I’d had a taste of a different version of this same kind of excitement when I first heard Patti Smith’s Horses a few years before. After that I stole her book Babel from the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts and read it obsessively, especially the poems about rape and Judith and Marianne Faithfull and Edie Sedgwick. I didn’t know what it was all about but I knew it was dirty and I thought it had something to do with liberation in a very large sense. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine—what more do you need to say, really? That’s how Horses began and it always sounded just like I felt. And I don’t think anyone who has not had this experience can really imagine what I mean. Sure, everywhere I looked, all around me, were terrific female role models, women doing amazing things, running for Congress, joining the army, refusing to be excluded from the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel, having babies at age forty, whatever. But the feeling I got listening to Patti and Chrissie—as Michael Stipe put it in Spin: “There was a rawness and energy to Horses that I had not heard in any other music, ever. It was really wild and raw; there was an energy and a charisma to that music that set the room on fire. I’d never heard anything like it in my life, like someone had torn my head off and slapped it back on for me. From then on my life was changed.” And me, I felt for the first time that I was a world waiting to be born. I felt it. I didn’t think it or know it but goddamn I felt it. I felt that way listening to the Velvet Underground, or the first Stooges album or the MC5 doing “Kick Out the Jams.” And hearing my true idol, Bruce Springsteen, I felt it also, but my connection with him came later. Patti and Chrissie, they were a wake-up call. I’m convinced that if Liz Phair and Courtney Love and a whole gamut of women in the raw had been around back then, I’d have been invincible. As it was, listening to Patti Smith, listening to the Pretenders, I was certain that if I ever got my hands on the world, I’d be sure to change it because the urgency I felt was that big. THAT BIG.
And I thought to myself: I don’t have to live like this. I can be wild and free. I saw whole new ways to be a woman in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, which was good because I didn’t have the faintest idea of how to go about it on my own.
To explain it better—civil rights types and Negro leaders could talk about liberation and revolution at every church south of the Mason-Dixon line, but until Rosa Parks said with her actions, I will not move, it was all talk. And basically, until Patti Smith, a woman with hairy armpits and dirty hair got onstage and said, “Can’t you show me nothing more than surrender?” the ERA really didn’t mean shit. And that’s why all the backpedaling and backstepping that goes on with powerful women today, with Hillary Clinton saying she could have stayed home and baked cookies and blah blah blah, and then offending everybody so that she had to say that she does, in fact, love to make cookies, loves it almost as much as she likes to trade agricultural futures. I mean, what is that about? All this I’m really a lady, I’m really a nice girl crap—who needs it? It really is nothing more than surrender.
The vibrancy I got from the women I idolized when I was growing up—I didn’t get those feelings because they were giving the world a bunch of lines; I got them because they radiated truth.
For a woman it is never enough to be just an artist, just a talent: our art is our life, carrying on with charisma, all that counts. I don’t mean that a woman has to be a great beauty to matter—Janis Joplin was far from anything of the sort, but she had great possession, great élan, she wore lamé and feathers and wiggled a lot, and the intensity of release in her soul singing all adds up to great style, and in that a great fight against the invisibility that would be hers because she is a woman and she is not a beauty. That’s how Madonna came to be: she is the triumph of style alone, talent more in mise-en-scène than elsewhere. She reduces the requirements of visible femaleness so that all that is left is visible femaleness. And it is not surprising that she is the leap between Patti and Chrissie and eventually Courtney and Liz (in the rock world, there was nothing in between—Quarterflash and Pat Benatar don’t count).
But woman’s ability to use her sexuality to express liberation—which Madonna’s whole career is so stylishly symbolic of—resulted paradoxically in her body’s increased availability as an object of oppression. Since the sixties, the commodities of temptation and desire have been put on display in both a blatant and sidelong sense more now than ever: sex lines, the videocassette market that has made pornography a $5 billion a year industry, Victoria’s Secret catalogues as a softer substitute, the Playboy channel, the virtual-reality sex sites that are the only real moneymakers on the Internet—all of these things are actually born of women’s newfound freedom, and all of them serve mostly the interests of men. There is so much sex available in so many purchasable, perishable, inconsequential and trivial ways, so much that it practically demands that men focus on their sexual needs and ignore everything else. This has made for a lonelier world that gives the impression that it is more free. “I had come of age at a time when sexual liberation did not yet mean groupies and massage parlors, when it was still a potent metaphor for liberation in general,” wrote Ellen Willis in 1975, in a Rolling Stone article about her brother’s conversion to fundamentalist Judaism while visiting Israel. “Though I hated the way this vision [of sexual freedom] had been perverted, co-opted and turned against women, I believed no less in the vision itself.”
As feminism has charged forward—and no one can deny the leaps and strides it has made—so has the invention of the overeager hyper-sexualized female body. Nowadays you pay for sex not because you are lonely and miserable and can’t get laid, or married and looking for cheap thrills, but because sex as a commodity is not distasteful; it’s interesting. The recent best-seller by three Hollywood call girls, You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, essentially chronicles the availability for money of just about anything. The women write about their experiences servicing major Hollywood movie stars, men who presumably don’t “have to” pay for sex, but like to be able to control the action, or like the absence of any emotional involvement, or just plain think it’s cool. In the midst of all this, it seems hard to talk about date rape or anything else, because as much as women may try to be seen not as sex objects there is a countervailing force, in which many women collaborate—mostly out of financial need—to turn women into nothing but sex objects.
Which is why the good-time liberated lady whose sexual bravado could be celebrated by Germaine Greer and Helen Gurley Brown alike has metastasized over time into a harsh, hard force of flat, canned sexuality whose most protuberant and pertinent metonymy is the obvious and bulbous silicone breast implants that caricature a sexual reality that is already a cartoon, that don’t even try to mimic mammarian nature.
I think the choices become whether you will use it for yourself or against. Look, I think many people have rescued themselves from this game, but pretty girls, girls who learned to manipulate, girls whose hearts always belonged to daddy—they just can’t help it. And the world rewards it at the same time it condemns it. On the whole, one lesson of a book like You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again is that sex is really not much of a weapon in the end. You need to have some talent and brains or nothing will work. Most men who sleep with some girl won’t want to give her a job since they’d prefer never to deal with the situation again. I think that’s the main thing that’s missing from any discussions of this subject—the complexities of date rape, the way strip clubs have become feminist enterprise zones while ignoring the degrading damaging nature of the work. For a woman to do just as she pleases and dispense with other people’s needs, wants, demands and desires continues to be revolutionary. Men pretty much do as they will, and women pretty much continue to pick up the slack. That’s why books like The Rules and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus succeed. It remains to this day, even after feminism, a woman’s chore to close the gap. Time is not on our side, our youth and beauty is brief, tick-tock the biological clock, and that message is thrown at us over and over
again. In Manhattan Nocturne, an unusually perspicacious noir novel with the genre’s usual theme of the good man brought down by a beautiful bad girl, the author Colin Harrison muses at one point on what a short shelf life a pretty girl in New York City has. “I would say the most determined people are the young women who arrive in the city from America and around the world to sell, in one way or another, their bodies: the models and strippers and actresses and dancers who know that time is running against them, that they are temporarily credentialed by youth.”
Of course, we are meant to understand that this is the lot of glamour girls, that those of us who put brains before beauty need not worry about this stuff. But to paraphrase Rosie O’Donnell once again: It feels as if it’s true for us all. And while there are commitment-phobic women, the story you always hear when there is a troubled relationship—when the balance of power is off—for the most part it’s always the one of women trying to get men to tie the knot. Now, I personally know a number of women who are putting off their boyfriends who are eager to get married—but those relationships are not the ones that seem in constant crisis, they are not the ones where somebody is always complaining, because for any number of reasons, the focus on commitment still only assumes a desperate cast when the woman is the injured party.
And the fact that all this relationship anxiety marks a regression of sorts is not lost on pioneers of the women’s movement who thought it would be better by now. London eating disorders expert Susie Orbach, author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, is the founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre, where among her patients was Princess Diana. “I see all sorts of young confident women around,” she told Mirabella in late 1996. “But when they’re in my consulting room, they talk about the same bloody issues we had thirty years ago. They’re afraid. Women in the most oppressive relationships are trying to manage them rather than get out of them. Only now, with no women’s movement, if you have problems you feel like a freak. All the problems are internalized.”
That’s why The Rules is a runaway best-seller and may well be a perennial hit.
But it is wrong to see that book as a setback to feminism in any way, or to be mad at the authoresses for their Aunt Edna-like advice because the book is completely nonideological: feminism is beside the point in a list of what is probably fairly sound advice for learning to behave like a woman who is about to embark on some serious, goal-oriented dating. It tells women how to act so as to compensate for the fact that while feminism has changed the way many of us think and behave, while it has made men change diapers and do dishes and spend quality time with children while women perform neurosurgery and direct movies and trade Eurodollars, it has failed to truly change the way we feel. As Ellen Willis put it, most succinctly: “Feminism had transformed women’s consciousness without, as yet, transforming society, leaving a gap between what many of us demanded of a relationship and what most men were willing to give.” The proof: Go to any bookstore and there are hundreds of titles in the self-help section about how to overcome love addiction and fear of abandonment and the like, and while there are plenty of books for women about how to deal with commitment-resistant, impossible men—Smart Women, Foolish Choices and the like—there is not one book addressed to men about how to work out their own damn problems with relationships. No book for men about how to get over fear of commitment, how to learn to open one’s heart, how to stop running from emotional involvement—I know, because I searched high and low for such a thing for my last boyfriend and it doesn’t exist.
Do you know why?
Because it doesn’t need to. Men don’t have to change the way they sexually assess women, the way certain triggers and indications of female power or feminine weakness may frighten them off. They don’t have to change the psychic messages inculcated into their brains from way back in their preverbal, pre-Oedipal days. They don’t have to because we women will learn to behave. We could all enact, by collective will, an emotional Lysistrata of sorts, we could all walk out, like Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, like the woman in Mary-Chapin Carpenter’s song “He Thinks He’ll Keep Her,” like the women in a zillion country songs—we could all say that we abdicate all responsibility for the emotional well-being of our relationships, let the men learn to cope with it all. But we don’t. And there’s no indication it would do any good anyway. So we’ll “adjust”—the word Betty Friedan used over thirty years ago in The Feminine Mystique to describe how intelligent Seven Sisters types learned to accept the notion that Mop & Glo was intellectually stimulating—and if we’re from Venus and they’re from Mars, we’ll learn to speak Martian. We’ll follow The Rules: We won’t call them, we won’t ask them out, we won’t talk about ourselves, we won’t make snide comments, we’ll be good.
Well, I for one am sick of it. All my life, one person or another has been telling me to behave, saying don’t let a guy know you’re a depressed maniac on the first date, don’t just be yourself, don’t show your feelings. And the truth is, this is probably good advice, men probably don’t like overbearing, hotheaded women who give blow jobs on the first date. In all likelihood the only man who will ever like me just as I am will probably need to believe I’m somebody else at first. I probably do need to learn to behave. But I don’t like it. It seems like, all this, all these years of feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi—all that smart writing all so we could learn to behave? Bra burning in Atlantic City—so we could learn to behave? Roe v. Wade—so we could learn to behave? Thelma & Louise—so we could learn to behave? The gender gap—so we could learn to behave? Madonna, Sally Ride, Joycelyn Elders, Golda Meir, Anita Hill, Bette Davis, Leni Riefenstahl—all those strong, indefatigable souls so we could learn to behave? What good really have any of those things done if we still get the feeling that we have to contain our urges and control ourselves in the interest of courtship and love? Did Germaine Greer importune us so long ago with the words “Lady, love your cunt,” and did Anka Radikovich regale us with her tales of the sexual picaresque in The Wild Girls Club so we could be told never to succumb to sexual abandon on the first date? After all this agitation, along comes The Rules to tell us that we’re not even allowed to accept a date for a Saturday night after Wednesday.
Here’s my point: I have no quarrel with The Rules or the advice it gives—it actually seems pretty sound to me—but if we had really come a long way, baby, if men’s perceptions of women had transformed fundamentally and intensely so that we were accepted as full-fledged sexual creatures and romantic operatives who were free to chase or be chased, and if this expanded dimension of women’s sexual personae were not frightening or overwhelming to them, then we would not need The Rules. We would be truly free.
So of course the bitch persona appeals to us. It is the illusion of liberation, of libertine abandon. What if you want to be large in a world that would have you be small, diminished? You don’t want to diet, you don’t want to say no, thank you, and pretend somehow that what is there is enough when always, always, you want more. That has been your defining characteristic: You have appetites, and only if you are truly shameless will you even begin to be sated because nothing is ever really enough. Not because you are greedy or insatiable but because you can’t help it, you can’t go along with the fiction that the world would have you believe and adhere to: that you ought to settle and be careful and accept the crumbs that are supposed to pass for a life, this minimized self you are supposed to put up with, that feminism and other political theories of woman cannot really begin to address because this is about something else entirely.
This is about what has become the almost monstrous notion of female desire. This is not about making demands of other people or wearing down those who have their own screams for MORE! to address: You’d be amazed at how often we are reluctant to indulge ourselves by our own means. It is amazing that the smallness of the space we’ve been told to squeeze into has meant that we don’t even know how to ask o
r what to want. Everything tells us to stop, to not talk to that guy first, to not have a thousand lovers if that’s what feels right because one husband is supposed to be enough. Everything says we don’t need another piece of chocolate cake, we don’t need another Gucci bag, another dime-store lipstick, another Big Mac, another night on the town, another spin on the Rainbow Room dance floor. Well, this is meant to be a story about people who are so beyond need, who want and have figured out that it’s never too soon to make demands of this life, this world, this everything. It’s about how nice it must be to just decide I will not be nice, I am never sorry, I have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me.
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