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All men at the Tokio asked this. What do you like? It was part of the tête-à-tête of her profession, but what the men wanted was a limited variety of set responses: I like pleasing you. I like squirming on your lap. I like to fantasize about a man just like you watching me take my clothes off. I think about it when I’m alone, and I have to put my own little girl hands in my underwear, just to stop the longing to be on your lap. Gullibility was beside the point: hearing these things was a performance the men were paying for. They didn’t really want to know what she liked, and it never would have occurred to her to tell them. But she figured that the Frenchman, with his bemused half-smile, was too clever to want such an obvious put-on. He seemed to understand flirtation—real flirtation, and not a bluntly performed simulation of it. She suspected that if she said “I like squirming on your lap,” he’d surely laugh his head off, and at her expense.
“I like those few days of the year when it’s cold here, at the end of hurricane season,” she said. “It’s cold enough you need a sweater. And at night, blankets. But I don’t fall asleep with blankets over me. I leave them down at the end of the bed and make myself fall asleep uncovered. When I wake up later in the night, freezing cold, I reach down and pull up all the blankets.”
honestly i get it. it's like letting yourself fall asleep briefly on the couch midway through a book
[...] into a very large long room, in the middle of which was a gleaming oval table of the size which makes one think at once of the factory there must be somewhere whose whole business it is to create immense tables, long or oval or round, for the use of international conferences.
lol
Well of course it was ridiculous to expect her, Kate, to turn herself into an old woman just because … Soon she discovered that if she wanted to be alone, she should sit badly, in a huddled or discouraged posture, and allow her legs to angle themselves unbecomingly. If she did this men did not see her. She could swear they did not. Sitting neatly, alertly, with her legs sleekly disposed, she made a signal. Sagging and slumped, it was only when all the seats in the coffee room were taken that someone came to sit near her. At which time it was enough to let her face droop to gain her privacy again, and very soon.
It was really extraordinary! There she sat, Kate Brown, just as she had always been, her self, her mind, her awareness, watching the world from behind a façade only very slightly different from the one she had maintained since she was sixteen. It was a matter only of a bad posture, breasts allowed to droop, and a look of “Yes, if you have to …” and people did not see her. It gave her a dislocated feeling, as if something had slipped out of alignment. For she was conscious, very conscious, as alert to it as if this was the most important fact of her life, that the person who sat there watching, shunned or ignored by men who otherwise would have been attracted to her, was not in the slightest degree different from the person who could bring them all on again towards her by adjusting the picture of herself—lips, a set of facial muscles, eye movements, angle of back and shoulders. This is what it must feel to be an actor, an actress—how very taxing that must be, a sense of self kept burning behind so many different phantasms.
[...] The pain was more what some part of her which she felt she ought not to approve of believed was owed to the situation. But the marriage continued quite well. To the surprise of them both, since they were surrounded by divorcing couples, marriages which had not been able to withstand an infidelity … at this point, the pattern of Kate’s thought, or memories, quite simply dissolved. Some of it was true: they had been right in making sure they did not expect too much from each other, or from marriage. But for the rest—the truth was, she had lost respect for her husband. Why, when he was doing no more than “everyone” did, men in his situation? But she was feeling about him, had felt for some time, rather as if he had a weakness for eating sweets and would not restrain it. He was diminished; there was no doubt about that. She felt maternal about her husband; she had not done so once. To have fallen in love, and painfully—that she could understand, she had done the same herself. But to arrange his life, consciously and purposefully, as he had done, “clearing it” with her, of course, while he did it, so that he might have an infinite series of casual friendly sexual encounters with any young woman who went by—that made him seem trivial to her. And the way he had been dressing and doing his hair—when he came back from abroad somewhere, the first time, having tried to turn the clock back by at least fifteen years—she had suffered a fit of trembling anger and disgust. Soon, of course, she had been persuaded—not least by what Michael was not saying so much as indicating—that she was envious: it was petty of her.
But from the time she understood that this was what he was doing, and that this was what she could expect until old age did for him—unless, like a granny who dyed her hair and wore short skirts so that people could admire her legs, still unchanged, he would keep on till he died—she felt that her own worth, even her substance, had been assaulted. There was no explaining this, but it was a fact. Because her husband—who was in every possible way a good and responsible husband—had decided to experience an indefinite number of “affairs” that were by definition irresponsible, and would have no point to them but sex, she, Kate, felt diminished. She would have preferred him to confess—no, insist, as his right, on a real emotion—a real bond with some woman, even two or three women, which would deepen and last and demand loyalty—from herself as well. That would not have made her feel as if a wound had been opened in her from which substance and strength drained from her as she sat in her house in South London, knowing him to be (only in the intervals of his real work, his real interests, of course) pursuing this or that sexual titillation. She felt about him—against all reason and what her carefully constructed blueprints told her she could feel—as if he had lost his way, had lost purpose.
honestly relatable
As for the normalized sexism inside straight culture, lesbian feminists wrote volumes. With righteous rage, they detailed the ways that straight men desired women’s services—emotional, sexual, reproductive, domestic—rather than actual women, and they exposed the toll this took on women’s mental health. The Radicalesbians declared, “by virtue of being brought up in a male society, we have internalized the male culture’s definition of ourselves . . . as relative beings who exist not for ourselves, but for the servicing, maintenance, and comfort of men.”7 They described recoiling from men’s misogyny (“I began to avoid him, . . . to sleep with him to shut him up, to be silent out of exhaustion, to take tranquilizers . . .”).8 Audre Lorde described sex with men as “dismal and frightening and a little demeaning.”9 Gloria Anzaldúa recounted the misogyny inside straight Mexican culture, wherein “woman is the stranger, the other, . . . man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of fear,” and consequently, Anzaldúa explains, “I made the choice to be queer.”10 Kate Millet put forward a theory of patriarchy as a heterosexual political system maintained through men’s sexual power over women, in families as well as in the public sphere, that had naturalized rape and other forms of men’s sexual coercion and control of women.11 Cherríe Moraga concurred that the “control of women begins through the institution of heterosexuality,” adding that a man wants “to be able to determine how, when, and with whom his women—mother, wife, and daughter—are sexual. For without male-imposed social and legal control of our reproductive function . . . Chicanas might freely ‘choose’ otherwise, including being sexually independent from and/or with men.”12
ugh
[...] The professional and university-educated young women whom Fincher interviewed described their boyfriends as selfish, jealous, insensitive, boring, arrogant, and generally unappealing, and yet they also described a high likelihood that they would marry these men because they did not believe better men were available and they feared being lonely.61 This tragic arrangement on which heterosexuality was founded—“I don’t really like you, but I am going to get (or stay) married to you out of fear or practicality”—remains alive and well, giving rise to an enormously profitable self-help and relationship-coaching industry designed to smooth over heterosexual antagonisms and disappointments.
[...] In particular, the tension between the expectation of heterosexual love and men’s unapologetic disinterest in conversation with their wives produced a demand among women readers for advice on how to cultivate their husbands’ affection. For instance, Dr. Edward Podolsky’s 1947 book Sex Today in Wedded Life: A Doctors Confidential Advice includes a list of “10 Commandments for Wives”:
- Don’t bother your husband with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work.
- Be a good listener. Let him tell you his troubles; yours will seem trivial in comparison.
- Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego (which gets bruised plenty in business). Morale is a woman’s business.
- Let him relax before dinner, and discuss family problems after the “inner man” has been satisfied.
- Always remember he’s a male and marital relations promote harmony. Have sane views about sex.
- No man likes a wife who is always tired out. Conserve your energy so you can give him the companionship he craves.
- Never hold up your husband to ridicule in the presence of others. If you must criticize, do so privately and without anger.
- Remember a man is only a grown-up boy. He needs mothering and enjoys it if not piled on too thick.
- Don’t live beyond your means, or add to your husband’s financial burdens.
- Don’t try to boss him around. Let him think he wears the pants.
lol
In sum, midcentury representations of marriage doubled down on earlier themes of opposite-sex disinterest and resentment by suggesting to women that not only their bodies but also their personalities needed to be carefully managed in order to produce happy heterosexuality. As experts elaborated their expectations of the good wife, women’s submission and self-sacrifice became central ingredients of straight culture, with women warned about what they must give up in order to “keep their men” (the list of sacrifices included their jobs and interests, their desire for adult conversation, their selfhood). Straight culture was also marked by men’s fragility and irritation, their pervasive sense of burden, loss, and entrapment. Men were encouraged to fantasize about freedom from emotional intimacy with women or to dream of a life characterized by diminished heterosexual demands (i.e., bachelorhood) and expanded homosocial bonds (the company of men). Of particular significance to my analysis of the heterosexual-repair industry is the fact that midcentury advertisers learned to capitalize on the tragedy of heterosexuality by creating ads that played on men’s desire for freedom and power over women and women’s desire to be attractive and interesting to their husbands.54 Marketers recognized that women had to work to achieve and sustain men’s transitory satisfaction with heterosexual marriage or face the threat of abandonment and economic insecurity. Women’s subordination and precarity within heterosexual relationships gave marketers a phenomenally effective “hook” for reaching straight women consumers, a hook that would continue to animate the heterosexual-repair industry into the next several decades.55
Another number-one New York Times best seller from this era, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, by the psychologist Susan Forward and published in 1986, took a different and more feminist approach by naming misogyny, rather than codependency or lack of self-love, as the main dysfunction of the tragedy of heterosexuality. The book boldly demonstrated that misogyny was a widespread problem, characterized by men who controlled, devalued, yelled at, threatened, blamed, and frightened the women they claimed to love. These men flew into rages and acted like “hungry, demanding infants” who expected women to be “a never-ending source of total, all-giving love, adoration, concern, approval and nurturing.”60 In a particularly striking passage that echoes William Robinson’s account of heterosexual marriages seventy years prior, Forward acknowledged that readers may wonder about her use of the word “hatred” to describe many heterosexual relationships: “I realize that my use of the word hatred in the context of an intimate relationship is both explosive and controversial. . . . But it is the only word that sufficiently describes the combination of hostility, aggression, contempt, and cruelty that the misogynist exhibits in his behavior toward his partner.” [...]
Exemplifying this kind of broad generalizing about straight women, Kezia Noble announced during her bootcamp, in a salty and mocking tone, “Oh, he was so nice, I just had to have sex with him. . . . No woman has ever said that!” She went on to sing the praises of the bad-boy archetype: “If you are the bad guy, brilliant. He gives women a purpose, a challenge. He shows the world that he’s a big, bad, nasty guy but he shows the woman his good sides. He has a picture of his mother by his bedside table. He has cried in front of her. She wants to save him and melt his icy heart.” As I watched men take notes on this most nauseatingly heteronormative of monologues, I struggled not to roll my eyes with queer repulsion. It was not that I believed her to be wrong across the board; I knew many straight women, and queer women too, who were attracted to this kind of edgy masculinity. But it was the context of heteronormativity—wherein utterly mediocre straight men, including self-destructive, emotionally deficient tough guys, had the power to absorb straight women’s attention, to make women labor to save them, to impress women with the most basic displays of human feeling—that depressed me. Here was evidence of the power and resilience of narratives that repackage men’s deficiencies as enticing challenges for women.