SEX AS GRIEVANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 781, 9 July 1954, Page 13

SEX AS GRIEVANCE

ADAM'S RIB, by Josephine Langstaff; Allen and Unwin, English price 10/6." ‘THis American book is subtitled "A '". Defence of Women’s Sexuality"; it is far more a frontal assault on the male. While, on the one hand, any girl who does not thoroughly enjoy herself is in for a frightful wigging from headmistress Langstaff, on the other, men are in any case the targets for an invective whose psychological origins are labelled plainly enough by the author herself. Her thesis is that it is only because of education and social pressure (in a man’s world) that women are the passive partners. "No greater danger to satisfactory adjustment for women exists than the pervasive social view that women are automatically dependent on the motor activities of men." If women had their rights, every day would (continued on next page)

BOOKS (continued from previous page) be Leap Year. Women indeed can do all that men can do and bear children too. The book is highly "scientific" and full of informative titbits that are of unfailing interest to a layman-or ought I to say laywoman? As a man I hide my head from the Langstaff brickbats (all distressingly well-aimed) and can come up only with the feeble riposte, "Ya! Envy of the male!" It is a disappointment to me personally that the learned author is preoccupied with sex as mechanism and sex as grievance, and does not examine sex as comedywhich provides the overwhelming proportion of novels with their raison d’étre. The age-old problem of why John loves Myrtle and sees nothing in Marian, who loves him, while Myrtle loves Edgar, who flings himself at the feet of Barbara, who loves only Ernest -and so on, ad infinitum. And yet, in spite of all this (and of Josephine Langstaff) happy marriages do occasionally

occur.

David

Hall