CULTURE MEN AND WOMEN

ONE REASON the effects wrought by the Women’s Movement remain clouded in uncertainty is that its goals have been divided between matters of simple justice and matters of androgyny. The simple part is that any fair-minded person who walks into a bank and sees that all the tellers are women and all the officers are men is going to cast a vote for women’s rights. This might not have been the case a dozen years ago -nor is it now in backwoods America -any more than other principles of social justice which we regard as elementary have always been considered so. But powerful inertial forces opposing change in the United States have a way of abruptly caving in; and nowadays most people who learn that women are discriminated against in questions of jobs, salary, educational access or property rights are going to react the same. That battle, however painful, has been uncomplicated and, except for what amounts to a mopping-up operation, seems to have been won.

What is utterly unknown, unwon, is the extent of the changes in sexuality itself that are underway. Some women activists wanted men to cease to exist. Others wanted women to become like men. Others wanted women to become like men and men to become like women, in the old sense, while still others wanted everybody to become the same, somewhere in between.

The mainstream of the Movement took an attitude on the subject too ambiguous to put into words. It both did and didn’t wish for punitive as well as substantive change. It both did and didn’t advocate equality between the sexes in complex, potentially anguished areas like child-custody and alimony law and military service. It both did and didn’t look forward comfortably to a bisexual world.

Usually, one need only see one’s mother, if she is over 60, to recognize that an immense, recent inequity existed between what the two sexes could do in the span of their lives. And yet a lot of confusion arose because of the comparison the Movement drew between this struggle and the civil rights movement of 10 or 15 years before. Linking them was an effective tactic for adding momentum, righteousness and rage to the new cause, and plenty of people actually came to believe that middle-class white women in suburban America were a trod-upon underclass who had suffered injuries equatable to the mean and savage constrictions that had been imposed upon American blacks. To say that such a notion is absurd is not to belittle the wrong done to that row of underpaid bank tellers, who could work for 20 years with never a chance to advance themselves. But the result has been that any solution sounded so easy. If women were essentially identical to men, another institutionalized outrage could be set right, another long-suffering “minority” could be integrated into the vast, egalitarian megaclass through what by-now had become quite standard methods of corrective laws and pressure politics. If women and men could be compared to rival ethnic constituencies, the imbalance between them could be construed as having originated only through prejudice, not biological imperatives. If men and women had no more need for each other as men and women than black people had for Caucasians as Caucasians – if they could now merely blend together -then legal remedies would be able to deal with the difficulties quite handily.

This is not to suggest that our customs are not due for a profound overhaul. Apart from the issue of what is right, there are enough new imperatives arising from technology to have seen to that. But it will be an overhaul reaching to the wellsprings of how we express our love and lead our lives and how our children are raised. Two by two, we’ve gone into Noah’s ark or wherever we wanted to go for countless years; and to have gone always in twos implies some innate difference between the parties who have joined hands. Otherwise, it could have been done as well in ones or threes or fours.

Surely, also, not just considerations of unit efficiency created this arrangement for raising a family. There must have been a feeling that life was thinner when lived either homosexually or in harem-style-that a partner picked from Column A went best with one from Column B, whom probably thereafter should be adhered to. Where feminism has argued that columns B and A should be equal by custom and before the law, it is not at all the same as saying there aren’t and never should have been two columns.

My own reaction has been to agree too slowly, sometimes too begrudgingly, with most of the proposals for social equity that the Movement made. But always I was astonished at how easy the proponents have thought the whole thing was going to be, once the Neanderthals arrayed against them had been overcome.

Not long ago (to take a literary example), Ernest Hemingway and other writers of the hairy-chested school were receiving such a chivvying for their roosterly preoccupations that an alarmist might have wondered whether some precious part of our admiration for bigger figures, like Homer’s Achilles and Shakespeare’s Henry V, and real-life heroes such as Garibaldi and Captain Cook, might also go by the boards. But women have generally taken such men to their hearts, just as other men do.

There will be people more taken with the sensibility of Jane Austen and people who prefer Herman Melville, without reference to their own gender, sex as such having come to matter much less. We will have statistical improvements in every Olympic sport -ever superior performances on the cello and at figure skating – while fame, as lately, coptinues to be quick, neuter and bankable, emphasizing self-promotion, but a homogenized celebrity, so that new faces can be substituted easily. It is already impossible to paddle a canoe anywhere that hasn’t got a zip code, and our admirable competitions in the marathon are not run in wild, open country, where they might convey the authority of an ancient marathon, but as though under glass, through Boston and New York City as glorified folk festivals.

It’s admirable that so many people can run 26 miles now when they no longer need to, and that upwards of two million New Yorkers are willing to leave their telephones long enough to watch them. And, of course, the argument that liberty has diminished with all this shrinking of operational territory and (as it seems to me) options of temperament with the decline in regional distinctions, individual responsibility and sexual definition, and the swing toward an egalitarianism of the lowest common denominator, by which, for example, a prospective president must run for office for many years full time – can be stood on its head. There is evidence, on the contrary, of an unprecedented freedom. With so many “subcultures,” the pleasure of variety is everywhere.

Plenty of women in their 20s and 30s do evince a rare exuberance; one meets older women who sharply envy them the era they have been born into. And if, accordingly, many men of 28 or 33 tend to display a peculiar mutedness, it is not that they have special cause for complaint, but that they are “not themselves” in the apt phrase -which is exactly what the feminist revolution had demanded. Very young men, bearing expectations better rooted in the chameleon realm of androgyny, appear to be more cheerful. And middle-age men, although perhaps caught in the familiar hodgepodge of midlife misdoubts and ironies, like middle-age women, nevertheless may confess to having had the best of both worlds. As young men, they were prepared to rule the roost like Chanticleer, but now they watch the parade of change with quite a sympathetic interest, such as older men feel for younger women anyway, which often outweighs the sort of fatherly favoritism that they otherwise might direct toward younger men.

The women most vocal in Women’s Lib haven’t wished to concede the intricate interdependence that has existed between women and men, because to acknowledge such a complication would be to grant that unpredictable and agonizing problems might arise. Still, as a codicil to their prognostications, they have added the encouragement that men also were going to be liberated from unnecessary or discomforting constraints. One can see, in fact, that women, being franker and more approachable, have made the ritual of courtship a good deal easier, softening the old charade men had to go through of winning over a leery but conniving adversary with small lies and legerdemain. When they work, it is considerable convenience, too, to the former “breadwinner,” and even in high-strung professions like the law or public relations, women are by no means unanimous in advocating that men be unmanned and women masculinized until everybody starts from a hermaphrodite position, there to allow the personality to bend as it will. If young women are happier, so much the better for everybody; and on the tender question of who raises the children, possibly television raises them now anyway.

Genetically, we are nearly identical to mankind 50,000 years ago; and some of us delight in the continuity represented by this, while others may be appalled. But we count on each other. In political, civil and money matters we depend on one another, just as in the arts; if there were no community of response, there could be no drama, music, painting or poetry. Clasping a lover, feeling a heartbeat, one doesn’t immediately know whose blood it is, and there is a triumph in this. Maybe eventually, in the same way, people won’t care what biological equipment a lover has. And yet the pleasure of lovemaking derives from two people repeatedly trying to position themselves as opportunely as they can for insemination to occur. They can murmur nothings in the meantime or vary the approach by trying to climb headfirst inside each other for a prenatal interlude. But the final sensation is basically just such as will best serve to help us replicate ourselves.

The difference between the sexes used to be exaggerated to create a worse imbalance in rights and duties, but this was not only so that men could amass more power of the purse and of the sweets of life; it was also because a woman needed to mother six or eight children if two or three of them were to reach adulthood. In 1800, American women bore an average of seven children apiece in the process of settling the continent; and one of the dislocations of feminism has been not to allow for the complexity of the War Between the Sexes, as that half-humorous battle used to be called. Like the conflict between the generations, it had at its core real dissimilarities, as well as opportunism and bullying.

Women, waiting out the sexual urgencies of men, have insisted upon some show of strength or nervous energy in a partner, as well as love and kindness, and all the lavish emblems of success and a commitment to the way of the world -but more fragile, nonconformist virtues too, lest these be lost. The man as suitor buys flowers as a token of his earning power and in appreciation of the lady’s finer tastes; yet, in the tableau that they go through, he must also smell the flowers appreciatively and admire them himself. He must moon with her by moonlight, as well as make big bucks under the bright light of the sun.

From their urge for permanence, women have generally avoided love affairs outside their own social class. The built-in passion for the female body that men are saddled with has created a constant dilemma for them: Did the gentleman want the lady in particular that he was with or just an all-night squeeze? Was his love so abiding that it would transfer to the child that she might have by him? Did he “need” his ladylove enough; did he pay enough attention to her to stick by her through the task of feeding, as well as conceiving babies? Was he conventional enough to make a go of things – yet, at the same time (and passion tested him for this), could he weather sleepless nights; did he have a sense of joy and fun; did he come back after a rebuff or when the woman whom he said he loved didn’t look her best? And she too -could she do without sleep? Was she clever or beautiful enough even in periods of discouragement to persuade another person to try to have more babies with her or at least continue to put food on the table for the earlier ones, instead of setting out to look for other ladies to make more babies with?

Though one knows women who enjoy playing with a man’s body with the same utilitarianism that a man would feel in making free with theirs, at least up until now most women are far from being as casual about sex as most men. Nevertheless, besides the wish for steadiness, many have had a taste for what was reckless and randy in a man, looking especially for physical vigor or daring, or have looked particularly to “trade up,” with respect to social class. Many a woman preferred the man who set his hat at a tilt and touched her leg without first asking if he could – except that the pain of that choice was that he might not go slow afterwards. For practical reasons, she must choose one partner and try to hold him to fidelity, whereas, in theory – with his body tooled to father not just two or three children, but hundreds – he could choose to mate again and again.

Men have their heartstrings tied to their children and suffer an awful wrench if they lose them in a divorce. Still, they have that opposing imperative -to plant more offspring, not only among their contemporaries but in the next generation, and with ladies of the Left and Right, ladies who blow the trumpet and ladies who play the harp. This tension between the sexes enriches as well as afflicts us, having evolved by a primeval path.

No one is as fragile as a woman, but no one is as fragile as a man. A lady, in sitting on my lap, becomes my child, but when she unbuttons her blouse, I become her child. A balance is struck, yet not a flattening balance of the kind that would make men and women the same. Her strengths make me feel strong, as do her weaknesses, and she says mine operate similarly. If this were not the case, our lovemaking would become only a business of rubbing two sticks together, and our affections would level out to a primitive state.

In sex and love contradictions abound. If two men love one woman, they may hate each other or may become the best of friends. Although it’s sexy if the woman is gentle, it can also be sexy if she’s ungentle; and though most women don’t want a kinky lover, a little stitching of kinkiness in him will prolong and spice their pleasure. The oldest riddle is that the same woman who draws men and glances wholesale, as though she had been brought into being expressly for procreation, is often mediocre as a mother. Yet that woman with the passion-peach complexion who might not wish to mother children -how deliciously she mothers men! The less in need they really are, the better. She turns apricot. We see the uneasy, long legs, the breasts like brandy snifters (though modestly covered), the tumbling hair; and yet alongside these importunings, perhaps in the straight neck sits an aloof boy.

It’s no coincidence that boys could play Shakespeare’s female roles rather convincingly, because part of what attracts a man to a woman is a swirl of emanations from her resembling “boyishness” and vice versa. The juice of sex is the consent of two adults to go to bed together, but counter to that, they both do look for secret semblances-plump Momma and so on. Probably the biggest discovery of a young man’s sexual awakening is that whatever he wants to do is not so far removed from what his girlfriend wants. So this could be called a species of androgyny, as is so much of the more complicated play-acting, the chameleon coloration, of sex later on. It’s an androgyny we are familiar with, however, an androgyny like that of Henry V himself, as Shakespeare imagined him in a play that is entirely predicated upon the fact that the hero king actually existed as a warrior, wooer, ruler, lover. Utterly masculine, Henry was androgynous because he was playful. But remove him as a sounding board, and you would have an art without echoes, history as archeology – what was it like when there were men and women?

Sex draws us back into society from self-absorption. The ocean beach, the lights along the skyline, soon lose their romance if we have no company to enjoy them with. And our breadth of sympathy for other people is expanded if there is even a distant possibility that we might become sexual partners with them.

Sex both as a tranquilizer and as the apple of contemporary existence may be nearly as necessary nowadays as the old sex of procreation was, though the tension it assuages is partly of its own making. Endless priapism, but no resolution.

We struggle to complete ourselves – male with female, chatterbox with suppressed personality, blond-haired soul who hugs the exotic personage whose hair is black. And the extraordinary mating leap we make is possible only because there is a gap to leap. If acrimony alone were the upshot of the barriers that separate the sexes, their collapse would not be missed. But, under unisex, will we leap at all? And when the sex organs have been reduced to instruments of light pleasure, will the ecstasy of climax – losing even its presently tenuous connection with child-bearing -keep only its imitation of death at the end?

Perhaps, though, sexual intercourse will remain a deep, not light, pleasure of profound significance, whatever the pretext for it may be. Perhaps, indeed, the Reagan and “Moral Majority” electoral landslide is not merely a sort of “Ghost Dance” of American cultural conservatism (as I tend to believe), but a genuine reversal of direction. Or on the contrary, androgyny may be an irresistible phenomenon, not to be opposed by “Ghost Dance” political movements or wistful traditionalists of a less hidebound stripe, such as me -a natural means of birth control, in other words, for a society gradually growing old.

Sex has always been “dehumanizing,” as the saying goes -for Samson, and occasionally for everybody else since then. Yet part of why we emphasize it so perfervidly in an age when nature outdoors is dwindling is just that it is dehumanizing – animal, “natural.” Better than baseball or jogging, it lifts us out of our envelopes of propriety. What a relief it would be in other corners of one’s life to do exactly what one does in a romance -lean one’s lovesick head against the lady’s shoulder and ask indulgence and understanding. To tremble, sleepless from picturing somebody else, and then able to lay one’s face against that person’s back and breast – this is luxury, just as is the “animal” ras-sling and thrashing.

But the flipside of our mating leap is the inconstancy that often characterizes friendship between the sexes. We will confess the scary cancer operation, the close brush with a nervous breakdown, while touching hands during that first all-night conversation. Splurging every dearest detail of a childhood spent on the Arkansas River, a Bronze Star won under zany circumstances on the Mekong River, we want the other person to know the very best and worst of us. Yet, a month later, in mutual exasperation, we claim we never want to see each other again. The commitment of two people who are preparing to raise children together is all-or-nothing. Heterosexuals break off so sharply because they are looking for a partner in a 20-year task. They must preserve an edge of total involvement for the love to come. Better a fresh start. Tear free suddenly and get away intact.

The right to a legal abortion is central to feminist demands, and, by its nature, cannot be guaranteed by applying the concept of “equal access.” Plenty of women who recognize that the current rightward-moving pendulum in politics offers no serious threat to their recently won civic and professional mobility, feel on occasion, though, an atavistic panic that above their rib cage they are forever hostage to what lies below; that only with the option of abortion can they be as free as a man. And their claim seems reasonable to me -a tragic but necessary trade-off that contemporary life requires. I’m offended not by the idea, only the flippancy and brutality with which it is sometimes propounded.

At heart, their proposition is that it takes two people -a woman as well as a man-to have children; that the woman is not simply a vessel for an embryo that, designedly or inadvertently, has been planted by a man. Both of them must be at risk and in favor of what is happening, in other words. But the question that immediately follows is whether the principle is to work both ways – if the man as well as the woman is part of the equation and ought to be involved. Do single women, going beyond their power to terminate a pregnancy with or without the consent of the father, also have a moral right to initiate a pregnancy, with an anonymously or carelessly donated vial of sperm – and then possibly flip out the fetus three months later, if they change their minds, their whim for self-fulfillment having meanwhile turned elsewhere?

“Strangely, laughter seems to me like the sexual act, which is perhaps the laughter of two bodies,” says British author V.S. Pritchett. However, among feminists who neither wish to participate in the age-old, lifelong, gingerly and rather exciting process of accommodation, nor to become lesbians, there is a third course.

Oriana Fallaci’s novel, A Man, revives a singularly innovative way of dealing with the continuing appeal of macho men: Pick ’em wild and pick ’em doomed. Her brave Greek revolutionary, Alexander Pana-goulis, is so far-out, frenetic, heroic, self-destructive that it would be impossible for him ever to “tie her down.” She can have her splendid romance without troubling to try to leap the gap, because, in due course, he can only die, young and violently, freeing her from the necessity of making any compromising commitment to him, as well as from the likelihood that she will ever fall in love again. Who, after all, in raw maleness, could ever measure up to him? Nor need she wear a widow’s weeds in a darkened drawing room, as women who loved mourning used to; she can roam the world as entrepreneur or para-journalist. And to be inseminated by such a hero would be ideal. In lovemaking, she had handled his war wounds and torture scars. He then departs the scene; and the lady, if she has a mind to, can marry her obliging, tidy-minded business manager for help in raising the twice-blest child. As a program, it might prove quite popular, if enough heroes were at hand.

This is an exaggeration. I meet womenwho wore jackboots and helped bust downthe barriers at all-male saloons a decadeago, and who announce plaintively, ironically, to anybody listening that they “wantto sue for peace,” that they are marriageable, that with an amniocentesis it isn’t yettoo late for them to have a baby. Otherwomen say they never did wear jackboots,that their opinions would be unfashionable among their sophisticated friends, ifknown. And, of course, since even men inmacho garb in fact are also greatly tamed(even in backwoods America, if one putsone’s ear close to the ground), conditionsat the moment hint at a truce.