The Women's Room by Marilyn French Read Free Book Online Page A

him, she would follow him with her eyes and obey him submissively, and you knew she loved him forever. It was called conquest and surrender, and a man did one and a woman did the other, and everybody knew it.

8
    These things crept into her imagination as her hands crept about her body as she lay in bed: it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a meeting of elements. Her first experiments with what she did not know until years later was called masturbation were inept, but incredibly titillating. She was drawn to continue bravely in them, terrified about what she might be doing to her body, but charging boldly onward. And invariably her mind, as she probed and rubbed, was drawn to what she did not know until years later were called masochistic fantasies. She grasped at any material, and there was never a dearth. History lessons about the treatment of women in China, the laws of England before the twentieth century, or the customs of Moslem countries would provide her with weeks of new fantasies. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors , and plays of Romans, Greeks, and Englishmen offered visions of worlds where such things were permitted. And there were lots of movies like Gone With the Wind , or movies with Nazis invading a little town in the Netherlands and taking over the big houses in which lived the daughter of the man who owned it, or with mean men, like James Mason, threatening beautiful women. Even lesser scenes could serve to trigger the alert imagination.
    She would choose a culture, a time and place, and embroider all thesurroundings. At the center, there had to be a power struggle. Years later, when she finally encountered pornographia, she found it tedious and dull compared to her own brilliant fantasies with their stage sets, costumes, and the intense power struggle. She realized, after hundreds of hours of mind-wandering down the corridors of male cruelty toward women, that the essential ingredient of her titillation was humiliation, and for that, a power struggle was necessary. Her female characters might be noble and brave, spunky, tough, or helpless and passive but resentful, but they had to put up a fight. Her male characters were always the same, though: arrogant, convinced of male supremacy, and rule, but always intensely involved with the female. Her submission is the most important thing in the world to them, and worth any effort. Since he holds all the power, the only way she can defy him is to resist. Yet the moment of surrender itself, the instant of orgasm, always seemed to Mira a surrender of both characters. At that moment, all the fear and hate the female character felt turned to love and gratitude; and she knew that the male character must feel the same way. For that brief time, power was annulled and all was harmonized.
    But if Mira fantasised masochistically, she did not act so. She recognized that there was a large difference between life and art. In the movies and in her fantasies, the things that were done to the heroine hurt but did not hurt. They left no scars. She felt no hatred for the hero afterward. But that was not so in life. In life such things would hurt and scar and build up incredible hatred. Mr Willis beat Mrs Willis, but she was so thin and frail and had teeth missing and hunched-over shoulders and she looked at her husband with blank eyes. Mira could not imagine Mr Willis who was also rather thin and frail and blank, acting like Rhett Butler. And both Mr and Mrs Mittlow were large and bossy. He had glasses and she had a broad stiff bosom and they lived in an immaculate house and talked about their neighbours and their automobile. Even if she jumped when he spoke, Mira could not imagine him chaining her up and torturing her.
    It was sex itself, Mira decided, that was the humiliation. That was why she had such thoughts. Two years ago she had been her own person, her mind was her own, a clear clean space for the working out of clear, clean and interesting problems. Mathematics had