Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (37 page)

No rationale can obscure that message. When our daughters ask why they may never see a woman president or a woman priest, we have no good answers for them. That is because there are none.

NOT ABOUT BREASTS
January 19, 1992

Because the plastic surgeon was using a local anesthetic, Mariann Hopkins heard his exclamation when he saw what was inside her. She heard him call for an anesthesiologist. She heard him say, “Both implants have ruptured.” And then they put her under.

In the beginning I thought the furor about breast implants was about breasts. This is convenient. As soon as we begin to talk about vanity, sexuality, and self-image, attention is diverted from the real issue.

This is not about breasts. This is about business as usual and Dow Corning, a company that manufactures silicone implants and has sold millions of them.

We know that unsatisfactory products are sold all the time. But finding a split seam in your new suit and hearing a doctor talk
about teasing stray bits of silicone out of your chest wall are two different things. It would be grand to know that those who manufacture body parts hold themselves to a higher standard than the makers of acrylic sweaters.

We have ample evidence to know this is not true. We have women whose reproductive organs were removed when they were barely past puberty because their own mothers took a synthetic estrogen during pregnancy that caused cancer in their daughters. We have women whose reproductive organs were maimed by an intrauterine device.

We have lived with a negative standard—not unsafe—instead of the affirmative standard we deserve. Some makers of diethyl-stilbestrol, or DES, still insist there is doubt about whether their useless product caused cancer. The makers of the Dalkon shield collapsed into the safe and sheltering arms of bankruptcy still insisting that their device, which caused infection, infertility, and even death, was safe and effective.

Safe and effective: that’s what Dow Corning says about silicone implants, even as the Food and Drug Administration has declared a moratorium on their use. Every day there are new allegations: that company officials misrepresented data to the Food and Drug Administration, that they suppressed results that would be detrimental to their bottom line, that they did inadequate testing. Some plastic surgeons asked about research years ago. “I assured them, with crossed fingers, that Dow Corning too had an active study underway,” a marketing executive wrote.

That was part of a memo that was used when Mrs. Hopkins brought suit. She hired her lawyers with one condition: she said she would never settle out of court. She had spent years thinking that there was no link between her painful and debilitating connective-tissue disease and the implants that she received after a mastectomy.

And then she began to hear that there were documents that indicated otherwise but that had been sealed as part of out-of-court settlements. And she got mad. And even. According to Mrs.
Hopkins, Dow Corning’s lawyers offered her almost $2 million just before closing arguments in her case. She refused. The jury awarded her $73 million.

Most of that was in punitive damages, although it will be a long, long time before she sees any money because the company is appealing. But she’s satisfied. Her case is part of the public debate, and six ordinary people sent a message to Dow Corning: You did a very, very bad thing.

There are many women who have silicone implants and think they’re terrific. They constitute the majority, although no one knows if they will have problems in years to come. Dow Corning likes to argue that women have a right to make their own decisions about implants, a freedom-of-choice argument that is a good sell.

But I’m not buying from Dow Corning right now. Women have a right to implants—a right to safe ones, rigorously tested with the best interests of people placed before the bottom line.

“As long as we don’t make a fuss we don’t get anything better,” said Mrs. Hopkins. We must make a fuss, and the Food and Drug Administration, which has acted laudably in this case, must stay with us every step of the way, so that dangers are recognized before the damage is done. We are not machinery, to be tinkered with and then patched together when it turns out the parts don’t work. But that is how we have been treated for too long a time.

CONTRADICTIONS
January 8, 1992

Videotape confers a peculiar kind of immortality. The parents of Major Marie Rossi can watch their daughter, alive as anything, tell the world how she feels about what she does. In a jaunty camouflage hat, she stands in the desert and tells the cameras what some of us were saying in print: that national defense is sex-blind. “What I am doing is no greater or less than the man who is flying next to me,” she said, as pundits were opining the same on the home front.

But we were only operating word processors while Major Rossi was flying a Chinook chopper for the Army, and the day after the cease-fire the chopper crashed. She was buried in Arlington Cemetery, where a memorial to women in America’s wars is planned. Rewind. Play. “We thought it was pretty neat that three women were going to be across the border before the rest of the battalion,” Major Rossi, forever upbeat, tells CNN.

Fast forward.

It’s been a year since we went to war in the Persian Gulf. Most
of the veterans came home to their bases or to their civilian jobs. The people who help the homeless say they’re seeing some of them in shelters or on the streets. And some came home to verdant places like Arlington.

Major Rossi was perhaps the best known of the casualties, a kind of poster figure in that war which redefined the role of military women. At banquets and memorial ceremonies, her parents have become accustomed to having her come alive on tape, her open face and matter-of-fact manner summing up all that we think of as particularly American.

“She was a very compassionate person,” says Gertrude Rossi, remembering her daughter’s last letter, dated the day before she died, describing with empathy the prisoners she was transporting, barefoot and ragged, boys and old men.

It has been a year of gender wars in America; at no other time have the motives, mind-set, roles, and relationships of men and women been as thoroughly dissected and debated. The problem in these debates has been a classic one—a yen for simplicity, for no contradictions, no complications. A philosophical framework that long ago outlived its usefulness. Either you are a good girl or a bad one: no middle ground. Either you are a victim or a strong woman, not both. Either you are a soldier or a mother. Choose.

So many of us have chosen lives of seeming contradictions, at odds with the old ways. I remember mentioning the baby-sitter in a column once and receiving outraged letters from readers who could not understand how anyone who could write feelingly of her children would hire help with their care. When did those people think I was writing? In the checkout line at the supermarket?

It came as a surprise to me, looking back, to see that I began the year 1990 by considering women in combat in Panama. (Remember Panama?) And I began 1991 by considering women in combat in Saudi Arabia. The good news is that at the beginning of 1992 the question of women in combat has gone back to being a philosophical issue.

The philosophy will inevitably be shaped by Major Rossi and others like her. Like them, so many of us said matter-of-factly that women should do the jobs that they could do. But there was no doubt that it was a stretch, for those simultaneously feminist and pacifist, to fight for the right of women to freely choose what we abhorred.

There is accomplishment contained in this description of Major Rossi: First Female Combat Commander to Fly into Battle. There is infinite sadness that the description is on her headstone. Equal access to body bags: that is a tough one to argue from the heart.

Some of us were afraid to argue what we really felt, that the world would be better served if we all internalized those traits that have been seen, for whatever reason, as female. If we stopped thinking physical aggression was the obvious way to settle things. If we stopped seeing talk as weak and wimpy. If world politics became less a test of manhood and more a matter of coexistence.

I remember reading what Major Rossi’s husband said at her funeral, as powerful a contrast as I have ever heard. “I prayed that guidance be given to her so that she could command the company, so she could lead her troops in battle,” he said. “And I prayed to the Lord to take care of my sweet little wife.”

THE GLASS HALF EMPTY
November 22, 1990

My daughter is two years old today. She is something like me, only better. Or at least that is what I like to think. If personalities had colors, hers would be red.

Little by little, in the twenty years between my eighteenth birthday and her second one, I had learned how to live in the world. The fact that women were now making 67 cents for every dollar a man makes—well, it was better than 1970, wasn’t it, when we were making only 59 cents? The constant stories about the underrepresentation of women, on the tenure track in the film industry, in government, everywhere, had become common place. The rape cases. The sexual harassment stories. The demeaning comments. Life goes on. Where’s your sense of humor?

Learning to live in the world meant seeing the glass half full. Ann Richards was elected governor of Texas instead of a good ol’ boy who said that if rape was inevitable, you should relax and enjoy it. The police chief of Houston is a pregnant woman who
has a level this-is-my-job look and a maternity uniform with stars on the shoulder. There are so many opportunities unheard of when I was growing up.

And then I had a daughter and suddenly I saw the glass half empty. And all the rage I thought had cooled, all those how-dare-you-treat-us-like-that days, all of it comes back when I look at her, and especially when I hear her say to her brothers, “Me too.”

When I look at my sons, it is within reason to imagine all the world’s doors open to them. Little by little some will close, as their individual capabilities and limitations emerge. But no one is likely to look at them and mutter: “I’m not sure a man is right for a job at this level. Doesn’t he have a lot of family responsibilities?”

Every time a woman looks at her daughter and thinks, She can be anything, she knows in her heart, from experience, that it’s a lie. Looking at this little girl, I see it all, the old familiar ways of a world that still loves Barbie. Girls aren’t good at math, dear. He needs the money more than you, sweetheart; he’s got a family to support. Honey—this diaper’s dirty.

It is like looking through a telescope. Over the years I learned to look through the end that showed things small and manageable. This is called a sense of proportion. And then I turned the telescope around, and all the little tableaux rushed at me, vivid as ever. That’s called reality.

We soothe ourselves with the gains that have been made. There are many role models. Role models are women who exist—and are photographed often—to make other women feel better about the fact that there aren’t really enough of us anywhere, except in the lowest-paying jobs. A newspaper editor said to me not long ago, with no hint of self-consciousness, “I’d love to run your column, but we already run Ellen Goodman.” Not only was there a quota; there was a quota of one.