Onceuponatime: The Roles
45
fathers simply had their female children killed at birth.
Cinderella’s father saw her every day. He saw her
picking lentils out o f the ashes, dressed in rags, degraded, insulted. He was a good man.
T he father o f Hansel and Grethel also had a good
heart. When his wife proposed to him that they abandon
the children in the forest to starve he protested immediately—“But I really pity the poor children. ” 18 When Hansel and Grethel finally escaped the witch and found
their way home “they rushed in at the door, and fell
on their father’s neck. T h e man had not had a quiet
hour since he left his children in the wood [Hansel,
after all, was a boy]; but the wife was dead. ” 19 Do not
misunderstand —they did not forgive him, for there was
nothing to forgive. All malice originated with the
woman. He was a good man.
Though the fairy-tale father marries the evil woman
in the first place, has no emotional connection with his
child, does not interact in any meaningful way with
her, abandons her and worse does not notice when she
is dead and gone, he is a figure o f male good. He is the
patriarch, and as such he is beyond moral law and human decency.
T he roles available to women and men are clearly
articulated in fairy tales. T h e characters o f each are
vividly described, and so are the modes o f relationship
possible between them. We see that powerful women
are bad, and that good women are inert. We see that
men are always good, no matter what they do, or do
not do.
We also have an explicit rendering o f the nuclear
Woman Hating
family. In that family, a mother’s love is destructive,
murderous. In that family, daughters are objects, expendable. The nuclear family, as we find it delineated in fairy tales, is a paradigm of male being-in-the-world,
female evil, and female victimization. It is a crystaliza-
tion of sexist culture —the nuclear structure of that
culture.
C H A P T E R 2
Onceuponatime: The Moral
of the Story
Fuck that to death, the dead are holy,
Honor the sisters of your friends.
Pieces of ass, a piece of action,
Pieces.
The loneliest of mornings
Something moves about in the mirror.
A slave’s trick, survival.
I remember thinking, our last time:
If you killed me, I would die.
Kathleen Norris
I cannot live without my life.
Emily Bronte
T h e lessons are simple, and we learn them well.
Men and women are different, absolute opposites.
T h e heroic prince can never be confused with Cinderella, or Snow-white, or Sleeping Beauty. She could never do what he does at all, let alone better.
Men and women are different, absolute opposites.
T he good father can never be confused with the bad
mother. T h eir qualities are different, polar.
W here he is erect, she is supine. Where he is awake,
she is asleep. W here he is active, she is passive. Where
47
48
Woman Hating
she is erect, or awake, or active, she is evil and must be
destroyed.
It is, structurally at least, that simple.
She is desirable in her beauty, passivity, and victimization. She is desirable because she is beautiful, passive, and victimized.
Her other persona, the evil mother, is repulsive in
her cruelty. She is repulsive and she must be destroyed.
She is the female protagonist, the nonmale source of
power which must be defeated, obliterated, before male
power can fully flower. She is repulsive because she is
evil. She is evil because she acts.
She, the evil persona, is a cannibal. Cannibalism is
repulsive. She is devouring and magical. She is devouring and the male must not be devoured.
There are two definitions of woman. There is the
good woman. She is a victim. There is the bad woman.
She must be destroyed. The good woman must be
possessed. The bad woman must be killed, or punished.
Both must be nullified.
The bad woman must be punished, and if she is
punished enough, she will become good. To be punished enough is to be destroyed. There is the good woman. She is the victim. The posture of victimization, the passivity of the victim demands abuse.
Women strive for passivity, because women want to
be good. The abuse evoked by that passivity convinces
women that they are bad. The bad need to be punished,
destroyed, so that they can become good.
Even a woman who strives conscientiously for passivity sometimes does something. That she acts at all provokes abuse. The abuse provoked by that activity
Onceuponatlme: The Moral of the Story
49
convinces her that she is bad. T h e bad need to be punished, destroyed, so that they can become good.
T h e moral o f the story should, one would think,
preclude a happy ending. It does not. T h e moral o f the
story is the happy ending. It tells us that happiness for
a woman is to be passive, victimized, destroyed, or
asleep. It tells us that happiness is for the woman who
is good —inert, passive, victim ized—and that a good
woman is a happy woman. It tells us that the happy ending is when we are ended, when we live without our lives or not at all.
Part Two
THE PORNOGRAPHY
Among my brethren are many who dream
with wet pleasure of the eight hundred
pains and humiliations, but I am the other
kind: I am a slave who dreams of escape
after escape, I dream only of escaping,
ascent, of a thousand possible ways to
make a hole in the wall, of melting the
bars, escape escape, of burning the whole
prison down if necessary.
Julian Beck, The Life of the Theatre
Bookshop shelves are lined with pornography. It is a
staple o f the market place, and where it is illegal it
flourishes and prices soar. From The Beautiful Flagellants of New York to Twelve Inches around the World, cheap-editioned, overpriced renditions o f fucking, sucking,
whipping, footlicking, gangbanging, etc., in all o f their
manifold varieties are available — whether in the supermarket or on the black market. Most literary pornography is easily describable: repetitious to the point o f inducing catatonia, ill-conceived, simple-minded, brutal, and very ugly. Why, then, do we spend our money on it? Why, then, is it erotically stimulating for masses