The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [150]
That this spiral of sexual “lust, luridness and lasciviousness” was not exactly a sign of healthy affirmation of human intercourse became apparent as the image of males lusting after women gave way to the new image of women lusting after males. Exaggerated, perverted extremes of the sex situations seemed to be necessary to excite hero and audience alike. Perhaps the best example of this perverse reversal was the Italian movie La Dolce Vita, which with all its artistic and symbolic pretentions, was a hit in America because of its much-advertised sexual titillation. Though a comment on Italian sex and society, this particular movie was in the chief characteristics of its sexual preoccupation devastatingly pertinent to the American scene.
As is increasingly the case in American novels, plays and movies, the sex-seekers were mainly the women, who were shown as mindless over-or under-dressed sex creatures (the Hollywood star) and hysterical parasites (the journalist’s girl friend). In addition, there was the promiscuous rich girl who needed the perverse stimulation of the borrowed prostitute’s bed, the aggressively sex-hungry women in the candlelit “hide and seek” castle orgy, and finally the divorcée who performed her writhing strip tease to a lonely, bored and indifferent audience.
All the men, in fact, were too bored or too busy to be bothered. The indifferent, passive hero drifted from one sex-seeking woman to another—a Don Juan, an implied homosexual, drawn in phantasy to the asexual little girl, just out of reach across the water. The exaggerated extremes of the sex situations end finally in a depersonalization that creates a bloated boredom—in hero and audience alike. (The very tedium of depersonalized sex may also explain the declining audience of Broadway theaters, Hollywood movies and the American novel.) Long before the final scenes of La Dolce Vita—when they all go out to stare at that huge bloated dead fish—the message of the movie was made quite clear: “the sweet life” is dull.
The image of the aggressive female sex-seeker also comes across in novels like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report—which consciously cater to the female hunger for sexual phantasy. Whether or not this fictional picture of the over-lusting female means that American women have become avid sex-seekers in real life, at least they have an insatiable appetite for books dealing with the sexual act—an appetite that, in fiction and real life, does not always seem to be shared by the men. This discrepancy between the sexual preoccupation of American men and women—in fiction or reality—may have a simple explanation. Suburban housewives, in particular, are more often sex-seekers than sex-finders, not only because of the problems posed by children coming home from school, cars parked overtime in driveways, and gossiping servants, but because, quite simply, men are not all that available. Men in general spend most of their hours in pursuits and passions that are not sexual, and have less need to make sex expand to fill the time available. So, from teen age to late middle age, American women are doomed to spend most of their lives in sexual phantasy. Even when the sexual affair—or the “extramarital petting” which Kinsey found on the increase—is real, it never is as real as the mystique has led the woman to believe.
As the male author of The Exurbanites puts it:
While her partner may be, and probably is, engaged in something quite casual to him, accompanied, of course, by verbal blandishments designed to persuade her of just the opposite, she is often quite genuinely caught up in what she conceives to be the real love of her life. Dismayed by the inadequacies of her marriage, confused and unhappy, angry and often humiliated by the behavior of her husband, she is psychologically prepared for the man who will skillfully and judiciously apply charm, wit and seductive behavior…. So, at the beach parties, at the Saturday night parties, on the long car rides from place to place—on all of which occasions the couples naturally