Fear of Fifty (15 page)

Sometimes I wonder why it took me so long to realize that I was supposed to be the second sex? What insulated me when my sisters were not similarly insulated? I always felt like the designated heir. But heir to what? Heir to my father's show business ambitions and my mother's art? Heir to my grandfather's easel and my mother's fierce feminism?
“Do as I say, not as I did,”
she somehow communicated. And “
I got gypped, but you can have it all.”

I actually remember her saying: “If you have fame, you'll have your pick of beautiful men.”

“I
never
said that,” my mother protests.

But she did.

Or else I heard it. (I was not to learn the complications of that imperative until much later.)

No sons.
⁸
A family with no sons. In a family of daughters, one daughter may become the son. Is that the devil's bargain we make? I only know that somehow I became the weary carrier of most of the parental and grandparental ambitions. And what a heavy load it was. Somehow I had to be at once an artist, a vaudevillian, and an earner of big money. I wanted to be that oxymoron: a bestselling poet. I wanted to be a millionaire artist. My ambitions were so impossible that I felt like a failure no matter what I achieved. I still do.

But where did I pick up the message that I was the second sex? In school. We learn at home and we learn at school. And of the two forms of learning, perhaps school is the most damaging. We look to school for the world's authority. We look to school to tell us whether what we learned at home was right or wrong. And school too often reinforces the worst prejudices of our culture: a tendency to mindlessly rank us as if intelligence were quantifiable, a tendency to stereotype the sexes, to see male and female as separate opposed beings instead of qualities we all possess, a tendency to teach us by rote and exclusion instead of by freedom and expansion.

When I was in high school, I already called myself a feminist, and I carried a copy of
The Second Sex
as proof. I don't remember whether I read it. I didn't need to. I knew that women had to eat a lot of shit. I knew that boys were arrogant and that women learned to appease them to survive. I didn't question there was a problem. I only questioned how to
solve
it.

Although I read and wrote all the time, and reading and writing were the things I liked to do best, I told most people I was going to be a doctor. It was not just that I was drawn to healing—still am—but that I was looking for a profession where women were not trod upon. From my adolescent vantage point, medicine seemed to be it.

This is not a chapter about whether or not women are equal in medicine. This is a chapter about learning to be unequal, and most of that learning takes place in adolescence.

The boys snap the back of your bra. You live in terror of your Kotex bleeding through. Your body suddenly becomes an encumbrance, a source of ridicule. It's not just the unwieldiness of all bodies, but the particular vulnerability of a female body, which can bleed so unexpectedly and which marks you inevitably as a potential victim.

Of course it doesn't help that women are still raped everywhere, that one in three women is injured by the man she lives with and calls husband or lover. Even if the world were safe, adolescence would mean vulnerability for girls. Suddenly you become a sexual prey and suddenly you know it. Suddenly the long, sunny afternoons of reading Nancy Drew mysteries on the beach are over. You enter a new world—a world of menace.

When I started at Music and Art, my family lived at Eighty-first Street and Central Park West. Every morning at eight, I had to go down into the roaring subway and travel to 135th Street and Convent Avenue. The train was mostly deserted—all the traffic went the other way. Often I would see exhibitionists in the subway—old men with open flies and exposed cocks fondling themselves and whispering to me to come, come, come. Sometimes I looked. Sometimes I was afraid to look. Sometimes I bolted down to the next car, my heart thudding in my chest.

“Oh, exhibitionists never
do
anything. They're afraid of their own shadows,” my mother used to tell me. This was about as comforting as being told that when we die we go back into the earth and become tomatoes. Even for a kid from a pretty sheltered childhood, it was terrifying. Nobody molested me at home, but by the time I was thirteen, nobody could
protect
me. Maleness was out there—an anarchic, unchecked force. Women didn't expose themselves in subways. I learned that women were trustworthy and men were not.

Now, when I send my daughter to school in a New York grown twenty times as violent as when I was a kid, I send her on a private bus. If somebody raped her, I would kill him and expect to be acquitted. Though she's five foot seven and towers over me, she's a vulnerable little girl at heart. I still tuck her in bed with a teddy bear. I send her off to school with trepidation. “You are surrounded by a shield of white light,” I say, as I once said, “Goddess Bless and Goddess Keep” over her crib. I turn to witchcraft and the mother goddess at moments like these because I want to summon the primal forces of the universe. I need Kali and Isis, Inanna and Mary, to shield my daughter.

A society that can't protect its young women is a doomed society. Male aggression has existed throughout history, but always it has been channeled, ritualized into jousts and quests, contained. Not now. Why do we care so little for our daughters?

My mother's response to the exhibitionists was a collaborationist's response—however much she may have believed it herself. The male world teaches women what to believe about men. And about women. It teaches them valuelessness. It teaches them secondary status. It pooh-poohs the danger of rape.

In the fifties and sixties, when I was in high school and college, we hadn't publicly named the problem yet. Feminism was quiescent. The problem, as Betty Friedan said, had no name. The feminism of Virginia Woolf's day, of Emma Goldman's day, of Mary Wollstonecraft's day, of Aphra Behn's day, had been buried. In a patriarchal culture, feminism keeps getting buried. It always has to be rediscovered as if for the first time.

Even at Barnard, a women's college, founded by feminists and steeped in the tradition of female excellence, we did not study women poets and novelists. The atmosphere was full of encouragement for young women, but we felt we had been born, like Venus, from the foam. There were no role models. (How could we know our role models had been deliberately erased?) George Sand and Colette were out of print. Women poets were not taught. The poets I had discovered on my own in my high school days, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, were looked down upon. We studied to become surrogate men. We studied the penis-power poets—Eliot, Pound, Yeats—and tried to write like them. And did. Our professors doted on us, of course, and our brains were nimble, but the context in which we grew was blindly sexist. How can we even assess the stunting effect this may have had on our imaginations? We had to liberate ourselves even to
begin.

But the sexism was not overt. Only in my senior year, when I went to my interview for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, would I be asked (I swear it), “Why does a pretty girl like you want to be in a dusty library?” With something of a shock, I realized that the whole world was not a women's college. The shock became more intense at Columbia Graduate School, where I encountered the chilling maleness of sexist academe. Like my mother's Russian grandfather, Lionel Trilling—then playing God at Columbia—did not pay attention to
girls.
Look to the right of you, look to the left of you, one of you will not get tenure: the one without a cock.

I wish I could say it has all changed in thirty years. But the number of women with tenure is still pathetically low. The reason can only be discrimination: We are better at reading and writing at age ten, but starting at adolescence thousands of obstacles are put in our path. Our lives become (as Germaine Greer called it in her book about women painters)
The Obstacle Race.

From the vantage point of age fifty, the discriminatory cycle is utterly clear. That's the difference between a woman of fifty and one of twenty. At twenty we think we can beat the system. At fifty we know we have reasons for despair. We become, as Gloria Steinem says, more radical with age.

Suddenly we realize how, all our lives, we have been trained to appease and flatter men, not to confront them. At an Authors Guild meeting, at a party, at a business meeting, I smile and flirt and flatter and make nice. Perhaps I want to tell the truth to the men around me—but I
know
they can't take it. My very presence already offends some of them. The sexuality of my writing, my inability to grovel, my determination to confront—at least
here
—these things
automatically
offend. They go against the grain. There's only one man I tell the whole truth to—the one I live with—and even there I sometimes hedge and waffle, probably more than I know.

The truth is I
don't
blame individual men for this system. They carry it on mostly unknowingly. And women carry it on unknowingly too. But more and more I wonder how it can ever be changed. I look around and see two armed camps: the women who believe men and sex are the collective enemy, and the women who don't want to challenge the existence of sexism, who are happy to collaborate—as long as they get their little crumbs of power. And then there are all the men who benefit by being the first sex and don't even know it. They feel vulnerable and lost too. They wonder why women are so tough on them—so they go out and fuck a woman half their age.

I believe the world is full of men who are truly as perplexed and hurt by women's anger as women are perplexed by sexism, who only want to be loved and nurtured, who cannot understand why these simple desires have suddenly become so hard to fulfill. How can we blame the men we live with for a world they didn't make? We can't, yet sometimes, with the best will in the world, we do. The problem of sexism is so intractable that we are frustrated. We are sick of talking about the problem, of writing about the problem, of polluting relationships with the problem. We want it solved.

The problem of sexism is great for
all
women, but for Jewish women it is perhaps even greater because of the hidden bigotry of that pervasive anti-Semitism that masquerades as class snobbery. Sexism is practiced perhaps most fiercely by Jewish intellectual men who chronically suffer from the Annie Hall syndrome. And, curiously, the literary discrimination against Jewish women has gotten worse, not better, in the last few decades. At the beginning of the century and all through the thirties, the Jewish woman was associated with radicalism, reform, intellect, idealism. Emma Goldman, the radical author; Emma Lazarus, the poet; Annie Nathan Meyer, one of the founders of Barnard College; Rose Schneiderman, the union organizer (who popularized the phrase “we want bread and roses too” and was one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union), were far more typical of the image of the Jewish woman than Mrs. Portnoy or Marjorie Morningstar. The more assimilated Jews became in the United States, the worse the Jewish male writer treated his mother (in print, at least). To Henry Roth in
Call It
Sleep (1934), she was a heroine of survival and female strength. To Philip Roth in
Portnoy's Complaint
(1969), she was a castrating harpy with witchy powers.

With the films of Woody Allen, the status of the Jewish woman deteriorated still further. In fact Jewish male creators prove the theory that members of a minority group tend to act out their aggression against each other rather than against their oppressors. They hate Jewish women as they hate themselves. More, in fact. They project all their self-loathing onto Jewish women. The trouble is: We remind them of their strong mothers. And they would rather have the Monkey, or Diane Keaton, or Mia Farrow, or Soon-Yi, than
anyone
resembling mother. Our strength is too close, too threatening, too reminiscent of that primal minicastration when the Jewish mother stood passively by while the Jewish men cut off that teenie weenie piece of that teenie weenie cock of that teenie weenie future cocksman.

That, of course, is what these Jewish men will never forgive us for. We get blamed for the bris. On our heads are the sins of the fathers. So if we dare the presumption of the pen, they retaliate by cutting it off in our hands—phallic symbol that it is.

Thus, the Jewish woman writer is twice marginalized, twice discriminated against. She is discriminated against both as a woman and as a Jew. She is discriminated against by Gentiles—who see her as loud, overweight, demanding—and by Jews—who see her as the ferocious sacrificing incarnation of the mother goddess. She is discriminated against first as a woman, then as an aging woman, then as an aging
Jewish
woman. Marginalization is, of course, painful, but in certain ways it is a blessing too.

Members of the club are often afraid to write honestly about themselves. They have too much to lose. We aging Jewish women writers, on the other hand, have nothing to lose. We are already at the bottom of the barrel. Thought suitable only for fund-raising and social-climbing, we are already relegated to caretaking elderly relatives, nursing our men through midlife crises, and schlepping our teenagers to college interviews. There's no place to go but up. We have no status. We're not even a trendy minority to fulfill a quota. For some odd reason, Jews in America are no longer even considered victims of discrimination. So my generation of Jewish women has had the dubious distinction of being discriminated against by Jewish men (professors, employers, lovers) when we were young, only to be discriminated against in midlife for being “white.” The mind not only boggles—it does the hora.

When my last book was published, some middle-aged reviewer called me a middle-aged writer. She stopped short of calling me “a middle-aged Jewish woman writer” though she was one herself. I thought a lot about the use of the epithet “middle-aged” and why it bothered me so. After all, this was a publishing season filled with books about the hipness of midlife—I wondered what was presumed to be wrong with being “middle-aged”? For my generation of women writers, “middle-aged” ought to be a term of honor.