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 Let's Make Love: “What am I afraid of? W hy am I so
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.
People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—
have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the
lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt
ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by
men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished
to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately
ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing
that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or
whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it
so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused
and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own
lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as
men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-
defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,
by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any
individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the
male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for
male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.
Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly.
Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on
your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will
focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In
effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she
has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to
the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual
adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is
the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-
supremacist rule.
*
. . . I gradually came to see that I would have to