What Do Women Want?

For the last 30 years, Americans seem to have been trapped in an exploding cosmos of inexplicable sexual phenomena:

--The pill was invented, putting reproductive control--and with it a kind of protection--into the hands of women. Sex was far less fun, Norman Mailer lamented in “The Prisoner of Sex,” now that women no longer took their lives in their hands when they “did it.”

--In 1973, abortion was legalized. This meant, in theory at least, any woman could be “free” from having children, that no one “had to get married” anymore.

--Women began to make money. At the professional level, by a few months ago, they earned 61 cents to every dollar a man earned in the same job. Even if they had to work one-third harder than a comparable man, they might nonetheless earn enough money to live well.

--Less than a decade ago, young homosexual men began dying. At a recent Beverly Hills party, psychologist David Viscott opined that three out of four of all human beings would be dead from AIDS by the year 2000. (Anthony Pascal from the RAND Corp. puts the figure at a more modest 50-100 million.) Now, women and men take their lives in their hands when they participate in a sexual act.

If all this seems to belabor the obvious, it doesn’t. These sexual changes are as emotionally stunning, as volatile and even--potentially--as lethal as the atom bomb. The bomb was obvious too. How could you miss it? But more than a generation after it dropped, we are still trying to get our minds around it. These new sexual facts seem, like the bomb, entirely beyond our comprehension. We flee from them to beliefs that shelter above all by their familiarity--beliefs that our parents always knew were “true.” In the strange new world of sex, such beliefs include the following:

--That despite their newfound economic independence, women have become ever more needful--infinitely needful--of men.

--That women have a slimmer chance of marrying after age 35 than being kidnapped by terrorists.

--That women get “left” far more often than men, and that men are apt to do this “leaving” in ever stranger, less explicable ways. Walking out to get that cigarette and never returning; waiting until their women step into the shower, then scooting out the back door.

--That men have become so scarce, so unattainable, that they float above the laws of property, good manners, reasonable human behavior.

--That there exist authorities on these phenomena, even if their expertise consists of little more than a Ph.D., a divorce or two and an interest in the subject.

A few weeks ago a friend of mine read about the tragic incident in which 18 Mexican aliens lost their lives by being locked in a boxcar. Holding the head of the INS personally responsible for this hideous event, she remarked, “I hope that man believes in hell, because then he’ll burn in it.” That was a remark about belief systems, and “Men Who Can’t Love: When a Man’s Fear Makes Him Run From Commitment (And What a Smart Woman Can Do About It)” (Evans: $15.95) by Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, and dozens of other, similar books are also about belief systems. In fact, whatever they may claim to be, these books are about the return of old-fashioned beliefs about relationships between men and women.

The advertising campaign for “Men Who Can’t Love” includes a full-page black-and-white photograph of a 30-ish man with this caption: “He’s single, successful, straight and healthy. And totally unavailable.” The hidden message here is intended to intimidate, for “He” isn’t even all that cute! “He” has the unmistakable look of a woman’s third choice , but it is precisely that which makes this situation so terrifying. Any woman now who contemplates a heterosexual relationship even with Mr. Semi-Right is asked to stoically accept the fact that she comes to him with the leverage of a typhoid germ.

She is asked to believe that even an undreamy man like him will invariably give her wrong phone numbers, instruct his bartender to tell her he’s out, wait until she’s taking a shower and then leave forever. This is not solely a figment of Carter’s and Sokol’s imagination: I personally know two men who walked out while their women were taking a shower. On the other hand, all of us know many men who come home at night, and go to the movies with their women. If they feel like breaking a relationship, they say so. Also, many men get dumped. All of us know a few.

But the old-fashioned belief systems--now revived in all their grim glory--don’t allow for that diverse reality. Men can’t take heavy doses of women, Connell Cowan and Melvin Kinder suggest in “Women Men Love/Women Men Leave: Why Men Are Drawn to Women/What Makes Them Want to Stay” (Clarkson Potter: $18.95). Why do these books have such long and very strange titles, and why is their punctuation so entirely peculiar? Is it not just men but commas and colons that have walked out while women were in the shower? Cowan and Kinder warn women against acting like “sphinxes” or “cheerleaders.” They warn women not to be “boring” but on the other hand not to be “romantic.” They specialize in admonitions, Cowan and Kinder do.

Again, let us remember what makes these men experts on why men hate “cheerleaders” or “romantics.” Kinder received his Ph.D from UCLA--he and half the West Side. ( I even received my Ph.D from UCLA!) There is another sense in which these gentlemen are experts, of course. When asked by a perceptive woman on a recent Donahue show how many divorces they’d had, one author held up one finger, the other, two. UCLA and the School of Hard Knocks--not the most reassuring of all credentials.

Maybe they do know something, but what they know came originally from the Seventeen magazines of 30 years ago, when girls were advised to be good listeners and never call a boy on the telephone. Of course, women’s hearts could break that way: Hans Christian Andersen knew it a century ago when his mermaid princess loved a prince in silence, and allowed her tail to be split so that she could walk upon the land, to pursue him. She suffered the tortures of hell, and ended up a piece of sea foam without the prince she loved ever knowing.

This is not to suggest in any way that the authors of these books intentionally prey on women’s insecurities, but rather that they are addressing themselves to a series of large and intractable clashes between facts and belief systems that cannot, at this chronological moment, be put in coherent order. Ptolemy, when he invented the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, was not trying to get rich quick, or pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. He was trying, as best he could, to explain the phenomena that he perceived. The writers of these books are doing the same, but it just isn’t good enough. They are missing something, even if it would take a Copernicus to know what it is.

Thus it seems that though professional women earn 61 cents for every dollar that men earn, and are being accepted to more medical schools every day, they still are--as Robin Norwood suggests in “Women Who Love Too Much: When You Keep Wishing and Hoping He’ll Change” (Pocket: $4.95)--in utter emotional bondage to men. Norwood postulates that women who are children of unloving parents will seek out destroying men, and, in an echo of that fairy-tale mermaid, will ask and act out the rhetorical question: “If I suffer for you, will you love me?” This book, which really does look like it would help if you walked out of your shower shivering and found the love of your life gone, is full of nice, common-sense suggestions about keeping busy with your friends, founding support groups and generally keeping your hold on reality.

My own sense of this, however, is that reality has nothing to do with it. My bet, my guess, is that all of these books are responding to an atavistic warning from our own collective unconscious. The human race is in very serious trouble. In the classic “fight or flight” syndrome, these books represent “flight” at its most desperate. We must , these books seem to tell us, go back to the old ways. In times of crisis, men have traditionally been called to dare and women to endure; men to heroism, women to suffering. Thus, the mermaid must choose to split her tail and, pursue--in agony--her happy, impervious prince. Thus, Emma Bovary must repent her adultery and gobble powdered arsenic; thus, Anna Karenina must fling herself, uncomplaining, under her train. Emma didn’t know what was wrong, neither did Anna. Neither, in our day, do those who read these books. Neither, most emphatically, do those who write them. The books are (as was once said of psychoanalysis) the disease of which they claim to be the cure.

Their authors think they know what the cure is, but they don’t. We have been hit by an atomic bomb. They remind us not to go out without sun screen and a wide-brimmed hat.