Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (10 page)

At our first meeting, we all went around the room explaining why each of us had come. For all intents and purposes, all eight of us were married—the one exception had been living with a man for several years—and, as it turned out, we were all there because of our marriages. Most of the women said that they hoped the
group would help them find ways to make their marriages better. Margo, who was in no better shape than the rest of us but tended to have faith in theatrical solutions, said that what she was interested in from the group was mischievous pranks. When we all looked blank, she explained that what she meant by her catchy little phrase was devising experiments like putting hot fudge on your nipples to perk up your sex life. It came around to me, my turn to explain why I was there. I said that I, too, hoped that the group would help me find a way to make my marriage better, but that it was just as likely that I was looking to the group for help in making it worse.

My consciousness-raising group is still going on. Every Monday night it meets, somewhere in Greenwich Village, and it drinks a lot of red wine and eats a lot of cheese. A friend of mine who is in it tells me that at the last meeting, each of the women took her turn to explain, in considerable detail, what she was planning to stuff her Thanksgiving turkey with. I no longer go to the group, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I don’t think the process works. Well, let me put that less dogmatically and more explicitly—this particular group did not work for me. I don’t mean that I wasn’t able to attain the exact goal I set for myself: in the six months I spent in the group, my marriage went through an incredibly rough period. But that’s not what I mean when I say it didn’t work.

I should point out here that consciousness-raising was never devised for the explicit purpose of saving or wrecking marriages. It happens to be quite good at the latter, for reasons I would like to go into further on, but it is intended to do something broader and more
political—“to develop personal sensitivity to the various levels and forms that the oppression takes in our daily lives; to build group intimacy and thus group unity, the foundations of true internal democracy; to break down in our heads the barrier between ‘private’ and ‘public’ (the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’), in itself one of the deepest aspects of our oppression.” Those lines are quoted from a mimeographed set of guidelines which were worked out by the New York Radical Feminists and which were read at our group’s first meeting, along with a set of rules: each woman must speak from personal experience, the group has no leader, each member takes her turn going around the circle, no conclusions are to be drawn until each woman has spoken, no woman is to challenge another woman’s experience. I do not have any idea of what happens in other groups. It took ours just over two hours to break every one of the rules, and just over two months to abandon the guidelines altogether.

In the beginning, none of this seemed terribly important. I loved consciousness-raising. Really loved it. The process sets off a kind of emotional rush, almost a high. There is so much confession, so much support, so much apparent sisterhood. At each meeting, we would choose a topic—mothers, success, sex, femininity, and orgasms were a few we took on at the start—and it was really like being part of a novel unfolding, as every week the character of each woman became clearer and more detailed. There were tears. There were what seemed like flashes of insight. There were cast changes: two women dropped out of the group because their husbands insisted they do so; there were two new members. It all seemed heady, and fun, and yes, voyeuristic, and after every meeting I think each of us felt a kind of pride and relief, not the
kind you’re supposed to feel, some sort of high-principled feminist consciousness or other—we never had that—but the well-I’m-not-as-bad-off-as-I-thought sort of feeling. Women who were making it with their husbands only once or twice a week found there were women who made it with their husbands only once or twice a month. And so forth.

In the autumn, 1972,
American Scholar
there is a panel discussion on women by several notable women writers, followed by a far more interesting commentary by Patricia McLaughlin in which she mentions consciousness-raising. The problem with it, she says, “is that discoveries are made, yes. (‘You feel that way? I thought only
I
felt like that.’) But what is one to do with them? Discoveries have reverberations. A new idea about oneself or some aspect of one’s relation to others unsettles all one’s other ideas, even the superficially unrelated ones. No matter how slightly, it shifts one’s entire orientation. And somewhere along the line of consequences, it changes one’s behavior.” All that may well have happened in Patricia McLaughlin’s group, but it did not happen in mine. No one’s behavior changed; quite the opposite occurred. It almost seemed as if our patterns were reinforced through the group process. The tendency among us was always to side with the woman in the group against her husband, to refuse to see the part both partners usually play in marital problems, to refrain even from asking the woman what
she
might be doing to make things difficult. And as for the discoveries—ah, the discoveries, guaranteed or your money back—even those had very little impact. In a different time or a different place or under different circumstances, things might have worked out exactly as they’re
supposed to. Three or four years ago, say—it must have been electrifying for women to get together and find, for example, that none of them could deal well with anger, or that few of them were having vaginal orgasms, or whatever. In Dubuque, say—perhaps in places like that, when housewives meet for this sort of thing, discoveries pop faster than corn, and women who have never worked go out and find jobs, women who have never shared household duties refuse to wash the dishes, or some such. Had we been single, say, or completely happy with our marriages.… But we were all married, living in New York, in 1972. We had read the movement literature. Almost all of us had careers. We were much too sophisticated—or so we thought—to waste time discussing hard-core movement concepts like “the various levels and forms that the oppression takes in our daily lives.” What we wanted to talk about was men.

And so, ultimately, it all settled into a running soap opera, with new episodes on the same theme every week. Barbara and Peter, Episode 13 of the Barbara Is Uninhibited and Peter Is a Drag Show: this week Barbara and Peter went to a party and Barbara pulled down her pants and mooned the guests and Peter was furious. Joanna and Dave, Episode 19 of the Will Joanna Ever Get Dave to Share the Household Duties Show: this week Joanna refused to get out of bed and change the channel and Dave hit her and she threatened to kill herself. Claire and Herbie in the Claire Has Sexual Boredom but Loves Her Husband Show: this week a man in the office Claire has the hots for put his hand on her leg while they were having a drink at P. J. Clarke’s, but it was time to go home and feed the children and she never did find out whether it was significant or an accident.
And there was also me, with a brand-new episode in my series; and week after week, I felt more and more support from the group and more and more despair about a solution.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to hear Midge Decter speak before the Women’s National Book Association. Decter has just published a long, almost unreadable attack on women’s liberation and she has been justifiably creamed for it by the critics. The audience at the W.N.B.A. was no more responsive to her, and one of the women in it, in what I suspect was an attempt to make Decter lose even more of her credibility than she already had, asked her what she thought of consciousness-raising. “Consciousness-raising groups are of a piece with a whole cultural pattern that has been growing up,” Decter replied. “This pattern begins with the term ‘rapping’—which is a process in which people in groups pretend that they are not simply self-absorbed because they are talking to each other.” There was a long hiss on that line, but it did not stop Decter. “I personally know of three marriages that broke up because of consciousness-raising,” she said.

A year ago, I would have joined the general disdain that greeted that remark. Even now, it kills me to admit that anything Midge Decter says might just possibly be true. But I’m afraid she has a point. Unlike her, I do not consider it a blanket tragedy if a marriage breaks up; several of the marriages I know of that ended after the women entered consciousness-raising would have ended anyway; the breakups cannot really be laid to the groups, and both parties are better off. On the other hand, it seems unquestionably true that many groups tend to get into marriage counseling, and that the process
itself tends to lead to exits rather than solutions. I cannot speak for anyone but myself, but it would have been crazy for my marriage to have ended; and yet, back in June, when I left consciousness-raising, it seemed more than likely.
^*

I suspect Decter is also on the right track when she links the process with the rap. Consciousness-raising is at the very least supposed to bring about an intimacy, but what it seems instead to bring about are the trappings of intimacy, the illusion of intimacy, a semblance of intimacy. There are incredible confidences traded, emotional moments shared, but it is all done in the context of the rap, the shut-up-it’s-my-turn-now-it’ll-be-yours-in-a-minute school of discussion. The case of the session on turkey stuffing is too classic an example to resist: no woman ever really wants to know what another woman is stuffing her turkey with; she just wants her turn to tell what
she
is planning to do.

What finally happened with my group—and this was, for me, by far the most serious development—was that it became an encounter group. The rules are precise on this point; consciousness-raising is
not
group therapy; there are to be no judgments, no confrontations, no challenges to another woman’s experience. But, as I said, all that had begun to crumble by the end of the first meeting, when one of the women in the group was told by three members that her marriage sounded lousy. And I don’t want to pretend that I had nothing to do with
that—I was one of the three women who told her. As time went on, we all fell into the pattern. We felt free to give advice—and not friendly, gentle advice, the kind that is packed with options; this was more your I-think-you’re-crazy-to-stand-for-a-minute-more-of-that kind of advice. What was especially interesting about it—and I gather this is fairly common in encounter groups—is that in spite of all this advice, none of us really wanted any one of us to get better. There was one woman in the group whose sex life was so awful that it made us all feel lucky; I think we would have been quite disturbed if she had shown up, one Monday, having straightened the whole thing out. There was another woman in the group who had what I think is called a problem about hostility. She seemed compelled, at every session, to vent her anger against some member of the group. Both these women were playing definite roles for the group, and someone with training and an understanding of group dynamics might have helped them—and us—by pointing this out. But none of us was equipped to do that, and there were no controls whatsoever on anything that happened at the meetings. I am not sure that even with a leader, encounter therapy works; without a leader, it is dangerous.

In June, when our group disbanded for the summer, I left it and went into therapy again. I am not going to write a tribute to therapy here. All I can say is that I was fortunate, I found a brilliant woman therapist, and at the moment I think that things might work out. At the same time, I don’t mean to write a wholesale attack on consciousness-raising. I hear of more and more groups every day, and some I hear about sound wonderful. They seem to follow the rules, they give women a real and
new sense of pride, they help them change in important ways, they have to do with feminism and politics and the movement as well as with personal trauma. Mine didn’t. My group thought the process could be used for something for which it was never intended. And that is the main point I want to make.

March, 1973

Leonard Lavin simply does not understand what all this is about.

Leonard Lavin is the kind of man who believes, almost to the point of religious fervor, in the free-enterprise system. In capitalism. In advertising. In this great land of ours. When Leonard Lavin sits in his Melrose Park, Illinois, factory, in the shade of a 75-foot-high can of Alberto VO5 hair spray, he knows that what he surveys is not just good but positive proof that America works. In less than twenty years, he has taken Alberto-Culver, a piddling drug company with sales of $300,000 a year, and brought it to its current yearly volume of $182 million. Leonard Lavin is proud of this, proud of every bit of it, and one of the things he is proudest of is the fact that there is a product on the market, a product that did not exist seven years ago and probably would not exist today but for him, and that product is going to gross over $40 million this year. Forty million dollars a year added on to the gross national product. Leonard Lavin deserves a medal for that. Right? And what he is getting instead is flak.

Leonard Lavin simply does not understand.

• • •

I will try to keep this from becoming gamy, but it is going to be hard. This is an article about the feminine-hygiene spray, and how it was developed and sold. I will try to keep it witty and charming, but inevitably something is going to sneak in to remind you what this product is really about. This product is really about vaginal odor. There are a lot of advertisements on television for the product that are so subtle on this point that some people—maybe not
you
, but some people—might not even know what the product
does
. There are a lot of men who manufacture the product who are so reluctant to talk straight about it that you can spend hours with them and not hear one anatomical phrase. They speak of “the problem.” They speak of “the area where the problem exists.” They speak of “the need to solve the problem.” Every so often, a hard-core word slides into the conversation. Vagina, maybe. Or sometimes, from someone particularly candid or scientific, a vulva or two. But mostly, the discussion of this product from industry spokesmen is vague, elusive, euphemistic. Here, for example, are the words of Larry Foster, a public-relations man for Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of Vespré and Naturally Feminine. He is speaking here of feminine-hygiene sprays and cunnilingus; I tell you this for the simple reason that he does not.