Living Out Loud (26 page)

Change is exceedingly slow, but somehow sure. My friend the female rabbi still meets up with the occasional father of the bride who will not pay for the wedding if she officiates. To write that sentence alone is a measure of the shock of the new, and the stubborn strength of the old. On the one hand, the father of the bride and his wallet. On the other, a rabbi who is a woman.

I went to a women’s college. Not long ago I was asked what it was like. At the time I was speaking at a college that until 1969 had been all-male and fiercely proud to be so. I said it was a little like learning to swim while holding on to the side of the pool; I didn’t learn the arm movements until after I graduated, but by that time I was one hell of a kicker.

When I began school there were still marks on the university buildings made by student demonstrators. Perhaps that was why some of us were happy to view our own feminism as a liberal and not a radical political movement. A liberal movement is precisely what we got. We were permitted limited access to the world of men provided that to some considerable extent we mimicked their behavior but did not totally alter our own.

I suppose we sometimes feel disappointed with our circumstances
today because now that the liberal movement has taken place, now that women are performing cardiac surgery and becoming members of the welders’ unions, it has become clearer than ever that what we really needed was a radical movement. We have given the word an ominous connotation, but in fact it means only a root change. We needed a root change in the way things work: in the way everyone approached work, in the way everyone approached the care of children, in the way everyone, male and female, approached the balance of life and work and obligations and inclinations. I do not think this really came about.

Everyone now accepts that men, too, can cry, but women still often have more reason to. “We must fight for parental leaves for mothers and fathers,” one feminist told me, and I knew she was right, except that I didn’t know many men who were going to take paternity leaves if they were offered. I suppose we must fight to raise sons who will take them.

We still find ourselves dependent on the kindness of strangers, from Supreme Court justices to husbands and lovers. I do not believe that we are likely to go back to a time when patients refuse to be treated by female doctors, but I think we could go back to a time when doctors of both sexes are forbidden by law to perform abortions. I think that institutions run by men, with a sprinkling of women in high places, may begin to feel self-congratulatory and less enthusiastic about hiring and promotion efforts about which they have always been ambivalent.

It is difficult to communicate some of the terror of this to young women who have grown up with a sense of entitlement, who were born in the year in which a bin was filled with undergarments on the Atlantic City boardwalk in protest of the Miss America pageant, who grew up knowing that they could go to Princeton or rabbinical school or the moon if they worked at it hard enough, who have never been asked how fast they typed.

Some have told me that they do not think of themselves as feminists, that they are a generation of individualists who do not align themselves with a group cause, particularly one which represents battles they believe have been largely won.

Perhaps it was a particularly female thing about me, but I did not feel qualified, when I was young, to be an individualist. I felt that by birth I was part of a group, and that the signal hallmark of that group was that they were denied access to money and power by virtue of biology. That seemed overwhelming to me at seventeen, and it seemed to present me with two choices. One was to distinguish myself from other women. The other was to stand up for the rights of women as a group. I wasn’t capable of going it alone. Luckily, I didn’t have to. I had my sisters.

I
remember with great clarity the afternoon my mother, an exceedingly gentle soul, hurled the current best seller across the living room with such force that it bounced off the wall opposite. “It’s a dirty book,” she said, nostrils flaring, as she saw my face, and she stomped off into the kitchen. It was some measure of how rattled she was that she left the book itself, its yellow jacket a bright blot on the carpet, in the same room with a teenager whose paperback copy of
The Group
fell open automatically to Dottie’s deflowering.

The book was
Portnoy’s Complaint
, and I thought it was wonderful. I understood what my mother meant—the breaks in the binding indicated that she had pitched the book just at the pivotal liver scene—but it seemed to me that the sex was so central to, so much a part of the extraordinary humor and tone that to be offended by it was beside the point. I tried to tell her this,
but she could not be persuaded. And so I came to see vividly that reasonable people could disagree about whether something was obscene.

Naturally, this came to mind when the commission headed by Attorney General Edwin Meese III released its report on pornography. But I had thought of it many times before, because, of all the areas in which generations are divided from one another, the subject of sex is the one where they are least likely to meet. My grandmother once caused a great stir on the beach at Atlantic City because she and her best friend were among the first to venture forth on the sand wearing one-piece bathing suits instead of the bloomers and skirts and overblouses that were then the norm. I, on the other hand, had to decide on my honeymoon whether to be the only person on a Caribbean island wearing the top to my bikini. It is inevitable that we two would have disparate views about the propriety and obscenity of displaying the nude human body. This is not because my grandmother is old-fashioned and I am modern—I sometimes think my grandmother is about as old-fashioned as the Concorde—but simply because of the disparate climates in which we learned about, became accustomed to, and made our personal peace with sex.

And so I was in part distressed about the Meese commission because it did not seem very much like a jury of my peers. Mostly, of course, I didn’t like the idea of a jury of any sort. The commission seemed to spend a lot of time talking about sex with children, torture, and rape, which seem to me things that all reasonable people, regardless of their ages, agree are wrong. I’m under the impression that there are laws having nothing to do with pornography that make such acts illegal whenever they are performed. But reasonable people can surely disagree about some of the other material the commission examined: skin magazines, X-rated movies, the kind of material
that most people my age have been exposed to over and over again.

The idea of outlawing pornography makes me remember the box spring and the mattress. I don’t know when it was that parents decided that the space between the two was a good place to put their so-called dirty books—which in most cases were marriage manuals and the odd copy of
Tropic of Cancer
—but it was a good place for curious kids; we all knew just where to find them. In my home, the marriage manuals, or whatever you call
The Joy of Sex
, will stay on the shelf and off the box spring. After all, while my mother’s mother told her nothing about sex, and my mother told me the basics when I was ten (which I gather from my friends made her something of a pioneer), on some days it seems as if I will have to tell my almost-three-year-old the facts of life in the next fifteen minutes.

Will the illustrations in
The Joy of Sex
titillate my sons when they are in their early teens? Probably. (My recollection of teenage boys is that they can get worked up over women’s underwear flapping on a clothesline.) Is it pornography? Of course not. Would it have been so classified when my mother was a girl? Without a doubt.

Mores change. Fifteen years ago my father, like lots of others, said that if a daughter of his lived in sin before she was married, she’d be off his Thanksgiving dinner list. Today, he says he thinks cohabitation is sometimes a good preparation for a lifetime together. Fifteen years ago, I thought
Playboy
was pretty lewd. Now, I think the centerfolds are simply silly, and that all those women miming sexual ecstasy in bizarre undergarments succeed only in looking as if they have bad colds. And nearly fifteen years ago I saw my first pornographic movie. I was twenty-one, and a city editor with an odd sense of humor sent me to sit through
Deep Throat
with a judge who was
ruling on some obscenity issue. I thought the judge was going to have a stroke when he saw, not Linda Lovelace, but me watching Linda Lovelace.

It would be some feat to come up with a standard of obscenity that reflects my experiences; those of my mother, who was as perturbed by the fleeting flash of breasts as she was by the blood in the
Psycho
shower scene, and those of my grandmother, who lived through the enormous brouhaha over the “damn” in the last scene of
Gone With the Wind
. That’s why it’s so terrific that, until now, we have set such standards for ourselves. Those who make movies of people beating up other people should be arrested as an accessory to assault. That’s not a crime of sex, but a crime of violence. Meanwhile, I would like to maintain the obscenity standards set so well by my mother and me that afternoon in our living room. She exercised her personal right to throw a dirty book at the wall, and I exercised my personal right to read it and discover that it was not really dirty at all. It worked just fine then, and it will work just fine now.

H
er name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal several Januarys ago. I was doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just passing through, although she’d been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.

They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eyes brown-red in the flashbulb’s light. They were pictures of a house. It was like a thousand houses in a hundred towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of backyard. The house was yellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need for discussion.
I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creases had made me believe she was. She had a house, or at least once upon a time had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.