The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [159]
A Radcliffe student recently wrote a sensitive account of a boy’s growing bitterness at the girl who cannot study without him—a bitterness not even stilled by the sex with which they nightly evade study together.
She was bending down the corner of a page and he wanted to tell her to stop; the little mechanical action irritated him out of all proportion, and he wondered if he was so tense because they hadn’t made love for four days…I bet she needs it now, he thought, that’s why she’s so quivery, close to tears, and maybe that’s why I loused up the exam. But he knew it was not an excuse; he felt his resentment heating as he wondered why he had not really reviewed…. The clock would never let him forget the amount of time he was wasting…he slammed his books closed and began to stack them together. Eleanor looked up and he saw the terror in her eyes…
“Look, I’m going to walk you back now,” he said…“I’ve got to get something done tonight”…He remembered that he had a long walk back, but as he bent hurriedly to kiss her she slipped her arms around him and he had to pull back hard in order to get away. She let go at last, and no longer smiling, she whispered: “Hal, don’t go.” He hesitated. “Please, don’t go, please…” She strained up to kiss him and when she opened her mouth he felt tricked, for if he put his tongue between her lips, he would not be able to leave. He kissed her, beginning half-consciously to forget that he should go…he pulled her against him, hearing her moan with pain and excitation. Then he drew back and said, his voice already labored: “Isn’t there anywhere we can go?”…She was looking around eagerly and hopefully and he wondered again, how much of her desire was passion and how much grasping: girls used sex to get a hold on you, he knew—it was so easy for them to pretend to be excited.23
These are, of course, the first of the children who grew up under the feminine mystique, these youngsters who use sex as such a suspiciously easy solace when they face the first hard hurdles in the race. Why is it so difficult for these youngsters to endure discomfort, to make an effort, to postpone present pleasure for future long-term goals? Sex and early marriage are the easiest way out; playing house at nineteen evades the responsibility of growing up alone. And even if a father tried to get his son to be “masculine,” to be independent, active, strong, both mother and father encouraged their daughter in that passive, weak, grasping dependence known as “femininity,” expecting her, of course, to find “security” in a boy, never expecting her to live her own life.
And so the circle tightens. Sex without self, enshrined by the feminine mystique, casts an ever-darkening shadow over man’s image of woman and woman’s image of herself. It becomes harder for both son and daughter to escape, to find themselves in the world, to love another in human intercourse. The million married before the age of nineteen, in earlier and earlier travesty of sex-seeking, betray an increased immaturity, emotional dependence, and passivity on the part of the newest victims of the feminine mystique. The shadow of sex without self may be dispelled momentarily in a sunny suburban dream house. But what will these childlike mothers and immature fathers do to their children, in that phantasy paradise where the pursuit of pleasure and things hides the loosening links to complex modern reality? What kind of sons and daughters are raised by girls who became mothers before they have ever faced that reality, or sever their links to it by becoming mothers?
There are frightening implications for the future of our nation in the parasitical softening that is being passed on to the new generation