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Authors: Marilyn French
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miserable. She curled in on herself. She felt she had to withdraw, feeling defeated, feeling that it was, after all, the world that she wanted and the world that she was repudiating. But she had no choice. She tried to tell herself that the life she wanted would someday be possible, that someday she would have it all, adventure and excitement and independence. But she also knew that such a life had, for her, to include sex, and there was no way she could reconcile that danger and those aspirations. She saw her choice clearly as being between sex and independence, and she was paralysed by that. Since she always risked pregnancy, which meant dependence, a sexual woman lived with Damocles’ sword always over her head. Sex meant surrender to the male. If Mira wanted the independent life, she would have to give up being sexual. The situation was a terrible incarnation of her masochistic fantasies. Women were indeed victims by nature.
11
Young men like to say that young women want to be raped; no doubt this statement is intended partly to alleviate their guilt about the kinds of pressure they place on women, but there is a germ of truth in it. Young women caught in psychological bonds like Mira’s probably, at moments, half welcome a violent solution to the dilemma. But the kind of rape they imagine is like the one in The Fountainhead: it springs from passion and love, and it has no consequences more serious than the consequences for Justine’s body of all her whippings and torture. No broken bones, scars, destroyed tissue. Act without consequence, arrows with rubber tips, comedy: like the cartoons they make for children in which the cat or bear or whatever gets smashed over and over, but always rises from its own ashes. Revocability is an ideal, it frees us from the grimness of puritanical insistence on the seriousness of all things.
Sex, being what it is, is pretty drab for young people. Val used to say it was wasted on the young. She said they combined the utmost in desire with the utmost in ineptitude. I told her she’d been reading too much Shaw. She didn’t even smile. Earnestly, she went on, amending her statement: the males had the utmost in desire. Females, she said, whether it was from fear or physiology, wouldn’t reach the utmost in desire until their thirties. It was nature, she thought, that had made humans strangely; it had intended young men to rape and impregnate young women and then go their way, as the gods did in Greek myth. The young women were supposed to have the babies and bring them up alone. Then, in their thirties, the young women became sexually charged – if they hadn’t died along the way – at which point they become terrifying to the male of the species. The men sniff the female’s revenge, and identify such women with forbidden mothers, or scorpions, witches, and sibyls. By this time, most of the older males were dead from their adventures or dissipations, so the older women tried to seduce young men, although without the violence young men used on women. She said the ideal marriage was between exhausted middle-aged men and young women, or between middle-aged women and young men. The young woman would get pregnant by a young man, and then the older man would take over and take care of her without giving her too hard a time with sexual demands, and when hedid make love, would have some idea of what he was about, and would give her at least some pleasure. Then, when she was older and the old geezer had kicked the bucket, she’d send her kids out into the world and take in some struggling young guy who could satisfy her sexually, after she’d taught him all of what she’d learned from her years with the old geezer.
Val amused us with many such evening entertainments, but I thought it made sense, at least as much sense as the way things are presently ordered. I said the major problem was for the young women to bring up the children. It was different when everyone lived on the land, and a
11
Young men like to say that young women want to be raped; no doubt this statement is intended partly to alleviate their guilt about the kinds of pressure they place on women, but there is a germ of truth in it. Young women caught in psychological bonds like Mira’s probably, at moments, half welcome a violent solution to the dilemma. But the kind of rape they imagine is like the one in The Fountainhead: it springs from passion and love, and it has no consequences more serious than the consequences for Justine’s body of all her whippings and torture. No broken bones, scars, destroyed tissue. Act without consequence, arrows with rubber tips, comedy: like the cartoons they make for children in which the cat or bear or whatever gets smashed over and over, but always rises from its own ashes. Revocability is an ideal, it frees us from the grimness of puritanical insistence on the seriousness of all things.
Sex, being what it is, is pretty drab for young people. Val used to say it was wasted on the young. She said they combined the utmost in desire with the utmost in ineptitude. I told her she’d been reading too much Shaw. She didn’t even smile. Earnestly, she went on, amending her statement: the males had the utmost in desire. Females, she said, whether it was from fear or physiology, wouldn’t reach the utmost in desire until their thirties. It was nature, she thought, that had made humans strangely; it had intended young men to rape and impregnate young women and then go their way, as the gods did in Greek myth. The young women were supposed to have the babies and bring them up alone. Then, in their thirties, the young women became sexually charged – if they hadn’t died along the way – at which point they become terrifying to the male of the species. The men sniff the female’s revenge, and identify such women with forbidden mothers, or scorpions, witches, and sibyls. By this time, most of the older males were dead from their adventures or dissipations, so the older women tried to seduce young men, although without the violence young men used on women. She said the ideal marriage was between exhausted middle-aged men and young women, or between middle-aged women and young men. The young woman would get pregnant by a young man, and then the older man would take over and take care of her without giving her too hard a time with sexual demands, and when hedid make love, would have some idea of what he was about, and would give her at least some pleasure. Then, when she was older and the old geezer had kicked the bucket, she’d send her kids out into the world and take in some struggling young guy who could satisfy her sexually, after she’d taught him all of what she’d learned from her years with the old geezer.
Val amused us with many such evening entertainments, but I thought it made sense, at least as much sense as the way things are presently ordered. I said the major problem was for the young women to bring up the children. It was different when everyone lived on the land, and a
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