Notes for Wayward Women

EVER since people started to get wind of the feminist movement in the late 60s, books on the subject of "women" have come tumbling wildly off the presses--face it, the subject's in vogue. Men rarely get written about because of their gender, but because they are truck drivers, astronauts, doctors or otherwise good at doing something. Books about women tend to deal with insanity, love, divorce, orgasms, the pill, the shape of their bodies (not from an athletic point of view)--subjects related to what women are, not what they do. The major task and concern of women has traditionally been to be enough, rather than to get enough, or do enough, and somehow all the recent attention still focuses on how women be.

But maybe I should go easier on this consciousness problem. After all, when women begin to realize that they have it in them to be something besides the opposite sex, when they understand what forces are at work in them--social, biochemical and genetic forces--to hinder them from asserting themselves in fields dominated by men, they will certainly become better able to change the balance. They will recognize and value the difference between, say, former prime minister Golda Meir and the other nine women (Pat Nixon, Patricia Neal, Ethel Kennedy...) on Good Housekeeping's list of women most admired by American women in 1974; all but Meir had power merely by association.

Although most of the men and women I know wouldn't draw up a list like the one that appeared in Good Housekeeping, they still have trouble (as I do) shrugging off some of the attitudes that make such women respect-worthy. And, as the shelves stocked with volumes titled "Women and ..." suggest, sex really does get in the way of dealing straightforwardly with people, even when the important criteria should be intelligence, job competence, ambition or simple sympathy.

THE MORE constructive literature to appear recently on the subject of women questions the conventional modes of male/ female interaction and the traditional place of the female sex in society. Although it would be spurious to try and propose some kind of plan of action by which women could complete more equitably on all levels with men, these writers suggest ways for them to change their habits of being in order to assert themselves more effectively, to do more.

Elizabeth Williams's Notes of a Feminist Therapist is largely a complication of the case histories of her psychoanalytic patients--cases-in-point in which women had to grapple with such things as competing professionally with a spouse, having children out of wedlock, adopting children into a lesbian household, or relying on masochistic fantasies for sexual arousal. Each example provides a pivot for her own condemnation of the tyranny of stereotypical yet pervasive forms of morality and feminine role-playing.

In Women, Money and Power, Phyllis Chesler and Emily Goodman deplore the reluctance of the business world to admit women. Anyone who's glanced at its full-page business promotions in The New York Times, knows that Cosmopolitan, say, provides some of advertising's most lucrative exposure. Women are constantly manipulated by business firms, yet they rarely have a say, as executives, in how this is done: the tradition of the nurturant and emotionally unstable female gets in the way of such careers.

Women often work as volunteers, claiming their "help" is needed, without examining what these activities satisfy in themselves. Chesler and Goodman have found that the average female volunteer believes that she is not really worth taking seriously. She shirks being judged by "professional" standards, being fired, reprimanded or competed with. "She is a 'good' woman: although she is working outside her home, everyone knows that most female volunteers are primarily loyal to their families--and not to their unpaid volunteer work."

Although women shouldn't feel called on to repudiate old-fashioned roles and values in the search for a new identity, these writers suggest that something different and more rewarding is possible, something more willfull and willed. And they affirm that it is necessary to debunk old mores on the level of one-to-one relationships between men and women before you can proceed to the larger issues and ambitions.

SOME kind of intimacy with another person seems essential to everyone's happiness. This doesn't necessarily include sexual intimacy, just the chance to share thoughts and acts privately that you're not comfortable about bringing out in front of everybody. It's often nice to be intimate with more than one person, in succession or at the same time-- where sex is involved, variety is a tricky thing.

Maude, in Rohmer's movie My Night at Maud's appeals to me because she lives out a seemingly unattainable fantasy. She's a physician, pretty jaded, about 35, who picks up men whenever she feels like it. I guess Rohmer made her jaded to excuse her jaded to excuse her waywardness. The discouraging (and conventional) catch to her (unconventional) way of life is that she's unhappy.

SOCIETY expects those in love at least to consider marriage (unless they're homosexual, in which case it expects them not even to be in love). Long-term affairs without marriage are not supposed to be entirely satisfying, and the world tends to make those who engage in them unhappy, if only to prove the point. But, after all, we're not here to complete each other, whatever myths like the Christian one may say--we're just here. Complementing someone else may be all right, even desirable, but as Williams shows, the institution of marriage has too often cajoled a woman into deriving her identity from her partner, "just as when she was growing up her whole family derived its 'identity' (social status and community 'image') from the father's reputation and social position." The special effort it takes for a woman to maintain her independence in a love relationship can make you wonder whether it's worth it.

Marriage, of course, used to be an easier niche to recede into without doubts. When my own and my peers' parents were young, the strictures against sleeping with several people were greater than now, and doing it was harder and riskier anyway--for lack of privacy, close and habitual contact between the sexes, and easy access to contraceptives. Even if they were curious about what an intimate relationship with a second or third person would be like, the chances of finding out were small, so it was easier to adjust to the good thing they had and forget that there can be more than one good thing.

IT'S still particularly inappropriate for women to chase after sexual experience A woman is supposed to let sex sort of happen to her. Traditionally, she's not supposed to want to make sex; nor, as a wife, is the woman traditionally allowed to make money. In her domestic role she is supposed to provide sexual services, among others. Chesler and Goodman note the stigma that results when the married woman's usual duties are connected with money--both the prostitue and the maid are commonly labeled low-class creatures. In a pretty devious way, a predominant feminine image turns out not to mix with a yen for money and the power, respect and independence (perhaps the highest goals of American capitalist society) that go along with it.

Yet women do learn to use their bodies and their sexuality. Sometimes it seems hard to get men to listen to a woman unless she humbles herself a little--there are too many jokes about the shrewish type. When a woman says no, her body tends to find ways to soften or deny her words; Chesler and Goodman call it using her body "deferentially." She adopts certain mannerisms as a way for daring to threaten, rather than to put men at their ease. It is more acceptable for women than men to behave childishly, thereby rendering themselves less imposing as sexual beings.

According to Chesler and Goodman, "Touching' is one way of signifying power: economic power in general and sexual power, the droit du seigneur." While this may sound overly ominous, men, whether they like the role of aggressor or not, seem to touch more readily. The boss can wrap a paternal arm around a female's shoulder without seeming too forward. If she returned the gesture, the scene would become an embarrassment or a joke; only by this reversal would its essential presumptuousness or plain silliness come out. A woman who acts this way might be tagged a flirt--a demeaning way of putting her on guard.

LESBIANISM is sometimes interpreted and feared as a hostile reaction to men. But by this logic, you could take female heterosexuality for a sign of hostility toward other women. A friend of mine returning from a bar early one morning told me of an incident she thought I might "understand" better than the man and woman she had been with. There was a woman playing guitar in this place, and as my friend watched her from a distance she sort of "fell in love" with her. Neither of us is sure exactly what this means, but a certain affinity with her physical presence was involved, a sympathy for it.

MANY women spend a lot of time, money and often desperate effort trying to make their bodies desirable. They are primed to do so by the cosmetics and clothing industry and their advertising, by fashion magazines or even blatantly exploitive pulp like Viva and Playboy. The result of this obsession with every wrinkle, fold of flesh and smell seems to be low body-esteem, increased insecurity, regardless of how attractive they actually are. Chesler and Goodman cite a 1973 study in which female and male college students were asked to "write down the amount of money you would ask in compensation for each part of your body that was lost." The women sold themselves cheaper--they thought their eyes, for example, were worth a median dollar value of $20,000, while the men valued their eyes at a median of $50,000.

It seems fair to say that men have more sources of approval than women, It is frustrating to find so much importance attached to women's bodies and to the illusions they can create out of them, rather than to bodily health and honesty. Carol Ginandes has published a collection, entitled Of Women Born, of ambiguously sexual photographs of commonplace women, startlingly exposed in their homely nakedness. Snippets of interviews accompany each portrait, in which her subjects try to say something meaningful about themselves--a dubious proposition in which, at least for the onlooker, they don't succeed. Occasionally an isolated phrase, like Lottie's, escapes tendentiousness. Her pronouncement damns men implicitly and reveals a healthy and admiring kind of greed in her own character. She says, "Men go to all lengths to have a woman's beauty; I don't want them to have it all to themselves."

The token woman is a black Chicana fluent in Chinese who has borne 1.2 babies (not on the premises, no childcare provided) owns a PhD, will teach freshmen English for a decade and bleach your laundry with tears, silent as a china egg. Your department orders her from a taxidermist's catalog and she comes luxuriously stuffed with goosedown able to double as sleeping or punching bag. --From The Token Woman, by Marge Piercy