The World Split Open (31 page)

In the midst of so much pressure, some women decided to withdraw entirely from what seemed like an insane sexual competition. In an essay, “On Celibacy,” Dana Densmore declared in 1969 that “sexual freedom is the first freedom a woman is awarded and she thinks it is very important because it's all she has; compared to the dullness and restrictiveness of the rest of her life, it glows very brightly.” Densmore urged women to call time-out. “This is a call not for celibacy,” she wrote, “but for an acceptance of celibacy as an honorable alternative, one preferable to the degradation of most male-female sexual relationships.”
¹⁹

A few groups even began to adopt a “no sex” position. Members of the Boston radical feminist group Cell 16, led by Roxanne Dunbar, called for long-term celibacy as a precondition for women's liberation. Ti-Grace Atkinson, the leader of The Feminists in New York, similarly decided that “women should neither marry nor engage in sex with men.” Although such groups made up a tiny part of the burgeoning women's movement, they were disproportionately influential because their charismatic leaders wrote striking, often shocking, articles that provoked a great deal of the debate within the movement. Without the complications of sex, they suggested, women could enjoy the platonic love of “sisterhood” and channel all their passion into the movement.
²⁰

Sexual repression, in the midst of a so-called sexual revolution, created all kinds of unanswered questions. If sex was free, where did you draw the line? In one Washington, D.C., group, a member complained that “the sexual revolution is making me miserable because my husband is fucking everything in sight, and I'm not supposed to be jealous.” Rosalyn Baxandall recalled that in her group, they talked “in
absolute detail, on how you lost your virginity, interracial sex, what sex was like, techniques, different men, what people did in bed, and even masturbation.” One woman, whose group had “these graphic, screaming yak sessions about this stuff,” later admitted, “One of the things I remember is that I began to feel permanently guilty and I had nightmares about people like Ti-Grace Atkinson who were so draconian about sex.”
²¹

Older women sometimes found themselves bewildered by young women's obsessive discussions about sexuality. Betty Friedan thought that such attention to sex distracted feminists from the more important subjects of employment and poverty. Cindy Cisler, a major activist for the legalization of abortion, who was just a few years older than most members of the movement, admitted, “I never heard of a faked orgasm until I got into women's liberation. . . . I realized that this so-called sexual revolution had created this need for fakery, the sudden flip of ‘don't do it' to ‘you damn well better do it you frigid deviant' . . . and I had escaped that.” Pat Cody, a veteran activist who, with her husband, Fred, had created and sustained Cody's Bookstore in Berkeley, joined a small group of women who, like herself, were married and in their thirties or early forties. “We never got into really intimate sex problems [we had] with our husbands. That was never brought out . . . or ‘what do you like to do in bed?'” Instead, they focused on the careers they had given up as wives and mothers, how to resume active intellectual lives and the obstacles they faced. One of the longest-lived women's groups, it continued meeting for three decades.
²²

But for young women, sex seemed like the stuff of high drama. In 1970, many groups read and debated Shulamith Firestone's original and controversial book
The Dialectics of Sex
, a dense theoretical work that tried to explain why sex, not class, lay at the root of all oppression. Firestone championed a “cybernetic socialism” . . . “the freeing of women from the tyranny of their biology by any means available, and the diffusion of the childbearing and child-rearing role to the society as a whole, to men and other children as well as women.”
²³
In short, if babies could be conceived in test tubes and mature outside the female body, women would be freed from the tyranny of their biological fate. Reaction to Firestone's book was mixed. Some women thought she had found
the
solution. Other feminists were furious that Firestone seemed to accept men as the normative human being, rather than demanding that society accommodate—and honor—women's important biological contribution as the bearers and rearers of children.

In the same year, Kate Millett dissected the male sexual revolution in her book
Sexual Politics.
Many young women had previously welcomed court rulings that banned the censorship of literature, magazines, and films. They had supported and defended the right to publish D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, Henry Miller's
Sexus
, and William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch
, and argued that far from being obscene or pornographic, such highly praised novels told the truth about sex. But few young budding feminists realized before Millett that it wasn't
their
truth, but a sadistic view of men abusing women.

Kate Millett grasped this with uncanny clarity. Through a close reading of their texts, Millett demonstrated how much cruelty and hatred these misogynist authors had directed at women. Her book, originally a doctoral thesis, jump-started the field of feminist literary criticism and altered millions of women's views of “sexual emancipation.” As one woman wrote nearly thirty years after the publication
of Sexual Politics
, “Reading Millett was the 20th century equivalent of picking up Darwin a hundred years before and realizing that the whole internalized structure of the human place at the pinnacle of the Great Chain of Being was simply wrong.”
²⁴

Millett quickly became a media celebrity, praised (and condemned) by people in academic life and mainstream literary criticism. When she declared her bisexuality, the media tried to discredit her literary criticism by portraying her as a “man-hating dyke.” But those efforts failed. Her book had changed the terms of debate. Heterosexual women proved quite as capable as lesbians of recognizing the misogyny and sexism in these novels, once Millett had shown the way. The female characters never seemed to mind male acts of rape, violence, or mutilation. The moment a man penetrated a woman, she invariably experienced sublime heights of orgasmic bliss. In fact, the crueler a male character was, the greater her sexual satisfaction seemed to be. Consider this scene from Henry Miller's
Sexus
in which a woman desires sex, but then protests that it “hurts.” Since she has already consented, the “hero” assumes she has waived all rights:

Shut up, you bitch! You said “It hurts does it? You wanted it, didn't you?” I held her tightly, raised myself a little higher to get it into the hilt, and pushed until I thought her womb would give way. Then I came—right into that snail-like mouth which was wide open. She went into a convulsion, delirious with joy and pain. Then her legs slid off my shoulders and
fell to the floor with a thud. She lay there like a dead one, completely fucked out.
²⁵

For women who viewed themselves as already “emancipated,”
Sexual Politics
sparked some serious soul-searching.

In 1971, Germaine Greer, author of
The Female Eunuch
, swooped into the United States advocating sexual liberation as the precondition for women's liberation. A tall, svelte Australian, Greer had earned a Ph.D. in literature, and edited the European pornographic journal
Suck.
Promoted by slick full-page ads that hailed
The Female Eunuch
as “the women's liberation book of the year,” Greer quickly became the feminist du jour, a media star who appeared on many TV talk shows. After Norman Mailer published
Prisoner of Sex
in 1973, an attack on the women's movement, Greer agreed to a live debate with him in New York's Town Hall, an event that received considerable publicity.

Greer argued that mothers and wives were cut off from sexual pleasure. In her view, women's liberation meant that all women should become sexually liberated, as she defined it. “The castration of women,” she argued, “had reduced all heterosexual contact to a sadomasochistic pattern.” Unimpressed by reform movements, Greer claimed she sought “revolution” and “liberation,” rather than equality for women. She even advocated the use of the “weapon” most honored among the proletariat—the strike, which in her case meant the withdrawal of sexual labor.
²⁶

Greer's aura of aggressive sexuality made her especially appealing to men. Unlike many American feminists, she seemed to be conflating the sexual revolution with feminism. Her book, in fact, advocated using men for women's own pleasure. Rejecting the moral self-righteousness for which American reform movements are famous, Greer emphasized joy, spontaneity, and the pleasure principle. She didn't want women to be men, but she did hope women could gain the same sexual freedom, unrestrained by family or marriage, that was then available to men.
²⁷

Greer flirted and flaunted her way through a media circus, even as she made serious arguments for the sexual liberation of women. As one annoyed American feminist wrote, “Here was a libber a man could like.” What especially irritated some American feminists was that Greer had never been attached to any women's group in England. Some viewed her as an exotic opportunist who wanted to replace the “grim institution of marriage” with “the dehumanizing, anonymous and spiritually
debilitating thrusting that men call sex.” Greer seemed to accept the male sexual revolution on its own terms, as long as women received as much pleasure as they gave. “The difficulty,” as one American feminist writer wrote, “is that many feminists have been to that movie before. . . . They still remembered when, in order to qualify as a hip, emancipated female, their alternate-culture brothers insisted they perform as sexual gymnasts. Resentment at this treatment is one powerful motive for the current women's movement.”
²⁸

Erica Jong offered a far more complicated portrayal of the problematic relationship between sex and independence for women in her bestselling 1972 book,
Fear of Flying.
The media hyped Jong's work as an erotic novel that admitted, yes, women want “it” too. But that was a narrow and perhaps willful misreading of her novel. Jong deeply understood that sexual emancipation did not necessarily confer on women any independence.
²⁹

Isabel White Wing, the heroine of the novel, is afraid of flying, a metaphor for her even greater fear of independence. Accompanying her husband to a scholarly conference in Europe, Isabel fantasizes about the “zipless fuck,” a passionate sexual act in which there is no conversation, no sense of past or future, in which passion rules and all inhibitions disappear. Bored and restless at the conference, Isabel meets Adrian Goodlove, with whom she starts a passionate affair. Unlike her husband, Adrian turns out to be a poor and unimaginative lover; nor does the affair even remotely resemble a “zipless fuck.” Isabel, who compulsively tells him (and the reader) every neurotic turn in the dramatic plot of her life, soon begins to fantasize about Adrian and realizes that she has once again yoked sex to commitment. “All my fantasies included marriage. No sooner did I imagine myself running away from one man than I envisioned myself tying up with another. . . . I simply couldn't imagine myself without a man. Without one, I felt lost as a dog without a master: rootless, faceless, undefined.”
³⁰
When Adrian announces that he will neither leave nor hurt his wife and children, Isabel is plunged into an existential crisis.

On a train home, Isabel also realizes that she never really wanted a zipless fuck after all. What she wanted was a man to complete her. “But perhaps that was the most delusional of all my delusions. People don't complete us. We complete ourselves. The search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.”
³¹
When a train conductor suddenly proposes
a quick “zipless fuck,” Isabel panics and flees. “My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I'd been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years . . . and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me.”
³²
By novel's end, Isabel's existential terror has diminished. “Whatever happened, I knew I would survive it. I knew, above all, that I'd go on working. Surviving meant being born over and over. It wasn't easy, and it was always painful. But there wasn't any other choice except death.”

Jong appealed to a broad audience. The very
idea
of the “zipless fuck” challenged almost everything most Americans had learned to value about the connection between sex and commitment. But Isabel, unable to shake herself loose from the fifties, instead resorts to an old-fashioned affair, dreams of a future with her lover, and, when rejected, returns to her husband.

Fear of Flying
, as most readers realized, was about a woman attempting to take off and define herself. How to do this was not at all self-evident. Isabel had few ideas about what she—or any other woman—really enjoyed. “I learned about women from men,” Isabel muses, echoing Millett's argument in
Sexual Politics
:

Naturally, I trusted everything they said, even when it implied my own inferiority. I learned what an orgasm was from D. H. Lawrence. . . . I learned from him that all women worship “the Phallus”—as he so quaintly spelled it. I learned from Shaw that women never can be artistic; I learned from Dostoevski that they have no religious feeling; I learned from Swift and Pope that they have too much religious
feeling
. . . . I learned from Faulkner that they are earth mothers and at one with the moon and the tides and the crops; I learned from Freud that they have deficient superegos and are “incomplete” because they lack the one thing in this world worth having: a penis.