Anatomy of Female Power Page 10
These claims are borne out by a recent research on European and American women by Professor Donald Kanter. According to a press report,
Kanter, a psychologist at Boston University, conducted a survey of 2250 European women for an advertising firm. He uncovered layer upon layer of 'staggering cynicism.' Eight out of 10 women thought most people lie to get what they want, more than 80 per cent agreed that people inwardly dislike putting themselves out to help others, and that it's harder and harder to make true friends. 'I'd expect the gentler sex to be softer, more charitable,' Kanter concluded. 'The responses we got showed most European women think people are liars, reality is money, and an unselfish person is a pathetic 'figure. That's why they despised Jimmy Carter.'
Kanter has now finished a new survey of middle class American wives and is dismayed by the results. About 50 percent believe that most people are just out for themselves and nearly two-thirds agree with the European women that by and large human beings are selfish, mendacious and money mad. 'The central tendencies are quite alarming,' Kanter said. 'I never expected to see numbers so large.'76
Poor Professor Kanter! One of his cherished illusions about women seems to have been shattered, and he seems quite shocked! One may well marvel at the sentimental education which blinded him to women's basic cynicism. Anyway, if Florence Nightingale and Indira Gandhi are to be believed, Kanter's finding is not outlandish, and the cynic in Mrs America is the cynic in every girl. {91}
Man's belief that he is naturally superior to woman is perhaps the greatest tribute ever paid to male conceit by wilful blindness: evidence to the contrary is everywhere. Just consider this. All that a woman has to do for sex, whether for pleasure or procreation, is signal her availability and, unless she is unspeakably ugly and stinking, there will be a stampede of men competing for the chance to service her. The poor devils must show their credentials, and must pass whatever test she sets, or she will deny them access to herself. Yet it is these very males - who have to fight and claw at one another; who have to woo, cajole, beg or even resort to rape to gain access to her - it is these very pitiful males who proudly declare themselves superior to her! They conveniently forget (for their own ego's sake) to ask: What would they themselves say of candidates who claimed to be superior to those who interviewed, judged, selected and admitted them to positions for which they went down on their knees to beg?
The notion of male superiority is a noisy myth, a compensatory boast, born of men's acute consciousness of inferiority. Rather than being inferior to man, woman's superiority is incontestable, and is based on the womb. After all, the achievements of even a Caesar are but credentials which he tenders before a woman when he competes with rival suitors for the use of her womb.
Man's sense of woman's mysteriousness was there at the dawn of history, and persists till this day. Ancient Pharaonic Egyptians recorded it in the saying: "One does not ever discover the heart of a woman anymore than one knows the sky."77 A 19th century Britisher, Coventry Patmore, echoed them:
A woman is a foreign land,
Of which, though there he settle young,
A man will ne'er quite understand
The customs, politics, and tongue.78
And even Sigmund Freud, the great explorer of the human psyche, confessed: {92}
The great question... which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?’79
And on any day, you will find some man somewhere baffled into asking the same perennial question: "What does a woman want?"
Why do men find women so baffling? The answer, as a German woman, Eva Figes, put it, is that "man's vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be."80 Of course, this lack of an objective view is precisely why woman, who he does not allow himself to see as she is, baffles man. If he ever took the trouble to observe and study woman, instead of projecting his fantasies and wishes onto her, he would find her much less of a mystery.
In my view, men would understand women much better by avoiding one subjective error. Because men's chief interest in women is sexual, men are prone to think that women's chief interest in men is also sexual. In so doing, they overlook the point that men and women are biologically complementary rather than identical; and that, therefore, their main interest in each other would be complementary rather than identical. This elementary error is the key to men's historic inability to understand women. When women's behaviour is analysed from the standpoint of men's interests and needs, it becomes incomprehensible, and quite rightly too.
Women, of course, do not make a similar mistake; they do not confuse men's key interest in women with their own in men. Having grasped men's key interest in women, they use it to analyse men's behaviour, and that is why they find men so transparent that one woman, Jackie Robb, could say: "You can tell all you need to know about a man by the way he peels an orange."81 By the way, that women so easily understand men, and that men find women so baffling, is additional evidence that women are cleverer than men.
However, it should not be too difficult for those who have understood the mysteries of the universe, including evolution and quantum physics, to understand women, provided they look and see and think. If men start from the complementarity of the sexes; if they accept that men pursue wealth, fame, honour and power for the love of women (i.e. in order to trade these for access to a womb); if they heed the Igbo saying that beauty is woman's wealth and wealth man's beauty, then they would realise how natural it is for women's aim to be the trading of their womb and beauty for a share of men's wealth, fame, honour, power, and status. By focussing on women's key interest, women's behaviour becomes readily understandable and far from mysterious. In brief, woman's mysteriousness is projected unto her by the muddled male mind. {93}
On the whole, contrary to men's ego-boosting illusions, man may be the brawnier and brainier sex; woman is not the weaker but the wilier sex. However helpless and sentimental women may appear to be, in those things which matter to them they are less sentimental, less naive, more cynical, more ruthless, and more tenacious than men. If men could be even half as fickle, passive or irrational as women are, wouldn't their lot be easier? As for the dogma that women are a sex inferior to men, it is simply stupid. Nobody who knows the ways of the world would accept it. Ask Chaucer, ask Boccaccio, ask the Chagga Elders. And as for the mysteriousness of women, it is a shadow cast upon them by male fuzzymindedness. All these silly male illusions enable women to manipulate and rule men; and that is why mothers, and all other women, would rather encourage than dispel them. {94}
12. Man’s Fear of Woman
There is a deep-seated fear of women in every man… An average man harbours a sense of powerlessness towards a woman’s sexuality and feels vulnerable to this sexuality.82
–Juliet, a Nigerian, unmarried mother.
It is women that men fear most of all.83
–A male psychiatrist.
American manhood may have kicked out the first Redcoats, defeated the Indians and conquered the moon, but the truth is they are now retreating in hopeless disarray before their own womenfolk.84
–Alan Whicker
The myths of many lands encode man’s experience of woman as a being to be feared: feared as mother and as consort. Woman as mother evokes awe; woman as consort provokes terror; in either aspect, it is fear – fear reverential and hostile fear – that woman inspires in man.
As the Great Mother, woman enjoys the awe due to one who brings forth life, as well as the reverence and loyalty due to the child’s nurse, nourisher, teacher, healer, trainer, and first refuge from danger. In her awe-inspiring aspect, which breeds a habit of obedience, woman is represented in the pantheons of many lands: as Egyptian Aset/Isis (goddess of birth, goddess of the Earth, restorer of life to Asare/Osiris, ruler in heaven, on earth and in the world below); in Prithivi of the Hindus (goddess of the Earth, vegetation deity who rescued the wor
ld from famine); as Omeciuatl of the Aztecs (mother of the human race); as Gaea of the Greeks and Terra of the Romans (mother of the gods, universal mother, personifying the Earth); as Ala of the Igbo (earth {95} goddess, goddess of creativity, guardian of morality). In all these guises, woman-as-mother inspires obedience in man.
Man’s habit of obeying mother is part of the enduring make-up of those great macho dictators who, all their lives, remain obedient mama’s boys. Strong women executives, whether in business or politics, who dominate their lieutenants, are in part able to do so by evoking in the men their childhood awe of Mother-who-must-be-obeyed.
Many myths and legends also record man’s fear of woman as a devouring consort, as one whose company is fatal to man’s liberty and adventurous spirit. Let us consider a few: the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh’s encounter with Ishtar; the Greek legend of Odysseus’ struggles against Calypso, Circe and the Sirens; and the Hebrew myth of Adam’s pathetic fall at a sly shove from his consort Eve.
In the epic of Gilgamesh we read that Ishtar prayed Gilgamesh to be his consort; and Gilgamesh answered in scorn, enumerating her previous lovers and their harsh fates:
Which of your lovers have you loved forever?
Which of your little shepherds has continued to please you?
Come, let me name your lovers for you.
….
You loved a shepherd, a herdsman,
Who endlessly put up cakes for you
And every day slaughtered kids for you.
You struck him, turned him into a wolf.
His own boys drove him away,
And his dogs tore his hide to bits.
You loved also Ishullanu, your father’s gardener,
Who endlessly brought you baskets of dates
And every day made the table jubilant.
You lifted your eyes to him and went to him:
‘My Ishullanu, let us take pleasure in your strength.
Reach out your hand and touch my vulva!’
Ishullanu said to you,
What do you want from me?
Mother, if you don’t cook, I don’t eat.
Should I eat the bread of bad faith, the food curses?
Should I be covered with rushes against the cold?’
You heard his answer.
You struck him, turned him into a frog.
You set him to dwell in the middle of the garden,
Where he can move neither upward nor downward.
So you'd love me in my turn and, as with them, set my fate.85
When Gilgamesh, having learned from the fates of his predecessors, turned down Ishtar's advances, what did she do? Feeling spurned, she caused her father Anu, god of the heavens and father of the gods, to create a heaven bull which devoured Gilgamesh's warriors, killing hundreds before it was slain by Gilgamesh and Enkidu, his partner in arms. Ah Ishtar, terrible Ishtar; cruel, callous and capricious goddess of love, whose embrace may neither be accepted nor spumed without danger! Ah Ishtar, personification of the terrible core of woman-in-love, as men experience her! Odysseus, in his encounters with the Sirens, with Calypso and with
Circe, survived attempts to lure, trap and hold him prisoner by woman-in-love.
First, who were the Sirens? They were lovely sea maidens who lured men to destruction with songs which men could not resist. Outside of mythology, a siren is any woman on the street, any seductive and destructive femme fatale, who fascinates a man with her eyes, her voice, her bearing, or some other riveting action or attribute, and lures him to his ruin in one form or another. Odysseus survived his encounter with the Sirens by waxing up the ears of his ship's crew so as to make them deaf to the songs, and by having himself tied tight to the mast of his ship. He was thus able to enjoy the enchanting songs of the sirens as he sailed past them, without throwing himself into the sea and swimming to them and to his doom.
And what about Calypso? When Odysseus landed on her island, the nymph received him kindly, looked after him, proposed to marry him, and planned to give him immortality and ageless youth, if only he would remain with her for ever. Why did all that not persuade Odysseus to stay? He had other plans. After his years away at the Trojan War, he was keen to get home to his wife and son. Calypso had no sympathy for that. Hoping to habituate him to herself, she plied him with hospitality, and kept him on her island for eight years, kept him there a "cold lover with an ardent dame" (after) "the nymph had long ceased to please."86 She might have kept him prisoner for the rest of his life had Zeus, king {97} of the gods, not intervened and ordered her to give him up. Now, no man who loves his liberty, who has other plans for his life, would welcome being held against his wishes, however gently and sumptuously, even with a promise of immortal youth.
Circe was the sorceress who turned men into swine. When Odysseus came to her island, he sent his men out to explore it. They found the home of Circe. She welcomed them, fed them pottage, and then, with a wave of her magic wand, turned them into pigs, and ordered them off to her pigsty for later slaughter. Only Eurylochus escaped to tell Odysseus what had happened. After consulting his gods, who told him how to resist Circe's charms, Odysseus set out to meet Circe and rescue his men.
Let us consider Circe's tricks and how Odysseus countered them. Her first trick was to serve him drugged pottage, which would weaken his resistance to her magic, and then to wave her wand and order him off to the pigsty. When her pottage and wand technique failed, she didn't give up, but tried another trick. She shrieked, fell on her knees, burst into tears, and invited him to her bed, where she planned to rob him of his courage, and so render him susceptible to her magic wand. To counter her tears and sex appeal, Odysseus drew his resolute sword. When capitulating, Circe praised Odysseus, saying: "you must have a heart in your breast that is proof against all enchantment."87 That was high praise indeed! She added: "I beg you now to put up your sword and come with me to my bed, so that in love and sleep we may learn to trust one another."88
The encounter between Circe and Odysseus illustrates that, when tangling with a woman's desire, a man is embattled with a predatory goddess whose appetite is implacable. Any man who would thwart her needs all the guile and discipline of an Odysseus, plus the good counsel of his gods. Any man who would keep his freedom must also be prepared to use violence if need be. Woman, like the slave hunter, wants to live. If you don't want to be captured, you must make it clear that an attempt on your liberty will cost the attempter's life. Nothing less will make her back away and leave you alone.
Note also that it is only in defeat that Circe finally accepts a relationship based on love and trust. Only when a man-hunting woman is persuaded that she cannot enslave you is she prepared to settle for a friendship which, to her nature, is only second best. Alas, a beast of prey does not take easily to fair exchange; a parasite does not take easily {98} to symbiosis. Men who insist on fairness in relationships with women must have a resolute heart proof against all enchantment, as well as a sharp and ready sword, and the will to use it on any would-be enslaver.
The man-entrapping spirit of Calypso and Circe is echoed in Barbra Streisand's famous lines about a woman in love who would do anything to get a man into her world and hold him within. Man's fear of that entrapment is expressed in this Japanese poem:
Take me in your arms, said the woman.
The man took her. And remained, for the rest of his life,
Between her hands.89
Women may delight in such a prospect; men, naturally, fear it, and therefore fear women.
The most important lesson from Odysseus's encounters with these women is that the lot of a man in the hands, of a woman hungry for a consort depends on him. If he allows himself to be trapped and tamed, his lot will be enslavement; if he stands his ground, he could escape, or at least exact an equitable and symbiotic relationship.
It is perhaps significant that though Odysseus was able, with advice from his guardian gods and goddesses, to scheme his way ou
t of the fangs of Circe, he had to rely on a direct order from Zeus, the all-powerful, to effect his release from Calypso. Does this not suggest that it is more difficult for a man to rescue himself from a courteous and gentle weakener of resolve, like Calypso, than from the not-so-gentle Circes of the world? A woman's soft approach, being less resistible, may be more dangerous to the liberty of a man.
Nevertheless, if a man must choose between a Calypso and a Circe, which should he choose as his mate? Better a Calypso than a Circe, for Calypso's heart is not a block of flint. She knows what pity is; she has some sense of what is fair; and one could negotiate a deal with her.
Which is most unlikely with a Circe, whose style of domination is not amenable to negotiation or compromise, not until she is decisively defeated, and perhaps not even then. The wonderful thing about the adventures of Odysseus is that he is a master of ruses, one from whom many survival tricks may be learned. His encounters with the Sirens, with Calypso and with Circe ought to be used to teach standard lessons to adolescent boys as they begin relationships with predatory women. The Hebrew myth of the Fall of Man is usually read as the story of the fall of the human species, male and female together, from paradise, {99} and of its banishment to a life of toil and hardship outside the primeval Garden of Eden. But it includes a much more specific fall than that. Its kernel is the story of the fall of man below woman; of how Adam, originally lord and master over Eve his consort, was pushed, fell and became Eve's slave.
It is the story of a brilliant coup whereby woman, pleading the hardships of pregnancy and childbirth, caused a division of labour which dumped upon man the hard economic tasks and risky adventures of society. For eating the apple given to him by Eve, Adam was condemned to eke out a living by the sweat of his brow, and to sustain his children and his child-bearing consort. Eve's crowning subterfuge was to fix responsibility for the new arrangement on the serpent, Adam and God.