The Female Ego

"In the Fifties, you had to be Jewish to get a girl," Mort Sahl writes in Heartland. "In the Sixties, you had to be black to get a girl, and now you have to be a girl to get a girl." The unerring truth of that statement sums up the dilemma of our time: What happens to us guys? Well, gentlemen, I was always one of those men who would do anything to score, and if that means becoming a girl, I'm ready.

In fact, I have already tried, though the deed is much easier said than done. Surgery is somewhat too permanent. Fashions change. There may come a time when we will once again have to be men to get women. It is considerably easier to remove a penis than to replace it. But the human spirit is somewhat more plastic than the flesh. Maybe it is possible to become female in everything but body.

The problem in doing so is lack of information. If they won't let us near them, how are we going to learn how to be like them? We need spies to ferret out their secrets. This calls for volunteers willing to lay down their sacred macho images in the interests of all mankind. Dressing in drag isn't necessary. The task is made slightly easier by the fact that so many women are doing a very good job pretending to be men. That's why they want girls. They're not perverts, you know. But is it enough for us to imitate women pretending to be men? Or do we have to really become ladies?

I cannot say that I have actually passed as a woman, but there have been points where I have become virtually invisible, neither accepted nor rejected but ignored. And so I have been able to undertake a preliminary reconnaissance of the territory. I would like to offer this to The New York Times Magazine as an article to be titled Whither Woman? but I know that there is not much of it that they will consider fit to print. Pussy licking is a bit avant-garde for them, for example. How can one talk about women without talking about pussy licking? Why would one want to? I mean, Norman Mailer likes getting head. What is his beef against giving it?

Norman is against mouth love. It is not manly, he says. I don't care about being manly, I just want to get laid. That man is a Communist. He should be deported. This is where the principle of freedom of speech and I part company. Shut him up. I wish for the equipment of a whale: a tongue that big and a hole in the top of my head to breathe through!

I am truly happy to see that this has become a political issue. It's a hell of a lot more interesting than tax reform. I think we should get it on the ballot. In some states, there are actually laws against tongue dances. Let's have mass protests and demonstrations, general strikes and furious barrages of wall posters, petitions, the White House mail room forklifting bales of telegrams demanding the right of intimate lip service.

We have to infiltrate the women's movement and get it going on these issues. What is this bullshit of picketing record companies for producing album covers that tend to promote violence against women? Let's poll the membership. How many of us have been raped at pistol point? How many did not get enough head in our last sexual embrace?

We need armies of female impersonators working from within like moles. To get that close, you have to know a little of their lingo. Things that women say: "I have to have my own space." "It's something I have to do." "I have to find out who I am." "I have to be my own person." "I have to be free to be me." "As a woman, I feel ..." (followed by anything from "I am fucking your psychoanalyst" to "The television is broken").

The beauty of all these statements is that there is no answer or argument possible. They are axioms. They are always delivered as if the woman is for the first time revealing to herself and to you a truth whose novelty is so imposing it ought to be engraved on stone tablets. No matter how many times she has said it or you have heard it, it always comes out that way, fresh.

One is always tempted to ask, "Why do you have to have your own space?" I mean, I know why I have to have my own space--to run little forbidden sexual scams in. Does anyone expect a woman to reply, "Because I like to play with myself once in a while and you get in the way"? Possibly they say this to each other. Possibly. But to men? Everything is covered by the Official Secrets Act. Omerta. The Code of Silence.

The taboo extends to the smallest details. You lick her pussy for 40 minutes. A blister is beginning to sear your tongue. Your upper lip is numb. You rise as if from 80 fathoms. "I guess you don't want me to come," she complains. You ask, "Exactly how would you like me to do it?" This is about the 56th time you have had this exchange with her. You are thinking about thumbscrews and truth serum. "What strokes? Fast? Slow? On? Around?" This can go on for a lifetime. If she suspects that you are a man, she will answer, "Oh, you seem to know what you're doing," and the subject will be closed. But woman to woman, maybe at last she says, "I like you to lick it in quick short strokes very intensely without stopping even for a second until I come." Do it and she pops over in a little under three minutes.

In moments like these--and they are bliss--the ladies tend sometimes to become paranoid. After all, it is a bit difficult to conceal an erection when you are naked. If she notices, you must say, "It is my clitoris. I know I'm a freak. I can't tell you the abuse I've taken from men about it. But I know that you, another woman, will be able to accept my deformity with dignity."

The female ego is different from the male. You need a computer print-out merely to begin to index the ways and the reasons. There is more to be written about this than may be recorded on all the leaves there ever were or yet shall be. The footnotes alone would make trees an endangered species. Since the dawn of history, for example, it has been noted with great regularity in all the scriptures and epic annals that womanly techniques such as getting their way with sadness, sulkiness and tears are designed to "unman" their opponents. The feminists dismiss this as mere superstition. Now come University of California psychologists Paula B. Johnson and Jacqueline D. Goodchilds with a scientifically creditable survey confirming this basic truth: Women get their way with sadness, sulkiness and tears. Much of the rest of the folklore--feminist and traditional--is equally valid, I am sure, but not all, according to my own firsthand observations.

My own observations are merely my own observations. They tend to depart from the fashionable viewpoint, however. I don't know about other men, but I was raised most of my life in a society ruled by women. Elementary school was hell for me and all the boys I knew. All the teachers were women. They favored the girls shamelessly. Girls were obedient little toadies who did their homework diligently and neatly and handed in their compositions in pretty folders decorated with crayon flowers. Girls score higher academically at all levels until they reach college, where more of the instructors are men. The feminist explanation for this has been male bias in the colleges. Maybe it is simply that they are being graded fairly for the first time.

Let us not even discuss Mothers and Motherhood, what Philip Wylie railed against as momism. Those were the days when every mother began every sentence with, "As a mother. ..." Playboy's Editorial Director, Arthur Kretchmer, says, "It isn't Jewish Mothers. They are all Jewish Mothers. It's just that Jewish sons are so articulate." But we aren't going to discuss that. In any case, the females I knew were so superior, so condescending. Theirs was the upper hand. Furtively, you sought their armored breasts with your cautious fingers. Oh, that disdain, that scorn of rejection or--almost worse--sorrowful success. You've defiled her. Now you're going to talk about it to all your friends. Years later, you find out she was wearing falsies, anyway.

As I see it, nothing has changed. Women are still getting better marks in every category except one--truthfulness. But only barely. As more and more men have joined their ranks, we have seen an evident disintegration of public morality. That was the meaning of Watergate. They lie because they can get away with it. Few men have the will to deal with them. That's why men run away into their clubs and offices and factories. Women are winners. Most guys reach the point where they can't handle losing anymore and they withdraw. It used to be merely social. Now it is overtly sexual. Dr. Ruth Moulton of the William Alanson White Institute of New York City told an American Academy of Psychoanalysis convention that feminism sometimes has a negative effect on men varying from impotence in young men to sexual withdrawal in older men, a weapon, she comments, that women in the past were more apt to use against men. Maybe in this case it isn't a weapon. It's an epidemic of giving up and walking away. Since when is surrender a weapon? How many times can Lucy beat Charlie Brown at checkers and keep him interested? I feel that women are better chess players than men, even though there never has been a female grand master. They know how to lose battles and win wars. They are strategists, and to the strategist, truth is merely a tactic. But even the best of strategists eventually have to face truths that transcend the battlefield.

The main truth that women are facing these days is that sex as a battlefield just isn't any fun. Nor is anything else. Men go to war seeking not pleasure but oblivion. Even generals sometimes throw up in disgust. It is not working. We all know that. Women are entering the market place and finding out the meaning of rat-race. There is no terror like the terror of Madison Avenue, no brutality like the brutality of the board room. It's win or the ovens. The executive rises on what we normally consider feminine wiles: stealth, flattery, deceit, patience, ability to endure pain. And these are the top jobs, the ones that you have to be Gloria Steinem to qualify for, or Helen Gurley Brown. The token females think they are being singled out for special cruelty.

In the early Sixties, during the first debates over equal pay for equal work, I read a study that refuted the argument that men would not work for women bosses. If anything, it turned out, they liked them better, treated them with greater courtesy and consideration. It's just that the ordinary reality of the industrial machine is horrifying whether you are a man or a woman. Maybe it is good to be protected from it.

The factory is death. Women live, on (continued on page 191)Female Ego(continued from page 116) the average, seven years longer than men. Office workers live longer than factory workers. Do we have to elaborate that sequence any further? Women's liberation, for most women, is freedom to do factory work. That is why poor black women reject the women's movement, reports Dr. Julia Mayo, a social worker at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center in New York City, who told the American Psychopathological Association: "This means the right to compete with black men for the few jobs of janitor, custodian, stock clerk, sanitation engineer and similar lower-class jobs. Many a black mother would gladly exchange day-care facilities to remain in her own home, providing care for her own children. Ironically, for years, the black woman has been free to do all of the things the white woman is now demanding just as the black woman is trying so hard to give them up. And give them up she must if there is ever to be any masculinity for the black male."

Day-care centers sound great. So did Thalidomide. I guess maybe we are going to have to talk about Mothers and Motherhood, after all. That is taboo these days. Bad medicine. Kids have been written out of the script. If there is any characteristic that is particularly human, it is the ability to turn a perfectly sensible idea into an insane obsession. First it was space out those children and give them room in which to grow. Then we began to hear about something called zero population growth. That soon came to mean zero kids. Add to your woman's-language phrase book this one: "Kids are so high." Feed them groovy granola and stick them into the closet. Mom has to boogie tonight. It's something she has to do. She has to find her center. Do they allow children at Esalen?

The children are screaming. An uncountable number of women in their late 20s and early 30s are wandering in the grisly wake of the sexual revolution leading little children by the hand, from man to man, from house to house. It is not easy to be a single woman with children in any society, least of all this one. Children in their formative years like the company of the same male. They're learning to talk. Every new person has to be taught his special baby talk. Maybe this makes them grow faster intellectually. Maybe it also makes them hyperkinetic or something like that. The emotional effects of neglecting children have been very carefully documented. In some cases, the results have been so devastating that the studies have been virtually suppressed. The facts are very clear: Bottle-fed babies grow up with machinelike personalities, alternatively angry or depressed, unable to form lasting relationships, eternally unsatisfied and attempting to fill the emptiness with store-bought pleasures and cheap thrills. Seventy to 80 percent of all American children are bottle-fed.

As a woman and a father, it seems to me that if we are going to make childbearing a privilege rather than a right, and apparently a rare privilege, at that, we ought to seek to at least make those children the very healthiest and happiest we can.

Men are not allowed to speak out on these matters directly. There is virtually no informed male criticism of the things that women are doing and saying. There is no satire. The male-dominated communications media are too timid to take the ladies on. Self-censorship prevails. The women's media are worse. Not long ago, I was contacted by Playgirl. I flipped out with joy. I thought they wanted to take pictures of me naked, but I was too flat-chested and skinny. They go for beefcake over there.

It turned out they wanted me to write for them. We spent hours talking about it. I expounded my ideas to two blonde and voluptuous ladies and they were creaming. "No one else is saying these things," they crooned. "You are wonderful." We settled on an idea, "The Death of Romance." I went home feeling good. Women were going to read my words. Maybe it would make them horny about me. I would have groupies like a rock star. Then came a letter from Playgirl: "We would prefer to have a story such as this done by a woman." Yes, and Tiny Tim would prefer to play King Kong.

Nor are women really allowed to discuss these issues openly. Veronica Geng wrote a piece for Harper's called Requiem for the Women's Movement, which concluded with, "No one knows what will happen when women stop lying ... because feminism has never pushed that far," and with this quote from Colette Price about a recent consciousness-raising session: "We always used to talk about sex with people gushing and crying. That's how people were talking about the women's liberation movement. They were crying." One person returned the magazine in a vomit bag, the cover scrawled with obscene abuse.

I think finally that if some of us do manage to slip through and pass as female, however briefly, however inadequately, we have to maintain as a primary aim the elimination of this sort of repression. That is not an easy task. I refer you to The Hite Report, a distillation of questionnaires filled out by thousands of women. Although this is presented as the most authentic information since Masters and Johnson, it must be viewed with a certain amount of skepticism. That doesn't mean the information is useless but merely that it must be interpreted carefully.

The questionnaires were circulated through various women's organizations and classified advertisements in magazines. The sample is thus distorted in the direction of the literate. It takes some education to fill out a form like that. I know because I filled one out myself and sent it in under the name Julia Gaviota.

The questionnaire itself was so hot I could hardly keep from masturbating while reading it. The detail was more intense than Color Climax No. 8, the all-time wildest Danish porno review. There were minute interrogations about clitoral stimulation. The emphasis encouraged comment about that. Anal sex was dismissed with one short line, something like, "You do find getting it in the ass painful and disgusting, don't you?" and about a quarter inch for reply. I had Julia answer that question on a separate sheet: "Anal sex is my very favorite way of reaching climax," she wrote. "I like it best when a new lover goes completely insane with lust and rapes my asshole violently. I pretend it's the first time. Afterward, I cry and make him feel bad, but inside I am secretly glowing."

In my brief scan of the book, I found nothing quite like that. Was it left out in error? If someone arbitrarily eliminated it without checking back with Julia, what does that say about the accuracy of the rest of the material? If it is included, what does that say? But be that as it may, let us accept the report on its own terms. The most quoted finding is that 70 percent of all respondents were unable to reach climax unless their clitorises were being directly stimulated, either by their partners or by themselves. Kinsey found that the majority of women who masturbated could achieve orgasm within four to five minutes. In the light of this information, I think it is only fair to ask, "What does that mean, when you say to a man, 'You can't give me an orgasm'?" All they have ever had to do was reach down and pull their own triggers. The very least they could have done was to have told us how to do it for them.

The women attribute their reluctance to masturbate in the presence of their lovers or to talk about their desires to the overpowering force of male repression. I must be a freak, but I experienced that one the other way around. It was always women who were beating up little boys for playing with themselves. The guys I knew, despite this, were quite out-front about jerking off. As Bennett Levine, a childhood buddy of mine, put it, "Ninety-nine percent say they do it and the rest are liars." These women in The Hite Report are the educated elite. They do it with college graduates. Can you see your average certified public accountant recoiling in horror as his girlfriend flails her pudenda shamelessly: "If I catch you doing that again, young lady, I'll put your hands in the fire!"? Men frequently find my dirty talk hilarious, and so do many women, but it is the ladies who put me down most coldly: "I guess you're really into sex," they say disapprovingly.

If you raise this issue, you get another one of those slogans: "Women have had to tell men what they think they want to hear since time began." Why must that continue? Is there any hope or are we doomed to eternal quarrel? I direct you to a curious work, The Inevitability of Patriarchy: Why the Biological Difference Between Men and Women Always Produces Male Domination, by Steven Goldberg, a philosopher at City College of New York. Goldberg's thesis is that male hormones produce competitive behavior, which makes the male almost always the victor.

I don't feel much like a victor. Maybe I ought to have my testosterone level checked. But it is an interesting argument and it may even be right. The work of medical psychologist John Money indicates that male/female personality patterns do seem to have a definite hormonal basis, though social environmental influences may be somewhat more important.

More interesting, perhaps, is the school of thought that when women take over work that was once exclusively male, that work drops in status for men and women alike. When men do work that was formerly female, its status goes up. The most esteemed cooks are men, for example. In the United States, where being a physician is a male role, that work has very high status. In the Soviet Union, on the other hand, where most doctors are women, medicine is no longer so highly respected a role, except in research, an area dominated by men.

If this pattern is true, and it is biological rather than environmental, all men have to do is to become women. We will do it so much more aggressively because of our God-given testosterone that women will become jealous and want to be women, too. This will be confusing, but I am sure that it will be all right. There will be a point, though, where we men masquerading as women will be doing such a good job that we will have the upper hand over those ineffectual men who were once such competent women. What shall we do with that power? Pay them back, boys, pay them back!

Or shall we be better women than they and forgive and forget? Where shall we find our model? I look back on my childhood and my parents' marriage with increasing nostalgia. What did they have? Their lives were infinitely harder than ours. Yet they hardly quarreled. I think they understood that life is a battlefield, not between men and women but between what for lack of a better description we must call good and evil, life and death. They found each other in a shell hole and clung to each other as partners in survival, partners in the survival of the human race, perhaps, but mostly just partners.

Our home was a bunker with lace curtains in which they created their own illusion of peace. Yes, it was an illusion, and I suppose we shall have no more illusions like that ever again--but what a pity to have lost them because of inability to face the truth.

"There is virtually no informed male criticism of the things that women are doing and saying."