by Nancy Friday
Having never slain the dragon, having brought no independent fire to sex in our single days, married sex merely becomes something else the man owns, like the house and the car; giving in to “his” sex, his penis, becomes something we resentfully do for him, not for ourselves.
Having made our husbands into cozy symbiotic partners, we no longer desire sex. We become mother, first slowly, then faster when we become mothers ourselves. Many of the women who fought for sexual freedom twenty years ago changed their minds when they held their tiny babies in their arms: “Now I understand why mother acted that way!” Having abandoned their own sexuality, they take their tiny daughter’s hand away from between her legs, thus planting the seed for another generation’s double standard of aging.
Owning our sex, rejoicing in it, feels forbidden because we fear that going against mother means she will rise up and smite us; what else is powerful enough to stand between independent women and erotic bliss? Put another way, mother’s sexual condemnation is the engine that drives our fantasies. These are the best years of my life for having written My Mother/My Self, which was published at the height of feminist joy, before sex became a dirty word again.
Good Witch/Bad Witch
When we are incorrectly taught at adolescence that only now are we sexual, we must assume that when we stop bleeding, we are no longer sexual. The ability to carry a child in adolescence is just that, a stage in the evolution of female sexuality that begins at birth. Menopause marks the end of childbearing years, not the death of sex. There have been times in history when menopausal women were thought to be at the height of their sexuality. The older woman as sexual initiator was a popular theme of literature and poetry in earlier centuries. From the twelfth-century The Art of Courtly Love: “As regards that natural instinct of passion, young men are usually more eager to gratify it with older women than with young ones of their own age.” In her In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality, Lois Banner quotes a sixteenth-century autobiography: “He that wooeth a widow must not carry ‘quick’ eels in his codpiece, but show some proof that he is stiff before.”
I like the image of the mature woman, who has never forgotten (women never do) what was lacking in her own first lover and can teach that slow build to orgasmic passion, having imagined and rerun more tapes of past and future seductions than any man. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Banner points out, the sexual appetites of older women were seen as prurient: “Even the presumed ugliness of aging had to it an erotic quality, the quality of being beyond the ordinary… of indicating new realms of vice.”
Our sexual appetites aren’t lost as we age; it is the image of ourselves as sexual that we dutifully abandon to fit the bygone stereotype of Patriarchy that regimented women’s sex to accommodate the economic power structure; everything and everyone in that structure was designed to keep men’s shoulder to the wheel of commerce and women’s prodigious sexual power confined to childbearing.
We don’t live that way any longer. While there are those who would like to retain certain rigidities from Patriarchy, seeing constancy and security in going back to “the good old days,” what use is our new economic power if it doesn’t buy us the privileges of aging that men have always enjoyed? “Most men and more women—young women afraid for themselves—punish older women with derision, punish them with cruelty, when they show inappropriate signs of sexuality,” writes Doris Lessing in her novel of a sixty-five-year-old heroine who is “in love to the point of insanity” with a man half her age. Lessing has been a feminist heroine for decades; once again, she is right on the money.
In a stunning example of life imitating art, Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of Lessing’s book appears as I am writing these pages. “The story Ms. Lessing has chosen to relate in ‘Love, Again’ is unbelievable, inadvertently comical and clumsily rendered,” Kakutani writes. “Ms. Lessing asks us to believe that a sixty-five-year-old woman not only falls into a state of longing and lust, but that she also becomes the love object of several younger men.”
Kakutani’s envy of Lessing and the novel’s heroine is as obvious as it is outrageous. Coming from the most powerful female book critic in the country, Kakutani’s words sound like nothing more than the child’s denial of mother’s sexuality. Will she, a woman in her early forties, feel the same way when she is sixty-five?
Twenty-five years into feminism, we still accept an older man with a much younger woman, but not the reverse. Think Eastwood and Streep, Redford and Pfeiffer, or, in real life, Senator Alfonse D’Amato with gossip reporter Claudia Cohen. If feminism is about anything, it is seeing the women who break new ground as heroines; clearly, this is true in the world of ideas and commerce, but not in the bedroom. How else to explain Kakutani’s conclusion that “in earlier Lessing novels, such inventories of a heroine’s self were rendered in meticulous emotional detail, and they were used as a kind of commentary on the society in which that heroine lived. For some reason, this does not happen in ‘Love, Again,’ and as a result the novel feels perfunctory and contrived, as well as implausible in the extreme.”
Rereading a 1972 article by Susan Sontag I can’t help but think how her description of an aging woman reminds me of women’s lifelong attitudes about our sexual selves, in particular those parts of the body that we are taught from the time we are born are ugly, dirty, smell bad, and, therefore now, in older age, must smell and look all the worse:
“Aging in women is a process of becoming obscene sexually,” wrote Sontag, “for the flabby bosom, wrinkled neck, spotted hands, thinning white hair, waistless torso, and veined legs of an old woman are felt to be obscene. In our direst moments of the imagination, this transformation can take place with dismaying speed—as in the end of Lost Horizon, when the beautiful young girl is carried by her lover out of Shangri-La and, within minutes, turns into a withered, repulsive crone…. One of the attitudes that punish women most severely is the visceral horror felt at aging female flesh…. That old women are repulsive is one of the most profound esthetic and erotic feelings in our culture.”
I don’t know what comes to mind first, the witch or the vagina, but as Sontag makes clear in her last sentence, they are intermingled. Women’s sex is either “bewitching,” as in young and beautiful, or ugly, as in the warts on a crone’s nose. Between 1500 and 1800, as many as nine million women were killed for being witches. The Church saw women’s sexuality as the root of all evil and women as the obstacle to men’s holiness. The handbook regarding the persecution of witches, Malleus Maleficarum, commissioned by Pope Innocent VIII in 1486, stated that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable.” The Malleus made clear that women, by virtue of their sex, whether they be beautiful beyond dreams or blindingly ugly, had terrible power over men.
We mistakenly think that all witches were crones, but the bewitchingly beautiful woman was as likely to be thought a witch as was the old hag; the effects of the beautiful one’s sexual power—the man’s erection, wet dreams, as well as his impotence at a time when these reactions weren’t understood—all gave reason to the belief that she had consorted with the devil. Women were seen as more susceptible to the devil’s seduction because they were irrational and more sex driven. And no woman was more susceptible to the devil’s wiles than the aging one.
“As sexualized beings, aging women were malevolent creatures,” comments Lois Banner, “the devil’s ‘go-betweens’ to the human world…. ‘Where the Devil cannot go, he sends an old woman.’ These women themselves were supposedly engaged in a vast conspiracy of secret prostitution, as they controlled those young female devils (the succubi) and the young male devils (the incubi) whom they sent to seduce others and to enlist them in their satanic worship.”
If you look at illustrations of witches you will see that they wear poulaines, the same long, pointy shoes that men enjoyed wearing in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, before the king and the Church forbade them. While men wore poulaines to
celebrate their mighty penis, the witch wore them, perhaps mockingly, to celebrate women’s sexual power over men.
Raised from the cradle not to touch our genitals or think well of them, we understand why menstruation is called The Curse, the power that only witches own. Is it so unusual that when we look in the mirror at age forty or fifty and see loose skin, loss of beauty, that it is painted in the hues of the ugliness of vagina/witch? I sometimes think women rush into asexual old age.
Here we are, wiser, richer, and more accomplished, and it is as if none of our victories have altered the sexual image of the older woman. When we look in the mirror, we see little traces of the witch sneaking up on us, and a frost passes over our hearts. Refusing to believe that a man still wants us, we ask him to turn off the light before we crawl into his bed. When he says he doesn’t see the wrinkles, we hate him for lying. By the time the wrinkles do appear, there is triumph in our words, “See, I told you so! Go away, sex, get thee gone, for I never was at peace with you. Now, finally, done with beauty and sex—though I am only forty, fifty, whatever—I can rest on mother’s bosom, I can be mother. I am at peace. Age, take me!”
Many women prefer to see menopause as the end of their sexual lives even when scientific proof is offered that their libido decline is not as precipitous as men’s. To women who would prefer to close the book on sex, such breakthrough news arrives on an ill wind.
The older mother grows, the more her flesh sags on her bones, the more the unseparated daughter tries to hold on to her internally by becoming not the good but the bad mother. It is not conscious; when friends tell the daughter, after mother’s death, that her voice on the phone sounds just like her mother’s, the woman shivers, knowing how she hated that voice. Now when she looks at the graying pubic hairs, the hard line of her lips, she sees horror beyond aging; in her preconscious she recognizes not the mother she loved, but The Witch.
“The witch—more than the other creations of our imagination which we have invested with magic powers, the fairy and the sorcerer—in her opposite aspects is a reincarnation of the all-good mother of infancy and the all-bad mother of the oedipal crisis,” writes Bettelheim. “But she is no longer seen halfway realistically, as a mother who is lovingly all-giving and an opposite stepmother who is rejectingly demanding, but entirely unrealistically, as either superhumanly rewarding or inhumanly destructive.”
I prefer the wisdom of fairy tales to strict psychoanalytic literature, especially as regards fear of sex; the former has a credibility given their lasting power over the centuries and in our own memories as well. Fairy tales are beloved because they mirror our deepest feelings, good and bad. They belong as much in this final chapter as in earlier ones because in the third act of life most of us are no closer to conquering our fear of sex than we were when Mommy read the stories to us.
The fact that we may have raised children of our own has nothing to do with fear of sex; the act of intercourse is merely that, an act, until we challenge and defeat the ancient fear of loss of love should we go against parental antisex rules. “One becomes a complete human being who has achieved all his potentialities,” writes Bettelheim, “only if, in addition to being oneself, one is at the same time able and happy to be oneself with another.”
There are two stages in becoming a complete human being; tales such as “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” wherein the hero and heroine must undergo a series of trials, are about gaining selfhood. The purpose is to bring the central character to the point of revelation that he or she is “worthy of being loved.” But there is no mention of Cinderella’s or Snow White’s feelings for the Prince, just a vague assurance of happily ever after. A sense of incompleteness exists. “These stories, while they take the heroine up to the threshold of true love,” writes Bettelheim, “do not tell what personal growth is required for union with the beloved other.” One more test is required: The hero/heroine must conquer fear of sex. For this, the Animal Groom Cycle of fairy tales picks up where the Sleeping Princess leaves off.
“Fairy tales suggest that eventually there comes a time when we must learn what we have not known before—or, to put it psychoanalytically, to undo the repression of sex,” says Bettelheim. Why do women want sex in the dark? What is so loathsome about the investigation of a man’s body? Initially, we were curious, even excited, to look, but as we mix our love of him with sex, the former destroys the latter, making it love or sex. If that is so, then the quality of our love must be questioned. As Bettelheim writes: “What we had experienced as dangerous, loathsome, something to be shunned, must change its appearance so that it is truly beautiful. It is love which permits this to happen.”
Think of the tale of “Beauty and the Beast,” which belongs to The Animal Groom Cycle. In the tale, the heroine faces her fear and the beast becomes beautiful because of her love. Children are assured by these stories that they aren’t the only ones to fear sex but that others share their anxiety. “As the story characters discover that despite such anxiety their sexual partner is not an ugly creature but a lovely person, so will the child.”
The Romanian fairy tale “The Enchanted Pig” is less well known but is rich in modern-day female heroism; in it, the heroine is made to marry a pig, who at night turns into a man; come morning, he is once again a pig. She follows a witch’s advice and ties a string around the man’s leg to keep him from changing back into a pig—but because she has tried to hurry things, she earns the pig/husband’s displeasure. She is told she will not see him again until she has “worn out three pairs of iron shoes and blunted a steel staff” looking for him.
Bettelheim describes her search: “He disappears, and her endless wanderings in search of him take her to the moon, the sun, and the wind. In each of these places she is given a chicken to eat and warned to save its bones…. Finally… she comes to a place high up, where she is told her husband dwells.” To reach him, she assembles a ladder out of the bones of all the chickens she has eaten on her journey, and even cuts off her little finger to provide the final rung she needs. When she reaches him, the spell is lifted from him. As Prince and Princess, they inherit her father’s kingdom and “ruled as only kings rule who have suffered many things.”
In fairy tales it is usually an older woman, a stepmother, who casts a spell, or a witch, who turns the man/Prince into an ugly animal, suggesting none too subtly “that girls’ sexual anxieties are the result not of their own experiences, but of what others have told them.” Or, what other women have not told us. We can argue indefinitely about who plants the antisex message in women but there is little argument as to whether or not feminism has educated women to embrace the beauty of our own sexual selves, to embrace men and thus become complete human beings. Feminism has left us nonheroines in our own modern fairy tale.
We must begin by bringing sex into the journey of modern feminism. We stand today at the entrance to the beast’s cave, heels dug in, cowardly refusing to complete our task as human beings. Women play a fool’s game thinking that by eliminating men from our lives we don’t have to conquer fear of sex, when, in fact, the fear was in us long before the opposite sex came to call. Before this moment in history, we were too dependent to go on such a journey. Now we have the tools but have found another reason to postpone the quest: our war against men.
But even the scapegoat of men’s brutality doesn’t protect us from our fear of aging, which has become worse; when we look in our mirrors, we don’t see women aging better than any generation before us, but instead see The Witch, the Bad Mother of fairy tales who didn’t like it/us when we touched ourselves. Until The Sewer is found to be lovely—like the pig who was found to be handsome—we will perceive age as ugly. Most grim of all, until we change what was loathsome into something beautiful, which, in essence, is human sexuality, our children will grow up vulnerable to all the deadly plagues associated with irresponsible sex.
Reading the recent literature on aging women written by such feminist heroines as Steinem and Greer can be grim, y
es, as in Grimm’s fairy tales, for each of these heroines was a young, sexual beauty when feminism began. And brave, oh, my, were they brave! But alas, they bring none of the passion of earlier years to the subject of aging.
When economic and political equality were the goals, these women were the mothers of invention; there was nothing we could not change, they told us, could not accomplish if enough of us wanted it. They were right. Our objectives were extraordinary, some said not doable, but we did it. Because they believed in their vision, we believed in ourselves leading lives our mothers never imagined.
What could be harder to alter than the image of women/mother as caretaker, reconstituted as man’s equal in the workplace? Clearly, it is the image of women retaining sexual beauty as we age. By eliminating sex and beauty from the feminist agenda, The Sisterhood removed the major sources of dissension among women. But let us be clear regarding our deepest feelings: We did not pick an ugly woman to represent feminism. We picked a great beauty whose sexual liaisons with powerful men were well known. Steinem was, and remains, feminism’s legendary queen, though no fairy-tale heroine who conquers sex.
Here, in an interview with Gail Sheehy, is Steinem’s pronouncement on sex: “Sex and sensuality—going to bed for two entire days and sending out for Chinese food—was such an important part of my life, and it just isn’t anymore…. I don’t know how much of it is hormonal and how much is outgrowing it.”
It is a perplexing message. Knowing the weight her words carry as the most quoted feminist alive and realizing her place in history, Steinem nonetheless goes further, holding out her success at getting past sex as a goal for other women, to “…have faith that it may be true for them, too.” What does that mean? Losing interest in sex in the last third of our lives is a godsend, something to which we can look forward?
Let me return to the beginning of the tale, for no feminist was more witchily successful at everything she touched than the young and beautiful Gloria Steinem. “When she had become a spokeswoman for feminism, the reassurance her appearance offered to women that, contrary to the impression given by the media, not all feminists resembled male truck drivers in boots and fatigues, was profound,” wrote Steinem’s biographer Carolyn Heilbrun.
