Looking Back Read online

  If it hasn’t happened before, the pressure is really on at college. I’m looking back now to the beginning of my freshman year. What I should remember is my first glimpse of the college campus, freshman assembly, buying notepads and textbooks and writing my name and my dorm on the covers. Instead, my memory of September blurs into a single word: sex. Not that Yale was the scene of one continuous orgy. But we surely were preoccupied. Ask a friend how things were going and he’d tell you whether or not he’d found a girl. Go to a freshman women’s tea or a Women’s Liberation meeting and talk would turn, inevitably, to contraceptives and abortions. Liberated from the restrictions imposed by parents and curfews and car seats (those tiny Volkswagens), we found ourselves suddenly sharing a world not with the junior high and the ninth grade, but with college seniors and graduate students—men and women in their twenties. Very quickly, we took on their values, imitated their behavior and, often, swallowed their pills.

  September was a kind of catching-up period for all the people who hadn’t cut loose before. All that first week, girls trooped up the stairs at 3 and 4 A.M., and sometimes not at all. Fall, for the freshmen, at least, was a frantic rush of pairing off, with boys running for the girls and, strangely enough (there were so few of us, so many boys to go around) the girls rushing for the boys and the couples, finally, rushing for the beds as if this were musical chairs and if you didn’t hurry you’d be left standing up. It was maybe the last chance to be clumsy and amateurish and virginal. After that, you entered the professional league where, if you weren’t a pro, you had a problem.

  I don’t mean to reinforce the embarrassment, to confirm the hopelessness of the virgin’s situation—“yes, things are pretty bad, aren’t they?”—or to frighten anyone about to embark upon the brave new world of college or job-and-apartment. Because as a matter of fact there shouldn’t be anything scary or hopeless or embarrassing about virginity any more than there should be anything scary, hopeless or embarrassing about the loss of it. I’m not for virginity or against pre-marital sex, and I’m certainly not defending virginity for its own sake—the I’m-saving-it-for-my-husband line. Whether or not you’re a virgin isn’t the point; the question is what kind of a virgin or a nonvirgin you are, and whether you are what you are by choice or by submission to outside pressures. (Plenty of “freely consenting” adults are really victims of a cultural, everybody’s-doing-it type of forced consent.) Some women can easily and naturally love a man or want to be close to him, maybe even without love. I have a friend like that—a girl I used to think of as promiscuous and hypocritical when she said of each new boy friend (and sometimes two at once), “I love him.” I see now this was quite genuine.

  She has a giving and sharing nature and she loves very easily. She isn’t racking up points in her sexual relationships; she truly wants to know as many people as she can. Not everyone can be that way; knowing someone means being known, giving up privacy in a manner that’s difficult for many people. These days one’s privacy is no longer one’s own. Even the act of refusing to give it up is intruded upon. It’s no longer just the nonvirgin who subjects herself to in tense scrutiny; now it’s the virgin whose very refusal is scrutinized, maybe even more closely than her surrender would be. People don’t talk much about who’s on the pill or who’s sleeping together, but there’s endless speculation about who isn’t. “What’s the matter with her?” they ask. Is she frigid? Lesbian? Big-brother types offer helpful advice, reasoning that if she isn’t interested in them except as a friend, something must indeed be wrong with her. Her abstinence, in short, is fair game for everyone.

  Privacy—and freedom—can be maintained only by disregarding the outside pressures. Freedom is choosing, and sometimes that may mean choosing not to be “free.” For the embarrassed virgin, unsure now whether her mind is her own (“Do I really want to go to bed with him, or do I simply want to be like everybody else?”)—for her, there’s a built-in test. If she really wants to, on her own, she won’t have to ask herself or be embarrassed. Her inexperience and clumsiness will have, for him, a kind of coltish grace. Our grandparents, after all, never read the Kamasutra, and here we are today, proof that they managed fine without it.

  1972

  EVERYONE IS RAISED ON nursery rhymes and nonsense stories. But it used to be that when you grew up the nonsense disappeared. Not for us—it is at the core of our music and literature and art and, in fact, of our lives. Like characters in an Ionesco play, we take absurdity unblinking. In a world where military officials tell us “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” Dylan lyrics make an odd kind of sense. They aren’t meant to be understood; they don’t jar our sensibilities because we’re used to non sequiturs. We don’t take anything too seriously these days. (Was it a thousand earthquake victims or a million? Does it matter?) The casual butcher’s operation in the film M*A*S*H and the comedy in Vonnegut and the album cover showing John and Yoko, backs bare are all part of the new absurdity. The days of the Little Moron joke and the elephant joke and the knock-knock joke are gone. It sounds melodramatic, but the joke these days is life.

  You’re not supposed to care too much any more. Reactions have been scaled down from screaming and jelly-bean-throwing to nodding your head and maybe—if the music really gets to you (and music’s the only thing that does any more)—tapping a finger. We need a passion transfusion, a shot of energy in the veins. It’s what I’m most impatient with, in my generation—this languid, I-don’t-give-a-shit-ism that I stems in part, at least, from a culture of put-ons in which any serious expression of emotion may be branded sentimental and old-fashioned. The fact that we set such a premium on being cool reveals a lot about us: the idea is not to care. You can hear it in the speech of college students today: cultivated monotones, low volume, punctuated with four-letter words that come off sounding only bland. I feel it most of all on Saturday mornings, when the sun is shining and the crocuses about to bloom and, walking through the corridors of my dorm, I see there isn’t anyone awake.

  TO ME AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD sixth grader in 1964, the Goldwater-Johnson election year was a drama, a six-month basketball playoff game, more action-packed than movies or TV. For all the wrong reasons, I loved politics and plunged into the campaign fight. Shivering in the October winds, outside a supermarket (“Hello, would you like some LBJ matches?”), Youth for Johnson tried hard to believe in the man with the ten-gallon hat. We were eager for a hero (we’d lost ours just ten months before) and willing to trust. Government deceit was not yet taken for granted—maybe because we ! were more naïve but also because the country was. Later, the war that never ended and the CIA and the Pentagon Papers and ITT would shake us, but in those days, when a man said “My fellow Americans …” we listened.

  At school I was a flaming liberal, holding lunchroom debates and setting up a ten-year-old’s dichotomies: if you were for Johnson, you were “for” the Negroes (we called them Negroes then, not blacks) if you were for Goldwater you were against them. Equally earnest Republicans would expound the domino theory and I would waver in spite of myself (what they said sounded logical) knowing there was a fallacy somewhere but saying only “If my father was here, he’d explain it …”

  A friend and I set up a campaign headquarters at school under a huge ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ sign. (The tough kids snickered at that—“all the way” was reserved for the behavior of fast girls in the janitor’s closet at dances.) The pleasures we got from our LBJ headquarters and its neat stacks of buttons and pamphlets was much the same as the pleasure I got, five years later, manning the “Support your Junior Prom” bake sale table in the lobby at school. I liked playing store, no matter what the goods.

  And I believed, then, in the power of dissent and the possibility for change. I wrote protest songs filled with bloody babies and starving Negroes, to the tune of “America the Beautiful.” I marched through the streets of town, a tall candle flickering in my hand, surrounded by college kids with love beads and placards (what they said seems mild an
d polite now). I remember it was all “so beautiful” I cried, but when I try to recapture the feeling, nothing comes. Like a sharp pain or the taste of peach ice cream on a hot July day, the sensation lasts only as long as the stimulus.

  Gene McCarthy must have encountered blizzards in 1968, and mill towns like Berlin, N.H.—where I went to campaign for George McGovern—must have smelled just as bad as they do now. But back then those things made the fight even more rewarding, because in suffering for your candidate and your dreams you were demonstrating love. But in 1972, there was nothing fun about air so smelly you bought perfume to hold under your nose or snow falling so thick you couldn’t make out the words on the Yorty billboard right in front of you. No one felt moved to build snowmen.

  Campaigning in New Hampshire was work. Magazines and newspapers blamed the absence of youth excitement on McGovern and said he lacked charisma—he wasn’t a poet and his bumper stickers weren’t daisy-shaped. But I think the difference in 1972 lay in the canvassers; last year’s crusaders seemed joyless, humorless. A high school junior stuffing envelopes at campaign headquarters told me that when she was young—what is she now?—she was a socialist. Another group of students left, after an hour of knocking on doors, to go snowmobiling. Somebody else, getting on the bus for home, said, “This makes the fifth weekend I’ve worked for the campaign,” and I was suddenly struck by the fact that we’d all been compiling similar figures—how many miles we’d walked, how many houses we’d visited. In 1968 we believed, and so we shivered; in 1972, we shivered so that we might believe. Our candidate was perhaps no less believable, but our idealism had soured and our motives had become less noble. We went to Berlin—many of us—so we could say “I canvassed in New Hampshire,” the way high school kids join clubs so they can write “I’m a member of the Latin Club” on their college applications. The students for McGovern whom I worked with were engaged in a business deal, trading frost-bitten fingers for guilt-free consciences. Nineteen sixty-eight’s dreams and abstractions just didn’t hold up on a bill of sale.

  President Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong harbor in the spring of my freshman year at Yale. I waited to feel again the outrage I’d experienced three years before when our Armed Forces invaded first Cambodia and then Kent State, but I stayed numb. It was as though each new Vietnam development and each unfruitful protest raised our threshold of tolerance—mine, at least—as if, like insects growing used to DDT, we’d built up an immunity, an indifference. Or—and this is a sadder commentary on ourselves than on the government—that few people can maintain, indefinitely, enthusiasm for a cause that doesn’t affect them personally. The draft no longer threatened so much, and opposition to the war was no longer so fashionably radical. For whatever reason, in any case, there was little protest. A few students behaved responsively, of course—talking low, crying even, not eating much. It seemed faintly immoral to eat, wrong to care, still, about food when villages were being destroyed and civilians dying. But I confess my discomfort came not because I was upset but because I felt I ought to be.

  Outside my window there were marchers, chanters, rallies, bed sheet banners with messages (SCREW NXON). There was no single big group, though; instead, a dozen straggly and uncompelling ones, like groups of wandering Christmas carolers in March. Bad enough that the redundancy of this doubtful outcry had weakened it. More than that, it weakened in retrospect the really forceful and well executed statements made back in the sixties. Better to have stayed inside, maybe, and left to the imagination how many people cared. We would have pictured grander crowds.

  I am suspicious-natured. I look for the lowest motives, aware of what they are as only one who feels them herself can be aware. So when I saw the Haiphong demonstrators, reruns of 1969, it seemed to me (because that’s what my motives might have been) that what they were involved in was nostalgia—lots of “remember how it was in Washington?… the flowers in the National Guardsmen’s guns, the candlelight, the dead soldiers’ names, handcuffs locked to the White House gate …” It was an attempt to perform again a gesture that can have real impact only once. (To kill a man in self-defense takes just one well-aimed bullet. Firing again and again alters the spirit of the act.) Those straggly April marches, the petitions and demands for strikes, seemed only to remind us all of how the last great demonstrations, May Day 1969 and the November moratorium, had failed to bring about a change. Now they seemed founded not in disappointment that the country had failed to do the good things we hoped it would, but based, instead, on bitterness—there was an I-told-you-so-ish feeling surrounding what was going on, as if the actions of that spring only confirmed what we’d expected all along—the worst. Demonstrators on the lookout for injustice and brutality found it, of course, responding with a cry of “Pigs” before the provocation had even come, like too-well-rehearsed actors who give their lines before they get their cues. New Haven atrocities were traded like baseball cards and marbles (“How many times did they hit you?” “Well, I got arrested …”) while Vietnam, it seemed to me, got mentioned very little. It was a time for vanity and demagoguery and political power struggles and legitimized cowboys and Indians, and I didn’t like it, most of all because it put in an unfair light the people who were genuinely and, still rarer, selflessly distressed about the war.

  Girls of my generation (I should call them women, I know, but old, pre-liberation habits linger on) are often asked for their opinions on Women’s Lib (the abbreviation is, in itself, the beginning of a diminution of the cause), and one predictable answer, read off with a seemly giggle, is that every girl likes to have doors opened for her on dates. Or she can launch into a Rights of Women talk about the prostitution of marriage and the chauvinism of the media.

  Most likely, though, she’ll nervously, cautiously seat herself on the fence, legs crossed demurely at the ankle, chin out to show she is no southern belle, and torn between the desire to save her cake and the desire to eat it now, she’ll say that yes, she’s all for equal rights and equal pay, and day care centers are fine for some people, and TV commercials—though they certainly don’t influence her—are a disgrace, but she doesn’t care for the movement’s style—those women are too loud and coarse, they come on too strong, they have no sense of humor, they intimidate and antagonize the very people they’re trying to convert—other women. She doesn’t like the bitterness she sees so often among feminists. (Why is it that, like nuns, they’re often so plain? Sour grapes, she’ll say.) She likes men. She wants to get married and have children—she’s for (the old cliché) human liberation.

  It’s an easy out, that line—incontestable. Is anyone in favor of unequal jobs and unequal pay? Feminists would regard the fence sitter as a sellout and a traitor, and I guess they’d see me that way too. Because, while I’m conscious of the cliché, that is—to a great extent—how I feel. I do not feel inferior or unliberated, and while I recognize that there are women who do, women (for whom the movement does a great service) whose image of themselves needs to be changed, and that even those of us who feel equal to men may not get equal treatment, the truth is that the methods of the feminist movement turn me off. Sexist that, in some ways, I might be called, I think first of looks, and am aware of what it is about Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem that appeals to me. Almost certainly they would reject the idea that their function is to give to the movement glamour, but much of their importance to the movement comes, unquestionably, from the slim, stylish, graceful-moving image they project. (Gloria Steinem can liberate as only someone on the other side of prison bars can unlock a door.) Women who are attracted to her use the same set of standards I use, when I find myself unattracted to them—they like her looks as I dislike theirs; they want to be associated with her style and poise as I want to disassociate myself from their stylelessness—from women too old to go blue-jeaned and braless, from the tousled haired and the tensely scrawny and the ones whose eyes bear the look of frustration and anger that have more than memories of unfair pay behind them. Women with “
Vaginal Politics” buttons pinned to the zippers on their jeans; women who call me sister, who speak, in locker-room, army-barracks lingo of being “fucked over by the crappy shit” men hand them. I feel my privacy intruded upon with orgasm and sex-object talk.

  The actions of large groups, when they assemble, frighten me a bit. United we stand, divided we fall—I know that. But the effects crowds have on the people in them are often dangerous and deceptive. When individuals join in affection and good feeling (as at a folk music concert) the atmosphere of warmth (while it may be illusory and deceptive) seems healthy. But people in crowds stir each other up to a point where good sense is suspended by too much strong feeling in too-close quarters, too much chanting and foot-stomping and hand-clapping. I think of the football game I went to once, where the wild, touchdown-crazed crowds made the wooden stands we sat on creak and then crumble. Films of Hitler in action, of the Rolling Stones at Altamont—the analogies I make are rash and perhaps unfair to a movement that unquestionably does good. But it is, nonetheless, a movement held together by shared negative feeling, a sisterhood of bitterness and sometimes hate.