Word: sexual
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...corpses would be preferable to the straightfaced but inwardly leering remarks of the police officers who discover the bodies. After an hour, one is thoroughly tired of the discovery scenes, the interviews with terrified old ladies, and the slapstick arrests of suspects seemingly chosen at random from the sexual underground by Boston police...
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...
...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...
...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...