“Social climbing” is real in Manhattan, and when I hear the phrase, I see before me stilettoed women—the Queen of the Queen Bees and her friends at the top, the rest coming up close behind—in Chanel dresses and Yves Saint Laurent tuxedo jumpsuits, glittering minaudières in hand or hanging from their slender shoulders, skillfully making their way in the dusk up a tree, negotiating the branches, finding an ideal spot at an optimal height that gives them a perfect view of the forest floor below or the savanna before them. This perspective makes them, like primates of all species, including our own Homo sapiens ancestors, feel safe. And rich.
As the evening wound down, women parted with thank-yous to Rebecca and kisses for one another. And tonight, as always, in departing, they said, “Will I see you at the thing on Thursday? Are you going to the school meeting tomorrow?” Like the demurral from a compliment, the confirmation of the next meet-up affirmed that they were one.
Women of the tribe I was studying paid the price for beauty, looking frozen, feeling disconnected, starving and exercising their bodies into submission. They did the never-ending work of forging and maintaining social connections and social status for themselves, their children, and the couple. But it was men who picked up the tab. It was easy to believe, that night at Rebecca’s apartment, that all these women, wealthy, competent, and beautiful, were powerful as well. But there was the nagging fact, for me, always, of the apartness, the undeniable cloistering from men. “It’s more fun this way!” the women would say whenever I asked. “Are you kidding? We prefer it!” the men told me at one especially lovely and friendly dinner party—where men and women sat at separate tables in separate rooms. Like “staying at home” with the kids, sex segregation struck me as a state of affairs quite possibly giving clue to some deeper, meaningful reality but masquerading, like a Save Venice ball reveler, as a simple preference. Like a designer frock hanging in a walk-in closet, one among many, sex segregation, I was told, was a “choice.”
Worldwide, the ethnographic data tells another story: the more stratified and hierarchical the society, and the more sex segregated, the lower the status of women. One had to consider the initially unlikely seeming possibility that here was no exception. What were the men doing, while the women of my tribe hung together in the various retail and social zenanas around the city—the women’s committees of the boards, the upscale breakfast spots next to the toddler music classes, luxe exercise studios and spas—discussing the children and the Parents Association? Usually, they were off with other men, at work, in the public world of still-mostly-men and of commerce. Sometimes they were at the Dads’ Poker Night, a private-school fund-raising fixture across the city where no wife dares show up and no questions are asked. And sometimes, the women around me fretted and confided, they suspected the powerful, wealthy men they were married to were enjoying flirtations and dalliances and extramarital affairs—which field biologists refer to, when they happen among animals, as “extra-pair copulations.”
Through the lens of anthropology and primatology, this is mostly an issue not so much of moral failing but of circumstance. Of course, many men of the tribe I was studying chose monogamy. But several factors conspire to allow high-ranking, wealthy men the world over to engage in extra-pair copulations at will, with no consequence, in the hypothetical and in reality. Following the typical pattern among all the great apes, it is female Homo sapiens who tend to disperse at sexual maturity, losing crucial social support from their families and rendering alliances among (unrelated) females predictably fragile. (Female bonobos, alone among the great apes, have come up with a strategy to improve this situation and build bonds: frequent homosexual encounters with their female troop mates.) It is easy to see how dispersal and relatively weak social bonds make it harder to contemplate up and leaving with your kids than if you lived in a compound (or on a savanna) with your own family of origin, surrounded by welcoming relatives who have your back. “I can’t move back to Long Island with my parents and uproot my kids,” one woman told a mutual friend, explaining what compelled her to stay with her philandering husband until their young kids were off at boarding school.
Female dispersal is not the only thing that gives males more power than their mates. Female Homo sapiens face a fundamental hardship, one unprecedented in the world of nonhuman primates: they are uniquely dependent. We are the only primates that practice intensive food and resource sharing, the only species in which females, in many societies, depend on males for shelter and sustenance. Female birds, Efe mothers, and chimps with offspring never stop searching out and finding food of their own. Indeed, among the !Kung San, even women with very young children bring in upward of 85 percent of the group’s daily calories. Agta women of the Philippines hunt while pregnant. Their status as “breadwinners” empowers them—to leave partnerships when they want, to take lovers, to come or go, to have an active and influential voice in their communities. As in the Kalahari Desert and the southeastern Asian rain forest, resources are the bottom line on the Upper East Side, and in Upper East Side marriages. If you don’t bring home tubers and sha roots, if you don’t earn money, your power is diminished in your marriage. And in the world. Period.
The men I was observing and socializing with (often awkwardly—everybody seemed a little out of practice) had more than circumstances in their favor. Like male primates everywhere, the highest-ranking among them have a repertoire of strategies for compelling their females to stay, no matter what. Male hamadryas baboons use eye-flip threats and neck bites to control the females in their harem-like groups and discourage them from mating with others or even straying too far away. Rhesus macaques in Puerto Rico chase and sometimes wound females who attempt to copulate with low-ranking males. And many a nonhuman primate male practices infanticide, killing the youngest offspring sired by other males in order to bring a female back into estrus, that she may bear his.
Male primates of Park Avenue are more subtle, certainly, in their tactics. They subjugate their dependent females, ensuring continued unique access to them, regardless of how they themselves are behaving, by controlling female access to resources. Disbursing and withholding luxurious gifts, lavish vacations, allowances for seasonal wardrobe upgrades and “work” on faces and bodies, allowances that pay for women’s charitable work, their ticket to the public world—all are common practices among a certain set. So, several women let me know, are “year-end bonuses” for wives, which may be outlined in a prenup, or may just be given out of “largesse”—or withheld for any reason. It’s an open secret uttered among those who already know, at board meetings or a girls’ night out: “I’m not sure what I can give this year because I don’t know what my charity allowance will be.” “My yearly bonus hasn’t been set [by my husband] so I don’t know whether I’ll take a table at the patron’s or benefactor’s level.” These are the coercive tactics, disguised as cushy and generous enticements, that many high-ranking men use to reinforce their considerable power within their society and their ultimate power within their marriages.
The more I looked, the more I saw the asymmetries of power played out, not just interpersonally between women, but institutionally, socially, and culturally. Financially successful men in Manhattan sit on major boards—of hospitals, universities, and high-profile disease foundations—boards with yearly give/gets (the combined amount you agree to donate and procure from others) of $150,000 and more. Their wives are frequently on lesser boards, women’s committees, and museums in the outer boroughs with annual give/gets of $5,000 to $20,000. Wealthy and powerful husbands are trustees of prestigious private schools; their wives are “class moms,” tasked with being an official and unremunerated social and communications hub for all the other mothers. While their husbands make millions, privileged women with kids capitulate, with little choice (“I need to be a good volunteer so my kid gets into a good school,” these moms were always saying), to the “Mommynomics” of the Upper East Side. They give away the skills they honed in college and in graduate sc
hool and in their vaunted professions to their children’s schools for free—organizing the galas, editing the newsletters, running the libraries, staging bake sales. Schools would go under without this caste of privileged-mommy volunteers, who provide hundreds of thousands of dollars of free work per year. In a way, a woman’s participation in Mommynomics is a way to feel and be busy and useful. It is also an act of extravagance, a brag—“I used to work, I can, but I don’t need to.” But compare it with what some of their husbands have done and aspire to do—amass enough money not merely to quit work but also to take the “Giving Pledge,” a public avowal billionaires make to give away half their wealth.
Wives lunch with other women with children at Freds and Bergdorf Goodman while their silverback husbands move with ease among their watering holes. A few years ago, at the 21 Club, one could see Henry Kissinger, Roger Ailes, and William Safire all seated within feet of one another, table-hopping and reinforcing their world dominance. The Grill Room might as well be a men’s club, my husband observed one day when the ratio of women to men there was one-to-four (other men told me the ratio was usually one-to-two). These are places business is done, and among the tribe I studied, business is mostly done by men.
As I stood in front of Rebecca’s building that night hailing a cab, I recalled the view from her massive windows twenty-six stories above. In the most elite sector of the world’s most elite economy, in a tiny corner of a specific neighborhood, a proliferation of women have left work or have never had to work. From an anthropological perspective, these wealthy women who seem and are so fortunate are also marooned in their sex-segregated world, on their lesser boards, at their charity breakfasts and luncheons, and in their playgroups and Hamptons homes all summer long. With sex ratios in their favor, with resources under their control, with wives who are dependent on them caring for their even more dependent offspring, privileged men of the Upper East Side can do as they please. Men may speak the language of partnership in the absence of true economic parity in a marriage, and they may act like true partners. But this arrangement is fragile and contingent and women are still dependent, in this instance, on their men—a husband may simply ignore his commitment at any time. Access to your husband’s money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can’t buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates your version of power from your man’s, could keep a thinking woman up at night.
CHAPTER SIX
A Xanax and a Bloody Mary: Manhattan Moms on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
I am wearing an army-green vest with ample pockets and a practical rubber-soled shoe, stealthily making my way across the second floor of Bergdorf Goodman. Laden with lavender shopping bags for camouflage, I am on the hunt for The One amid the Prada and Lanvin. No luck. Adjusting my blowgun, the type biologists use in the field, I ascend the elevator to the jungle of “young and fun!” designers on 5. It is hard to choose from the specimens around me, since so many fit the criteria: remarkably thin, highly stressed, sleep-deprived, economically privileged reproductive Upper East Side females in midlife. But they tend to travel in packs, and are partial to leather leggings and jeans, so my task is complicated, all about finding not just the right animal, but also the right moment. I can wait. This is important. Thus far, I have mostly studied the troop’s group behaviors. Now I need to understand them individually, from the inside out. A blood sample could reveal so much about their physiology and emotions.
And then, on the edge of the floor, one strays from her peers to look at a rack of Balenciaga. Even better, she is wearing lightweight trousers. I get her in my sights and, with a puff to my blowgun, quickly dart her in the buttock. She wanders, dazed, toward the fitting rooms, falling to the soft pile carpet in fewer than twenty seconds. As I drag her through the heavy curtain into the largest of the mirrored rooms, Robert Sapolsky, a neuroendocrinologist and primatologist, who has made a career of studying the lives and blood work of olive baboons in Kenya’s Maasai Mara reserve, ushers me in and concedes, “You’re getting pretty good at this.”
We take her vital signs and draw her blood quickly, efficiently, knowing there is not much time. Our petite, well-dressed great ape will come to on the plush carpeting, see the half glass of champagne we have left on the table in the fitting room, and, blaming herself, be too ashamed to tell anyone what has happened. Meanwhile, we hit the street and head to Quest Diagnostics—the one on East Fifty-Seventh between Park and Lex. There is a skip in my step and I have the urge to whistle. I am eager to hear the story that her blood, still warm in its vials in my pockets, will tell us.
As I wrote this book, I had this daydream over and over, while riding the M86 bus across the park or jammed into the plastic depression that counts as a seat on the subway or sitting on a bench on the edge of the playground, chatting with other moms and half keeping track of my kids. But the morphology of many of the Upper East Side mothers I knew from my older son’s school and my younger one’s playgroups—their bodies and faces—told a story of its own. Their gaunt visages and taut torsos and limbs that seemed always ready to spring put me in mind, as I passed them in the school hallways and ladies’ luncheons and galas we all went to, of animals primed for fight or flight. Their fingers and thumbs flew across their iPhones and BlackBerries. Their jaws were clenched. Their brows were furrowed, unless they had had Botox injections there, in which case the story found expression in their mouths, which were frequently pursed or arranged in tight smiles, the kind that did not telegraph pleasure or happiness or relaxation but rather the very opposite: “Hi, I see you, but I’m in a rush.” Mostly, though, the tale was in their eyes—wide, alert, hypervigilant eyes that took in everything, like a gazelle endlessly scanning its surroundings, as if its life depended on it.
By now, I knew about the rites of passage and initiation ceremonies a privileged Upper East Side mommy went through. I knew her identity was forged, in part, through certain rituals that were all but explicitly agreed upon: making what narrators of eighteenth-century English novels called “an advantageous match”; passing a co-op board interview and undertaking an apartment renovation; applying to prestigious private schools for her children; attending grueling exercise classes daily; and participating in “Mommynomics,” the circle of charity luncheons and social and school events that allowed her to work on strategic alliances, solidifying or raising her social rank. But I often wondered what it felt like to be the wife of an alpha (or close-second beta) and the mother of young children on the Upper East Side. In spite of my having gone native, I would always be a late transfer to the troop, with less money than many of the women around me. I was low-ranking, and still a relative newcomer. So I couldn’t be sure that my own feelings of stress and unease when I was at drop-off or a school event or a playgroup were an accurate indicator of theirs. Over coffee, and after school meetings, some forthcoming Upper East Side mommies put words to what their faces were saying.
They said: “When the radiator bangs, I jump out of my skin.”
And: “Our daughter’s teacher told us she was having a hard time finding a group of kids to play with at recess and I burst into tears.”
And: “My husband tapped me on the shoulder to ask me something and it startled me so badly I screamed and fell off my chair. In my own home.”
“I know exactly what you should be writing about,” Candace told me breathlessly over lunch one day. She quickly retrieved something from her purse and popped it into her mouth. She had arrived late—“Brutal traffic,” she apologized—having learned just twenty-four hours before that her son had a concussion from a soccer game. Her husband was looking for a new job. Candace hadn’t slept well, I gathered; there were dark circles under her eyes. She had lost weight, too, and looked so thin that she might break. I wanted to comfort her, but I also wanted to hear what she had to say, because Ca
ndace really understood the übercompetitive, ultrasuccessful men and women whose lives I studied. She was married to one, after all, and as a high-end event planner, she had organized the baby showers and over-the-top kiddie birthday parties and charity soirees of some of Manhattan’s richest and most powerful players for years. She had seen them all at their worst, and with their guard down.
“Anxiety,” Candace whispered urgently across the table now. “Your tribe of mommies and anxiety.”
“Right,” I said. I nodded, thinking. Then I ventured, “Um, what was that pill, Candace?”
“Ativan,” she replied matter-of-factly. She exhaled with a smile and fell back into the leather chair, her shoulders and face finally relaxed. She looked beautiful and radiant, just like herself again, and she said, “Shall we order some wine?”
Anxiety and stress are diseases of the West, afflictions of the WEIRD—anthropologist Jared Diamond’s acronym for Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic peoples. A look at the cross-cultural data regarding one reliable measure of out-of-whack anxiety, social anxiety disorder, makes the case nicely. While rates of social anxiety disorder in China, Korea, Nigeria, and Taiwan are all well under 1 percent, the US rate is nearly ten times greater. One in four Americans will experience severe and sustained anxiety at some point in his or her life.
And city people are especially, extraordinarily stressed and anxious, researchers tell us. Packed streets and buses and costly clothing and food and shelter and the din of jackhammers, it seems, produce feelings of threat and diminish our sense of control, leading to high anxiety, high stress, and escalating rates of stress-related disease. Indeed, such city-niche-specific conditions have changed the human brain, altering our cingulate cortexes and amygdalae so they are, in a vicious circle if ever there was one, less able to deal with stress than those of our country cousins.
Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir Page 15