What Do Women Want? (30 page)

 

That is the preliminary culling. It gives us, at least, a starting point. An equally long list could be made of memoirs, poems, and novels in languages other than English.

All lists are highly arbitrary. And this, like all such efforts, is a work in progress. I invited my readers to write their favorites to me at my e-mail address, so that I could include books I and my respondents had missed. So many worthy books were sent to me that this little essay could well turn into a book. Perhaps it will.

Ranking the listed books seems to me like a useless exercise. Books are not prizefighters. They don’t compete against one another. It may even be that many worthy volumes escaped the notice of my helpers because they were printed in tiny editions and disappeared into the pulping machine before they were even discovered. Many good women’s books doubtless go unpublished. What the list chiefly teaches us is the extent of our own ignorance. I don’t claim to have read all these books, but it strikes me that this list would make a fascinating beginning course in women’s literature. If we could only begin to immerse ourselves in the riches of the writers who came before us, we would see that we had an excellent broth to nourish our future efforts.

It interested me greatly to learn how hard it was for most of my respondents to name a hundred books. I received scribbled notes that said things like: “Don’t forget Angela Carter!” Or “What about the short story writers whose novels are less good?” Since the list was of novels written in English, I had to exclude favorites of mine—like Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Memoirs like Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior
were excluded because there will eventually be a separate list of memoirs. Poetry was excluded because that, too, must wait for a future tally. (Women poets in English in this century could fill a very large library.)

Assembling the preliminary list, I kept being reminded of Emma Goldman’s wise words: “When you are educated, when you know your power, you’ll need no bombs or militia and no dynamite will hold you.”

—BETTE DAVIS

 

 

 

There was a time in
the not so very far past when women of a certain age accepted, often with relief and pleasure, their new status on the margins of the sexual dance. They nurtured the younger generation. They gave advice. They taught table manners, which fork to use, how to waltz (or Charleston), and how to write a bread-and-butter or condolence note. They were the great repositories of social knowledge. The fact that they were not going to nab your boyfriend was obvious. They had said good-bye to all that.

My grandmother was in her late fifties when I was born. Considered a stylish beauty in her youth in Russia and England, she now dressed to go out in black velvet suits with white silk blouses, pearls, white kid gloves, and sensible, low-heeled black shoes. She almost never wore color. No makeup—except for a swipe of pink on the lips for going to the New York Philharmonic and out to dinner. She dressed in the elegant way of ladies who accepted their age. Her flirting days were over and her clothes showed it. She was a lady. In her bureau drawers was an almost infinite supply of white kid gloves of all lengths. In her closet, silk blouses in cream or white. Her hats were becoming, black, and never full of feathers or fake jewels. Her pearls were real and came in various lengths. Her demeanor said: I am a grandmother and I love it.

Her calm, her sweetness, her sense of herself as matriarch gave my sisters and me a great sense of security. In no way was she in competition with us as we grew up. When boys called the house or arrived to pick us up, there was no hint of impropriety in her manner. Our mother was flirtatious, stylish, dressed to kill. She never gave up on designer clothes until, in her nineties, she exchanged them for nighties and caftans. Our grandmother was the rock on which we stood.

Think of Colette’s aging courtesans like Lea in
The Last of Chéri
or Gigi’s grandmother in
Gigi.
These women were not antisexual. They were just past it and happy to be past it. That gave them time to educate the younger generation.

Of all women writers, Colette understood this female transition from sensual being to grandmotherly teacher most accurately. Lea is still sexual in
Chéri,
when she takes as her lover the beautiful young boy she calls Chéri. Chéri is willful, gorgeous, indefatigable in bed. He is nineteen and a walking erection—but that is not really the point. The point is that he loves his aging “Nounoune” (as he has called her from childhood) and she is life itself to him.

Half mommy and half mistress, Lea knows that Chéri must marry a girl of his own generation sooner rather than later, and that she must let him go. Meanwhile, she enjoys him to the fullest and he enjoys her coddling him as much as the sex, which is only ever implied but clearly omnipresent. He loves to wear Lea’s marvelous pearls against his naked body. He is a sleek, muscular Adonis in bed with an aging Aphrodite.

Lea is forty-nine to Chéri’s nineteen. And we know she is old enough to resort to various stratagems of dressing and grooming to make her look younger. She wears pink silk around her face, winds diaphanous fabrics around her lined throat, and keeps her bedroom decorated with rosy silken fabrics—though such decoration is out of date. She is a woman in the full ripeness of her years and she knows what she knows. She would rather be fully dressed or utterly naked—nothing in between. She is proud of her marvelous breasts, which still stand up. But she understands they will not last forever. Nor will her liaison with Chéri.

In
The Last of Chéri,
Chéri has married the appropriate girl of his own age and he is wretchedly unhappy with her. She knows nothing of his needs. She is vain and silly. She cannot nurture him and satisfy him as his Nounoune did. He tries to come back to his aging Aphrodite, and for a moment he does. Then Lea takes it upon herself to quit the sexual dance—in part to force Chéri to grow up, as she knows he must.

She cuts off all her hair, abandons her regime, grows fat, and wears asexual clothes. When Chéri comes to see her, he is horrified—though the reader knows that Lea has retreated from love in part to make him grow up. Her renunciation of sex is not only her own healthy acceptance of age but also her wish to make him a man by withdrawing her coddling.

Chéri is shaken by her transformation. He now has no place to hide. He doesn’t want to grow up. He wants his Nounoune, his childhood, his carefree existence. He doesn’t want to be a husband and a father. He is Adonis, so of course he can never grow up. He is fated to die young. The second Chéri book ends with him about to put a bullet through his head.

 

 

And now we come to the present day. Colette is long gone (she died in the fifties) and the baby-boom generation is at the crest of the hill and about to go over it. I pick up an amusing memoir by a woman now in her seventies, but in her sixties when she wrote it. It is called
A Round-Heeled Woman
by Jane Juska and it recounts the story of a woman in her sixties who, after her son is grown and gone, after she has retired from her career as a teacher, decides to have some “late-life adventures in love and sex.”

Jane Juska is appealing to me. She reads Trollope and admires good prose. She writes her story with a light, ironic hand. She is able to tell tales on herself—the sign of a real writer. And, blessedly, she doesn’t take herself too seriously.

She has had real unhappiness in her life: a first marriage that was painful but left her with a son she adores, a period of being freakishly overweight (more than one hundred pounds) in order to hide from her sexual yearnings, a history of illness induced by obesity, a struggle to lose weight for the sake of her health. She has a psychological breakthrough—the right therapist coming just at the right time when she is open to change—and she decides to experience sex before it’s too late. So she turns—where else?—not to the Internet but to the
New York Review of Books.

She places an ad that reads:

 

 

And then she describes what happens. She describes the winnowing process, the meeting process, the anxiety, the disappointments, the bad eggs and the good guys she meets after having been out of the world of sex for forty years. What a brave woman she is to embark on this at sixty-seven! I think of my own intervals of dating—between marriages, at twenty-three, at thirty-nine, at forty-seven—and how sexual mores were totally different each time I found myself single, and I want to salute JJ for her daring. To date again at sixty-seven, even to take your clothes off with a stranger at sixty-seven—what guts! Or what idiocy! And then to write about it! That takes courage. I admire courage far more than I admire circumspection and repression. Courage makes the world go round.

JJ becomes a risk-taker—something she has never been before. She becomes an inspiration to all her women friends as she explores the various partners the
New York Review
sends her way. Hurray for Jane! I like her—and not just because she’s a Democrat and a constant reader. She’s got pluck and she seeks to know herself. She’s a teacher teaching herself. She believes, like me, that the unexamined life is not worth living.

 

 

 

Where do we
learn more than we do in bed? Bed is where we learn what frightens us, what delights us. Bed is often where we discover who we are.

Jane is a teacher and bed becomes her classroom. She learns and she teaches. What she finally learns is a lot like what I learned in my eight and a half years of singledom between my third and my fourth marriages: Men are not the enemy. They are as scared as we. Possibly more. Sex only really works when you are friends as well as lusters-for-each-other. Men can be fun and they enhance a woman’s life. But they are not essential. Women friends are essential. Men are not the main course. They are dessert. Women friends and children are the main course.

Of course that’s only my opinion. It does not necessarily reflect the views of all women. Some right-wing women hate my affection for Juska’s courage. Men think themselves essential and bully for them if they think so. But wisdom for women usually means knowing you can take care of yourself—with the help of your trusty women friends and your loving, if self-centered (as they must be to make their lives), children and grandchildren.

Lately I have read more than one whining male-authored magazine article about how independent women have become the new men. These men complain in shock and amazement that the new woman doesn’t want commitment, loves to sleep alone, treasures her privacy in her own home, enjoys her ability to run her own life even though she
does
want men for companionship and sex.

She refuses to be faithful to one partner or compromise about money, children, or even home decor. She likes men but doesn’t want to be mastered by a man. She wants to live alone. Shocking!

Men seem utterly flummoxed by this new independence. “Women now act as men once did!” they complain. It’s not fair! And men now act like
women
once did, trying to trap their girl-friends into marital monogamy. They cook for women, cosset them, try to get them into living together arrangements in which they promise not to fuck other men. But the new woman doesn’t want this. She treasures her “space.” She
does
want a man in her bed a few nights a week, but she’s perfectly happy to let him leave after they have sex. O Brave New World that has such women in it!

 

 

 

Jane Juska’s story
is hardly unique. Suddenly there are postmenopausal women going to bed all over the place and not wanting any strings attached. There’s “Erica Barry” [
sic
] played by the marvelous Diane Keaton in the absurdly named
Something’s Gotta Give.
Erica Barry is a rich playwright who lives in the Hamptons and falls (unbelievably to me) for her daughter’s boyfriend played by Jack Nicholson. The appeal of this lover is that he gobbles Viagras like M&Ms, keeps having heart attacks, and is amazed to be turned on by a woman over thirty. I found his character rather repellant despite Nicholson’s animated eyebrows; I myself would have opted for the dishy young doctor played by Keanu Reeves. But Diane Keaton’s performance is a wonder. She also looks great (despite having been born in 1946) and from the fuss made about her looks in this movie, you’d think fifty-eight was Methuselah’s age.

The costuming of Keaton in
Something’s Gotta Give
is also bizarre. She plays a woman who seems to feel that if she takes off her turtleneck, her head will fall off. Swathed in white cotton up to the chin, she begins the movie as a nun of some sort of weird order clothed by L.L.Bean. When she finally takes off the white turtleneck and appears fleetingly nude in one scene, movie critics responded as if she’d invented the cure for cancer. Is the flesh of women in their fifties and sixties considered so unacceptable in our society that we must never take off our turtlenecks? This movie was hailed as liberated for presenting the older woman as a sex object, but I found it full of unconscious misogyny.