Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye

by Florence King

  She begs the question. The attitudes to which she objects have resulted from our enshrinement of equality: if everybody is as good as everybody else, why should a plumber be respectful of a syndicated columnist? Especially when she momentarily forgets her “correct” politics and likens manual workers to dogs.

  We go to pieces in the face of bigoted germs. America is the home of the Democratic Crud. Every article on every ailment always contains The Sentence: “Hepatitis [mononucleosis, herpes, shingles, kidney stones, the clap] strikes Americans of all socio-economic groups and educational levels without regard to race, national origin, or sex.” If we could turn sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease over to the Justice Department we would do so.

  The year before AIDS was discovered the airwaves were full of voices thick with concern saying things like “Lung cancer is an equal opportunity disease.” They launched into a history of cigarette smoking, pointing out that when it was considered unladylike, most women did not indulge and therefore did not get lung cancer, which led people to think it was a man’s disease from which women were naturally immune. “But now,” the Earnest One continued happily, “women are catching up.”

  The hysterical insistence that AIDS is “everybody’s disease” finds us faced with the task of promoting safe sex without using elitist words like choosy. The current “tasteful” condom commercials will have to come down in the world so that we can get across the message that people who use condoms are no better than anybody else. This can be done if we show a motherly amazon pummeling the things and bellowing “They don’t say Trojans till I say they say Trojans!” and a teenager saying “They’re my parents, I tell you, and they’re acting strange. Hmmm … whose is this?”

  America can democratize anything. Imagine for a moment that we revived the “natural aristocrat” theory held by John Adams and other Founding Fathers. Somebody would go on “Nightline” and say “Everybody’s gotta right to be a natural aristocrat,” and then it would start: the Natural Aristocrat Task Force, the Natural Aristocrat Resources Center, the Natural Aristocrat Hot Line, the Natural Aristocrat Crisis Team, Natural Aristocrat Crash Programs, Natural Aristocrat Counseling, Natural Aristocrat Awareness, Natural Aristocrat Advocacy, Natural Aristocrat Month, and a bestseller entitled How to Help Your Child Be a Natural Aristocrat.

  Our successful democratization of the middle class shows up in the construction worker’s reply to the demographics pollster who asks him to rate himself on the social scale: “Aw, sorta middle-class, I guess.” Everyone who is not actually rolling in the gutter will make this self-assessment. It usually means they have a mortgage.

  Owning your own home is America’s unique recipe for avoiding revolution and promoting pseudo-equality at the same time. To keep citizens puttering in their yards instead of sputtering on the barricades, the government has gladly deprived itself of billions in tax revenues by letting home “owners” deduct mortgage interest payments. By favoring housing over industry in access to capital we have deprived industry, the employer of our blue-collar squirearchy, of the money to expand and compete with foreign countries. The consequent flight to superior foreign products and cheaper foreign labor has led to unemployment here, and the bizarre, only-in-America spectacle of the jobless workingman sitting in his “own home” fuming at the thought that a “middle-class” person like himself should be in such straits.

  The democratization of the law has given us the Tort Mystique. I am the only menopausal kid on the block who isn’t going to law school; the Harvard hotshot has turned into the Harvard hot flash. A few years ago Ms. magazine ran a pathetic letter from a fifty-six-year-old woman who was attending first-year law school at night. Being a lawyer is now a “re-entry” job for older women and a sexy job for spring chickens, like the Catherine Hicks character in Valley of the Dolls: 1981 who flounced and wriggled and tumbled into bed with James Coburn while the camera picked up her brief case lying on the coffee table with the half-finished martinis.

  Familiarity breeds contempt not only between individuals but between citizens and their institutions. If too many people have too many dealings with the courts, the judicial system loses the majesty it must have in order to function as a restraining force. Such exclusivity benefits the social order by providing a natural protection for the Great American Family that everyone is trying to save. Ordinary people used to be prevented from divorcing, not only by the cost of lawsuits but by their abject fear of lawyers and courts. These were the stamping grounds of their betters and they shrank from them, choosing to put up with a difficult spouse rather than enter those dark, wood-paneled offices where, they were sure, they would be patronized by someone who looked and sounded like Claude Rains.

  Now the floodgates have been opened and the veil has been removed. Television is full of lawyers and most of them are naked. The word is out: lawyers are just plain folks, and everybody’s gotta right to go to court and sue hell out of everybody else.

  If these litigious egalitarians want to win their cases, they had better choose carefully from among newly minted women lawyers. The Tort Mystique is predicated on the idée fixe that law school is the place to go to learn how to be logical and how to argue. This attitude has resulted in a dismaying number of women who look upon the study of law primarily as a vanishing cream to remove those age-old female blemishes of emotionalism and unassertiveness.

  The democratization of discrimination sounds strange but remember, we’re talking about America. On October 15, 1983, the New York Times ran a story about a conference on the Italian experience in America headlined “SCHOLARS FIND BAD IMAGE STILL PLAGUES U.S. ITALIANS.” Humbert S. Nelli, professor of history at the University of Kentucky, told his fellow scholars that although “the stigma of criminal activity” is still a problem, “the stigma may disappear as members of other groups take over criminal activities.” After planting the seed of sawed-off affirmative action, Nelli went on to rhapsodize about his vision of the future “when Americans will look back nostalgically to the syndicate, as we look back now to the gunfighters of the Old West.” Time-Life Books, take note.

  We have democratized the intellectual process itself. Recently while browsing in a secondhand bookstore I bought a paperback copy of The Intellectual and the City, but I was unable to read it. When I got home I discovered that the original owner had highlighted the entire book—literally . Every line on every page had been drawn through with a bright green Magic Marker. It was a terrifying example of a mind that had lost all power of discrimination.

  We tried to democratize fame but it backfired. The television talk show is carefully crafted around a casual living-room format designed to bring celebrities down from Olympus and show them relaxing and chatting together like just plain folks. It sounds cozy but there’s a catch. Television’s early stated intention to “come into our homes” has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The sensation that the celebrities are actually present makes the necessarily silent viewers feel like duds, the shy people who get left out of conversations, and triggers in them an emotion that Christopher Sykes identified in his biography of Lady Nancy Astor: “There is among the famous a freemasonry that offends the obscure.”

  The offense taken has led to outlandish efforts to get into The Guinness Book of World Records by performing such feats as eating five miles of spaghetti in three minutes to prove that everybody’s gotta right to be famous.

  The democratization of the femme fatale can be laid squarely at the feet of Cosmopolitan magazine, which stands in relation to true seductiveness as Robespierre to the ancien régime.

  We may end up spreading the wealth but we will never spread the “It.” Two women we have lately come to regard as femmes fatales are actually That Cosmo Girl. The bona fide femme fatale takes her leaf from the cry of Marlowe’s Faust, “Her lips suck forth my soul.” Donna Rice’s stabs at sultriness come straight out of “Ten Ways to Look Sexy While Waiting in Line.”

  Bedding down was not an issue in Fawn
Hall’s case but her Cosmo Girl credentials are flawless. You can be sexy and successful! Work is sexy! Offices are sexy! Overtime is sexy! Shredding machines are sexy! “The Dedicated Man And You! Can You Stick By Him In A Crisis?”

  Listening to Rice whining about the rigors of celebrity (“Everybody wants a piece of me”) and Hall rotely reciting her endless job description, we heard not the hiss of the serpent of the Nile but Helen Gurley Brown’s deathless exhortation to the daughters of the Common Man: “If you’re a little mouseburger, come with me. I was a mouseburger and I will help you.”

  Would you believe the democratization of Lesbianism? Until the mid-seventies, the traditional or classic Lesbian was always a spinster and often a tweedy intellectual, with a stark glamour that titillated men and women alike. This is the woman that feminists destroyed when they pressured the media for “positive images” of Lesbians.

  Suddenly open enrollment struck the Sapphic elite and dykes-for-the-masses were everywhere. We got the Lesbian detective, the Lesbian ghost, the Lesbian vampire, the possessed Lesbian, the Lesbian next door, the Lesbian with a heart of gold, the kept Lesbian, the other Lesbian, the Lesbian amnesiac, the Lesbian with cancer, and just plain Butch.

  Could it get worse? Yes. We also got the Jason’s Mommy Lesbian.

  After her divorce, Jason’s Mommy not only discovered her own potential but some other woman’s as well. Having between them enough children to start a kindergarten, they decided to live together and practice family values. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was into cunnilingus.

  When some member of the big bad Establishment threatened this happy home with a pink slip or an eviction notice, the whole menage went on television to explain their side of the story. The children always stole the show. As the loathsome little Jason raced up and down the aisles, the studio audience got the soothing idea that Jason’s Mommy and her girlfriend were no more able to make love in peace than any bona fide married couple. By the end of the show they seemed so normal and heterosexual that the audience could almost forget they were Lesbians. To leave daytime-television fans smiling through their tears, little Jason was given the last word, piping the fadeout with “Mommy and Aunt Betty love each other.”

  A bold matriarchy, their country’s pride, when once unleashed, can never be denied. The classic Lesbian is no more. In the name of equality, feminists rolled her up in her tweeds, weighted her with her scholarly tomes, and threw her overboard. The last thing she heard was “Everybody’s gotta right to be a Lesbian.”

  The democratization of Lesbianism is fraught with danger.

  There was once a time when Lesbians went scot-free in a homophobic world. All the rancor was reserved for homosexual men; Lesbians were regarded simply as nice maiden ladies with lots of dogs who shared a home for reasons of safety and thrift.

  Most people guessed the truth on a subconscious level but they didn’t feel threatened. Lesbianism has always been very soothing to the heterosexual majority for three reasons. First, Lesbians do not lust after little girls as some homosexual men lust after little boys. Second, because women are more class-conscious than men and have more to fear from a sexual encounter with trash, Lesbians do not go slumming. Third, female vanity being what it is, Lesbians do not chase spring chickens—no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might desire her.

  These behavior patterns make the average Lesbian relationship suffocatingly stable, which in turn makes the participants hands-down favorites of landlords and neighbors, who appreciate the stability so much that they gladly put up with all the dogs.

  As if the foregoing were not blessing enough, even the Far Right likes Lesbians. The November 1971 issue of the John Birch Society magazine, American Opinion, contains an article called “Sex Denied: Perversion and the Hatred of God” by Medford Evans. The article is a predictable attack on male homosexuality, but it contains a permissive, even good-natured reference to Lesbianism: “It seems to me natural enough for anybody to want to make love to a beautiful woman, including, imaginably, another woman.”

  No Lesbian in her right mind would blow this cover but radical-feminist Lesbians did when they started saying things like “Lesbianism is now! Lesbianism is an alternative acculturation within a resources-oriented framework of socialistic oneness!” (They forgot pussy.) These anarchistic fulminations chipped away at Lesbians’ favored status as solid-citizen perverts who could do no wrong.

  The Sapphic sisterhood got another boost in the early AIDS years when Time stated: “The disease is virtually unknown among Lesbians.” This was followed by a funny letter to the editor from a man who wrote: “I am tired of hearing people say that AIDS is God’s revenge on homosexuals. Using that logic, lesbians, among whom the disease is virtually unknown, must be God’s chosen people.”

  Would the Radi-Clits blow their cover a second time? You bet. The January/February 1988 issue of Visibilities, a new Lesbian magazine published in New York, contains an incredible article insisting that Lesbians can too catch AIDS, just like the fellas. To prove that two women can draw blood in sex play, the author makes dubious but nonetheless nauseating references to “vaginal fisting” and “vampirism.”

  What will come of this equality if a real AIDS panic should take hold? The women in the Gay and Lesbian Alliance should ask themselves what they have to gain by joining forces with their increasingly castigated brothers. If AIDS were a disease linked to female homosexuality I seriously doubt that gay men would go out on a limb to help their sisters. To paraphrase a George Eliot character: “Men’s men, straight or gay, they’re much of a muchness.” Politically active Lesbians would be wise to abandon the gay rights scene and revive the stereotype of the Doggy Ladies.

  Chinks in America’s egalitarian armor are not hard to find. Democracy is the fig leaf of elitism.

  Equal opportunity is good, but inborn talent is better as long as you don’t say so out loud. Americans worship creativity the way they worship physical beauty—as a way of enjoying elitism without guilt: God did it.

  Contempt for manual labor is a big factor in the shoddy manufacturing that has contributed to our trade imbalance. Only an American union leader would say, as Samuel Gompers did: “The promise of America for the laboring man is the promise of someday no longer having to work with his hands.” If Mary McGrory’s home repairmen are slapdash and surly, it’s because they agree with him.

  The happy many who own their own homes are the brahmins in that caste nightmare known as the American Dream. If America is suffering from a shortage of rental housing, it’s because nobody wants to rent to renters. Checking the own block instead of the rent block on forms and applications is our way of dividing the wheat from the chaff. Apartment has become a dirty word; the few really nice buildings left strive for such euphemistic names as “towers” or “complex.” The apartment dweller is one jump up from the trailer dweller and the gap is narrowing by the minute.

  Everybody’s gotta right to be a landed gent, so ruro-mania is back, if it ever left. “Lot” is out and “acreage” is in, “nearest neighbor” is in and “next-door neighbor” is out, and millions of white-collar Americans rationalize their purchase of a pickup truck by repeating “They’re fun to drive” over and over until they believe it.

  Ruromaniacs like to attribute their bucolic tic to their unquenchable pioneer spirit, but since we all know that Americans have less pioneer spirit than a Byzantine grand vizier, there must be another reason. The sage of the twenties, William Allen White, nailed it when he wrote: “Why are Americans so country-minded? We are Emporians all, because we desire to belong to the governing classes.”

  The accurate maxim, “the masses love a lord,” has found a cracked way to coexist with American democracy. Mother Nature being the first and most unyielding of aristocrats, we have set ourselves the task of preserving her shrinking peerage. The residents of a New England town get up at dawn to fuss over beached whales like ancient Hawaiian minions stoking
a 400-pound queen. If a land developer with a roll of shopping mall blueprints under his arm had the misfortune to show up while these ichthyological obeisances are in full throttle, he might well be lynched. Developer and growth have become euphemisms for “too many people”; our pseudo-egalitarian closet misanthropes practice hatred of humanity and call it conservation.

  We persist in believing that gambling is a gentleman’s vice open only to people like Count Vronsky, who knew it was comme il faut to pay his gambling debts at once and let his tailor wait. Whenever state lotteries come under discussion, the tendency of poor people to spend too much on tickets invariably arises. The talk-show sages who regularly debate this issue sound like Victorian toffs mouthing hypocritical pieties about the “deserving poor” as opposed to the other kind. The crocodile tears shed by the “thoughtful” and “concerned” (Americanese for “the better sort”) is actually a fear that some member of the undeserving poor might hit the jackpot and not know how to “handle” all that money.

  America has a whole sheaf of unwritten sumptuary laws, but unlike ancient societies that told the poor what they couldn’t wear, we tell the rich. People who would be terrified to joke about watermelons and pawnbrokers think nothing of making jokes about polyester. The last time I toured a book, three newspaper interviewers inserted snide references to my favorite pants suit into their stories. All three of these sumptuarists were women too young to remember having to iron satin slips and ten-gore circular skirts made of something called butcher linen, but like Cato the Elder ranting against centurions’ wives in silk stolae, they would brook no excuses.