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.”

So today seems to be Blog Action Day. Their website says

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

And how, one might wonder, does a sex blogger post about the environment in his own way and relating to his own topic, with an aim to get everyone talking towards a better future?

I’d say one good way would be to look back nearly 38 years in order to develop on this post about men’s belief that they must be “worthy” and/or “earn” sex. Watch this.

So some time before 1970 Germaine Greer wrote, in some draft of The Female Eunuch, a scathing indictment of an image of women, created by men for men’s benefit, that Greer called “The Stereotype.” (Note: read carefully and wait for the last lines in the following excerpt.)

She is more body than soul, more soul than mind. To her belongs all that is beautiful, even the very word beauty itself. All that exists to beautify her. The sun shines only to burnish her skin and gild her hair; the wind blows only to whip up the colour in her cheeks; the sea strives to bathe her; flowers die gladly so that her skin may luxuriate in their essence. She is the crown of creation, the masterpiece. The depths of the sea are ransacked for pearl and coral to deck her; the bowels of the earth are laid open that she might wear gold, sapphires, diamonds and rubies. Baby seals are battered with staves, unborn lambs ripped from their mothers’ wombs, millions of moles, muskrats, squirrels, minks, ermines, foxes, beavers, chinchillas, ocelots, lynxes, and other small and lovely creatures die untimely deaths that she might have furs. Egrets, ostriches and peacocks, butterflies and beetles yield her their plumage. Men risk their lives hunting leopards for her coats, and crocodiles for her handbags and shoes. Millions of silkworms offer her their yellow labours; even the seamstresses roll seams and whip lace by hand, so that she might be clad in the best that money can buy.

The men of our civilization have stripped themselves of the fineries of earth so that they might work more freely to plunder the universe for treasures to deck my lady in. New raw materials, new processes, new machines are all brought into her service.

...

The stereotype is the Eternal Feminine. She is the Sexual Object sought by all men, and by all women. She is of neither sex, for she has herself no sex at all. her value is solely attested by the demand she excites in others. All she must contribute is her essence. She need achieve nothing, for she is the reward of achievement. She need never give positive evidence of her moral character because virtue is assumed from her loveliness and her passivity. If any man who has no right to her be found with her she will not be punished, for she is morally neuter. The matter is solely one of male rivalry.

It would be extremely easy to mistake Greer’s indictment of the near-Platonic ideal trophy contested over by men as indicting… blaming... women. We get enough of that already and it’s not even true (at least not in the sense of “truth” being that which is still even when everyone stops believing it.) That’s not to say no women participate in it, or even gain from it to one degree or another. But even to that extent it’s difficult to assign blame to people who play a game when it’s the only game they’re permitted to play or, as in some parts of the world, the only game in town.

I might add that to the extent it’s perceived as the only game in town, a staggering degree, by men themselves, even men aren’t to blame for it. Which, while subjectively tragic in the extreme I see as objectively great since, if the exits can only be lit — lit well enough to reveal there “be no dragons” beyond — that men as well as women will head for those exists. In droves.

Until then… yeah, if you consider how wealth itself has been repurposed, how exploitation of mountain ranges, of species, of peoples, of oceans, of atmosphere, of posterity itself has served only to further “the matter … solely one of male rivalry” then the peculiarly sexless sexual ideal — “The Stereotype” as Greer labels it, has been Hell on the environment.

The kicker? It’s a big kicker.

Via Jessica of Feministing, a Rutgers study suggests that...

...having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women. Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite.

<Read the report here.

The cool thing about feminism is that men and women can appreciate each other for each other instead of for our worthiness if we’re men or our worth if we’re women. And those who can handle real, human attraction needn’t put themselves, or the planet, out in ephemeral and ultimately futile gestures of worthiness and worth.