Sexing the Cherry Read Online Free PDF Page A

such privation?
    Their quarters were very comfortable, with every kind of couch and bed and game to play, but they were not allowed to go outside.
    How could they live without space?
    There was silence, and it seemed as though they were communicating without words. Then one spoke to me and explained that they were not so confined as it seemed. That through the night they came and went as they pleased.
    How could this be? The house was barred. Each door had thirteen locks. The windows were too high to reach and the skylights, though always kept open, could not be broached.
    Underneath the house was a stream. The stream, on its way to the river on its way to the sea, passed beneath the lodgings of quite a different set of women. Nuns. This convent, the Convent of the Holy Mother, had its cellars opening over the stream. Every night, any of the women who wished to amuse herself in the city, visit friends, eat dinner with her beloved, dropped herself into the fast-flowing water and was carried downstream towards the convent. It was the custom of the nuns to keep watch over the stream through the night, and any of the women shooting past the convent vault was immediately fished out in a great shrimping net by the nun on duty.
    Some of the women had lovers in the convent; others, keeping a change of clothes there, went their way in the outside world. At dawn the women were let down into the water, and with great fortitude swam upstream into their locked citadel.
    Their owner, being a short-sighted man of scant intelligence, never noticed that the women under his care were always different. There was an unspoken agreement in the city that any woman who wanted to amass a fortune quickly would go and work in the house and rob the clients and steal the ornaments supposedly safe on the wall. He did not know it but this selfish man, to whom life was just another commodity, had financed the futures of thousands of women, who were now across the world or trading in shops or as merchants. He had also, singlehanded, paid for the convent's renowned stock of fine wine and any number of altarpieces.
    Some years later I heard that he had come into his pleasure chamber one day and found it absolutely empty of women and of treasures. He never fathomed the matter and made no connection between that event and the sudden increase in novitiates at the Convent of the Holy Mother.
    I have met a number of people who, anxious to be free of the burdens of their gender, have dressed themselves men as women and women as men.
    After my experience in the pen of prostitutes I decided to continue as a woman for a time and took a job on a fish stall.
    I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.
    In my petticoats I was a traveller in a foreign country. I did not speak the language. I was regarded with suspicion.
    I watched women flirting with men, pleasing men, doing business with men, and then I watched them collapsing into laughter, sharing the joke, while the men, all unknowing, felt themselves master of the situation and went off to brag in barrooms and to preach from pulpits the folly of the weaker sex.
    This conspiracy of women shocked me. I like women; I am shy of them but I regard them highly. I never guessed how much they hate us or how deeply they pity us. They think we are children with too much pocket money. The woman who owned the fish stall warned me never to try and cheat another woman but always to try and charge the men double or send them away
    1. Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them.
    2. Men are easy to make passionate but are unable to sustain it.
    3. Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women.
    4. Men must be occupied at all times otherwise they make mischief.
    5. Men deem themselves