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)

  "Say the word, Therese, out with it: a scoundrel, eh? Oh, I admit it, but I have no other titles to offer you; that our sort does not marry you are doubtless well aware: marriage is one of the sacraments, Therese, and full of an undiscriminating contempt for them all, with none do we ever bother. However, be a little reasonable; that sooner or later you lose what is so dear to you is an indispensable necessity, hence would it not be better to sacrifice it to a single man who thereupon will become your support and protector, is that not better, I say, than to be prostituted to everyone?" "But why must it be," I replied, "that I have no other alternative?" "Because, Therese, we have got you, and because the stronger is always the better reason; La Fontaine made the remark ages ago. Truthfully," he continued rapidly, "is it not a ridiculous extravagance to assign, as you do, such a great value to the most futile of all things? How can a girl be so dull-witted as to believe that virtue may depend upon the somewhat greater or lesser diameter of one of her physical parts ? What difference does it make to God or man whether this part be intact or tampered with? I will go further: it being the intention of Nature that each individual fulfill on this earth all of the purposes for which he has been formed, and women existing only to provide pleasure for men, it is plainly to outrage her thus to resist the intention she has in your regard. It is to wish to be a creature useless in this world and consequently one contemptible.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Somehow the writers of this article are still insecure: the dubious dovetailing of archetypal culture with the inevitability of biology does not explain the present softening of sexual stereotype brought about by the industrial revolution and the emancipation and education of women. They are faced now with a “nuclear” family in place of the virtues of the extended family and polygyny, two forms of social organization which they see in benign terms as cases of clearer and more sensible sex-role differentiation. Yet to admit to inutility in any aspect of a conservative and therefore desirable version of the present would be to admit defeat. Therefore the nuclear family is granted pragmatic sanction on the humorously specious grounds that in emergencies father and mother can “fill in” for each other.220 While vaguely aware that “our mechanized economy is perhaps less dependent than any previous economy upon the superior average strength of the male,”221 the authors are unable to admit that although a technological and capitalist culture puts a very low salary value on the muscle it attributes to the male, it never for a moment relinquishes male control. In fact, muscle is class-lower class. The difference between a stevedore and a scrub-woman, on the one hand, and an executive or physicist on the other, is a difference measured in the one’s confinement and the other’s escape from physical labor; other factors at issue being education, economic power, and prestige. In the same fashion the article acknowledges that “the conditions favoring low sex differentiation appear to be more characteristic of the upper segments of our society, in socioeconomic and educational status, than of lower segments.”222 What is actually meant is that some degree of privilege and education may be shared by both sexes in certain favored classes. The authors appear to be quite blind to the fact that the “biological mission” of fulltime child rearing which they ascribe to the female is actually a modem and middle-class luxury. However much the working class is devoted to sexual status, it does nevertheless produce vast numbers of women engaged in menial work in and out of the home and a very large number of households headed by women employed in physically exhausting labor. But it does not appear to be this class of women, mere “lower segments,” to whom the authors address themselves. To their middle-class bias such women are not competitors but cheap and useful labor. It is against the middle-class woman, at this moment a college student, that their wisdom is leveled, and its message is that she will limit her auxiliary role to “homemaker.”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  One of the most delicious moments in the book occurs upon Willoughby’s return from a trip abroad: Willoughby returned to his England after an absence of three years. On a fair April morning, the last of the month, he drove along his park palings, and by the luck of things, Laetitia was the first of his friends whom he met. She was crossing from field to field with a bank of school-children, gathering wild flowers for the morrow May-day. He sprang to the ground and seized her hand. “Laetitia Dale!” he said. He panted. “Your name is sweet English music! And you are well?” The anxious question permitted him to read deeply in her eyes. He found the man he sought there, squeezed him passionately, and let him go, saying, “I could not have prayed for a lovelier home-scene to welcome me…”174 Meredith is an expert at satirizing the enormous bulk of egotism that masculine chivalrous sentiment had injected into love, Romantic or Courtly. Willoughby, who finds society a “weltering human mass”175 without feminine “virtue” intends by that chivalric desideratum an eternal fidelity to a masculine proprietor: Clara! to dedicate your life to our love’ Never one touch! one thought, not a dream! Could you?—it agonizes me to imagine…be inviolate? mine above?—mine before all men, though I am gone-true to my dust. Tell me. Give me that assurance. True to my name!-Oh! I hear them “His relict.” Buzzing about Lady Patterne. “The widow.” If you knew their talk of widows! Shut your ears my angel! Consent; gratify me; swear it. Say, “Beyond death.” Whisper it. I ask for nothing more. Women think the husband’s grave breaks the bond, cuts the tie, sets them loose. They wed the flesh—pah! What I call on is nobility; the transcendent nobility of faithfulness beyond death. “His widow!” let them say; a saint in widowhood.176 Willoughby’s gallant professions of protection are in fact nothing but an odious form of patronization: “Whenever the little brain is in doubt, perplexed, undecided, which course to adopt, she will come to me, will she not.”177 So imperturbable is Willoughby that when Clara warns him, “I fear we do not often agree, Willoughby,” he replies with irritating assurance, “When you are a little older!”178

• 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

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Alone of our contemporary writers, Genet has taken thought of women as an oppressed group and revolutionary force, and chosen to identify with them. His own peculiar history, his analysis of expropriated peoples, inevitably lead Genet to empathize with what is scorned, relative, and subjugated. Each of his last plays incorporates the sexual into political situations: in The Balcony it is power and sex, in The Blacks. race and sex, in The Screens. sexual rank and the colonial mentality. Lawrence, Miller, and Mailer, identify woman as a annoying minority force to be put down and are concerned with a social order in which the female would be perfectly controlled. Genet, however. has integrated her into a vision of drastic social upheaval where her ancient subordination can produce explosive force. And, in fact, in The Screens. it is the women who are the revolution. As the play opens the Arabs are immersed in a system of hierarchal situations; the European colon lords it over the Arab male, who vents his frustrations on his woman, who, if she is lucky, takes it out on her daughter-in-law. As the colon guards his fields with a mechanical glove suspended in the air like a Blue Meaney, the Arab husband, during the hours of his absence, governs his females by means of his empty trousers.87 In the first scene Said, The Screens’ anti-hero, is on his way to marry the “ugliest woman in the next town and all the towns around,”88 fuming that he is stuck with her: In the scale of capital and marriage values, his own poverty is presumed to match her ugliness. It’s hard to tell if her face is a real or imagined catastrophe, since Leila the bride wears a black bag throughout the entire performance, stark evidence of her nonentity, enslavement, and exclusion from human experience. Said’s mother, a traditional Arab woman, tags behind him carrying a valise of gewgaw wedding presents. A devout male supremacist, she is persuaded her son would “be less of a man”89 if he were to condescend to come to her aid in public. Leila is Said’s salvation as well as his fate; her very odium epitomizes the Arab’s colonial situation. Scorning her with a ferocious ardor, Said becomes a dangerously disgruntled colonial. More an allegory than a character, Leila the loathed woman, is a symptom of the general degradation of the Arab world. If Said the Arab hates her, he hates himself, for no people are capable of self-respect, if, like Genet’s Muslims, they so fervently despise half their own population. The folk humor of the ugly wife with which the play begins contains its central situation. Said’s dissatisfaction brings him first to the brothel where the pariah prostitutes, creatures of a chiefly decorative function, assuage his native disaffection with mock-Western manners and ornate display. But even the house of illusions is not enough, and its essentially colonial character is explicit for both sexes:

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

  Even amongst ourselves, Madame, I dare add; how can you lull yourself into believing you can maintain concord amongst ourselves when you counsel each to heed nothing but his own self-interest? Would you have any just complaints to make against the one of us who wanted to cut the throats of the others, who did so in order to monopolize for himself what has been shared by his colleagues? Why, 'tis a splendid panegyric to Virtue, to prove its necessity in even a criminal society... to prove for a certainty that this society would disintegrate in a trice were it not sustained by Virtue!" "Your objections, Therese," said Coeur-de-fer, "not the theses Dubois has been expounding, are sophistries; our criminal fraternities are not by any means sustained by Virtue; rather by self-interest, egoism, selfishness; this eulogy of Virtue, which you have fabricated out of a false hypothesis, miscarries; it is not at all owing to virtuousness that, believing myself, let us suppose, the strongest of the band, I do not use a dagger on my comrades in order to appropriate their shares, it is because, thereupon finding myself all alone, I would deprive myself of the means which assure me the fortune I expect to have with their help; similarly, this is the single motive which restrains them from lifting their arms against me. Now this motive, as you, Therese, perfectly well observe, is purely selfish, and has not even the least appearance of virtue; he who wishes to struggle alone against society's interests must, you say, expect to perish; will he not much more certainly perish if, to enable him to exist therein, he has nothing but his misery and is abandoned by others ?

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. One is laughter. Misogynist literature, the primary vehicle of masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic genre. Of all artistic forms in patriarchy it is the most frankly propagandistic. Its aim is to reinforce both sexual factions in their status. Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance literature in the West has each had a large element of misogyny.52 Nor is the East without a strong tradition here, notably in the Confucian strain which held sway in Japan as well as China. The Western tradition was indeed moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love. But the old diatribes and attacks were coterminous with the new idealization of woman. In the case of Petrarch, Boccaecio, and some others, one can find both attitudes fully expressed, presumably as evidence of different moods, a courtly pose adopted for the ephemeral needs of the vernacular, a grave animosity for sober and eternal Latin.53 As courtly love was transformed to romantic love, literary misogyny grew somewhat out of fashion. In some places in the eighteenth century it declined into ridicule and exhortative satire. In the nineteenth century its more acrimonious forms almost disappeared in English. Its resurrection in twentieth-century attitudes and literature is the result of a resentment over patriarchal reform, aided by the growing permissiveness in expression which has taken place at an increasing rate in the last fifty years. Since the abatement of censorship, masculine hostility (psychological or physical) in specifically sexual contexts has become far more apparent. Yet as masculine hostility has been fairly continuous, one deals here probably less with a matter of increase than with a new frankness in expressing hostility in specifically sexual contexts. It is a matter of release and freedom to express what was once forbidden expression outside of pornography or other “underground” productions, such as those of De Sade. As one recalls both the euphemism and the idealism of descriptions of coitus in the Romantic poets (Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes), or the Victorian novelists (Hardy, for example) and contrasts it with Miller or William Burroughs, one has an idea of how contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-social character as well. Since this tendency to hurt or insult has been given free expression, it has become far easier to assess sexual antagonism in the male.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Sensitive to the contemporary interest in animal societies, Erikson introduces the baboon. Like our author himself, the baboons Washburn and de Vere photographed in their famous study appeared to be chivalrous, “the greatest warriors display a chivalry” which protects the weak female with her ‘lesser fighting equipment.”202 Here Erikson invokes Freud’s phrase about the “rock bottom of sexual differentiation”203 inferring that evidence of infrahuman species confirms traditional notions of sexually differentiated roles. The author proceeds to generalize from primate evidence and the length of mammalian gestation to justify the seclusion of women (“limited circle of activities”) and their subordinate position (“less resistance to control”).204 But as a pacifist, Erikson has just committed a fatal error: baboon society is built on war, he believes, and human society is said to hold certain traits constant in its evolutionary descent from primate life. It is just as likely then that war is as inherent and inevitable as the psycho-sexual behavior he insists upon and therefore, that female co-operation in the hope of peace can affect it no more than can the efforts of female baboons. This scheme of secluded motherhood guarded by aggressive and predatory male “chivalry” is very close to Ruskin’s. In urging woman’s participation in the larger social and political life, yet insisting she stay within her traditional domestic sphere and passive temperament (or insisting that such is innate) Erikson has defeated his own purpose. The female continues to be socially ineffective because confined by a menial, domestic or bioreproductive role, while the male who does control every avenue of public efficacy, continues (and is authorized to continue) to exercise the aggression defined as his nature. If human sexual temperament is inherent, there is really very little hope for us.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  She was just exactly the way her name sounded-pretty, vain, theatrical, faithless, spoiled, pampered, petted. Beautiful as a Dresden doll, only she had raven tresses and a Javanese slant to her soul. If she had a soul at all! Lived entirely in the body, in her senses, her desires—and she directed the show, the body show, with her tyrannical little will which poor Woodruff translated as some monumental force of character…. Ida swallowed everything like a pythoness. She was heartless and insatiable.2 Woodruff himself is given out as a uxorious fool: “The more he did for her the less she cared for him. She was a monster from head to toe.”3 The narrator claims to be utterly immune to Ida’s power but is nonetheless subject to coldly speculative curiosity: I just didn’t give a fuck for her, as a person, though I often wondered what she might be like as a piece of fuck, so to speak. I wondered about it in a detached way, but somehow it got across to her, got under her skin.4 As a friend of the family, Val is entitled to spend the night at the Woodruff house, followed by breakfast in bed while husband Bill goes off to work. Val’s initial tactic of extracting service from Ida is important to the events which follow: She hated the thought of waiting on me in bed. She didn’t do it for her husband and she couldn’t see why she should do it for me. To take breakfast in bed was something I never did except at Woodruff’s place. I did it expressly to annoy and humiliate her. 5 In accord with one of the myths at the very heart of a Miller novel, the protagonist, who is always some version of the author himself, is sexually irresistible and potent to an almost mystical degree. It is therefore no very great surprise to the reader that Ida falls into his hands. To return to the plucking then, and the passage quoted at length above. The whole scene reads very much like a series of strategems, aggressive on the part of the hero and acquiescent on the part of what custom forces us to designate as the heroine of the episode. His first maneuver, for example, is to coerce further service in the form of a demand for towels, which reduces Ida to the appropriate roles of a hostess and a domestic. That Ida has dressed herself in a collapsible bathrobe and silk stockings is not only accommodating but almost romancelike. The female reader may realize that one rarely wears stockings without the assistance of other paraphernalia, girdle or garters, but classic masculine fantasy dictates that nudity’s most appropriate exception is some gauzelike material, be it hosiery or underwear.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Erikson believes he has answered objections by the disclosure that photos of his subjects’ constructions were sex-identifiable to his colleagues. This is not very conclusive, since his teen-agers themselves proved so adept at taking such conspicuous cultural clues. The behavior of the subjects themselves is insisted on: “If the boys thought primarily of their present or anticipated roles, why, for example, is the policeman their favorite toy?”194 Why indeed? One is often mystified by the incongruity of giving middle-class children police and fireman toys with which to identify, functionaries whom it would mortify their parents to see them grow up to be. Yet possibly the motive is revealed in Erikson’s question—a policeman is an authority figure operating by physical force, and it is just this idea of himself that official educators such as public schools and the producers of textbooks wish to inculcate in the little male. Why boys choose policemen to align themselves with and girls do not is hardly a question; apart from the fact that they are taught to make sex-category identifications and policemen are not women, every child, or rather most of those in Erikson’s test, is fully aware that boys are supposed to play with policemen and girls are not. What might be more productive to study is the child who has broken the magic circle of programmed learning so that one could isolate elements which helped in transcending the cultural mold. How, for example, does a tomboy arrive at the positive “aggression” of an outdoor scene, or a boy arrive at a peaceful scene; the one escaping the doll house which has been successfully inflicted on her peers, the other the malevolence inflicted on his. Eleanor Maccoby’s informative article on female intelligence195 offers some clues to this sort of question by pointing out that the independence and ego-strength necessary for first-rate achievement in certain analytical fields is completely absent from the cultural experience of nearly every girl child. Other experiments196 have proven that the field orientation and dependency, the reliance upon approval and destructive attention which is the general course of female upbringing, produces in boys, a condition of passivity and infantilism considered extremely detrimental to achievement and even to maturity. The double standard of formal, and even informal, education decrees that what is harmful to one group is beneficial to another. And so it is if one approves an arrested development for half the race at the level of “playing house.” While it is indisputable that the games of both sexes were, as the result of Erikson’s choice of materials, notably banal, those for the girls were, for all the sedate feminine virtue the investigator found in them, but the prediction of stereotypical domestic lives; those of the boys had the seeds of something that might become real achievement, architectural, technological and exploratory, as well as moronic violence and war.

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

  He would hence be a fool to trouble himself about the object's sensations and forget his own; he would be entirely mad if, in order to modify those sensations foreign to him, he were to renounce improvement of his. That much established, if the individual in question is, unhappily, organized in such a fashion he cannot be stirred save by producing painful sensations in the object employed, you will admit he is forced to go ruthlessly to work, since the point of it all is to have the best possible time, the consequences for the object being entirely excluded from consideration.... We will return to the problem; let us continue in an orderly fashion. "Isolated enjoyment therefore has its charms, it may therefore have more of them than all other kinds; why I if it were not so, how should the aged and so many deformed or defective persons be able to enjoy themselves? for they know full well they are not loved nor lovable; perfectly certain it is impossible to share what they experience, is their joy any the less powerful on that account? Do they desire even the illusion? Behaving with utter selfishness in their riots, you will observe them seeking pleasure, you will see them sacrifice everything to obtain it, and in the object they put to use never other than passive properties.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In the second scene, the whore is a thief and a criminal (versions of Genet himself) so that a bank clerk may play at justice and morality. Her judge may order her whipped by a muscular executioner or grant her mercy in a transcendent imitation of the powers-that-be, powers reserved to other more fortunate males. The General of Scene III, following his own notions of masculine majesty, converts his whore into his mount and plays at hero while her mouth bleeds from the bit. No matter with which of the three leading roles of sinner, malefactor, or animal the male client may choose to mime his delusions of grandeur, the presence of the woman is utterly essential. To each masquerading male the female is a mirror in which he beholds himself. And the penultimate moment in his illusory but purchasable power fantasy is the moment when whether as Bishop, Judge, or General, he “fucks” her as woman, as subject, as chattel. The political wisdom implicit in Genet’s statement in the play is that unless the ideology of real or fantasized virility is abandoned, unless the clinging to male supremacy as a birthright is finally foregone, all systems of oppression will continue to function simply by virtue of their logical and emotional mandate in the primary human situation. But what of the madame herself? Irma, The Balcony’s able and dedicated administrator, makes money by selling other women, wherein it may be observed how no institution holds sway without collaborators and overseers. Chosen as queen under the counterrevolution, Irma does nothing at all, for queens do not rule. In fact, they do not even exist in themselves; they die as persons once they assume their function, as the Envoy graciously explains. Their function is to serve as figureheads and abstractions to males, just as Chantal, a talented former whore who moves for a moment toward human realization by means of her hope in the revolution, wavers, and then is sold anew and converted into the sexual figurehead for the rising when it becomes corrupt and betrays its radical ideals under the usual excuse of expediency. “In order to win” it adopts the demented consciousness of its opponent and establishes a rotten new version of all it had once stood against. In no time it turns the rebellion into a suicidal carnival, an orgy of blood connected to the old phallic fantasy of “shoot and screw.” Its totem is the ritual scapegoat provided by every army’s beauty queen since Troy. Once Chantal enters upon the mythical territory of a primitive standard and prize over whom males will tear each other apart, the revolution passes irrevocably into counterrevolution.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The psychoanalytic term for the generalized adolescent tone of men’s house culture is “phallic state.” Citadels of virility, they reinforce the most saliently power-oriented characteristics of patriarchy. The Hungarian psychoanalytic anthropologist Géza Róheim stressed the patriarchal character of men’s house organization in the preliterate tribes he studied, defining their communal and religious practices in terms of a “group of men united in the cult of an object that is a materialized penis and excluding the women from their society.”60 The tone and ethos of men’s house culture is sadistic, power-oriented, and latently homosexual, frequently narcissistic in its energy and motives.61 The men’s house inference that the penis is a weapon, endlessly equated with other weapons, is also clear. The practice of castrating prisoners is itself a comment on the cultural confusion of anatomy and status with weaponry. Much of the glamorization—of masculine comradery in warfare originates in what one might designate as “the men’s house sensibility.” Its sadistic and brutalizing aspects are disguised in military glory and a particularly cloying species of masculine sentimentality. A great deal of our culture partakes of this tradition, and one might locate its first statement in Western literature in the heroic intimacy of Patroclus and Achilles. Its development can be traced through the epic and the saga to the chanson de geste. The tradition still flourishes in war novel and movie, not to mention the comic book. Considerable sexual activity does take place in the men’s house, all of it, needless to say, homosexual. But the taboo against homosexual behavior Cat least among equals) is almost universally of far stronger force than the impulse and tends to effect a rechanneling of the libido into violence. This association of sexuality and violence is a particularly militaristic habit of mind.62 The negative and militaristic coloring of such men’s house homosexuality as does exist, is of course by no means the whole character of homosexual sensibility. Indeed, the warrior caste of mind with its ultravirility, is more incipiently homosexual, in its exclusively male orientation, than it is overtly homosexual. (The Nazi experience is an extreme case in point here.) And the heterosexual role-playing indulged in, and still more persuasively, the contempt in which the younger, softer, or more “feminine” members are held, is proof that the actual ethos is misogynist, or perversely rather than positively heterosexual. The true inspiration of men’s house association therefore comes from the patriarchal situation rather than from any circumstances inherent in the homo-amorous relationship.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  A spitefulness lurks within femininity, here defined not as the property of “a female in a skirt,” but as a matter of “submission to the imperious male.”44 Genet’s malevolence is a stubborn heresy cherished despite his self-proclaimed system of adulation, a lurking intractability. Slavelike, it shows itself in petty acts of betrayal and bitchiness. Refusing to accept the honor of a puff from the cigarette Botchako offers him, Genet, a mere fairy putting down a manly crasher, experiences a “triumphal moment.”45 The fag laughs at the mac behind his back. Just as he first rebelled from the social judgment of thief by embracing crime and converting it by “certain laws of a fictional aesthetic”46 into his own version of evil as good, Genet has chosen to rebel from the ignominy of “cunt” status by creating tantes who transcend and outdistance their overbearing males. Inscribing a copy of a book for a friend “Jean Genet, the weakest of all and the strongest”47 he reveals he has always been a clerk among barons, a part of him forever supercilious, aloof, and superior to the heroes he turns into poetry, donating gratis “those virtues they themselves never possess,”48 knowing full well they are but overgrown bullies, clods, moronic adolescents. Their lawlessness, celebrated to appall the bourgeoisie whom Genet hates with a hatred more bitter and unrelenting than that of other contemporary French intellectuals (and with greater cause), is finally only the mugs’ own bungled defeat before the fatalities of their class and education. But the Big Shots are cruel, and their masculine harshness, a stylized elaboration of the prevailing brutality of the world, makes them his enemies as well as his allies, his oppressors as well as his lovers. The queen is continuously trying to absorb and become these lovers, to assume their superiority as Mimosa II swallows a photograph of Our Lady “like a host.” Genet reveals the comic error in penis envy: to say he is infected is a gross understatement-possessing a penis, he has power envy. The very fellatio which is the queen’s role and insignia of servitude is converted to a kind of castration rite wherein the pimp’s hardness (“with Gorgui all is hard”) is overcome by softness (“Divine is she-who-is-soft”).49 An insight into the strangely subjective character of sexual power is contained in this brief description: From the way he talks, the way he lights and smokes his cigarette, Divine gathered that Darling is a pimp. At first she had certain fears: of being beaten up, robbed, insulted. Then she felt the proud satisfaction of having made a pimp come.50

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  In a great many respects Miller is avant-garde and a highly inventive artist, but his most original contribution to sexual attitudes is confined to giving the first full expression to an ancient sentiment of contempt. The remainder of his sexual ethos is remarkably conventional. Reading, again in the toilet, he converts his own syndrome into a “great tradition” and fancies himself one of the illustrious company of Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Petronius, “the fine lusty genuine spirits who recognized dung for dung and angels for angels,” observing with them the ancient distinctions between good and evil, whore and lady, adamant about the virtues of a “world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit.”75 Under the brash American novelty is the old story: guilt, fear, a reverence for “purity” in the female; and a deep moral outrage whenever the “lascivious bitch” in woman is exposed. Despite the fact that Don Juan’s success lies in proving “they all like it—the dirty bitches,” Miller seems each time disappointed that they should, shocked and unsettled by the discovery. Somehow he wishes they wouldn’t, is sure they shouldn’t. Yet, most do and it appears that it is just to unmask this very hypocrisy that he carries on so many campaigns. Disillusion sets in early. Giving piano lessons, the stripling discovered that his pupil’s mother is “a slut, a tramp and a trollop if ever there was one.” Worse still, she lives “with a nigger…seems she couldn’t get a prick big enough to satisfy her.” Now the first rule of his code is that no opportunity should be wasted-anyway, “what the hell are you going to do when a hot bitch like that plasters her cunt up against you”—yet Miller seems shocked nevertheless.76 He has a hygienic preference for the daughter, who is “fresh cunt,” clean as “newmown hay.” When she is “knocked up” he finds a “Jewboy,” coughs up a very modest contribution toward the cost of an abortion and lights out for the Adirondacks. Off on a jaunt to the Catskills he meets a pair of girls who, in the manner of medieval “types,” represent Dishonesty and Integrity. Agnes is a “dumb Irish Catholic” and consequently, a prude; she “likes it,” but is afraid to admit as much. In splendid contrast stands Francie—“one of those girls who are born to fuck. She had no aims, no great desires…held no grievances, was constantly cheerful.”77 She is so exemplary she even relishes a beating: “it makes me feel good inside…maybe a woman ought to get beaten up once in a while,” she volunteers, and Miller marvels that “It isn’t often you get a cunt who’ll admit such things-I mean a regular cunt and not a moron.”78

• From Manhunt (2022)

  The plaza was mostly empty, except for the dozen or so protesters with their cardboard NO TERFS and TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS signs who jeered and shouted at her as she hurried past them down the steps. She grinned and threw them a salute. Two Legion soldiers in secondhand riot gear stood by the hall’s plate-glass front doors, one leaning against a concrete bulkhead, the other lighting a cigarette from the butt of her last. “Nice,” chuckled the taller of the two, a black girl with island chains of vitiligo on her cheek, her hands, and across the bridge of her nose. Her name was Kari or Karin, Ramona thought. Something with a K. Inside, the building was, if anything, more forbidding than its facade suggested. Light fell through skylights set into the ceiling at regular intervals, creating a grid of dusty illumination sharply demarcated by lines of shadow. Bare concrete steps rose toward reception and the elevator banks and offices beyond it. Ramona thought that it had probably bustled in its heyday, the shouts and whispered conversations of its hundreds of loud, rude Massachusetts civil servants ringing from its unforgiving walls. Now it was almost empty, just like the rest of the world. Major Molly Lang was waiting for her by the stairs. Molly was a broad, stocky dyke somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties—“A lady never tells” was her unchanging reply when asked—with leathery skin and close-cropped silver hair. She said she’d been a cop for twenty years before T-Day, but Ramona had never quite believed that. There was something inexplicably “career postal carrier” about her. Maybe her quick, confident stride, or the orthopedic sleeve she always wore on her left knee. “Hey, Molly,” she said. “How’s it hanging?” Molly grabbed her face so quickly that all she could do was yelp and slap ineffectually at the shorter woman’s strong, thick arms. Hard, squinty blue eyes magnified by scratched bifocals bored into hers. “You going up to the boss like this?” “What the fuck are you talking about?” She pushed against Molly’s shoulders, but couldn’t break her grip. She hated being held like this. Hated it. “Stop fucking around and let me go!” “Stupid,” Molly sighed, though not without affection. “Your eyes. You look like a roadie coming off a three-day bender. How much ganja you smoke?” Ramona wrenched herself free of Molly’s clutches, staggering a little and doing her best to ignore the curious stares of the few Legion personnel and Boston council staff dispersed around the cavernous entryway. “It was just a spliff. And no one calls it ganja anymore, grandma. ” She brushed dust off her jacket. “Do you have fuckin’ eye drops or did you just want to break my balls?”

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  While the first half of Sons and Lovers is perfectly realized, the second part is deeply flawed by Lawrence’s overparticipation in Paul’s endless scheming to disentangle himself from the persons who have helped him most. Lawrence is so ambivalent here that he is far from being clear, or perhaps even honest, and he offers us two contrary reasons for Paul’s rejection of Miriam. One is that she will “put him in her pocket.” And the other, totally contradictory, is the puzzling excuse that in their last interview, she failed him by not seizing upon him and claiming him as her mate and property. It would seem that for reasons of his own, Lawrence has chosen to confuse the sensitive and intelligent young woman who was Jessie Chambers65 with the tired old lily of another age’s literary convention. The same discrepancy is noticeable in his portrait of Clara,66 who is really two people, the rebellious feminist and political activist whom Paul accuses of penis envy and even man-hating, and who tempts him the more for being a harder conquest, and, at a later stage, the sensuous rose, who by the end of the novel is changed once again—now beyond recognition-into a “loose woman” whom Paul nonchalantly disposes of when he has exhausted her sexual utility. Returning her to her husband, Paul even finds it convenient to enter into one of Lawrence’s Blutbruderschaft bonds with Baxter Dawes, arranging an assignation in the country where Clara, meek as a sheep, is delivered over to the man she hated and left years before. The text makes it clear that Dawes had beat and deceived his wife. Yet, with a consummate emotional manipulation, Paul manages to impose his own version of her marriage on Clara, finally bringing her to say that its failure was her fault. Paul, formerly her pupil in sexuality, now imagines he has relieved Clara of what he smugly describes as the “femme incomprise” quality which had driven her to the errors of feminism. We are given to understand that through the sexual instruction of this novice, Clara was granted feminine “fulfillment.” Paul is now pleased to make a gift of Clara to her former owner fancying, that as the latter has degenerated through illness and poverty (Paul has had Dawes fired) he ought to be glad of salvaging such a brotherly castoff. Even before it provides Paul with sexual gratification, the affair offers considerable opportunities for the pleasure of bullying: “Here, I say, you seem to forget I’m your boss. It just occurs to me.” “And what does that mean?” she asked coolly. “It means I’ve got a right to boss you.” “Is there anything you want to complain about?” “Oh, I say, you needn’t be nasty,” he said angrily. “I don’t know what you want,” she said, continuing her task. “I want you to treat me nicely and respectfully.” “Call you ‘sir,’ perhaps?” she asked quietly. “Yes, call me ‘sir.’ I should love it.”67

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  The lines of influence which psychoanalysis will exercise over sexual politics are set; generations of practitioners will follow, reputable or ridiculous. Yet more effective even than penis envy is the school’s tendency toward a pseudoscientific unification of the cultural definition of masculinity and femininity with the genetic reality of male and female. Dressing the thing up in jargon—“passivity,” “low libido,” “masochism,” “narcissism,” “undeveloped super ego”—one gives the old myth of feminine “nature” a new respectability. Now it can be said scientifically that women are inherently subservient, and males dominant, more strongly sexed and therefore entitled to sexually subjugate the female, who enjoys her oppression and deserves it, for she is by her very nature, vain, stupid, and hardly better than barbarian, if she is human at all. Once this bigotry has acquired the cachet of science, the counterrevolution may proceed pretty smoothly. Sex, like race, is something one cannot really change. It is a sign of a rather superior female to wish herself out of such a case, seeing and aspiring to the virtues of the ruling group. But it is futile to hope to escape one’s birth caste. Aspiration on the part of the truly incapacitated only forbodes frustration. And, after all, psychoanalysis promised fulfillment in passivity and masochism, and greater fulfillment, indeed, the very meaning of woman’s life lay in reproduction, and there alone. Then too, in venal hands, psychoanalysis could not only discredit the revolution and turn it back, but give work, make money, sell itself and consumerism as well.135 Some Post-Freudians In general, Freudian psychology would posit an irreducible human nature, an essential and universal human psychology; the Oedipus complex should develop in matriarchal or communal society as well as in patriarchal; penis envy in a sexually egalitarian as well as in a male-supremacist culture. Its tendency is to view each personality as the result not of individual choices or social conditions, nor as the interaction of the two, but as the product of a childhood biography imposed upon inherent constitution by parental behavior. Finally, having misapprehended the physiological data it claims to be based on, it imagines sexual temperament to be the function of biology (masculine is active, feminine is passive) and genetics (the activity and passivity of the sperm and ova). Having done all this, it concludes that sexual status, role, and temperament are fixed entities-that culture is based upon anatomy, and must, therefore, be destiny.