"I've been called homosexual," he said, adding: "But things are getting better. Last week I was called bisexual."

At the same time, They can accept feminine ideals--gentleness, passivity, endurance--if actual femininity is rejected. In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the hero partakes of the heroic aspects of femininity but is revolted by actual femininity to the point of refusing sexual intercourse. Conversely, They revile women for manifesting masculine qualities, aggression in particular. Women's books are reviewed as if they were women--criticized for being "shrill," praised for being "not shrill." Critics call Marianne Moore "the best women poet in America." Why not the best blue-eyed poet? In the Nov. 1 issue of Time Magazine (one of Their favorite mouthpieces), a group of books by women are reviewed in these terms: "mere female savagery," "hysterical," "measuring feminine eye," "becoming feminine pique over fit," "gruesome little stories," "all the women's-fiction cliches," etc., etc.

ON THE MOST general level, They use women and sexuality to symbolize whatever man is not, Mrs. Ellmann notes. Her idea is only partly developed, but its implications are extensive. Behind it lies Their ethic of the male writer. In art, the feminine is everything external to the artist--the incoherence and incomprehensibility of Nature. The writer must struggle against this all-encompassing enmity. Sexual capacity is equated with the capacity to write, and woman is what resists both.

This idea comes out in fiction, where men are impotent and women are insatiable. In The Graduate, Benjamin must undergo ordeal by orgasm before he can act decisively; in Bonnie and Clyde, the woman takes bank robbery and murder in her stride while the man battles paralysis (this is not to say that Bonnie is crudely portrayed). Man must prove himself against the external and feminine. The hero of Malraux's La Voie Royale is driven to conquer nameless woman after nameless woman. The vision of writing that emerges from all this is somewhat masturbatory--the emphasis is not on understanding or even communication but on the need to dominate an outside implacability, like sleeping with a whore. Here again is Norman Mailer in Armies of the Night:

Without guilt, sex was meaningless. One advanced into sex against one's sense of guilt, and each time guilt was successfully defied, one had learned a little more about the contractual relation of one's own existence to the unheard thunders of the deep--each time guilt herded one back with its authority, some primitive awe--hence some creative clue to the rages of the deep--was left to brood about. Onanism and homosexuality were not, to Mailer, light vices--to him it sometimes seemed that much of life and most of society were designed precisely to drive men deep into onanism and homosexuality; one defied such a fate by sweeping up the psychic profit which derived from the existential assertion of yourself--which was a way of saying that nobody was born a man; you earned manhood provided you were good enough; bold enough.

Here is sex, closely linked to creativity, as a solitary descent into an abyss; here is sex as a warlike self-assertion "against much of life and most of society"; here is an onanistic vision of sex as defiance of onanism.

HERE ALSO is a key notion put forward by Mrs. Ellmann when she turns from Their analogies to Their view of women themselves. This is the idea that men must struggle to achieve manhood, they must prove themselves in all sorts of tests, while women are women and must transcend the failings of their sex to attain their ideal condition. Manhood is a title conferred; womanhood is a judgment to be escaped. They say "he's a man" in praise of any manifestation of worth; the equivalent for women is "she's a real person." "She's a woman" is said in reference to sexual performance.

Beneath this is Their unfailing tendency to see Woman lurking behind every individual and to define Woman exclusively as a sexual being. They don't like women to deviate from preconception, and when women do threaten to leap the boundaries their achievements are either discounted or attributed to some mysterious quality of femininity. At one point Mrs. Ellmann quotes an article on Sylvia Plath:

Owen that 'all a poet can do today is to warn.' But being a woman, her warning is more shrill, penetrating, visionary than Owen's. Owen's came out of the particular circumstances of the trenches, and there is nothing to make us think that if he had not been on the Western Front ... he would not have warned anyone about anything at all. He would have been a nice chap and a quiet poet. With Sylvia Plath, her femininity is that her hysteria comes completely out of herself.

Sylvia Plath would have agreed with Wilfred

The absurdity of assuming that since Sylvia Plath is a woman, her dislocation has no relation to reality while Wilfred Owen's is purely a response to reality goes unnoticed.

With individual considerations dispensed of, the remaining abstraction is either idealized or debased. Women are glowingly told that their lack of ordinary creativity is made up for and surpassed by the creativity of bearing a child. Here again They confuse individual personal worth with sexual function and voluntary, conscious achievement with involuntary, passive achievement. At the same time, women as sexual objects are the butt of endless jokes; getting pregnant is getting knocked up. One of the most ingenious of Their numberless stereotypes is the belief that women can be salvaged from piety, ambition, bad temper, nervousness, sadness, fear, worry, pedantry, distressing political beliefs, hysteria, pretentiousness or aggression by a good session in bed.

*****

IT IS OBVIOUS that the villain of the story is They. Mrs. Ellmann does a good job of pinning down the general view of femininity; she even manages to grind her axe gently. But instead of explaining why the view exists and how it affects real women she trails off in feeble optimism. She argues that writing and opinions are moving toward a mode of indecision, a non-judging, antiabsolutist, amoral, particularized view of life in which no form the species can take is not somehow acceptable and in which the artist's aim is to become rather than to judge the other. The mode of Joyce, Sartre, Godard, drugtakers and anarchists, it excludes sexual stereotyping and indeed is a feminine mode in that it shuns ethical sweep for the underside of life that women have always been relegated to. (In contrast is the masculine, decisive mode of someone like Mailer, who emphasizes the battle of the ego with reality, the importance of choice, of change, of self-assertion, of evaluation coupled with insistent sexual discrimination.)

Presumably, though Mrs. Ellmann stops here, when the imagination of the multitude seizes on this world view women's minds will be finally liberated. But even overlooking the fragility of this vision of a non-struggling, non-judging society, problems arise. Everyone can't groove passively on the complexity of reality; someone will have to make decisions and run things--and it is then that we will have women factory managers and women Presidents; men's minds will function on higher levels.

More realistically, evidence shows that women will never shake off their chains. Feminism has won its battles, and except for a deranged member of the Society for Cutting Up Men shooting Andy Warhol and demonstrators at the Miss America pageant burning girdles and false eyelashes, there is no neo-feminist agitation against male supremacy. Women remain as charmingly or dully subjugated or as neurotically anguished as ever. Indeed, most are well satisfied with their lot; their freedom is always increasing and no one is really sure that Y-chromosome doesn't give the male mind all sorts of innate superiority.

But there is more to women's conservatism than biology. Hegelians could find a rewarding case study of a dialectical process in women's identity crises. If people are known by their actions, women (thesis), whose lives for the most part are not showcases for decisive action, are unknowable. The opinion-makers fill the gap with preconception and stereotype (antithesis), and the idea takes on a life of its own as women struggle to accommodate it. They may be warped (synthesis) in the attempt to reconcile potential with the roles assigned, but then a perfect circle is formed, and curves are feminine.