The Kennedy Boys

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 3 · 11 February 1993

From Jacqueline Castles

I see that R.W. Johnson is a fellow in politics at Magdalen College, Oxford, a victim, no doubt, of the view that ‘man has expectations to fulfil … which are … simply harsher, tougher, more inescapable than the challenges women face’ (LRB, 28 January). Well, as he has mentioned the comparative IQs of Joe and Jack Kennedy, I have the IQ of a university professor, but my easier – ‘women can be passive’ – challenge was to be removed from school at 15 to work as a bank clerk, because, in spite of being top of every class I was in, one was a girl, and if one wanted anything one had to marry it. I spent twenty years being told that I was ‘too intelligent for a girl’ and that ‘girls should be amusing and not too serious.’ I might not know a lot about the pressure to have irreducible erections – aren’t all erections reducible? – but I know a lot about minor tranquillisers. Compulsory passivity is hard work.

‘In sex, as in life, a woman can be passive and get away with it’: but what if she doesn’t want to be passive? Getting away with it is in this case the fantasy of the envious male: Johnson can identify with the pressurised Kennedy boys, but not with Rosemary, who, being ‘difficult’, was lobotomised by (male) doctors on the orders of her father. Having noted en passant that ‘some thought he [her father] had sexually abused her early on and wished to cover up the fact,’ Johnson pauses only to point out that Jack and Joe were probably not that interested in the fact that their sister was a ‘human vegetable’, before eventually concluding that ‘one is left pondering what it is we do to boy children.’ On the evidence of the Kennedy family, it is as nothing to what we do to girl children, who are first lobotomised, and then written out of the script.

Jacqueline Castles
London W2