Resting on the Mount of Venus
“There is a good principle which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.”
- Pythagoras.
“All that has been written about women by men should be suspect, for the men are at once judge and party.”
- François Poullain de la Barre
There are countless pages that men have written about women: poems, novels, essays, songs and films and — in most of these works — the most varied feelings are combined: contempt, admiration, spite, love, envy, tenderness and cruelty. I wonder if the reason men have written so much about women is because they don’t want to talk about themselves? Or because they don’t have anything interesting to say about their gender. More has been expounded on women as a literary motif than on the important issue of the existence of God.
The Bible has been a big promoter of machismo — doesn’t it say there that we come from a male rib? Furthermore, the long-standing bad female reputation comes from Eve, who tempted the naive and influential Adam to sin. The Bible is not only “the greatest invention of fantastic literature” as Jorge Luis Borges aptly put it, it is also one of the most macho documents that history possesses. When choosing the apostles, they didn’t call twelve women but twelve men to the contest. Although the Catholic Church insists on not telling us about the gender of God, the truth is that in school books they draw him as a bearded man on a cloud.
Women, as an object of study, is a rather trite subject. Day by day it is observed how many conversations end in what has been called the mono-topic. As we love to give strange names to the simplest things, so as not to get bored of the eternal affair, we invent terms such as machismo, hembrismo, feminism, woman-object, man-object, vaginal masturbation, penile masturbation… and other terms still to be invented!
Elisa Lerner, a well-known Venezuelan writer, had the courage to face the well-trodden issue of women, writing an interesting and controversial book called Gynaecological Chronicles, in which she brings together twenty-seven articles written between 1979 and 1983 that deal with women (Latin American women, especially) and their relationships with the world. In this book, themes such as the participation of women in art, politics, their confrontation with machismo, feminism, history, etc. are developed.
As the reader can see, Elisa Lerner tried to cover too many topics. For example, Virginia Woolf devoted 150 pages to a single issue: the importance, for a female writer, of having her own room and certain economic conditions to be able to write novels — and she takes as a point of reference the English writers of the last century. In this regard, wrote E. Lerner: “the English storytellers of the 19th century, par excellence, were spinster and industrious daughters, whose twilight or night dream was literature.” Virginia Woolf did not write about the relationships a writer can have with men. This was not the subject that V. Woolf raised. If she had raised it, her book would have been five or six hundred pages — as happened with Simone de Beauvoir, who tackled this subject, and in fact he devoted eight hundred pages to it.
In Gynaecological Chronicles, the author shows us she is a writer who can develop arguments with sharpness and critical spirit; she also has a good sense of humour and masters irony. Proof of this lies in the paragraphs dedicated to the sexuality of young Jewish women in North America, Eva Perón and Barbara Hutton:
The first of them reads like this: “The sexuality of young Jewish women in North America was frankly more effusive after the creation of the State of Israel. Before, more than one Jewish girl, believed that her homeland was in her vagina. Sex and history are more closely linked than is generally believed.” About Eva Perón she writes: “Many of Eva Perón’s habits were nighttime cabaret. On some occasions she snatched the wallets from the rich gentlemen who visited her, and then gave that money, so mischievously stolen, to the poor. And she would finish these activities at dawn, like a luxurious and weary prostitute.”
About Barbara Hutton (the owner of the Woolworth chain’s ten-cent stores, who was married seven times) she writes: “Barbara, she was always skinny. And since the inheritance took up so much space, so much weight in the world, being skinny was a compensation, an apology. And since she didn’t want to occupy space with her person or with money, she filled it with men.” She goes on to say: “Mrs. Hutton never knew men, but she did achieve a certain, even absolute, mastery over the sticky ceremony that serves to join us to them.”
I wonder then, what does it mean to know men?
It surprised me not to find in this book certain themes and approaches. For example, she writes about machismo and does not refer to the cult of the phallus (penis).
She writes about Eva Perón and only dedicates a line to Margaret Thatcher: “The very brave Thatcher.” What does she mean by this? Isn’t that repeating what the majority says about Thatcher? Margaret Thatcher is a very interesting and controversial subject that E. Lerner could have taken advantage of — as she was also a controversial woman.
She doesn’t say a single word about lesbianism — or her relationship with women’s literature. She does not write about abortion, a topic which facilitates the convergence of social, medical and religious considerations. (Abortion, moreover, is the victim of the ignorant speculations of men. If men had to bring children into the world, surely abortion would already be legalised.)
Elisa Lerner, in her book, dedicates an article to Mirla Castellanos. Does a woman like Mirla, who is part of the traditional bourgeoisie, need to be written about? On the other hand, María de Lourdes Devonish, a magnificent singer and songwriter, a rebellious and underrated artist, is subjected to an unjust media blackout — because her lyrics speak truth in a very direct way. She doesn’t refer to Manuelita Saenz either.
What I was able to observe throughout this book is that the author shows only one side of the coin when writing about Latin American women and men. She shows the woman as a victim of the inconstancy and clumsiness of the male. Sometimes, perhaps more frequently than is believed, men are victims of the inconstancy and clumsiness of women.
It is a complicated and controversial subject, which lends itself to generalisations.
I am going to give an example of how a generalisation can be disastrous to the image of a writer: Søren Kierkegaard (Danish philosopher and theologian, 1813–1855), when referring to women writes: “What a disgrace to be a woman! And when she is a woman, however, the worst misfortune, deep down, is not understanding that it is a misfortune!”
What an insult! I thought that S. Kierkegaard was broader. What this phrase shows, through his generalisation, is his own limitations in relation to women. And it seems to me an insult, since he not only calls us unfortunate, but he considers us so oligophrenic that we do not even have the capacity to realise that we are unfortunate.
What I observe is that the subject of women, as time goes by, has become a taboo subject. In Venezuela, one way to repress the writers who deal with this issue is to label them “feminist,” a term with an emotional charge that translates as “frustrated woman,” “lesbian,” “frigid” or “liberated woman.” All these terms are democratically disguised repression, but repression nonetheless. And in a political regime in which anything can be said, this freedom inhibits more than it stimulates.
The best male intervention on women is this phrase by J.P. Sartre: “Semi-victims, semi-accomplices, like everyone else.”
I believe that in the face of death, being a woman or a man is immaterial. When I hear a young woman deny her womanhood, I say to her with vain conceit and a sure maternal tone: Dear friend, have you not yet realised that our world has always rested on the Mount of Venus?
