The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [130]
The buying of things drains away those needs which cannot really be satisfied by home and family—the housewives’ need for “something beyond themselves with which to identify,” “a sense of movement with others toward aims that give meaning and purpose to life,” “an unquestioned social aim to which each individual can devote his efforts.”
Deeply set in human nature is the need to have a meaningful place in a group that strives for meaningful social goals. Whenever this is lacking, the individual becomes restless. Which explains why, as we talk to people across the nation, over and over again, we hear questions like these: “What does it all mean?” “Where am I going?” “Why don’t things seem more worth while and when we all work so hard and have so darn many things to play with?”
The question is: Can your product fill this gap?
“The frustrated need for privacy in the family life,” in this era of “togetherness” was another secret wish uncovered in a depth survey. This need, however, might be used to sell a second car….
In addition to the car the whole family enjoys together, the car for the husband and wife separately—“Alone in the car, one may get the breathing spell one needs so badly and may come to consider the car as one’s castle, or the instrument of one’s reconquered privacy.” Or “individual” “personal” toothpaste, soap, shampoo.
Another survey reported that there was a puzzling “desexualization of married life” despite the great emphasis on marriage and family and sex. The problem: what can supply what the report diagnosed as a “missing sexual spark”? The solution: the report advised sellers to “put the libido back into advertising.” Despite the feeling that our manufacturers are trying to sell everything through sex, sex as found on TV commercials and ads in national magazines is too tame, the report said, too narrow. “Consumerism,” is desexing the American libido because it “has failed to reflect the powerful life forces in every individual which range far beyond the relationship between the sexes.” The sellers, it seemed, have sexed the sex out of sex.
Most modern advertising reflects and grossly exaggerates our present national tendency to downgrade, simplify and water down the passionate turbulent and electrifying aspects of the life urges of mankind…. No one suggests that advertising can or should become obscene or salacious. The trouble lies with the fact that through its timidity and lack of imagination, it faces the danger of becoming libido-poor and consequently unreal, inhuman and tedious.
How to put the libido back, restore the lost spontaneity, drive, love of life, the individuality, that sex in America seems to lack? In an absent-minded moment, the report concludes that “love of life, as of the other sex, should remain unsoiled by exterior motives…let the wife be more than a housewife…a woman…”
One day, having immersed myself in the varied insights these reports have been giving American advertisers for the last fifteen years, I was invited to have lunch with the man who runs this motivational research operation. He had been so helpful in showing me the commercial forces behind the feminine mystique, perhaps I could be helpful to him. Naively I asked why, since he found it so difficult to give women a true feeling of creativeness and achievement in housework, and tried to assuage their guilt and disillusion and frustrations by getting them to buy more “things”—why didn’t he encourage them to buy things for all they were worth, so they would have time to get out of the home and pursue truly creative goals in the outside world.
“But we have helped her rediscover the home as the expression of her creativeness,” he said. “We help her think of the modern home as the artist’s studio, the scientist’s laboratory. Besides,” he shrugged, “most of the manufacturers we deal with are producing things which have to do with homemaking.”
“In a free enterprise economy,” he went on, “we have to develop the need for new products. And to do that we have to liberate women to desire these