Still Mad

by Still Mad (retail) (epub)

  Sex and the Single Girl functions as a self-help guide for the career gal who needs to know how and where to meet men. On which men are eligible, Brown advises her readers “not to rule out married men but to keep them as pets”: “While they are ‘using’ you to varnish their egos, you ‘use’ them to add spice to your life. I say ‘them’ advisedly. One married man is dangerous. A potpourri can be fun.” The key to attracting guys is to be “a sexy woman”—that is, “a woman who enjoys sex.” Accessories help: “the sheer stocking, the twenty-four-inch waist, the smoldering look.” Whereas “Clean hair is sexy,” evident “hair under your arms, on your legs and around your nipples, isn’t.”18 And so forth. If men are not liberated, women nevertheless have the means at their disposal to milk them for what they are worth.

  To be sure, Helen Gurley Brown believed that employment remains crucial before or even instead of marriage. She therefore pitches her own impoverished origins to set out the ways in which girls in lean times can live in style while saving for and investing in the future. Needless to say, these instructions include never going out “Dutch treat.” An instant success, Sex and the Single Girl critiqued a culture that defined sexually active young women as shameful. Amid advice on how to furnish an apartment as a “sure man-magnet,” how to entertain and diet, and how to exercise and use makeup (even “plastic surgery is very, very ‘natural’ ”), Brown emphasizes the importance of speaking honestly about women’s desires. She wants to blow to smithereens publications that portray “the problems of single women in the same vein as their articles on [nuclear] fall-out.” Marriage is “no longer the big question for women,” and therefore, “You, my friend, if you work at it, can be envied the rich, full life possible for the single woman today.”19

  As her biographer Jennifer Scanlon demonstrates, Helen Gurley Brown was attacked from the right (for promoting immorality) and from the left (for encouraging women to use sex in exchange for benefits from wealthier men).20 Yet, as Scanlon also shows, Brown appealed to those young career women who wanted to exploit a system biased against them. Embarking on diets that kept her 5'2" frame pencil-thin at 100 pounds, Brown devoted herself to selling the programs required by a deliberate performance of femininity. Her single girls are not prudes, sluts, bimbos, or old maids; they are ambitious to rise from rags to riches while savoring their work and their affairs—as Brown did until she settled down to the editorship of Cosmopolitan, which soon included articles on the ways in which the Pill improved women’s sex lives.

  In 1966, the year the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded to end sex discrimination, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson’s Human Sexual Response—also an instant best seller—echoed Helen Gurley Brown’s view that women are as sexually desirous as men and then upped the ante. In order to measure sexual response, the two researchers created “artificial coital equipment”: transparent plastic penises. Equipped with a camera, the dildo could be “controlled completely by the responding individual.” Nicknamed Ulysses, this plastic penis led the scientists to declare that “clitoral and vaginal orgasms are not separate biological entities.” In their view and in opposition to the Freudians, the clitoris is “unique,” the only organ “totally limited in physiologic function to initiating or elevating levels of sexual tension. No such organ exists within the anatomic structure of the human male.”21 One psychiatrist, Mary Ann Sherfey, immediately concluded: “There is no such thing as a vaginal orgasm distinct from a clitoral orgasm.”22

  Ulysses led Masters and Johnson to the realization that “many well-adjusted women enjoy a minimum of three or four orgasmic experiences before they reach satiation.” Unlike men, women are “capable of rapid return to orgasm immediately following an orgasmic experience,” and they can maintain “an orgasmic experience for a relatively long period of time.” Masters and Johnson want to “emphasize the physiologic similarities in male and female responses rather than the differences”; however, their data prove that “female orgasmic experience usually is developed more easily and is physiologically more intense . . . when induced by automanipulation as opposed to coition.”23

  Masturbation, not intercourse, evidently generated the most intense orgasmic experiences. At home, Penelope no longer had to wait passively for Ulysses, weaving and unweaving her tapestry. By the end of the sixties, feminists would tease out the significance of the view promulgated by Human Sexual Response: men, liberated or unliberated, were instrumental for reproduction, but were no longer needed to bring about female sexual satisfaction.

  SUSAN SONTAG, JOAN DIDION, AND SAN FRANCISCO

  Long before Ulysses the plastic penis was a glitter in the eyes of Masters and Johnson, the 26-year-old Susan Sontag meditated on the orgasm. “Good orgasm vs. bad. Orgasms come in all sizes,” she mused in her journal in 1959, adding, “Woman’s orgasm is deeper than the man’s. ‘Everybody knows that.’ Some men never have an orgasm; they ejaculate numb.” A few months later, she was still brooding on the same subject. “The coming of the orgasm has changed my life,” she noted, and went on to declare: “The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego.”24 Sontag would continue to welcome the new forms of eroticism ushered in by the sexual revolution, while another public intellectual, Joan Didion, would deplore them.

  Famous for her brilliance as a critic, Sontag was both intellectually and sexually precocious. At an early age she had decided that she was either bisexual or homosexual, and as a 15-year-old freshman at the University of California, Berkeley, she had an affair with a classmate, Harriet Sohmers, who would become an on-and-off fixture in her life. With Harriet, she cruised the gay bars in San Francisco, got drunk, and made wild love while also applying to the University of Chicago, drawn by its Great Books program. Then, at 16, she left Berkeley for Chicago.

  During her second year of college, Sontag listed the lovers she had from “1947 (age 14) to 8/28/50 (age 17)”: they added up to thirty-six. According to her biographer Benjamin Moser, the list, titled “The Bi’s Progress,” shows that she “was trying to train herself into heterosexuality by increasing the proportion of heterosexual encounters.”25 After a brief courtship, she married her sociology instructor, the 28-year-old Philip Rieff, when she was just 17. Shortly before the wedding, she wrote a single, solemn entry in her journal: “1/3/51: I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness.”26 Retrospectively, alluding to the pedantic antihero of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, she often said, “I married Mr. Casaubon.”27

  Despite anxiety about her marriage, she thrived on Chicago’s Great Books, graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa when she was 18 and giving birth to her only child, David Rieff, when she was 19. During these years, she also collaborated with Philip Rieff on his well-received Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959), for which he claimed sole authorship but which she later insisted she had co-written. From Chicago, Rieff went on to teach at Brandeis, and Sontag pursued further studies at Harvard while teaching freshman English at the University of Connecticut and—at the same time—caring for young David.

  By the time she was awarded an American Association of University Women Fellowship to Oxford, though, the marriage was crumbling. Sontag went to Europe on her own in 1957, leaving David with his grandparents and essentially abandoning Rieff, though he did all he could to keep her. Disliking Oxford’s formality, she left for Paris after one term, ostensibly to study at the Sorbonne but really to immerse herself in the culture of the Rive Gauche. There she fell again into the arms of Harriet Sohmers and, almost simultaneously, longed to make love to the Cuban playwright Irene Fornes, Sohmers’s current inamorata, who would later become her own partner in New York. There she heard Simone de Beauvoir “talk on the novel” and concluded that she is “lean and tense and black-haired and very good-looking for her age, but her voice is unpleasant.”28 And there she learned to be the cosmopolite—the “intellectual-diva,”29 as one observer called
her—who would become a youthful star among the New York intellectuals of Commentary and Partisan Review.

  She was striking, with a mane of dark hair that would, as she aged, be marked with a signature streak of white. Commentators even compared her to “Marilyn” and “Judy”—glamour girls with whom enthralled admirers like to think themselves on a first-name basis. “Jackie” too would fit into this category, and “Gloria.” But none of them had an intellectual glamour as dazzling as their celebrated looks: only “Susan” had that. As if to emphasize this point, her first book, a sort of “antinovel” titled The Benefactor (in which, said the New York Times reviewer, “the characters do not lead lives, they assume postures”),30 featured no blurbs on the back jacket but only a sumptuous portrait of the author, looking pensive and French, in a black turtleneck.

  Though The Benefactor (1963) wasn’t much of a success, by the time the feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun interviewed her in 1967 Sontag was such a celebrity that, said Heilbrun, “Everyone knows who she is. . . . One need not have read her books, nor even have heard of Partisan Review. . . . [She is] smart enough to tell America off, and glamorous enough to make America like it.”31 What catapulted her into the pages of the popular press was her essay “Notes on Camp,” which appeared in 1964 and drew so much attention that Time magazine did a story about it.

  In setting down a collection of cultural decrees, Sontag assumes a kind of Wildean role, transforming herself into a philosopher of pop culture. “Camp,” she declared, “sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ ” And then, “Camp is the triumph of the epicene style. (The convertibility of ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ ‘person’ and ‘thing.’)”32 With these two “notes” (numbered 10 and 11), Sontag, “out” neither as a feminist nor as a lesbian, might as well have been inventing some of the theoretical notions of the nineties feminists who claimed that there is no ontological woman, only a socially constructed “woman.” (But then, remember that Sontag had been listening attentively to Simone de Beauvoir in Paris, and perhaps inhaling Beauvoir’s view that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”)33

  “Notes on Camp” was also, to be sure, a celebration of what had long been an underground gay aesthetic, so in elaborating these ideas Sontag was allying herself (a supposedly closeted lesbian) with a long tradition of transgressive transvestism. No wonder that the essay particularly enraged both the right-wing critic John Simon and the Old Left thinker Irving Howe.34 From the perspective of both men, Sontag’s blurring of genre distinctions was close to barbaric.

  By the time she had published Against Interpretation, Sontag had indeed come to be an acolyte of what the historian Theodore Roszak shrewdly called the counter culture,35 and as a partisan of that subversive movement she had become not only a defender of the new revolution represented by, say, hippie flower children in San Francisco but also an antiwar activist, horrified by the role that the American military had come to play in the Vietnam War. If “Notes on Camp” had been shocking in its espousal of a gender-bending gay aesthetic, “What’s Happening in America,” published in 1966, was perhaps even more scandalous in its attack on “the arch-imperium” of “today’s America, with Ronald Reagan the new daddy of California and John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House.” Cataloging America’s flaws—“the most brutal system of slavery in modern times,” “a country where the indigenous culture was simply the enemy . . . and where nature, too, was the enemy”—she notoriously concluded that America is the apotheosis of the civilization of “the white race” and that “the white race is the cancer of human history . . . which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads [and] which has upset the ecological balance of the planet.”36

  Against this backdrop of what she considered the “Yahooland” of America, Sontag argued that the rebellious youth of the sixties heralded a brave new world. Responding to an attack on hippies by the critic Leslie Fiedler (who feared that long-haired pot-smoking young men were “the new mutants” bringing about a “radical metamorphosis of the Western male”), she celebrated what she called the “depolarizing of the sexes” as “the natural, and desirable, next stage of the sexual revolution.” “From my own experience and observation,” she confided, “I can testify that there is a profound concordance between the sexual revolution, redefined, and the political revolution, redefined.” For what “some of the kids understand is that it’s the whole character structure of modern American man . . . that needs rehauling.”37

  If one were to postulate an anti-Sontag, Joan Didion would be an almost inevitable choice. Yet like Helen Gurley Brown and Gloria Steinem, the two had a lot in common. They were nearly the same age, and both so photogenic that their portraits often appeared instead of copy on their book jackets. Both were California-bred, both studied at UC Berkeley, and both were successful journalists. But where Sontag started her career in intellectual quarterlies, Didion wrote for Vogue, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Both were drawn to film, but where Sontag studied the avant-garde and eventually directed a few innovative movies, Didion worked in Hollywood. Where Sontag promoted revolution in cultural, aesthetic, and sexual mores, Didion was having none of it. Where Sontag (born Susan Rosenblatt) came from an immigrant Jewish family and never knew her father, who died when she was 5, Didion was born into a WASP ranching family that had long been established in Sacramento.

  Even more important, where Sontag aligned herself with the Old (and then the New) Left, Didion cleaved to Republican conservatism. Where Sontag drew a parodic picture of “John Wayne chawing spareribs in the White House,” Didion limned a misty-eyed portrait of “Duke’s” true grit in “John Wayne: A Love Song.”38 And where Sontag was drawn to the political and sexual changes that were immanent in the experimental lives of “the kids” in the sixties, Didion traveled from Los Angeles to San Francisco to research their ways because she wanted to study “the evidence of atomization, the proof that things fall apart.”39 The result of her entirely sober trip into the center of drug-induced tripping was her most famous essay, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.”

  The piece—whose title was drawn from W. B. Yeats’s apocalyptic “The Second Coming”—begins with a passage of unmitigated gloom, which is worth quoting at some length:

  The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes. . . . It was a country in which families routinely disappeared . . . and adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and future as snakes shed their skins. . . . It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady . . . and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes[,] . . . but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not.40

  From this set of bleak assumptions about the mid-sixties as an American landscape that is, on the one hand, a sort of post-apocalyptic waste land and, on the other hand, a weirdly Orwellian society in which “a great many articulate people” profess duplicitous optimism, Didion begins her investigation of San Francisco, “where the social hemorrhaging was showing up,” and “where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves ‘hippies.’ ”41

  She locates herself in Haight-Ashbury, during the famous 1967 “summer of love,” where a conglomeration of “beatniks,” “hippies,” and “flower children” are smoking dope, listening to the Doors or the Grateful Dead, dropping acid, and celebrating “be-ins” in Golden Gate Park. Here she befriends a crew of mostly inarticulate teenage drifters—Don, Max, Sharon, and so forth, along with an equally inarticulate Officer Gerrans, who is shrewdly introduced by Max as “our Officer Krupke” and who explains that “the major problems [in the Haight] are narcotics and juveniles. Juveniles and narcotics, those are your major problems.” 42 Didion’s stance t
oward this cast of characters is, as one might expect from the opening paragraphs of her essay, both icily objective and bitterly ironic. A sophisticated documentarian, she lets many of her subjects speak for themselves:

  “I’ve had this old lady for a couple of months now, maybe she makes something special for my dinner and I come in three days late and tell her I’ve been balling some other chick, well, maybe she shouts a little but then I say, ‘That’s me, baby,’ and she laughs and says, ‘That’s you, Max.’ ”

  “I remember I wanted to be a veterinarian once. . . . But now I’m more or less working in the vein of being an artist or a model or a cosmetologist. Or something.”

  “I found love on acid. But I lost it. And now I’m finding it again. With nothing but grass.”43

  Gradually the tone darkens as Didion enters less laughable scenes. Searching for the mysterious Chester Anderson, a 30-something “legacy of the Beat Generation” who posts “communiques” all over the district, she records one of them verbatim:

  Pretty little 16-year-old middle-class chick comes to the Haight to see what it’s all about & gets picked up by a 17-year-old street dealer who spends all day shooting her full of speed[,] . . . then feeds her 3,000 mikes & raffles off her temporarily unemployed body for the biggest Haight Street gangbang since the night before last. . . . Rape is as common as bullshit on Haight Street. Kids are starving on the Street. Minds and bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.44

  When the summer of love began, the hippie part of San Francisco, mellowed by the comparative innocence of marijuana and energized by, yes, the legacy of the Beats, seemed as hopeful as Sontag had thought it was. Participants in all the revolutionary “movements” of the decade—the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement—mingled with paisley-clad, long-haired, runaway teenagers. But dealers moved in and earnest students went back to school, leaving quite a lot of debris behind them.