—Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other common places of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.
The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as something, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.
No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male will, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a female life. In this way, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without which no life can have meaning.
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The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women—to make the world slightly more habitable, in other words—by offering the following:
Form. Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life. Sounds, signs, promises, threats, wildly crisscross, but what do they mean? The Right offers women a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order. Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing.
Shelter. Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home and to believe that women without men are homeless. Women have a deep fear of being homeless—at the mercy of the elements and of strange men. The Right claims to protect the home and the woman’s place in it.
Safety. For women, the world is a very dangerous place. One wrong move, even an unintentional smile, can bring disaster—assault, shame, disgrace. The Right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The Right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.
Rules. Living in a world she has not made and does not understand, a woman needs rules to know what to do next. If she knows what she is supposed to do, she can find a way to do it. If she learns the rules by rote, she can perform with apparent effortlessness, which will considerably enhance her chances for survival. The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend. The Right also promises that, despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified rules.
Love. Love is always crucial in effecting the allegiance of women. The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return, the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely—be Woman as it were—without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.
It is important and fascinating, of course, to note that women never, no matter how deluded or needy or desperate, worship Jesus as the perfect son. No faith is that blind. There is no religious or cultural palliative to deaden the raw pain of the son’s betrayal of the mother: only her own obedience to the same father, the sacrifice of her own life on the same cross, her own body nailed and bleeding, can enable her to accept that her son, like Jesus, has come to do his Father’s work. Feminist Leah Fritz, in Thinking Like a Woman, described the excruciating predicament of women who try to find worth in Christian submission: “Unloved, unrespected, unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son, and fucked by the Holy Ghost, western woman spends her entire life trying to please.”3
But no matter how hard she tries to please, it is harder still for her to be pleased. In Bless This House, Anita Bryant describes how each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and children.”4 In The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan explains that it is only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others, including our husbands.”5 In The Gift of Inner Healing, Ruth Carter Stapleton counsels a young woman who is in a desperately unhappy marriage: “Try to spend a little time each day visualizing Jesus coming in the door from work. Then see yourself walking up to him, embracing him. Say to Jesus, it’s good to have you home Nick.’”6
Ruth Carter Stapleton married at nineteen. Describing the early years of her marriage, she wrote:
After moving four hundred fifty miles from my first family in order to save my marriage, I found myself in a cold, threatening, unprotected world, or so it seemed to my confused heart. In an effort to avoid total destruction, I indulged in escapes of every kind…
A major crisis arose when I discovered I was pregnant with my first child. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the crowning moments of womanhood, but not for me…. When my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt even more trapped…. Then three more babies were born in rapid succession, and each one, so beautiful, terrified me. I did love them, but by the fourth child I was at the point of total desperation.7
Apparently the birth of her fourth child occasioned her surrender to Jesus. For a time, life seemed worthwhile. Then, a rupture in a cherished friendship plummeted her into an intolerable depression. During this period, she jumped out of a moving car in what she regards as a suicide attempt.
A male religious mentor picked up the pieces. Stapleton took her own experience of breakdown and recovery and from it shaped a kind of faith psychotherapy. Nick’s transformation into Jesus has already been mentioned. A male ho
mosexual, traumatized by an absent father who never played with him as a child, played baseball with Jesus under Stapleton’s tutelage—a whole nine innings. In finding Jesus as father and chum, he was healed of the hurt of an absent father and “cured” of his homosexuality. A woman who was forcibly raped by her father as a child was encouraged to remember the event, only this time Jesus had his hand on the father’s shoulder and was forgiving him. This enabled the woman to forgive her father too and to be reconciled with men. A woman who as a child was rejected by her father on the occasion of her first date—the father did not notice her pretty dress—was encouraged to imagine the presence of Jesus on that fateful night. Jesus loved her dress and found her very desirable. Stapleton claims that this devotional therapy, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables Jesus to erase damaging memories.
A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable way to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain—the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical ministry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.
Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy.”8 She describes years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him, and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him.”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports.”10 Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model, Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and his feelings.”11
Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled…’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and pure as eating cottage cheese.”12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on how to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for which religious women pray.
No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, an autobiography first published in 1970, Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing].”13 She blamed herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.
She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every “No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He hounded her.
Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by definition unwomanly and potentially satanic—Green manipulated Bryant with a cruelty nearly unmatched in modern love stories. From both of Bryant’s early books, a picture emerges. One sees a woman hemmed in, desperately trying to please a husband who manipulates and harasses her and whose control of her life on every level is virtually absolute. Bryant described the degree of Green’s control in Mine Eyes: “That’s how good a manager my husband is. He willingly handles all the business in my life—even to including the Lord’s business. Despite our sometimes violent scraps, I love him for it.”14 Bryant never specifies how violent the violent scraps were, though Green insists they were not violent. Green himself, in Bless This House, is very proud of spanking the children, especially the oldest son, who is adopted: “I’m a father to my children, not a pal. I assert my authority. I spank them at times, and they respect me for it. Sometimes I take Bobby into the music room, and it’s not so I can play him a piece on the piano. We play a piece on the seat of his pants!”15 Some degree of physical violence, then, was admittedly an accepted part of domestic life. Bryant’s unselfconscious narrative makes clear that over a period of years, long before her antihomosexual crusade was a glint in Bob Green’s eye, she was badgered into giving public religious testimonies that deeply distressed her:
Bob has a way of getting my dander up and backing me up against a wall. He gets me so terrifically mad at him that I hate him for pushing me into a corner. He did that now.
“You’re a hypocrite,” Bob said. “You profess to have Christ in your life, but you won’t profess Him in public, which Christ tells you to do.”
Because I know he’s right, and hate him for making me feel so bad about it, I end up doing what I’m so scared to do.16
Conforming to the will of her husband was clearly a difficult struggle for Bryant. She writes candidly of her near constant rebellion. Green’s demands—from increasing her public presence as religious witness to doing all the child care for four children without help while pursuing the career she genuinely loves—were endurable only because Bryant, like Stapleton and Morgan, took Jesus as her real husband:
Only as I practice yielding to Jesus can I learn to submit, as the Bible instructs me, to the loving leadership of my husband. Only the power of Christ can enable a woman like me to become submissive in the Lord.17
In Bryant’s case, the “loving leadership” of her husband, this time in league with her pastor, enshrined her as the token spokeswoman of antihomosexual bigotry. Once again Bryant was reluctant to testify, this time before Dade County’s Metropolitan Commission in hearings on a homosexual-rights ordinance. Bryant spent several nights in tears and prayer, presumably because, as she told Newsweek, “I was scared and I didn’t want to do it.”18 Once again, a desire to do Christ’s will brought her into conformity with the expressed will of her husband. One could speculate that some of the compensation in this conformity came from having the burdens of domestic work and child care lessened in the interest of serving the greater cause. Conformity to the will of Christ and Green, synonymous in this instance as so often before, also offered an answer to the haunting question of her life: how to be a public leader of significance—in her terminology, a “star”—and at the same time an obedient wife acting to protect her children. A singing career, especially a secular one, could never resolve this raging conflict.
Bryant, like all the rest of us, is trying to be a “good” woman. Bryant, like all the re
st of us, is desperate and dangerous, to herself and to others, because “good” women live and die in silent selflessness and real women cannot. Bryant, like all the rest of us, is having one hell of a hard time.*
Phyllis Schlafly, the Right’s not-born-again philosopher of the absurd, is apparently not having a hard time. She seems possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus. It appears that she wants to be The Prince. She might be viewed as that rare woman of any ideological persuasion who really does see herself as one of the boys, even as she claims to be one of the girls. Unlike most other right-wing women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and the Panama Canal Treaty. Her roots, and perhaps her heart such as it is, are in the Old Right, but she remained unknown to any significant public until she mounted her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment. It is likely that her ambition is to use women as a constituency to effect entry into the upper echelon of rightwing male leadership. She may yet discover that she is a woman (as feminists understand the meaning of the word) as her male colleagues refuse to let her escape the ghetto of female issues and enter the big time.* At any rate, she seems to be able to manipulate the fears of women without experiencing them. If this is indeed the case, this talent would give her an invaluable, coldblooded detachment as a strategist determined to convert women into antifeminist activists. It is precisely because women have been trained to respect and follow those who use them that Schlafly inspires awe and devotion in women who are afraid that they will be deprived of the form, shelter, safety, rules, and love that the Right promises and on which they believe survival depends.
Last Days at Hot Slit Page 15
