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By Root 2052 0

or would like to do, not necessarily as wives or mothers, but when they were not occupied with their husbands or their children or their housework. The question might even be what they were doing with their education. But some of these women simply assumed that I was asking about sex. Was the problem that has no name a sexual problem, after all? I might have thought so, except that when these women spoke of sex, there was a false note, a strange unreal quality about their words. They made mysterious allusions or broad hints; they were eager to be asked about sex; even if I did not ask, they often took pride in recounting the explicit details of some sexual adventure. They were not making them up; these adventures were real enough. But what made them sound unsexual, so unreal?

A thirty-eight-year-old mother of four told me sex was the only thing that made her “feel alive.” But something had gone wrong; her husband did not give her that feeling anymore. They went through the motions, but he was not really interested. She was beginning to feel contemptuous of him in bed. “I need sex to feel alive, but I never really feel him,” she said.

In a flat, matter-of-fact tone that added to the unreality, a thirty-year-old mother of five, calmly knitting a sweater, said she was thinking of going away, to Mexico perhaps, to live with a man with whom she was having an affair. She did not love him, but she thought if she gave herself to him “completely” she might find the feeling that she knew now was “the only important thing in life.” What about the children? Vaguely, she guessed she would take them along—he wouldn’t mind. What was the feeling she was looking for? She had found it at first with her husband, she supposed. At least she remembered that when she married him—she was eighteen—she had “felt so happy I wanted to die.” But he did not “give himself completely” to her; he gave so much of himself to his work. So she found that feeling for a while, she thought, with her children. Shortly after she weaned her fifth baby from the breast, at three, she had her first affair. She discovered “it gave me that wonderful feeling again, to give my whole self to someone else.” But that affair could not last; he had too many children, so did she. He said when they broke up, “You’ve given me such a feeling of identity.” And she wondered, “what about my own identity?” So she went off by herself for a month that summer, leaving the children with her husband. “I was looking for something, I’m not sure what, but the only way I get that feeling is when I’m in love with someone.” She had another affair, but that time the feeling did not appear. So with this new one, she wanted to go away completely. “Now that I know how to get that feeling,” she said, knitting calmly, “I will simply keep trying until I find it again.”

She did take off for Mexico with that shadowy, faceless man, taking her five children with her; but six months later, she was back, children and all. Evidently she did not find her phantom “feeling.” And whatever happened, it was not real enough to affect her marriage, which went on as before. Just what was the feeling she expected to get from sex? And why was it, somehow, always out of reach? Does sex become unreal, a phantasy, when a person needs it to feel “alive,” to feel “my own identity”?

In another suburb, I spoke to an attractive woman in her late thirties who had “cultural” interests, though they were rather vague and unfocused. She started paintings which she did not finish, raised money for concerts she did not listen to, said she had not “found her medium yet.” I discovered that she engaged in a sort of sexual status-seeking which had the same vague, unfocused pretentions as her cultural dabblings, and in fact, was part of it. She boasted of the intellectual prowess, the professional distinction, of the man who, she hinted, wanted to sleep with her. “It makes you feel proud, like an achievement. You don’t want to hide it. You want everyone to know, when it’s a man of his stature,” she told me. How much she really wanted