The seventh issue of Vestoj, ‘On Masculinities,’ will be in stores this month. In introduction, Vestoj Online is publishing a series of articles on the theme.
IN COUNTRIES CIVILISED ACCORDING to the current industrial commercial idea of civilisation, while women flaunt their sexual attractiveness on all occasions, men do exactly the opposite. Sex in civilised man is signified solely by a certain kind of clothes, and he does his best to suppress all appearance of his maleness of body. Men’s clothes are simply a more or less convenient covering, convenient for the job of being a clerk in an office, a covering to obscure all his animal nature – there is no use for such in the city. But sex in civilised women is not signified simply by clothes of a conventional kind. We do not say: Look, there goes a woman; you can tell by her skirt. We know her for a woman by the shape of her legs, the roundness of her croup and by the protuberance of her bosom. A woman dressed in men’s clothes has no such opportunities for exposition, and a man in his own clothes is as much sexless as possible. He shaves his face so that, if he be young & fair, you’d not know but that he might be a girl, and any protuberance by which his sex might be known is carefully and shamefully suppressed. It is an organ of drainage and not of sex. It is tucked away and all sideway dishonoured, neglected, ridiculed and ridiculous – no longer the virile member and man’s most precious ornament, but the comic member, a thing for girls to giggle about – comic and, to nursemaids, dirty. ‘You dirty little boy, put it away.’
This matter is not only to be seen with eyes fixed on England; it has world-wide importance. In England we are told that, in spite of the fact that more boys are born than girls, there are a million or so more women than men of marriageable age; and doubtless, whether they are aware of it or not, this fact, this condition, has something to do with the present exhibitionism of women of all classes. A million or more of them cannot possibly marry – as marriage is understood in our erstwhile Christian and still largely Christianesque society. They must do something about it. The wiles, the not very wiley wiles, of the professional prostitute must be used – scents, paint, closely clothed hips and croups, a swaying walk, immense care of the face and hair, short skirts in the street, diaphanous clinging drapes in the evening, bare backs and chests, such tricks all help to influence the suppressed and inflammable male, but it is probable that, were the numbers of the sexes reversed, we should see a notable change. If men were in the majority – assuming for the moment that they were not only in the majority but also physically exuberant and economically sure of themselves and not, as they now are, mere worms crawling for the crumbs which fall from the industrial table – then we should probably see women return to modesty. They would in practice be forced to do so, in self-defence. They would become dear instead of cheap. They would be better able to choose a mate, and would hide their charms from all but the chosen, if only to avoid being pestered by the importunities of the million unsatisfied males.
Doubtless the proportions to one another of the numbers of men and women have a considerable if unconsidered influence on clothes. But the matter goes much deeper than that. It is not merely that there are more females than males and that therefore women are cheap and must advertise. It is that the spirit and nature of industrial commercial civilisations effects a profound change in the quality of sex itself. It turns men into women. It does not physically emasculate them but it causes in them a feminine cast of mind. It does not, on the other hand, turn women into men. It has no need of men at all, and it has a progressively lessening need of women themselves – women as mothers, woman as breeders, woman as woman. The hard business woman of Paris, of the French peasantry, of the small shop, is the ideal type of the commercial industrial male, She can drive as hard a bargain as any man and protect her ‘little pile’ against all comers.
And the artist type of man is, for the same reasons, most detestable and reprobate. For the artist, fool as he has become and lap-dog, represents the normal man, the normal workman, the workman who is responsible for what he makes; the craftsman, if you prefer to call him that, the person who designs what he makes and makes what he designs, for his own personal customers, whose work is his life. What possible harmony can there be between such a one and a factory-owner or a store-keeper or a stockbroker or a banker? And the artist man is not only typical of the unindustrialised worker, he is also the type of the male creature. The inventive creative mind is the male mind. Hence the sympathy between poets and soldiers – the old kind of soldiers, those who fought with sword and spears, and not the new kind who fight with bombs and poisons. For to create carries with it the implication of defence, & Nietzsche’s saying: ‘Let your work be a fight, your peace a victory’ was the saying of one who was as much a poet as a philosopher. Poet, fighter – they are much the same, if by fighting you mean fighting and not merely throwing poisons about. Poets, fighters, whether with sword or pen, such are the types of maleness, virility – actual physical maleness and not a metaphorical taradiddle. And what have such activities to do with industrialism but to destroy it? What possible friendship can there be between poetry and ‘big business’ and what alliance between soldiering and the fatuous business of buying stocks and shares for ‘a rise’?
Hence it is that in a world devoted to commerce, trading, shop-keeping, money-making, the male creature is under eclipse. He is not wanted, and a premium is put upon the rabbit type, the kind that sees nothing wrong in travelling in a tube to and from the city where, cooped up in burrows, they scuffle and scoop and nibble and grab for little profits and ‘quick returns’, where the highest ambition is to make lots of money, by means proper to tricksters & card sharpers (always remembering that ‘honesty is the best policy’ and that the only sin is being found out), and thus gain the extraordinarily not-worth-having power of being able to buy large quantities of things, food, clothing, houses, cars & amusements provided by people who regard such things as the rabbit man himself does, simply as so many means of making money to be spent in similar ways – all men more or less cheating and scrounging and wangling and grabbing and grasping as performed by others – the baker baking inferior commercial bread in order to make money to buy the inferior bread of other commercial bakers. No wonder they dress him in trousers and tie up his maleness all crushed and sideways and tell him it’s dirty. The world of men of business is a world of men become female – getting and spending, a housekeeping business, a business of making food go round & jealousy of neighbours. And instead of the more or less holy motive of providing necessities for your own husband and children, your own flesh and blood, it becomes an unholy scramble of impersonal production, merely ‘goods’ in account books, and as the ‘balance sheets’ in the final arbiter of success, so the financier, moneylender, banker is the ultimate ruler. And the banker, however much morally he may resemble a robber, and enjoy the title of baron – baron this, lord the other – is not like the old kind of ‘robber baron.’ He is no fighting man. He hides behind the police and the soldiers & pays them to fight for him. He is no tyranny to be overthrown by force. He rules in the mind. His kingdom is the souls of men, men who worship money and profits, and getting and spending, and insurance and ‘capital appreciation.’
But there are limits to profitable individualism. ‘The weak in courage is strong in cunning.’ Hence the development of trusts and combines and mergers and cartels. And then the war of greed and grab continues on a larger scale. Where formerly there were merely local rivalries between local shop keepers & attempts to corner local markets, now there are international rivalries and the scuffle and scoop and nibble and grab is transferred on to the high-sounding plane of foreign politics, and behind the chairs of those we call statesmen are the sinister figures of the agents of world-wide commercial corporations. And wars, which in earlier times were dynastic or racial or religious, and essentially male in character, are now only camouflaged by false propaganda and advertisement made out to be such, for religion and race, ‘king and country’ are still the only war motives with any ‘glory’ attached to them, and glory is still the only real incentive to the undertaking of a thing which of its nature involves sufferings & devastations so horrible. But commercially inspired wars are not only inglorious, they are also both feminine and inhuman in character – feminine because they are in essence wars between rival boarding-house keepers, inhuman because they are no longer fights between men, hand to hand, muscle to muscle, will to will, sword to sword, and wars conducted according to that most male of all human contrivances, the rule of honour; ‘playing the game’ and the laws of civilised warfare. Honour has now become absurd, and so war has become as obscene and non-moral and as inhuman as a fight between rival ant-heaps. And we employ the same technique, burrowing and worming in the ground, and poisons and gases. And so modern war takes on the full character of modern life, the commercially inspired life of the modern world, the industrial world, the machine, mass production world, the world of the factory. The factory! The factory filled with young women and girls, because the things made in factories are made by the machines, and minding machines is not only a job women can do, & cheaper than men, but a job they do better because they like doing it. And they like factory life, the routine and the chatter and the escape from the home in the slum, the home no longer honoured, the home in which children are a disaster & men are ridiculous, sheep, rabbits, worms, and clothing to match, with the appetites of he-goats and their women find them almost as nasty. What’s the sense of a lusty young man in a slum or in a model dwelling or in a ‘working-class flat’? What’s the good of a handle to your belly in Burnley or Preston or Limehouse or Leeds? – no more good than hands on your arms or brains in your skull. There is no real use for such things in a world turned female – food, clothing and shelter and finery and frivolity, what else is there need for?
And as a clear indication of the connection between all these things and clothes, between this economics and politics, these machines and these factories, and the outward appearance of men and women, it is significant that all those countries which have accepted what are called Western ideas and Western civilisation have also Western dress. There are no exceptions. The things go inseparably together. Whether or no we fabricate any theories about this, the facts are sufficiently striking – the mere obvious, visible facts. What does industrialisation mean for men’s work? It means the destruction of the small independent craftsman, the man depending upon his own initiative, invention, courage and responsibility. The craftsman becomes intellectually irresponsible, his imagination withers, he loses pride in himself. His work no longer demands either bodily or intellectual vigour. He takes to cheap ready-made coats and collars and ties. He puts on a billy-cock hat – in some countries (Persia for example) he is compelled to do so by law and police. He wears trousers. In a word, he throws away his robes, the robes of his ancestors and puts on machine-made, ready-made upholstery. He is pleased to do so. He now feels civilised. He has joined the great army of money makers, the factory gadgets and sanitary conveniences are now his own. He wears the uniform that goes with them. And the women! In the case of the women even more striking results are to be seen. The modesty and decorum proper to people who know their importance and the importance and fragility of their precious and desirable bodies is gone – gone like a house of cards, like a smashed bubble, no memory left. Gone is the ancient dignity of shawls and veils; and instead, in Constantinople, in Cairo, in Jerusalem, to in Tokio, in Peking, in India – wherever the Western world is worshipped and its industrialism imitated – we have the whole cheap paraphernalia and frippery of Manchester, London, Paris and Monte Carlo, the semi-nudity, the cheap silk, the lipstick and paint, the beach pyjama, the whole caboodle of female exhibitionism. The sexes are reversed. The male becomes the modest sex, the female the immodest. And why not? The man is now ashamed – though not yet always consciously and statedly so. He is no longer the fighter, whether with sword or hammer. At the best he is ‘in work’ and can pay the rent and the grocer; an employee, a wage slave. And as to his sex, perhaps the most common and frequent exercise of it is in the dark with contraceptives – masturbation a deux, whether married or single. The man is ashamed; there is nothing left for him to be proud of. He is a worm and no man.
But for the woman it is different. She is now emancipated.’ She has thrown off the shackles. She has become a worker.’ And this has become possible, not because women have gained the imagination & responsibility & initiative of the men of old time, not because they can now do the work men formerly did, but because the work men formerly did has been done away. It is no longer wanted. The whole world of work has been reduced to the level of female accomplishment. Women make good wage slaves. They are quite conscientious about it. They feel that they have come into their own. Getting and spending is their business and now the world is nothing else but getting and spending and men have indeed laid waste their powers. Hence the immense enthusiasm among the women of Russia. The Communist state, if such it can be called, is the matriarchy by right. It is the essentially female thing. The dregs of maleness which so sadly mar the capitalist world have been abolished in it – the captain of industry with his almost warlike pride in his avarice – ‘butter kings’ (kings, mark you!), ‘iron kings,’ ‘princes of commerce,’ the strike, the lockout – these things have no place in the well-run female world of machine production – the machine production of the necessary things, that is to say the things for which and about which and in which men formerly fought.
But the fighting decayed, it was corrupted by commerce, degraded by the world of the merchants and financiers which had destroyed that of the kings and princes. That’s where they got their jargon from! Who would have thought of calling the biggest purveyor of butter a ‘butter king’ if there had not formerly been kings of men? And how could there have been tariff ‘wars’ if there had not formerly been wars of flesh and blood? But now there are only groceries to squabble about and naturally enough such wars are waged with gas bombs and poisons. The idea of poison is familiar to those who for the sake of gain do not scruple to adulterate food. Hence indeed the matriarchal state – Communist or Fascist, totalitarian or corporative. It is all a matter of more or less efficient housekeeping. The capitalist world is rotten and it is the rot of men. It will be superseded by a world run by women. That is its proper culmination. Women do not object to industrialism, but only to the waste and want which are inseparable from the mad competition of capitalists. They do not object to the machine industry but only to its use as an instrument of money-making. Theirs is a purely quantitative world. Let there be a world of plenty even if it be plenty of second-rate groceries – cheap houses, cheap food, cheap clothes and cheap finery. And let the men, if any remain unemasculate (man, as a popular author puts it, ‘half god, half mischievous prattling child’), let them carry on with their childish games in their leisure hours. Culture and sport will keep them out of mischief – ‘Go on talking, darling.’
The ‘civilised’ man and woman may think, from what I have written, that I am not merely an anti-feminist but a misogynist of a peculiarly vituperative kind. I shall not try to disabuse them – so little good would be done by the attempt. I wish only to record that when I belittle the business man, financier or merchant, stockbroker or clerk, and the wage-slave, factory hand or shop assistant, by calling them emasculate, and when I curse Communist or Fascist states as matriarchies (for the Fascist’s militaristic bombast is only an extension of the business of butter kings, and Fascism and corporativism are no less industrialist and commercial than Communism – they are a grocer’s shop improvement made by the masters instead of by the ‘hands), and when I say industrialism is man turned female, I do not therefore despise either the female or the feminine. But surely this is obvious.
The emasculate man is despicable, but not because he is like a woman. He is not; he is simply a worm. And the industrialised woman is not despicable because she is like a man. She is despicable because she is barren.
***
It may be observed that in the foregoing pages I have written of industrialism and the workers as though masters and managers, directors and share-holders, hardly existed, and the industrial world were inhabited entirely by ‘hands’. I have written of men’s clothes and women’s as though such things as trousers were only worn by wage slaves and lipstick only used by mill girls and drapers’ assistants. In this, doubt-less, I show my obsession. For me, I admit, the world of men is first of all the world of the poor. Think of all the phrases that confirm me! Man, ‘the Son of Man,’ the Poor Man, ‘Masters and men,’ ‘officers and men’ (one loves one’s men’ as the subaltern says – it’s probably in ‘Infantry Training,’ and I dare say they really do; there’s no earthly reason why they shouldn’t; why shouldn’t they?). The army is the men, not the officers. The officers are only men chosen to lead (but the war was won in the trenches, not at G. H.Q. – unless you confirm that it was won on Wall Street – and that’s true too), The Church is the laity, not the clergy. The hierarchy is ordained to lead, to teach, to preach, to sacrifice, but, no less than the laity, it must go to confession. You don’t become more of a soldier by becoming an officer and you don’t become more a Christian by becoming a priest or a preacher. And so, in the everyday world of work, it is the men that matter. The work of the world is the work of the ‘men’ – but the masters, by overthrowing the principles of social justice and making private property an absolute instead of a relative and social right, and the good of the individual more important than the common good, by these doings and other blasphemies the masters have turned the world of men into a likeness of the inhuman world of ants and bees.
How doth the little busy bee
Make profits for his Master
By minding mechanisms which
Go faster still and faster.
Who minds what the masters wear? Let them wear court dress with swords. By so doing they provide at least a laugh. Let them wear the best tailorings of Savile Row and draw dividends from the sale of 50s suits at the same time. Who cares? By all means let wear trousers. Nothing could be more seemly and appropriate. And who minds what fine ladies wear? The fine wives of financiers! Dukes and duchesses are only a name and the trappings of ghosts are like the bridal veils of divorcees.
Perhaps it should also be added. to avoid misunderstanding, that when I said, in the early pages of this essay, that the modern dress of man was such as to suppress his maleness shamefully, I did not intend to imply that it would be a good thing in my opinion if men were to be shamelessly exhibitionist as women are. I do not merely wish to reverse the present situation. I was merely describing the situation with regard to clothes as it actually is. In fact my wish would be, if I had any say in the matter, that both men and women should dress in what are commonly called robes, although the word is a little pompous. Take for example the traditional dress of the Arabs, which they still wear, and compare that way of dressing with that of our medieval ancestors, and note how, even today, European medieval dress still lingers for use on formal occasions – the judge in his court, the priest at the altar, the king on his throne. These clothes which we now regard as being purely conventional and ceremonial are in fact the remains of what were originally the common dress of people in their ordinary lives.
So I am not arguing that women should hide their bodies and men expose them. Rather I am arguing that both men and women should regain their human dignity and dress accordingly. Today, it would seem that we only think of ourselves as a kind of superior animal. We say how convenient such and such clothes are, or how inconvenient, how comfortable or how uncomfortable, healthy or unhealthy. We never say how appropriate or inappropriate, suitable or unsuitable; at any rate such considerations are very much in the background and the chief thing in the minds of those who would reform modern dress are hygiene and functional convenience. The idea that man is a being having intrinsic dignity (child of God, ‘and if child, heir also’) is forgotten. We dress either as fashion demands or imposes (which is largely a matter of salesmanship and advertisement exploiting human vanity) or we dress simply for convenience; as when we wear shorts for cycling, slips for swimming and, strange as it may seem, ‘plus fours’ for golfing. And if I have been at considerable pains to throw contumely upon man’s modern dress and to sneer at its sexlessness, it is not because I wish men to flaunt their maleness as women flaunt their femaleness, but because I consider such clothes unworthy of human beings and derogatory to their male & female natures. The highlander in his kilt (beneath which he is normally naked) is not exposing his sex, but, on the other hand, neither is he dishonouring it.
***
And there is another point upon which it may be well to avoid misunderstanding. I have insisted upon the honour and dignity of maleness and femaleness as such, both physical and psychological. Perhaps I have made it appear that I am urging a clearer and more visible differentiation of the sexes – the man to be on all occasions visibly male and the woman female. There are two things to be considered here. In the first place, inasmuch as all men in commercial industrial countries today wear the coat and trousers, collar and tie of the man of business – kings & shop-walkers, clerks and mechanics all dress in the same uniform except when, on ceremonial occasions, they put on medieval robes – and all women wear some kind of skirt, except when they are engaged in some special occupation for which it is supposed that trousers or breeches are more convenient – aviation, cycling, horse-riding and, on the beach, pyjamas (but this is a sort of swank and indicates not so much a desire to exhibit their emancipation from the femininity of the Victorian fashions) – therefore there can be no possible need to demand any greater visible differentiation between the sexes than we now have. On the contrary, indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, the need today for a much closer approximation in dress as there is, for instance, among the Arabs. However different, sexually speaking, the function from the male is from that of the female – as different as giving and receiving, fertilising and being fertilised – yet, as human beings, there is no such monstrous difference between men and women as modern industrial uniforms suggest. Apart from their organs of sex, men and women are remarkably alike in physiological disposition, & however widely apart they may be psychologically (& there is indeed an impassable gulf between them) there is no justification for dressing the male sex universally in tailor-made trousers, as though man alone had legs and he alone were bound by hard and fast convention, and all women in skirts and ornaments as though woman did not bifurcate and she alone had any need to be pleasing to the eye. In fact the difference between the clothes of men and women in commercial-industrial co unifies is a monstrous absurdity and abnormality. In the second place it is to be remembered that in actual physiology the sexes are not distinct. The virile member itself has its active counterpart in the female clitoris, and these members have at least one function in common. The male breast does not normally give milk, but its nipples are not entirely insensitive. And inasmuch as man is more or less female physically and woman more or less male, so the two sexes are not absolutely differentiated psychologically. The male has no absolute monopoly of sexual initiative – he is not the only one to possess an erectile and therefore provocative member. And so also the female has no absolute monopoly of sexual receptivity. There is fair give and take, and the giving is not entirely on one side and the taking all on the other.
What I have written therefore is not at all a plea for a return (if it would be a return) to primitive or barbaric sexual absolutism. The ideal of the pure male, the ‘he man,’ the man who is all activity, initiative, muscular force and ratiocinativeness is an absurdity. He has never existed and even approximations to him are monstrosities. The ideal of the pure female is likewise ridiculous. The ‘womanly’ woman, the creature who, underneath a man-imposed veneer of romantic modesty and spirituality, is purely instinctive & predatory, has never existed and never will. It is only by way of a joke that the human female is likened to the female spider, and it is only in periods of economic depression or religious eccentricity that the human male is regarded as having no virtues but those of the shire horse, and is therefore thought of as being better kept in stall. This essay is neither a plea for sexual exhibitionism nor sexual absolutism. It is not a plea for anything except a frank recognition of the relation between clothes and civilisation and, above all, a recognition of the fact that our clothes & our commercial-industrialism exactly go together. ‘The soul,’ says the theological philosopher, ‘is the form of the body,’ that is to say the soul is the principle which determines a thing in its species. The soul of the man of business has determined him as a species of machine-trousered animal and the soul of his mate has determined her as an aniline-dyed dancing partner.
What I have written therefore is not at all a plea for a return (if it would be a return) to primitive or barbaric sexual absolutism. The ideal of the pure male, the ‘he man,’ the man who is all activity, initiative, muscular force and ratiocinativeness is an absurdity. He has never existed and even approximations to him are monstrosities. The ideal of the pure female is likewise ridiculous. The ‘womanly’ woman, the creature who, underneath a man-imposed veneer of romantic modesty and spirituality, is purely instinctive & predatory, has never existed and never will. It is only by way of a joke that the human female is likened to the female spider, and it is only in periods of economic depression or religious eccentricity that the human male is regarded as having no virtues but those of the shire horse, and is therefore thought of as being better kept in stall. This essay is neither a plea for sexual exhibitionism nor sexual absolutism. It is not a plea for anything except a frank recognition of the relation between clothes and civilisation and, above all, a recognition of the fact that our clothes & our commercial-industrialism exactly go together. ‘The soul,’ says the theological philosopher, ‘is the form of the body,’ that is to say the soul is the principle which determines a thing in its species. The soul of the man of business has determined him as a species of machine-trousered animal and the soul of his mate has determined her as an aniline-dyed dancing partner.
Eric Gill, born in 1882, was an English artist and craftsman known for his sculpture, engravings and typography (the Gill Sans typeface takes his name). Today, he is a controversial figure, revered for his designs and reviled for the deviant sexual practises which came to light after his death. During his lifetime, Gill was a prolific writer on diverse topics including Christianity, modernity and art. The above essay, originally published in 1937 by Faber & Faber, articulates Gill’s views on the role of clothing in society.