Fear of Fifty (48 page)

The fact that younger feminists are coming along to enliven the women's movement with this debate is thrilling. (Susie Bright is another young voice of fierce feminism and lusty political incorrect-ness.) These feminists and their many contemporaries give me hope for a new movement that can truly become a mass movement. I know the obstacles Roiphe, Wolf, and Bright will have to face in maturing as writers. Most of the obstacles will come from other women, who—having starved themselves of self-expression for years—may react with rage that attractive, privileged young women dare to take on the world of intellectual discourse in such a free and contentious fashion. Already these young writers have been strongly denounced for their sexual openness.

Which brings me to the question of older women and younger women and the rivalry between us. When I was young and the flavor of the month—as Wolf, Roiphe, and Bright are today—I was appalled by the jealous hatred and hostility I faced from older women. This was not something I expected. And it hurt more than the criticism I received from men, which I more or less expected. It is hard even now to remember the hatred that came on the heels of
Fear of Flying.
Women journalists who confessed deep identification in private would attack in public, often using the very confidences they had extracted from me, citing their feminine identification. The sense of betrayal was extreme. I felt more silenced by these bitter personal attacks than I ever did by male critics.

I came gradually to understand that this tendency to draw blood was not in itself a female characteristic but the characteristic of a female who had been deprived of important body and personality parts. Her feet had been bound, her clitoris excised, and what she was left with were nails and teeth. These were not natural women, they were women with parts missing.
Female eunuch
was the phrase Germaine Greer coined for such creatures, intuitively understanding that full female sexuality implied full female revolution. But women trained in puritanism and second-classness were hardly ready for full female revolution. Pitted against each other in rivalry, they could not even
imagine
a society in which older women emotionally supported younger women, in which women's sexuality was prized, in which women's excellence was celebrated. The capo system had for centuries split women off from each other and made them enemies of each other and of female progress.

I have often had the experience of welcoming a young woman journalist who has been inspired or moved by my books and who later sends me a tearsheet from her paper with a sad apology about how she was forced to censor her own feelings, turn her agreement to disagreement, provide more “edge” (i.e., nasty swipes and character assassinations—whether true or not). Often the commissioning editor demanding this clitoridectomy is a woman—a woman well-pummeled by the system—a woman who has kept her job by seeming to have the opinions of her male bosses and who therefore enforces these opinions more stringently than they might themselves.

We must learn to be whole creatures in order to make women's freedom a natural part of our society. It is up to us to claim that territory. Men
cannot
do it for us. It is not their mountain to climb. We must learn to love and support each other
without demanding ideological conformity.
We must learn to agree to disagree, to struggle like grown-ups and fight fair, to allow many kinds of feminism into the big tent, not to let ourselves be splintered into smaller and smaller and less and less powerful groups. That way lies the triumph of sexism—with our own complicity. Feminism cannot afford a “Big Lie,” and it has had one for the last couple of decades—which is partly why the word has become discredited. Women are
not
merely kind and sweet, victims of a sexual rapaciousness we want no part of, nor are we defanged, declawed, neutered creatures. In the name of a false feminism, we have been asked to
pretend
to be. And those of us who wrote about women in a different way were declared “bad sisters” and excluded from the circus tent.

Since this has been my fate as a writer in my own country (though much less so abroad), I feel I have the right to talk about it. It has resulted for me in periods of excruciating blockage in which I tried to write and couldn't because I knew that
anything
I said would be wrong. I realized gradually that women had managed to do to me what men no longer had the power to do: make me feel utterly and absolutely in the wrong, make me hate my own creativity, distrust my own impressions, second-guess myself until nothing I said could be clear enough to understand. I would sit down to write and be so seized with self-hatred that I could not function. Every time I put pen to paper I would see a chorus of jeering women telling me that everything I said was not worth saying.

When women have so absorbed the disease of sexism that they themselves can inflict it on each other, we clearly have a perfect, self-replenishing machine for the continuation of sexism. Unable to turn our assertiveness against men, we turn it against each other. Thus we remain stuck in the troubles we have always had. It is imperative we renovate the machine—no, not renovate it, but smash it entirely, so that we allow women to be all they need to be.

The Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés has reached a wide audience in part because of her insight into women's wildness:

But we are only at the beginning. And our strictures on each other prove this. Our enforcement of thinness, of nonsexuality, of “good” feminism versus “bad” feminism, are proofs of our being at the beginning, not the end, of a process. That younger feminists are embracing their sexuality is a sign of hope—a sign that women's lives will someday be less constricted, less fearful of the dark side of creativity (to which Eros provides the key). If that happens, we will at last have the full gamut of inspiration so long denied to us. We will have access to
all
parts of ourselves—all the animals within us, from wolf to lamb. When we learn to love all the animals within us, we will know how to make men love them too.

 

And what about aging? Do men force the fear of aging upon us or are we ourselves terrified because we only know one kind of power—the power of youthful beauty?

Isn't it possible that if we became comfortable with other forms of female power, men might too? In her futurist novel, He, She and It, Marge Piercy imagines a cyborg who is taught to love the bodies of older women. A delicious proposal, because it tells us that whatever we may imagine can come true. Women often hate their own bodies. Sometimes I think that the most important thing about having at least one relationship with someone of your own gender—especially if you are a woman—is to confront the female self-hatred and turn it into self-love.

In my forties, I fell in love with a blonde artist who looked like my twin. Ours was a close friendship that sometimes included lovemaking and sometimes did not. But when we turned to each other in desire, it was the lust of doubles seeking to accept their mirror images. It was an affirmation, not only of friendship but of self. In a sane world, love and sex would not divide by gender. We could love like and unlike beings, love them for a variety of reasons. The battered adjectives for homosexuality—queer, lesbian, gay—would disappear and we would only have people making love in different ways, with different body parts. We are too far gone with overpopulation to insist that procreation be an immutable part of desire. Desire needs only itself, not the proof of a baby. We would do well to baby each other instead of making all these unwanted babies that no one has time to nurture or to love.

 

At this point in my life, I am blessed by my friendships with women. I make no distinction between my gay and straight women friends. I hate the very terms, feeling that any of us could be
anything
—if we were to unlock the full range of possibilities within.

It is not just women who are going through a transformation of roles. Men have been asked to change everything about their lives too. They do increasingly sedentary work, which is difficult for restless creatures, filled with testosterone. They are asked to take care of babies and share responsibilities their mothers never prepared them for. If we are going to ask men to change their usual ways of responding and relating, we should be prepared to do the same. We should remember that loving responses to other women may not come easily at first because of our own ingrained self-hatred. But little by little, we will learn to nurture, not attack, other women. We will not let men separate us from each other or use us as tokens. With practice, this will get easier. When we feel the impulse
not
to share power, not to collaborate, we will remind ourselves that women's power depends, not only on men changing, but on our own inner changes. We will exchange the harem model so long established in our psyches and replace it with a model of mutual nurturing, mutual support. When men begin to see that we cannot be separated, our statistical force in the population will have the power it should have had many decades ago. When we stop beating ourselves and each other, we will be able to join hands to conquer the abusers of women and children.

That is the
old
model of women's self-hatred—the one we must smash. Change does not come through denial but through acceptance. Those feminists who have complained that we must not write about women's self-torture, self-loathing, obsessional loves, are slighting a crucial phase in female evolution. The surrender of our self-loathing, of the slave in the self, is an essential phase we must go through—a sort of group exorcism or mass analysis. If we demand that women's literature be prescriptive rather than descriptive, we will never exorcise the slave. A future of socialist-realist art—happy feminists in blue overalls waving from shiny tractors, or the contemporary equivalent—will not take us where we need to go. We need to unlock the staggering power of Eros in the female psyche. We have let Eros mean slavery, but Eros also has the power to set us free. We must demand the right to depict women's lives as we
know
them, not as we might like them to be. We must stop applying political prescriptions to creativity.

We have been much freer to grant women of color the right to depict their lives without political prescription, and their writing shows a freedom white women's writing often lacks. The lushness, openness, and moral weight we find in such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Terry McMillan, Lucille Clifton, Rita Dove, and so many others have a common source. Black women were at least a century ahead of white women in banishing the slave in the self. It was a matter of necessity: If both the white world and black men disempower you, you had better not disempower yourself. “Wild women don't have the blues,” wrote the African-American poet (disguised as blues woman) Ida Cox. The energy we so admire in African-American women's writing is the energy that comes when we stop denying reality. There is no shame in this writing, no rearranging of reality to suit political ends. The chronic racism of our culture selectively permits the black woman to be in touch with the chthonic impulses beneath the veneer of civilization. The black woman is
allowed
to be our seer, our poet laureate, our oracle. I would like to see all women writers—whatever their ethnicity—claim this power, so that eventually both color and gender can become insignificant.

I look at my own ethnicity—Jewish—and I see an ambivalent identification among my colleagues. We seem to have turned our backs on our great poets like Muriel Rukeyser, mirroring the contempt intellectual Jewish men have had for their sisters. This is an ambivalence we will have to understand and triumph over if we are going to claim our right to sing unambivalent songs. We Jewish women writers have mostly hidden our ethnicity as if it were unimportant. From Emma Lazarus identifying with the “huddled masses” to Gloria Steinem reading Alice Walker's poems aloud to express her own sometimes stifled self-expression, we have taken on the role of social workers and freedom fighters, but we have not dared the first act of freedom—to free ourselves. In her book
What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
, Adrienne Rich traces her own self-acceptance as poet, as lesbian, as Jew. Jew comes last, an identity we have been taught not to bother with. But perhaps that is why it should come first.