Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Tess of the D’Urbervilles 237
Parade of Pleasure, tried to show that the size of women’s breasts in
America of the early fifties followed fantasy rather then function
(receiving ultimate reductio in the early pages of Playboy). Women
have simply been assigned subordinate physique-roles for so long.
Lady athletes in the last Olympics, one dating a steady boyfriend,
were surprised and indignant to find themselves reclassified males
(sometimes on the mere basis of testes concealed in the labia major).
Such sex tests indeed provoked one British doctor to declare, in 1966,
‘There is no definite line between male and female.’
Margaret Mead had told us this years ago, showing how certain
societies institutionalize types and traits in both men and women:
‘No culture has failed to seize upon the conspicuous facts
of age and sex in some way, whether it be the convention of
one Philippine tribe that no man can keep a secret, the Manus’
assumption that only men enjoy playing with babies, the
Toda prescription of almost all domestic work as too sacred
for women, or the Arapesh insistence that women’s heads
are stronger than men’s. In the division of labour, in dress,
in manners, in social and religious functioning—sometimes
in only a few of these respects, sometimes in all—men and
women are socially differentiated and each sex, as a sex,
forced to conform to the role assigned to it. In some societies,
these socially defined roles are mainly expressed in dress or
occupation with no insistence upon innate temperamental
differences.’ 14
In her valuable Adam’s Rib Ruth Herschberger starts off with a
denunciatory dissection—indeed a ‘ribbing’—of the famous findings
made by Robert M. Yerkes with his Yale chimpanzees, on which so
many ‘norms’ of male dominance have been based, norms already
intentionally present in the all-too-male experimenters—desiderata.
Female chimps of the same weight as male seem to be far more
aggressive in almost every activity, including and especially mating:
‘If a mother discovers her young son and daughter
wrestling, she usually feels there is something vaguely indecent
about it. Even though the little girl may on this occasion have
established a half-nelson and be about to pin her brother to