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 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

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

  "Oh, Monsieur, in the light of such principles the miserable must therefore perish!" "Does it matter? We have more subjects in France than are needed; given the mechanism's elastic capacities for production, the State can easily afford to be burdened by fewer people." "But do you suppose children respect their fathers when they are thus despised by them ?" "And what to a father is the love of the children who are a nuisance to him ?" "Would it then have been better had they been strangled in the cradle ?" "Certainly, such is the practice in numerous countries; it was the custom of the Greeks, it is the custom in China: there, the offspring of the poor are exposed, or are put to death. What is the good of letting those creatures live who, no longer able to count upon their parents' aid either because they are without parents or because they are not wanted or recognized by them, henceforth are useful for nothing and simply weigh upon the State: that much surplus commodity, you see, and the market is glutted already; bastards, orphans, malformed infants should be condemned to death immediately they are pupped: the first and the second because, no longer having anyone who wishes or who is able to take care of them, they are mere dregs which one day can have nothing but an undesirable effect upon the society they contaminate; the others because they cannot be of any usefulness to it; the one and the other of these categories are to society what are excrescences to the flesh, battening upon the healthy members' sap, degrading them, enfeebling them; or, if you prefer, they are like those vegetable parasites which, attaching themselves to sound plants, cause them to deteriorate by sucking up their nutritive juices. It's a shocking outrage, these alms destined to feed scum, these most luxuriously appointed houses they have the madness to construct quite as if the human species were so rare, so precious one had to preserve it down to its last vile portion! But enough of politics whereof, my child, you are not likely to understand anything; why lament your fate? for it is in your power, and yours only, to remedy it."

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

  "Soup! Bleeding Christ! Soup! Behold, deary," said the usurer to his dame, "behold and tremble at the progress of luxury: it's looking for circumstances, it's been dying of hunger for a year, and now it wants to eat soup; we scarcely have it once a week, on Sunday, we who work like galley slaves: you'll have three ounces of bread a day, my daughter, plus half a bottle of river water, plus one of my wife's old dresses every eighteen months, plus three crowns' wages at the end of each year, if we are content with your services, if your economy responds to our own and if, finally, you make the house prosper through orderliness and arrangement. Your duties are mediocre, they're done in jig time; 'tis but a question of washing and cleaning this six-room apartment thrice a week, of making our beds, answering the door, powdering my wig, dressing my wife's hair, looking after the dog and the parakeet, lending a hand in the kitchen, washing the utensils, helping my wife whenever she prepares us a bite to eat, and daily devoting four or five hours to the washing, to mending stockings, hats, and other little house-hold odds and ends; you observe, Therese, 'tis nothing at all, you will have ample free time to yourself, we will permit you to employ it to your own interest, provided, my child, you are good, discreet and, above all, thrifty, that's of the essence." Chapter 6You may readily imagine, Madame, that one had to be in the frightful state I indeed was in to accept such a position; not only was there infinitely more work to be done than my strength permitted me to undertake, but should I be able to live upon what was offered me? However, I was careful to raise no difficulties and was installed that same evening. Were my cruel situation to permit me to amuse you for an instant, Madame, when I must think of nothing but gaining your compassion, I should dare describe some of the symptoms or avarice I witnessed while in that house; but a catastrophe so terrible for me was awaiting me during my second year there that it is by no means easy to linger over entertaining details before making you acquainted with my miseries.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Conflict with the father warns the boy that the castration catastrophe might occur to him as well. He grows wary for his own emblem and surrenders his sexual desires for his mother out of fear.76 Freud’s exegesis of the neurotic excitements of nuclear family life might constitute, in itself, considerable evidence of the damaging effects of this institution, since through the parents, it presents to the very young a set of primary sexual objects who are a pair of adults, with whom intercourse would be incestuous were it even physically possible. While Freud strongly prescribes that all lingering hopes of acquiring a penis be abandoned and sublimated in maternity, what he recommends is merely a displacement, since even maternal desires rest upon the last vestige of penile aspiration. For, as she continues to mature, we are told, the female never gives up the hope of a penis, now always properly equated with a baby. Thus men grow to love women, or better yet, their idea of women, whereas women grow to love babies.77 It is said that the female doggedly continues her sad phallic quest in childbirth, never outgrowing her Oedipal circumstance of wanting a penis by having a baby. “Her happiness is great if later on this wish for a baby finds fulfilment in reality, and quite especially so if the baby is a little boy who brings the longed—for penis with him.”78 Freudian logic has succeeded in converting childbirth, an impressive female accomplishment, and the only function its rationale permits her, into nothing more than a hunt for a male organ. It somehow becomes the male prerogative even to give birth, as babies are but surrogate penises. The female is bested at the only function Freudian theory recommends for her, reproduction. Furthermore, her libido is actually said to be too small to qualify her as a constructive agent here, since Freud repeatedly states she has less sexual drive than the male. Woman is thus granted very little validity even within her limited existence and second-rate biological equipment: were she to deliver an entire orphanage of progeny, they would only be so many dildoes.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In this book, Kate initiated the analysis that the sexualization of power is the basis of oppression. She observes and trenchantly dissects its deployment across time, space, and culture, and insists with humor but without apology on the liberation of everyone from it. She argues not only that a realpolitik exists that is sexual in nature, but that politics itself, properly understood, is sexual at its core. Defining the political as being about “power-structured relationships,” she contends, drawing on an array of compelling examples from literature and history, that heterosexual coitus is “a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane” (23), producing “sex [as]a status category with political implications” (24). Speaking of Jean Genet, who treats gay as well as straight sexual relations, her reading of his play The Balcony finds him exposing “the fundamental human connection, that of sexuality, to be the nuclear model of all the more elaborate social constructs growing out of it,…in itself not only hopelessly tainted but the very prototype of institutionalized inequality” (20). Genet’s play is set in a brothel. Inequality, institutionalized, is what its relations are seen to manifest. “Unless the clinging to male supremacy as a birthright is finally foregone,” Kate argues in that context, “all systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situation,” sexuality being that situation (21). In her analysis, as well as that of the women’s movement that followed, sexuality is socially, not naturally, constructed and driven; it is a gendered relation in social space, not an internal essence or biological drive. Social roles, gender-based temperaments, and sexual scripts produce and reproduce the sexual domination of men over women and other men. Far from being inherent or biologically inevitable, masculinity and femininity, Kate states in her critique of Freud, are “elaborate behavioral constructs for each sex within society, obviously cultural and subject to endless cross-cultural variation” (190–91). These constructs engender widespread conformity to social norms that are widely but falsely believed to be based on male and female anatomy. Sex roles create a patriarchal character structure that becomes a habit of mind and a way of life (63). “Consent” to subordinate status by women and subordinate men is obtained through conditioning to ideology through socialization (26), resulting in “interior colonization” (25).

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  To a dispassionate judge of reactionary tactic, functionalist formulation must appear a rather more admirable technique than the earlier and rather tarnished charge of penis envy. Like the latter, it points an accusatory finger of maladjustment at any woman who fails to conform to its arrogant program, but it avoids the openly invidious character of Freud’s formula, and appears, through the very turgid cipher of its language, disinterested and beyond opinion. It also avoids pitfall references to sexual status without resorting to Ruskin’s or Erikson’s chivalrous fatuity. The spheres are separate still, isolated by “science” while this attack mumbles on, clinical and efficient, the arm of a blind justice, its prosaic jargon nearly negating meaning itself, yet remarkably successful at camouflaging even the most ambitiously regressive strictures in its deadening verbiage. If the orthodoxy of sex role as social benefit as well as biological necessity is inculcated successfully, it is not very difficult for this type of expedient “science” to survey the present population, assign traits to each group, gloss them in a blurred and neutral-seeming terminology, and imply that, while subject to variation and gradation, they are in some way inherently sex-linked. As “biology” determined sex role in the previous study, it will hover helpfully in the background of the next study229 to assure that what are, in fact, the assigned characteristics of two political classes must also, even if acquired, be nature as well. In Brim’s “Survey of Some Sex Differences in Socialization,” the author has hardly any need for prescription. Although he is anxious that sex role be properly absorbed, his main interest is simply to define it. The normal will not neglect to learn.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most effective agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her alone of the dangers and evils it imputes to sexuality. The Greek example is interesting here: when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility through the phallus; when it wishes to denigrate sexuality, it cites Pandora. Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump the female and sex together as if the whole burden of the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one. The Pandora myth is one of two important Western archetypes which condemn the female through her sexuality and explain her position as her well-deserved punishment for the primal sin under whose unfortunate consequences the race yet labors. Ethics have entered the scene, replacing the simplicities of ritual, taboo, and mana. The more sophisticated vehicle of myth also provides official explanations of sexual history. In Hesiod’s tale” Zeus, a rancorous and arbitrary father figure, in sending Epimetheus evil in the form of female genitalia, is actually chastising him for adult heterosexual knowledge and activity. In opening the vessel she brings (the vulva or hymen, Pandora’s “box”) the male satisfies his curiosity but sustains the discovery only by punishing himself at the hands of the father god with death and the assorted calamities of postlapsarian life. The patriarchal trait of male rivalry across age or status line, particularly those of powerful father and rival son, is present as well as the ubiquitous maligning of the female. The myth of the Fall is a highly finished version of the same themes. As the central myth of the Judea-Christian imagination and therefore of our immediate cultural heritage, it is well that we appraise and acknowledge the enormous power it still holds over us even in a rationalist era which has long ago given up literal belief in it while maintaining its emotional assent intact.67 This mythic version of the female as the cause of human suffering, knowledge, and sin is still the foundation of sexual attitudes, for it represents the most crucial argument of the patriarchal tradition in the West.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  …we are perpetually told that women are better than men by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the King of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees.102 On the other hand, if we accept the report of Ruskin’s vision, the grief of the world is on the heads of women, so powerful are they in their secluded bowers, those shadowy comers of “higher mystery” at whose behests masculine power “bows itself and will forever bow, before the myrtle crown and the stainless sceptre of womanhood.”103 Carried aloft by his chimera of woman’s power, he insists, “there is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered.”104 There is a certain humor in Ruskin’s proclamation that woman, confined through history to a vicarious and indirect existence, without a deciding voice in any event, with so much of the burden of Inilitary, economic and technological events visited upon her, and so little of their glories, is nevertheless solely accountable for morality on the planet. Ruskin then launches into a peroration on Bowers, whose subject, though he can never bring himself to say so in English, is prostitution, the cancer in chivalry’s rose. He begins prosaically enough: “the path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers, but they rise behind her steps, not before them.”105 He then takes off in ecstasy, and orders the good women of England, presumably the matrons snugly seated before him in Manchester’s Town Hall to go out into the “darkness of the terrible streets” on a mission to rescue certain persons there whom he refers to in cipher as “feeble florets,” full period euphuism for whore.106 Ruskin’s plan is that the matrons will plant and establish the harlots in “little fragrant beds.” Perhaps more in line with his general intentions, is the injunction to “fence them, in their trembling from the fierce wind.”107 However buried in flowers, the overtones of sexuality in the last passage provoke still others: Ruskin quotes from Tennyson’s vaguely erotic lyric “Come into the garden Maude” and transforms the unbalanced young man who is actually the speaker in the poem into a slightly eroticized Christ, and one with whom the lecturer appears to identify in the most curious, oblique, and oddly personal manner. Having now run off into a rather self-indulgent type of piety Ruskin concludes the lecture in a paroxysm of Dissenting fervor:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  I would ask her to prepare the bath for me. She would pretend to demur but she would do it just the same. One day, while I was seated in the tub soaping myself, I noticed that she had forgotten the towels. “Ida,” I called, “bring me some towels!” She walked into the bathroom and handed me them. She had on a silk bathrobe and a pair of silk hose. As she stooped over the tub to put the towels on the rack her bathrobe slid open. I slid to my knees and buried my head in her muff. It happened so quickly that she didn’t have time to rebel or even to pretend to rebel. In a moment I had her in the tub, stockings and all. I slipped the bathrobe off and threw it on the floor. I left the stockings on—it made her more lascivious looking, more the Cranach type. I lay back and pulled her on top of me. She was just like a bitch in heat, biting me all over, panting, gasping, wriggling like a worm on the hook. As we were drying ourselves, she bent over and began nibbling at my prick. I sat on the edge of the tub and she kneeled at my feet gobbling it. After a while I made her stand up, bend over; then I let her have it from the rear. She had a small juicy cunt, which fitted me like a glove. I bit the nape of her neck, the lobes of her ears, the sensitive spot on her shoulder, and as I pulled away I left the mark of my teeth on her beautiful white ass. Not a word spoken.1 This colorful descriptive prose is taken from Henry Miller’s celebrated Sexus, first published in Paris in the forties but outlawed from the sanitary shores of his native America until the Grove Press edition of 1965. Miller, alias Val, is recounting his seduction of Ida Verlaine, the wife of his friend Bill Woodruff. As an account of sexual passage, the excerpt has much in it of note beyond that merely biological activity which the narrator would call “fucking.” Indeed, it is just this other content which gives the representation of the incident its value and character. First, one must consider the circumstances and the context of the scene. Val has just met Bill Woodruff outside a burlesque theater where Ida Verlaine is performing. In the rambling fashion of Miller’s narrative, this meeting calls up the memory of the hero’s sexual bouts with Ida ten years before, whereupon follow eleven pages of vivid re-enactment. First, there is Ida herself:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Val proceeds—his manner coolly self-assured and redolent of comfort: “I lay back and pulled her on top of me.” What follows is purely subjective description. Ceasing to admire himself, the hero is now lost in wonder at his effects. For the fireworks which ensue are Ida’s, though produced by a Pavlovian mechanism. Like the famous programed dog, in fact “just like a bitch in heat,” Ida responds to the protagonist’s skillful manipulation: “…biting me all over, panting, gasping, wriggling like a worm on the hook.” No evidence is ever offered to the reader of any such animal-like failure of self-restraint in the response of our hero. It is he who is the hook, and she who is the worm: the implication is clearly one of steely self-composure contrasted to loverlike servility and larval vulnerability. Ida has—in the double, but related, meaning of the phrase-been had. In the conventional order of this genre of sexual narrative, one position of intercourse must rapidly be followed by another less orthodox and therefore of greater interest. Miller obliges the reader with a quick instance of dorsal intercourse, preceded by a Hitting interlude of fellatio. But more pertinent to the larger issues under investigation is the information that Ida is now so “hooked” that it is she who makes the first move: “…she bent over and began nibbling at my prick.” The hero’s “prick,” now very center stage, is still a hook and Ida metamorphosed into a very gullible fish. (Perhaps all of this aquatic imagery was inspired by the bathtub.) Furthermore, positions are significantly reversed: “I sat on the edge of the tub and she kneeled at my feet gobbling it.” The power nexus is clearly outlined. It remains only for the hero to assert his victory by the arrogance of his final gesture: “After a while I made her stand up, bend over; then I let her have it from the rear.” What the reader is vicariously experiencing at this juncture is a nearly supernatural sense of power-should the reader be a male. For the passage is not only a vivacious and imaginative use of circumstance, detail, and context to evoke the excitations of sexual intercourse, it is also a male assertion of dominance over a weak, compliant, and rather unintelligent female. It is a case of sexual politics at the fundamental level of copulation. Several satisfactions for the hero and reader alike undoubtedly accrue upon this triumph of the male ego, the most tangible one being communicated in the following: “She had a small juicy cunt which fitted me like a glove.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  It is difficult to continue to describe the female as an incomplete male without eventually concerning oneself with the quality of intellect in a creature so curtailed. Freud’s early interpretation of what he regarded as the undeveloped feminine intellect was that it was due to social inhibitions on her sexuality which in turn inhibited all other mental effort.120 As the female’s greatest interest was sex, he reasoned-feeling no contradiction with his repeated stress that she had little sex drive or pleasure—and since this was the one subject she is forbidden to study, terrorized on all sides that her “greatest thirst for knowledge” might end in the “pronouncement that such curiosity is inwardly a sign of immoral tendency,” she can only inhibit and repress, rarely sublimate and transcend. Intimidated from pursuing the strongest interest she is capable of entertaining, the young woman is soon directed away from any study and soon “all mental effort and knowledge in general is depreciated in their eyes.”121 And so the mere fact of sexual repression at first seemed sufficient cause for what Freud took to be the manifestly inferior mentality of the female: “…the undoubted fact of the intellectual inferiority of so many women can be traced to that inhibition of thought necessitated by sexual suppression.”122 One is edified not only by the safety-valve phrase “so many women,” but by the confused fatalism of “necessitated.” These remarks were made in 1908 when, still a young man, Freud was willing to contradict Moebius’ contention that the female was inherently inferior in mental ability, and was still willing to attribute a certain amount of female resistance to her situation, however euphemized as “conflict,” etc., to social and educational factors-cultural rather than inherent biological or psychological elements. As the years went by Freud underwent a can. siderable change of attitude in respect to this question and grew to have a greater and greater need of stronger formulations to convince us that the female character is a static thing ordained by Nature and the unalterable laws of her anatomy. Inferior, vice-ridden, half savage; she comes to be seen as all this simply by virtue of her deformed, castrated physiology. Since the possibility of social factors in regard to woman’s relation to human culture and intellectual achievement did not satisfy him very long, Freud desired surer evidence that woman fails to contribute to civilization not because she is prevented but because she is constitutionally incapable of doing so. Proof of such came to be supplied by Freud’s description of female psycho-organic development through the stages of infancy and adolescence.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Bachofen had felt the importance of the knowledge of paternity and was therefore attracted to mythic and religious statements such as the Eumenides furnishes. But, understandably, he refused to rely too heavily on such sources as evidence either as to the discovery of paternity or as to its part in the origins of patriarchy. He sought other reasons. For his part, Engels was not only suspicious of what he called the “mysticism” of Bachofen’s thought when it touched on myth or religion, but was disinclined to accept such evidence in any case.128 So he chose instead to follow Bachofen on a second and much less reliable hypothesis. Asking themselves how women allowed their subjection to overtake them, they responded with a naïveté characteristic of their era, claiming that women submitted willingly to the sexual and social subjection of pairing and then monogamous marriage because in fact women find sexuality burdensome.129 “They constantly longed for relief by the right of chastity,”130 Engels informs us and therefore accepted the exclusive sexual possession with which patriarchy originated as a not unwelcome “penalty” for “becoming exempt from the ancient community of men and acquiring the right of surrendering to one man only.”131 One is tempted to see an absurdity in such confident assumption that women dislike sex. Moreover, there is something unconsciously patriarchal in the assumption that sexual association involves “surrender” as well as in the inference that sexual intercourse is in fact (for women) a political act of submission. One cannot help but be unfavorably impressed at the extent to which Engels’ attitudes are affected by the presuppositions of his culture. But in fact, he is only being Victorian. The point of his remark was the widespread appreciation in his own period that, however much sexual resistance militated against the woman’s own sensual desires (and the possibility of their existing in any intensity was largely disregarded) it was nevertheless an act of self assertion. The notion of sexual resistance, the defense of integrity with frigidity, or the preservation of independence through chastity, are common themes in Victorian literature. Under the demands of a socially coercive or exploitative sexuality such as patriarchy had instituted, where sexual activity implied submitting to male will, “chastity,” frigidity, or some form of resistance to sexuality took on something of the character of a “political” response to the conditions of sexual politics. While chastity, or even the negative attitudes toward coitus which accompany frigidity, operated as patriarchal social and psychological “stratagems” to limit or prohibit woman’s pleasure in sexuality, they could also be transformed into protective feminine “stratagems” in a refusal to capitulate to patriarchal force: physical, economic, or social.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Yet all this well-intentioned puritanism dissolves before the reader’s observation of the callowness with which Paul treats both Miriam and Clara. The first girl is, like Paul himself, a bright youngster restless within the narrow limitations of her class and anxious to escape it through the learning which has freed Paul. Less privileged than he, enjoying no support in a home where she is bullied by her brothers and taught the most lethal variety of Christian resignation by her mother, she retains some rebellious hope despite her far more discouraging circumstances. Having no one else to turn to, she asks Paul, whom she has worshiped as her senior and superior, to help her eke out an education. The scenes of his condescension are some of the most remarkable instances of sexual sadism disguised as masculine pedagogy which literature affords until Ionesco’s memorable Lesson. Paul has grandly offered to teach her French and mathematics. We are told that Miriam’s “eyes dilated. She mistrusted him as a teacher.”58 Well she might, in view of what follows. Paul is explaining simple equations to her: “Do you see?” she looked up at him, her eyes wide with the half-laugh that comes of fear. “Don’t you?” he cried…It made his blood boil to see her there, as it were, at his mercy, her mouth open, her eyes dilated with laughter that was afraid, apologetic, ashamed. Then Edgar came along with two buckets of milk. “Hello!” he said. “What are you doing?” “Algebra,” replied Paul. “Algebra!” repeated Edgar curiously. Then he passed on with a laugh.59 Paul is roused by the mixture of tears and beauty; Miriam is beautiful to him when she suffers and cringes: “She was ruddy and beautiful. Yet her soul seemed to be intensely supplicating. The algebra-book she closed, shrinking, knowing he was angered.”60

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Since the model on which such attitudes are formed comes from the past, functionalism has a nostalgic Savor under its impersonal exterior. Perhaps this is nowhere more quaintly evident than in Talcott Parsons’ functionalist evocation of “youth culture” as student life in some golden past when all was varsity prom and varsity football.206 One can often discern some faintly glamorized version of the social scientist’s own childhood in the comfortable middle class. The orientation is small town and Middle West, a world of some twenty years back, before the dangers and innovations of the present ever occurred to the investigator. One sees it echoed in the media’s bland portraits of comfort, in the children’s texts illustrated with blond and bourgeois parents, prosperously equipped with an automobile and a house of their own, neatly divided into breadwinner in business suit and housewife beaming behind her apron. Each of the social disciplines contributed to re-establishing and then maintaining a reactionary status quo in sexual politics, each through its own method of reasoning: anthropologists might study cross-cultural divisions of labor and ascribe them to a fundamental biological source, while sociologists, in announcing they merely recorded social phenomena, gradually came to ratify them by noting that nonconformist behavior is in fact deviant and produces “problems.” The psychologist, in deploring individual maladjustment to social and sexual role, finally came to justify both as inherent psychological nature, fundamental to the species and biological in essence. Later this point of view acquired sufficient confidence to go on the offensive. The habit of discovering and deploring instances of feminine dominance grew obsessive. It became eminently fashionable to regard sexual identity, especially for the male, as so crucial to ego development that any frustration of the demands of masculine prerogative would result in considerable psychic damage, described either as neurosis or homosexuality. In its extreme forms, this attitude insists it is therapeutic necessity, somehow an issue of social health, that male supremacy continue unchallenged. I have chosen two examples of the type of thinking representative of these attitudes. One is a study entitled “A Cross-cultural Survey of Some Sex Differences in Socialization,” by Berry, Bacon, and Child, whose orientation is comparative cultural anthropology, and another called “Family Structure and Sex Role Learning by Children,” by Orville G. Brim Jr., whose point of view derives from social psychology.207 Both shall be analyzed at length so that their logic may be fully explored; their representative character will be established by short quotations affirming their position from comparable sources.208 Both articles were published in reputable professional journals (the first in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology and The American Anthropologist; the second in Sociometry) before their inclusion in a popular and influential college textbook, Selected Studies in Marriage and the Family, edited by Winch, McGinnis and Barringer, regarded as reputable and widely used in many kinds of social science courses.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  This position has much to recommend in it, but perhaps it is not quite invidious enough. Freud finally concluded with evident gratification that here again the answer should lie in the facile and well worn but seemingly irrefutable business of organic constitution. Women have contributed little to civilization; it follows that they are incapable of contributing at all. For civilization is made through sublimation, and “women, as the true guardians of the race, are endowed with the power of sublimation only in a limited degree.”128 Moreover, as Freud emphasized, the female since she is not required, as is the male, to conceal and transcend her Oedipal complex for fear of castration (she has been through this surgery once and nothing worse can befall her) fails to develop sufficient super ego.129 Man makes his contribution to civilization through sublimation and the development of a strong super ego goaded on by fear of castration—as a result of possessing a penis—and the fear of losing it. Never having had a penis and so, unafraid to lose it, the female has far less super ego than the male. This is why, Freud explains, she is largely without moral sense, inclined to be less ethically rigorous, has little perception of justice, submits easily to the necessities of life, is more subject to emotional bias in judgment, and contributes nothing to high culture. Again her inferiority-real now and not childishly imagined—is the result of her lack of a penis. With a penis, one might have acquired moral understanding and contribute to human progress, art, and civilization. In fact, it appears that girls who believe in the superiority of the penis, are—by all Freud’s “proof,” entirely correct. Civilization, we are informed, is created through sublimation, or, in a more recondite Freudian phrase “instinctual renunciation,” and again, this is the result of development which, due to her psychological history and physiological constitution the female is, for want of a penis, incapable of achieving. One of Freud’s happiest thoughts along this line is an entertaining specimen of his logical processes, and a particularly quaint instance of his unflagging enthusiasm for glorifying the inestimable male organ. Speculating on how man discovered fire, Freud concludes that it was the result of “instinctual renunciation” of the impulse to extinguish the fire by urinating on it. It must be perfectly clear to all that the female could not discover fire because she could not renounce the impulse to urinate on it, lacking as she docs the only adequate organ of long-distance urination. Here one has an extreme and pristine case of how, anatomically, woman is disqualified from contributing to the advancement of knowledge.130

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

  Has there ever existed a rowdy scoundrel more worthy of public indignation! What is he but a leprous Jew who, born of a slut and a soldier in the world's meanest stews, dared fob himself off for the spokesman of him who, they say, created the universe! With such lofty pretensions, you will have to admit, Therese, at least a few credentials are necessary. But what are those of this ridiculous Ambassador? What is he going to do to prove his mission? Is the earth's face going to be changed? are the plagues which beset it going to be annihilated? is the sun going to shine upon it by night as well as by day? vices will soil it no more? Are we going to see happiness reign at last?... Not at all; it is through hocus-pocus, antic capers, and puns... (The Marquis de Bievre never made one quite as clever as the Nazarene's to his disciple: "Thou art Peter and upon this Rock I will build my Church"; and they tell Us that witty language is one of our century's innovations!) ...that God's envoy announces himself to the world; it is in the elegant society of manual laborers, artisans, and streetwalkers that Heaven's minister comes to manifest his grandeur; it is by drunken carousing with these, bedding with those, that God's friend, God himself, comes to bend the toughened sinner to his laws; it is by inventing nothing for his farces but what can satisfy either his lewdness or his gourmand's guts that the knavish fellow demonstrates his mission; however all that may be, he makes his fortune; a few beef-witted satellites gravitate toward the villain; a sect is formed; this crowd's dogmas manage to seduce some Jews; slaves of the Roman power, they joyfully embrace a religion which, ridding them of their shackles, makes them subject to none but a metaphysical tyranny. Their motives become evident, their indocility unveils itself, the seditious louts are arrested; their captain perishes, but of a death doubtless much too merciful for his species of crime, and through an unpardonable lapse of intelligence, this uncouth boor's disciples are allowed to disperse instead of being slaughtered cheek to jowl with their leader. Fanaticism gets minds in its grip, women shriek, fools scrape and scuffle, imbeciles believe, and lo! the most contemptible of beings, the most maladroit quacksalver, the clumsiest impostor ever to have made his entrance, there he is: behold! God, there's God's little boy, his papa's peer; and now all his dreams are consecrated I and now all his epigrams are become dogmas! and all his blunders mysteries! His fabulous father's breast opens to receive him and that Creator, once upon a time simple, of a sudden becomes compound, triple, to humor his son, this lad so worthy of his greatness; but does that sacred God stick at that?

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  JW: Do you know how hard it is to teach an animal to drum, to keep the same rhythm? SA: [Laughs] So at readings, I’ve been mocking those Native American critics, those fundamentalists, by saying, “I have to speak to all you non-Natives in the crowd that if you do happen to attend a powwow expecting—because of my picture book—to see a bear, a coyote, and a snake drumming, it’s not going to happen. Now, you might see three drummers nicknamed Bear, Coyote, and Snake, but you’re not going to see the actual animals, so I’m sorry for that cultural misrepresentation. I’m sorry if I’ve given you a stereotypical racist example of what could happen at a powwow.” True Diary got some of that also ten years ago, but the culture has changed so dramatically in terms of not just judging non-Native representations of Native-ness, but harshly judging Native representations of ourselves. This is my story, this stuff actually happened to me, and I get judged for telling the story of the real-life decisions I made. JW: I wondered about that, that’s another thing in the last decade, if Native American representations in films and books have changed in some way, or if those battles are still fought in the same way. SA: We’re still underrepresented in every art form. You know, I was in New York recently and doing an interview, we’re in MoMA, that was part of the interview, and I was walking through MoMA, and I said every museum in the country could also be called the Museum That Excludes Native American Thought. That could be the subtitle of every museum in the country. So the fact remains that we are not seen as contemporary. And the sneaky thing about colonialism is that I think far too many indigenous peoples don’t think of themselves as being contemporary. In fact, they all too often romanticize their own past. I think nostalgia is a terminal condition among the indigenous. In writing this book, and now in working on the movie, and in my whole career, I would hope to be indigenous nostalgia’s greatest enemy. I hope that’s on my tombstone. I want that on my tombstone. JW: I want to talk to you about Diary showing up on so many banned books list. And didn’t it finally drop off? SA: It was in the top ten for nine years, but it never made number one. I was always number two. The two books that always kept me out were: Captain Underpants…So one year Captain Underpants was more dangerous than my book. All the conservative book banners of the country decided that Captain Under-pants was more dangerous than True Diary. And then another year it was And Tango Makes Three, which is about the gay penguins in the Bronx Zoo. So apparently, gay penguins and Captain Underpants are more politically dangerous than a reservation Indian boy seeking a better education.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The pacific, rather than merely passive character which Erikson ascribes to the girl’s play is of course most depressing in view of the fact it lacks all possibility of social implementation until the female “sphere” becomes not the doll’s house inner space Erikson endorses, but the world. What is perhaps most discouraging of all is not even the masculine fixation on violence but the futility of the girls’ sedentary dream, even its barrenness, for they sit awaiting the “intrusion of men and animals” (a remarkable combination) and doing nothing at all—not even the “nurturance” expected of them. Could the role of playing the piano in the bosom of their families really be considered representative of what these girls (some of them passionate horseback riders and all future automobile drivers) wanted to do most or, indeed thought they should pretend they wanted to do?197 Unless we assume, as Erikson does, that the pianos in some obscure manner do pertain to inherent female nature as “natural reasons which must claim our interest,” the very “spatial order” of their sex, one can only conclude that the female is more completely and more negatively conditioned than the male. And it seems she has to be in order to fulfill the far more limited existence or, in jargon, “role” which Erikson and his confreres would continue to prescribe for her. Erikson himself takes satisfaction from the more “limited circle of activities” which girls are permitted in society, and the “less resistance to control” they exhibit than do males. The latter phrase may be rendered in one word-docility.198 Yet Erikson’s entire project in the article was to make this more palatable, to shift theoretical emphasis from the loss of an external organ to a sense of vital inner potential; from a hateful contempt for the mother to a solidarity with her and other women; from a “passive” renunciation of male activity to the purposeful competent pursuit of activities consonant with the possession of ovaries, a uterus, and a vagina; and from a masochistic pleasure in pain to an ability to stand (and to understand) pain as a meaningful aspect of human experience in general and of the feminine role in particular. And so it is in the “fully feminine” woman, as such outstanding writers as Helene Deutsch have recognized.199 There is a certain awkwardness in the fact that no matter how he tries to brighten the picture, Erikson is incapable of stopping at the right moment, but must always go on to exhibit his own distaste or misgiving for the situation he is trying to reinterpret in such positive terms. Even the possession of a womb becomes a detriment, leaving the female “unfulfilled” every moment she is not pregnant:

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Not only does Mailer conform to that curious pattern in American media which, as Diana Trilling once pointed out,100 insists on portraying hostile society as a female intent upon destroying courage, honesty and adventure, he has gone so far as to conceive of masculinity as a precarious spiritual capital in endless need of replenishment and threatened on every side. True to the conflict between his perception and his allegiance, Mailer has frequently parodied masculine vanity: in the naïvete of the soldiers of The Naked and the Dead (Minetta, for instance, with his record fourteen “lays”—not bad for a fella my age, he hugs himself), or in D.J.’s wry allusion to the “grab for your dick competition snit.”101 Even with Sergius there are moments when one is certain the author knows O’Shaugnessy is a bully and a fool. But the comprehension of folly is so little a guarantee of its renunciation in Mailer, that his critical and political prose is based on a set of values so blatantly and comically chauvinist, as to constitute a new aesthetic. In a witty essay Mary Ellmann has described it as “phallic criticism.”102 It measures intelligence as “masculinity of rnind,”103 condemns mediocre authors for “dead-stick prose,” praises good writers for setting “virile example” and notes that since “style is root” (penis), the best writing naturally requires “huge loins.”104 Really negative judgments are reserved for all that is or can be deprecated as feminine (here Mailer indulges himself unstintingly), or like Jean Genet, can be baited as “unconscionably faggot.”105 As he settles into patriarchal middle age, Mailer’s obsession with machismo brings to mind a certain curio sold in Coney Island and called a Peter Meter; a quaint bit of folk art, stamped out in the shape of a ruler with printed inches and appropriate epithets to equate excellence with size. Mailer operates on this scale on an abstract or metaphoric plane. His characters male and female, labor under simpler delusions. Guinevere is indefatigable on the subject of her lover’s “whangs”; D.J. is paralyzed with the usual fear that someone else has a bigger one. III