An old English poet expresses the same thought:
Oh! Menstruating woman, thou’rt a fiend
From whom all nature should be closely screened!
These beliefs have been vigorously perpetuated right up to today. In 1878, a member of the British Medical Association wrote in the British Medical Journal: “It is an indisputable fact that meat goes bad when touched by menstruating women.” He said that he personally knew of two cases of hams spoiling in such circumstances. In the refineries of the North at the beginning of this century, women were prohibited by law from going into the factory when they were afflicted by what the Anglo-Saxons call the “curse” because the sugar turned black. And in Saigon, women are not employed in opium factories: because of their periods, the opium goes bad and becomes bitter. These beliefs survive in many areas of the French countryside. Any cook knows how impossible it is to make mayonnaise if she is indisposed or simply in the presence of another woman who is indisposed. In Anjou, recently, an old gardener who had stocked that year’s cider harvest in the cellar wrote to the master of the house: “Don’t let the young women of the household and their female guests go through the cellar on certain days of the month: they would prevent the cider from fermenting.” When the cook heard about this letter, she shrugged her shoulders. “That never prevented cider from fermenting,” she said, “it is only bad for bacon fat: it cannot be salted in the presence of an indisposed woman; it would rot.”9
Putting this repulsion in the same category as that provoked by blood is most inadequate: more imbued with the mysterious mana that is both life and death than anything else, blood, of course, is in itself a sacred element. But menstrual blood’s baleful powers are more particular. Menstrual blood embodies the essence of femininity, which is why its flow endangers woman herself, whose mana is thus materialized. During the Chaga’s initiation rites, girls are urged to carefully conceal their menstrual blood. “Do not show it to your mother, for she would die! Do not show it to your age-mates, for there may be a wicked one among them, who will take away the cloth with which you have cleaned yourself, and you will be barren in your marriage. Do not show it to a bad woman, who will take the cloth to place it in the top of her hut … with the result that you cannot bear children. Do not throw the cloth on the path or in the bush. A wicked person might do evil things with it. Bury it in the ground. Protect the blood from the gaze of your father, brothers and sisters. It is a sin to let them see it.”10
For the Aleuts, if the father sees his daughter during her first menstruation, she could go blind or deaf. It is thought that during this period woman is possessed by a spirit and invested with a dangerous power. Some primitives believe that the flow is provoked by snakebite, as woman has suspicious affinities with snakes and lizards; it is supposed to be similar to crawling animals’ venom. Leviticus compares it to gonorrhea; the bleeding feminine sex is not only a wound but a suspicious sore. And Vigny associates the notion of soiling with illness: “Woman, sick child, and impure twelve times.” The result of interior alchemic troubles, the periodic hemorrhage woman suffers from is bizarrely aligned with the moon’s cycle: the moon also has dangerous whims.11 Woman is part of the formidable workings that order the course of planets and the sun; she is prey to the cosmic forces that determine the destiny of stars and tides, while men are subjected to their worrisome radiation. But it is especially striking that menstrual blood’s effects are linked to the ideas of cream going sour, mayonnaise that does not take, fermentation, and decomposition; it is also claimed that it is apt to cause fragile objects to break; to spring violin and harp strings; but above all it influences organic substances that are midway between matter and life; this is less because it is blood than because it emanates from genital organs; even without knowing its exact function, people understood it to be linked to the germination of life: ignorant of the existence of the ovary, the ancients saw in menstruation the complement of the sperm. In fact, it is not this blood that makes woman impure, but rather, this blood is a manifestation of her impurity; it appears when the woman can be fertile; when it disappears, she becomes sterile again; it pours forth from this womb where the fetus is made. The horror of feminine fertility that man experiences is expressed through it.
The strictest taboo of all concerning woman in her impure state is the prohibition of sexual intercourse with her. Leviticus condemns man to seven days of impurity if he transgresses this rule. The Laws of Manu are even harsher: “The wisdom, energy, strength, and vitality of a man coming near a woman stained by menstrual excretions perish definitively.” Priests ordered fifty days of penance for men who had sexual relations during menstruation. Since the feminine principle is then considered as reaching its highest power, it is feared that it would triumph over the male principle in intimate contact. Less specifically, man shies away from finding the mother’s feared essence in the woman he possesses; he works at dissociating these two aspects of femininity: that explains why incest is prohibited by exogamy or more modern forms and is a universal law; that explains why man distances himself from woman sexually when she is particularly destined for her reproductive role: during her period, when she is pregnant, or when she is nursing. Not only does the Oedipus complex—whose description, incidentally, has to be revised—not contradict this attitude: on the contrary, it even implies it. Man guards himself against woman to the extent that she is the confused source of the world and disorder become organic.
However, this representation of woman also allows the society that has been separated from the cosmos and the gods to remain in communication with them. She still assures the fertility of the fields for the bedouins and the Iroquois; in ancient Greece, she heard subterranean voices; she understood the language of the wind and the trees: she was the Pythia, Sibyl, and prophetess. The dead and the gods spoke through her mouth. Still today, she has these powers of divination: she is medium, palmist, card reader, clairvoyant, inspired; she hears voices and has visions. When men feel the need to delve into vegetable and animal life—like Antaeus, who touched earth to recoup his strength—they call upon woman. Throughout the Greek and Roman rationalist civilizations, chthonian cults subsisted. They could usually be found on the periphery of official religious life; they even ended up, as in Eleusis, taking the form of mysteries: they had the opposite meaning of sun cults, where man asserted his will for separation and spirituality; but they complemented them; man sought to overcome his solitude by ecstasy: that is the goal of mysteries, orgies, and bacchanals. In the world reconquered by males, the male god Dionysus usurped Ishtar’s and Astarte’s magic and wild virtues; but it was women who went wild over his image: the maenads, thyades, and bacchantes led men to religious drunkenness and sacred madness. The role of sacred prostitution is similar: both to unleash and to channel the powers of fertility. Even today, popular holidays are exemplified by outbreaks of eroticism; woman is not just an object of pleasure but a means of reaching this hubris in which the individual surpasses himself. “What a being possesses in the deepest part of himself, what is lost and tragic, the ‘blinding wonder’ can no longer be found anywhere but on a bed,” wrote Georges Bataille.
In sexual release, man in his lover’s embrace seeks to lose himself in the infinite mystery of the flesh. But it has already been seen that his normal sexuality, on the contrary, dissociates Mother from Wife. He finds the mysterious alchemies of life repugnant, while his own life is nourished and enchanted by the tasty fruits of the earth; he desires to appropriate them for himself; he covets Venus freshly emerging from the waters. Woman first discovers herself in patriarchy as wife since the supreme creator is male. Before being the mother of humankind, Eve is Adam’s companion; she was given to man for him to possess and fertilize as he possesses and fertilizes the soil; and through her, he makes his kingdom out of all nature. Man does not merely seek in the sexual act subjective and ephemeral pleasure. He wants to conquer, take, and possess; to have a woman is to conquer her; he penetrates her as the plowshare in the f
urrows; he makes her his as he makes his the earth he is working: he plows, he plants, he sows: these images are as old as writing; from antiquity to today a thousand examples can be mentioned. “Woman is like the field and man like the seeds,” say the Laws of Manu. In an André Masson drawing there is a man, shovel in hand, tilling the garden of a feminine sex.12 Woman is her husband’s prey, his property.
Man’s hesitation between fear and desire, between the terror of being possessed by uncontrollable forces and the will to overcome them, is grippingly reflected in the virginity myths. Dreaded or desired or even demanded by the male, virginity is the highest form of the feminine mystery; this aspect is simultaneously the most troubling and the most fascinating. Depending on whether man feels crushed by the powers encircling him or arrogantly believes he is able to make them his, he refuses or demands that his wife be delivered to him as a virgin. In the most primitive societies, where woman’s power is exalted, it is fear that dominates; woman has to be deflowered the night before the wedding. Marco Polo asserted that for the Tibetans, “none of them wanted to take a virgin girl as wife.” A rational explanation has sometimes been given for this refusal: man does not want a wife who has not yet aroused masculine desires. Al-Bakri, the Arab geographer, speaking of the Slavic peoples, notes that “if a man gets married and finds that his wife is a virgin, he says: ‘If you were worth something, men would have loved you and one of them would have taken your virginity.’ ” He then chases her out and repudiates her. It is also claimed that some primitives refuse to marry a woman unless she has already given birth, thus proving her fertility. But the real reasons for the very widespread deflowering customs are mystical. Certain peoples imagine the presence of a serpent in the vagina that would bite the spouse during the breaking of the hymen; terrifying virtues are given to virginal blood, linked to menstrual blood, and capable of ruining the male’s vigor. These images express the idea that the feminine principle is so powerful and threatening because it is intact.13 Sometimes the deflowering issue is not raised; for example, Malinowski describes an indigenous population in which, because sexual games are allowed from childhood on, girls are never virgins. Sometimes, the mother, older sister, or some other matron systematically deflowers the girl and throughout her childhood widens the vaginal opening. Deflowering can also be carried out by women during puberty using a stick, a bone, or a stone, and this is not considered a surgical operation. In other tribes, the girl at puberty is subjected to savage initiation rites: men drag her out of the village and deflower her with instruments or by raping her. Giving over virgins to passersby is one of the most common rites; either these strangers are not thought to be sensitive to this mana dangerous only for the tribes’ males, or it does not matter what evils befall them. Even more often, the priest, medicine man, boss, or head of the tribe deflowers the fiancée the night before the wedding; on the Malabar Coast, the Brahmans have to carry out this act, apparently without joy, for which they demand high wages. All holy objects are known to be dangerous for the outsider, but consecrated individuals can handle them without risk; that explains why priests and chiefs are able to tame the malefic forces against which the spouse has to protect himself. In Rome all that was left of these customs was a symbolic ceremony: the fiancée was seated on a stone Priapus phallus, with the double aim of increasing her fertility and absorbing the overpowerful and therefore harmful fluids within her. The husband defends himself in yet another way: he himself deflowers the virgin but during ceremonies that render him invulnerable at this critical juncture; for example, he does it in front of the whole village with a stick or bone. In Samoa, he uses his finger covered in a white cloth and distributes bloodstained shreds to the spectators. There is also the case of the man allowed to deflower his wife normally but he has to wait three days to ejaculate in her so that the generating seed is not soiled by hymen blood.
In a classic reversal in the area of sacred things, virginal blood in less primitive societies is a propitious symbol. There are still villages in France where the bloody sheet is displayed to parents and friends the morning after the wedding. In the patriarchal regime, man became woman’s master; and the same characteristics that are frightening in animals or untamed elements become precious qualities for the owner who knows how to subdue them. Man took the ardor of the wild horse and the violence of lightning and waterfalls as the instruments of his prosperity. Therefore, he wants to annex woman to him with all her riches intact. The order of virtue imposed on the girl certainly obeys rational motives: like chastity for the wife, the fiancée’s innocence is necessary to protect the father from incurring any risk of bequeathing his goods to a foreign child. But woman’s virginity is demanded more imperiously when man considers the wife as his personal property. First of all, the idea of possession is always impossible to realize positively; the truth is that one never has anything or anyone; one attempts to accomplish it in a negative way; the surest way to assert that a good is mine is to prevent another from using it. And then nothing seems as desirable to man as what has never belonged to any other human: thus conquest is a unique and absolute event. Virgin land has always fascinated explorers; alpinists kill themselves every year attempting to assault an untouched mountain or even trying to open up a new trail; and the curious risk their lives to descend underground to the bottom of unprobed caves. An object that men have already mastered has become a tool; cut off from its natural bonds, it loses its deepest attributes; there is more promise in the wild water of torrents than in that of public fountains. A virgin body has the freshness of secret springs, the morning bloom of a closed corolla, the orient of the pearl the sun has never yet caressed. Cave, temple, sanctuary, or secret garden: like the child, man is fascinated by these shadowy and closed places never yet touched by animating consciousness, waiting to be lent a soul; it seems to him that he in fact created what he is the only one to grasp and penetrate. Moreover, every desire pursues the aim of consuming the desired object, entailing its destruction. By breaking the hymen, man possesses the feminine body more intimately than by a penetration that leaves it intact; in this irreversible operation, he unequivocally makes it a passive object, asserting his hold on it. This exactly expresses the meaning in the legend of the knight who hacks his way through thorny bushes to pick a rose never before inhaled; not only does he uncover it, but he breaks its stem, thereby conquering it. The image is so clear that in popular language, “taking a woman’s flower” means destroying her virginity, giving the origin of the word “deflowering.”
But virginity only has this sexual attraction when allied with youth; otherwise, its mystery reverts to disquiet. Many men today are sexually repulsed by older virgins; psychological reasons alone do not explain why “old maids” are regarded as bitter and mean matrons. The curse is in their very flesh, this flesh that is object for no subject, that no desire has made desirable, that has bloomed and wilted without finding a place in the world of men; turned away from her destination, the old maid becomes an eccentric object, as troubling as the incommunicable thinking of a madman. Of a forty-year-old, still beautiful, woman presumed to be a virgin, I heard a man say with great vulgarity: “It’s full of cobwebs in there.” It is true that deserted and unused cellars and attics are full of unsavory mystery; they fill up with ghosts; abandoned by humanity, houses become the dwellings of spirits. If feminine virginity has not been consecrated to a god, it is easily then thought to imply marriage with the devil. Virgins that men have not subjugated, old women who have escaped their power, are more easily looked upon as witches than other women; as woman’s destiny is to be doomed to another, if she does not submit to a man’s yoke, she is available for the devil’s.
Exorcised by deflowering rites or on the contrary purified by her virginity, the wife could thus be desirable prey. Taking her gives the lover all the riches of life he desires to possess. She is all the fauna, all the earthly flora: gazelle, doe, lilies and roses, downy peaches, fragrant raspberries; she is precious stones, mother-of-pea
rl, agate, pearls, silk, the blue of the sky, the freshness of springs, air, flame, earth, and water. All the poets of East and West have metamorphosed woman’s body into flowers, fruits, and birds. Here again, throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the modern period, it would be necessary to quote a thick anthology. The Song of Songs is well-known, in which the male loved one says to the female loved one:
Thou hast doves’ eyes …
thy hair is as a flock of goats …
Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn …
thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate …
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins …
Honey and milk are under thy tongue.
In Arcanum 17, André Breton took up this eternal song: “Melusina at the instant of her second scream: she sprang up off her globeless haunches, her belly is the whole August harvest, her torso bursts into fireworks from her arched back, modeled on a swallow’s two wings, her breasts are two ermines caught in their own scream, blinding because they are lit by scorching coals of their howling mouth. And her arms are the soul of streams that sing and float perfumes.”