With men there is no fear of the kind of sexist stereotyping journalists routinely report on without excuse or extenuation if a woman is involved: hence the Grimm-imagined shrew who is ruining a whole office because she is so favored by her boss continues to exist in press accounts of powerful women. Consider the way the obviously capable New Yorker editor Tina Brown still has her success tied to getting involved with husband Harold Evans when he was at the helm of The Sunday Times of London many years ago, and is still routinely pointed to for having special pull with her boss, S. I. Newhouse, Jr.—as if without some cache of charm (that is not apparent to most people who come in contact with Ms. Brown), this talented editor would still be an assistant fetching tea at The Tatler.
Women as a rule are so sexual, they are such natural erotic objects. Even after feminism, it’s still hard to view men as sex objects, regardless of what any single one might do for you. Men’s sexuality is tied up in one organ, while women just embody it all over. So women’s unignorable sexuality makes them a threat when they aren’t bonded to a particular man, and this energy isn’t safely channeled. This is why there is something despicable and nightmarish about the free woman. Of course, single women are the most vulnerable class of people in our society—to crime, to poverty, to loneliness. They have, on the whole, less money, less physical strength and less status than any other group. They are not to be feared so much as to be pitied—another reaction that is not necessarily fair, but one that is more realistic than this baseless animosity.
To measure the extent to which antagonism against the single female has built up, consider this strange reversal of fortunes: in old film noir, the villainess was as likely to be married as not, but nowadays it is always a single woman that is the public menace. The bored housewives who were the classic vixens—the wretched, fleshy sexpots who preyed upon the traveling salesmen and bashful insurance brokers who darkened their doorways not knowing they were the portals to hell—have been displaced in villainy by frustrated single career women: Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice have made way for Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Disclosure. This changes the dynamics because now the predatory female is in fact nobody’s wife, while the man is married: the woman’s cushion of safety has been reduced if not eliminated, while the man has extensive emotional resources.
In the movie Disclosure, it’s Demi Moore who is the deadly careerist climbing her StairMaster to nowhere, pitted against Michael Douglas, who portrays the victim of her sexual ploys. But whatever career troubles she may actually cause him, the scenes depicting the hominess of Douglas’ life after hours, the appearance of wife and kids at ideally spaced intervals throughout the movie’s two reels, are all meant to remind us that anything that hard-up tramp does to him is only a temporary setback because he is a good man with family values; Michael Douglas is cosseted and coddled both metaphorically and in actuality by the shelter of home and hearth. Douglas has the warmth of family, while Moore, in contrast, is alone and lonely. But we’re never allowed to feel sorry for her: her role as both office wrecker and home wrecker is consummate, even though at the end she succeeds in destroying neither.
The worst insult in Disclosure’s despicable array of overdetermined signifiers comes at the very end of the movie, when Michael Douglas, safely and soundly resuming his happy career in his bright, sunny office, receives an e-mail from home that is signed by “A Family.” Not individual names like normal people would use, or even “The Joneses,” or even—what the hell?—“Your Family.” Just “A Family,” the generic brand, the type Pat Robertson ministers to, the usual kind. Like everything else in Disclosure, this final symbolic gesture is meant to suggest that single women are a dangerous plague preying upon family life. And of course, there’s that slightly less obvious message about how they’re stealing all the good jobs from men—men who have families to support. Never mind that it’s absurd to posit that women are assuming all the powerful roles in the world of computers. Obviously Andrew Grove and Bill Gates and Steve Case prove that women are not, in any meaningful capacity, in charge of Silicon Valley.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said, “In revenge as in love woman is always more barbarous than man.” This is the lesson of all these evil-woman movies. For the most part, the only competing alternative to the villainess in Hollywood’s arsenal of Technicolor dreams is the tear-tugging high melodrama of the tragic heroine. In an interesting inversion of Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray team up again in There’s Always Tomorrow, where she is a lonely widow and glamorous career gal—the stately fashion designer Norma Vale, as opposed to the bored and murderous Los Feliz houswife Phyllis Nirdlinger—and he is a lonely, unhappily married family man who falls in love with her. He invents toys and is an early innovator of robotics; she designs dresses in the manner of Edith Head. They come across as the Bill Gates and Donna Karan of their day, busy bees watching the world go by. In the end, despite the natural, refreshing rapport this pair enjoys, it of course must stop. She is left with nothing, returning to her empty life in New York, and he goes back to home life in Pasadena. But it is she who sacrifices, who insists he return to his wife and kids, who plays the virtuous role—one of the many tearjerker “women’s film” roles she took after being a red-hot pistol earlier on.
Television, on the other hand, has always been more hospitable to single characters because the episodic nature of the shows requires serial relationships as plot device. Imagine if any of the Seinfeld characters got married: so desperate were the writers to kill off George’s fiancée, Susan, that they had her die of licking envelopes for the wedding invitations. On The Dick Van Dyke Show of the early sixties, comedienne Rose Marie, in the role of Sally, serves as the resident spinster/tomboy, the funny chick who the guys in the office half forget is female. Mostly there’s no fuss made about it—she likes to bowl and share ice cream with her cat, Henderson (back then this was strictly a boy’s name)—but one episode revolves around the possibility of her going dateless on her birthday. It doesn’t help when six-year-old little Richie asks how old she is and when, after she tells him she doesn’t have a husband, he blurtingly asks, “Why don’t you get one?”
Sally pretends not to mind, but Laura knows she must. She has to explain this to her poor benighted husband, Rob. “When a woman gets to be a certain age, every birthday is a milestone,” Laura says, “and every milestone is a millstone.” Sally frets as she contemplates birthday plans, tries calling her friend Fred and offering to bake lasagna, and cries in the car one night just thinking about this lonely prospect. Finally a Leo Fassbinder from her high school days shows up at the office—when at first he leaves no message, she tries all sorts of ways to figure out who it is. It’s one of those things married people, people in relationships, don’t understand: they don’t know how important it is to take accurate messages for us single gals. Sally tells the receptionist that if the guy shows up again to tie him to a chair. He calls and they arrange a date on her birthday. The comedy in all this is that in the meantime her co-workers decide to surprise her, Fred realizes he’s not busy after all, and Leo turns out to be just an insurance agent on a sales call. Anyway, it portrays the life of a single woman as rather desolate compared to happy Rob and Laura Petrie. Sally sends them away pretending to expect a date, rather than reveal that she’s left alone.
The irony is that happily hitched Laura will eventually become Mary Richards, the quintessential single woman, not a swinging single gal like Mario Thomas of That Girl, not a powerful media personality like the one presented on Murphy Brown—Mary is just middle-American Mary, an honestly overworked and underpaid woman among the alcoholic and otherwise addled men. Everyone falls in love with Mary at some point because it is just inevitable: to not believe at least for an episode or two that this dream girl is the one you ought to marry (even if you’re already hitched) is to deny Manifest Destiny, the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution—everything that matters would cease to be in a
world where men did not fall for the hospital-corners perfectionism and goofball goodness of Mary. She just had such a certain way about her: “I’m an experienced woman; I’ve been around.” Pregnant pause. “Well, all right, I might not have been around, but I’ve been … nearby.” Mary Tyler Moore was an anti-icon. She had dates, men fell for her all the time, she turned down proposals left and right—and though she did not exactly seem single by choice, it seemed like she was not made neurotic by her situation. She seemed like she’d be all right whichever way it went, and she’d probably marry eventually, when it felt right. Or not. She was gonna make it after all.
While Mary Richards was herself childless, her show’s power of parthenogenesis spawned several offshoots. Mary Tyler Moore was the single-woman show, and then Rhoda became the married version. (Do you know that I still watch Rhoda reruns hoping that Joe and Rhoda won’t get divorced, that they’ll reconcile after all, so much do I want to believe it can work? I still believe that through the power of syndication this relationship can be saved.) Now it’s Seinfeld as the single-person paradigm, with Mad About You as the married version. Although TV is a much more accessible medium for actresses to find work in, somehow in all these years no network has managed to come up with a Mary replacement—and Mary Tyler Moore herself has been through several failed pilots. They tried to make the single-gal-next-door out of Geena Davis with a show called Sarah, which no one remembers, lucky for her. Now you have Brooke Shields finding her mien at last on Suddenly Susan. NBC has scheduled this sitcom as part of its Monday night lineup of “Must She TV”—shows centered on smart, funny women offered as counterprogramming to Monday Night Football. Likewise, the Fox network has come up with Ally McBeal, an hour-long drama about a pretty Harvard Law graduate who, between courtroom arguments and visits to her very politically correct firm’s uncomfortably coed bathroom, struggles weekly to straddle the extremes of primness and promiscuity. Since Ally is meant to illustrate the issues that all young single women grapple with, this show airs in the same Monday night antispectator sports time slot. And somehow, in all this estrogen-charged TV programming, someone had the bright idea to transform swinging single gal Mario Thomas into Jennifer Aniston’s mom on Friends and Mary Tyler Moore into Téa Leoni’s mom on The Naked Truth.
It’s motherhood that redeems women in the Bible, with asexual, God-ordained, angel-announced reproduction the ideal. As Cheryl Exum explains in Judges and Method, “The immaculate conception allows motherhood to be completely separated from the sex act, dividing the virtuous mothers from the decadent swinging singles.” Even now, there is a certain kind of respectability that even an outré outlaw like Courtney Love gets because she is, after all, a mom (never mind that anyone can get pregnant, but few can be accomplished songwriters or rock stars). Back when Debra Winger was considered a Hollywood wild thing—doing too many drugs, too many men and too much attitude on the set—Vanity Fair put the then-pregnant actress on the cover of its February 1987 issue in a white terry robe, her face fresh and dewy damp as if just out of a steamy hot shower, beside the headline SQUEAKY CLEAN. It was as if, married and carrying Timothy Hutton’s baby, the woman who had once posed in a smooch with her dog while he pressed his paws against her tits had suddenly acquired virtue, had mysteriously been granted absolution. When I hear Chrissie Hynde singing, “I’m not the kind I used to be / I got a kid, I’m 33,” I think: Good for her, especially thinking back on early interviews when she was such a mess. Motherhood is the happy ending.
Think of how much nicer everyone is to Madonna now that she is a mother—she has suddenly become more mature, more serious, more respectable, she wears chignon knots and elegant red lipstick and ladylike suits. Even the stigma of illegitimacy is smoothed by the simple grown-upness and the sexy combination of the beautiful woman with her baby-as-prop. Supermodels Stephanie Seymour, Kristin McMenamy, Beverly Peele and many others have all had children out of wedlock; actresses Jessica Lange, Patricia Arquette and Kelly Lynch are among the many movie stars who are or have been unwed moms. And nobody cares: Ingrid Bergman would still have a Hollywood career if she had embarked on parenting with Roberto Rosselini today. It has been noted that, were Harlem a country, it would have one of the highest illegitimacy rates on earth. If Hollywood and the high-fashion catwalks could unite into nationhood, I wonder what the numbers would be—and I wonder why we tolerate unwed mothers who are rich, white and beautiful and despise the ones who are black, indigent and most in need of our help.
On the other hand, dispensing with all glamour not contained in cut muscles and cut-up T-shirts, Linda Hamilton was a walking paramilitary operation in Fidel Castro’s clothes in Terminator 2. She was an avenging mother, a lioness fiercely protecting her cubs, a woman hell-bent on making the world safe for her child. Because her martial artwork and sharp-shooting technique are all in the name of motherhood—to save, in the final analysis, Mother Earth—they assume a certain old-fashioned, primitive respectability. Hamilton’s monomaniacal, presumably psychotic one-woman war with the world is portrayed as the apocalyptic equivalent of a more conventional mom insisting that the PTA purchase metal detectors.
And all these redemptive images of motherhood may even be true. It is grounding and growing to marry and mother or do one or the other. But not everyone in life has these choices. I don’t mean that certain people have no one who wants to settle down with them—that too, but that’s not the point—so much as life takes mysterious turns, bad decisions are made at one moment that affect us forever. If you yourself were poorly parented, it will take some time to be able to attach to someone, to find a person you might want to have kids with. And unlike men, who are given an eternity to grow up and grow out of these troubles, women age into insignificance. If they don’t work out their nonsense while they are still fairly young, it is hard for them to find a mate, a partner, a spouse. Feminism wants to pretend we have forever, but we don’t. Men do. And they are the ones making the rules, stigmatizing single women while at the same time making it difficult for many women to be otherwise.
“Years go by if I’m stripped of my beauty and the orange clouds raining in my head / Years go by will I choke on my tears until finally there is nothing left?” When Tori Amos asked that, she had a surprise hit, a commercial success, even though the question is so awful and upsetting that it is basically out of the realm of Top 40. But so many people feel the same way, like they may be disappearing, that something about life is not working out and finally they will cry themselves dead, they will be King David in Psalms, protesting and shouting out to the Lord above, begging for relief from this life of solemn sorrow: “I am weary from this groaning / all night make I my bed to swim /1 water my couch with tears. / Mine eye is consumed because of grief.”
But the idea is to always believe in the possibility of redemption—the day of reckoning, the time when it will all make sense. Somehow we are meant to understand that life in and of itself is the happy ending: not Dear reader, I married him, which, by the by, Charlotte Brontë never did, but that I am here, I’m my own person, I am not Nicole Brown with faraway searching eyes, killed for—when you get right down to it—not being her own person.
Life is maybe a bit like being a vaudeville veteran singing “I’m Still Here.” I’ve been through summer stock and dinner theater and Las Vegas revues and bad reviews and—hah!—I’m still here. Or what could be more perfect than the supergroup of veteran rockers that formed in the late eighties to make two hard pop albums, calling themselves the Traveling Wilburys. Among the band’s membership of true rock-and-roll holdouts were Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison and George Harrison. Naturally, the Wilburys scored a big hit single with “Handle with Care,” a survivor’s tale of life in the trenches tracing the fickle curve of success, with allusions to days of going through Twelve Step programs and twenty different gurus, through a Christian phase, several Jewish phases, through too much pot, not enough coke, drunk beyond words, doped out of this world, divorced and in custody battles, on
the Rolling Thunder Revue, made fun of on Saturday Night Live, and then even appearing on Saturday Night Live—after all that, a man can be tired. “I’ve been robbed and ridiculed / In day care centers and night schools / Handle me with care.”
Of course men, even damaged ones, will always find someone who will handle with care.
Which is why, just once I would like to see a play or novel or memoir about an older single man who, unable to find a suitable mate, faces middle age reconciled to his aloneness, accepts as he approaches fifty that he will never marry, adopts a child, decorates his co-op as not just a bachelor pad but a permanent home. Just once I’d like to see such a portrait of a vibrant professional man who is failed by love and therefore, in most ways, by life. I want a male version of Alison Rose or Vivian Gornick.
But it could never happen. Because these men do not exist. Not that the world is not filled with unmarriable misfits among the male of the species: they are everywhere, unavoidable and unnoticeable at once. They live in rooming houses for life, they collect disability, they are marginally employed, often adrift, many of them mentally ill in a chronic way, symptoms subdued—along with most of their personality—in a permanent way by an electric-chair dose of shock meted out in a state institution in the sixties. Or they are shy and pleasant, dull and sweet, village idiots, mama’s boys, gentle giants, simple men, war heroes, Vietnam veterans, dropouts and burnouts without the coping skills to interact with the world or with a woman in a meaningful, material way. They are unconscionably mean and understandably sad in a way so compelling that you wish you could be the girl who could love them as they deserve, you wish you did not have cowboy dreams of your own to chase after. They are Terry Nichols with his mail-order bride from the Philippines, and they are Timothy McVeigh with his fertilizer bombs and his middle-American paramilitary paranoia. They are Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and they are Freddie, the Sylvester Stallone character in Copland, described by the actor to Conan O’Brien as “one of those people you take for granted, who don’t make too much of a fuss, who live with a quiet dignity.” They are heartbreaking and haunting.
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