by Nancy Friday
We have brought the jungle into a fluorescent-lit space, leaving the human animals to work out the spectrum of male/female interaction. Everyone is bringing home his or her own bacon, everyone is competing, everyone is eyeing one another with desire, rage, envy, and competition, emotions that used to be spread across a dozen different stages, but are now all in one space with a waiting audience in the form of fellow workers.
“Women’s freedom will be men’s freedom too!” We said that. It was a campaign pledge twenty-five years ago. Did we understand how they would read that promise? Women have no idea of how men see us. Men are most relaxed in one another’s company. When we peek at them in their locker rooms, on their playing fields, we envy the way they let go, so different from how they are with us and how we are with one another too; we want them to give us that trust they reserve for other males.
What do we give them? We are not yet men’s economic or political equals, but we have taken a good chunk of their pie and, far from relaxing the rules of the war between us, we have become even more antagonistic to them. Instead of sexual harassment systematically being argued from the woman’s point of view, why not question why the man is the only responsible party? Women are blind to our body image, clothed and unclothed. When issues of anorexia are raised, instead of attacking Patriarchal Society, why not question women’s own contribution to the dilemma?
We are born and raised to be selected. What does our genetic heritage know of feminist alternatives? The heat that burns in our cheeks at the penetration of a man’s gaze is a mix of excitement, humiliation, and rage. We have just broken The Nice Girl Rules. Never mind that in the real world we have outgrown them, that we are now economically independent and shouldn’t even be thinking of mother’s rules. Didn’t we buy the dress, select it, and pay for it? Doesn’t that separate us from her, still loving her, but very much our own person? These men are looking at us, not at the other woman; we have won the genetic beauty contest.
But before pride can settle in, there is a terror: We are on our own, all eyes on us and we are not part of a group! Without experience in handling the high of successful exhibitionism, the thrill of being the genetic star, we fear loss of control, humiliation. We do what women used to do and reach for haughty indignation. We cover ourselves with it like a shield. We act as women did before gaining economic power, which is where we still are emotionally; we love those books that buttress the platform that men are bad and women inherently good. We turn humiliation around and voilà! there is feminism, not educating us in the power of beauty and sex but encouraging us to dump all negative feelings on to Bad Men.
“What happens to women who haven’t integrated their sexuality when they get into the workplace,” says Judith Seifer, “is what so much of sexual harassment is about. They think, ‘This is something I have to keep the lid on, I have to police, because men can’t control themselves around it.’ Instead, they should be thinking, ‘Part of my energy, part of the thing that makes me so good in the workplace, part of the creative flow, has to do with my sexual energy.’
“I do workshops on sex in the workplace and the big issues today are the flirtatious, romantic, sexual, intensely personal relationships that go on there. Most women have had a good working relationship with a man, where they grow to rely on one another, read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences. What this often involves is a form of displaced energy. But whether the relationship between the man and woman is a working friendship, a personal friendship, or whether they become office lovers, the woman must acknowledge her own sexual energy. If it’s never negotiated, it becomes a disaster waiting to happen; they’re working late one night, they go to a convention or one of them is feeling needy, and here is the one person who understands and with whom they feel comfortable, and suddenly all that sexual energy that had been channeled into work goes into a sexual overture, or what we call sexual harassment.
“Women blame it all on men, but until women learn to recognize and separate out their own sexuality as an important part of who they are, they will never own it. I look at most energy as either physical or sexual. They blend and spill over. We don’t teach our children this. A sense of control of our sexuality has to start in childhood. So far we’ve successfully robbed generations of people of a sense of personal control. Instead, we are raised to believe that if a woman gets a man turned on he will not be able to control himself. I know I can control myself, and so can men. But our culture at large has sanctioned the idea that ‘Sex with men and sexual urges are uncontrollable. Sex is something that women have that men want, and we must police it.’
“This is why women think of themselves as victims; men don’t make us victims, the culture, the way we are raised to disown our sexual energy, this is what leads to acquaintance rape and to sexual harassment in the workplace.”
The burden of being male is just beginning to be discussed, written about, though the words stick in the craw, so wimpy, so unmasculine is it to change our picture of the Marlboro Man. Somewhere in the back of the Matriarchal Feminist mind there is the suspicion that if we allow men a humanity as vulnerable as our own, we women will become the brutes.
It seems that feminist headquarters will do anything to keep alive the proposition that men have all the power and women are nothing more than used Kleenex blowing in the wind. Last year, however, the Ms. Foundation went too far in preparing for its annual “Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” urging teachers and parents to educate little boys on how it feels to be a girl: The boy should close his eyes and imagine himself living inside a cramped, dark box. “What if you want to get out of the box and you can’t?” the written instructions read. “What do people say to girls to keep them in a box? What happens to girls who step outside the box?” Pressed to answer, I would imagine a boy would think he is more likely to be the one in a tight, dark box, given the amount of woman power at home, where as likely as not there is no other male, where mother/sister power is all he knows.
“Take Your Child to Work Day” is a great idea for both sexes. As young girls we do often abandon our best selves at age ten or eleven, but we would do it less if, from the day we were born, a man as well as a woman poured himself into us, his adoration, energy, voice, courage, everything. It is infuriating to imagine boys watching their sisters being honored, at their exclusion, being selected either by mother and/or father as The Chosen One. How will the boy see this? As he has seen life so far: women with all the power. And what about the splendid opportunity for boys to see women succeeding in the workplace, outside the nursery, and alongside men?
Why do we assume that our sons don’t need as much of our emotional and intellectual focus? We have skewed our thinking to see men solely as negative models. I hear women in offices referring contemptuously to male colleagues as “Empty Suits”; how does a dear, sensitive boy grow into an Empty Suit? There will never be a “Take Your Child to Work Day” until fathers begin to tell their sons the full story, good and bad, of what it is to grow up male.
The definition of manliness is still so rooted in the strong and silent imagery of the tough guy that the relatively few men who have come forward to complain of sexual harassment by a woman are looked down on, as are men who claim to have been abused by a woman. Even many of us who write and fight for men’s rights in the nursery admit to a vestigial twinge at the sight of a man with a baby strapped to his breast. We want him to love his baby, to do just what he is doing, but holding that baby, he can’t take the bullet for us. This is precisely what must be discussed: Ambivalence.
The real world that young men today encounter in the workplace is not the world that Steinem and her sisters preach, in which women are powerless opposite Bad, Omnipotent Men. This isn’t at all how young, and older, men feel. Neither sex is prepared for the relationships encountered today in the workplace. “There is often ambivalence,” says Eleanor Maccoby, a developmental psychologist of gender studies. “You’re not sure whether you want to be attractive to t
he other sex or just a colleague. That’s when people have difficulty.”
As a woman who is against real sexual harassment of women and men, let me quote Warren Farrell describing how men experience women’s provocative dress, makeup, and flirting: “[Men] see these behaviors as an invitation to respond on a non-professional level, which leads them to take this woman’s professional intentions less seriously.”
As anthropologist Lionel Tiger put it in our first Beauty Symposium in 1989, “Beauty is a marketing tool for Mother Nature’s most basic product—reproduction—which in turn depends upon sexual attraction and sexual success.” When the beauty’s initiative was successful, it led to marriage and the end of the woman’s involvement in the workplace.
Colleagues of the beautiful woman know that every heterosexual male is vulnerable to her. She is what Farrell calls a “genetic celebrity.” Male clients automatically offer her easier access. The male boss desires to mentor her, to show her the way and protect her from failing, to rescue her if she does fail; meanwhile, he also fears “playing favorites.” Farrell’s research indicates that the male employees who work for the beautiful woman fear that a genetic celebrity boss will be so used to being protected, she will not know how to protect them; they fear that she won’t know how to “give and take” because she must be used to having her way. They fear that she has probably had little experience in being criticized.
Luckily, there is a growing number of women speaking and writing about working women’s lives. “True, there are still far fewer women than men in senior management positions, but feminists don’t acknowledge that this disparity is at least partly the result of women’s choices,” writes Laura A. Ingraham, a lawyer on the advisory board of the Independent Women’s Forum. “The idea that women are constantly thwarted by invisible barriers of sexism relegates them to permanent victim status. It also stands on its head the cause that true feminists originally championed: equal opportunity for women. Equal access to the work force and advancement within it was never intended to guarantee that women would ultimately hold a fixed percentage of executive positions…. In 1992, women held 23 percent of corporate senior vice president positions as against 14 percent in 1982. From 1979 to 1993, women’s wages increased by 119 percent…. By demanding real, not rigged, competition in every profession, women would fulfill the true goal of feminism…. Instead of whining about an imaginary glass ceiling, why don’t feminists celebrate the fact that women in the work force are at long last pushing against a wide open door?”
Under Patriarchy, women didn’t question a man’s looks—the potbelly, sallow skin, loss of hair; if his bank account was healthy, his look of ill health didn’t register. We have an investment in the image of men as indestructible; even as women have gained economic power, we resist looking at the figures on men’s vulnerability.
In the past twenty-five years women’s health issues have received long overdue attention; now it is one of the fastest growing areas of medicine. But I worry when feminism paints the picture of evil Patriarchy thriving at women’s expense, when indeed, the facts are different. “In the latter part of the twentieth century women live about 10 percent longer than men,” writes Dr. Andrew Kadar. “Throughout human history from antiquity until the beginning of this century men, on the average, lived slightly longer than women. By 1920 women’s life expectancy in the United States was one year greater than men’s (54.6 years versus 53.6). After that the gap increased steadily, to 3.5 years in 1930, 4.4 years in 1940, 5.5 in 1950, 6.5 in 1960…. In 1990 the figure was seven years (78.8 versus 71.8)…. We have come to accept women’s longer life span as natural, the consequence of their greater biological fitness. Yet this greater fitness never manifested itself in all the millennia of human history that preceded the present era and its medical-care system—the same system that women’s-health advocates accuse of neglecting the female sex.”
While swallowing our morning coffee, we read with aplomb the latest statistics on violence committed by men. Women’s cruelty, however, is not as easily surveyed as men’s; sons don’t rat on their mothers, nor do most husbands on wives.
Some men, however, are coming forward. The morning paper recently told of a twenty-eight-year-old man who has lived uneasily all his life with a coroner’s report that his baby brothers’ deaths were diagnosed as crib deaths; having recently obtained legal action to have the bodies exhumed, he was right to have thought otherwise; twenty-five years ago his mother murdered her other two sons, and the judge, like everyone else at that time, refused to believe she did it. Mothers were idealized. More recently, Susan Smith, a South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons because they interfered with her love life, was quickly imprisoned. Medea grows more credible by the day.
Men have their work cut out for them: Paternalistic Society’s protection isn’t what it used to be. Women haven’t just acquired our due rights, we can act as bad as any man, setting up punitive sexual harassment laws. While most men remain reluctant to press charges against women, there being so few definitions of manliness aside from Spartan silence, it won’t last. Men are slow to confront feminism, but they aren’t dumb.
When men’s anger is voiced by the older patriarchal generation, as with Norman Mailer, we hear a startling revelation of men’s fear of women: “If women ever take over everything, as they well may,” Mailer is quoted as saying in an interview with Madonna, “and you get the equivalent of a Stalin or a Hitler among the women (and having had some contact with a few of the early women’s liberationists, I can easily conceive of such a female), I can see a day when a hundred male slaves will be kept alive and milked every day and the stuff will be put in semen banks to keep the race going. No more than a hundred men will have to be maintained alive at any time. Men have a very deep fear of women as a result. It isn’t that men think, ‘Oh, there’s a breast, I’ll lay my head on it; it’ll cost me nothing.’ Rather, what they know is that in that tender breast there are chill zones of feeling, icy areas, zones of detestation, and if they have any sense at all of women, they know that approaching a woman is quite equal to climbing a rock face…. Not everyone thinks the same way I think, but men feel it instinctively, I’d argue.”
What Mailer neglected in the above is that women, as well as men, have “a very deep fear of women.” It is our fear of one another, our need for other women’s approval, into which the Ms. form of feminism plays, the “don’t you dare disobey me, disagree with me, compete with me” command from the Giantess of The Nursery. Women’s anxiety over rejection by other women, the deep roots of our sadness that accompanies the feeling of being left out, gets its heat from that earliest relationship, which feminism naturally tapped into as a way to keep the marching army in line.
Early on, feminism preached that when women gained positions of real power, there would be less war. “With women as half the country’s elected representatives, and a woman President once in a while,” wrote Gloria Steinem in 1970, “the country’s machismo problems would be greatly reduced. The old-fashioned idea that manhood depends on violence and victory is, after all, an important part of our troubles in the streets, and in Viet Nam…. For the next 50 years or so, women in politics will be very valuable by tempering the idea of manhood into something less aggressive and better suited to this crowded, post-atomic planet.”
Women like Janet Reno, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and top Clinton adviser Susan Thomases don’t exactly flesh out Steinem’s prophecy that women would bring more compassion to positions of power. Nor has her forecast about women’s looks come to pass: “Women with normal work identities will be less likely to attach their whole sense of self to youth and appearance; thus there will be fewer nervous breakdowns when the first wrinkles appear.”
Oh?
Today, as women’s incomes increase, so do the amounts we spend on fashion and cosmetics; whether new on the job or climbing the corporate ladder, in sophisticated pants suits or skirts eight inches above the knee, women in the workplace want to look go
od; maintaining a youthful appearance is very much a part of that portrait. Fashion designers may attempt with peripatetic designs to decipher precisely what it is that women want, but you can be sure that young men aren’t going to just sit there and ogle the passing parade, taking whatever sexual harassment suits women throw at them. Instead, men will counterattack; they will compete with confused women and come up with a new golden age of male beauty.
Men will not be hampered by the “Who, me, beautiful?” defenses against envy that women hide behind. There is no girlish denial in men’s style of competition; today, as men move more into using their looks within the power structure of the workplace, they assemble their arsenal—briefcase and great looks too, employing everything to get the contract. “When you control the resources [as men once did, almost exclusively],” says consumer psychologist Michael R. Solomon, “you don’t worry about your personal desirability… [but the] influx of women into responsible positions in the workplace has shifted the balance of power.” Men look around for what can give them back their edge and see how effectively women’s looks work for them in the conference room.
A study finds that the city where men spend the most money on business clothing is not fashionable New York but Atlanta. A clothing executive tells Newsweek that Atlanta is “a city of salesmen and regional managers, ‘just the type of people who must put their best foot forward.’” As manufacturer Hart Schaffner & Marx says in its ad for what they call “The Right Suit”: [It] might not help you close the deal. But the wrong suit could easily close you out.”
Nor do men, as you may have noticed, confine their new focus on fashion to the workplace. Norman Karr of the Men’s Fashion Association tells Newsweek that men are accumulating separate wardrobes “for my public self and the real me.” Sound familiar, ladies?