So the biggest thing that happened to me this year, the biggest that might ever happen, was figuring out (for myself at least) exactly what the “dominant paradigm” we used to talk about subverting might really be. I had little glimmerings about it, and then it just sort of poured out this summer, and ever since then my posts have been far more purposeful and, sorry to say, quite a bit less erotic.

So it’s kind of fitting that today, on the last day of this memorable-for-me year, that I’d read just a marvelous, affirming chapter in a 37 year old book.

I mentioned back in September that it looked like Germaine Greer might have anticipated my idea back in 1970 in The Female Eunuch.

How about her chapter called Puberty then? She fiercely lays out her side, women’s side, of the conundrum…

...all that we are constantly aware of is that puberty is hell. It is hell for boys as well as girls, but for boys it is a matter of adjusting to physical changes which signify the presence of sex and genitality… For the girl it is a different matter: she has to arrive at the feminine posture of passivity and sexlessness. No sooner does her public hair appear than she has to learn how to obliterate it. Menstruation must be born and belied. She has been so protected from accepting her body as sexual that her menstruation strikes her as a hideous violation of her physical integrity.

...

The growing girl is encouraged to use her feminine charm, to be coy and alluring, while ignoring the real theatre [i.e. sexuality] in which such blandishments operate.

...

In this critical period a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men, dealings based upon her attractiveness as a sexual object, dealings which can only be hampered by any consideration of her own sexual urge.

One more quick quote that I needed to read a couple of times before I recognized that she isn’t simply regurgitating a common put-down of women who “put out” to be popular (it’s in the final clause.)

It is not uncommon for a girl seeking ‘popularity’ or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself.

In other words, says Greer, puberty is a particular kind of hell for girls because that is the time that, first, they become present to “sex and genitality,” and second, that, unlike boys, this is taken away from them so that, to be “normal” and “well adjusted” they must become female eunuchs.

So that’s Greer’s side — the consequences of what I’m calling men’s dominant paradigm of women as the “no-sex” class. Unlike Greer, however, who focused so much on the aftermath, what I’ve been trying to plumb is the origins of the thing. And it’s consequences for men. Which, as I occasionally hint is of a deeper and more souls-conquering nature than the routine carping about “getting drafted” or “having more heart attacks” or just generally being “more expendable than women.”