I found evidence of these phenomena everywhere. There is, as I have said, an air of exaggerated unreality about sex today, whether it is pictured in the frankly lascivious pages of a popular novel or in the curious, almost asexual bodies of the women who pose for fashion photographs. According to Kinsey, there has been no increase in sexual “outlet” in recent decades. But in the past decade there has been an enormous increase in the American preoccupation with sex and sexual phantasy.1
In January, 1950, and again in January, 1960, a psychologist studied every reference to sex in American newspapers, magazines, television and radio programs, plays, popular songs, best-selling novels and nonfiction books. He found an enormous increase in explicit references to sexual desires and expressions (including “nudity, sex organs, scatology, ‘obscenity,’ lasciviousness and sexual intercourse”). These constituted over fifty per cent of the observed references to human sexuality, with “extramarital coitus” (including “fornication, adultery, sexual promiscuity, prostitution and venereal disease”) in second place. In American media there were more than 2 1/2 times as many references to sex in 1960 as in 1950, an increase from 509 to 1,341 “permissive” sex references in the 200 media studied. The so-called “men’s magazines” not only reached new excesses in their preoccupation with specific female sex organs, but a rash of magazines blossomed frankly geared to homosexuality. The most striking new sexual phenomenon, however, was the increased and evidently “insatiable” lasciviousness of best-selling novels and periodical fiction, whose audience is primarily women.
Despite his professional approval of the “permissive” attitude to sex compared to its previous hypocritical denial, the psychologist was moved to speculate:
Descriptions of sex organs…are so frequent in modern novels that one wonders whether they have become requisite for sending a work of fiction into the best-selling lists. Since the old, mild depictions of intercourse have seemingly lost their ability to excite, and even sex deviations have now become commonplace in modern fiction, the current logical step seems to be detailed descriptions of the sex organs themselves. It is difficult to imagine what the next step in salaciousness will be.2
From 1950 to 1960 the interest of men in the details of intercourse paled before the avidity of women—both as depicted in these media, and as its audience. Already by 1950 the salacious details of the sex act to be found in men’s magazines were outnumbered by those in fiction best-sellers sold mainly to women.
During this same period, the women’s magazines displayed an increased preoccupation with sex in a rather sickly disguise.3 Such “health” features as “Making Marriage Work,” “Can This Marriage Be Saved,” “Tell Me, Doctor,” described the most intimate sexual details in moralistic guise as “problems,” and women read about them in much the same spirit as they had read the case histories in their psychology texts. Movies and the theater betrayed a growing preoccupation with diseased or perverted sex, each new film and each new play a little more sensational than the last in its attempt to shock or titillate.
At the same time one could see, almost in parallel step, human sexuality reduced to its narrowest physiological limits in the numberless sociological studies of sex in the suburbs and in the Kinsey investigations. The two Kinsey reports, in 1948 and 1953, treated human sexuality as a status-seeking game in which the goal was the greatest number of “outlets,” orgasms achieved equally by masturbation, nocturnal emissions during dreams, intercourse with animals, and in various postures with the other sex, pre-extra-or post-marital. What the Kinsey investigators reported and the way they reported it, no less than the sex-glutted novels, magazines, plays and novels, were all symptoms of the increasing depersonalization, immaturity, joylessness and spurious senselessness of our sexual overpreoccupation.
That this spiral of sexual “lust, luridness and lasciviousness” was not exactly a sign of healthy affirmation of human intercourse became apparent as the image of males lusting after women gave way to the new image of women lusting after males. Exaggerated, perverted extremes of the sex situations seemed to be necessary to excite hero and audience alike. Perhaps the best example of this perverse reversal was the Italian movie La Dolce Vita, which with all its artistic and symbolic pretentions, was a hit in America because of its much-advertised sexual titillation. Though a comment on Italian sex and society, this particular movie was in the chief characteristics of its sexual preoccupation devastatingly pertinent to the American scene.
As is increasingly the case in American novels, plays and movies, the sex-seekers were mainly the women, who were shown as mindless over-or under-dressed sex creatures (the Hollywood star) and hysterical parasites (the journalist’s girl friend). In addition, there was the promiscuous rich girl who needed the perverse stimulation of the borrowed prostitute’s bed, the aggressively sex-hungry women in the candlelit “hide and seek” castle orgy, and finally the divorcée who performed her writhing strip tease to a lonely, bored and indifferent audience.
All the men, in fact, were too bored or too busy to be bothered. The indifferent, passive hero drifted from one sex-seeking woman to another—a Don Juan, an implied homosexual, drawn in phantasy to the asexual little girl, just out of reach across the water. The exaggerated extremes of the sex situations end finally in a depersonalization that creates a bloated boredom—in hero and audience alike. (The very tedium of depersonalized sex may also explain the declining audience of Broadway theaters, Hollywood movies and the American novel.) Long before the final scenes of La Dolce Vita—when they all go out to stare at that huge bloated dead fish—the message of the movie was made quite clear: “the sweet life” is dull.
The image of the aggressive female sex-seeker also comes across in novels like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report—which consciously cater to the female hunger for sexual phantasy. Whether or not this fictional picture of the over-lusting female means that American women have become avid sex-seekers in real life, at least they have an insatiable appetite for books dealing with the sexual act—an appetite that, in fiction and real life, does not always seem to be shared by the men. This discrepancy between the sexual preoccupation of American men and women—in fiction or reality—may have a simple explanation. Suburban housewives, in particular, are more often sex-seekers than sex-finders, not only because of the problems posed by children coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways, and gossiping servants, but because, quite simply, men are not all that available. Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. So, from teen age to late middle age, American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy. Even when the sexual affair—or the “extramarital petting” which Kinsey found on the increase—is real, it never is as real as the mystique has led the woman to believe.
As the male author of The Exurbanites puts it:
While her partner may be, and probably is, engaged in something quite casual to him, accompanied, of course, by verbal blandishments designed to persuade her of just the opposite, she is often quite genuinely caught up in what she conceives to be the real love of her life. Dismayed by the inadequacies of her marriage, confused and unhappy, angry and often humiliated by the behavior of her husband, she is psychologically prepared for the man who will skillfully and judiciously apply charm, wit and seductive behavior…. So, at the beach parties, at the Saturday night parties, on the long car rides from place to place—on all of which occasions the couples naturally split up—the first words can be spoken, the ground first prepared, the first fantasies conjured up, the first meaningful glance exchanged, the first desperate kiss snatched. And often, later, when the woman realizes that what was important to her was casual to him, she can cry and then she can dry her tears and look around again.4
But what happens when a woman bases her whole identity on her sexual role; when sex is necessary to make her “feel alive”? To state it quite simply, she puts
impossible demands on her own body, her “femaleness,” as well as on her husband and his “maleness.” A marriage counselor told me that many of the young suburban wives he dealt with make “such heavy demands on love and marriage, but there is no excitement, no mystery, sometimes almost literally nothing happens.”
It’s something she has been trained and educated for, all this sexual information and preoccupation, this clearly laid out pattern that she must devote herself to becoming a wife and mother. There is no wonder of two strangers, man and woman, separate beings, finding each other. It’s all laid out ahead of time, a script that’s being followed without the struggle, the beauty, the mysterious awe of life. And so she says to him, do something, make me feel something, but there is no power within herself to evoke this.
A psychiatrist states that he has often seen sex “die a slow, withering death” when women, or men, use the family “to make up in closeness and affection for failure to achieve goals and satisfactions in the wider community.”5 Sometimes, he told me, “there is so little real life that finally even the sex deteriorates, and gradually dies, and months go by without any desire, though they are young people.” The sexual act “tends to become mechanized and depersonalized, a physical release that leaves the partners even lonelier after the act than before. The expression of tender sentiment shrivels. Sex becomes the arena for the struggle for dominance and control. Or it becomes a drab, hollow routine, carried out on schedule.”
Even though they find no satisfaction in sex, these women continue their endless search. For the woman who lives according to the feminine mystique, there is no road to achievement, or status, or identity, except the sexual one: the achievement of sexual conquest, status as a desirable sex object, identity as a sexually successful wife and mother. And yet because sex does not really satisfy these needs, she seeks to buttress her nothingness with things, until often even sex itself, and the husband and the children on whom the sexual identity rests, become possessions, things. A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.
Is it the need for some kind of identity or achievement that drives suburban housewives to offer themselves so eagerly to strangers and neighbors—and that makes husbands “furniture” in their own homes? In a recent novel about suburban adultery, the male author says through a butcher who takes advantage of the lonely housewives in the neighborhood:
“Do you know what America is? It’s a big, soapy dishpan of boredom…and no husband can understand that soapy dishpan. And a woman can’t explain it to another woman because they’ve all got their hands in that same soapy boredom. So all a man has to be is understanding. Yes, baby, I know, I know, you’ve got a miserable life, here’re some flowers, here’s some perfume, here’s ‘I love you,’ take off your pants…. You, me, we’re furniture in our own homes. But if we go next door, ahh! Next door, we’re heroes! They’re all looking for romance because they’ve learned it from books and movies. And what can be more romantic than a man who’s willing to risk your husband’s shotgun to have you.…And the only exciting thing about this guy is that he is a stranger…she doesn’t own him. She tells herself she’s in love, and she’s willing to risk her home, her happiness, her pride, everything, just to be with this stranger who fills her once a week…. Anyplace you’ve got a housewife, you’ve also got a potential mistress for a stranger.”6
Kinsey, from his interviews of 5,940 women, found that American wives, especially of the middle class, after ten or fifteen years of marriage, reported greater sexual desire than their husbands seemed to satisfy. One out of four, by the age of forty, had engaged in some extramarital activity—usually quite sporadic. Some seemed insatiably capable of “multiple orgasms.” A growing number engaged in the “extramarital petting” more characteristic of adolescence. Kinsey also found that the sexual desire of American husbands, especially in the middle-class educated groups, seemed to wane as their wives’ increased.7
But even more disturbing than the signs of increased sexual hunger, unfulfilled, among American housewives in this era of the feminine mystique are the signs of increased conflict over their own femaleness. There is evidence that the signs of feminine sexual conflict, often referred to by the euphemism of “female troubles,” occur earlier than ever, and in intensified form, in this era when women have sought to fulfill themselves so early and exclusively in sexual terms.
The chief of the gynecological service of a famous hospital told me that he sees with increasing frequency in young mothers the same impairment of the ovarian cycle—vaginal discharge, delayed periods, irregularities in menstrual flow and duration of flow, sleeplessness, fatigue syndrome, physical disability—that he used to see only in women during menopause. He said:
The question is whether these young mothers will be pathologically blown apart when they lose their reproductive function. I see plenty of women with these menopausal difficulties which are activated, I’m sure, by the emptiness of their lives. And by simply having spent the last 28 years hanging on to the last child until there’s nothing left to hang on to. In contrast, women who’ve had children, sexual relations but who somehow have much more whole-hearted personalities, without continually having to rationalize themselves as female by having one more baby and holding on to it, have very few hot flashes, insomnia, nervousness, jitteriness.
The ones with female troubles are the ones who have denied their femininity, or are pathologically female. But we see these symptoms now in more and more young wives, in their 20’s, young women who are fatally invested in their children, who have not developed resources, other than their children—coming in with the same impairments of the ovarian cycle, menstrual difficulties, characteristic of the menopause. A woman 22 years old, who’s had three children, with symptoms more frequently seen with menopause…I say to her, “the only trouble with you is that you’ve had too many babies too fast” and reserve to myself the opinion “your personality has not developed far enough.”
At this same hospital, studies have been made of women recovering from hysterectomy, women with menstrual complaints, and women with difficult pregnancies. The ones who suffered the most pain, nausea, vomiting, physical and emotional distress depression, apathy, anxiety, were women “whose lives revolved almost exclusively around the reproductive function and its gratification in motherhood. A prototype of this attitude was expressed by one woman who said, ‘In order to be a woman, I have to be able to have children.’”8 The ones who suffered least had “well-integrated egos,” had resources of the intellect and were directed outward in their interests, even in the hospital, rather than preoccupied with themselves and their sufferings.
Obstetricians have seen this too. One told me:
It’s a funny thing. The women who have the backaches, the bleeding, the difficult pregnancy and delivery, are the ones who think their whole purpose in life is to have babies. Women who have other interests than just being reproductive machines have less trouble having babies. Don’t ask me to explain it. I’m no psychiatrist. But we’ve all noticed it.
Another gynecologist spoke of many patients in this era of “femaleness-fulfilled” to whom neither having babies nor sexual intercourse brought “fulfillment.” They were, in his words:
Women who feel very unsure about their sex and need to have children again and again to prove that they are feminine; women who have the fourth or fifth child because they can’t think of anything else to do; women who are dominant and this is something else to dominate; and then I have hundreds of patients who are college girls who don’t know what to do with themselves, their mothers bring them in for diaphragms. Because they are immature, going to bed means nothing—it is like taking medicine, no orgasm, nothing. For them getting married is an evasion.
The high incidence of cramps with menstruation, nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, depression with childbirth, and severe physiological and psychological distress at menop
ause have come to be accepted as a “normal” part of feminine biology.9 Are these stigmata that mark the stages of the female sexual cycle—menstruation, pregnancy, menopause—part of the fixed and eternal nature of women as they are popularly assumed to be, or are they somehow related to that unnecessary choice between “femininity” and human growth, sex and self? When a woman is a “sex creature,” does she see unconsciously in each step of her feminine sexual cycle a giving up, a kind of death, of her very reason for existence? These women who crowd the clinics are personifications of the feminine mystique. The lack of orgasm, the increasing “female troubles,” the promiscuous and insatiable sex-seeking, the depression at the moment of becoming a mother, the strange eagerness of women to have their female sex organs removed by hysterectomies without medical cause—all these betray the big lie of the mystique. Like the self-fulfilling prophecy of death in Samarra, the feminine mystique, with its outcry against loss of femininity, is making it increasingly difficult for women to affirm their femininity, and for men to be truly masculine, and for either to enjoy human sexual love.
The air of unreality that hovered over my interviews with suburban housewife sex-seekers, the unreality that pervades the sex-preoccupied novels, plays, and movies—as it pervades the ritualistic sex talk at suburban parties—I suddenly saw for what it was, on an island ostensibly far removed from suburbia, where sex-seeking is omnipresent, in pure phantasy. During the week, this island is an exaggeration of a suburb, for it is utterly removed from outside stimuli, from the world of work and politics; the men do not even come home at night. The women who were spending the summer there were extremely attractive young housewives. They had married early; they lived through their husbands and children; they had no interest in the world outside the home. Here on this island, unlike the suburb, these women had no way to make committees or housework expand to fill the time available. But they found a new diversion that killed two birds with one stone, a diversion that gave them a spurious sense of sexual status, but relieved them of the frightening necessity to prove it. On this island, there was a colony of “boys” right out of the world of Tennessee Williams. During the week when their husbands were working in the city, the young housewives had “wild” orgies, all-night parties, with these sexless boys. In a sort of humorous puzzlement, a husband who took the boat over unexpectedly one midweek to console his bored and lonely wife, speculated: “Why do they do it? Maybe it has something to do with this place being a matriarchy.”