The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise

306 Pages·2010·1.66 MB·English

by  Dinnerstein

Drawing “Home” by James Thurber. Copyright © 1945 James Thurber.
Copyright © 1963 Helen W. Thurber and Rosemary Thurber Sauers. From The
Thurber Carnival, published by Harper & Row. Originally printed in The New
Yorker.

Excerpts from W. H. Auden’s “Lullaby” from City Without Walls and Other
Poems, New York, Vintage Books, 1971, reprinted by permission of Random
House, Inc.

Copyright © 1999 by Naomi Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written
permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in
reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information
write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th floor, New York, NY 10016. Or
visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Dinnerstein, Dorothy.
The mermaid and the minotaur: sexual arrangements and human
malaise / Dorothy Dinnerstein.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, c1976.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-469-6
1. Sex role. 2. Psychology. 3. Social structure. I. Title.
BF692.2.D56 1999
306.7—dc21

99-16337
v3.1
Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Few Words on the Re-publication
Foreword
Preface

Part One The Mermaid and The Minotaur
1 Terms and Aims
2 The Human Project of Sexual Liberty
Part Two The Rocking of the Cradle and the Ruling of the
World
3 The Rocking of the Cradle
Notes Toward Chapter 4
4 Higamous-Hogamous
Notes Toward Chapter 5
5 “Children! Every One of Them!”
Notes Toward Chapter 6
6 “Sometimes You Wonder if They’re Human”
Notes Toward Chapter 7
7 The Dirty Goddess
Notes Toward Chapter 8
8 The Ruling of the World
Part Three Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
Notes Toward Chapter 9
9 Mama and the Mad Megamachine
10 At the Edge
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
A Few Words on the Re-publication of “The Mermaid
and The Minotaur”
by
Vivian Gornick

Her intelligence is poetic, and her imagination is informed by a respect
for systematic thought. These elements of mind and heart combined have
created a stirring view of the common psychic life of men and women and
its relation to the whole of organized human history.

I wrote these words twenty-three years ago in a review of The Mermaid and
The Minotaur. Re-reading the book now, I am struck again by what, indeed, is
the poetic intelligence of Dorothy Dinnerstein; an intelligence that here, in this
work, is brought to bear on a large, unwieldy insight she made her own through
the depth of being with which it was felt. Strong feeling led Dinnerstein into the
clarity of a poet. It is this clarity that makes Mermaid a participant in the
conversation of the century: the one about human fears and social arrangements.
From the very beginning—the sheer density of theory notwithstanding—the
reader is drawn by the words of a writer committed to making the act of
intellection come alive. She has seen the meaning of the sexual arrangement, in
all its vast consequence, and has made it her mission that it will resonate in us as
it did in her. And, indeed. Not a page of Mermaid goes by that there isn’t a
phrase, a sentence, a paragraph to strike the famous chord of recognition just
long enough to persuade us we are “remembering” what we have always known:

Sexual attraction is the “animal-poetic” in us.
Childhood is the “drowning sweetness” we cannot bear to climb out of.
The sexual arrangement is a masquerade in which “generation after
generation of childishly self-important men on the one hand, and childishly
play-acting women on the other, solemnly re-create a child’s-eye view of
what adult life must be like.”
If we did not fear the loss of infancy as much as we do, we could have “the
joy of a creature who knows time and senses its own
separateness … [perceives] the living tie between its fragile individual
existence and the existence of the hurtful, entrancing surround.”
This joy would echo the old euphoria clearly enough “to remind us of what
we lost when we found our solitary mortal selves.”
But our hatred of the loss is greater than our pleasure in the gain: “This is
what makes effort—the kind of effort we would be apt to engage in for its
own sake—feel like work.… The underlying grudge that embitters our love
of enterprise … is central to human malaise …”

These powerful, brooding sentences! How long and how hard Dinnerstein had
to have stared into her own thought and feeling to arrive at them. Her gaze is
penetrating. It compels me to put myself behind her eyes. When I do, the
connection between what I observe and what she concludes becomes
inescapable. The dynamic is penetrating.
Of how many theoretical works can it be said, It makes the reader feel what it
knows? That, for me, is the ultimate value of The Mermaid and The Minotaur;
the thing, above all else, that assures it a long, perhaps a permanent place in the
cultural record.
Foreword
by
Ann Snitow

When I first read The Mermaid and The Minotaur in 1977, a bright light went on
in the world. There, at last, in gorgeous, three-dimensional detail someone had
described the inner workings of the gender injustices that had burned me all my
life.
Why and how did the book make such a difference to many like me who read
it in the late seventies? To get at its initial impact one would need, first, to
remember, or imagine, the decades before our revival of feminism. Misogyny
was the very air we breathed then: “In the long years before second-wave
feminism, women and girls were unquestioningly belittled. Daily insulted
without remark. Definitely tracked away from achievement. Aggressively
ignored or ignorantly aggressed upon. Assumed as helpers, and when unhelpful,
called bitches or witches. Humiliation seemed fitting and pride made one faintly
ridiculous.”*
The great outburst of indignation against this common state of affairs that
began second-wave feminism in America had already peaked and was in decline
by the time Mermaid first appeared. The many women who had risen up on the
high roll of that wave had barely had time to sort out where our mass explosion
of rage came from—or what we were going to make of it in the long term.
Deeply enlivened as I had felt by the new reading of the world that feminism
offered, my delight and activist passion had often been accompanied by a
shadowy, unformed anxiety: “But there is something wrong with women. There
is something distasteful about them (us).”
For example, armored by feminism as I supposedly was, I could still find
myself: in a magazine store, exclaiming with enthusiasm to my lover about some
article I had found, “Hey, look at this,” and crumbling entirely at his
ordinary/extraordinary answer: “Don’t give me orders!” Why was I ashamed by
his absurd response? After all, I had been merely lively, active, reaching out with
a peremptory confidence for friendly company. In fact, I would never have had
the nerve—had I had the desire—to boss. Yet nothing felt more familiar than
this shame, this cowed acceptance of the fact that my lover—and by extension,
men in general—found my energy unseemly and overwhelming. Feminism, so
hopeful and Utopian, had made promises of transformation through the exercise
of nineteenth-century virtues like knowledge and will and effort. Meanwhile,
little daily episodes like the one in the magazine store were wearing me down
and crippling my new feminist resistance.
To my amazement and deep relief, Dorothy Dinnerstein had written about
what I wordlessly felt: “The stone walls that activism runs into have buried
foundations.” The book offered a full anatomy of the men who run the world yet
fuss like threatened children when women with less worldly power say “Boo.”
Such men, she argues, are continuing their endless acts of separation from the
ruler of their infancy, mother. Women, too, are complicit in the daily injustices
they suffer since they, too, distrust the mother in themselves.
Dinnerstein offered a subtle, revealing account of the deals men and women
have traditionally struck with each other, including what was for me the first
intelligible, usable explanation for women’s shamed acquiescence in male
power, and our ambivalence about our own uses of force. She saw the female
monopoly of infant care as decisive in all the gender asymmetry of social life
that follows. It is a woman who introduces us to the world before we can
recognize her as a limited, mortal being like ourselves. Struggling out from
under the control of this first alluring, seemingly all-powerful person is the
biggest fight we ever fight. Exhausted, we fling ourselves out of the sea full of
mermaids onto the dry land of minotaurs who roar and strut but who nonetheless
seem much more tamable and rational in contrast to the mother still stalking in
an infantile layer of our personality.
Dinnerstein argues that male power in the public sphere feels right, even when
terrible; at least male tyranny stands on the firm ground of adult mastery and
will; at least it seems solid in its denial of absurdity, limitation, and death. For
the most part, public projects are carried on without the constant modifying
influence of doubts. One boldly builds the bomb; one doesn’t let anxiety about
how to stow radioactive garbage slow one down. Worrying about the waste
products of human efforts is somebody else’s job, and that irritating, nagging
somebody is a woman. (“Don’t give me orders!”) In spite of feminism’s
extraordinary energy and collective will, which did indeed change so much,
hatred and fear of women is entrenched, pervasive within us as well as without.
The Mermaid and The Minotaur didn’t rescue me from this fact, or from my
vulnerability to policing by men, but Dinnersteinian knowledge shifted the