A Woman's Fancy

...Man created God in the image of his own erect penis: a generative rock of ages, a staff of life, a divine obsession," Chesler pontificates...

...Agatha, Chester gloats over the emotionless expression of the torturers-as if any show of emotion on their part wouldn't be a far greater invitation to gloating...

...Does this mean that fear of the atom bomb makes them prematurely senile...

...In Se-bastiano del Piombo's Martyrdom of St...

...Perhaps the exceptions were homosexuals insensitive to Chesler's large breasts and narrow waist, referred to elsewhere...

...second, recollections of men in the author's life...

...Without a shred of supportive evidence, she concludes that "these men are more interested in violent wars than in pornographic films...

...I do not know whether About Men is the worst book ever written on its subject-whatever, exactly, that may be-but I can affirm that it is the gloomiest, the most condemnatory, the most hopeless...

...unable to walk-not by time's exigencies, but by sculptor's fiat...

...This document is described by Dr...

...Or to emphasize the poetic and sibylline character of these lucubrations...

...Thetis in the kneeling posture of the postulant, in Ingres' Jupiter and Thetis, supposedly "brings Jupiter to orgasm orally...

...The iconographic parts are presumably modeled on such popular interpretive works as Kenneth Clark's Looking at Pictures or John Berger's Ways of Seeing, combined with works of mythological reinterpretation such as Robert Graves' The White Goddess, or Graves and Raphael Patai's Hebrew Myths...

...And even a statue with legs is unlikely to do much walking...

...Herewith the end of the "Arthur" poem: "Trouble was,/ when you wouldn't suck me/ (your mother hadn't left the house in 10 years),/I put my fist through the window?or would have if I wasn't a, girl,/and stopped talking to you...

...But Chester has neither the learning nor the ingenious perceptivity of those authors...

...All men, it seems, wanted Chesler to be a combination Madonna and Magdalene for them...

...working with heroin addicts who are presumed to be studs and pimps, "the doctors grow aroused" (note the italics that now replace capital letters, and presumably represent the erection of a typeface), and so forth...

...And: "Man's Son, Manson, is convinced that he, not Rockefeller, should be King...

...Typically, if men in a porn theater watch a Swedish film, they do so for a scene in which a girl is forced to have sex with a dog...

...This could occur only to a commentator unaware of the vast body of mystical writings almost always making use of erotic imagery...

...Mine is the century of male-birthed children, precocious with radiation...

...But it takes a Phyllis Chester to reduce His- and Her-story to an endless, unstoppable chain of violence linking all human beings (despite negligible exceptions mentioned only to be speedily dismissed) in a bond of hatred, aggression, bloodshed...

...what her skimpy, sophomoric interpretations offer is mostly blatant preconception backed by insufficient evidence, when not by actual misreading...

...A sample of the author's verse seems indicated...

...Not content with misinterpreting art works, Chesler will reinterpret myths to suit her prejudices...

...cool' as in firm, unyielding, erect, and immortal...

...We conclude with 1971, a year of only two affairs, so it can be treated in prose...

...A female torso by Hans Bellmer supposedly reduces woman to something "headless...

...Again, why is Manson, despite his quasibiblical name, indicative of the human condition...

...It is the book's aim to demonstrate that virtually all male behavior is based on sons' fear of castration or murder by their fathers, fathers' fear of castration or murder by their sons, men's hatred of women for reminding them of their mothers, men's hatred of women for not reminding them of their mothers, men's envy of women for having wombs to bear children with, men's contempt for women for not having a penis and thus being less than human...

...Thus the fact that there are fewer male frontal nudes than female ones in art is supposed to demonstrate the forbidden sanctity of the male organ-whereas it merely proves that, in the past, most painters were males, whose esthetic-erotic idols tended to be female...

...It is characteristic of Chesler's procedure to take a grisly but atypical case and build an entire edifice on it, as if a cathedral could be constructed out of nothing but gargoyles...

...Munch's Death and the Maiden, for example, is interpreted as a representation of the artist's minority view that it is not the female who threatens the male with death, but vice versa...

...The Resurrection of the Sacrifice...

...That few female nudes are pregnant is supposed to have ominous implications, and so on and on...

...Presently, we come to three short prose sections, each dedicated to one of Chesler's lovers, with dates duly recording the duration of the affair...

...Actually, she turned her into a live or living (what's the difference, by the way...

...And note the dreadful style -part Old Testament-prophetic, part watered-down Walt Whitman, studded with capitals, and glibly gliding from platitude to grandiose platitude -call it Vaseline Vatic...

...The fact that Botero's Presidential Family is made up of fat people is supposed to prove something about "the patriarchal family and nation-state...

...the needle, the/thread, dangling, the whole unraveling...

...Chesler's aphorisms -or are they prose poems?-are printed one or two to a page, surrounded by awesome fields of margin...

...then a couple of anecdotes about well-known men who offered young Phyllis professional help in exchange for her favors, proving, of course, the vileness of most men...

...To be sure, the vehemence of my rejection of Chesler's work is bound to elicit responses from some readers -Such as those found in letters to the Los Angeles Times (April 23,1978), in which Jonathan Yardley's hostile review evoked comments like "male supremacist backlash," and, from Jon Snodgrass, a California sociologist often quoted in About Mem "Yardley's rageful reaction indicates that there is something deeply valid about Chesler's assessment of men...

...What is this-and pages and pages of similar stuff-doing in an allegedly scientific, psychosociological investigation of the male in society and history...

...Next, the unpublished poet in Chesler leaps to the fore in a free-verse sequence in five sections, each devoted to one of five lovers she had during 1970-obviously a banner year to which prose could not do justice...

...I hesitate to say whether this is worse as poetry or as science, but one thing is certain: It is a little out of place in a supposedly serious investigation of the male psyche...

...Even if that were so, why would it be the exclusive privilege of males, to whom almost every social evil is ascribed throughout this book...

...Well, yes, if a country is ruled by kings rather then queens-just as Blake's God has to be male if our religion would have it so...

...If Bologna's Neptune Fountain has four mermaids at the corners of its pediment, that proves that the god is "held up by the labor of women...

...Or to allow for enough space for the reader, confronted with so much pseudo-science and pseudo-profundity, to write in expletives...

...But, then, so is alchemy the invention of "men consumed by womb-envy," while "men in science have carried us all to the brink of total...

...Why is it the century of death...

...Of course, Munch is saying no such thing: he is merely continuing the medieval tradition of the Dance of Death (as in Holbein the Younger and others), in which the most touching image is Death and the Maiden, precisely because the Maiden is the idealized emblem of trusting innocence-hardly a vicious piece of antifeminism...

...At the very end, there is an annotated bibliography that, for instance, includes the SCUM Manifesto of Valerie Solanas, the man-hating maniac who tried to kill Andy Warhol...

...Why and how are they "precocious with radiation...

...Chesler, however, is there to see the film as representing "the futility of rehabilitating juvenile delinquents...

...There follows an Epilogue whose highly purple prose bemoans the lack of a "Hero" to change the course of history-or "His-story," as Chester sometimes stoops to calling it...

...Why are children "male-birthed" in that century...

...Throughout this part, what has been fairly apparent before becomes painfully obvious: Chesler's graceless, humorless self-importance, which parades her attractiveness to men and her sexual, emotional and intellectual superiority to them across page after distasteful page...

...We come now to the second, or autobiographical, part of the book...

...Thus Blake's Nebuchadnezzar is supposed to represent-on nothing but Chester's authority-the frightened look of fathers after child-beatings or infanticides, just as his Soul Reunited With God, because both soul and deity are male and embracing, raises questions of whether sons wish to mate with their fathers...

...but once more, without reference to a broader context of ancient cultures and history...

...It contains fewer than a hundred snippets from we cannot tell how many men's testimonies and is therefore less than compelling and easily mani-pulable to prove whatever the good doctor wants proved...

...Michelangelo's Creation is a highly artistic expression of "male uterus envy...

...The Son has come to slay the Father...

...Is it to pad the book to grander dimensions...

...How did we get to "very few" from none within one paragraph...

...Thereupon we get an anthology from Chesler's newspaper clipping collection, illustrating male-female and male-male violence-as if such clippings could not be made to show anything at all...

...Chester as "a fierce, scathing, passionate radical pamphlet," and not as the ravings of a madwoman...

...Are the Tablets of the Law, then, in their twofoldness, really testicles...

...Everywhere, men judge and are judged by the languages of penises...

...That men throughout history have victimized those weaker than themselves-whether men or women, or even parents or children-Is undeniable...

...otherwise she would surely have observed their temperature to be anything but cool...

...Evidently, in an atypical lapse from scientific inquiry, Chester neglected to palpate those numerous male organs seeking her Madonna-Magdalene ministrations...

...All of page 29, for example, is given over to the following two nuggets: "Mine is the century of Death...

...Yet she promptly gives herself the lie: "Very few men could talk to me without some unconscious reference to this dynamic...

...Yet Chester's ignorance can be much more specific and palpable...

...Take the first part-gnomic utterances interrupted by extended literary quotations and reproductions of art works with (and sometimes without) interpretations...

...First, general reflections interspersed with literary quotations and iconographic commentaries...

...She then compares them to "twentieth-century bomber pilots over Asia," who, no doubt, bombed women exclusively, just as all saints in Chesler's martyrol-ogy are, doubtless, female...

...destruction" out of "repressed and unresolved uterus-envy...

...Chester, to be sure, attacks that too...

...Thus page 30 harbors exclusively the following four lines: "I wonder if the Fates still sit at/their work-or have they left their/tapestry undone, for good...

...The feminist animus (I am sorry about that masculine ending, but "anima" would not serve my purpose) informs Chester's nonthinking throughout, and is conveniently bolstered by that "little learning" Alexander Pope knew for the "dangerous thing" it was...

...This was already hinted at in the Preface: "Men's need for maternal compassion and approval is so great, so unconscious, so pervasive, that its shadow fell across every relationship and encounter I've ever had with men...

...Which century is referred to...

...The Second Coming...

...The last main part of the book, "An Essay About Men," is meant to be a scientific theory based on Dr...

...This peculiar triptych is supposed to afford insight into masculine psychology and behavior, into history and art, into life and strife between the sexes...

...I suggest that there are times when the absence of ethical and esthetic outrage would itself constitute an even greater moral outrage...

...Chesler's interviews and case histories...

...then recollections of her first marriage, to an Iranian, in whose country's provinces Chesler experienced patriarchalism that she treats as if it were the universal human condition...

...Even if any part could stand on its own feet, which does not happen to be the case, it would have to collapse in its violent clash with the other two...

...If these propositions strike you as mutually contradictory and gross oversimplifications stated thus in outline form, rest assured that they cannot begin to compete with the full text in preposterous exaggeration, humorless pretension and arrogant silliness...

...Yet aren't all torsos, male or female, legless...

...Why bother with paintings when your quarrel is in reality with Judeo-Christianity...

...male scientists crowd around a new computer "as if it's [no subjunctive] a girl they're all going to fuck...

...In the laboratory where Chesler subsequently works, the chief "fucks each delicate electrode...

...but all of Botero's figures, in all his paintings, are obese: It's his trademark...

...third, speculations based on case histories and interviews with men-chesler is a professor of psychology in the City University of New York...

...So Chester will analyze - The Judgment of Solomon by Poussin (whom to her and the Simon & Schuster copy editor's shame she misspells as "Poussaint"-but, then, elsewhere in the book Dionysus becomes, ignor-antly, "Dionysius," petite mort "petit mort," and so on) in terms of "only a male king can still the vengefulness of women...

...Writes Chesler...

...According to Chesler, Aphrodite turned Pygmalion's figure of the ideal woman "into a live or living statue...

...woman, who, because she was more complaisant than a feminist would wish, is reduced by Chesler to the status of mere living statue...

...Even when Chesler observes something correctly, she must twist it to her fanatical purpose...

...Here we have reminiscences of the author's first glimpse of her father naked, of a spanking he administered to her (her age and offense remain significantly unrevealed...

...To add obscurity to bathos, Chester sticks in nonsensical commas after undone and thread, making arcane syntactical hash out of banal logorrhea...

...She tells us, for example, that when male underlings talk about the envied and resented "top dogs," they frequently use the term "cool" to describe them...