small-mindedness and material greed of the working-class wife who
harasses her humble, hardworking, ever patient husband with
petty tirades of insult that no gentle rebuke can mellow. The Lady,
the Aristocrat, is a polished, empty shell, good only for spitting at,
because spit shows up on her clean exterior, which gives immediate
gratification to the spitter, whatever his technique. The Jewish
mother is a monster who wants to cut the phallus of her precious
son into a million pieces and put it in the chicken soup. The black
woman, also a castrator, is a grotesque matriarch whose sheer endurance desolates men. The lesbian is half monster, half moron: having no man to nag, she imagines herself Napoleon.
And the derision of female lives does not stop with these toxic,
ugly, insidious slanders because there is always, in every circumstance, the derision in its skeletal form, all bone, the meat stripped clean: she is pussy, cunt. Every other part of the body is cut away,
severed, and there is left a thing, not human, an it, which is the
funniest joke of all, an unending source of raucous humor to those
who have done the cutting. The very butchers who cut up the
meat and throw away the useless parts are the comedians. The
paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a
dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.
Every woman, no matter what her social, economic, or sexual
situation, fights this paring down with every resource at her command. Because her resources are so astonishingly meager and because she has been deprived of the means to organize and expand them, these attempts are simultaneously heroic and pathetic. The
whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light
reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur
dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men
who rise by clim bing over her prone body in m ilitary formation,
w ill not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken
from her: she w ill not scream out as their heels dig into her
flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all
the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly
stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as
her own.
So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine,
but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons,
institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her
powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most
honest expressions of her w ill and being. She becomes a lackey,
serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and
her kind. This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to
her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of
all ideological persuasions define it.
*
M arilyn Monroe, shortly before she died, wrote in her notebook on
the set of
afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I
am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. ” 1
The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.
When she acts w ell, that is, when she convinces the male controllers of images and wealth that she is reducible to current sexual fashion, available to the male on his own terms, she is paid and
