Is Flight of Male From Female Necessary?

By Doris O'Donnell

Debunking the myths that females are demons and witches and indicting males as anxiety-ridden sufferers is not likely to cancel out the age-old battle between the sexes. to lose their virility.

the conclusion that men have drawn a cruelly false image of women. Man has done this, not because he is inherently superior, but because he cannot rid himself of primitive convictions. that women are witches beThese are the hoary old tales that women are witches be-

But H. R. Hayes in The Dangerous Sex: The Myth of Feminine Evil (Putnam's, $5.95) draws the battle lines. He does a probing and scholarly job of tracing the attitudes of the male toward the female through the centuries. If there is any complaint about his book, it is that it lacks statements from the girls on how they Man, the author states feel. has always feared physical HAYS COMES UP, with union with women. Legends

cause

their sexual processes are different.

Mel-

from remote parts of the analytical chapters on the ed. The association between globe record that contact second sex as projected in boys and adult males in this with women will cause men Western literature type of closed society gives evidence, Hays states, of "overt behavior in some culture to underline the homosexual componet in this type of rejection of women.”

All sorts of taboos have

been manufactured to cover the physical relationship between the sexes with much emphasis on the demon-like qualities of women during their menstrual cycles. Folk lore, unearthed by Hays, and bearers of death to men tags women as "unclean" with illness and plagues to animals.

1

THE MOST intriguing parts of Hays' book are

ville, Milton, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Poe, de Sade and

others.

Hays attempts to prove his thesis that the anti-woman

literature is from the pens

of men whose mothers had rejected them, and also that their size and physical char-

acteristics made them impotent.

The homosexual male is traced back to the primitive villages where men's societies and homes were accept-

:

With homosexuality on the

increase, Hays finds the flight of the male from the female not an easy riddle to

solve.

ONE VIEW is that contemporary man is retreating from too many demands made upon his masculinity. The rebellion of the second sex, on the other hand, stems from a need for creative as well as sexual fulfillment.

To counteract the drive of the female, the male who fears "demasculinization by the female or society" can get assurance of his masculinity from another male who like himself is threatened.

Hays thinks today's male must get a new grasp on his masculinity and destroy the myths that women are witches, corrupting him with lustful sex. The old bogeys have to go. It seems like a big order after all these centuries.