In Praise of Messy Lives (18 page)

Which is not to say that baroque stories of sexual submission are new. Sadomasochism is, of course, what someone I know referred to as “a hearty perennial.” It has always existed in secret pockets, and periodically some small glimmer of it breaks into mainstream culture and fascinates us. But the S&M classics of the past make fewer compromises with normal life; they don’t traffic in things as banal or ordinary as love.

In
Story of O
, the famous French novel written by Pauline Réage in 1954, the heroine is elaborately trained to be a slave, after being whisked off to a chateau where masked men whip her and abuse her sexually. O’s masochism begins as an intense devotion to her lover but quickly turns into something else. O begins to vacate herself; she loses her personality in the pure discipline of pain. When Susan Sontag wrote about O, she talked about “the voluptuous yearning toward the extinction of one’s consciousness.”

Every so often a book or movie comes along that absorbs us and generates discussion about bondage and power, with eroticized scenes of rape or colorful submission, such as
The Ages of Lulu
,
Belle de Jour
, and
The Sexual Life of Catherine M
. What is interesting is that this material still, in our jaded porn-saturated age, manages to be titillating or controversial or newsworthy. We still seem to want to debate or interrogate or voyeuristically absorb scenes of extreme sexual submission. Even though we are, at this point, extremely familiar with sadomasochism, it still seems
to strike the culture as new, as shocking, as overturning certain values, because something in it still feels, to a surprisingly large segment of our tolerant post-sexual-revolution world, wrong or shameful.

One of the salient facts about
Fifty Shades of Grey
’s Anastasia Steele is that she is not into sadomasochism, she is just in love with Christian Grey (“Deep down I would just like more: more affection, more playful Christian, more … love”), so she is willing to give beatings and leather crops the old college try. This is important for a mainstream heroine appealing to mainstream readers: she indulges in the slightly out-there fantasy of whipping and humiliation without actually taking responsibility for any off-kilter desires. She can enjoy his punishments and leather whips and mild humiliations without ever having to say that she sought them out or chose them. It’s not that she wants to be whipped, it’s that she willingly endures it out of love for, and maybe in an effort to save, a handsome man. This little trick of the mind, of course, is one of the central aspects of sexual submission: you can experience it without claiming responsibility, without committing to actually wanting it, which has a natural appeal to both our puritan past and our post-ironic present.

When Maggie Gyllenhaal appeared in
Secretary
, a comic commentary on a boss disciplining his secretary, she was worried about a feminist reaction against the flamboyant depiction of sexual domination. But she said, “I found women, especially of my generation, are moved by it in some way that goes beyond politics.”

Explaining the endurance of submissive sexual fantasies, the feminist Katha Pollitt says, “Women have more sexual freedom
and more power than ever before in our history, but that does not mean they have a lot of either, and it doesn’t mean they don’t have complicated feelings of guilt, shame and unworthiness.” And over the years researchers and psychologists have theorized that women harbor elaborate fantasies about sexual submission because they feel guilty or skittish about claiming responsibility for their own desires: they are more comfortable being wanted than wanting, in other words. But more recent studies show that the women who fantasize about being forced to have sex are actually less prone to guilt than those who don’t. In any event, that theory seems too sweeping or at least too nineteenth-century an answer for most modern women: it is not so much guilt over sex but rather something more basically liberating in the situation of being overcome or overpowered. The thrill here is irrational, untouched by who one is in life, immune to the critical or sensible voice, the fine education, or good job.

Feminists have long tried to explain away our continuing investment in this fantasy, the residual desire to be controlled or dominated in the romantic sphere. They have blamed the pornographic male-dominated culture for how many strong, successful, independent women are caught up in elaborate fantasies of submission (and realities, of course, but that’s another story). Gloria Steinem writes that these women “have been raised to believe that sex and domination are synonymous,” and we must learn to “finally untangle sex and aggression.” But maybe sex and aggression should not, and probably more to the point, cannot be untangled.

Recently on talk shows there has been a certain amount of upstanding feminist tsk-tsking about the retrograde soft-core exploitation
of women in
Fifty Shades of Grey
, and there seems to be no shortage of liberal pundits asking, “Is this what they went to the barricades for?” But of course, the barricades have always been oddly irrelevant to intimate life.

As the brilliant feminist thinker Simone de Beauvoir answered when someone asked her if her subjugation to Jean-Paul Sartre in her personal life was at odds with her feminist theories: “Well, I just don’t give a damn.… I’m sorry to disappoint all the feminists, but you can say it’s too bad so many of them live only in theory instead of in real life.”

In her controversial and revealing meditation on her own obsession with spanking in
The New Yorker
, Daphne Merkin speculates about the tension between her identity as a “formidable” woman and her yearning for a sexualized childish punishment. She writes, “Equality between men and women, or even the pretext of it, takes a lot of work and may not in any case be the surest route to sexual excitement.”

It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics or even changing demographic realities; it doesn’t care about the End of Men or peruse feminist blogs in its spare time; it doesn’t remember the hard work and dedication of the suffragettes and assorted other picket sign wavers. The incandescent fantasy of being dominated or overcome by a man shows no sign of vanishing with equal pay for equal work, and may in fact gain in intensity and take new, inventive—or, in the case of
Fifty Shades of Grey
, not so inventive—forms.

In fact, if I were a member of the Christian right, sitting on my front porch decrying the decadent morals of American working women, what would be most alarming to me about the
Fifty Shades of Grey
phenomenon, what gives it its true edge of desperation
and end-of-the-world ambience, is that millions of otherwise intelligent women are willing to tolerate prose on this level. If you are willing to slog through sentences like “In spite of my poignant sadness, I laugh,” or “My world is crumbling around me into a sterile pile of ashes, all my hopes and dreams cruelly dashed,” you must really, really want to get to the submissive sex scene.

Maureen Dowd’s penchant for provocative overstatement found its natural outlet in her book
Are Men Necessary?
In it she bemoans a perceived return of 1950s values and courtship rituals and portrays a younger generation of women as grasping, shallow housewife wannabes. In the most inflammatory and intriguing passages, she claims that men are put off by women in power, that they prefer the women who serve them, “maids, masseuses, and secretaries,” to their equals. She goes on to attribute the fact that she herself is unmarried to her powerful position as an op-ed columnist at
The New York Times
. At one point, she notes her own family history of domestic service and concludes that being a maid would have enhanced her chances with men.

Is this dark view of sexual politics a little extreme? If it is, it shouldn’t be surprising. Dowd pushes every statement to its most exaggerated form; her column occupies a space somewhere in between the other columns on the
New York Times
op-ed page and the political cartoons that sometimes run there. She is, at her best, a brilliant caricaturist of the political scene, turning each presidency into vivid farce. As a caricaturist, she has a fondness for
punchy one-liners strung together, and for the one-sentence paragraph: “Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest”; “We had the Belle Epoque. Now we have the Botox Epoch”; and “As a species is it possible that men are ever so last century?” Her style evokes a brainier Candace Bushnell, whose oeuvre she frequently refers to, but it is given extra weight by her position at the
Times
.

Like the crude, sexist men she obsessively lampoons, Dowd is extremely fond of clever stereotyping. But this strategy is better suited to satirizing a real person (say, President Bush) than it is to offering insights into the already cartoonish war between the sexes. In
Are Men Necessary?
she gravitates toward quotes like this: “Deep down all men want the same thing: a virgin in a gingham dress,” or “if there’s one thing men fear it’s a woman who uses her critical faculties.” To support these generalizations, Dowd relies on the faux journalism of women’s magazines. She cobbles together anecdotal evidence from people she encounters. The formula is basically this: “Carrie, a twenty-nine-year-old publicist, says …” And from Carrie’s experience she extrapolates to the universal. The problem with this approach, of course, is that one could go out and find a twenty-nine-year-old publicist who would say the opposite. It would be one thing if Dowd were writing pure, straightforward polemic, ranting against the people she feels the need to rant against, but Dowd is pretending to cover cultural trends with journalistic accuracy, and it is this pretense that gives her arguments a shoddy, makeshift feel.

Much of what Dowd observes in the piece is true: the nostalgic passion for the 1950s, the increasing number of educated women opting to be housewives or change their names when they marry, the strange, runaway success of books like
The Rules.
And yet, somehow, the alarmist portrait she draws of female life feels skewed. Her sensationalism renders the generation she is writing about unrecognizable. She seems to believe that we are all obsessed with beauty, we all want to efface our personalities to ensnare a man, we all want to stay home and take care of him.

In fact, Dowd’s most compelling example of the rarefied, lonely demographic of woman too successful for love is herself.

As Dowd would have it, men simply find her intelligence, her status, her wit too daunting. (A friend called her up to complain that her own Pulitzer Prize would make it impossible for her to get a date.) But is it possible that there is something else at play? In a recent
New York
profile, the writer reports: “She is an utter and unreconstructed fox. Something that nearly every person I spoke to about her mentioned, unprompted, is that men can’t resist her.” The piece further describes the wide variety of men Dowd has been involved with, ranging from movie stars, to important editors, to creators of television dramas. And they have apparently all been attracted to her, even though she is not in a service profession, or a maid, or a virgin in a gingham dress. One imagines that her intelligence, her sharpness, her sarcasm, may even have interested or enticed these men. Could there possibly be another reason that the attractive, successful Dowd has not settled down? Something that is not in the zeitgeist, or the political climate, but some irreducible quality of her own psychology? It would seem wrong to raise this question about a woman writer, and in fact about any writer, but Dowd uses her experience with men as a template for her theories so often, and marshals her failure to marry as evidence so frequently, that she herself plants the question in her reader’s mind.

One of Dowd’s many admirers extravagantly compared her
to Edith Wharton. But Wharton was among the first female writers to write about the single woman’s ambivalence toward marriage, a subject Dowd conspicuously evades. What is maddening about Dowd’s book and the excerpt in
The New York Times Magazine
is that she does not develop her ideas, that she does not push beneath the surface. One wishes that, instead of devoting herself to zinginess, to ripostes and one-liners, she would use her threatening intelligence to unearth the deeper complexities of her subject. Is there something about the generation of women who came of age in the late 1960s “in male-dominated universities and workplaces” that finds its own power unsettling? Why is it that so many women are taking refuge in outdated visions of femininity?

I don’t mean to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with using one’s own life in political writing. But one should use it honestly, rigorously, complicatedly, like critics such as Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Joan Didion, Christopher Hitchens, or Andrew Sullivan. Because the issues surrounding sexual politics are so emotionally charged, so laden with contradiction, so racked with ambivalence and irrationality, it is especially important not to neglect nuance. One of the failures of the feminist movement in the first place was a reliance on easy aphorisms, and the schematic worldview that such aphorisms implied or evoked. The famous line “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” did not prove to be a constructive or interesting contribution to the feminist cause. Replacing one set of rigid gender stereotypes with another did not allow women the full range of their desires and ended up sabotaging and satirizing the movement. Dowd herself criticizes the feminists of the 1970s for imagining a sea of identical, sexless women in navy blazers descending
on the workplace. Though she appears to be arguing for a new, more rigorous feminism, she is guilty of precisely the same intellectual fault, starting with the catchy meaningless title of her book,
Are Men Necessary?
Dowd’s aphorisms, amusing and pithy in the morning paper along with a cup of coffee, are precisely what the conversation about sexual politics does not need.