I did not do a Kinsey study. But when I was on the trail of the problem that has no name, the suburban housewives I interviewed would often give me an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all. I would ask about their personal interests, ambitions, what they did, or would like to do, not necessarily as wives or mothers, but when they were not occupied with their husbands or their children or their housework. The question might even be what they were doing with their education. But some of these women simply assumed that I was asking about sex. Was the problem that has no name a sexual problem, after all? I might have thought so, except that when these women spoke of sex, there was a false note, a strange unreal quality about their words. They made mysterious allusions or broad hints; they were eager to be asked about sex; even if I did not ask, they often took pride in recounting the explicit details of some sexual adventure. They were not making them up; these adventures were real enough. But what made them sound unsexual, so unreal?
A thirty-eight-year-old mother of four told me sex was the only thing that made her “feel alive.” But something had gone wrong; her husband did not give her that feeling anymore. They went through the motions, but he was not really interested. She was beginning to feel contemptuous of him in bed. “I need sex to feel alive, but I never really feel him,” she said.
In a flat, matter-of-fact tone that added to the unreality, a thirty-year-old mother of five, calmly knitting a sweater, said she was thinking of going away, to Mexico perhaps, to live with a man with whom she was having an affair. She did not love him, but she thought if she gave herself to him “completely” she might find the feeling that she knew now was “the only important thing in life.” What about the children? Vaguely, she guessed she would take them along—he wouldn’t mind. What was the feeling she was looking for? She had found it at first with her husband, she supposed. At least she remembered that when she married him—she was eighteen—she had “felt so happy I wanted to die.” But he did not “give himself completely” to her; he gave so much of himself to his work. So she found that feeling for a while, she thought, with her children. Shortly after she weaned her fifth baby from the breast, at three, she had her first affair. She discovered “it gave me that wonderful feeling again, to give my whole self to someone else.” But that affair could not last; he had too many children, so did she. He said when they broke up, “You’ve given me such a feeling of identity.” And she wondered, “what about my own identity?” So she went off by herself for a month that summer, leaving the children with her husband. “I was looking for something, I’m not sure what, but the only way I get that feeling is when I’m in love with someone.” She had another affair, but that time the feeling did not appear. So with this new one, she wanted to go away completely. “Now that I know how to get that feeling,” she said, knitting calmly, “I will simply keep trying until I find it again.”
She did take off for Mexico with that shadowy, faceless man, taking her five children with her; but six months later, she was back, children and all. Evidently she did not find her phantom “feeling.” And whatever happened, it was not real enough to affect her marriage, which went on as before. Just what was the feeling she expected to get from sex? And why was it, somehow, always out of reach? Does sex become unreal, a phantasy, when a person needs it to feel “alive,” to feel “my own identity”?
In another suburb, I spoke to an attractive woman in her late thirties who had “cultural” interests, though they were rather vague and unfocused. She started paintings which she did not finish, raised money for concerts she did not listen to, said she had not “found her medium yet.” I discovered that she engaged in a sort of sexual status-seeking which had the same vague, unfocused pretentions as her cultural dabblings, and in fact, was part of it. She boasted of the intellectual prowess, the professional distinction, of the man who, she hinted, wanted to sleep with her. “It makes you feel proud, like an achievement. You don’t want to hide it. You want everyone to know, when it’s a man of his stature,” she told me. How much she really wanted to sleep with this man, professional stature or no, was another question. I later learned from her neighbors that she was a community joke. Everyone did indeed “know,” but her sexual offerings were so impersonal and predictable that only a newcomer husband would take them seriously enough to respond.
But the evidently insatiable sexual need of a slightly younger mother of four in that same suburb was hardly a joke. Her sex-seeking, somehow never satisfied despite affair after affair, mixed with much indiscriminate “extramarital petting,” as Kinsey would have put it, had real and disastrous consequences on at least two other marriages. These women and others like them, the suburban sex-seekers, lived literally within the narrow boundaries of the feminine mystique. They were intelligent, but strangely “incomplete.” They had given up attempts to make housework or community work expand to fill the time available; they turned instead to sex. But still they were unfulfilled. Their husbands did not satisfy them, they said, extramarital affairs were no better. In terms of the feminine mystique, if a woman feels a sense of personal “emptiness,” if she is unfulfilled, the cause must be sexual. But why, then, doesn’t sex ever satisfy her?
Just as college girls used the sexual phantasy of married life to protect them from the conflicts and growing pains and work of a personal commitment to science, or art, or society, are these married women putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes? Are they using sex or sexual phantasy to fill needs that are not sexual? Is that why their sex, even when it is real, seems like phantasy? Is that why, even when they experience orgasm, they feel “unfulfilled”? Are they driven to this never-satisfied sexual seeking because, in their marriages, they have not found the sexual fulfillment which the feminine mystique promises? Or is that feeling of personal identity, of fulfillment, they seek in sex something that sex alone cannot give?
Sex is the only frontier open to women who have always lived within the confines of the feminine mystique. In the past fifteen years, the sexual frontier has been forced to expand perhaps beyond the limits of possibility, to fill the time available, to fill the vacuum created by denial of larger goals and purposes for American women. The mounting sex-hunger of American women has been documented ad nauseam—by Kinsey, by the sociologists and novelists of suburbia, by the mass media, ads, television, movies, and women’s magazines that pander to the voracious female appetite for sex phantasy. It is not an exaggeration to say that several generations of able American women have been successfully reduced to sex creatures, sex-seekers. But something has evidently gone wrong.
Instead of fulfilling the promise of infinite orgastic bliss, sex in the America of the feminine mystique is becoming a strangely joyless national compulsion, if not a contemptuous mockery. The sex-glutted novels become increasingly explicit and increasingly dull; the sex kick of the women’s magazines has a sickly sadness; the endless flow of manuals describing new sex techniques hint at an endless lack of excitement. This sexual boredom is betrayed by the ever-growing size of the Hollywood starlet’s breasts, by the sudden emergence of the male phallus as an advertising “gimmick.” Sex has become depersonalized, seen in terms of these exaggerated symbols. But of all the strange sexual phenomena that have appeared in the era of the feminine mystique, the most ironic are these—the frustrated sexual hunger of American women has increased, and their conflicts over femininity have intensified, as they have reverted from independent activity to search for their sole fulfillment through their sexual role in the home. And as American women have turned their attention to the exclusive, explicit, and aggressive pursuit of sexual fulfillment, or the acting-out of sexual phantasy, the sexual disinterest of American men and their hostility toward women, have also increased.
I found evidence of these phenomena everywhere. There is, as I have said, an air of exaggerated unreality about sex today, whether it is pictured in the frankly lascivious pages of a popular novel or in the curious, almost asexual bodies of the women who pose for fashion photographs. According to Kinsey, there has been no increase in sexual “outlet” in recent decades. But in the past decade there has been an enormous increase in the American preoccupation with sex and sexual phantasy.1
In January, 1950, and again in January, 1960, a psychologist studied every reference to sex in American newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs, plays, popular songs, best-selling novels and nonfiction books. He found an enormous increase in explicit references to sexual desires and expressions (including “nudity, sex organs, scatology, ‘obscenity,’ lasciviousness and sexual intercourse”). These constituted over fifty per cent of the observed references to human sexuality, with “extramarital coitus” (including “fornication, adultery, sexual promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease”) in second place. In American media there were more than 2 ½ times as many references to sex in 1960 as in 1950, an increase from 509 to 1,341 “permissive” sex references in the 200 media studied. The so-called “men’s magazines” not only reached new excesses in their preoccupation with specific female sex organs, but a rash of magazines blossomed frankly geared to homosexuality. The most striking new sexual phenomenon, however, was the increased and evidently “insatiable” lasciviousness of best-selling novels and periodical fiction, whose audience is primarily women.
Despite his professional approval of the “permissive” attitude to sex compared to its previous hypocritical denial, the psychologist was moved to speculate:
Descriptions of sex organs . . . are so frequent in modern novels that one wonders whether they have become requisite for sending a work of fiction into the best-selling lists. Since the old, mild depictions of intercourse have seemingly lost their ability to excite, and even sex deviations have now become commonplace in modern fiction, the current logical step seems to be detailed descriptions of the sex organs themselves. It is difficult to imagine what the next step in salaciousness will be.2
From 1950 to 1960 the interest of men in the details of intercourse paled before the avidity of women—both as depicted in these media, and as its audience. Already by 1950 the salacious details of the sex act to be found in men’s magazines were outnumbered by those in fiction best-sellers sold mainly to women.
During this same period, the women’s magazines displayed an increased preoccupation with sex in a rather sickly disguise.3 Such “health” features as “Making Marriage Work,” “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” “Tell Me, Doctor,” described the most intimate sexual details in moralistic guise as “problems,” and women read about them in much the same spirit as they had read the case histories in their psychology texts. Movies and the theater betrayed a growing preoccupation with diseased or perverted sex, each new film and each new play a little more sensational than the last in its attempt to shock or titillate.
At the same time one could see, almost in parallel step, human sexuality reduced to its narrowest physiological limits in the numberless sociological studies of sex in the suburbs and in the Kinsey investigations. The two Kinsey reports, in 1948 and 1953, treated human sexuality as a status-seeking game in which the goal was the greatest number of “outlets,” orgasms achieved equally by masturbation, nocturnal emissions during dreams, intercourse with animals, and in various postures with the other sex, pre- extra- or post-marital. What the Kinsey investigators reported and the way they reported it, no less than the sex-glutted novels, magazines, plays and novels, were all symptoms of the increasing depersonalization, immaturity, joylessness and spurious senselessness of our sexual overpreoccupation.
That this spiral of sexual “lust, luridness and lasciviousness” was not exactly a sign of healthy affirmation of human intercourse became apparent as the image of males lusting after women gave way to the new image of women lusting after males. Exaggerated, perverted extremes of the sex situations seemed to be necessary to excite hero and audience alike. Perhaps the best example of this perverse reversal was the Italian movie La Dolce Vita, which with all its artistic and symbolic pretentions, was a hit in America because of its much-advertised sexual titillation. Though a comment on Italian sex and society, this particular movie was in the chief characteristics of its sexual preoccupation devastatingly pertinent to the American scene.
As is increasingly the case in American novels, plays and movies, the sex-seekers were mainly the women, who were shown as mindless over- or under-dressed sex creatures (the Hollywood star) and hysterical parasites (the journalist’s girl friend). In addition, there was the promiscuous rich girl who needed the perverse stimulation of the borrowed prostitute’s bed, the aggressively sex-hungry women in the candlelit “hide and seek” castle orgy, and finally the divorcée who performed her writhing strip tease to a lonely, bored and indifferent audience.
All the men, in fact, were too bored or too busy to be bothered. The indifferent, passive hero drifted from one sex-seeking woman to another—a Don Juan, an implied homosexual, drawn in phantasy to the asexual little girl, just out of reach across the water. The exaggerated extremes of the sex situations end finally in a depersonalization that creates a bloated boredom—in hero and audience alike. (The very tedium of depersonalized sex may also explain the declining audience of Broadway theaters, Hollywood movies and the American novel.) Long before the final scenes of La Dolce Vita—when they all go out to stare at that huge bloated dead fish—the message of the movie was made quite clear: “the sweet life” is dull.
The image of the aggressive female sex-seeker also comes across in novels like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report—which consciously cater to the female hunger for sexual phantasy. Whether or not this fictional picture of the over-lusting female means that American women have become avid sex-seekers in real life, at least they have an insatiable appetite for books dealing with the sexual act—an appetite that, in fiction and real life, does not always seem to be shared by the men. This discrepancy between the sexual preoccupation of American men and women—in fiction or reality—may have a simple explanation. Suburban housewives, in particular, are more often sex-seekers than sex-finders, not only because of the problems posed by children coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways, and gossiping servants, but because, quite simply, men are not all that available. Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. So, from teen age to late middle age, American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy. Even when the sexual affair—or the “extramarital petting” which Kinsey found on the increase—is real, it never is as real as the mystique has led the woman to believe.
As the male author of The Exurbanites puts it:
While her partner may be, and probably is, engaged in something quite casual to him, accompanied, of course, by verbal blandishments designed to persuade her of just the opposite, she is often quite genuinely caught up in what she conceives to be the real love of her life. Dismayed by the inadequacies of her marriage, confused and unhappy, angry and often humiliated by the behavior of her husband, she is psychologically prepared for the man who will skillfully and judiciously apply charm, wit and seductive behavior. . . . So, at the beach parties, at the Saturday night parties, on the long car rides from place to place—on all of which occasions the couples naturally split up—the first words can be spoken, the ground first prepared, the first fantasies conjured up, the first meaningful glance exchanged, the first desperate kiss snatched. And often, later, when the woman realizes that what was important to her was casual to him, she can cry and then she can dry her tears and look around again.4
But what happens when a woman bases her whole identity on her sexual role; when sex is necessary to make her “feel alive”? To state it quite simply, she puts impossible demands on her own body, her “femaleness,” as well as on her husband and his “maleness.” A marriage counselor told me that many of the young suburban wives he dealt with make “such heavy demands on love and marriage, but there is no excitement, no mystery, sometimes almost literally nothing happens.”
It’s something she has been trained and educated for, all this sexual information and preoccupation, this clearly laid out pattern that she must devote herself to becoming a wife and mother. There is no wonder of two strangers, man and woman, separate beings, finding each other. It’s all laid out ahead of time, a script that’s being followed without the struggle, the beauty, the mysterious awe of life. And so she says to him, do something, make me feel something, but there is no power within herself to evoke this.
A psychiatrist states that he has often seen sex “die a slow, withering death” when women, or men, use the family “to make up in closeness and affection for failure to achieve goals and satisfactions in the wider community.”5 Sometimes, he told me, “there is so little real life that finally even the sex deteriorates, and gradually dies, and months go by without any desire, though they are young people.” The sexual act “tends to become mechanized and depersonalized, a physical release that leaves the partners even lonelier after the act than before. The expression of tender sentiment shrivels. Sex becomes the arena for the struggle for dominance and control. Or it becomes a drab, hollow routine, carried out on schedule.”
Even though they find no satisfaction in sex, these women continue their endless search. For the woman who lives according to the feminine mystique, there is no road to achievement, or status, or identity, except the sexual one: the achievement of sexual conquest, status as a desirable sex object, identity as a sexually successful wife and mother. And yet because sex does not really satisfy these needs, she seeks to buttress her nothingness with things, until often even sex itself, and the husband and the children on whom the sexual identity rests, become possessions, things. A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.
Is it the need for some kind of identity or achievement that drives suburban housewives to offer themselves so eagerly to strangers and neighbors—and that makes husbands “furniture” in their own homes? In a recent novel about suburban adultery, the male author says through a butcher who takes advantage of the lonely housewives in the neighborhood:
“Do you know what America is? It’s a big, soapy dishpan of boredom . . . and no husband can understand that soapy dishpan. And a woman can’t explain it to another woman because they’ve all got their hands in that same soapy boredom. So all a man has to be is understanding. Yes, baby, I know, I know, you’ve got a miserable life, here’re some flowers, here’s some perfume, here’s ‘I love you,’ take off your pants. . . . You, me, we’re furniture in our own homes. But if we go next door, ahh! Next door, we’re heroes! They’re all looking for romance because they’ve learned it from books and movies. And what can be more romantic than a man who’s willing to risk your husband’s shotgun to have you. . . . And the only exciting thing about this guy is that he is a stranger . . . she doesn’t own him. She tells herself she’s in love, and she’s willing to risk her home, her happiness, her pride, everything, just to be with this stranger who fills her once a week. . . . Anyplace you’ve got a housewife, you’ve also got a potential mistress for a stranger.”6
Kinsey, from his interviews of 5,940 women, found that American wives, especially of the middle class, after ten or fifteen years of marriage, reported greater sexual desire than their husbands seemed to satisfy. One out of four, by the age of forty, had engaged in some extramarital activity—usually quite sporadic. Some seemed insatiably capable of “multiple orgasms.” A growing number engaged in the “extramarital petting” more characteristic of adolescence. Kinsey also found that the sexual desire of American husbands, especially in the middle-class educated groups, seemed to wane as their wives’ increased.7
But even more disturbing than the signs of increased sexual hunger, unfulfilled, among American housewives in this era of the feminine mystique are the signs of increased conflict over their own femaleness. There is evidence that the signs of feminine sexual conflict, often referred to by the euphemism of “female troubles,” occur earlier than ever, and in intensified form, in this era when women have sought to fulfill themselves so early and exclusively in sexual terms.
The chief of the gynecological service of a famous hospital told me that he sees with increasing frequency in young mothers the same impairment of the ovarian cycle—vaginal discharge, delayed periods, irregularities in menstrual flow and duration of flow, sleeplessness, fatigue syndrome, physical disability—that he used to see only in women during menopause. He said:
The question is whether these young mothers will be pathologically blown apart when they lose their reproductive function. I see plenty of women with these menopausal difficulties which are activated, I’m sure, by the emptiness of their lives. And by simply having spent the last 28 years hanging on to the last child until there’s nothing left to hang on to. In contrast, women who’ve had children, sexual relations but who somehow have much more whole-hearted personalities, without continually having to rationalize themselves as female by having one more baby and holding on to it, have very few hot flashes, insomnia, nervousness, jitteriness.
The ones with female troubles are the ones who have denied their femininity, or are pathologically female. But we see these symptoms now in more and more young wives, in their 20’s, young women who are fatally invested in their children, who have not developed resources, other than their children—coming in with the same impairments of the ovarian cycle, menstrual difficulties, characteristic of the menopause. A woman 22 years old, who’s had three children, with symptoms more frequently seen with menopause . . . I say to her, “the only trouble with you is that you’ve had too many babies too fast” and reserve to myself the opinion “your personality has not developed far enough.”
At this same hospital, studies have been made of women recovering from hysterectomy, women with menstrual complaints, and women with difficult pregnancies. The ones who suffered the most pain, nausea, vomiting, physical and emotional distress depression, apathy, anxiety, were women “whose lives revolved almost exclusively around the reproductive function and its gratification in motherhood. A prototype of this attitude was expressed by one woman who said, ‘In order to be a woman, I have to be able to have children.’”8 The ones who suffered least had “well-integrated egos,” had resources of the intellect and were directed outward in their interests, even in the hospital, rather than preoccupied with themselves and their sufferings.
Obstetricians have seen this too. One told me:
It’s a funny thing. The women who have the backaches, the bleeding, the difficult pregnancy and delivery, are the ones who think their whole purpose in life is to have babies. Women who have other interests than just being reproductive machines have less trouble having babies. Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m no psychiatrist. But we’ve all noticed it.
Another gynecologist spoke of many patients in this era of “femaleness-fulfilled” to whom neither having babies nor sexual intercourse brought “fulfillment.” They were, in his words:
Women who feel very unsure about their sex and need to have children again and again to prove that they are feminine; women who have the fourth or fifth child because they can’t think of anything else to do; women who are dominant and this is something else to dominate; and then I have hundreds of patients who are college girls who don’t know what to do with themselves, their mothers bring them in for diaphragms. Because they are immature, going to bed means nothing—it is like taking medicine, no orgasm, nothing. For them getting married is an evasion.
The high incidence of cramps with menstruation, nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, depression with childbirth, and severe physiological and psychological distress at menopause have come to be accepted as a “normal” part of feminine biology.9 Are these stigmata that mark the stages of the female sexual cycle—menstruation, pregnancy, menopause—part of the fixed and eternal nature of women as they are popularly assumed to be, or are they somehow related to that unnecessary choice between “femininity” and human growth, sex and self? When a woman is a “sex creature,” does she see unconsciously in each step of her feminine sexual cycle a giving up, a kind of death, of her very reason for existence? These women who crowd the clinics are personifications of the feminine mystique. The lack of orgasm, the increasing “female troubles,” the promiscuous and insatiable sex-seeking, the depression at the moment of becoming a mother, the strange eagerness of women to have their female sex organs removed by hysterectomies without medical cause—all these betray the big lie of the mystique. Like the self-fulfilling prophecy of death in Samarra, the feminine mystique, with its outcry against loss of femininity, is making it increasingly difficult for women to affirm their femininity, and for men to be truly masculine, and for either to enjoy human sexual love.
The air of unreality that hovered over my interviews with suburban housewife sex-seekers, the unreality that pervades the sex-preoccupied novels, plays, and movies—as it pervades the ritualistic sex talk at suburban parties—I suddenly saw for what it was, on an island ostensibly far removed from suburbia, where sex-seeking is omnipresent, in pure phantasy. During the week, this island is an exaggeration of a suburb, for it is utterly removed from outside stimuli, from the world of work and politics; the men do not even come home at night. The women who were spending the summer there were extremely attractive young housewives. They had married early; they lived through their husbands and children; they had no interest in the world outside the home. Here on this island, unlike the suburb, these women had no way to make committees or housework expand to fill the time available. But they found a new diversion that killed two birds with one stone, a diversion that gave them a spurious sense of sexual status, but relieved them of the frightening necessity to prove it. On this island, there was a colony of “boys” right out of the world of Tennessee Williams. During the week when their husbands were working in the city, the young housewives had “wild” orgies, all-night parties, with these sexless boys. In a sort of humorous puzzlement, a husband who took the boat over unexpectedly one midweek to console his bored and lonely wife, speculated: “Why do they do it? Maybe it has something to do with this place being a matriarchy.”
Perhaps, too, it had something to do with boredom—there just was not anything else to do. But it looked like sex; that’s what made it so exciting, even though there was, of course, no sexual contact. Perhaps, these housewives and their boyfriends recognized themselves in each other. For like the call girl in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s who spends the sexless night with the passive homosexual, they were equally childlike in their retreat from life. And in each other, they sought the same nonsexual reassurance.
But in the suburbs where most hours of the day there are virtually no men at all—to give even the appearance of sex—women who have no identity other than sex creatures must ultimately seek their reassurance through the possession of “things.” One suddenly sees why manipulators cater to sexual hunger in their attempt to sell products which are not even remotely sexual. As long as woman’s needs for achievement and identity can be channeled into this search for sexual status, she is easy prey for any product which presumably promises her that status—a status that cannot be achieved by effort or achievement of her own. And since that endless search for status as a desirable sexual object is seldom satisfied in reality for most American housewives (who at best can only try to look like Elizabeth Taylor), it is very easily translated into a search for status through the possession of objects.
Thus women are aggressors in suburban status-seeking and their search has the same falseness and unreality as their sex-seeking. Status, after all, is what men seek and acquire through their work in society. A woman’s work—housework—cannot give her status; it has the lowliest status of almost any work in society. A woman must acquire her status vicariously through her husband’s work. The husband himself, and even the children, become symbols of status, for when a woman defines herself as a housewife, the house and the things in it are, in a sense, her identity; she needs these external trappings to buttress her emptiness of self, to make her feel like somebody. She becomes a parasite, not only because the things she needs for status come ultimately from her husband’s work, but because she must dominate, own him, for the lack of an identity of her own. If her husband is unable to provide the things she needs for status, he becomes an object of contempt, just as she is contemptuous of him if he cannot fill her sexual needs. Her very dissatisfaction with herself she feels as dissatisfaction with her husband and their sexual relations. As a psychiatrist put it: “She demands too much satisfaction from her marital relations. Her husband resents it and becomes unable to function sexually with her at all.”
Could this be the reason for the rising tide of resentment among the new young husbands at the girls whose only ambition was to be their wives? The old hostility against domineering “moms” and aggressive career girls may, in the long run, pale before the new male hostility for the girls whose active pursuit of the “home career” has resulted in a new kind of domination and aggression. To be the tool, the sex-instrument, the “man around the house,” is evidently no dream-come-true for a man.
In March, 1962, a reporter noted in Redbook a new phenomenon on the suburban scene: that “young fathers feel trapped”:
Many husbands feel that their wives, firmly quoting authorities on home management, child rearing and married love, have set up a tightly scheduled, narrowly conceived scheme of family living that leaves little room for a husband’s authority or point of view. (A husband said “Since I’ve been married, I feel I’ve lost all my guts. I don’t feel like a man anymore. I’m still young, yet I don’t get much out of life. I don’t want advice, but I sometimes feel like something is bursting loose inside.”) The husbands named their wives as their chief source of frustration, superseding children, employers, finances, relatives, community and friends. . . . The young father is no longer free to make his own mistakes or to swing his own weight in a family crisis. His wife, having just read Chapter VII, knows exactly what should be done.
The article goes on to quote a social worker:
The modern wife’s insistence on achieving sexual satisfaction for herself may pose a major problem for her husband. A husband can be teased, flattered and cajoled into performing as an expert lover. But if his wife scorns and upbraids him as though he had proved unable to carry a trunk up the attic stairs, she is in for trouble. . . . It’s alarming to note that five years after marriage, a sizable number of American husbands have committed adultery and a much larger proportion are seriously tempted to do so. Often, infidelity is less a search for pleasure than a means of self-assertion.
Four years ago, I interviewed a number of wives on a certain pseudo-rural road in a fashionable suburb. They had everything they wanted: lovely houses, a number of children, attentive husbands. Today, on that same road, there are a growing spate of dream-houses in which, for various and sometimes unaccountable reasons, the wives now live alone with the children, while the husbands—doctors, lawyers, account chiefs—have moved to the city. Divorce, in America, according to the sociologists, is in almost every instance sought by the husband, even if the wife ostensibly gets it.10 There are, of course, many reasons for divorce, but chief among them seems to be the growing aversion and hostility that men have for the feminine millstones hanging around their necks, a hostility that is not always directed at their wives, but at their mothers, the women they work with—in fact, women in general.
According to Kinsey, the majority of the American middle-class males’ sexual outlets are not in relations with their wives after the fifteenth year of marriage; at fifty-five, one out of two American men is engaging in extramarital sex.11 This male sex-seeking—the office romance, the casual or intense affair, even the depersonalized sex-for-sex’s-sake satirized in the recent movie The Apartment—is, as often as not, motivated simply by the need to escape from the devouring wife. Sometimes the man seeks the human relationship that got lost when he became merely an appendage to his wife’s aggressive “home career.” Sometimes his aversion to his wife finally makes him seek in sex an object totally divorced from any human relationship. Sometimes, in phantasy more often than in fact, he seeks a girl-child, a Lolita, as sexual object—to escape that grownup woman who is devoting all her aggressive energies, as well as her sexual energies, to living through him. There is no doubt that male outrage against women—and inevitably, against sex—has increased enormously in the era of the feminine mystique.12 As a man wrote in a letter to the Village Voice, New York’s Greenwich Village newspaper, in February, 1962: “It isn’t a problem anymore of whether White is too good to marry Black, or vice versa, but whether women are good enough to marry men, since women are on the way out.”
The public symbol of this male hostility is the retreat of American playwrights and novelists from the problems of the world to an obsession with images of the predatory female, the passive martyred male hero (in homo- or heterosexual clothes), the promiscuous childlike heroine, and the physical details of arrested sexual development. It is a special world, but not so special that millions of men and women, boys and girls cannot identify with it. Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” is a flagrant example of this world.
The aging homosexual hero from an old Southern family, haunted by the monstrous birds that devour baby sea turtles, has wasted his life in pursuit of his lost golden youth. He himself has been “eaten” by his seductively feminine mother, just as, in the end, he is literally eaten by a band of young boys. It is significant that the hero of this play never appears; he is without a face, without a body. The only undeniably “real” character is the man-eating mother. She appears again and again in Williams’ plays and in the plays and novels of his contemporaries, along with the homosexual sons, the nymphomaniacal daughters, and the revengeful male Don Juans. All of these plays are an agonized shout of obsessed love-hate against women. Significantly, a great many of these plays are written by Southern writers, where the “femininity” which the mystique enshrines remains most intact.
This male outrage is the result, surely, of an implacable hatred for the parasitic women who keep their husbands and sons from growing up, who keep them immersed at that sickly level of sexual phantasy. For the fact is that men, too, are now being drawn away from the large world of reality into the stunted world of sexual phantasy in which their daughters, wives, mothers have been forced to look for “fulfillment.” And, for men too, sex itself is taking on the unreal character of phantasy—depersonalized, dissatisfying, and finally inhuman.
Is there, after all, a link between what is happening to the women in America and increasingly overt male homosexuality? According to the feminine mystique, the “masculinization” of American women which was caused by emancipation, education, equal rights, careers, is producing a breed of increasingly “feminine” men. But is this the real explanation? As a matter of fact, the Kinsey figures showed no increase in homosexuality in the generations which saw the emancipation of women. The Kinsey report revealed in 1948 that 37 per cent of American men had had at least some homosexual experience, that 13 per cent were predominantly homosexual (for at least three years between 16 and 55), and 4 per cent exclusively homosexual—some 2,000,000 men. But there was “no evidence that the homosexual group involved more males or fewer males today than it did among older generations.”13
Whether or not there has been an increase in homosexuality in America, there has certainly been in recent years an increase in its overt manifestations.14 I do not think that this is unrelated to the national embrace of the feminine mystique. For the feminine mystique has glorified and perpetuated in the name of femininity a passive, childlike immaturity which is passed on from mothers to sons, as well as to daughters. Male homosexuals—and the male Don Juans, whose compulsion to test their potency is often caused by unconscious homosexuality—are, no less than the female sex-seekers, Peter Pans, forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic.
The role of the mother in homosexuality was pinpointed by Freud and the psychoanalysts. But the mother whose son becomes homosexual is usually not the “emancipated” woman who competes with men in the world, but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique—a woman who lives through her son, whose femininity is used in virtual seduction of her son, who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman, nor can he, often, cope as an adult with life on his own. The love of men masks his forbidden excessive love for his mother; his hatred and revulsion for all women is a reaction to the one woman who kept him from becoming a man. The conditions of this excessive mother-son love are complex. Freud wrote:
In all the cases examined we have ascertained that the later inverts go through in their childhood a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation on the woman (usually the mother) and after overcoming it, they identify themselves with the woman and take themselves as the sexual object; that is, proceeding on a narcissistic basis, they look for young men resembling themselves in persons whom they wish to love as their mother loved them.15
Extrapolating from Freud’s insights, one could say that such an excess of love-hate is almost implicit in the relationship of mother and son—when her exclusive role as wife and mother, her relegation to the home, force her to live through her son. Male homosexuality was and is far more common than female homosexuality. The father is not as often tempted or forced by society to live through or seduce his daughter. Not many men become overt homosexuals, but a great many have suppressed enough of this love-hate to feel not only a deep repugnance for homosexuality, but a general and sublimated revulsion for women.
Today, when not only career, but any serious commitment outside the home, are out of bounds for truly “feminine” housewife-mothers, the kind of mother-son devotion which can produce latent or overt homosexuality has plenty of room to expand to fill the time available. The boy smothered by such parasitical mother-love is kept from growing up, not only sexually, but in all ways. Homosexuals often lack the maturity to finish school and make sustained professional commitments. (Kinsey found homosexuality most common among men who do not go beyond high school, and least common among college graduates.)16 The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the homosexual’s sex life usually characterize all his life and interests. This lack of personal commitment in work, in education, in life outside of sex, is hauntingly “feminine.” Like the daughters of the feminine mystique, the sons spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy; the sad “gay” homosexuals may well feel an affinity with the young housewife sex-seekers.
But the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene is no less ominous than the restless, immature sex-seeking of the young women who are the aggressors in the early marriages that have become the rule rather than the exception. Nor is it any less frightening than the passivity of the young males who acquiesce to early marriage rather than face the world alone. These victims of the feminine mystique start their search for the solace of sex at an earlier and earlier age. In recent years, I have interviewed a number of sexually promiscuous girls from comfortable suburban families, including a number—and this number is growing17—of girls who marry in their early teens because they are pregnant. Talking to these girls, and to the professional workers who are trying to help them, one quickly sees that sex, for them, is not sex at all. They have not even begun to experience a sexual response, much less “fulfillment.” They use sex—pseudo-sex—to erase their lack of identity; it seldom matters who the boy is; the girl almost literally does not “see” him when she has as yet no sense of herself. Nor will she ever have a sense of herself if she uses the easy rationalizations of the feminine mystique to evade in sex-seeking the efforts that lead to identity.
Early sex, early marriage, has always been a characteristic of underdeveloped civilizations and, in America, of rural and city slums. One of the most striking of Kinsey’s findings, however, was that a delay in sexual activity was less a characteristic of socio-economic origin than of the ultimate destination—as measured, for instance, by education. A boy from a slum background, who put himself through college and became a scientist or judge, showed the same postponement of sexual activity in adolescence as others who later became scientists or judges, not as others from the same slum background. Boys from the right side of the tracks, however, who did not finish college or become scientists or judges showed more of that earlier sexual activity that was characteristic of the slum.18 Whatever this indicates about the relationship between sex and the intellect, a certain postponement of sexual activity seemed to accompany the growth in mental activity required and resulting from higher education, and the achievement of the professions of highest value to society.
Among the girls in the Kinsey survey, there even seemed to be a relationship between the ultimate level of mental or intellectual growth as measured by education, and sexual satisfaction. Girls who married in their teens—who, in Kinsey’s cases, usually stopped education with high school—started having sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than girls who continued their education through college or into professional training. This earlier sexual activity did not, however, usually lead to orgasm; these girls were still experiencing less sexual fulfillment, in terms of orgasm, five, ten and fifteen years after marriage than those who had continued their education.19 As with the promiscuous girls in the suburbs, early sexual preoccupation seemed to indicate a weak core of self which even marriage did not strengthen.
Is this the real reason for the kind of compulsive sex-seeking seen today in promiscuity, early and late, heterosexual or homosexual? Is it a coincidence that the many phenomena of depersonalized sex—sex without self, sex for lack of self—are becoming so rampant in the era when American women are told to live by sex alone? Is it a coincidence that their sons and daughters have selves so weak that they resort at an increasingly early age to a dehumanized, faceless sex-seeking? Psychiatrists have explained that the key problem in promiscuity is usually “low self-esteem,” which often seems to stem from an excessive mother-child attachment; the type of sex-seeking is relatively irrelevant. As Clara Thompson, speaking of homosexuality, says:
Overt homosexuality may express fear of the opposite sex, fear of adult responsibility . . . it may represent a flight from reality into absorption in bodily stimulation very similar to the auto-erotic activities of the schizophrenic, or it may be a symptom of destructiveness of oneself or others. . . . People who have a low self-esteem . . . have a tendency to cling to their own sex because it is less frightening. . . . However, the above considerations do not invariably produce homosexuality, for the fear of disapproval from the culture and the need to conform often drive these very people into marriage. The fact that one is married by no means proves that one is a mature person. . . . The mother-child attachment is sometimes found to be the important part of the picture. . . . Promiscuity is possibly more frequent among homosexuals than heterosexuals, but its significance in the personality structure is very similar in the two. In both, the chief interest is in genitals and body stimulation. The person chosen to share the experience is not important. The sexual activity is compulsive and is the sole interest.20
Compulsive sexual activity, homosexual or heterosexual, usually veils a lack of potency in other spheres of life. Contrary to the feminine mystique, sexual satisfaction is not necessarily a mark of fulfillment, in woman or man. According to Erich Fromm:
Often psychoanalysts see patients whose ability to love and so be close to others is damaged and yet who function very well sexually and indeed make sexual satisfaction a substitute for love because their sexual potency is their only power in which they have confidence. Their inability to be productive in all other spheres of life and the resulting unhappiness is counterbalanced and veiled by their sexual activities.21
There is a similar undertone to the sex-seeking in colleges, even though the potential ability to be “productive in all other spheres of life” is high. A psychiatrist consultant for Harvard-Radcliffe students recently pointed out that college girls often seek “security” in these intense sexual relationships because of their own feelings of inadequacy, when, probably for the first time in their lives, they have to work hard, face real competition, think actively instead of passively—which is “not only a strange experience, but almost akin to physical pain.”
The significant facts are the lowered self-esteem and the diminution in zest, energy, and capacity to function in a creative way. The depression seems to be a kind of declaration of dependence, of helplessness, and a muted cry for help as well. And it occurs at some time and in varying intensity in practically every girl during her career at college.22
All this may simply represent “the first response of a sensitive, naive adolescent to a new, frighteningly complicated and sophisticated environment,” the psychiatrist said. But if the adolescent is a girl, she evidently should not, like the boy, be expected to face the challenge, master the painful work, meet the competition. The psychiatrist considers it “normal” that the girl seeks her “security” in “love,” even though the boy himself may be “strikingly immature, adolescent, and dependent”—“a slender reed, at least from the point of view of the girl’s needs.” The feminine mystique hides the fact that this early sex-seeking, harmless enough for the boy or girl who looks for no more than it offers, cannot give these young women that “clearer image of themselves”—the self-esteem they need and “the vigor to lead satisfying and creative lives.” But the mystique does not always hide from the boy the fact that the girl’s dependence on him is not really sexual, and that it may stifle his growth. Hence the boy’s hostility—even as he helplessly succumbs to the sexual invitation.
A Radcliffe student recently wrote a sensitive account of a boy’s growing bitterness at the girl who cannot study without him—a bitterness not even stilled by the sex with which they nightly evade study together.
She was bending down the corner of a page and he wanted to tell her to stop; the little mechanical action irritated him out of all proportion, and he wondered if he was so tense because they hadn’t made love for four days . . . I bet she needs it now, he thought, that’s why she’s so quivery, close to tears, and maybe that’s why I loused up the exam. But he knew it was not an excuse; he felt his resentment heating as he wondered why he had not really reviewed. . . . The clock would never let him forget the amount of time he was wasting . . . he slammed his books closed and began to stack them together. Eleanor looked up and he saw the terror in her eyes . . .
“Look, I’m going to walk you back now,” he said . . .“I’ve got to get something done tonight” . . . He remembered that he had a long walk back, but as he bent hurriedly to kiss her she slipped her arms around him and he had to pull back hard in order to get away. She let go at last, and no longer smiling, she whispered: “Hal, don’t go.” He hesitated. “Please, don’t go, please . . .” She strained up to kiss him and when she opened her mouth he felt tricked, for if he put his tongue between her lips, he would not be able to leave. He kissed her, beginning half-consciously to forget that he should go . . . he pulled her against him, hearing her moan with pain and excitation. Then he drew back and said, his voice already labored: “Isn’t there anywhere we can go?” . . . She was looking around eagerly and hopefully and he wondered again, how much of her desire was passion and how much grasping: girls used sex to get a hold on you, he knew—it was so easy for them to pretend to be excited.23
These are, of course, the first of the children who grew up under the feminine mystique, these youngsters who use sex as such a suspiciously easy solace when they face the first hard hurdles in the race. Why is it so difficult for these youngsters to endure discomfort, to make an effort, to postpone present pleasure for future long-term goals? Sex and early marriage are the easiest way out; playing house at nineteen evades the responsibility of growing up alone. And even if a father tried to get his son to be “masculine,” to be independent, active, strong, both mother and father encouraged their daughter in that passive, weak, grasping dependence known as “femininity,” expecting her, of course, to find “security” in a boy, never expecting her to live her own life.
And so the circle tightens. Sex without self, enshrined by the feminine mystique, casts an ever-darkening shadow over man’s image of woman and woman’s image of herself. It becomes harder for both son and daughter to escape, to find themselves in the world, to love another in human intercourse. The million married before the age of nineteen, in earlier and earlier travesty of sex-seeking, betray an increased immaturity, emotional dependence, and passivity on the part of the newest victims of the feminine mystique. The shadow of sex without self may be dispelled momentarily in a sunny suburban dream house. But what will these childlike mothers and immature fathers do to their children, in that phantasy paradise where the pursuit of pleasure and things hides the loosening links to complex modern reality? What kind of sons and daughters are raised by girls who became mothers before they have ever faced that reality, or sever their links to it by becoming mothers?
There are frightening implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed on to the new generation of children as a result of our stubborn embrace of the feminine mystique. The tragedy of children acting out the sexual phantasies of their housewife-mothers is only one sign of the progressive dehumanization that is taking place. And in this “acting out” by the children, the feminine mystique can finally be seen in all its sick and dangerous obsolescence.