Perhaps, too, it had something to do with boredom—there just was not anything else to do. But it looked like sex; that’s what made it so exciting, even though there was, of course, no sexual contact. Perhaps, these housewives and their boyfriends recognized themselves in each other. For like the call girl in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s who spends the sexless night with the passive homosexual, they were equally childlike in their retreat from life. And in each other, they sought the same nonsexual reassurance.
But in the suburbs where most hours of the day there are virtually no men at all—to give even the appearance of sex—women who have no identity other than sex creatures must ultimately seek their reassurance through the possession of “things.” One suddenly sees why manipulators cater to sexual hunger in their attempt to sell products which are not even remotely sexual. As long as woman’s needs for achievement and identity can be channeled into this search for sexual status, she is easy prey for any product which presumably promises her that status—a status that cannot be achieved by effort or achievement of her own. And since that endless search for status as a desirable sexual object is seldom satisfied in reality for most American housewives (who at best can only try to look like Elizabeth Taylor), it is very easily translated into a search for status through the possession of objects.
Thus women are aggressors in suburban status-seeking and their search has the same falseness and unreality as their sex-seeking. Status, after all, is what men seek and acquire through their work in society. A woman’s work—housework—cannot give her status; it has the lowliest status of almost any work in society. A woman must acquire her status vicariously through her husband’s work. The husband himself, and even the children, become symbols of status, for when a woman defines herself as a housewife, the house and the things in it are, in a sense, her identity; she needs these external trappings to buttress her emptiness of self, to make her feel like somebody. She becomes a parasite, not only because the things she needs for status come ultimately from her husband’s work, but because she must dominate, own him, for the lack of an identity of her own. If her husband is unable to provide the things she needs for status, he becomes an object of contempt, just as she is contemptuous of him if he cannot fill her sexual needs. Her very dissatisfaction with herself she feels as dissatisfaction with her husband and their sexual relations. As a psychiatrist put it: “She demands too much satisfaction from her marital relations. Her husband resents it and becomes unable to function sexually with her at all.”
Could this be the reason for the rising tide of resentment among the new young husbands at the girls whose only ambition was to be their wives? The old hostility against domineering “moms” and aggressive career girls may, in the long run, pale before the new male hostility for the girls whose active pursuit of the “home career” has resulted in a new kind of domination and aggression. To be the tool, the sex-instrument, the “man around the house,” is evidently no dream-come-true for a man.
In March, 1962, a reporter noted in Redbook a new phenomenon on the suburban scene: that “young fathers feel trapped”:
Many husbands feel that their wives, firmly quoting authorities on home management, child rearing and married love, have set up a tightly scheduled, narrowly conceived scheme of family living that leaves little room for a husband’s authority or point of view. (A husband said “Since I’ve been married, I feel I’ve lost all my guts. I don’t feel like a man anymore. I’m still young, yet I don’t get much out of life. I don’t want advice, but I sometimes feel like something is bursting loose inside.”) The husbands named their wives as their chief source of frustration, superseding children, employers, finances, relatives, community and friends…. The young father is no longer free to make his own mistakes or to swing his own weight in a family crisis. His wife, having just read Chapter VII, knows exactly what should be done.
The article goes on to quote a social worker:
The modern wife’s insistence on achieving sexual satisfaction for herself may pose a major problem for her husband. A husband can be teased, flattered and cajoled into performing as an expert lover. But if his wife scorns and upbraids him as though he had proved unable to carry a trunk up the attic stairs, she is in for trouble…. It’s alarming to note that five years after marriage, a sizable number of American husbands have committed adultery and a much larger proportion are seriously tempted to do so. Often, infidelity is less a search for pleasure than a means of self-assertion.
Four years ago, I interviewed a number of wives on a certain pseudo-rural road in a fashionable suburb. They had everything they wanted: lovely houses, a number of children, attentive husbands. Today, on that same road, there are a growing spate of dream-houses in which, for various and sometimes unaccountable reasons, the wives now live alone with the children, while the husbands—doctors, lawyers, account chiefs—have moved to the city. Divorce, in America, according to the sociologists, is in almost every instance sought by the husband, even if the wife ostensibly gets it.10 There are, of course, many reasons for divorce, but chief among them seems to be the growing aversion and hostility that men have for the feminine millstones hanging around their necks, a hostility that is not always directed at their wives, but at their mothers, the women they work with—in fact, women in general.
According to Kinsey, the majority of the American middle-class males’ sexual outlets are not in relations with their wives after the fifteenth year of marriage; at fifty-five, one out of two American men is engaging in extramarital sex.11 This male sex-seeking—the office romance, the casual or intense affair, even the depersonalized sex-for-sex’s-sake satirized in the recent movie The Apartment—is, as often as not, motivated simply by the need to escape from the devouring wife. Sometimes the man seeks the human relationship that got lost when he became merely an appendage to his wife’s aggressive “home career.” Sometimes his aversion to his wife finally makes him seek in sex an object totally divorced from any human relationship. Sometimes, in phantasy more often than in fact, he seeks a girl-child, a Lolita, as sexual object—to escape that grownup woman who is devoting all her aggressive energies, as well as her sexual energies, to living through him. There is no doubt that male outrage against women—and inevitably, against sex—has increased enormously in the era of the feminine mystique.12 As a man wrote in a letter to the Village Voice, New York’s Greenwich Village newspaper, in February, 1962: “It isn’t a problem anymore of whether White is too good to marry Black, or vice versa, but whether women are good enough to marry men, since women are on the way out.”
The public symbol of this male hostility is the retreat of American playwrights and novelists from the problems of the world to an obsession with images of the predatory female, the passive martyred male hero (in homo-or heterosexual clothes), the promiscuous childlike heroine, and the physical details of arrested sexual development. It is a special world, but not so special that millions of men and women, boys and girls cannot identify with it. Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” is a flagrant example of this world.
The aging homosexual hero from an old Southern family, haunted by the monstrous birds that devour baby sea turtles, has wasted his life in pursuit of his lost golden youth. He himself has been “eaten” by his seductively feminine mother, just as, in the end, he is literally eaten by a band of young boys. It is significant that the hero of this play never appears; he is without a face, without a body. The only undeniably “real” character is the man-eating mother. She appears again and again in Williams’ plays and in the plays and novels of his contemporaries, along with the homosexual sons, the nymphomaniacal daughters, and the revengeful male Don Juans. All of these plays are an agonized shout of obsessed love-hate against women. Significantly, a great many of these plays are written by Southern writers, where the “femininity” which the mystique enshrines remains most intact.
This male outrage is the result, surely, of an implacable hatred for the parasitic women who ke
ep their husbands and sons from growing up, who keep them immersed at that sickly level of sexual phantasy. For the fact is that men, too, are now being drawn away from the large world of reality into the stunted world of sexual phantasy in which their daughters, wives, mothers have been forced to look for “fulfillment.” And, for men too, sex itself is taking on the unreal character of phantasy—depersonalized, dissatisfying, and finally inhuman.
Is there, after all, a link between what is happening to the women in America and increasingly overt male homosexuality? According to the feminine mystique, the “masculinization” of American women which was caused by emancipation, education, equal rights, careers, is producing a breed of increasingly “feminine” men. But is this the real explanation? As a matter of fact, the Kinsey figures showed no increase in homosexuality in the generations which saw the emancipation of women. The Kinsey report revealed in 1948 that 37 per cent of American men had had at least some homosexual experience, that 13 per cent were predominantly homosexual (for at least three years between 16 and 55), and 4 per cent exclusively homosexual—some 2,000,000 men. But there was “no evidence that the homosexual group involved more males or fewer males today than it did among older generations.”13
Whether or not there has been an increase in homosexuality in America, there has certainly been in recent years an increase in its overt manifestations.14 I do not think that this is unrelated to the national embrace of the feminine mystique. For the feminine mystique has glorified and perpetuated in the name of femininity a passive, childlike immaturity which is passed on from mothers to sons, as well as to daughters. Male homosexuals—and the male Don Juans, whose compulsion to test their potency is often caused by unconscious homosexuality—are, no less than the female sex-seekers, Peter Pans, forever childlike, afraid of age, grasping at youth in their continual search for reassurance in some sexual magic.
The role of the mother in homosexuality was pinpointed by Freud and the psychoanalysts. But the mother whose son becomes homosexual is usually not the “emancipated” woman who competes with men in the world, but the very paradigm of the feminine mystique—a woman who lives through her son, whose femininity is used in virtual seduction of her son, who attaches her son to her with such dependence that he can never mature to love a woman, nor can he, often, cope as an adult with life on his own. The love of men masks his forbidden excessive love for his mother; his hatred and revulsion for all women is a reaction to the one woman who kept him from becoming a man. The conditions of this excessive mother-son love are complex. Freud wrote:
In all the cases examined we have ascertained that the later inverts go through in their childhood a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation on the woman (usually the mother) and after overcoming it, they identify themselves with the woman and take themselves as the sexual object; that is, proceeding on a narcissistic basis, they look for young men resembling themselves in persons whom they wish to love as their mother loved them.15
Extrapolating from Freud’s insights, one could say that such an excess of love-hate is almost implicit in the relationship of mother and son—when her exclusive role as wife and mother, her relegation to the home, force her to live through her son. Male homosexuality was and is far more common than female homosexuality. The father is not as often tempted or forced by society to live through or seduce his daughter. Not many men become overt homosexuals, but a great many have suppressed enough of this love-hate to feel not only a deep repugnance for homosexuality, but a general and sublimated revulsion for women.
Today, when not only career, but any serious commitment outside the home, are out of bounds for truly “feminine” housewife-mothers, the kind of mother-son devotion which can produce latent or overt homosexuality has plenty of room to expand to fill the time available. The boy smothered by such parasitical mother-love is kept from growing up, not only sexually, but in all ways. Homosexuals often lack the maturity to finish school and make sustained professional commitments. (Kinsey found homosexuality most common among men who do not go beyond high school, and least common among college graduates.)16 The shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity, lack of lasting human satisfaction that characterize the homosexual’s sex life usually characterize all his life and interests. This lack of personal commitment in work, in education, in life outside of sex, is hauntingly “feminine.” Like the daughters of the feminine mystique, the sons spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy; the sad “gay” homosexuals may well feel an affinity with the young housewife sex-seekers.
But the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene is no less ominous than the restless, immature sex-seeking of the young women who are the aggressors in the early marriages that have become the rule rather than the exception. Nor is it any less frightening than the passivity of the young males who acquiesce to early marriage rather than face the world alone. These victims of the feminine mystique start their search for the solace of sex at an earlier and earlier age. In recent years, I have interviewed a number of sexually promiscuous girls from comfortable suburban families, including a number—and this number is growing17—of girls who marry in their early teens because they are pregnant. Talking to these girls, and to the professional workers who are trying to help them, one quickly sees that sex, for them, is not sex at all. They have not even begun to experience a sexual response, much less “fulfillment.” They use sex—pseudo-sex—to erase their lack of identity; it seldom matters who the boy is; the girl almost literally does not “see” him when she has as yet no sense of herself. Nor will she ever have a sense of herself if she uses the easy rationalizations of the feminine mystique to evade in sex-seeking the efforts that lead to identity.
Early sex, early marriage, has always been a characteristic of underdeveloped civilizations and, in America, of rural and city slums. One of the most striking of Kinsey’s findings, however, was that a delay in sexual activity was less a characteristic of socio-economic origin than of the ultimate destination—as measured, for instance, by education. A boy from a slum background, who put himself through college and became a scientist or judge, showed the same postponement of sexual activity in adolescence as others who later became scientists or judges, not as others from the same slum background. Boys from the right side of the tracks, however, who did not finish college or become scientists or judges showed more of that earlier sexual activity that was characteristic of the slum.18 Whatever this indicates about the relationship between sex and the intellect, a certain postponement of sexual activity seemed to accompany the growth in mental activity required and resulting from higher education, and the achievement of the professions of highest value to society.
Among the girls in the Kinsey survey, there even seemed to be a relationship between the ultimate level of mental or intellectual growth as measured by education, and sexual satisfaction. Girls who married in their teens—who, in Kinsey’s cases, usually stopped education with high school—started having sexual intercourse five or six years earlier than girls who continued their education through college or into professional training. This earlier sexual activity did not, however, usually lead to orgasm; these girls were still experiencing less sexual fulfillment, in terms of orgasm, five, ten and fifteen years after marriage than those who had continued their education.19 As with the promiscuous girls in the suburbs, early sexual preoccupation seemed to indicate a weak core of self which even marriage did not strengthen.
Is this the real reason for the kind of compulsive sex-seeking seen today in promiscuity, early and late, heterosexual or homosexual? Is it a coincidence that the many phenomena of depersonalized sex—sex without self, sex for lack of self—are becoming so rampant in the era when American women are told to live by sex alone? Is it a coincidence that their sons and daughters have selves so weak that they resort at an increasingly early age to a dehumanized, faceless sex-seeking? Psychiatrists have explained that the key problem in promiscuity is usually “low self-esteem,” which often see
ms to stem from an excessive mother-child attachment; the type of sex-seeking is relatively irrelevant. As Clara Thompson, speaking of homosexuality, says:
Overt homosexuality may express fear of the opposite sex, fear of adult responsibility…it may represent a flight from reality into absorption in bodily stimulation very similar to the auto-erotic activities of the schizophrenic, or it may be a symptom of destructiveness of oneself or others.…People who have a low self-esteem…have a tendency to cling to their own sex because it is less frightening.…However, the above considerations do not invariably produce homosexuality, for the fear of disapproval from the culture and the need to conform often drive these very people into marriage. The fact that one is married by no means proves that one is a mature person…. The mother-child attachment is sometimes found to be the important part of the picture…. Promiscuity is possibly more frequent among homosexuals than heterosexuals, but its significance in the personality structure is very similar in the two. In both, the chief interest is in genitals and body stimulation. The person chosen to share the experience is not important. The sexual activity is compulsive and is the sole interest.20