Femininity (29 page)

In a new age of relative sexual freedom, or permissiveness, at any rate, squeals and
moans replace the blush and the downcast eye. Screaming bobbysoxers who fainted in
the aisle at the Paramount Theater when a skinny young Frank Sinatra crooned his love
ballads during the 1940s (reportedly, the first wave of fainting girls was staged
by promoters) presaged the whimpering orgasmic ecstasy at rock concerts in huge arenas
today. By contrast, young men in the audience automatically rise to their feet and
whistle and shout when the band starts to play, but they seldom appear overcome.

Most emphatically, feminine emotion has gotten louder. The ribald squeal of the stereotypic
serving wench in Elizabethan times, a supposed indicator of loose, easy ways, seem
to have lost its lower-class stigma. One byproduct of our media-obsessed society,
in which privacy is considered a quaint and rather old-fashioned human need, has been
the reproduction of the unmistakable sounds of female orgasm on a record (Donna Summer’s
“Love to Love You Baby,” among other hits). More than commercialization of sex is
operative here. Would the sounds of male orgasm suffice for a recording, and would
they be unmistakable? Although I have seen no studies on this interesting sex difference,
I believe it can be said that most women do vocalize more loudly and uncontrollably
than men in the throes of sexual passion. Is this response physiological, compensatory
or merely symptomatic of the feminine mission to display one’s feelings (and the corresponding
masculine mission to keep their feelings under control)?

Feminine emotion specializes in sentimentality, empathy and admissions of vulnerability—three
characteristics that most men try to avoid. Linking these traits to female anatomy
became an article of faith in the Freudian school. Erik Erikson, for one, spoke of
an “inner space” (he meant the womb) that yearns for fulfillment through maternal
love. Helene Deutsch, the grande
dame of Freudian feminine psychology, spoke of psychic acceptance of hurt and pain;
menstrual cramps, defloration and the agonies of childbirth called for a masochistic
nature she believed was innate.

Love of babies, any baby and all babies, not only one’s own, is a celebrated and anticipated
feminine emotion, and a woman who fails to ooh and ahh at the snapshot of a baby or
cuddle a proffered infant in her arms is instantly suspect. Evidence of a maternal
nature, of a certain innate competence when handling a baby or at least some indication
of maternal longing, becomes a requirement of gender. Women with no particular feeling
for babies are extremely reluctant to admit their private truth, for the entire weight
of woman’s place in the biological division of labor, not to mention the glorification
of motherhood as woman’s greatest and only truly satisfactory role, has kept alive
the belief that all women yearn to fulfill their biological destiny out of a deep
emotional need. That a sizable number of mothers have no genuine aptitude for the
job is verified by the records of hospitals, family courts and social agencies where
cases of battery and neglect are duly entered—and perhaps also by the characteristic
upper-class custom of leaving the little ones to the care of the nanny. But despite
this evidence that day-to-day motherhood is not a suitable or a stimulating occupation
for all, the myth persists that a woman who prefers to remain childless must be heartless
or selfish or less than complete.

Books have been written on maternal guilt and its exploitation, on the endemic feeling
that whatever a mother does, her loving care may be inadequate or wrong, with consequences
that can damage a child for life. Trends in child care (bottle feeding, demand feeding,
not picking up the crying baby, delaying the toilet training or giving up an outside
job to devote one’s entire time to the family) illuminate the fear of maternal inadequacy
as well as the variability or “expert” opinion in each generation. Advertising copywriters
successfully manipulate this feminine fear when they pitch their clients’ products.
A certain cereal, one particular brand of packaged white bread, must be bought for
the breakfast table or else you have failed to love your child sufficiently and denied
him the chance to “build a strong body twelve ways.” Until the gay liberation movement
began to speak
for itself, it was a commonplace of psychiatric wisdom that a mother had it within
her power to destroy her son’s heterosexual adjustment by failing to cut his baby
curls, keep him away from dance class or encourage his interest in sports.

A requirement of femininity is that a woman devote her life to love—to mother love,
to romantic love, to religious love, to amorphous, undifferentiated caring. The territory
of the heart is admittedly a province that is open to all, but women alone are expected
to make an obsessional career of its exploration, to find whatever adventure, power,
fulfillment or tragedy that life has to offer within its bounds. There is no question
that a woman is apt to feel most feminine, most confident of her interior gender makeup,
when she is reliably within some stage of love—even the girlish crush or the stage
of unrequited love or a broken heart. Men have suffered for love, and men have accomplished
great feats in the name of love, but what man has ever felt at the top of his masculine
form when he is lovesick or suffering from heartache?

Gloria Steinem once observed that the heart is a sex-distinctive symbol of feminine
vulnerability in the marketing of fashion. Heart-shaped rings and heart-shaped gold
pendants and heart-shaped frames on red plastic sunglasses announce an addiction to
love that is beyond the pale of appropriate design for masculine ornamentation. (A
man does not wear his heart on his sleeve.) The same observation applies a little
less stringently to flowers.

Rare is the famous girl singer, whatever her age, of popular music (blues, country,
Top Forty, disco or rock) who is not chiefly identified with some expression of love,
usually its downside. Torchy bittersweet ballads and sad, suffering laments mixed
with vows of eternal fidelity to the rotten bastard who done her wrong communicate
the feminine message of love at any cost. Almost unique to the female singer, I think,
is the poignant anthem of battered survival, from Fanny Brice’s “My Man” to Gloria
Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” that does not quite shut the door on further emotional
abuse if her man should return.

But the point is not emotional abuse (except in extreme, aberrant cases); the point
is feeling. Women are instructed from childhood to be keepers of the heart, keepers
of the sentimental memory. In diaries, packets of old love letters and family albums,
in slender books of poetry in which a flower is pressed, a woman’s emotional history
is preserved. Remembrance of things past—the birthday, the anniversary, the death—is
a feminine province. In the social division of labor, the wife is charged with maintaining
the emotional connection, even with the husband’s side of the family. Her thoughtful
task is to make the long-distance call, select the present and write the thank-you
note (chores that secretaries are asked to do by their bosses). Men are busy; they
move forward. A woman looks back. It is significant that in the Biblical parable it
was Lot’s wife who looked back for one last precious glimpse of their city, their
home, their past (and was turned into a pillar of salt).

Love confirms the feminine psyche. A celebrated difference between men and women (either
women’s weakness or women’s strength, depending on one’s values) is the obstinate
reluctance, the emotional inability of women to separate sex from love. Understandably.
Love makes the world go round, and women are supposed to get dizzy—to rise, to fall,
to feel alive in every pore, to be undone. In place of a suitable attachment, an unlikely
or inaccessible one may have to do. But more important, sex for a woman, even in an
age of accessible contraception, has reproductive consequences that render the act
a serious affair. Casual sex can have a most uncasual resolution. If a young girl
thinks of love and marriage while a boy thinks of getting laid, her emotional commitment
is rooted not only in her different upbringing but in her reproductive biology as
well. Love, then, can become an alibi for thoughtless behavior, as it may also become
an identity, or a distraction, a la Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, from the frustrations
of a limited life.
*

Christian houses of worship, especially in poor neighborhoods, are filled disproportionately
by women. This phenomenon may not be entirely attributable to the historic role of
the Catholic and Protestant religions in encouraging the public devotions of women
(which Judaism and Islam did not), or because women have more time for prayer, or
because in the Western world they are believed to be more religious by nature. Another
contributing factor may be that the central article of Christian faith, “Jesus loves
you,” has particular appeal for the gender that defines itself through loving emotions.

Women’s special interest in the field of compassion is catered to and promoted. Hollywood
“weepies,” otherwise known as four-handkerchief movies, were big-studio productions
that were tailored to bring in female box-office receipts. Columns of advice to the
lovelorn, such as the redoubtable “Dear Dorothy Dix” and the current “Dear Abby,”
were by tradition a woman’s slot on daily newspapers, along with the coverage of society
births and weddings, in the days when females were as rare in a newsroom as they were
in a coal mine. In the heyday of the competitive tabloids, sob-sister journalism,
that newsroom term for a human-interest story told with heart-wrenching pathos (usually
by a tough male reporter who had the formula down pat), was held in contempt by those
on the paper who covered the “hard stuff” of politics, crime and war. (Nathanael West’s
famous antihero labored under the byline of Miss Lonelyhearts.) Despite its obvious
audience appeal, “soft stuff” was, and is, on the lower rungs of journalism—trivial,
weak and unmanly.

In Government circles during the Vietnam war, it was considered a sign of emotional
softness, of lily-livered liberals and nervous nellies, to suggest that Napalmed babies,
fire-bombed villages and defoliated crops were reason enough to pull out American
forces. The peace movement, went the charge, was composed of cowards and fuzzy thinkers.
Suspicion of an unmanly lack of hard practical logic always haunts those men who espouse
peace and nonviolence, but women, the weaker sex, are permitted a certain amount of
emotional leeway. Feminine logic, after all, is reputedly governed by the heartstrings.
Compassion and sentiment are the basis for its notorious “subjectivity”
compared to the “objectivity” of men who use themselves as the objective standard.

As long as the social division of labor ordains that women should bear the chief emotional
burden of caring for human life from the cradle to the grave while men may demonstrate
their dimorphic difference through competitive acts of physical aggression, emblematic
compassion and fear of violence are compelling reasons for an aversion to war and
other environmental hazards. When law and custom deny the full range of public expression
and economic opportunity that men claim for themselves, a woman must place much of
her hopes, her dreams, her feminine identity and her social importance in the private
sphere of personal relations, in the connective tissue of marriage, family, friendship
and love. In a world out of balance, where men are taught to value toughness and linear
vision as masculine traits that enable them to think strategically from conquest to
conquest, from campaign to campaign without looking back, without getting sidetracked
by vulnerable feelings, there is, and will be, an emotional difference between the
sexes, a gender gap that may even appear on a Gallup poll.

If a true shape could emerge from the shadows of historic oppression, would the gender-specific
experience of being female still suggest a range of perceptions and values that differ
appreciably from those of men? It would be premature to offer an answer. Does a particular
emotion ultimately resist separation from its historic deployment in the sexual balance
of power? In the way of observation, this much can be said: The entwining of anatomy,
history and culture presents such a persuasive emotional argument for a “different
nature” that even the best aspects of femininity collaborate in its perpetuation.

*
“Facile” is the English translator’s match for the French
facile,
more correctly rendered as “easy.” Beauvoir did not mean to ascribe a stereotypic
superficiality to women in her remark.

*
The overwhelming influence of feminine love is frequently offered as a mitigating
explanation by women who do unfeminine things. Elizabeth Bentley, the “Red Spy Queen”
of the cold war Fifties, attributed her illegal activities to her passion for the
Russian master spy Jacob Golos. Judith Coplon’s defense for stealing Government documents
was love for another Russian, Valentin Gubichev. More recently, Jean Harris haplessly
failed to convince a jury that her love for “Scarsdale diet” Doctor Herman Tarnower
was so great that she could not possibly have intended to kill him.

I
F PRETTINESS AND GRACE
were the extent of it, femininity would not be a puzzle, nor would excellence in
feminine values be so completely at odds with other forms of ambition. In a sense
this entire inquiry has been haunted by the question of ambition, for every adjustment
a woman makes to prove her feminine difference adds another fine stitch to the pattern:
an inhibition on speech and behavior, a usurpation of time, and a preoccupation with
appearance that deflects the mind and depletes the storehouse of energy and purpose.
If time and energy are not a problem, if purpose is not a concern, if the underlying
submissiveness is not examined too closely, then the feminine esthetic may not be
a handicap at all. On the contrary, high among its known satisfactions, femininity
offers a welcome retreat from the demands of ambition, just as its strategic use is
often good camouflage for those wishing to hide their ambition from public view. But
there is no getting around the fact that ambition is not a feminine trait. More strongly
expressed, a lack of ambition—or a professed lack of ambition, or a sacrificial willingness
to set personal ambition aside—is virtuous proof of the nurturant feminine nature
which, if absent, strikes at the guilty heart of femaleness itself.