Femininity

Prologue

Body

Hair

Clothes

Voice

Skin

Movement

Emotion

Ambition

Epilogue

About the Author

A Note on Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

W
E HAD A GAME
in our house called “setting the table” and I was Mother’s helper. Forks to the left
of the plate, knives and spoons to the right. Placing the cutlery neatly, as I recall,
was one of my first duties, and the event was alive with meaning. When a knife or
a fork dropped to the floor, that meant a man was unexpectedly coming to dinner. A
falling spoon announced the surprise arrival of a female guest. No matter that these
visitors never arrived on cue, I had learned a rule of gender identification. Men
were straight-edged, sharply pronged and formidable, women were softly curved and
held the food in a rounded well. It made perfect sense, like the division of pink
and blue that I saw in babies, an orderly way of viewing the world. Daddy, who was
gone all day at work and who loved to putter at home with his pipe, tobacco and tool
chest, was knife and fork. Mommy and Grandma, with their ample proportions and pots
and pans, were grownup soup spoons, large and capacious. And I was a teaspoon, small
and slender, easy to hold and just right for pudding, my favorite dessert.

Being good at what was expected of me was one of my earliest projects, for not only
was I rewarded, as most children are, for doing things right, but excellence gave
pride and stability to my childhood existence. Girls were different from boys, and
the expression of that difference seemed mine to make clear. Did my loving, anxious
mother, who dressed me in white organdy pinafores and Mary Janes and who cried hot
tears when I got them dirty, give me my first instruction? Of course. Did my doting
aunts and uncles with their gifts of pretty dolls and miniature tea sets add to my
education? Of course. But even without the
appropriate toys and clothes, lessons in the art of being feminine lay all around
me and I absorbed them all: the fairy tales that were read to me at night, the brightly
colored advertisements I pored over in magazines before I learned to decipher the
words, the movies I saw, the comic books I hoarded, the radio soap operas I happily
followed whenever I had to stay in bed with a cold. I loved being a little girl, or
rather I loved being a fairy princess, for that was who I thought I was.

As I passed through a stormy adolescence to a stormy maturity, femininity increasingly
became an exasperation, a brilliant, subtle esthetic that was bafflingly inconsistent
at the same time that it was minutely, demandingly concrete, a rigid code of appearance
and behavior defined by do’s and don’t-do’s that went against my rebellious grain.
Femininity was a challenge thrown down to the female sex, a challenge no proud, self-respecting
young woman could afford to ignore, particularly one with enormous ambition that she
nursed in secret, alternately feeding or starving its inchoate life in tremendous
confusion.

“Don’t lose your femininity” and “Isn’t it remarkable how she manages to retain her
femininity?” had terrifying implications. They spoke of a bottom-line failure so irreversible
that nothing else mattered. The pinball machine had registered “tilt,” the game had
been called. Disqualification was marked on the forehead of a woman whose femininity
was lost. No records would be entered in her name, for she had destroyed her birthright
in her wretched, ungainly effort to imitate a man. She walked in limbo, this hapless
creature, and it occurred to me that one day I might see her when I looked in the
mirror. If the danger was so palpable that warning notices were freely posted, wasn’t
it possible that the small bundle of resentments I carried around in secret might
spill out and place the mark on my own forehead? Whatever quarrels with femininity
I had I kept to myself; whatever handicaps femininity imposed, they were mine to deal
with alone, for there was no women’s movement to ask the tough questions, or to brazenly
disregard the rules.

Femininity, in essence, is a romantic sentiment, a nostalgic tradition of imposed
limitations. Even as it hurries forward in the 1980s, putting on lipstick and high
heels to appear well dressed,
it trips on the ruffled petticoats and hoopskirts of an era gone by. Invariably and
necessarily, femininity is something that women had more of in the past, not only
in the historic past of prior generations, but in each woman’s personal past as well—in
the virginal innocence that is replaced by knowledge, in the dewy cheek that is coarsened
by age, in the “inherent nature” that a woman seems to misplace so forgetfully whenever
she steps out of bounds. Why should this be so? The XX chromosomal message has not
been scrambled, the estrogen-dominated hormonal balance is generally as biology intended,
the reproductive organs, whatever use one has made of them, are usually in place,
the breasts of whatever size are most often where they should be. But clearly, biological
femaleness is not enough.

Femininity always demands more. It must constantly reassure its audience by a willing
demonstration of difference, even when one does not exist in nature, or it must seize
and embrace a natural variation and compose a rhapsodic symphony upon the notes. Suppose
one doesn’t care to, has other things on her mind, is clumsy or tone-deaf despite
the best instruction and training? To fail at the feminine difference is to appear
not to care about men, and to risk the loss of their attention and approval. To be
insufficiently feminine is viewed as a failure in core sexual identity, or as a failure
to care sufficiently about oneself, for a woman found wanting will be appraised (and
will appraise herself) as mannish or neutered or simply unattractive, as men have
defined these terms.

We are talking, admittedly, about an exquisite esthetic. Enormous pleasure can be
extracted from feminine pursuits as a creative outlet or purely as relaxation; indeed,
indulgence for the sake of fun, or art, or attention, is among femininity’s great
joys. But the chief attraction (and the central paradox, as well) is the competitive
edge that femininity seems to promise in the unending struggle to survive, and perhaps
to triumph. The world smiles favorably on the feminine woman: it extends little courtesies
and minor privilege. Yet the nature of this competitive edge is ironic, at best, for
one works at femininity by accepting restrictions, by limiting one’s sights, by choosing
an indirect route, by scattering concentration and not giving one’s all as a man would
to his
own, certifiably masculine, interests. It does not require a great leap of imagination
for a woman to understand the feminine principle as a grand collection of compromises,
large and small, that she simply must make in order to render herself a successful
woman. If she has difficulty in satisfying femininity’s demands, if its illusions
go against her grain, or if she is criticized for her shortcomings and imperfections,
the more she will see femininity as a desperate strategy of appeasement, a strategy
she may not have the wish or the courage to abandon, for failure looms in either direction.

It is fashionable in some quarters to describe the feminine and masculine principles
as polar ends of the human continuum, and to sagely profess that both polarities exist
in all people. Sun and moon, yin and yang, soft and hard, active and passive, etcetera,
may indeed be opposites, but a linear continuum does not illuminate the problem. (Femininity,
in all its contrivances, is a very active endeavor.) What, then, is the basic distinction?
The masculine principle is better understood as a driving ethos of superiority designed
to inspire straightforward, confident success, while the feminine principle is composed
of vulnerability, the need for protection, the formalities of compliance and the avoidance
of conflict—in short, an appeal of dependence and good will that gives the masculine
principle its romantic validity and its admiring applause.

Femininity pleases men because it makes them appear more masculine by contrast; and,
in truth, conferring an extra portion of unearned gender distinction on men, an unchallenged
space in which to breathe freely and feel stronger, wiser, more competent, is femininity’s
special gift. One could say that masculinity is often an effort to please women, but
masculinity is known to please by displays of mastery and competence while femininity
pleases by suggesting that these concerns, except in small matters, are beyond its
intent. Whimsy, unpredictability and patterns of thinking and behavior that are dominated
by emotion, such as tearful expressions of sentiment and fear, are thought to be feminine
precisely because they lie outside the established route to success.

If in the beginnings of history the feminine woman was defined by her physical dependency,
her inability for reasons of reproductive biology to triumph over the forces of nature
that
were the tests of masculine strength and power, today she reflects both an economic
and emotional dependency that is still considered “natural,” romantic and attractive.
After an unsettling fifteen years in which many basic assumptions about the sexes
were challenged, the economic disparity did not disappear. Large numbers of women—those
with small children, those left high and dry after a mid-life divorce—need financial
support. But even those who earn their own living share a universal need for connectedness
(call it love, if you wish). As unprecedented numbers of men abandon their sexual
interest in women, others, sensing opportunity, choose to demonstrate their interest
through variety and a change in partners. A sociological fact of the 1980s is that
female competition for two scarce resources—men and jobs—is especially fierce.

So it is not surprising that we are currently witnessing a renewed interest in femininity
and an unabashed indulgence in feminine pursuits. Femininity serves to reassure men
that women need them and care about them enormously. By incorporating the decorative
and the frivolous into its definition of style, femininity functions as an effective
antidote to the unrelieved seriousness, the pressure of making one’s way in a harsh,
difficult world. In its mandate to avoid direct confrontation and to smooth over the
fissures of conflict, femininity operates as a value system of niceness, a code of
thoughtfulness and sensitivity that in modern society is sadly in short supply.

There is no reason to deny that indulgence in the art of feminine illusion can be
reassuring to a woman, if she happens to be good at it. As sexuality undergoes some
dizzying revisions, evidence that one is a woman “at heart” (the inquisitor’s question)
is not without worth. Since an answer of sorts may be furnished by piling on additional
documentation, affirmation can arise from such identifiable but trivial feminine activities
as buying a new eyeliner, experimenting with the latest shade of nail color, or bursting
into tears at the outcome of a popular romance novel. Is there anything destructive
in this? Time and cost factors, a deflection of energy and an absorption in fakery
spring quickly to mind, and they need to be balanced, as in a ledger book, against
the affirming advantage.

Throughout this book I have attempted to trace significant
feminine principles to basic biology, for feminine expression is conventionally praised
as an enhancement of femaleness, or the raw materials of femaleness shaped and colored
to perfection. Sometimes I found that a biological connection did exist, and sometimes
not, and sometimes I had to admit that many scientific assumptions about the nature
of femaleness were unresolved and hotly debated, and that no sound conclusion was
possible before all the evidence was in. It was more enlightening to explore the origins
of femininity in borrowed affectations of upper-class status, and in the historic
subjugation of women through sexual violence, religion and law, where certain myths
about the nature of women were put forward as biological fact. It was also instructive
to approach femininity from the angle of seductive glamour, which usually does not
fit smoothly with aristocratic refinement, accounting for some contradictory feminine
messages that often appear as an unfathomable puzzle.