Living Out Loud (6 page)

   BEING   
       A        
WOMAN

M
y favorite news story so far this year was the one saying that in England scientists are working on a way to allow men to have babies. I’d buy tickets to that. I’d be happy to stand next to any man I know in one of those labor rooms the size of a Volkswagen trunk and whisper “No, dear, you don’t really need the Demerol; just relax and do your second-stage breathing.” It puts me in mind of an old angry feminist slogan: “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I think this is specious. If men got pregnant, there would be safe, reliable methods of birth control. They’d be inexpensive, too.

I can almost hear some of you out there thinking that I do not like men. This isn’t true. I have been married for some years to a man and I hope that someday our two sons will grow up to be men. All three of my brothers are men, as is my father. Some of my best friends are men. It is simply that I think women are superior to men.
There, I’ve said it. It is my dirty little secret. We’re not supposed to say it because in the old days men used to say that women were superior. What they meant was that we were too wonderful to enter courtrooms, enjoy sex, or worry our minds about money. Obviously, this is not what I mean at all.

The other day a very wise friend of mine asked: “Have you ever noticed that what passes as a terrific man would only be an adequate woman?” A Roman candle went off in my head; she was absolutely right. What I expect from my male friends is that they are polite and clean. What I expect from my female friends is unconditional love, the ability to finish my sentences for me when I am sobbing, a complete and total willingness to pour their hearts out to me, and the ability to tell me why the meat thermometer isn’t supposed to touch the bone.

The inherent superiority of women came to mind just the other day when I was reading about sanitation workers. New York City has finally hired women to pick up the garbage, which makes sense to me, since, as I’ve discovered, a good bit of being a woman consists of picking up garbage. There was a story about the hiring of these female sanitation workers, and I was struck by the fact that I could have written that story without ever leaving my living room—a reflection not upon the quality of the reporting but the predictability of the male sanitation workers’ responses.

The story started by describing the event, and then the two women, who were just your average working women trying to make a buck and get by. There was something about all the maneuvering that had to take place before they could be hired, and then there were the obligatory quotes from male sanitation workers about how women were incapable of doing the job. They were similar to quotes I have read over the years suggesting that women are not fit to be rabbis, combat soldiers, astronauts, firefighters, judges, ironworkers, and President of the United States. Chief among them was a comment from one
sanitation worker, who said it just wasn’t our kind of job, that women were cut out to do dishes and men were cut out to do yard work.

As a woman who has done dishes, yard work, and tossed a fair number of Hefty bags, I was peeved—more so because I would fight for the right of any laid-off sanitation man to work, for example, at the gift-wrap counter at Macy’s, even though any woman knows that men are hormonally incapable of wrapping packages or tying bows.

I simply can’t think of any jobs any more that women can’t do. Come to think of it, I can’t think of any job women don’t do. I know lots of men who are full-time lawyers, doctors, editors and the like. And I know lots of women who are full-time lawyers and part-time interior decorators, pastry chefs, algebra teachers, and garbage slingers. Women are the glue that holds our day-to-day world together.

Maybe the sanitation workers who talk about the sex division of duties are talking about girls just like the girls that married dear old dad. Their day is done. Now lots of women know that if they don’t carry the garbage bag to the curb, it’s not going to get carried—either because they’re single, or their husband is working a second job, or he’s staying at the office until midnight, or he just left them.

I keep hearing that there’s a new breed of men out there who don’t talk about helping a woman as though they’re doing you a favor and who do seriously consider leaving the office if a child comes down with a fever at school, rather than assuming that you will leave yours. But from what I’ve seen, there aren’t enough of these men to qualify as a breed, only as a subgroup.

This all sounds angry; it is. After a lifetime spent with winds of sexual change buffeting me this way and that, it still makes me angry to read the same dumb quotes with the same dumb stereotypes that I was reading when I was eighteen. It makes me angry to realize that after so much change, very little is
different. It makes me angry to think that these two female sanitation workers will spend their days doing a job most of their co-workers think they can’t handle, and then they will go home and do another job most of their co-workers don’t want.

O
ne day I was standing in a bathroom in City Hall washing my hands when the city council president stepped up to the sink beside me. (I will stop here, lest I precipitate another city scandal, to say that at the time the city council president was a woman.) We began to chat, and eventually our chat turned to matters of moment, and eventually the matters of moment became newsworthy. I left the bathroom with a story. After years of worrying that the best stories were coming out of conversations in the men’s room, I also left with the conviction that journalism was going to be all right for women after all.

My mind goes back to that day when I think of what I consider the worst scare tactic employed by people opposed to the proposed equal rights amendment. This was the suggestion that passage of the measure would lead to unisex bathrooms. (Nearly as objectionable was the use of the word “unisex,” which should by law be applied
only to certain hair salons to let you know that they are the kind of places you want to avoid.) I can assure everyone that if a piece of legislation took away restricted access to the jane—as I prefer to call the female john—I would march in the streets to protest its passage.

Little has been written about the role of the jane in the life of the contemporary career woman. It is impossible to overestimate its importance. In some ways it has replaced the old consciousness-raising group as a setting for the free exchange of ideas about men, work, children, personal development, and the ridiculous price of pantyhose. In most offices, it is one of the few spots in which a woman employee can pause, throw back her head, and say, loudly, “Men are so stupid sometimes I want to shoot all of them.” The only difficulty is that this statement often precipitates a free exchange of ideas for a full half hour.

I have also frequently used the jane—I’m not ashamed to say it—to apply makeup. Recently I read an etiquette question about whether it is permissible to apply makeup at your desk. The answer was no, that it was in bad taste. The answer should have been, no, not if you ever want to be taken seriously again. I actually came closer to having a baby at my desk than I ever did to applying makeup there. (An extenuating circumstance was that several of my male coworkers thought that I never wore makeup, which was a testimonial either to the deftness of the application or the futility of the effort.) In the jane you can get right down to business and unload your purse: blush, blush brush, lipstick, concealer, mascara, hair brush. Apply blush, apply lipstick, use concealer under eyes, touch up mascara, bend at the waist, drop head, brush hair, throw head and mane back, check out the results. Show me a woman who would do this in her office and I’ll show you a woman who will never get promoted.

I have also cried in the jane. This is a major admission.
During my early years in the newspaper business in New York, there was a young woman of about my age who became famous for having burst into tears—in the middle of the office—when criticized by an editor. (To be fair, the editor reportedly pointed to the first paragraph of her story and said, “What the hell is this supposed to mean?” in a voice that carried beyond the newspaper circulation area.) At the time, those of us who were the same generation and gender as our unfortunate colleague vowed that no one would ever see our tears in the office.