Mariana Rissi Azevedo 

 

 

 
Women from the Point of View of the Bukowskian Narrator: The representation of the 
feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary 

Madness 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

São José do Rio Preto 
2015 

 



Mariana Rissi Azevedo 

 

 

 
Women from the Point of View of the Bukowskian Narrator: The representation of the 
feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary 

Madness 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Dissertação apresentada como parte dos requisitos 
para obtenção do título de Mestre, junto ao Programa 
de Pós-Graduação em Letras, do Instituto de 
Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas da Universidade 
Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita Filho”, Campus 
de São José do Rio Preto. 

 

Orientador: Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris 

 

 

 

São José do Rio Preto 
2015 

 



 
Azevedo, Mariana Rissi. 
Women from the point of view of the Bukowskian narrator : the 
representation of the feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions 
and General Tales of Ordinary Madness / Mariana Rissi Azevedo. -- São José do 
Rio Preto, 2015 
125 f. 
Orientador: Peter James Harris 
Dissertação (mestrado) – Universidade Estadual Paulista “Júlio de Mesquita 
Filho”, Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas 
1. Literatura americana – Séc. XX – História e crítica. 2. Contos 
americanos – História e crítica. 3. Mulheres na literatura. 4. Feminismo e 
literatura. 5. Misoginia na literatura. 6. Bukowski, Charles 1920-1994. Erections, 
ejaculations, exhibitions and general tales of ordinary madness - Crítica e 
interpretação. I. Harris, Peter James. II. Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de 
Mesquita Filho". Instituto de Biociências, Letras e Ciências Exatas. III. Título. 
CDU – 820(73).09 
Ficha catalográfica elaborada pela Biblioteca do IBILCE 

UNESP - Câmpus de São José do Rio Preto 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

 



4 

 

COMISSÃO EXAMINADORA 

 

TITULARES 

Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris – Orientador 

Profa. Dra. Carla Alexandra Ferreira 

Profa. Dra. Nilce Maria Pereira 

 

SUPLENTES 

Profa. Dra. Maria das Graças Gomes Villa da Silva 

Profa. Dra. Norma Wimmer 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



5 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 

 

 

I would like to thank Fernando Poiana for introducing me to the Dirty Old Man; 
Prof. Dr. Álvaro Hattnher for presenting the Most Beautiful Woman in Town to me; 
Prof. Dr. Peter James Harris for his love and support throughout this project; and 
Hugo Azevedo dos Santos for giving me the will to live. 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



6 

 

Women from the Point of View of the Bukowskian Narrator: The representation of the 
feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary 

Madness 
 

 

RESUMO 

 

Russell Harrison (1994) reconhece a presença do chauvinismo machista na obra de Charles 

Bukowski e afirma que a redação de seus romances tem de ser vista no contexto da ‘segunda 

onda do feminismo’, época na qual Bukowski se consolidou como escritor, e como 

consequência recebeu influência. Esse momento da liberação feminina é representado por 

livros tais como Sexual Politics de Kate Millett (1969) e The Female Eunuch de Germaine 

Greer (1970). Bukowski, conhecido por apresentar a mulher como objeto do desejo 

masculino, demonstra uma sensibilidade diante da objetificação do corpo feminino no conto 

‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’, no qual o autor retrata a protagonista Cass como 

vulnerável e carente de assistência. A dissertação situa esse conto no contexto dos 64 contos 

de Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972), para 

demonstrar a forma excepcional com que o autor mostra a sua sensibilidade em relação à 

figura feminina no contexto de uma coletânea caracterizada por sua misoginia. 

Palavras-chave: Charles Bukowski, objetificação sexual, segunda onda do feminismo.   

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



7 

 

Women from the Point of View of the Bukowskian Narrator: The representation of the 
feminine universe in Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary 

Madness 
 

 
ABSTRACT 

 

Russell Harrison (1994) recognises the male chauvinism of Charles Bukowski’s work and 

argues that his novels must be seen in the context of the ‘second wave of the feminism’, a 

time in which Bukowski established himself as a writer, and which certainly influenced him. 

This point in the struggle for women’s liberation is represented by books such as Sexual 

Politics, by Kate Millett (1969), and The Female Eunuch, by Germaine Greer (1970). 

Bukowski, known for his presentation of women as the objects of male desire, demonstrates a 

sensitivity concerning the objectification of the female body in the story ‘The Most Beautiful 

Woman in Town’, in which he depicts the protagonist, Cass, as vulnerable and in need of 

assistance. The dissertation situates this story in the context of the 64 stories of Erections, 

Ejaculations, Exhibitions and Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972) in order to demonstrate how 

exceptional its sensitivity with regard to women is in a collection characterised by its 

misogynism. 

Keywords: Charles Bukowski, sexual objectification, second wave of feminism.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



8 

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS  

 

1.0 Introduction  …………………………………………………………….….………….. 11   

1.1 The First Wave of Feminism and the beginning of the Second Wave…………… 14   

1.2 The Second Wave of Feminism…………………………………………………… 18 

1.3 Charles Bukowski v Alter Ego Narrator…………………………………………. 23 

1.4 The organisation of the corpus…………………………………………………… 30 

 

2.0 Chapter One: Stories that refer to female protagonists pejoratively……………….. 33 

2.1 ‘A .45 to Pay the Rent’……………………………………………………………. 33 

2.2 ‘3 Chickens’……………………………………………………………………….. 34           

2.3 ‘3 Women’………………………………………………………………………… 35  

2.4 ‘All the Great Writers’……………………………………………………………. 35 

2.5‘All the Pussy We Want’…………………………………………………………... 36  

2.6 ‘The Beginner’…………………………………………………………………….. 37 

2.7 ‘The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper’……………………. 37 

2.8 ‘The Day We Talked About James Thurber’…………………………………….. 38 

2.9 ‘A Drinking Partner’………………………………………………………………. 39 

2.10 ‘An Evil Town’…………………………………………………………………... 40 

2.11 ‘The Fiend’………………………………………………………………………. 40  

2.12 ‘Flower Horse’…………………………………………………………………… 41  

2.13 ‘The Gut-Wringing Machine’……………………………………………………. 42 

2.14 ‘Life in a Texas Whorehouse’…………………………………………………… 43  

2.15 ‘A Lovely Love Affair’………………………………………………………….. 43  

2.16 ‘The Murder of Ramon Vasquez’……………………………………………….. 44 

2.17 ‘No Stockings’…………………………………………………………………… 45 

2.18 ‘One for Walter Lowenfels’……………………………………………………... 46 

2.19 ‘A Rain of Women’……………………………………………………………… 46 

2.20 ‘Rape! Rape!’……………………………………………………………………. 47 

2.21 ‘Reunion’………………………………………………………………………… 48 

2.22 ‘Trouble with a Battery’………………………………………………………… 49 

2.23 ‘The White Beard’………………………………………………………………. 49 

2.24 ‘A White Pussy’…………………………………………………………………. 50 

2.25 ‘Would you Suggest Writing as a Career?’……………………………………… 51 



9 

 

2.26 ‘The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California’………………………………. 52 

2.27 ‘The Fuck Machine’……………………………………………………………... 55 

2.28 ‘My Big-Assed Mother’…………………………………………………………. 59 

2.29 ‘Six Inches’………………………………………………………………………. 62 

 

3. Chapter Two: Stories that make pejorative references to women in passing ………. 68      

3.1  ‘ ’………………………………………………………………………………... 68 

3.2 ‘Another Horse Story’……………………………………………………………. 69 

3.3 ‘A Bad Trip’………………………………………………………………………. 69  

3.4 ‘The Big Pot Game’………………………………………………………………. 70 

3.5 ‘The Blanket’……………………………………………………………………… 70 

3.6 ‘Cunt and Kant and a Happy Home’…………………………………………….. 71 

3.7 ‘Doing Time with Public Enemy Nº 1’…………………………………………… 72 

3.8 ‘Eyes Like the Sky’……………………………………………………………….. 72 

3.9 ‘Great Poets Die in Steaming Pots of Shit’……………………………………….. 73 

3.10 ‘I Shot a Man in Reno’………………………………………………………...... 74 

3.11 ‘Kid Stardust on the Porterhouse’…………………………………………….... 75 

3.12 ‘Life and Death in the Charity Ward’…………………………………………… 75 

3.13 ‘Love It or Leave It’……………………………………………………………... 76 

3.14 ‘Night Streets of Madness’……………………………………………………..... 76 

3.15 ‘Non-Horseshit Horse Advice’…………………………………………….…….. 77 

3.16 ‘Notes of a Potential Suicide’………………………………………………........ 78 

3.17 ‘Notes on the Pest’……………………………………………………………….. 78 

3.18 ‘Nut Ward Just East of Hollywood’……………………………………………. 79 

3.19 ‘Politics is like Trying to Screw a Cat in the Ass’……………………………… 79 

3.20 ‘A Popular Man’…………………………………………………………………. 80 

3.21 ‘Purple as an Iris’………………………………………………………………...  80 

3.22 ‘A Quiet Conversation Piece’…………………………………………………… 81 

3.23 ‘Scenes from the Big Time’……………………………………………………… 81 

3.24 ‘Twelve Flying Monkeys Who Won’t Copulate Properly’…………………….. 82  

3.25 ‘Beer and Poets and Talk’……………………………………………………….. 83 

3.26 ‘The Great Zen Wedding’………………………………………………………... 86 

3.27 ‘My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage’…………………………………………………. 89 

3.28 ‘The Stupid Christs’……………………………………………………………… 92 



10 

 

 

4.0 Chapter Three: stories which depict positive aspects of women, particularly ‘The 

Most Beautiful Woman in Town’ ………………………………………………………… 96          

4.1 ‘25 Bums in Rags’………………………………………………………………… 96 

4.2 ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’………………………………………………….. 99 

4.3 ‘A Dollar and Twenty Cents’……………………………………………………. 102 

4.4 ‘Goodbye Watson’……………………………………………………………….. 103 

4.5 ‘Ten Jack-Offs’…………………………………………………………………... 105 

4.6 ‘Too Sensitive’…………………………………………………………………... 106 

4.7 ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’…………………………………………. 107 

 

5.0 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………... 118 

 

6.0 References…………………………………………………………………………... 124 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



11 

 

INTRODUCTION 

 

Love is one of the universal themes of literature, of interest to all readers, 

irrespective of their cultural background. I myself still remember the day when I came across 

a powerful story in which a man fell in love with a girl because she was ‘a fluid moving fire, a 

spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her’ in his own words. She was the most beautiful 

girl in town and very different from the stereotype of women only interested in men for their 

money; her life was wretched and she had been completely destroyed. I felt her pain instantly, 

picturing myself in her; we had lots of things in common. Suddenly I became her in the story 

and felt all the intensity of that love, so strong and unique. The man tried to save her and she 

loved him, but it was not enough. I imagined what it must have been like for him to live 

without her, to have lost someone who gave up living. I cried for her, cried for him. 

After that I decided to read other stories by Charles Bukowski. I started to look for 

that same love in his other books. However, in many of his poems, novels and short stories, 

he refers to women extremely pejoratively. It occurred to me that he might be writing like this 

because he had really loved the character in his story and, after her death, he could never love 

another woman as much as her. Of course, this was just an intuition, but it seemed to make 

sense. 

On reflection, after reading some critical writing on Bukowski, I realised that he was 

frequently accused of being misogynistic and sexist and this was undoubtedly true. But I was 

still bothered by the story I had fallen in love with, because, apparently, it showed a different 

attitude towards women. It showed his indignation about how society had treated Cass, and it 

showed a man who was touched by her pain, touched by love. 

This was the starting point for the present research: an investigation of how women 

are depicted by Bukowski; the corpus could only be the book containing the short story, ‘The 

Most Beautiful Woman in Town’ – Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of 

Ordinary Madness, a collection of 64 short stories written in the late sixties and first 

published in a single volume in 1972. 

Henry Charles Bukowski Junior (1920-1994) was born in Germany on 16 August 

1920. He moved with his parents to the United States when he was just two years old. 

Bukowski had a difficult childhood, because he was constantly beaten by his father and had 

no support from his mother. When he became an adolescent he had a serious problem with 

acne which made him even more reclusive. Against his father’s wishes, Bukowski started 

writing when he was just a teenager, but his work was only noticed in 1955. He became 



12 

 

famous for his colloquial and obscene style focused on society’s underworld. In 1967 he 

wrote a column called ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’ for the alternative newspaper Open City, as 

a result of which he became known as a dirty old man. His career took off after John Martin, 

founder of the publisher Black Sparrow, had published his works. Women are constantly 

mentioned in his work, most of them are objectified, and Bukowski has become known as 

sexist and misogynist. Some critics, such as Russell Harrison (1994), recognise that 

Bukowski’s male chauvinism is present in his work, but, in his later writing, the irony used to 

depict the machismo of his protagonists reveals a satire of the male protagonist, and the 

characterisation of women moves from being stereotyped towards a more complex 

representation. Harrison affirms that the later novels are best analysed in the context of the 

Second Wave of Feminism, because they were written at the time of the Women’s Liberation 

movement, which influenced Bukowski’s writing.  

The Feminine Mystique (1963), Sexual Politics (1969), and The Female Eunuch 

(1970), by the feminist critics Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer and Kate Millett, 

respectively, are key works in the Second Wave of Feminism, a useful overview of which is 

given by Thomas Bonnici in Teoria e crítica literária feminista (2007), a dictionary 

concerning biographical, literary, historical, conceptual, fictional, psychoanalytical and 

sociological aspects of sexual politics, as well as Feminist and Gender Studies. Bonnici’s 

research gives an overview of terms used in feminist literary criticism. In the present research 

some of the terms defined by Bonnici are fundamental in the analysis of how women are 

depicted in Charles Bukowski’s Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of 

Ordinary Madness. 

According to Bonnici, the First Wave of Feminism comprehends the literary, 

cultural and political activism from the final decades of the eighteenth century to the fight for 

the feminine vote in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1792, there was the 

publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft, in which the 

author demands education for women and attacks the educational restrictions and wrong ideas 

about feminine virtues, which kept women ignorant and dependent. At that time women could 

neither vote nor assume functions which were not related to housework. The end of the 

nineteenth century brought better opportunities for women in education and they initiated a 

fight for equality in England. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf’s A 

Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) had a strong impact on the feminist 

movement. The right to vote was conceded at different times around the world: Russia in 



13 

 

1917, Germany in 1918, the United States in 1919, the United Kingdom in 1928, Brazil in 

1932, and France, Italy and Japan in 1945. 

Bonnici dates the start of the Second Wave of Feminism to 1949, with the publication 

of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, in which she analyses male and female 

stereotypes and investigates sexist attitudes; for de Beauvoir, the woman is ‘the Other’. In the 

1960s and early 70s, Betty Friedan, Kate Millett, and Germaine Greer, amongst others, 

became famous for their political, cultural and literary activism in the Women’s Liberation 

movement; their writing formed the basis of the theoretical position of feminist literary 

criticism. Bonnici states that Germaine Greer focuses upon women’s right of sexual 

expression, while Millett analyses literary values and conventions that were shaped by men 

and written for men. He explains that the term ‘sexual politics’, used by Millett, refers to the 

way in which sexual roles perpetuate the relationship of domination and subordination 

between the sexes.  

Among the terms defined by Bonnici, the most important for the present study of 

Bukowski’s work are: ‘Symbolic annihilation of woman’ (men represented as dominant and 

women reduced to subordination); ‘Cyborg’ (the bionic human being; one of Bukowski’s 

characters is a female ‘fuck machine’); ‘Stereotype’ (concepts, opinions and conventional 

beliefs that typify an invariable model; in Bukowski’s work most women are stereotyped); 

‘Marginality’ (patriarchalism marginalises the feminine experience, a common procedure in 

most of Bukowski’s writing); ‘Misogyny’ (in feminist criticism, misogyny is represented in 

the negative feminine stereotypes found in literary work written by men; Bukowski himself 

was accused many times of being misogynist); ‘Objectification’ (the manner in which a 

person or group of persons treat others as objects; usually in Bukowski’s stories women are 

sex objects); ‘Patriarchalism’ (manifested in literary works in which feminine characters are 

stereotyped and seen as the marginalised other); ‘Sexism’ (degradation and repression of 

women; a resource frequently used by Bukowski to depict women characters); ‘Violence’ 

(violence against women goes from the act of insulting to murder; Bonnici cites Millett, who 

demonstrates male domination in the description of sexual violence in many canonic novels); 

‘Victimisation’ (the condition of women when reduced to objects caused by patriarchalism). 

All these terms will be used in the analysis of Bukowski’s female characters in Erections, 

Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (1972). 

The hypothesis that I wish to investigate in the present study is that Bukowski’s 

portrayal of Cass in ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’ is markedly more sensitive 

towards her marginalised and objectified status than the misogynistic attitude that 



14 

 

characterises his depiction of almost all other female characters in the collection. The 

theoretical basis for my analysis is drawn from the work of the feminist literary critics of the 

Second Wave of Feminism who were Bukowski’s contemporaries. In order to better describe 

the particular contribution of Friedan, Greer and Millett to feminist thinking it will be helpful 

to set them in the context of their forerunners. 

 

1.1) The First Wave of Feminism and the beginning of the Second Wave 

 

Inspired by the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) wrote A 

Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). It was a response to a pamphlet (a proposal for 

the New Constitution of France) written by the legislator M. Talleyrand, Late Bishop of 

Autun (1754-1838), in which he vindicated education for all men. Wollstonecraft extended 

the right to women, with the justification that, in order to be a good wife and a good mother, it 

was necessary to be educated.  

Wollstonecraft argues that women had been made weak as a result of being educated 

to cultivate the ‘elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners 

supposed to be the sexual characteristic of the weaker vessel’ (WOLLSTONECRAFT, 1996, 

p. iv). She ascribes this weakening of the female sex to inadequate education: 
 
One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of education, 
gathered from the books written on this subject by men who, considering 
females rather as women than human creatures, have been more anxious to 
make them alluring mistresses than affectionate wives and rational mothers; 
and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled by this specious 
homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a few 
exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a 
nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect (p. 6). 
 

The author explains that women were taught since their infancy to be beautiful, obedient and 

docile in order to obtain the protection of men, when ‘men and women must be educated by 

the opinions and manners of the society they live in’ (p. 20). She criticises men’s thought 

about women’s delicacy and says that it serves only to soften women’s slavish dependence. 

She wishes that elegance were inferior to virtue, because the human character is fundamental 

without any distinction of sex (p. 8). For Wollstonecraft, the perfect education was an exercise 

of the understanding calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart, an education which 

would enable the individual to be virtuous and independent, however society ‘enslaved 

women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses’ (p. 21). 



15 

 

The author expresses her dissatisfaction by saying that tyrants and sensualists kept 

women in the dark because they were interested in converting them into slaves and mistresses, 

and she affirms that women should not be made subservient to love or to lust: 
 
Let us examine this question. Rousseau declares that a woman should never, 
for a moment, feel herself independent, that she should be governed by fear 
to exercise her natural cunning, and made a coquetish slave in order to 
render her a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion to man, 
whenever he chooses to relax himself. He carries the arguments […] and 
insinuates that […] obedience is the grand lesson which ought to be 
impressed with unrelenting rigour. What nonsense! (p. 25) 

 

Her belief was that man and woman were equal in mind, so knowledge of the two sexes 

should be the same in nature. She claims that women should be seen as rational creatures, 

‘ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the same means as men, 

instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being’ (p. 38). She asked her 

contemporaries to rise above the prejudice of women’s inferiority; she demanded the right to 

strengthen women’s minds by education and reflection, ‘preparing their affection for a more 

exalted state!’ (p. 94). 

Wollstonecraft’s vindication of women’s rights would find an important 

representative more than a century later; in 1929 Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote A Room 

of One’s Own, in which she demonstrates the injustice to which women were subjected in 

England. She registers her own research into the status of women:  

 
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down  
one of the latest, Professor Trevelyan's HISTORY OF ENGLAND. Once 
more I looked up Women, found “position of” and turned to the pages 
indicated. “Wife-beating”, I read, “was a recognized right of man, and was 
practiced without shame by high as well as low. . . .” “Similarly,” the 
historian goes on, “the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her 
parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, 
without any shock being inflicted on public opinion” (WOOLF, 1992, p. 
54). 
 

She records that the next reference to the position of women is about two hundred years later, 

after 1470 (soon after Chaucer’s time), when ‘It was still the exception for women of the 

upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been 

assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him’ (p. 54). 

Woolf points out that, although women were portrayed as if they were of the highest 

importance in Literature, dominating the lives of kings, in reality they were insignificant and 



16 

 

almost absent from History; they could hardly read and they were the property of their 

husbands. 

Even in Virginia Woolf’s own time in the early twentieth century, a woman was still 

not expected to be more than a housewife, and far from being encouraged to become an artist; 

‘on the contrary, she was snubbed, slapped, lectured and exhorted. Her mind must have been 

strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that’ (p. 71). 

Woolf asserts that the world, of which Keats and Flaubert were part, was hostile to women 

writing: ‘There would always have been that assertion – you cannot do this, you are incapable 

of doing that – to protest against, to overcome’ (p. 70). She argues that this hostility is rooted 

in the male belief in his superiority over the woman. According to Virginia Woolf, although 

some women could make money by writing essays on Shakespeare and translating the 

classics, if a woman was to write fiction, she ‘must have money and a room of her own’ (p. 

4). The problem was the lack of education to which women had been subjected throughout 

History. Woolf states that intellectual freedom depended upon material things and women 

have always been poor from the beginning of time: ‘Women have had less intellectual 

freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of 

writing poetry’ (p. 141). That is why she laid so much stress on having money and a room of 

one’s own.  

Twenty years after Virginia Woolf published her book, a Frenchwoman who had 

money and a room of her own was Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), who was able to 

become an intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social 

theorist. Her book, The Second Sex, first published in 1949, is the foundation stone in the 

Second Wave of Feminism. 

In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir discusses the light in which women are viewed by 

biology, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. The author demonstrates ‘how the 

concept of “truly feminine” has been fashioned – why woman has been defined as the Other – 

and what have been the consequences from man’s point of view’ (DE BEAUVOIR, 1997, p. 

28). In Book Two, she describes ‘how woman undergoes her apprenticeship, how she 

experiences her position, in what kind of universe she is confined, what modes of escape are 

vouchsafed her’ (p. 29). 

According to H. M. Parshley, English translator of the book, de Beauvoir’s 

perspective is existentialist:  
 



17 

 

She states in general how certain existentialist concepts – which, it may be 
remarked, in themselves command intellectual and ethical respect – apply to 
woman’s situation (…). The central thesis of Mlle de Beauvoir’s book is that 
since patriarchal times women have in general been forced to occupy a 
secondary place in the world relation to men, a position comparable in many 
respects with that of racial minorities in spite of the fact that women 
constitute numerically at least half of the human race, and further that this 
secondary standing is not imposed of necessity by natural ‘feminine’ 
characteristics but rather by strong environmental forces of educational and 
social tradition under the purposeful control of men (Preface in DE 
BEAUVOIR, PARSHLEY, 1997, p. 8-9). 

 

With regard to sexuality, de Beauvoir states that women are accused of thinking with their 

glands, but she points out that men also have glands. However, this is seen as an aspect of 

nature connected to the world, while a woman’s body is just a prison of hormones. She 

demonstrates how men have historically seen a woman as a less than human being, by quoting 

Aristotle and St. Thomas, who claim that the female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of 

qualities and that the woman is an imperfect man, an incidental being. For de Beauvoir, a 

woman is ‘defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; 

she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the 

Absolute – she is the Other’ (p. 16). 

Women were made ‘the others’ by those who established themselves as ‘the ones’, 

according to de Beauvoir. She questions how women came to accept such a title of inessential 

and object, principally sex objects. ‘She is for man a sexual partner, a reproducer, an erotic 

object – an Other through whom he seeks himself’ (p. 85). She observes that some French 

writers such as Montherlant and Jean de Meung, were hostile towards women, which, de 

Beauvoir argues, stems from an inferiority complex. In other words, since they were anxious 

about their virility, they were aggressive to women:  
 
If Montherlant had really deflated the myth of the eternal feminine, it would 
be in order to congratulate him on the achievement: it is by denying Woman 
that we can help women to assume the status of human beings. But, as we 
have seen, he does not smash the idol: he changes it into monster. He too, 
believes in that vague and basic essence, femininity; he holds with Aristotle 
and St. Thomas that woman is to be defined negatively; woman is woman 
through the lack of virility; that is the fate to which every female individual 
must submit without being able to modify it (p. 214). 
  

De Beauvoir goes on to point out that, in her time, society expected women to make 

themselves erotic objects (it is still like this at the beginning of the twenty-first century; the 

media subjugate women to a stereotype of beauty that offers them up as a plaything of male 

sexual urges). Even in de Beauvoir’s time, ‘the purpose of the fashions to which she is 



18 

 

enslaved is not to reveal her as an independent individual, but rather to offer her as a prey to 

male desire’ (p. 506). She comments that ‘the costume may disguise the body, deform it, or 

follow its curves; in any case it puts it on display’ (p. 506). 

Simone de Beauvoir fought for women’s rights. She fought for women to be 

considered more than sex objects. She could not accept a destiny which turned women into 

submissive creatures, based on the justification that males were superior due to not bearing 

children, not having a womb. Her work was the beginning of something more; it was the 

beginning of the Second Wave of Feminism. People around the world were reading The 

Second Sex and it changed women’s lives. It definitely changed Betty Friedan’s mind, since 

her work The Feminine Mystique (1963) is considered to have been inspired by it.  

 

1.2)  The Second Wave of Feminism  

 

On 26 August, 1970, more than 20,000 women went onto the streets in New York 

City and throughout the US, vindicating equal opportunities in the workforce, political rights 

for women, and social equality in relationships such as marriage. Despite the arguments of 

Wollstonecraft, Woolf, de Beauvoir and many others, women still did not have the same 

freedoms as men. Women earned less than men for the same work, even when they were 

equally educated and qualified. In many states women were also unable to obtain credit cards, 

make wills, or own properties without a husband. 

Betty Friedan (1921-2006), leader of the National Organization for Women, had 

planned the protest and spoke about the strength and ability of women to rise above their 

oppression. The main objective of the demonstration was to publicise the feminist movement 

and ideas. Friedan had written about many of them in her work The Feminine Mystique, first 

published in 1963, in which she exposes the injustices experienced by women. 

The feminine mystique is the conviction that a woman can fulfil herself only by 

being a wife and mother, and this belief is so strong that, according to Friedan, ‘women grow 

up no longer knowing that they have the desires and capacities the mystique forbids’ 

(FRIEDAN, 2010, p. 61). She describes the impact of the feminine mystique as follows: 

 
The feminine mystique permits, even encourages, women to ignore the 
question of their identity. The mystique says they can answer the question 
“Who am I?” by saying “Tom’s wife ... Mary’s mother.” But I don't think 
the mystique would have such power over American women if they did not 
fear to face this terrifying blank which makes them unable to see 
themselves after twenty-one. The truth is – and how long it has been true, 



19 

 

I’m not sure, but it was true in my generation and it is true of girls growing 
up today – an American woman no longer has a private image to tell her 
who she is, or can be, or wants to be (p. 64). 
 

For Friedan the mistake is to believe that fulfilment can only be found in sexual passivity, 

male domination and nurturing maternal love. The preservation of the feminine mystique 

turned women into a target of sexual marketing naming it femininity.  

In Friedan’s time it was well documented that novelists of suburbia, the mass media, 

ads, television, movies, and women’s magazines, all exploited the voracious female appetite 

for sexual fantasy. Friedan explains that, having repressed their desire, sex was the only 

frontier open to women who had always lived within the confines of the feminine mystique, 

but she defines a woman who accepts being a sex object as a woman who lives in a world of 

objects, ‘unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself’ (p. 255):  
 
It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American 
women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But 
something has evidently gone wrong. Instead of fulfilling the promise of 
infinite orgasmic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is 
becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous 
mockery (p. 250). 
 

According to Friedan, this frustrated female sexual hunger has increased women’s conflicts 

over their so-called femininity and turned their attention to the pursuit of sexual fulfilment. 

The stereotype of the ideal woman trapped the suburban housewife and chained her to 

mistaken ideas and unreal choices, which for Friedan were not easily shaken off, but ‘these 

images would not have such power, if women were not suffering a crisis of identity’ (p. 68). 

Friedan claims that the only way to change this situation would be for women to start to see 

through ‘the delusions of the feminine mystique and realize that neither her husband nor her 

children, nor the things in her house, nor sex, nor being like all the other women, can give her 

a self’ (p. 326).  

Friedan’s basic ideas of women being turned into sex objects and being imprisoned 

in the mythical perfect woman as a good mother and good wife were developed by Germaine 

Greer in The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970. Greer argues that women’s enemy is 

discrimination against their sex, but that they have been conditioned to accept male 

oppression. Germaine Greer states that: 
 
women must learn how to question the most basic assumptions about 
feminine normality in order to reopen the possibilities for development 



20 

 

which have been successively locked off by conditioning (GREER, 2010, p. 
17). 
 

She asserts that the female is seen as a sex object by men, available for their use. Her 

sexuality is exposed as passive, her body is suppressed and the praised characteristics in her 

are the same as those of the castrate, which are timidity, plumpness, languor, delicacy and 

preciosity. For Greer, the female body is shown as weak, since women have a womb, which 

supposedly causes hysteria, menstrual depression and weakness. The stereotype is the 

dominant image of femininity in which the women are effectively castrated, reduced to ‘the 

object of male fantasy’: 

 
The castration of women has been carried out in terms of a masculine-
feminine polarity, in which men have commandeered all the energy and 
streamlined it into an aggressive conquistatorial power, reducing all 
heterosexual contact into a sadomasochistic pattern (p. 19). 

 

Greer states that love has been perverted and sadism inspires hideous crimes on the bodies of 

women, but more frequently they are casually abused and insulted, which unconsciously 

makes them see men as their enemy. For Greer, ‘sex must be rescued from the traffic between 

powerful and powerless, masterful and mastered, sexual and neutral’ (p. 21). 

Like Friedan, Greer argues that women must recognise that the role given to them by 

society is not fair. Instead of accepting it and using a mask, women need to understand that 

the purpose of their existence is not to be a wife and mother. They need to be independent and 

free. In society women have become objects to be ornamented; they need to follow fashion, to 

use jewels; the more they use, the more they become the showcase for wealth. While men do 

not need to wear accessories, women’s beauty has become celebrated in terms of riches; the 

comparisons made to female beauty are connected with precious adornments: ‘She was for 

consumption’ (p. 65). Women are required to look expensive, they study the stereotype 

created by the media; they become sex objects, because the media tell them so. Fetishes vary 

according to male taste, but all of them welcome the stereotype, because there are commonly 

recognised areas of value. A woman’s function is to be a sex object, she is a doll; ‘her 

essential quality is castratedeness’ (p. 69). Her image appears smiling interminably. 

According to Greer, women are conditioned to abandon their autonomy and follow 

society’s guidance. They are made to believe their function is to take care of the house and the 

children from the earliest age. Their thoughts about marriage and child-bearing are very 

romantic, so when they finally get into the situation itself the result is disappointment and 

frustration. Psychology pushes the masochistic role as the proper one for women and 



21 

 

reinforces the belief that they are conditioned to from childhood on. From the time a girl is 

born she is forced to accept her duty as wife and mother. 

Greer observes that women have been using a mask without being able to show it was 

a mask; they have been deprived of idealism and because of that they have had a closer 

contact with reality: ‘They have been charged with deviousness and duplicity since the dawn 

of civilization’ (p. 129). She goes on to argue that the restraints of paternalist society must be 

overthrown: 

 
Womanpower means the self-determination of women, and that means that 
all the baggage of paternalist society will have to be thrown overboard. 
Woman must have room and scope to devise a morality which does not 
disqualify her from excellence, and a psychology which does not condemn 
her to the status of a spiritual cripple (p. 131). 

 

Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch, in 1970, the year after the US 

publication of Kate Millett’s PhD dissertation, Sexual Politics, in which she criticises 

patriarchal society and literature and questions the origins of patriarchy, arguing that sex-

based oppression is both political and cultural. Both authors, Greer and Millett, share the idea 

that, in human History, the female has been limited to an existence committed to menial 

labour and domestic service. Women have been forced to accept the condition of being sex 

objects, but have been forbidden from enjoying their own sexuality. Millett affirms that 

women are ‘made to suffer for and be ashamed of their sexuality, while in general (they are) 

not permitted to rise above the level of a nearly exclusive sexual existence’ (MILLETT, 1977, 

p. 119). For her, women have been condemned to provide men with a sexual outlet and to 

exercise the animal functions of reproduction and care of the young. 

The imposed characteristics of male and female are described by Millett to 

demonstrate women’s subjugation and subordination, because each sex role elaborates a code 

of conduct and attitude for men and women. ‘In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic 

service and attendance upon infants to the female, the rest of human achievement, interest, 

and ambition to the male’ (p. 26). In other words, society ascribes a superior position to the 

male: 
 
As to status, a pervasive assent to the prejudice of male superiority 
guarantees superior status in the male, inferior in the female. The first item, 
temperament, involves the formation of human personality along 
stereotyped lines of sex category (“masculine” and “feminine”), based on 
the needs and values of the dominant group and dictated by what its 
members cherish in themselves and find convenient in subordinates: 



22 

 

aggression, intelligence, force, and efficacy in the male; passivity, 
ignorance, docility, “virtue”, and ineffectuality in the female (p. 26). 

 

Hostility towards women is expressed in a number of ways. ‘Misogynist literature, the 

primary vehicle of masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic genre’ (p. 45). For 

Millett, all artistic forms in a patriarchy reinforce both sexual factions in their status, and the 

image of women is an image created by men to suit their needs. This notion presupposes an 

established patriarchy that sets the male as the human norm and the female as the other. 

Although they are not a minority, women tend to feel marginalised, because of the 

discrimination they face in relation to their behaviour, employment and education. The media 

present an unreal image of passivity, which must be followed as an example of conduct. Their 

sexuality is subjected to social forces and it is suffocated, because they exist to be ruled, but 

‘the recent liberation of sexual desire in women, and particularly the new right of sexual 

initiative, place women in a position to rule’ (p. 273), however, when they take their 

opportunity they are oppressed and interpreted as immoral. 

Kate Millett investigates how women are depicted in literature, and chooses the 

modern novelists D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, contrasted with the 

viewpoint of the homosexual author Jean Genet. Her intention is to demonstrate how sexist 

and misogynist these authors are, and how this behaviour influences society, propagating 

women’s suffering: 
 
just “fuck” women and discard them, much as one might avail oneself of 
sanitary facilities, Kleenex or toilet paper, for example. Just “fucking”, the 
Miller hero is merely a huckster and a con man, unimpeded by pretension, 
with no priestly role to uphold. Lawrence did much to kill off the traditional 
attitudes of romantic love. At first glance, Miller seems to have started up 
blissfully ignorant of their existence altogether. Actually, his cold-blooded 
procedure is intended as sacrilege to the tenderness of romantic love, a 
tenderness Lawrence was never willing to forgo. In his brusque way, Miller 
demonstrates the “love fraud” (a species of power play disguised as 
eroticism) to be a process no more complex than a mugging. The formula is 
rather simple: you meet her, cheat her into letting you have “a piece of ass,” 
and then take off. Miller’s hunt is a primitive find, fuck, and forget (p. 296). 

 

Millett asserts that ‘Miller simply converts woman to cunt-thing’ (p. 297), because his ideal 

woman is a whore; whereas, for Lawrence, prostitution is a profanation of the temple, for 

Miller it is ‘a gratifying convenience for the male (since it is easier to pay than persuade)’ (p. 

301).  



23 

 

It is common to find in Charles Bukowski’s writing examples of the sexist, 

misogynistic discourse identified by Kate Millett when she criticises Miller. Bukowski’s 

voice and that of his narratorial alter ego, Henry Chinaski, are seen as one. In the next section 

I outline how this connection is made and how the image of dirty old man was constructed by 

Bukowski himself. 

 

1.3) Charles Bukowski v Alter Ego Narrator  

 

Best known as a poet, Bukowski published thirty-four collections of poetry between 

1960 and his death in 1994. However, his initial attempts as a writer were with prose. His first 

publication, in 1944, was the short story entitled ‘Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip’. 

Two years later he published another short story, ‘20 Tanks from Kasseldown’. Without any 

other success Bukowski became disenchanted with the publishing world and spent his next 

decade getting drunk. He only started writing poetry at the beginning of the 1950s and 

published his first collection of poems, Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, in 1960. Known for its 

colloquial and obscene style, his poetry was successful and, in the 1960s alone, Bukowski 

published a total of thirteen volumes of verse. In 1969 he gave the first of the readings, 

characterised by his drunkenness and his combative relationship with his public, which 

continued until 1980. In the mid Sixties Bukowski started writing prose again, beginning in 

1967 with a column for the alternative newspaper Open City, which was published in the 

collection entitled Notes of a Dirty Old Man in 1969. It was also in 1967 that Bukowski 

returned to writing short stories, which were published in Open City and other small 

magazines such as Nola Express, Knight, Adam Reader and Pix, most of which were 

pornographic publications. 

In 1972, sixty-four of these short stories were collected and published by City Lights 

Books1 in the collection Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary 

Madness. (In 1983, the stories in this book were republished, divided between the two 

volumes Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town.) 

Bukowski’s success in the 1960s did not provide him with sufficient income to become 

a professional writer. Throughout the decade he worked in the Post Office, an experience that 

                                                 
1 City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California that specialises 
in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence  
Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin. Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the 
obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection Howl and Other Poems (City 
Lights, 1956).  



24 

 

he hated and which provided the raw material for his first novel, Post Office (1971), published 

two years after signing a contract with John Martin, founder of the Black Sparrow press, 

which finally enabled him to become a full-time writer. Until the year of his death Bukowski 

wrote five more novels: Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), Hollywood 

(1989) and Pulp (1994).  

Whether in poetry or prose, some themes are recurrent in Bukowski’s work: the 

quotidian of people on society’s margins, drunkenness, the act of writing, the boredom of the 

fixed-wage worker and, above all, relationships with women. Much of Bukowski’s prose is 

narrated in the first person by Henry Chinaski, the writer’s alter ego:  
 
Bukowski revealed the genesis of the name: “The ‘Chin’ part, if you must 
know, was thrown in because of my chin. I was one of those guys able to 
absorb a terrific punch. I was not a very good fighter but taking me out was 
a great problem. I won a few by simply out-enduring the stupid son of a 
bitch trying to do me in”. And of course ‘as’ = ‘ass’ – thus ‘Chinaski’ is a 
thoroughly embodied name to give to his often wearily enfleshed anti-hero 
(CALONNE, 2013, p. 77-8). 
 

In an interview for Hustler magazine in December 1976, ‘Bukowski claimed the 

majority of what he wrote was literally what happened in his life. (…) He even went so far as 

to put a figure on it: ninety-three per cent of his work was autobiography, he said, and the 

remaining seven per cent was improved upon’ (SOUNES, 2010, p. 7). So, generally speaking, 

it can be affirmed that the point of view, the attitudes and the speech of Henry Chinaski are, 

largely, those of Charles Bukowski himself. 

David Charlson (2005) was the first to publish an academic dissertation on the poetry and 

prose of Charles Bukowski. His doctoral dissertation is, according to him, ‘a historical 

document concerned with an amazing author who continues to matter to the world’ 

(CHARLSON, 2005, p. 7). In his book, the author gives a useful insight into Bukowski’s 

narratorial persona quoting Bukowski’s own words:  
 
I began writing poetry at the age of 35 after coming out of the death ward of 
the L.A. County General Hospital and not as a visitor. To get somebody to 
read your poems you have to be noticed, so I got my act up. I wrote vile 
(but interesting) stuff that made people hate me, that made them curious 
about this Bukowski. (…) Meanwhile, I wrote about most of this, it was my 
persona, it was me but it wasn’t me. As time went on, trouble and action 
arrived by itself and I didn’t have to force it and I wrote about that and this 
was closer to my real persona. Actually, I am not a tough person and 
sexually, most of the time, I am almost a prude, but I am often a nasty drunk 
and many strange things happen to me when I am drunk. … What I am 



25 

 

trying to say is that the longer I write the closer I am getting to what I am … 
(qtd. in CHARLSON, 2005, p. 44). 

 

According to Oxford Dictionary definition, persona is the aspect of someone’s character that 

is presented to or perceived by others, or, a role or character adopted by an author or an actor.  

Charlson comments that, ‘although the above responds to a question about the persona in 

Bukowski’s poetry, it easily applies to his prose as well, maybe even more so’ (CHARLSON, 

2005, p. 44). According to Charlson, the ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’, which labelled the 

persona of Bukowski and some of which were republished by City Lights in the collection 

Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness, solidified the 

intended initial impression of vileness. Charlson believes that Bukowski, the real author, first 

created a persona from his own experiences to build a myth. With time and publicity, both 

author and persona came to use the myth to define themselves. The final stage in the process 

resulted in Bukowski the autobiographical novelist: 
 
In this stage, Bukowski is allowed the time and space to tell the full story of 
Henry Chinaski, his alter ego, through five novels, while more poetry and 
various short stories attend them. The overall effect, however, does not 
seem all that complicated; the effect is that Bukowski the real author, no 
matter what name is attached to the persona, is just telling more of his 
history, refining the myth, making quite clear just who he was and is. 
(CHARLSON, 2005, p. 45) 

 

Despite the vile and vulgar persona built by Bukowski himself, Charlson is 

convinced that he was ‘also a sensitive and sensible man, with a strange and unique way of 

revealing himself to the world’ (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 45). His affirmation is based on the 

later manifestations of the persona, as in Women, and in his life. In an interview from 

September 1987, published as ‘Tough Guys Write Poetry: Charles Bukowski by Sean Penn’ 

(1987), Bukowski told Sean Penn he was sure he makes women look bad sometimes, but he 

makes men look bad too and he makes himself look bad. ‘Such awareness is why he often 

made the claim that he is neither misogynist nor misanthropist, despite any evidence quoted 

out of context’ (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 74). 

Charlson stresses the autobiographical element in Bukowski’s writing: ‘Considering, 

then, Bukowski’s voluminous output of autobiographical poems, short stories, novels, and 

nonfiction, plus his comments on all that in interviews, one is hard pressed not to call him an 

autobiographer driven to tell all’ (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 41). But he stresses that this does 

not necessarily mean that Bukowski is being truthful. He refers to Timothy Dow Adams’ 

Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography (1990) to demonstrate how ‘Adams takes 

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/character#character__11
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/author#author__2


26 

 

the widely recognized fundamental terms of “design” and “truth” from Roy Pascal’s Design 

and Truth in Autobiography (1960) and adds a third – lying’ (p. 42).  

 

The recognition of such a strategy allows Adams to offer the following 
expanded definition of the genre: “autobiography is the story of an attempt 
to reconcile one’s life with one’s self and is not, therefore, meant to be 
taken as historically accurate but as metaphorically authentic”. Authenticity 
is what the autobiographical author is after, and Adams’ approach allows 
him to study not only McCarthy and Hellman but also Gertrude Stein. 
(CHARLSON, 2005, p. 42) 
 

 Charlson argues that Adams’ comments on Sherwood Anderson can be extended to 

Bukowski as well. ‘In Anderson’s autobiographies, the “casual use of the facts of the author’s 

life results in an accurate portrait of the real Anderson” (qtd in CHARLSON, 2005, p. 42).  

 

The famous Anderson legend – the author leaving the paint factory for art – 
is “personal myth” rather than “historical account”; however, even if the 
legendary incident did not happen, it does suggest who Anderson was or 
chose to portray himself to be. As Adams says, “We often discover that 
whether or not an autobiography rings true is as important as whether or not 
it is true”. (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 42) 
 

Charlson claims that the strategic lying of Bukowski in the depiction of his male protagonists, 

especially Henry Chinaski, portrays characters who think almost the same as himself, and, 

with regard to women, Bukowski confesses that he lies too little. ‘The more one studies 

Chinaski and similar Bukowski personae, the closer one can get to seeing an accurate portrait 

of the real Bukowski’ (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 43). 

 

Furthermore, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the 
compression, addition, and repetition of letters by Bukowski to make 
up his autobiographical persona’s name of Henry Chinaski 
symbolically represents what Bukowski did with his life experiences 
as well for nearly thirty years. What he did is not exactly lying; 
rather, it is strategic presentation of self. Any biographer can do little 
else. (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 46) 

 

In Against the American Dream: Essays on Charles Bukowski, published in 1994, 

Russell Harrison argues that Chinaski has been ‘problematized as the protagonists of 

Lawrence, Miller and Hemingway had not been’ (HARRISON, 1994, p. 210). Harrison 

maintains that Bukowski stopped following the chauvinist tradition and began ‘to deconstruct 

that tradition as we have come to associate it with Hemingway, Miller and Mailer’ 



27 

 

(HARRISON, 1994, p. 203). Charlson states that ‘Chinaski often debunks traditional 

masculine ways almost as much as Bukowski’ (CHARLSON, 2005, p. 79), and Chinaski once 

said ‘there’s nothing worse than an old chauvinist pig’ in the novel Women, which shows that 

the character knows about his reputation, just as Bukowski knew about himself. ‘Furthermore, 

it is not too much of a stretch to say that the compression, addition, and repetition of letters by 

Bukowski to make up his autobiographical persona’s name of Henry Chinaski symbolically 

represents what Bukowski did with his life experiences as well for nearly thirty years’ 

(CHARLSON, 2005, p. 46). 

In Charles Bukowski: Sunlight Here I Am (2004), David Stephen Calonne collects 

interviews and encounters with Bukowski between 1963 and 1993; in one of them, given to 

Douglas Howard in 1975 for the Grapevine (Fayetteville, Arkansas), Bukowski asserted that 

he was very gentle to women: 

 
In my life, of all the women I’ve known, I have hit two of them. And that’s, 
that’s a pretty good record with all the women I’ve known. They got to me 
twice. Generally, I’m very gentle, very tolerant. I try to understand what’s 
bothering them (qtd. in CALONNE, 2004 p. 116-7). 
 

However his affirmations are paradoxical; how can a man be gentle to women if he beats 

them, even if it was only a minority of his partners? Such a man must still be considered 

brutal. Bukowski’s discourse is ambiguous; although he defends himself from the accusation 

of being sexist and misogynistic, he also says: ‘I tell the women that the face is my experience 

and the hands are my soul – anything to get those panties down’ (qtd. in CALLONE, 2004, p. 

147).  

In 1976, Glenn Esterly interviewed Bukowski for Rolling Stone magazine and 

challenged him by recalling some of his contradictory statements about women, ‘Like, on one 

hand, “women are the world’s most marvellous inventions,” and, on the other, “I wouldn’t 

recommend getting involved with women to any man” (qtd. in CALONNE, 2004, p. 156). 

Bukowski responded that both affirmations were absolutely true and said there was no 

contradiction in that; he continued by saying that, before he met Linda Lee Beighle, he had 

spent four years without a woman and felt pretty good about it because women can be awfully 

time-consuming. ‘What can I tell ‘em? I wanna fuck ‘em, that’s all’ (qtd. in CALONNE, 

2004, p. 156). 

Bukowski believed that he was neither anti-woman nor pro-woman; for him, he just 

experienced them and wrote about it. When Douglas Howard asked him in 1975, what he 

thought about women’s liberation, he stated that it was a good thing, but also weakening: 



28 

 

 
Once you gather in a group and you start using group’s ideas, you lose your 
own individual thinking processes. And in that way, it’s weakening. So, you 
get some baddies in that group too, simply man haters. It’s like any other 
group; it has its good points and its bad; it has its freaks; it helps some and 
destroys others. Overall, I’d say it’s a good function (qtd. in CALONNE, 
2004, p. 120).  
 

Some years later, in 1981, Silvia Bizio interviewed Charles Bukowski for High 

Times and she wanted to know why people in Europe appreciated his writing more than 

readers in the United States. Bukowski replied that Europe was one hundred years ahead in 

poetry, painting and art, and in America the feminists hated him, which for him was not fair. 

He said the feminists just read parts of his work and, being infuriated, they refused to read the 

next page or story. 

In 1990, he told Mary Ann Swissler in an interview for Village View, that there were 

good feminists and bad feminists – ‘it depends upon the individual’, according to him. In his 

view his misogynistic image had been constructed by people who had not read the totality of 

his work. ‘In my life when I’ve met a woman who you could call a bad woman, a bitch, I’ve 

written her up as a bitch. Also when I was a bastard, I wrote myself up as a bastard. So I think 

I’m pretty fair’ (qtd. in CALONNE, 2004, p. 263). 

Bukowski even called women’s sexual liberation ‘bullshit’ in his interview with 

Silvia Bizio (High Times); she asked him if he was concerned about how women feel making 

love with him and he asked her if she was talking about the sexual liberation ‘bullshit’; he 

mentioned that he knew where the clitoris is and that he knew how to do all these things, but 

if women did not enjoy what he was doing, they just simply got another man. He believed he 

always had trouble with women when he got attached; he mentioned in an interview with 

Marc Chénetier for Northwest Review in 1975 that all his women said to him, ‘Oh you write 

this hard stuff but you’re soft, you’re all marshmallow inside’ (qtd. in CALONNE, 2004, p. 

142), and in his opinion he was really like that. He stated that, ‘If you want to write bad things 

about women, you have to live with them first. So I live with them in order to criticize them 

in my writings’ (qtd. in CALONNE, 2004, p. 184-5)  

When he was asked by Sean Penn to talk about women and sex in 1987 he said that 

women are just complaining machines: 

 
Things are never right with a guy to them. And man, when you throw that 
hysteria in there … forget it. I gotta get out, get in the car, and go. 
Anywhere. Get a cup of coffee somewhere. Anywhere. Anything but 
another woman. I guess they’re just built different, right? (He’s on a roll 



29 

 

now.) The hysteria starts … they’re gone. You got to leave, they don’t 
understand. (In a high woman’s screech:) “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” 
“I’m getting the hell out of here, baby!” They think I’m a woman hater, but 
I’m not. A lot of it is word of mouth. They just hear “Bukowski’s a male-
chauvinist pig,” but they don’t check the source (qtd. in CALONNE, 2003, 
p. 213). 

 

In the same interview he asserts that all a man has to do is to say a few words to women and 

‘grab ’em by the wrist, “Come on, baby.” Lead ’em in the bedroom and fuck ’em’ (qtd. in 

CALONNE, 2004, p. 214). In his judgement it is a big thing for women ‘to have some guy 

pop ’em’. However, he demonstrates in some of his statements that he is not as confident as 

he would like to appear. When he was asked by Douglas Howard in an interview for 

Grapevine what the meaning of the male castration was in some of his stories, Bukowski said 

that he thought it was a symbolic gesture ‘to escape the female and the power she has over us’ 

(qtd. in CALONNE, 2004, p. 120). He added that his characters’ feelings are frustration, 

panic, dominance and loss, but he did not know the meaning of it. 

In a later book, Charles Bukowski: Critical Lives (2012), David Stephen Calonne 

asserts that, in Bukowski’s writing, violence, sexuality and madness are balanced by absurd 

humour: ‘Indeed, any pretensions of Chinaski to triumphant, phallic malehood are deflated 

since during his many beddings of women he is frequently unable to achieve an erection and 

he constantly exposes his fear, vulnerability and impotence: he is often too drunk to perform’ 

(CALONNE, 2012, p. 129). 

According to Calonne, Bukowski ‘reveals how the artist takes the raw material of 

his life and through constantly reworking and re-examining it, tries to bring it closer to truth’ 

(CALONNE, 2012, p. 162). In a letter to Nancy Flynn, written in 1975, Bukowski exposed 

his feelings about women: 

 
I think the women might become truly liberated if they realize that some 
women can be shits, at times, just as some men can be. To simply defend 
women as women, no matter, that can only be self-defeating, and you know 
this. 
I’m no woman-hater. They’ve given me more highs and magics than 
anything else, but I’m also a writer, sometimes. And there are variances in 
all things (qtd. in CALONNE, 2012, p. 123). 

 

It is very difficult to label Bukowski as either pro- or anti-women, because his statements are 

almost always contradictory. It is necessary to analyse his work, where both attitudes will be 

seen, which shows the complexity of the subject. Being classified by feminists as a woman-

hater was the initial critical response, but now it is essential to collect evidence which reveals 



30 

 

Bukowski’s view of women in more detail. The work chosen as a corpus for analysis in this 

dissertation is the collection of short stories Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General 

Tales of Ordinary Madness, first published in 1972. The book was selected because of the 

story, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’, in which, apparently, Bukowski reveals a more 

sensitive attitude towards women; he depicts Cass (the female protagonist) as a victim of male 

society, which turns her into a sex object. Calonne explains that the volume also contains 

several stories which cross into transgressive domains: 

 
‘The Fuck Machine’ describes a device which provides ecstatic sexual 
experiences and explores the Baudrillardian concept of virtual versus ‘real’ 
reality which would inform many of Bukowski’s stories: the men prefer the 
machine woman to a real one. ‘The Fiend’ portrays the middle-aged Martin 
Blanchard’s rape of a small girl. The violation is graphically described, and 
at the close Blanchard turns himself in to the police. The story created a 
scandal: Bukowski defended himself saying that his job as a writer was to 
‘photograph’ reality and that the role of writer and moralist were separate 
categories. ‘The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California’ involves 
necrophilia, again charting the liminal territory between fantasy/real 
relationships which would preoccupy Bukowski as he examined the 
complexities of sexual longing and frustration. (CALONNE, 2012, p. 111-
2) 

 

In order to conduct my analysis of Bukowski’s attitude(s) to women in this 

collection of 64 stories I have divided them into groups according to the way in which the 

female characters are portrayed. In the overwhelming majority, women are depicted 

pejoratively – either as important characters or in passing. A very small minority portray 

women in a favourable light, and some other stories show a more ambivalent attitude on the 

part of the Bukowskian narrator. My method has been to summarise each of the stories 

succinctly and to draw attention specifically to the way in which each one portrays its female 

characters. In each group I have selected a number of representative stories for more detailed 

analysis. Finally, I analyse ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’ in order to determine to 

what extent that story may be seen as a striking an entirely different note from the other 

stories in the collection. 

  

1.4)  The organisation of the corpus 

 

There is no information available about the person responsible for compiling 

Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General tales of Ordinary Madness in 1972. The 

volume does not have the name of an editor in addition to Bukowski’s name as the author. It 



31 

 

is therefore impossible to know why these 64 stories were selected for inclusion, nor why they 

were printed in the particular order in which they are presented. There is no information about 

the date and place of the first publication of each of the stories – apart from a list of 

magazines and periodicals in which the stories in the collection were previously published, 

which does not specify which story appeared in which publication. For that reason, I have 

reorganised the stories in alphabetical order of their title, including the page number where 

each particular story is to be found. In the following chapters I present a summary and brief 

analysis of each of the stories in that particular group. The stories which I have selected for 

more detailed analysis are then presented, out of alphabetical order, at the end of the 

sequence. 

The first group of stories is entitled ‘Stories that refer to women pejoratively’. The 

29 stories in this group – almost half of the total – feature female characters, who are depicted 

in a negative, sexist light, often in a deeply offensive manner. In this group we will find the 

stories: ‘A .45 to Pay the Rent’, ‘3 Chickens’, ‘3 Women’, ‘All the Great Writers’, ‘All the 

Pussy We Want’, ‘The Beginner’, ‘The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper’, 

‘The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California’, ‘The Day We Talked About James 

Thurber’, ‘A Drinking Partner’, ‘An Evil Town’, ‘The Fiend’, ‘Flower Horse’, ‘The Fuck 

Machine’, ‘The Gut-Wringing Machine’, ‘Life in a Texas Whorehouse’, ‘A Lovely Love 

Affair’, ‘The Murder of Ramon Vasquez’, ‘My Big-Assed Mother’, ‘No Stockings’, ‘One for 

Walter Lowenfels’, ‘A Rain of Women’, ‘Rape! Rape!’, ‘Reunion’, ‘Six Inches’, ‘Trouble 

with a Battery’, ‘The White Beard’, ‘A White Pussy’ and ‘Would you Suggest Writing as a 

Career?’. 

The second group is entitled ‘Stories that make pejorative references to women in 

passing’. The 28 stories in this group mention women pejoratively, even though the character 

is not a protagonist of the story. Some of these stories are not even stories as such, but 

accounts of Bukowski’s experiences at the horse races or other personal anecdotes. This 

group contains the stories: ‘卐’, ‘A Bad Trip’, ‘Another Horse Story’, ‘Beer and Poets and 

Talk’, ‘The Big Pot Game’, ‘The Blanket’, ‘Cunt and Kant and a Happy Home’, ‘Doing Time 

with Public Enemy No. 1’, ‘Eyes Like the Sky’, ‘Great Poets Die in Steaming Pots of Shit’, 

‘The Great Zen Wedding’, ‘I Shot a Man in Reno’, ‘Kid Stardust on the Porterhouse’, ‘Life 

and Death in the Charity Ward’, ‘Love it or Leave It’, ‘My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage’, ‘Night 

Streets of Madness’, ‘Non-Horseshit Horse Advice’, ‘Notes of a Potential Suicide’, ‘Notes on 

the Pest’, ‘Nut Ward Just East of Hollywood’, ‘Politics is like Trying to Screw a Cat in the 



32 

 

Ass’, ‘A Popular Man’, ‘Purple as an Iris’, ‘A Quiet Conversation Piece’, ‘Scenes from the 

Big Time’, ‘The Stupid Christs’, and ‘Twelve Flying Monkeys Who Won’t Copulate 

Properly’. 

 Finally, the last group of stories contains those which show some positive aspects of 

women, even though, in most of them, these are mixed with negative aspects too. There are 

only 7 stories in this group: ‘25 Bums in Rags’, ‘Animal Crackers in My Soup’, ‘A Dollar and 

Twenty Cents’, ‘Goodbye Watson’, ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’, ‘Ten Jack-Offs’, 

and ‘Too Sensitive’. This group was entitled ‘Stories which depict positive aspects of women, 

particularly ‘The Most Beautiful Woman in Town’. The story in the title is singled out for 

attention, because, apparently, it is an exception in Bukowski’s representation of the feminine 

universe. Cass, the main female character, is marginalised and restricted by society’s rules. 

Through the eyes of the narrator this feminine character reveals herself to be sensitive and 

unjustly treated by those around her; he analyses the impositions that are made upon her and 

suffers with her pain. She is different from other female characters depicted by the 

Bukowskian narrator because she is more complex, and his attitude towards her is kind and 

protective. For this reason, my analysis attempts to determine how exceptional this story is in 

relation to the other stories in the collection. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



33 

 

CHAPTER ONE: STORIES THAT REFER TO FEMALE CHARACTERS 

PEJORATIVELY  

 

In this chapter I shall examine the 29 stories in which women feature as important 

characters and are depicted in a pejorative light. Most of the stories objectify the female body 

and transform women into sex objects. The characters are often addressed or referred to as 

‘cunt’ or described as if composed of no more than private parts. Some of the characters are 

only interested in money and others are portrayed as mad or superficial. Many of them are 

nymphomaniacs and yet are desperate to satisfy men as if their own satisfaction depended on 

that. The language used to depict the women is often offensive, and sex is often seen as an 

animal act. Bukowski often uses the verb ‘to mount’ or the violent word ‘to rape’. 22 of the 

stories in this group are in first-person narration, which demonstrates the contamination of the 

narrator’s opinion in the stories. Many of the stories uses the alter ego Henry Chinaski, and 

these stories are based on events in Bukowski’s own life. I shall present 25 of these stories in 

the form of a brief synopsis, followed by a short critical comment. The remaining four stories 

will be analysed at greater length. 

 

2.1) ‘A .452 to Pay the Rent’ (p. 241) 

 

This third-person narrative is a day in the life of Duke, an ex-con and small-time 

armed robber. We see him going to the supermarket with his four-year-old daughter, Lala, 

with whom he has a harmonious relationship based on the inversion of roles, allowing the 

child to treat him as her baby. However, when they return home, he treats his wife, Mag, 

abusively, saying the ‘only thing (she is) good for is fucking, for nothing, and laying around 

reading magazines and popping chocolates into (her) mouth’ (p. 245). He addresses her as 

‘cunt’, and says she’s ‘nothing but a cunt on the whitehouse steps, wide open, and mentally 

siffed3…’ (p. 244). Nonetheless, despite the abuse, she still loves him and expresses anxiety 

as he takes his .45 to go out and hold up a liquor store because of the risk posed by the clarity 

                                                 
2 The ‘.45’ in the title is the Colt .45, a single-action revolver which has been manufactured by Colt’s Patent 
Firearms Manufacturing Company from 1873 to the present. Known as the ‘The Gun That Won the West’, it is 
perhaps the most iconic of sidearms. 
 
3 This is a word invented by Bukowski. One can conjecture that he may have meant to write ‘syphed’, or 
infected with syphilis. 
 



34 

 

of that night’s full moon. Once at the liquor store he himself has second thoughts and drives 

on into the night. Although Duke nurses a chip on his shoulder because of the way society 

exploits and marginalises  ex-prisoners, he himself perpetuates the cycle in his abusive 

relationship with his ‘little wifey’ (p. 244). 

 

2.2) ‘3 Chickens’ (p. 66) 

 

This is an account of the first-person narrator’s disturbing relationship with Vicki,4 

which is characterised by drunkenness, verbal abuse, physical violence and sexual betrayal. 

Nonetheless, they do not separate, feeling compelled to feed the sick love they feel for each 

other. At the beginning of the story, the narrator breaks Vicki’s arm by folding her away in a 

fold-down bed in their flat. On another occasion he breaks her false teeth by slapping her 

across the mouth. Instead of leaving him, Vicki goes to bars and chases other men, ‘“looking 

for a live one,” as the girls would say’ (p. 67), and sometimes only returns home after three 

days. On one of these occasions, the narrator catches her in her favourite bar and tells her that 

he had ‘tried to make a woman out of’ her, but that she was ‘nothing, but a god damned 

whore’ (p. 67). Then he hits her so hard that she falls off the barstool. Later, in response to her 

taunting, the narrator admits that he only hits her because she is a woman and that he would 

not have enough courage to hit a man. The three chickens appear in the story when the 

narrator picks up a prostitute called Margy; he buys three chickens to bake after they have had 

sex, but she drops them on the floor when he sticks his middle finger up her vagina. Before 

they can have sex Vicki arrives back at the flat with two policemen, who arrest Margy when 

she calls one of them homosexual. In order to prove that he is not he assaults her in the lift on 

the way out, and the story ends with Vicky and the narrator having sex. Closely 

autobiographical in its detail, this story reveals Bukowski’s attitude to women in many 

occasions of his life.   

 

 

 
                                                 
4 Although Bukowski does not identify himself as such, this story is based on his relationship with Jane Cooney 
Baker – who is also referred to as Vicki in ‘Life and Death in the Charity Ward’. According to Howard Sounes, 
‘Bukowski transformed Jane into a stock character of his fiction, second only to Henry Chinaski and his father’ 
(SOUNES, 2010, p. 28). Sounes points out that, in interviews, Bukowski gave the ‘entirely fictitious’ 
information that Jane was a half-Irish/half-Indian orphan, and in this story Vicki is described as ‘half  Indian’ (p. 
70). 
 



35 

 

2.3) ‘3 Women’ (p. 58)  

 

This is a supposedly autobiographical account of a period when Bukowski was 

living with a woman called Linda in a room in an eight-storey hotel opposite McArthur Park 

in Los Angeles.5 They are both unemployed, and all they ‘could do about’ their ‘worries was 

to fuck’ (p. 58). After an unsuccessful attempt to find work the narrator named Bukowski 

returns to the hotel and finds Linda drinking with her friends Jeanie and Eve. The three 

women pass out from drunkenness and the narrator takes advantage of the situation. First he 

goes to the bedroom where Jeanie is sleeping and ‘mounts’ her, not finding too much 

resistance, and has ‘one of the best fucks of (his) life’ (p. 61). The second one is Eve who 

‘didn’t protest at all’ (p. 62). Finally, having had two orgasms, he lies down beside his partner 

Linda. She says she is hot for him but, since he is unable to perform, she gives him oral sex 

until he comes once again, conveniently forgetting about her own desires in the process. The 

narrator is much more concerned to chronicle his own sexual prowess than to portray the three 

women as individuals. (Indeed, having described his three orgasms, he even exaggerates the 

total, claiming there were ‘four times that night’ (p. 63).) Jeanie is simply described as ‘a 

large woman, and naked’ (p. 61), whom he ‘mounts’ as if she was a bitch in heat. Eve ‘was a 

little female pig, farting and grunting and sniffling, wiggling’ (p. 62), and Linda is appreciated 

for her skill in sucking his cock. Afterwards, the three women go out drinking by themselves 

and the narrator is thrown out of the hotel for his inappropriate behaviour in a ‘respectable’ 

establishment. He summarises the story by saying, ‘let’s just say that one night I fucked or got 

fucked by 3 women. and let that be story enough’ (p. 65). 

 

2.4) ‘All the Great Writers’ (p. 148)  

 

This story narrates the first few hours one morning in the life of Henry Mason, the 

boss of a publishing house which has Bukowski on its list of authors. He receives visits from 

‘great writers’, who are actually bad writers who believe they are good. The first one is James 

                                                 
5 From 1970 to 1972 Bukowski did indeed have a turbulent relationship with the sculptress Linda King – ‘after 
Jane Cooney Baker, probably the greatest love of Bukowski’s life’ (SOUNES, 2010, p. 111). However, in this 
case, it would appear that Linda is the pseudonym of Jane herself. The account in the story’s opening paragraph 
of Bukowski seeing a man falling past the window and spattering onto the ground below and calling Linda to see 
the mess, is included in Howard Sounes’ biography as an event that occurred while Bukowski and Jane were 
living in ‘a room overlooking MacArthur Park’. (SOUNES, 2010, p. 30) 
 



36 

 

Burkett who is furious over the rejection of his manuscript. He is followed by Ainsworth 

Hockley, a pornographic writer on the publisher’s list. He outlines an idea for a science fiction 

sex fantasy set on a spaceship, for which Mason gives him an advance of $75. After this, even 

though it is only 10:30, he invites his receptionist, Francine, out to lunch, aroused by the 

extremely short dress she’s wearing. He kisses her and paws her buttocks in the lift before 

they have even left the building, to which she only ‘offered a token resistance’ (p. 154). In the 

restaurant she understands the sexual symbolism when Mason says he is ‘thinking of clams’ 

and says she will let him have sex with her because he’s ‘a very nice man’ (p. 154). Francine 

is the personification of the male fantasy, seducing her boss and offering herself as a sex 

object ready to satisfy him. 

 

2.5) ‘All the Pussy We Want’ (p. 195)  

 

The two protagonists of this story, Harry and Duke, are ex-convicts living in a ‘cheap 

hotel in downtown L.A.’ (p. 195). Harry invites Duke to be his partner on a fantastic mission 

to pick up gold supposedly lying on the ground on an army firing range. Despite the danger, 

they believe it is worth the risk because they see the chance to become rich, which will enable 

them to have ‘all the pussy (they) want’ (p. 196). They go out to buy whisky and beer, and on 

the way back they are accosted by Ginny, ‘a young woman (…) about 30 with a good figure’ 

(p. 198). Back in their hotel room Ginny says she ‘wanna fuck’ Duke first (p. 198) and boasts 

that she has ‘the tightest pussy in the state of California’ (p. 199), to which Duke replies that 

his penis is so big that he’ll ‘probably rip (her) wide open’ (p. 199). Harry watches the two of 

them having sex, and the story ends as he contemplates shooting Duke out on the firing range 

in order not only to keep the gold for himself but also to have sole access to Ginny’s ‘tight 

box’ (p. 201). Throughout the story the two protagonists speak of women metonymically as 

‘pussy’ and, by the end of the story, they are referring to Ginny’s vagina as a mere ‘box’, 

nothing more than a receptacle for an erect penis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



37 

 

2.6) ‘The Beginner’ (p. 202)  

 

Like ‘Reunion’, this story is a sequel to ‘Life and Death on the Charity Ward’. Both 

stories are narrated by Bukowski’s alter-ego, Harry, feature his partner, Madge,6 and recount 

events immediately after Harry had been discharged from hospital and obliged to stop 

drinking. Madge suggests that, instead of drinking, he can bet on horses. They drive to 

Hollywood Park.7 When they arrive he tells her to pull her ‘skirt down (because) everybody’s 

looking at (her) ass’ (p. 203). He bets on a couple of winners, and has the impression he can 

make easy money betting on horses. They go to the racetrack bar to celebrate, and he tells her 

to ‘pull (her) stockings up’ because she looks ‘like a washerwoman’ (p. 206). As she is doing 

so he looks at her and thinks that, with his putative future winnings, he would soon ‘be able to 

afford something just a little bit better than that’ (p. 206). The discourse, in particular the 

reference to his partner as a thing, is that of a man about to trade his car in for a newer model, 

which reveals that, for him, she is a mere object.  

 

2.7) ‘The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper’8 (p. 109) 

 

At twenty-one pages this is the longest story in the collection, possibly an indication 

of the significance of the subject material for Bukowski. In it, the narrator named Bukowski 

tells the story of the rise and fall of Open Pussy, the underground newspaper in which he has a 

controversial column, ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’. The editor, Joe Hyans,9 and his wife, 

Cherry, work intensively together with a group of volunteers to publish pacifist ideas. Women 

are certainly an important subject in the story. At the beginning, Bukowski records Cherry’s 

accusation that he had been harassing her, telling her that he ‘was going to fuck her up against 

                                                 
6 Madge (Mad + Age) is a pseudonym for Bukowski’s first girlfriend, Jane Cooney Baker. After being 
discharged from the LA County Charity Hospital, where he had been treated for a bleeding ulcer in 1955, 
Bukowski ‘went back to Jane afterwards and told her the doctors said if he ever drank again it would kill him’ 
(SOUNES, 2010, p. 34). She then suggested that he start betting on horses instead, and took him to the 
Hollywood Park race track for the first time in his life. 
 
7 ‘Hollywood Park was the track, a huge arena in Inglewood near Los Angeles airport’ (SOUNES, 2010, p. 34). 
 
8 ‘Bukowski wrote a satirical short story, The Birth, Life and Death of an Underground Newspaper, about a 
paper he called Open Pussy, and the pretensions of its editor. There were particularly crude comments about the 
editor’s wife. The story had obvious parallels with Open City’ (SOUNES, 2010, p. 93), the underground 
newspaper in which Bukowski had his weekly column, ‘Notes of a Dirty Old Man’. 
 
9 The editor of Open City was John Bryan. 
 



38 

 

the bookcase’ (p. 122); he even insinuates that she has good reason to worry about him being 

close to her five-year-old daughter. Referring to the female nineteen-year-old volunteer 

workers, he admits that he ‘kept searching out the women for ass’, and expresses his 

disappointment that, ‘whenever I’d lay my drunken hands on them they were always quite 

cool’ (p. 110). When he is invited for the commemoration of the paper’s first anniversary, he 

expects to find that ‘the wine and the pussy and the life and the love would be flowing’ (p. 

120), but, instead of ‘fucking on the floor and love galore’, he finds the ‘little love-creatures’ 

hard at work, reminding him of ‘little old ladies’ who were as ‘neurotic as all hell’ (p. 120). 

At the Post Office, where he works, he sees his female co-workers as prostitutes at his 

disposal, thinking about ‘how each of the girls who walked by would go on a bed, legs high, 

or taking it in the mouth’ (p. 112). When Hyans tells him that Cherry has cheated on him, 

Bukowski urges him not to make ‘this a personal property thing’ (p. 123), but expresses no 

comment at Hyans’ hypocrisy when he reveals that he himself has a lover.10  

 

2.8) ‘The Day We Talked About James Thurber’11 (p. 140)  

 

In ‘The Day We Talked About James Thurber’, the first person narrator Bukowski 

tells the bisexual adventure he had while living in the house of a ‘great French poet’ called 

Andre.12 In addition to being a successful writer Andre has a very large penis (‘twelve inches 

limp’), and he receives a stream of visitors who are at least as interested in his penis as they 

are in his poetry.13 On one occasion, Andre travels to another city for a reading, leaving 

Bukowski alone at his home. A young boy and a girl called Wendy pay a call and refuse to 

                                                 
10 Graham Sounes reveals that this story was published in Evergreen magazine and that it was because of the 
publication of the ‘comments about the editor’s wife’ that the friendship between Bukowski and John Bryan 
came to an end. It was at this time that Bryan came up with ‘a new nickname for his former friend: Bullshitski’ 
(SOUNES, 2010, p. 93). 
 
11 James Grover Thurber (1894–1961) was an American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright, and 
celebrated wit. Thurber was best known for his cartoons and short stories, published mainly in The New 
Yorker magazine and collected in his numerous books. One of the most popular humourists of his time, Thurber 
celebrated the comic frustrations and eccentricities of ordinary people. 
 
12 Andre could possibly be a fictional representation of Harold Norse (1916-2009), an American poet who had 
lived in Paris in the 1960s with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso (authors mentioned by 
Bukowski in the short story). He returned to America in 1968, and moved to Venice Beach, California. 
Bukowski situates the story in the first months of 1970, just a few months before his 50th birthday. 
 
13 Harold Norse, who was homosexual, ‘claims that when Bukowski was drunk he sometimes got his cock out 
and asked to see Norse’s cock. This did not appear to be meant as a joke. “He was fascinated to see other men’s 
cocks. It’s a sexual thing,” says Norse.’ (SOUNES, 2010, p. 95) 
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoonist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playwright
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_cartoon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_story
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Yorker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_humorists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Ginsberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Corso
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venice,_California


39 

 

believe Bukowski when he tells them that he is not Andre. The boy gives Bukowski oral sex. 

After Bukowski has ejaculated, the three of them talk about literature for a while, mentioning 

a stream of authors including Thurber. Bukowski then has sex with Wendy while the boy 

watches them and masturbates. He stresses his own brutality and his disregard for the girl 

herself, saying he ‘rammed rammed her, rammed her, had her head bobbing like some crazy 

puppet, and her ass’ (p. 146). After he has reached his orgasm he writes ‘I just tossed her off 

somewhere. Threw her away. (…) I just let go of Wendy. I don’t know where the hell she fell, 

nor did I care’ (p. 146-7). She is disposable, serving no useful purpose after he has obtained 

his pleasure, and he is as indifferent to her as he would be to any other spent container being 

discarded in the rubbish. 

 

2.9) ‘A Drinking Partner’ (p. 224)  

 

The first person narrator Bukowski was ‘coming off a bad run with a woman who 

had almost finished’ him (p. 224). Disenchanted with women he seeks solace in gambling, 

masturbating and drinking. His drinking partner is Jeff, a colleague at the auto parts 

warehouse where he works, who had also ‘been burned by the ladies’, who is prone to attacks 

of psychopathic violence when he gets drunk. Bukowski describes two different occasions 

when even he was shocked by Jeff’s violence. In the first episode, Jeff holds a bulldog while a 

friend slashes its stomach open with a knife, and in the second one he punches a pregnant 

woman on the chin and pushes her down a flight of stairs before giving her husband similar 

treatment. Although Bukowski attempts to knock Jeff out after this he nonetheless holds a 

certain admiration for him – ‘a real son of a bitch like him is needed now and then’ (p. 230). 

In this story, Bukowski shares Jeff’s negative view of women. He drinks every day in order to 

forget little Flo, who had just dumped him, and harbours a grudge against women in general. 

He carries a chip on his shoulder because he believes his poverty renders him less attractive to 

young women: ‘The girls don’t search out the common laborers, the girls search out the 

doctors, the scientists, the lawyers, the businessmen so forth’ (p. 227). He laments that he can 

only get ‘the girls when they are through with the girls, and they are no longer girls (…) the 

used, the deformed, the diseased, the mad (…) seconds and thirds and fourths’ (p. 227). As so 

often, his language reduces women to the level of consumer goods; since he can’t get top 

quality he prefers to be ‘womanless’ (p. 224). 

 

 



40 

 

2.10) ‘An Evil Town’ (p. 351) 

 

The protagonist of this story, Frank Evans, is a guest in a hotel in an unidentified 

town. He is tormented by the desk clerk, who gives him a piece of cheese wrapped in 

cellophane, saying that it is a piece of his mind. Frank goes out to a pornographic cinema in 

which the members of the exclusively male audience are masturbating and having sex with 

each other. The plot of the silent movie on the screen is about a girl who is raped when she is 

drunk and, as a result, becomes a prostitute. Evans rejects an attempt by a man to solicit him 

and, in the toilet, urinates in the eye of another man spying on him through a hole in the stall. 

Back at the hotel he drafts a letter to his mother, couched in evangelical terms, complaining 

about the behaviour of the people in this ‘evil town’. He is interrupted by a visit from the 

hotel clerk, who declares his love for him and attempts to kiss him. His response is to stab the 

clerk in the stomach with a flick-knife, after which he unzips the man’s fly, cuts off his penis 

and flushes it down the toilet. The story ends as Frank finishes the letter to his mother, telling 

her that he is leaving the town, and starts to pack. In this thoroughly disagreeable story, the 

violent reaction of the Bukowski’s protagonist to the various homosexual overtures he 

receives reveals his own latent homosexuality. A Freudian analyst would have a field day 

with this text, not only with its account of male denial of latent homosexuality, but also with 

the violent treatment of the female protagonist in the silent film. 

 

2.11) ‘The Fiend’ (p. 207)  

 

This is without doubt the most disturbing and controversial story in a collection 

replete with graphic images of explicit sexuality and gratuitous violence. It is a detailed 

account of the rape of a pre-pubescent girl by a 45-year-old man which leaves nothing 

whatsoever to the imagination. The central character is Martin Blanchard, twice-divorced, 

unemployed, a loner with nothing to occupy his time. One ‘hot and lazy’ summer morning he 

looks out of the window of his fourth-floor apartment and sees three young children playing 

on the lawn below – two boys and a girl aged ‘somewhere between six and nine’. Aroused by 

the sight of the girl’s ‘very short red skirt’ and her ‘most interesting panties’ (p. 208), 

Blanchard masturbates over the kitchen floor as he gazes down at her. He goes out to buy 

more port wine and cigars and notices that the three children are now playing inside a garage. 

He goes into the garage with them and closes the door behind him. What follows is a graphic 

description of the rape as he kisses the girl greedily and sits on a chair forcing the girl’s tiny 



41 

 

vagina down over his engorged penis. Blanchard is only too aware of the discrepancy in their 

sizes – ‘It’s in her body now, Martin thought. Jesus, my cock must be half the length of her 

body!’ (p. 211). The two boys, understanding little of what is happening, look on, giving a 

running commentary. Leaving the girl’s ripped and unconscious (possibly dead) body on the 

floor he returns home, where he is soon arrested and savagely beaten by the police. What 

makes this story especially disturbing are the similarities between the paedophile and 

Bukowski himself: both men are in their mid-40s, drink port wine, listen to Mahler, care little 

about personal hygiene, prefer their own company and masturbate frequently. Above all, they 

share the same misogynism: Martin’s accumulated experience of women ‘had made him feel 

that the sex act was not worth what the female demanded in return’ (p. 207).14 

 

2.12) ‘Flower Horse’ (p. 462)  

 

‘Flower Horse’ is a narrative set in Los Angeles. The first-person narrator goes to 

the Hollywood Park15 horse racetrack after an all-night drinking session with his friend John 

the Beard, in the course of which they had discussed the poet Robert Creeley,16 whom the 

narrator says he was ‘against’. The narrator starts betting on horses and refers to an under-

performing jockey called Charley Short.17 His male acquaintances become interested in a 

young prostitute, pejoratively described by the narrator as ‘something in a very short 

miniskirt’ (p. 463). He talks to her himself and finds out that she charges $100 for a ‘night in 

bed’, but, in his opinion, ‘Miniskirt’s pussy was worth about 8 dollars, she was only charging 
                                                 
14 Not surprisingly, interviewers attempted to discover why Bukowski should have written such a story. In 1975 
he stated that, ‘I wrote a story once about a little girl getting raped on roller skates. In fact, it appeared in the 
Free Press, and the editor put a long prelude in front of it before he published it: “Bukowski has a daughter; he 
loves his daughter; if you see Bukowski with his daughter, you’ll understand that he is a good man.” He had to 
say all of these things before he published the story. He was frightened of it. What I try to do is to get into the 
mind of a man who would do such a thing, and try to figure his viewpoint. I write stories about murderers, 
rapists, all these types. It doesn’t mean that I’m for murder or rape or anything, but I like to explore what this 
man might be thinking and that a murderer can enjoy a cup of hot cocoa or enjoy a comic strip. This is rather 
fascinating to me, you know, to explore these things’ (In CALONNE, 2004d, p. 116). In an interview in 1981 he 
protested that, although certain readers might find the story arousing, he himself ‘didn’t get a hard-on’ while he 
was writing it (In CALONNE, 2004d, p. 181). 
  
15 The Hollywood Park racetrack is located in Inglewood, L.A.; it was inaugurated in 1938 and closed in 2013. 
 
16 Robert Creeley (1926–2005) was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. At the time of the 
story he was a member of the Black Mountain poets. 
 
17 Charley Short was actually Charles E. Kurtsinger (1906-1946), an American Hall of Fame jockey who had 
won the Triple Crown in 1937. 
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Racing_and_Hall_of_Fame
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jockey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Triple_Crown_of_Thoroughbred_Racing


42 

 

about 13 times the worth’ (p. 463). However, when he wins $236, on a horse that he describes 

as ‘flower horse’ (presumably a reference to the ‘flower power’ of the late 1960s), he notices 

that she is looking at him and he rushes away from the racetrack. Even though the woman is a 

prostitute, the narrator’s reference to her as a thing, as well as his metonymic reduction of her 

identity to the skirt that she is wearing, reveal the same objectification of women that we find 

in so many of the other stories. 

 
2.13) ‘The Gut-Wringing Machine’ (p. 47) 

 

In ‘The Gut-Wringing Machine’, Bukowski returns to one of his recurrent themes, the 

dehumanising and emasculating demands of the world of work. The story is a fantastic social 

satire, narrated in the third person. It is set in the ‘Satisfactory Help Agency’, where the 

proprietors, Danforth and Bagley, pass reluctant candidates for employment through a body 

wringer to squeeze the rebelliousness out of them and render them suitable for submissive 

acquiescence to the demands of American consumer society. The story is located in the 

contemporary world, with references to the Paris Peace Conference, President Nixon, Biafra 

and ageing celebrities like Mae West and Marlene Dietrich,18 amongst a host of others. 

Although the protagonists and characters in the story are male, the place of women in society 

is clearly delimited to that of housewives and sex objects. In fact, at the end of the story, 

Danforth puts his partner through the wringer specifically in order to emasculate him 

sufficiently so that he will be able to enjoy the spectacle of his own wife being ‘bung-holed’ 

by Danforth later in the day, a graphic euphemism for anal sex. As they drive to Bagley’s 

house Bagley demonstrates the success of the gut-wringing machine by practising fellatio on 

Danforth as he drives Bagley’s brand-new ‘69 Caddy’ – he has been transformed into a 

woman providing sexual services for men. 

 

 

 

 

                                                 
18 The Paris Peace Talks ran from 1968 until the final agreement to end the Vietnam War was reached on 27 
January 1973; President Nixon replaced President Johnson during the process, being sworn in on 20 January 
1969; the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, started in July 1967 and was brought to an end in 
January 1970. In the story, Mae West (1893-1980) and Marlene Dietrich (1901-92) are derided for being 
geriatric sex symbols, only capable of arousing desire in a man who had been passed through the wringer; in 
1969, Mae West was 76 and Dietrich was 68.