Why do mermaids sing? Psychoanalytic reflections on (men’s) misogyny

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot, 1915

With all their disparities, confusions and internal contradictions, Freud’s writings continue to present us both with a re‑affirmation of patriarchal inevitability (especially in the papers of the 1920s) and yet also an incipient critique of masculinist authority (for example in the crucial 1905 text on sexuality). His various iterations of our discipline stand both as the apotheosis of the modern era’s preoccupation with epistemological mastery (think here of the structural-functional theory formulated in the 1920s), and yet are nevertheless the harbinger of postmodern inspiration (from the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams onwards).

Working between the various tensions that occur within the span of Freud’s writings, I want to offer here some preliminary reflections on what psychoanalysis might teach us concretely about the genesis and the perpetuation of men’s misogyny. Here my comments will only be applicable to the otherness of cis‑gendered men and women. It’s beyond the scope of this brief paper to address the anguished play that is at issue in transgender journeys (or to touch on the psychic travails of being born intersex). I have eight brief remarks to offer you.

(i) Three tenets that emerge from psychoanalytic experience:

I shall take for granted that we can agree upon three tenets of psychoanalytic wisdom. First, that attachment always involves the processive management of the emotional forces of both love and hate, that are immixed in every relationship. Second, that in considering the relations between the ‘one’ (for example, the self) and its various ‘others,’ there are crucial distinctions between the forces of envy (in its dyadic destructive mode), of jealousy (in its triadic viciousness), and of benignly wishing. For example, think of the clinical differences between penis-envy, penis-jealousy, and the feeling of simply wishing-for the availability of this potentially playful attribute. Third, that actual lived-experience counts for something psychically, perhaps for everything and especially in its embodied sensuality ― dare we speak of libidinality. (This tenet distances my thinking from that of therapeutic theorists who posit, entirely speculatively, that infants come into the world with a repertoire of substantive phantasies and motivations).

(ii) Anatomy matters:

Exemplified by his 1925 paper, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” Freud tended to emphasize the child’s lived‑experience of genital differences as crucially significant (and to varying degrees, ubiquitously traumatic) in the genesis of neurotic conflicts and characterological formations in adults. Over the past fifty years, this focus has become less discernible in our professional literature ― without any evidence that it has become clinically less salient. This diminution or deflection was perhaps inaugurated by Karen Horney’s early papers that were collected and republished in her famous 1967 book, Feminine Psychology, but it was decisively accelerated by the impact of Judith Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble (as well as her presentations to the American Psychoanalytic Association). In short, we have come to comprehend the performativity of gender and gender roles ― an understanding that is of inestimable clinical value. But perhaps, in a worthy effort to divest ourselves of mistaken essentialism, we have gone too far ― perhaps distracting ourselves from the flesh-and-blood of our bodily experience and our experience of others’ bodies. Without endorsing Freud’s famous but erroneous aphorism that ‘anatomy is destiny,’ I think we should reconsider the clinical significance of the multiple ways in which humans assimilate ― by generating fantasies around ― the physicality of bodily differences.

Nowadays it is politically incorrect to decline the commendable challenge of trying to think beyond binaries. Yet the clinical-empirical fact is that toddlers are quite preoccupied with the anatomical male/female dichotomy and, especially if left to their own devices, abundantly curious about genitals and sex differences as well as ― a little later ― about the mysteries of baby-making. What roles do all the childhood feelings and fantasies around these issues have in generating adult men’s attitudes toward women?

(iii) How developmental thinking can distract from the existential issues in adult psychoanalysis:

Although the comments I am about to make may sound as if they are a developmental sequence, let us keep in mind the enduring reality of the processes of Nachtrāglichkeit, and the way in which every challenge encountered developmentally is done and redone with every phase of life’s journey. Thus, so‑called ‘pre‑oedipal’ conflicts are always recorded exclusively in the context of oedipality and there is no such thing as the manifestation of unreconstructed pre‑oedipal issues in adulthood. And anyway, my concern here is less about the phases of childhood and more about the way childhood conflicts generate men’s hatred of women.

(iv) On the mother’s body and her breasts:

So, let us start with the mother-boy dyad. When a woman gives birth to a girl, she produces from within her a miniature facsimile of her own anatomy. When she births a boy, she produces from within herself an infant endowed with the very apparatus that she does not possess. To many women, this amazes her and also reactivates her earlier ― unconscious ― conflicts. Here is an intergenerational aspect involving both the enigmatic messages and the explicit scripts to which the infant is subjected. Of course, motherhood is one of the ‘impossible professions,’ so we must avoid any whiff of accusation here. However, we cannot avoid thinking about the significance of this estrangement or alienation between the embodiment of the mother and that of the male infant. In her fantasies (and inevitably to some extent in her overt behaviours), a mother may regard her boy-child as representative or emblematic of the phallic side of herself ― this can take the form of a fascination or even adoration in relation to his male apparatus, and/or of revulsion and hostility toward it. The former may result in the boy’s overstimulation, and his attachment to the mother’s body on a path that warps his security in his own embodied experience (and usually contributes to the denigration of bodies that are unlike his, including his mother’s). The latter condemns the boy to genital self-hatred, which often results in a ferocious antagonism toward women. Either way, the boy‑child’s primary narcissism and what the public calls ‘basic self-esteem’ are profoundly affected.

Of course, the infant craves access to the sensuality of the mother’s body. However, given the considerations just mentioned, this is not without a sense of catastrophe or rupture. In the dreams of adult men in psychoanalysis, landscapes and architectural structures often serve as backdrop images of the mother’s body ― this is well known to us as practicing analysts and mentioned in much of the literature. Yet in my experience, there is always an element in the dream which indicates disaster. For one patient, a car-ride through the most luscious countryside, with verdant rolling hills, ended with the car plunging off a ravine. For another, the exploration of a vast and complex set of buildings culminated in a horrifying sense of being lost and alone.

There is also a behavioural and emotional context to all this in terms of the boy-toddler’s separation and individuation in relation to the mother. From the empirical‑developmental literature, we know there to be a slew of evidence that mothers are more likely to push their boy-child toward independence than they are a girl-child. This constitutes a further source of resentment toward the mother’s embodied sensual and emotional being ― a further estrangement or alienation. Despite the vogue for ‘enlightened parenthood,’ it has been empirically documented many times over how boys become less emotionally contextualized and more agential. This surely contributes to male fantasies that the penis is, not just an appendage to be playfully shared, but rather a tool the purpose of which is to do something instrumentally to an ‘other’ ― including wreaking vengeance on the maternal body or its proxies that has caused him distress.

Now we turn from the mother’s body in general to her breasts. That is, the woman’s body not only as a source of sensual pleasure, unpleasure and pain, to which the infant has access or from which he is pushed into separateness. But also the woman’s body as a source of nourishment ― breast milk. The mother gives ― or withholds ― the infant receives. In South Africa, we know daily the complex dynamics between the one who helps and the other who is helped ― attachment and appreciation maybe, attachment and resentment inevitably. The mother has the power to provide sensual affection and nourishment, or to withhold these vital resources. The infant has negligible power.

For men, much of this dynamic is focused on the material reality of the mammary glands and all the fantasies that are thence inspired. There are very few men, straight or gay, who are immune to the provocation of breasts. Appreciation, yes. But also, resentment at their powers to charm, to nourish, and to frustrate. Think here of how many men are regular customers of topless bars where they are entranced by the exposed breasts, but suck only on their bottle of beer (and note in passing how many will go to bars in which the woman retains her panties, but will avoid fully nude establishments … I will return to this shortly when we consider men’s fear of the vulva-vagina).

In a sexuality education group for men that I conducted, Mister A admitted that he loved to caress his partner’s breasts and to please her in this manner, but he also liked to torture them, sometimes using pegs on her nipples until she screamed in pain. In heteroplay, squeezing, pinching or slapping the breasts to the point where the woman is uncomfortable is not uncommon. The medieval practice of torturing women suspected of witchcraft often involved a gruesome procedure of in vivo mastectomy. This is the violence of breast-envy at its extreme. Enough.

Breast-jealousy is also much in evidence. I recall a couple of occasions in which I witnessed social events for six-year-old boys, at which the group became highly excited with an activity in which each put a pair of balloons under their shirts or sweaters to mimic the experience of adult women.

As if miraculously, breasts produce life-giving milk. This inspires men’s jealousy. In this regard, we should note how many men are quite preoccupied with ejaculating in a manner that is visible, often over the breasts of their female partner or into her mouth. My psychoanalytic experience with men’s dreams (in which ejaculation has appeared either in the manifest content or in the associations) suggests that there is an unconsciously fantasied equivalence between semen and breast milk. After all, ejaculate is more or less creamy and life-giving (although only in the most abstract or remote way, since the product, if it arrives at all, will only do so forty weeks later, and anyway will definitely not arrive if the semen is deposited outside the vagina). The eagerness of some men to have their ejaculate orally consumed by their partner also speaks to this fantasied equivalence. This can be a very powerful fantasy. For example, Mister B, who after a session or two decided not to enter treatment with me, announced with considerable braggadocio: “I dump any woman who doesn’t swallow.” But surely these acts are a rather paltry equivalent to the women’s capacity to produce a baby and to nourish it ― on some level, men know this and often, I believe, resent the woman consequently. I will return to this point shortly.

(v) And then she has a vulva-vagina:

Going beyond the hostilities generated within the mother-infant dyad, he boy may understandably hold his mother responsible for the triple catastrophe that is inevitably experienced as the he comes into toddlerhood and grows thereafter: (i) that there are not only role differences associated with gender, but provocative anatomical differences associated with sex; (ii) that there are special things that adult men and women do together (this is a sort of generic description of what we call the ‘primal-scene’ experience) from which he is not only excluded but also would be utterly incapable of performing even if inclusion were not forbidden; (iii) that, as he comes into language, there has to be a confrontation and assimilation of the primordial ‘No’ (which is that of the incest taboo, ‘the law’ of all culture).

Freud’s 1925 paper is quite adamant. Children observe the genitals of other children (and sometimes of adults) and invariably interpret difference in terms of domination and deficit. In Freud’s opinion, the child thinks that what is protuberantly visible about boys is self-evidently preferable and must have been there once‑upon‑a‑time for girls. As feminists ― such as Nancy Chodorow ― have rightly argued, Freud makes masculinist assumptions about children’s thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. First, that visible-perceptual experience necessarily takes priority over tactile‑sensual experience ― a prioritization that, as many contemporary philosophers have indicated, is endemic to the masterdiscourse of the modern technologically-driven era. Second, that exteriority trumps interiority. Yet, contrary to this assumption, we know that from the earliest acquisition of what Jean Piaget called ‘object constancy,’ as well as the timeless appeal of hide-and-seek, the allure of secrets and of things-hidden is more or less ubiquitous (and not only to children). Third, that difference can only be cognized in terms of the dominant and the subordinate (or subjugated); the dominant and the deficient. This is a difficult issue, because subsequently it has been assiduously demonstrated ― not least in the writings of Jacques Derrida ― that the languages of human culture compel our cognition into the hierarchization of binaries. To wit: Everything has to be either this or that ― either ‘one’ or its ‘other’ ― and, contextualized in a network of signifiers, the one is either above or below the other. Linguistic cognition is also required for the internalization of the primordial ‘No.’

In several respects, some of Freud’s 1925 thesis has been repeatedly confirmed by subsequent psychoanalytic experience. For the boy, castration is a very powerful fantasy, and the girl’s lack of a penis is cause for the deepest concern, if not terror. For the first year of his psychoanalysis, Mister C, a college professor, could not bring himself even to name the female genitals; they were condemned to being ― quote/unquote ― “matters down below.” This phobic reaction is not uncommon and is born of a profound fear of the vulva-vagina. Freud may or may not have overestimated the significance of the penis in the little girl’s mind, but he was certainly correct in his assessment of the fears that guide the fantasies of little boys. Thus, the significance of the girl’s envy and jealousy of the penis may be a debatable issue. But the significance of the boy’s castration anxiety is not; it is confirmed in every male psychoanalysis.

Although not stated explicitly by Freud in this manner, what is implied is that women’s bodies are, for men, the site of multiple disasters. For the little boy, and thence in the unconscious fantasies of men, the female anatomy and especially “matters down below” is the source of great anxiety ― indeed, terror.

Participating in one of my sexuality education workshops, the Reverend D, an ‘out’ gay clergyman with very liberal attitudes toward sexuality, giggled his way through the section of my presentation in which a multitude of breasts were shown on a screen, but then left the room to vomit when pictures of vulvas were displayed. Mister E, after one session of his psychoanalysis in which a particularly complex dream had been unpacked, spent the evening with his girlfriend. Attempting cunnilingus, he had a panic attack in which ― quote/unquote ― “I suddenly couldn’t remember where the location of the clitoris was.” Yet this was anatomical information he had known full well from many years of heteroplayful experience. Mister F came with his wife to sexuality counselling. She wanted more erotic play, including cunnilingus, whereas he would routinely proceed quickly to a brief bout of penile-vaginal in-and-out, which she found quite dissatisfying. Over the course of our sessions, he disclosed how he found even the thought of cunnilingus repulsive ― quote/unquote ― “it just seems dirty down there.” This suggest the continuation of a common way in which little boys deal with their anxiety about the vulva’s absent penis, which is to decide that the vagina is simply an extra anus (this being the ‘cloacal theory’ discussed in Freud’s 1914 paper on children’s typical theories of oral impregnation and anal birth).

The castration anxiety stirred by the encounter with the vulva‑vagina often prompts, by way of the illogic of the unconscious (as André Green said, sometimes the rabbit chases the hunter), the convictional fantasy that the female genital might itself be an agent of castration. Freud perhaps overemphasized the issues of paternal rivalry and the threat of the father’s mutilative punishment for forbidden sexual impulses. But the little boy can equally imagine that the absence that has been castrated, but also be the agent of castration. The unconscious illogic of this is impeccable.

Mister G often lost his erection just prior to vaginal intromission or, if intromission was successfully accomplished, he would either ejaculate quickly and exit, or lose his erection even before ejaculation. In the third year of his psychoanalysis, examination of several recurrent dreams eventually disclosed his vagina dentata fantasies. If the penis was in there too long, it might be imprisoned and lopped off. The excavation of such unconscious convictions gradually enabled him and his partner to enjoy more relaxed intercourse.

In another variant of this sort of fantasy, one of my supervisors told me of a case in which the patient as a small boy had multiple opportunities to observe parental copulation. By way of reconstruction during his psychoanalysis, the patient became convinced that he must have seen his father’s penis disappearing into his mother’s vaginal canal and been terrified by the image of this disappearance.

It is not uncommon for small boys, perhaps especially if they have been informed of the birth of a sibling via the vaginal canal, to imagine that this is a vast and rapaciously engulfing orifice into which all might be lost. For the first year of two of his psychoanalysis with me, Mister H complained that his wife’s vaginal canal was so lax that his penis was insufficiently stimulated inside her. He insisted on her having a gynaecological exam, in which no abnormalities were detected; indeed the musculature of her canal was found to be well toned. In treatment Mister H’s complaints decreased as his fantasies of the vagina as cavernous were understood.

A somewhat different, but not uncommon fantasy was evident with my third training case ― an emotionally constricted man, tortured by obsessionality, with his career as an attorney and accountant perpetually in a condition of near collapse. With considerable excitability, Mister I would speak of his great enthusiasm for penile-vaginal intercourse, at least in principle. In practice his sexual life was characterized by inhibition and a pervasive retreat into secretive self-pleasuring. The inhibition around hetero-partnered sexual relations was readily attributable to anxiety over his own underlying aggressive fantasies toward his partner, whose dislike of intercourse colluded with his anxiety-laden avoidance of penile-vaginal relations. His aggressive fantasies ― which caused him immense anxiety and were not elaborated consciously until the fourth year of treatment ― were focused on his wife’s vulva-vagina. He would privately refer to her as ― quote/unquote ― “the black hole of Detroit” and only very gradually did he become able to explore his fantasies of raping her. As he became more comfortable with the idea of fantasies as just fantasies (that is, without the slightest chance that he would enact them), he decided to divorce his wife. Eventually he established a vibrant sexual relationship with another woman that was notably uncontaminated by aggression. He contacted me several years after the analysis, telling me that he had never known that life could be so filled with ― quote/unquote ― “pleasure with my lover and shared wonderment at all the mysteries of the universe.” His seemingly endless obsessionality had notably abated.

As we all know, many men deal with their terror of the vulva-vagina in a more overtly violent manner. Coming to sexuality counselling, Mister J admitted to what the DSM, in all its myopia, refers to as ‘retarded ejaculation.’ Whereas readily able to release with self-pleasuring, he would continue thrusting inside his wife for what seemed (to both of them) like hours. That is to say, long after she had orgasmed several times, lost her vaginal lubricity, and complained of the intense discomfort caused by the friction with his penis. The underlying hostility in his so-called ‘ejaculatory disorder’ was readily inferable (although with other patients, I have encountered the same phenomenon and found it to be caused by an unconscious dread of paternity).

We do not need to discuss here the fantasies of ‘corrective rape,’ which although inherently aggressive might possibly have a benign dimension if they remained in the imagination (quote/unquote, “I’m going to show her how she could be having such a good time”), but are utterly vile in their enactment.

In clinical practice, we observe frequently how a compulsion to seduce multiple women may often be a man’s way, not only of avoiding his unconscious homoerotic inclinations, but also of reassuring himself that the vulva-vagina is safe, because conquerable. Mister K was an ostensibly pious, born-again Christian, with a track record of prodigious seductions of women with whom he had little or no emotional engagement (in short, he was a Lothario). In the first months of his dabbling in psychoanalytic treatment, he insisted on telling me a ― quote/unquote ― “joke.” It is a riddle: “What is a woman?” Answer: “The life support system for a cunt.”

Men’s fantasies about the female genitals are not always so infected with anxiety-induced hostility. For several decades (and certainly marked by my 1999 paper on ‘cracks’), I have been interested in those jokes that seem never to lose their traction. (I think this is a homāge to my beloved grandfather, who would reprimand me for retelling his jokes by saying “A joke’s a joke once,” but then would himself frequently violate his own principle. There is a type of joke that evokes mirth even when repeated ― again and again and again. I encountered one example when I worked as a forester. There was a joke that someone in our gang of woodsmen would tell at least once a week. It is in the form of a riddle, and it is surely significant that never did anyone speak aloud the answer to it. Here it is: “Where is it that you spend nine months trying to get out, and the rest of your life trying to get back in?” Week after week, no sooner than the riddle was posed, we would all roll about in manic laughter, a camaraderie of guffaws, back slapping, and salacious merriment. I think the psychoanalytic significance of this ritual events is obvious.^

(vi) On the oedipalized challenge of the primal-scene:

It would be remiss if we did not pause here to highlight the mother’s ‘great crime’ that focuses and organizes so much of men’s hostility toward women’s sexuality and their fear of its potential intensity and immensity. In relation to matters of genital difference, the little boy comes to realize that there are special activities going on between adult women and men (mother and father) from which he is excluded. The discovery ― usually considered as the consequence of the primal-scene ― is devastating. Not only because of the exclusion it involves, and not only because the boy is uncertain which of the two dramatis personae he would wish to be, but also because he is aware of his incapacity in relation to these two adults. This has the most serious consequences for the boy’s secondary narcissism and what the public call self-esteem.

Think here of all those boys who seem to enter and go through elementary school with an ongoing sense of humiliation, as if the world has beaten them already ― or conversely, think how often boys latch on to grandiose fantasies, from GI Joe to Superman, as if to compensate for a terrifying underlying sense of castrative inadequacy. Not only the father figure, but the mother is to blame; she has betrayed the boy’s belief that they belonged together. Clearly, she is a Whore who has prostituted herself by attending to his rival; she might also be a Madonna, who never engaged in such activities or who did so only under duress. We cannot escape the fact ― and I am convinced it is a fact ― that every man nurtures a Madonna/Whore complex, often very conspicuous in manifestly heteromen, less in those who are ‘out’ as gay. The long-and-the-short of it is a profound and persistent denial or denigration of women’s sexuality, and accordingly of the sexual aspects of her anatomy. She cannot be both a sexual being with a pleasure-seeking vulva-vagina and a good woman or mother with a nurturing womb from which ‘I’ was born. Obviously, there is an inscription of the incest taboo involved in the elaboration of such fantasies, but I published on this in the 2019 IJP so will not reiterate this key issue here.

(vii) And then there is the indignity of not being able to make babies:

The Madonna, of course, gives birth. Whether or not they were superheroes as little boys, adult men do in fact build pyramids, conquer distant lands, send rockets into space ― write books even. But surely there is no human accomplishment remotely comparable or miraculous as that which a woman’s body can accomplish. Not only is the potential of her sexuality greater than that of a man, but from out of her body a new human being may emerge. I am convinced that womb-envy, womb-jealousy, and womb-wish are inscribed deep in men’s psyche.

Freud was ensconced in an acceptance of the certain sorts of patriarchal values. Perhaps correctly ― if the Lacanian reading of the phallocentricity of the symbolic order constituted by language is upheld. He observed women’s envy and jealousy of men, and did not entertain the possibility that, obscured beneath these modes of hatred ― and indeed precisely obscured because of patriarchal values ― lies men’s envy and jealousy of women, which is focused on their anatomy.

(viii) And so, at last, to mermaids:

I have made the case that men harbour significant envy and jealousy of women’s sexuality and their fecundity, and that these hostile and aggressive sentiments are focused on anatomy ― the vulva-vagina and the womb.

This brings us finally to mermaids, and to therianthropic wisdom. After all, myth tells us much about our madness, and any production of the human imagination reveals, even if in a concealed manner, the dynamics of our inner world. So, what do shapeshifting creatures and those that do not shape-shift but remain resolutely half-human and half-animal teach us about how we fantasize and experience the ‘other’ gender.

Leaving aside the Sphinx that is, for our own discipline, the emblematic guardian of access to the unconscious, the most popular therianthrope in the western canon would seem to be the mermaid, with centaurs and werewolves being close runners‑up. Moreover, because traditionally sailors, fishermen, and pirates have almost always been men, we are entitled to take their existence as an exquisite product of the male imagination.

For some time, I have been interested in mermaids. I embarked on this piece of writing in part as a sort of homage to my friend, Christopher Bollas, whose novella, I have heard the mermaids sing, is not only a depiction of how he works as a psychoanalyst, but also a forthright disclosure of the pain and the pleasures of his own depressive tendencies. Our consideration of mermaids is obviously derived from the image of these creatures as a dangerous female muse ― as famously articulated in T. S. Eliot’s paean of ambivalent praise for mediocrity and mortality, The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Let me remind you of the closing lines of this remarkable poem:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

Mermaids are redoubtably female and feminine, as well as being, almost invariably, of astonishing beauty ― at least from the waist upwards. Interestingly, the only exceptions to their great beauty are those rarities that are captured (usually in the nets of fishermen). They turn out not only to be the most ugly and ghoulish of corpses, and they are ― on close inspection ― found not to have been mermaids at all, but cases of mistaken identity. To continue with their appearance in the wild: We should note that, only in the prudish mind of the Disney studios, do mermaids appear to humans as anything other than bare-breasted. Deprived of both vulva-vagina and uterus, if they reproduce at all, they do so by spawning, like fish. That is, external fertilization without any hint of intercourse. But perhaps they do not reproduce at all, since any he, who might contribute the male gamete, is conspicuously absent. Sadly, I tell you all this not from personal experience. Rather, all this information comes not only from the many available illustrations of these creatures, but also from a few texts, written or recounted by sea‑going men who claim to have observed their attributes.

One attribute of these creatures as they frolic in the high seas is particularly significant. Very remarkably, since mermaids spend most of their lives underwater, they have the most beautifully mellifluous ability to sing ― their dulcet melodies often being heard long before their physical presence is sighted.

Typically, mermaids spend their lives cavorting in the ocean, playing like children, combing their long silky hair, and singing sweetly. However, there is a darker side to their existence. Like the sirens encountered by Jason and the Argonauts three millennia ago, mermaids have a bad habit ― a compulsive need to lure sailors onto the rocks and to their death. They do so by the sinisterly seductive use of their melodious charm and their great physical beauty. Simply put, they are irresistible.

I will leave it to you to speculate as to why mermaids have such a compulsion (perhaps their compulsion to kill innocent, but desirous, men is no more than a reflection of men’s guilt for their own illicit desires). I will also leave it to you to conjecture why they have neither vulva-vagina nor evident reproductive ability, why their breasts and hair are so alluring, and their singing so beautiful. Why they are overpoweringly beguiling to men at sea, who probably suffer the pangs of unrequited, even if unacceptable, desire. Whatever men suffer ― and they do suffer ― it is surely clear from the evidence of mermaids’ behaviour that, in men’s minds, our desires for women are indeed deadly dangerous.

• I realized, after I had presented these notes, that (for whatever personal/unconscious reason), I had omitted or underemphasized men’s fear of the fact that women bleed. The literature on how much men are often troubled by menstruation is extensive.