At the same time, she was one of the most intelligent and well-informed women I’ve ever known, an avid reader, a woman who could breeze through the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, in ink, in less than twenty minutes, who could wield a wrench as deftly as a knitting needle, who had strong political opinions and an even stronger commitment to her work. The conflicting strains emerge in odd, contrary juxtapositions: an image of my mother’s studio, a small room crammed with canvases and frames and oil paints, located right next to the kitchen and steps from the washer-dryer; a picture of her bed, strewn with copies of both Woman’s Day magazine and the New York Review of Books; the memory of her front hall, a place you’d walk into and find the acrid scent of turpentine competing with smell of spaghetti sauce. Not insignificantly, the maternal, other-directed strain left more of an impression on me than the autonomous, creative one: I grew up with the idea that my father had a job, while my mother had a hobby.
In The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963, Betty Friedan began to articulate what women of my mother’s generation were feeling, the “problem with no name.” Friedan’s descriptions are well-known by now—she wrote about fury seething beneath the placid suburban surfaces, about truncated lives and thwarted ambitions, about the extraordinary personal costs incurred by attending to everybody’s needs but one’s own—and although my mother’s world was more progressive and politicized than the one Friedan described, I don’t have to reach too far to place her in it, to recall the sense of strain and discord. I remember her as a woman who never actively raged or stormed but who sighed a lot, and slammed things around in the kitchen when she got “cross,” as she’d rather delicately put it, who’d shut herself in her bedroom with a headache and stay there for hours, a weary, off-limits, don’t-ask sensation emanating from behind the door. I remember the way she’d play hostess at periodic cocktail parties for my father’s colleagues, a role she abhorred but executed gracefully: a woman smiling demurely, passing homemade pâté and crackers on a tray, her attendant efforts (a back-breaking day of dusting and vacuuming, of making the pâté, of scrubbing the bathroom and stocking it with little soaps and hand towels) both implicitly mandatory and invisible. And I remember how tired she’d be the next morning, exhausted in the bone-deep way I now recognize as almost entirely emotional: It’s the rage-laced fatigue you feel after you’ve given and given and taken next to nothing for yourself.
Friedan and her feminist contemporaries described that feeling quite clearly; less clear are the ways in which that generation’s struggle with muted desire got transmitted (and may still be transmitted) to children, particularly to daughters. How does a woman who’s been raised to table her own needs, to sublimate her own desires and strivings into the care and feeding of others, to swallow her own disappointments, communicate to her daughter the very feelings of authority and entitlement that she herself lacks?
Perhaps she doesn’t. One school of thought—one you might read about in a textbook on gender identity or socialization—argues that a certain degree of constraint goes with the female territory, that girls are piloted from the first months and years of life toward a style based on identification with the “feminine” qualities represented by mothers (accommodation, nurturance, orientation toward others) and disidentification with the qualities embodied by fathers (autonomy, self-seeking, an orientation toward the outside world). We learn about hunger at home, this view suggests, and in the cruel rigidity of gender differentiation, men eat, women feed.
There are certainly grains of truth to this idea: Even in this time of more relaxed gender roles, where mothers work and fathers change diapers, the gospel of femininity lives on, echoing in memory for some, preached in daily life for others, its commandments about appetite passed on in accumulated lacks: lack of comfort with it, lack of reinforcement for it, lack of embrace. A mother who is tormented by diet and weight, who appears preoccupied with her appearance and disgusted by her own body, cannot easily teach her daughter to take delight in food, to feel carefree about weight or joyful about the female form. A mother who finds her own sexuality frightening or dangerous or dirty can’t easily revel in her daughter’s. And a mother whose experience of desire is based on taboo and self-denial, on feeding others and concealing her own pangs of unsatisfied hunger, can’t easily steer her daughter toward a wider landscape.
At the very least, the gospel of femininity, which is essentially self-negating, may explain why a quality of guilt and murkiness can so easily leak into a woman’s experience of appetite, a profound uncertainty about entitlement, even a sense that desire itself is indefinable or inappropriate. A woman in her mid-thirties, whose mother was a “paragon of self-sacrifice,” a woman who lived for her kids, who always took the smallest piece of meat on the platter and the most bruised piece of fruit, tells me she has struggled her whole life to believe that her own desires have any weight at all: Even something as simple as choosing a movie or a restaurant can tie her into a knot, evoking a bone-deep sensation that “it is just plain wrong to let my needs come first.” Another, thirty-eight, talks about inheriting from the females in her family a certain “blankness about desire,” as though that entire territory were simply off limits, shrouded in a fog. “The needs of men were always blaringly loud and clear,” she says. “My father needed dinner at seven o’clock and got dinner at seven o’clock, my brothers needed the car for football practice and got the car for football practice. But my mother and my aunts—there was this feeling that it would be unbelievably selfish to let your own needs eclipse someone else’s, so you didn’t even think about it.”
I’ve watched women do battle with that notion my whole life: agonizing about asserting themselves at work, or debating about whether they “deserve” a raise, or struggling to subdue the chronic press of worry about other people’s feelings, or fighting the urge to apologize for things most men would never think to apologize for (bumping into a chair, overcooking a meal, the weather). This is learned behavior. There is not a shred of compelling evidence to suggest that such impulses are biologically based, that females are genetically more caretaking and less self-seeking than males, that we’re hard-wired to be accommodating, that we have less natural hunger or aggression. You observe, you follow, live and learn.
But this muddy business of identification is more than a matter of role modeling. Beyond the simple dos and don’ts of femininity, there may also be a more complex communication of constraint, a daughter’s hunger shadowed by a mother’s vulnerability or frustration or despair. Psychiatrist Jessica Benjamin writes, “It is too often assumed that a mother will be able to give her child faith in tackling the world even if she can no longer muster it for herself. And although mothers ordinarily aspire to more for their children than for themselves, there are limits to this trick: A mother who is too depressed by her own isolation cannot get excited about her child learning to walk or talk; a mother who is afraid of people cannot feel relaxed about her child’s association with other children; a mother who stifles her own longings, ambitions, and frustrations cannot tune in empathically to her child’s joys and failures.” That feels closer to the heart of appetite’s puzzle, to the more subtle imprints of feeling that may be may be etched onto girls along with mandates about being good and pretty and sweet.
Like so many women I know, I grew up understanding that self-worth and likeability were inextricably linked, that a sizeable portion of my value would come from nourishing others: pleasing, avoiding conflict, concealing my own needs and disappointments. Granted, some of this had to do with what I observed and absorbed about women as a child, the standard messages about gender and female accommodation. Some of it, too, had to do with my own drive to fit in, the creeping uncertainty I felt in adolescence about my own likes and dislikes and desires. But a pivotal piece, I think, was rooted in a more visceral feeling of alliance with my mother, a sense of fated and necessary sameness, as though I’d been swaddled as a child with some of her own struggle with entitlem
ent and voice, absorbed bits and pieces of her being the way a patch of earth absorbs a raindrop. This is the stuff of identity and attachment, the thick essence of a mother—strengths, weaknesses, hopes, disappointments, love, rage—taken in by a daughter, and known to her in a way that’s so deeply internal and wordless it becomes part of her own marrow, as present and unquestioned as the air she breathes. Today, nine years after my mother’s death, I still feel these impressions; they live on in an almost corporeal way, as though genetically embedded. My mother’s manner was unfailingly polite, restrained, other-directed. Particularly with people she didn’t know well, she had the most beautiful, deferential smile—gaze slightly averted, head slightly lowered, a faint blush—and when I find myself in an awkward or insecure situation, I feel the exact same smile come over me, as well as what I imagine to be the exact same self-diminishing instinct, boundaries slightly blurred, my own needs instinctively tied to the needs of others, my own voice and perspective dialed down while someone else’s grows louder.
What I did not learn, what was not seared on a cellular level, was an alternative way of being. Not once, growing up, did I see my mother refuse to make dinner, or fail to get the laundry done, or boycott the grocery shopping, or shut herself in her studio for a whole day because that’s what she wanted to do, the rest of us be damned. This is a picture of responsibility and unselfishness and eternally delayed gratification and I find it very nearly tragic. For lost in that picture—for her, for me—was any sense of what a woman might look like if she had large and vigorous appetites of her own: a woman with real passions and independent desires; a woman who fed, in all senses of the word, herself as dutifully and consistently as she fed her family. I certainly didn’t know any women like that as a child; I probably couldn’t have imagined one if I’d tried.
Neither could Lisa, a dark, pretty, soft-spoken woman of thirty-six who spent several hours in my living room one summer talking about mothers and daughters and indulgence and restraint. Lisa, a comedy writer, struck me immediately as a representative soldier on the battlefield of appetite, partly because she has veteran status (long history of struggle with weight in her twenties, including a period of bulimia) and partly because she seemed to have an appreciation for the subject’s dark mystery: Her heart started racing as soon as I turned on the tape recorder, and she couldn’t quite explain why except to say that the very word “appetite” seemed “so big and so close to the bone, so tied up with old family stuff—mother stuff.”
At the time of our meeting, Lisa’s primary site of combat had to do with professional strivings, ambition, a hunger for achievement and recognition. Comedy writing is a very male-dominated field, and she has fought—with no small degree of success—against many of the standard obstacles: sexist attitudes at work; a sense of being isolated from the boys’ club; a need (real and perceived) to be extraordinary in order to get the same degree of recognition as her often less extraordinary male colleagues. Now firmly established and respected as a producer at a Boston-area television production company, she finds herself fighting a new set of obstacles, confusing and stubborn ones that she’s tentative about even mentioning: “One of the things that’s up for me now is the question of how big can I think? How much can I take on, or take in? I tend to be very belittling, getting in my own way. And now I think, Why shouldn’t I think big?”
Thinking big, in her definition, would mean “kicking it up a notch or two. Or five or ten. Being a very successful producer, having more than just a tiny little success. Having more of an impact. I feel like I want to be contributing on a mass level.”
And why is that so hard to say?
Lisa grapples with that question for a while, an exercise that covers many of the standard themes about gender and constraint. She talks about the lifelong absorption of messages about femininity: “Somewhere along the line I got the idea that it’s not okay to stand out, that it’s better to serve others—that sort of selfless, help-others-achieve-their-dreams thing.” She talks about familial expectations, and about the number of rules her choices have already broken (appearances in her household were considered paramount for girls, sex ruinous, female ambition ideally limited to such “noble” spheres as teaching). And she talks about her father, an intellectual, charismatic, commanding presence whom she adored but who never quite gave her the kind of encouragement she needed.
This could be read as a fairly classic gender tale, a case study in the way in which female desire can be cauterized by mandates about femininity. Lisa’s description of her father is particularly resonant, a poignant testimony to the kind of distance that so often characterized father-daughter relationships during her childhood and to the consequences of that distance. Lisa’s father admired her curiosity, found her bright and sweet, but, as she puts it, he always left her with the feeling that “women were just not all that visible.” He talked at her rather than to her; her identification with him always felt thwarted, a tad incomplete, as though she couldn’t quite absorb the attributes she saw in him and coveted. The case-study reading would reach precisely this conclusion: a girl whose identification with her father is frustrated or compromised will fall back on her mother, identifying and absorbing the qualities associated with her, and in the process losing the sense that “male” qualities—strength, entitlement, power—are truly available to her. Active versus passive, self-seeking versus self-sacrificing, hungry versus not hungry, man versus woman: These were the rules when Lisa was a girl, distinctions still widely reinforced by culture and family; end of story.
And yet the story is not so simple, in part because humans are not quite so malleable nor appetites so yielding, and in part because so many of the traditional mandates about femininity have been challenged and thrown open for debate. Women can—and do—test those mandates all the time. Grown up, educated, inhabiting an altered world, we hold them up in the clear light, we decry them as sexist and self-limiting, we toss them aside. Lisa is one such woman: she believes, unequivocally, that women are entitled to every bit as much as men are, and like a lot of women, she’s come to that belief the hard way, which is to say the angry way: By feeling the rage a woman feels when she’s judged by appearances, or patronized by a man, or paid less for the same work, or considered “bitchy” when she dares to voice an opinion; by working extraordinarily hard to prove herself as competent and intellectually able; and by learning—step by angry step—to be less accommodating, less caretaking, more entitled, more deeply committed to her own heart and hungers.
This is appetite’s grunt work, a daily battle against stubborn inhibitions and abiding taboos and lingering strains of sexism, and there’s no question that it’s tough going. It can take decades for a woman to feel comfortable with her own power and competence, to stop apologizing for her achievements, to resist explaining them away (it was a fluke, a product of luck or timing or circumstance), to fend off feelings of fraudulence, to truly internalize her achievements. It can take decades, too, for a woman to feel a sense of ownership and agency about her sexual appetite, to feel that she has a right not just to be desirable but to desire, that she’s entitled to sexual pleasure, with all its implicit threats of selfishness and uncontrollability.
What may take even longer to work through—what nags and gnaws in more intricate and puzzling ways—is a deeper sense of unease, a vague disquiet that sometimes feels like abandonment, sometimes like betrayal, and that springs, I think, from the territory of mothers, that plane of merging and attachment where knowledge of the mother is enlaced with knowledge of the self. That “other” we long to be—the one who’d emerge if we lost the right amount of weight or found just the right clothes, the one who so often gets lost under the relentless focus on size and shape and appearance—is not a figure many women can conjure up from childhood; she is not deeply familiar or intimately known or felt at the core; a woman may have to invent her by herself. And in order to do so, she may have to leave something—or someone—behind.
Li
sa hints at this when she talks about her mother, who arouses the most complicated feelings, far more elusive ones than her father does. Like my own, Lisa’s mother was in many ways a model of self-sacrifice, but she was also a complex, rather angry woman who, not uncharacteristically, put her career on hold until her kids were in school, who never felt sufficiently recognized herself, and who always resented—in a vague, rarely articulated way—Lisa’s accomplishments, which (Lisa suspects) have evoked her own sense of failing and unsatisfied ambition. This has put Lisa in a most delicate position, for she has come to understand that the satisfaction of her own appetites might incur a cost, perhaps the highest interpersonal one: Indulged or relished, they might threaten her connection with her mother.
And yet this awareness is not entirely conscious, Lisa can hardly name the feelings it arouses. She calls her mother on the phone to deliver good news about a television pilot she’s just completed, and she hears something hollow in her mother’s voice, a tone just slightly edged with disappointment or haughty disregard; she feels as though she’s broken some unspoken rule, and while there is no overt expression of negativity or transgression (“That’s great,” says her mother, then moves on to to something else), the conversation leaves a knot in Lisa’s stomach, an acid sensation that feels partly like longing, partly like rage.
The sensation, if I understand it correctly, is guilt, and it is the most painful variety, each step away from the prescribed path a step away from mom, each success a possible slap, each appetite tinged with the possibility of betrayal. It is a subtle, pressing feeling, deeper than the garden-variety guilt a woman experiences when she breaks one of the more tangible sanctions against appetite (goes off her diet, takes the last pork chop) and considerably more wrenching.
Appetites Page 8
