paring down of a whole person to vagina and womb and then to a
dismembered obscenity is their best and favorite joke.
Every woman, no matter what her social, economic, or sexual
situation, fights this paring down with every resource at her command. Because her resources are so astonishingly meager and because she has been deprived of the means to organize and expand them, these attempts are simultaneously heroic and pathetic. The
whore, in defending the pimp, finds her own worth in the light
reflected from his gaudy baubles. The wife, in defending the husband, screams or stammers that her life is not a wasteland of mur
dered possibilities. The woman, in defending the ideologies of men
who rise by clim bing over her prone body in m ilitary formation,
w ill not publicly mourn the loss of what those men have taken
from her: she w ill not scream out as their heels dig into her
flesh because to do so would mean the end of meaning itself; all
the ideals that motivated her to deny herself would be indelibly
stained with blood that she would have to acknowledge, at last, as
her own.
So the woman hangs on, not with the delicacy of a clinging vine,
but with a tenacity incredible in its intensity, to the very persons,
institutions, and values that demean her, degrade her, glorify her
powerlessness, insist upon constraining and paralyzing the most
honest expressions of her w ill and being. She becomes a lackey,
serving those who ruthlessly and effectively aggress against her and
her kind. This singularly self-hating loyalty to those committed to
her own destruction is the very essence of womanhood as men of
all ideological persuasions define it.
*
M arilyn Monroe, shortly before she died, wrote in her notebook on
the set of
afraid? Do I think I can’t act? I know I can act but I am afraid. I
am afraid and I should not be and I must not be. ” 1
The actress is the only female culturally empowered to act.
When she acts w ell, that is, when she convinces the male controllers of images and wealth that she is reducible to current sexual fashion, available to the male on his own terms, she is paid and
honored. Her acting must be imitative, not creative; rigidly conforming, not self-generated and self-renewing. The actress is the puppet of flesh, blood, and paint who acts as if she is the female
acting. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act
but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however
inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is
not a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.
Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol
cannot touch.
Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the
men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who
had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along— It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions
of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? If
so, how endangered they had been to be deceived, so fragile and
exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could leap out from
those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they
knew she deserved. There arose the male imperative that Monroe
must not be a suicide. Norman Mailer, savior of masculine privilege and pride on many fronts, took up the challenge by theorizing that Monroe may have been killed by the FBI, or CIA, or whoever
killed the Kennedys, because she had been mistress to one or both.
Conspiracy was a cheerful and comforting thought to those who
had wanted to slam into her until she expired, female death and
female ecstasy being synonymous in the world of male metaphor.
But they did not want her dead yet, not really dead, not while the
illusion of her open invitation was so absolutely compelling. In
fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death,
and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer:
no, M arilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.
