THE SPECTATOR REVIEWofBOOKS

SPRING BOOKS

The Bishop of Durham on God and rationality Reviews by Patrick Cosgrave, Marcus Cunliffe, Robert Orr, Angus Maude, Hugh Plommer Charles Wilson, Simon Raven, Maurice Zinkin, Michael Black, Germaine Greer and Auberon Waugh

John Wain on Sexual Politics

Miss Millett's book* conies in a smart pink-and-blue package with a badge an- nouncing it to be a 'World Bestseller'. Since any bestseller is worth a diagnostic glance, I approached it with interest. lts plan is simple enough, but interesting, breaking into two sections. There is the general demonstration of how, why, when, and in the name of what, men have kept women from enjoying their full human rights and fulfilments. And there is a literary-critical section which examines the way in which male supremacist attitudes come to the fore in certain widely-read and widely-imitated writers of our century. Of these, three are 'counter-revolutionary sexual politicians'—Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer; a fourth, Jean Genet, is analysed more kindly— admiringly, indeed—because he has put his finger on the core of the male disease and said to his sex. 'Thou ailest here and here'.

It must be said immediately that the literary-critical chapters are much more enjoyable to read than the general, theor- etical part of the book. For one thing, the style conies to life much more. Miss Mil- lett—on second thoughts I will call her Mrs Yoshimura—could never, at any Point, be called a good or even a half- way decent stylist, but when she turns to her typewriter fresh from the perusal of some vivid phrase-monger like Miller Or Mailer she does at least have the run or rhythmic, concrete writing in her head, Whereas after a prolonged, dose of socio- logical or psycho-analytical prose she Writes relentlessly in this vein: The effect of patriarchal social conditions upon women with regard to their sexual lives has had enormous and even anomalous re- sults. One marvels at the proof of socialisa- * Sexual Politics Kate Millett (Rupert Hart-Day is 02.50) tion's powers found in the fact that the vast inherent potential of female sexuality had come, by Engels's time, to be nearly totally obscured through cultural restraints. One also observes the paradoxical situation that while patriarchy tends to convert woman to a sexual object, she has not been encouraged to enjoy the sexuality which is agreed to be her fate. Instead, she is made to suffer for and be ashamed of her sexuality, while in general not permitted to rise above the level of a nearly exclusively sexual existence. For the great mass of women throughout history have been confined to the cultural level of animal life in providing the male with sexual outlet and exercising the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young. Thus the female has had sexuality visited upon her as a punishment in a way of life which, with few exceptions, and apart from maternity, did not encourage her to derive pleasure in sex- uality and limited her to an existence other- wise comprised mainly of menial labour and domestic service.'

It is a pity that Mrs Yoshimura, who has enjoyed a mandarin education which in- cluded reading English at Oxford, can't take the trouble to use the language de- cently; she finds it too much bother to sort out 'comprise' from 'compose'. or to remember that one derives pleasure from something and not in it; and slapdash writing is accompanied by hit-or-miss thinking and question-begging on an awe- some scale. What, for instance, is 'the cultural level of animal life"? Is it building dams like beavers? Or homing, like eels, to the Sargasso Sea? And if the immensely complex and creative work of 'care of the young' is an 'animal function', then so is just about everything else except writing sonnets, solving equations and cooking souffles. The male stickleback builds an elaborate nest, by a rigid procedure con- ducts the female thither to lay her eggs (with supplementary visits by other fe- males if she does not produce enough): then he guards and washes the eggs, and when they hatch out he continues to pro- tect the young until they are big enough to swim away by themselves. If men take over the main responsibilities of child- rearing, will Mrs Yoshimura deride this as 'a piscine function'?

Much of the book's thinking is on this level. In the theoretical chapters, Mrs Yoshimura rambles over a wide ground, scooping lip various bits of information which all turn out, whether surprisingly or not, to be evidence for her point of view. All this is the more annoying because her point of view does not, in fact, lack evi- dence. 'Women's Lib' has a case, and a strong one. Men and women are con- structed along very different lines add their tastes and talents do not overlap in most areas; but we ought to be able to hold that fact in our heads and at the same time recognise that. in pblitics, in business, and in the professions. women ought at least to start fair and have an equal chance with men. This state of affairs does not yet obtain. and until it does obtain, there will be a Liberation movement, with its accom- panying extravagances and distortions. - Some kind of organised thrust towards recognition of women's rights is inevitable, in any case, in the nature of any highly developed industrial society. Such a society is constantly accelerating both in produc- tion and in consumption. The more people have, the more they want. Wellsian Utop- ians daydreamed of an age in which the machine, by taking over 'brute labour'. would reduce our working time to two , hours a day. In fact. no machine-domin- ated civilisation wil! tolerate any such easy- going attitude. Its drive for more-and- more is uncontrollable. First it draws the population from the countryside to the cities. Then it accelerates production by assembly-line techniques. Then, inevitably, it absorb' the women into the labour force, having abolished the kind of work that needed a man's strength (or, as Mrs Yoshi- mura prefers to phrase it disapprovingly, 'The heavier musculature of the male'). And once women are in the world of productive work, they inevitably and naturally wish to be of it also. In England, the total mobilisation of 1914-1918 produced a generation of women who lost no time in translating into actuality most of the pro- gramme of the 'New Woman' of the Edwardian era. In America, a country whose involvement in total war was post- poned till the 1940s, it was the girls born during the second world war who had an inherited programme to fulfil; and since they grew up in the era of protest and activism, the present-day contours of Women's Lib could have been foreseen from about 1955 onwards.

Most of what they want, they will get; some of it, they already have; apart from the merely demented fringe who want to use men's lavatories and so on, most of the girls will go home quietly once they have pushed the half-open door a few more times and got it to open properly: and good luck to them. The theoretical argu- ment, however, will go on. It is an argu- ment about fundamentals. And, like all arguments that concern human happiness, it revolves about the idea of Nature.

In a satirical passage of Rasselas (Chap- ter xxit), Samuel Johnson has his young prince meet a sage who possesses the secret of happiness; it is, he declares, `to live according to nature', Rasselas,. thirsting for wisdom, asks the philosopher to explain how one sets about living according to nature, and is met with a string of mean- ingless generalities that expose the wise man's emptiness. The satire is apt because the basic cliché is so universal. Everyone agrees that happiness conies, and can only come, from living according to nature. And what is that? When woman is assign- ed a different role from man, is she being thwarted and twisted away from 'nature'? Or is it, on the contrary, the woman who wants to be treated exactly like a man who is turning her back on 'nature' and happi- ness?

We have record of no society in which women hold more power than men. The anthropologist Gloria Levitas testifies in a recent number of the magazine Dialogue (ln, 4) that `Although a popular mythology-----most fami- liar to us in the myth of the Amazons but echoed in the origin myths of many other cul- tures—attests to the existence of prehistoric matriarchates, in fact there is not convincing evidence of the existence of past or present societies ruled by women.'

The feminist answer, in the face of this, has always been simply that men have kept women down against their will. But would they have been able to manage such a world-wide conspiracy. so consistently and successfully, without some degree of co- operation from the women? Considering that average male humanity shows an abysmal lack of the power to co-operate, would they have got away with such a world-wide swindle if women had not, with at least part of themselves, wanted things to be that way? For, as Dr Levitas reminds us in the same essay, 'even learned cultural systems are maintained through largely unconscious mechanisms'.

Intellectually, the worst fault of Mrs Yoshimura's book is that it skirts—if the expression may be pardoned—round the central question: to what extent are male- female differences biological and to what extent learned? She gives a good deal of rather scrappy evidence about female con- ditioning, but hardly any corresponding hard evidence for the other point of view.

This is where the literary-critical chap ters come in. Since Mrs Yoshimura will have it that women accept a different, and subordinate, role because they are condi- tioned to do so, literature becomes import- ant in her scheme of things, since 'writers . . . after the usual manner of cultural agents, both reflected and actually shaped attitudes'. (I am glad, incidentally, to have support from this quarter against those people who maintain the censorship of books and films is irrelevant because people's behaviour is nor affected by what they see and read.) Men take up a certain' set of attitudes towards women because they have read books that make these attitudes seem attractive; and women. pre- sumably, read the same books and acqui- esce dumbly in the message.

Mrs Yoshimura accordingly, has a fine time blazing away at three male suprema- cist writers. The chapter on Lawrence, in fact, is excellent add contains much that needed to be said. Lawrence's rather Nazi attitude towards women, combined with a distinctly narcissistic and homosexual streak, is something that his admirers ought to be made to face and come to terms with; the chapter and verse given by Mrs Yoshimura builds up to a convincing and effective case, which the Lawrence lobby will hardly be able to avoid answer- ing.

On Miller and Mailer she is, in my opinion, blazing away at a couple of barn doors. Does anyone. really, take either of them seriously as an analyst of the human condition? Miller writes lively prose, but he has never had much to say in it. Mrs Yoshimura has no difficulty in demonstrat- ing the brutal egotism of his treatment of women—the coarse disregard of their humanity and individuality, the tendency to treat them as play-objects and as victims who must be humiliated in order to heighten the male's masturbatory gratifica- tion. But in fact the heroes of Miller's books are (approvingly) shown as so totally egotistical that no one impinges on them =neither women, nor other men, nor chil- dren. One's comment on Miller must, in the end, be Henry James's on Kipling- 'How, little of life he can make use of!' As for Mailer, Mrs Yoshimura shrewdly analyses the 'strange personal mishmash of hypochondria and pseudo-medicine to which he subscribes' and shows him as a fugitive from some secret fear, the fear of a nothingness in which homosexuality.

lack of virility and non-existence all meet in one black void. It is this that produces the typically Mailerian insistence on male sexuality as a knobkerrie with which to beat down the opposition and prove one- self the master These, as I say, are barn doors. In the interesting discussion of Jean Genet with which the book concludes, Mrs Yoshimura finds something at last to admire. For Genet's analysis of male sexuality, and the attitudes that have resulted from it, is con- ducted from the point of view of a homo- sexual: a male who has been used, as females are used, as an object in and through which the all-conquering phallus makes its bid for total power.

The chapters on Lawrence and Genet arc so good that one wishes away the chap- ters on Mailer and Miller, as largely empty exercises. There is, however, one good reason why they should be in the book.

Not a good reason from my point of view, but from the point of view of whoever designed that proud badge' 'World Best- seller'. For Mailer and Miller are impec- cably trendy. They make the charts. Open Sexual Politics and the first thing you will read, on the first page of the first part, is a slab from Miller's .Sexes, and one of the most lurid slabs at that. Ten years ago, you would probably have been put in prison for printing this paragraph in London or New York, so where is the best place for it today? That's right—up on the mast-head, where nobody can miss it. If men have no other uses in Mrs Yoshimura's world, they can still provide juicy chunks of bait for her dispassionate hook. Come buy, come buy!