The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [153]
Women who feel very unsure about their sex and need to have children again and again to prove that they are feminine; women who have the fourth or fifth child because they can’t think of anything else to do; women who are dominant and this is something else to dominate; and then I have hundreds of patients who are college girls who don’t know what to do with themselves, their mothers bring them in for diaphragms. Because they are immature, going to bed means nothing—it is like taking medicine, no orgasm, nothing. For them getting married is an evasion.
The high incidence of cramps with menstruation, nausea and vomiting during pregnancy, depression with childbirth, and severe physiological and psychological distress at menopause have come to be accepted as a “normal” part of feminine biology.9 Are these stigmata that mark the stages of the female sexual cycle—menstruation, pregnancy, menopause—part of the fixed and eternal nature of women as they are popularly assumed to be, or are they somehow related to that unnecessary choice between “femininity” and human growth, sex and self? When a woman is a “sex creature,” does she see unconsciously in each step of her feminine sexual cycle a giving up, a kind of death, of her very reason for existence? These women who crowd the clinics are personifications of the feminine mystique. The lack of orgasm, the increasing “female troubles,” the promiscuous and insatiable sex-seeking, the depression at the moment of becoming a mother, the strange eagerness of women to have their female sex organs removed by hysterectomies without medical cause—all these betray the big lie of the mystique. Like the self-fulfilling prophecy of death in Samarra, the feminine mystique, with its outcry against loss of femininity, is making it increasingly difficult for women to affirm their femininity, and for men to be truly masculine, and for either to enjoy human sexual love.
The air of unreality that hovered over my interviews with suburban housewife sex-seekers, the unreality that pervades the sex-preoccupied novels, plays, and movies—as it pervades the ritualistic sex talk at suburban parties—I suddenly saw for what it was, on an island ostensibly far removed from suburbia, where sex-seeking is omnipresent, in pure phantasy. During the week, this island is an exaggeration of a suburb, for it is utterly removed from outside stimuli, from the world of work and politics; the men do not even come home at night. The women who were spending the summer there were extremely attractive young housewives. They had married early; they lived through their husbands and children; they had no interest in the world outside the home. Here on this island, unlike the suburb, these women had no way to make committees or housework expand to fill the time available. But they found a new diversion that killed two birds with one stone, a diversion that gave them a spurious sense of sexual status, but relieved them of the frightening necessity to prove it. On this island, there was a colony of “boys” right out of the world of Tennessee Williams. During the week when their husbands were working in the city, the young housewives had “wild” orgies, all-night parties, with these sexless boys. In a sort of humorous puzzlement, a husband who took the boat over unexpectedly one midweek to console his bored and lonely wife, speculated: “Why do they do it? Maybe it has something to do with this place being a matriarchy.”
Perhaps, too, it had something to do with boredom—there just was not anything else to do. But it looked like sex; that’s what made it so exciting, even though there was, of course, no sexual contact. Perhaps, these housewives and their boyfriends recognized themselves in each other. For like the call girl in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s who spends the sexless night with the passive homosexual, they were equally childlike in their retreat from life. And in each other,