The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

forms, indeed any kind of sex which can escape the dead hand of the institution—group sex, criminal sex, child-violation, bondage and discipline—has flourished, while simple sexual energy seems to be steadily diffusing and dissipating. This is not because enlight- enment is harmful, or because repression is a necessary goad to hu- man impotence, but because sexual enlightenment happened under government subsidy, so that its discoveries were released in bad prose and clinical jargon upon the world. The permit to speak freely of sexuality has resulted only in the setting up of another shibboleth of sexual normality, gorged with dishonesty and kitsch. Women who understand their sexual experience in the way that Jackie Collins writes of it are irretrievably lost to themselves and their lovers:

    He took her to the bedroom and undressed her slowly, he made love to her beautifully. Nothing frantic, nothing rushed. He caressed her body as though there were nothing more important in the world. He took her to the edge of ecstasy and back again, keeping her hovering, sure of every move he made. Her breasts grew under his touch, swelling, becoming even larger and firmer. She floated on a suspended plane, a complete captive to his hands and body. He had amazing control, stopping at just the right moment. When it did happen it was only because he wanted it to, and they came in com- plete unison. She had never experienced that before, and she clung to him, words tumbling out of her mouth about how much she loved him. Afterwards they lay and smoked and talked. ‘You’re wonder- ful,’ he said, ‘You’re a clever woman making me wait until after we
    were married!’ 9
    Miss Collins’s heroine is prudish, passive, calculating, selfish and dull, despite her miraculous expanding tits. When her husband grows tired of playing on this sexual instrument she can have no recourse but must continue to loll on her deflated airbed, wondering what went wrong. There is no mention of genitals: everything hap- pens in a swoon or a swamp of undifferentiated sensation. He la- bours for her pleasure like a eunuch in

    the harem. Sex is harnessed in the service of counter-revolution.

    Embraces are cominglings from the Head to the Feet, And not a pompous High Priest entering by a
    Secret place.
    Blake, ‘Jerusalem’, pl. 69, II. 39–40

    What Jackie Collins is expressing is the commonest romantic ideal of the perfect fuck. It shows how deeply we believe in the concept of male mastery. Miss Collins’s heroine was manipulating her mate’s colonizing sexual urge, making him wait, as long as his importunacy lasts, until she is ready. In manipulating his violent impulses she exercised an illusory superiority, for she is tender, sentimental and modest, loving not for her own gratification, but in expression of esteem, trust and true love, until she could civilize him into marriage and the virtuoso sexual performance. The complicated psychic aspect of his love is undervalued; she is still alone, egotistical, without libido to desire him or bring him to new pleasure in her. Jackie Collins and the sex-books show that we still make love to organs and not people: that so far from realizing that people are never more idiosyncratic, never more totally there than when they make love, we are never more incommunicative, never more alone.

    The Wicked Womb

    Sex is not the same as reproduction: the relation between the two is especially tenuous for human beings, who may copulate when they will, not only when they are driven thereto by heat or an instinctual urge. The difference must be at least partly caused by the fact that human beings have memory, will and understanding to experience the pleasure of sex and desire it for itself. Little girls only learn about the pleasure of sex as an implication of their discoveries about their reproductive function, as something merely incidental. Much more care is taken to inform them about the approaching trauma of men-