Welcome to the Postliberation World

Ispent the past summer with a group of writers, one of whom was inordinately fond of talking about what he liked to call "the lib." His little homilies invariably began like this; "I'm not a chauvinist, and I think Edith Wharton is a terrific writer, but. ..." Then would follow a list of a grievances against women. Itwas difficult to believe that one man could have so many.

So I got mad at him, and I wrote his name on many slips of paper, which I put in desk and dresser drawers--an old English remedy, prescribed by Nancy Mitford, for those to whom you wish no good to come. Then, of course, I felt guilty. Because (continued on page 230)Sexaul Detente/Harrison(continued from page 96) I could always bring myself--just barely--to see his point.

Whenever possible, I spend half an hour of my day watching a TV show produced and broadcast in the New York area, on which three women, not actresses, discuss problems "touching on the lives of women." (That's what the announcer says, over organ music, when he introduces what I suppose is meant to be real-life soap opera. structured very much like a consciousness-raising group.) One day, a female guest, an expert on depression by virtue of the fact that she had once been depressed, told the regulars why women get depressed: They give too much. she said: like, just that Christmas, site had filled her kids' Christmas stockings; and had they filled hers? No, thoughtless creatures, they had not--the moral of which is, stop giving.

So I got mad at her, and I said many prayers on her behalf, petitioning that the clay on which she had nobody to give to would soon come--and how would she like that? Then, of course, I felt guilty. Because I could bring myself--just barely--to see her point.

I knew a woman once who made very pretty dresses for her little girls. That's what she used to say: "I sew my daughters' dresses." Then, presumably because her consciousness had been raised and she didn't wish to regard traditional women's activities as trivial, she took to calling herself a clothes designer. The activity was the same, but the change in job description enabled her to feel better about herself. Well, why not? If an increase in self-esteem can be bought so cheaply. what's the harm? There was, however, a problem: This woman could purchase her happiness--or what passed for happiness--only by devaluing the work of others, the work of men. With great glee, she told this story: A male acquaintance, an architect, had designed an important public building. He returned from the construction site one clay in high dudgeon because bricks that were supposed to have been laid horizontally had been set vertically, destroying the integrity of his design. "Isn't that just like a man," she said, "to make such a fuss over some silly bricks, to be so self-important. ..." The obvious irony of her remark--she was basting a hem at the time--was lost on her.

And I, cowed by her vehemence, said nothing. That was ten years ago.

Several years later, she tried (unsuccessfully, as it happened) to alienate her daughters from their father by telling them that he was a "latent homosexual" and a "latent alcoholic."

By this time, she'd truly lost me: "Well, I'm a latent heroin addict and a latent murderess," I said. "Cheerio"--or words to that effect.

There is a moral to this story, perhaps several. Of course it's ridiculous to judge any social movement by the people who use it as a vehicle for their craziness. Still, ten years ago, few of this woman's peers, I daresay, would have challenged her words or her actions. Ten years ago, anger was the air many of us in the women's movement breathed--anger and bitterness and absolute certainty. Practically none of us was inclined to give men the benefit of the doubt.

I'm not talking about focused anger, directed at specific men (or specific institutions) for specific deeds. I'm talking about a kind of miasmic rage--the kind of rage that permitted to go virtually uncriticized a statement such as "All men are in a conspiracy to rape all women." Such a statement--which appeared in an otherwise good and important book--is, on the face of it, patently absurd. And yet even some men, eager to appease or gain favor, accepted that kind of mass indictment. How very silly of them, and duplicitous as well, since to admit such culpability is, in fact, to say, "I'm good enough--enlightened enough--to say I'm bad . . . which makes me a worthy object of your love, or lust."

No one can live in a perpetual state of anger, though a lot of people try. (You'd think they'd give themselves a break.) I recently heard a heterosexual woman argue against lesbian separatism on the grounds that not to need men for sex or love might result in a blunting of one's rage; if a woman removed herself from men, she said, she was unlikely to remain angry enough to be revolutionary. (And some people have clogs in order to beat them.) I find the notion of using men simultaneously to satisfy one's lust and to refuel one's anger as obscene as the visual image of a woman being fed through' a meat grinder. And I'm not saying this out of an excessively tender regard for all men; I'm saying it because I think any woman who avidly pursues men as fodder for her anger invites self-degradation. I don't see where love comes into it.

Most of the women I know--the women I choose as friends--don't want to see men objectified or diminished. That need, if it ever existed, evaporated when they made it absolutely clear that they didn't want to be seen as objects or treated as lesser human beings. They don't assume that the assertion of their full humanity is contingent upon the assertion of the inhumanity--or subhumanity--of all men.

•

There are some things you never get over. You wake up in the middle of the night and you remember them; they stain your dreams, dilute your pleasures. Once I gave up smoking for eight months, and--this is not a non sequitur--I remembered every deprivation, every loss, I'd ever suffered. The memories were as fresh and as painful as if they had not lain dormant for musty years, and I felt them all anew. I was detoxing, I suppose, discharging poisons. It was terrible.

Consciousness raising was in some ways like that: a period of detoxification, an attempt td purge myself of every lie and every half-truth I'd ever bought or told about myself and about my relationships with men. I rehearsed every betrayal, every false beginning, every bit of rotten luck I'd had, every act of bad faith. It was terrible.

It could have been worse. What made it bearable was that I forced myself to remember that a man had saved my life when I was 15 years old. Without him--without his charity and his disinterested love, which rescued me from the claustrophobia and meanness of an eccentric religious sect--I doubt that I would have survived. Had it not been for the memory of him, I think it is entirely possible that consciousness raising would have been deadly for me. I don't know whether or not I would have recovered from that prolonged outpouring of anger, that solipsistic rage.

(I would have remembered--I never forgot--that I loved sex. That's different. You can love sex and hate the opposite sex, evidence for which abounds.)

Of course, it is equally possible that my common sense would sooner or later have asserted itself, or that grace would have come from another direction. Perhaps even without the fact of him, I would have remembered that I love men.

These are things it is impossible to know.

•

A lot has happened to us in the past ten years.

In principle, it shouldn't be too much to expect of someone that she not be blinded to the pain of others while in the process of articulating her own pain. But, in fact, consciousness raising, invaluable to those of us engaged on an 232 anthropological dig of our own psyches, was a series of literally blinding revelations. What it sometimes blinded us to was the pain of men. Understandably. For if we hurt, it followed (or seemedto follow) that someone must be doing the hurting (men). Only now, ten years after the fact, does it seem to me that "Who's to blame?" is a peevish and futile question--when it is the only question on the agenda.

Ten years ago, I was just finding my anger. Anger has to be found before it is lost. Otherwise, it crops up in all the wrong places--in bed, for example--and under various guises and disguises, warping and poisoning love, infusing sex with dread and hostility, anesthetizing genitals, killing spontaneity.

Ten years ago, I dredged my personal experience and found that 1 had good reason to be angry, not least because I had always been taught that it was unbecoming for women to be angry. At first my anger was specifically targeted: I was angry at every man who had used me badly, every man who presumed to tell me what my place was and contrived to keep me there. Then my anger leaped out of all reasonable bounds: If any man could behave like this, every man behaved like this.

But my anger coexisted with a propensity to fall in love.

During that time, I chose men who were like blank slates ("What does she see in him?") so that I could have the pleasure of inventing them. Remembering how, in my youth, before the women's movement, I had felt and acted like a satellite to accomplished men--writers, painters, poets--I now chose men who were (not to put too fine a point on it) boring, men whose accomplishments were in the future. Years before the women's movement, I would sit for hours in front of McSorley's, then a male-only bar in New York's East Village, waiting for the man of the hour to clown his ale and discuss his art before he collected me. (I was never alone in my vigil; I kept company with other women, all of whom derived status from waiting; many of us knitted while we sat on camp stools, a gaggle of Penelopes.) Since my relationship to men of accomplishment had been to wait for them, it seemed to me--ten years ago--that the answer was to choose men who were without accomplishments (without even visible proof of goodness or energy) and who would wait--or be dependent--upon me. Determined to root out all traces of masochism, I succeeded only in behaving more masochistically. That is the behavior of a snake eating its own tail. And, like a cold-blooded animal, I wasn't interested in men's suffering. I preferred to ignore it or to analyze it out of existence. Always I made exceptions of my brother, my father, my son. The pain they encountered in the process of living, and the pain the man who saved my life had lived with, was transparently clear to me; but I wasn't all that eager to see the pain of other men. My pain was valuable and interesting; theirs was not.

Maybe that initial surge of anger was necessary: I began to write out of anger and to make choices out of anger. It's true that I made some lousy choices. But at least I was choosing, whereas before I had always the sense that I was acted upon.

I'm still often angry. And I'm grateful to the women's movement....

My teenage daughter just this moment walked in to tell me this: A man stopped her at a subway turnstile to ask her the time. And she--naïvely trusting and beautiful--was rewarded by his running his hands along her thigh.(The creep.)

I'm grateful (I was about to say) to the women's movement for identifying the issues and communally deploring the acts--rape, violence against women, sexual harassment and discrimination, systematic institutional oppression--that inspire me to cleansing rage. But I'm no longer inclined to see every man as a wolf in wolf's clothing. (My daughter is now on the phone with her boyfriend, telling him about the subway creep. I know that he won't tell her that she invited unwanted caresses because she is beautiful and trusting. Good for him. And good for my daughter, who won't for a second believe that she asked for it. Ten years ago, this whole scenario would have been different.)

I must say that to be rid of diffuse anger makes a nice change.

I wish I could say that change came about because I woke up one morning and discovered! that I was "liberated"--and therefore no longer in need of anger. It didn't happen that way; it was a function of time. Myconsciousness has been transformed over the past decade; society, unless I'm very much mistaken, has not. (AsMary Tyler Moore pointed out to Tip O'Neill, if Mary Richards were supporting two kids on the salary she made as Lou Grant's assistant producer, she'd need food stamps to feed them.)

The fact that institutions have been loath to respond to the needs of women led, ten years ago, to this declension: Institutions are male-dominated; we are living in a patriarchal society; all men want to keep it that way, for why would anyone willingly relinquish power?

That's very neat, very tidy. A little too neat, a little too tidy. As ideologies go, this one is as strait-jacketing as any I can think of. (I myself have never shaken the hand of a patriarchs. What does one look like?)

It doesn't allow for the fact that men suffer, too. The men I love most, among whom I count my father (who is 78), my brother (who is 42) and my son (who is 18), are all good, decent people. They are also bound to circumstantial necessity: None of them is sitting on a pile of rock candy. They have trouble enough exercising dominion over their own lives; I can't imagine them getting their kicks out of tyrannizing women.

And it won't do to say that men invite their own suffering, that they choose it. Suffering chooses us--all of us. This is called being alive. It is a great perversion of a great truth to say that suffering ennobles us, and by that to mean that we ought to go in search of it. The truth is that suffering will find us, so we might as well learn from it and put it to use. This is called being fully alive and it is a condition men and women share.

James Baldwin used to say that oppression was as bad for the souls of the oppressors as for those of the oppressed. The men I love understand that principle as it applies to women. Insofar as they have been oppressive, they are struggling against the conditioning that has made them that way. They are willing to give up the prerogatives of power anti privilege--because it's bad for them. Their response to women's needs is pragmatic; that's OK. It strikes me frequently--as it has apparently struck them--that the human need for happiness often exerts the same psychic pressure, and leads to the same behavior, as pure morality does. What makes one happy, in the long run, is to act morally; really, happiness and morality are for all practical purposes indistinguishable (unless one confuses ephemeral pleasures and happiness). So it almost doesn't matter why men are now more sensitive to women's needs--so long as they are.

•

Dorothy Parker once said that she hated everyone who was rich but that she herself would be adorable at it. I see her point. For most of my adult life, I saw her point quite clearly--and, at the same time, not quite clearly enough. The problem wasn't stated in all its dimensions, and I was guilty of a stupid and vulgar mistake: Hating the system that allowed some people to get rich at the expense of others, I allowed myself to believe that everybody who had remarkable amounts of money had got them at others' expense. ("What about the Beatles?" my kids would ask me. "Shut up," I explained.) So, naturally, I found it difficult to believe that rich people really suffered in the way and to the extent that people I knew intimately suffered. With clicheed thinking, I saw money as a barrier against pain. My smart friends were good enough to tell me that I was a fool--or, at the very least, a smart person with a blind (and sore) spot. I accepted their criticism ... but I lacked proof. Then I met, and came to love, a person with pots of money, houses in Malibu and Spain.

The money didn't help when her husband committed suicide and her only child ran off to some guru or other in Benares. Even I couldn't help noticing that her anguish was as great as if she'd been obliged to go to H & R Block to file her tax returns.

All along, until direct observation and experience cured me of my stubborn idiocy, I'd been guilty of confusing an iniquitous system with the people who managed to get a share of it, by not dishonorable means. (Do I mind that Judith Rossner and E. L. Doctorow are rich? Does it grieve me that Robert Redford is rich? I mind that I'm not rich; but that's something else.)

Privilege and power reside mostly with men as a class. That doesn't mean all men are iniquitous. (I'd hate to make the same mistake twice.) And it doesn't exempt men from pain.

In fact, I find it increasingly difficult to regard men--or women--as a class. ("Do the rich have souls?" a Jesuit once asked me. "Yes," I said, "but harder for a camel to get through the eye of a needle...." "Charity," he said, "is not your strong point. ... Do the rich have souls?" "Yes." So do Jesuits. Even bishops.) At a time when we may be gearing up for military action in the country of Alexander Haig's choice, it becomes more and more important to make the crucial distinction among individuals, classes and institutions. Better to reserve one's anger for those who truly threaten or wish to harm us, for those who truly hate us. At this moment, I hate the subway creep (charity is not my strong point). But I don't see him as representative of his sex.

There are good men and good women, bad men and bad women, people who get messed over and people who do the messing and this doesn't break down conveniently along the lines of gender.

As my father said when he voted for New York State's E.R.A., "Fair is fair ... but do I think all women are oppressed? Is Clare Boodle Luce an oppressed? I'm an oppressed." (And so he is: To be 78 and living on Social Security is hardly to be a member of a ruling class.)

Isn't it funny: Ten years ago, it was widely argued that any woman had more in common with Clare Boothe Luce than she had with any man.

These were among the things that women were said, at the time, to have in common: They had, in a literal sense, blood in common; they had in common the ability to bear children. And they had in common this: Their hearts could be broken by men.

I briefly entertained the notion that I had more in common with Clare Boothe Luce than I have with my brother. I dismissed it as nonsense. Nonsense, as well, to espouse the opinion that Clare Boothe Luce has more in common with a peasant woman in El Salvador than she has with Henry Kissinger. You can allow rhetoric to carry you only so far before you break into wild laughter. Rhetoric tells us that Clare Boothe Luce and an impoverished Salvadorian woman (or, for that matter, Nancy Reagan and Bella Abzug) are natural allies and sisters; experience and observation teach us that they are not. Even if all their hearts can be broken by men.

Our hearts can be broken by men. (I sometimes think mine must look like a mosaic.) But they aren't broken because men come at them with hammers and chisels. Lovers have the power to hurt and savage each other. I've clone it; we all have.

It's probably fair to say that men and women grow up learning different ways of responding to heartbreak and different ways of inflicting pain. And, of course, our own ways--our own tricks, defenses, denials--seem natural to us; so, confronted with another set of behavior, we see it as unnatural, careless, cruel. If that is true, it is also true--formen as well as for women--that behavior can be unlearned. And that probably entails our coming halfway to meet each other.

It's also true that most women grew up learning to mediate between men and their pain. Women were a kind of buffer between men and the world. They absorbed a lot of the shocks. (A crude way of saying that is to say women give too much, are too compassionate.) It's possible to acknowledge that, and to rue it, without denying men the authenticity of their suffering. It's also possible to refuse to exist as a vehicle for men's pain--and, at the same time, not to abort one's compassion. That is known as declaring one's independence, then accepting one's interdependence ... and consorting with the right men. Which takes some doing.

One of the reasons it takes some doing is. that you don't, when you're in love or attracted to someone, ask for his credentials every five minutes. Now, I have idiosyncratic tastes: If, for example, by some miracle Frank Sinatra should come my way, I would do everything I couldto keep him within my orbit. And I'm not stupid; I can count the ways in which he is not wonderful. But I am besotted. (I once fed a jukebox 30 quarters to hear him sing Send in the Clowns. When Sinatra sings New York, New York, I am overcome with an almost violent tenderness for him.) This is, I suppose, an aberration; but when Sinatra dies, I will feel that a part of me has died. (A part of my past will have died.)

Lucky for me (I guess) that the real world isn't presenting me with Frank Sinatra as a choice. But you see what I mean: To a large extent, "liberated" or not, our choices choose us. (Did I ask to love Sinatra?) I said earlier that the women's movement gave me the sense of choosing, of not feeling acted upon. I now see how that is only partly true. Once you feel you can choose, you can also allow yourself to be acted upon. There's room for mistakes. Sometimes the mistakes are glorious.

I am, for instance, very much in love with Evelyn Waugh, now dead. Waugh had many children--he tended to forget exactly how many, and he was seldom around at the moment of their birth, preferring to he in a more salubrious and exhilarating climate (covering a war, for example). He chided his wife for writing boring letters. He was cranky and abrasive and abusive; he drank too much and he was funny-looking. And I wish he had been my friend. Because underneath that crusty exterior, there was not only a quick and fierce intelligence but an enormous heart. Armored, but enormous. He once nursed a difficult friend through a long, messy illness; he was exceedingly loyal to his friends--even when Ire loathed their political beliefs. Which is not to say he wouldn't have abhorred the women's movement as much as he deplored the Mass in the vernacular and despised Picasso, whom he thought should be hung (or hanged) upside down.

This is to say that consorting with the right men is not as simple a matter as it might appear.

•

It is possible these days to make more distinctions than our blinding anger of a decade ago allowed: There are cruel men, careless men, blundering men. Institutions do oppress women. But not every man is cruel, careless or blundering (and appearances, given the complexity of human nature, are, of course, deceptive: I knowmen who appear to be sensitive but who are weak, and exercise the tyranny of the weak; and I know men, on the other hand, who don't natter about feminism and yet understand the uniqueness of every human being they know--which is really all one asks for). Not every man who is attached to an oppressive institution is himself anoppressor. To give what may seem an extreme example: I know many priests who are as committed to the ordination of women as I am--and I cannot believe they are conning me. Nor can I exist in a state of perpetual armed combat, wariness and lack of trust. If I did, I could never form a friendship and never love a man: Love requires, if not a suspension of disbelief, a leap into belief; it entails risk--for everyone concerned.

All this may seem axiomatic, not to say simple-minded. But the fact is, the men-are-the-enemy line stemmed from women's confusing institutions with individuals. Like most of the mistakes we make, it stemmed from our not seeing.

I'd be a fool if I didn't notice that there is a difference between my father and Don Corleone, between my brother and Jerry Falwell. My brother may be--he is--somewhat nervous about his wife's increasing mobility; he finds himself confused by female bonding (gossip makes him uneasy because he understands that it is a form of truthtelling--and he's learning to decode it, while at the same time feeling that he may be the butt of it); he thinks my sister-in-law and I are ganging up on him when we rap his knuckles for making a thoughtless remark about women or for behaving carelessly. But he struggles against the limits imposed on him by his upbringing; he loves his wife, and his struggles are as painful as her own--though his involve learning to give up a measure of power and hers involve choosing a measure of autonomy.

I think--though I am not privy to the secrets of his heart--that my son has not gone unscathed by the idea that women come in two forms, Madonnas and whores. He struggles against that notion, in part because it serves him badly--it hopelessly muddles his own pursuit of happiness--in part because his experience tells him that this idea is simply not true to the facts as he has experienced them.

My daughter exercises more options than I knew existed when I was her age. When she and her young man quarrel, they sometimes sound like Nick and Nora Charles, sometimes like a replay of a Hepburn-Tracy movie and sometimes like Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth. They never sound like dominant/submissive, victim/ victimizer. It's nice. (I've never heard them fight about who's going to take out the garbage, but they once didn't speak to each other for a week because they disagreed about Olivier's interpretation of Hamlet. Lovely to be that young.)

My father loves and blesses us all. He broods over us ... like a mother hen.

•

In many ways, the women I know have come full circle. Having rejected passivity, they no longer need, in any sense, always to be on top. Having rejected (concluded on page 240)Sexaul Detente/Harrison(continued from page 237) self-abnegation, they are free to give. Having been satiated with the literature of male angst, they are now free to write and speak of their own. When you begin to feel free to talk about your pain--when you no longer feel constrained by societal censure--you begin to understand that pain is (I've been avoiding these words) an inescapable part of the human condition.

Probably for that reason, I'm no longer awfully keen on feminists writing exclusively about feminism. I want to read work that is informed by a feminist sensibility and consciousness, but I don't want to read tracts. I'm tired of being bludgeoned and I'm tired of bludgeoning.

I tell the following story to remind myself, and anyone else who needs reminding, that there are still plenty of Neanderthals around: Not long ago, I had lunch with the editor of a prestigious publishing house and his assistant. Our conversation was pleasant and desultory. Somewhere between the salad and the sambuca, I said, "I'm not awfully keen on feminists writing exclusively about feminism...." The editor's assistant asked me, to the point, what contemporary novelists suited my particular bill, and I said, "Mary Gordon and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Helen Yglesias and John Fowles--The French Lieutenant's Woman may be the best 'feminist' novel written in this decade--though it was never touted as one--" Before I could proceed any further, I noticed--it was impossible not to--that the editor's eyes were rolling around in his head, a physical act that I had often heard described but had never actually seen before. "Oh, my God," he said, no doubt with his spring list in mind, "if feminism's out, what's in? Is motherhood," he said, controlling his eyeballs with difficulty, "in? Mothers? Are mothers in?"

The moment I observed his panic--which carried with it the implication that feminism was, like Hula Hoops, a fad designed to sell commodities--I was possessed of the desire to read cogently argued feminist ideology ... though I had, not ten minutes before, argued that to be locked into ideology was to be unaliveto nuance; it resulted in the death of prose and in inescapable weariness for Poor Reader.

Whether he'd missed my point or I'd advanced my point poorly is still unclear to me. (What is clear to me is that he is probably, at this very moment, dreaming up a new "angle" on mothers and enlisting a hapless writer to bring it off for him.) What I was trying to tell him was that the point of feminism was to make the whole world available to women; feminism is a way out of parochialism, not a way into narrow dogma. The single most important task of feminism is to advance the truth--still novel, apparently, in some quarters--that women are fully human. If one agrees that women are fully human, it doesn't take much imagination to see that they are fully capable of reading and writing about anything from, Bach to daisies, from David Rockefeller to eros, from motorcycles to babies. Another way of putting it is that I'd far rather hear what a woman has to say about Aristotle than listen to a woman argue that she has the right to study Aristotle on equal footing with men. I assume her right; I'm interested in her ideas.

To men who do not assume women's right to full participation in the world of emotions, sensations and ideas--to those who deny women their full humanity--my door is closed. Well, perhaps opened only a crack: Change is arduous and slow; and men and women need each other. Flawed, wounded and wounding, we need each other's mercy, each other's bodies, each other's love. We need each other's otherness.

The men I feel warmly toward understand that we need each other, not as subject/object, sovereign/slave, subordinate/insubordinate but as equals. (To reap the benefits of equality is in no way to cast aside the salt and spice of differences.) I watch them struggling; I see their relapses into familiar me-- Tarzan, you-Jane roles. I observe them noticing their own mistakes and hastening, because they don't want to lose us, to correct them.

There is--it would be crazy not to admit--an element of farce in all of this. There has always been an element of farce in the relationships between the sexes; perhaps there always will be. The difference now, it seems to me, is that when we laugh, it is not necessarily at each other's expense. One finds oneself laughing more and more with men. (And one trusts that the men one loves aren't secretly leering at women.) History may see our struggles as heroic (and, if things work out right, ennobling); but right now, in this time and place, we are neither heroines nor heroes--just players in the human comedy.

"I think any woman who avidly pursues men as fadder of her anger invites self-degradation."