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The Cloven Race
THE CLOVEN RACE
The Young Man's Guide to Womankind
“If I were crested (male) instead of cloven (female) you would not dare speak to me so”.
Queen Elizabeth I of England (1557-1603) to an impertinent male
By
D.W.Osborne
Copyright DW Osborne 2006
The Cloven Race
THE CLOVEN RACE
The Young Man’s Guide to Womankind
Chapter Synopses
Semantics
Origins of the word “woman”, “man”, “wife”, “lady”, “girl”, etc. How to speak to and about
women.
Biological Imperatives
Why the human race is divided into women and men. Mammalian reproduction. Sex roles.
Menstruation. Pregnancy. Childbirth. The female beast - a biological juggernaut.
Physiological Differences
Size and shape of women and men. Why women are smaller. Natural variation. The
significance of breasts. Secondary sexual characteristics. Appreciating women as creatures.
Female flesh and when to touch it. Physical power of the cloven race. Endurance and the
will to live. Voices. Differences and equality.
Hormone Drives
Male and female brains. Is there such a thing as a woman’s mind? Bio-chemical basis of
gender. Aggression. Feminine style. Masculinity-femininity as a continuum.
Nature and Nurture
Stereotypes of female character. Sex-role training. Similarity of human cultures. Creative
tension between genetic inheritance and environment. Mutual incomprehension of men and
women. The myth of women’s intuition. Intellectual competence of women. Greater genetic
variability of men. A theory of male genius. Is the average woman more intelligent?
The Female Spirit
“Gynergy”. Female piety and mysticism. Humanism of women. Do not be misled by a mild
manner and lack of assertiveness. Maiden into matriarch. Isomorphism of the female spirit.
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Relentlessness. Rule of the dragons. Why some women go sour. Disappointment with men.
Female restlessness. The fear of female sexuality. “Woman is to blame”.
Repression of Female Sexuality
Social need for repression. The old compact between men and women. Priestly horror of
female flesh. Distorting effects of repression. The pendulum swings between repression and
liberalism. A realistic view of sex.
The Female Principle
Effects of sex-role specialisation on human perceptions of the world. Male and female as the
twin pillars of life. The many-sided female principle. Gods and goddesses. Woman as
shaman, priest and seer. Demonisation of female sexuality. Economic and social basis of
male supremacy. The Sky Father takes over. Subordination of the female principle. Witch
hunts. Re-injecting the female principle into the godhead.
Misogyny
Fear and hatred of women. Degrees of misogyny. Male apprehension about female power.
Psychopathology of woman-haters. How to avoid misogyny.
Whore, Witch and Bitch
Hostility to the female principle. Coming to terms with female sexuality. The smashing of
the cage, an end of the repression. Re-invention of the family. Women take responsibility.
Supposed bitchiness of women. Wicca. Why Christians hunted witches. The pure woman
and the Devil’s whore. Resurgence of female spiritual power.
Patriarchy
The feminist onslaught. Counter-demonisation of maleness. Psychological frailty of men.
The patriarchal system. Why it endured so long. Hidden female power. Exceptional women
in history.
Man the Hunter
The cult of the male body. The myth of Man the Hunter. Male beauty. Did woman create
man? What women look for.
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Homosexuality
What to think about it.
How not to be a bigot. Homosexual in-groups. Coping with
lesbianism.
Machismo
The cult of male superiority. How to deal with it.
Pair Bonding
The universal conspiracy to pair everyone off. Love and marriage. How society damages
natural pairing. Essentially monogamous nature of humans. Purpose of sexual intercourse.
Mateship.
Biological efficiency of monogamy.
Practice bonding between parents and
children.
Love
A kind of madness.
Western concept of love: romanticism, chivalry, Judaeo-Christian
inheritance. Romantic passion and marriage. Jealousy. Sexual predation. Who holds the
best cards? Falling in love. Separation and rejection. A fool from heaven.
Courtship
Courtship as a natural phenomenon.
Human adaptation of animal courtship behaviour.
Looking, approaching, touching. Sexual display. What women look for. Importance of
conversation. Making them laugh. Eye games. Reading the signs. “A cunning look”.
Usefulness of flirting. Negotiations with the other sex. The first touch. (The symbolism of
gifts. Feeding rituals.
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Sexual Intercourse
Sex and love. Over-promotion of sex in popular culture. Common sense of the people. The
cement of a relationship. Difficulty in achieving a balanced view of sex. Kissing, caressing,
penetration. Orgasm. Emotional aspects of sex. Morality of sex.
Manhood
What being a man will mean. Ideals of manhood. The gentleman. Towards a new definition
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THE CLOVEN RACE
The Young Man’s Guide to Womankind
This book addresses the central issue of our age, the relationship between the sexes. The
present time is a turning point in history, the time when the ancient contract between men and
women is being rewritten. The first clause in the new contract will say that men and women
are equal, thus overturning the situation which has persisted for several thousand years.
It looks as if men could have a hard time adjusting to the new relationship, but this depends
on their own attitudes. The new era will still need men. Women will still need men, but they
will have to be men who can accept women truly as equals. That such men are still relatively
rare is a hangover from the age of male supremacy. Most men need to change the way they
see women. We must teach our boys how to understand women and how to enjoy sharing the
world with them.
The book is ostensibly a homily from a grandfather to his grandsons
The viewpoint is
exclusively male, seeing women as they appear to men. In plain language, it gives the
thoughtful layman a guide through the minefields of sexual politics. It is designed to help
men to understand and appreciate women. In passing, it invites men to take a good look at
themselves and to wonder about their future relationship with the other half of the species,
that strange and wonderful cloven race.
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TO MY GRANDSONS
Dear Boys,
I hope you will find this book interesting and that it will help you to lead happy and fulfilled
lives. It is my legacy to you. No doubt, you would have preferred money, but you will have
to make do with wisdom instead. If it works, it will be worth more than money.
You boys were born into a momentous period in the world's history. At long last, the
relationship between men and women is being reformulated. In fact, it is the great issue of
our age. Of course, the two sexes have always been passionately involved with one another.
They have often been friends, as well as lovers. All the same, there is no doubt that we are
coming to the end of an immensely long era during which women have been undervalued,
some would say oppressed. This was not due so much to men's hostility to women, although
that has been a factor, as to men's inability to understand and sympathise with women. That
is something which can be put right, especially if we teach our boys properly.
If you are going to be happy in the new world order, you must learn to value our female
friends and to live in harmony with them. Understand that I want you to be real men, not
these dreadful New Men, who cringe to the new regime. What they don't seem to understand
is that petticoat government is every bit as oppressive as patriarchy, and that we men will be
on the receiving end of it. No, you will have to stand up for yourselves and not let yourselves
be emasculated by the feminisation of society. But you must also remember that real men are
friends with women and love them. What is more, real women love them back. That is the
basis of happiness for both kinds of people.
You will ask what I know about women that I should lecture you about them. All I can say is
that I have survived for a number of decades in this world, which is positively swarming with
women, although some men pretend not to notice. My survival and my mental and physical
well-being, like yours, is mainly due to a succession of women who decided to spend some of
their time on it. In the case of my mother and my wife, this was a great deal of their time.
But I am also indebted to my grandmother, sister, cousins, aunts, daughters, daughter-in-law,
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colleagues, friends, teachers and the legions of other women I have met on life's long journey
for the insight they have given me into the female mind and spirit.
Some of these ladies are well-known to you boys, so you don't need me to testify to their wit,
wisdom and strength of mind. For my part, there was scarcely one of them I did not like and
respect. It seems to me that if I can get along with them, so can you. Now read on.
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SEMANTICS
The word "woman" is extremely ancient. It is the modern English form of the Anglo-Saxon
word "weobman", which meant literally a female man. Some amateur etymologists have tried
to render this as "womb-man", but the "weob" element is derived from the same root as the
modern word "wife", or the German word "weib". This, too, meant simply a female person.
The modern English word "wife" has only recently come to mean specifically a married
woman. So those who complain about the word "housewife", saying, "I'm not married to the
house", are losing sight of the fact that in a compound word of this sort the "wife" part only
means "woman", hence woman of the house. Similar words such as "ale-wife" and "fishwife" meant women who worked with ale or fish. Another such word is "midwife", which
means the woman who attends a birth, "mid" meaning "with" in the sense of accompanying.
The Old English word "weob" also seems to have carried some connotations of seniority, so
that it implied not just any woman, but a woman with special functions or skills. Hence, the
"housewife" really means the senior woman in the household. In an age when there might
have been several adult women in a household this was an important distinction. Similarly,
the ale-wife specialised in brewing and selling ale. Presumably, she was not to be taken
lightly, either.
If the notion of a female man seems odd to modern ears, it would not have done to our
forebears. The use of the word "man" to mean exclusively an adult male human being is also
relatively recent.
In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary shows this as only the fourth
meaning of the word. The first three meanings are, "An individual member of the human
race", "The human race in general" and "The human race in a particular aspect", for example
Neanderthal Man.
So the use of the word "man" in compound words, such as "chairman" or "spokesman", to
refer to people of both sexes is quite logical when the sex is irrelevant. Earlier English
speakers took this for granted. Until the end of the Middle Ages, an Englishman could call
his sweetheart his "leman" (pronounced lee-man). This means "love-man", something which
would have an altogether different connotation today.
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If English is a sexist language, it has only become so in modern times. If we want to avoid
sexism, we should perhaps go back to our roots, instead of wilfully perverting our ancient and
glorious tongue with ugly and unnecessary neologisms. There is no reason why a woman
head of a committee should not be called its chairman, if her sex is indeed immaterial. If it is
a specifically female committee, then she can be called the chairwoman. This is surely
preferable to the faintly ridiculous "chair" and to the even more laughable and illiterate
"chairperson". If she were the foreman of the jury, some people would presumably want to
call her the "fore" or the "foreperson". Ugh!
Of course, to the more rabid sort of feminists, this is anathema. They insist that the hated
element "man" must be expunged and that they have no connexion with the firm next door.
Even Webster's College Dictionary once suggested that "women" might be spelled "womyn"
(why not "wimmin"?) This is a fair amount of nonsense. Most women would not deny that
they are members of the human race, the race of Man.
There are a number of terms which must be used with care when dealing with the opposite
sex. We are told that almost none of the words traditionally used to refer to female people are
acceptable nowadays.
Apparently, we are not allowed to use the old terms, such as
"housewife", and must say "homemaker" instead. Also, any terms which might be considered
derogatory to women, or even flippant about them, are equally taboo. Even if you call them
"girls", "the fair sex" or "waitresses", the thought police will be after you to scrub out your
foul mouth and put you in the stocks.
Presumably, the cheery Cockney habit of calling all women "tarts" would have the social
engineers in hysterics. Even the word "hysterics" will have to be banned, because it comes
from the Greek word for womb, implying that the owners of wombs are a bit inclined to jump
off their trolleys. Naturally, you do have to watch your words when dealing with women. A
lot of the old speechways are indeed dismissive of women or downright offensive to them. I
do not recommend you to call women "tarts", even in jest. Generally speaking, if you have
respect and affection for women, you will not want to use offensive expressions about them.
If your manner and intention are affectionate, your actual words are less important in
themselves. It is not what you say, it is the way that you say it which counts. Lovers say the
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most amazing things to one another, but that does not mean they are intending to demean or
exploit each other. Words are only one element in communication. The intention behind
their use is what gives them meaning. This is signalled in dozens of ways, but especially by
intonation, emphasis, context, body-language and timing. One of the staples of comedy is to
change the ostensible import of words by these means. Thus, I can tell my wife she is a silly
old tart and yet make her laugh, because she knows it really means I feel affection for her.
(Don't try this at home, by the way!) Conversely, I could tell her she is a wonderful
homemaker and yet make her angry, because she knows I am being sarcastic.
That is why you must use your own judgment and not believe everything people tell you
about the words you may or may not use. Words can have a huge variety of meanings, not
just one meaning. They are like guided missiles. It depends what warhead you put on them.
The notion that certain words are bad and must never be used is obnoxious. There are no bad
words, only bad intentions. All words are interesting and useful in one way or another. Many
of them are charged with the history of our people, like "woman" itself. To try to control the
way people think by controlling the words they use is an act of terrorism. It was the
technique of the Nazis.
So, dear boys, if your attitude is right, your vocabulary will take care of itself. Remember that
analysing texts is a task for numbskulls.
Let us now consider some of the expressions used in common parlance and the meanings
which are most often attached to them. One of the big NO words for the social engineering
prigs is "girl" when applied to a woman. In point of fact, this is a very widespread habit and
is usually intended affectionately. Why anyone should take exception to this is hard to
fathom. Presumably, it can be taken as a put-down, by according women only juvenile status.
Actually, "girl" can now mean almost any female person, regardless of her age.
The word "girl" is yet another word which has changed its meaning in modern times. In
Shakespeare's day, it meant an immature person of either sex. A young female was called a
maiden.
Nowadays, "girl" means specifically a young female person, especially before
puberty. However, the point at which a girl becomes a woman is not clearly defined, unlike
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the point at which a maiden becomes a woman. Certainly, it is not considered derogatory to
refer to young adult women as "girls".
Because youth is considered a virtue in women, there is a universal benign conspiracy to
prolong their youth by calling them "girls" as long as possible. It is meant to be euphemistic,
or slightly complimentary. Also, using the word "women" can seem slightly brusque in some
circumstances. For example, in an industry where most of the workforce is female, it is very
usual to refer to them as "the girls", even when they are mostly middle-aged women. So
people say, "How many girls do we need for this?" or, "The girls won't stand for it." The fact
that the women workers refer to themselves as girls shows that they accept this as a
convention. To refer to them as "the women" sounds rather impersonal. To call them simply
"workers" makes them sound like ants. "Girls" is more informal and matey. It is a parallel
with the habit of calling a male workforce "the boys".
Because of usages like this, the word "girl" is moving towards becoming just another term for
a woman, although it still has connotations of youth. In relations between the sexes, a man
calls a beloved woman his girl, even if she is sixty years old. Or he may call her "Girl"
instead of using her name. If he says it with affection and because "girl" has a warm and
intimate feel to it, she will not mind, even if she is a feminist.
Another word which is in common use is "lady". This comes straight from the Anglo-Saxon
"hladig", which was the female counterpart of "hlaford" or lord. Consequently, it means
literally a woman of high social rank. Of course, in modern mouths it does not generally
mean Lady, as in an aristocratic title. It may mean a woman of high integrity and refined
character. In that sense, a lady is the female counterpart of a gentleman, someone we admire
for their nobility of mind and spirit. More commonly, however, "lady" is used rather archly
and humorously to mean a woman of character, as in "She was one hell of a lady!" or “The
Iron Lady” (Margaret Thatcher).
Sometimes, a woman inspires intense admiration in a man, so that he might be heard to say of
her, "She is a real lady". This is a heartfelt compliment to her character. It is also using the
word in something like its original sense, meaning a woman who is worthy of respect,
whereas the general use of the word as an alternative to "woman" rather devalues it.
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Feminists say we should not use the word "lady". This is a pity, because not all women are
ladies, at least not all of the time, and it is useful to have a word which distinguishes those
who are. So if you think a woman is a lady, go ahead and tell her so.
What some people dislike about "lady" is that it has connexions with outmoded ideas of
chivalry, which they consider demeaning to women.
Although chivalry was once an
elaborate and artificial system of values, which placed women on a silly pedestal, and quite
possibly at bottom treated them as inferiors, it is nevertheless still an emotion which springs
naturally in a man's breast. It stems from powerful elements in male sexuality, especially an
urge to defend women and a longing to bask in the warm glow of their approval. It seems
probable, too, that men have normally a basic respect for women which our society does its
best to knock out of them.
I was brought up in an old-fashioned world, in which a man who walked with a woman in the
street placed himself between her and the traffic. Older men whose opinion I respected told
me this is what I ought to do. You read all sorts of nonsense about the reasons for this
custom, such as a man needing to be able to draw his sword if attacked. In reality, it was
nothing more significant than the fact that in former times ladies wore expensive and
impractical clothing. Traffic threw up a lot of mud (and other things). So a gentleman took
the flying ordure on his own macho boots.
Modern women tend to think that such old-world courtesies make them look like shrinking
violets, but on the other hand few women object to a bit of tender solicitude. When I first
started walking out with young women, I noticed that my female companion was indeed
smaller and less physically assertive than a male would be. She did not like loud noises or
being jostled. So it seemed that the best place for her to walk was on the inside, nearest the
wall, at least in crowded places.
Nowadays, young women often wonder why I suddenly appear on the other side of them
when we cross the street. Similarly, in a noisy, bustling place, such as a pub, I still invite a
woman companion to sit in the most sheltered place, so that oafs do not barge into her or drop
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beer on her. In a restaurant, I try to seat her so that she can see into the room, rather than
facing a wall. These things are done to help someone I care about have a good time.
There is a world of difference between the substance of good manners and the mere form. It
does not matter very much which side of a woman you walk. What does matter is that you
care what happens to her. The old-world courtesies are no use unless the right attitude
underlies them.
You should not place a woman on a pedestal, but you should show
consideration for her feelings and her well-being. Chivalry these days means nothing more
than being well mannered. The essence of good manners is to be able to imagine how
someone else might feel.
This is why the word "lady" is a good word and actually helps relations between the sexes. It
reminds us men that women are often worthy of our chivalrous feelings. To a man who really
likes women, as opposed to merely lusting after them, every woman is a lady. Also, a good
man feels chivalrous to all female persons, from little girls to ancient dames.
Another pet hate of feminist social engineers is when men address women with terms of
endearment which are obviously insincere. To call women "darling", "baby", "honey". "doll"
or "dear" requires some sureness of touch. Once again, we are back to the business of
intentions. If your manner is friendly and respectful, you can just about get away with using
these terms to women you do not know. Just about. It is terribly easy to stray over the
dividing line between being friendly and being demeaning or over-familiar.
For example, the word "darling" is a common term of endearment between lovers, or between
husband and wife (which is not always the same thing). So it is potentially a highly-charged
word. However, it is also used very frequently between people who are just friends or
relatives, especially in certain circles, such as show business, the middle class, and so on. To
some extent, therefore, "darling" has lost some of its special intimacy. Nevertheless, if a man
says "darling" to a woman he does not know, it tends to come across as condescending. In
fact, it is sometimes used precisely as a put-down, when it is said with sarcastic emphasis.
Listen to a male motorist speaking to a female motorist: "Can you move back a bit, darling?"
This means, "You are in my way, you brainless female".
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On the whole, I do not recommend you to call women "darling", unless you really mean it.
Save it for when you take your favourite female friend in your arms and you need something
to whisper in her ear. If she knows you do not say it lightly, she will be doubly pleased.
In some parts of the English-speaking world, it is very common for men and women to call
each other "love", even on the most casual encounter, such as in shops and bars, where one is
serving the other. Once again, this folksy speechway is disliked by those who believe that our
words shape our thoughts rather than vice versa. It is difficult to see anything sinister in it,
especially as it is generally used as a way to address affectionately a member of the opposite
sex. Since both sexes do it, there is no question of the custom being a matter of men
patronising women. On the contrary, when a middle-aged woman calls me "love", I know she
means it as a recognition of our basic equality. It is much nicer than "comrade" or "citizen",
but the idea is the same.
In general, you call a woman "love" in the same sorts of circumstances in which you would
call a man "pal" or "mate". That is, it is a demotic mannerism which does not sit easily on
everyone's lips. So if you never call other men "pal" or "mate", you should never call a
strange woman "love". Of course, when you are in the happy state of being admitted to a
woman's private world, that is closer than 10cm to her surface, you can call her "love" as
much as you like. It means something different then.
Another tricky word is "dear". Like all such words, it can mean something civil and pleasant,
or it can be used as an offensive weapon. My theory is that modern people say "dear" where
our ancestors in the 17th Century would have said "daughter". That is, it is a friendly form of
address by an older person of either sex to a young female. In this context, it has nothing to
do with love, other than an affectionate regard. So when a young woman does some kindness
to an elderly woman, the latter will be heard to say, "Thank you, dear", without any trace of
patronage.
It is a bit trickier for a man to call a woman "dear". Essentially, you have to be at least twenty
years older than she is, otherwise she will think you are being patronising. As a true term of
endearment, the word "dear" has ironically rather fallen into disuse. It sounds very quaint for
a man to call his wife "dear" these days. Instead, it has become a camp form of address
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between men who either are, or want to appear, effeminate. If you want to use "dear" as a
real love word, you have to use it as an adjective in combination with the beloved's name:
"Dear Emily!" (sigh).
If all of this has caused you to think that relations between the sexes are a minefield, with
every little word being potentially explosive, you are beginning to get the idea. Women have
sharp ears for every nuance of meaning and are very touchy about real or imagined putdowns. The younger ones, particularly, are full of feminist dogma. This teaches them that
the world is basically a male conspiracy against women and that our language itself is an
engine of discrimination against them. Once people have these kinds of notions, nothing in
the world can persuade them otherwise. You can never satisfy a zealot. So don't try. The
golden rule is not to be Jack-the-Lad and do not take any liberties with a woman you do not
know. Just be civil and friendly. If she wants you to be anything more, she will let you
know.
Since about 1988, the word "gender" has come into fashion as a smart-speak synonym for
"sex". Strictly speaking, gender is properly the attribute of one of the sexes and is expressed
in an adjective, "masculine" or "feminine". The word "sex" is a noun and stands for the thing
itself. Thus, there are two sexes, male and female, and three genders, masculine, feminine
and neuter.
No doubt, the language changes and people will speak as they wish. It just seems a bit
prudish, as well as ignorant, to say "gender" when you mean "sex". It is also a pity to lose the
distinction between sex and gender when this is intellectually very useful. The characteristics
of the thing can be separated from the thing itself. So we should take "gender" to mean
masculinity and femininity, the supposed attributes of the two sexes.
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BIOLOGICAL IMPERATIVES
In the beginning there was chaos. Some say there still is. But what is meant by "chaos" in
this sense is that, in the great explosion with which the universe is supposed to have started,
there were no patterns or irregularities in matter. All the molecules just whirled about
aimlessly, without making any shapes or form.
However, they soon got themselves
organised, for reasons which we do not understand. In the primeval chaos, shapes and
patterns soon began to appear. There were clouds of gas, out of which formed countless
galaxies and billions of stars. Many of the stars have planets, where conditions are less severe
than in the burning hearts of the stars, or in the frigid void of space. On some of these
planets, conditions are suitable for the evolution of life, with gentle warmth and sufficient
water, so that carbon-based molecules can become ever more complex and eventually
organise themselves into living matter. Living things are different from inanimate things in
being able to adapt to their environment and to reproduce themselves.
Why inert matter should organise itself into living matter is anybody's guess. Perhaps there is
indeed a Creator, who ordered the slime to become noble and the dust to walk tall. If there is
a Creator, perhaps It (for it could hardly be a He or a She) also ordered that living things
should become ever more beautiful. That would explain why most living things, especially
those which have evolved the furthest, are beautiful as well as strange. Or so it seems to us.
All living things, from the simplest moving molecule to the most complex animals, seem to
live under two great biological imperatives, which come like standing orders from the fount
and headquarters of life. These orders are to survive and to reproduce. Without these two
great urges, there could be no living things. The two imperatives are, of course, connected. If
we survive, we can reproduce. If we reproduce, we can survive through our offspring.
The survival of the species seems to be more important than the survival of the individual,
although again the two things are connected, The individual may be to some extent
expendable, but the species much less so, since it is in effect the gene pool from which the
individuals are created. Nevertheless, the individuals must survive in sufficient numbers for
the species to survive.
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Consequently, the individual is by no means completely expendable, especially in the most
highly evolved species, such as humans, where each individual represents a lot of investment
of the species' energy. So we humans, in common with all living creatures, have two primary
urges.
They are firstly to survive and secondly to make sure the species survives by
reproducing ourselves. Some biologists say that what we really want is for our genes to
survive, thus giving us some kind of immortality as our descendants walk about the earth.
Whichever it is, we want to live and we want to produce offspring. It could be argued that
these two priorities should be reversed. That is, we first want to reproduce ourselves and then
we want to live. Most parents would readily die to protect their children.
The simplest way for a creature to reproduce is to divide itself into two. There are a number
of life forms which do just that.
The problem with this method is that although one
individual easily becomes two individuals, they are genetically identical. In other words, they
are really the same individual going around in two instalments. Also, splitting yourself into
two is not much fun and therefore only suitable for really dismal life forms, such as amoeba
and diatoms, or microbes and viruses, which are only just alive.
It is biologically much more efficient if the new individuals are not just exact copies of their
progenitors, but are genetically different. If the new generation is composed of individuals
who are different from their parents genetically, then evolutionary change can happen
relatively quickly. The point is that if the genes of two parents are mixed when producing
offspring, the offspring will not be exactly the same as either of them, but will truly be new
and unique individuals.
Consequently, successive generations of genetically varied and
vigorous individuals can take part in the great game of evolution, whether by natural
selection, survival of the fittest, or some other mechanism.
As a result, Nature, the Life Force or It decided quite early on that mixing the genes is the
best way to reproduce. So practically all advanced animals and plants do it that way.
However, if the genes are to be mixed, there has to be a method and an apparatus for mixing
them. This apparatus is the sex organs, while the method is called sexual reproduction.
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All creatures and plants which engage in sexual reproduction have to possess organs for
producing genetically coded material and for exchanging it with other individuals of the same
species. In general, these organs consist of one type for emitting the genetic material and
another type for receiving it. By convention, the first type are called male organs and the
second type are called female organs.
In principle, there is no reason why the same individual should not possess both types of
organ, so as to be able both to give and to receive genetic material. Indeed, there are some
species, particularly of plants, which do just that. Of course, these species do not really want
to fertilise themselves, as this would mean there would be no exchange of genes with another
individual and the whole purpose of sexual reproduction would be defeated. So that is one
problem a hermaphrodite has to deal with.
Another problem with sexual reproduction is what to do with the newly-conceived individual,
who does not spring into the world fully-grown, but has to grow from a tiny embryo into a
fairly advanced state before being able to survive unassisted. The most effective way of
dealing with this problem is for the recipient of the genetic material, that is the female, to
provide a special environment for the embryo to grow in.
So the female, instead of being merely the recipient in an exchange of genetic material, tends
to become a more specialised individual, adapted to the specific purpose of receiving the
genetic material to mix with her own and then providing an environment for the embryo to
grow in. When that happens, having both types of sexual organs becomes wasteful and
hermaphroditism tends to fade out. The specialist female individual is born.
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The male individual evolves in the opposite direction. There is now no need for him to have
female organs and he becomes a specifically male individual, who can only reproduce by
transmitting his genetic material to a female receptor. Once life developed the principle of
sexual reproduction, the evolution of specialised male and female individuals tended to
follow as a logical consequence.
This is not to say that the role and function of male and female individuals are laid down
immutably by nature. They are not. There are many different ways in which male and female
creatures can organise their collaboration and their social relationship. For instance, in some
species the males help the females to rear the young, while in other species the males abandon
their mates immediately after conception. Even within the single species of humanity, in
different societies and at different times, the relationship between the sexes can be rather
different.
The females of many species solved the problem of what to do with the new embryo by
packing it in a protective casing, together with a food supply, and ejecting it into the world as
an egg. This is the practice of all fishes, reptiles, birds, spiders, crustaceans, amphibians,
insects and molluscs. Taken together, these groups make up the vast majority of species in
the world. So the egg solution is one that works.
However, the egg method has its limitations. Firstly, there is a practical limit to the size of
eggs, so the young creatures which emerge from them are very small and vulnerable,
especially if their parents have abandoned them. This means that large numbers of eggs must
be produced in order to guarantee that sufficient young creatures survive to adulthood. In
effect, a large amount of the species' biomass goes to feed other species, which gobble up the
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eggs or the newly-emerged young creatures. Secondly, the egg is not a very good solution for
relatively large, air-breathing animals, especially if they are also warm-blooded. Birds have
both of these characteristics. Consequently, they have to spend a lot of their time attending to
their eggs before they have hatched, as well as to the young chicks when they emerge.
A better solution for advanced animals, which tend to have a long gestation period and a long
infancy, is for the female to keep the egg in her body while it grows into an infant. Since it
does not need a protective casing or much of a food supply, the egg can be very tiny and thus
very economical in weight and biomass. Small boys are often surprised to discover that
women produce eggs. We naturally think of eggs as being like birds’ eggs. But the whole
point of the mammalian egg is that it need be no bigger than the full stop at the end of this
sentence. That is why we never see our female relations’ eggs.
When the egg is fertilised, the female mammal does not need to expel it into the world
immediately, but instead provides an ideal environment while the foetus, or forming creature,
grows larger. She can regulate the temperature and the food supply, using her own body to
form a mighty hostelry for the little creature. At the same time, she can carry it around with
her and defend it without much inconvenience to herself, at least until it becomes fairly large.
Of course, there comes a time when the growing foetus is too large to be kept in the mother's
womb any longer and has to be delivered into the outside world, even though it is far from
ready to survive unaided.
The animals which have adopted this method of producing their young are called mammals.
They include most of the warm-blooded animals which are not birds, including of course
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humankind. In all these species, the females have mammary glands with which the mother
produces milk to feed her offspring once they are born.
Because she alone possesses the means to feed them, and possibly also because they have
emerged from her own body, the female generally takes charge of the babies until they have
developed sufficiently to survive on their own, or for other adults to help in rearing and
defending them.
The part played by the males in all this varies greatly from species to species. Some males,
such as the polar bear, slope off and leave the females to get on with it. This is acceptable,
because his mate does not need him for her defence. She is quite capable of looking after
herself. Nor does she need him to fetch food. There is enough fat on her body to last for
months. In any case, the male has the unfortunate habit of eating the young. All in all, she
does not really need him.
In many other species, the males play an active part in feeding and defending the young. The
extent to which this happens depends on the lifestyle of the species. For example, in the
large, four-legged grazing animals, the males cannot help in feeding the young, because they
can't carry anything. Nor are they much use in defence, because they can only butt with their
heads. Consequently, the females use the herd system for defence. In these herds, the
females do not need many adult males, perhaps only a few to a herd.
Other advanced animals, such as lions, also have a system in which the males take no part in
rearing the young, other than playing games with them. The lionesses seem to do all the real
work of the family, including hunting, while the male takes first bite of the prey, looks noble
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and sleeps a lot during the day. At night, he goes out and skulks around, roaring. Yet he is
very popular with the females, who show him great affection. Like some other females we
can think of, lionesses do not always show a proper respect for male dignity. When the king
of the beasts comes back to the pride after his night out, the females often leap on him, roll
him over and tickle his tummy.
Which leads on to the observation that in many species of mammal, the main function of the
male, after fertilising the females, is to fend off the unwanted attentions of other males. Once
she has a growing foetus in her womb, a female mammal has no further use for the male in
the reproductive sense. So she stops sending out the scents, or pheremones, which attract
him. However, males being what they are, they keep trying to muscle in. Consequently, the
male who is the father of the unborn young has a genetic interest in seeing that the female is
allowed to breed peacefully and successfully. That involves chasing away other males, who
might pester her or kill the offspring. This is what the lion is doing with his roaring out in the
bush, warning other males not to come near.
Similarly, although the adult males among grazing animals cannot very well defend the herd
from predators, they are well-equipped to see off male intruders of their own kind, who might
interfere with the rearing of the head of the herd's own offspring. This system leads to battles
for supremacy and breeding rights among the males, which in turn ensures that the females
only breed off the strongest and most vigorous males.
With primates, among which the human race is numbered, the animals tend to live in family
groups of varying size and organisation. The females do most of the rearing of the infants
when these are very young, but there is much more collaboration with other females in this
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task than in most species. A pattern of mothers and daughters, sisters, aunts and nieces, all
recognising and helping each other, is discernible in species such as baboons. So is a female
power structure, with older and more dominant females imposing on the younger or less
powerful females.
What, you may ask, has all this to do with women? Well, if you look carefully at a woman,
you will notice that she is a female mammal of the primate type. From this fact stem many of
the features of her character and behaviour. In particular, two aspects of her mammalian
nature are never far from a modern woman's mind. They are menstruation and pregnancy.
Menstruation
Every twenty-eight days, a woman's body is subject to a cyclical hormone change, which
causes part of the womb lining to be flushed away and renewed.
Nature, as ever, is
economical. The fluid which is used for the flushing is blood, because blood vessels are
numerous in that area and blood is a plentiful fluid in the body.
The significance of this change is that the womb lining, the place where the fertilised egg
would settle in order to develop into a foetus, has to be kept in perfect condition. It is, in
effect, renewed every twenty-eight days. When this happens, there is a slow discharge of
blood from the womb and out through the vagina. Women in the English-speaking world call
this their "periods", but the technical word for it is menstruation. Of course, there are all sorts
of slang and vernacular terms for it, such as "monthlies", the "curse", "having the painters in",
etc. French women used to refer to the arrival of "les Anglais", either because of the
puritanical reputation of the English in interrupting fun and games, or because throughout the
ages French people could expect to bleed when the ferocious islanders arrived.
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The fact that women bleed regularly like this is not only a source of some inconvenience to
them, but has also been the cause of ignorant castigation of women by prudish males,
especially in cultures where there is a superstitious horror of blood. Menstruation has been
seen as evidence that women are somehow inferior or unclean, or even cursed by God. In
reality, the bleeding is in the noblest of causes, the continuation of the human race. No
warrior ever bled in a better cause.
The monthly periods are triggered and controlled by hormone messages, which are frequently
noticeable to the women herself.
She may feel strange and slightly off-colour, with a
tendency to fluctuations in mood. Often, she will look drawn and wan, with dark circles
round her eyes. Sometimes, she may have slight contractions or muscle spasms in her womb,
which can be uncomfortable and are referred to as "period pains".
Women's reactions to menstruation depend on the individual woman herself and, also, on the
culture in which she lives. In some countries, women make a great thing of menstruation,
retiring to their quarters or to bed for two or three days. In other countries, they try to pretend
nothing is happening. One thing is certain, however, which is that if you are her friend you
must understand this menstruation business as a fact of a woman's life. There is no need for
us males to make a great fuss about it. Just understand that she is not quite herself. Do not
take it amiss, but accept that she will be back to normal in a day or two, when her hormones
settle down.
It is hard for men to understand the mood changes induced by menstruation. Males feel pretty
much the same all the time, so they tend to regard the female mood changes as irrational or
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perverse. On the other hand, menstruation does heighten the masculine tendency to see
women as somewhat strange creatures, with a distinctly mysterious side to their natures. We
understand dimly that it is something to do with their peculiar power of reproduction. It leads
us to suppose that women's bodies are the regions between life and non-life. To males
throughout the ages, women's bleeding has seemed strangely repellent, but also awe-inspiring.
For example, it used to be thought that women are ruled by the moon, because her periodicity
is roughly the same as theirs (27 or 28 days). Indeed, no one has offered any explanation why
this is so. Perhaps it is just a coincidence. Perhaps the first women were influenced by the
tidal surges induced by the moon. This is not entirely fanciful, because the moon does exert a
perceptible physical influence on the earth, unlike the distant planets and the stars.
One remarkable thing about menstruation is that it has been observed that a group of women
living together in close proximity for any length of time eventually end up all menstruating at
the same time. Why this should happen is hard to explain. It has been suggested that the
hormone which triggers off menstruation could be exuded in the sweat of the first woman and
so be picked up by the others breathing it in.
Then, when two or three women are
menstruating at the same time, there is so much hormone flying around that every woman
within range is triggered off. Well, it is an interesting theory...
Whatever the truth of this, it is obvious that menstruation is a very serious female process.
All we males can do is try to understand, to watch and to be a little circumspect. During the
1940's, when the great age of sexual repression still had a little time to run, my mother used to
send me occasionally to the chemist's shop with a note, which I was sworn not to read. The
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note was read in silence by the shop assistant, who handed me a package wrapped in brown
paper. This I took home and handed to my mother, still unopened.
Although only a small male person, I knew from the conspiratorial manner of these
transactions that it was some mystery which I could never be allowed to share, and that it was
a female mystery. Consequently, I never even asked about it. Only years later did I realise
that I had been fetching my mother her monthly supply of sanitary towels. She had been
sparing me the embarrassment of asking for them aloud in the shop.
In those days, no-one spoke the words "sanitary towel" or "tampon" aloud, much less
menstruation, certainly not in mixed company. Even the word "periods" was too much for a
woman to mention in the presence of any male, especially a young one. The whole thing was
a shameful secret. Polite society demanded that it was never mentioned. Nowadays, this
whole hypocritical nonsense has been blown away. Tampons are advertised on television and
everyone knows that women menstruate. We should all rejoice that they do, because without
it there would be no human race.
Pregnancy
The second great fact of a female mammal's life is pregnancy. When her tiny egg is fertilised
by the male spermatozoon breaking into it, thus uniting the father's genetic code with hers, the
egg settles on the lining of the womb and, as it were, puts down roots. Immediately, the
hormone progesterone is released into the blood stream to tell the brain that pregnancy has
occurred and that menstruation should not take place for the duration.
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Pregnancy is an enormous subject, which is too complicated to be described here. To the
watching male companion, it has several distinct phases which he has to be able to recognise
and cope with.
Men are usually baffled by pregnancy and quickly become bored or
exasperated with it, even though they want to be kind and helpful. If you know what is going
on, you will find it easier to be a good mate to her and to help her through her great
adventure.
During the first three months, although it does not show itself in her figure very much,
pregnancy involves a woman's body in more hormone changes. These can make her sick in
the mornings. In fact, morning sickness is one of the traditional early signs of pregnancy.
There can be slight changes in the appearance of the woman. In former times, experienced
older women sometimes claimed they could tell when a girl was pregnant just by looking at
her. She may be rather unwell for a time, but you should remember that she will be alright. It
is quite natural. Of course, she should be under medical supervision, but every doctor will
tell you that pregnancy is not an illness.
What you can help with is her emotional state. She will be excited and a bit scared, if this is
her first time. She may be alarmed by feeling so nauseous and fragile. What she needs is
peace and calm, warm companionship and lots of cuddles. Do not press her to drink alcohol
or to smoke. Realise that she may not want to go motor racing. Above all, do not fuss her
and do not get worried yourself. This early pregnancy soon gives way to a much more normal
phase.
During the middle three months of pregnancy, women usually feel and look extremely well.
They delight in feeling the baby move inside the womb and they start to feel happy as well as
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excited. Their eyes have an extra sparkle and their hair is extra glossy. It is hard to overstate
the female urge to produce babies and the sense of triumph when they do. In the middle three
months, life can be fun again.
The last three months of pregnancy are something of a drag. Time seems to go by very
slowly. The expectant mother gets very big in the abdomen and becomes weary of waiting.
She feels she is in the grip of forces beyond her control and that Nature is ruthlessly using her
for its own purposes, which is a pretty fair assessment of the situation.
Emotionally, she needs a lot of understanding at this stage. She may fear that she is hideous
and that her mate will go off to find a more attractive woman. It has to be said that some men
do just that. So her fears may be based on reality. Once again, a loving mate will treat her
like a crystal goblet, gently and carefully.
Fortunately, the sight of your woman when she is heavily pregnant will generally fill you with
feelings of reverence and affection. You will see in her your gallant female friend who is
fighting life's battle for both of you. In fact, pregnancy is the acid test of how much you love
her. That is why she is afraid you might fail the test. If you do love her, you will feel a strong
sense of sympathy with her and will respond to her need for affection and psychological
support.
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Childbirth
Of course, pregnancy normally ends in childbirth. This is the supreme mammalian event in a
woman's life. At this point, the modern woman who thinks she is mistress of her own destiny
is brushed aside and the female beast comes rushing out of her lair. According to some
thinkers, the male partner ought to be present at this event. The theory is that he will give the
woman moral support and confidence. I am not so sure. In fact, this seems to be an issue
where the conscious attempt to involve the male partner more closely can backfire. Having
been present at the births of two of my children and absent from the birth of one, I can see
that there are arguments for and against having the father there.
Like a battle, childbirth comprises long hours of discomfort and boredom, interspersed with
flashes of fear and danger. It is true that a man can help his partner over the hours of tedium,
especially if it is her first birth and goes very slowly. But at the final crisis a man feels
completely useless and unnecessary. In fact, it is doubtful whether she knows or cares
whether he is there at the moment of delivery. It always seemed to me to be a good time to be
somewhere else.
Some men make fools of themselves by fainting or rushing out of the room. Even the
toughest of men, perhaps especially the toughest of men, may do this. Consequently, I am
still to be convinced of the wisdom of the father being present at the birth unless he really
wants to be. The psychological effects on a man can be damaging. Certainly, he will not be
prepared for the shock of seeing his partner like that. She huff and puffs, moans and groans,
heaves and pushes, shrieks and curses, for all the world as if she were fighting some unseen
demon.
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A man is deeply alarmed to see her like this. A lot of his illusions about her will be shattered.
That lovely lady he used to know is shown to be a fighting tigress caught in a trap. She may
swear and shout and tell him where to go with his sympathy. Then there is the blood and the
mess. Males are generally squeamish, as well as prudish. So childbirth may not be for you.
Perhaps the best way of preparing yourself for the experience of watching your partner give
birth is to remember the meaning of the medical term for it, which is "parturition". This
means dividing into parts. So what you are going to see is your partner splitting herself into
two people, maybe more. With this in mind, all the moans and shrieks seem more natural and
understandable. It is after all a natural process and, as long as she has proper attendants, she
most probably will not come to any harm.
In some ways, childbirth really is women's work, however progressive we may think we are.
Once, when my wife was being delivered at home by a woman doctor and a midwife, I could
not help noticing that whenever I went out of the room there soon arose the sounds of witchlike cackling and ribald laughter. Whenever I went back in, a respectful hush returned. In
other words, the women were finding my presence a drag on their natural exuberance. At the
critical moment, they ordered me out to make tea and coffee for them all. That was my real
contribution.
Undeniably, it is good for a man's soul to be present at the birth of his child. Even if you
could arrange to be somewhere else that day, it is probably better to make the effort and at
least be in the vicinity, like the stereotypical anxious father in the old Hollywood movies,
pacing up and down, smoking a thousand cigarettes. In the first place, you will get a lot of
Brownie points for devotion to duty, whereas if you sneak off you may be suspected of
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lukewarm commitment. More importantly, it should help form a stronger bond between the
partners. A man can too easily sweep childbirth under the carpet as "women's work" and not
bother his head about it. But if he has watched and waited as his wife struggles for eighteen
hours to produce his baby, he will feel more passionately about both her and the child.
When my own wife gave birth to our first child, we were just a young couple living in a
cottage in the country. One night, just after we had gone to bed, my wife suddenly leaped up
and said it had begun. Medical help arrived swiftly in the form of an experienced midwife,
who quickly organised everything as it should be. Then we sat and waited. The labour went
on for hours and hours, until at last the baby started his progress down the birth canal. But
there he stuck and would come no further. I watched in mounting desperation as my wife
grew exhausted and began to give up. Even the midwife's iron self-control began to crack.
She got on the telephone.
The doctor was there in ten minutes. He took one look and told me to go and make tea. Out
in the kitchen, I heard the baby's first cry, even before the kettle boiled. Tears of joy and
relief streamed down my cheeks. I rushed back to the bedroom. The midwife came out as I
reached the door. She knew what I wanted to know and said, "She's OK". Then she added,
"Give us five minutes and bring in the tea. It's a boy".
I leaped around with glee as the tea brewed. When I went back in, my wife was lying whitefaced and exhausted, but her eyes were triumphant. On the bed beside her was a tiny figure
wrapped in a white cloth, with a little dark head. It was our son. On that day, we became
mates, like a pair of swans. All the ups and downs of later life were as nothing compared to
the battle we won that day.
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I say "We won", because I was there. My wife did the real fighting, but my feelings were
wrenched around and battered, too. The point of this episode was the impact it had on me,
the male partner. My wife would have experienced it in any case, but I could easily have
missed it and remained ignorant of the struggle of life and death by which our child was won.
That is why you should take an interest in childbirth. It is not only women's work. If it is
your child she is bearing, it is your work, too. Later that night, while my wife and infant son
were sleeping, I prowled around the house feeling utterly savage. If any intruder had come
upon the scene, he would have met a swift demise. It was as if the birth had touched off some
masculine reflex which said, "Now defend your wife and child. Don't let anyone come near".
It was the most primitive emotion I have ever had.
Although having a baby is the supreme female trial, it is also the supreme female triumph. It
is the great fact of women's lives. They encourage and congratulate one another, like athletes.
A women who has had a baby is treated like someone who has broken a record. She is a
heroine for a while. Everyone is so pleased for her. A man has to understand that childbirth
is like doing a parachute jump. It is scary but exciting. Unlike a parachute jump, childbirth
provides a tangible reward, a new baby. It also initiates a woman into the sisterhood of truly
adult women, those who have borne a child. She is truly adult, because she now cares for
someone else more than herself.
Of course, Nature does not ask a woman her views on all this. She cannot decide she would
rather not do it after all. Once full-term pregnancy has arrived, it has only one conclusion and
that is the birth. A fully automatic natural process takes place, over which the modern
woman has only slight control. She has to stand aside and let the female beast do her work.
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Consequently, it does not matter much whether she is brave or cowardly. One way or
another, the baby is going to get born. In the event, women are usually full of spirit and
courage.
This has a poetic aspect, which stems from the way a woman uses her own life, even risks it,
to create new life. This is the source of her triumph. She emerges from the jaws of death
carrying the tiny spark of life. At this time, she is truly a heroine. No wonder a man feels
gratitude and admiration for the woman who has given him a child. At least, he ought to. Too
many men are either flippant or indifferent about childbirth. If you really want to get on with
women, you have to understand how they feel about giving birth.
One word of warning. Do not go too far the other way and start trying to muscle in on the
childbearing business or taking it over. Women know they can cope with that. They usually
get advice and guidance from more experienced women, such as their mothers, and from their
doctors. All they want from men is affection and support, plus an acknowledgement that they
are doing something wonderful. As a man, you are a supporting player, not the lead.
Another word of warning. Be careful when you first inspect the new baby. Most males think
new babies look horrible, but your partner will be watching anxiously to see whether you
approve of the child. She thinks it is wonderful, because it is hers and she made it. She
begins to love the child immediately it is given to her by her attendants. You, however, will
think this tiny stranger, with the pointed head and scrunched-up red face, is a very odd sort of
creature.
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Do not be alarmed if you feel nothing for the baby at first. As the male partner, you are
meeting this person for the first time. Of course, you will be curious to see your child, and
probably dismayed by its appearance, especially as the women will be clucking about, telling
you that the baby is absolutely beautiful. "What's beautiful about that?" you will ask yourself.
Despite that, you must pretend to be impressed and agree that the baby is lovely.
You will quickly come to love the child for real. If the truth were known, we men are just as
crazy about children as women are. It is just that we have to get to know them first. On the
day that your baby curls its amazingly little hand around your finger and grasps it, you
become its father. You will feel a fierce urge to protect and love your child. It is as if the
baby, in making this gesture says, with unconscious cunning, "Love me, Daddy", pressing a
little button in your brain which releases the flood of paternal feeling.
Sometimes a man feels worried and a little jealous that the new mother may care more about
the baby than about him. After all, there are now two candidates for her love. Also, she is
very busy with this demanding newcomer. But there is nothing to worry about. If she loves
you, the baby will not get in the way of that. Her love for you is completely different from
her love for the child. You will be something of a hero to her, because you are the father of
her baby. In any case, there is no rationing of her love. There is plenty to go round, even
though her attention is focussed on the child for a while. If you are a good mate to her, you
will definitely be part of her plans for the future. So just stick around and wait to collect your
reward.
You will, I hope, have noticed in all this that the mammalian nature of a woman makes a
huge impact on her life. So much so, that we take it for granted and never even notice. To
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call a woman a "female mammal" sounds slightly jokey, or even disrespectful. Yet that is
exactly what she is. Modern women like to pretend that all this is in the past and that
civilised life makes them completely different from their foremothers, who wandered over the
savannah a million years ago. In many ways, that is true. But inside every modern woman
there is a female beast who has lived there for sixty million years, since mammals first
evolved.
This female beast is ruthless in pursuit of her objectives. Anything that gets in her way is
discarded or crushed. Above all, she insists in the primacy of her mission, which is to
produce her offspring and to rear them, thus projecting her kind into the future. Biologically,
she is a juggernaut driving along the highway of life from its unimaginable beginning to its
unimaginable end. As a male, your best chance, is to make friends with her and hitch a lift
into the future. Then, if you help make her life more secure and agreeable, you can sleep in
the cabin with her. Otherwise, out you go.
Evidently, woman is the most successful creature in this part of the universe. Remember,
there is a good biological argument for believing that the basic human being is the female,
while the male is a specialist adaptation created by the female for her own purposes. The case
for this lies in the fact that at an early stage in the development of the human foetus, a genetic
switch has to turn on the genes that make the baby a male. If the switch does not operate, the
foetus just goes on and becomes a female. In other words, every foetus is a female unless it is
switched into a male. Presumably, this is why we males still have rudimentary female organs.
If you don't believe me, look at your chest.
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St. Thomas Aquinas said that a woman is a deficient man, but in fact it is more true to say
that a man is a special kind of woman. How ironic that the proper name for mankind is really
womankind!
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PHYSIOLOGY
The human race is notable for being rather highly specialised in its male and female forms.
That is, there are more visible physiological differences between our two sexes than there are
in most species of mammal.
In common with the other primates, the adult males are
generally bigger than adult females. In early adulthood, young men of northern European
type are something like 15cm taller than young women of the same age. That is, men are
about 9% taller.
Even a visitor from another world would notice that men are a bit taller than women and that
this is true among all peoples, despite considerable differences in average height between the
various peoples. Although a northern European woman may be taller than many Japanese
men, nevertheless Japanese men are generally taller than Japanese women. In other words,
height is largely determined by sex within any one human culture.
In terms of height, as in much else, the two sexes overlap to some extent, with the tallest
women being taller than the shortest men. It is well to remember the concept of the "normal
distribution", as statisticians call it. This means that in any naturally occurring characteristic,
such as height, most people are quite close to the average for their group, but there are always
a few who are very different from the average in being much more or much less than the
average.
This helps understand the great natural variability of human beings and also
explains why, despite this variability, it is still possible to generalise about them. The average
man is indeed taller than the average woman, even though not all men are taller than all
women.
It is in terms of body weight that the difference in size between the sexes is most apparent. A
young northern European man weighs about 75kg on average and his female counterpart
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weighs about 55kg. This is a difference of 34%. So a difference of 9% in height translates
into a 34% difference in body weight. Really, the male is a lot bigger than the female,
because body weight is the main determinant of strength and physical power.
The large difference is partly because the size of the body is increased in every dimension
when the length is increased. Consequently, the volume of a man's body is usually greater
than a woman's and he weighs more for that reason. There are other reasons. The male
skeleton is heavier than the female, the bones being thicker as well as longer. The skull of a
man is normally more massive than a woman's, so even his head weighs more. In addition,
the male body typically contains a higher ratio of muscle to fat than the female. Muscle
weighs more than fat, contrary to popular belief.
One of the great advantages of philosophy is that it teaches us to question everything,
including those things which are so obvious that nobody ever gives them a moment’s thought.
We all know that women are generally smaller than men. It is a basic fact of human
existence. Yet I have never heard anyone ask why this is so. There must be a reason for it,
otherwise it would not happen so persistently over aeons of time. As far as most normal
people are concerned, women always have been smaller than men and always will be, and
that’s that.
We have already noted that this size difference only holds good within a particular human
culture. Some European types of women are generally taller than the men in some other
cultures. In other words, women are not necessarily smaller than all men, only those they are
most likely to mate with. They want to be smaller than their own men, but they do not care if
they are taller than men on the other side of the world. More accurately, we should turn this
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the other way round and say that they want their own men to be taller than they themselves
are.
Herein lies a clue. This size difference between the sexes is something to do with the
relationship between them. Most likely, the difference exists because women want it to. The
reasons for that may be found in the female’s basic survival strategy. Having evolved herself
into a specialist female mammal and her male counterpart into a specialist defender and
helpmate, woman took the next logical step of disarming herself
In a dangerous world, there are two main strategies for survival. One is to be more heavily
armed than your likely adversaries. The problem with that is you spend a lot of your energy
carrying your armament around with you. So the second strategy is to be totally disarmed,
relying either on speed and agility, or on outwitting your enemies. Presumably, at an early
stage in human evolution, humans had to fear animal predators. Since a woman could not
hope to fight a leopard or a bear, she learned to emit a piercing scream which, as we shall see,
brings her menfolk running. So she had no need to be big and strong, just to fight off the
occasional predator.
As time went on, it became increasingly plain that women had more to fear from attacks by
the males of her own species than from animal predators. Having invented this big, strong
helpmate who, being a fighting animal, can be of uncertain temper, woman had to devise a
way of dealing with him. This is where the total disarmament strategy comes into play.
Human beings of both sexes and all ages generally feel protective towards anyone who is
smaller than they are. Being smaller than her mate was one way for her to evoke his
protective feelings.
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When you grow to manhood, you will be surprised to find how fiercely you feel about your
women friends and how angry you get if anyone interferes with them. As a rough old
working man once said to me, “Women are little darlings.” He meant they inspire great
affection in men, partly because they are smaller. The female strategy, then, is to arouse her
mate’s feelings of affection and protectiveness, to be his “little darling.” In this way she
averts most potential aggression from him. When a man sees he is dealing with a woman, his
aggressive feelings drain away. You can actually feel it happening sometimes.
Of course, some men do beat their wives, and women are occasionally killed by men, but
these phenomena are caused by social dysfunction and psychological disorders. Normal men
in normal circumstances feel no urge to attack women physically.
Another reason why women are small is that it is biologically efficient. Small women are
perfectly well able to produce and rear healthy infants. They are also extremely good at
attracting and keeping the affection of their mates. Sexually, a woman does not have to be
big to be powerful. Moreover, in times of famine and starvation, a woman’s small body
needs less feeding than a man’s. He is the gas-guzzling performance model. She is the
economy model. Guess who comes off best when gas is in short supply!
Are Women Pretty?
If you go to any busy place, where there are crowds of people, and look at the women going
by, you will find that not many of them are beautiful. Of course, you should perhaps reflect
that that many of them would make very loving and loyal friends, but that is another issue. If
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you now turn your gaze on the men, you will see that they are even further behind in the
beauty stakes. In fact many of them are positively hideous.
So although women may not be all that pretty, on the whole they are a darn sight more so than
their men. Once again, we may ask why this should be so. This time, the answer is easy. It
is because she does not need heavy bones or huge muscles. Her face and limbs can be
delicate and smooth. Most importantly, she can turn this to further advantage by appearing
gentle and appealing to her mate. With its wide open glistening eyes, its big, soft mouth and
little nose, her face is tender and expressive. It invites a tender response.
Some psychologists have pointed out that human beings respond affectionately to young
animals with that same wide-eyed, innocent look. All I can say is that women are not little
animals, but very big and powerful animals. Do not be deceived by appearances. How often
does a man look at a woman and think, “She’s manipulating me with those goo-goo eyes and
that soft expression.” But it works. He often thinks, “Oh, well! I don’t mind being
manipulated by her.”
All in all, being small and pretty is not a bad strategy for a woman in a world which is full of
men. Many big and ugly women know this only too well. Critics of this strategy say it locks
women into their age-old sex role and, hence, into their age-old subservience to men. That is
one way of looking at it. Another way is to think that being attractive to half the world’s
population could be an advantage, whichever way the relationship is worked out. After all,
some men have discovered that being attractive to women is a good strategy for them, too.
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As women accumulate more power (or even more power) we shall witness the recrudescence
of male beauty. At the moment, many men feel that they can afford to be slobs, because there
are loads of women desperate to find a man. Also, the anti-bourgeois drift of popular culture
has meant that many icons of the young, such as rock stars, deliberately cultivate an unkempt
and brutish appearance, for fear of being thought “nice”. It seems probable that this will
change and that male fine feathers will come back into fashion. Any man who happens to
overhear what women are saying about men will want to go off and clean up his act. They are
sick and tired of the degenerate finks who pass themselves off as men.
To come back to the point of the size differences between men and women, it is obvious that
generally speaking a man is an altogether bigger and stronger animal than a woman. This has
a profound bearing on the relationship between the sexes and on their respective
psychologies. Not to acknowledge this fact is to fail to recognise one of the most important
reasons for the way men and women feel about one another and about the world.
Other physiological differences are equally visible. Men are generally more massive higher
up their bodies, with broad shoulders and deep chests. In contrast, women have rather small
upper bodies but are relatively broad in the pelvis area, so appearing to carry their weight
lower than males. Perhaps this is why the derogatory slang term "broads" is sometimes
applied to them. Really, a woman is like a ship. She is broader in the beam than you would
suspect from looking at her from the side. Subconsciously, we men are impressed by the
wide pelvic girdle of a woman. It signals to us a kind of physical power which is not male.
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When they are fit and not overweight, women have narrow waists. This produces the
characteristic female hour-glass shape, with an astonishing contrast between the broad hips
and the narrow waist, which never ceases to fascinate men.
Men are also deeply impressed by the female's breasts, which give her body another of its
characteristic shapes. Breasts are practically the badge of womanhood. In no other species
are mammaries of the slightest interest to adult males, but in the human race they have
evolved into a prominent feature of the adult female body. So much so, that women are very
proud of their breasts and are conscious of their significance in communicating with men.
Growing girls look anxiously at their chests, to see what quality of equipment they are going
to be issued with.
It is probable that in former times sexual repression, with an insistence that breasts must at all
times be covered, resulted in an exaggeration of their sexual significance. Consequently,
there arose a rather juvenile preoccupation with breasts. In Hollywood, the advertising
industry and in the popular press and pornography, every effort was made to show breasts as
the essence of female sexiness. This was particularly true in America. In Europe, men have
always been more inclined to think that the best part of a woman is her backside.
In fact, in Europe it has long been accepted practice for breasts to be uncovered on the beach.
As a result, men have become used to seeing them and their sexual significance is moving out
of the pornographic range. Nevertheless, breasts are still a hugely important symbol of
female status. A woman writing a letter to a newspaper declared that she was proud to be a
woman and finished by saying, "I have breasts, which are perfect for dealing with babies and
men!" That just about sums everything up.
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Another difference between the sexes is that women's legs are generally longer relative to
their upper bodies than men's. Walking behind a couple in the street, it is often noticeable
that although the man is taller, her waist is level with his, or even higher. Women's legs are
long and elegant. They are a secondary sexual characteristic. That is, they are one of the first
things a man notices about a woman's body. They are used by women to make sexual
displays. The vast sale of ultra-glamorous coverings for women's legs, having nothing to do
with keeping legs warm and everything to do with making them more beautiful and visible,
shows the enormous importance attached to a good show of shapely legs.
I once witnessed an extraordinary demonstration of the sexual power of a woman' legs. It was
at a garden party on a fine summer's day, at a house where there was a big lawn. All the
guests wore fancy dress and they lounged around on the terrace, chatting and drinking,
sometimes flirting. The lawn was empty until one of the guests, a not-so-young, but still
attractive blonde woman, walked out into the middle of it. She sat down on the grass and
hitched up her shepherdess dress to reveal the most astonishingly beautiful legs. She reclined
with these wondrous limbs fully on display, like bait. Within a few minutes, there was a
semi-circle of men sitting around her. She held court, like a queen, allowing her fascinated
followers to gaze at her beauty, until she tired of the game and walked away, casting a
knowing look at the other women, who were watching this and spitting rivets. It was
explained to me that this was her reply to a disparaging remark by another woman and was
intended to demonstrate that she could have any man there if she wanted. I didn't doubt it.
Apart from their man-destroying legs, women also have more globular buttocks than men,
giving the rear end a rounded and sensuous shape, which is distinctly pleasing to the male
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eye. This is another characteristic female shape which is very difficult to disguise. Once, I
was crewing on a yacht when the skipper said to me, "Watch your language. There are
women on board." I looked around and found that everyone was dressed in yellow oilskins
with hoods up. "How can you tell which ones are women?" I asked. The skipper looked at
me pityingly and said, "The women are the ones with cruiser sterns." This referred to a
certain type of round back end to a boat. He was right. Even through the oilskins, I could
still see the round female stern.
This skipper was an experienced man in his sixties. He had the affectionate regard for
women which comes from a lifetime of living happily with them. It turned out that we were
taking our women passengers out to meet their friends on a boat further out to sea. When we
got out there, the sea was a bit choppy, but the skipper knew exactly how to transfer females
at sea. He regarded this as a test of seamanship.
Stepping off one rolling, pitching and
yawing boat onto another requires judgment and nerve. Most men and some young women
will just launch themselves off and hope for the best, but the skipper knew that although they
are very courageous, most women will have nothing to do with that sort of thing.
He took the helm himself and briefed me. He said, "Get over and stand on the side with her.
Hang onto the shroud with one hand and cling onto her like grim death with the other. When
the other boat comes near enough to step onto, wait until the right moment, then smack her
smartly on the rump and shout 'Go!'" He meant that there is only one right moment to go.
That is when the sides of the two boats roll exactly together. A split second's hesitation and it
is too late. Then with each succeeding failure to jump, the decision becomes harder and
harder to take. That is why the skipper also added, "Get her to go the first or second time,
otherwise she'll just cling on and refuse to go."
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So I climbed over the side and stood with the first woman, watching the other boat inch
towards us, rolling and wallowing horribly. I realised that my companion was not afraid, but
she just did not like taking that decision to step off. My job was to tell her when. So at last,
as the two boats rolled together, I shouted "Go on, gal!" but she shrunk back. I looked
helplessly at the skipper and he gestured to smack her backside. I had forgotten an essential
part of the drill. When the boats came together again, I thwacked her on the rump and she
took off like a rocket, straight into the arms of the two guys waiting for her on the other boat.
In this way, we transferred all the womenfolk, without any of them falling into the sea or
getting bruised.
In case you think this story demeans women, it does not. We treated them like precious
creatures who behave according to the rules of their own nature, like unicorns, in fact. In a
dangerous situation, we took care they should not come to any harm. Besides, they did not
mind at all. They probably thought, "What are males for, after all?" What about the bottomsmacking? Well, the generous and pattable female rump is yet another means for her to
communicate with men she knows and trusts. It galvanised her into action much quicker than
any words.
By the way, don't you boys try thwacking women on the rump. I only did it because the
skipper told me. Otherwise, I wouldn't have dared. Besides, it was the best procedure in the
circumstances. The women knew that, too. Normally, a man does not touch the rump of a
woman he does not know. To do so is to invite a stern rebuke, possibly a slap round the
chops. Even in Italy, the home of bottom-pinchers, men are now more cautious about taking
liberties of that kind.
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With her wide pelvis, a woman's thighs are angled inwards towards the knee more sharply
than a man's. Consequently, as she walks she has to swing her moving foot around the foot
which is on the ground. When she walks carefully and daintily, you may see her place one
foot more or less directly in front of the other. As a result, a woman's footprints in sand or
snow can show almost a single line of prints. By contrast, a man's footprints are more nearly
two parallel lines, one for each foot.
This swinging of her moving foot round to the front gives a woman her typical swaying gait.
When she walks fast, the swinging hips produce the mincing motion and wagging bottom ,
which all comedians guying women try to imitate. In a fashion show, this female gait is
exaggerated by the models on the catwalk and is called "sashaying". It is a sight for sore eyes.
Someone (a man) once asked, "How can we take seriously a creature which wiggles its
bottom when it walks?" The answer is, "You had better!"
A man who appreciates women knows these things and takes an aesthetic delight from them.
There is great joy to be had from looking at women, whether they are dancing, skating,
playing games or just walking around.
The wonderful shapes their bodies make, their
gestures and unconscious poses, all serve to remind us of their glorious otherness, their status
as female members of the human race. No doubt, women feel much the same about men.
Male and female beauty are not so different, after all, and a man can also be a beautiful
creature.
Nevertheless, we are men (or are going to be) and life challenges us to enjoy our female
friends, not as some imaginary ideal of beauty, but as they really are. For that, you need eyes
to see them with. That is what I have tried to give you. Watch a woman walking and see
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how she places her feet. She may not always walk as I describe, because women are like
horses and have several different gaits, but when she does you will exclaim, "Ah, ha!"
I have said nothing about women's luxuriant hair, or their lustrous eyes, nor about their big,
tender mouths. These are things you can see for yourselves everywhere. However, these are
all subject to fashion, or to put it another way, to culturally-induced changes. Women
regularly adjust the colour and appearance of their hair and faces, so that what you see is what
the woman thinks she ought to look like, with just some of the tinges of her own personality
showing through.
You should accept this for what it is, adornment. It is of a piece with her clothes and
jewellery. So do not adopt a prudish attitude and call it falseness. Human beings are so
complex that it is hard to say what is natural. Wearing a ring is not "natural", but it hardly
qualifies as false. So too with make-up. Of course, using cosmetics requires skill and taste.
Misuse of make-up can do as much damage to a woman's appearance as the skilful use of it
can improve her looks.
Women's motives for using make-up are varied. They have been persecuted down the ages
for doing so, probably because they were suspected of trying to increase their already
formidable sexual power. It is a common male assumption that they do it to please and attract
men, or to seduce them. In fact, this is only part of the story, probably only a small part. We
have to remember that women also live in their own female world, in which the opinions of
other women are very important. In any case, it is a characteristic human habit to paint our
bodies. Modern Englishmen, who believe that only savages paint their bodies, are often
covered in tattoos, which are a permanent form of body paint.
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Mostly, we paint ourselves in order to be fashionable. The opposite sex may like it or not, but
we have to be in fashion. All we can say from the male point of view is that women seem to
us to be very glamorous creatures. They have a capacity to fascinate us and sometimes to
stun us out of our minds. Yet, when you see a woman putting on her make-up, you realise
that being glamorous in that way demands a fair amount of effort. To some extent, it is all a
carefully-contrived front.
We men get so used to seeing women with make-up that we forget what they look like
without it. It can be quite a shock to see your lady as nature made her. Actually, women are
just as glamorous without make-up, once you get used to their weird appearance. The first
woman I fell in love with was not wearing a molecule of make-up, but from the first moment
I saw her, I thought I had never seen anything as wonderful as her. We were both thirteen
years old.
If your eyes will tell you much about the style and nature of women as creatures, and you will
surely get great joy from that, your other senses will detect further physiological
characteristics of the female human being which are just as remarkable. Of course, your eyes
will have seen how smooth and rounded the female limbs and body are, giving them a
streamlined, almost boneless appearance. The absence of heavy muscles in the shoulders,
arms and legs gives a woman's body a singular elegance. If she is not obese, that is. But it is
when you approach more closely that you will see that her flesh has a sumptuous, satiny
sheen. This is due to a fine layer of subcutaneous fat, just below the skin. The quality of the
female flesh is amazing. No wonder the early Church fathers sat sweating in their cells
thinking of it, before reaching for their pens and denouncing it as the work of the devil.
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When you actually touch her skin, you realise that a woman is something else. Nothing is the
world feels as soft and as smooth as that. A young friend of mine, telling of his first
encounter with an amorous female, said it was like being mugged by the bed quilt. Indeed,
the incredible softness and smoothness of a woman's body are such that you always remember
the first time you take one in your arms. My little friend was fourteen by the time I had the
sense to put my arms around her. I can still remember that sensation half a century later.
Once you actually touch a woman's skin, it is hard to stop. She draws you to her like a
magnet. The nearer you get, the stronger the pull. If you get near enough to touch her skin,
you are a goner, if that is her intention. Here follows a short lecture about touching women.
The broad rule is, DON'T. Not unless you are pretty certain your touch is welcome. Because
the touching of the skin is the prelude to a sexual relationship, women are naturally very
particular about who touches them. Really, you have to be invited. All human beings have
an invisible boundary about 10cm above the surface of the skin. Within that boundary is
private personal space, a little world which belongs only to that person. No-one is allowed in
except close friends. Strangers are only allowed to touch us in certain formal or ritualised
ways, for example in exchanging greetings or in playing games, when the strangers are
deemed to be honorary friends for the time being.
Of course, a woman is excited by the touch of a man, but only after she has decided to allow
him to enter her private world. If she has not so decided, any attempt to touch her will be
disastrous. An unwelcome grab or grope will not turn her on, but on the contrary will
probably turn her off the intruder for good. So beware!
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If you do have to touch a woman who is not a close friend, for example in helping her across
the road, or picking her up if she has fallen, you must take hold of a non-erogenous part.
Now, it is not easy to find a non-erogenous part of a woman, but for steering her away from
danger, the elbow is recommended. She will probably not resent that. Similarly, for helping
her up, take her by the hands if possible.
Touching hands is part of normal human
communication and signifies friendly intent.
Avoid touching her legs above the knee, her bottom, breasts or abdomen. These are definitely
erogenous zones. Always make it plain that your intentions are merely helpful, not amorous.
Also, always give her the chance to decline your assistance if she wants. If you hold out your
hand and say, "Shall I give you a hand up?" she will usually accept.
To come back to physiological differences, the layer of subcutaneous fat which makes her so
marvellous to touch, and leads on to all sorts of etiquette about when you may or may not
touch her, is not there entirely for your delight. Nature often causes things to have more than
one purpose and more than one advantage to their owner.
In this case, the layer of
subcutaneous fat not only makes her singularly delicious to touch, hence gives her some of
her sexual power, but it is also a survival factor for a woman. It insulates her from the cold
and also helps her withstand starvation. In contrast to men, women are able to consume their
body fat for immediate use, so that in an emergency they have a substantial reserve of energy.
This gives them their outstanding endurance. They can withstand cold and hunger much
better than men and, above all, can go through a long labour without fainting from hunger and
exhaustion, even though eating is impossible.
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History is full of examples of the durability of the cloven race. In every siege and famine,
they seemed to survive in much greater numbers than men, despite their not having much
value as warriors and therefore coming low on the priority list for supplies of food and water.
Eye witness accounts of the siege of Leningrad tell of the bitter sadness of the women that all
their menfolk died first. "The streets were full of women. Only women." "The bigger and
stronger the men, the sooner they died."
There are good explanations for this phenomenon. A man needing about 1500 calories a day
for long-term survival is in a poor situation compared with a woman, who can subsist on
1,000 calories a day. If the available supply is only 900 calories the man is not going to
survive long. The human body is able to go into a starvation mode, which greatly reduces the
calories needed to survive, although at the expense of a correspondingly reduced level of
activity and energy. Women seem to be especially good at this. Would it be possible to
count the number of mothers since our race began who have given their own food to their
children? It would not.
It may be that there are basic biological reasons why women are able in effect to consume
their own bodies in order to help them and their children to survive. If the situation is so bad
that the survival of the whole group seems doubtful, it would make biological sense for the
men to die first, since they consume the most food and have the lowest biological priority. In
a way, the men do their duty to the group by dying, because they thereby help the women and
children to survive.
If the food supply eventually improves, and enough women have
survived, they can soon make more men to restore the tribe's losses.
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There are also less chillingly biological and more warmly human reasons for the high survival
value of women.
They seem simply more determined to survive. Everywhere you see
evidence of the cloven race's extreme reluctance to die. Visit any geriatric ward and you will
find that ninety percent of its patients are women. An old girl who can only move one eyelid
will still think life worthwhile, or at least preferable to the alternative, whereas a man will
give up once his vital powers are gone. Our society values men for what they can do. An old
man therefore sees himself as valueless as a machine that does not work any more.
Women also have the power to keep their men alive, as well as themselves. Everyone knows
how often a man dies soon after his wife. This is because she was keeping him alive, not just
physically with food and comforts, but spiritually by being someone who wanted him to live.
When she goes, he stops wanting to live. Some religious men may hope to join her in heaven.
Others simply feel life is not worth living without her.
Then consider the case of the wagon train which set out to carry migrants from St Louis to
California in the 1840's. This was a group which must have been in some ways similar to a
small human tribe in the Palaeolithic time. There were not many old people, but a number of
family groups comprising people of all ages and both sexes, plus a number of unattached
young men. There were 147 of them in all. Through bad luck and bad judgment, the wagon
train became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada and was completely unable to move. With
winter closing in, they were in a terrible state. Being so near to their intended destination,
they had used most of their supplies. Furthermore, the only person who knew of their
existence was a man they had ejected from the party at the beginning. So no help was likely
to be forthcoming.
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For three desperate months, they held out in the frozen wilderness. Several of them kept
diaries, so we know exactly what happened. The men were not able to get much by hunting.
Gradually, they began to die. The unattached young men went first, then the smaller children,
then the older men. Ironically, the man they had ejected had reached California and realised
that something was amiss. He went looking for them. When he and his companions found
them, half of the party were dead. Most of the others were too weak to move. So he went to
fetch more help. Finally, the remnant were rescued.
At the final reckoning, most of the men had died, but nearly all of the women survived.
Those women who did die were those who refused to leave their dying menfolk, when the
first rescuers took some survivors away. Even more remarkable, the few men who survived
were all members of the family groups. That is, they were accompanied by their womenfolk.
All the unattached men died.
It seemed that there is something about women which
reinforces their men's determination to survive. This is possibly a kind of family solidarity,
which makes men see the point of surviving.
Also, it could be to do with women's
psychological gift of bolstering men's courage and self-belief. Finally, it must be due to the
grim determination to survive which flows through the female spirit.
What has all this to do with subcutaneous fat? Well, beneath her skin, making her practically
irresistible to the touch, a woman carries her emergency rations and her spare blanket.
Equipped with these, and with a fierce grip on life in her soul, she can face the world with
quite a lot of confidence. So subcutaneous fat is very important. And we men don't have
much of it.
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Once, when I was young man, I was swimming in a cold sea with a woman friend. We were
a long way from the shore and I urged her to turn back, saying, "I may not be able to save you,
this far out". She laughed and replied, "But I should more likely have to save YOU!" She
had realised that it was I who was scared of getting cramp, not her, and that my hot male
blood was cooling quickly in the cold water. After lingering for a few moments to make her
point, she turned and swam back at my side. She was a gracious lady, who understood that
my masculine pride would not let me go back without her, especially as our friends were
watching on the beach.
So she let me keep my pride.
I was thus chastened but not
humiliated. She never told anyone that my nerve gave out first.
Although women may look tender and vulnerable, which they are in some ways, they are
amazingly tough physically. They are not designed for performance, like men, but for
survival. So you should not subscribe to any nonsense about women being the weaker sex. In
a test of endurance, the greater strength of men does not count for much. People in the West
used to be amazed to see newsreels of women doing heavy manual labour in the Soviet
Union. In fact, women are well able to do heavy physical work. They just do it in a woman's
way, that is by steady plodding, rather than by Herculean heaving.
Voices
One of the most remarkable differences between the sexes is their voices. At puberty, the
voice box of a boy greatly enlarges, so that his voice "breaks" and he soon develops the
deeper resonances of a man's voice. The human voice has a very wide range. In a man, the
lower registers are very deep, giving the characteristic growling, grumbling sound of men's
voices. Civilised men generally pitch their voices a little higher than the bottom register, so
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as to make themselves sound a little less Neanderthal. On the other hand, men seldom make
use of the top register of their voices, except in falsetto speaking and singing.
Women, in contrast, do not develop the big Adam's Apple of the man. As they grow to
adulthood, their voices become deeper than the piping squeak of the little girl, and much
richer and more melodious. In the West, ladies are encouraged to pitch their voices a little
lower, so as to sound as musical as possible. This is why Asian women's voices sound highpitched to a westerner. It is a matter of culture to some extent.
Because the voice changes are brought about by the sex hormones, it seems that the human
voice is yet another sexual characteristic. As a man, you will discover that women's voices
are one of the things that most bind you to them. Of course, the voices of women who are
angry or unhappy are often shrill or strident. That is a sound which will make you cringe.
But normally, the sounds women make are music to the ears of men.
If you spend any time in an all-male society, and I mean weeks not hours, you will find that
you eventually begin to yearn for the sound of women's voices. If you are really cracking up,
you will hear them in your sleep. Quite why this is so is hard to explain. Possibly, it is
because we men have a little coded message in our brains telling us to go and live where there
are women. More likely, it is because we become addicted to women. Quite unknowingly,
we get used to hearing them around us with their very distinctive voices. We associate these
sounds with home, peace and happiness. Ask anyone who ever served in a war. Perhaps we
remember our mother's voice in the time before we knew there was such a thing as
unhappiness. Maybe we even heard it in the womb.
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Certainly, the relatively high pitch of the female voice makes it very penetrating. You can
hear it more clearly than a man's. If she becomes angry, a woman's voice loses that warm
musicality and becomes a strident brass trumpet. Quite regardless of what she actually says,
which may be painful enough, the tone of her voice is enough to strip the paint off the wall
and the skin off your back. Most experienced men show a marked reluctance to engage in
verbal combat with a woman. That is one battle she is likely to win. That is the reason why
so many men resort to violence in that situation. To do that is to suffer defeat of another kind.
It is unacceptable for a civilised man to behave in that way. Violence against females is the
first and oldest taboo in human society, and throughout the primate world.
Another curious feature of the human voice is that all females can emit an alarm note, which
takes the form of an ear-splitting scream. This is so high-pitched and of such intensity that it
can be heard over a wide area. Presumably, in the wild it was used to bring her friends
running. As an unarmed, soft-skinned creature in a dangerous world, the human female had
to have a reliable method of summoning help if, for example, she met a bear while out
foraging for nuts and berries. It is not too fanciful to imagine all the males in the vicinity
rushing to confront the predator and trying to drive him away. Something of the sort still
happens.
In all armies which have tried to use women as fighting soldiers, there have been problems. It
is not that women are not brave. They are. The trouble is that, if a woman soldier is hurt, it is
difficult to stop all the male soldiers rushing to her aid. If she screams loudly, they will
certainly stop what they are doing to help her. It seems that a woman's scream is still an
effective way of bringing her friends running. The reactions of the males seems as much a
reflex as her emission of the alarm note.
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Experiments involving the mock kidnapping of a young woman in the street show that
passers-by often ignore the woman's screams and merely watch passively as her "attackers"
bundle her into a car. Only if there is someone there who personally knows the supposed
victim will he or she go to her assistance. In fact, if there are a number of her friends nearby,
the "attackers" risk getting lynched.
Public-spirited people are often shocked by these
findings, believing that we all have a duty to assist anyone in distress. This attitude ignores
one obvious fact about human beings, which is that in matters of personal defence we operate
at the level of the individual, or the kinship group, not at a public level. Strangers in the street
do not mean much to us, not enough to risk our lives for them. We will only risk our lives for
our loved ones and friends. If it is your mother the hoods are kidnapping, you will be over
there in a flash.
This does not mean there is no commitment at all to help strangers, just that it is much
slower-acting in a real life crisis. A newspaper report of an attack on a young woman at a
subway station revealed that the victim put up a long struggle while people watched or
stepped aside. Eventually, the girl was rescued by two middle-aged men who came out of the
crowd to her aid. Presumably, the struggle went on long enough for the rescuers to weigh up
the situation and decide this had to be stopped. The fact that they were middle-aged suggests
they may have been fathers of daughters and so were quicker to identify with the victim.
Although modern women sometimes scream with excitement rather than fear, other people
can distinguish between the two types of scream. In fact, what sounds like mere noise
contains a lot of coded information. You can tell whether the woman screaming is hurt, or
just frightened, whether she is mainly angry or seriously needs assistance. Once, on a street
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in London, I saw a huge truck roll right over a young woman on a bicycle. The truck stopped
immediately and loud screams came from beneath it. Everyone was struck with horror. The
driver started running around like a headless chicken, too terrified to look underneath. But
the screams told me the victim was indignant and frightened rather than hurt. Sure enough,
when I dived under the truck she was lying completely whole and the wheels had narrowly
missed her. She stopped screaming as soon as I spoke to her.
Make sure you do not go to the assistance of a woman who is only having a fight with her
lover. She may make terrible noises, but is engaged in a private fight which strangers are not
invited to join. I once saw a fracas in the street between a young woman neighbour and her
live-in boyfriend. He was punching her so hard she was rising into the air. I thought of
intervening because her life looked in danger, but this guy was a huge ex-marine who was
said to have a lump of shrapnel in his head which made him go funny at times. So the
intervention idea was not something I was keen on. Fortunately, my cowardice produced the
right decision, because a few seconds later they walked past me. He was sobbing and she was
comforting HIM. So I could have got myself pulped for nothing.
Most of the time, we men love the sound of women's voices. To hear women laughing, even
vulgar women with ribald screeches, is one of the happiest experiences. Likewise, to hear
women singing is one of the great pleasures of life. Remember the legend of the Sirens.
These were supernatural female creatures whose singing could deprive a man of his senses.
Odysseus, when his ship approached the place where the Sirens lived, put earplugs in his
sailors' ears, so that they could not hear the Sirens singing. The crafty old fellow kept his own
ears unplugged, but got someone to tie him to the mast of the ship, so that he would hear the
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unearthly song. When he went crazy, he could not do himself any harm, because he was tied
up. Meanwhile, his deafened sailors rowed him away to safety out of earshot.
The point of the story, apart from the old adventurer's cunning, is that the female voice can
bring enchantment, not necessarily to the hearer's advantage. Perhaps we remember, deep
down in our minds, our mothers singing to us, when our tiny infant brains first registered that
strange and magical sound.
This then is the third way to experience women as creatures and to get pleasure from their
company. The first two ways are to look at them with an educated eye and to touch them
when invited. Now the third way is to listen to their voices. Get into the habit of listening to
the sounds they make, not just the words they say. Soon you will be able to recognise the
beauty in a voice. Everyone's voice is unique and contains coded information about its
owner's innermost character.
DIFFERENCE AND EQUALITY
It is fashionable nowadays to claim that, apart from the obvious differences in genitalia, there
is not that much physical difference between men and women. In fact, like so much that is
fashionable, this is complete nonsense. Merely changing the genitalia does not change a
person from one sex to another. The European Court of Justice ruled in 1990 that a person
who had changed sex from male to female could not legally be considered a woman, even
though she was psychologically female and had no male genitalia. Surgery and hormone
therapy, it was ruled, could never make her a woman, because sex is decided genetically soon
after conception and is determined by the chromosomes which are present in every cell of the
body.
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In general, and there are some individuals to whom this does not apply, each cell in a
woman's body has two X chromosomes in its genetic code, while each cell in a man's body
has one X and one Y chromosome. In effect, every cell in the body "knows" whether it is part
of a male body or of a female body. The difference between the two sexes is the Y
chromosome, the determinant of maleness.
In fact, some individuals have two Y
chromosomes, a double helping of maleness. This makes them overly masculine, so that they
may be violent and aggressive, frequently dangerous. It seems that a man without the balance
of the female X chromosome is an ugly brute. Conversely, a woman with a Y chromosome
can be better at athletics than most women. This leads to agonised debates in athletics over
how to define a woman. We might end up with events for a third sex, the Y chromosome
women competing against the double X men.
The principles of maleness and femaleness are deeply rooted in the innermost structures of
the body. It seems hard to justify the claim that the physiological differences between men
and women are relatively superficial, even though the normal complexity of human life
means that not all individuals are indisputably male or female. Biologically, men and women
look like two different forms of humanity, rather than one form with minor variations.
Compared with the differences between the sexes, the differences between the so-called races
of mankind are indeed minor. In other words, a Japanese man is more like an American man
than he is like a Japanese woman. Conversely, a Japanese woman and an American woman
are more like one another than they are like either of their menfolk.
Those who want to minimise the differences between the sexes are usually motivated by
ideological considerations and the wish to change society in the way they see fit, an impulse
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which is called "social engineering". No doubt, it is a worthy intention to make men and
women equal, but it is surely a hopeless project to make them the same.
We have to be sophisticated enough to realise that you do not have to make men and women
the same in order to make them equal. How do you make oranges equal to apples? Only in
terms of their worth. Equality for us humans cannot mean that we are the same, only that
each one of us has an equal right to be considered a full member of the human family and to a
share in its rights and privileges, such as they are. In that sense, my 16 pound grand-daughter
is indeed the equal of her 200 pound grandfather, even though we could hardly be more
different as human beings.
The first step to wisdom is to understand that women are themselves and form their own
frame of reference. They think and feel like women and are not pale imitations of men. They
are emphatically not the "weaker sex". If they have a mind to it, they can do anything a man
can do. Never feel tempted to put them down on the basis of some imagined superiority of
performance.
On the other hand, don't let anyone sell you the idea that the differences between the sexes are
such that men and women are inevitably cast for specific roles in the world. There is nothing
inevitable about it. Human beings are very advanced and complex creatures. They can
choose to be anything they like. So although women generally enjoy being women and like
doing the "womanly" things, they have the capacity to do anything which the human mind can
encompass. The big difference which has come over the world in the last few generations is
that we men have been obliged to change our perceptions of women as socially functioning
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human beings. That is, we have had to change our views on what women are and what they
can and should do in the world.
No doubt, this has had the effect of freeing women to some extent from the confines of a
rigidly-defined sex role. This was the so-called "women's liberation" movement of the 1960's
and Seventies, although the roots of that movement go back to the First World War.
Nowadays that seems old hat. Thoughtful women realise that they did not want just to be
allowed to do the things that men do, but to be accepted as fully paid-up members of the
human race. In short they want men to recognise that being a woman is a reasonable
alternative to being a man and is just as good.
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HORMONE DRIVES
The list of physiological differences between men and women is quite lengthy. I have only
mentioned some of the more obvious ones.
The differences in size, shape and sexual
specialisation of the male and female bodies are such that it would be surprising if they did
not make a difference to the way men and women feel about themselves and about the world.
On the other hand, there is no real evidence that men and women are truly different in their
brain functions.
Various researchers have thought that they have detected differences in the way the brains of
the two sexes work, but there has never been any convincing proof of any real differences. In
particular, crude analogies with simple computers are doomed to failure. The brain is not a
computer. Claims that the female brain is "wired differently" are only another way of saying
that females have different values and skills. That is what you would expect, given their
sexual specialisation and social conditioning. Their neural nets may indeed work in such a
way as to facilitate those skills, but which came first, the skills or the neural nets?
Women's brains are generally smaller than men's, but in relation to their body sizes they are
not so. Just as there is nothing to suggest that big men are more intelligent than small men, so
there is no evidence that women are generally less intelligent than men, simply because their
brains are smaller. Sometimes, when we want to tease our female friends, we men say that
women don't have brains at all, just something that does a similar sort of job. This is pointing
out their weird ability to cope with life, despite an apparent absence of any brain function as
we know it. The women usually reply that it is men's brains which work in an odd way
because, however brilliant we may be, we are always chumps. Well! That is not an argument
you should let yourselves be drawn into.
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It is sometimes suggested that women have more verbal ability than men and that men have
more ability in spatial relationships. This is held to account for the argumentative power of
women and, also, for the supposed tendency of women drivers to collide with gate posts, to
say nothing of their reluctance to park in narrow spaces. It is hard to say whether there is any
substance in either of these stereotypes. Any such differences are likely to be culturallyinduced, rather than due to inherent differences in brain function, even supposing they are
real.
In truth, there are no known psychological tests which show significant differences between
men and women. The aimed throwing test is the only one which may show a possible
difference. It is said (and I have never seen the results) that if a target is placed vertically, like
a dartboard, then women can throw missiles as accurately as men with comparable
experience. However, if the target is made very large and laid flat on the ground, then the
women are said to throw less accurately than men. This is sometimes taken to mean that men
find it easier to judge how far away something is.
It is hard to see how or why such a difference could arise, given that both sexes have very
similar brains and neurological equipment. Probably, it is yet another culturally-induced
difference, brought about by the fact that naughty little boys throw stones a lot, and older
males regularly play games involving throwing. There is, for example, no evidence that
women tennis players are less able than men to judge the length of a ball.
In the light of current knowledge, it seems that most of the differences between the sexes
which are bandied about in battle-of-the-sexes arguments are imaginary, or at least are due to
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upbringing and cultural conditioning rather than to inherent differences. Yet every man
knows that women are different from us, not just in their bodies but in their minds. As a
young man, when you first fall in love with a girl, you realise it is not really her woman's
body which makes you love her but her woman's mind. There is an otherness about women
which fascinates men. We all feel there is such a thing as a woman's mind.
The problem is how to define it. This is a question over which philosophers have made asses
of themselves throughout the ages. It is like music or painting. You cannot discuss it at a
serious level without making an ass of yourself. Not only do we have to invent an
extraordinary terminology, and list of strange concepts, in order to think about the subject, but
when we do we find ourselves caught in a web of high-flown nonsense, because the subject is
so abstract and so elusive.
It is best to be humble about this and to admit that very little is known. We are too close to
the trees to see the wood, and too closely involved with this amazing creature to be objective
about her. Many a wise man gives up the struggle and just takes shelter in her arms. Much of
what we perceive about women is seen through a haze of mystery, partly created by women
themselves, partly by a society which wishes us to see them in a particular way. Nonetheless,
it is possible to peer through the smokescreen and to catch a glimpse of the creature herself
flitting through the shadows.
The key to the problem is to realise that much of what makes a woman feminine, as opposed
to merely female, is the hormone balance in her body. Conversely, what makes a man
masculine is the different balance of hormones in his body. It seems that although the basic
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bodily structures, including sex, are genetically determined, what actually makes us feel and
behave like men and women is our cocktail of hormones.
Hormones are chemical messages carried around the body in the bloodstream. They are
produced in various glands and, in effect, tell they various parts of the body how to behave.
The sex hormones not only trigger off the changes which result in the development of an
adult male or female body, but also tell the brain to behave like a man or like a woman,
depending on which hormones predominate.
So the fact that a male person behaves "like a man" is largely due to the fact that he is full of
testosterone, the main male hormone. Underlying all the cultural influences which dictate
what a man is supposed to be like, there is a real hormone-driven urge to be masculine. A
society which tries to ignore this, or to suppress it, will eventually be blown apart by it.
It is often said that testosterone makes men naturally aggressive. This is generally accepted as
obvious and self-evident, but in reality it does not stand up to serious examination. Like all
the great primates, adult men are generally fairly peaceable. They will go to some lengths to
avoid a fight, especially against someone who is equally powerful. It is truer to say that man
is not a naturally aggressive creature, but like all male mammals is capable of aggression.
That is, there are certain things which will trigger off aggression in a man. For example, he
will certainly fight in defence of his mate and his children. So would a woman, you might
say. There is nothing specifically male about that.
Nevetheless, there does seem to be a real difference between men and women in their
reactions to a physical threat. When they feel themselves in imminent danger of a life-
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threatening attack, both sexes adopt one or other of two defensive strategies, which are used
by most animals when faced by a predator. These strategies are either to freeze or to flee.
If the danger is very close, the best strategy is to freeze. If you run, you will attract the
predator's attention, with most likely fatal results. If you keep perfectly still, there is a good
chance that the predator will lose interest and go away. This freezing strategy would require a
lot of nerve if we had freedom of choice, so nature takes the choice away from us and makes
the freezing a reflex action which we are not able to control. Many women who have been
attacked by a man say that one of the worst things about the experience is that they were not
able to move a muscle. They find this frightening and humiliating, but really it is only the
working of their natural defensive system. The fact that this was evolved to deal with bears
rather than men is a shocking commentary on what our race has become.
This freezing reflex operates in men also. When battles were fought hand to hand with
swords and spears, even the greatest warrior could suddenly find himself unable to move his
limbs. The ancient Anglo-Saxons had a word for it. They called it the dreaded "battle
fetters". It must be a reflex action, because nobody would voluntarily render himself totally
immobile in the middle of a pitched battle.
The main alternative to freezing is to flee. If the danger is not too imminent, or there seems a
good chance of outrunning the predator, most animals and all sane human beings run away.
In general, this is the best tactic when the attack would be of irresistible force. The only
defence then is not to be there.
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There remains a third option. Instead of lying doggo or running away, we have the option of
fighting.
This is the riskiest course, because the outcome of the fight is uncertain.
Consequently, before deciding to fight the attacker, we have to make a very quick assessment
of the balance of power. This is where a real difference between the sexes becomes clear. In
general, men will more readily consider the fighting option, and more often decide that it is a
valid choice. Even when it leads to probable disaster, a man will sometimes choose to go
down fighting, because he is a fighting animal and feels better doing what he can.
There is a story in the Iliad which illustrates this psychological truth. Achilles, the mighty
warrior, does not wish to follow his king to the Trojan war. He has something else he wants
to do. As he cannot lawfully defy the king's direct order, Achilles decides to hide where the
king's officers will never think to find him. He persuades the holy women in a convent to
shelter him. As he has a good reason, not wanting to kill people with whom he has no
quarrel, he is admitted into the convent. Sure enough, the baffled king is unable to find him.
However, as Achilles is by far the best warrior in the land, the king is very reluctant to leave
without him. So he asks Odysseus, a captain famous for his cunning, to help find Achilles.
At first, Odysseus does not have much luck, either, but one day as he is passing the convent
he realises that this is exactly where someone who is a great warrior but a bit bone-headed
would think himself invulnerable to discovery.
Calling at the convent at first yields nothing. The mother superior, in deference to the king,
allows Odysseus to inspect the premises. Ostensibly, he finds nothing, but he notices that one
of the nuns at prayer is rather huge. When he leaves, he tells one of his men to leave his spear
leaning against the wall, as if he had forgotten it.
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Once outside, Odysseus orders his troops to rush the doorway, clashing their arms and
making a fearsome noise, as if they were going to sack the place. He watches through a
window while this happens. The genuine nuns scoot off like a flock of doves, but the huge
one picks up the spear and turns to face the attackers. Homer does not tell us what Odysseus
said, but it must have been something like, "Ah, Lord Achilles, I presume!"
So poor old Achilles was hauled off to the war where, as we all know, he met his death. He
was flushed out of his hiding place because Odysseus knew that real females would flee the
scene if they thought a mortal attack was imminent but not yet at hand's reach, whereas a man
would think of fighting if there was a weapon to hand. Also, being a gallant man, Achilles
would try to defend his gentle protectors if he could.
All male mammals are essentially similar in this respect. To test this theory, walk through a
field where there is a herd of cattle grazing. If there is no bull there, you have nothing to
worry about. The cows will only show a mild interest and will probably move out of the way
if you go near them. If you run towards the cows, big as they are, they turn and flee. Unless,
that is they have a calf with them. Then it is another matter. Female mammals will definitely
fight in defence of their young. So do not try this experiment if there are calves in the field.
If there is a bull there, you will not feel like going into the field at all. You can tell which one
he is without going into anatomical details. He is the one who watches you with a fixed,
suspicious stare. You just know that running at him would be courting disaster. He won't run
away, not from a creature as puny as a human being. He will stand and fight. Moreover, if
you get too close to his cows he will attack you in any case. He does not really mean you any
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harm. He just wants to get rid of you. So if you run and vault over the nearest gate, he will
probably feel he has made his point.
What then is the difference between the cows and the bull? The answer is that he is full of
testosterone, which tell him, "If anyone comes onto your patch looking threatening, chase him
off". The cows, on the other hand, are full of female hormones, which tell them, "Don't get
involved in any brawls. If anyone threatens you, run away and let the males do the fighting".
So although the cow could easily chase you off, she runs away because she is not looking for
a fight. Why is she not looking for a fight? Essentially, it is because females are too valuable
to risk in fighting. The ability of a mammalian population to multiply and, hence, to survive,
depends on how many females it has who are capable of producing offspring. Because in the
higher mammals each baby has a long gestation period and a long infancy, females are worth
much more biologically than males. Each infant requires a lot of female time to produce and
rear it, but very little male time.
This is true of human populations, also. The traditional cry of "Women and children first!"
when it comes to taking people off a sinking ship is not only a matter of chivalry but of the
sheer survival of the species. Our instinct is always to try to save our females and infants
from a disaster, because we love them and because of the biological investment they
represent. Males, unfortunately, are rather more expendable.
So, boys, if you feel tempted to call girls sissy and timid, just remember that females have
better things to do. They think that fighting is silly and a waste of time, as well as dangerous.
To them, fighting is something which is best left to us silly-mutt males. If you enjoy fighting
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and scrimmaging with other young males, it is because you are pumped up with a strange
hormone which makes you into a bit of a turkey cock. Testosterone tells you to defend your
patch and not to let other males achieve dominance over you. As a result, you like to practise
mock fighting with your friends, in order to sharpen yourselves up against the day when you
may have to do it for real.
In our popular culture, too much is made of the supposed aggressiveness of men, as if this
were the primary characteristic of the male mind. While it is true that females are remarkably
mild and physically unassertive, compared with which most males seem more physically selfconfident or downright cocky, it is greatly over-simple to say that females are never
aggressive. Nor is it true that males are naturally aggressive.
In fact, it seems doubtful whether in the natural state, whatever that may have been, that men
were very aggressive at all. The modern picture of unadorned savagery in the Stone Age
seems not to be supported by such facts as are known. Of course, there must have been
arguments and possibly bloodshed over territory or hunting rights, but there is no evidence of
organised warfare until the Neolithic era. That is very recently in the geological time scale
over which our species has evolved. You could say that people did not start to be really nasty
to one another until they started to become "civilised".
Primitive people, so-called, had very little idea of property and helped themselves to whatever
they could find. This is why the first agriculturalists soon became city dwellers. They were
forced to build walls around their habitations, so they could stop the hunter-gatherers breezing
in and taking all their hard-won food stores. When you have cities with walls, you have to
have armies, or at least an organisation which is capable of fighting off a wandering tribe
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which is down on its luck. This entails leaders and followers. When you have rulers with
armies, you can have wars. From war derives men's reputation for aggression.
Yet wars between Neolithic peoples were probably not much worse than village football
matches. Judging from what happened in the remaining Neolithic societies which still existed
in the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, Neolithic warfare involved a lot of featherwearing, spear-brandishing and insult-trading, but not much in the way of hand strokes.
Missiles were hurled and occasionally someone was killed. That often meant the end of the
proceedings for the day. Both sides were ready to run away when things looked a bit
threatening. In short, this sort of warfare looked remarkably like the intra-species fighting in
other species. That is, it was mostly display and head-butting, with minimal real casualties.
These examples suggest that, far from being natural born killers, men are really natural
cowards, who will fight only if they think there is not much chance of getting hurt. In order
to engage in the systematic slaughter of real warfare, from the late Neolithic onwards, the
organisers of armies had to overcome the natural tendency of their men to run away and go
home. All armies are organised on the premise that anyone in his right mind will desert as
soon as possible.
To combat this tendency, armies have iron discipline, which is designed to inculcate
unquestioning obedience to orders, with harsh punishments of deserters. In addition, the
power of tradition, patriotism, ancestor worship, idealism and male group loyalty are brought
to bear. The minds of men have to be moulded by the state so as to make war possible.
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So much for the myth that men are naturally aggressive. It is civilisation which makes them
aggressive. Like most male creatures, men will only fight voluntarily when they are very
alarmed or very angry. Of course, society has still not worked out how to deal with young
males, who will indulge in rough and tumble antics if they think there is not too much chance
of getting hurt, or when they have had too much to drink.
The converse myth, that females are never aggressive is equally easily demolished. Apart
from the fact that all female mammals will fight in defence of their young, women are also
aggressive in other ways. They are not well-adapted to physical combat, although any
hospital casualty department will provide examples of men beaten up by their wives. You
may from time to time find yourselves on the receiving end of some sharp slaps and kicks if
you offend a female person, but serious assaults are reserved for unfaithful lovers and
unsatisfactory husbands. It is to be hoped that you boys will develop the nous to avoid such
situations. If not, you will have to learn to avoid the slaps.
You will discover that female aggression is often directed at other females and is aroused by
those things which concern women most.
After children, that means position, power,
dominance and possessions. In this context, possessions include men, who you will discover
are regarded by women as more or less valuable possessions, depending on performance.
You may well have noticed that the list of things which cause conflict and aggression among
women are much the same as those which cause strife among men. Once again, the supposed
difference between the sexes appears on closer examination to be more a matter of viewpoint
than of real difference. Yet all the evidence of our senses and experience tells us that women
are different from men, psychologically as well as physically.
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Once, I was in a farmyard talking to the farmer, when through the open door of a shed came a
herd of young cows, or heifers. Seeing us standing there, the first two or three stopped and
looked uncertainly at us. Then they formed single file and, as it were, began to tiptoe past us.
the farmer, who had his back to them, laughed aloud during his conversation, at which all the
cows stopped and shrank back a little. Then, seeing there was no danger, they resumed filing
past us. Once they had got past, each one broke into a little canter, until eventually the whole
herd was scampering away.
I said to the farmer that they behaved exactly like a crowd of girls. All that was missing were
the giggles. “Yes," he said, "Cows don't giggle, but they are feminine". I suggested to him
that if that had been a mob of steers we should have had to leap out of the way. "Yes," he
said, "Or boys!"
Of course, women are not like cows, although the comparison is by no means as unflattering
to women as might be supposed. The point is that by reminding me of women those young
heifers taught me that I recognise certain patterns of behaviour as "feminine". In that case, it
was the delicate cautiousness in physical matters, the dislike of sudden loud noises and the
impish high spirits which reminded me of the young women that I knew.
Like all human beings, women have a natural dignity. But theirs is a weird kind of dignity,
even loopy. This enables them to wear amazing hats and still look wonderful. It gives them
great style, so that a woman can tie a bit of cloth over her head and make herself look like
something from mythology. In fact, one of the best ways to appreciate women is to look at
them as if you were a tourist from another planet. You will say to yourself, "Oh, no! I don't
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believe this! That hair! Those eyes! Those limbs! Whose idea was this, to dream up a
creature so strange, so wacky and so wonderful? We don't have anything like this on planet
Zog".
It is a question of having the eyes to see them with. Then you will discover that when they
are free and happy and not unduly oppressed by poverty and ignorance, women usually have a
huge sense of fun, as well as their inimitable style. That is what makes them seem dignified
and loopy at the same time. That is what we recognise as characteristically feminine. Yet
you must never forget that this creature is deadly serious about her mission in life.
Much of what I have told you will have convinced you that there is no such thing as female
human nature, or a female mind. At a rational level, logic suggests that women can only be
human beings who, male or female, are more alike one another than they are different.
Moreover, if there really is a masculine-feminine dimension to human personality, it must be
a huge continuum, ranging from the most masculine to the most feminine. In the middle,
there must be lots of individuals who are neither particularly masculine nor feminine.
As in other things, there would be an overlap between the sexes, so that the most "masculine"
woman is more masculine than some men. Also, the masculine-feminine dimension to
personality may be overlaid by other dimensions which are equally important, such as
dominance-submission and assertiveness-reticence. So it would be possible for a woman to
be both very feminine and very dominant. Some men say the two things go together and that
feminine women are naturally dominant. Certainly, dominant females are very familiar to
market researchers and others who conduct group interviews.
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NATURE AND NURTURE
We are still left wondering what, if anything, it means to be "feminine". Shakespeare has one
of his female characters describe how a man should behave when disguised as a woman, in
order to be a convincing counterfeit female.
This character, Rosalind, advises, "Be
effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, aspish, shallow, inconstant, full
of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something for no passion truly anything".
This paints a picture of a complex personality, combining as it does a warm, impulsive,
emotional nature with a spiteful streak. The overall impression, though, is of someone fickle,
shallow and lacking real "soul", to use the current jargon. Fortunately, we can take all this
with a pinch of salt. Apart from the playwright's impish desire to get all the women in the
audience hissing and jeering, Shakespeare had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he wrote
this. His character, Rosalind, is disguised as a man when she says this. Moreover, she is
talking to a man. Consequently, her remarks are a part of her own disguise. She wants to
sound like a man. So she panders to Orlando's male prejudices to make herself seem one of
the boys.
This, then, is not how Rosalind herself sees women, but how she thinks men see them. She is
very nearly right, too. These ideas are still current among men four hundred years later.
Shakespeare was too good an analyst of the human heart to believe that women really are
warm and impulsive but essentially shallow and silly. Many of his female characters are
powerful and noble personalities. Others are wise and witty or compassionate and selfsacrificing. However, not all men are as perceptive as Shakespeare. Rosalind's portrayal of
female human nature is regularly dragged out in every saloon bar in the world. The Bard
spent a lot of his time in pubs. That's probably where he got the idea. Even our female
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friends will admit that women sometimes play up to this image of their kind and have some
fun being dizzy, skittish and unpredictable.
It is necessary to understand why this strange stereotype of female nature came into being. At
the root of it is the fact that men and women are trained from birth to play fundamentally
different roles in the world. Consequently, they develop different sets of values and personal
skills, those skills which will enable them to play their respective roles.
This training is encoded in every word and gesture of the child's parents, relatives, friends,
teachers, even total strangers. Every one of us wants a boy child to grow up to be a man,
whatever our ideal of manhood is. Similarly, we all want a girl child to grow into a woman.
Until quite recently, it was the custom to dress a baby in the colour of its sex, pink for a girl
and blue for a boy. This was so that during the period when the sex is not obvious to the eye,
strangers would know how to behave towards the child.
We actually use different
speechways for talking to children of each sex. The children expect this, as well as their
parents.
A friend of mine was once playing with a group of children in the yard on a cold day. The
children were all muffled up in winter clothing, so their sex was not apparent from their dress
or hair. My friend thought he was playing with a group of boys, because they were playing
some boisterous game. He noticed that one of the group was hanging back and dropping out
of the game. So he said, "Come on, little man! It's your turn now". To which the tiny person
replied, "I'm NOT a man".
"Well, you will be when you grow up," said my friend.
"No, I won't" said the child.
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"Why ever not?"
"Because I'm a GIRL," said the child witheringly.
My friend's failure to recognise her sex and to give due acknowledgment to her gender had
created a slight tension between them which the girl had put right at the first opportunity.
Even now, when everything relating to gender is supposed to be free and easy, you still feel a
fool when you get a child's sex wrong. Seeing a woman acquaintance with a small child
whom I did not know, I remarked, "What a lovely little boy!" The woman said coldly, "It's a
girl, actually". The child looked at me as if to say, "Where did they find HIM?" Well, an old
codger might be forgiven for confusing the gender of people who wear unisex clothes and
hair styles. In my day, a girl had long hair and wore a pink ribbon in it.
Observations of parents with children show that male babies are treated differently from
female babies, especially in the way in which parents hold the children, the way they talk to
them and play with them. Also, there is an interaction between parent and child which is sexrelated. That is, mothers deal differently with sons than with daughters. Fathers do the same
in the opposite direction.
As a result, a child perceives very early in life that there are two sorts of people in the world
and that mummies are different from daddies, not only in the work they do but also in the way
they are. It soon becomes apparent to the child that the rules are different when one is dealing
with a person of opposite sex. In particular, relations between male and female are based
upon an affectionate recognition of difference, rather than a communality of aims and
attitudes. Consequently, a little girl discerns that her father loves her blindly, whereas her
mother also loves her but expects a lot more of her. Moreover, her mother insists on a certain
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female code of conduct being observed. Unconsciously, the mother teaches her daughter how
to be a woman. Conversely, the father should teach his son how to be a man. Unfortunately,
it too often happens that the father is either a weak figure or is absent, so that boy children are
unable to make the transition to adulthood without emotional problems.
Of course, this is a gross simplification of an extremely complicated set of behaviour. There
are wide variations between families and between cultures in the way children are brought up.
Yet all over the world, women are recognisably women and men are essentially men. This
either means that human culture is everywhere broadly similar, or that infant nurture is less
important than we suppose. Life being what it is, we may safely bet that both of these
alternatives are true to some extent.
Nurture is obviously of great importance.
It is widely held to be the most important
determinant of how the finished adult eventually turns out. Hardly anyone could be found to
support the notion that upbringing, education and training are irrelevant. Yet every parent
suspects that people are essentially themselves from the minute they first open their eyes.
When the time comes for you to have your own children, you may notice that each of them
has a different character, which is distinctive from a very early age. You may therefore think
that we are what we are because of the way we are made. Although the way we are brought
up may modify the way we think and behave, our essential nature still tends to keep bursting
through. You can put a bridle and a bit on a horse, but he is still a horse.
Of course, the question of the relative importance of nature and nurture is an immense
subject, which is not within the scope of a short guide to womankind. This question will
never be resolved clearly, because human beings are too complex for any simple answer to be
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adequate. No doubt, some academic will try, but really it is best to think of nature and
nurture exerting a kind of creative tension within the mind of the individual. This is perhaps
why each individual is truly unique. There is little chance of repeating exactly the same mix
of genetic inheritance and upbringing. Even though people in the same family may have a
close genetic relationship and a very similar material and emotional environment, the children
all turn out differently.
We were discussing whether there is such a thing as a "woman's mind". It proves to be
impossible to resolve that question, because of the way female children are brought up to be
women. That is, women are in some sense the product of how society collectively expects
women to be. All I have pointed out is that her nature as a female mammal makes her
physically and emotionally very different from a man. It also gives her a different viewpoint
and experience of life. When her upbringing as a trainee woman is piled on top of all this, it
would be surprising if a woman did not have a different mental set from a man's, even though
her actual brain is identical. This helps to explain the mutual incomprehension of men and
women. Someone who is trained from birth to be one thing may find it hard to understand
someone who is trained from birth to be something else.
Whether there is such a thing as a woman's mind, each man has to find out for himself. Most
men do believe women operate differently, even in the way they set about the process of
ratiocination, or serious reasoning. Many jokes are made about this, along the lines that
women do not have brains as such, but they do have something which does a similar job. This
is, of course, a male gibe at the apparent unwillingness of women to engage in step-by-step
teleological thinking and yet, annoyingly, to arrive at the right conclusions.
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This was ascribed by the Victorians to something called "women's intuition", which enabled
women to know things without having to think. We now have a rather more matter-of-fact
explanation, which does not involve supernatural powers. The mind is not a computer, which
works step-by-step in a logical sequence. It can follow many branches simultaneously,
working by association of ideas and other non-logical methods. We now distinguish between
logical thinking, following a particular logical pattern, and a more characteristically human
mental activity, exploring many branches, including those which at first sight have no logical
connection.
Formal education, of the classical Western type, teaches us to use our minds like simple
computers, following a chain of logic. We are not allowed to explore apparently irrelevant
avenues, but must keep our minds on the final objective of the investigation. Consequently,
people with a formal education tend to think of the mental processes as being characterised by
logical reasoning.
Those without the benefits of education tend to use their minds
spontaneously and unselfconsciously. That is, they engage more in lateral thinking, making
surprising discoveries about the connections between things, which purely logical thinking
does not always reveal.
In the Nineteenth Century, women were much less likely than men men to receive a formal
education. They were therefore less likely to be trained in logical thought. What is more
important, they felt free to use their minds naturally. They were, of course, perfectly well
able to solve many of life's problems by this means. As a result, women gained a reputation
for intuition, despite apparently having no brains. Perhaps "women's intuition" should have
been called "women's lack of tuition".
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Nowadays, we do not hear so much about women's intuition, except in the mouths of those
who cling to Nineteenth Century modes of thought.
Women now often have formal
education and have adopted yet another male vice, logical thinking. Nevertheless, it remains
true that lateral thinking by an untrained mind can be refreshing and valuable. One day, when
Albert Einstein was talking to a little girl, the girl's father came in and said, "Why, Dr
Einstein! I am delighted to see you are teaching my daughter about mathematics." Einstein
replied, "On the contrary. She is teaching me about mathematics!"
Just like men, women vary in their intellectual capacity from the extremely stupid to the
extremely intelligent. None of them has any supernatural powers, but the best of them have
very witty, mocking, sceptical minds. If you fall into the common male error of thinking that
women are a pushover in a reasonable argument, simply because they are generally mild and
unassertive, you may get a nasty surprise. Fortunately for us, females are generally goodhearted souls who do not turn their weapons on us unless we are particularly crass or
obnoxious. However, intellectual overconfidence in dealing with them is best avoided, lest
you find yourself overmatched.
It is said that female human beings are less extreme in their range of intelligence than males.
The female population appears to contain fewer geniuses than the male, but also fewer
cretins. It is hard to substantiate such a claim, since most tests of intelligence are of dubious
authenticity. Yet there has been much agonising at universities over the reasons why women
students achieve pro rata fewer first class degrees than men. Perhaps we should go to schools
for the educationally subnormal and see whether males are over-represented there also. If so,
it would lend some support to the hypothesis that males are more extreme in the range of their
abilities than females, and that women are more concentrated around the average.
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It would not be hard to propose a biological explanation for such a difference, if it were found
to exist. It is probably to a child's advantage if its mother is a "normal" person, not a genius
or a lunatic. These are frequently pretty much the same thing, in any case. So nature tends to
make women more in the right mould for the job, as it were. Males, on the other hand, are
biologically less valuable, even though women have always sought to enlist the aid of men in
their long struggle to rear the children. Consequently, the male population can be used for
evolutionary experimentation. In particular, if the genes of males were mixed in such a way
as to produce a wider spread of characteristics in men, this would produce both more geniuses
and more cretins among them.
The cretins would be the unfortunate casualties of the evolutionary process, but the male
geniuses, given the opportunities provided by their sex role specialisation, could be the
cutting edge of the species in the intellectual and moral spheres.
If our species, like some great animal, in addition to evolving physically, wished to evolve
intellectually and morally, this would be one way of doing so. Women will protest that this
seems to glorify the male sex, leaving women to be the little brown hens. This is not
necessarily the case. It could be that males should be seen as the foot soldiers of humanity,
whose job is to over-run those positions the rest of the race will afterwards occupy. In
addition to the glory, males also take the casualties. For every male genius there is a male
cretin. So men are lost not only in physical battles, but in intellectual and moral battles.
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Of course, there will be female geniuses. There always have been. Now that society is
evolving to the stage where some of the burden of child-rearing is lifted off women, we shall
see them coming into flower in every part of human life, not just in the "feminine" domain.
Another sobering thought from the male point of view is that if there truly is a wider spread of
abilities in males, this would mean a corresponding lowering of the average ability of males.
The so-called "normal distribution", which describes the incidence of most naturally
occurring characteristics, is bell-shaped. If the extremes contain more individuals, then the
centre, clustered about the norm, must contain fewer individuals.
So the intelligence
distribution of the two sexes would look like this:
40
Men
Women
30
% 20
10
0
70
80
90
100
110
120
130
IQ
You do not need to be a mathematician to see that this would make the average woman
brighter than the average man. If you ask any woman, she will of course confirm that this is
the case, apart that is from a few really bright men. In order to be brighter than most women,
a man would need to be near the top of the ability range for males. So you see, the theory of
male genius does not really glorify men. It merely suggests that nature puts a lot of the male
brains into a relatively few men, so that they can be the intellectual cutting edge of humanity.
Incidentally, by a male genius I do not mean the pompous fools who hold important posts and
thereby assume they must be geniuses.
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philosophers, moralists and scientists who advance the frontier of mankind in the realm of
mind and spirit. They give us our eyes and ears.
A prime example is Jesus Christ. Whether or not he was the son of God may be debated, but
the fact is that he was a teacher who reshaped the moral perspective of masses of humanity.
Even those who deny his divinity are influenced by the teaching of this rebel Jewish rabbi.
When the precepts he taught are totally ignored, there is blackness and barbarism.
Arguably, Christ's ideas on morality and how to live contain nothing that is really new. All
the great religions teach something similar. Also, there is much pre-Christian philosophy in
his ideas. But he was the one who got great masses of people to accept that life is essentially
moral or it is nothing. He lost his life storming those moral heights which humanity had to
capture before it could evolve any further.
People at the time saw exactly this. Despite the hostility of governments and the persecution
of the incumbent priesthoods, people after people were persuaded of the rightness of the new
ideas. It is recorded that in the pagan English kingdom of Northumbria, when the king
allowed the Christian missionaries to preach, the people rushed to destroy their pagan altars,
led by the pagan priest. In a passage written about 737AD, the historian Bede describes how a
Northumbrian nobleman declares to the assembled court that before the teaching of Christ the
life of man was like a sparrow flying through the king's hall. We came out of the darkness,
spent a little time in the light and passed again into the darkness. Christ taught us that this is
not all we are.
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It seems as if, when humanity is ready to make a moral advance, someone comes to show us
how to do it. Naturally, the powers that be are not generally pleased to hear that their time is
up.
What has all this to do with women? Well, Christ was surrounded by women, who were his
friends and confidantes. His attitude towards them was amazing to someone brought up in
the later Christian tradition of male supremacy. He loved and respected them, without a trace
of patronage, or of the distaste for pleasure, for sex and for womankind which infected so
many of his later followers. Some of his earliest followers were women. To this day, if you go
to any Christian church you will find that the congregation is mostly women.
Cynics may sneer and say that this is because women are supporters of tradition and the status
quo, and are generally conformists and goody-goodies. No doubt, there is an element of truth
in that, but many women genuinely love Jesus because they believe he died for them. He
helped to make the world a more spiritual place. A gentler, kinder world is a better world for
everybody, but especially for women.
In this respect, Jesus was an archetypal male hero. A hero to women, that is. His genius
illumined the dark places of the human soul, while his courage enabled him to establish his
moral authority, even at the cost of his life. Many such geniuses, male and female, have to
suffer as he did the contumely and indifference of the powerful and the clods and hatred of
the ignorant. Their souls are shrivelled by bigoted opposition and prejudice. They are
regularly tortured and murdered by those who know best. Yet they still struggle to help us see
the light.
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Often they die in despair, either because their struggle is unsuccessful, or because they are
actually wrong. Not all geniuses find the way forward. As James Joyce said, because a man
dies for a cause, that does not make him right.
Anyway, all this is just a theory at the moment. What you should learn from it is that a man
who thinks he is more intelligent or more able than a woman, simply because he is a man, is
likely to be making a fool of himself, or nature may have done it for him. Women are as well
equipped in the intellectual sphere as they are in the physical. Even women who are not very
bright often seem saner and wiser than men of comparable intelligence. This is because of
the tendency of females to be compassionate and to empathise with other people; that is, to
understand how others feel. Since to be wise usually means to be kind, it seems to us that
people who are kind must also be wise. This is not necessarily true, of course, but women
often do seem both kind and wise.
During your journey through life, you will meet many women who are foolish and some who
are unkind, but you will meet many more who are sensible and warm-hearted. It is often said
that women have more common sense than men. You may or may not find this true. Really,
it means that women are less extreme than men. Certainly, a sensible woman by your side
will add a new dimension to your thinking and quite often stop you making an ass of yourself.
Maybe it is just the working of that old adage that two heads are better than one. Men and
women are at their best when they are working together. Each sex has its own wisdom. We
can help save each other from our respective follies.
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THE FEMALE SPIRIT
Men sometimes complain that women have no soul, that they seem rooted in the sordid,
mundane realities of life and never take time off to contemplate the things which fill us men
with awe and wonder. Comedians, male comedians that is, through the ages have made
capital out of this accusation.
For instance, you will no doubt hear the story about
Shakespeare being scolded by his wife for wasting his time writing silly plays when he could
have had a good job down at the slaughterhouse.
This sort of thing is actually something of a slander on women. Most artists' wives are very
supportive of their eccentric husbands. No doubt, most women have been intensely preoccupied with the practicalities of life. But then, dreaming about Hamlet does not get the
dinner cooked. Life for women has not, at least until now, left much time for speculation on
the meaning of it. Of course, there have always been women with the leisure and the money
to engage in the intellectual and spiritual debate at its highest level. However, it is not lack of
intelligence that men complain about, but the lack of the curiosity and of the unsentimental
appreciation of beauty which together make up "soul".
One day, sitting in my office, I heard a strange noise in the sky, an extraordinary droning of
engines of a kind I had not heard before. I went outside and saw an airship flying very low
over the street, so that its bulk filled the sky and its motors rattled the windows. I called to
my assistants, "Look, an airship!" They came out to see. There were three women standing
chatting just outside the door. Not one of them so much as glanced up at the strange and
beautiful sight as the great machine glided overhead.
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I wondered how they could have done that. The airship filled me with admiration at its
perfect lines and its proud vulnerability. To the three women, it was just another of the
incomprehensible nonsenses men get up to. This incident made me wonder whether these
women's reactions, or rather non-reaction, was typical of their kind and whether women are
not altogether too earthbound. On reflection, it seems probable that the accusation that
women lack soul stems from masculine pique that women are not interested in the same
things which interest men. Machines, in particular, tend to belong to the masculine sex role.
Women often do not understand the effort which goes into making them, nor the
characteristically male aesthetic which goes into their design.
Most of the machines that men make are very beautiful. Functional efficiency seems in itself
to make things beautiful, but men also more or less consciously try to build beauty into their
creations. Indeed, there are those who assert that everything men do is actually about women,
that the male designer's ideas about beauty are derived from those creatures he sees all around
him and who fill his mind with most of its images.
It will be interesting to see what female designers produce once they arrive at the top of their
profession. Will a jumbo jet still look like a beautiful pregnant woman? Women do see
beauty in the things they make, especially children. The accusation that women lack soul
does not stand up to serious examination. The female soul is just a little more elusive to us
men and is not worn quite so conspicuously on the sleeve as the male version.
It has been remarked, in fact, that women do indeed have a spiritual energy which is peculiar
to them. Some wit has dubbed this "gynergy", that is women's energy. This shows itself in
the enthusiasms which tend to grip the female population rather than the male. I have already
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observed that religious feeling is more prevalent among women. It is, moreover, a particular
kind of religious feeling, a sort of simple piety rather than a theological conviction. Women
seem to feel a reverence for life, and for the giver of life. They would probably go to any
church, without taking much interest in its doctrines, provided these were reasonably sane and
gentle. For them, the important thing is the act of worship.
There is something about women which makes them more inclined than men to mysticism.
This is the tendency to feel that one can approach the deity by contemplation and selfsurrender. It does not involve a highly-evolved conceptualisation of the godhead, only a
feeling of the ineffable wonder and glory of life. This is, by the way, a highly spiritual
approach, even though I may make it sound simple-minded. This spiritual awareness may
account for the success of women as priestesses of the pagan religions. No wonder the male
priesthood is suspicious of their desire to become priests in the Christian churches. You
actually hear Anglican priests spitting out the word "priestesses", implying that they will lead
the flock straight back to the maypole.
A man I knew once told me that he got up very early on his wedding day to go for a walk by
the sea. It was a beautiful summer dawn and he rejoiced that he was about to be married to a
lovely woman. Suddenly, he was astonished to see his bride-to-be standing on the cliff top,
facing the rising sun. She stood motionless, with her arms raised in a gesture of salutation
and submission. At first, he thought she must be wearing a swimsuit. Then he realised she
was completely naked.
He was afraid she would hurl herself off the cliff, but there was something about her stillness
which told him not to rush forward. For long minutes he watched. Then he crept away,
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because he knew she was communing with the spirits of nature and, on her wedding day,
dedicating her mind and body to the service of life, God, It, or what you will.
When next my friend saw her, she was in her wedding dress. He never dared tell her that he
had seen her naked on their wedding day before the ceremony. She would have been
mortified. Besides, tradition held that it would bring bad luck. I was amused by his story and
asked how the marriage had worked out. "Oh, I revere her. She's a wonderful woman. So
spiritual." He meant she was a mystic.
In the West, pious women have appeared throughout history. In Anglo-Saxon England,
women of noble birth often became the heads of monasteries, ruling monks as well as nuns.
The quality of these women's spirits shines out from the pages of the chronicles. For
example, an early English monk named Caedmon, after an undistinguished career, suddenly
developed an ability to write very accomplished religious poetry. His brother monks were
disbelieving. They may have suspected that he had been at the magic mushrooms, of which
the Old English were very fond.
The chronicle relates, without comment, that Caedmon was hauled up before Hild, his abbess.
Evidently, the chronicler does not think it remarkable that Caedmon's religious boss was a
woman. Anyway, her dealings with the poet monk reveal the typically female combination of
sympathy, piety and shrewdness.
The abbess evidently suspects something fishy, but she does not accuse or confront Caedmon,
nor even interrogate him. She realises that if she is rough with him she might kill off
something spontaneous and valuable. So she mildly asks him to describe how this amazing
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gift came to him. He says it must be a gift from God, because he suddenly felt the urge to
write poetry and, when he did, his brother monks were astonished by its quality.
"Well," says the abbess, "will you write a poem for me, tonight?"
"Sure," says Caedmon.
The abbess nods her head and he goes back to his cell, which we suspect has meanwhile been
searched for illegal substances and other evidence of cheating.
The cell is locked and guarded for the night. When it is opened in the morning, there is
Caedmon with another poem. He comes before the assembled monks and nuns and the poem
is read. By popular acclaim, it is pronounced original and good.
"Right," says the abbess, "It must be a gift from God. Let Caedmon be allowed to write
whenever he wants to."
Thus, she simply and swiftly tests Caedmon's authenticity and stops any idle gossip and envy.
Through her patience and subtlety, an important early English poet was encouraged to
blossom.
It is, indeed, very difficult to describe the human spirit, except anecdotally. I was wondering
how to find suitable anecdotes to illustrate the female spirit, an elusive concept if ever there
was one, when my eye spotted a picture on the wall. It was a print of a painting called
"Autumn Leaves" by the pre-Raphaelite painter Millais. It shows four girls in a garden on an
autumn evening. They have gathered a great pile of dead leaves and are standing round it.
Looking at this scene, I realised that although the girls all have different expressions on their
faces, ranging from patient humility in the youngest to proud haughtiness in the oldest, all
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four of them are unmistakeably and characteristically female. Old Millais has somehow
captured the flame of the female spirit.
Describing this spirit in words is a little more difficult. Millais is telling us that although
females are outwardly mild and humble, almost subservient, not far beneath the surface there
is a fierce pride, almost an arrogance. This gentle, frail-seeming creature has an amazingly
strong grip on life and is capable of blazing passion.
Yet in general, the female flame burns softly. So long as nobody tries to deny her right to be
here, or to prevent her from carrying out her biological mission, the female human being is
generally able to live and let live. She sees the real art of life as simply living, enjoying the
people and the planet. To her, human beings are the real things in life. She has a huge
capacity to love other people, something which she sometimes accuses us men of not being
able to do.
For this reason, women are generally sceptical of ideological convictions which make us
inhuman. This is why in war women are often accused of treason and collaboration with the
enemy, despite their evident patriotism when their countries are attacked. They have an
annoying tendency to see enemy soldiers just as men, as human beings. They quite often fall
in love with them, instead of hating and killing them, as right-thinking people should.
When my uncle was captured by the German army at the battle of Dunkirk in the hot summer
of 1940, the captive Allied troops were marched from there to prison camps in Poland. In the
towns and villages they passed through, the women often came out to give them food and
water. They did not see a defeated foreign army, only exhausted and thirsty men. They had
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enough imagination to see that these were other women's husbands, lovers and sons. Perhaps
they felt that somewhere, in the great sisterhood of women, a foreigner might help save their
own menfolk.
Of course, this does not mean that women are incapable of being nasty. On the contrary, you
may meet women who are ideological fanatics and who are cruel and merciless. My point is
that it is not very common for a woman to be like that. Nor is it for men to be. The main
human weaknesses are vanity, self-indulgence and lack of moral vision. Women certainly
have these weaknesses as often as men. I do think, as a matter of observation, that women are
more interested in other people than men and, in consequence, more kind and loving. This is
not just due to the way women are brought up. It is to do with being female, as well.
I have already mentioned that I think women have a particular style and a strong sense of fun.
These are also manifestations of the female spirit or "gynergy". There is a kind of
indomitable, but self-deprecating and humorous vitality about women at their best, which is
surely the gynergy coming out. That is why I say they have a, loopy dignity. This creature is
deeply serious, but it laughs at itself.
It follows, too, that men who use their physical power to dominate women, to mistreat them
or otherwise to bruise and squash their spirit, are themselves the losers. We men need that
particular radiance about us, or our own lives are diminished. If you go to the Topkapi Palace
in Istanbul, you will see the harem where the great sultan kept his women. We westerners at
first think that this is a monument to thousands of enslaved women. After all, the sultan
literally owned up to five hundred women at a time. But the guide says that the motto of the
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sultans was that the three most wonderful sounds in the world are falling water, the clink of
gold and the voices of women.
The sultan used to sit where he could hear the women and children playing. Apparently, the
sign of a great man was that his house was full of women and that he could provide for them
and keep them happy. Patriarchy in its extreme form. So how unfortunate were the inmates
of the harem? All we can say is that other people do things differently.
Sometimes, women can seem to be unassertive to the point of being natural victims.
Feminists say this is because girls are trained to be submissive. No doubt, there is truth in
this, although one sometimes feels that they do not need an awful lot of training. However,
this is yet another of those false ideas we males get when faced with female people. We tend
to mistake that physical slowness and that mild manner for lack of assertiveness. We often
find, when we get to know them that there is a fairly steely character underneath that
mildness.
When my best friend and I started going out with girls, he said to me one day, "Don't you find
females bloody passive?" I had to agree. Both our girls would go to some lengths to avoid
disagreeing with us or putting forward any ideas of their own. We were used to rough and
tumble male company and found the girls a bit quiet.
Now, of course, I know that this apparent passivity was only a defensive screen. Putting
myself in their shoes, it seems obvious that they, too, were dealing with the opposite sex for
the first time. Very young women, meeting cocky young men, who were physically selfconfident and mentally assertive, if not aggressive, most probably would adopt a snail-like
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defence of drawing in their horns and retiring into their shells. They would not confront us,
or take us on, until they had assimilated the rules of this new and dangerous game. Like us,
they were unsure how to deal with the opposite sex on an adult level. Once they were used to
us, their confidence quickly grew, until at last my friend and I were moaning about the
implacable willpower of the cloven race.
As they grow older, women become more assertive.
In fact, they frequently become
dominant. It is quite usual for the young bride to think her husband is God, but to have
achieved dominance over him by the time she is fifty or sixty.
Either women's
submissiveness training gradually wears off, or there is some reason why the matriarch is
much bossier than the bride.
Presumably, there is some complex sequence of events,
whereby the husband's testosterone level falls as he grows older, while the wife's oestrogen
level also falls and her testosterone level rises. As testosterone is the hormone associated
with assertiveness, while oestrogen tends towards female mildness, it seems that the two
partners become respectively less "masculine" and less "feminine". At the same time, the
wife's life experience, being a powerful figure as a mother and grandmother, often makes her
more self-confident. In short, she turns into a formidable character, while he all too often
turns into a neutered tom-cat.
In some ways, the female spirit is like play-dough. It can tolerate being pummelled and
kneaded into all sorts of shapes. Women can turn themselves into all kinds of things in order
to please society in general and their men in particular. They can be golfers, yachtswomen,
drudges, glamour-pants, super secretaries, punch bags, Earth mothers, housewives,
disciplinarians, whatever seems to be required. Yet they are also isomorphic. That is, they
always resume their own true shapes in the end.
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This puts a heavy responsibility on us men. When they are young, our women are full of
female hormones. This makes them mild and eager to please us. We must take care not to
abuse them or exploit their good nature. Remember that your partner particularly needs your
support and protection during those years when she is in her child-bearing phase. Never
forget, too, that your tender little flower will grow into a powerful matriarch as time goes by.
It seemed that my grandfather forgot this precept, or more likely never knew it. As a small
boy, I wondered why this poor old man was treated with such contumely by his wife and
daughters, when all the other males in that vast family, including me, were treated with
generosity and affection. Much later, I learned that he had been rather free with his fists as a
young man. The females never forgave him and when he grew old and sat in the corner,
trembling with Parkinson's disease, it was finally their turn. It was a classic case of the old
adage, "You should be kind to people you meet on your way up, because you will meet them
again on your way down". You can add to that, "If you want respect from a woman, you have
to earn it".
Apart from an occasional warning that you will not find them all like this, I have generally
given the impression that most women are kind-hearted and generous people, who do not bear
any malice towards us males, even though we do not always treat them very well. Perhaps I
was influenced by my own father, who told me, "You will find that the average woman is a
better type than the average man". No one could accuse my father of being one of those
irritating male feminists, or rather female supremacists. My own experiences have convinced
me he was just a good observer and got it right on that one.
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Remember, however, Shakespeare's character Rosalind, who says flatly that women have a
spiteful streak, or so it must seem to us men. We have to consider the possibility that all is
not sweetness and light and that women can be vicious at times. In a general sense, it would
be surprising if that were not so. Human beings are fairly tough animals. At the core of each
of us is a strong sense of self and a native pride in being a magnificent creature. When this is
threatened, we tend to come out fighting, men and women alike.
In one way, the feeling that women have a spiteful streak is due to surprise and pique that the
fierce human pride resides in women as well as men. There is a parallel with our relationship
with cats, who are also beautiful, soft and cuddly, but who also surprise us by producing
razor-sharp claws and a savage temper when annoyed. Perhaps this is why women are often
called catty.
In this general sense, women are no more spiteful than men. In fact, since their weapons are
usually words rather than beer bottles, women are actually rather less vicious than men. A
woman may give you some stripes with her verbal claws, but she is unlikely to bash your
head in. Those who maintain that words can do more damage than blows have never been
punched in the face by a big man.
Another thing which surprises us males about women, although it should not, is that there is
something relentless in the female spirit. Like elephants, they never forget a slight or an
injury. If you malfease, the date and time of this is entered into a computer-like memory from
which no erasure is possible. This can then be brought up in any future argument as evidence
of your unsatisfactory character.
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Men are inclined to refer to powerful women irreverently as "dragons", meaning something
terrifying and uncanny, which mortal men would rather flee than fight. I sometimes debate
with a male friend whether women are born dragons or whether they learn it from their
mothers. As true scientists, we are not able to resolve this question. However, we have
established that our daughters have this dragon-like quality, as well as their mothers.
This is our jokey way of acknowledging that our womenfolk are formidable characters, all of
them evincing from the earliest age the remorseless female strength of mind. The women
listen to our prattling with scorn. They take it for granted that they are not dainty bits of fluff,
but very tough human beings. They could not survive if they were not. They do not mind if
we call them dragons, because they know we mean it as a back-handed tribute to their female
power.
In any case, they know that the psychological balance between the sexes is much more in their
favour than we men like to imagine. It is not too much to say that we are psychologically
dependant on them. That is why every female, however young, knows that she can take
charge of her menfolk. You will hear daughters and grand-daughters telling off very old and
distinguished men. I once heard an eleven year-old girl say to her father, "Now, come along,
George! We shall be late for lunch. And put your hat on. It's raining."
George meekly did as he was told, because he knew his daughter loved him and was thinking
of his wellbeing. Of course, she was saying what her mother would have said if she had been
there. The girl regarded herself as her mother's deputy and was looking after George in her
absence. Incidentally, George was no lapdog but a great character. Like any sensible man,
his way of getting by was to let his womenfolk organise him.
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Sometimes, the fierce sense of self which resides in most women, coupled with their tendency
to be strong-willed, produces a less pleasant aspect. At its simplest, this takes the form of
undue pertinacity in conversation, a refusal to let things go. When you meet this, you feel
exasperation that every little thing has to be chewed over and every ball chased down the hill.
You ask yourself, "Why does she keep going on? Why can't we just let it go? Why is
everything equally important?"
It has to be said, of course, that if she likes you and you have been a good boy she will not put
your head in the meat grinder like that. But there are some women who do not like anybody
very much and who are not much affected by male charm. An encounter with one of them
makes you feel that it would be better if you were somewhere else. These are the real
dragons.
We can only speculate what it is that turns some women sour, but there is no doubt that it
does happen. Instead of the warm, good-heartedness that emanates from most women, you
meet an oncoming tide of vinegar and the soul-shrivelling frost of dislike and contempt. If
we are pretty enough and smarmy enough, as you have already found, we males can get round
most women. But you will not get round a true dragon.
I am not talking here about powerful women as such. Most powerful women are really very
nice, although you may have to watch your step a little. Like all powerful people, powerful
women tend to form a judgment about someone along the lines of
(a) Is he useful?
(b) Can I trust him?
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If the answer to either of these questions is "No", she will forget you in ten seconds.
Although, inevitably, some powerful women are dragons, most are not.
My theory is that women go sour because of the slow drip of a disappointment that goes on
for a long time, most commonly because they are not loved enough. There is a peculiar
psychological satisfaction which a women gets out of her relationship with a man, which is
more important than sex, money, power, and security, although she most probably does like
these things as well. It is his willingness to give himself to her which most satisfies her
female soul. Sad to say, men tend to have an ability to carry on a relationship without giving
themselves to the other party.
Possibly, men sense this female hunger for possession and fear it. It is said that deep down in
a man's psyche is a fear of being eaten by the female. This could be a symbol for his fear of
being emotionally engulfed by her. Having struggled painfully out of his mother's emotional
empire, he sees the next imperialist coming along, ready to snuff out his brief independence.
Of course, most men realise that this fear is largely unfounded. Women do not want to
devour men, nor to make them emotionally dependant. But they do want men to give
something of themselves, to be warm and loving.
For a man not to grant the woman who loves him that satisfaction of possessing him to some
degree is to do her grave harm. She feels that her love is given for nothing, however good a
husband he may be. Her most passionate desire is to be loved in return, to feel his need for
her being expressed by a surrender to her female power.
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This is such a bone of contention between the sexes that women often complain that men
have no capacity for love. Men reply that they cannot be expected to feel like women and
that love is something different for them. Things do not have to come to this pass. It is not
difficult for a normally affectionate man to give a woman what she wants. Too many men
hold back deliberately, or think it bad policy to show their vulnerability to a woman. They
are afraid of falling under her domination, because her love gives her power.
The short answer is not to worry about things like that and just act naturally. That is, treat
your woman with respect and affection. You can show her too much respect, but you can't
show her too much affection. To be affectionate does require physical expressions of feeling.
All females like hugging and kissing, but there are a thousand other gestures which give as
much reassurance. For example, lightly laying your hand on her cheek and looking tenderly
into her eyes is extremely effective. All sorts of little pats and squeezes are also welcome
when they come from a lover and are true expressions of love.
Really, affection is an attitude of mind. It means caring about how she feels. So the physical
gestures are only there to tell her how you feel about her, one action being worth a hundred
words. An affectionate attitude also produces subtle inflections in your use of words which
she will be very quick to pick up. Similarly, an affectionate attitude will produce affectionate
behaviour on your part. How women resent the casual and off-hand manner with which their
men so often treat them! If she comes in cold and wet, make her a hot drink. Don't just say,
"What's for supper, honey?"
The thesis, then, is that some women go sour because of a lack of affection. It does not seem
to be only a matter of personality or of genetically transmitted factors. Anyone who has lived
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long enough has seen a good woman go sour over a period of years. No doubt, there is a
certain type of frosty, uptight, puritanical personality which contains the seeds of full-blown
dragonhood. Such women may be difficult to love, which contributes to their sourness. Also,
there is a tendency for mere quirks of personality in young people to become positive manias
by the time they are fifty. So your rather prim young bride can become a grim old dragon in
due course.
There is a careful distinction to be drawn between a dragon and a battle-axe. This is another
type of woman who can give you a hard time. A battle-axe is not necessarily sour. Usually,
they are just tough women who are quite nice if you avoid offending them. The truly sour
woman is not likely to be very nice. You always feel that a sour woman would bloom like a
cherry tree if anyone knew how to treat her. So do not hate or despise her. Remember that
something has happened to wither her female spirit.
She cannot face the world with
confidence and power, as other females do, but has to defend herself with acid and bile.
Another aspect of the female spirit which strikes men forcibly is its restlessness. The divine
discontent which is said to be a characteristic of the human spirit in general burns particularly
fiercely in the female. Among the sexual stereotypes which are dominant in our society (and
which foul up relations between the sexes) one of the most foolish is that man is the hunter,
the questing adventurer who is only reluctantly domesticated, whereas woman is the
contented home-bird, who stays in to mind the children and make the supper. She sits at
home knitting, while man the hunter roams the range (or the pubs and clubs) and comes home
triumphant (or drunk). There are no doubt good social-anthropological reasons why these
sexual stereotypes exist and, also, why they do not bear a great deal of relationship to the
actual psychological make-up of the two sexes.
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Some women do undoubtedly sit at home knitting and do indeed seem happy to mind the
children. However, these are mostly well-adjusted women who have come to terms with the
fact that they have a job to do, just as some men seem happy to work in steel foundries. You
do not have to scratch the surface very deeply to find the discontent coming boiling out.
Women are like volcanoes. Some of them seem to lack the inner fire, but do not rely on it.
Freud famously said the he had studied women all his life and the only thing he did not know
about them is, "What do they want?" This might as well be said about all human beings. Yet
men do not seem so restless. It could be argued that men are allowed more freedom of action
by their traditional sex role, while women are frustrated because their sex role does not give
them much scope for creativity or personal power (who wants power over children?)
Probably there is something in this, but the problem of female restlessness goes deeper than
that.
In the first place, when they are young women seem haunted by the fact that their beauty will
not last long and that the responsibilities of adulthood will rest particularly heavily on them.
In any group of people, it tends to be the young women who want to go dancing or to see a
show, while the men will more readily settle for drinking in a bar. The women usually want
to have some fun, meaning action, laughter and romance.
As they grow older, women often find that life has not delivered everything they expected of
it. Even with all the things that should theoretically put the traditionalist woman in an earthly
paradise, you will still hear her say, "I have a wonderful husband, beautiful children, a lovely
house, enough money and, yet..." Possibly, it is particularly those women with all those
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things who say this. Those who have not got them are too busy striving for them. Perhaps it
really is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Beware of wishing for things! You may get
them.
This restlessness may not be anything to do with social dysfunction, but everything to do with
being female. There is a wild streak in women which suggests that the veneer of civilisation
is quite thin, despite their addiction to the plumbing, the creams and lotions and all the
trappings of modern life. One suspects that inside every sophisticated woman, with her nice
house, her nice husband and her nice children, there is a female beast which would rather be
out in the bush, copulating with a wild man, or out on the savannah giving birth under the
stars. Who knows?
This wild streak is deeply alarming to those who want to control female sexuality and to have
an orderly world in which each of us functions as he or she ought and nobody rocks the social
boat. This surely is the psychological truth which underlies the story of Adam and Eve and
has caused it to reverberate down the millennia.
The story is that God created the first man, Adam, and saw that he was good. Then He
realised that Adam was lonely and had no idea how to reproduce himself. So God took one
of Adam's ribs while he was asleep and fashioned from it Eve, the first woman. Apart from
being obvious male-supremacist propaganda, implying that Eve was the junior partner, this
story has a momentous insight into the relationship between the sexes and their respective
characters.
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What Adam said when he woke up and saw Eve is not recorded, although we may speculate.
The point is that God gave the pair of them the Garden of Eden to live in, where they would
never feel want or unhappiness. There was only one condition; they must not eat the apple of
the Tree of Knowledge. Only by staying ignorant could they remain blissful.
Then, guess what? Eve got very curious about those apples. She kept hanging about the Tree
of Knowledge, eyeing it thoughtfully. Adam meanwhile just sat around eating bananas,
looking at his toes. Of course, the inevitable happened. The evil spirit Satan, who was
jealous of God's creation and wanted to mess it up for Him, took the form of a serpent and
slithered down the tree. He whispered to Eve that it would be a good idea to eat the forbidden
fruit.
Actually, this bit about the serpent is not strictly necessary because, judging from her
descendants, Eve would have had the apples anyway. Still, she resisted at first, pointing out
that God had told them most explicitly not to eat the apples. The serpent said, "Stuff God!" or
words to that effect.
So Eve said to Adam, "I think we should eat the apples", to which Adam replied, "But God
said that if we did we would lose the Garden of Eden and have to work for a living for
evermore."
"Oh, don't worry about that," said Eve. "He didn't mean it. Even if He does kick us out, you
can do the work and I'll have the babies."
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While Adam was pondering whether this sounded like a good deal, Eve plucked two of the
apples. She took a big bite from one and handed the other to Adam.
"I'm not sure about this," he protested.
"Listen, you!" said Eve. "I'm not spending my life in this state of bliss. I want to have some
fun. Stay here if you like, but it will be by yourself."
So Adam did as she told him and took a bite. Then God appeared, exceeding wrathful, and
drove them out of the Garden of Eden into this world which we all know and love.
That, dear children, is how woman came to take the blame for all the ills of the world. It was
the result of Eve's restless spirit, her urge always to be somewhere else, to do something else,
to disregard instructions and to do her own thing.
Of course, the story of Adam and Eve was written by men for the purpose of asserting their
moral superiority. The story appears in many cultures. The ancient Greeks had Pandora and
her box. Pandora was given charge of a great chest and told that she was never, under any
circumstances, to open it. As somebody said, if you tell a woman what she cannot do, you
have just described what she can and will do.
Unknown to Pandora, the great box contained all the world's ills.
When her curiosity
eventually got the better of her and she opened the box, all the ills flew out. At least Pandora
was only guilty of the natural human failing of curiosity. But the upshot is the same: it is all
woman's fault.
What never seems to be noticed is that actually Eve comes out of the story rather well.
Compared with her, Adam sounds a bit of a ninny. Eve is obviously the one with fighting
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spirit and is ready to take the world on. She will even risk Big G's wrath, whereas Adam
would have done as he was told and stayed in the Garden of Eden. Even in the world outside,
Eve remains the driving force. Without her, Adam would still be whittling sticks outside a
cave. Instead of which we have progress and Adam has a job.
Piecing together all these various aspects of the female spirit is like looking at the plans of a
building. As you look at more of the elevations from different viewpoints, you gradually
understand the concept of the whole building. So too, as you look at the different aspects of
the female spirit, you realise that this creature is not a random collection of characteristics,
but is designed as a coherent whole. She is a complete, functional, operating example of a
successful creature.
Moreover, she is a considerable character.
She is what she is.
Everything about her hangs together to make her complete.
In the end, no matter how compressed, moulded, battered and bruised it may be, the female
spirit regains its true shape. Woman is not easily put down. Even thousands of years of male
supremacy have not diminished her. She is like the plant that pushes up paving stones. Like
a plant, she lives, bears fruit and makes the Earth bountiful.
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REPRESSION OF FEMALE SEXUALITY
It could be argued that the wild streak in woman's spirit is nothing more than her sexual
energy bubbling up. It rises like a spring from the subconscious strata where it has been
buried by the heavy demands of society on her sense of duty and desire to be a good woman.
Practically all organised societies seem to find it necessary to repress female sexuality. The
reason why this is necessary is rooted in the biological and social-anthropological basis of
human existence.
The brute fact of life is that a woman can procreate whenever she likes. All she has to do is
to copulate with a male, whom she can to a large extent choose for herself. The offspring is
unquestionably hers, whereas the father may not know about, or feel certain of, his paternity.
As the saying goes, "Motherhood is a matter of fact. Fatherhood is a matter of speculation."
The woman keeps the child and knows for sure that half the genes she is fostering are hers. A
man, on the other hand, can only procreate by making an alliance with a woman, who must
agree to accept only his genetic material and to produce and, most probably nurture, the
offspring on his behalf. This gives the man a powerful incentive to assert his breeding rights,
to chase off other males and to protect and provide for the mother and infant. Otherwise, he
cannot have a child to call his own.
This arrangement can suit both parties very well. The woman gains a powerful friend and
helper at her most vulnerable time, while the man gains the security of knowing that the
children they rear will be his too. This is how the two sexes have evolved their partnership. It
helps to explain why there are so many men, when equality of numbers is not biologically
necessary. Each woman prefers to have her own mate, because that is the best way to ensure
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the survival of her offspring. In grazing mammals, relatively few males are needed, because
the males cannot do much to help the females rear the young or protect them from predators.
A man, on the contrary, can be a very useful ally for a breeding woman.
By and large, despite all the outcry about divorce rates and the breakdown of the family, most
people still try to keep up the ancient bargain. If society is breaking down, it is for economic
reasons. In particular, an economy in which very many young men are unemployed tends to
destroy the old relationship between men and women. A man who cannot provide for his
children is likely to withdraw from the compact and divert his energies to other, usually
destructive, channels. Conversely, a woman does not strictly need a man who cannot provide
for her children. Although she may still value his psychological support, economically she
may be better off without him.
In a society with male-supremacist views on how the universe is organised, that is, with a
male god in heaven and great power and prestige accorded to male human beings on Earth, it
is not surprising that the simple and effective biological compact between men and women
was subsumed into an arrangement for guaranteeing the primacy of male objectives in life.
So the woman became not man's mate and helper in the essential business of procreation but
his property. His breeding rights became of paramount importance, in order that his goods
and other privileges might be transmitted unerringly to his progeny.
If the female partner fails to act as her man expects, especially if she breeds off another man,
she is guilty of not just a slip or error of judgement, as a man would be, but of a heinous
crime. She may be cast away, or become an object of hatred and contempt. In extreme cases,
she may be tortured or put to death.
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In certain societies, and at certain times, this attitude towards women as men's property has
been so extreme as to defy credulity. It is said that in Anglo-Saxon England, during the pagan
period, women who were raped were afterwards put to death by their kinfolk by being buried
alive. The supposition was that an honest woman would die rather than submit to rape. What
she was guilty of was violation of her father's right of ownership, or her husband's exclusive
breeding rights.
Another charming Old English custom was that a husband who had been away a long time
and came back to find his wife with a child which was manifestly not his was entitled to kill
the infant. These examples from pagan life give the lie to the idea that gross repression of
female sexuality was an exclusively Christian preserve. It is known that pre-Columbian
cultures in America had very similar ideas on the treatment of aberrant females. Who knows
what torment and horrors women were subjected to down the ages because of this repulsive
attitude.
Even in more civilised times, the freedom of women to choose their mates or breeding
partners has been strictly controlled. Every manifestation of female sexuality has been
frowned upon, because it may lead to that most dreadful crime, fornication. This means
having sex with the wrong man, someone other than he who has been granted the right. Thus,
Christian women must cover their arms in church, lest these beautiful appurtenances should
lead the men in the congregation to have lewd thoughts in God's house. It never occurs to
anyone that the female congregation might entertain lewd thoughts at the sight of male flesh.
Oh, no. Women tempt men, not vice versa.
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The priesthoods of the main Sky-Father religions appear to have a peculiar horror of female
sexuality. Women must be confined to certain areas in the place of worship and they must
dress in a certain way. They may not become priests, lest they profane the sanctity of
worship.
Above all, they must be cleansed of their nasty female practices, such as
menstruation and giving birth.
These priests see women as temptresses who lure innocent male creatures to commit dreadful
sins, such as the sex act.
Some priesthoods insist on celibacy as evidence of their
renunciation of the wickedness of the world. They give up the joyful, but sinful, communion
with women in favour of a purer communion with God. My view is that men who are
celibate entertain nasty thoughts of their own. In fact, they become obsessed with sex and
sexuality, which normal men do not. What they ignore is that women can teach us the proper
way to think, feel and behave about sex.
Those who equate sex with sin are guilty of a horrible blasphemy against the Creator,
assuming they still believe in one, because He made women as well as men and no doubt
feels proud of His achievement. Really, greed for sex is no more or less sinful than greed for
money or power. Our task as men is not to shun women, or despise them, but to share our
lives with them and live in harmony with them. Jesus ordered, "Men, love your wives!" It
was good advice.
We are now coming to the end of a long era of gross suppression of female sexuality in the
western world.
In the Christian West, women have long been suspect as Eve's flesh,
temptresses, fornicators and seducers of men. This is the Christian view of them, introduced
by corrupt church fathers during the early centuries of the church's existence. Yet through all
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these long ages, the secular western tradition, which sees women as bringing beauty and
bounty to the world and generally making life worth living, has never completely died out.
Moslems, who have even stricter views about female sexuality, are astonished that we allow
our women to bare their arms and legs, even their breasts, in public. Most people alive now
are aware that the present time is much less repressive for women than a few generations ago.
In the Nineteenth Century, women in Europe were not allowed much more freedom in dress
than Moslem women are now.
Throughout Europe, the years between about 1830 and 1914 were a period of grim repression
for women, compared to which the periods immediately before and after were relatively less
harsh. The reason for this was the Christian revival, which began in the Eighteenth Century
and reached its apogee about the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century.
In Protestant countries, particularly, there was a strong Puritan revival, which reinforced the
general tendency of Christians to repress sexuality, especially the female variety. The search
for greater spiritual purity and higher standards of morality led once more to the polarisation
of the concept of womanhood into virgin and mother on the one hand and whore on the other.
It became even more than usually difficult for an honest woman to admit to having any sexual
feelings.
Some of the legacy of those times is still with us. Older women are still sometimes uncertain
about how to express their sexual feelings. Indeed, they are not always sure they ought to
have such feelings at all. By contrast, younger women make no bones about it. If they fancy
a man, they make sure he knows about it. In this respect, they think more like men, in
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recognising that sexual desire is normal and healthy and does not have to be made respectable
by a thick smokescreen of romantic love.
Sexual repression on a large scale, as practised in many societies, makes people unhappy in a
variety of ways, not only by denying the legitimacy of their normal feelings. Men and women
are deformed by a burden of guilt. All sorts of unhealthy side effects appear. Because it is
forbidden, sex becomes the object of prurient interest.
An underground industry of
pornography and titillation develops. The sex act becomes on the one hand degraded into
something lewd and filthy. On the other hand it is glorified into the greatest of all consumer
goods. So when the repression is lifted, as all distortions of the human spirit tend to be in the
end, society lurches from one stupid attitude to sex to the opposite, and equally stupid,
attitude.
Instead of the naughty, forbidden fruit of dancing girls' legs on our television screens, we now
have five-minute simulated sexual intercourse scenes, with the actors writhing and shrieking
in mock ecstasy. So the wheel has turned full circle. Instead of unhealthy repression, we now
have silly propaganda to the effect that, if you do not writhe and shriek in ecstasy while doing
that in a hundred different positions, you are not getting your share.
Real sex is no more like the offerings on the liberated television screen than it is like
pornography. Both give a distorted view of real life. For most people, most of the time, sex
is friendly, companionable fun, which relieves tension and makes the partners mates. It
leaves them glowing with relief and gratitude, full of admiration for each other.
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The courtship and foreplay leading up to the sex act are exciting, while coitus itself is full of
subtleties and nuances which make it different every time. On the other hand, if you expect
the sex act to be the most wonderful experience of your life, you are likely to be disappointed.
In fact, it is the former climate of sexual repression which has misled our generation into
believing that the sex act is the highest possible good which the world can provide. That
view is just as silly as believing that sex is the pits of sin and evil.
An unbalanced
condemnation of copulation has been followed by an equally unbalanced glorification of it.
My advice is to have fun being male and female together. If you have respect and affection
for one another, you cannot go far wrong. Of course, you still have a duty to one another to
avoid unwanted pregnancy or disease.
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THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE
Sex role specialisation has been so strict, and has gone on for so long, that men and women
have evolved into creatures who are very different physically and psychologically.
Furthermore, human culture has built a huge structure of society in which a person's sex is
probably their most important personal characteristic or dimension.
So deep is this
distinction in our psyche that we tend to think that sexual difference must extend throughout
the universe, even into heaven, and that the gods must be like men and women. Monotheists
think that God must be a male personage, a father to be precise.
From our earthly viewpoint, it seems that male and female are like two great principles which
form the whole of life between them, except for the nasty asexual life forms. Like the old
grammarians, who thought they saw masculine and feminine characteristics in words, we see
them in much else besides. We see the male and the female as the two great pillars on which
life itself is founded.
We know that masculinity and feminity are really a continuum, stretching from one extreme
to another without a break.
Some individuals are extremely masculine and some are
extremely feminine. A classic demonstration of this was given by an exhibition of human
skulls, which were placed in a long line in descending order of their masculinity. The most
extreme male head must have been huge and bony, no doubt with a big beard and bushy
eyebrows. At the other end of the scale was the skull of a woman who must have been very
slight and delicate-looking. The point is that in between were lots of individuals who were
neither particularly masculine nor particularly feminine.
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This probably applies to our psychological make-up, as well. There are extremely butch men
and extremely feminine women, but in between there are lots of us who are moderately so,
and some who are not particularly so. It is fashionable to assert that there is masculine and
feminine in all of us. This is probably true. After all, we all have a balance of male and
female hormones. Yet it seems too much to go all the way and say that a man or a woman is
simply a construct in the mind.
What undoubtedly are constructs in the mind are the
principles of masculinity and femininity which we think we see everywhere. Let us turn first
to the female principle.
All human beings, both male and female, feel a powerful urge to worship a female deity. In
the last thousand years or so, this fact has been lost to sight because of the dominance of the
Sky-Father religions in the Middle East and the West. However, in the vast sweep of human
history, the last millennium will eventually be seen as only an episode, and an aberrant
episode at that.
Throughout most of human existence, which means several hundred thousand years, the
supernatural powers which governed life on Earth were perceived as being a series of gods
and goddesses, together with lesser spirits, who controlled the weather, the crops, the fertility
of humans and animals and the destiny of all things. Only relatively recently in historical
terms, in classical antiquity, were the gods seen as essentially a family, like a human family,
complete with faithless husbands and errant wives. The one great idea running through the
endlessly shifting perception of the gods was that some of them were male and some were
female. In particular, in the West, it was the union of the Sky-Father with the Earth-Mother
which produced life on Earth.
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This was said to represent the rain from heaven falling on the Earth, causing her to bring forth
all her plants and creatures. It was natural to think of the Earth, the party bringing forth life,
as the female partner. Conversely, the sky which fertilised her must be male. From this
stems the belief that the universal force which produces flowering, fruiting and the
multiplication of animals and mankind is a female principle. Allied to this is the notion that
the skills and emotions needed to raise the young are also part of the same general principle.
Thus, nurturing, compassion, mercy, patience and gentleness are seen as female
characteristics, part of the universal female principle. However, as with anything human,
goodness and kindness cannot be the whole of the story. There is always a darker side of our
nature. So the female principle also has its obverse side. From the male viewpoint, females
seem to stand closer to the mysteries of fertility, life and death. The female principle stretches
from the bright sunlight of life and happiness into the shadows that lie before life and after
death. Just as there is in the human imagination a queen in heaven, there is also a queen in
the underworld.
For most of the existence of the human race, great respect and reverence was accorded to the
female principle and to women in particular. People worshipped goddesses as well as gods.
In some respects, the goddesses seem to have been more impressive and powerful than the
gods, simply because people recognised that without the female gift of fruitfulness there
could be no life.
The male gods represented various aspects of the male principle, that is movement, force, the
wind, rain, thunder, lightning and male power as manifested by impressive male beasts, such
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as bulls, stags and lions. There appears to have been no supremacy of the male principle,
despite its powerful imagery. Men were quite as ready to worship a goddess as a god.
As time went on, the female principle, as represented by the Earth Mother, tended to become
more complex and to split into several component parts. These components were represented
by goddesses who embodied different aspects of female nature. As human beings project into
heaven those events which are going on in their own minds, this splitting of the Earth Mother
into a number of different goddesses, and her subsequent eclipse by them, suggests that
people became aware that there is more to the female principle than motherhood. Just as a
woman on Earth is maiden, wife, lover and wise friend, as well as mother, so the goddess
who represents her in heaven needs to be more complex than an Earth Mother. Also, the
Earth is notably passive, long-suffering and uncommunicative, despite her huge fecundity,
whereas women are also fecund, but notably active and communicative.
So the Earth Mother, in most mythologies, tended to become a rather archaic and shadowy
concept, while heaven became populated with vigorous, sharp-minded goddesses. These
were much more like the female creatures men were used to dealing with. Moreover, further
aspects of the female principle kept revealing themselves. It was inevitable that goddesses
would become more and more like human people. As the human consciousness evolved,
people got beyond worshipping sticks and rocks, eventually beyond worshipping statues and
idols. The gods began to be perceived as more powerful versions of humans, not mere
embodiments of abstract principles as we like to believe they were, but complicated beings
with many facets to their characters.
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Relatively sophisticated peoples, like the ancient Greeks, had sophisticated gods, who
grappled with moral dilemmas and had passions and unreasonable feelings just like the rest of
us. Although Venus may have been the goddess of love in our eyes, to the Greeks she
represented not altruistic romantic love, but female sexuality in all its disturbing potential.
She was a very tricky lady. She gave sumptuous pleasure to those she favoured, but could
enjoy the destruction of those who annoyed her. Above all, she gave rise to sexual passion,
the most explosive and potentially destructive force in the human psyche.
On Earth, women were powerful in the spiritual side of life right through the Bronze Age
until the psychological revolution in the Iron Age, which saw the establishment of the SkyFather religions reflecting the growth of male supremacy. For long after this, even into
modern times, there was a struggle between the archaic forces of female equality and the new
ideology of male supremacy. But from that time, the great facts of human life were that there
was a great father in the sky, ruling as the head of all life, and that woman was to blame for
all the troubles of humanity.
Under the old system, women were seers, prophets, oracles, mystics and priestesses. They
could also be temporal rulers, that is queens and warriors. No man thought it odd that his
commander-in-chief was a woman, because women were very powerful medicine. Naturally,
the goddesses in heaven could hardly be less impressive than the women on Earth. Hence,
some goddesses came to incorporate this spiritual and mystical side of female nature,
including its uncanny and otherworldly aspects.
As on Earth, the goddesses often held high rank in the family. For every powerful father
figure, there was a female consort, his queen, who wielded power and influence. Her
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husband, like a mortal husband, took pains to conceal his wrongdoing from her. He did not
much care for her wrath. In those spheres for which they were responsible, especially
marriage and child-birth, these queens of heaven could not be over-ruled, even by their
powerful husbands.
Some goddesses were of awe-inspiring, even terrible, aspect. Such was Hecate, queen of the
underworld. She is generally represented as having three heads, facing three ways. Her heads
were most often depicted as jackals' heads. She was said to be present at crossroads at
midnight and other uncanny places. Evidently, she was not the kind, motherly female being
we are used to, or in our sentimental stereotypes. Yet female she undoubtedly was. Her three
heads represent three aspects of the female principle. She is simultaneously the queen of the
underworld, the spirit of fertility on Earth and the moon in the heavens. Her worshippers
visualised Hekate as a figure of power, inspiring awe as well as reverence. She expressed the
centrality of the female principle in life.
Like most goddesses, Hekate changed her form and function as time went on. To the devotees
of the emerging patriarchy and the concomitant Sky-Father religions, she became one of the
principle demons. Instead of being the fountain of the many-sided female principle, she was
turned into the arch-exponent of its seamier side. This was the side which was most terrifying
to males, especially the male priests of the new religion. This was woman as whore, bitch
and witch.
It is true that Hekate had always represented the spring of female sexuality. After all, there
could be no fertility without it. Also, the goddess represented the mystical aspect of female
nature, from the supposed closeness of women to the eternal verities of life and death. Every
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human being is born out of a woman's body, and most of us end up being prepared for the
graven by women. It is not difficult to imagine that the underworld is ruled by a female spirit.
Thirdly, the age-old association of women with plants and herbs, and their reputation for
wisdom, led to them being shamans, priestesses and medicine men.
From a hostile viewpoint, it is easy to turn these three aspects of the female principle from
something good and life-giving into something evil. Most importantly, the problem of female
sexuality had to be met head-on if the patriarchy was to be given ideological foundations.
Rampant female sexuality, if left unchecked, would lead to women breeding all over the place
and off the wrong men. Obviously, this could not be allowed, or it would mean the end of
male ownership of women. So the doctrine was expounded that good women are chaste and
women who are free with their favours are whores.
Hekate was damned as the propagator of that part of female nature which leads to women
being whores. Males who wish to keep female sexuality to socially acceptable limits find it
easy to believe that woman is at heart a bit of a whore. This is because when it is regarded as
a menace, the repressed, but essentially irrepressible, female urge is alarming. So the normal
woman becomes demonised as a potential whore. Similarly, male frustration at and fear of
the female principle can turn the free-spirited woman into a bitch and the priestess into a
witch.
With powerful goddesses in heaven, and in the underworld, it is not surprising that there were
many priestesses on Earth. Although men might worship them, the most natural attendants of
goddesses were women, the partakers of the same female nature. It is not hard to imagine the
power which the idea of a goddess can have on the human mind. We men would worship her
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as the giver of life and bounty. We would also tend to see mortal women as being ruled by
her as her disciples.
Something of the sort must have happened in countless temples
dedicated to goddesses, with a mixed congregation but female priests. This is the exact
opposite of what happens now in the temples of the Sky Father.
Of course, there were powerful male gods in the ancient world. In fact, by the middle of the
Bronze Age in the Middle East and Europe, the male gods began to become dominant. Allpowerful father figures, later called Zeus or Woden, etc., began to rule families of gods. This,
too, reflected what was happening on Earth. The very ancient matriarchy was giving way to a
patriarchal form, with men holding the main positions of power, not only in the family, but in
the state.
It is sometimes said that this came about after men realised that they too played a part in
procreation. The former reverence for females disappeared when it was realised that they
could not produce anything on their own. This explanation does not seem very satisfying. It
hardly seems possible that people had not realised that the male is necessary to produce
offspring. It is possible that the domestication of animals had spelled out to humans that there
is nothing magical about procreation. A single male animal can fertilise large numbers of
females.
Nevertheless, it seems more likely that the rise of the patriarchy came about simply as a result
of the growing complexity of social organisation. By the end of the Neolithic, people were
building cities.
In the Bronze Age, they organised armies and wars, with monarchies,
aristocracies and economic systems to support them. Men became dominant because they
had more time for the new activities which kept springing up. The women were too busy,
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because that very few women were childless and hardly anyone survived to middle age,
which is when women generally have more time for public affairs.
Another factor was the increasing violence of life. With larger human populations competing
for space and resources, conflict between peoples became more common. The main survival
factor for a human group was now not so much the matter of how many breeding females it
had, but how many armed men it had. By this stage, the hunter-gatherer phase of evolution
was over for most people and the means of subsistence was agriculture. If a family was
pushed off its land by a gang of squatters, it would starve, men, women and children alike.
People therefore gathered together for protection in families, clans and tribes, while warlords
fought to aggregate them into kingdoms and eventually empires.
So the relatively peaceful pursuits of the Neolithic gave way slowly to the harsher world of
the Iron Age, while the worship of the female principle changed into the glorification of arms
and the man. It seems likely that the domination of society by men was inevitable once the
rise of private property had given added importance to the ancient biological prerogative of
male breeding rights. If men owned everything else, they could soon own the females too. In
very old societies, descent had been matrilineal. That is, property and title had come down
the female line. This had to be stamped out, so that men could hand on their property and
privileges, as well as their genes.
The balance of power between the sexes is always rather unstable, in fact. If men choose
ruthlessly to exert their physical power, there is not much women can do about it. A more
violent world is likely to be a patriarchal world.
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On the precept that what happens on Earth determines men's perceptions of what happens in
heaven, it was not long before the male principle became dominant in the pantheon. The
Earth Mother was lost to sight and Zeus and Woden ruled the skies over Europe, spear in
hand. These were still fatherly figures who, on the whole, kept order and dispensed justice.
They also enthusiastically performed their task of fertilising everything female that caught
their eyes, including giantesses and mortal women. The very name of Europe comes from a
beautiful maiden called Europa, to whom the lustful Zeus appeared in the form of a very
friendly bull and gave her a lift over the Hellespont into the continent that was forever to bear
her name.
The harsher aspects of masculinity were not represented by the father-figures Zeus and
Woden, but were embodied in gods of war, such as Ares-Mars or Tiw. Of course, all was not
horror and violence among male gods, any more than there is among men. The best of male
gods were boisterous and rollicking, but also great-hearted and funny. Middle Easterners and
Europeans seem to have avoided falling under the sway of the sort of deity who demands
endless slaughter and human sacrifice. However, human sacrifice is mentioned in the Bible
and in the Iliad. Evidently, it was not unknown in Bronze Age Europe and the Middle East.
Eventually, people realised that the old gods were somehow unsatisfactory. Their worship led
to a lot of bewildering contradictions. Every place, every tree almost, had its own resident
deity. None of this did much to explain the universe or Man's place in it. There was a lot of
nonsense attached to these old religions.
People must have realised that they were
worshipping painted statues and stones. They must have longed for these inanimate objects
to speak to them, but they never did.
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Even the anthropomorphic gods of the Greeks and other later cultures were finally
unsatisfying. They were not much better than humans in terms of their morals, and they had
nothing to say about the meaning of life.
The next great intellectual revolution was, in the Middle East and the West, the movement to
monotheism. This was the realisation that only one god is needed, the all-embracing, allpowerful creator of the universe. This system made better sense, on the grounds that if the
universe existed something must have created it. If something created the universe, it must
have done so for a purpose. Thus was created not only the universe, but theology.
The times being what they were, with a patriarchy being created on Earth, it stood to reason
that the big boss of the whole universe must be a male, a great Father in the sky. Humans
were His children, but only in the generalised sense that that He created everything, including
the mothers who bear children. Like all good fathers, He was kind and loving to those who
obeyed him, but could be very hard on those who were disobedient.
This one God was not only male, but needed no female consort. There was only one top job
and a male had it, for ever and ever. The Sky-Father could provide fruitfulness and bounty
without female assistance, just by willing it. In the theological sense, the female principle
was not only subordinated, it was virtually expunged. The male spirit of God was sufficient
unto itself.
Among the main modern religions of the West and Middle East, that is Judaism, Christianity
and Islam, there is no institutional subordination of women in the sense that the rules actually
say they are inferior, but the Headquarters in the sky and the hierarchy on Earth are
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immutably male. Small wonder that women in these countries feel an inchoate sense of grief
and loss. They are second class beings. The female principle is utterly overthrown.
The primeval notion that everything in the universe springs from the union of male and
female is supplanted by the doctrine that everything springs from the will of one God, who is
male. In other words, the male principle is supreme and self-sufficient. Your heavenly father
does not need a heavenly mother to create you, or anything else.
From the theological point of view, it makes perfect sense for there to be only one God, who
is omnipotent and who created everything, male and female alike. After all, because sexual
reproduction is widely practised on Earth, it does not mean that the Deity has to be male or
female. Presumably, the Deity does not need to reproduce. However, the practical effect of
monotheism coming at the same time as the patriarchal revolution was that the one and only
God was inevitably cast as male. People could not visualise a God who was neither male nor
female, especially as we were supposed to be made in His image.
He had to be a great father in the sky, where the male component in the universal system
traditionally lived. Throughout the monotheistic age, until recently, God was conceived and
depicted as a patriarch, a tetchy old gentleman with a white beard.
Only now have
sophisticated people realised that this is a misconception, that God is a spirit of whom it is
impossible to make a picture. Still we cannot get away from the personalisation of God as a
man. Every day, Christians pray to "Our Father".
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Even our language does not allow much scope for breaking this mental set. If we use the
neuter form of the pronoun and refer to God as It instead of Him, this suggests that God is an
inanimate object. Yet God is the very essence of animus, or spirit. So It will not do.
The installation of the omnipotent Sky-Father in the place of the old female powers was a
more or less conscious act.
That is why I call it the patriarchal revolution.
It was
accompanied by a steady wind of male-supremacist propaganda, instigated largely by the
male priesthoods who served the Sky-Father. The story of Adam and Eve is one of the
mildest anti-female calumnies which were inserted into every kind of theological treatise and
learned paper. Some of them were scabrous and virulent, betraying a hatred and contempt for
women which would nowadays land the authors in a psychiatric ward. St. Paul, one of the
earliest Christian fathers, is particularly notorious for his anti-female views. He wrote that if
men could see the insides of women they would soon lose their lust for them. They would no
longer want to go up "between the piss and the shit".
Apart from its obnoxious viewpoint, this is interesting as a typically priestly remark. Priests
are commonly obsessed by the notions of "purity" and the "spirit". "Purity" comes to mean
having as little as possible to do with the flesh, which is seen as being inherently unclean.
The animal basis of our existence is seen as deplorable and is continually denied or pushed
aside. It is a hindrance to the really important part of us, our soul. The flesh is unclean
because it involves gross activities such as eating and sex and because it produces foul
substances and odours.
This inability to come to terms with the animal nature of our bodies has been a failing of the
priesthood through the ages and is, I believe, a characteristically male attitude. The idea that
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the soul is a manifestation of our whole being, and not a separate, pure part trapped in our vile
bodies, seems to have eluded these people. The reasons for this have to be sought in the early
corruption of Christianity by pagan Gnosticism, which had long taught that the soul is pure
but is trapped in the foul body. Christ never said anything of the sort.
However that may be, the creatures mainly on the receiving end of this loathing of the flesh
were the unfortunate women. They attracted the priestly ire because of their all too earthly
and fleshly lives. The peculiar horror of women in this view is that men actually enter their
bodies and are thus engulfed in spectacularly unclean flesh. This is one of the main roots of
misogyny, or hatred of women. One of the most distinguished Greek philosophers exhibited
this tendency when he said, "The worst thing about a woman is that you need a bath
immediately you rise from her bed". As I said, this attitude was rife long before Christianity.
Shakespeare knew all about it, too, when he made King Lear say how wonderful a woman is
above the waist, but below it, "Pah! Pah! Pah!" to express unmitigated disgust.
At least Christian priests have never denied that women have souls, but their distaste of
women spread like a cancer through Western society. There was a still more sinister side to
the anti-woman attitudes of the early Christian priesthood. This was professional rivalry.
Women had often been the shamans, priestesses and seers of the traditional religious life
before monotheism. Their influence had to be extirpated in the interests of the new religion.
Yet they continued to plague the church until modern times.
The early converts to
Christianity were too often belt-and-braces converts. That is, they adopted the new religion
but did not entirely drop the old religion. In any case, the old religion was not a religion in
the sense of being a body of dogma. It was just a lot of old beliefs and attitudes which were
deeply ingrained habits of thought rather than a teaching or a theory of the cosmos. In times
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of stress, the village wise woman could be as great a comfort as the village priest. The
villagers retained a lot of what the new priests called their superstitions.
The campaign against nature religions, shamanism and plain superstition still continues.
Until the end of the Seventeenth Century, women who dabbled in herbal remedies and folk
cures risked being burned alive. Some may have been burned because they were old and
ugly. Nearly all the victims of witch hunts were women, largely because the priesthood
propounded a demonology of Satan served by female acolytes, or witches. This was a sort of
garbled memory of the pre-Christian deities served by female attendants.
The priests' hatred of any non-Christian deity was so extreme that anything the common
people might have reverence for, other than God himself, was damned to Hell. Moreover, no
moral authority other than the Church's was tolerated. This was why the village shamans had
to go, despite the fact that the people had relied on them for thousands of years. Their folk
remedies and wisdom had been passed on from generation to generation, but they smacked of
pre-Christian nature religion and rank superstition.
Even today, some priests express fear that the old religion is raising its head again. They
thunder against feminist theologians who say that the female principle should be reinstated.
Apart from being against the ordination of women, on the grounds that it is contrary to the
tradition (male-supremacist) of the Church, these priests claim that feminist theology
represents a revival of paganism. The implication is that statues of Venus will be erected and
sexy priestesses will dance around them. Would that it were so!
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It has to be said that the monotheistic religions did humanity a great service in attacking and
largely destroying a great deal of superstitious nonsense.
There were nasty rites and
unpleasant beliefs associated with the old nature religions and polytheistic systems including,
as I have said, human sacrifice.
The Spaniards may have been beastly to the Aztecs, but Spanish priests stopped them tearing
out the hearts of thousands of people in obscene religious ceremonies. Scores of such
unpleasant cults were swept away in the monotheistic revolution.
Much of the black
ignorance and terror which filled the minds of people in previous ages was replaced by a
more sophisticated concept of the place of the spirit in the life of mankind. There was no
longer a ghost in every tree or a god in every stream, or if there was, they were no longer
terrifying, because the omnipotent Sky-Father protected his followers from them.
Nevertheless, despite all the good they have done in banishing the worst kinds of superstitious
nonsense, the Sky-Father religions have had the effect of demoting the female principle to the
point of non-existence. As a result, women are widely seen as subsidiary to men, not just the
second sex, but the second-class sex. Any man with a grain of affection for women, that is
most men, accepts that this is a rotten state of affairs. Still, it is going to collapse soon.
The problem for theologians is how to reinstate the female principle in the concept of the
deity. About eight hundred years into the Christian era, Christians tried to insert an element
of the female into their faith. Completely unselfconsciously it seems, they promoted the
Virgin Mary from being simply God's handmaiden, the vessel for His incarnation, into the
Mother of God. So God, who did not strictly need a mortal mother, nevertheless choose to
have one, to the great glory of Mary and all womankind.
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Of course, the Virgin Mary has obviously been got at by the priests. She is a heavily sanitised
female personage. She does not appear to do any of the nasty things other women get up to,
such as menstruating or copulating. She gave birth without any unpleasantness like that,
although she needed an angel's assistance to convince her husband that it was God's child she
was bearing. She is a virgin and therefore more estimable than other women, who seldom
maintain that status for long.
Despite being a priestly version of womanhood, the Virgin Mary still exerts a powerful appeal
to Catholic women. They pray to her and seek her assistance and protection, especially in
those things which concern women, no doubt exactly as their forebears did to the goddesses.
Because Catholics are much given to making statues and pictures of their saints, offering
prayers and gifts to them, the stern Protestants took this to be idol-worship and frowned on
the cult of the Virgin Mary. No doubt, idolatry is indeed unwholesome, but the Protestants
threw out the baby with the bath water. As a result, the Protestant branch of Christianity is
even more exclusively male in its theology than Catholicism.
Paradoxically, it is now the Protestants who are the most inclined to try to re-admit the female
principle, possibly because they most feel its complete lack.
Meanwhile, the Catholic
hierarchy is setting its face against doing so, possibly because they feel that their conception
of the Godhead already does include some reference to the female principle via the Virgin
Mary. They also say that there is nothing in the scriptures which hints that women may be
priests. They do not point out that there is nothing which says they cannot be, either. There
is some debate about what St. Paul meant when he urged his followers to keep their women
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quiet in church. Did he mean that women were not to be allowed to speak in church? Most
sensible people think he meant that they should keep their women quiet in church. Nothing
annoys a priest more than having a good sermon drowned out by chattering women.
Certainly, modern theologians have a ticklish problem to solve in meeting the need to reinject the female principle, on equal terms with the male, into the concept of the deity. There
is nothing in the scriptures or in church tradition to indicate that any such thing is possible.
There wouldn’t be, because these are the records and traditions of the Sky-Father religion.
We moderns will have to solve this problem without reference to tradition. It will be a leap in
the dark (not into the dark, we hope).
Some attempts to remedy the situation have been laughable. Reports that the Lord's Prayer is
to be rendered "Our parent-person who is in heaven" do not inspire much confidence. Surely,
the description of God as "Our Lord" and "Our Father" are not intended to mean that God is
literally our male parent, but that He is kind and loving like a good father. In short, it is a
metaphor. De-sexing Him in that particular way makes God seem like the chairman of a
social services committee.
The source of the problem lies in the use of human family analogies in describing the deity.
Since the human family is essentially sex-based, the solution is to avoid analogies with
human life. If Christians really think that God is the eternal, omnipotent creator and divine
spirit of the universe, they should start calling it that and stop referring to it as a big Daddy in
the sky. We are grown-up people now. We can take it.
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Finally, to round off this chapter on the female principle, we can now answer Freud's question
about women; "What do they want?" What they want is to be accepted as equal in worth to
men.
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THE MYTH OF MAN THE HUNTER
When I was much younger and fitter than I am now, I looked at my naked body in a fulllength mirror. Was this body, I wondered, really designed for hunting and fighting, as people
said? Certainly, the big rib cage indicated a massive heart and lungs. This, and those legs
with their iron-hard muscles, like a cat's, suggested a creature which could run. This was true.
I could run like the wind. But somehow I suspected this was to enable me to get away from
my enemies, not to catch up with them.
Then those broad shoulders and powerful arms told of a creature which could give an account
of itself in a combat. This also was true. No-one had offered to fight me since I grew those
shoulders.
However, the most prominent feature of my body (not my belly then, you
impudent boys) was obviously designed neither for hunting nor for fighting, except that is in a
metaphoric sense.
Then I reflected that natural selection frequently has less to do with the survival of the fittest
than with the preference of the female for the characteristics of her mate.
Moreover,
experiments have shown that in many species, admittedly less complex than ours, the females
tend to have the same ideas as to what constitutes the ideal mate. In other words, the females
are all pushing in the same direction, thus causing the males to adapt to their demands or to
die out. It is literally a case of shape up or ship out. No-one knows why peahens think lover
boy should have a huge tail with gorgeous markings, but they do. Any peacock without this
appendage can forget about projecting his genes into the future.
Women are not quite that simple, but they may have their own more subtle agenda when it
comes to masculine beauty. Perhaps, I thought, this male body is not so much designed for
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hunting and fighting as for pleasing females. Maybe I look like this because this is what
women think a man should look like. Hell's bells! That would be a jolt for male supremacy!
Consider the facts about Man the Hunter. Although my appearance terrifies my cat, it is hard
to think of any other creature which it would terrify. Compared to the big grazing animals,
the largest man is a midget. The big predators would consider a naked man nothing more
than a tasty morsel. Only the smaller mammals and reptiles would be at threat from a
"natural" man without weapons, and they could easily run out of the way. An unarmed man's
chances of getting anything to eat by hunting are practically zero. The only way early men
could kill animals was by hunting in packs and by using their brains to make weapons and to
devise hunting techniques. Essentially, the human hunters only had a chance because they
were more intelligent than their prey. By studying the animals they wished to kill, men learnt
how to do it, realising the animals would always behave in the same way.
However, there is nothing to suggest that being big and tall was an advantage to a Stone Age
hunter. On the contrary, it would probably be more of an advantage to be wiry, fast and agile,
like the remaining "primitive" hunters still remaining on Earth.
So why are men big and tall, and becoming more so all the time? One possible explanation is
by reference to the other function of the male mammal, which is to establish his breeding
rights and to drive off the unwanted attentions of other males. In many other species, the
male is an impressive fellow who engages in trials of strength with other males for breeding
rights. But humans do not operate a herd system. Every woman has her own mate and, by
and large, human couples pair off on a long-term basis. So there is no need for me to have
my broad shoulders and big chest to fight off other men. They never challenge me for
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possession of my wife, because they are busy with their own women or, more importantly,
because they know my wife chooses her own mate.
The only reason why a man should be a big, fine fellow is that it increases his chance of
getting a mate. Women like their men to be bigger than they themselves are. They like a
mate who is reassuringly powerful. The female human being is aware that she is an unarmed
mammal in a dangerous world. Fear of being eaten by wild animals is still an integral part of
the human psyche. Witness the immense popularity of films about huge monsters terrorising
humanity. Watch the crowds around the lions in a zoo.
There is some evidence from the fossil record that the early hominids, who were quite small,
fell prey to the medium-sized members of the cat family, such as leopards and cheetahs. One
way out of this problem was to get bigger. Predators are looking for a meal, not a fight.
Whereas mankind's early precursors may have been easy meat to a leopard, an adult male of
the homo sapiens type, armed with a club and defending his family, would have been capable
of giving a leopard a terminal headache.
As time went on, it is likely that the chief danger to women was not leopards and other animal
predators but rogue males of their own species. These are men who do not have wives and
families of their own and are disposed to cause mischief. This might include attacking
females and infants, perhaps seizing the women by force. Such disruptions of peaceful
breeding could not be allowed. The best defence against them was for a woman to have a
mate big enough to chase off the intruder.
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Of course, modern women have come a long way from those days, although in evolutionary
terms those days are still very recent. Nevertheless, it is still very obvious that women are
uneasy at being on their own in the dark, especially in unfamiliar places. My first adult girlfriend once remarked that it was amazing how safe she felt with me. We were walking
through a deserted churchyard at night. She said she could no more do that on her own than
fly through the air, even though her mind told her there was nobody there and no possible
danger. I said there was possibly another, older part of her mind which told her that female
people do not take silly risks.
She asked me to explain why I was not afraid. The truth was that if she had not been there I
would have been. I learned then that in some extraordinary way it is our women who give us
men our courage. Her belief in me made me feel fierce and proud. I knew that there were
few creatures, human or non-human, which would have cared to take me on while I was in
that mood. Moreover, with her there I did not care a damn about ghosts, spooks, fairies,
goblins, boggarts or trolls. Nevertheless, as we walked through the churchyard I looked
warily about me.
Psychologically, a woman needs a male for her defence, that is to chase off unwanted male
attention and to keep away unspecified things that go bump in the night. She also needs him
for her sexual satisfaction, which involves much more than mere sexual intercourse,
important though that is. A woman seems to take what in fashionable jargon is called a
"holistic" view of a relationship with a man. That is she evaluates the thing as a living whole.
She does not simply want his body. She wants a warm closeness, to feel his desire for her
and to sense his commitment to her.
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This is because, over countless millennia, a woman's chief survival tactic has been to find the
best mate she can and to hang on to him through thick and thin. Above all, she understands
perfectly well that the best guarantee of this is if he is committed to her emotionally.
Indifference and lack of commitment in her man is a real frost to the female soul.
Conversely, a woman is usually an amazingly loyal friend and partner to a man who loves her
well.
It is perhaps a process of natural selection, meaning women preferring to mate with big,
strong men, which has led to the development of large male human beings. For this process
to operate, it would require that women be free to choose their mates over many generations.
It would be interesting if some social-anthropologist could study the correlation between
marriage customs and the height of the menfolk in human cultures.
It might test the
hypothesis that women prefer big men.
In those hunter-gatherer societies which survived into modern times, the food supply of the
people depended much more on the gathering than the hunting. So-called primitive peoples
lived principally on fruit, berries, nuts, seeds and roots.
Such animal protein as they
consumed came mainly from creatures which were unable to move quickly out of reach, such
as grubs, insects, lizards, molluscs and shellfish, or from eggs. Moreover, these items were
mostly collected by women and children. This is why it is thought possible that agriculture
was invented by women. They got to know the food plants very well and eventually realised
that they could be made to grow in more convenient places, perhaps through having seen
germinating seeds.
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The male hunters could indeed bring in game from time to time, but they could not guarantee
a catch every day. Even then, their efforts were concentrated on wildfowling and fishing,
which are relatively unglamorous branches of hunting. The Hollywood notion of Man the
mighty hunter, battling it out with gigantic beasts, is probably a bit colourful compared to the
reality. Nevertheless, it is certain that early modern men did hunt large grazing animals, such
as horses, deer, bison, antelopes, zebra and so on. We have cave paintings dating back
12,000 years depicting this sort of hunting.
In caves high up in the Alps, there has been found bizarre evidence of a strange relationship
between men and the huge bears which inhabited these caves thousands of years ago. The
skulls and crossed bones of the bears have been found, carefully placed in niches in the cave
walls. They could only have been put there by human agency. Evidently, some ceremony
was involved. It may have been religious, for ancient mankind venerated the great beasts.
Bears were regarded as gods in the pagan north of Europe almost into modern times.
Alternatively, it may have marked a triumph over a dangerous enemy. Killing a bear in his
own lair would have been a cause for celebration, but not for disrespect for a mighty animal.
Perhaps the men wounded the bear in the open and followed it to its cave to finish it off. We
can only speculate.
By the time modern men had fully evolved, they had indeed become formidable killers of
great beasts. Even so, for most of human existence it seems unlikely that hunters as we think
of them could have done more than bring in the occasional kill. Fishing and trapping were
another matter. Where these were possible, for example around lakes and seashores, a more
or less regular supply of animal protein could be assured. However, it seems probable that it
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was not Man the Hunter who fed the people, but Woman the Gatherer, or protoagriculturalist.
We are left with the puzzle. Which came first? Was it that lithe and muscular male body,
which so arouses women's sexual interest? Or was it women's desires which created that lithe
and muscular male body? This is the problem of the chicken and the egg. Probably, the two
forces interact with one another. To be effective in the male sex role during the evolutionary
stages of human existence, men evidently had to be strong and agile. Consequently, women
came to associate maleness with those physiological characteristics which differentiate the
male body from the female. In particular, this meant the high, broad shoulders, long back and
narrow pelvis, which give the male body the Y shape to be seen on half the lavatory doors in
public places. People, especially women, immediately recognise a person of that shape as
being male.
Women also admire the strong legs and muscular arms of men. They particularly like their
narrow hips and small, hard buttocks. Inevitably, women take a great interest in the external
male sex organs. Women often give a penetrating glance at a man's groin, presumably in the
same way that we stare at the shape of a woman's breasts under her clothing. The bulge in a
man's groin is probably not as aesthetically pleasing as breasts are, from their size and
exquisite subtlety of contour, but that sharp female stare seeks the same sort of evidence, the
evidence of full sexual development.
Once women learned to associate the characteristics of the male body with successful mating,
they would naturally look for those characteristics in the mates they chose. Over large
numbers of generations, this has produced the modern man, who was perhaps for a short
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while, Man the Hunter, but is now Man the Bedroom Favourite. There is nothing wrong with
that. Being liked by women is the way to ensure that your progeny will go forward into the
succeeding generations. Besides, it makes for a very happy and fulfilling life, provided
always that you have the right attitude to women and can live in harmony with them.
When you grow to manhood, you will no doubt look at yourself in the long mirror and see
that you are a magnificent creature. If you eat properly and exercise well when you are
young, you will almost certainly have all those male attributes which will cause the female
population to think you are wonderful. Those little girls who are at present toddling around
with their hair in bunches will have grown into the glory of womanhood. But you have
nothing to fear. You will be a match for them.
You must beware of the danger of turning a proper regard for your body into a cult of your
body. Nothing is more tiresome than the narcissistic poseur with over-developed muscles
which are no earthly good for anything. Heavy body-building is best avoided. Women do not
in fact particularly like huge muscles. What they seem to like most is a combination of
strength and grace, what I have called litheness. They realise that a man does not have to be
heavily muscled to be immensely strong. An over-muscled body loses that magical male
beauty which sends women wild.
The other thing which ruins the beauty of the male body is obesity. Pads of fat obscure those
lean, spare lines which are the essence of maleness and which send the right message to the
female brain. If you have a big belly and womanish hips, you are not sending the right signals
to the roving female eye. What you need to do is to keep trim and strong. Then you will
enjoy the sensation of feeling bright eyes watching you.
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You should keep an eye on your body weight and take steps to keep reasonably slim. Overeating and over-drinking are the main causes of overweight, coupled with lack of exercise and
a bad diet. On the other hand, you should avoid food faddism and weird diets. A variety of
different foods, including some fresh fruit and vegetables, seems to be the surest way of
having a good diet. By all means be a vegetarian if you do not like the way animals are
treated, but do not make a religion out of it.
Really, you should take an intelligent interest in food and nutrition. If you know about food,
you can enjoy it and still stay slim. Being fat is not so much a sign of greed as of ignorance.
Your body is your most valuable possession. You should respect it and care for it. It is like a
beautifully made car. If you service it and look after it properly, it does not need much
attention. It will give you years of service. It will also give your female partner good service
and help to keep her loyal and happy.
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WHORE, WITCH AND BITCH
Hostility to the female principle and to women stems from the male-supremacist ideology
which underpinned the patriarchal revolution. This in turn was associated with the founding
of the Sky-Father religions two or three thousand years ago. Such hostility is endemic in our
society. It is also very dangerous. Men cannot possibly live in harmony with women until
this old canard is put down. In recent times, efforts have been made, including this book, to
examine the roots of this mouldy old prejudice and to dig them up and put them in the
museum.
The main attack on the female principle took the form of a praising of those parts which fitted
in with the new ideology and a condemnation of those which did not. So woman as wife and
mother was fine, especially as the male priesthood eventually took control of marriage and
childbirth by institutionalising them within the Sky-Father religion. What was not acceptable
was female sexuality, female mysticism and female priesthood. Since the essence of the new
patriarchy was that men owned the women and everything else, the free female spirit was
anathema. These aspects of female nature were castigated and outlawed. In order to render
her a fit member of society, a woman's sexuality had to be channelled into acceptable paths,
her mysticism replaced by worship of the Sky-Father and her ambitions as priestess thwarted.
The dangerous and challenging side of her nature was locked away and she was put in a cage.
It was often a comfortable cage, but a cage nonetheless.
The word was put about that the prisoner was on no account to be released, for if she were
free she would immediately discard the chaste gown of wife and mother and put on the hellish
robes of whore, witch and bitch. Given the prevailing ideological hostility to the flesh, and
by extension to women, it was easy to build up a whole culture on the basis that women were
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the property of men and had to be kept close guarded, lest their propensity to evil should
come bounding out. Hecate, the ancient fountain of the female principle, was branded a bitch
goddess, the patroness of whores and witches, a female Satan.
That culture is still with us, or at least the dying embers of it are. The big problem is still
female sexuality. Most men suspect that woman is still a bit of a whore at heart. Every father
dreads that his daughter will follow her instincts and get pregnant as soon as possible. Every
husband suspects that his wife is susceptible to handsome salesmen. Many a lover has been
dismayed to find that his lady love has had a fling with another man. In the armed forces,
they maintain that a loyal woman left on her own can keep faith for about six months, some
much less. Every seducer knows that an honest woman gives ninety percent of herself to her
husband and children, but keeps ten percent for herself. He looks for a piece of the ten
percent.
The male reaction to this is typically bewilderment and anguish. We ask in despair, "How
can she do this?" There is never an answer except perhaps a slight pursing of the lips which
means "Because I am me, that's why." Other men grow bitter and curse women as faithless,
even as whores.
Our anguish is due to our inability to see female sexuality for what it is and to come to terms
with it. When I was a boy, I had no idea that girls entertained lewd thoughts about us boys, as
we did about them. The general doctrine taught to young males was that sex is something a
man does to a woman. While we boys might long to do things to the girls, there was no
chance they would agree to our disagreeable requests. The fact was that an honest woman
never let anyone do that to her except her husband. It seemed natural to assume that girls did
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not really want to do it, otherwise they would surely break the rules, as we would do if given
the chance.
Occasionally, we heard of a girl who did do it, but such girls were like ghosts. It was always
somebody else who saw them. The shame and scandal aroused by even the suggestion of
such occurrences proved that they were exceptional. We were brought up in the ideal of the
chaste woman, who was only wife and mother, never a whore. Of course, we knew about
prostitutes, but they were regarded as different creatures altogether. They were dealt off the
bottom of Hecate's pack, the side of female nature which was kept under wraps.
No doubt, the adults took a more realistic view of these things. Such innocence was for the
young. Even so, there was a very widespread view that lewdness and sexual appetite was a
male preserve. Women were much chaster and purer in this scheme of things. We were
never allowed to make crude remarks in their presence. In our minds was engraved the image
of the wife and mother. We ought never to defile her.
For their part, women were indeed very cautious about sexual encounters, which were likely
to leave indelible evidence of guilt in the form of pregnancy. Although the advent of
reasonably cheap contraceptive sheaths, or condoms, in the 1920's had made it much more
feasible to engage in illicit sex without much risk, the shame and odium of discovery was still
a big deterrent. It took several generations for the attitudes of sexual repression to fade.
Without going into a history lesson, it is enough to say that the events of the first half of the
Twentieth Century finally blew away most of the social conventions governing the relations
between the sexes. Two gigantic wars among the Western peoples, fought largely in their
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ancestral homeland of Europe, with a terrible economic depression in the twenty-year interval
between the wars, just simply smashed the cage in which women had lived under the
patriarchy. The prisoners escaped and there is no way of getting them back in. Under the
pressures of war, women showed that they could do more or less anything a man could do.
They also showed that they were at least as brave, imaginative and resourceful as men. There
had to be a reappraisal of what women are and what their role in life is.
The second instalment in the sexual liberation of women came with the widespread use of the
female contraceptive pill in the late 1950's and 1960's. Now women could regulate their own
fertility. The legend of the Swinging Sixties was born. What was really new was that it was
publicly admitted that women do indeed like doing THAT. As a spoof gynaecologist was
made to explain to his students, "A woman is a creature which menstruates once a month,
parturiates two or three times in her lifetime, pistulates every four hours, micturates once a
day and copulates whenever she has the opportunity."
It was the last bit which made everybody laugh, because it was shocking but true. We all
recognised that creature. This was a new light on womanhood and it was some way from the
old ideal of woman as chaste wife and devoted mother. At the same time, liberal-minded
people recognised that a free woman has a perfect right to copulate whenever she has the
opportunity.
While this struck some people as the end of civilisation as we knew it, most recognised that
civilisation as we had known it had already died. It was done to death between 1914, when
the old Europe committed suicide, and 1945, when the survivors staggered out of the ruins
into a new age. Even then, it was another 44 years before the Berlin Wall fell and the World
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Wars finally came to an end. This twilight period, or Cold War as it was called, was really a
long stand-off between two opposing camps among the victors of the Second World War.
For a long time it threatened to blow the world apart again, perhaps literally. But the two
opposing sides had very different experiences during this time.
The Soviet Union seemed like a glacier in a warm wind. It stopped moving and gradually
disintegrated. In the West, on the other hand, the post war period saw an astonishing
renaissance. For all the economic difficulties, and the tension of the eyeball-to-eyeball
confrontation with the huge Soviet military empire, the West enjoyed a veritable explosion of
its wealth and culture. Western Europe, especially, seemed to shrug off the wars and the Great
Depression and became once again rich and beautiful and civilised.
There were great
revolutions in the way people lived and thought and felt.
One of the most important changes was in the general attitude towards women. The role and
function of women in society had been completely shaken up during all the upheavals. Even
in the 1920's, it had become plain that women were not going to put their crinolines back on.
On the contrary, they hoiked their skirts up above the knee and demanded the vote. By the
end of the 1950's, it had become plain that the game was up for the traditional role model of
woman as the second sex, man's helpmate and homemaker. Women still liked playing this
role. They probably always will. But they were not going to be stuffed into it willy nilly.
They wanted to participate in the world outside the home, not just as secretaries and nurses,
but as equals.
These demands caused something of a crisis of conscience for those who valued the old
contract between men and women. To this day, such people are still bemoaning the loss of
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"family values". Apart from the fact that they may be over-estimating the virtues of the
traditional family, these people under-estimate the power of the human race to reinvent itself.
Out of the confusion of the present state of flux, there will emerge a new contract between the
sexes. Its first clause will say, "Men and women are equal".
Starting from that premise, a new family structure will be built. A human couple will be less
like a lord and his retainer and more like a pair of swans, each going about their business,
guarding their nest and rearing their young together.
"What about the children?" the
traditionalists cry. "Do they not need their mother. Would they not prefer her to be at home,
rather than out managing a store?" Indeed they would. Mothers are generally aware of this
and are pressing for society to change its methods of working so as to allow them to be with
their children when needed. This means things like flexitime, childcare at work, home
working and so on.
Once it is accepted that they are not to be imprisoned in it, many women will be quite happy
to stay in the home while the children are young. But the children grow up relatively quickly,
and our active lives are extending to seventy or eighty years. So every woman worth her salt
is looking at the prospects for a career. Men tend to take a jaundiced view of all this, pointing
out as old pros that the world of work is not all cakes and ale. Men feel rather as professional
seamen do towards yachtsmen. "Only a bloody fool goes to sea if he doesn't have to".
It is perfectly true that for most people work is not exactly a bundle of fun. Yet it gives a
daily contact with a wider world, an adult world for the most part. Also, being able to earn a
living gives a person of either sex a measure of independence. Women are bitterly aware that
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before the present generation, women were forced to stick with bad husbands, because the
alternative was abject poverty, or actual starvation.
Many people now realise that the so-called "liberation" of women is on the whole a good
thing, even though in some ways it is a sham. Modern women take much more responsibility
for themselves than their immediate predecessors did, but they are also in many cases simply
working twice as hard, performing both their new roles and the traditional women's role. It is
no coincidence that women are succumbing to booze, cigarettes and stress-related illnesses,
just like men always have.
Perhaps the best thing to come out of the revolution in the role of women in the world is the
widespread realisation that women's sexuality in particular had been heavily repressed and
that this ought not to continue. Most men concede that equality of the sexes must include
sexual equality. In other words, women must be free to do what men have always done, to
enjoy sex and engage in it without social odium.
It is at the personal level that we men are still not able to cope with female sexuality. While it
is fine to accept that women in general are fully equal and fully-sexed human beings, it is still
a shock to discover that this includes OUR women. We tend to think that the old terms and
conditions still hold, that when we exchange vows with a woman she becomes our property
and will never entertain another man. As it happens, most women are indeed fairly loyal to
their men, at least as loyal as we are to them. Nevertheless, the bitter truth is that they do not
belong to us. They belong to themselves. The fact that they often yearn for a warm and
committed nearness, which certainly feels like belonging, does not alter that truth.
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Men are very prone to hypocrisy, the very same failing we attribute to women. We tend to
apply double standards to our womenfolk's sexual behaviour.
We curse them for
faithlessness and deceit when they do exactly what we would do, perhaps already are doing.
A married friend of mine was having an affair with single woman. One day, he was horrified
to discover that she had been seeing another man, a married man. My friend was distraught
and remonstrated with her. "How could you go with someone else, after all that has passed
between us? This man is a married man, a philanderer!" His mistress pointed out that he too
was a married man, and also a philanderer for that matter, whereas she was a free woman and
could sleep with whomever she liked.
My friend said to me, "This has put me right off her. I'll never be able to forgive her. I'm
going to give her up." Apart from the fact that she had seemingly given HIM up, my view
was that he could not have any claim on her loyalty unless he committed himself to her.
Perhaps she took another lover in the hope of finding a more secure relationship. As for
going off her, that was just jealousy because he did not like the thought that she had had
another man. He was regarding her as his possession. If he loved her he would realise that
she was still herself.
This lecture did not suit my friend very well. He said, "Humph!" or words to that effect.
Even so, he did go back to her and they remained lovers for years.
It has been unfortunate, though surely no coincidence, that the sexual emancipation of women
has seen the awakening of a terrifying Kraken in the shape of sexually-transmitted diseases.
There is nothing really new in this. There was a serious outbreak of syphilis in Europe in the
early Sixteenth Century. Nearer our own time, it was a considerable problem, perhaps a
scourge, in the Nineteenth Century and right up to the invention of antibiotics in the mid-
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Twentieth Century. But no sooner had the spectres of syphilis and gonorrhoea been banished
than the virus diseases of herpes and AIDS burst upon the hapless human race. Since we
have as yet no effective way of stopping viruses, other than our own immune system, AIDS in
particular has become a serious threat.
All this has caused the unreconstructed Puritans to come rushing out of their bunkers
shouting, "We told you so! It is God's wrath!" Well, it almost looks like that, but really it is
yet another lesson in the complexities of life. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch. If
humanity changes its behaviour in a massive and sudden way, then all sorts of unforeseen
consequences can arise. It does seem that as a species we are prone to sexually-transmitted
diseases. Perhaps our ancestors learnt this the hard way long ages ago and handed on to us
their experience in the form of the precept that sexual promiscuity is dangerous. Like many
such practical precepts, this took the form of a religious injunction, "Thou shalt not commit
adultery."
What has come to haunt us now is not God's wrath but the spirits of our ancestors saying,
"You can't throw away the wisdom of the ages on a whim." It does not need much training in
mathematics to see that the possibilities for epidemics of sexually-transmitted diseases are
enormously increased if each person has more than a few sex partners in a lifetime. Because
of our propensity, unique in the animal kingdom, to copulate all the time, any significant
multiplicity of partners puts us into a vast and rapidly-spreading network of physical contact
with other people. This is the very stuff of epidemics.
Whatever the eventual outcome of the AIDS epidemic, and let us hope that effective countermeasures can be found soon, sexual mores have undergone a profound scrutiny. A more
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adult attitude to sex has been forced upon us. No doubt, AIDS has led many of us to become
more careful and thoughtful about our sex lives, as indeed we ought to be in any case. But
the essential point is that out of the sexual revolution, the so-called "permissive society" and
its awkward and unexpected aftermath, something of great value has emerged.
It is no longer possible to think of woman as being a chaste wife and mother as long as she is
watched, but who is suspected of being a bit of a whore underneath. Now we accept that
women are complete human beings, fully-equipped with normal sexual feelings and capable
of deciding for themselves how they use them. So the ancient calumny of Woman the Whore
is laid to rest.
The second old anti-female gripe is that woman is a bitch. She looks kind and enticing, but
she is bad news for men because in reality she is unscrupulous and callous. She uses her
sexual power to make men miserable. This is really an extension of the complaint about her
being a whore. Instead of being man's property, as she ought, she plays her own game,
trapping men in her net and bending them to her will. She is indifferent to men's welfare and
simply uses them for her own purposes.
We can all of us recognise some tinge of reality in this view. Women do seem like that
sometimes. Yet we ought to realise that this is a matter of viewpoint. Naturally, some
women are bitches, just as some men are unpleasant bastards. But most often our bitter
feelings are due to our not understanding that women are not obliged to do exactly what we
want. We get angry that someone who ought by rights to be our nice, mild, unassertive
property actually has a mind of her own, and a disconcertingly strong mind at that.
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We also get hurt by ignoring the fact that woman is a creature with her own program and her
own set of priorities. In particular, young men find the experience of being discarded by a
girl-friend something that can scar them for life and embitter them against women
permanently. Yet we must understand that a female just has to dump unwanted admirers,
otherwise she may never get one she does want. Male psychology is not attuned to being let
down lightly, gallantly as some women try.
My father told me, and I pass it on to all young males who will listen, that women are like
buses. If you miss one, there is always another one coming along. Of course, he was right.
The wonderful miracle of female sexual energy means that no normal male has to worry
about not finding a mate. If you climbed to the top of a mountain and made your solitary
home there, eventually some woman would clamber up and find you.
So don't waste your time and emotions chasing a woman who does not want you. Above all,
do not run yourself onto the spikes of her rejection and then complain that she is a bitch.
Complaints about women's cattiness and bitchiness really stem from men's annoyance that
they are not always what we expect them to be. Moreover, they quite often have the gall to
dismiss our complaints in a peremptory fashion. Yet it seems doubtful whether women really
are any more bitchy than men. We males can certainly get tetchy when we are thwarted. Men
also enjoy gossip as much as women, even though we pretend we don't. Our gossip simply
has a masculine viewpoint, but the subject matter is the same, other people's quirks and
peccadilloes.
In fact, idle gossip is engaged in by nit-witted people of either sex. The image of woman as
specially prone to gossip is part of the propaganda image of woman as the empty-headed
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prattler. Some of them are, but in general that image is defamatory. It is perfectly true that
women do love to talk to each other. They also like to talk to men, if we can think of
anything interesting to say to them.
If you spend any time in the company of women, you do notice that every so often they have
to go off for a chat with other women. They form little coteries of their pals, with whom they
engage in deep conversation. If you get close enough to hear what is being said, you will find
that although the talk is often titillating, even ribald, it is seldom scabrous or vicious about
anyone.
The verbal powers of female people has often been noted. This appears very early in their
lives. In a primary school playground, little girls will be seen seated on steps engaged in
conversation, while the little boys roar around the yard. Girls also are very inclined to play
games which involve verbalisation, such as skipping and singing, or games with nursery
rhymes. Presumably, this both reflects and increases their verbal skills. Those who dislike
women can turn their articulacy into a negative factor. So women become shrews and vipers'
tongues.
The third great charge against women is that they are witches. The word itself comes from
the Anglo-Saxon "wicca". The Old English pronounced the double C like the modern Italians
do, as "ch". The word is thought to have meant the whole panoply of nature religion,
including benign forms like folk medicine, but also including some soppy bits like prancing
about in the woods, worshipping non-existent gods. Wicca also probably included some
things which the modern mind finds less attractive, such as magic and the sacrifice of
animals, possibly humans in earlier times.
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The monk Bede, writing in 732AD, reports that as soon as the gospel of Christ was heard in
the English kingdom of Northumberland, the pagan priests were the first to rush off to tear
down their heathen altars. It is rash to doubt the word of Bede, but this sounds like Christian
propaganda. Maybe the pagan priests recognised that they were in the same business as the
Christian priests and were gratefully accepting a take-over bid from a bigger and better
company. Whether they did or not, it seems certain that the old pagan beliefs did not
immediately die out. In fact, they lingered for hundreds of years in old customs and sayings,
much to the annoyance of the Christian priests.
With an uncertain hold on the loyalty of their flocks, the early Christian priests may not have
felt strong enough to stamp on the remnants of the old religion. It is difficult to say just when
the mass of the common people became thoroughly Christian in their habitual ways of
thought and speech. No doubt, Christians will claim earlier, while pagan revivalists will
claim later, if at all. What does seem incontrovertible and extraordinary is that in the
Sixteenth Century the Church began a fierce war on witchcraft.
Of course, Christians had always believed in the Devil and his hellish acolytes the demons.
But they were taken for granted as part of the supernatural world which overlapped to some
extent with our own world. Why, after a thousand years as the official religion of most of
Europe, should the Church start a war on witches? What was going on? Was the Church
decadent and therefore under attack from a resurgence of the old religion? If so, there is no
mention of this in learned commentaries of the time. At least, there is no-one who took
seriously the intellectual and moral challenge of wicca.
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Perhaps the common people loathed the Church so much that they did not give a damn about
the intellectual and moral content of wicca, just so long as it was not Christian. More likely,
there were still people about who dabbled in the occult arts when the Church was seized by
one of its recurring fits of Puritanism, the grisly echo of that pagan Gnosticism which
corrupted the early Church.
Anyway, the fact is that only three hundred years ago, Christian churches regularly instigated
the burning alive of people, usually women, who were suspected of being witches. The
Church had a system of inquisitors, or investigating priests, who spent their time searching
for evidence of witchcraft. Once accused, the putative witches were unlikely to be acquitted,
because a denial of the charges was taken to be evidence of guilt. ("Well, they would deny it,
wouldn't they?") It never seems to have occurred to anybody that belief in the existence of
witchcraft, and hence of witches, was itself a piece of rank superstition.
Then there was the little matter of the method of execution, burning alive in a bonfire. This
was the method favoured by Christians for getting rid of those who were deemed spiritually
impure, especially witches, but also other Christians who disagreed on points of doctrine.
Apart from the extreme physical and mental cruelty involved, burning also carried the
supreme spiritual penalty. Christians expected to be physically resurrected on the Day of
Judgment. If the body was burned to ashes, this denied them resurrection. Dem bones aint
gonna walk around.
In the world history of cruelty and barbarism, Christianity has a prominent place. Christians
will no doubt argue that they were no more cruel than anyone else at the time and that pitiless
cruelty is in any case one of the main characteristics of the human race. However, it was they
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who thought up the idea of burning women alive. This leads one to suspect that there is in
Christianity a broad streak of sadism and masochism, a tendency to worship torture and
suffering. It is good for the soul because it mortifies the foul flesh.
Once again, the main victims of this loathing of impurity were the unfortunate women, those
arch-instigators of the sins of the flesh, those willing slaves of Satan. If they were suspected
of allying themselves with the Devil, and it was known they had a habit of copulating with
him, well, that was a double reason to burn them, to put them through the fire which purifies.
A complete demonology was erected on the basis of zero evidence. Everybody knew what a
witch was and could draw a picture of one. The same applied to the Devil. To this day, all
self-respecting Christians know that the Devil has horns and goat's feet and that he is lord of
the fiery underworld. If we met him in the street, we should know him immediately.
We also know what it is that a witch can do that is so terrible. She regularly turns people into
unpleasant creatures, such as toads. Also, she can bring down pestilence on people's crops
and cattle. She can make a woman sterile or miscarry or, even worse, give birth to a monster.
Her enemies are likely to die of mysterious maladies. For a small fee, she would do the same
for someone else's enemies, or just burn their house down if the offence was not too serious.
Most of these powers involved interfering with the natural processes of fertility and
reproduction, exactly those functions which were once associated with goddesses and
priestesses, or with the ancient figure of the shaman or medicine man. The witch was the
horrid, garbled remembrance of the priestess of old.
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It is only with the rise of secular humanism that the figure of the witch has been banished
from the minds of reasonable people and the bonfires in the town squares no longer contain
living human beings.
But if woman is not a witch, does she have mystic powers which made the priests afraid of
her, as they seem still to be in modern times? In a certain sense, the male priesthood may
have had a loathing of women which had its source in a sense of guilt about them. We hate
most those we have most wronged. We can tolerate feelings of guilt about God, but it is
harder to tolerate feelings of guilt about other people. Every man has a mother and therefore
every reason to feel guilty about women. But men priests have more or less deliberately
acquiesced in an ideological system which makes women secondary to men, which robs them
of their equality and their dignity.
Witch hunts may have had their origin in a fear and hatred of women arising from a neurosis
in the male mind. That is, the inability to reconcile female power with male supremacy.
Having overthrown the female principle in heaven, the priesthood may still have felt insecure
, because they knew they were the summit of an unnatural and unstable system. Of course, the
female principle pushed back. Hekate might any day raise a vast army. Every woman was a
potential soldier in it. All unjust supremacies come to an end sooner or later.
It is perfectly possible in human affairs for currents of opinion to be flowing in opposite
directions at the same time. Indeed, it is not uncommon for one individual to hold mutually
incompatible opinions without noticing the contradiction. Many Christians realised that male
supremacy was not the spiritual basis of their religion, but an accidental import. Male
supremacy was and is a secular movement as much as a religious one. What happens in
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heaven is a reflection of what happens on Earth, not its cause. Nevertheless, Christ did say
that God was his father and Christians enthusiastically embraced that notion. So Christians
must at least share the blame for the completeness of the patriarchal revolution.
By the time of the witch hunts, Christianity had long been feminising itself in response to
popular demand. In fact, the worst excesses of witch-hunting came relatively late in the
Christian era, during and after the Reformation. This suggests that it was associated with a
recrudescence of the search for spiritual purity. In Catholic countries, the most emotive
symbol of the Christian faith had ceased to be a man dying in agony on a cross and had
become the altogether more reassuring figure of a mother with a child. The extraordinary
number of Madonnas painted in southern and eastern Europe testify to the intense yearning
people felt to venerate the female principle. The Virgin Mary became almost a goddess in her
own right.
Yet these same people could also believe that some women were evil, so evil that they should
be burned alive. Apparently, they could reconcile the image of the Virgin Mary with the foul
image of the witch within the common framework of womankind.
This was because
Christians, like many religionists, see the world as a battleground between the forces of good
and evil. Anyone, man or women, can be recruited to the benevolent service of God, or into
the evil army of Satan. Thus, the Virgin Mary is a woman purified in God's service, while a
witch is a woman corrupted by Satan.
In the parlance of science-fiction films, a witch is equivalent to someone who has been taken
over by an alien. Burning her destroys an anti-human enemy. Perhaps it seems absurd to us
that people believed in the demonology of Satan and his following of goblins and witches.
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Yet some people still do. Even today, many people believe that, if you draw a circle on the
floor and stand within it, you can see the Devil by reciting a certain spell. Very wise people
abjure us never to do this foolish thing. In other words, they are saying the Devil is sure to
appear. Perhaps our rational minds are still not securely in control. Underneath our thin layer
of critical intelligence lies a million year-old mind, full of spirits, ghosts, gods and demons.
The time has come to make a stand, to assert that witches and witchcraft may exist, but they
do not have magic powers. Those who say they do have a duty to convince us sceptics. We'll
hire a football stadium and the people can come and watch a witch turn a prince into a frog.
And back again, of course. Otherwise no prince would take part. "Ah!" the witches will say,
"It doesn't work like that." You bet it doesn't.
Woman is not a witch, any more than she is a whore or a bitch. She is just the female half of
humanity, long traduced and misrepresented, for too long repressed and denied her equality
with her male partner. Now that the shadow of male supremacy is finally passing away, the
spiritual side of woman's nature will come to the fore again. Once again, women will be
priests, not witches, and their kind of wisdom will be as highly valued as the male kind.
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THE PATRIARCHY
Some people who are opposed to male supremacy have erected a kind of counter
demonology. Whereas male supremacists accused women of being a whore, bitch and witch,
the new breed of feminist extremists are intent in their turn on branding men as the sadistic
tormentors and exploiters of women. Like all really bad ideas, this one has more than a grain
of truth in it. Men often are nasty to women, and many a woman has discovered to her cost
how hard it is to read male human nature. A woman who has a good husband can see all
around her women who do not have good husbands. Yet they all started out with the same
high hopes. Even today, a woman has only to pick the wrong man for her life to be more or
less blighted. Consequently, it is easy for women to believe that most of their troubles are
caused by the inadequacy or plain nastiness of men.
Feminists fulminate against the "patriarchy", which they take to mean the dominance of men
in the home and in society at large. It is this dominance which, they say, gives men the power
to inflict their nastiness on women. In their eyes, the patriarchy is an unmitigated evil which
must be overthrown forthwith. Some want to do away with men altogether.
From this quarter comes the whiff of rancour and sour, anti-male propaganda. Lurching from
one iniquity to another, male supremacy is to be replaced by female supremacy. So we are
told that the world would be a better place, and men much happier, if only they were like
women. All virtue is ascribed to the female, and all vices to the male. According to this
doctrine, nothing female ever did any harm and nothing male ever did any good. Men are
reduced to two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs, with only their viciousness and something
called their "ego" to sustain them. Men are puffed-up coxcombs of vanity and delusion
Apparently, we would be much better if we cried properly, like women, and played with dolls
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rather than guns when we were children. This sort of nonsense denies that there is any
legitimacy in the idea of manhood or of the male human being. The ideal state will be
reached when men are no different from women, except in the incidental matter of their
genitalia.
We shall discuss manhood and male sexuality later. It is enough here to say that there is more
to the male personality than viciousness and "ego" (another Freudian idea that has passed its
sell-by date). Like women, men are very complicated creatures and have many facets to their
personalities.
To the thoughtful observer, it seems that although men may indeed be
potentially aggressive, and are buoyed up by a kind of ebullient cockiness (the "ego"?) they
are also very often sensitive and nervous, even slightly hysterical. Their famous ego is a very
delicate bubble indeed.
Through the ages, women have recognised this basic psychological frailty in their men and
have realised that a man whose bubble has burst is not much use as a mate. In short, women
like men to be masculine. That male ebullience and cockiness can be very cheering to a
female. On their own, women have a slight tendency to depression. So they love a man to
make them laugh and chase the blues away. It is in their interests, therefore, to build up their
men's self-esteem and boost their confidence. Far from being monsters of egotistical conceit,
most men are insecure and prone to self-doubt. One of the first things you will notice about
women who love you is that they give you confidence in yourself. They encourage you to
believe that you can do it. Sure, they have a realistic assessment of their men's limitations,
but unquestionably the knowledge that a woman loves and respects him is what gives a man a
lot of his power.
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Nor is it true, as some feminists assert, that women in general feel the need to cut men down
to size. Naturally, some men are too big for their boots and many a woman does demonstrate
that other side of female power, the ability to deflate a male conceit that goes too far. But on
the whole most women admire male pride and power. Probably, they invest men with greater
prestige than they really deserve.
Once a woman executive in my department came to me and said, "I've got a room full of
mutinous women out there. It needs a touch of male prestige. Show them your eyelashes!"
She meant that the women workers she was briefing on a job had collectively decided to give
her a hard time about it. She guessed, correctly, that they were just being awkward and were
not responding to her personally.
A man appearing before them and being gentle and
persuasive might get them to lower their hostility and listen to our arguments. Showing them
my eyelashes meant to use my male sex appeal (I was a good deal younger then). Eyelashes
are used in sexual display. My female colleague held that long eyelashes on a man are
impressive to women, in a subliminal sort of way. The mutineers would be subdued without
being aware they were being worked over.
It must have worked, because the job got done. One of the women workers said to me
afterwards, "We wouldn't do it for the company, but we would do it for you." This tells you
more about women workers than about my sex appeal. Women seem to live in a world where
people are much more real than abstractions like the company. They were quite prepared to
let the company down, but they did not want to let me down. My female colleague had
realised this and wheeled me on do the trick.
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What has all this to do with the patriarchy? Well, the point is that relations between the sexes
are much more complicated than the simple model of male dominance and female submission
offered by some who decry the patriarchy.
Dominance and submission are matters of
individual personality, not of gender. There are plenty of dominant woman and of submissive
men. Furthermore, those aspects of the male personality which are said to give men their
supposed arrogance are not necessarily seen as pernicious by women in general. So the
concept of the patriarchy as embodying masculine dominance and female submission is likely
to be simplistic at best.
Nevertheless, patriarchy is a useful concept. It is a good way of expressing the basis of social
organisation over the past several thousand years. During this time, all the institutions of
religion, law and the state assumed the male as the senior sex.
Male supremacy was
enshrined in the family, where the father was considered to be the head of the household, and
in society at large, where men held practically all positions of power and authority. God was
perceived as a great father in the sky and his priests had to be male.
All of this has been made to sound like an intolerable situation to modern minds, which are
concerned with equality. Those who denounce the patriarchy are convinced that women are
gradually emerging from a long slavery. Yet the patriarchy lasted an extremely long time. It
was a stable, enduring and on the whole successful form of social organisation. During the
patriarchy, society moved (not necessarily advanced) from the Iron Age to the modern world.
That is, from monarchy to democracy, from virtual powerlessness to virtual mastery of the
physical environment, from extreme poverty to relative wealth, above all, from primitive
animism to secular humanism. That is, most of the known history of our race has been under
the patriarchal system.
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During all this time, the notion of equality was virtually unknown. There were slaves and
masters, serfs and lords, peasants and aristocrats, men and women. Nobody in his right mind
would have suggested that any of these categories could be considered equal, except before
God. In the real world there was vast inequality. Everyone assumed it was the natural order
of things.
There still is inequality in the world, not just in wealth and power, but in personal
accomplishment and character. It may be observed that those who have the most wealth and
power are not necessarily the brightest and best among us. This is some consolation to those
of us who do not have much wealth or power. We can dismiss the inequality as an accident
in a wicked world.
It is those inequalities which are persistent and institutionalised which give us most offence.
If someone can overcome a disadvantage and rise above it, we applaud and say that although
the inequality is wrong, at least it is not absolute and people can beat it. When society as a
whole seems to be organised on the basis of not allowing certain groups of people a fair deal,
on the grounds of their race, religion or sex, we see more clearly that the system is wrong.
We none of us can be safe under such a system. We all know that, in one way or another,
each of us is a member of some group or minority which could be discriminated against. If
discriminating against groups of people is permissible, then sooner or later the wheel will
come round to us.
For this reason, it is the egalitarian assault on patriarchy which carries most weight. Once
you accept that women have all the faculties of the human race, it becomes impossible to
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accept discrimination against them. More particularly, institutionalised inequality in the law
and in the ordinary arrangements of society, such as marriage, property and taxation can no
longer be considered reasonable. Defenders of patriarchy try to justify the inequality of the
sexes and the grounds that women do not in fact have all the faculties of the human race.
Being the gentle sex, they lack the qualities of leadership which are needed in a violent world.
A short course in history would put these people straight. Men have always followed women
leaders as well as male ones. In literature, as in life, heroic women have always been a staple
of the human imagination.
If patriarchy now seems so cruel and unreasonable, we are left to wonder why it lasted so long
and why it was so successful. Why did everyone, including the women, take it for granted
that society should be patriarchal? The reasons for this are to be found in the fundamental
physiological and psychological differences between men and women, and in the primeval
biological relationship between them.
In the first place, as I have already pointed out, men are generally much bigger and stronger
than women. They are also more assertive and ebullient, although this is not all due to
testosterone but to training and upbringing. Consequently, the father is likely to be an
impressive figure in the context of the family. All the family members look to him for their
personal defence. They also expect him to keep order. All is not sweetness and light in
family life. Sometimes the power of the strongest member of the household is needed to stop
fighting and prevent victimisation in the family. Often, the father acts as a check on the
otherwise overweening power of the mother ( and vice versa, of course).
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There are in fact several reasons why the members of a family might accept the father as their
natural leader. The mother tends to see her partner as her protector and chief supporter in the
world. Many women like to look to men for psychological as well as physical leadership.
They are not being feeble-minded in this. One of the main ways in which men can make
women happy is to provide them with physical and psychological security in so far as such
things are possible.
The ancient pact between men and women included the undertaking from the male partner
that, in exchange for the woman bearing his children, he would protect her and provide for
her. In modern days a rider has been added that he will also care for her and help her in her
battles with life. For all the redefinition of the relationship between the sexes, if she can find
a man who will do it, a woman still wants her man to look after her. Really look after her,
that means, not just going through the motions of the traditional sex role playing. I vividly
remember the huge satisfaction of a woman who told me that her husband treated her "like
cut glass". She meant that he showed her she was precious to him. She positively basked in
his fervent desire to please her and in his tender solicitude.
A man who keeps his side of the bargain and genuinely attends to his partner's well-being is
entitled to, and generally gets, respect and affection from his woman. She will even allow
him to put on the airs and graces of being her lord and master, if society demands it, all the
time realising that theirs is essentially a partnership.
At the purely personal level, the
patriarchy in short was a bit of a charade. Women throughout history have known this.
Although they may have laughed at their husbands behind their backs, that did not necessarily
stop them loving and respecting them. Women's attitude to male power has always been part
deferential and part mocking.
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Outside the home, the main engine of patriarchy was the ever-increasing complexity of social
and economic structures. These required more and more people to fill the offices of the state
and to man the productive economic system. These new people had to be mostly men,
because the women were already too busy, not just rearing children, but doing all the other
things women were expected to do.
If you look at scenes in the lives of the surviving hunter-gatherer societies, you will see that
the men spend a great deal of their time asleep under a tree. This is because of the rigid
division of labour between men and women. Men are specialised in hunting and fighting and
nothing else. All the rest of society's work was done by women. Since there was little
hunting or fighting to be done, the men were like mercenary soldiers, essential at times but
usually a drain on resources.
Men were loafers in the true sense of the word.* As social organisation became more
complex, these loafers were enlisted to serve it. First they became engaged in systematic food
production as fishermen and trappers, later as farmers. Next, they were organised into proper
armies, in order to defend the food surpluses and the city states which emerged. Finally, they
were used for secondary production as artisans and craftsmen, as well as general labourers.
Needless to say, all positions of authority in the state were filled by men.
Men thus became socially useful and, hence, biologically useful at a rather critical juncture in
the evolution of the human species. In many other social animals, especially the social
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insects, the biological usefulness (and indeed life expectancy) of the males is limited to the
fertilisation of the females. Even some higher animals, such as the grazing animals, operate
on the basis that not many males are needed.
Human society might have evolved in the direction of a female worker/male drone type of
social organisation. The reason it did not is to be found in the long gestation and very long
infancy of human child. Because of this, women were pretty helpless for long periods.
Furthermore, the high fertility of women meant that each woman had several children to look
after at the same time. It would have required a high degree of social organisation to provide
for a population consisting more or less entirely of single-parent mothers and children. The
simplest way to cope with the problem was to get the male partner to accept responsibility for
providing for his offspring. This remains a primary social objective to this day.
Consequently, woman as a creature opted very early on to do a deal with the male on the lines
of, "I will have your babies. You will look after us". This meant that every woman had to
have her own man, or at least that there would be a high ratio of males to females. So
perfectly evolved has this system become that more male babies than females are born, in
order to offset the higher mortality of males and to maintain a close equality of numbers in
the population of breeding age.
By giving him the biological incentive to stay loyal to her, that is exclusive breeding rights
and the onward transmission of his genes, woman has enlisted the services of man in her
reproductive mission. The problem for her is that the deal went wrong in some ways. She
*
About one thousand years ago, the kings in Europe kept private armies of professional soldiers, who received a
loaf of bread each day for their subsistence. The peasants resented having to work to feed these men. The term
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ended up not as his breeding partner, but as his property, while he ended up as lord and
master of all he surveyed. The patriarchy was born.
It is by no means certain that patriarchy was always felt to be intolerable by the mass of
women. They do not seem to have gone around muttering, "When is this patriarchy going to
end?" In the first place, women are born survivors. What they cannot change they endure
with stoic patience. Besides, they had other things to worry about. So long as they could
produce their children and rear them in some sort of peace, a lot of their female energy was
absorbed and the basis of the ancient pact still seemed to be in place. It is true that women
who wanted to do things other than rearing children were regarded as rather odd, but there
were relatively few of them. In any case, women had the satisfaction of knowing that their
traditional work was the whole basis of society. While the world belonged to the men, the
people in it belonged to the women.
There was, and still is, a slightly mocking female reaction to male pomp and power, as if to
say, "Every man jack of them came out of our wombs". When the army marched through the
town, the women in the crowd saw not the plumes and weapons or the emblems of male
power, but their husbands, lovers, brothers and sons decked out in glory. So females took a
pride in male achievements, as if to say, "Those are OUR men. They do great things for us".
They may have thought them strutting jackasses as well, of course.
The idea that women deprecate everything men do, especially war, does not stand serious
examination. Women realise better than anyone what the consequences of a lost war can be.
They are also notably patriotic. Throughout history, women have egged on their men to fight
"loafer" became a byword for a lazy rascal who hangs around doing nothing except sponge on others.
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for the tribe or country. It is only since the horrors of the two World Wars in the Twentieth
Century that anti-war feeling became really prevalent. Modern war involves massive attacks
on civil populations, that is women and children. No wonder women have become anti-war.
Yet when the British fleet set sail for the Falklands expedition in 1982, crowds of people
went to the shore to watch the ships leave. It was the first time in generations that a fleet had
sailed out of Portsmouth with battle flags flying. The people were full of anxiety and
foreboding. The whole expedition was extremely hazardous. The fleet was going to fight a
well-armed enemy 8,000 miles away across the wild Atlantic, with no base from which to
operate. The people on the quayside wept as the ships glided past, not for their power and
beauty, but for their tragic vulnerability. Some of the young women watching bared their
breasts in a gesture of ancient and primitive passion meaning, "Fight bravely, but come back
to us". It was an extraordinary moment.
Several of those ships did not come back. Perhaps some of the bare-breasted ones learned the
bitter lesson that women have to produce the men who are lost in these battles. Probably,
they were under no illusions in the first place.
Another reason why women survived under the patriarchy is that personal relations between
men and women are actually only indirectly influenced by the official ideology of the state.
Although women were required to acquiesce in the formal doctrines and practices of
patriarchy, in fact they could work out their relations with their husbands in a less formal
way. Despite what some feminists say, most men have great affection for the women in their
lives, and vice versa.
Consequently, what happened in the home was not always in
accordance with the tenets of patriarchy.
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In fact, the role-reversal of bossy wife and meek husband has long been a favourite element in
comedy, as has the apparently commanding husband who is secretly terrified of his wife.
Even the mighty Zeus was afraid of his wife finding out about his activities. The reason for
this is that males are dependent on females for love and self-esteem, as well as for sexual
relief. Consequently, women can have a dire revenge on malefactors, the same sanction that a
mother has upon a naughty little boy: "I will stop loving you".
It is grossly simplistic to say that the patriarchy consisted entirely of the suppression and
exploitation of women by men, even if that is what the ideology of the time suggested was
happening. Every woman worth her salt knows that she is a match for a man. In a curious
inversion, the theoretically downtrodden women of former times seem to have had more selfconfidence than those of today, who tend to be riven by doubts and anxieties. The female
characters in Shakespeare's plays, for instance, do not seem particularly servile or lacking in
self-esteem. Even the wenches have sharp tongues.
All through literature, which was presumably meant to be credible, the female characters are
more often shown as fully-fledged adult humans than as the empty-headed "fair sex" they
were imagined to be by us moderns. Perhaps that part of the patriarchy which women really
resented did not appear until towards the very end, with the emergence of the Victorian pater
familias. Now he was portrayed in literature as a very unattractive aspect of patriarchy.
There were kind and loving fathers, we also know from the literature, but when ordinary,
mortal men took it upon themselves really to be the lords and masters in their own homes,
instead of just in the office and council chamber, the end was in sight. Their women were not
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going to stand for that. There was serious rebellion in the ranks. Eventually, the First World
War blew all that away, along with a large proportion of European manhood.
It is possible that a very strongly structured society, with rigidly defined sex roles, and a
strong ideological underpinning of social ideals and mores, does in fact bear less heavily on
women than is generally supposed. Our present rather fluid society seems to put more stress
on everybody, including women, than the traditional society with its more inflexible rules. It
was rather like being in the army. Everybody knew the rules and how everything worked.
Provided you kept to the rules, you could have a relatively easy ride.
Some types of personality love the army for this reason. Freedom is a difficult and dangerous
commodity. Christian and Jewish women under the patriarchy may not have suffered as
much as it is now fashionable to suppose. Present-day Muslims, who still maintain a formal
patriarchy, claim that their women are not less happy than Western women.
It is difficult to know the truth of this. Feminists say the women were silent because they
were suppressed. It is difficult to imagine modern women being so suppressed. Could
women have changed so much? If you look at Nineteenth Century photographs of women,
you do sometimes see a repressed, bottled-up kind of look about them. On the other hand, the
photographic techniques of those times required the subject to sit still and shut up for a while.
By the age of the fast-film snapshot of the mid-Twentieth Century, the women look distinctly
unbottled-up. Portrait painters of the Romantic age tended to see women as creatures of
mystery and power.
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It is very hard for us to imagine what it was like to live in former times. People long ago did
not think or feel like us, at least not about social organisation. So it is useless to imagine
them having our thoughts and feelings. Articulate women did complain about the patriarchy,
but we cannot know to what extent they spoke for all women. Even now, there are masses of
women who are not desperately unhappy in our still rather patriarchal system.
Let us not forget, however, the other side of the coin. Woman as victim is also one of the
stock characters of literature, revealing what could happen to women if the patriarchal system
failed them, as it often did. Just think of the tragic women in Hardy's novels, which were not
all that overdrawn. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Fanny Robin are archetypes of women illused and betrayed by men and punished by the miserable hypocrisy of respectable society.
This is the real criticism of all highly-structured social systems: what happens in the
exceptional cases? If a woman is considered her husband's property, this may be tolerable if
she has a kind and loving husband, but what if he is cruel or neglectful? Or, more commonly,
if he is a fool, or simply inadequate for his responsibilities? A woman's happiness depended
entirely on who she married. If she had no choice even in this, she might as well be a slave.
Her fate was likely to be a matter of chance. It could be miserable indeed, given that she had
scant powers of redress if she were wronged.
Then there was the other kind of exception. Supposing a woman did not want to be a wife and
mother? Under the patriarchy, she could become a nun or a prostitute, perhaps a servant. Not
many other choices were open to her. Yet the pages of history are full of exceptional women,
who somehow evaded the constraints which were supposed to be placed on their entire sex.
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Like other human institutions, patriarchy was never very complete or particularly rigorous. It
was the official ideology, but what people actually do is not always in accordance with
official ideology. It is this inefficiency which makes ideology tolerable. Anyone who tries to
live rigidly within a set of ideals quickly goes mad, or is put down by the neighbours.
Throughout the patriarchy, there were families with women as head and states with women as
rulers. Ironically, it was the rather old-fashioned peoples, such as the Bronze Age tribes of
northern Europe, and later the English and other Germanic peoples, who most often had
women rulers. It was the go-ahead peoples, such as the Franks, who got rid of the old Celtic
and Teutonic notion that kingship could descend in the female line. The Romans, and all the
advanced Latins of later centuries, never had women rulers. Completeness of patriarchal
institutions became a badge of modernity.
Backward tribes, such as the Iceni and the Brigantes in Britain, were sometimes led by queens
who actually ruled the people, including armies of warriors. Queen Boudicca of the Iceni
certainly led her people on the field of battle. The Romans just could not get over it. They
were shocked to the tips of their beaky noses.
These ancient peoples had rules of inheritance which allowed kingship to descend to a female
of the royal blood. Naturally, this system produced queens as well as kings. This was a
throwback to the pre-patriarchal system of the Bronze Age. There are recorded instances of
peoples deliberately breaking this link with the past, so as to fall in line with the later
patriarchal ideas. Thus, the Salian Franks were said to have decided in the Tenth Century
that henceforth no woman could inherit any part of their land or, hence, the kingship of the
Frankish people. This law persisted until the end of the French monarchy nearly a thousand
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years later. In point of fact, it was not the Franks' fault at all, but part of the general trend to
disinherit women in the Middle Ages.
In some places, therefore, the old ways persisted long after the patriarchy became the official
ideology. In the Western world, women could see examples of women who did not bend
their necks to men. In the Roman Empire, two thousand years ago, people said that the
Emperor Augustus ruled the world, but his wife Livia ruled Augustus.
The position of women rulers in an officially male-supremacist society was potentially
difficult. The question was what part their female sexuality should play in the ruling of their
male subjects. They solved it in a number of ways. Most chose to be respectable married
women and thus appeared before their subjects as matriarchs. The modern queens of England
have used this method to harness the affection of their people by being the mother of the
nation.
Other female leaders have chosen the opposite route and made virginity the source of a
mysterious power. They too avoid a decisive sexual involvement with their male subjects.
Queen Elizabeth I of England was a notable exponent of this technique. She invoked the awe
and wonder of her people by remaining a virgin, despite being manifestly a fully-sexed
woman. Whether her virginity was real or a propaganda fiction is a matter of debate, but she
certainly claimed the devotion of poets and intellectuals, as well as the obedient royaltyfodder.
Joan of Arc, the heroine of French resistance to English hegemony in France, was another
example of a woman using her virginity to inspire reverence in male followers. She was
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doubly powerful, because she was also of unquestionable holiness. A holy virgin was almost
a magical person in the Christian world of the late Middle Ages. Men followed Joan in
battle, believing that her purity would cause God to give her victory. As she won most of her
battles, this seemed self-evidently true.
It might be thought that Joan of Arc was an example of a much older figure in the Northern
world, the battle maiden. Armed women have long been part of European mythology,
perhaps because they did actually exist in a remote past. Perhaps the ancient Greeks told tales
of Amazons because they had heard stories of warrior queens of the old Bronze Age tribes.
In Britain, there were still queens ruling fierce tribesmen in the first century AD.
Men would indeed follow a woman into battle, especially a virgin girl. They probably
thought that where she could go, they could go, and that she would put them to shame if they
were less brave than she. Then there was the powerful mystique of the virgin at work.
Virgins had special powers. In particular, they were closer to the spiritual essence of life than
ordinary mortals.
An example of the mythic power of the virgin in battle occurs in J.R.R. Tolkien's story "The
Lord of the Rings". In the final great battle between mankind and all the anti-human forces of
evil, the Maid of Rohan disguises herself as a man in order to disobey her father's injunction
that she must not take part in the fighting. During the battle, she is confronted by a terrible
monster of evil which so terrifies all men that their hearts quail and they die of fright. The
Maid defies the beast, which hisses at her, "You fool to stand against me! It is written, by no
man's hand may I be slain!"
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The Maid replies, "I am no man!" While the monster is digesting this, she chops its head off.
We recognise the force of the myth at once. Women are mighty in their own way. They can
do things men cannot do. The battle in the story stands for life in general, where good
struggles against evil. The holy virgin slays the dragon of evil. Men and women are not
afraid of the same things. The otherness of women is a source of strength to the race.
So, all through the long years of the patriarchy, women knew they were as valuable as men
really, and that they could rule nations if required. Men in their pomp and power could never
wholly repress the female spirit, which flowed through the ages like an underground river.
MISOGYNY
Men very seldom say in public anything which is overtly anti-women, not in civilised society,
anyway. Yet they frequently make snide remarks and sneers about them, particularly in allmale company. Usually, this is only the normal wear and tear of daily life. When somebody
upsets us, we quickly resort to generalisations about their kind. We seize on any perceived
difference in religion, nationality or sex to explain the apparent perverseness, awkwardness or
plain nastiness of the offender. So a man who is crossed by a woman may mutter about the
awfulness of women in general. Most of the time this does not mean anything. People who
are angry will seize any stick to beat an adversary.
Real hatred and fear of women usually only reveals itself more subtly. Presumably, men who
are afraid of women learn very early to keep their feelings to themselves. In fact, it is
sometimes their very early experiences of women which have damaged them in this way.
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It is normal for a man to have a healthy respect for women, because he meets them at
practically every point in his life and many of them have some sort of power or influence over
him, especially during his formative years. He learns that they have special rewards for males
of whom they approve, and terrifying sanctions on those of whom they disapprove. A small
boy who has a fight with his mother soon learns that she can turn off the tap of love which
fills his life with happiness. Or she can pretend to, because she is much more experienced
than he is. Either way, it is enough to make him wary of crossing her.
Nevertheless, young males are generally greatly indulged by females of all ages. It would
seem to most boys that, although women can be pretty tough and authoritative, they are not
usually frightening unless they are grossly offended. Normally, they offer the comforting lap,
the reassuring bosom and the soft arms for which males never cease to crave.
Yet fear and hatred of women, or misogyny, is not unknown among men. Obviously, it is
hard to quantify this. In any case, it is a matter of degree. Real out-and-out, fully paid-up
woman haters are hard to find, though by no means impossible. It is easier to find a less
morbid antipathy. Possibly one man in ten does not like women, while many more can show
a broad streak of dislike if they are scratched. Most men can be provoked into anti-female
abuse at some time or another.
While real hatred of women is probably pathological, and an ingrained dislike is probably
only a neurosis, much of the niggling dislike which occasionally surfaces is probably due to a
social dysfunction, that is an inability to relate successfully to women as they really are,
instead of how they are imagined.
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We can only speculate on why a few men really hate women. Hatred is usually the opposite
side of the coin to fear. Being afraid of people is one of the main reasons for hating them. It
has been suggested that most of men's problems in relating to women stem from their own
relationships with their mothers. In short, men hate and fear women because they hated and
feared their mothers.
In some ways, this is an attractive theory, because the first woman a man knows is his mother,
or whoever stands in for her. If you could shine a torch into a man's mind, you would see
there, like an idol in the back of a cave, the huge figure of his mother. A little boy sees his
mother as a sort of beautiful giantess, who gives him everything that makes life possible. He
knows that what makes him develop is not the food she brings him, but her love.
Clearly, this is a relationship of such intensity that it can easily go wrong. Not all mothers are
loving and caring.
Not all human beings, irrespective of gender, can cope with the
responsibility of bringing up a child. Many children have bruising experiences in their
formative years. Yet it is too easy simply to blame the mothers for damaging the psyches of
their male children, even though this does surely happen. Real pathological hatred of women,
which occasionally reveals itself in gross acts of violence against them, is quite likely to be,
like some other "mental" illnesses, physiological or genetic in origin rather than purely
psychological. That is to say, the repressed and sullen loner who one day starts killing
women is as likely to have had a warm and loving mother as a neglectful or cruel one. The
fact is, the guy is a nut and could just as well have developed the same corrosive hatred of
basketball players as of women. It so happens that, for a man, women are much more
important than basketball players.
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A neurotic dislike of women, which is altogether less serious and more common, may well
have its origin in unhappy early experiences. Even here, however, it is sometimes difficult to
see what the mother should have done differently. The fact is that some personalities are
prone to paranoia and self-delusion. They convince themselves that those who love them are
secretly doing them down. Given the extraordinary power which mothers have, it is not
surprising that a slightly paranoid male child can come to the conclusion that his mother is
trying to manipulate and control him. In fact, he may be dead right in his assessment. Some
mothers are monsters who do mercilessly manipulate and control everyone around them who
is not big enough to fight back. Yet many men survive this and grow up to be normal people.
A less severely neurotic condition, which gives rise to slight feelings of misogyny, is a
resentment of the power and influence of women. There can occur in males a cognitive
dissonance between the ideology of male supremacy, which pervades our society, and the real
state of affairs in the world in which women often have a great deal of power and status.
These creatures who are supposed to be nice, docile and supportive of men are getting above
themselves and walking about as if they own the place.
This attitude sometimes leads men of inadequate education and low self-esteem to attack
"superior" women, such as students and nurses. There have been horrifying cases of women's
colleges and hostels being systematically terrorised by men with this particular mental set,
who rape their victims out of sheer anger at their superiority.
Of course, a man who feels better as a result of raping and terrorising women has something
wrong with him, but he is not necessarily a psychopath. Plenty of normal men have this same
resentment of female superiority without having the same proclivity to brutality and violence.
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Yet they are willing to demonstrate their hostility if they think they can get away with it. I
once knew a young woman who drove around in a conspicuous red Italian sports car. She
had to give it up because of the continual harassment, aggression and foul sexual abuse from
male drivers, especially the younger and dimmer ones, who fiercely resented her apparent
wealth and superiority. When she acquired a feeble little "woman's car", she never had any
more trouble.
If you want to know what women have to put up with from these knights of the road, you
should do as I once did and lie out of sight on the back seat of a car being driven by a woman,
This happened once when were returning from a party. Being slightly the worse for drink, I
did not drive but lay on the back seat, while my wife and her friend occupied the two front
seats. Halfway home, they got into an altercation with a taxi driver, who stopped his cab
across the front of our car and started to harangue the two women in a very unfriendly and
sexist way. They did not take this lying down but shouted back at him. At first, I ignored the
row, thinking it would all be over in a second as such things usually are. But it dragged on.
Then I realised the taxi driver was having fun by deliberately trying to frighten the women.
Moreover, he was beginning to succeed.
I became angry and sat up to see what was going on. Something about the man's hostile rat
face angered me. I roared at him to get lost, adding some selected expletives. His reaction
was amazing. He peered and cringed at the same time, as if he could not believe his eyes.
Seeing two women in the front, he had not considered the possibility that there could be a
man in the back of the car. He was prepared to enjoy tormenting two women, because there
was no risk to himself, but a vigorous male on their side made the odds unacceptable. He
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could get hurt. He hurriedly drove off, still cringing, as if I might miraculously appear behind
him in his own cab.
Just as there are some men who can never be alone with a woman without making a
suggestive remark to her, there are some men who cannot be alone with a woman without
showing dislike and aggression towards her, especially if she cannot be patronised. This
phenomenon is too common to be dismissed as merely the odd behaviour of an
unrepresentative few.
As I have said, the cognitive dissonance between an ideology of male supremacy and
manifest female superiority is too great to be borne by some men of low ability and personal
attainment. Knowing themselves to be inferior to most men, these characters get at least
some lift from feeling superior to women. They are bitter when they discover that there are
women with higher intellect and attainment than them. It is like finding that your dog has a
degree in mathematics. Instead of patting him on the head, you might feel like kicking him
up the rear.
Another kind of misogyny stems from an irrational gut dislike of females at a very basic level.
This is acquired very early in life, from a young male's first social contacts with females of
the same age. Boys sometimes complain that girls are nasty and smelly. Normally, this is
only slight alarm at the otherness of females. Boys with sisters get used to them very quickly
and do not think anything of their strange ways. Sometimes, though, little boys are much
more sensitive and nervous than is generally supposed. They can be shocked by the apparent
brutality of little girls, who can indeed be quite nasty.
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On my first day at a new school at the age of six, I was seated by the kindly teacher next to
two girls, in the fond belief that they would play the caring female role and look after me. In
fact, they subjected me to a systematic campaign of humiliation and mental torture. At last,
the teacher realised that her plan was not working. I remember looking through a mist of tears
at the girls' blunt, freckled noses, their bland smooth foreheads and straight blond hair and
thinking how much I hated them.
Fortunately, there were other girls who were nice to know, so I did not suffer any lasting
damage to my opinion of females. Also, the teacher who rescued me and earned my gratitude
was a woman. She did not know she was helping to insulate a young male against the perils
of misogyny. On the other hand, I did learn from this episode not to idealise females. They
are not all kind and compassionate, like the ones I knew at home. That was a lesson I had to
learn.
As to whether females are smelly, that is a matter of predilection. If you like them, they smell
nice, but if you dislike them you could say they are smelly. Think of a food you dislike and
ask yourself whether you like the smell of it cooking. Then do the same for a food you really
enjoy. It smells lovely. No doubt, a male with a sharp nose, especially a young male that is,
can detect a characteristic female body odour. Usually, it is masked by deodorants and
perfume, but women's sweat does smell different.
Once at a remote airfield, where there were no women for miles, a group of us pilots had been
flying all day from the other side of the base, away from our quarters. All we had smelt for
hours was fresh air, jet fuel and our own sweat. At the end of the day, we went back to the
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officers' mess. As we piled out of the transport and through the doors of the mess, one of the
young men stopped, sniffed the air and exclaimed, "Women!"
He was right. We could smell the usual odours of polish, tobacco smoke, beer and men, but
in addition there was perfume and the unmistakeable note of female body odour. Amid
laughter, someone said we were so sex-starved we could smell oestrogen. Some of the
officers had brought their womenfolk in to dinner and we could smell them long before we
could see them. Needless to say, we unmarried men could not wait to see these wondrous
creatures.
The nature of the female smell is hard to describe. Probably, everyone experiences smells in
different ways, in any case. I experience it as a slightly sweet, milky smell, much different
from the musky odour of fresh male sweat. When it goes stale, women's sweat smells rather
sharp and astringent, whereas men's old sweat smells rather of cats. That's what I think,
anyway.
The point is, females are not any more smelly than males. They just smell different. Like the
sights and sounds of them, the smell of women is something you miss if you are unfortunate
enough to live far from them. We know now that human beings, like other animals, respond
to pheromones, or chemical messages, which are transmitted through the air into the nostrils
from one animal to another.
It seems that we males send subtle messages to females, telling them that we are male, how
old we are and how vigorous we are. A strong, dominant man sends out pheromones which
are frightening to other men but attractive to women. Probably, the same things happen in
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reverse, with sexually vigorous women tampering with our brains by their unseen, largely
unsmelt, chemical messages.
Perhaps a misogynist is a man who either cannot receive these messages, or who for some
reason reacts adversely to them. Most of us are ready to open our minds and hearts to them,
letting those pheromones fly in and allowing those female minds and bodies to do their work
on us.
The biggest mistake which misogynists make is to regard all females as the same, as if there
were only one of them. So a man with this mental set may have a painful experience in a love
affair. He may think himself cruelly and callously treated and conclude from this that all
women are bitches.
Women frequently are ruthless and unscrupulous in personal
relationships, especially with men. Consequently, we can expect to get hurt sometimes.
However, it is wrong to think that every woman will be like that. Most of us eventually have
the happy experience of loving a woman who is kind and wise.
In fact, she might be the same woman who has just broken another man's heart. Generally,
women are good to men they love and callous with those they do not love. This is because
they regard love as a poker game in which men hold most of the cards. Consequently, they
are inclined to play it rough. All's fair in love and war, they say.
Being heartbroken in love is no reason to be become a misogynist. It happens to all of us,
men and women alike. We just have to get over it. You feel so bad for a time that you think
you will never get over it. But everybody does, in the end. For most of us, someone else
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comes along, or else we just come to accept that there is no point in loving someone who
does not love us in return.
By not expecting too much or too little of women, by neither idealising them nor despising
them, you can avoid the deep, lonely rut of misogyny. Women are just people, like us, but
being female they have the power to make us sad or happy. Best decide they are going to
make us happy. You can do this by accepting them as they are and enjoying them as
creatures, a mixture of all that is bad and all that is good in human nature.
Once, sitting in a pub with a friend and his sons, we fell to talking about the difficulties and
dangers of our relationships with women. One of the young men sighed and asked, "Why do
they have such weird power over us?" No one volunteered to answer that. We older men
realised that we just accepted it as a fact of life. On reflection, I suppose the answer is that we
need them as much as they need us.
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HOMOSEXUALITY
So far, we have assumed that to be a man is to find your destiny in women and that your
sexuality will be enacted in relation to them. This is true for most men, but not for all. Nor is
it true that absolutely all women look to express their sexuality through men. There are some
people who are sexually attracted to people of their own sex. Hence the word "homosexual",
which means "the same sex". In the present terminology, they are usually referred to as
"gays", although there are an immense number of other terms used, most of them derogatory
and offensive. Female homosexuals are sometimes called "lesbians", a reference to the
ancient Greek poet, Sappho, who was a woman whose passions were clearly directed at other
women and who lived on the island of Lesbos.
In our Judeo-Christian culture, homosexuals have long been subject to the abuse and hostility
of the rest of society. In particular, the churches have considered homosexuality "unnatural"
and abhorrent. As a result, respectable people were inclined to allow their suspicions to get
the better of them. The power of the law was used to suppress homosexual practices. Men in
public life who were discovered to be homosexual found themselves hounded from office
more ruthlessly than those who simply stole the public's money. Some, like Oscar Wilde the
brilliant playwright and wit, were sent to prison for being homosexuals. Wilde never dared
show his face in England again after his release from Reading gaol. He died in exile in Paris,
where people were more realistic in their attitude to sexual matters. His case became a cause
celebre, which eventually led to a more tolerant and sympathetic view of homosexuality
among thoughtful people.
At long last came the famous Wolfenden Report in 1957, which recommended that
homosexuality should no longer be a crime. The British Parliament duly enacted this a few
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years later, in parallel with similar legislation in other western countries. Nevertheless, there
remained much prejudice against homosexuals. Happily, our own times have seen a certain
amount of enlightenment on the subject of homosexuality. At least, homosexuals are no
longer officially persecuted.
Nevertheless, there is still a lot of misunderstanding and
hostility towards them. Also, there seems to be a genuine moral perplexity over what to think
about homosexuality and how to react to it. Possibly, this perplexity will never be resolved.
It is a genuine conundrum. The only thing to do is to make sure you are not an ignorant bigot
about it.
The steps toward wisdom in this matter are to realise that:
a)
People cannot do anything about their sexual orientation. It seems to be completely
innate. They can repress it and ignore it or express it openly, but they can in no way
change it.
b)
Sexual orientation, which seems on the face of it to be completely bi-polar, is really
more complex than this. It seems to us that everyone is either straight or gay, but in
reality things are not that simple. More probably, there is a continuum between the
extremes of hetero and homosexuality. It is true that most of us are clearly on one side
or the other, but many people are more ambivalent. They contain elements of both.
Possibly, most of us are capable of homosexual feelings to some degree. It is best not
to be smug about being heterosexual, if that is what we think we are.
c)
Homosexuals are no threat at all to anyone who is not of their sexual persuasion. The
only exception to this is pederasty (being sexually attracted to children) but this afflicts
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heterosexuals as well as homosexuals. It is thus a separate issue. Pederasty is a menace
which society has to deal with sternly in order to protect children, but the vast majority
of homosexuals are not a threat to children or anyone else.
d) Some heterosexuals profess to find the sexual practices of homosexuals distasteful. In
particular, buggery, or anal intercourse, is held to be physically repugnant and grossly
unhealthy.
It is important to realise that homosexuals feel the same way about
heterosexual practices. So they fiercely resent being called perverts. They may be a
minority, but it is a mistake to think that a minority is by definition perverted.
e)
No doubt, those who wish to pin the label of perversion on homosexuals will point out
that what heterosexuals do is manifestly ordained by nature, that the vagina is expressly
designed to receive the penis, whereas the anus is not. Even so, in human affairs it is a
difficult philosophical undertaking to establish what is normal, other than in a purely
statistical sense, i.e. what the majority do.
Also, it is not a good idea to pin labels on people, especially rude labels. There is a
strong tendency in human nature to give a dog a bad name and then hang him. That is to
say, because the term "pervert" carries overtones of judgment and condemnation, it too
easily leads to the wider assumption that homosexuals are bad people. This in turn
leads to the even more dangerous assumption that any nasty things which are done to
them are justified.
f)
On a purely personal basis, it is as well to remember that homosexuality is fairly
common (though just how common is a matter of controversy). Consequently, there is a
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strong possibility that someone you love is a homosexual. Another reason for being
slow to condemn.
Bearing all these points in mind, it should be possible to see that we ought to be able to live
in peace with homosexuals. Homophobia, or hatred of homosexuals, is seen as irrational,
since nobody is threatened by them. Even an ordinary gut dislike of them is foolish, because
their practices are their own concern and do not involve anyone else.
It is sometimes said that although they may not be a threat sexually, homosexuals do have
an annoying tendency to form cliques and in-groups which take over whole areas of activity,
so that heterosexuals may not enter. Even more annoying is the claim that effeminate men
sometimes make that they are more sensitive and artistic than other men, so that
"masculine" men are decried as brutish and insensitive. No doubt some of them are, but it is
not necessary to list the great heterosexual male artists in order to nail this silly lie. Also,
the gay notion of sensibility is not always as appealing to others as they might like to think.
However, these are mere squabbles among equals. They should not colour our general
attitude to homosexuality.
These accusations of homosexuals' clannishness are sometimes true, but gays are only being
characteristically human when they do this. They form in-groups, like other humans, for
mutual defence and support. They are a defensive reply to the rest of society's hostility
towards them. You will probably find that if you are unprejudiced and friendly towards
them, gays are not much different from other people socially. Of course, you have to accept
their homosexuality as they do. That is their condition for friendship. They do not want to
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be patronised or pitied, just to be accepted as they are. If you can do that, you will find there
is much fun and friendship in their world.
As a matter of fact, dealing with homosexuals of your own sex is very easy, once you realise
that they are no threat to your own sexuality. What is harder to cope with is homosexuality
in the opposite sex. Women often say they have no problems with male homosexuals. In
fact, they rather like them, because of the absence of sexual undertones in the relationship.
But men may have more problems coming to terms with lesbianism.
At first, a heterosexual man may experience some bewilderment, because lesbians also may
embody elements of both male and female role-playing. To a male onlooker, they present
the puzzle of women who are not attracted to men.
Some lesbian couples have a
"masculine" and a "feminine" partner. While is easy for us males to understand that the
"masculine" is attracted to women, it is less easy to grasp that the "feminine" one is too.
When I was a very young man, I was sitting in a cinema on day and noticed a pretty girl
sitting next to me. Thinking my luck had changed, I turned to look at her. I was horrified to
see that her skirt was up around her waist and that the woman sitting on the other side of her
had her hand in the girl's crotch. Even as a young prig of seventeen, I was sufficiently
worldly not to let on that I had seen anything, but I was shocked and confused. First, there
was the grossness of it. If I myself ever had the chance to put my hand in a girl's crotch, it
was under her skirt, so nobody would notice, particularly teachers, fathers and others who
might object to this practice. Secondly, I wondered how the girl could let an older woman
use her so.
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Of course, on reflection, I realise that the woman was only doing what I would have enjoyed
doing. For the girl's part, she would not have wanted me to do it, even though I thought she
would be better off with me. She was just not attracted to men. So my first encounter with
lesbians ended with me learning that it was nothing to do with me. They were impelled by
motives which do not involve men.
Once again, if you can accept that, you can be friends with lesbians. Some of them actively
dislike men, it is true. Sometimes, they are the exact counterparts of the misogynists I have
described. If you met a woman who dislikes men, it will be difficult to get on with her,
because her feelings will be transparent and you will notice the hostility. Fortunately,
misanthropy among women seems relatively uncommon, even among lesbians. In general,
if you regard them with respect and affection, as I trust you now do other women, lesbians
will not seem any different from other women, except that the element of sexual attraction is
missing.
It is unlikely that you will find yourself in the unfortunate position of making sexual
advances to a woman who is a lesbian. This is a situation which can be a mixture of
comedy and tragedy, depending on how good your sense of humour is. It is a good idea to
be sure of a woman's sexual proclivities before you start to woo her. However, this is
largely a theoretical problem, because women are normally much more in charge of the
situation sexually than we realise. So a lesbian will not let you get so far as falling in love
with her.
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PAIR-BONDING
An observer from another planet would quickly realise that there are two types of human
being. It would also be apparent that there is a strong tendency for the adults to go about in
pairs, consisting of one of each sort. In fact, anyone who does not have a partner will tell
you that the whole of society is organised on the assumption that everyone is one of a
couple. Broadly speaking, it is. Married couples usually go around together. Young lovers
do so whenever they can. People who are not married normally have a friend or partner of
opposite sex. Consequently, social events are very often organised on the basis that the
participants will be couples rather than individuals. People who are unattached are often
given by their hosts another single person as a temporary partner, just so they don't feel left
out.
Happiness is often regarded as synonymous with having a mate, despite the fact that most
people's troubles only really begin when they acquire a sexual partner. Well-meaning
friends and relatives persist in trying to find a suitable mate for anyone who is single. A
cynic would say that that, being all in the soup themselves, they are damned if they see why
anyone should be allowed to get away. A kinder interpretation is that people genuinely want
their friends to be happy and they know that a good mate gives more joy than woe.
At any rate, there is strong social pressure on us to pair off. Probably, we don't need much
encouragement. Our tendency to form an alliance with a mate or partner is surely innate.
Social pressures may reinforce it, but most of the time we are doing what comes naturally.
Sociologists glorify this process with the term "pair bonding".
This refers to the
psychological process by which the partners form their attachment and their loyalty to one
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another. They seem to weave a mysterious spell about each other, so that they yearn to be
together and only feel happy when they are.
This process may be analogous to the imprinting which occurs when a young creature is
born and forms a strong bond with its mother. A duckling emerging from its egg attaches
itself to the first large thing it sees which moves. Presumably, it has a little message in its
brain which says, "Peck your way out of the egg and meet your mother, who is waiting
outside." This is what happens most of the time, although we have all heard the story of the
duckling who thought the farmer's wife was his mum.
Human beings are a little more complicated than ducklings, but something of the same sort
happens when a new baby meets his mummy. She takes him to her breast and cradles him
there. He immediately memorises her smell and ever after wants to be with her. She in turn
falls in love with him and longs to hold him and attend to his needs. If a mother gives a
young baby to someone else to hold, he pulls a face and shrinks back as if to say, "You're
not my mummy!" Young as he is, he is imprinted with the sight and smell of his mother
and he knows exactly who she is.
A similar sort of imprinting occurs when people fall in love. That is what pair bonding
really is, falling in love. The extraordinary thing about it is that it appears to have no
rational basis. You might think we could chose our mates, using our brains to make a wise
decision.
Not at all. We cannot decide who we fall in love with any more than we can decide the
colour of our eyes. This is why people have put it down to fate, or predetermination, some
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factor operating outside our own willpower. I have heard a woman say that when a man she
did not know came into the room, she recognised him straight away as her husband. That is,
the husband he was destined to become. This sounds like the workings of hindsight, but it
illustrates the feeling which many people have that their mates are walking around out there
somewhere and all they have to do is find them.
This sense of pre-ordained destiny underlies many of the attitudes to marriage found in the
West, where people are more of less free to find their own partners. It is essentially a
romantic view, laying emphasis on the feelings of the partners and their sense of individual
fulfilment. In cultures which view marriage as more of a dynastic and social contract, the
feelings of the partners are of course relevant, but a clear distinction is made between love
and marriage. They may go together, but not necessarily. So a king could marry a princess
from a neighbouring kingdom mainly because it was important to be allied to her father and,
also, to keep up a supply of legitimate heirs to the throne. Yet the mistress of his heart, the
woman he really loved, might be someone else, a nobody in dynastic terms.
This is an extreme example, but Indian farmers do the same sort of thing. Many fathers
have said to their sons, "You must marry this girl, but you can still keep the woman you
love." Does this cause anguish to the wives, you may ask. Of course it does. Women are
not free to the same extent to take lovers. Back to exclusive breeding rights. If the queen
took a lover, who knows who the heir to the throne might be? He could be the son of the
king's valet. This is why having intercourse with the queen was an act of treason, with dire
penalties.
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So the separation of love and marriage is fine for husbands but not for wives. Not in
general, at any rate, although powerful women could always do pretty much as they liked,
within the rules of the game. Witness the first act of the opera Der Rosenkavalier, which
begins with the Marschalin in bed with her toy boy, as we would say nowadays.
While such an arrangement might seem dishonest and immoral to some, it at least
recognises that we marry quite deliberately, but we fall in love more or less haphazardly.
There is a clear distinction to be made at this point between affairs of the heart and mere
philandering. Many people like to pursue the opposite sex for nothing more than the fun of
it. However, most of us eventually come to realise that this is a destructive and rather
unfulfilling pursuit. We tend to grow out of it, although some men can be heard boasting in
their middle age of how many birds they can pull. More mature men realise that there is a
difference between a casual acquaintance and a wife. It is like the difference between a
Mars bar and a three-course dinner. Both have their points, but you should not try to live on
Mars bars.
True pair bonding only occurs a few times in anyone's life and is usually the start of a long
relationship. Pairing starts early in life, even before puberty. Among our friends and
acquaintances of the opposite sex, there is always one who is special. By the teenage years,
we have already formed the habit of pairing off into boy-girl couples. Adults sometimes
dismiss teenage love as "calf-love", because of the love-sick appearance and desperate
mooning of these apprentice adults. Their plaintive bleating fills the airwaves in popular
music.
Nevertheless, these adolescent affairs are often very passionate, despite their
apparent instability. We should acknowledge the reality of the emotions of young people
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who are learning to cope with some of the most powerful feelings of which human beings
are capable.
Some people pair off in their teens and remain together for long periods, sometimes all their
lives. It seems reasonable to suppose that in the "natural" state, people always did start
pairing off at puberty and, after some trial and error, find mates who were more or less
permanent. Modern society has tried to equate permanent pairing with marriage. It also
tends to force people to delay their final pairing until relatively late in life or, at least, for a
long time after puberty. You have to finish your education, get a job, find a house, and so
on, before you can even think of marrying. The age of first marriage increases all the time
in advanced societies. More recently, the economic and social trends have been reinforced
by a general feeling that it is essential to have a few years of carefree adulthood before
getting down to the serious business of marriage.
Until the middle of the Twentieth Century, and still today in less stressful societies, people
in the West married very much earlier. In fact, getting married was almost the first adult act
of most people. Most women were married by the age of nineteen and most men by twenty
or twenty-one. The minimum age of marriage was actually raised to sixteen in England in
the Nineteenth Century.
In those days, it was recognised that sexual activity would begin as soon as physical
adulthood was reached and that it was undesirable to try to prevent young people from
following their instincts. Marriage was the way to allow that to happen in a socially
controlled way. It seemed to be in accordance with people's physical and psychological
needs. Now that social pressures force the postponement of marriage for many years after
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sexual adulthood is reached, society has to accept that young adults will be sexually active
outside marriage. There was some resistance to this at first, on the grounds that sex outside
marriage is immoral.
The dam finally burst in the 1960's, when it became generally
accepted that marriage is only one of the possible relationships between men and women.
As it happened, the informal, ad hoc relationships which many couples set up actually
looked remarkably like monogamous marriages. What was lacking was the legal contract
and the solemnity of a proper marriage, but the arrangement felt pretty much like marriage
to the participants.
The essential point is that what makes a relationship work is the human bonding between
the partners. This can exist with or without the ceremonial and the legal contract. Latterly,
people have come to realise that the legal contract and the solemn ceremonial are desirable
for all sorts of reasons, both practical and emotional. So marriage is just as popular as it
ever was. It serves to cement and strengthen the natural pair-bonding, which could happen
even on a desert island, without all the paraphernalia of priests, lawyers, bridesmaids and
mothers-in-law. It seems most couples want to stand up in front of the whole tribe and
publicly swear their commitment to one another. Our ancestors knew a thing or two about
these matters. Marriage was a folk custom long before it was taken over by the church and
the law. It only became a religious sacrament in the Twelfth Century in Europe, well over a
thousand years after Christianity was founded.
Some people see the tendency for young couples to co-habit without a formal marriage as a
decline in standards. But there is no other solution. The alternative would be to try to force
young adults to be celibate during the most sexually active part of their lives. That would
cause more social dislocation than a lack of marriage contracts. It is better to have the
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young men at home sleeping with their girl friends than roaming the streets like waifs and
strays.
Truly, we do have a primeval urge to mate early in life. In some ways, it is a pity more
people do not marry their first loves. The sexual passion and fierce, biological partnerloyalty of first love is hard to recreate in later life. We become more experienced and more
cynical. We also learn to hold back some part of ourselves in sheer self-defence.
The observer of these events will also notice that most people tend to form a stable pair,
whether or not they marry. That is, apart from some youthful exuberance, human beings are
not usually very promiscuous. They do not copulate with every attractive member of the
opposite sex, but seem to want one regular partner. In short, they mostly want to find a mate
with whom to do all sorts of things in addition to sexual intercourse. It seems fairly obvious
that the sex act is not the sole object of these partnerships, but the cement which binds them
together.
Human beings are so highly evolved that sex, which was once a biological necessity for
reproduction, as in other animals, has become largely a social matter, for the purpose of pair
bonding. Sex binds the partners together and keeps them loyal to one another. That is
something which is far harder to achieve, and more important to the future of the race, than
mere conception, which for most people is easily achieved.
Those theologians who
maintain that the purpose of sexual intercourse is to procreate, and that therefore
contraception is wrong because it thwarts Nature's or God's intentions, have completely
missed the point.
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Anyone who has been married knows that sex is more important than that. If contraception
enables the partners to copulate more often and more happily, it does more for the
procreation and rearing of children than the strictures of priests against it. For most couples,
the conception of children is an incidental in their sex lives, an added advantage, not the
purpose of it. The important, and difficult, part is to stay loving and loyal to one another, so
that the children can be raised by their parents. Sexual intercourse is a means of achieving
this. If procreation were the main purpose of sex, we would only do it once a year.
Human love takes many forms, not necessarily all sex-related. Our emotional life consists
largely of the strong bonds we form with people who matter to us. We find ourselves
enmeshed in all sorts of relationships. For example, parents generally love their children
and vice versa. Good friends become dear to us, as do members of our families. All of
these feelings are called love, even though there is little or no sexual element in them. No
doubt, fathers feel particularly strongly about their daughters. Quite possibly, there is a
sexual element in this, deriving from a man's desire to cherish his females, perhaps even to
own them.
Similarly, mothers have some sort of a love affair with their sons. Women find tiny males
very appealing, perhaps because they are vulnerable as well as male. Either way, there is a
certain sexual element in such relationships. It is possible that these “love affairs” between
children and their parents of opposite sex are a form of training or practice for the serious
pair-bonding they will experience in adult life.
Sexual feelings do colour many of our emotions, given that there is more to sexuality than
mere copulation. Conversely, there is more to love than mere sex. Freud said that all
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psychological energy is essentially sexual in origin, even if it is used for other purposes.
Indeed, this often seems to be a reasonable proposition. Much human energy, including
such activities as art and music, does seem to have the mark of a sexual wellspring. Also, it
is noticeable that a man who is in love experiences a rush of mental energy which makes
him more exuberant and active in every way.
The feeling of being loved and accepted by his woman give a man great joy. It makes life
seem glorious. Males generally seek the emotional security of a close relationship with one
woman, a monogamous relationship. Women themselves offer this kind of relationship in
preference to any other. When she loves a man, a woman does not normally show much
interest in any other man. In effect, she gives her loyalty in exchange for his.
The emotional ties between the partners were originally designed to make them a
biologically efficient breeding pair. She offered him sole breeding rights in exchange to his
help and protection. Naturally, they had to be loyal to one another for this arrangement to
work and for their children to have the best chance of survival. These primitive emotions
still regularly spring in the human breast. Lovers are fiercely protective of their mates.
They are also jealous of each other's loyalty. Both demand exclusive sexual rights with the
other.
These are, of course, purely adult considerations, but the relationship between a man and a
woman does carry undertones of their respective first close relationship with someone of
opposite sex, that with their parents. There is in the man-woman relationship something of
the mother-son nexus and something of the father-daughter nexus. It is very noticeable that
although parents love their children of the same sex, probably with a tinge of sympathy for a
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fellow-traveller on life's road, there is usually something of a love affair going on between
mother and son and between father and daughter.
The reasons for this are not hard to find. To a father, a little girl represents everything that is
most adorable about female people. She is very small, thus making him feel huge and
protective. She is usually pretty, thus making him addicted to being with her. Above all,
she is one female who definitely belongs to him, thus making him feel proud and
possessive. Added to all this is the fact that her attitude towards him is affectionate, without
any of the problems and dangers of his relationships with adult females. So, of course, he is
in a way "in love" with her.
For her part, the little girl senses that her father, who is the biggest and probably the most
prestigious person in her world, particularly adores her. So she plays up to him and tries to
win his love even more.
Most likely, she enjoys the feeling of power which her
manipulation of him gives her.
The same sort of thing happens between mother and son, for exactly the same reasons. This
effect was noted by Freud in his early researches, leading him to propound the theory of the
Oedipus complex, in which the child desires the parent of opposite sex and regards the
parent of same sex as a sexual rival. Whether present day thought can go all the way with
this theory is a matter of debate, but it seems probable that Freud was basically right in
seeing that there is some sort of sex-related interaction between parent and child.
Perhaps, too, the bonding which occurs between parent and child is not so very different to
that which occurs between the adult man and the adult woman when the time comes for
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them to form a pair for breeding and all the social activities which stem from that
fundamental activity.
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LOVE
For most people, love is the great experience of life. Love blasts through the world like a
devouring gale. It makes sane people mad, although it does not make mad people sane. It
certainly makes sad people happy and happy people sad. It also makes ugly people beautiful
and can make beautiful people ugly. Above all, love transforms everything it touches. To a
man in love the world seems brighter and more terrible. Everything seems more wondrous
and more real at the same time. By a marvellous alchemy, the base metal of the world's grim
existence is turned into shining gold.
No wonder that philosophers have collectively decided that love is a kind of madness. For
madness it is that makes men and women abandon their cherished freedom and rush headlong
into thraldom under another person's sovereignty. The nature of love is somewhat baffling.
There is no doubt that Nature's purpose of impelling us towards one another, of mating and of
loyally defending one another and our offspring could be achieved without all this fuss and
drama. Other animals do it without any problem. We are alone in the animal kingdom in
experiencing the ineffable joys and the dreadful sorrows that love brings to its subjects. Love
illustrates exactly the glory and the folly of humankind. There is no creature more exalted in
its feelings than a lover, and no greater fool, either.
Why then should love exist? First, we must decide that here we take love to mean sexual
passion, not the quieter kinds of love we feel for our friends and relatives. So the question
becomes, why should we make our natural mating and breeding into such a hurricane of
emotion and turmoil? One can only speculate. It seems to be a characteristically human habit
to try to transform the ordinary animal impulses and functions, which we share with other
mammals, into something much higher and more sublime. In fact, we tend to exult in our
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ability to feel. We want to give ourselves to emotions and to experience life as a series of
sensations which are altogether more powerful and more complex than the simple animal
feelings and sensations.
So when you see a woman and realise that she is not just a female animal of your own
species, but a glorious creation, a noble creature, you do not want only to mate with her. You
want to be in love with her. There enters into the situation a whole raft of ideas, concepts and
feelings which are social and cultural, specific to humanity, as well as the basic animal
feelings. You don't just want to mate with her, mooing in a field, but to enter into a lifeenhancing relationship with her, in which both of you recognise your partnership as a joyous
union of like-minded, sentient beings.
Love contains elements of feeling which are derived from social and cultural considerations.
It is not a natural or biological phenomenon, except that biology starts it all by giving us the
glands and hormones which prompt us to mate in the first place. What we feel when we are
in love depends very largely upon what we expect to feel. That stems from our training and
conditioning.
In the Western world, it is possible to discern several different elements in the idea of love.
How men view women, and how they think they ought to react to them emotionally, is
influenced by the whole history of ideas among Western mankind. Foremost among these
ideas is the mediaeval concept of chivalry. Although modern people tend to know nothing of
their own history, they are still profoundly influenced by what their ancestors thought. The
basic ideas of chivalry are still present in our minds.
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Although the gross extravagances of chivalry have long since been abandoned, we modern
men at a very deep level still tend to see women as somehow purer and nobler than us. This is
only one strand in a complicated web of feelings, but it is still prevalent. If you can ever get
men to admit what they really feel about women, you come eventually to a yearning to feel
the tender reverence which the best of women can inspire. Listen to any male composer's
writing of music for a female character. The music always turns warm and compassionate. It
seems to say, "Ah! If only we men were as kind and as wise". Listen to Brunnhilde's music in
the Ring cycle, The Girl With the Flaxen Hair, or Lara's theme in the film of Dr Zhivago.
In every man's mind there lurks the notion of the beautiful lady. She is derived from chivalric
myth, yet she is not entirely mythical, because we have all seen her (usually at someone else's
table in a restaurant). She rules us by her wit and wisdom, her beauty and, above all, by her
huge capacity to love. A lovely woman is truly a remarkable creature, almost indeed a
creature of myth.
She engraves herself on our minds and burns her way into our
imaginations. Whether she is golden blonde or dusky as the night of tropic clime, we come to
hunger for the sight of her, to feed our starving senses on the miracle of her beauty, to hear
her voice and to touch her skin.
Even ordinary women, who are not particularly beautiful, become so to the men who love
them. Perhaps we men do have a coded message in our brains, telling us that we will meet a
being who looks and sounds like a mythical creature and that, when we do, we shall fall under
her spell. More likely, our minds are full of ideas about what women are like, or ought to be
like, and that we create a powerful fantasy around this ideal.
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The chivalric ideal taught that women are purer and gentler in spirit than men, almost holy in
fact. Consequently, we men ought to adore them and to serve them. A true knight was
always proclaiming his lady's beauty and virtue. He never sought to take advantage of her
natural sexuality. The impulse of a man should be towards a gallant, unselfish adoration of
his lady. She in turn gave him some token of her affection, usually something personal that
belonged to her. This was called her "favour". With his lady's favour thus tangibly bestowed
on him, the knight felt fortified against misfortune.
Something of these ideas persists into the modern world. The notion that a woman's favour
insulates a man from enemies and from ill-luck is still with us. The young fighter pilots in
the World Wars often carried something given to them by a woman, perhaps an item of
female underwear placed around the neck or under the shirt. This was to bring them luck.
Even if it did not, at least they died in their ladies' favours.
Everyone at the time realised that these young men were the modern equivalent of the
mediaeval knights. Like knights, they engaged in single combat against others similarly
trained and armed. No woman would refuse to give such a man her favour to wear. The
chronicles of those times record how passionately women loved those gallant and, all too
often, doomed warriors.
Especially on the Allied side, where the peoples perceived
themselves to be fighting against heavy odds for justice and mercy in the world, there was an
aura of heroism about the fighting men which gave them a ready entrance to women's hearts.
It seems that women for their part are not insensible to the appeal of chivalry. Not the sham
chivalry of the drawing room or boudoir, but the real gallantry of men who will fight and die
to protect the innocent and the meek of the world. Knighthood was about grace of the spirit,
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but it also entailed real fighting and death. It expressed something about the male soul which
women recognise as beautiful.
The second great current of ideas which colours our view of love is romanticism. This is not
merely the set of daft notions about love which are expressed in popular romantic fiction. It
was in fact a revolution in the way western people saw the world and themselves in it, which
occurred at about the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Basically, what happened was
that people stopped trying to model themselves on the world of classical antiquity, which they
imagined was characterised by order and reason. In that ancient world of Greece and Rome,
brute nature and natural chaos were brought to order and beauty by the operation of the
human intellect.
In the Romantic revolution, people turned away from classical order and reason. They began
instead to look to the world of the high middle ages in Europe, which they imagined was
populated by a much less intellectual and much more passionate kind of humanity. Nature
was rehabilitated, to be seen not as a nasty chaos but as good and beautiful in its own right.
There was much less emphasis on order in life and much more emphasis on meaning. Life
was given meaning not by the cerebrations of philosophers but by the human spirit, by the
loyalty and gallantry of men and the beauty and steadfastness of women. Above all, the
emphasis was on feeling. To be human was to feel things, to have emotions.
This gave rise to the notion that the individual is more important than collective abstractions
such as society or the state. This is because the individual is the level at which feelings are
experienced. Consequently, each individual feels like, and is, a unique and irreplaceable
being.
This exaltation of the individual and of individual feelings is in some ways a
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characteristic of the western mind. There has been a strand of it in western thought since the
ancient Greek philosophers first began to lay down the framework of western ideas.
However, the total triumph of individualism has only been in the last two hundred years.
The revival of interest in the middle ages brought about great changes in all of the arts and in
the ways in which men and women saw themselves and their relationship to one another. In
architecture, classical proportion and restraint gave way to Gothic revival and pseudo
medievalism. The Houses of Parliament in London burned down in 1838 and were rebuilt as
a Gothic pastiche palace. In music and drama, the emphasis switched from structure and
order to feeling. The powerful and often chaotic passions of human beings were henceforth
seen as the proper stuff of art.
First, artists realised that it is the human brain which sees things, not just the eye as in the lens
of a camera. So Turner and, later, the Impressionists painted what it feels like to see things
rather than what a camera would record. Later still, this movement led to the various
Twentieth Century manifestations of the tendency to depict emotion rather than cold reality.
This tendency is called Expressionism, meaning that the artist tries to convey an emotion
instead of simply a scene. The supreme example of this is Munch's "The Scream", which
shows a woman screaming. What Munch is actually trying to portray is not the woman but
the feeling of terror which makes her scream.
All of this is by way of explaining why to the modern western mind emotions are more
important than laws or facts, or even good order and social discipline. In particular, most
people in the West believe that love is the supreme human emotion and that nothing should,
or indeed can stand in its way.
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A prime example of this is the shock and dismay with which western people view the eastern
custom of parents arranging their children's marriages. Westerners ask how the young people
can possibly be happy unless theirs is a love match and they have freely chosen each other.
The Asian parents reply that it makes more sense for the marriage to be arranged by older and
more experienced people, who have the young couple's best interests at heart.
Westerners snort with disbelief and say that a couple must love one another if the marriage is
to have a ghost of a chance. Well, say the Asians, people tend to fall in love with their
spouses anyway. So what is the problem? Actually, the Asians and others who make
arranged marriages are only carrying on a tradition which was prevalent in Europe until the
middle of the Eighteenth Century. The higher the social rank of the people concerned, the
more likely their marriages were to be arranged by their families. Princes and princesses
almost invariably had their marriages arranged for them. It was one of the prices of being
royalty.
Lower down the social scale, there was a strong tendency to see a successful marriage as one
in which natural affection coincided with the interests of dynasty and property. Above all,
before the romantic revolution, Europeans saw marriage as ideally a cosy domestic
arrangement, with stability, order, mutual respect and a healthy income being the mainstays.
Of course, they did not always achieve this. No doubt, there was much emotional upheaval in
olden time marriages, but the contrast with the present-day attitude that a married couple
should be passionately in love with one another is quite stark.
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No wonder so many modern marriages fail. Ecstatic romantic love is not something that can
be kept going for long. The daily grind of work, house-keeping and child-raising soon puts
paid to romance. Of course, successfully married couples always love one another, but it is
not the febrile heightened passions of romantic love, more the love of staunch friends who are
resolved to help each other through life and to give each other a home, a sense of purpose,
emotional security and sexual comfort.
What then is the present-day legacy of the romantic revolution? The short answer is that it
still influences our ideas about love. It is responsible for some of our more profound insights,
for example that love regenerates the spirit and gives life meaning. It is also responsible for
some of our silliest excesses, for example the notion that love is all you need. A philosopher
would say that love is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In other words, love is NOT
all you need, although you do need it.
The main legacy of romanticism, though, is that we still believe that our feelings are the most
important things about us. Therefore, we see nothing wrong in giving ourselves to the wild
ecstasy and terrible sorrow that romantic love entails. In short, it encourages us to feel that it
is alright to go completely nuts about someone and to behave like a lunatic. At the same
time, romanticism gives us very fierce notions of personal integrity. It is right to have sex
with someone if you love them, but generally wrong if you do not. Western women in
particular tend to subscribe to this view. In their minds, love and sex are usually bound up
together, whereas men are more often able to distinguish them as two different orders of
experience. That is, women tend to have a more romantic view. Quite possibly this will
change as women's experience of the world becomes more similar to that of men.
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The ideas of chivalry and romanticism tend to shape our views of how we should feel when
we are in love. There is, however, a third strand of cultural influences which mainly shape
our perceptions of what we should actually do about love and sex. In other words, there is an
ethos relating to the whole subject of love and sexuality.
This ethos stems directly from the Judaeo-Christian ethical system, which was injected into
western culture about two thousand years ago, mingling with existing Greek and Roman
ideas and with other Middle Eastern elements, such as Gnosticism. I say "Judaeo-Christian"
because, although Christians have often preferred to ignore this, Christianity was an offshoot
of Judaism. The Jews evidently evolved culturally during the time span covered by the Bible.
For example, Jewish patriarchs in the Old Testament are sometimes depicted as polygamous.
King Solomon is the best example, with his many wives.
By the time of the New Testament, in the First Century AD, and in the early Jewish historian
Josephus, there is no mention of polygamy. Evidently, the Jews became monogamous some
time before the birth of Christ. It is difficult to find any reference at all to polygamy among
western peoples in the historical period.
Even in mythology, the western gods were
monogamous, at least in their institutions, if not in their practices. Probably, in all societies
the common people were generally monogamous. Even where polygamy was tolerated, it
was most likely the prerogative of the rich and powerful.
At any rate, the emerging Judaeo-Christian culture became associated with fairly strict views
about love and marriage. In particular, marriage became an organised institution, shaped by
civil laws and religious doctrines, as well as by the folk customs of the people. Western man
became officially monogamous. Society as a whole regulated who might marry whom and
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what were the rights and duties of married men and women. Indeed, the Christian church
eventually came to regulate the whole of the relationship between men and women, especially
its sexual aspects.
Since this process has been going on for at least two thousand years, it is not surprising that it
has entered into the minds of the people, so that its precepts are now regarded as being natural
law. Modern western people take it for granted that human beings are monogamous, at least
at any one point in time. It is regarded as improper and unnatural to have two spouses. In
fact, most people regard it as impossible to love two members of the opposite sex at the same
time. This is because we regard love as an exclusive, ecstatic and romantic pairing, which is
the prelude to a monogamous marriage (or at least a monogamous co-habitation). In this
light, it would be crazy to love two people, because you cannot marry both of them.
It is probably a safe supposition that this situation could hardly have come about if
monogamy were plumb against the inclinations of most people. We have seen that there are
good biological reasons why monogamy has been adopted by humans as the most successful
reproductive strategy. Consequently, most people do tend to want a mate rather than just
casual sexual encounters, especially if they intend to breed. Nevertheless, we should never
forget how much our western ideas about love and marriage are influenced by the laws of the
Jews and the Christians
.
We have before our inner eyes the ideal of the life-long, happy marriage. If we fall short of
this ideal, we feel a sense of failure. Divorce is seen as evidence of guilt, wrong-doing social
breakdown and failure. Yet divorce was brought in only to liberate a substantial minority of
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people from life-long unhappy marriage. Marriage is a powerful medicine, with divorce as
the only antidote if things go really wrong.
The fact that marriage is not just a private matter between two partners, but of concern to the
whole of society, is also deeply ingrained in our consciousness. To get the male partner to
contribute to the raising of his offspring is one of the great objectives of every organised
society. Otherwise, other people have to do it and the taxpayers get tetchy about raising other
people's kids. That is why, if your marriage is rocky and you go to a marriage counsellor, you
will usually be told to get back together and make your marriage work. It is in everybody's
interests to do this, probably including yours.
In our society, love is a prelude to a monogamous marriage, or a one-to-one relationship.
Loyalty to your partner is regarded as the highest virtue and is described in positive terms,
such as "faithfulness", "honesty" or "virtue". In contrast, sexual encounters with someone
other than your recognised partner are condemned as "cheating", "infidelity" or
"philandering". In other words, everybody expects us to keep to our partners. It must be
added that our partners feel this particularly strongly. We all expect that a partnership confers
an explicit guarantee of sexual exclusivity, or sole breeding rights, as I have termed it.
The opposite side of the coin of love is jealousy.
If we even suspect our partner of
proclivities towards another person, we experience the ghastly emotion of sexual jealousy.
This is a most unpleasant and dangerous feeling, because it combines rage with the manic
feelings of a lover. People suffer from jealousy because of emotional insecurity. That is, they
are afraid of being abandoned by their partners. When we are jealous, we feel a terrible dread
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of our rival, the person of same sex, because we recognise the power of his or her sexuality
and realise that our partner may succumb to it.
The result can be aggression directed at the rival. We do not normally blame our partner of
opposite sex, at least in the beginning. If someone starts wooing our partner, we react like
any other animal and try to chase them off. This is often effective, because the intruder may
be nervous about entering someone else's territory and getting into a fight with the love
object's partner. Women are notably ruthless at seeing off a rival. Consequently, female
predators are shy of upsetting another woman. Probably, also, women generally take sexual
liaisons seriously and regard it as pretty despicable to take another woman's man.
Men seem to be rather less considerate of other men's feelings and are more willing to risk a
battle for possession of a woman. On the other hand, wanton philanderers are usually easily
seen off by the husband. The problems really start if one partner does seriously entertain the
advances of the third party. Then the fur really starts to fly. If we even suspect that our
partner has succumbed to the deadly charm of our rival, or if she is the one doing the wooing,
then we start to blame her for our misery.
These love triangles produce a great deal of unhappiness. Sometimes, they lead to violence,
even murder. If you read the newspapers, they are full of stories about murder and mayhem
between lovers and their rivals, of illicit lovers conspiring to bump off the spouse of one of
them and, saddest of all, people killing their spouses rather than lose them. Things do not
usually reach this pitch, but almost everyone's life story would contain some such struggle
against a rival, the loss of a loved one and the sadness of being unlucky in love.
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Love is a great game in which adults engage, with happiness and fulfilment the prize for the
winners, and grief and bitterness the penalty for the losers. Despite what I have said about
humans being generally monogamous, they constantly rearrange their sexual liaisons. Men
and women do not, in fact, invariably form once-for-all relationships. They tend naturally to
do so, but these relationships sometimes dissolve to be replaced by new relationships. It is
not only incompatibility or stress which causes these break-ups. They are also caused by
sexual predation. That is, people looking for partners are not always scrupulous about
respecting the rights of those who do have partners. "All's fair in love and war", it is said.
The novelist Edna O'Brien was once asked on a TV question show why girls go out with
married men. She replied, "Because there aren't any others, unless you meet one coming back
from his wife's funeral". She meant that although there is a close balance in the numbers of
the two sexes at the breeding age, the number of men who are actually available and desirable
to women is smaller than the number of women who want a man. It is no exaggeration to say
that out of every twenty men one is gay, one is a drunk, one is a bastard, two are wimps and
two no woman would be seen dead with. The corresponding figures for women are much
smaller, so that out of every twenty women only two or three are genuine no-hopers.
That means there are seventeen eligible women for every thirteen eligible men. Anyone who
knows anything about markets will realise that there is a permanent bull market in eligible
men. Much of literature is occupied with this fact, particularly the fate of the unfortunate
women who are forced to marry the bastards and the wimps. The general consensus seems to
be that wimps do more damage to women than bastards.
At any rate, any man who is
halfway attractive is most likely to be married or spoken for already. So a woman who wants
a man may have to contemplate knocking another woman off her perch.
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From the male point of view, this may seem a pleasing situation. You may think that we need
never be short of female companionship and that nature has dealt us a very promising hand.
It is true that we do have an easier time than women in some ways, because of our scarcity
value and our sexual mobility. That is, our ability and willingness to jump ship if things do
not suit us. Nevertheless, we do not necessarily hold all of the best cards. For a start, we may
turn out to be one of the rejects.
The man who is not acceptable to women is in an unenviable situation. Although we may be
cheered up by observing that women will marry absolutely anyone or anything, this is not
entirely true. I have known men who make every woman's flesh crawl and who therefore
have no hope of having a sexual relationship. This is a desperate situation, not just for the
luckless man, but for society as a whole. At the extreme, these are the guys who sit alone in
their rooms, sharpening knives and oiling guns, waiting for their frustration and bitterness to
boil over.
You do not even have to be a creep to be rejected by women. I once shared an office with a
man who was a really nice, fun guy, but of tiny stature. One day, I said to him that it was not
difficult to get on with our women colleagues. He said rather bitterly, "You obviously haven't
noticed that whenever a woman comes into the room she addresses her remarks to you. I may
as well not exist".
I was surprised by how heartfelt his comment was, so I decided to put it to the test. Sure
enough, He was dead right. It could not possibly have been a chance result. Every woman
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coming into the room, if she looked at him at all, just glanced and looked away. Their lack of
interest was painfully obvious.
However, as if to prove the truth of my dictum that somewhere there is a mate for everyone,
my tiny colleague eventually turned up with a tiny wife and they proceeded to have several
normal-sized children. There is hope for all of us. Well, most of us. It is, though, a distinct
advantage to be a big, good-looking guy. Women who say they do not prefer big, goodlooking guys are kidding somebody, probably themselves.
So far, we have established that love is a great game for adults, played for very high stakes.
While we men seem in general to be holding the best cards, some of us have no cards at all.
Moreover, nature has dealt women the ace of trumps which negates most of our male
advantages. This is the fact that while man proposes, woman disposes. No matter how big,
good-looking, clever, sexy or just plain wonderful you are, she does not have to accept you.
There is no way known to science or philosophy to make a woman accept a man if she does
not want to. Some men are tempted to try love potions, alcohol, drugs or witchcraft to get
around this natural injustice. Others think darkly of abduction and rape. The former will
probably only make her sick, while the latter will land you in the slammer. At the end of the
day, as policy-makers say, if she likes you you're in. If she doesn't like you, you're out. And
that's that!
So we males, for all our natural advantages, usually end up as petitioners in the game of love.
We usually fall for a woman and then find we have the ticklish problem of getting her
interested. It is ticklish because although nature intended us to fall into each other's arms, and
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this is something we both earnestly desire, women do not want just any old man. He has to
be the right one, Mr Right, in fact. Even more than men, women have the privilege of choice.
It is a privilege they sternly insist on exercising.
Apart from the problem of persuading her that we are Mr Right, we also face the problem that
our chosen darling pudding has a mind like a pole-cat. She knows her prey and has a fair idea
how to catch him. As I speculated earlier, women may have built up some kind of collective
memory of dealing with men for the past few million years. Certainly, they show amazing
astuteness in these matters from the age of nought.
However, since we are doing a little studying of the prey ourselves, we should observe their
tactics. Firstly, when they are serious they generally play their game long. That is, wise
women are content to let the male make the advances, during which time they can get a look
at him and size him up. They understand also that a man likes a chase and that the way to
make him keen is to show him the bait and then withdraw.
Some women are addicted to this tactic. They have a habit of leading the man on, giving him
a chase but ultimately not delivering the reward. Such women are politely known as flirts,
but are known among men as PT's or prick teasers.
The second thing which women seem to understand intuitively is that men are liable to flee
like startled gazelles if a woman advances upon them with serious intent. Men are generally
not averse to a little casual sex, but they are no more willing than women to be lassoed and
tied down. So women have another reason for playing it cool when they are serious.
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A woman who is faced with a shy suitor who does not make the running has something of a
problem herself. If he is that shy, she may easily scare him off, but if she does not give him
some encouragement he may drift off. Worse still, he may be snapped up by another woman
trawling with jaws open for tasty little fish. So if you do not make an advance, your female
friend will give you a sign that it is safe to do so. She will touch you on the hand or arm and
come close and smile directly into your eyes.
We are now drifting into the subject of courtship. But first we must consider what it is like to
fall in love. You can't live happily with women if you don't love them. You will find that for
a man life consists mostly of the women he loves, most of whom will be relations like
mother, daughters, sisters and so on. There will usually be one who is very different from all
of those, the one for whom he feels a sexual passion. She will be wife, mistress, partner,
lover. The story of falling in love is how you come to join your life to hers.
Falling in love is like paddling a canoe happily down a slow-moving river and suddenly
finding you haven't noticed a waterfall, which does not foam and roar like a proper waterfall,
to give the unwary due notice, but suddenly opens up before you. In a second, you are over,
plunging helplessly into whatever follows. There is no going back.
This sense of being swept along by forces you cannot control is one of the main features of
falling in love. You may meet a female person ( I do not say "woman" at this point, because
this can happen when you are both seven years old) and find that that you keep thinking about
her. Something about the way she holds her head, or perhaps a little dimple at the corner of
her mouth when she smiles, will fascinate you and start you forming her image in your mind.
Soon, you can think of nothing else and try to get near to her whenever you can. Every time
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you see her, you have a sickening sensation of excitement that churns your stomach. You feel
that she is a vortex which is drawing you into the still, central part where she lives and rules.
The whole world has become only her. For those who like to be in control, it is a deeply
alarming experience. For the rest of us, it is very exciting as well as deeply alarming.
There is no set pattern to falling in love. Sometimes, you wake up one day to the realisation
that you are in love with someone you have known for a long time. You wonder how this
could have happened and why you did not notice it happening. You give a few tugs to the
bonds to see if it would be possible to break away, but they hold fast and you know you are
doomed. You cannot live without this person.
That is the acid test of whether or not you are in love. If you only like someone, you can say
goodbye and simply look forward to seeing her again. If you love her, you feel you are going
to die if she does not come back almost immediately. Being separated from her is a ghastly
misery. Being reunited with her is like the first warm day of the year, sheer joy. This wish of
new lovers to be together is very strong and painful. Experienced adults usually indulge a
young couple, for instance by sitting them together at the table, allowing them to be alone
together whenever possible without scandal, and so on.
When I was a young man and serving in the military, we often used to get weekend leave
passes, which meant we had to get back to base before midnight on Sunday evening. There
was a train which left the town where I lived at about six in the evening, which everyone
called "The Heartbreak Express", because of the touching scenes as the young women bade
farewell to their boyfriends and turned away in tears as the train left.
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The cynics among us used to say that they would jump into their other boyfriends' cars
outside the station, but I think most of them went home and cuddled their pillows. We men
also felt very unhappy about parting but, being men, we would get out the playing cards and
start laughing again a few miles down the track. After all, we would be back in a week or
two. Which leads me to observe that it is much easier to be the one who leaves than the one
who waits at home.
Anyway, it is certain that separation is the second biggest dread to a lover. Why only the
second biggest terror? Because the worst thing by far is rejection. If the one you love does
not love you back, you feel so bad you would welcome the end of the universe as a relief to
your suffering. Worst of all is losing your love when you thought she was yours, because she
grows tired of you, or because someone else takes her fancy. This is worse than having dental
surgery, a hangover, flu, a migraine, food poisoning and a huge tax demand all at the same
time. If you can imagine having all that at once, followed immediately by a letter informing
you that you have failed all your exams and your dog has died, you can get an inkling of how
bad it feels. Only an inkling, because really it is much worse than that.
So beware! Love which feels so ecstatic and wonderful at first can have a colossal downside,
a corresponding bottomless pit of despair. When you have been through it a couple of times,
as everybody does, you learn to be a bit wary, to hold yourself back until you are fairly sure
the loved one is favourably disposed to this enterprise. As I have said, this rather spoils the
spontaneity and animal passion of falling in love, but we have to survive somehow.
Not all of us make it to the farther shore of wisdom and maturity in love. On the contrary,
people continue to fall in love at a great age. It also happens to people of every culture. So all
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human beings are basically the same. We are all complete fools. However, a creature which
is capable of falling in love is a wonderful fool, a fool from heaven.
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COURTSHIP
On the day that Nature, God, the Life Force or It invented sexual reproduction, there
immediately arose the main problem stemming from it, as if in vindication of the axiom that
all solutions produce new problems. Sexual reproduction was the solution to the problem of
how to make the species genetically mutable and, hence, responsive to changes in the
environment and capable of evolution. It worked brilliantly. All advanced forms of life
reproduce sexually.
The new problem was how to bring the sexes together. Having invented male and female
creatures as separate individuals, Nature, etc, then had to find ways of bringing them back
together again in order to breed, or at the very least, to mingle their genetic material so that
the conception of new individuals could take place. As always with Nature, a number of
solutions were tried and some of them work very well.
For creatures which are not mobile, such as plants and marine polyps, the problem is
particularly difficult, because the males cannot come dancing up to the females and offer to
fertilise them, as happens with mobile creatures. What the immobile creatures do therefore is
either to release their genetic material into the environment and leave things largely to chance,
or else to bribe creatures which are mobile to carry their genetic material around for them.
Many plants simply release enormous amounts of pollen, the male genetic package, into the
air, allowing the winds to distribute it to the female plants. If you ever get hay fever in the
spring, it is because the air is full of pollen from plants, particularly grasses, which literally
gets up your nose and irritates the mucous lining. The plants don't mind you snuffling away,
so long as some of the pollen reaches the waiting sticky pistils of the female flowers.
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Under the sea, similar things happen. Marine polyps, or corals, release their eggs and sperm
into the water so that they mingle and form new polyps. However, for this to be effective
they all have to do it at the same time. So, at the first full moon of the due season, all the
females release their eggs and all the males release their sperm. For a while, the sea is a soup
of genetic material. Then all the fertilised eggs sink down to find lodgings for the new
creatures they will become. The disappointed spermatozoa die off.
We shall not ask how creatures with no eyes, living at the bottom of the sea, can tell when the
moon is full. They are of course sensitive to light, but some of us surface dwellers with sharp
eyes have to look hard to see whether the moon is full. No doubt, there is some simple
explanation.
Another way in which immobile creatures can mingle their genes is to bribe mobile creatures
to carry the genetic material around for them. Many plants produce flowers which are
designed to attract insects. The flowers are highly visible and often strongly scented, so that
flying insects can easily find them. Secreted in the depths of the flower is a supply of nectar,
a sugary liquid which the insects can drink as a supply of energy for themselves, To get the
nectar, the insect has to dive down into the flower, rubbing its body against the plant's sexual
organs, the stamens and pistils. In this way, pollen from one plant is carried on the insect's
body to the next plant. By spending some of its energy on producing flowers and nectar, the
plant can mate successfully by proxy with another plant some way away.
This is a classic case of a business deal in which everybody wins. The plant has achieved its
purpose in getting fertilised, the insect gets free food and you and I can look at the flowers
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and smell their scent. Nectar and pollen are so plentiful that some insects can live on them.
Bees make a career of collecting and storing these delicious substances and turning them into
honey. The honey is really for the bees themselves to eat during the winter, but we humans
often take it and give the bees sugar water instead.
Once fertilised, the plants have a similar problem in distributing their seeds, from which the
new plants will grow. A tree, for instance, does not want its seeds just falling directly to
earth, because all its offspring will then grow in the shade of their parent. Also, the tree really
wants to colonise other sites and so move its species around the earth. So some trees produce
flying seeds which drift away in the wind, or winged seeds which spin off like helicopters.
Some plants are in the bribery business for distributing their seeds, as well as their pollen.
They produce fruits which animals, especially fruit eaters like monkeys and apes, can use as
food. Of course, the catch is that the fruit contains the seeds. The animals eat the fruit and
either discard the seeds or else swallow them. They pass unharmed through the digestive
tract and are excreted onto the earth, which is a splendid way for a young plant to start its life.
Either way, the seeds are distributed over a wide area.
So every time you eat an apple, just think that the apple tree is in effect saying to you, "Take
this delicious fruit which I have made for you and enjoy it with my compliments. When you
get to the seeds, you won't like them very much, so please spit them out. Better still, throw
the whole core over the hedge." So the crafty old tree gets you to help with its reproduction
problems. That's why you see so many apple trees growing just over the hedge.
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All this is by way of saying that mingling the male and female genes is not a completely
straightforward process. Creatures spend a lot of their time and energy on bringing it about.
During the large number of millions of years of evolution from marine polyps to higher
animals, the world became populated with the mobile creatures, most recently with mammals
like ourselves. In principle, there is no problem with mobility. These creatures can come
together under their own power. On the other hand, there is no particular reason why they
should.
So Nature has to step in yet again and give them a reason for mating and
reproducing.
The first step in this is to make them actually want to do so. All creatures have a genetically
transmitted urge to breed, so that when the time comes they actively want to find a mate. We
humans are more or less aware of this propensity in ourselves. We know we have a very
deep-seated wish to have children and that we get immense psychological satisfaction from
having them. Not only do we have the normal mammalian urge to cherish our young, but we
also realise that they are our future and will carry our genes into the future.
Other animals do it from a blind instinctive urge. However, we should not imagine that we
are so terribly different from other animals. We are more complicated, it is true, and we have
some consciousness of our motivations. We also have the gifts of intellect and of free will.
So our animal natures can be buried under social conditioning and cultural manners. Yet we
are not so different from other animals, particularly our close relatives in the primate order.
Not far beneath our veneer of sophistication, our homo sapiens brain, there lies the brain of a
less evolved hominid. Within that there is the brain of an early primate and within that the
brain of a primitive mammal. Inside all of these, like the smallest doll in a nest of Russian
dolls, lies the brain of some amphibian which crawled out of the sea hundreds of millions of
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years ago. We cannot shake off our animal past as easily as we think. More of our actions
and reactions are determined by our inheritance than we like to imagine.
All mobile creatures have a pattern of behaviour which brings the sexes together to mate.
This takes the form of rituals, displays and dances which are designed to attract an individual
of opposite sex and to convince him or her (usually her) that mating will be successful and to
mutual benefit. This is called courtship and human beings indulge in it just as much as other
animals.
You young males have already noticed that some of your contemporaries are female. You
will feel a strong urge to look at them, to approach them and ultimately to touch them. Above
all, you will want them to notice and admire you. This much is given to you by nature
through the inheritance of your genes. Young males are made like that and, don't worry, the
young females are just as intrigued by you. All of you are just healthy little animals.
Much human behaviour which looks to be entirely social or cultural in its derivation is
actually built on underlying structures which go much deeper than the last few generations of
modern society. It is the current fashion to insist that technological and economic changes
have produced us modern people who are totally different from anything which has gone
before. This is of course a conceit. We are the same old human race. We just have different
toys.
Of course, times change and different generations have different ways of doing things, but a
diligent observer cannot help noticing the essential unity of the human race in the most
important things in our lives and the unchanging nature of humanity over eons of time. In our
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questing way, we tend to concentrate on the differences between ourselves and others.
Perhaps we should think more of the ways in which we are alike.
The most important way in which we are alike is in our genetic inheritance. Society can
modify how we go about things, but it cannot change our essential nature. Our urge to breed
is expressed in different ways, but it is still the same old urge.
In general, social mores seek to make these animal urges and functions acceptable, according
to the ideology of the time. Very often, we are too close to the trees to see the wood. When
we go to a wedding, we admire the bride's dress and the bridegroom's savoir faire, but we do
not see the primeval mating of man and woman as part of the age-old drama of mammalian
reproduction. Our ancestors were closer to these things. The traditional marriage service
does indeed draw attention to the fact that this is what we are witnessing. In olden times, the
bride and groom were put to bed immediately after the ceremony and everyone else got on
with the party.
A marriage is in fact an example of how social custom regulates our sexual urges. If you
want to enter into a permanent relationship with a woman and to have this dignified by law
and custom, there is a complicated series of procedures to go through. But first you must woo
her and win her. In other words, the first thing you need is her consent. That is the principle
of courtship.
The courtship displays and rituals which are so noticeable in other species have their
counterparts in our own behaviour. The whole purpose of these rituals is to bring the
individuals of breeding age together and allow them to choose their mates. Firstly, the
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potential mates have got to see one another. Then they have to select one another. Finally,
they have to mate.
The human equivalent of the special markings which in birds and animals indicate their sex is
clothing. Although it is the fashion nowadays for both sexes to wear rather similar clothing,
especially for casual wear, when the women really want to sock it to the men they wear
specifically female clothing which emphasises the characteristic shapes of a woman's body
and shows off their beautiful limbs.
These female glad rags also demonstrate the second aspect of animal courtship, sexual
display. This happens when a creature of one sex shows off to a member of the opposite sex,
in effect saying, "Look at me! I'm a male (or female)." There follows the showing of a
beautiful tail or a special marking. Some creatures display their sex organs. We humans do
not do that, fortunately, but we do show what we consider our best bits. So women show
their breasts and shoulders, as well as their limbs. Their clothing is drawn tight around their
bottoms, to give promise of the delights that lie underneath. A woman who wants to get a
man interested may show him a lot of her thighs, knowing that this will make an impact on
him. If she wants to be more subtle, and probably more effective, she gives him tantalising
glimpses of her body through diaphanous materials and cunning draping of her clothing.
This can give rise to all sorts of misunderstanding between the sexes. To a man, this is so
obviously a sexual display that he feels he is entitled to assume it is an invitation to approach.
Yet the women often protest that nothing is further from their minds. The answer is that
women take pleasure in displaying their beauty, and do not object to masculine admiration, to
say the least. But they do not issue open invitations to all and sundry to approach them
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sexually. Sometimes, the sexual display is intended as such, but only for one particular man.
Also, don't forget what I told you about women dressing as much for other women as for
men. Women are glamorous creatures and their mind-blowing displays of sexual power are
really a statement to the world at large, including other women. The female motto, "If you've
got it, flaunt it" expresses this precisely.
Men also make sexual displays to women, showing them broad shoulders and strong arms.
Tight trousers are likewise a display to women, who admire the narrow hips and small bottom
of the male. When we wear specifically masculine garments, such as a shirt, we give a
message to women that underneath this poplin there lies a broad chest and a manly heart.
What we and the other animals are trying to do with these displays is to convince a potential
mate that we are fit and suitable. In short, that we can cut the mustard. The first thing a
woman looks at after your face is your waistline. A thick waist or worse, a paunch, is a sign
of an old or an unfit man. So is a fat bottom. Not good for the genes, you see. How often we
older men pull in our stomachs when there are women around!
If we don't have much to offer by way of youth and physique, we males are forced to display
the other qualities which females admire and which can sometimes make up for the
shortcomings. These include intelligence, wealth and power. Women realise that their
offspring will have an advantage if they are intelligent, or if their father is wealthy and
powerful. In this, they are absolutely right.
There is a famous story about George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright.
Shaw was
approached by a celebrated beauty who breathed, "We should have a child. With my beauty
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and your brains it would be superhuman!" Without pause for reflection, the ancient sage
snorted, "But, Madam, it might have my beauty and your brains!"
As so often in these matters, the woman was quite right. Whether or not they turned out to be
beautiful, the chances are that her children would have been better for having a superintelligent father. However, this leaves open the question of how we can convince a woman
of our superior intelligence. The answer is don't even try. Of course, you can leave her your
calling card with your academic qualifications listed, but women are not so daft as to equate
that with intelligence. Being a professor helps, as the continuing saga of university scandals
testifies.
For us ordinary mortals, displaying intelligence is really a matter of conversational skills.
When you first talk to a woman, she looks for evidence of how your mind works, not PhDlevel learning but genetically transmittable native intelligence. One of the best tests of this is
whether you can make her laugh. To make someone laugh requires a good deal of what in
English is called "wit", which is also an alternative word for intelligence. It takes several
qualities which are themselves evidence of intellectual capacity, including irony, a sense of
the absurd, empathy with someone else and an acute sense of timing. Best of all, women like
men to have a big-minded and jovial sense of what really matters in life.
They know that men who have these qualities make the best husbands, the best fathers, the
most staunch and reliable allies and the most enjoyable companions. So when people say that
women like men who make them laugh, they mean that women like their men to be intelligent
in that special native-wit way. It sounds like a formidable challenge. Well, it is.
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The only advice I can offer is not to try too hard. Just be yourselves. I am sure the females
will find you charming. In fact, nature has already thought of your problem. You will find
that when you get near enough to talk to an attractive girl you will feel happy and excited,
which in itself will make you bubbly and witty (not babbly and twitty, I trust). If you feel
tongue-tied, just tell her so. She is probably feeling shy herself, so you can laugh about it
together.
The smoothest pick-up I ever saw was by a friend of mine who went up to a girl in a dance
hall and stood before her mutely. At last he grinned and said, "I don't know what to say!"
She replied, "Then don't say anything. Let's dance!" Needless to say, his confidence soared
and they were soon very friendly.
Displaying wealth is not something which need concern us, except that you will probably
come up against rivals who have more of it than you. There is no question that women
generally are impressed by wealth and even more by power. So you may be unfortunate
enough to see your loved one swept off in a limousine by a man old enough to be her father.
You have to be philosophical about that. If she is that impressed, then your chances of
keeping her were pretty small anyway.
On the other hand, it takes a lot of wealth and power to compensate for the frequently
gruesome character of those who possess them. Many a woman would rather take her
chances battling away in the suburbs with a young husband and a brood of children than be
the grande dame of an empty mansion in the country, especially if it means being an old man's
third wife. The proverb is, "Better to be a young man's slave than an old man's darling".
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Generally speaking, this is true. In this context, an old man means anyone who is more than
about fifteen years older than she is.
So whether you win or lose a struggle with a rival who is older and more wealthy than you
will depend upon her assessment of the deal you are offering instead. If she is a sensible (i.e.
average) woman, she will rate love and loyalty ahead of money. So you can win if she thinks
you will be more loving and loyal than him. However, she may also be ruthlessly realistic
about your chances in life and may decide that starving in a garret with you might soon lose
its charms. It is a tough one. You are running a footrace against a guy who has a big start.
It is no good moaning about life's unfairness. Of course life is unfair. But just remember, one
day you will be the guy with the big car. If you play your cards right, that is. So do not
expect to win all your tussles over women. At first, you may appear a bit young and wimpish
to girls of your own age. Females grow up much quicker than we do. Sometimes she will
prefer the other man. She has every right to. If it is any consolation, remember that women
are notoriously poor in their judgement of men. It may be that, if you were a close second in
the contest, she will come round to you, after all, having discovered what the other guy is
really like. It is a good idea to accept rejection with a good grace and good humour, thus
keeping the door open for a change of heart on her side.
On the other hand, it is not good tactics to tag along as her second string. She will be more
intrigued if you appear to be able to get along without her. That is what it is all about,
arousing a woman's curiosity, making her wonder about you. That is why second string
seldom gets the big prize. All he gets is taken for granted. Of course, if she is not bothered
whether you tag along or not, you would have been wasting your time anyway.
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Which leads on to another golden rule in courtship. Never hang around a woman who does
not want you, once she has made that plain. It is painful and demeaning for you, and boring
and annoying for her. The best thing is to go somewhere quiet and have a good sob. Then go
out with male friends and start thinking about where you are going to find your next love.
Remember what I said about women being like buses; there will be another one along shortly.
Of course, you will bleat to your friends, "But there'll never be another one like her!" They
will lean on their cues and say, "Yeah, Yeah. Come on, it's your shot." Men have strangely
little sympathy for one another in matters of the heart. Perhaps it is a way of stopping us
getting all maudlin and tearful over life's little problems. Maybe they realise that nothing can
be done for someone in that predicament and that, in any case, there will be another one like
her.
Eye Games
The first contact with a person of opposite sex is generally by eye. Human beings may not
have such keen eyesight as some other species, but we can see pretty well. The most
important use we make of our eyes is to look at each other. Our eyes are drawn irresistibly to
other people, even to pictures of other people. If you ever go to a place where the landscape
is completely devoid of anything human, your eyes keep scanning around. What you are
looking for is other people. Even in a snowy waste, when you know there is nobody there,
you keep catching sight of something that might be human. When you get nearer, it turns out
to be a tree or a rock.
When we do spot another person in a lonely place, we watch them carefully. Somewhere in
our brain, their image is being studied for clues to their identity, their character and their
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intentions. What we most need to know is whether they are friend or foe. If not positively
identified as a friend, we need to know whether the approaching person could pose a threat.
In this case, the questions to be answered are about the person's sex, size, armament and
demeanour.
For example, if you are a reasonably large and fit man, you do not have much to fear most of
the time. Nevertheless, you feel a distinct relaxation of tension if you see that the person
coming towards you is a woman. She will be most unlikely to attack you. On the other hand,
if she looks mad and is carrying a revolver, you will be alarmed. Similarly, an amiablelooking man who is unarmed will not be seen as a menace, especially if he looks no bigger
and stronger than you.
So we use our eyes to look carefully at other people , trying to figure out things about them
which are relevant to ourselves. The examples I have given relate to our concern for our
personal safety. In a lonely place, we may well give that a high priority. Even in a crowded
place, we quickly notice anyone who is odd or looks dangerous. A madman or a drunk raving
in a busy place has a space around him, as the people give him a wide berth. If he produced a
knife, they would scatter in all directions.
The other thing we are always looking out for is attractive members of the opposite sex. Both
men and women operate a non-stop system for eyeing up the talent. So if a man sees that the
person coming towards him is a woman, he stops asking himself, "Is he aggressive?" and
starts asking, "How old is she? Is she attractive?"
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Of course, women also ask themselves these questions about the men they see. We are all of
us on the lookout for a suitable mate. Naturally, if we already have a mate, these questions
are somewhat academic. Nevertheless, we never completely stop sizing up the other sex.
After all, I might meet the most beautiful woman in the world and she might give me the look
that means "Follow!" It is a pretty big "might", of course, but I still look at all of them with
great interest.
It is a curious fact that men and women look at each other in this appraising way mostly when
they do not know each other. When you get to know a woman, you place her in a social
context and look at her with different eyes. Instead of just being that woman over there, she
becomes Jane the butcher's wife. You know something about her, so your mind stops trying
to analyse her from the visual clues your eyes provide. She may still be very attractive, but
you know that the butcher is a jealous man and you can in any case forget about relating to
her sexually because she is a loyal wife.
Suppose, however, that both parties are really in the market for a mate and are not just fooling
around. Then it is a safe bet that the first inkling they will have of each other's existence is
through their eyes. In a word, they will see one another. The first phase of courtship can
begin. Eye contact is so vital in relations between the sexes that there is an elaborate code of
behaviour regulating how it should be done. There is also an unmistakeable language of the
eyes, which allows a vast amount of information to be exchanged practically instantaneously.
Generally speaking, men being less inhibited about making sexual advances, they tend to look
more frankly and boldly at women than vice versa. Females are perhaps a little more cautious,
mainly because they want to know more about a man before giving him an invitation to
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approach. A man has nothing to lose, but a woman can get into serious difficulties if she gets
involved too readily with a male stranger. Nevertheless, women do ogle men, especially if
they are in a position from which they can easily withdraw.
Perhaps because they are trained to be discreet about their eyeing of the opposite sex, women
have an extraordinary habit of looking out of the corners of their eyes. You can get a shock
when you think a woman is looking somewhere else and you suddenly discover that she is
looking at you. We men assume that if anyone wants to look at something they turn their
heads to face it. Not so with the cloven race. They can look sideways as well. It is no good
you trying it. We males can't do it.
Women also seem to be able to see out of the backs of their heads. If you make a rude
gesture behind your mother's back (which I don't recommend, incidentally) the chances are
that she will turn around and tell you off about it. As a young man, I used to think women
had an admiration detector between their shoulder blades. I noticed that whenever I looked
admiringly at a woman from behind, she very often turned round to see who was looking at
her. It only works if you genuinely admire her back view. However, a woman friend
explained to me that when that happens it is because she has noticed your interest previously
and as she walks away she glances round to see if you are still looking. Nothing supernatural
about it, you see.
Women have mixed feelings about men looking at them. It depends on who is doing the
looking and what sort of look it is. They particularly do not welcome unrelenting staring, nor
lascivious leers, nor oafish gaping. On the other hand, they do like a warm look of real
admiration. Best of all, they like a spontaneous demonstration of an impact made on your
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masculine susceptibilities, such as a "double take", when you glance casually at first and then
quickly take a longer look. Naturally, they prefer to get such looks from men who are
themselves attractive.
So women on the whole do like men to look at them, so long is it is done warmly and in a
non-threatening way. In Latin countries, where it is customary for men to stare at women and
to pass comments about them, this can be too much of a good thing, even though the
comments are usually complimentary. On the other hand, when women come from those
countries to cooler climes, they sometimes write letters to the newspapers complaining that
the men do not look at them. Certainly, it is a sad day in a woman's life when she realises that
men no longer look at her.
More men make fools of themselves through not knowing how to look at a woman than
anything else, except perhaps elementary maths exams. If you are just idly watching the
talent, it does not matter too much. But if you seriously want to get to know the woman, you
must make proper eye contact with her. You have to imagine that her female feelings can be
aroused by a gentle pressure of your gaze on her retinas. So the trick is to look right into her
eyes and smile kindly and knowingly (not an inane grin, please).
For heaven's sake, don't try this in a self-conscious and ham-acting way. You will make her
think you are a complete fool. Just remember what I say and, when the time comes, you will
know what I mean. Consider the following story from the Odyssey.
In the course of their long wanderings, trying to return home after the Trojan War, Odysseus
and his companions come to the island where lives Circe, a beautiful enchantress. She is not
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too happy about several dozen armed ruffians landing on her island, but Odysseus introduces
himself courteously and explains that they are only stopping for food and water. Then,
Homer says, "He looked at her cunningly". This is enough, apparently, to turn her knees to
jelly and to start her thinking lewd thoughts about Odysseus. Even so, she decided to turn
them all into pigs, in order to make sure they did not get up to any mischief.
Circe gives them all a delicious drink, but Odysseus has a special herb given to him by
Mercury, a god with whom he is quite pally. Having had a good look at Circe, he does not
trust her any more than she does him. So he takes his magic herb as well as the drink. His
companions are all turned into swine, but he is not. So he looks cunningly at Circe again and
she leads him off to her bedroom. Eventually, Odysseus gets his companions turned back
into men and they all slip off, much to Circe's grief.
The point of this tale is the cunning look. What on earth did he do to turn her on? Can we
learn anything? First of all, we must remember that Homer, the poet who wrote this yarn,
was a DWEM, or Dead White European Male. (Of course, he was not dead when he wrote
it). This means that he completely overlooked the woman's point of view and was generally
of no account. He was also quite old, which reduces his street cred to nearly zero. So we
must put this right and retell the story from Circe's point of view:
"I am on my island one day, minding my own business and practising a few spells, when this
ship comes along. To my annoyance, it turns into my landing stage and all these men start
climbing out. I don't like the look of them at all. They look as if they have been in a war for
ten years and have then spent several years wandering about, getting into scrapes and
generally making a nuisance of themselves. They are very blokey indeed. Anyway, they all
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come trooping up to my house and stand leaning on their spears and gaping when I go out to
ask what the Hades is going on. Their leader is quite polite, though. He isn't one of those
huge louts you usually get on warships. He is not particularly good-looking, although he is
very lean and athletic. He obviously has more brains than the rest of them put together. He is
very sure of himself on account of it, but I go along with that.
He says his name is Odysseus. All they want is food and water and a rest. It is obvious that
he fancies me. I am a bit taken aback, but I say, "Alright. I'll fetch you something to drink".
What I don't say is that the drink will turn them all into pigs. And so it does, all except for
Odysseus, who must have had an antidote. So then it is just him and me. He looks at me, you
know, that way. So I say to myself, "Ho, Hum! No one will ever know".
Of course, it doesn't work out. The louse takes advantage of me and enjoys his wicked way.
Then one morning I wake up to find them all gone. If he comes back, I'll turn him into a toad
before he looks at me like that again".
Poor Circe! Her spells were no defence against a cunning masculine look. Tell us, you cry,
how to perform this miracle. Well, it is quite simple in principle but, like so many things in
dealing with women, it requires self-confidence, nerve and skill. The principle is that if you
want to get off with a woman you have to look her right in the eye. The cunning look that
Odysseus gave was direct and penetrating, knowing, but warm and humorous. It said to
Circe, "I am a wise man and I know all about your female desires". It was not a glare, a stare,
a peer or a leer, but a frank admission of her desirability.
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The urge to look is thus the first stage of sexual attraction. Both sexes know this and have
developed a complex code of behaviour concerned with eye contact. Women realise that a
look can be a sexual overture. So they are almost as particular about who looks at them as
they are about who touches them. I am talking here about first encounters between strangers.
When people first meet, they are most curious about each other, their minds both racing to
assess the other. That is when a warm, knowing, cunning look has most impact on a woman's
emotions. All the cells in her body jangle like alarm bells, as her brain sends out the message,
"There's a dishy male person out there and he looks interested. Action stations!"
The excitement can be phenomenal. If both parties are interested, there is an electric frisson.
Some people experience the notorious coup de foudre, or lightning flash, and immediately
develop a fierce sexual passion. Most of us, however, play it cooler than that and simply
register the fact that we have made an impact. You know when this has happened if the
woman gasps or giggles and looks down at your crotch or your waist. If she is young, she
may blush as well, as she realises that you can read her thoughts.
The games people play with their eyes are quite entertaining once you understand what is
going on. For example, a woman' best way of fending off looks that are unwelcome is to
refuse to accept them. She either avoids eye contact altogether, perhaps turning her head
away, or simply switches her eyes off to incoming messages. That is, she closes them. This
is a good method, because it also allows her to signal some additional information. In
particular, she can show how adamant her rejection of the male advance really is.
When you are walking down the street and you see an attractive female coming, you will look
at her because you get pleasure from doing so. If she notices you looking, which she almost
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certainly will, you will get a speedy response, depending on how she assesses you. If she
decides you are also attractive, and you appear to be frankly admiring, she will look warmly
back, possibly smiling as well. A less confident or a shy woman will simply look a little selfconscious, but pleased, and glance down modestly.
Her eye signals are not always so welcoming. If she shuts her eyes quickly, it means you are
not eligible, being too young, too old, too poor or too ugly. Worse still, the rat-trap snap of
closing eyelids combined with a slight sneer means, "Get lost, Creep! How dare you look at
me?"
When her eyelids come down more slowly it means "Thanks, but no". She is either spoken
for, or else she thinks you are cute but not right for her. Most intriguing of all is when she
closes her eyes very slowly and smiles slightly, because this means, "No, but I wouldn't take
much persuading".
Do not be too worried if women in the street close their eyes dismissively when you look at
them. It generally only means they are too busy to fool around with males. If you met them
at a party, they would probably show more interest.
Right, then. So far we have established that men and women first get to know quite a lot
about each other just from looking. The very first glances can tell what he thinks of her and
what she thinks of him. When they can have a really good look at each other, their eyes drink
in massive amounts of information. The visual impression they make seems to burn its way
into their imaginations. When you met someone attractive, you keep thinking of how the sun
glints on her hair, how her eyes draw you into her, how wonderful her thighs are, and so on.
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She for her part also looks at you. If she likes what she sees, her eyes become soft and
shining as her pupils dilate. The dilation, or opening, of the pupils of the eye is a sign of
arousal, what you and I call interest. It is entirely uncontrollable by the conscious will, which
is why we find it hard to conceal our feelings if people can see our eyes clearly. With their
large, wide-open eyes, women give the game away especially easily. If you are really lucky, a
woman who fiercely desires you will look at you so that you see what seems like fire in her
eyes. It is only the red reflection from the inside of the eye, which you sometimes see in
photos taken by flashlight. You see it because her pupils are so wide open as she gazes at the
object of her desire.
What are our eyes looking for and what evidence does the brain demand that the person we
see is attractive? First of all, of course, we look to see what sex the stranger is. Very often,
the conventional clothing, hairstyle or make-up will tell us immediately. These, however, are
socially-determined factors and are not conclusive proof. This is why cross-dressing, female
impersonations and drag acts are such fun. They confuse the whole question of gender and
dress and we laugh to resolve the conflicting feelings we have.
Women's clothing tends to emphasise the characteristic shapes of a woman's body. The
colours and the materials used also indicate the sensuousness and tenderness of her skin. So
it is very easy to see that someone is female if she is wearing conventional female dress. The
converse is true of male dress, which immediately signals to a female observer that she is
looking at a male.
However, with androgynous (or "unisex") appearance now being
fashionable, and casual clothes being very similar for both sexes, it is sometimes not
altogether obvious what sex someone is.
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You get a strange sensation as your brain tries to decide this momentous issue. It can switch
on and off like a defective light switch, saying "It's a male. No, it's a female. No, it's a male",
and so on. You realise then that you expect to feel differently according to which sex a
person is. It can be quite embarrassing to find you have just given a roguish glance to
someone who turns out to be another man. Whether he is gay or straight, you have sent the
wrong signal.
Having established as far as we can the sex of the person we are looking at, we next look for
signs of sexual maturity. Looking at a female person, we look at her breasts, hips, legs and
bottom. Here we see evidence of the adult woman. We also look for evidence of youth and
fitness. Those old genes are saying to us, "Find a good mother for our children". In that
sense, a good mother means a young and fit one. We know instinctively that a shapely
bottom is a sure sign of a fit woman.
Naturally, women are also looking for fit young men to be the fathers of their children, with
the added complication that wealth and power can substitute for youth and strength. Eye
cameras fitted to women's heads in order to record where their eyes are looking, reveal that
when a man goes by her a woman looks at his face, his waistline and his crotch, not
necessarily in that order. From behind, she looks mostly at his bottom. If it is small and hard,
she knows he is fit. She, too, is looking for evidence of sexual maturity and physical fitness.
The Urge to Approach
Having seen your fair lady, you will next be moved by an urge to approach her. Suddenly,
everything seems much nicer over there, where she is. If it is a party, or some other social
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gathering, you keep looking round to see where she is. You get a little shock of excitement
when you spot her, and you yearn for her to notice you. If she has noticed, and your luck is
in, she will look at you steadily for long enough for you to realise that this is a message. It
means you may approach.
If she has not noticed, the only thing to do is to approach anyway and try your luck. This is
more difficult, because attractive women are pestered all the time by men trying their luck.
So if you swagger up, all cocky and over-confident, she will think, "Here's another creep
coming!" It is even worse if you are timid and furtive, like a fur salesman at an animal rights
convention.
What you must do is to approach simply and normally, look her in the eye and say something
to engage her in conversation. Ah, but what to say? Many a time I have hung around,
looking longingly at a girl and thinking I had just about enough courage to go up to her, but
could not think what to say when I got there. It reminds me of that old Thurber cartoon in
which the man says to the girl, "Do you come here often?" and she replies, "Only in the
mating season". What DO you talk about?
As a young man, I could not solve this problem. So there were probably several girls
thinking, "What the hell is he waiting for? Why doesn't he come over?" Nowadays, of
course, the young woman would come over herself and say, "You interested in me, or what?"
Anyway, the solution was demonstrated to me one day by a friend who, meeting an attractive
woman for the first time said, "You’re nice!" She smiled and told him her name. It was as
simple as that.
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This may strike you as a genteel way of going about it, but women do not mind a spot of
gentility as long as you are sincere. The point is, she can hardly fail to be pleased, even if she
is not interested. So you will not get what you most dread, the bum's rush. What will happen
is that, because you have told her straight out that you fancy her, she will register that she has
made a score. She has had what the Victorians called "a gentleman caller". You have
metaphorically left your visiting card on her silver salver. It is very gratifying to get a definite
approach from a member of the other sex. Almost the first thing you should do is exchange
names, while she is still glowing with pride at having pulled.
Nowadays, it is much easier to open a conversation with a female stranger than it used to be.
Many women work in similar fields to men. So you can ask her the question which women
have always used to start talking to men: “What do you do?” Women were trained by their
mothers and teachers to start a man talking about something which really interests him, i.e.
himself. So that was their opening gambit. It was a good one. Now we males can use it, too.
Getting her talking about herself will make you seem much more interesting than if you do
most of the talking yourself. Most women dislike listening to monologues. They like to
participate in a conversation. So if she gets her “What do you do?” question in first, you
should reply as briefly as possible and then ask her the same question.
Next, you should try to engage her emotionally. Ask her something which invites her to show
how she feels about something, such as “Do you like your job?” After that, it is all down to
good luck and good judgment. If she likes you, she will accept your gambit as an invitation
to open a conversation, during which you will explore your mutual interest, which amounts
to, “Are you available?” and “What are you offering?”
If she does not like you, the
conversation will peter out and she will suddenly spot a friend whom she just has to go and
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see. Remember, no woman would go off to see a friend when she could be getting along with
a hunky man.
All this has to be taken fairly seriously. You have to realise that you are asking to be put on
her list. So don't start anything unless you really want to get involved. Chatting up the girls
and flirting for fun is one thing. Both sexes enjoy that. It helps them to sort out the most
desirable partners. Light-hearted banter is one thing, but looking a girl in the eye and telling
her she is lovely is something else. It will be interpreted as a serious offer, so you could be
starting something big.
One word about flirting. You must always make sure the other party is enjoying it. What you
may think is a bit of flirting may come across as unwanted attention, or even sexual
harassment, to her. Most women can more than cope with a spot of badinage, but some can't.
So just watch to see what impact your words are having.
If she looks anxious and
embarrassed, cut out the funny stuff and quickly apologise. Say, "I didn't mean to upset you",
or something similar.
On the other hand, you can be too cautious and too responsible about approaching women.
You will never get a girl like that. Love is a glorious gamble. You cannot tell how it will pan
out. They say it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Of course it
is! In matters of the heart, it is better to be sorry than safe. If you love a woman and it all
goes wrong, well never mind. At least you will have had the wonderful experience of being
involved with her. You may end up sadder, possibly wiser, perhaps both, maybe neither, but
nothing can take away that feeling of glory, of being truly alive, of suffering with the damned
and exulting with the angels.
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A friend of mine, who has been unmarried and lonely all his life, told me that his mother
warned him about women, saying they were out to trap him. I replied, "Exactly! That's the
whole idea. You must let them catch you." He was dumbfounded. Yet he envied me for
sleeping every night in my wife's bed. What his mother should have told him is that if you
want to share a woman's bed, you have to come to terms with the cloven race. They want to
sleep with us, just as much as we want to sleep with them. We must not hold ourselves back
from them, afraid of being trapped. They are willing to commit themselves, so why shouldn't
we? To be sure, it is a trap, but it is a warm and tender trap.
So we must advance boldly, but not overconfidently, towards them and say modestly, "Hello!
Can I talk to you?" Then we shall see what transpires. The desire to approach is thus the
second stage of courtship. In some ways, it is the most crucial stage, because if one of you
does not approach the other, nothing more will happen. That is why women sometimes grow
impatient with waiting for the man to advance. So they take it upon themselves. They know
that some of the best of men are shy about approaching women, while many rascals are bold
and forward. Thoughtful women seem to understand the problem of the shy suitor and are
ready to give him every encouragement.
Why is it that so many men are more afraid of the tender breasts of women than of the guns of
the enemy? There is a famous cartoon from the time of the First World War, showing a
French girl standing astride a German trench, lifting her skirt and showing her pudenda. The
moustachioed, battle-hardened warriors are fleeing with looks of stark terror on their faces.
This illustrates an important psychological point.
We males are indeed a bit afraid of
females. It must be something to do with our tortured relationships with our mothers. Our
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emotional dependence on women makes us afraid of rejection, of being cut off from security
and love. That is why we are shy of approaching a fair stranger. She might say, "Get lost!"
In fact, women are usually very kind in dealing with a genuine approach from a man. They
may say, "My boyfriend is that huge man over there", but they usually let you down lightly if
the answer is negative. Nearly always they are pleased and flattered that someone should be
interested. As long as you do not think you are God's gift to women, there is nothing to be
afraid of and nothing to lose.
One golden rule. Do not prepare a speech before making your approach. That is something I
used to do. It is a recipe for disaster. Two things which a female looks out for when
approached by a possible suitor are insincerity and general twerpishness. A twerp is a foolish
person who cannot be taken seriously. You can be a joker, a clown a buffoon even, but never
a twerp. When a twerp makes a joke, people laugh at him instead of at the joke. Women like
a man to make them laugh, but they will not stand a complete fool. He has to have a serious
side as well.
Try to see it from the female point of view. A woman looking at a new suitor hears the
female beast barking in her ears, "Could he really love us?
Could he look after us?"
Insincerity suggests the answer is No to the first question and twerpishness says the same
answer to the second. That does not necessarily rule him out of taking her to the barn dance,
but he will not get any further. You have to be either husband material or a desirable hunk if
you are going to end up in her arms.
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Unless you are a natural actor, a prepared speech will sound both insincere and gauche. You
must just get yourself over there, look her right in the eye and say the first Hello! She will
know what you have come for, especially if your eyes have met a few times before. So get on
and exchange names. If she is not interested, the conversation will stay polite and desultory.
You will feel it is leading nowhere. On the other hand, if she is interested, she will make it
easy for you and you will feel you are getting on like a house on fire.
Like a salesman clinching a deal, it is a good idea before you take leave of her to arrange to
meet her somewhere. If she finds an excuse not to accept, you can take it she is not
interested. A woman will rearrange practically anything, except perhaps her father's funeral,
for the sake of a date with a desirable man. So if she is washing her hair, it means the kiss of
death to romance.
If she does accept, you have a date. You will see her again and romance should blossom from
there. She will rush off and tell her friend, "You see that fellow over there? He's taking me
to the concert!" Her friend will reply, "Never! You lucky bitch!" Thus are these female
triumphs celebrated.
It is hard to say why a woman accepts or rejects a suitor at first sight. Obviously, sheer
physical attraction comes into it, generally a smaller part than men think, but a larger part
than women think. So when you first get close to her, she looks steadily at you. Her brain is
thinking, "Quick! Get him in focus. Is he any good?" If she is wise, she will play for time.
So you may not get any clear reaction for a while. This is why you have to be ready to talk to
her, so she can size you up and decide whether she likes you. This is often called "chatting
her up". Being able to sustain a friendly, but not over-familiar, conversation with a stranger is
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a great social skill. There is no question that women more readily accept dates with men who
can chat them up.
A second golden rule of courtship is be bold, but do not rush your fences. As a charming Irish
girl of sixteen once put it to me, "Don't force the issue". What she meant was that a woman's
mind makes itself up in its own good time and that if you push too soon you will get the
wrong answer. She would rather wait until she is certain before rushing into anything
That is why you must watch very carefully for signs that you are trying to progress too
quickly. Women know that creeps push hard because they are desperate. So you must not be
mistaken for a pushy creep. Let her know how you feel, but let her decide the pace of
advance. Of course, everyone is different. Some women like to be taken by storm. Others
prefer a siege. Others will advance boldly with flags flying, challenging you to take them on
in the great battle of love.
It is usual for adolescents and very young adults to move around in a gang or set, so that the
young men and women get to know each other quite naturally and without conscious
courtship games. So what I have been talking about is the more tricky situation when you try
to get off with a complete stranger. Even the teenage gang is really a courtship system in
which young people can associate on friendly terms while they find mates. It is a networking
system. You will most likely fall for your friend's girl-friend, or her friend, or your friend's
sister's friend, or something like that. The teenage gang system enables the gang members to
meet quite a lot of people of the same age, but of opposite sex. Also, shy young people get to
meet the talent brought into the set by its more enterprising and sociable members.
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When you are meeting a complete stranger, you will find that your first conversations with
her will be nothing more or less than negotiations.
You will find yourself telling her
everything she needs to know, almost as in a job interview. Both sides try to find out in the
first few minutes the most vital piece of information about a member of the opposite sex. Is
he/she available? You search for clues. A wedding ring suggests not, but not all married
people are still with their partners. You need not worry too much about an engagement ring,
either. Plenty of girls are engaged to boring men and would gladly accept a better offer.
The second most vital piece of information is what type of relationship is being offered? That
is, you have to ask yourself where might this lead? If you are both young and unattached, the
relationship is generally friendship, leading to love, leading to a possible permanent liaison.
If one of you is married and intends to remain so, then what is being offered is an affair,
which will probably be exciting at first but eventually unhappy.
It may also be life-
enhancing. If you are both married, the relationship on offer will be something else, probably
a short, adulterous romp.
Everything depends on what the pair of you want and how you assess the chance of getting
some emotional satisfaction from it. Not everybody is looking for marriage and a family, at
least not at first. Very young women, in particular, are often not ready to form a permanent
bond. Consequently, many young men are confused and hurt by the apparently coquettish and
capricious behaviour of their teenage sweethearts. You will be tempted to wonder, "Can
these be the loving and loyal friends our grandfather told us we should find?"
If young girls seem heartless and cruel, remember that a spirited girl does not want to give
herself to the first guy who shows up. The female strategy is to find the best mate she can.
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So the female beast keeps reminding her, "He may not be the best you can do". So the young
female likes to keep her options open. Only when she has had a look around the field will she
be ready to choose a permanent mate. It is all to do with females taking sex seriously. She
doesn't belong to you until she has decided it is time to belong to someone and that you are
the one.
So far, we have dealt with courtship as if it were a matter of males approaching females.
Conventionally, it has been seen like that, although I have already hinted that females will
take the initiative if they are not happy with the speed of advance. In other words, the idea of
the male as the initiator is something of a social convention, to which females acquiesce so
long as it suits them. In some ways, this old convention suits the respective psychology of the
two sexes, with the males wanting to play Jack-the-Lad, while the females play their old
waiting game. However, as I have pointed out, not all males feel so bold and not all females
are so reticent. In fact, females take the initiative more often than is generally supposed.
Observation of young people at social gatherings suggests that women make the first sexual
advances in a surprisingly high proportion of cases. Surprising, that is, to someone brought
up in the notion that initiation of sexual pairing is the prerogative of the male. Not entirely, it
seems. Women take the bull by the horns (well, something like that) in about one-third of
cases. This is if we take the initial advance to be something overt, like an invitation to dance
or touching the intended partner. The extent to which women initiate sexual relations by less
overt means, particularly by eye contact, may be much greater. Women themselves are very
aware of this trick of giving men the glad-eye. More than once I have heard a mother telling
her daughter to stop it.
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Older women, reminiscing about their first meeting with their husbands, often claim that she
saw him before he saw her and that she caught his eye. The husband, conversely, will claim
that he spotted this young woman, not realising that she may have caused him to notice her.
There are other subtle ways in which a woman can initiate sexual relations without the man
feeling threatened. If a woman fancies a man, she finds some occasion to touch him. This is
sometimes disguised as accidental or casual, but more often is a very discreet, but definite
signal. This may take the form of a playful slap of incredible lightness, or it may be a laying
of a hand on his arm, or else the drawing of a feather-light fingertip across some portion of
his anatomy. I once bent down to fix the interior light of a woman friend's fridge, whereupon
she drew her finger lightly across the breadth of my shoulders, making it plain that I was
invited to fix more than the fridge.
It is, of course, just a surge of affection which makes her want to touch you. A very young
woman, or a teenage girl, may slap you quite hard, or even kick you on the shins, just as a
young boy will punch you to show affection. An adult woman generally tones it down and
makes it more obvious that her feelings are tender.
If you do not react, that is the end of the romance. She will take it that you are not interested.
If you are interested, you should touch her lightly in return, for example by giving her hand a
squeeze.
After that, everything depends on the circumstances.
yourselves into each other's arms.
Sometimes you hurl
Sometimes you let things develop more slowly.
Whichever it is, you always have a wonderful feeling of conspiratorial togetherness
afterwards.
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What is certain is that people who are mutually attracted have an irresistible urge to touch one
another. The third stage of courtship is therefore the stage of touching. As I have already
made plain, touching a woman is strictly by invitation only. That is the significance of her
first touch. It means you are invited to touch her and that a sexual relationship can begin. It
is not possible to lay down hard and fast rules about touching. You can't make love according
to a textbook. However, it is possible to lay down some ground rules, so that you can perhaps
have a better chance of happiness.
For a start, you should follow your own instincts and be guided by your feelings. But you
must also be guided by your partner's feelings. In a male, tenderness can paradoxically be
rather a fierce feeling. So you must remember how soft and sensuous women's bodies are.
With one of my first girl-friends, I used to put my arms around her and crush her to me as
hard as I could. I thought she would like to feel my strength and fervour, but she got bruised
breasts and was not very pleased. What she really wanted was to be held firmly but gently.
She could feel how strong I was without being crushed to death. What excited her was a
combination of desire and tenderness.
If she lets you touch sensitive parts of her body, which is most parts, do it gently. Do not
seize her nipple as if it were the ring-pull on a beer can. Take her breast in your hand, by all
means, but squeeze it gently. Don't yank at it. Kissing and cuddling and petting are normal
forms of preliminary love-making. It gives you both a chance to get to know each other and
how you respond. Quite often, the affair does not go any further, particularly if one of you
decides he or she is not keen, after all. The general objective, nevertheless, is to lead on to
the final objective of courtship, mating or sexual intercourse.
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"Leads on" are the operative words here. It may be weeks or months before that finally
happens, or it may be straight away. It happens more quickly with experienced adults than
with very young people. Your own first experiments may be when you and the girl are both
inexperienced. You can try anything you like, but you must let the female partner decide the
speed of advance. If you try to touch her where she does not want you to, she will take your
hand and move it away, or else give it a little slap. Females never blame us for trying. On the
contrary, they would be disappointed if we did not. But they must have the right to say "No"
at any time.
So if your partner pushes your hand away, do not be angry but get on and enjoy what she does
allow. You will win a lot of Brownie points for being chivalrous and considerate with her. It
is true that a woman's intentions can be hard to read, even to the woman herself. There used
to be a Nineteenth Century saying that if a woman said, "Oh, Harry! Do have done!" she
meant that Harry should continue. But if she said, "Oh, Harry! Have done, do!" she meant he
should stop.
In other words, there can be token resistance for the sake of form, but this is signalled by the
lack of vehemence in the rejection. Either way, it is essential to listen to the vibrations
coming from your partner. A modern woman may not speak like her great grandmother, but
if she really wants you to stop, you will not be in much doubt about it.
Women's sexual feelings are very strong, but so in general are their social consciences. They
usually have a sense of right and wrong in these matters and are very concerned about what
other people think and feel. So a woman may desire a man but decide she is not going to
allow any love-making. Consequently, when he approaches her, she is in a turmoil of
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conflicting emotions. Sometimes, she has to find some psychological device to allow her
natural desires overcome her conscience. This can involve getting the man to overcome her
resistance, so that he can share the blame.
This is why men often complain that woman are hypocritical about sex and pretend not to
want it. Even worse, it also leads women to change their minds halfway through the act, or
even after it. This is an old bone of contention between the sexes: At what point can a
woman withdraw her consent? The answer is probably at any time up to the climax, but
afterwards is too late.
Most times, there is no problem about this. You will both be equally enthusiastic and the
outcome should be mutual satisfaction and affection. If you are in any doubt about the
woman's intentions, slow it down and see what develops. Women learn very early in life that
males do not want what they can have too easily and that men habitually retreat when the
female advances. Consequently, your young woman friend may instinctively try not to make
it too easy for you in the early stages of your courtship.
All I can advise is common sense and common decency. Be a good bloke with her. Listen to
the sounds she makes. Press on, because she expects it and wants to have the option, but
don't force her to do anything she does not want to do. If you play it gently like this, you will
most probably have your reward, which is not really the sex act, but her love and affection.
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SEXUAL INTERCOURSE
The drama of human courtship, like that of other creatures, is meant to end in mating. This is
rather euphemistically called sexual intercourse or, in vernacular English, fucking. Given the
general hostility of priests to these fleshly activities, it is not surprising that sex has long been
a taboo subject in most of the civilised world. One consequence of this repression of
sexuality is that this simple and agreeable act has been regarded as filthy and unmentionable.
So "fuck" is the commonest swearword among English speakers. Unfortunately, we have no
generally acceptable word between the prissy "sexual intercourse", the coldly scientific
"coitus" and the native but non-respectable "fuck".
As it happens, the former swearword is becoming less shocking and may eventually become
widely acceptable in everyday speech. Even so, people still have to pussy-foot around, using
terms like "having sex" or just "sex" when they mean the act of mating. This problem over
language illustrates the whole process by which society is coming to terms with sexuality and
gradually discarding the Judaeo-Christian inhibitions about it. Some people see this as a
degradation of standards, but many realise that it is a liberating and humanising movement,
which will allow us to come to terms with one of our most powerful and most characteristic
impulses.
We modern people (or post-modern, as we should now say) owe a great deal to the early
leaders of the struggle against sexual repression. At the risk of odium and contempt from the
conventional majority, these pioneers assaulted the citadel of prudery and bigotry. All too
often, however, they went too far. In attempting to show that the sex act is not lewd, filthy
and degrading, they tended to exalt it to an almost silly degree.
One such was D.H.
Lawrence, who portrayed sex as natural and human, which it is, but also as a sublime, almost
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religious experience, which for most people it is not. As one of his contemporaries remarked,
"The trouble with you, Lawrence, is that you keep trying to build the Taj Mahal out of a good
fuck!"
When we read Lawrence's work now, we recognise that there is a grain of truth in this
observation. Other liberalisers followed a similar route, seeking to justify the physical sex act
as the supreme manifestation of love, thus transferring the respectability of love, the highest
Christian virtue, onto the physical act.
This, too, seems some way over the top nowadays. We are more ready to recognise that,
although love certainly comes into it, for most people, most of the time, the sex act is not the
supreme manifestation of love. It involves a lot of other feelings and considerations besides
love, if by "love" we mean an altruistic and selfless devotion to another person. Like many
other human activities, the sex act appears simple and straightforward, but is in reality a most
amazingly complicated bundle of personal emotions and social factors.
So we must be wary of glib generalisations about sex. It means different things to different
people at different times and in different circumstances. Each of us has a different mixture of
emotional and social needs. Sex is as much about power, self-expression, self-image and
social position as it is about love. The fact is that human sexuality encompasses far more
than love. It is not even primarily concerned with reproduction. The sex act, which appears
on the face of it to be a simple expression of animal high spirits, carries overtones of social
relationships, status, personal authority and many other things.
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As I have pointed out, reproduction is only one of the functions of sexual intercourse, quite
possibly not the most important one. Its main function is to cement the relationship between
man and woman. This is why women feel jealous when their men have sex with other
women. It is not just that this is a violation of the sole breeding rights which we ought to
offer our partners. It is worse even than that. A man who has sex with a woman is quite
likely to form a strong bond with her. Men often claim that they are clever mice, who can
take the cheese without springing the trap, but women are not so sure that this is possible. Put
briefly, if you have a satisfactory sex life with one person, you tend not to be interested in
anyone else. Everyone can point to exceptions to this rule, but generally speaking that is how
it works.
One of the problems with the present phase of western society, as we disengage from the old
sexual repression, is that we have gone off too far in the opposite direction. Sex is now
actively promoted as the most desirable consumer good. Instead of being stupidly repressed,
sex is stupidly promoted as indispensable to life. The message which comes out of every
television set, most newspapers and magazines and many movies, is that if you are not having
sex three times a day you are not getting your share of life's goodies. Even worse, you are
probably abnormal and will shortly die.
At the very least, you will suffer dreadful
psychological problems, which will lead to the disintegration of your personality.
The fact that this is piffle has so far eluded the people who run the media. They only know
that "sex sells", as indeed it did in a sexually repressed society. As people become more
sophisticated about it, sex will sell less and less.
Anyway, nobody ever suffered any
psychological damage through not having a sex life. It is something we can take or leave, as
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it suits us and as circumstances dictate. This is not to say that people deprived of sex have no
sexual longings. Of course they do, but they will not come to any harm.
We may yet find that that the so-called liberated attitude to sex will cause more psychological
problems and social damage than outright repression ever did. Already we have seen the
physical downside in the form of sexually-transmitted diseases. Perhaps we shall soon see
people screaming that they have only had sex six hundred times this year, as they are dragged
away by men in white coats.
Fortunately, in the end the good sense of the people will come to the rescue. Everyone who
has experience of it knows that sex is not at all like the picture painted of it by the media and
their close relatives the pornographers. Those few surveys which have anything truthful to
say about sex tend to show that most people go on their way imperturbably, using sex as
nature intended it to be used, as the cement of relationships, of family life and as the means of
personal fulfilment. They do not do it dozens of times a week, using a hundred different
positions to show how liberated they are. They do it whenever they feel like it, which is two
or three times a week for regular couples. In the West, they generally adopt the "missionary
position", that is with the woman lying on her back and the man face down on top of her.
Most people find this physically and emotionally the most satisfactory.
Why do the masses of poor, deprived, deluded, "ordinary" people still persist in these
outmoded attitudes and practices? They could be swinging from the ceiling and enjoying all
sorts of new sensations (mostly involving rubber, whips, handcuffs, etc.) Ask the average
married man why he does not get his wife to dress up as a Nazi prison guard. The answer is
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because he is not a nut. For most people, most of the time, sex is matey, friendly, comforting,
reassuring and gives a lot of relief. It is also fairly exciting and pleasurable and is great fun.
Like so many things involving pleasure, sex is more exciting in the contemplation than in the
act. It is mostly those who do not have much of a sex life who think most about it. Celibates,
in particular, are inclined to think that sex is far more exciting and pleasurable than it really
is. This is why priests have always been so down on it, except in those churches which allow
the clergy to marry. Sex is like money. Those who have enough of it do not usually worry
much about it.
Much of the sex-obsession of the media is due to their having noticed that society no longer
cares for sexual repression. Consequently, they are no longer forbidden to use rude words in
public, or to show simulated sexual intercourse on the screen. As a result, we had to go
through a period when sexual intercourse simulation by actors was practically compulsory
viewing. No drama was complete without it. The producers seemed to go out of their way to
find an excuse for trotting it out. It seemed at one time as if even the gardening programmes
might include humping on those smooth green lawns.
Fortunately, that phase seems to have passed. Possibly, the audience research showed that
watching other people pretending to have sex is pretty boring after the first couple of times.
The old Greek dramatists knew that it is much more effective to keep this sort of thing off
stage and let us imagine what goes on. Besides, experienced practitioners of sex, watching
the actors writhing and shrieking, would turn to each other and say, "It's not like that when we
do it!" Indeed, it is not.
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Perhaps the pendulum will swing still further back and newspaper editors will realise that
grown men do not really want to look at pictures of women's breasts any more. Most of us
can see the real thing whenever we want to. So pictures of them give only a momentary flash
of interest, especially when they are grossly inflated, like footballs. No-one, except a few
religious nuts, wants a return to sexual repression. It is to be hoped that the widely-predicted
puritan revolution will not happen.
What we have to realise is that sex is more elemental and animal than the idealists pretend,
but less exciting and pleasurable than the liberationists would have us believe. As with
everything else in life, we have to hope that common sense and common decency will prevail.
That ought to banish both Puritanism and pornography, but of course it never will. There will
always be some people who are sex-starved or else enjoy the characteristic puritan hypocrisy
of titillation by things which are forbidden or naughty. What is naughty about women's
breasts, I can't imagine.
So far, I have concentrated on preparing you for sexual encounters with our female friends by
putting you in the right mental set about it. Remember the three N's. Sex is Natural, Normal
and Nice. It is natural because men and women were made for each other. If your sexual
orientation is towards women, when you get to a certain age (which is much younger than is
generally imagined) you will start to fantasise about sexual adventures with the females you
meet. This will often be with grown women, who are much older than you are, as the
heroines of your day dreams. This, too, is natural, because adult women have the sexual
power which promotes such thoughts, whereas a girl of your own age may be still as straight
as a plank. I remember when I was a boy thinking that my teacher had the most amazingly
beautiful legs. She probably just had women's legs, which to a boy are amazingly beautiful.
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Whichever it was, she noticed my fascination and simply told me to keep my mind on my
lessons. She was an experienced woman and knew that it was quite natural for me to be
interested in her elegant limbs, which however were designed to catch much bigger fish than
me.
Sex is also normal. Do not think you are the only person in the world to think these thoughts.
Almost everybody does. When I was an irreverent young man, my pals and I used to have fun
imagining what the couples we met would be like when they were making love. We knew
that practically everyone in the world does it if they have half a chance. On this reckoning,
there must be some pretty grotesque pairings. Big disparities is size were one cause of
merriment. Another was gross obesity. "It's not over till the fat lady comes!" said my pal.
Yet another was advanced years, as we imagined the clash of Zimmers in the twilight. This
was the unkindness of youth, of course, but it seemed funny at the time.
As you have by now guessed, sex is also faintly ridiculous, or at least rather comic. This is
why we do not really want to see other people doing it. Only a scientist would want to know
what happens when the average Joe Ocker couples with Mrs Ocker.
And yet, as with anything human, there is greatness and beauty to be found in even our most
ridiculous goings-on. A friend of mine said he had seen a couple having sex on the grass in a
park. Far from being annoyed or offended by such a public display of wantonness, my friend
was moved by the couple's complete absorption with one another and by the way the man
tenderly cradled the woman's head in his arm. So when people show respect and affection for
each other, the sex act ceases to be lewd or ridiculous and becomes rather noble.
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What about the third N? Sex is also nice. Only the sex-starved imagine sex to be a great
ecstasy. As an American youth was heard to observe, "Sex is good, but not as good as fresh
sweet corn." When it is part of a regular relationship, sex is more accurately described as
comforting, reassuring, pleasurable and, well, nice. It makes you feel loved, wanted and
admired. You rejoice that your partner wants you to be her mate. Above all, you both feel
grateful for the relief you have given one another. Using the new eyes I have given you to
look at her, you see that your woman is a wonderful creature and that you are lucky to be
loved by her. That is, if it goes well.
Sex is most exciting the first time you do it with someone new, especially if this is after a
long or difficult courtship. That is perhaps why some men suffer from the dreaded condition
of satyriasis, which compels them to find new sexual partners all the time. They seek the pot
of gold at the end of the rainbow, the great ecstasy which sex is supposed to provide. Some
say it is the excitement of the chase which makes their adrenalin flow, but it is obvious the
poor fellows are sick and get no satisfaction at all from something which most people find
deeply satisfying.
They do it to demonstrate how rich, powerful, clever and generally
wonderful they are. Most people think they are idiots, because they miss the whole point of
sexuality, which is to find someone you want to do it with and to share this gift of nature with
her.
So far, we have established that you will soon start to desire sexual intercourse and that this is
normal and natural. All sorts of people will be bombarding you with messages to the effect
that you must have sex frequently, or you will become personally and socially a failure. All
that stuff you can ignore. Sex is a very private matter and most young people find out about it
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in their own way and in their own time. Having sex with someone just to impress your
friends can be a mistake. It is demeaning to you and to her.
You must also know that you can't make love according to a text book. The "How to do it"
books about sex tend to reflect the fashionable doctrines of their time. So they are usually
peddling some line or other. When I was a youth, my friend had a text book which pursued
the line taken at that time, which was that women are generally very difficult to bring to
orgasm, so we men had a duty to do everything possible to help them achieve this essential
end. Among its recommendations was that the woman had to be warm and comfortable. This
may be a valid generalisation, but the first time I was invited to perform this act was by a
lovely woman some years my senior. It was also in the open air on a frosty night.
She lay down on her back, instructed me where to lie and enveloped me in her big overcoat.
This should have been the beginning of my adulthood. Then I remembered the text book.
"But you'll be cold!" I said. She thought I was not man enough for the job, which was not
altogether true, and the romance ended there. What the text book should have said is that if a
woman wants it in a field on a winter's night, a good man gets down on his knees in the frosty
grass. To hell with the cold! In other words, it is what the woman wants that we must listen
to, not some doctrine about us men providing all the right conditions, as if we were trying to
grow mustard and cress.
As this is not a "How to do it" book, you will have to make do with some tips. The first of
these you already know. Respond to what your partner wants. Look at her, listen to her, care
about her. Of course, my old text book was right about one thing. The woman's enjoyment is
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as important as the man's, and he can do a lot to make sure she does enjoy it. Remember, if
she does enjoy it, you will be invited to come again.
How to make she sure enjoys it? In general, if you are considerate and kind to her and then
just follow your natural inclinations, she most probably will enjoy it. Women also have
strong sexual feelings. They desire sexual intercourse as much as we do. In practice, then,
both of you will go into this thing with natural enthusiasm. In fact, some males are shocked
by the vehemence of a woman's lust. But do not be afraid. Just grapple with her and you will
quench her fires.
A second tip is to note one quirk of female nature which is important in sexual dealings with
them.
Most women enjoy kissing, cuddling and caressing nearly as much as actual
penetration. To us men, this seems pretty small beer compared with the sex act, but for some
reason women do not think so. Consequently, they often like things to develop slowly, with
lots of caressing before the actual union. The text books call this "foreplay", although you do
not hear this term much in everyday speech.
Being generally very expressive of their emotions, women usually like to give caresses as
well as receive them. So do not be surprised, therefore, when her hand reaches out for your
doodle. Notice, though, how incredibly soft and light a woman's touches are. These people
get a lot of pleasure from owning a skin.
Among western peoples, and indeed, much of the human race, love-making generally starts
with kissing. This strange custom is hard to explain, except perhaps in terms of the lips and
mouth being very muscular and expressive, yet also being covered by soft, moist membranes.
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The mouth is one of the most personal and intimate parts of the body. It also contains the
tongue, that sly, flexible, darting organ, which contrives to be at once warm, moist, vigorous
and slightly rough.
It can therefore make a strong impact on your partner's sensitive
membranes.
So all good love-making generally involves the mouth and the tongue. With their big,
sensuous lips, women seem designed to be kissed. It is certainly a delightful sensation for us
males, but I suspect that women enjoy it even more. According to ancient Greek legend,
there was a character called Tiresias, who in his time had been both a man and a woman.
This intrigued the gods, who hauled him up before them so that Zeus could ask him who had
the most pleasure in love-making, men or woman. Tiresias replied that women did, by a
factor of nine to one. This amused Zeus, who was not known for abstemiousness in these
matters, but Hera his wife immediately turned the unfortunate Tiresias blind, to teach him that
he should not have blown the most jealously-guarded feminine secret.
Most young men assume that passionate, almost violent kissing should be the start to lovemaking, as it is portrayed in films. Well, it may do, but usually only between established
lovers who are particularly passionate, perhaps because they have been separated for a while.
You have to be sensitive to the circumstances. If it is your first time with a shy, young
woman, you probably should not just grab hold of her and stick you tongue down her throat.
Of course, she wants to feel your desire for her, but it is best if she senses it growing as you
embrace her. Then she knows that it is she who is causing this effect, and her desire will rise
with yours. Otherwise, she might just as well be the gate post which you have seized in your
amatory blindness.
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So it is a good idea to start with light, almost close-mouthed kissing, or "bussing" as the old
English used to say. Kiss her lightly and repeatedly on her mouth, on her closed eyelids and
on her neck. If you kiss her on the cheek, near the corner of her mouth, she will turn her
mouth towards yours if she desires you. If necessary, tilt her face up gently with your finger
on her chin, so you can reach her mouth. After a while, you can indeed let your passion be
your guide. Most people, when they get worked up, put their tongues in each other's mouths
and exchange caresses with their tongues.
You will soon learn which kisses and caresses your partner likes best.
One little boy
returning from a sex education lesson informed his mother that girls have knobs on their
chests which have to be turned. This is not quite in focus, but the basic idea is right. Women
do like to have their breasts touched, but it needs a fairly sensitive approach, not a turning of
knobs. The best way is to knead the whole breast gently in your hand. The nipples are very
sensitive and should be brushed or kissed very lightly.
Most women will tell you that this caressing of their breasts has an arousing effect. Yet if you
listen to what women say are the things they most dislike about clumsy male approaches, a
hasty grabbing of the breasts ranks high on the list. Be warned. You have to make a fine
judgment as to when it is safe to touch her breasts. You should not, on the other hand, be
hesitant or fumbling, either. That will annoy her, too.
Following the precept of looking at her and listening to her, if you are in any doubt you
should look her in the eye and move your hand slowly as if to touch her there. If she looks at
you like an eagle about to devour a vole, withdraw your hand and scratch your ear or
something. However, if she looks wide-eyed and tender, put your hand where it wants to go.
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Another place where women like to be caressed is on the thighs, especially on the insides.
The fact is that the thighs are of special sexual significance. They are like the petals of a
flower, leading you, the busy bee, to the place where life's business is to be transacted. So
you will find your lady's thighs amazingly beautiful and you will have a serious urge to touch
them. She for her part will long for you to touch her there. Sometimes, when you do so her
legs open involuntarily, as if you have released a spring. A caressing of the thighs is always a
prelude to sexual union. It is therefore something about which women are very particular.
They do not allow any old groper to put his hand there.
Although her breasts and thighs will give a lot of pleasure to both of you, the real magic
button is the clitoris. This is a little organ, nothing more than a tiny mound of flesh, really,
situated towards the top of her vulva, between the labia or outer lips of what is vulgarly called
her pussy. Now, of course, you don't get to touch this until love-making is fairly advanced.
So, please, no grabs for it under her clothing, unless you know that is what she wants.
In the dark, and being unfamiliar with female anatomy, your chances of finding the clitoris at
first are not good. So just ask her where she wants you to touch her and all will be revealed.
When she does guide you to the spot, treat it with respect and caress it gently at first. She will
soon let you know when it is time to be a bit more vigorous.
If you feel really passionate about your partner, you may want to caress her clitoris with your
tongue. This is called cunnilingus, or in the vernacular, "going down on her". It is something
which most women greatly enjoy. Her clitoris truly is the seat of her sexual experiences, so
your licking it with your soft-rough, sensuous tongue gives her a tremendous thrill. It is also
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a sort of act of homage to her body. You really do feel like a worshipper at a shrine. Don't
worry about the health aspects. It is perfectly clean and wholesome with a healthy woman. If
you have any reservations about this, they will probably disappear when your passion rises.
You should be making love to woman because you adore her. If you do, every part of her
body will seem holy to you and you will want to give yourself to her without reservation.
What caressing the clitoris does is to arouse her sexually and start the physical and mental
processes which will lead her to orgasm. Now, it is often said that unless her clitoris is
stimulated properly beforehand, a woman is unlikely to reach orgasm as a result of
penetrative sex, that is the penis going into the vagina. Whether this is true or not is
something a female writer could tell us, but wise men never take a chance and always at least
rub the clitoris gently with one fingertip before attempting to penetrate.
This tells you when it is time to penetrate, because in a while the lips of the vulva open and
the whole area becomes soft and moist. Then it is time to go. She may actually tell you to
stop fooling around and get cracking. At this point, you may feel like thrusting fiercely to
achieve your heart's desire and to take possession of conquered territory. But a little restraint
here will win you big dividends later. So enter gently, if necessary, by degrees rather than in
one bound, so as not to hurt or alarm her. After a few careful thrusts, she will relax and you
can be as enthusiastic as you like. In fact, she will probably exult in your passion.
In your fevered imaginings about sex, there is never any problem in coupling. In real life
there sometimes is, especially if both of you are inexperienced. You may find yourself
pushing against something hard, which is definitely not penetrable. This is another reason for
proceeding slowly at first. If you simply present the tip of your penis gently to the general
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area of where you think you want to be, this gives an experienced woman time to adjust her
position so that your penis is in exactly the right spot.
If it is her first time, she may lie quite still, waiting for you to find your way in. Then if you
can't do so quickly, you may feel panicky and humiliated. If you are a sensitive person, your
erection may collapse and the whole thing end in fiasco. So if you can't do it on your own,
don't be afraid to say to her, "Show me where to go!" She will not mind, I promise you. Her
hand will show you the way home. It is quite usual for the woman to guide the penis to where
you both want it to be.
It is, in fact, better if you play it for laughs the first time, despite its historic importance in
your lives. With youths and girls, a bit of giggling and tomfoolery is probably a surer route to
a happy ending than a passionate but over-solemn ceremony. It is being anxious about these
things which really causes the problems.
Now a word about erections. One of the harshest facts of life is that the vagina cannot be
penetrated by a penis which is not fully erect. The walls of the vagina are smooth and
springy, but they are also very muscular. They absolutely refuse to let in anything which is not
hard enough to push them apart. Small wonder that we males are greatly concerned about
this and can get ourselves into various neurotic conditions about it. Social conditioning does
not help much, when the ability to perform this act is called "Potency", equating it with the
quintessence of masculine power and virtue. Conversely, the inability to do it is called
"Impotence", meaning powerlessness and contemptibility. These stupid expressions are a
hangover from the days of patriarchy, when to be male was to be powerful, worthy and
respected.
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The second harshest fact of life is that the erection of the penis is controlled at lower levels in
the brain than the conscious will. In other words, we cannot decide for ourselves whether or
not to get an erection. The penis lives a life of its own which is outside our control. This
results in embarrassing erections at the wrong time and even more embarrassing lack of
erections when you most need them. So those hostile feminists who maintain that a man is
not a fit person to be in charge of a penis have got it all wrong. We are not in charge.
You have to be philosophical about this, realising that it is a man's fate to be at the mercy of
some primitive reflex action originating in some ghastly backwater of the brain. People write
books about this, because the physiology and psychological processes are impressively
complicated. We shall stick to the practical implications, which are that if you don't get the
horn you don't get your oats.
Firstly, this being planet Earth, you may find that you get an erection in the office when a
young woman is careless with her skirt, but that when she takes you home and invites you to
terminate her virginity, Percy has gone on holiday. When you are young, you tend to get an
erection at the slightest provocation. You can, for instance, give yourself a hard merely by
thinking about a desirable female. In effect, you trick the brain into sending out the magic
chemical message. Alternatively, close proximity to a female can do the trick.
At my first senior school dance, the girls came clad in the full panoply of adult female finery.
Instead of their shapeless school gear, they wore dresses and stockings, the whole mindblowing assemblage of feminine glamour. I eventually plucked up the courage to ask a girl to
dance and found that I had never been that close to anyone so desirable. I was soon the owner
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of a prominent bulge at the front of my immaculately creased trousers. The young woman
pretended not to notice, but looking back I realise she must have done. There were moments
when our respective sex organs were only separated by a few layers of flimsy fabric. Then
her face flushed rosy with excitement. In a similar situation, Mae West asked her partner, "Is
that a gun in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?" My young partner was not so
self-confident, but she probably remembers the dance as well as I do.
Unwanted erections are only an embarrassment. A non-erection at a critical time can be
something of a tragedy. I say "can be" because it depends on your attitude. All the text books
say that every man has a failure sometimes and that the causes of this are to be found in
tension, tiredness or too much drink. Fortunately, women seem to understand this and, in any
case, do not necessarily regard penetration as the be-all and end-all of good sex. They are
quite prepared to settle for a loving cuddle instead. So you do not have to worry about what
your partner will think of you, unless you get all silly and humiliated and refuse to cuddle her.
The best thing to do is to take shelter in her arms. Women like their men to be a bit
vulnerable and cast-down at times.
Of course, if you have booked a room at an expensive hotel for a long-awaited coupling with
a highly desirable lady, then a failure to consummate will be disappointing to say the least.
This happened to a friend of mine, who normally had a most reliable mechanism (so he said).
Anyway, on this occasion the reflex did not happen. The lady in the case was expecting a
night of illicit bliss. So she was not at all pleased and made it plain that cuddling was not an
option. She started screaming, "Go hard! Go hard!" while he tried to explain that an erection
was not in his personal gift. This was in the middle of the night at a quiet hotel. In the
morning, everyone in the breakfast room looked strangely at them. Worst of all, they were
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slinking out of the hotel after this miserable fiasco when they met a friend of his wife. He had
some explaining to do later. "Serves him right!" I hear you say.
Any man who has a persistent problem of non-erection should get medical advice. There is
no need to suffer from this condition nowadays, as there are treatments which have a 90%
chance of success.
Orgasm
If it goes on long enough, sexual stimulation usually ends in orgasm, which is generally called
"coming" in popular speech. As it often does, popular speech provides a more accurate and
concise description of what occurs than scientific jargon. You actually feel you are coming,
or arriving, at a destination which is an explosive release of tension and a sensation of intense
pleasure, followed by a huge feeling of relief and a deep relaxation. In the male, the orgasm
results in an ejaculation of semen, the viscous, opalescent fluid which contains the sperm
cells, millions of them.
Women have a similar experience, although of course they do not secrete any semen. St
Thomas Aquinas is castigated by feminists for writing that "female nature is deficient in that
respect", which they take to be an attack on womankind. However, mediaeval Latin is not
widely understood these days. Translations from it into modern English can be suspect,
especially when fitted out with a politically correct modern subtext. Old Thomas may well
have been a patriarch, but all he was doing on this occasion was to remark rather portentously
that women do not produce semen.
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This may seem rather obvious, but it was long debated by scholars and scientists whether
women did in fact produce an emission parallel to the male emission of semen. It now seems
certain that the main female contribution to human reproduction lies in the tiny egg which she
contrives to have in position to receive the incoming spermatozoa. Female emissions are
made, but are concerned with lubricating and cleansing the vagina. In any case, they usually
start well before the orgasm.
The orgasm is really Nature's reward to us for doing what she wants us to do and engaging in
sexual intercourse, thus producing both the babies and the loving parents needed to look after
them. However, being clever animals, we can cheat Nature a bit by inducing orgasm in
ourselves, without the help of a partner. This is called masturbation. It involves stimulating
the tip of the penis in men, or the clitoris in women, until an orgasm occurs.
Practically everyone, of both sexes, does this. It gives relief from sexual frustration and the
resulting tension. Like everything to do with sex, masturbation was severely frowned upon
by priests and moralists. It was widely thought to cause hair to grow in the palms of your
hands, to stunt your growth and to make you too weak to do anything. Hence the popular
terms for masturbation are also generally derogatory, such as "wanking", "jerking off",
"tossing off", etc. From these terms are derived insulting nouns, all implying weakness and
incompetence, such as "wanker", "jerk", "tosser" etc. There was a lot of smirking and
smothered hilarity in English classes when Sir Andrew Aguecheek was described as a "tosspot".
Shakespeare evidently was thinking of his drinking habits but we boys thought
differently
.
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All this stuff about masturbation being harmful is mostly nonsense. The orgasm resulting
from masturbation is the same as that achieved in real sex. Obviously, the benefit to those
who have no sexual partner is considerable. Once, in a court of law, where the defendant to a
charge of attempted rape tried to excuse his conduct on the grounds of his sexual frustration,
the judge was heard to mutter, "What's the matter with him? He's got hands, hasn't he?"
Other famous male jokes about masturbation are:
"Masturbation is better than real sex because in your fantasies you meet a better class of bird."
"Masturbation is best because you are making love to someone you really love."
Presumably, women make the same sort of cracks about it. The fact that it is in effect making
love to yourself has led some psychologists to question whether masturbation might be
harmful precisely because it makes its practitioners turn inwards upon themselves. This too is
misguided. Most of us have no problem turning outwards again when the time comes and a
willing female appears. Some critics have said that youths should not moon around
masturbating, but should engage in vigorous sports, cold showers or hard study, in order to
take their minds off sex and put their energies to better use. This is true in so far as loafing
around doing nothing much is hardly the best training for life. But this could also be said of
watching television, smoking cannabis or drinking beer.
As the Ancient Greeks used to say, "Moderation in all things" is the key to happiness. The
average man feels the need to emit semen about every other day or so, depending on his age.
So masturbating every day does not seem excessive, if he has no other sex life. Being a
pleasurable and private activity, the main danger with masturbation is that it can turn into an
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entire private world. Then it can become obsessive and lead into the disordered fantasy world
of pornography. You must always realise that your fantasies are indeed fantasies and that the
real world of sex and of women is not like that at all.
People of both sexes engage in sexual intercourse for a variety of reasons, but the main one is
always to achieve an orgasm and so obtain relief from sexual tension. One way to think of it
is that sexual tension gradually builds up, like the electrical charge in a thunder cloud.
Eventually, it is discharged like a flash of lightning. This build-up of tension becomes
noticeable, in anyone who is not overworked, under stress or ill, after a couple of days. Most
people masturbate if they cannot relieve it any other way, but most people also prefer to have
sex with someone else, which is a much richer experience. This is what keeps us returning to
our partners and why most people prefer to have a steady relationship in which regular sexual
intercourse is desired by both parties.
Now you know why mummies and daddies like living together and why they are so
disgustingly lovey-dovey all the time. If their relationship goes wrong, it is often because
they don't get on sexually any more, or perhaps never did and one of them has realised this.
Most children prefer not to think of their parents doing THAT, but sex is not the prerogative
of the young. Actually, it seems possible that older people do it better than the young,
because they are not so impatient and selfish. Older people who have lived in a relationship,
especially those with experience of parenting, tend to become more concerned about other
peoples' feelings. Certainly, plenty of men have found that an older woman is a more
confident and generous mistress than a young one. Conversely, many men become more
giving and loving as they get older, and appreciate women more, which is why young women
sometimes take comfort in their arms.
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However, there are plenty of old fools, as well as young ones. So we must not make too
much of the age factor. Impatience, selfishness and a failure to appreciate your partner's
worth are the besetting sins in sexual intercourse. These can occur at any age. The reason
why they are such a crime is that they lead you to forget that your partner has a right to an
orgasm, too.
We males have a special responsibility in that respect. The third cruellest fact of life is that
when we have an orgasm our erection collapses. The penis reverts to being a limp little
sausage. Our female partner can have no more joy from it. So if we are selfish and rush
ahead to have our own orgasm as quickly as possible, we shall probably leave our partner
stranded without reaching her own climax. This is a horrible sensation for her, because the
mounting excitement and tension is suddenly stopped in mid course, with no chance of relief.
What was joy and excitement suddenly turns to frustration and emptiness.
Naturally, she is not pleased with this ending. A wise man tries to avoid it happening. There
are two main things we can do. As I have said, kissing and caressing, especially of the
clitoris, before penetration will cause her to come more quickly when you do penetrate.
Secondly, we can delay our own orgasm quite a lot by simply willing it not to happen. Older
men are can be more successful at this, because experience and self-training are a factor.
After a while, we learn to match the arrival of our orgasm with that of our partner.
It has to be said that we men sometimes find ourselves sweating it out, wondering when the
hell she is going to come. It can be lonely up there, waiting for this heaving geyser to
explode, but it is worth waiting for her, because the glow of mutual satisfaction is quite
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something if you can contrive to both come at the same time. It does not always happen,
mind you. Most couples have to accommodate themselves to coming separately some of the
time, or even most of the time.
Another trick is to time your thrusts so as to create the maximum effect. This means looking
at your partner's face and listening to the sounds she makes. As I have said, it is better to
penetrate very gently and carefully at first, but once you are well mounted you should march
boldly ahead with a steady swing. If you thrash madly too soon, you will come and she will
not.
My own theory is that you should vary the pace and change your position occasionally. Even
in the missionary position, with the man lying on top, it is possible to get quite a lot of
variation. A gentleman takes his weight on his elbows, it is said, but you can also extend
your arms fully, creating a different relationship between your two bodies.
By going
sometimes slowly and dreamily, sometimes quickly and forcefully and sometimes moderately
and majestically, you can give your partner a lot of different sensations. If she is enjoying it,
she usually wears a big grin on her face and makes little noises of satisfaction and
contentment.
When she is starting to come, a woman's face becomes a mask of fierce concentration. She
starts to moan and make extraordinary noises. Sometimes it sounds as if you are murdering
her rather than making love to her. When she finally comes, she will most probably emit loud
shouts or shrieks, which could have the neighbours calling the police, except that grown-up
people all know the unmistakeable sound of a woman having an orgasm.
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If you succeed in bringing her to that point, there is a good chance that you have made a
friend for life. On the other hand, it is amazing how quickly such a tremendous emotional
storm can pass over and be forgotten. The sex act itself is rather a fleeting pleasure. One of
the very nicest things about it is the time immediately afterwards, when you lie quietly,
entwined together, letting the deep relief and relaxation draw you down to a dreamless sleep.
In these moments, the bonds of mateship are tied.
People sometimes talk of "post-coital tristesse", as if making love can make you feel sad
afterwards. We hear less of this nowadays, so it is possible that the sadness was caused by
guilt and shame in people who were taught that sex is lewd and filthy. In any case, if the pair
of you spend some time lying quietly together afterwards, you will not feel anything other
than a deep joy in your male-female creaturehood.
Emotional Aspects
Writing like this on the physical act of sexual intercourse produces advice which will be quite
unintelligible to those who have not actually tried to do it. It is like my book on cross-country
skiing. You have to skid down those steep chutes and crash on the bends before you begin to
understand what the author is talking about. This is why I took care to advise you not to be
too earnest at first. When you crash on the bends, you can laugh and pick yourselves up
again. If you admit to your partner that you have never done this before, she will not despise
you. On the contrary, if she is more experienced she will be touched and will take you to her
heart
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If on the other hand she says, "Neither have I!" then you should say something like, "Well,
we'll have to find out together, then". So you go ahead as two fellow adventurers. If you
have affection and respect for each other, you will not come to any harm.
In the days of sexual repression, it was thought that a woman, especially a lady, did not
willingly enter into sexual relations with a man. At least, she would never do anything which
would precipitate such an event, not even if she were married to him. Apart from being quite
untrue, of course, this attitude led to the unfortunate mental set that sex is essentially
something which a man does to a woman. In fact the vernacular phrase was that he "does"
her.
There is a certain amount of truth in this, because the male partner wields what is sometimes
called a "weapon", while the female provides a receptacle for it. So the male is likely to be
the most active physically. Consequently, men were expected to be the experts on lovemaking and were judged by their experience and competence in the art. The text books were
full of advice on how men should do it, as if the women took no active part but were played
like musical instruments in the hands of experts. It is true, there are some women whose idea
of love-making is to lie back and let the man get on with it. In such a case, the man may
wonder whether there is anybody in down below. Possibly, watching a football match could
be more fun. Yet, such women are often the most critical if they do not enjoy themselves and
achieve an orgasm.
The way to encourage your partner to participate more actively and to feel an equal coadventurer is to talk to her. There is an old joke in which a therapist asks a patient, "Do you
talk to your wife while you are making love?" to which the patient replies, "Only if she
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phones me". Although the therapist's assumption that the man made love to his wife was
wrong, the idea underlying the question was right. You should talk to each other.
By "talking", I don't mean discussing the day's events or explaining Bernoulli's theorem to
her. I mean communicating with her, letting her know what you are feeling and finding out
how things are going with her. So there may be more grunts, groans and sighs than words
from your side, and more sighs, moans and squeaks from hers. The point is to express your
emotions in some way. Otherwise, she may think she is coupled with a steam engine and you
may think you are coupled with the bed quilt.
Every pair of lovers develops a language which is all their own, but the essence of it is always
to convey three simple ideas. They are;
"I want you"
"You are beautiful, wonderful, adorable"
"You fill me with desire, joy, delight"
It has been well said that while the man desires the woman, what the woman desires is the
man's desire. She wants to hear and feel him popping his cork for her sake. That is a large
part of her emotional satisfaction. So if you tell her some variant of these three things, or
better still, gasp, sob and moan them, her confidence and her pleasure will go soaring.
It is amusing that while men talk boastfully about "having" a woman, as if she were
conquered by this skilled predator, women also talk among themselves of "having a man".
Only their version sounds more like having a glass of orange juice or a peanut butter
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sandwich. It makes you wonder who has who. Certainly, after sex a man feels like an empty
champagne bottle, whereas a woman feels fighting fit. She will get up and run round the
block, or scrub the kitchen floor.
To some extent, the two sexes regard each other as fair game. Men will stalk women and try
to enjoy their bodies without intending to enter into any commitment to them. Women are
aware of this and are understandably cautious about such approaches. On the other hand,
being on the whole quite realistic about sex, they know that a man can end up enmeshed in
the web of a woman's power, whether he intends it or not. So men wail, "How can we fall
into their arms without falling into their hands?" How, indeed, since we were designed to fall
into their hands!
It is man's predatory instincts which land him in this situation. As Tennyson observed,
"Man is a hunter; woman is his game,
The sleek and shining creatures of this chase.
We hunt them for the beauty of their skins."
Of course, old Tennyson was making a wise-crack, but he was right. We do enjoy chasing
these amazing creatures who seem to radiate light. What he did not say is that in this chase it
is often the hunter who ends up in the cooking pot. These sleek and shining creatures are well
able to deal with the supposed predators.
For their part, women also can enjoy the pursuit of men. Since women do not claim to be
hunters by nature, they call this activity by some other name. The uncharitable call it luring
or snaring, implying that an unscrupulous woman can lure an innocent youth to his doom.
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Mythology is full of stories about female creatures doing just that. To be more understanding,
we should see that they simply use the weapons at their disposal. These are precisely those
beautiful skins of which Tennyson told us.
So if a woman fancies a man, she will make sure he sees a lot of her body surface, especially
her thighs, breasts and shoulders. Once, I worked with a young woman colleague who was
unattached. She had extremely beautiful legs, as I knew because they were constantly on
display before my eyes. She would sit with her feet on her desk and her skirt drawn up to her
crotch, always when there was nobody else about. I wondered at her naivety, or her complete
confidence in my integrity. I was not sure which. Then one day she went away on holiday.
When she came back, she announced that she had found a boy-friend. After that, I never saw
her legs again.
Only then did I realise what had been going on.
Consciously or
unconsciously, she had been trying to get me interested. Perhaps I had been the ninny!
If it had worked, this would have been an example of sexual predation by a woman. She
knew that I was married and it is unlikely that she wanted a permanent relationship. She
would have picked me off just to see what I was like. Her tactics were those of someone
playing games with a cat. Something irresistibly fascinating was trailed in front of my eyes. If
my curiosity had got the better of me, and I had pounced, she would have entwined those legs,
and her equally beautiful arms, around me. That would have been that. It beats me how I
escaped such a dreadful fate!
Both sexes play this game. So don't let anyone tell you it is all men's fault. The question is,
are there any rules, or do we just play ducks-and-drakes with the emotions of the other sex
and let them look after themselves? Like all good games, sex has an element of risk.
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Consequently, it gives a wonderful sense of playing for real. If you are not skilful and
careful, someone could get hurt, and not just emotionally. That someone could be you, or it
could be your partner. She might have an embarrassing pregnancy, or there could be jealous
third parties defending their territory.
The first thing to acknowledge is that sex is a power play. If one player is immensely more
powerful than the other, the weaker one gets hurt. This is why otherwise liberal fathers do
not want their sixteen year-old daughters messing about with forty year-old married men.
That is one example of a big disparity in power. The two lovers have to be nearly equal in
personal power, otherwise the stronger one is exploiting the other.
Another example of where a disparity in power makes a pairing immoral is if a man seduces a
mentally retarded girl. Most people would agree that would be wrong. The reason is that she
has not the power to meet him on equal terms and is therefore being used by him. This is
why society is so down on sex between children and adults. The children have relatively little
power to repel sexual advances from adults. Sex between unequals is indeed a form of abuse.
So to stay moral you have to be sure your intended partner is able to meet you on something
like equal terms. While you are young, this is not a problem. Your first experiments will
generally be with someone of roughly the same age or, if you are lucky, a bit older. When
you get to adulthood, the range of possible sexual partners becomes very wide. They range
from young girls to old dames.
Now, I personally disapprove of too wide an age gap when the girl is young. That smacks of
cradle-snatching. A very young female, especially a pubescent girl, is not competent to look
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after herself in the adult game of sex. People do most of their growing up between the ages of
twelve and twenty. A difference of only two years represents a gulf of experience and
maturity. So a guy of nineteen who goes around with a girl of twelve, as you sometimes read
about in the newspapers, needs to be investigated. It is a sign of inadequacy in a man to be
interested in immature females. When she is sixteen, it is a different ball game, but if the guy
is twenty-seven, it still seems suspect.
Later in life, the age difference does not matter very much. Once a woman gets into her
twenties, she is a big girl and can take on any man on something like equal terms. Of course,
very young females can exert great sexual power, as Humbert Humbert found out in "Lolita".
But as poor old Humbert also found out, they are generally playing a game of their own,
which is not like the adult game. The best advice is to keep off the green apples. They will
give you colly-wobbles.
When thinking about the emotional aspects of sex, the big question is whether the two sexes
are really playing to the same set of rules. In particular, do they both want the same things, or
are they simply trying to exploit each other? As always, the answer is not that simple. What
we males find difficult to know is whether women have sex for fun, as we do, or whether they
always take it much more seriously than we do. All our cultural conditioning from the past
says that females are bound to take sex more seriously. Indeed, we hear women complaining
that men have an irremediably juvenile attitude to sex. Yet, we men, who after all have
sexual dealings with them, know that women can be just as frivolous about it as we are.
It is often said that when a woman has sex with a man, she gives herself more completely and
therefore wants to enter into a relationship with him. She cannot understand why he is content
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to come and have sex with her once a week and carry on with his normal life the rest of the
time. How many women have said, "I don't want to be your bit on the side," fearing that this
is all that is offered. Women whose lovers only visit them once a week say forlornly, "Better
to be happy once a week than never at all," to which their more cautious sisters reply, "Why
be unhappy six days a week, when you could get on with your life and never give men a
thought?"
It seems there can be no hard and fast rules about this. It all depends on the circumstances. If
the woman is lonely and longs to have a man of her own, it is indeed shameful for a man to
promise to become her partner in due course, without intending to deliver. Such an affair will
make her very unhappy. In fact, it used to be called "breach of promise" and could lead to a
lawsuit. If on the other hand she is well set-up in life and just wants to brighten up her sex
life, an affair may be all she wants. Sometimes, she may be inclined merely to have a brief
romp, without any intention to enter into a relationship.
It is not true, then, that women are incapable of indulging in casual sex. Nor is it true that
affairs always make women unhappy. It depends on their expectations and whether the two
parties are honest with one another. As I said, grown women are normally able to look after
themselves and soon learn to watch out for the men who are exploiters and deceivers. These
used to be called "cads" in the age when women were thought to be wholly innocent and
gullible. Ironically, women often found cads very attractive because of their raffish ways. We
don't use the expression now, but it is still important to realise that you should not play fast
and loose with other people's feelings.
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If there is a difference between the two sexes in their attitudes to sex, it is that men recognise
more clearly that there is a distinction between sex and love, while women see more clearly
that the two are connected and that one tends to lead to the other. My metaphor was that man
is the mouse who thinks he can take the cheese without springing the trap, whereas women
think the trap will probably spring. Which is right? They both are in their different ways. It
is a very clever mouse who can take the cheese without being caught, but some do manage it.
If a woman plays her cards right, she can usually get a man to fall in love with her if he wants
her sexually. The kill ratio of us bold mice is pretty frightening.
It would probably be better for us men if we did move a little in the direction of the female
attitude towards sex. It would certainly be better for society as a whole. At present, many
young men regard sex simply as a sport, with a correspondingly unfeeling attitude towards
women. As long as the women are able to take them or leave them on those terms, no great
harm is done. All too often, however, the women are forced by social pressures to acquiesce
in this brutish game, or else subsist without a sex life.
Luckily, most of us find out quite quickly that the excitement of the chase leads to a very
short-lived pleasure, unless there is some emotional involvement. If you fall in love with a
girl, you won't chase any others. Then sex ceases to be a sport and becomes part of the
serious pleasure of an adult relationship.
It is often said that we old fogies should not tell the young about sex unless we also tell them
about the moral aspects. Well, the moral aspects of sex are the same as the moral aspects of
anything else in life. Firstly, you should never knowingly harm anyone else. Secondly, you
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should look after those who are weaker, or less able to look after themselves than you are.
That just about covers it.
You can work out for yourselves what that means in matters of sex. Moralisers are generally
thinking about avoiding unwanted pregnancies and about sexually transmitted diseases. Very
often, these are practical matters rather than moral issues. If you make a girl pregnant against
her will, or without her realising the risk, that is clearly immoral, since it amounts to wilfully
doing her harm. If you are older and more experienced than she is, then the responsibility for
avoiding pregnancy is likely to be yours as much as hers.
Similarly with sexually transmitted diseases. People will urge you to have "safe sex", by
which they mean using a condom. It is pretty good advice, but in reality the safest form of
sex is to have it with someone who does not have any other partners, and who never has had
many. The risk of AIDS for young heterosexual couples in Western countries has been greatly
exaggerated. However, there are lots of other nasty surprises in store for the promiscuous.
So it is best to restrict your adventures to chaste and clean-living young women, of whom,
thank God, there is a plentiful supply.
The other thing which is immoral in dealing with women is using them for your own
pleasure, as if they were objects without any human capacity to feel emotions. In some male
company, you will hear the expression of attitudes which would be a disgrace on a stud farm.
In particular, the reference to a woman as "that" is especially repulsive. To see a young
woman walk by and to hear some lout say, "I'll have that!", as if she were a lump of meat, is
not one of life's most edifying experiences. Of course, a lot of this kind of talk is only the
vainglorious boasting and strutting in which men engage, particularly young men. Even so,
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there is a new and unpleasant tendency among men to nurture an attitude of callous
indifference to women, as if to justify treating them as consumer goods.
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MACHISMO
"Machismo" is the cult of masculinity. It is a kind of male triumphalism, which insists that to
be male is to be cock of the walk, king of this planet and of everything in it. This places
heavy emphasis on what the Italians call bella figura, which means looking good in every
sense of the word. Indeed, some male birds such as the cock pheasant, which have this
quality in spades, might be called practitioners of machismo. They are proud, vainglorious,
boastful and altogether very pleased with their fine feathers. See if that reminds you of any
men you know.
If that were all to it, machismo would not be worth noticing. But it is in fact a rather ugly
mind-set, because it is an institutionalised male superiority cult. It devalues the feminine
principle, in so far as that exists in men, and propagates a harshly male attitude. So we must
all strut and loom and boast, like turkey cocks.
When you look into it, machismo has a curious psychopathology. It is not something which
men foist upon an unwilling world. Rather, it stems from a general tendency in human
culture to elevate the male principle above the female. Much of it originates with women,
who also venerate the male principle and raise their sons to be little tin gods in the home.
Even more curious is that machismo is most obvious in societies in which women wield the
greatest influence from their power base within the home. In a traditional society, in which
women play more or less exclusively the female sex role as wives, mothers and home-makers,
they have relatively little power outside the home, but a great deal inside it. They see their
sons as the future movers and shakers in the world outside the home. So they try to give them
strong self-esteem and the other social skills needed for their high destiny.
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It is ironic that macho men are often mummies' boys who, after they have finished bragging,
go off home to get their shirts laundered by their doting mothers. This is particularly true in
Latin countries, where the cult of machismo is paralleled by the cult of the mamma. In
Anglo-Saxon countries, the macho male is more often just a thug.
Machismo is extremely tiresome to a normal, well-adjusted male who does not feel the need
to prove anything to anyone. You get these second rate imbeciles posing and threatening
around you, when you know that on the inside they are frightened little creeps who suspect
they don't really measure up. The correct response is to walk softly but carry a big stick. So
you pretend not to notice that some guy has a flashier car or a tartier girl-friend than you have
and is waving them in your face. Also, ignore the obvious macho symbols, such as bared
flesh, tattoos, heavy rings, big boots and a loud, braying voice.
When I say "ignore", I mean act as though they do not exist. It is not a good idea to make
disparaging remarks or clever put-downs, because you will soon find yourself treading on
someone's inferiority complex. Don't do that unless you intend to smack the guy. You only
do that if there is no alternative. This is when the big stick comes in. As the Greeks used to
say, "Those who want peace should prepare for war". Do not neglect the manly art of selfdefence. Be ready and able to smite the Midianite if the need arises.
No real man goes around looking for trouble, but he does not shirk it if someone tries to
impose on him too grossly. In every football match, there is some clown on the other side
whose tackles are designed to rile, or even hurt you, someone whose elbow always seems to
be in your face. This happens throughout life, if you let it. There is no use remonstrating
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with such people.
That only adds to their satisfaction. You really need to get them
somewhere quiet and inflict pain on them.
The male world is indeed a harsh one, as I am sure you have already found out. Machismo is
mostly directed at other males. So we all have to be ready to defend ourselves. Fortunately,
these masculine struggles are mostly about personal power and precedence, or pecking order.
Physical violence is the exception rather than the rule. Once or twice in my school career, I
had to offer to fight a bully. Each time, it was a stand-off. He offered in return to fight me,
but by keeping cool and standing my ground, I averted actual combat and it ended up evens.
However, a draw is enough in those circumstances. My prestige rose because I had stood up
to the bully, while his fell because his bluster was shown to be empty. This only happened
because I was a large and muscular boy.
In short, do not offer to fight anyone who is much stronger than you. What most of us do is
to form coalitions with other males, who provide mutual support. This marginalises the
bully, who is obliged to pick on luckless boys who have no supporting group. Because of the
huge disparities in size and strength among boys, this situation can arise quite often. A big
bully can be terrifying to the small fry. That is how we males learn about weighing up the
balance of power, when to fight and when to give way, how to distinguish between bluff and
bluster and a real threat. We learn how to deal with the brute power which knows no moral
constraints.
From this we also learn the eternal truths about male life, such as how vital it is to stand up
for yourself, how valuable it is to collaborate with other people, how important it is to stand
by a friend. We also learn that we can be in conflict with people without hating them and that
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we may have to get on with people we do not like very much. We learn to hide our feelings,
so that an adversary does not know we are scared, or a superior does not see that we loathe
him. Keeping your emotions under control is sometimes said to be bad for you, as if the
submerged feelings will rot and fester inside you. This is not a problem for most people, who
learn to give vent to frustration and other negative emotions by regaling their friends with
stories about the horrible boss, etc.
In some Japanese companies, the employees are
encouraged to go to the gym and punch a bag with the boss's face on it.
The ability to control your emotions is a great social skill. Those who cannot do this are at a
big disadvantage in dealing with other people, especially those whom we meet in a power
structure, such as a company or other workplace. We cannot usually choose our boss or
workmates, so we have to get on with them whether we like them or not. This is a skill which
we learn by our early training in the macho world of male society.
"Is it then wrong to feel proud of being male?" I hear you ask. No, of course not. The
difference between justified male pride and machismo is that machismo is ugly and
aggressive, a kind of male triumphalism over the female principle. That is why it is most
evident in uneducated, unsophisticated and stupid men. Most men grow out of it, when they
learn what the female principle means to the world.
When I was a young man, I walked down Regent Street in London on a beautiful summer's
day with another young man beside me. We wore no jackets because of the heat. It was a
splendid thing to be tall, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped. As we strolled along in the
sunshine, we looked at the women and they, in their summer dresses, looked at us. At that
moment, it was glorious to be alive and to be a man.
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The difference between that feeling and machismo is that we were proud that our manly
figures attracted admiring glances from the female passers-by. But we were not lording it over
them or swaggering, just interacting with them as nature intended. We thought they were
wonderful, too, and showed it in our faces. That is why they smiled at us.
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MANHOOD
In the previous generation, the trials and tribulations of a boy's life could be offset against the
great fact that that one day he would be a man. Then, big boys and school teachers would
hold no terrors for him. Women would respect and admire him. Some of them would love
him. It was a fine and wonderful prospect before a boy's eyes. In those days, to be a man
meant being a powerful human being, who could hold his place among his peers and who had
a defined role in the world.
It was acknowledged that a man's life was for the most part hard and dangerous. Men did
awful jobs, in which the risk of injury and death was very high. They were often expected to
take part in wars, which were a sort of competition to see who could kill the most men. But
there were compensations. In particular, there was the prestige and the privileges of being a
man.
A man who had spent the day down a coal mine, risking his health and his life to provide for
his family, was not expected to heat up his own supper in a microwave. His wife washed the
coal dust from his body and prepared his supper for him. He gave his entire wages to her and
trusted her to do what was best for the family. Coal miners' married lives were perhaps the
extreme example of the ancient contract between men and women, but something of the sort
persisted at all levels of society until recent times. Men worked to provide for their families.
In return, they were given respect, affection and prestige. That was the theory, and for many
people it worked well enough.
It would be absurd to pretend that the old ways were better and that everyone was happier
then. That is manifestly untrue. Whether people are happier now is, however, equally
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debatable. The modern world has a different sort of unhappiness . Certainly, those who
could remember the Nineteenth Century and the first years of the Twentieth said that people
who were lucky enough to have jobs and homes then were very happy on the whole.
Probably, a sense of continuity and stability was given by their living in a traditional society,
in which the basic social structure was the family.
The point is that a man's role in life was defined by custom and precedent. So was a
woman's, of course. Consequently, people had a sense of certainty about the world. God was
in His heaven. On Earth, Adam delved and Eve span, which means he brought home the
bacon and she did everything else.
Everyone knew what a man was. He was a complex construct, with many different aspects,
ranging from the lout and ruffian at one end of the spectrum to the gentleman at the other.
The problem with our age is that the old certainties have been suddenly shattered, leaving
everyone with an uneasy sense of drift and aimlessness. The relationship between the sexes is
based less and less on biological role-playing and more and more on economic and social
factors. In particular, the family may need more money than the man alone can provide. At
the same time, women are freed to some extent from endless child-rearing and are able to take
on a much bigger role in economic, political and social life.
It is hard to be a man just now, because our sex seems to be in many ways on the retreat,
whereas women seem to be advancing. However, there is really no need to be despondent
about this. It was inevitable that the surplus energy of women would be put to productive
use. Advances in technology have made it possible to do many jobs without needing huge
muscle power. Indeed, many of the new jobs being created by the electronic revolution seem
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better designed for women than for men, who tend to have bigger, clumsier hands and less
accurate motor control.
Feminists, or "women's liberationists" as they used to be called, like to claim that it was their
campaigning which brought about this change, but in reality it was economic and
technological forces which have changed the world in this and in other ways, beginning at
about the time of the First World War and accelerating swiftly ever since. This has indeed
liberated women from their circumscribed sex role, and from their total dependence on men
who were all too often unsatisfactory, but it has also called on them to do more of the world's
work outside of the home. Some women, who have interesting and rewarding jobs, have
welcomed this development, but the average woman has discovered what men always knew,
that full-time employment is not exactly a bowl of cherries, either.
Where the male sex has lost out is in the collapse in demand for unskilled labour of the type
that an uneducated but strong young man could do. It is this which is creating the so-called
"underclass" of unemployable young people and is causing such harm to the structure of the
family. A young woman, even a single mother, is better off on her own than with an
economically functionless, idle man. Young men, finding themselves cast off as unnecessary,
have a distressing tendency to smash the place up. It seems unlikely that the present trends
can continue much longer without some violent reaction and serious social unrest.
One thing which has to change is the attitude of men. There is no excuse for being an
uneducated man. It is a conscious choice, at least in a country with a public education
system, whether you choose to throw away your chance in life by refusing to collaborate with
your teachers. Don't blame it on your parents, on ignorance, poverty or your teachers. Every
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man is responsible for educating himself. Teachers cannot help anyone who does not want to
help himself.
You become educated by reading, especially good newspapers and good books, so that you
become accustomed to complex and subtle ideas, and by consorting with people who are
themselves educated, especially your fellow students, who will teach you more than your
teachers. If you speak with one cultivated person, you immediately learn to recognise the
difference between thoughtful congress and the jack-ass braying of an ignoramus. It is of
course considered "elitist" to speak in such terms, but we live in an age when the "elite" is the
majority of the population who have had the wit to prepare themselves for living in the
modern world. So the only thing to do is to join them.
What has really changed in the modern world is that the traditional male role of breadwinner
has been partly, though not entirely, eroded by women emerging from their age-old role as
child-bearers and home-makers. However, we must not confuse an economic and social role
with that of sexuality. Work is not specifically masculine and is not a definition of a man,
even though it used to be said that, "Man does. Woman is," meaning that a man is what he
does, whereas a woman is what she is. This was never entirely true. There are a lot of things
a man can do besides work. Male aristocrats and warriors never soiled their hands with work,
yet nobody suggested they were not men.
A man can be a biologically functioning male person without being the breadwinner of the
family. Just think of the lion. He does not mind if the females do all the work. Neither do
they, apparently. Do not believe the reports that because women are able to earn their own
money they no longer need men. Women need men because they are women, not because
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they need the bread. As it happens, we need them even more. Between us, we have the basis
of a deal.
Men and women still need, and want, to come together to produce and rear children. In any
case, they still like to live together and to share their lives, even if procreation is not their
intention. What has changed is that there are many more options open to them when it comes
to casting their relationship. Man is not necessarily the worker and woman the home-maker,
although lots of people will still prefer to operate that way.
Whichever way you cast your relationship with your woman, it is a safe bet that she will want
you to be a man, her man. Will the new woman still need a man? Yes, because her sexuality
will still be a large part of her personality. That sexuality develops by way of a permanent,
tragi-comic soap opera with her other half, the male human being. She may not be able to
live with him, but she sure can't live without him. Lesbians claim that soon all female sexual
experience will be between women. It is true that many modern women are attracted to the
idea of sisterly love-making, but it is a matter of observation that there is a continuing
demand for hunky men of heterosexual inclination.
Some observers claim that the new woman wants her counterpart to be the "New Man". This,
apparently, is to be a reformed model of the old man. He will have the defects of the old
model removed and will be hairless, narrow-shouldered, chinless and "unthreatening".
Perhaps he can have hair, provided it is a wispy little beard. He will do the washing up and
look after the children. On Saturday mornings, he will do the hoovering and on Saturday
afternoons will not watch football but will do the shopping instead. Above all, he will not be
drunk at dinner parties and insult his partner's bien pensant friends, nor fall asleep before the
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guests leave. He will not fart in bed or show any other signs of having a large and active
alimentary tract. His love-making will be divine, being dedicated entirely to ensuring that his
partner has as many orgasms as possible, whenever she wants, which is at midnight after a
long day in which he has done the laundry, while she has had a fulfilling time at the office.
In fact, there is no evidence that the new women want their men to be pet poodles. They
surely do not want to be left to do all the work of the household, especially if they have a fulltime job, but there is nothing new about that.
Your beer-swilling, football-loving,
testosterone-packed grandfather was helping with the chores thirty years ago, plus painting
several houses top to bottom, chasing off intruders, entertaining the children, driving
hundreds of thousands of miles, delivering the family safely to all destinations. Then there
was the little matter of impregnating the lady of the house on three occasions. We old men
were quite useful, really. There is no evidence that our women did not love us.
It seems the much-heralded New Man is just a journalistic phantom who will never
materialise. The old man will do very well, if he bucks up his ideas a bit and realises that a
corollary of his partner working outside the home is that he will have to work inside it. His
contribution does not even have to be all that huge. Most women do what they do in the
home as their contribution to the well-being of their loved ones. So they do not want to be
relieved of all domestic duties. They just want to feel that their mates are willing helpers,
rather than a burden.
So, what will your female partners want you to be? As you may have guessed, they will want
you to be men. As you will also have guessed, that could mean any of a number of things. A
"man" is as much the creation of social conditioning as a "woman". Yet, as I have explained,
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these two things are not merely ideas, or constructs. Under the layers of social conditioning,
there live two real animals, the male and female human being. We can, if we wish, reject
these aboriginal animals as altogether too uncivilised to be allowed to wander around in the
modern world. In fact, all organised society recognises that this is so. Some of our natural
tendencies have to be modified, or downright repressed, if civilised life is to be possible.
As it happens, I do not believe that that a completely "uncivilised" human being would be a
savage monster. That has always been the conventional view. But other animals are not
savage monsters, so why should human beings be? Obviously, disorderly behaviour, like
pissing in the street, has to be discouraged, but it is hard to believe that civilisation involves
the repression of our most basic instincts. A very old compliment to a man's character is to
say that he is a "natural man", meaning that he is not overburdened with the artificial manners
of society, but behaves with an innate male generosity and manly grace.
Whatever crust of socially-induced attitudes and behaviour are imposed on our natural animal
selves, the real human being has a habit of tapping on the crust and crying, "Let me out!"
That is why, every now and then, there is a revulsion against the accumulation of artificiality
and an urge to return to nature. Most people conceive that as a return to simplicity and a lack
of ostentation. The whole of history is full of swings from conceit and artificiality back to
naturalness and simplicity, in clothing, manners and most other things. Of course, nothing in
life is ever simple, least of all nature, but we have this feeling that our real selves can easily
get buried under the pomp and circumstance of civilised life.
Well, then. What sort of men are we going to be in the new world order? First of all, we are
going to be the sort of men who admit women to their hearts as equals. Once we can see
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women as the other, and equal, half of the human race, many of the problems between the
sexes disappear. For example, the questions of whether women should be priests, judges,
politicians, company directors, or anything else, all seem irrelevant, because there is no
rational reason why not. Would I accept a woman as my boss, doctor, lawyer? I had a
woman for my mother. She was a combination of all three, yet I thrived.
That much is obvious. But in the evolving world, we men will not be differentiated from
women so much by our work and our social roles as by our sexuality. In other words, we
shall be defined in terms of our being sexually male and therefore complementary to the
female. Being economically and socially masculine will seem less important. Nevertheless, it
seems doubtful whether the family, that ancient genetic defence pact, will ever completely die
out. In fact, with the modern world remaining as difficult and dangerous as the old world, it
is likely that people will reinvent the family as a refuge. No doubt, the new family will be
more open and less of a pressure cooker than the old family. Because it will be more of a
voluntary association, there will be more genuine affection and collaboration between the
sexes and between the generations.
I have already pointed to the formidable biological and anthropological reasons why the
family has been so effective as a system for producing and rearing new human beings. For
countless millennia it has been the basic unit of social organisation and the principal means
by which new humans are produced and socialised. It has also allowed the socially useful
expression of both male and female sexuality. Like everything else, the family has its
disadvantages and its dysfunctions. There are some who, seeing only these, are gleefully
announcing the imminent demise of the family. But they should not hold their breaths while
waiting. They might have a long wait.
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It is true that in the western world rising divorce rates and falling birth rates have made the
nuclear family very small, too small in fact to form a very stimulating and stable social unit.
In large families, the sense of security is engendered by having a number of kinfolk, who
form concentric circles of friendship and association. A child who has brothers and sisters,
several grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins has a very different experience of life from
one who has only two parents, perhaps only one parent.
Naturally, humans are very adaptable. So you will meet plenty of people who do not have
any family and yet are fully-functioning members of society. It is by no means proven that
not having a family is necessarily bad for people. In fact, there is an astonishing tendency for
people to grow up into "normal" adults, whatever their childhood experience. It sometimes
seems that the reality is the very reverse of what conventional wisdom tells us and that people
who have had bitterly unhappy and disadvantaged childhoods frequently grow up to be very
fine and successful human beings.
Conversely, those who have happy and privileged
childhoods are by no means guaranteed to be wonderful human beings.
In many utopian models of the ideal society, it is envisaged that the children will not be
brought up by their dreadful, ignorant parents but by the enlightened forces of the state.
Paediatricians and social workers and other caring "professionals", as they like to call
themselves, no doubt dream of the time when the family and those tiresome, interfering
parents will be abolished. Then the children will be brought up by experts instead of
amateurs. If you ever feel yourself inclining to this view, the best cure is to visit a children's
home. No matter how kind and competent the people who run it, and some of them are, the
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look in the children's eyes reveals the lie behind professional caring for children. The look
says, "Are you the one who is going to be my Daddy?"
The child knows, even if many adults do not, that its best chance in life is to be somebody's
baby. A parent gives a passionate, one-to-one service that a professional carer cannot. A
mother is not always on sick leave, or on a course, or worse still, leaving to take another job.
In order to develop emotionally, the child needs to love the people who care for it. That is
difficult to do with professional carers. I remember as a tiny child, in my first school class,
being grief-stricken when the teacher whom I had grown to love moved on to another school.
I learned that I could not love a teacher as I did my mother. The fact was that there was only
one mother, the one who would never leave me while she lived.
What all this amounts to is that there are very good reasons why the family will probably be
reinvented. So you boys will most likely be called upon to be the fathers of your children. By
that I mean you will be needed to help raise them, and not merely to impregnate the lucky
mothers. You may not necessarily be the chief breadwinners in the family. Your wives may
turn out to be bigger earners than you.
But even the most powerful woman, perhaps
especially the most powerful woman, wants a husband she can respect. Your children will
want a father they can love and admire. In short, they will want you to be a man.
What does it mean to be a man? you ask. Especially as I have just explained that a man is
not just a male hominid. A man is a construct in the mind, as well as 80 or 100 kilos of
testosterone-driven meat on the hoof. So let us put forward a description of this creature as
we think he ought to be. If you don't like my description, you can think of your own, but you
will probably come up with something like this.
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Firstly, whatever we might think about the supremacy of moral and intellectual quality over
the material, we must never entirely disregard the physical. To be a man, you must keep your
body in some sort of shape. Anybody can see that there is a difference between a man and a
slob or a weedy wimp. Ask any woman. She may prefer her man to be kind and loving, but
if he also has broad shoulders, a slim waist and a tight bottom, she will tend to prefer him to a
kind man with narrow shoulders and a beer gut. Really, it is an insult to your woman to let
yourself go.
So much we understand. Since you are a male animal, you may as well be a proper one. Your
body is intended by Nature to be extremely beautiful, as well as strong and efficient. Just
watch the women's faces when a hunky man comes into view. The conventional wisdom is
that women are not so "visual" as men, meaning that they take more notice of a man's
character than his body. I was once sternly admonished about this by a woman friend who
noticed that, even as she was talking to me, my head was swivelling to watch a beautiful
woman walk past.
Considering that this is high on my list of things NOT to do when with a woman, the passerby must have been something special. So I apologised for letting my attention stray. The
matter was closed. However, my companion was forced to eat her words a few weeks later
when we went to the cinema. In one scene in the film, an extremely beautiful young man
climbed out of a swimming pool. My companion, and every other female within earshot, let
out an audible gasp. I turned to her and said, "Not visual, eh?"
Of course women like beautiful men. The very idea that they do not was part of the system of
sexual repression, which held that proper women ought not to have carnal appetites.
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Acquaintance with them will teach you that such an idea was doomed to failure in the long
run. Proper or not, most women have a keen interest in male flesh.
Women know that their emotional needs are best taken care of by men who are fit enough and
strong enough to do the job. Ask yourself, "Would she feel safe walking out at night with
me?" Then there is the matter of her sexual needs. A man must be capable of arousing
sexual passion in his woman, and of satisfying it. It is true that you occasionally see lovely
women walking out with men who look as if they have escaped from a Genetic Curiosities
museum. This makes you wonder what these guys can do in bed. However, I would not take
any bets on them holding on to their prizes.
Inexperienced women tend to think that a man is a man, without distinction of race, class,
education or culture. They soon learn that there are differences. The experience for a woman
of being with one man and another can be as great as the difference between eating rare fillet
steak and a charred rat. Both are meat, but oh, the difference! Our cloven friends quickly
learn that it is not the equipment between your legs that really counts, but the furniture inside
your head. So it is back to the construction of man as an idea. That depends on what we, and
society at large, expect and want a man to be. Of course, you cannot just pose as a man. You
have to BE a man. In other words, you have to make the idea come true, as far as you can.
This requires a clear notion of what a man should be like and constant practice and training in
trying to become the embodiment of that ideal.
For example, in the 19th Century in Europe and America, there was the ideal of the
Gentleman. Other cultures had this same idea, so it may be one of the distinguishing marks
of civilisation. It involved a generally accepted set of expectations of how a man should be
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and how he should behave. This was taken to mark him off from his opposite, the brute and
savage. Of course, most men are not brutes and savages, whatever society they live in, so
really the distinction was between a cultivated man of high character and the uncouth hoi
polloi.
Among the English, with their obsessive concern with blood and lineage, the idea of a
gentleman became confused with certain kinds of wealth. So the heir to a great estate was
considered a gentleman, even if he was a complete buffoon. Conversely, a man whose wealth
was derived from industry and trade could never be a gentleman, because he had besmirched
himself with ignoble commerce (or work, as we should now call it).
In practice, these snobbish notions were dispelled by the discovery that inherited wealth in the
form of land or "old money" ( meaning the filthy lucre was amassed a couple of generations
ago) were no guarantee of good behaviour, or even respectability. In any case, the real
aristocracy did not, and still do not, give a damn what anybody else thinks of them. Which
goes to show that owning large amounts of land gives people ideas above their station. It also
explains why so many aristocrats took a ride in a tumbrel during the French Revolution.
Nobody bothered too much about what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian variety after 1917,
either. Nobody has a scrap of sympathy for them.
So the idea of a gentleman is not really an aristocratic ideal. The aristocracy are above such
vulgar concerns as caring what other people think, whereas a gentleman is so concerned. An
aristocrat is unlikely to be a gentleman, except by chance. Consequently, the gentleman ideal
tended to lose its association with high social status and became more a matter of high moral
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standards and upright conduct. People realised that a man could be a gentleman even if he
had coal dust on his face.
Nevertheless, it was quite hard for a completely untutored man to be a gentleman. It required
a certain amount of self-assurance and inner strength. These qualities are most often given by
education and by experience of life in a civilised society. Much of what made a man a
gentleman stemmed from the cultural inheritance of his people. Thus, one could speak of a
Spanish gentleman, an English gentleman or a Christian gentleman, acknowledging that
various cultures produced men whose high character was tinged with the distinctive colouring
of their native society.
The fundamental idea of a gentleman was based upon the assumption that a man ought to
behave in a certain way. He ought, for instance, to be polite and affable to everyone,
including those of lower rank or under his command. A gentleman should never brag or
threaten, nor precipitate a brawl, but should be capable of defending himself if threatened. He
should never take advantage of anyone who is weaker or at his mercy, but should show
clemency to the defeated and compassion for the suffering.
It may be seen that these qualities are indeed the exact opposite of those required in business,
where aggression, ruthlessness and noisy self-aggrandisement seem to be regarded as virtues.
In the real world, of course, there have always been gentlemen in business, just as there have
always been scoundrels sitting in the gentleman's club.
In his relations with women, a gentleman was supposed to show these same qualities. He
would never strike a woman, except in self-defence, and would never impose himself on her
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if she should fall into his power. He would consider her feelings in all his dealings with her.
That is the essence of good manners.
Not surprisingly, women liked the idea of a gentleman. He was nothing more or less than a
civilised man. Indeed, it is still a high compliment for a woman to call a man a gentleman.
Conversely, the concept can be used to draw attention to his shortcomings if he offends her in
some way. I once witnessed a London woman deal with an impudent male motorist who
blasted his horn at her. She walked over and looked in the driver's window and said, "Oh, a
FINE gentleman! Your mother must be proud of you!"
The ideal of the gentleman was somewhat downgraded by the growth of a set of silly rules
about how a gentleman should dress and behave in social gatherings. For example, it was
said that no gentleman would wear brown shoes in town after six o'clock in the evening. In
fact, it was doubtful whether a gentleman should wear brown shoes in town at all. Similarly,
a gentleman always wore a tie, presumably to prove that he could not possibly be connected
with useful work (you try working with a tie on). The tie was also a banner which proclaimed
a gentleman’s taste, regiment, club membership and general social standing.
Being a gentleman became a matter of knowing all the little nuances of correctness. If your
bottom waistcoat button was done up, you could hardly expect to be considered a gentleman.
Presumably, men who did not change their shoes at six o'clock, or who buttoned their
waistcoats all the way down, would start to beat their wives and cheat their creditors.
Despite all this snobbery, the ideal of a gentleman had many fine things going for it. It was a
code of conduct which greatly improved standards of behaviour. They may have been ghastly
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snobs, but the gentlemen of old were also sticklers for proper conduct. It is hard to imagine
an officer and a gentleman murdering his prisoners of war, not because it is against the
Geneva Convention, but because it is dishonourable.
It has been observed that until the time of the First World War, warfare in Europe was
conducted in an absurdly gentlemanly fashion. At the battle of Malplaquet in 1704, the
English commander sent a message to his French counterpart inviting him to open fire first.
The polite Frenchman declined, saying "Let the English gentlemen fire first."
Of course, even gentlemanly warfare is pretty ghastly, but the ideals of manly conduct did
spare some of its horrors. Captured enemy officers were treated as gentlemen and quite often
entertained in the Officers' Mess before being sent off to detention. This happened well into
the 20th Century wars. During the American War of Independence in the 1770's, the British
and American officers were quite often kinsmen, even freemasons, who fraternised amicably
between the campaigns. They were gentlemen, as well as soldiers, and bore no grudge
against their enemies.
It was really the advent of totalitarian ideologies, and the reintroduction of the concept of total
war by Hitler, which brought about the demise of old-fashioned ideas of proper conduct in
war. Older generations of Europeans had learned the hard way, during the terrible religious
wars of the 16th and 17th Centuries, that we ought not to be too beastly to the enemy, because
we shall have to live with these people afterwards. In any case, we should probably be on the
same side in the next war, such were the complexities of European politics.
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All that was swept away by the horrible fantasies of ideological maniacs, who believed that
warfare was about the extermination of one people by another, or of one class by another. In
those circumstances, it is hard to feel any glimmer of human sympathy for enemy soldiers
who are nothing more than mass murderers. Early in the Second World War, there were many
instances of the Waffen SS, Hitler's elite troops, murdering captured Allied soldiers and
civilians. Later, when the boot was on the other foot, the Allied troops routinely shot anyone
they captured in SS uniform. Towards the end, the battlefields were littered with discarded
black uniforms, but still many enthusiastic young Nazis met a fitting end. How can mercy be
extended to people who deny that there is such a thing?
Until relatively recently, then, the ideal of the gentleman served to socialise and civilise men
who were fortunate enough to be trained in its precepts. In many ways, the ideal was rather
austere. It involved self-discipline and self-restraint, neither of which is very popular these
days. Many people would now regard the idea of a gentleman as an anachronism and quite
laughable. They think anyone with those ideals is certain to be a loser in the jungle of life,
that a man should be a beast, red in tooth and claw.
However, this attitude overlooks the whole purpose of civilisation, which is to ensure that we
can live like humans, not like beasts. To think that the gentleman is certain to be a loser is to
ignore the evidence of history. The gentleman, with his rapier and training in swordmanship,
could easily kill the bully boy armed with a cudgel. Civilised men always made better
soldiers than savages.
Similarly, a cultivated man in business or politics has a huge advantage over an uncouth man.
Being a gentleman does not mean giving up the option of being tough on occasion, just that
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being tough (whatever that means) is not seen as a virtue in itself. Most of humanity
responds better to reasoned persuasion and good manners than to bluster and bullying. It used
to be said that "A soft answer turns away wrath." Certainly, treating an opponent like a
fellow human being does a lot to reduce the bitterness of conflicts.
Yet it must be admitted that the idea of the gentleman fell into disregard for very good
reasons. Firstly, as I have said, it became associated with snobbery and social pretension.
More importantly, it was seen to be identified with an obsolete world-view which had led
Europe and the West generally into total calamity in 1914. That was the point at which the
great and self-confident European civilisation imploded. The horrors of the two World Wars,
with the great depression during the truce between them, caused people to question whether
Europe actually had a civilisation worthy of the name.
In particular, the gentlemen who were the unchallenged leaders of European society before
1914 were now seen to have failed. They may have had high standards, but in the harsh light
of the great conflagration they seemed like old buffers whose time had passed. Colonel
Blimp was the archetype, a crusty old gentleman who insisted on out-of-date standards of
behaviour.
Such was the loyalty engendered by the nation-states in Europe that in 1914 the common
people flocked to join their countries' war efforts. Men who a few months before had been
tending sheep or factory machines obeyed the orders of their leaders, the gentlemen, to run
against machine guns. The consequences were inevitable. Many of the best men of Europe
died, including the young gentlemen, some of whom advanced on the enemy trenches sword
in hand.
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Small wonder that people questioned whether it was a good idea to put so much faith in their
leaders. The cultured and civilised gentleman was seen to be a political, economic and
military failure. This failure became even more painfully obvious when the collapse of the
old European order allowed the emergence of creatures who would formerly have been
confined to the social sewers. Decent, civilised, rational and right-thinking gentlemen had
absolutely no idea how to deal with the likes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. They still don't.
Franklynn Rooseveldt thought that underneath Stalin's baleful exterior there lurked a
Christian gentleman. In fact, under the grim exterior there was a grim interior. The guy was
a paranoid mass murderer. Similarly, the British appeasers thought that we should not be
nasty to Herr Hitler, otherwise naturally he would be nasty to us. If we were decent chaps,
and did not annoy him too much, he would not be unpleasant to anyone, except perhaps for a
few Eastern Europeans.
How much better for the world if Neville Chamberlain had taken a gun into the conference
chamber at Munich and simply blown Hitler's head off. That would have been the most
effective way to deal with him. Of course, nobody who considered himself a gentleman
would do such a thing. That is the behaviour of people like Al Capone, whereas Chamberlain
was certainly a gentleman, whatever else he may have been. If he had been a ruthless swine
and a thug, like say Cortez or Pizarro, scores of millions of lives would have been saved. Noone in Germany apart from Hitler and a few crazy Nazis wanted a war against most of the rest
of the world. But Hitler got his war, because he WAS a ruthless swine and a thug. He called
his most powerful warship the Bismark, but Prince Otto von Bismark was a gentleman. He
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would have been appalled at the scum who were now running Germany, and the calamitous
predicament they were steering her into.
Anyway, after Neville Chamberlain's efforts, the British people finally decided that they did
not need a gentleman to lead them but a street fighter. So they chose Winston Churchill. Noone ever accused Churchill of being a gentleman. In fact, he was a rather disreputable
aristocrat with a drink problem and an American mother. But he knew what to do with
Hitler, which was to smack him and keep smacking him.
Well, then! Here we are in the new world, with no clear idea of what a man should be and
how he should behave. All we know is that the old ideal of a gentleman will not do any
more. He is discredited and no one looks up to him or expects him to lead them. And yet...
And yet the time has come to set up a new ideal of manhood, otherwise the young will
continue to sink into the swamp of ignorance, lethargy and self-indulgence. For most young
men, that is all there is left of the once-great civilisation which sustained their forefathers. If
you do not believe me, put it to the test. Sit down and write a list of the ethical and moral
precepts which define "Western Civilisation".
You will come up with a few vague and windy platitudes like "Freedom", "Individualism"
and "Democracy". Your French cousins will tell you it is "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity."
The next question is the real stumer: "What do these words mean?" Freedom to do what? Is
individualism all that matters?
Do we really have democracy?
How do you measure
equality? Fraternity with whom? Is not our much-vaunted Western way of life founded on a
moral nothingness? Our critics say it is.
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We know in our bones that it is not. It is true that the buzz words I have mentioned do now
seem just hot air. They come from the time of the American and French revolutions in the
late 18th Century, which was indeed a time of windy rhetoric. Yet the people of those times
thought these words meant something. At that time, they expressed the yearning of mankind
to be free from arbitrary power and unrepresentative government. We must never forget that,
because there is always a danger of back-sliding into tyranny again, not through our
wickedness but through our neglect. If we fail in our civic duties, become intellectually
sloppy and morally blind, it's back to the feudal system, lads.
We need a new concept of manhood, precisely because our culture has reached a kind of
crisis point. All the certainties from the pre-1914 era are now dead, including Communism,
which was the last dying kick of the old Europe. Most importantly from the male point of
view, the economic, social and emotional relationship between the sexes is being recast in a
way which looks on the face of it unfavourable to males. Many men are becoming
demoralised, defeatist and nihilist.
This has a devastating effect on women. Just when they
thought they were breaking through to some sort of equality with men, the men are opting to
slob out. Moreover, the "New Man", who was supposed to emerge in response to the new
woman, all too often turns out to be surly, loutish and downright misogynistic.
So the time has come to set up a new ideal of manhood, not the gentleman perhaps, but
certainly not an emasculated, feminised wimp. We need a new model for a new race of men.
The world is going to need real men more than ever. You can see all around you the
consequences of the lack of principle and of moral fibre in our leaders, the degeneration of
practically every aspect of public and private life. This is due to the collapse of confidence in
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our culture and the lack of training of the young in their duties as citizens and as human
beings.
There is also a moral and intellectual rot, which started with a retreat from the liberal
humanism of the Enlightenment in Europe and America. This had been founded on the
tradition of rational inquiry derived from Plato and Aristotle. Modern people are actually
fleeing from reason, on the one hand into simplistic fundamentalist religion, and on the other
hand into witch-craft, astrology, flying saucers and every other kind of Tommy-rot. As
somebody said, when people stop believing in the great inherited truths, they don't just
believe in nothing, they believe in ANYTHING.
This degeneration afflicts the male sex more than the female. Economic and technical
changes seem to have marginalised many men, leaving them frustrated and bitter. They not
only have no jobs and no prospects, they have no one to look up to and no model of how a
man should be, except for some the gangsters' values of street cred. There is a danger that
their hunger will be fed by a false prophet, a new Hitler.
Do not forget that Hitler came to power because he rallied a demoralised and desperate
people. They were inclined to overlook the rest of his programme, just as long as there were
no more people dying of hunger in the street. We are not so very far from that situation right
now. The working classes in Western countries are marked by a simple gut patriotism, which
easily turns to xenophobia, and by a tendency to think that liberal values are for the overeducated and the feeble-minded. Consequently, the European fascists and Nazis ("National
Socialists") found their most fervent support among these people. The neo-Nazi movements
still do.
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The present time is in some ways like the 17th Century, when the chivalric ideal of the knight
was finally seen to have run its course. This was satirised by Cervantes in the story of "Don
Quixote of La Mancha", an impoverished old man of gentle birth who tries to rekindle the
vanished flame of knighthood. Cervantes ruthlessly exposes the sillier notions of chivalry,
but he also lets us see that striving for higher standards of conduct is always a noble aim.
Poor Don Quixote is a hopeless knight, but he is still a great gentleman.
In our own age, the gentleman as an ideal is roughly where the knight was in Cervantes' time.
It is an anachronism, yet we still need some of the better parts of the concept. Shall we
reconstruct it? Probably not any more than Don Quixote could reconstruct the ideal of
knighthood. If we are wise, we learn from our experiences. This means we take what was
right and good from the past and reject what was bad or ineffective. The example of Don
Quixote shows that it is foolish to try to go back to old ideals, but right to try to be better men.
In our hearts, we know this to be true, which is why we laugh and cry at the same time over
the man of La Mancha's adventures.
In this age of moral relativism, when every man's idea of morality is said to be as good as any
other man's, how can we set up standards of conduct? If a man thinks it right to beat his wife,
who am I to say he is wrong? It is indeed hard to find a rational reason for saying so,
especially if all she suffers is bruises. It eventually comes down to an ethical judgment.
Really, we have to be ready to make ethical judgments in order to be fully functioning human
beings. If we cannot condemn that which makes us indignant, we might as well be turkeys.
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In ethical terms, it is easy to see why wife-beating is wrong. It is because the difference in
physical power between man and woman is so great that he is able to inflict injury on her
without risk to himself. It is an unequal contest which can serve no useful biological or social
function. He does it simply because he is the stronger and can get away with it. Now, it is
surely unethical for the strong to terrorise and hurt the weak.
Human life would be
impossible if that were accepted behaviour. It happens, of course, but it is not accepted. The
perpetrator is castigated as a tyrant and a bully.
So I can look across at my neighbour, who beats his wife, and make the judgment that my
way, which does not involve wife-beating, is the better, not simply because my wife is
happier (she may not be!) but because it corresponds more with an ethical idea of manhood.
That idea says a man should not use his strength on people who are weaker, especially
females and children. That is one of the main differences between a man and a thug. All
other male primates agree with me, incidentally.
Remember, when you come to manhood you will probably be the biggest and strongest
member of a little group of people, your family, who will look to you for their defence and
support. They will want a cheerful and affectionate male spirit around them, so that their own
spirits can grow and blossom. Just go to an airport and watch some children seeing their
father arrive. You should envy the one whose children shriek, "Daddy!” and rush into his
arms.
Even if your wife is stronger than you economically, morally and personally, she will still
want you to be her man and to look after her physically, psychologically and sexually. You
can do all of these things if you are a man. So let us set the agenda for becoming a man, the
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sort of man who will be able to face the challenges of the coming age and will be a credit to
the human race. The principles I shall suggest are not new. The ancient Romans knew them
two thousand years ago.
Although much has changed since then, people are not very
different. The problems of being a man were the same then as now, and will remain so while
our species lives.
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