The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

ANTIFEMINISM AND SEX REFORM
My lady once leapt sudden from the bed,
Whereon she naked lay beside my heart,
And stood with perfect poise, straight legs apart,
And then from clustered hair of brownish red
A wondrous fountain curve, all shyness fled,
Arched like a liquid rainbow in the air,
She cares not, she, what other women care,
But gazed as it fell and faltered and was shed. 13
Ellis pronounced that aggression was an innate part of sexuality.
This is an idea that dies hard. It is a crucial motif of that bible
of the most recent wave of the ‘sexual revolution’, Alex Comfort’s
Joy of Sex (1973). Comfort quotes Ellis in the ‘bondage’ section
of the book which seeks to reassure women that being tied up
and gagged for a man’s sexual pleasure is a normal enjoyable
part of sexual interaction: ‘Any restraint upon muscular and
emotional activity generally’, wrote Havelock Ellis, ‘tends to
heighten the state of sexual excitement.’ 14 Ellis stated that it
was almost or quite normal for men to take pleasure in inflicting
pain upon women, and ‘certainly normal’ for women to delight
in experiencing pain:
While in men it is possible to trace a tendency to inflict pain,
or the simulacrum of pain, on the women they love, it is still
easier to trace in women a delight in experiencing physical
pain when inflicted by a lover, and an eagerness to accept
submission to his will. Such a tendency is certainly normal. 15
The examples he gave to support the idea that women enjoyed
receiving pain included cases of women enjoying, according to
Ellis, being battered by their husbands in Russia, Hungary,
amongst the Indians of South America and in the East End of
London, along with cases of French prostitutes who ‘enjoyed’
being beaten up by their pimps.
Ellis’s conclusions did not go unchallenged. He explained
that he was able to write in such detail about women’s feelings
because so many women were in correspondence with him telling
him precisely what they felt. The women who wrote to him
were representative of women in general, he said, unlike the
women who wrote books, who were not. He quotes copiously
from his women correspondents and on one occasion from one
who plainly disagreed. She admitted to masochistic fantasies
but asserted that the idea of pain was very different from its
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