from the word cunt, no reference to or description of the female genitals: they are hidden, shameful and subject.9 Male genitals are not only the aesthetic standard, “…the balls between his legs! What a mystery! What a strange heavy weight of mystery…The roots, root of all that is lovely, the primeval root of all full beauty,”10 they become a species of moral standard as well: “The root of all sanity is in the balls.”11 Yet all that is disreputable, even whole classes of society, are anathematized by the words “female” or “feminine.” The scenes of sexual intercourse in the novel are written according to the “female is passive, male is active” directions laid down by Sigmund Freud. The phallus is all; Connie is “cunt,” the thing acted upon, gratefully accepting each manifestation of the will of her master. Mellors does not even condescend to indulge his lady in foreplay. She enjoys an orgasm when she can, while Mellors is managing his own. If she can’t, then too bad. Passive as she is, Connie fares better than the heroine of The Plumed Serpent, from whom Lawrentian man, Don Cipriano, deliberately withdraws as she nears orgasm, in a calculated and sadistic denial of her pleasure: By a swift dark instinct, Cipriano drew away from this in her. When, in their love, it came back on her, the seething electric female ecstasy, which knows such spasms of delirium, he recoiled from her…. By a dark and powerful instinct he drew away from her as soon as this desire rose again in her, for the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction, the throes of Aphrodite of the foam. She could see that to him, it was repulsive. He just removed himself, dark and unchangeable, away from her.12 Lawrentian sexuality seems to be guided by somewhat the same principle one finds expressed in Rainwater’s study of the working class (also the doctrine of the nineteenth-century middle classes)—“sex is for the man.”13 Lawrence’s knowledge of Freud was sketchy and secondhand, but he appears to be well acquainted with the theories of female passivity and male activity and doubtless found them very convenient. Ladies—even when they are “cunt”—don’t move. In both novels there are a number of severe reprimands delivered against subversive female “friction.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  He, going stately on his slim legs, walked after her, then suddenly, for pure excess, he gave her a light cuff with his paw on the side of her face. She ran off a few steps, like a blown leaf along the ground, then crouched unobtrusively, in submissive, wild patience. The Mino pretended to take no notice of her. He blinked his eyes superbly at the landscape. In a moment she drew herself together and moved softly, a fleecy brown-grey shadow, a few paces forward. She began to quicken her pace, in a moment she would be gone like a dream, when the young grey lord sprang before her and gave her a light handsome cuff. She subsisted at once submissively…In a lovely springing leap, like a wind, the Mino was upon her, and had boxed her twice, very definitely, with a white, delicate fist. She sank and slid back, unquestioningly. He walked after her and cuffed her once or twice leisurely.98 Ursula draws the parallel, in case we missed it: “It’s just like Gerald Critch with his horse—a lust for bullying—a real Wille zur Macht.”99 Birkin defends such conduct and brings home the moral: ‘With the Mino it is a desire to bring this female cat into pure stable equilibrium…It’s the old Adam…Adam kept Eve in the indestructible paradise when he kept her single with himself, like a star in its orbit.”100 And of course a star in Birkin’s orbit is exactly what Ursula’s position is to be; Birkin will play at the Son of God, Ursula revolving quietly at his side. According to a formula which Lawrence was to favor increasingly, Ursula is presented as an incomplete creature, half-asleep in the tedium of her spinster schoolmistress life. Birkin will awake her according to a Lawrentian convention whereby the male gives birth to the female. What is particularly surprising about all this is how very much Lawrentian marriage resembles a plunge into another sleep, even a death. Ursula resigns her position, allowing Birkin to dictate her letter of resignation. We are told over and over that the marriage is to bring her a new life, yet nothing materializes, and she becomes more and more her husband’s creature, accepting his instruction even in her own field of botany, which he entered at their first meeting by taking over her classroom, and goes on to master so that he may correct her on the species of a daisy. Lawrence tells us Ursula “was not herself—she was not anything. She was something that is going to be soon-soon-very soon…It was all like a sleep.”101 What she does “become” is only a nonentity, utterly incorporated into Birkin, his single follower, proselytizing and sloganeering “if only the world were he! If only he could call a world into being.”102

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  However complacent he may appear, the feminist movement appears to have posed a considerable threat to Freud. His statements on women are often punctuated with barbs against the feminist point of view. The charge of penis envy against all rebels is reiterated again and again, an incantation to disarm the specter of emancipated or intellectual women, oddities who are putting themselves to unnecessary trouble in a futile effort to compensate for their organic inferiority by stabs at cultural achievement, for which Freud assumes the possession of a penis is a sine qua non. He even complains that the women who consult him in psychoanalysis do so to obtain a penis.86 Since this is obscure, it is necessary to translate: female patients consulted him in the hope of becoming more productive in their work; in return for their fees Freud did what he could to cause them to abandon their vocations as unnatural aberrations.87 Convinced that the connection between the penis and intellectual ability is unquestionably organic, Freud protests with a genial shrug “in the psychic field the biological factor is really the rock bottom.”88 The intellectual superiority of the male, constitutionally linked with the penis, is close to an ascertainable fact for Freud, a rock bottom of remarkable comfort. Freud believed that two aspects of woman’s character are directly related to penis envy: modesty and jealousy. It is her self-despair over the “defect” of her “castration,” we are told, which gives rise to the well-known shame of women. One is struck at how much kinder Victorian chivalry could be with its rigamarole about “purity.” Freud designated shame as a feminine characteristic “par excellence.”89 Its purpose, in his view, is simply the concealment of her hapless defect. As among the primitives, so today, the woman hides her parts to hide her wound. When Freud suggests that modesty in women was originally designed “for concealment of genital deficiency” he is even willing to describe pubic hair as the response of “nature herself” to cover the female fault.90 Although it is one of Freud’s favorite notions that women have not, and for constitutional reasons cannot, contribute to civilization (Otto Weininger, a misogynist thinker to whom Freud was often indebted, thought genius itself masculine and a female genius a contradiction in terms) Freud does allow that women might have invented weaving and plaiting-discoveries that spring from an identical impulse—the need to hide their deformity.91

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  remained widespread background noise across medieval Catholic Europe, particularly in Marian devotional literature. [33] Evidently, alas, the mass Christmas extinction proved less than a final solution, needing continuing vigilance from all right-thinking people. The more unpleasant corners of the internet persist in reminding the right-thinking of its contemporary relevance, though anachronistically relating it to ‘homosexuals’. All this is a contrast with Byzantine Christianity (and therefore with northern Orthodoxy as well). Since the Orthodox retained marriage for parish clergy, their religious culture did not share Peter Damian’s pioneering linkage of hating sodomites and hating married priests. The main concern of the Orthodox Church was therefore to regulate inappropriate same-sex relationships in monasteries. Same-sex behaviour was disciplined within the Church’s penitential system – for instance exclusion from Communion – and the priorities in punishment are interesting reflections of strong boundaries on male identity. Shaving one’s beard off and thus resembling a woman carried harsher penalties than a man soliciting another man for sex, and mutual masturbation was regarded in Byzantine and northern Orthodox canon law as a good deal less serious than violating gender roles by anal intercourse with either sex. [34] Lesbian activities did not greatly concern the Orthodox, since they did not offend against gender boundaries; in Russia a greater worry was their possible link to widely surviving pre-Christian religious practices. So the common term for lesbians was the same as for female leaders in such cults: baby bogomerzskie , which may be translated delightfully and not inaccurately as ‘God-insulting grannies’. [35] Medieval Europe being medieval Europe, persecution of sodomites in the end produced a miracle story. In 1320 a man was caught in al fresco sex with a thirteen-year-old boy in the papal city of Avignon; the two of them were sentenced to be burned at the stake. As the flames consumed the adult, the boy was about to suffer the same fate when his anguished prayers aroused the pity not just of the watching crowd but of Our Lady herself, who loosened his bonds and released him (see Plate 27). The Pope, John XXII, was so impressed by Mary’s intervention that he built a votive chapel in her honour on the site of the burning, and the boy was also given an honourable tomb in Avignon’s Cathedral at his death fourteen years later. [36] The contrasting fates of this pair, fiery oblivion and near-canonization, reflect the ambiguity around those participating in same-sex acts and how penalties should apply to them. Were they, like Jews, condemned as sinners simply by their birth (cursed by an unnatural nature), or was their crime a conscious choice, like heresy, something capable of recantation? Perhaps they were doubly damned by simultaneously though illogically being like both Jews and heretics. [37] Yet Our Lady’s discrimination between the Avignon participants (no doubt conveniently harmonizing with that of many onlookers by the stake) is likely to have been an acknowledgement that a younger participant could be led on. It is a reminder that the reforming aspirations of a Gregorian persecuting society were complicated by the irrepressibly multiple voices of medieval Western Christendom. PLURAL VOICES IN A UNITED

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In sexually segregated situations the distinctive quality of culturally enforced temperament becomes very vivid. This is particularly true of those exclusively masculine organizations which anthropology generally refers to as men’s house institutions. The men’s house is a fortress of patriarchal association and emotion. Men’s houses in preliterate society strengthen masculine communal experience through dances, gossip, hospitality, recreation, and religious ceremony. They are also the arsenals of male weaponry. David Riesman has pointed out that sports and some other activities provide males with a supportive solidarity which society does not trouble to provide for femnles.57 While hunting, politics, religion, and commerce may play a role, sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement of men’s house comradery. Scholars of men’s house culture from Hutton Webster and Heinrich Schurtz to Lionel Tiger tend to be sexual patriots whose aim is to justify the apartheid the institution represents.58 Schurtz believes an innate gregariousness and a drive toward fraternal pleasure among peers urges the male away from the inferior and constricting company of women. Notwithstanding his conviction that a mystical “bonding instinct” exists in males, Tiger exhorts the public, by organized effort, to preserve the men’s house tradition from its decline. The institution’s less genial function as power center within a state of sexual antagonism is an aspect of the phenomenon which often goes unnoticed. The men’s houses of Melanesia fulfill a variety of purposes and are both armory and the site of masculine ritual initiation ceremony. Their atmosphere is not very remote from that of military institutions in the modern world; they reek of physical exertion, violence, the aura of the kill, and the throb of homosexual sentiment. They are the scenes of scarification, headhunting celebrations, and boasting sessions. Here young men are to be “hardened” into manhood. In the men’s houses boys have such low status they are often called the “wives” of their initiators, the term “wife” implying both inferiority and the status of sexual object. Untried youths become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a relationship also encountered in the Samurai order, in oriental priesthood, and in the Greek gymnasium. Preliterate wisdom decrees that while inculcating the young with the masculine ethos, it is necessary first to intimidate them with the tutelary status of the female. An anthropologist’s comment on Melanesian men’s houses is applicable equally to Genet’s underworld, or Mailer’s U. S. Army: “It would seem that the sexual brutalizing of the young boy and the effort to turn him into a woman both enhances the older warrior’s desire of power, gratifies his sense of hostility toward the maturing male competitor, and eventually, when he takes him into the male group, strengthens the male solidarity in its symbolic attempt to do without women.”59 The derogation of feminine status in lesser males is a consistent patriarchal trait. Like any hazing procedure, initiation once endured produces devotees who will ever after be ardent initiators, happily inflicting their own former sufferings on the newcomer.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Love, when possible, under Mailer’s sexual politic becomes a thoroughly ambivalent emotion. Or, as D.J. would put it, “love is dialectic, man, back and forth, hate and sweet.”82 Mailer is nothing if not sporting, and his combative urges, his eagerness after a sparring partner, causes the much lamented “bitchery” of the American woman to become a species of erotic currency. The desirable woman is more likely to be the tough fighting spirit of the heroine of “The Time of Her Time,” or the greedy if vacuous Guinevere of Barbary Shore, than Elena Esposito, the beaten loser of The Deer Park, in the novel “a cocker-spaniel sinking inch by inch into quick-bog,”83 but revamped into a feistier breed by the pert vulgarity she is given in the play. In arming his opponent, Mailer has of course no intention of losing the war. He just likes a fight and is concerned with keeping up its interest and assuring the paying seats that the male struggle to retain hegemony will have the spice of adventure about it. Lest the contestants require ideology, he has exercised some ingenuity in concocting an existentialist-flavored home brew seasoned for genital man and hereafter referred to as “sexistentialism.” The cult owes little to the French, a great deal to the Yank Army and the street. Mailer insists on life after death, if only, as D.J. puckishly reports, that the “beeps” of orgasm, here taken as” both the Grail quest84 and a record of personal achievement, may be recorded and rewarded somewhere beyond. Sexistentialism is therefore religious rather than philosophic. As practiced by women, it is merely a hunt for fertilization, a minimal affair. As practiced by men, however, it is a thrilling test of self, played according to a demanding performance ethic which steers the athletic “hunter-fighterfucker”85 past the land mines of homosexuality, onanism, impotence, and capitulation to women. Through the perils of sexual traffic with women the courageous may “lay questions to rest” and “build upon a few answers” having “tested himself” and “fought the good fight or the evil fight” he is hereafter “able to live a tougher, more heroic life,” his maleness certified, fortified.86 Little wonder that Mailer’s sexual journalism reads like the sporting news grafted onto a series of war dispatches. As the formula of “fucking as conquest” holds true, the conquest is not only over the female, but over the male’s own fears for his masculinity, his courage, his dominance, the test of erection. To fail at any enterprise is to become female, defeated by the lurking treachery of Freudian bisexuality, the feminine in a man giving out like a trick knee at a track meet.87 Since all this is so arduous, men are, Mailer believes, self-evidently entitled to victory, their “existential assertion.” Reminding his teammates that “nobody was born a man” Mailer lays down the regulations—“you earned your manhood, provided you were good enough, bold enough.”88

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In the experience of the American manchild sex and violence, exploitation and sentimentality, are strangely, even wonderfully, intermingled. Miller relates how, on one climactic day of his childhood, he murdered a boy in a gang fight, then slicked his hair and returned to the welcoming arms of unsuspecting Aunt Caroline, to bask in the maternal solicitude of her homemade bread—“Mothers had time in those days to make good bread with their own hands, and still do the thousand and one things which motherhood demands of a woman.”79 The same afternoon brings sexual initiation: “Joey was so happy that he took us down to his cellar later and made his sister pull up her dress and show what was underneath…Whereas the other urchins used to pay to make Weesie lift her dress up, for us it was done with love. After a while we persuaded her not to do it anymore for the other boys—we were in love with her and we wanted her to go straight.”80 The model of the adult world already shines through the boy’s excitement: violence, a male prerogative; sexuality, a secret and shameful province of the female, regulated by the cash nexus. And the pieties are neatly arranged: Weesie shall be saved and isolated into “decency” through “love” will mellow in time into Aunt Caroline’s handy ignorant nurturance. Through all his exhausting experiences with enthusiastic “bitches,” Miller never abandons the icons of his “pure,” early loves, immaculate creatures about whom, he is pleased to announce, he “never had an impure thought.” Four decades later his chivalrous ardor toward Una Gifford can still gush forth at the remembered echo of a pop tune: “…a thousand times beyond any reach of mine. Kiss me, kiss me again!” How the words pierced me! And not a soul in that boisterous, merrymaking group was aware of my agony…Sounds of revelry filled the empty street…It was for me they were giving the party. And she was there, my beloved, snow-blonde, starry-eyed, forever unattainable Queen of the Arctic.”81 Miller, in love, reverts to all the sentimental tokens of “respect” appropriate to a Victorian suitor. Floundering in a sentimentality largely narcissistic, full of a sludgy “idealism” that complements his cynicism, he sends flowers and writes long letters full of regressive daydreams. Rich in pathos as it is, Miller’s long, frustrating attachment to Mara is less a love story than the case history of a neurotic dependence.