MASCULINE/FEMININE
MARRIAGE
He for God only, she for God in him
John Milton on Adam and Eve (1667)
Tucked away in the Church of England prayer book for hundreds of years, this list of the people you can’t marry seems pretty bizarre today. What granny would ever contemplate marrying her grand-daughter’s husband unless this table said she couldn’t? In fact some of these prohibitions have been lifted in recent years. Yet, sanctioned by organized religion and inscribed in the law of the land, this list represents a very British variation of the universal law of human culture which prohibits incest. It reads like the findings of anthropologists who have worked on the kinship systems of a primitive tribe and found out the particular code the incest taboo takes in that society.
In one respect the table of forbidden affinities does represent something universal, the law of human culture that the infant must grow up and take his or her place in adult society by giving up love for the mother. In another respect, however, the list is not universal but patriarchal. It pretends to equality between the sexes in the careful symmetry by which those a man and those a woman may not marry are lined up opposite each other. In fact it is no accident that the left-hand column comes first, ‘A Man may not marry his: – Mother’. For there to be a taboo on incest either the men or the women from one family must marry into another, or, as in primitive societies, from one clan into another. Patriarchy decrees that it is the women who are objects of exchange in marriage and not the men. Thus the prohibition on incest is imposed in the name of the symbolic father.
A dictionary defines patriarchy as: ‘social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line’. Patriarchy clearly has a social foundation in the way families, tribes and societies are organized. And it has always tried to incorporate into this the biological basis for gender, particularly by making women especially responsible for childbirth and nurturing. But it is the psychological and internal aspects of patriarchy which are the main concern here. The need to prevent incest means that sexual intercourse between close relatives must be forbidden. To do this through an exchange of women is a patriarchal solution. It leads on to a symbolic system which treats the father as supreme and tries to make masculinity universal by defining sexual difference in terms of a male symbol, as plus or minus the phallus. Women are clearly visible as the objects which are exchanged but much less visible, although equally important, is the male bond between the exchangers.
There are many ways in which Freud’s account of the unconscious is permeated by masculine assumptions. One of the most obvious is that it presents itself as universal rather than as what it is, an analysis of patriarchy. So it is with his assumption that the taboo on incest, some form of which exists in every human society, always follows the same pattern of the ancient Greek story of Oedipus, the king who killed his father and married his mother. In Totem and Taboo (1912–13) he tries to explain the origin of all human society in a single event. The first father kept all the women to himself and so, to gain brides, the sons had to kill him and eat him. Later Freud came to concede that this was a ‘scientific myth’, a kind of ‘Just-So’ story like the ones in Rudyard Kipling. For it presupposes just what it pretends to explain, which is why it should be the father who had all the power in the first place.
Anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski have challenged the view that the incest taboo always takes the form Freud assumes, a desire for the mother prohibited by the father. In Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1937) Malinowski describes the culture of the Trobriand Islanders in Melanesia. In their family structure property is inherited by the male child from his uncle, his mother’s brother. The boy’s relations with his mother and father are close, friendly and relaxed. But there is a strong taboo on incest with members of the uncle’s clan, and specifically the boy’s sister. Because of such evidence the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss worked out a much more general notion of the nature of incest. Whatever particular objects are forbidden by the rules governing incest, its importance lies in the very fact that it does lead to rules and conventions. While incest might be perfectly possible in terms of biology (the supposedly disastrous genetic results are much exaggerated), it was made impossible by laws and institutions. Incest is forbidden because in this way nature and natural instinct are denied while human culture and social obligation are affirmed. It is significant that this repeats in another form Freud’s distinction between biological instinct and symbolic drive.
Even if incest taboos do not universally correspond to the model Freud describes, they certainly do in Western culture. The son desires the mother and competes with the father for supremacy, as he does again and again in the stories of the ancient Greek gods. Uranus imprisoned his sons in a kind of pre-emptive strike. But his son Kronos, at his mother’s instigation, rose up and castrated him. Kronos in turn ate all his children except for one, Zeus, who was saved by his mother. Zeus defeated Kronos and took his place as ruler of Olympus. There he lives on in a troubled relationship with his wife, Hera. Christian mythology provides a much more radical solution to the problem of competition between father and son for the love of the mother. God has no wife but creates everything, and Jesus, far from challenging the father, suffers the worst that can be done to him. Women are simply written out of the script.
Based on the idea that the only way to solve the universal problem of incest is through the exchange of women, patriarchy continues in different forms throughout the Western tradition. Although it clearly has an embodiment in a social organization and laws which decide the legal dependence of wives and the way property is inherited, it is much more than this. It is a symbolic system through which the laws are lived by individuals. So it defines masculinity by two related principles. The first is that gender is determined by possession or non-possession of the phallus. The second is that masculinity must find itself in the place of the father or not at all.
Mike’s Smile, or the Phallic System Explained
When Mike in The Deer Hunter is forced to shoot at himself, he puts the loaded revolver to his head and smiles. He thinks he is invulnerable, partly because the masculine ego is able to disavow threats from the outside, including the threat of castration. But partly also his confidence comes from the idea that he possesses the phallus, an object of such cultural power it can never be finally destroyed. The phallus is able to take on this meaning in the dominant culture because it serves to represent sexuality itself and also the difference between the sexes. In a masculine culture the inevitable loss of the mother, which falls on both sexes, is symbolized as the loss or lack of the phallus. And sexual difference is defined in terms of having and not having the phallus so that women are always seen as somehow more castrated than men. Hence the imbalance Freud describes by saying masculinity encounters castration as a threat, a possibility, while femininity recognizes it as an accomplished fact.
Freud’s account is weakened and lends itself to being completely misunderstood because it keeps using the language of biology. For example, it refers to the penis as though it were an organ of the body that was in question. In fact, the instinct/drive distinction should require a consistent use of the term phallus since what is at stake is a symbolic idea. It is, however, very clear that Freud is writing about a symbolic system when he refers in the account of fetishism to the mother’s penis that the little boy believes in. One reason for preferring Jacques Lacan’s discussion of masculinity is that it consistently uses the term phallus, so making it explicit that a symbolic system is at issue. He also does this to bring in Lévi-Strauss and his emphasis on human culture as going beyond nature. Lacan analyses the way a patriarchal culture puts the phallus at the centre. He describes phallocentrism as a purely abstract symbolic system, and, in doing so, how the inherited tradition defines masculinity in relation to femininity.
Just as in Freud, the little boy demands the mother for himself, is threatened with castration, and so transfers his desire to the bride. But Lacan understands castration much more radically as a symbolic event, in fact as an effect of language and the way the infant enters language to become a child who speaks. Re-casting castration in relation to language complicates the whole account.
Before castration the little boy does not have the phallus. Rather he is the phallus for the mother. She has the phallus in having him and so makes up for what she lacks (this is indeed the phallic system in its pure form). The boy in loving her seeks to be fully present for her and at first treats language as though words were completely full of meaning and he could speak himself perfectly to her. But he discovers gradually that she desires in him what she has not got, the phallus. And so, wanting to be what she desires, he comes to recognize his own castration or lack. The discovery is bound up with the discovery that words are not things but only names for things, empty of full meaning. The boy also comes to understand that the father is not the perfect father he imagines – he begins to separate the real father from the symbolic role he only imperfectly performs. He discovers that the father is not a real presence but a name. So the boy gives up wanting to be the phallus and seeks to have the phallus. Castration, lack, the recognition that words are only words and paternity only a name, all these work together to encourage him to take up his own place in the system as father and possessor of the symbolic phallus.
Lacan’s reworking of the castration complex in terms of the name of the father – the discovery that fatherhood is only a name – does find support in some prominent features of patriarchy. One is the use of patronymics in different societies, so that people are named after the father and the father’s father and so on. Another is that naming children after the father solves the old problem about paternity. ‘It’s a wise son who knows his own father’, as the saying goes. And so if nature cannot provide proof of who a baby’s father is, then in the name of the father law can step in and decide paternity. The father’s name is also crucial in the exchange of women since daughters take the name of the father and then, as brides, the name of the bridegroom’s father. However, Lacan’s explicit, purely schematic account of how masculinity is supposed to work in the phallocentric system points out very well where the system undoes itself, or contradicts itself.
Three Contradictions in the System
In the dominant conception of it, masculinity tries to disavow and deny what it depends on. Very obviously, in the exchange of women, masculinity depends upon women to be exchanged. A second difficulty emerges if we are asked to think of castration and the making of masculinity in terms of the name of the father. Plausible as this seems, it poses a problem that can be posited as a pretty simple question: if the father is a name, why this name when any name would do? Once again the argument leads back to a single essential question: why should everything seem to begin with a male symbol in the first place? And again this issue will be left over for the moment.
What is so useful about Lacan’s account of ‘the name of the father’ is the way it points to a gap that opens up between the supposed reality and the name, and how masculinity has tried to fill it. The masculine myth keeps coming back to the idea that the father is absolutely all there, that sons are perfect copies of him, that they are masculine all the way through, and that fathers and only fathers are really responsible for making babies. In ancient Greece this myth appears in the story of Athene. Zeus was frightened that Metis, his first wife before Hera, would bear him a son who would overthrow him. So he swallowed Metis when she was pregnant. The child, Athene, was born out of Zeus’s head. This is not the only male maternity in our culture, since Jesus in the Christian story is born from a father who dispenses with the normal decencies of sexual intercourse with a partner. Jesus is an even more perfect embodiment of the masculine myth since the father creates him purely as an idea, by an act of speech, renting a womb from an unwilling virgin.
In contemporary popular culture the myth of male procreation is hidden inside a film such as Hawks’s Red River. As was pointed out, the John Wayne figure seems to acquire a son out of thin air. And he continues to offer himself as the complete father, origin of his own name and the brand of his ranch, rather than as simply a person who bears a name. For a long time the symbolic sons accept this, presumably because they want to believe in that kind of father. It is only with some pain that they give it up.
Thirdly, Lacan’s analysis supposes a kind of essence of masculinity and femininity. Sexuality is determined around the idea of the phallus, and only in relation to it (him). Masculinity is that which has the phallus and desires the feminine. Femininity lacks the phallus and so desires to have it in so far as it is represented by the masculine. And this is a close analysis of the model the dominant version of masculinity tries to impose. He for God only, she for God in him.
We have been here before (see Part I). The idea that men are masculine and only masculine because they possess the symbol of male power, the phallus, only works if it can guarantee that the phallus is not an object of male homosexual desire. It is, as is demonstrated by something else in the system. If patriarchy consists of the exchange of women between the fathers and between fathers and sons it must assert the male bond. And this is motivated by the homosexual desire which is expressed in all forms of male relationship: between fathers and sons, between men at war and at play, and in various forms of masculine style. The exchange of women can only repress the feminine without by expressing the feminine within.
This account of masculinity and phallocentricism has all been fairly abstract, though the later discussion of examples from popular culture will put some flesh on these bones. It has been important to look at the system clearly, as though it were a piece of algebra. But the very next section turns well away from the abstract to the particular. It is also concerned with exchanging women and how masculinity treats femininity as an object. But its example is one very special form in popular culture, that of jokes.
JOKES
The ‘Chinaman’ Joke from ‘Chinatown’, directed by Roman Polanski (1974)
(Jake comes into his office from the barber’s, opens the door smiling, speaks to his two associates.)
JAKE: Duffy! Hey, Walsh! (to secretary) Sophie, go to the little girl’s room for a minute please.
SOPHIE: But Mr Gittes …
JAKE: Sophie!
SOPHIE: Yes, Mr Gittes.
DUFFY: Jake …
JAKE: Listen to me, man, I want to tell you a story. So there’s this guy … Walsh, you understand? … he’s tired of screwing his wife.
DUFFY: Jake …
JAKE: So wait a second, Duffy, you’re always in such a hurry. So his friend says to him, ‘Hey! why don’t you do it like the Chinese do?’ So he says, ‘Well, how do the Chinese do it?’ And the guy says, ‘Well, the Chinese, first they screw a little bit, then they stop and they go and read a little Confucius; come back, screw a little bit more, then they stop again, go back and they screw a little bit more …
WALSH: Jake …
JAKE: Walsh, just listen to me for a second. (Walsh looks behind Jake to the door at which appears Mrs Mulwray, grey suit, grey hat; she watches and listens to the story) You’ll love this. Now, then they go back and they screw a little bit more. And then they go out and they contemplate the moon or something like that, makes it more exciting. So now the guy goes home and he starts screwing his own wife, see. So he screws her for a little bit and then he stops and he goes out of the room and he reads Life magazine. Then he goes back in, he starts screwing again, he says, ‘Excuse me for a minute, honey’, and he goes out and he smokes a cigarette. Now his wife is getting sore as hell. He comes back in the room, he starts screwing again, he gets up to start to leave again to go look at the moon, she says, ‘Hey! what’s the matter with you? You’re screwing just like a Chinaman!’
(Jake cackles with laughter) Jesus! (Jake begins to turn slowly and sees Mrs Mulwray; he looks at Walsh, who shuts his eyes.)
MRS MULWRAY: Mr Gittes.
JAKE: Yes.
MRS MULWRAY: Do you know me?
JAKE: Well, er, I think I would have remembered (supportive agreement from Walsh in the background).
MRS MULWRAY: Have we ever met?
JAKE: Well, no, never.
I’m going to do everything men do.
Drink, smoke, tell jokes
Julie Andrews in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967)
A woman (the wife) in exchange between two men, her husband and his male friend. But there are always three positions in the telling of a joke: the person who tells it, the person who listens to it, the person it is about. So really the wife is in exchange between five men here, since Jake Gittes tells the story about the wife and the two men (‘this guy’ and ‘his friend’) to his two sidekicks, Duffy and Walsh.
The pleasure of the dirty joke begins from the child’s pleasure in looking at its sexual organs and those of other people. It is related to scopophilia, that is, the pleasure in looking (discussed in next section but one). Pleasure in looking can become the pleasure of talking about sex, and the dirty joke is a convention which allows that. In the film Jake Gittes is played by Jack Nicholson and his performance shows that he enjoys using the words and the names, simply the saying of ‘screw a little bit’ (which carries the unspoken implication that a penis is constantly put into a vagina and taken out again). Told among men, as it generally is, the dirty joke gives its teller the fantasy of seducing a woman with the encouragement of his audience. Like banter, the dirty joke represents a version of masculine style. Jokes work by using a joke mechanism, a play on words or ideas that temporarily conceals the meaning. In a simple childish joke it is just a play on words (‘When is a door not a door?’ ‘When it’s ajar’ = ‘a jar’) but in more complicated, ‘adult’ jokes, like this one from Chinatown, the play on words leads to something forbidden being said that otherwise could not be spoken. The wife’s words, ‘You’re screwing just like a Chinaman’, don’t make sense until we reach behind them to the meaning they hide. If she simply and explicitly stated, ‘I recognize the sexual techniques you’re using because I have been making love with a Chinaman’, most of the effect of the joke would be lost because the mechanism of play would have gone. Hence, to explain a joke is to destroy it (and perhaps this joke is one that ought to be destroyed).
In the Chinatown joke a play on words allows the men to admit the otherwise unspoken and threatening idea of the wife’s adultery. She knows she has been unfaithful but she doesn’t say so, and may think her husband doesn’t know either. But of course he does know, because he has deliberately been making love in a Chinese manner. The husband may get upset by this (the joke doesn’t go on to say) but his discomfort is balanced by his superior knowledge – he knows something about his wife that she doesn’t know he knows. Has she spoken out deliberately for the satisfaction of saying something he shouldn’t understand? Probably not. She speaks spontaneously through sexual excitement because, so the story says, she was ‘getting sore as hell’. Thus the joke takes advantage of her submission to passion in contrast to his demonstration of masculine self-control (‘he goes out and he smokes a cigarette’).
At the price of some jealousy the husband gains a mastery over the wife. But for the teller of the joke, J. J. Gittes, and his audience, Walsh and Duffy, superiority over the wife is offered at no cost. They know that a husband gets ‘tired of screwing his wife’, they are party to the conversation in which the male friend instructs the husband in the art of Chinese loving, they know the wife has a Chinese lover. She is the butt of the joke, she and her sexual pleasure are passed between the teller of the joke and his assistants as an object in exchange between them. She is exposed to them almost as though they were spectators, watching her in bed with her Chinese lover without her knowing. By means of the joke she is made sexually available to them, a sexual object, an object of knowledge.
This is most obviously the case for Jake, the joke’s narrator. Since the teller of a joke has already heard it and found a release of pleasure in it, he can only find new pleasure in it at second hand, as it were, by borrowing it from the listener who is hearing it for the first time. But that is not necessarily so with the dirty joke, nor is it here. Jake comes in from the barber impatient to tell the joke he’s just heard and twice brushes aside Duffy’s interruption and once Walsh’s. In telling it he becomes the man making love to the woman, whether as husband or lover or both. He relives the coitus interruptus, smiling in the film with anticipated pleasure, getting more and more excited as the story gets ‘more exciting’, finally laughing loudly and orgasmically when he comes to the punchline which reveals both her infidelity and her desire for sexual pleasure.
Jake demands that Walsh and Duffy collaborate with him in making the joke happen, despite their attempted refusals. The telling of the joke is a reassertion of the male bond. So Jake sends Sophie out (‘to the little girl’s room’) while the men talk. He addresses Duffy as ‘man’, insists that Walsh will ‘love this’ (the story? the imagined object of the story?), offers the joke as sexual advice to Duffy who’s ‘always in such a hurry’. The male dirty joke is a particular way of talking about women. In this version of masculinity men are to master women by talking about them and affirming together a male bond which overrides heterosexual desire.
Desire, however, has always got more than one side. In the film Chinatown this joke is turned against its teller. It releases various ideas that threaten masculine self-possession. Although the husband is assumed naturally to be tired of screwing his wife, she also is presumably also somewhat tired of her husband. She too has her desires (a Chinese lover because he is exotically other? because they are such dilatory lovers? because there are potentially so many of them?). And she too is capable of deception. The joke only masters such male anxieties by awakening them.
Because the patriarchal system of exchanging women draws attention to the objects exchanged, the feelings towards each other of those who do the exchanging have been concealed. Once again masculinity tries to stay invisible. The first three parts of The Masculine Myth have described how the male bond works when women are not particularly at issue. The joke from Chinatown shows how sublimated male homosexual desire is equally active when the idea of a woman is exchanged between men. This will be so not only for jokes but for all male conversations and writing in which the feminine figures as an object. A good example will occur later on in the article on Warren Beatty, which invites the male reader to share a list of twenty-one women’s names.
The Chinatown joke also finds another place for male desire. Jake is the only one who laughs at his own joke, the only one who finds pleasure in it. No doubt, in his masculinity, he identifies with the male side of the joke, with the husband, the male friend, the Chinese lover. But in his femininity he must identify with the wife. And, in what is by no means the final twist in the story, the anecdote manages to suggest this also. Just as the wife is constanly interrupted in her love-making, so Jake is constanly interrupted by his two associates while he is telling the joke.
THE WHORE
‘Dynasty’, ABC Television, since 1980
Blake Carrington, a self-made man, is an oil tycoon based in Denver, Colorado, and has a fortune estimated at $200 million. In 1954 he married Alexis Morell (Joan Collins) with whom he had three children, Adam, Fallon and Steven. Following her adultery in 1965 they were divorced. Alexis was given a generous financial settlement on condition that she did not visit the children. In 1980 Blake married his secretary, Krystle Jennings (Linda Evans). Accused of manslaughter, also in 1980, he was convicted largely on the testimony of Alexis.
Machinations by Blake’s one-time friend, Cecil Colby, led in 1981 to Blake coming close to financial ruin and also to an explosion in which he temporarily lost his sight. In 1982 Alexis married Cecil Colby, who died immediately afterwards leaving her a controlling interest in his company, Colbyco, and instructions to destroy Blake. In the same year Krystle discovered her previous divorce was not valid, nor was her marriage to Blake. Alexis offered her a million dollars to leave Blake for good. However, in 1983 Krystle remarried Blake. In 1985 she had a daughter, Krystina Carrington.
Meanwhile, as chairman of Colbyco, Alexis has become the only woman to succeed in the oil business. In 1984 she persuaded Rashid Ahmed to double-cross Blake in a deal over South China oil, and in consequence Blake lost half his fortune. Alexis has since married Dex Dexter, and rediscovered her long-lost daughter, Amanda.
Every woman is a whore except my mother who is a saint
Italian saying
Out of the tradition of Victorian melodrama, television has developed a genre all of its own, soap opera, a form perfectly adapted to present a sense of the family and the relations between men and women. At present the most popular soap in the world is Dynasty. This is watched regularly by one hundred million viewers in more than 70 countries. In Britain it collects an audience of 11 million. It may seem surprising that British television cannot produce glossy, escapist soap opera about immensely rich people and that as a result we have to make do with the mundane realities of Coronation Street and Crossroads. There is a good reason for this. In a British context the very rich would have to be either aristocratic, lords and ladies, or commoners who had made good. Either way a large chunk of the audience would turn away from them. And that, no doubt, is why, as Rosalind Coward points out in her book Female Desire, the story of the Royal Family is the longest-running soap opera in Britain. Only they can appear to be above both class and money.
Alexis and Krystle
The contrast between Alexis and Krystle is at the centre of Dynasty and its success. In fact the cover photograph of Dynasty, the Authorized Biography of the Carringtons demonstrates this very well. Blake Carrington, in a dinner jacket, stands between Alexis, wearing black, and Krystle, wearing turquoise, while all three look at the camera and the viewer. Blake, therefore, is posed as able to choose between and have at his command both women. They represent the two great types or categories into which women are divided by the masculine myth. The opposition between Krystle and Alexis can be named in all kinds of ways – as Love Sacred and Profane, as Agape and Eros, Platonic love and sexual love, as love versus desire, or, at its crudest, in the American phrase, the difference between ‘nice girls’ and ‘easy lays’.
Together, Krystle and Alexis make up a pair of opposites. Krystle is ash blonde, Alexis brunette. She has blue eyes, Alexis has greeny brown. Krystle’s large mouth typically parts into a ‘sweet’ smile, while Alexis tends to pout and has what the Authorized Biography rightly names as ‘inviting lips’. Krystle’s fringe tends to give her no brow, and so, by implication, little brain; Alexis has a full brow barely covered by curls. The two types are opposed also in terms of sensual and pure, worldly and unworldly and, of course, work and home. Krystle’s name suggests the translucence of crystal while the other has a man’s name inside it, Alex-is. The biography unerringly summarizes the difference between them in the appropriate clichés. Krystle is ‘an American Aphrodite, good as she is beautiful’. Alexis personifies Kipling’s observation that ‘the female of the species is deadlier than the male’. Both types relate to a man, Blake Carrington.
The meaning of each stereotype, the ‘good girl’ and the ‘bitch’, is repeated and repeated with little change through a long series of events. Basically they are opposed as active to passive. In terms of sexual drive, Alexis says ‘yes’ and Krystle says ‘no’. In terms of narcissism Alexis follows her self-interest while Krystle submits to the interests of others. It is easier to list the men Krystle has turned down than the ones Alexis has made love with. In 1980, when her marriage to Blake was going through a sticky patch, Krystle was tempted by Matthew Blaisdel but turned him down. In 1981 she didn’t even notice Nick Toscanni’s passion for her and in 1983 she was again tempted but refused Mark Jennings, who was her first husband.
Alexis seeks to dominate Blake Carrington and her own children in a way that sometimes brings her into conflict with the law. She succeeded in having Blake convicted of manslaughter by testifying in court to his violence, she tried to buy off Krystle. She went along with her son Adam when he tried to poison Jeff Colby and she has schemed with Rashid Ahmed to ruin Blake. Thinking that Kirby Anders, as the daughter of a servant, is not a good enough match for her son Adam, she tells her a family secret that had been kept from her, and Kirby at once leaves. The attempts by Alexis to get rid of Krystle have twice brought the two women to physical violence. It is significant that both occurred only when Krystle felt her maternal interests were being threatened. One fight took place in 1982 at Alexis’s studio when Krystle thought Alexis had purposely fired a rifle which scared her horse and caused her miscarriage. The re-match took place, mainly in a lily pond, in 1983, because Krystle thought Alexis was implicated in the departure of her grandson Danny from the Carrington mansion. In these melodramatic scenes the opposition between the two types is vividly dramatized.
The Double Standard
Just as Alexis and Krystle both stand in relation to Blake Carrington, first wife and second, so the two types are a masculine product and projection on to the world of masculine fantasies. As always, for psychoanalysis the difference between the sexes originates in the different paths they follow past the mother. Female heterosexual desire begins with the mother, moves to the father, transfers to the bridegroom; male heterosexual desire begins with the mother and transfers, without any mediating figure, to the bride. This is what lies behind the masculine polarity between the madonna and the whore.
Male sexual feeling has both an affectionate and a sensual side. The affectionate current springs from the little boy’s first object, the mother. Later, however, especially at puberty, a second sensual current develops, aimed at an adult woman. However, the second cannot but follow the model for the first. In ideal circumstances, the sensual current will take over from the affectionate one. If it doesn’t, or doesn’t completely, this is because desire has got stuck or fixated on the first object, the mother. In consequence the man can only desire women who do not recall the incestuous figure forbidden to him. His feeling polarizes between love and desire. In its most acute form this would mean he was impotent with the woman he loved and could only feel sexual desire for other women.
Perhaps the opposition might be so extreme that he could only desire someone who was as far opposed for him to the image of the mother as a prostitute might be. Of those who experience this Freud remarks sadly, ‘Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.’ But he also notes that the condition touches most men in some degree. Its source lies with the proximity between the mother and the bride in the pathway of masculine development. And this goes some way to explain how masculinity tends to approach the feminine in terms of two opposed categories.
But psychoanalysis alone does not go far enough. Other societies, even other patriarchal societies, have interpreted the opposition very differently or hardly felt it at all. Freud himself suggests that the double standard has taken on a much more fierce quality in Western culture since the establishment of Christianity. Whereas the ancient world placed very few barriers on the fulfilment of sexual drive, Christianity made a name for itself by doing just that. The condemnation of sexual desire in Christianity encourages at the same time an idealization of sacred love and precisely the figure of the mother, the Madonna. And the pattern is intensified in bourgeois culture, after the Renaissance. As work and home become ever more separated, culture marks off the woman at home as ever more perfect. She is idealized as wife and mother, in the phrase of the Victorian poet, Coventry Patmore, ‘an angel in the house’. The more this saint has to be loved, the more other women will be desired.
Hence the perfect reproduction of a Victorian stereotype in Krystle and Alexis. For all the seeming independence of Alexis, she is not what the Authorized Biography calls her, ‘a world-class woman who is totally in control of her life’. In fact all her independence and ruthlessness is not for herself but for a man. It is an attempt to regain Blake Carrington in some way. So both she and Krystle are women for men, images in the dominant culture.
As a masculine construction the double standard cuts both ways. It is never unambiguous that Krystle is to be preferred to Alexis. Because she is an object of desire, Alexis is clearly more interesting, more attractive than Krystle, who seems in contrast nice, dull and maternal. Equally, Krystle can be used as a stick to beat Alexis, because in her sexual desire is active and appetitive. The double standard blames women either way and is able to build up considerable amounts of aggression against them – for being both too nice and too desirable, for saying no and for saying yes. As Joan Collins summed it up in an interview recently, ‘Alexis is only called a bitch because she’s a woman; if a man did what she does, they wouldn’t think of it that way.’
WOMAN
Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love’s name,
Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?
Robert Graves
This section will try to answer the question: why is male heterosexual desire presented as absolute and undifferentiating, as though it were always the same, no matter what the time, the place, or for that matter the person? In the dominant view women’s desire is shown as directed towards a particular person, and usually, as in the romantic novels of Mills and Boon, discreet dots fill the place of the sexual act. Masculinity, however, is constructed on all sides as above all an insatiable sexual appetite, something that seeks satisfaction everywhere – in posters, magazines, advertising, soft- and hard-core pornography – in images of women or bits of women.
For the dominant culture itself this is all a non-question. Male sexual feeling is a bodily appetite, a matter of biological instinct not drive. And so the penis fills with blood ‘at the whisper of Love’s name’ because it cannot not do so, just as saliva comes to the tongue at the sight of food. This is of course nonsense. Even if there is a biological difference between male and female sexual instinct, it would still have to be taken up, interpreted and a construction put upon it according to the operation of a particular human culture. An earlier section gave a vivid illustration of that. Whereas images of the phallus were commonplace in ancient society, they have not been so in our society since the advent of Christian hegemony. This was bound to make a difference to masculine sexuality. And in any case the distinction between instinct and drive means that sexuality cannot be separated from the symbolic forms in which it takes on representation.
For both these reasons the idea that male heterosexual desire is a natural force has to be rejected. And so the question is why contemporary culture wishes to think of masculinity that way. What organization of drives will explain the dominant idea that masculine desire is abstract, universal and inescapable, that it is always provoked as a kind of automatic reflex to the idea of Woman? It is supposed to be as obvious and direct as the image of women embodied by the famous Monroe Calendar. There she is, so there it is. All I have to do is look. Down, wanton, down.
‘Here’s looking at you, kid’
The idea of male desire as a universal imperative corresponds to the equally generalized and abstract representation of woman as Woman. And this has a very clear cultural and historical background, as John Berger suggests in his book Ways of Seeing. A number of quite separate innovations at the time of the Renaissance, including the development of a market for paintings, the system of linear perspective able to give a realistic effect, and the use of oil paint, were brought together. The result was a means of producing an image of a naked woman vividly and in graphic detail. It was rapidly promoted into the tradition of painting female nudes. But it should not be forgotten that for every painting of a naked woman there was a male purchaser. The idea of Woman supposes an equally abstract version of masculine desire.
From the high cultural fine-art tradition the representation of woman as an object to be looked at spreads in the nineteenth century into music-hall, engraving and finally photography. To these the twentieth century adds film and television, as well as cheap methods of colour reproduction. The high cultural presentation of woman as an object for male gaze extends until it can encompass the calendar, ‘Golden Dreams’, on the wall of a million garages. Monroe in 1949 is portrayed in almost exactly the same way as the reclining nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino in 1538. Each presumes very much the same conception of masculine looking and masculine desire. Wanting is as much a matter of immediate recognition as sight.
In a brilliant and original essay, reprinted in Popular Television and Film, Laura Mulvey has analysed this tradition of pleasure in looking as a form of scopophilia. In doing so she has emphasized its patriarchal content, that it brings about an unequal relation between male and female in which woman is to be an image and man a bearer of the look. Not unnaturally, she concentrates on the way the cultural system affects ideas of women, and though her account draws on psychoanalysis, it is not particularly concerned with asking how the system offers a version of masculinity.
Scopophilia has to be understood as the combination of three terms from three oppositions: masculine/feminine; active/passive; sexual desire/narcissism. Scopophilia begins with the child’s pleasure in looking at its own genitals, and develops into the pleasure of looking at the genitals of other people (‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine’). Thus it develops from being a narcissistic way of loving yourself into something mainly sexual. It also divides into active and passive, active being the pleasure of looking at others, or voyeurism, passive being the pleasure of being looked at, or exhibitionism. Within the dominant culture these oppositions become mapped on to gender. Photographs treat looking at women as active and masculine and show women as passive objects to be looked at. This generalization can be tested against the thirty or so photographs in any day’s issue of a popular newspaper. Once this regime of looking has lined up active with masculine and passive with feminine, it is then able to distribute sexual desire and narcissism into two categories. Men are invited to desire women by actively looking at images of them, women to identify with the images passively looked at.
In the calendar photograph Monroe is styled as an object to be looked at. She is posed in a fixed position, twisting sideways so that the male viewer can get as close as possible to seeing her from all sides at once, and as though she was simultaneously upright and lying down. Her head, half-hidden behind her arm, is turned sharply to the viewer so that the muscle of her neck is rigid with the effort. And the look in her eyes is precisely the look of the woman being looked at and submitting to male inspection. Colour photography and lighting combine to treat her body as a kind of landscape which the male gaze may explore in all its perfect, contoured detail.
So strong is this cultural regime of looking that it resists simple subversion. Attempts to attack it by reversing images don’t seem to come off, as some experiments have shown. If a man is posed, lit and photographed in the same kind of way as the Monroe Calendar, the result is often comic, or grotesque, or reveals an attractive femininity in the male image. There is, however, another way of approaching the issue, which works if the distinction between sexual desire and narcissism is kept in mind. The cultural tradition of scopophilia tries to assign them into hard and fast categories, keeping desire for active male looking and self-love for women’s identification with what is looked at. They can never be separated as easily, as the football pages of the popular press may prove.
The Sun, 16 September 1985
For a decade The Sun newspaper has carried a photograph on page three of an almost naked woman, its ‘Page Three Girl’. Clearly, according to the cultural tradition of scopophilia, the male viewer is expected to desire the woman sexually and not identify with her. However, the situation is reversed in the back pages of The Sun, in the football pages. These contain photographs of partly clothed young men displaying themselves. Now obviously the official intention is to offer these bodies to the male viewer for identification. They are always active, footballers in movement, and their look rarely engages the viewer’s. But even if they are active and not in a still pose, they are fixed once and for all in the frozen moment of a photograph. They are therefore open to active scopophilic looking, and the weight of the tradition must encourage this. No matter how much it is disavowed, these photographs of handsome youths with flashing thighs must represent objects of desire for male readers of The Sun.
This suggestion throws the whole dominant system for picturing men and women into crisis. For the system depends on lining up three sets of opposed terms (active/passive, masculine/feminine, desire/narcissism), so that active looking is lined up with masculinity and sexual desire, passive being with femininity and identification. In practice desire and narcissism always interact, and so, if the thesis of bisexuality is correct, do masculine and feminine in a given individual. How can the imposed regime ever prevent the feminine side of a male viewer from identifying with Marilyn Monroe? How can it stop the male viewer from desiring the male object in an image?
Masculine Desire and the Essence of Woman
What needs to be explained is the way masculine desire seems to take the form of a categorical imperative both when it comes to looking at women and looking at images of women. Scopophilia combines at least three mechanisms: narcissism, idealization and fetishism.
Although scopophilia activates desire, it also works with a strong element of narcissism in the form of a wish to master. In this respect looking at images of women is a function of the masculine ego, its need to keep everything under surveillance, see perfectly, dominate through vision. The mastery of the masculine ego, as was suggested earlier, requires a threat in order to be exercised, just as the idea of the unified body depends on the idea of the body in pieces. This notion is particularly relevant to scopophilia and masculine desire, for they are focused on the idea of a woman’s naked body.
A photographic image of a naked body excites the masculine ego because it both poses and resolves a threat. Thus, the real body is lacking, is absent, and that is a threat, but a threat apparently mastered at a glance because the image of what is missing is so palpably present. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 but 30 years later, the photographic sign of her is still very much alive, or so it seems. This pleasurable sense of mastery can come from a painting but it is enormously increased by photography, which can give a much greater effect of realism.
An image of a naked woman poses a threat for mastery in another way, that is, as a sexual threat. The feminine, felt as other than masculine, is a threat to masculinity, and an image of a naked woman is even more demonstrably a threat since it is the more manifestly feminine. But perfect clarity of vision promises to fix this threat. Since it will never go away, at least it can be known in every detail so you can keep an eye on it. And this effect is combined with another by which the masculine ego seeks mastery. Instead of all the different women in the world, the image of Monroe offers to sum them all up into one. Although she seems so real – for what could be more real than the naked body? – she is in fact an ideal. This is the perfect female body, the object of desire, the Woman. If the ego is faced with a summing up, an abstraction, the essence, then all the others can be safely ignored.
Idealization of the Woman acts for the masculine ego but also for masculine desire. As was discussed in the last section, such desire must try to reconcile two feelings, affection and sensuality, love and lust. One derives from the figure of the mother, the other from that of the bride, though of course for masculinity the two figures always risk occurring in dangerous confusion. The perfected image of the perfect female nude seems to reconcile them. For on the one hand it is a perfect ideal, as was the mother. But on the other it is an indelibly sexual image which no one could possibly confuse with the mother. Masculine heterosexual desire, as focused in images of naked women, brings together a quality of desire and an object of desire. The quality comes from the mother, desire in the form of a universal imperative. But the object comes from the bride, since what is desired is another adult woman.
A third strand in the mix is introduced by fetishism, something that has already been mentioned in connection with the clarity of masculine style. Masculinity, in this account, is always liable to find the threat of castration in an image of a woman’s body. This will be so even with the Monroe Calendar in which she has her legs discreetly closed and tucked up underneath her. It will be more demonstrably a threat in the imagery of hard-core pornography which displays female genitals. But the more intense the threat, the more complete the fetishistic response. Two things in images of women become obviously fetishized. One is the woman’s body itself, which can appear to have the firmness, solidity and unity of the phallus for which it is a fetishistic substitute. The other is the pleasure of looking, which, with all the techniques of modern colour photography, has come to seem ever more vivid, substantial and complete. If this sounds surprising, it should be remembered that the unfortunate young man who came to Freud about his problems had made a fetish not simply of a shine on the nose but of a glance at the nose.
In a complex organization, all these elements work together in the dominant culture to produce masculine heterosexual desire as an ungovernable force. Such desire is defined culturally in an imbalanced equation between active and male, passive and female. It is defined further by a particular relation to narcissism, idealization and fetishism. If the feminine is treated as an essence, the Woman, masculine desire must take a corresponding form. Hence, the verse from Robert Graves’s poem is exactly accurate. It is the abstract and general form of femininity as ‘Love’, as ‘Beauty’ which provokes a similarly generalized expression of male desire.
‘Love on Your Side’ by the Thompson Twins (1982)
(1) I hear you laughing in some other room,
and it makes me feel locked out
You say my passion often stifles you
and you need to move about.
Well I was told that boys need girls and girls need boys,
you say that’s not true.
You would rather fool around than be alone with me,
well that’s alright for you.
Chorus
’Cause you’ve got love, love, love on your side,
yes you’ve got love, love, love on your side,
yes you’ve got love, love, love on your side,
yes you’ve got love, love, love on your side.
(2) I brought you sentimental roses,
but you gave them all away
I played you all my favourite records,
Then we spent the night in talking, talking all the time,
you sent me home.
I was so surprised to find that after all
it doesn’t hurt to be alone.
Chorus
Words and music by Tom Bailey, Joe Leeway and Alannah Currie copyright © 1982 by Point Music/ATV Music
You are everything and everything is you
Old song
The world of popular music is a special enclave in the dominant culture. Within it masculinity is imagined almost as the exact opposite of what it is supposed to be elsewhere. In the poetry of these songs men cry, moan, sob, sigh, ache and suffer. They address women as ‘baby’ and expect to be addressed as ‘baby’ in return. It is as though everything repressed by the dominant image of the masculine ego – hard, firm, self-possessed, watchfully defensive – is here expressed in excess.
Sales of records in Britain have declined recently from their 1978 peak, a year when 86 million albums and 89 million singles were marketed. This is truly a dominant and dominating culture. Language and attitudes from pop songs permeate our waking life. At breakfast, at work, in pubs, the cinema, television, parties, they try to keep the values of home and the personal alive even in the impersonal environment of work. The music endlessly recycles simple variations of the same kind of melody and harmony familiar to us from, for example, the Church of England’s Hymns Ancient and Modern. It is often supposed that only the music matters and the words don’t. But if this were so, there would only be instrumentals and the record companies would save themselves the money spent on singers and songwriters. Even if the words are inaudible at first hearing, they penetrate through repetition to a level beneath conscious awareness.
Words tell and retell very much the same story of unhappy adolescent love. It is as though a whole culture were stuck with a moment of development after childhood but before the social responsibilities of adult life. This is, to borrow a phrase, the heart of a heartless world. Many songs are unisex, in the sense that they can just as well be sung by a man or a woman. And there is a reason for this. Love, romantic love, being in love is a form of mutual narcissism. So, if its model is a kind of closed circle, ‘I love you because you love me’, then it is likely the songs will express a reciprocated feeling and be sung equally by male and female singers.
But it is not possible for two people to stand in exactly the same place. Similarly the circle of narcissism can never be closed because you can never really see and love me from the position I see and love you. The theme of unhappy and unrequited love, you don’t love me as I love you, tries to make up for this. And the break in the circle admits an imbalance or inequality between the idea of the masculine and the idea of the feminine put forward in the songs. Within an apparently shared world, masculinity finds a privileged voice, and one that is surprisingly traditional, as it is in Tom Bailey’s version of ‘Love on Your Side’.
Romantic or courtly love is a thousand years old and seems unique to Western culture. It was unknown in the ancient world of Greece and Rome. The idea that a personal relationship between a man and a woman could lift them into a transcendent dimension, a spiritual paradise like that of the Christian paradise, was a novelty introduced in the South of France at the end of the eleventh century. In the lyrics of the troubadour poets of that period the woman who is loved is treated as a superior being, addressed as ‘my lady’, sometimes even as ‘my lord’. Despite appearances, the treatment works to the man’s advantage. The Woman is put on a pedestal and worshipped so she can be kept in place. Up there she cannot move.
The lyrics of ‘Love on Your Side’ reproduce once again this old relation. She is the mistress, he is her loyal servant, constant in love despite her independence, indifference or superiority. Despite his seeming servility, he gets the pay-off that he can only be seen as she would see him from her idealized position. Whatever she may feel and want, he can insist on it working his way. It is bigger than both of them, or so he says.
In the lyrics of ‘Love on Your Side’ her independence is constantly overwhelmed by his love and what it compels her to be. Her ‘laughing’ makes him feel ‘locked out’, she wants to ‘move’ but his ‘passion’ tries to stop her. He insists that sexual feeling is a kind of natural instinct that makes men and women complements of each other, but she refuses this and wants something beyond his masculine desire. He wants her to himself, to ‘be alone’, while she wants to be with others. One might think this was quite enough to terminate the affair. But in the passionate repetitions of the chorus all is swept aside. Her independence, her rejection of him is made over into something else. Her superiority is ‘alright’, in fact just what he really wants. If she looks down on him, he can be seen as he wants to be seen. She has become his mirror, reflecting him as the perfect lover, wholly given over to passion. She has love on her side, whether she wants it or not.
The more she hurts him, the more superior she becomes and the more his role as lover is confirmed. Like the true courtly or romantic lover he brings her ‘sentimental roses’. It is an act which strongly marks the singer as masculine for it is a line which in present culture could not yet be sung plausibly by a woman. Unlike a troubadour, and like a modern lover, he doesn’t sing to her but plays her his records. They talk instead of making love and she sends him home. The relation of master and slave, or here mistress and servant, is inherently aggressive. Because she is treated as superior, this masks his aggressive attempt to hold her in the position he – and love – imposes. And the aggression starts to emerge in the lyrics when he leaves and begins to find he can do without her. In fact, however, the third verse of the lyrics, which has not been quoted here, does not follow this traditional path. Partly because the song has explored the traditional roots of romantic love, the last verse begins to explore his uncertainty and a recognition that the rules of love are changing.
This song has been chosen because it shows clearly, perhaps in an extreme form, the basic structure of being in love. It is at root a masculine idea, a position offered for masculinity in the dominant culture. Although elsewhere being in love may presuppose more balance between the partners, it nevertheless repeats the version of masculine mastery concealed inside the male lover’s seeming subservience. To have love on your side means that the beloved must reflect the lover’s image of himself.
Torvill and Dean are a pair of ice-skating champions who came to prominence in 1984. In their most famous routine, danced to the music of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’, he takes the role of a bullfighter and she is his cape. After a number of movements which recall the passes made by the toreador over the bull, the cape is discarded. The climax leaves Jayne Torvill prone on the ice at the feet of Christopher Dean. The position of the two figures in the publicity for their 1985 World Tour repeats the traditional stereotype of romantic love, showing how masculinity is imagined in relation to femininity.
He is the master, she is the servant. He is physically active, turning, lifting, straining, while she is posed, arms akimbo, as a passive object. Her look, from underneath veiled lids, is abstract and unfocused. He, however, is looking at her, so that she is the object of his gaze. The vacant look in her eyes makes them a kind of mirror in which he may imagine himself reflected.
At the same time the pose suggests something else. In English the word ‘thing’ has meant and can mean the phallus, and she is his thing in this sense. The relative positioning of the two figures corresponds exactly to the schema previously discussed, the distinction between being and having the phallus. She is supported and held by him almost as though she were a baby dandled on daddy’s knee. Fixed and passive, she is posed to be the phallus. In the pose her body rises upright in front of him from the level of the hips. In having her, he has the phallus.
Love as a Masculine Idea: Idealization, Narcissism, Phallicism
As suggested already, the tradition of romantic love stretches back to the courtly love of the feudal period. Arguably, in terms of the importance it attributes to individuals, it is one of the main ways bourgeois culture is conceived in the womb of feudalism. Certainly after the Renaissance, it loses its courtly garb and becomes, in principle, democratically available to all. As a cultural form it is transmitted above all in the poetry of the high cultural tradition, by Shakespeare, Donne, and the English Romantic poets. In the twentieth century, through the songs of popular culture, it imposes itself throughout Western culture. Psychoanalysis would understand this tradition of ‘being in love’ especially in terms of three features: idealization; narcissism; phallicism. It also confirms that love is an exercise of masculinity.
The analysis of being in love begins by noticing that love is invariably unhappy. It revolves around disappointment, pain, loss, a sense of being abandoned, as in the Thompson Twins’ song, where the sound of her laughing with her friends makes him feel left out. In this respect love is close to melancholy, though neither can be grasped without some understanding of the nature of the ‘I’.
People often say things like, ‘I really think I oughtn’t do this.’ In that kind of sentence there are clearly two ‘I’s, an ‘I’ which does it and another ‘I’ which is critical of the first one. One is the ego, the other the superego, the voice of conscience. The superego develops out of self-love, initially as a sense of the former self, then of that as a better self, which then becomes like the voice of my parents and finally turns into the voice of social authority. Melancholy and being in love are close kin because it is possible to set up an object, particularly a love object, in the place of either the ego or the superego.
Mourning, typically for the death of a loved one, works itself out in the course of time. Melancholy doesn’t. Melancholy, like that of, say, Hamlet after the death of his father, is mourning which has got stuck. Or it is like the famous Widow of Windsor, Queen Victoria, who spent the last forty years of her life in seclusion doing little else but regret the death of her husband in 1861. If she was a typical melancholic her thoughts must have taken the form of constant reproaches for some imagined responsibility for his death. Psychoanalysis would explain the process by saying she had kept him alive, as it were, by putting him in the place of her ego. But the price for this is that her own self speaks in the accents of the superego, constantly reproaching the ego and criticizing it.
Being in love is the same process with the positions reversed. The loved object becomes internalized but this time it is set up in the superego. The loved one begins to take on all the authority of the voice of conscience. She – if it is a she – has more than love on her side, for she has morality as well. She becomes the lover’s morality, and whatever she does is good and right. But the price now is the impoverishment of the ego. His abasement guarantees her perfection – or at least that is how he wishes to regard the situation.
Freud states explicitly that men have been more prone to overvaluing or idealizing a woman in this way. The reason is the usual one. Idealization begins when the child thinks its parents are perfect. If the masculine individual is more liable to idealize a love object, it is because the image of the mother trenches so much more immediately on to the image of the bride. Idealization, seeing someone as transcendentally perfect, is yet another way in which male heterosexuality may hope to re-find love for the mother in an adult object of desire, The (Perfect) Woman.
This typically masculine idealization co-operates with the masculine ego. In an old image in seventeenth-century poetry the male lover wishes to be so close to his lady that he may see himself reflected in her eyes. No one can ever see themselves from the same point of view as they are seeing. The ‘I’ or ‘eye’ that looks at me in a mirror is not me but an image produced according to the laws of optics. But love seems to come close to seeing yourself seeing yourself. You can imagine that another person looks at you in the way you’d like to see yourself. And even if they don’t, or don’t perfectly, others can see you in the way you want, as the perfect lover.
Being in love is thus another version of the mastery of the masculine ego. All of the rest of the world, everything that is not the self, can be gathered together into a single point, the eyes of The Woman. Fixed there, it can appear as though mastered, known, perfectly visible once and for all. The effect is like that celebrated in the old song, ‘Everything is you and you are everything’.
Being in love offers the fantasy that the masculine ego should see itself in what is most other than it. The essence of Man seems to find unity and mastery in relation to the essence of Woman. Two moves are required to make the effect plausible, yet both are impossible and the structure collapses. The first move reduces the varied forms of desire – male and female, homosexual and heterosexual – to an essence. It tries to turn ‘everything’ into a ‘you’ where ‘I’ recognize myself. Secondly, the organization of being in love tries to make these two essences of Man and Woman complements of each other when they are in fact different. What actually emerges is, as usual, that her essence and her desire is the complement of his – that is, subordinate. This can be understood clearly enough if being in love is considered in terms of the phallic system.
Love and the Phallus
In the dominant culture the scenario of love, male narcissism as would-be master of what is other than itself, can be played out in terms of being and having the phallus. For several years now an advertisement for Dormeuil Men’s Clothing has appeared in the Sunday Times magazine section. It invariably shows a woman with an abstracted look posed in a fixed position alongside a man wearing a suit and looking at the camera. In one particular image, which appeared in 1981, the woman was placed literally on a pedestal from which she could not move. Her pose was almost perfectly upright and she wore a clinging red dress which, with her long, loose hair filling the space between head and shoulders, made her figure a single unity. Her look was unfixed, either an inward gaze or a vacant stare into space. Her passivity made her figure able to serve as a phallic object, to be the phallus.
Meanwhile the man in the suit stood resting his right elbow on top of her plinth. His left arm and hand were poised at the buttons of his coat just below the midriff, over the point where the threat of castration would be focused. His right hand and arm were raised erect in exact parallel to her body. He directed a hard, firm, controlling gaze straight at the camera and the viewer. Through the placing of his arms, what she is has been made over into what he has. He has the phallus because she is the phallus for him.
The image was a kind of epitome. It brilliantly sums up in a single photograph the abstract schema of the phallic system. This assumes two things. Firstly, it presumes that the difference between the sexes – sexual difference – consists of her difference from him (his masculinity supposedly is normal and universal). If the feminine is seen as different, other than masculine, it shows what masculinity lacks and so represents the threat of castration for him. But in the scheme of love, threat and solace are brought together. She opens up a gap that can seem closed if she keeps perfectly still. The wound she makes can be staunched if she remains fixed, uplifted and inert, for in this pose she becomes the phallus. Masculinity can be represented as active in having the phallus on condition that the feminine is passive in being the phallus.
Secondly, as noted before, the schema comes unstuck with the admission of male homosexual desire. It relies on a strict distribution of male narcissism and desire – the woman is there to be looked at sexually, the sleek male to be identified with. But the divided nature of male sexuality means that this distribution cannot be relied on.
THE LOVE OF WOMEN
TV Times, 29 June 1985
Taboo … for the man who has everything else
Advertisement for men’s perfume
Writing of the artist, whom he assumes is invariably male, Freud tells a kind of parable. The artist is a man obsessed with fantasies of masculine success, summed up as the wish for wealth, fame and the love of women. Through his special ability as an artist, he is able to translate these into an artistic form, where they become available to others without shame or embarrassment as marketable products. He thus gets in fact what he once only had in fantasy – wealth, fame and the love of women.
The little story hints at the problem the male artist faces once he has been successful. For now that he has got what he really wanted he does not need to fantasize. He has the problem of going on to new success, doing it again. The account does not confront its own assumption that the artist is working in a capitalist economy in which art is a saleable commodity. Nor does it question at all the fact that this idea of the male artist conforms to the dominant myth of masculinity. Much better than the businessman, the politician or the general, the figure of the artist can embody such masculine fantasy. Whether as writer or actor or media personality, the artist appears to be after something of human value, art, so that power and recognition are mere adjuncts to his art. And so also, in the prevailing fantasy, are women.
We do not know what Warren Beatty is really like and in fact the article quotes him as saying, ‘I am nothing like what you read.’ However, in what we read he becomes a definite image for masculine fantasy. The article is written from a woman’s point of view and assigns very clear positions to its male and female readers. Although it is frequently facetious about the figure of Beatty, it offers women a position of identification with the writer of the article. As the second paragraph says, other women try unsuccessfully to arrange a rendezvous with him, but the reader, in fantasy identification with the author of the piece, meets Beatty over lunch, as she later describes. Meanwhile the male reader is allowed to imagine himself as Warren Beatty.
This is a position of mastery, and as always, vision is part of its effect. It is said to be ‘hard to take your eyes off Warren Beatty’, and, as well as photographs, the article includes careful description of his bodily presence, height, weight and looks. He has been ‘in the public eye all these years’. But his fame and the recognition accorded to him does not make him simply an object. He is presented as a mastering subject. Of the ‘predictable ways’ in which women try to catch his attention it is said that ‘He’s seen them all’. And further down, with reference to his many love affairs, his sister Shirley MacLaine is reported as saying he has his ‘master’s degree in ladykilling’.
Because his life seems to be devoted to the non-commercial end of art, Beatty’s power and ownership of capital can be presented as mere adjuncts to his mastery. Casual and apparently incidental references are slipped in to his ‘Hollywood Hills home’ and his ‘personal fortune’. In terms of the phallic system he possesses the phallus. Men look at him surreptitiously, ‘straightening their ties’, their own less adequate emblems of male power.
For this figure of masculine fantasy, women are treated as mere adjuncts, a bagatelle. The headline – ‘BEATTY KISSES BUT WON’T TELL’ – links him to a nursery rhyme character:
Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry;
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
Opposite a nearly full-page photograph of Beatty smiling like a cat who has got the cream and waving in acknowledgement, the article prints small inset photographs of six women with the caption, ‘Warren’s women’. It also manages to reveal along the way the names of a further fifteen of what it refers to, twice, as ‘his women. Like the imaginary first father, Beatty has all the women to himself.
His heterosexual desire is presented as a form of natural instinct, and he is written of as a stallion among mares, a ‘shallow superstud’. But the nature of his desire is contradictory. He is said to be an ‘insatiable lover’ who made love ‘four or five times a day, even while he was on the phone’. Shirley MacLaine comments that ‘Sex is the most important thing in his life’ but it is also of very little importance if he makes love even while on the phone. Women are important only as supports for his masculine ego, objects to reflect his narcissism, part of his desire for power and recognition.
Casanova, Don Juan and Homosexual Desire
There are three fairly obvious ways to understand what drives this figure of masculine fantasy, and no doubt each is present to some extent in any one example, as it is here. The Casanova figure is trapped by the double standard, searching endlessly for the mother in one passionate affair after another. But where he loves he cannot desire and where he desires he cannot love. The woman seduced is immediately discarded as the search goes on. In the article Beatty is rumoured to have proposed marriage to only one woman, who turned him down.
The Don Juan figure makes love promiscuously because he hates his lovers. To him they represent sexual difference, and so the threat of castration. And so they are to be destroyed. This underlies a reference in the article to Beatty’s ladykilling’. A third motive is the attempt to deny homosexual desire. The article brings this out when it identifies Beatty with the hero of the film Shampoo, in which he plays a Beverly Hills hairdresser ‘mincing convincingly to disarm suspicious husbands’ while making love with their wives.
But there is another, more significant way in which the embodiment of fame, wealth and the love of women rests on male homosexual desire. In naming ‘Warren’s women’, the piece from the TV Times treats the feminine as simply dependent on masculinity, and offers positions to men and women readers accordingly. For the male reader, the list of names becomes an object in exchange between himself and the represented hero. Homosexual desire in the form of their male bond is given a covert importance that pushes heterosexual desire to the margins. If Beatty makes love while on the telephone it is because he is telling a male friend about it, and in this article the male reader is offered that position. The effect is strengthened because the report is written for us in the way it is from a woman’s point of view. In thinking only about Warren Beatty and making so much of meeting him for lunch she places herself in the position of one of ‘Warren’s women’ and invites the female reader to see herself in this role.
Each of these previous sections on the masculine and the feminine has considered the way the phallic system tries to enforce itself in different areas of the dominant culture. Each has examined how the masculine myth aims to deny the feminine, both by holding it on to the masculine ego and containing it through the male bond. The final two sections turn to more sinister and deeply wrought effects of the myth, in terms of male jealousy and how the feminine itself may figure as a bad object for masculinity, an object for the death drive.
Harry Moseby and Ellen in ‘Night Moves’ directed by Arthur Penn (1975)
A footballer who is now a private detective in Los Angeles, Harry Moseby specializes in divorce cases and watching people committing adultery. He is married to Ellen, who works as an antique dealer. At one point in the film she tells him she is going to the cinema with a friend, Charles, while Harry works on a case. Passing the cinema later he sees her come out with Charles and another man. Charles leaves and Ellen goes off with the other man. When their car stops at some lights Harry watches her lean across in the car to kiss the man. When she comes home she tells him that after the movie she and Charles had gone on to eat.
Having noted the number of the other man’s car, Harry visits him in his apartment by the sea. It is beautifully furnished with walls lined by fine pictures. The man, Marty Heller, has blue eyes, wears blue jeans and a blue shirt, and walks with a stick. Harry says he saw them coming out of the movie and threatens to become aggressive. When he confronts Ellen she asks why he didn’t come to her first and he says, ‘I wanted to see what he looked like.’ He says that if he’d not known for certain who the man was, she would have lied, passing him off as ‘some faggot friend of Charles’. Divorce is in the air. The film then moves back to its main narrative.
Ev’ry breath you take
ev’ry move you make
ev’ry bond you break
ev’ry step you take
I’ll be watching you
‘Every breath you take’ by Sting, reproduced by kind permission of Virgin Music (Publishers) Ltd
Although male jealousy has been represented in our culture, it is much more rarely portrayed in popular culture today. There may be two separate reasons for this. One is that male jealousy is very likely to disrupt the masculine myth. This, I think, is why the myth has often stepped around male jealousy, as it does for example when a man is presented as seemingly unaware of and disavowing his partner’s attachment to other men. Another reason is that the traditional version through which the myth handles jealousy seems to have been rendered implausible today.
It runs like this. Told by an envious friend that his wife was committing adultery, the husband would rapidly and successfully ascertain the truth of the allegation. Thereupon he would first confront the erring woman, reducing her to shame and tears by the force of his moral denunciation. He would then seek out her lover, challenge him to a duel or match him at fisticuffs, and mete out the punishment he deserved. After retiring to get drunk with male friends and find solace in the male bond, he would return to a suitably repentant wife, after which her lapse would be forgotten.
Something like this is hinted at in Night Moves. Harry does make certain that his jealous suspicion is true, and he does confront his wife, though only after seeing Marty Heller. But when he does face Marty in his house, he cannot possibly respond to his sneering ‘Why don’t you take a swing at me?’ Marty is older than him, limps, and uses a walking stick. The date on the calendar is 1974, not 1874. The masculine myth no longer has the confidence to occupy the territory of jealousy, even though it is extremely important. The reason is partly that the myth is under attack in this area, partly that male jealousy is always liable to undermine the myth, as happens in Night Moves.
Psychoanalysis has a very straightforward account of male jealousy, one that integrates a number of features already considered. Jealousy has three layers, distinguished as competitive or normal jealousy, projected jealousy, and delusional jealousy. Yet all three are present to some degree in any one instance of male jealousy. Competitive jealousy derives from a man’s incestuous feeling for his mother. Thus, the other man in the triangle is seen to be in the position of the father and the woman as the mother, so that her attachment to the other man is felt as the mother’s betrayal. In projected jealousy, as the name suggests, the man’s own desire for infidelity is projected on to the woman.
Neither competitive – so-called ‘normal’ jealousy – nor the projected kind can be properly understood apart from the culture in which they occur. Patriarchy, based as it is on the exchange of women, will help to intensify male jealousy if women are supposed to be dependent on men, wives on husbands. And bourgeois culture also will turn the screw tighter if wives are valued as commodities and idealized as the heart of a heartless world. In the film, Harry Moseby’s jealousy of Ellen has a social aspect. Her work in the art world gives her a social status above him, a former football player. And there is a suggestion that he is financially dependent on her earnings.
In delusional jealousy a man imagines his partner’s infidelity even when there is no actual cause. He watches her all the time, interpreting minute details of her behaviour as signs of love for another man. It is, in this respect, like the paranoia which shows itself in fantasies of being persecuted, and for psychoanalysis the origin is the same – defence against homosexuality. It can be stated as a formula, ‘I do not love him, she loves him’. Although these three kinds of male jealousy can be distinguished from each other, Freud emphasizes that each of the three components occurs with the others in some degree. Even if delusional jealousy invents what is not a real situation, the line between real and imaginary is hard to draw in the other cases. Especially in an officially monogamous society, people will feel the impulse to love more than one person even if the impulse is not always followed.
Harry Moseby’s jealousy has a basis in fact – Ellen is making love with Marty Heller. There is an element of competitive jealousy in Harry so that he feels as though the mother is betraying him with the father. Ellen sometimes looks and acts in a maternal way to him, while the other man seems older than him and walks with a stick. Projected jealousy is certainly present, for Harry does desire other women and later in the narrative commits adultery while in Florida. But what the movie shows particularly strongly is a component of delusional jealousy.
Harry’s chosen profession as a private eye means that he spends his time keeping men and women under surveillance. Cruising the dark streets in his car he is constantly looking and watching, seeing but unseen. Going to the Magnolia cinema on impulse he catches sight of his wife going off with Marty Heller. He scans the scene for minute particulars, following their car, gazing with the sick look of the jealous man as Ellen kisses Marty by the traffic lights. Just as she appears to have turned against him, so does his professional expertise as a detective. His masculine pleasure in knowing about other people’s adulterous affairs is reversed when it is his own wife he is spying on. He memorizes the car number.
Later, at home, when she comes back, he has the unpleasant pleasure of knowing she is lying to him. Charles left and she did not go to eat with him. Because this is realist cinema we as viewers are forced to share Harry’s visual mastery, watching exactly as he watches, though of course our pleasure is a safe one. We know he is only a character in a fiction.
The figure of Marty Heller is lent a connotation of bisexuality because of his association with art and the aesthetic in contrast to Harry’s athleticism. Harry (played by Gene Hackman) stands awkwardly among Heller’s paintings, looking at the blue sea and the man dressed all in blue. His homosexual desire is expressed later when he tells Ellen, ‘I wanted to see what he looked like’, and again when he speaks of him as ‘some faggot friend of Charles’. Harry insists that Ellen loves Marty so as to defend himself against the possibility that he might love him.
Jealousy and Masculinity
Male jealousy is almost unspeakable. It is so powerful because it sets in motion many features of the masculine myth while at the same time comprehensively undermining it. When Harry watches his wife put her arm round Marty’s neck and bend over to kiss him, the look that comes to his face combines disgust and a kind of shame, as though at his own complicity. He encounters the loss of most of what his masculinity claims for itself.
Jealousy activates the full resources of the masculine ego. Vigilance, knowledge, visual mastery are all called into play, but mastery is turned inside out, as it is when Harry finds it is his own wife he is spying on. Jealousy is the ‘green-eyed monster’ because it paints the world it sees the colour of bile. If it is not disavowed, it poses a threat which becomes worse, not better, through knowledge.
The dominant idea of the relation between the masculine and the feminine is challenged at every point. Instead of women being objects of exchange, jealousy reveals them as agents, subjects, able to do the exchanging themselves. The confident teller of jokes becomes their butt. His former madonna turns into the whore, moving out of her fixed place as his love ideal to somewhere else. Scopophilic pleasure in looking becomes the unpleasurable means of knowing what he doesn’t want to know.
Jealousy wholly disrupts the male bond, in two ways at once. First of all, the potentially companionable male friend is revealed as a traitor and an enemy. But secondly, more seriously, the basis of the male bond in homosexual desire is uncovered. Jealousy expresses desire that has been repressed rather than sublimated. Thus it acts to destroy the foundation of the masculine myth, by revealing that masculinity can never exist in a pure state, masculine all the way through. And in so doing it is more than likely to cast the feminine in the most terrible role the myth provides for her, as bad object. Discussion of this has been reserved for the final section.
BAD OBJECT
‘Kiss Me Deadly’ by Mickey Spillane (1953)
At the end of this thriller novel a woman who goes under the name of Lily Carver is holding the hero, Mike Hammer, at gunpoint. Wearing only a light bathrobe having just had an alcohol bath, she tells him how she has deceived him with another man. She is going to kill him and he is about to light a last cigarette. She reminds him that he loved her and tells him to kiss her:
Her fingers slipped through the belt of the robe, opened it. Her hands parted it slowly … until I could see what she was really like. I wanted to vomit worse than before. I wanted to let my guts come up and felt my belly retching.
She was a horrible caricature of a human! There was no skin, just a disgusting mass of twisted, puckered flesh from her knees to her neck making a picture of gruesome freakishness that made you want to shut your eyes against it.
The cigarette almost fell out of my mouth. The lighter shook in my hand, but I got it open.
‘Fire did it, Mike. Do you think I’m pretty now?’
She laughed and I heard the insanity in it. The gun pressed into my belt as she kneeled forward, bringing the revulsion with her. ‘You’re going to die now … but first you can do it. Deadly … deadly … kiss me.’
The smile never left her mouth and before it was on me I thumped the lighter and in the moment of time before the scream blossoms into the wild cry of terror she was a mass of flame tumbling on the floor with the blue flames of alcohol turning the white of her hair into black char and her body convulsing under the agony of it. The flames were teeth that ate, ripping and tearing, into scars of other flames and her voice the shrill sound of death on the loose.
I looked, looked away. The door was closed and maybe I had enough left to make it.
THE END
Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven
With spirits masculine, create at last
This novelty on earth, this fair defect
Of nature, and not fill the world at once
With men as angels without feminine,
Or find some other way to generate
Mankind?
Adam blaming Eve for the Fall in John
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
The thrillers of Mickey Spillane and his private eye hero, Mike Hammer, were widely published as pulp fiction in the 1950s and are still in print. With some modifications, Kiss Me Deadly was made into a grisly black and white movie in 1955, directed by Robert Aldrich. In 1960 Hitchcock’s film Psycho set a new extreme in portraying the violent murder of a woman by a man when the character played by Janet Leigh is knifed to death in the notorious shower sequence. Since then both film and television have increasingly shown scenes in which women are the victims of male aggression. There are many other examples of so-called ‘slash’ movies besides the Halloween series, Friday the Thirteenth and Dressed to Kill.
What can begin to explain the description of Gothic horror that closes Spillane’s novel? Psychoanalysis can find two ideas very close to the surface of this fantasy. One is that feminine sexuality is seen as posing the threat of castration. The body of the significantly named ‘Lily Carver’ is imagined as mutilated ‘from her knees to her neck’. The second idea is deemed to follow immediately from the first. Mike Hammer tries to destroy the threat by destroying the woman. Her body is fantasized as jaws that would bite him unless the flames of his phallic lighter can become ‘teeth that ate’ her and her scars. So he meets fire with fire. In a familiar mechanism, the fear of castration is projected back on to what seems to cause it. The feminine as good object becomes a bad object for him, unleashing the death drive.
But the question must be posed as to why the masculine comes to see the feminine as castrated in the first place. It is a question Freud tries to answer by considering the widespread importance attached to women’s virginity, and it is an answer that comes close to the heart of the masculine myth. Later, I will say why I think his answer is wrong.
The account starts by noting that the insistence that a bride should be a virgin is a form of what Freud calls ‘sexual bondage’. It is part of the way patriarchy treats women as dependent upon men. Patriarchy copes with the problem of incest by exchanging women in marriage. The value of that exchange is increased if women are denied sexual intercourse before marriage.
Value has been set on female virginity by Christian culture, and in bourgeois culture such virginity takes on the even greater value of a commodity. However, the evidence of anthropology is that primitive people have a quite different attitude. For them the taking of a woman’s virginity is a significant act, often reserved only for a specially important man, a priest or chief. Traces of this custom are retained in Western culture. In Roman marriage a young wife was required to sit on the gigantic stone phallus of the god Priapus. And in the feudal period the lord of the manor was frequently required to take a bride’s virginity according to the ‘law of the first night’, jus primae noctis.
Among primitive people it is not simply rites over virginity that set women apart from men. Menstruation also is regarded as taboo, and so is childbirth. It is not simply the first act of sexual intercourse with a woman which is taboo for men but sexual intercourse in general. Freud adds, ‘one might also say that women are altogether taboo.’ Noting that primitive man sets up a taboo where he fears danger, Freud goes on to suggest that a dread of woman, what he elsewhere calls horror feminae, ‘is based on the fact that woman is different from man.’ Such a feeling is not confined to primitive people but is ‘still alive’ in modern culture. For this the end of Kiss Me Deadly is more than sufficient evidence.
The Phallic System and Woman as Different
Freud offers to explain man’s dread of woman by saying she wishes to castrate him. In the case of virginity, for example, the young husband fears the loss of the phallus because the bride might wish to castrate him and keep it for herself. So, in the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Apocrypha in the Old Testament, Judith seduces Holofernes, an enemy general, and then cuts off his head.
This explanation must be inadequate or simply wrong. Having analysed patriarchal attitudes at their deepest level, it then merely repeats these assumptions as though they were an explanation. Having recognized that man’s dread of woman comes from the view ‘that woman is different from man’ it goes on to repeat that view by saying woman wants to castrate man and have the phallus. It does not say why women should want the phallus in the first place. Nor does it say why men should think women are different from them. Nor does it say why men should imagine women as lacking the phallus.
In human culture both the masculine and feminine individual must give up the figure of the mother because of a threat symbolized as a threat to the genitals as source of desire. Under patriarchy both the threat and the desire are imagined in terms of the phallus, the male symbol. In this myth masculinity sees itself as universal and normal. The difference between the sexes is regarded as feminine departure from a masculine norm. A phallus is attributed to the feminine so that masculinity can then find it missing and experience a threat to itself. This, the phallic system and supposed universality of the phallus, is a much better explanation of horror feminae.
In the dominant version masculinity is a myth not because it is not real. In fact, as the examples of popular culture have shown, its reality saturates modern culture. It is a myth in the sense that it is a wish for what is impossible, that masculinity should be like air, everywhere and the same all the way through. This is precisely what Adam wishes for in Milton’s poem, that God the Father had found some way to generate mankind without the feminine and without sexual difference. In order to perpetuate itself the myth must deal somehow with what is other than masculine. It tries to banish the feminine within the male individual by denying homosexual desire. But as many instances have proved, neither repression nor sublimation can cope with the way each individual contains differences inside himself. Desire for the same sex keeps coming back.
As represented by women, the feminine outside the individual cannot be denied but can be subordinated through the exchange of women and the other tactics discussed. But throughout, the phallic system tries to assert ‘woman is different from man’, and that the difference lies in her non-possession of the phallus. Fetishism imagines woman with the phallus and then finds a substitute for what is missing. Her lack of the phallus is recognized as a fact, his as the threat of a possibility. In the love relation she must be seen as the phallus so that he can have the phallus in her. The phallus itself can never be more than a symbol nor castration more than a fear imposed in the name of the father. But though only a name, it is made in the father’s name, not in that of someone or something else.
A single strategy underlies these varying tactics. The castration complex is an idea or meaning that arises in the gap between the two sexes, as the negative in which masculine is not feminine and feminine not masculine. The masculine myth aims to reconstruct castration on its own grounds. It tries to read sexual difference as her difference from him.
The myth is therefore all set to trigger aggression from the tightly bound masculine ego. Narcissism and desire are deeply interwoven. If the feminine is viewed as more deeply castrated, more lacking than masculinity, then the idea of woman appears as inherently threatening to the masculine ego. The object of desire will become an object of dread able to undo the unity of the ‘I’. And the risk here is that a fearful aggression will be released against the idea of woman, as it is in the passage from Mickey Spillane. There will be the ‘sound of death on the loose’.
Mrs Ramsay … seemed to raise herself with
an effort, and at once to pour erect into
the air a rain of energy, a column of spray,
looking at the same time animated and alive as
if all her energies were being fused into force,
burning and illuminating …
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
In films, television programmes, advertising, newspapers, popular songs and novels, in narratives and images that press in from every side, men are invited to recognize themselves in the masculine myth. The myth posits masculinity as natural, normal and universal. In fact it embodies a particular definition of masculinity with its own particular structure, as these various short essays have tried to show. Masculinity aims to be one substance all the way through. In order to do this it must control what threatens it both from within and without. Within, femininity and male homosexual desire must be denied; without, women and the feminine must be subordinated and held in place.
In terms of the myth masculinity wants to present itself as an essence – fixed, self-consistent, pure. In fact it has no essence and no central core. Gender is marked in three areas or levels of human experience – that of the body and the biological; that of social roles; and that at which gender is defined internally in the unconscious. The myth aims to bring together all three levels in a perfect unity, the completely masculine individual.
But it can never work like this because the levels are distinct and never simply overlap. If we use the terms ‘male’ for the body, ‘man’ for the social identity, and ‘masculine’ for the internal, subjective tendency, then we can see that they will not fit together evenly to make up ‘one’ individual. There are essentially two reasons for this. One is that each term can only fully be defined by its opposite – male/female, man/woman, masculine/feminine. And the other is that the body always has to be installed in its social roles (this is what growing up involves) by means of an internal, subjective process. And this process, which psychoanalysis describes as unconscious, always calls into play both masculine and feminine desire inside the individual.
Because gender can have no single, fixed definition, some writers have argued that it can have no fixity at all. This is an impossible dream, for it seeks to restore a kind of state of nature, like that of the infant who is, in Freud’s phrase, ‘polymorphously perverse’, seeking pleasure everywhere without inhibition. It is in fact a state in which the infant’s wishes focus mainly on the figure of the mother. And the law of human culture decrees that the mother must be given up so that the infant can take on identity as a child, able to speak coherently from its own distinct position as an ‘I’, desiring a person other than the mother. There can be no identity unless the object of desire is relatively defined – masculine desire for a female figure, feminine desire for a male figure. But both forms of desire are laminated together in any individual so that neither – heterosexual desire nor homosexual desire – can ever be more than a preference. The masculine myth insists that this preference should be heterosexual and only heterosexual. And it further demands that it should not in fact be a preference at all but rather a fixed, categorical desire for one sex instead of another. A man must be male and masculine and nothing else.
Clearly men do not passively live out the masculine myth imposed by the stories and images of the dominant culture. But neither can they live completely outside the myth, since it pervades the culture. Its coercive power is active everywhere – not just on screens, hoardings and paper, but inside our own heads.
Yet in whichever direction we now look this version of masculinity is in crisis, and has been for some time. The masculine myth has always tried to perpetuate its power by feigning invisibility. As soon as masculinity can be seen as masculinity, its power is challenged, it is called into question – for example, by any film which draws attention to how masculine the hero is. The prevalence of these has been increasing over the past ten years – calm, untroubled assurance has given way to hysterical assertion. Once upon a time, in the old Westerns of the 1950s, Gary Cooper or Randolph Scott steadfastly got on with doing what a man had to do. Now Dirty Harry leans over his victims and boasts that he has the most powerful handgun in the world.
The masculine myth is also threatened by the very existence of a book such as this, which attempts to define it. Most of the effort here has been devoted to tracking the various manoeuvres the myth adopts to keep itself alive, and the strategies it uses to keep itself concealed. That was the main purpose. But some brief, if hesitant, attempt must now be made to suggest how this new understanding might be applied. This will also provide a chance to distinguish some different layers of time and development so far elided in analysing the myth.
Possible Change
The masculine myth keeps alive in the present the thought of many dead generations. This was vividly demonstrated in the previous section with its discussion of Kiss Me Deadly and male fears of women.
Its roots deep and ancient, patriarchy itself forms the oldest layer in the myth; a second historical stratum that has kept resurfacing is that of the capitalist epoch and the forms of post-Renaissance culture; and a third layer is the immediately contemporary, the way the myth is presented in popular culture today. The possibility of change applies to each of these in rather different ways.
The cultural domination of the myth in the present, through various forms of mechanical reproduction – novels, films, television, advertising, pop records – is the most amenable to change if change is what we want. Almost all the examples discussed were produced by private capital as marketable commodities. Exceptions are Michelangelo’s David and Da Vinci’s castle, which were designed for city authorities; the picture of Jesus, commissioned by the Church; and Dynasty, made in America by a private corporation although it is broadcast in Britain by the BBC, a state institution. Every other text is an example of something that was made to be sold.
In principle, it should be easy for a democratic society to exercise control over all these narratives and images which at present are left to the discretion of private enterprise and the demands of the market-place. In Nicaragua since the revolution, for example, the government has decreed that erotic images of women, or bits of women, should not be used in advertising. But in practice – as Geoff Hodgson has shown with great thoroughness in his recent book The Democratic Economy – the only existing alternative to the private control of cultural forms is their control by the state. At worst this entails the danger of totalitarianism, and at best the risk of bureaucratic puritanism. This issue leads on to another, more directly political question: how can the state become a more genuine expression of democracy and the will of the people?
The inadequacies of state control are illustrated by the following story, one which almost has the qualities of a parable. In China the People’s Republic has attempted to change the social status of those who do the worst kinds of work. In consequence, in 1981 the state-controlled media put out a popular song which had the chorus line, ‘How it gladdens my heart to hear the night-soil collectors coming down the mountain.’ This rose to number one in the hit parade; however, it did so not because people liked the words but because they liked the melody. The moral seems to be that state control only really works if it corresponds to what people want.
The present shaping of the masculine myth is determined also at a secondary, deeper level of history, that of the capitalist era. This has fortified and intensified the myth in a number of ways. Since the early nineteenth century especially it has effected an unprecedented separation between work and home, between the sphere of production and the sphere of consumption. In doing so it has confirmed the polarization of gender by associating work with masculinity and the home with femininity. In a movement of compensation, women and the home became more idealized as work in industry became an increasingly boring routine. Here again, I think, the possibility of changing things turns into a political question related to the achievement of radical social change.
The End of Patriarchy?
Patriarchy is the oldest layer in the masculine myth and therefore the one most resistant to change. Yet patriarchy and the phallic system are always changing, as they must do, for they are not part of nature but part of human culture.
At every point this system turns on what is seen as the male symbol. Sexual difference is represented by having or not having the phallus; loss of the mother and castration are represented as a threat to the phallus; the source of the threatened castration is represented by him who bears the phallus and the name of the father. But the phallus, however deeply wrought by the traditions of patriarchal culture, is nevertheless merely a symbol. If the father is only a name, there is no reason in nature why another name might not serve as well.
The law of human culture requires that the closed circle of the infant’s love for its mother must be broken if the child is to grow up and take its place in organized society. Under the patriarchal system, incest is prohibited in the name of the father. But, as Juliet Mitchell explains (in her Introduction to Lacan’s essays on Feminine Sexuality), the problem could be solved another way:
To date, the father stands in the position of the third term that must break the asocial dyadic unit of mother and child. We can see that this third term will always need to be represented by something or someone.
‘Something or someone’. The function performed by the phallus is necessary if there is to be human culture, but the phallus does not have to be a ‘male symbol’.
The phallus is by nature empty, a sham, for it is merely a symbol or signifier which marks sexual difference. To emphasize this, Samuel Weber’s book on Freud refers to it as the ‘thallus’ rather than the phallus. But this inherently arbitrary symbol has taken on meaning and value from the conventions of patriarchal culture and patriarchal society. Thus it has become a male symbol. This is the aspect of the phallus to which Lacan draws attention when he writes of it as ‘the privileged signifier’ of sexual difference. A symbol or signifier cannot be privileged in itself any more than the sound of one word can be better than the sound of another, but the phallus is privileged in patriarchal culture, with the result that it has become a male symbol.
Perhaps here as so often poets and novelists have anticipated questions and answers that only become generally understood much later. For example, Virginia Woolf’s novel of 1927, To the Lighthouse, takes the lighthouse of its title and narrative as a phallic symbol. Throughout the story the male members of Mrs Ramsay’s family keep trying to reach the lighthouse, although when they do finally sail to it their quest has rather lost its point. Yet in other passages in the novel the image of the erect beacon takes on quite different meanings, especially when it and its light are associated with Mrs Ramsay. The passage quoted at the top of this section is a good instance. It suggests how the shape of the lighthouse is still visible but is now substantiated by something else, by a column of water linked closely with the figure of the mother, Mrs Ramsay. It is not, I think, either fanciful or an exaggeration to regard the lighthouse in the novel as being a phallus without masculine qualities, a dephallicized phallus, a possible third term to break the relation of mother and child, but one which does not belong clearly either to the father or the mother.
If a new unisex or ungendered definition of the third term came into existence it would save men from the impossible burden of trying to perpetuate the phallic system. It is not easy to foresee all the consequences of such a cultural revolution. From many possibilities I shall choose one line of speculation to pursue here, because it highlights something important that kept emerging in the discussion of the masculine idealization of women. We might now think briefly of how a new definition of the third term might affect the relation between fathers and sons.
In a number of places, this analysis of masculinity has drawn on the contrast between the development of heterosexual desire in male and female. Both little boys and little girls begin by loving the figure of the mother. While girls transfer their feeling from the mother to the father and then to the bridegroom, boys transfer from the mother to the bride. This psychoanalytic account has been used to explain a masculine tendency to idealize women as The Woman. The double standard corresponds to mother versus other women, and being in love imports a crippling tendency to idealize into the sexual relation.
So far the proximity of mother and bride for men has been accepted as though it were an unchanging aspect of human experience. It may not be so. In order to move from the mother to the bride the little boy must, at present, challenge the father for possession of the mother. He must challenge the father because patriarchy works in the name of the father. But if, as Juliet Mitchell suggests, the necessary break from the mother could be signalled by something else, a third term which did not entail the father and a male symbol, the situation might be changed. Under the presently dominant system the little boy must give up his homosexual desire for the father so as to contest possession of the mother. If the system were no longer patriarchal he would not have to do this. The figure of the father could be retained for a while as an object of desire, and this would interpose a figure between the mother and the bride. If the little boy’s trajectory moved from the mother to the father to the bride, the latter would be much less susceptible to being idealized. The damaging effect of seeing a woman as The Woman might be diminished or even disappear entirely. But how could the third term forbidding the child’s first incestuous love for the mother come to have a non-phallic, non-masculine meaning and value?
Let us take the risk of imagining the future. Utopianism should not, after all, be left to science fiction. Though it can be an escape from the present it can also be a way of confronting the present, to see what needs to be changed here and now. We must assume that the human race will resist the seductions of the death drive as represented by 30,000 warheads. We ought to be able to think what society would be like in, say, the year 2411.
To empty the phallus of its privilege as a male symbol will almost certainly require the dismantling of patriarchal culture itself. Although in itself a mere symbol – a signifier that could be replaced by ‘thallus’ as Weber has suggested – the phallus acquires force and value from the conventions of patriarchal culture (in fact considerable organization would be needed even to get all English speakers to use the term ‘thallus’ regularly instead of ‘phallus’). And patriarchal culture corresponds to the structures and institutions of the patriarchal society through which it is reproduced.
To make the new third term, the new signifier of sexual difference, into a real symbol, active at the deepest levels of the unconscious, would presuppose wholly new forms of human culture. Sexual relations must be remade, and so must the institutionalized forms of marriage and family life, possibly through the development of more widely dispersed and looser forms of kinship groupings, groups perhaps based on something more than friendship and less than blood relationship. But the implications carry further. As was suggested in the earlier sections on ‘The Masculine Ego’, and particularly in ‘Man and Nation’, patriarchy finds a forceful and aggressive expression in the idea of the nation state. It is hard to foresee the end of patriarchy before the nation state has been absorbed by some form of genuine world government. Possibly then the function of the third term, whose threat denies the mother to the human infant, might be performed by a symbolic representation of ‘The United Nations’. Even to speculate along these lines makes clear the scale of change that will have to occur. But by 2411 all this might have been achieved.