Love and Loathing

PERHAPS because the making of the Women's Movement was in the middle class--maybe good, maybe bad--the most vocal of the lot are most always middle class. But why are these most vocal women most always New Yorkers? From Steinem to Millet to Firestone; it's a checklist of New Yorkers. Now as far as anybody knows, the women problem is no worse in New York than anywhere else; neither is the movement, which has gone moreorless grassroots, headquartered there. Maybe the brains of the revolution have cached a reserve army underground in the city? Maybe to survive in that city crowded like sardines, people develop over-developed larynxes? Whatever the reason, it's the noise the women make that counts. Still it does sound at times like just about every middle class woman in the city is trying to be Joan of Arc.

The latest wordiest woman to break loose and bring out the banner is Erica Jong--poet (Fruits and Vegetables, Half Lives), New Yorker (she lives on the same Manhattan block where she grew up), middle class, Jewish. Erica Jong has written a medley of a book, something of a cross between a True Confessions of a Feminist--How Tough it Is and a Portnoy's Complaint. The book is probably meant to be the new monument to the movement. It's got everything: woman as Oedipus, masochist, narcissist, feminist; woman as hostage of her fears, her fantasies, her false definitions; woman as siren seductress and sexually screwed up; woman as dependent and woman as rebel.

The book is pitched to the public mood. And it ought to be a hit, not just with the faddists of feminism; there is plenty of stuff for feminists too, not new stuff, not all of it the right stuff, but stuff. At the center of the story Isadora Wing asks the question, "What does it mean to be a woman?," and only pirouettes round the problem. She hedges over whether to be or not to be liberated, zigzaging the issue until she finally aborts her own liberation. It's a real yoyo story.

Isadora Wing, like Erica Jong, is a Jewish middle class New York poet. She's got mangy blond hair and an ass, sexy to some, that gives a waddle to her walk. She's also got a kooky vulnerability that comes off like a Streisand stage performance. Her first marriage annulled when her husband freaked out in a Messianic frenzy, she remarried a psychoanalyst and was herself analyzed a few times over. And after more married life Isadora Wing has had it with monogamy. Monogamy simply didn't turn out to be the golden dream the American commercials--body soap, bathroom cleanser, baby powder, cars, cigarettes, and coca-cola all with their golden couples--pictured it. And nobody else, not the Victorian novels she grew up on, not Doris Day, not even Peyton Place, led her to picture anything less. So Isadora figures she's been brainwashed.

And now she's stuck with all these soupy longings for total annihilation by love. The point, surprise, is that growing up female in America is a liability. Educated for a monogamous homelife, dolled up to be a rosebud bed, what women really get is dullesville. And they stick it out because they have the idyll hammered so hard into their heads that when it doesn't happen, as each gray day goes by without the promised firework display, as the earth keeps turning and the dishes pile up--they wonder if they, not society, have failed, guiltily.

Isadora evolves the fantasy of the "zipless fuck" to deal with the problem. The zipless fuck is the platonic ideal in the newest sense of the word: you meet a strange male, your clothes fall off like flower petals, you come together in one soulbending mindbodyfuck, faceless, nameless, no ties, no commitments. It is to be a Last Tango, quick and compressed like a dream. (Erica Jong likes the bigger than life words, the exaggerated scene. Life for her people is one big high. If she doesn't dream big, she doesn't dream--when she dreams about getting laid, she pictures the Empire State building.) So you think you've found a with-it woman. This Isadora Wing has one tough ass, so far.

But watch. Isadora, Bennet her husband, and Adrian Goodlove, a Laingian from England, get involved in an adulterous whirlwing in Vienna. Bennet--Freudian, careful, compulsively clean, straight, steadfast--represents Isadora's panic about being alone and about change. Adrian--Laingian, irresponsible, egotistical, clown, ass grabber--represents her hunger for the heady and exuberant in life. Isadora tries to choose between them, juggling security with Bennet against escape with Adrian, The National Book Award and the Transatlantic Ass Award. She sleeps with Bennet dreaming of Adrian and sleeps with Adrian needing Bennet. She doesn't want what she has, and when she gets what she wants she finds it isn't what she needs. But she knows her own mind enough to know that she's in a bind.

Isadora finally summons the guts to run off on an existential experiment with Adrian, which she fails, and royally. "I realize more than ever how unliberated I am. All my high-fallutin' rebelliousness is only a reaction to my deep-down servility." Adrian disappointed her in love, while she had, knowing better, placed a magical efficacy in the word. She hightails it back to monogamy and files him away in her note-book, readying herself for work once again. And here's the key. Having made a mess of her life, only through her work can she piece it back together.

Isadora is no model of the liberation. But she could be, given a bit of self-discipline. She talks, after all, a fair feminist game. Men's minds are befuddled, their ideas are impossible, women frighten them--but then they have those "silky penises." The real sexual inequity is not that men have this great added marvel, a penis, but that "the female has an all-weather cunt. No wonder men invented the myth of female inadequacy." Women's only problem is jiving the need for sex with feminism. Sock it to 'em, Erica, baby. Show 'em what it feels like.

Unfortunately that is but the talk of her better moods. Most of the time she's a torn woman--torn between her fantasies and fears, between claiming her right to be selfish and guilt for asserting the claim, between the sexual dependence she was educated to need and the independence feminism declared as her right. Remember that Erica writes large; she's nothing if she's not subtle, and she hits you with her contradictoriness like a grease gun.

At bottom Isadora is a scared feminist, and what troubles her most is what she learned about herself in psychoanalysis. There, she found out about her Oedipal desires, about her masochistic need to be dominated and about her narcisstic need to be admired like the sexy Cover girl--all for love, of course. And she found out how the biggest need always boiled down to pleasing men, a need so embedded in her personality that she had spent a life smoothing over the sticky edges of her personality that didn't fit what men liked. She was afraid to grow up, afraid to write, afraid to fly. Then analysis came along and said to her, "Recognize the need. Take care of it, allow for it. But no need for it to run your life any longer. Let yourself become a woman." And, of course, nobody knew what that meant.

Isadora, or Erica, was left rather in a lurch. Feminism said to her, men are pigs, Liberons-nous, and she agreed. Analysis said, the language of the male world, the language by which you have defined yourself, is stuck in orbit in your head, and she agreed. Feminism said, you mean stuck like an enemy outpost, dig it out or shoot it down. Analysis said, not so easy, remember how guilty you tend to get, you'll punish yourself, you know--and how she knew. So she dilly-dallies. She draws a bead on the old need, she stiffens, she throws a tantrum of self-doubt, runs a guantlet of self-vivisection, and clutches at the coat lapels of her man, for self-definition. Fear of flying wins out every time. She should start a halfway house for feminists. Wait, no, she shouldn't. The book is too much of a wet towel, all wringing of hands and unchecked impulses.

Jong can see that analysis needs a facelift before it can tackle the woman problem. Her shrinks are half people--rigidly attuned to convention, reactionary vis-a-vis the issues of the family, the position of women, the cash transactions from patient to doctor. But problem patient as she might be, she is devout about the rule of the trade: "But first we must understand the problem." Make the unconscious conscious, burn the shadowy fantasies of your netherworld out of their holes. So to illuminate what happens in the mind in between conscious desire and conscious action. But analysis, a tool to explore the mind, Jong has somehow warped into a faith.

She can't take anything straight. Every feeling inspires her to seek its underside--feeling sexy she waits for guilt, feeling uninhibited she waits for fear, feeling love she locates dependence. Analysis taught her not to trust her impulses; it planted a sentry in her brain to doublethink her every move. And she never bade him exit. Now she trusts herself so little that she's glued herself into the groove of her problems. She gives rein to the antagonistic thoughts that spar in her brain and lock there like chain mail. And look, will you, at what she's done--she has used analysis in precisely the same way that she uses men: as a crutch for her own queasy personal indentity to steady itself and steer by. And worse, she doesn't know that she has done this. With her mind a muddle of criss-crosses she pictures herself a rebel analysand.

It's no easy problem, this trouble of hers. As a woman, handicapped by the lack of a female literary tradition, by an infant history of female role models, she lacks secure self-definition. "Femininity," she finds, cripples the personality, yet in rebelling against it, she has no other solid focus. Unlike the language of the male world, orbiting so neatly in its Ptolemaic course, her own vocabulary is still formative, fluid. How easy then, when so unsure inside, to locate in analysis a surer foothold upon self-understanding. And how uncertain. It's a slippery problem. It means, finally, separating the human needs from the needs of the sex role. It means grappling with the female sensibility--whatever that is.

So, Erica Jong, we all know how tough it is to be a feminist. Life is tough too. That doesn't make you a martyr for living. The point is that there isn't any point in writing the new book on women and liberation if you can't see your way clear through the issues involved. So, you didn't tell us anything new, though you gave us a lot of good juice and pillow talk, which was nice. You didn't write the book we need which would show us a woman etching out a serious liberation. Your Isadora, though, survives through her work, and for handles to hold on to that's an awfully solid start. Perhaps the only sure place to start.