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History, literature and two thousand years of stand-up comics show us
countless ways in which Western culture is ambivalent about femaleness and
the feminine – and particularly about female sexuality. Perhaps the prevailing
attitude is not so much ambivalent as anxious, uncertain and fearful, reactions
that cause perceptions to veer between two extremes. Women are seen as sexually
voracious and therefore as the source of chaos and disorder, or they are
placed on a pedestal of chastity by denying that they have sexual feelings
at all.

Fear generates defence and rationalisation: but if the problem is so
entrenched, how has Western culture coped with it? Much scholarly work has
been produced on this subject but, in the spirit of Valentine’s Day on
Monday, I offer a less than ponderous analysis.

The male world has cast women into four types, and all but one of them
is designed to reduce the threat of female sexuality. I have dubbed these
types Wife, Waif, Whore and Witch. The male psyche has also evolved four
distinct styles of dealing with women, all defined by various disturbing
features of male sexuality: Warrior, Whizzkid, Worthy and Warlock.

Before I describe in detail the psychological props behind these masks,
let us look at the problem. It is not only that we are anxious about being
‘properly’ masculine (or feminine) or that we hold incorrect stereotypes
about the natures of men and women. The real problem is that our thinking
is framed by dualism and polarity, concepts that permeate Western culture.
We define things by their opposites. We think in terms of either/or, and
so define good by it not being evil, and hard by it not being soft. But
then we go further, and define masculine by it not being feminine. As the
French writer Simone de Beauvoir pointed out some time ago, masculine and
feminine are not reciprocal. Men define woman as Other, she said, and this
does not just mean a different being, but a being who is the antithesis
of one’s male Self. So Woman in a sense has no existence, except to define
what Man is not.

Our dualism is particularly manifest in the fear that if we lose control
of the ‘dominant’ or ‘positive’ pole, the ‘other’ pole will take over –
with dire consequences. Unless the boundaries and defences of one pole are
maintained by constant vigilance, we fear leakage, dissolution and destruction.
There is a long-standing fear, evident in scientific and philosophical
as well as popular writings, that rationality will be overwhelmed by chaos,
the spiritual by the sensual. Western science rests, at least in part, on
sustaining rationality as a force against unreason, disorder and chaos.
Francis Bacon, the 16th-century English philosopher, saw science explicitly
as a way of controlling the chaos of Nature. Today, the forces of unreason
are bigotry, superstition and ‘pseudoscience’.

Throughout Western history, from Aristotle to the late comic, Les Dawson,
women have been seen as exemplars of chaos – as more subject to the forces
of unreason, or (except in the Victorian era) as more sexually voracious,
and more sexually unstable, than men. And of course, if rationality is seen
as the product of control and chaos as the product of a lack of control,
then that which upsets rationality is the handmaiden of chaos. There is
little so conducive to upsetting reason as sexuality.

Sensual female, spiritual male

Male/female duality also saturates the struggle between spiri-tuality
and sensuality. The identification of the female with the sensual, and the
male with the purely spiritual, has a long history. In the first century
AD, for example, the Alexandrian philosopher Philo Judaeus equated masculinity
with transcendence of the sensual, and so with access to the divine. He
conceived the feminine as tied to the flesh, and so unable to attain this
ultimate goal. Philo Judaeus expressed his concept of the masculine in describing
the number 7 (a number that has always had great mystical significance in
myth and numerology): ‘Virgin among numbers, essentially motherless; begotten
by the father of the Universe alone; ideal form of the male with nothing
of the female; the manliest and bravest of numbers. Well-gifted by nature
for sovereignty and leadership the symbol of knowledge and perfection of
³¾¾±²Ô»å.’

These lines may seem bizarre, but equally odd, and much closer to our
own time, is the work of the Austrian philosopher Otto Weininger, a disturbed
writer who greatly influenced the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Writing
in 1903, shortly before he committed suicide at the age of 23, Weininger
laid out a savage message in his one book, Sex and Character (published
in 1906): women are wholly sexual beings, with no place in the life of man,
whose sole function is to attain communion with the divine. ‘Man possesses
sex organs, (woman’s) sex organs possess her.’ He equated the masculine
– in all its senses – with everything that is spiritual and indeed real,
and the feminine – in all its senses – with everything that is sensual,
sexual and, indeed, of no worth whatsoever. ‘Women have no existence and
no essence; they are not, they are nothing. Mankind occurs as male or female,
as something or nothing.’ Mad he may have been, but he was influential.
His book was a wild success, and its message is often echoed by modern chauvinist
thought. Both Philo Judaeus and Weininger explicitly declared the necessity
of choice between the essentially negative feminine and the essentially
positive masculine – there could be no compromise, no merging of the sexes.

We are misled by our folk memories of the Victorian era, when women
were seen, for a brief period, as sexless, and therefore in control of morals.
But even Victorian mythology smacked of the same old dualism, with its message
that beyond the boundaries of rationality, there is chaos, which is one
with sexuality. Masculinity is equated with reason, control and mastery;
femininity with the undermining of these. Therefore, female sexuality is
dangerous. The abiding cultural problem is to find ways of diminishing
that threat.

The four models into which our culture casts women are not types of
women as identified by normal psychometric methods. They are, however, powerful
cultural myths about women. Nor should the style of masculine response be
read as types of men; they are merely coping strategies. The three types
of women who are reassuring to men are Wife, Waif and Whore. These women
can, it appears, be controlled by men. Their sexuality is not a threat.
The Witch is different: she is the epitome of threat.

Sexually receptive

The Wife is a central character in Victor-ian mythology. She is not
a threat because she has no autonomous sexuality. Her sexual life and motivation
are directed solely towards reproduction. She is ‘sexually receptive’ to
male advances. This model of female sexuality also pervades sociobiology,
and is applied to female mice and fruit flies as well as humans. Men can
control the Wife because it is easy to mythologise the Wife’s defining
characteristics of virtue, modesty and sweetness – and, in the process,
to distance themselves even further from their own irrational, ‘baser’ self.
The Wife is an icon of Western culture, appearing in religion, drama, myth,
and popular women’s magazines as the desirable aspiration for young virgins,
and the appropriate mate for good (that is, self-controlled) men.

The Waif is a sexual being – but she is made so only by her creator.
She is a vulnerable creature, moulded by men. Svengali, Pygmalion and even
Dracula may turn the innocent virgin into something more lascivious, but
her sexuality is owned by her master. Her very powerlessness and vulnerability,
which are the essence of her sexual appeal, make her available to male protection
– and therefore control. The Waif has come into her own in the modern cinema,
allowing the titillation of intense sexuality yet with the certainty of
its boundaries. Marilyn Monroe, both sexual and childlike, is one icon of
Waifhood; but Waifs can embody extreme youth – the prepubescent models of
the 1960s and 1990s, from Twiggy to Kate Moss, come to mind, along with
singers, such as Belinda Carlisle and Sinead O’Connor.

The Whore is, by definition, a sexual being. But she is not possessed
of an autonomous sexuality; she is sexual only in response to male demands
and expectations. The male remains in control – he can, as it were, stop
paying for the product. The Whore mythology also allows for a cathartic
disgust; the connotations of Whoredom include degradation and sin – in drama,
the Whore comes to a bad end, or reforms, and becomes a Wife. So, while
male indulgence is punished, albeit at second-hand, fantasy can safely persist.
Not only does the Whore practise the oldest profession, she represents the
oldest myth of the feminine; the epithets flung at women who do not conform
are still couched in language informed by attitudes to the Whore. The Bad
Girl of the movies, whatever form her deviance takes, is cast ultimately
as Whore, and judged thereby. Shakespeare did a fine job of vilification
on Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part I.

It is the Witch, however, who poses the real problems. Unlike the others,
she is a sexually autonomous being who makes sexual demands, and is not
controllable. She has power and she uses it.

It is interesting to see how our culture deals with Witches. They are
tamed by being transmuted, made into something else. A classic ploy is to
turn Witches into Whores. Cleopatra, for example, is one of history’s greatest
Witches, a woman of enormous political, as well as sexual, power. In most
Hollywood representations, she is turned into a Whore; even the Elizabeth
Taylor representation, self-parodying though it was to a degree, was ultimately
that of a scheming temptress. George Bernard Shaw made Cleopatra a Waif,
under the tutelage as well as the protection of Julius Caesar. Shakespeare,
uniquely, did not make her into a Whore.

A few Witches do survive. Mae West managed to do so, and increasingly,
powerful women are uncompromisingly presenting themselves as both attractive
and successful. Indeed, an even more threatening combination of Witch and
Whore can now be seen – extreme cases are Madonna, the performer, and Naomi
Campbell, the model. Here the threat comes from the ambiguity, the deliberate
confusion of messages. This is much more challenging to our culture and
to males than the usual one of Wife and Whore, which is an ancient dualism
of good and evil, sacred and profane.

Victorian Patriarch

Men have four ways of coping with their typecast women. These models
– Worthy, Warrior, Whizzkid and Warlock – reflect ways of dealing with the
threat, mostly by placing women into tidy compartments.

The Worthy tries to meet the current expectations of the Good Husband
and Father. Paradoxically, this places the Victorian Patriarch and today’s
New Man in the same category. The oppressive paternalism and protectiveness
of the Victorian Patriarch sprang from a concern to meet the highest moral
demands of the time: today, the moral high ground lies with those who are
caring, sharing and compassionately equal with women.

The Warrior is afraid, not only of actual women, but of femininity itself.
His response is flight – or fight. Warriors are most comfortable engaged
with other men in conquest, or pushing back the frontiers somewhere far
from the feminine world, which may include the laboratory, and especially
in contexts that facilitate ritualised bonding. For Warriors, women are
best kept for the most minimal contact; not only are they incomprehensible,
they may pollute maleness and sap strength.

The Whizzkid is a fixer. He thinks that rationality, or technology,
or cunning, can solve all problems. He believes in control and mastery of
his physical environment – but deals with the problem of having emotions
by avoidance or compartmentalisation. Women have two acceptable roles: as
mothers approving his cleverness, and as playmates. These women must, however,
stick to the rules about minimising emotional complexity. Playmates may
be sibling-like peers, honorary boys, or sexual toys, in which case they
will have a tendency to get younger and younger as the Whizzkid ages. Whizzkids
appear to believe that they themselves are permanently about 15 years old.

The Warlock sounds wise and wizard-like. In a sense he is: he can deal
with emotion – his own and other people’s – and he is not afraid of sexuality.
As a result, he does not fear its power to override rationality. The danger
of the Warlock is that he is tempted into a guru role, by the power that
such a capacity for understanding gives him, with both men and women. He
is, however, the only kind of man who can deal with a Witch without transmuting
her into something less threatening.

As I’ve suggested, these categories can have positive and negative connotations,
to a greater or lesser degree. We need Warriors at least in their more positive
guises, even if we could do without their manifestations as Wifebeater
and Wanderer. Whizzkids can be Wallies or Weeds, as well as Wranglers. Worthies
may also be Wimps or Worriers. Warlocks may be tempted to take on the more
sinister attributes of their name.

This kind of classification can be a party game, or part of an intriguing
message on the Valentine card you send. But I also offer it as a serious
analysis of how our culture deals with the anxieties that arise from the
way we divide and categorise ourselves. Dualism and polarisation create
problems for challenging our deep-seated conceptions of gender – and they
also do tend to make it an unnecessarily long haul to finding a soul mate.

Helen Haste is a reader in psychology at the University of Bath. She
wrote The Sexual Metaphor, published last year by Harvester Wheatsheaf,
price £12.95, £40 (hardback).