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Femmes Fatales and Male Supremacy: A Meditation on Evil Sisters
Bram Dijkstra. Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and the Cult of Manhood. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. 480 pages, illustrations, bibliography, index, illustrations credits, $30.00

Kenneth Alan Adams
The Journal of Psychohistory V. 25, N. 4, Spring 1998

"There are women - strongly passionate and often diseased - who - are endowed with strong animal nnatures, who, when they marry, in the intense exercise of their lustful natures, soon reduce the husband to a standard that physically and mentally places him below the brute, and long before the fulfillment of his just allotment of time on earth, he dies.when such cases, at the last day, come before the bar of judgment, it will be found that these premature deaths were murders, and that these sensualists were murders.
- John Cowan, The Science of a New Life, 1880, p. 104

Bram Dijstra's remarkable book, Evil Sisters, which takes as its task an examination of the social matrix which spawned the notion of women as femmes fatales as illustrated above, merits the attention of psychohistorians in general, and especially those concerned with the analysis of group-fantasy, gender, sexuality, racism, fascism, and popular culture. Other scholars have detailed the sexual notions and practices that were pervasive in American culture around the turn of the century, but impressive as these efforts have been,1 they do not achieve the scope, cohesion, or authority of Dijkstra's present work. From an examination of Theda Bara's illustrious debut in 1916 as the vampire in A Fool There Was, to meditations on the symbolic significance of semen; the theory of dimorphic gender evolution and manhood; the equation of blood and seme;, the connection of the female vampire to Africa; the seminal economy and spermatophagy; racism and socialism; the sexual woman and her Communist, Jewish, and Asian allies; the significance of Hollywood as modern myth-maker; scientific sexism; racism and inequality; and genocide as gynecide, Dijkstra's research is a fascinating, insightful, and challenging analysis of early twentieth-century American culture which demonstrates the significance of group-fantasies for understanding the American experience. Throughout mainstream culture women were portrayed as vampires and man-killers, as the evil other. Unless females were controlled, authorities from all walks of life predicted that progress would cease and society would revert to barbarism. These fantasies about women and their centrality to social functioning are the stuff of which this history is made, but Dijkstra intends more than an insightful look at a bygone era.

The world of Victorian America is still evident today, though perhaps turned inside out, as we approach the new millennium. Reality seems eerily like a kinky rewind of the herky-jerky images of a silent movie. In fact, although Dijkstra's purpose in writing Evil Sisters is to cast out the demons of our past, he recognizes the extent to which the ghosts of America past still haunt America present and future.

EROTO-MANIA IN FIN-DE-SIECLE AMERICA

The effect of reading Evil Sisters and living in contemporary America is not unlike immersion into a bizarre American Dream concocted by Mad Magazine, Herbert Spencer, Otto Weinberger, and Bram Stoker. Confabulated images of torch-lit, hooded klansmen appear, and melt and meld into Gustav Le Bon, Cesare Lombroso, and Adolf Hitler. To the strains of "Stars and Stripes Forever,Ó William Graham Sumner, the father of liberal American sociology, thunders that "the dogma that all men are equal is the most immoral doctrine which men have ever believed." The Founding Fathers could not agree more and join anthropologists and economists as they goose-step to "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" - in three-fifths time. Sociologists Lester Ward, Emile Durkheim, and E. A. Ross prattle about a master race, and Dear Abby wannabees warn of the dangers of "woman rule,Ó miscegenation, gender dimorphism, and devolution, even as scientists in Europe and America study brain size, sex, and race and declare victory for light-skinned males. "All men are created equal with certain inalienable rights" runs the pre-rap rap, but foolish women - "a rag and a bone and a hank of hair" - and nonwhites - atavistic Africans, reptilian Asians, and parasitic Jews - need not apply. Meanwhile, Freud and his disciples enslave the women in sinister jewel boxes and congratulate themselves with phallic cigars, only to transmute into fascist storm troopers. William Faulkner's Temple Drake, H. Rider Haggard's She Who Must Be Obeyed, Edgar Rice Burrough's La, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gloria, and Ernest Hemingway's Brett Ashley dance in a chorus line, howling serpentine semen hymns and avaricious anthems to the beat of "I Can't Get No Satisfaction," while Wall Street's preferences lean toward a Victorian Cabaret and Joel Grey's "Money Makes the World Go Around." Ezra Pound informs Havelock Ellis that the "brain isÉonly a sort of genital fluid" and economic theorists equate semen with dollars and fret about the downward trend of the "seminal economy" resulting from woman's sexual and economic vampirism.

Ghoulish images of woman proliferate - as serpent queen, black widow, praying mantis, tiger woman, dragon lady - as evil, the bloodsucker, "the dark, spawning womb" from which all curses and blessings flow. Georgia O'Keeffe's erotic flowers transmogrify into cannibalistic plants, and genetics discovers laws of nature that prove male traits dominant, female traits recessive, and the evolutionary necessity of denying sexual favors to females. Save the sap. Panic lurks in bedrooms and boardrooms over fears of male degeneration and economic exhaustion as "vamps," "gold-diggers," feminists, the "black mob," the "yellow peril," and the "red hordes" ascend society's rungs and, like the alien bugs led by the phallic female mind-vampire in today's Starship Troopers, storm the barricades of the nation's psyche. Jews and phallic women prowl the modern Sodom and Gomorrah - Hollywood - and, as predatory career women absorb men's vital fluid in non-procreative, pleasurable sexuality - growing stronger and more dangerous as they, in monstrous parody of the infant at breast, consume male essence - the battle of the sexes turns into chromosomal warfare. Supermen build muscles and de-emphasize their "manhood," Tarzan takes to the trees, Ellsworth Huntington of Yale tries to reassure the unenlightened but frightened that feminism is a form of autogynecide, Nazism and the KKK and racism and hopes for oodles of dumb blonde noodles are on the rise, and every mother's son is enamored of profits and terrified of passion.

"W-O-M-A-N" is feared as Sexual Vampire, as "Feminine Masculinism," - the Phallic Female - as the Alien Other, the Biological Atavism incarnating the terror of the African and the Asian and the Jew. This is WOMAN as the Destroyer of man, WOMAN as Consumer of life and dollars, WOMAN as the great Social Leveler, as the lurking horror of Socialism, as the Retrograde Force opposing evolution and progress, as Reversion and Regression, the Biological Constraint imprisoning the species - WOMAN as the Epitome of all that is Evvil, as WAR, as DEATH, stalking lower case modern man, who, through will, effort, intelligence, and proficiency in keeping fly zipped, represents the last hope for a better world against the rising tide of socialism, femininism, woman rule, and degeneration.

Fears of women, vampires, Jews, aliens, Asians, and blood poisoning anthropomorphize into the Vagina Dentata, an antique but timeless Pussy Galore, who inspires the cult of manhood to "just say no. Social Darwinism, Economic Imperialism, and Rugged Individualism - the secular, semen-conserving, Trinity - call the shots in life, but anxieties of cannibal intercourse terrify athletic Aryan males, who, as females grow stronger, follow Knute Rockne and the Gipper and play more football. Terror stalks the land of the free and the home of the brave as former Boy Scouts are terrorized by the possibility of too much ejaculation. It is as if H. L. Mencken, Dr. John Cowan, Augustus Kingsley Gardner, M.D., and American males en mass join with Thomas Mann to whine, "WHAT am I suffering from?" And the answer from the economic oracle is, "Sexuality. "It's the sex, stupid!"

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER:
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

As the twentieth century began, social Darwinism was the dominant intellectual perspective. Based on values that emphasized rugged individualism, fierce competition, free enterprise, imperialism, progress through war, and repression, it maintained that social inequality between men and women and among the races was essential for evolution and was morally irreproachable. The struggle to survive had led to differential results in homo sapiens. Males and females were dissimilar (dimorphic gender evolution). Males were superior because of their greater intelligence; females and non-whites were inferior because biology defined them. Evolution had surmounted biology through male will power and attained an intellectual and spiritual level in elite white males whose brains were storehouses of the soul, dynamos for further evolution, and portals to immortality. Women and nonwhite races, as embodiments of mere biology, represented, at best, the status quo; at worst, regression and degeneration. The proof of an evolved brain and moral worthiness was wealth; poverty was indicative of moral inferiority. Equality and generosity were considered immoral since they undermined the struggle for survival by making possible the survival of the unfit. Evolution was harsh but fair. It required the extermination and enslavement of the masses, whose sloth, sexuality, and stupidity constituted an impediment and threat to continued progress. The price of evolution was self control. This was especially true of sexuality.

The greatest threat to male supremacy, white domination, continued evolution, morality, and the status quo was women. Intellectuals, physicians, scientists, artists, and writers described them as literal vampires who lured men into non-reproductive eroto-mania. The problem with women and non-white races as well was "sex-vice,Ó the enjoyment of non-procreative sexuality. The natural tendency of both women and non-whites was toward sexual promiscuity. This was suicidal from an evolutionary perspective. Semen was understood to be the vital essence of evolution and male supremacy. It was believed that the brain was composed of congealed semen, and semen was conceptualized as the generative force driving social development, literally the vital essence of civilized existence. As the pure extract of blood, semen was the elixir of life. Since it was assumed that males have a finite amount of semen, they must not waste it. Beautiful women whose seductiveness lured men into frequent sexual intercourse were therefore unspeakably dangerous. Such women drained men of their life, their semen, and in so doing were expropriating the precious concentrate of male blood, brains, and virility. By draining men of semen, women thereby destroyed capitalism and society, since both were dependent on seminal accumulation as the means for the evolution of brain power, capital investment and prudent management.

In contrast to men, women's vital essence was stunted by menstruation and inefficient production, and consequently women's mentality was inferior. Women seduced men to get what they lacked - semen - which was absorbed by the wombb and acted as a nutrient. Men's blood, as semen, was food for women. Men were food for women. Women were deadly therefore because of their longing to devour men, to appropriate their semen, to eat them alive with their vagina dentata (spermatophagy).

What was perhaps even more terrible was that, while the sexual cravings of women could lead to the depletion and death of men, at the same time women would grow stronger by absorbing male vital essence in the womb. The possibility that the evolutionary balance of power between the sexes might be tipped in favor of women through vampiric intercourse was uncanny. Predators of male life, women were inherently evil.

The battle of the sexes was the gist of evolution, and for progress to continue, males must continue to exercise will power and continue to dominate women. The marital subjugation of women had been the greatest achievement in history since it transformed woman-rule (matriarchy) with its degenerate emphases on egalitarianism, socialist altruism, and sex-vice into male rule (patriarchy), inequality, competitive individualism, and seminal continence. At bottom, women were synonymous with nature, and nature at its most primitive was synonymous with Africa. The image of woman as a vampire, or praying mantis, or black widow spider was ultimately, therefore, woman as the womb of Africa - that is, as ravenous hunger and primitive promiscuity personified. Sexual promiscuity in women would lead to mongrelization of the race since they would absorb the semen of degenerates during licentious intercourse. The Black Menace, the Yellow Peril, and the Leering Jew - all were the creation of the African womb; all were instances of biological limitation and the threat of degeneration and reversion to more primitive biological states; and all would utilize miscegenation and sexual pollution as the means to world conquest. Woman thus constituted the greatest threat to male domination, since it was through her enticements and because of her promiscuity that the rule of patriarchy might be subverted. So great was the danger that only the cleansing fire of mass exterminations would decontaminate the world of their filth and end the possibility of biological reversion. Gynecide must inevitably include genocide, the two were inalterably linked.

BRAVO, BUT

Evil Sisters is a tour de force through America as Tinseltown Transylvania. Dijkstra goes to extraordinary lengths to document his argument. The group-fantasy of the woman as omnivorous vampire/vagina dentata and the permutations into the seminal economy, sexism, racism, nazism, and socialism are traced in great breadth and depth: through movies such as A Fool There Was, The Birth of a Nation, Dracula, Intolerance, Manslaughter, Nosferatu, Pandora's Box, and The Sheik; through the work of directors such as Josef von Sternberg, G. W. Pabst, F. W. Murnaw, Fritz Lang, D. W. Griffith, Cecile B. de Mille, and actresses such as Theda Bara, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong; through science fiction such as Amazing Stories, A. Merrit's Fantasy Magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, Weird Tales, and sci fi authors such as Philip Jose Farmer and Jack Williamson; through literature by Porter Emerson Browne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert W. Chambers, Francis Marion Crawford, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, H. Ryder Haggard, Ernest Hemingway, Sax Rohmer, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Oscar Wilde; through the work of physicians such as John Cowan, Augustus Kingsley Gardner, Arabella Kenealy, Th. H. van de Velde, George Voronoff, and O. A. Wall; through the psychoanalytic theories of Freud, Jung, Erich Neumann, and Otto Weininger; through sociological and anthropological theorizing by Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner, Emile Durkheim, Gustave Le Bon, Thorstein Veblen, E. A. Ross, Ernest Cawley, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Sir James George Frazer; through the poetry and ruminations of Rudyard Kipling, Ezra Pound, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and William Carlos Williams and the ideas of academics such as Edward M. East, Remy de Gourment, Ellsworth Huntington, and David Starr Jordan; through the race theories of Madison Grant, Adolf Hitler, and Lothrop Stoddard; and through the art and sculpture of Rolf Armstrong, Margaret Brundage, Philip Burne-Jones, C. Allan Gilbert, Hugo Hoppener, Gustav Klimt, Alois Kolb, Alfred Kubin, Arthur Lange, Frank R. Paul, Auguste Rodin, Franz von Stuck, publicity stills, film stills, handbills, Life Magazine, and Look Magazine. The source material is mountainous, though without footnotes, and the coordination with illustrations is superb. Together, they amply document the notion of history as nightmare. The argument that mainstream culture feared women and saw them as the enemy of civilization is utterly convincing. Both women and nonwhites were viewed as degenerate and dangerous, and as time progressed, the rhetoric of the attacks on them escalated. Hitler's final solution was thus only a small step for man, not a giant leap, and one that many others of his generation on both sides of the ocean had prepared and were themselves close to taking.

Dijkstra's treatment of the metaphoric stereotypes of women is convincing but his argument arrives at its conclusions by a different route than that usually trod by psychohistorians. Instead of treating the media as a mirror that reflects the nightmares, anxieties, ambivalence, and symbolic forms that are the residue of the mode of childrearing that characterizes a particular psychoclass, Dijkstra explores the institutional and ideological elaborations of group-fantasies. The metaphors that fascinate psychohistorians as exemplars of the unconscious are analyzed as conscious components of a bygone ideology that contemporary science has long ago debunked. Dijkstra is doubtless correct in his dissection, but he does not deal with the origin of the fantasies he so ably describes. The media, psychoanalysis, and the culture are excoriated for continuing to portray women in stereotypes that diminish their humanity and are predicated on an ethnocentric, sexist, racist, and imperialistic world view, but no origin for the fantasies is specified, other than the argument that they are the past speculations of misguided, misogynistic males. The suggestion that these media metaphors might function as a mirror, reflecting the anxieties, ambivalence, and symbolic forms of the mode of childrearing characteristic of a given psychoclass would not likely be welcomed; nor would the suggestion that these metaphors are indicative of unconscious conflicts associated with early stages of psychosexual and psychosocial development; nor would the suggestion that these media images might be analyzed as group-fantasies that reveal in their coded language other truths that may be unspeakable in more formalized language.2 This is an intellectual history that rises to the level of psychohistory, all the while pummeling Freud and ridiculing the notion of the unconscious in history. In so doing, Dijkstra is as much a product of the history of his day as Freud was of his.

These matters, though important, are for another time, however. Dijkstra has written a magnificent book that illuminates an era of our shared existence that deserves to be widely read and widely applauded. Evil Sisters is a bravura performance.

Kenneth Alan Adams is a Contributing Editor to the Journal and has done research on popular culture in the United States and Japan.

1. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, for the exceptional precursor to the present work. Both are based on the compelling work of G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. See also Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1979; John S. Haller and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977; and Ronald G. Walters, ed., Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

2. For an exceptional example of research that conceptualizes the metaphors of mythology as illustrative of childhood experiences, see Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. For a similar perspective that deals with America, see Kenneth Alan Adams, "Arachnophobia: Love American Style, Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 1981 (vol. 4, no.2): 157-97; "Love American Style: Octopoid Genitality and the Medusal Madonna,' Journal of Psychohistory, 1983 (vol. 10, no. 4): 409-63; "The Greatest American Hero: Ego Ideals and Familial Experiences, Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 1983 (vol. 6, no. 4): 345-413; "Man Eater: The "Where's the Rest of Me?' for the Rest of Us," Journal of Psychohistory, 1984 (vol. 12, no 1): 23-36.

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