A Month Among the Men
Maryse Choisy
There are 8,000 men in the monastic community of Mount Athos — and for more than 1,000 years not one female has been allowed to set foot there. Not a hen, not a cow — and, above all, not a woman. . . . To ace woman reporter Maryse Choisy, who revealed the world of the Paris prostitute in A Month Among the Girls, the challenge was irresistible. Disguised — extremely thoroughly — as a man, she became the first and only woman to crash this male sanctuary and spend a month among the men. The result is a sheer adventure in reporting — and a daring glimpse of a man’s world. — ‘One of the more astonishing moments among autobiographies appears in Maryse Choisy’s Un Mois Chez les Hommes (1929). In preparation for a visit to Mount Athos, the long peninsula in northern Greece that constitutes a monastic republic where, by religious edict, women have been forbidden to visit for over a thousand years, Choisy relates how she decided to have an elective bilateral radical mastectomy. She called it the Amazonian’ surgical procedure and undertook it with her boyfriend’s agreement. It worked: she was able to pose as a male servant, smuggle herself over the isthmus border beyond which women are prohibited, and spend a month wandering between the peninsula’s twenty monasteries. Choisy, briefly a patient of Sigmund Freud, had a personality that swung between enthusiastic extremes. Her immediately previous book, Un Mois Chez les Filles (1928), had been a participatory journalism study of a Marseilles brothel. She went from sexual dissipation to self-mutilation and chastity in the space of two closely-spaced books. Much of the remainder of her career was taken up with an intellectual effort to synthesize psychoanalysis with Christianity, an issue of concern especially to conservative Catholics in Europe. That’s why Choisy’s work remains one of the curious corners of French psychoanalytic history. Choisy’s choice to cut off her breasts was capitulation to religious misogyny promoted as spiritual purity. She surrendered visible parts of her physiological femininity as the price for a month’s worth of acceptance by men in a world that was all male world except her. Her travel account contains almost no reflection on her decision, seeming to accept her loss as a necessary ticket for admission. Aliki Diplarakou, a Greek beauty queen, followed Choisy by a few years in managing to infiltrate Athos dressed as a man, but did so with an intact chest. Choisy’s story of travel on Athos is one of gender victimization, even if she fails to recognize the act of sacrificial subordination she performs. Like other transgressive narratives such as that of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Choisy’s narrative has been dismissed as a made-up fraud. That is an unfounded allegation of the sort which is quite familiar in the reception histories of women’s and minority literature. Still, Un Mois Chez les Hommes is the only one of Choisy’s many books that has been translated, once into English in 1962 and again into Greek in 1980…’ ~ Joe Lockard, Holy Misogyny, Souciant, 24 May 2011
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Details
| Genre | Pulp |
| Publication Date | 1961 |
| Publisher | Beacon |
| Format | Paperback |
| No. of Pages | 187 |
| Notes | Noted as being of lesbian interest in The Ladder, January 1963. |
| Language | English |
| Rating | NotRated |
| Subject | Lesbian Sleaze |
| BookID | 15284 |
