What Do Women Want?

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY ERICA JONG

POETRY
Fruits & Vegetables
Half-Lives
Loveroot
At the Edge of the Body
Ordinary Miracles
Becoming Light

 

 

FICTION
Fear of Flying
How to Save Your Own Life
Fanny: Being the True History of
the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones
Megan’s Book of Divorce; Megan’s Two Houses
Parachutes and Kisses
Serenissima: A Novel of Venice
(republished as
Shylock’s Daughter)
Any Woman’s Blues
Inventing Memory
Sappho’s Leap

 

 

NONFICTION
Witches
The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller
Fear of Fifty
Seducing the Demon

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group
(Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin
Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green,
Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd,
11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive,
Rosedale, North Shore 0745, Auckland, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books
(South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

Previously published in 1998 by HarperCollins Publishers
First Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin edition 2007

Copyright © 1998, 2007 by Erica Mann Jong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic
form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of
the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following periodicals and books in which some of these essays originally appeared (in somewhat different form):

The Boston Globe; The Independent on Sunday
(London)
; Lear’s; Marie Claire; The Nation; The New Republic; The Sunday Times
(London)
; The New York Observer; The New York Times Book Review; The New York Times Magazine; The Times Literary Supplement
(London)
; Travel & Leisure; A Place Called Home,
edited by Mickey Pearlman, St. Martin’s Press, 1998;
Introspections,
edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini, University Press of New England, 1996;
In Their Own Voices,
produced by Rebekah Presson and David McLees, Rhino Records, 1996;
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë, introduction by Erica Jong, Penguin Books, 1997;
Reservoirs of Dogma,
edited by Richard Collins and James Purnell, Institute for Public Policy Research, London, 1996;
The Best of the Best,
edited by Elaine Koster and Joseph Pittman, Penguin Putnam, 1998;
The Oxford Mark Twain,
edited by Shelly Fisher Fishkin, Oxford University Press, 1996;
The Source of the Spring,
edited by Judith Shapiro, Conari Press, 1997;
Witches,
by Erica Jong, Abrams, 1997; National Public Radio;
Talk Magazine

 

Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, and educational needs. Special books or book excerpts also can be created to fit specific needs. For details, write Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Special Markets, 375 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Jong, Erica.
What do women want? : essays / by Erica Jong—1st Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : HarperCollins Publishers, c1998.

eISBN : 978-1-440-68496-8

1. Women. 2. Women—United States. I. Title.
HQ1150.J
305.40973—dc22

 

 

 

 

 

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

I wish to thank some of the editors and friends who provoked me to begin many of these chapters: Marie Arana, Jack Beatty, Glenda Bailey, Rosy Boycott, Gladys Justin Carr, Lisa Chase, Anna Coote, Shelly Fisher Fishkin, Peter Kaplan, Mike Levitas, Robin Morgan, Nancy Novogrod, Rebekah Presson, Jay Parini, and Robert Pack.

—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

What on earth
—or in heaven—do women want? Even Sigmund Freud was puzzled. And yet it seems so obvious, and we have been saying it for centuries—or at least since the eighteenth century. We want bread and roses. We want fair pay (at the time of this writing American women still make seventy-seven cents for every dollar men make)—and we also want roses—tenderness, love, and emotional support. Very few women in the United States—or indeed the world—get either of those things. Women are starving for roses when we are not starving for bread. In fact, it has astonished me to discover how much women all over the world have identified with these needs (and with my books) in wholly diverse cultures.

Why has it taken so long to have these obvious wants met? Why are women still divided into good and bad girls? Why are women still stoned for adultery in the Muslim world, murdered for being widows in India, genitally mutilated in Africa, raped in all wars, and malnourished as children?

Even in our comparatively egalitarian society where women can go to college and earn good, if not great, salaries, the inequities hit hard when children are born and the question of child care arises. Why, after centuries of feminist outrage, have we still done so little to make women equal?

This book doesn’t answer these questions. It would take another
Second Sex
(like Simone de Beauvoir’s classic text) even to
address
these issues. But it does give a commentary—humorous, I hope—on what it has meant to be an American woman in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Yes, we are privileged. But we look around the world from our outpost of privilege and see outrageous suffering. We also see how American women’s rights are going backward in the area of reproductive choice, equal pay, and political access. It’s bewildering that we have not yet come close to electing a woman president—as have Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Philippines, Liberia, Latvia, Finland, Chile, and twenty-eight other countries. It’s also maddening to see feminism become a dirty word to a generation whose freedoms were won by feminism. But never mind. Women become more radical with age. Sometimes it takes maturity to see that it’s still a man’s world.

We have heard again and again about what women want, and the buzz seems to put both women and men to sleep. So let’s ask the question another way: What can women
give
?

We can give perspective sadly lacking in foreign affairs. We can give a sense of balance to those men who think war is a metaphor for everything.
War on drugs, war on terror, war between the sexes
—by conceptualizing everything as war, we perpetuate war. What if we said: reduce drug dependence, eliminate the causes of terrorism, promote
goodwill
between the sexes? The language would be less dramatic and fear inducing, but we are all sick of lurid language and fearmongering anyway. The war metaphor doesn’t work anymore. It’s dead. Time for new metaphors. We can promote new metaphors—metaphors that conceptualize change rather than defeat or annihilate “the enemy.”

Whenever I hear George W. Bush speak, I want to edit the warmongering out of his language in the hope of editing it out of his behavior. But he is a lost cause. Perhaps a new generation of men will stop using terms like “the enemy” or “the war on terror.” These bellicose metaphors have gotten us exactly nowhere. This morning I turned on the TV and in two minutes saw these headlines: “War on War,” “Battlefield Iraq,” “War on Weight,” and “War on Wrinkles.” Not only is the metaphor tired, but it has also ceased to register. Fresh language would be welcome. It might even save us. Dieting is not comparable to people blowing one another up, but you’d never know it from watching American TV.

The truth is that many of the improvements in our lives have come from the participation of women in society. Without seventies feminism, men would not have been encouraged to have close relationships with children. My father was embarrassed to change a diaper. Today’s fathers are proud to. Baby shit doesn’t smell better, but men have a different perception of it. That’s a conceptual change, and conceptual changes eventually change behavior. Women wield great power to change the thinking that changes behavior. Women can give this gift.

We’ve never needed it more. Our entire planet is threatened. To save our species, we need to start thinking collaboratively rather than competitively.

Neither women nor men are good at collaborative thinking, but at least some women and men see the
need
for change. This is what women can give.

If more women entered politics and won (at present writing, the percentage of women in the Senate is 14 percent and in the House is 15.4 percent), maybe we could quell the warlike, penile thinking that has invaded every aspect of our lives—the need to be hard, erect, stiff, unyielding and the assumption that softness is a humiliation. Men have made the metaphors and the metaphors are leading us over a cliff. We need a world where nurturance counts more than stiffness, and a new version of Viagra will not help us find it.