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 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.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  When the water went down, one guy I read about in the paper found an eight-foot nurse shark flopping on his kitchen tiles. Whole bunches of people opened dresser drawers to find cottonmouths nesting next to their balled-up socks. There were also nutria-rat bites, kids mostly, toddlers who got cornered in their own yards. The rats were as big as raccoons and had front teeth shaped like chisels with bright orange enamel on them, which made the attacks particularly scary to think about. Neighbors came back to town bringing stories about cousins or friends of friends who’d been bitten, then gone through the agonizing rabies shots in the belly. I was a vulture for this kind of story. Grandma died during all this, of course. It turned out that she hadn’t been fully dead at Auntie’s, just in a coma. I’ve been told that she actually came out of that coma and spent a few days bedridden back at our house in Leechfield before she died. I don’t remember it that way. Apparently I just blanked out her last visit along with a lot of other things. She died, and I wasn’t sorry. The afternoon it happened, Frank Doleman came to the door of my second-grade class with Lecia in tow. Mrs. Hess told me to get my lunch box and galoshes. Out in the hall, Lecia was snubbing into a brown paper towel that covered half her face so I couldn’t see if she was ginning out real tears or just making snotty sounds in her head. Uncle Frank kneeled down eye-level to tell me that Grandma had “passed away.” I remember this phrase seemed an unnaturally polite way of putting it, like something you’d hear on Bonanza. All the local terms for dying started more or less coursing through my head right then. She bought the farm, bit the big one, cashed in her chips , and my favorite: she opened herself up a worm farm. (I had the smug pleasure once of using this term up north and having a puzzled young banker-to-be then ask me if these worm farmers in Texas sold worms for fishing, or what.) I sat in the back of Uncle Frank’s white convertible going home with Lecia blubbering nonstop in the front bucket seat and him putting his hammy hand on her shoulder every now and then, telling her it was okay, to just cry it out. What was running through my head, though, was that song the Munchkins sing when Dorothy’s house lands on the witch with the stripy socks: “Ding dong, the witch is dead.” I knew better than to hum it out loud, of course, particularly with Lecia making such a good show, but that’s what I thought. Daddy was squatting on the porch in his blue overalls and hard hat, smoking, when we pulled up. He’d obviously been called right out of the field.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  But the state had no jurisdiction over the conscience of the individual and no right, therefore, to fight heresy or lead a holy war. While it could have nothing to do with the spiritual realm, the state must have unqualified and absolute authority in temporal affairs. Even if the state were cruel, tyrannical, and forbade the teaching of God’s word, Christians must not resist its power.37 For its part, the true church, the Kingdom of God, must hold aloof from the inherently corrupt and depraved policies of the Kingdom of the World, dealing only with spiritual affairs. Protestants believed that the Roman Church had failed in its true mission because it had dallied with the sinful Kingdom of the World. Where premodern faith had emphasized the sacredness of community—the Sangha, the ummah, and the Body of Christ—for Luther “religion” was a wholly personal and private matter. Where previous sages, prophets, and reformers had felt impelled to take a stand against the systemic violence of the state, Luther’s Christian was supposed to retreat into his own interior world of righteousness and let society, quite literally, go to hell. And in his emphasis on the limited and inferior nature of earthly politics, Luther had given a potentially dangerous endorsement of unqualified state power.38 Luther’s response to the Peasants’ War in Germany showed that a secularized political theory would not necessarily lead to a reduction of state violence. Between March and May 1525, peasant communities in southern and central Germany had resisted the centralizing policies of the princes that deprived them of traditional rights, and by hardheaded bargaining, many villages had managed to wrest concessions from them without resorting to violence. But in Thuringia, in central Germany, lawless peasant bands roamed the countryside, looting and burning convents, churches, and monasteries.39 In his first pamphlet on the Peasants’ War, Luther had tried to be even-handed and had castigated the “cheating” and “robbing” of the aristocracy. But in his view the peasants had committed the unpardonable sin of mixing religion and politics. Suffering, he maintained, was their lot; they must obey the gospel, turn the other cheek, and accept the loss of their lives and property. They had had the temerity to argue that Christ had made all men free—an opinion that clearly chimed with New Testament teachings but cut no ice with Luther. He insisted that “a worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.”40 Luther encouraged the princes to use every possible means to suppress the peasant agitators: Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisoned, hurtful or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog: if you do not strike him, he will strike you and a whole land with you.41

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In New York he had founded the Jewish Defense League to avenge attacks on Jews by black youths, but when he arrived in Israel and settled in Kiryat Arba, he changed its name to Kach (“Thus it is!”), its goal to force the Palestinians to leave the Land. Kahane’s ideology symbolizes the “miniaturization” of identity that is one of the catalysts of violence. 59 His “fundamentalism” was so extreme that it reduced Judaism to a single precept. “There are not several messages in Judaism,” he insisted. “There is only one”: God simply wanted Jews to “come to this country to create a Jewish state.” Israel was commanded to be a “holy” nation, set apart from all others, so “God wants us to live in a country on our own, isolated, so that we have the least possible contact with what is foreign.” 60 In the Bible the cult of holiness had prompted the priestly writers to honor the essential “otherness” of every single human being; it had urged Jews to love the foreigner who lived in their land, using their memories of past suffering not to justify persecution but to sympathize with the distress that these uprooted people were enduring. Kahane, however, embodied an extreme version of the secular nationalism whose inability to tolerate minorities had caused such suffering to his own people. In his view, “holiness” meant the isolation of Jews, who must be “set apart” in their own Land and the Palestinians expelled. Some Jews argue that the Holocaust “summons us all to preserve democracy, to fight racism, and to defend human rights,” but many Israelis have concluded that the world’s failure to save the Jewish people requires the existence of a militarily strong Israel, and they are, therefore, reluctant to engage in peace negotiations. 61 Kahane, however, went much further. Messianic redemption, he argued, had begun after the Six-Day War. Had Israel annexed the territories, expelled the Arabs, and torn down the Dome, redemption would have come painlessly. But because the Israeli government wanted to appease the international community and refrained from this violence, redemption would come in a terrible anti-Semitic calamity, far worse than the Holocaust, that would force all Jews to leave the diaspora. 62 The Holocaust overshadowed Kahane’s ideology. The State of Israel, he believed, was not a blessing for Jews but God’s revenge on the gentiles: “He could no longer take the desecration of his Name and the laughter, the disgrace, and the persecution of the people that were named after Him.” Every attack on a Jew, therefore, amounted to blasphemy, and every act of Jewish retaliation was Kiddush ha-Shem, a sanctification of God’s name: “a Jewish fist in the face of the astonished gentile world that has not seen it for two millenniums [sic].” 63 This was the ideology that inspired Kiryat Arba settler Baruch Goldstein to shoot twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron on the festival of Purim, February 25, 1994.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Chivalry and all-marriage is really feudal, and Mill hates feudalism. At present little more than a “school of despotism in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished”89 the family can afford no real love to its members until it is based on a situation of total equality among them. His position of authority is less likely to inspire the husband to affection than to “an intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality; making him disdain a yoke for himself…he is abundantly ready to impose on others for his own interest and glorification.”90 With an admirable touch of candor, Mill admits that no man would wish for himself the conditions of life he chivalrously consigns to women: the pastoral coign of a Queen’s Garden would appall any man confined to it—perhaps Ruskin most of all. The single concession Ruskin’s sphere theory makes to its rule that male “duties,” meaning privileges, are “public” (war, money, politics, and learning) whereas female “duties,” meaning responsibilities, are “private,” e.g., domestic—is in the realm of philanthropy.91 In pursuit of its kind offices, Ruskin is inclined to permit woman a narrow latitude to step beyond her sphere, never into the great world of nineteenth-century reform, but into the little world of the homes of what were then known as the “honest poor.” There, while sewing garments and exchanging recipes, the respectable wife might make some minuscule restitution for the ravages her masculine class-counterpart had been busy accomplishing all day through his worldly prerogatives of politics, money, and technology. Ruskin, who had thought of a scheme whereby English boys might be “knighted” and English girls “invested” with the official title of “lady” under the auspices of a national chivalry movement something like the boy scouts, has a kindred inspiration for the adult middle class.92 The word “Lady,” he tells them, means “bread-giver”; or “loaf-giver”; “Lord” means “maintainer of laws.”93 Role should be determined accordingly: under the euphemism of “maintainer of laws” the male appropriates all power, and the female dispenses charity. In its ersatz-medieval character, the whole thing is not only depressingly fantastical, it is singularly inappropriate to the conditions of nineteenth-century industrialism whose nearly infinite economic injustices Ruskin felt so keenly. These could scarcely be ameliorated by the trilling charities of a middle-class housewife posing as some outlandish medieval almsgiver.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In formulating the theory of penis envy, Freud not only neglected the possibility of a social explanation for feminine dissatisfaction but precluded it by postulating a literal jealousy of the organ whereby the male is distinguished. As it would appear absurd to charge adult women with these values, the child, and a drastic experience situated far back in childhood, are invoked. Nearly the entirety of feminine development, adjusted or maladjusted, is now to be seen in terms of the cataclysmic moment of discovered castration. So far, Freud has merely pursued a line of reasoning he attributes, rightly or wrongly, to the subjectivity of female youth. Right or wrong, his account purports to be little more than description of what girls erroneously believe. But there is prescription as well in the Freudian account. For while the discovery of her castration is purported to be a universal experience in the female, her response to this fate is the criterion by which her health, her maturity and her future are determined through a rather elaborate series of stages: “After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect.”69 The female first blames her mother, “who sent her into the world so insufficiently equipped” and who is “almost always held responsible for her lack of a penis.”70 Again, Freud’s own language makes no distinction here between fact and feminine fantasy. It is not enough the girl reject her own sex however; if she is to mature, she must redirect her self positively toward a masculine object. This is designated as the beginning of the Oedipal stage in the female. We are told that the girl now gives up the hope of impregnating her mother, an ambition Freud attributes to her. (One wonders how youth has discovered conception, an elaborate and subtle process which children do not discover by themselves, and not all primitive adults can fathom.) The girl is said to assume her female parent has mutilated her as a judgment on her general unworthiness, or possibly for the crime of masturbation, and now turns her anxious attention to her father.71

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Because he understands how conditioning produces a sexual temperament appropriate to sexual role, Mill is in an excellent position to understand how woman is the product of the system which oppresses her: how all her education, formal and informal, is dedicated to perpetuating it. He also believes “the mental differences supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effects of the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no radical differences, far less radical inferiority of nature.”56 Mill’s description of the education assigned to women tallies exactly with Ruskin’s. Yet there is one alarming difference: Ruskin finds it a very good thing, whereas Mill despises it as a minimal literary acquaintance with decorative Culture deliberately designed to be superficial—in Mill’s derogatory phrase, “an education of the sentiments rather than of the understanding,”57 calculated to render women fit for submission, vicarious experience, and a service ethic of largely ineffective philanthropy. Since he has delineated their sphere, it remains for Ruskin to “fit” women to it. Whereas Mill is eager to train women in every branch of arts and science, to open professional learning to them, that the world’s available talent might be doubled-Ruskin would not be so precipitate: ‘We cannot consider how education may fit them for any widely extending duty until we are agreed what is their true constant duty.”58 Translated (it is continually necessary to translate chivalrous sentiment) this only means that women should not be educated in any real sense at all, least of all for the sake of education itself. Instead they should be indoctrinated to contribute their “modest service” to the male. Ruskin’s formula is an education deliberately inferior by any standard, and Ruskin’s standards are high in the case of young men. In an earlier lecture, he had derided short-sighted parents who aspired no further than adjusting their heirs to “their station in life.”59 He can rail at the pragmatic middle class for its unimaginative vocational interest, a low instinct for which he expresses an unqualified contempt, yet he feels it imperative that the education of women be no more ambitious than merely habituating them to “their place.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It is necessary to realize that the most sacrosanct article of sexual politics in the period, the Victorian doctrine of chivalrous protection and its familiar protestations of respect, rests upon the tacit assumption, a cleverly expeditious bit of humbug, that all women were “ladies”—namely members of that fraction of the upper classes and bourgeoisie which treated women to expressions of elaborate concern, while permitting them no legal or personal freedoms. The psycho-political tactic here is a pretense that the indolence and luxury of the upper-class woman’s role in what Veblen called “vicarious consumption”16 was the happy lot of all women. The efficacy of this maneuver depends on dividing women by class and persuading the privileged that they live in an indulgence they scarcely deserve. A use of intimidation in one class and envy in another effectively prevents solidarity. The young middle-class woman could be frightened into social and sexual conformity with the specters of governessing, factory work, or prostitution. And the less favored female is left only to dream of becoming a “lady,” the Single improvement to her situation she is permitted to conceive of, the hope of acquiring social and economic status through attracting the sexual patronization of the male. Despite the fact that class feeling prevented this from happening very often, it is a recurrent and favorite fantasy in the literature of the period. When the only known “freedom” is a gilded voluptuousness attainable through the largesse of someone who owns and controls everything, there is little incentive to struggle for personal fulfillment or liberation. To succeed, both the sexual revolution and the Woman’s Movement which led it would have to unmask chivalry and expose its courtesies as subtle manipulation. It would also have to cross class lines and join lady to factory hand, the loose and the respectable, in a common cause. To the extent it could be so, it succeeded. THE WOMAN’S MOVEMENT Education As a number of competent historians have already documented this event it is my purpose here Simply to recapitulate directing the reader’s glance across its general surface so that I may comment upon its effects in a wider cultural context and particularly that of literature. Curiously enough, the dictionary supplies us with a definition of “feminism” which is, in fact, neither more nor less than a complete and satisfactory characterization of the ends of the sexual revolution itself: “…a system of political, economic, and social equality between the sexes.” As this is so sweeping a formula, involving the radical transformation of an entire society with which this whole essay attempts to deal—a sexual revolution in fact-this section is confined to the Woman’s Movement and the concrete reforms it effected in the specific areas of education, the political organization of women (particularly around the issue of suffrage), and employment. We must acknowledge however, that most other related changes effected within society during the first phase arose from or co-operated with the vanguard which the Woman’s Movement represented.