Femininity (28 page)

Like all basic behavior, including eating and parental care, aggression in humans
is a learned response and a learned inhibition affected by childhood training, community
values, laws, social customs and religious codes. The psychology of feminine movement,
as we know and practice its provocative airs and graces, is based on the premise that
direct acts of initiative and self-assertion are a violation of the governance of
male-female relations, if not of nature itself. In place of forthright action we are
offered a vision so exquisitely romantic and sexually beguiling that few care to question
its curious imagery of limitations: a Venus de Milo without arms, a mermaid without
legs, a Sleeping Beauty in a state of suspended animation with her face upturned,
awaiting a kiss.

A
1970 LANDMARK STUDY
, known in the field as
Broverman and Broverman,
reported that “Cries very easily” was rated by a group of professional psychologists
as a highly feminine trait. “Very emotional,” “Very excitable in a minor crises” and
“Feelings easily hurt” were additional characteristics on the femininity scale. So
were “Very easily influenced,” “Very subjective,” “Unable to separate feelings from
ideas,” “Very illogical” and “Very sneaky.” As might be expected, masculinity was
defined by opposing, sturdier values: “Very direct,” “Very logical,” “Can make decisions
easily,” “Never cries.” The importance of
Broverman and Broverman
was not in nailing down a set of popular assumptions and conventional perceptions—masculine-feminine
scales were well established in the literature of psychology as a means of ascertaining
normality and social adjustment—but in the authors’ observation that stereotypic femininity
was a grossly negative assessment of the female sex and, furthermore, that many so-called
feminine traits ran counter to clinical descriptions of maturity and mental health.

Emotional femininity is a tough nut to crack, impossible to quantify yet hard to ignore.
As the task of conforming to a specified physical design is a gender mission that
few women care to resist, conforming to a prepackaged emotional design is another
imperative task of gender. To satisfy a societal need for sexual clarification, and
to justify second-class status, an emblematic constellation of inner traits, as well
as their outward manifestations, has been put forward historically by some of the
world’s great thinkers as proof of the “different” feminine nature.

“Woman,” wrote Aristotle, “is more compassionate than
man, more easily moved to tears. At the same time, she is more jealous, more querulous,
more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and
less hopeful than man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more
deceptive and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more shrinking,
more difficult to rouse to action, and she requires a smaller amount of nutriment.”

Addressing a suffrage convention in 1855, Ralph Waldo Emerson had kindlier words on
the nature of woman, explicating the nineteenth-century view that her difference was
one of superior virtue. “Women,” he extolled, “are the civilizers of mankind. What
is civilization? I answer, the power of good women … The starry crown of woman is
in the power of her affection and sentiment, and the infinite enlargements to which
they lead.” (In less elevated language, the Emersonian view was perhaps what President
Reagan had in mind when he cheerfully stated, “Why, if it wasn’t for women, we men
would still be walking around in skin suits carrying clubs.”)

A clarification is in order. Are women believed to possess a wider or deeper emotional
range, a greater sensitivity, say, to the beauties of nature or to the infinite complexities
of feeling? Any male poet, artist, actor, marine biologist or backpacker would strenuously
object. Rather, it is commonly agreed that women are tossed and buffeted on the high
seas of emotion, while men have the tough mental fiber, the intellectual muscle, to
stay in control. As for the civilizing influence, surely something more is meant than
sophistication, culture and taste, using the correct fork or not belching after dinner.
The idealization of emotional femininity, as women prefer to see themselves affirmed,
is more exquisitely romantic: a finer temperament in a more fragile vessel, a gentler
nature ruled by a twin need to love and to be protected: one who appreciates—without
urgency to create—good art, music, literature and other public expressions of the
private soul; a flame-bearer of spiritual values by whose shining example the men
of the world are inspired to redemption and to accomplish great things.

Two thousand years ago
Dominus flevit,
Jesus wept as he beheld Jerusalem. “Men ceased weeping,” proposed Simone de
Beauvoir, “when it became unfashionable.” Now it is Mary,
Mater Dolorosa,
who weeps with compassion for mankind. In mystical visions, in the reliquaries of
obscure churches and miraculous shrines, the figure of the Virgin, the world’s most
feminine woman, has been seen to shed tears. There are still extant cultures in which
men are positively lachrymose (and kissy-kissy) with no seeming detriment to their
masculine image, but the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in particular, requires keeping a
stiff upper lip. Weeping, keening women shrouded in black are an established fixture
in mourning rites in many nations. Inconsolable grief is a feminine role, at least
in its unquiet representations. In what has become a stock photograph in the national
news magazines, women weep for the multitudes when national tragedy (a terrorist bombing,
an air crash, an assassination) strikes.

The catharsis of tears is encouraged in women—“There, there, now, let it all out”—while
a man may be told to get a grip on himself, or to gulp down a double Scotch. Having
“a good cry” in order to feel better afterward is not usually recommended as a means
of raising the spirits of men, for the cathartic relief of succumbing to tears would
be tempered by the uncomfortable knowledge that the loss of control was hardly manly.
In the 1972 New Hampshire Presidential primary, Senator Edmund Muskie, then the Democratic
front-runner, committed political suicide when he publicly cried during a campaign
speech. Muskie had been talking about some harsh press comments directed at his wife
when the tears filled his eyes. In retrospect it was his watershed moment: Could a
man who became tearful when the going got rough in a political campaign be expected
to face the Russians? To a nation that had delighted in the hatless, overcoatless
macho posturing of John F. Kennedy, the military successes of General Ike and the
irascible outbursts of “Give ’em hell” Harry Truman, the answer was No. Media accounts
of Muskie’s all-too-human tears were merciless. In the summer of 1983 the obvious
and unshakable grief displayed by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin after the
death of his wife was seized upon by the Israeli and American press as evidence that
a tough old warrior had lost his grip. Sharing this perception of his own emotional
state, perhaps, Begin shortly afterward resigned.

Expressions of anger and rage are not a disqualifying factor in the masculine disposition.
Anger in men is often understood, or excused, as reasonable or just. Anger in men
may even be cast in a heroic mold—a righteous response to an insult against honor
that will prelude a manly, aggressive act. Because competitive acts of personal assertion,
not to mention acts of outright physical aggression, are known to flow from angry
feelings, anger becomes the most unfeminine emotion a woman can show.

Anger in a woman isn’t “nice.” A woman who seethes with anger is “unattractive.” An
angry woman is hard, mean and nasty; she is unreliably, unprettily out of control.
Her face contorts into unpleasant lines: the jaw juts, the eyes are narrowed, the
teeth are bared. Anger is a violent snarl and a hostile threat, a declaration of war.
The endless forbearance demanded of women, described as the feminine virtue of patience,
prohibits an angry response. Picture a charming old-fashioned scene: The mistress
of the house bends low over her needlework, cross-stitching her sampler: “Patience
is a virtue, possess it if you can/Seldom seen in women, never seen in man.” Does
the needle jab through the cloth in uncommon fury? Does she prick her thumb in frustration?

Festering without a permissible release, women’s undissolved anger has been known
to seep out in petty, mean-spirited ways—fits of jealousy, fantasies of retaliation,
unholy plots of revenge. Perhaps, after all, it is safer to cry. “Woman’s aptitude
for facile tears,” wrote Beauvoir, “comes largely from the fact that her life is built
upon a foundation of impotent revolt.”
*

Beauvoir hedged her bet, for her next words were these: “It is also doubtless true
that physiologically she has less nervous control than a man.” Is this “doubtless
true,” or is it more to the point, as Beauvoir continues, that “her education has
taught her to let herself go more readily”?

Infants and children cry out of fear, frustration, discomfort, hunger, anxiety at
separation from a parent, and rage. Surveying all available
studies of crying newborns and little children, psychologists Eleanor Maccoby and
Carol Jacklin found no appreciable sexual difference. If teenage girls and adult women
are known to cry more than men—and there is no reason to question the popular wisdom
in this regard—should the endocrine changes of adolescence be held to account? What
of those weepy “blue days” of premenstrual tension that genuinely afflict so many
women? What about mid-life depression, known in some circles as “the feminine malady”?
Are these conditions, as some men propose, a sign of “raging hormonal imbalance” that
incapacitates the cool, logical functioning of the human brain? Or does feminine depression
result, as psychiatrist Willard Gaylin suggests, when confidence in one’s coping mechanism
is lost?Belief in a biological basis for the instability of female emotions has a
notorious history in the development of medical science. Hippocrates the physician
held that hysteria was caused by a wandering uterus that remained unfulfilled. Discovery
in the seventeenth century that the thyroid gland was larger in women inspired that
proposition that the thyroid’s function was to give added grace to the feminine neck,
but other beliefs maintained that the gland served to flush impurities from the blood
before it reached the brain. A larger thyroid “was necessary to guard the female system
from the influence of the more numerous causes of irritation and vexation” to which
the sex was unfortunately disposed. Nineteenth-century doctors averred that womb-related
disorders were the cause of such female complaints as “nervous prostration.” For those
without money to seek out a physician’s care, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound
and other patent medicines were available to give relief. In the 1940s and ’50s, prefrontal
lobotomy was briefly and tragically in vogue for a variety of psychiatric disorders,
particularly among women, since the surgical procedure had a flattening effect on
raging emotions. Nowadays Valium appears to suffice.

Beginning in earnest in the 1960s, one line of research has attempted to isolate premenstrual
tension as a contributing cause of accidents, suicide, admittance to mental hospitals
and the commission of violent crimes. Mood swings, irritability and minor emotional
upsets probably do lead to more “acting out” by
females at a cyclical time in the month, but what does this prove beyond the increasingly
accepted fact that the endocrine system has a critical influence on the human emotional
threshold? Suicide, violent crime and dangerous psychiatric disorders are statistically
four to nine times more prevalent in men. Should we theorize, then, that “raging hormonal
imbalance” is a chronic, year-round condition in males? A disqualifying factor? By
any method of calculation and for whatever reason—hormonal effects, the social inhibitions
of femininity, the social pleasure of the masculine role, or all of these—the female
gender is indisputably less prone to irrational, antisocial behavior. The price of
inhibited anger and a nonviolent temperament may well be a bucketful of tears.

Like the emotion of anger, exulting in personal victory is a harshly unfeminine response.
Of course, good winners of either sex are supposed to display some degree of sportsmanlike
humility, but the merest hint of gloating triumph—“Me, me, me, I did it!”—is completely
at odds with the modesty and deference expected of women and girls. Arm raised in
a winner’s salute, the ritualized climax of a prizefight, wrestling match or tennis
championship, is unladylike, to say the least. The powerful feeling that victory engenders,
the satisfaction of climbing to the top of the heap or clinching a deal, remains an
inappropriate emotion. More appropriate to femininity are the predictable tears of
the new Miss America as she accepts her crown and scepter. Trembling lip and brimming
eyes suggest a Cinderella who has stumbled upon good fortune through unbelievable,
undeserved luck. At her moment of victory the winner of America’s favorite pageant
appears overcome, rather than superior in any way. A Miss America who raised her scepter
high like a trophy would not be in keeping with the feminine ideal.

The maidenly blush, that staple of the nineteenth-century lady’s novel, was an excellent
indicator of innocent virginal shyness in contrast to the worldliness and sophistication
of men. In an age when a variety of remarks, largely sexual, were considered uncouth
and not for the ears of virtuous women, the feminine blush was an expected response.
On the other side of the ballroom, men never blushed, at least not in romantic fiction,
since presumably they were knowledgeable and sexually practiced.
Lowered eyes, heightened color, breathlessness and occasional swooning were further
proofs of a fragile and innocent feminine nature that required protection in the rough,
indelicate masculine world. (In the best-selling Harlequin and Silhouette books devoured
by romance addicts who need the quick fix, the maidenly blush is alive and well.)