The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [151]
But what happens when a woman bases her whole identity on her sexual role; when sex is necessary to make her “feel alive”? To state it quite simply, she puts impossible demands on her own body, her “femaleness,” as well as on her husband and his “maleness.” A marriage counselor told me that many of the young suburban wives he dealt with make “such heavy demands on love and marriage, but there is no excitement, no mystery, sometimes almost literally nothing happens.”
It’s something she has been trained and educated for, all this sexual information and preoccupation, this clearly laid out pattern that she must devote herself to becoming a wife and mother. There is no wonder of two strangers, man and woman, separate beings, finding each other. It’s all laid out ahead of time, a script that’s being followed without the struggle, the beauty, the mysterious awe of life. And so she says to him, do something, make me feel something, but there is no power within herself to evoke this.
A psychiatrist states that he has often seen sex “die a slow, withering death” when women, or men, use the family “to make up in closeness and affection for failure to achieve goals and satisfactions in the wider community.”5 Sometimes, he told me, “there is so little real life that finally even the sex deteriorates, and gradually dies, and months go by without any desire, though they are young people.” The sexual act “tends to become mechanized and depersonalized, a physical release that leaves the partners even lonelier after the act than before. The expression of tender sentiment shrivels. Sex becomes the arena for the struggle for dominance and control. Or it becomes a drab, hollow routine, carried out on schedule.”
Even though they find no satisfaction in sex, these women continue their endless search. For the woman who lives according to the feminine mystique, there is no road to achievement, or status, or identity, except the sexual one: the achievement of sexual conquest, status as a desirable sex object, identity as a sexually successful wife and mother. And yet because sex does not really satisfy these needs, she seeks to buttress her nothingness with things, until often even sex itself, and the husband and the children on whom the sexual identity rests, become possessions, things. A woman who is herself only a sexual object, lives finally in a world of objects, unable to touch in others the individual identity she lacks herself.
Is it the need for some kind of identity or achievement that drives suburban housewives to offer themselves so eagerly to strangers and neighbors—and that makes husbands “furniture” in their own homes? In a recent novel about suburban adultery, the male author says through a butcher who takes advantage of the lonely housewives in the neighborhood:
“Do you know what America is? It’s a big, soapy dishpan of boredom…and no husband can understand that soapy dishpan. And a woman can’t explain it to another woman because they’ve all got their hands in that same soapy boredom. So all a man has to be is understanding. Yes, baby, I know, I know, you’ve got a miserable life, here’re some flowers, here’s some perfume, here’s ‘I love you,’ take off your pants…. You, me, we’re furniture in our own homes. But if we go next door, ahh! Next door, we’re heroes! They’re all looking for romance because they’ve learned it from books and movies. And what can be more romantic than a man who’s willing to risk your husband’s shotgun to have you.…And the only exciting thing about this guy is that he is a stranger…she doesn’t own him. She tells herself she’s in love, and she’s willing to risk her home, her happiness, her pride, everything, just to be with this stranger who fills her once a week