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)

  Under the influence of Wilhelm Reich,51 the young Mailer once put himself forward as a hero of the sexual revolution, and true to form, saw it in terms of a stirring combat. But by his own account, Mailer’s political position is that of a “Left Conservative,”52 a confusing hybrid whose stress falls with increasingly apoplectic emphasis upon the latter term. And so the grand “war for greater sexual liberty”53 amounted to nothing more than a crusade for an increased explicitness in the description of sexual activity, capped with the privilege of printing the taboo diction of four-letter words. This is all right as far as it goes. But, by a nice historical irony, the sexual libertarianism of the sixties had, in only a few years, managed to exceed anything Mailer desired, and in the course of time his attitudes have hardened so they might do credit to a parish priest. He is lyric about “chastity,”54 ferocious about abortion, and wildly opposed to all birth control—“I hate contraception…it’s an abomination. I’d rather have those fucking communists over here.”55 Forbidding sexuality to the young by counseling abstinence, he condemns onanism in the enlightened’ manner of a Victorian physician: “Masturbation is bad,” it “cripples people” and ends in “insanity.”56 Finally outstripping both the Victorians and the Church, Mailer’s line would sit well on a Nazi propagandist: “The fact of the matter is that the prime responsibility of a woman probably is to be on earth long enough to find the best mate possible for herself, and conceive children who will improve the species.”57

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The Plumed Serpent is the story of a religious conversion. A rather sensible Irish woman arrives in Mexico, falls in with two ambitious intriguers who wish to set themselves up as incarnations of the ancient Mexican gods in order to take over the country and establish a reactionary government, unmistakably fascist in character, and awkwardly neo-primitivist in program. Mrs. Leslie is tom between her realization that this is all “high-flown bunkem,” and the hypnotic masculinity of Don Ramon and Don Cipriano. At last she capitulates to the latter and stays on, married to one man and tempted by both to join the pantheon in the secondary capacity of a goddess. The novel’s point of view is the woman’s; its point of interest is the two attractive males. The prose celebrates phallic supremacy continuously. Falling under Cipriano’s spell, Kate Leslie is there to observe the “living male power,” the “ancient phallic mystery,” and the “ancient god-devil of the male Pan,” “unyielding forever,” “shadowy, intangible, looming suddenly tall, and covering the sky, making a darkness that was himself and nothing but himself.”166 The heroes, Ramon and Cipriano, are Lawrentian men and mouthpieces, intellectual and earthy respectively. Together with the heroine, they form a characteristic Lawrentian triangle. Cipriano and Kate Leslie appear to be in love with Ramon, who appears to be in love with himself. A very superior being, chief of the deities, the ‘1iving Quetzalcoatl,” brother and successor to Jesus Christ, Ramon is understandably self-sufficient. But in more relaxed moments, he enjoys some peculiarly erotic communions with Cipriano, as well as the pleasure of withholding himself from Kate, who is too imperfect to deserve him. Leavis, and other critics, have remarked upon the impropriety of a heroine as the center of consciousness in this novel.167 There is some truth in the objection, for Kate Leslie is a female impersonator, yet one cannot neglect her utility as an exemplary case of submission, and the model femininity she represents is surely part of her value. When presented with “the old, supreme phallic mystery,” her behavior is unexceptional: after “submitting,” and “succumbing,” she abdicates self utterly and is “swooned, prone beneath, perfect in her proneness.”168 Ah! and what a mystery of prone submission, on her part, this huge erection would imply! Submission absolute, like the earth under the sky. Beneath an over-arching absolute. Ah! what a marriage! How terrible! and how complete! With a finality of death, and yet more than death. The arms of the twilit Pan. And the awful, half-intelligible voice from the cloud. She could conceive now her marriage with Cipriano; the supreme passivity, like the earth below the twilight, consummate in living lifelessness, the sheer solid mystery of passivity. Ah, what an abandon, what an abandon, what an abandon!—”169 Overcome by the prospect of this supine future, the lady exclaims “My demon lover!” this last epithet a sad instance of Coleridge fallen to the excited cliche of magazine prose.170

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

  “Yes, in the house of our employer, a scandal has arisen, and it is very difficult to view the matter clearly. The wife loved to amuse herself, and began to go astray. He is a capable and serious man. First, it was with the book-keeper. The husband tried to bring her back to reason through kindness. She did not change her conduct. She plunged into all sorts of beastliness. She began to steal his money. He beat her, but she grew worse and worse. To an unbaptized, to a pagan, to a Jew (saving your permission), she went in succession for her caresses. What could the employer do? He has dropped her entirely, and now he lives as a bachelor. As for her, she is dragging in the depths.” “He is an imbecile,” said the old man. “If from the first he had not allowed her to go in her own fashion, and had kept a firm hand upon her, she would be living honestly, no danger. Liberty must be taken away from the beginning. Do not trust yourself to your horse upon the highway. Do not trust yourself to your wife at home.” At that moment the conductor passed, asking for the tickets for the next station. The old man gave up his. “Yes, the feminine sex must be dominated in season, else all will perish.” “And you yourselves, at Kounavino, did you not lead a gay life with the pretty girls?” asked the lawyer with a smile. “Oh, that’s another matter,” said the merchant, severely. “Good-by,” he added, rising. He wrapped himself in his cloak, lifted his cap, and, taking his bag, left the car. CHAPTER II. Scarcely had the old man gone when a general conversation began. “There’s a little Old Testament father for you,” said the clerk. “He is a Domostroy,”[*] said the lady. “What savage ideas about a woman and marriage!” [*] The Domostroy is a matrimonial code of the days of Ivan the Terrible. “Yes, gentlemen,” said the lawyer, “we are still a long way from the European ideas upon marriage. First, the rights of woman, then free marriage, then divorce, as a question not yet solved.” . . . “The main thing, and the thing which such people as he do not understand,” rejoined the lady, “is that only love consecrates marriage, and that the real marriage is that which is consecrated by love.” The clerk listened and smiled, with the air of one accustomed to store in his memory all intelligent conversation that he hears, in order to make use of it afterwards. “But what is this love that consecrates marriage?” said, suddenly, the voice of the nervous and taciturn gentleman, who, unnoticed by us, had approached. He was standing with his hand on the seat, and evidently agitated. His face was red, a vein in his forehead was swollen, and the muscles of his cheeks quivered. “What is this love that consecrates marriage?” he repeated.

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

  “Ask an experienced coquette, who has undertaken to seduce a man, which she would prefer,—to be convicted, in presence of the man whom she is engaged in conquering, of falsehood, perversity, cruelty, or to appear before him in an ill-fitting dress, or a dress of an unbecoming color. She will prefer the first alternative. She knows very well that we simply lie when we talk of our elevated sentiments, that we seek only the possession of her body, and that because of that we will forgive her every sort of baseness, but will not forgive her a costume of an ugly shade, without taste or fit. “And these things she knows by reason, where as the maiden knows them only by instinct, like the animal. Hence these abominable jerseys, these artificial humps on the back, these bare shoulders, arms, and throats. “Women, especially those who have passed through the school of marriage, know very well that conversations upon elevated subjects are only conversations, and that man seeks and desires the body and all that ornaments the body. Consequently, they act accordingly? If we reject conventional explanations, and view the life of our upper and lower classes as it is, with all its shamelessness, it is only a vast perversity. You do not share this opinion? Permit me, I am going to prove it to you (said he, interrupting me). “You say that the women of our society live for a different interest from that which actuates fallen women. And I say no, and I am going to prove it to you. If beings differ from one another according to the purpose of their life, according to their inner life, this will necessarily be reflected also in their outer life, and their exterior will be very different. Well, then, compare the wretched, the despised, with the women of the highest society: the same dresses, the same fashions, the same perfumeries, the same passion for jewelry, for brilliant and very expensive articles, the same amusements, dances, music, and songs. The former attract by all possible means; so do the latter. No difference, none whatever! “Yes, and I, too, was captivated by jerseys, bustles, and curly hair.” CHAPTER VII. “And it was very easy to capture me, since I was brought up under artificial conditions, like cucumbers in a hothouse. Our too abundant nourishment, together with complete physical idleness, is nothing but systematic excitement of the imagination. The men of our society are fed and kept like reproductive stallions. It is sufficient to close the valve,—that is, for a young man to live a quiet life for some time,—to produce as an immediate result a restlessness, which, becoming exaggerated by reflection through the prism of our unnatural life, provokes the illusion of love.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  While both writers enlist the fantastic into the service of sexual politics, Lawrence’s use seems pragmatically political, its end is to compel the emotional surrender of an actual woman, generally a person of considerable strength and intelligence. Miller confronts nothing more challenging than the undifferentiated genital that exists in masturbatory revery. In the case of the two actual women, Maude and Mara, who appear in Miller’s world amidst its thousand floozie caricatures, personality and sexual behavior is so completely unrelated that, in the sexual episodes where they appear, any other names might have been conveniently substituted. For the purpose of every bout is the same: a demonstration of the hero’s self-conscious detachment before the manifestations of a lower order of life. During an epic encounter with Mara, the only woman he ever loved, Miller is as clinical as he was toward Ida; Mara just as grotesque: And on this bright and slippery gadget Mara twisted like an eel. She wasn’t any longer a woman in heat, she wasn’t even a woman; she was just a mass of indefinable contours wriggling and squirming like a piece of fresh bait seen upside down through a convex mirror in a rough sea. I had long ceased to be interested in her contortions; except for the part of me that was in her I was cool as a cucumber and remote as the Dog Star… Towards dawn, Eastern Standard Time, I saw by that frozen condensed-milk expression about the jaw that it was happening. Her face went through all the metamorphoses of early uterine life, only in reverse. With the last dying spark it collapsed like a punctured hag, the eyes and nostrils smoking like toasted acorns in a slightly wrinkled lake of pale skin.12

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  With Kangaroo’s heavy emphasis on masculine privilege, politics, and the public life, from which females, citizens or not, are jealously excluded, come a whole series of other attitudes which we have come to know in this century as particularly dangerous and unpleasant: racism, a lust for violence and for totalitarian authority and control, a hatred for democracy, and a contempt for Christian humanism as a despicably “Jewish” weakness. And with these, Kangaroo has also—for all Lawrence’s hatred of democracy—a raffish tone, a vulgarity and cheapness of effect which make it the Lawrence novel that commands least critical respect. There is a veteran and buddy atmosphere one associates with the fascist phalanxes of Italy and Hitler’s early political cadres. It is the tone of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion; boastfully masculine, jealous of prerogative, stupidly patriotic, and spoiling for a war, the white man’s flag and the right to worship a consecrated leader. There is a “male only” exclusiveness, an enormous interest in deep, close, and cloyingly sentimental relationships with other men—on the Australian side, a sticky, palsy mate approach to Somers, mixed with deference, but perhaps not quite enough to suit him. He turns such occasions to rich advantage, posturing as the proletarian boy made good, born of their own kind but a gentleman really. Lovat patronizes his colonial cousins, but he loves to be courted and is hoping very hard to be won. Unlike Birkin, Somers is being courted rather than being rejected—in fact he is desired on all sides, every man he meets wishes to proclaim him. And this time he can turn them down. With a quaint egotism Lovat permits himself to dream that the leader of a major party would beg, on his deathbed, that the writer grant him a caress and an “I love you.” Lovat manages his suitors nicely—he is manly and straight, patronizingly true to his long-suffering wife, yet enjoys the adoration of two males, Jack Callcott and Ben Cooley, both of whom he finds impressive and attractive. Their infatuation is a wonderful tribute to his vanity, and so is his final reluctant refusal of their advances so that he may remain a just man saddled with a fractious wife who has no one or nothing else in the world to live for. This time the Lawrence hero sees himself rejecting the other male as Gerald rejected Birkin. His attitude is more “passive” and “feminine,” even coy toward his suitors; at the same time he is more grotesquely authoritarian and “masculine”—as the word is generally understood, toward the females.

• 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)

  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 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.

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

  But if all is now good at last, your God has nothing left to do; well, if he is useless, how can he be powerful? And if he is not powerful, how can he be God? If, in a word, Nature moves herself, what do we want with a motor? and if the motor acts upon matter by causing it to move, how is it not itself material? Can you conceive the effect of the mind upon matter and matter receiving motion from the mind which itself has no movement? Examine for one coldblooded instant all the ridiculous and contradictory qualities wherewith the fabricators of this execrable chimera have been obliged to clothe him; verify for your own self how they contradict one another, annul one another, and you will recognize that this deific phantom, engendered by the fear of some and the ignorance of all, is nothing but a loathsome platitude which merits from us neither an instant of faith nor a minute's examination; a pitiable extravagance, disgusting to the mind, revolting to the heart, which ought never to have issued from the darkness save to plunge back into it, forever to be drowned. "May the hope or fear of a world to come, bred of those primordial lies, trouble you not, Therese, and above all give over endeavoring to forge restraints for us out of this stuff. Feeble portions of a vile crude matter, upon our death, that is to say, upon the conjointure of the elements whereof we are composed with the elements composing the universal mass, annihilated forever, regardless of what our behavior has been, we will pass for an instant into Nature's crucible thence to spring up again under other shapes, and that without there being any more prerogatives for him who madly smoked up Virtue's effigy, than for the other who wallowed in the most disgraceful excesses, because there is nothing by which Nature is offended and because all men, equally her womb's issue, during their term having acted not at all save in accordance with her impulsions, will all of them meet with after their existence, both the same end and the same fate." I was once again about to reply to these appalling blasphemies when we heard the clatter of a horseman not far away. "To arms !" shouted Coeur-de-fer, more eager to put his systems into action than to consolidate their bases.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Erikson professes he is deeply impressed by “that everyday miracle, pregnancy and childbirth” (maternity is something of a preoccupation with him) and the experiment he is about to relate is put forward as proof that the maternal instinct exists through some inherent “somatic” awareness in the female and constitutes her “identity.” Here Erikson, who imposes no such limiting perspective in his studies of identity in males, appears to limit individual identity in women to a nearly exclusively sexual basis, believing “much of a young woman’s identity is already defined in her kind of attractiveness” and its function is largely confined to selecting a mate in “her search for the man (or men) by whom she wishes to be sought.”181 The period of formal education when she is permitted to extend her interest to activities “removed from the future function of childbearing” is, in Erikson’s view, simply a “moratorium.”182 But “a true moratorium must have a term and a conclusion: womanhood arrives when attractiveness and experience have succeeded in selecting what is to be admitted to the welcome of the inner space ‘for keeps.’ “183 The stages of female growth are all dedicated to the moment when she will “commit herself to the love of a stranger and to the care to be given to his and her offspring:”184 Here, whatever sexual differences and dispositions have developed in earlier life become polarized with finality because they must become part of the whole process of production and procreation which marks adulthood. But how does the identity formation of women differ by dint of the fact that their somatic design harbors an “inner space” destined to bear the offspring of chosen men, and with it, a biological, psychological, and ethical commitment to take care of human infancy?185 Much of the uneasy, even contradictory, tone of the essay is due to the fact that Erikson vacillates between two versions of woman, Freud’s chauvinism and a chivalry of his own. He wishes to insist both that female anatomy is destiny (and personality as well) yet at the same time pleads that the preordained historical subordination of women be abridged by a gallant concession to maternal interests. He compliments “the richly convex parts of the female anatomy which suggest fullness, warmth, and generosity”186-yet maintains the hallowed Freudian definition of the female as a creature with a “woundlike aperture,” “missing” a penis.187 He is by no means willing to relinquish the Freudian concept of female masochism, and even expands it to include the menses, “inner periodicities in addition to the pain of childbirth, which is explained in the Bible as the eternal penalty for Eve’s delinquent behavior,” all of which prompts Erikson to employ the poetic epithet “dolorosa.”188 Beneath the sympathetic surface of the essay there is a rather disturbing complacency. Erikson is content, until we invent a “new kind of biocultural history,” to interpret the long oppression of woman as due to her innate masochism, which explains how she has come to