Wit also requires an infinite supply of attitudes that have been bred out, trained out, and knocked out of women for centuries. Taught to say “I love people,” “sex is beautiful,” and her prayers, the average woman finds it impossible to summon the sang-froid, contempt, impatience, sarcasm, pessimism, blasphemy, and bawdiness required to crack ice at thirty paces.
This state of affairs supposedly changed with the advent of feminism. Throughout the seventies, enormous efforts were made to get women to laugh at previously forbidden topics. Anthologies of humor for women appeared (including one called Titters containing a reprint of one of my pieces), but for the most part the silence was deafening. Not that women didn’t try. In a letter to Cosmopolitan about an article of mine, the reader allowed as how it probably was funny, but concluded with a mixture of plaintiveness and moral superiority: “I guess I take sex seriously.”
One problem was the mixed signals feminists gave out. On the one hand they urged women to be raucous and bawdy, while on the other they promoted the I Am a Humorless Feminist teeshirt. Another problem was the catchall nature of the Women’s Movement. If, like the Suffragettes, feminists had concentrated exclusively on women and ignored other dispossessed groups, they could have helped women develop the healthy selfishness that lies behind the merry outlook. But in their zeal to stroke and identify with every have-not cause under the sun, they created a chaos of caring that forced women back into the age-old female trap of putting others before self.
The women-and-wit conundrum came to a head in a 1976 book called The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation by Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth. In a chapter on menstruation jokes, this earnest trio came up with one of the finest oxymorons of all time: “We would like to think that feminism will help women develop a different sense of humor, one that is warm, loving, egalitarian, compassionate.”
That’s like telling people to have calm orgasms.
One of the hardest things for the world to accept is a woman who laughs at sex while remaining above the battle. A woman is never allowed to be detached about sex. She must either pull out all the stops and be filthy—what nightclub comics call “working blue”—or make herself the butt of the joke and poke fun at her own sexuality.
I ran up against both of these non-choices in the seventies when I wrote for two new magazines aimed at liberated women. The first was Playgirl, whose male publisher conceived the idea of a monthly fictional vignette centering around a funny sexual encounter. The editor asked me to write it and passed on the publisher’s instructions: “Make it raunchy.”
I have always thought that raunch ought to be the French word for “armpit,” like manche for “sleeve.” The difference between raunchy and witty can be illustrated by two remarks on the same subject. The raunchy remark is from a movie whose title I have forgotten. In one scene a couple who work together are about to have sex on an office desk when the phone rings. The man answers it and says, “I can’t talk now. Something big has come up.”
The witty remark was made by the Edwardian actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the first Eliza Doolittle, who eloped during rehearsals of Pygmalion. When she returned to work after a four-day honeymoon, George Bernard Shaw asked, “What is this new husband of yours like?” Replied Mrs. Pat: “Six-feet-four and everything in proportion.”
I lasted through three Playgirl vignettes. The one that got me fired was about a woman who was so desperate to find her clitoris that she decided to use a divining rod. The publisher blew up when he read my lead: “The clitoris is the whistlestop between maidenhead and personhood on the feminist train of thought.” The editor told me later that he stormed through the office waving my manuscript and yelling, “That’s not raunchy! Suppose Linda Lovelace had said that in Deep Throat? It would’ve ruined the movie!”
Next Viva, the sister publication of Penthouse, asked me to be their sex advice columnist, a contributing editorship with my name on the masthead. It was the heyday of the kinky sex fad; the readers desperately wanted to believe that earnest cliché, “Anything two people do together is right as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else,” so I was under orders to find a funny way of reassuring them that sex is beautiful.
I quickly discovered that when the Penthouse empire tells a woman to be funny, they really mean “kooky.” I have always thought that kook ought to be the Arabic word for a woman who has a nervous breakdown in the middle of a belly dance. A kook is a sick handmaiden assigned to the male tent and given the job of seeing to it that men always laugh at, never with, the female sex. She accomplishes this by combining Belle Watling’s heart of gold with Aunt Pittypat’s instability to become the kind of sex partner men call “that crazy kid.” A century ago a kook was a girl who jumped naked out of a cake at stag parties; today she’s the chief purveyor of the attitude known as “nonjudgmental.”
Viva expected me to top the sexual experiences related by the readers with even more bizarre ones—real or imagined—of my own, and to write in a warm and friendly wait-till-I-tell-you-what-I-did tone calculated to soothe their guilty fears and make them feel loved.
Here is the letter that got me fired:
“Q: My boyfriend wants me to stick a lighted Fourth of July sparkler in his ass while we fuck. Is this wrong?
A: No, provided he has more than one ass to give for your country.”
15
SUPERGOY
It’s been eleven years since I published the Wasp book. It was called Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting? and everybody thought I was the ideal person to write it. My agent doesn’t call me Supergoy for nothing: being the child of an old-line Southern Wasp mother and a British father, I am an enriched version of the breed, as shot full of additives as Wonder Bread.
I decided that being a tenth-generation Wasp on one side and a first-generation English-American on the other would help me infuse the book with the balance needed to make it appealing to Wasps and ethnics alike. The Daughters had landed at Ellis Island and the beachhead was about to be secured.
I was wrong. No Wasp can write a Wasp book because we’re the most divided group in America.
I was two pages into the introduction when I ran into the biggest snag. Southerners might be Waspier than anybody else but we are so outré historically and socially that we screw up any book we get into. No book about Wasps can omit Southerners, but no book that includes Southerners can really be a Wasp book.
A writer must write about what he knows, however, so my first draft turned into a sequel to my first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. My editor, a Nebraska Wasp, called me with her evaluation.
“You’ve left something out,” she said tactfully.
Specifically, I had left out everything west of the Mississippi. My editor wanted more on midwestern Wasps, but except for her and the characters in Sinclair Lewis and William Inge, I had never known any. It was more than a lack of physical contact. I had never known any New England Wasps either, but as a Southerner I understand them instinctively because we share a certain ingrown, overbred craziness (there’s nothing like being in America for a really long time). I have no trouble identifying with the dark violence and twisted emotions of Lizzie Borden, Ethan Frome, and the characters in The Scarlet Letter, but the neurotic propriety of Splendor in the Grass leaves me bemused.
My editor cranked me up as much as she could with examples from her own experience, but I was writing through a psychological blind spot. I simply could not plug in to midwestern Wasps. Minor social customs were perplexing enough—do you realize that these people actually eat dinner as soon as it’s ready instead of getting half drunk first?—but when I got to religion I was stranded.
I am a Wasp only in the genetic sense; the P does not quite apply. As an Episcopalian I am technically an Anglican Catholic, meaning that I have a real feel for theological dottiness untainted by deeper questions of religious belief. I have no religious beliefs to speak of, but I stand four-square with the Highs against the Lows on Latin and incense, a
nd I will go to bat for transubstantiation even though it means nothing to me one way or the other.
I am also drawn to what the Upper South calls “Maryland Catholicism”—an older, landed version of the faith closer to the Stuart crown than to the Knights of Columbus. I don’t care whether church and state are separate as long as church and stateliness go hand in glove.
How, then, was I to write about my editor’s Methodist childhood? As a Southerner I knew about noisy Protestants, but what can you say about quiet Protestants?
I began to question the strength of our common Englishness. If my problems with Middle America were any guide, it meant nothing. Wasps come in so many different varieties that we’re all each other’s them.
Watch us in Europe and you’ll see why we don’t “stick together” at home. The Des Moines tourists demanding to know the price of something in “real money” are put off by the members of the Bowdoin College seminar, who are put off by the ancestor-hunting Virginia Daughters, who are put off by the liberated Junior Year Abroad girls, who are put off by the blustering Texas businessmen, who are ready to kill the members of the Bowdoin seminar because they’re a bunch of egghead Communist queers.
When all of these groups come together in a sidewalk cafe, they eye one another like the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, bemoan each other’s “awful voices,” and boast to any native willing to listen that they and they alone are the “real Americans … . We’re not like those terrible people over there at that other table.”
Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting? flopped. Part of the trouble was that nobody could find it. Because the title is a pun on I Corinthians, some bookstores shelved it under inspirational literature along with suffer-not tracts like Hey, God, Are You Listening? Evidently a question mark in a title suggests a spiritual crisis. Other stores shelved it under insects. A few relegated it to the new science of thanatology in the belief that it was a parental guide along the lines of How To Help Your Child Cope With Death, and one store stocked it in the juvenile section because they thought it was the story of William the Wasp, born without a stinger, who is mocked and persecuted by his nestmates until he teaches them the meaning of peace and love by becoming the pet of a little crippled boy.
If a Wasp can’t write a Wasp book, does it follow that an ethnic can? According to a 1987 book, The Wasp Mystique by Dr. Richard C. Robertiello and Diana Hoguet, it’s midnight in America and every member of Colonial Banes is a direct descendant of the Evil One.
Psychiatrist Robertiello is in the throes of a negative transference against the people who keep saying “Tennis, anyone?” Contending that America has been enervated by a “misguided idealization and emulation of WASPs,” he runs barefoot through all the clichéd Anglo-Saxon traits and taboos and explains how they have ruined the country.
This nasty little book is saved from being infuriating by a literary style that provides comic relief on almost every page.
Wasp Courage: “How often have we heard someone referred to as a real s.o.b.—but he sure has guts. Yes, but guts in the context of what—being an s.o.b., that’s what. Blame WASP Mystique for our failure to consider this sufficiently in making our evaluations.”
Wasp Good Taste: “It’s another example of the degree to which the WASP Mystique has been accepted by our culture. Other cultures clearly have different definitions of ‘good’ taste—including belching and throwing up, as our anthropologists can attest.”
Wasp Emotion: “A definite nay-say for WASPs … But being attached to a strong silent man or an ice queen has its deficits. Ask the man who owns one.”
Wasp Ambition: “Fighting down this trait is a mixed blessing. It may, in fact, inhibit the ability to maximize potential in whatever arena chosen.”
Wasp Hard Work: “It’s not enough for its own sake. Besides, ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ Likewise Jill.”
Wasp Families: “Because no matter how much emotional trouble the WASP family is in, they will go on denying it until they are blue in the face. Blue is an intended pun here—blue for blueblood aspired to, for never saying I’m sorry, for being the regal super-cool ruler, even while the royal house is falling down.”
American interest in the British royal family upsets Robertiello so much that he loses what little command of syntax he has. Our magazines devoted “reams of ink” to the royal wedding, he charges, and virtually deified the Prince of Wales because “Charles was exemplary of how one should comport himself.”
When the stereotyping has run its course, Robertiello backs up his claims with dreary case histories from his patient file (“Myra’s story epitomizes the state of the broken WASP”) and tosses in a mother who is called “Mumsy.”
He saves his most verbose whack for the Wasp stars of the Iran-Contra hearings—Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Fawn Hall. In a final brakeless slide down Bunker Hill that reads like an excerpt from the Choctaw edition of Psychology Today, he says that their disregard of the law “has the ring of the supervening superiority of the mystique of the WASP and its claim to a moral ascendancy justifying its preeminence in our society for WASPs and their multitude of pretenders.”
I swear by Mario Cuomo’s father’s bleeding feet that I have copied these passages correctly.
About the only Wasp stereotype that Robertiello missed is the martini. It’s just as well he didn’t get into it because he would have gone mad. The martini is supposed to be the Wasp drink, and it is—except that it isn’t. As if to add a final fillip to our schismatic games, the Waspiest region of America has no use for it.
Trying to find a good martini below the Smith & Wesson line is as futile as trying to find a rare steak. Different Southerners have different versions of martiniphobia. To the aging flower of chivalry the martini triggers visions of brittle women. To the crustaceous dowager it threatens that genteel female gathering called a “Saturday Sherry.” To the Baptist it’s an Episcopalian plot against iced tea. To the unreconstructed Rebel it’s the portent of yet another New South. And to the good ole boy it stands for men who don’t like whiskey. Jim Bob and T.J. harbor another objection as well: martinis are drunk out of “little dinky” glasses.
Birmingham: I ordered a martini straight up and they put it in a water goblet. Five inches of glass and half an inch of martini. If you think that saying “half-empty” instead of “half-full” is the sign of a pessimist, try saying “nearly gone” while looking at a martini you haven’t even touched.
I complained and the waitress explained.
“We believe in givin’ you plenny of room. You know how it is when evrathang’s all in there togethuh.”
Do Jim Bob and T.J. dunk for olives? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Macon: I switched to on-the-rocks. The waitress gave me an approving nod and said: “The iz cuts the bittuh taste. Ah don’t see how people can drink ’um ’less they’re watered down.”
Mine was watered down all right. It was in a champagne glass full of shaved ice—martini sherbet.
Memphis: “Oh, honey, you don’t want one of them mean ole thangs. My husband, Alvin, he drunk him some martini once, and lemme tell you, ole Alvin, he just slid right down the wall.”
My worst experience occurred when I stopped at a small-town motel while driving through South Carolina. My waitress was a sweet young thing with a big bow in her curly blond hair and a fanned-out lace handkerchief pinned to her shoulder. All in all a classic example of a type the Protestant South produces in droves: the Virgin Mary Lou.
The Virgin Mary Lou’s bag has always been simulated innocence. To preserve the girlish purity for which she is famed, she must find something to be completely ignorant about. It used to be sex, but that being impossible to pull off nowadays, she has switched to martinis.
The moment I said “martini” her face crumpled with such despair that she aged six months before my very eyes. She went into the small untended bar and stayed for what seemed like forever. When at last she reappeared, she carried in one hand a cocktail gla
ss containing an olive and about a half inch of liquid. In her other hand was a gin miniature with a peeling label. She sat both down in front of me.
I picked up the miniature and closed my hand around it. It was as warm as the Virgin Mary Lou’s smile.
“This is supposed to be cold.”
“If you want iz in it, Ah bettuh git you a bigger glass.”
“No, this is the right glass, I ordered a martini straight up. I don’t want ice in it, I just want it cold.”
“You mean like a Sebbin ‘n’ Sebbin?”
“No, a Seven and Seven is a highball. A martini is a cocktail. It’s supposed to be mixed with ice.”
“Ah kin bring you a l’il bowl of iz if you want.”
“No, it’s supposed to be mixed.”
“Ah kin put it in the milkshake machine if you want.”
“You can’t do that—it would bruise the gin.”
“Ma’am?”
“Never mind. What is this greenish stuff in the glass?”
“An olive.”
“No, I mean the liquid.”
“Oh, that’s the othuh part.”
“You mean you put the vermouth in the glass first?”
“Ma’am?”
“Vermouth! Do you know what vermouth is?”
“Yes, ma’am, it’s up North.”
“No. Look. Wait a minute. What did you pour in the glass?”
“A l’il juice from the olive bottle.”
“Don’t you know how to mix a martini? Didn’t they show you?”
“We don’t git much call for ’um ’round heah.”
“I tell you what. I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll have a Seven and Seven.”
“That’s real popular ‘round heah,” she said with a sweet smile.
Reflections In a Jaundiced Eye Page 14