Certain Female Spiders

Chivalry is dead, but that tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women and its echoes still resonate. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and postures, letting them pass through doorways and get into lifeboats first.

They set themselves up as the protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set some limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. Although, at the same time, the counter-convention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of privileged males against women socially inferior to themselves, showed that at no time did men cease to regard most women as fair game.

The exploitation of women by men, far from constituting a secondary formation dependant in one way or another on the organization of production, as good Marxists are taught to think, antedates the establishment of production based on private property. Needless to say, no slur clings to Odysseus for his infidelities to Penelope, willing or unwilling, in the course of his wanderings homeward. The faithfulness required of a man to his home and his kin did not include the chastity of his body as it did in the case of his wife. The long history of rape and seduction serves as a reminder that animal strength and nothing to do with the economic system, remain the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested in its most direct, ancient and brutal form.

Yet polite conventions, even when they are no more than a facade, function as an operational myth that provide women with a degree of ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. We have surrounded essentially exploitative relationships with a network of reciprocal obligations, which if nothing else, obscures the exploitation, thereby making it perhaps a little easier to bear. Nevertheless, regardless of her poise and her intellectual maturity, the fact remains that Simone was still deeply hurt by Jean-Paul’s infidelities.

Male and female are subjective assignments. A society which grants the privilege of doing or being done to, exclusively to one sex or the other, warps its children. A child of either sex has urges to penetrate, devour, and possess; to be cherished, dominated, and contained. Who can resist a detailed account of how certain female spiders eat their mates?