The Female Eunuch Read Online Free PDF

girls. Sometimes they accept their sex as described, and regard themselves as defective members of the wrong sex, assuming the behaviour and attitudes of that sex, despite special conflicts. In other cases, some sort of genetic awareness creates a problem which leads
    to investigation and the right sex of the child is established. 6 Some,
    like little girls born without vaginas, are wrongly considered neuter; others having the XXY construction are considered women without ovaries. Some of these difficulties can be resolved by cosmetic sur- gery, but too often surgeons perform such operations for peculiar motives, when scanning the body cell structure would reveal that no congenital abnormality is present. Most homosexuality results from the inability of the person to adapt to his given sex role, and ought not to be treated as genetic and pathological, but the preju- diced language of abnormality offers the homosexual no way of ex- pressing this rejection, so he must consider himself a freak. The ‘normal’ sex roles that we learn to play from our infancy are no more natural than the antics of a transvestite. In order to approximate those shapes and attitudes which are considered normal and desir- able, both sexes deform themselves, justifying the process by refer- ring to the primary, genetic difference between the sexes. But of

    forty-eight chromosomes only one is different: on this difference we base a complete separation of male and female, pretending as it were that all forty-eight were different. Frenchmen may well cry ‘Vive la différence’, for it is cultivated unceasingly in all aspects of life. It is easiest and most obvious to consider that deliberately induced de- formity as it is manifested in the body and our concepts of it, for whatever else we are or may pretend to be, we are certainly our bodies.

    Bones

    Just how much sex in there is a skeleton? When archaeologists state categorically that half a femur comes from a twenty-year-old woman we are impressed with their certainty, not the less so because the statement, being a guess, is utterly unverifiable. Such a guess is as much based in the archaeologists’ assumptions about women as anything else. What they mean is that the bone is typically female, that is, that it ought to belong to a woman. Because it is impossible to escape from the stereotyped notions of womanhood as they prevail in one’s own society, curious errors in ascription have been made and continue to be made.
    We tend to think of the skeleton as rigid; it seems to abide when all else withers away, so it ought to be a sort of nitty-gritty, unmarked by superficial conditioning. In fact it is itself subject to deformation by many influences. The first of these is muscular stress. Because men are more vigorous than women their bones have more clearly marked muscular grooves. If the muscles are constrained, by binding or wasting, or by continual external pressure which is not counter- balanced, the bones can be drawn out of alignment. Men’s bodies are altered by the work that they do, and by the nutriment which sustains them in their growing period, and so are women’s, but women add to these influences others which are dictated by fashion and sex-appeal. There have been great changes in the history of feminine allure in the approved posture of the shoulders, whether sloping or straight, drawn forward or back, and these have been bolstered by dress and corsetting, so that the

    delicate balance of bone on bone has been altered by the stress of muscles maintaining the artificial posture. The spine has been curved forwards in the mannequin’s lope, or backwards in the S-bend of art nouveau or the sway-back of the fifties. Footwear reinforces these unnatural stresses; the high-heeled shoe alters all the torsion of the muscles of the thighs and pelvis and throws the spine into an angle which is still in some circles considered essential to allure. I am not so young that I cannot remember my