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 I don't. I have very few convictions about sex and gender, although I think women who fail to comply with standards of traditional feminine roles, behaviors, etc., often pay for it. I'm not talking about women with "wild" streaks, which are often appreciated by men. I'm talking about women with aggressive, questioning minds. They have a harder time of it, unless they want to give up on the heterosexual dance entirely and bond with their own kind. Something I've considered doing, on and off . . . in fantasy, but not entirely. I've noticed that strong-minded women often feel compelled, as if to "atone" for the phallic quality of their intellect, to play up the womanly role in themselves. I think of Diana Trilling, whose mind was panther-like, but who was very much the hostess and housewife when she wasn't writing. And of Simone De Beauvoir, who clung to Sartre, even as he wandered. I've spent so much of my life not defining myself through men that I suddenly find myself wondering what it would be like to lean on the established identity of a man. A close friend of mine recently told me, in a rambling midnight conversation about sex and our discontents, that she thought I liked "dumb penises." She did, indeed, have a metaphorical point, in the sense that I have trouble letting men have power over me, and "dumb penises" would have less power than "smart" ones. Or, to put it another way: I tend to respond sexually to men I don't admire particularly; it's hard for me to eroticize men who are formidable, who can engage me on an intellectual level. (As I describe it, this strikes me as being a strange variation on the madonna/whore complex.) Perhaps I will work this all out some day in what is definitely the last round of therapy I plan to be in. Or perhaps I'm too deformed by my past, which I don't say blithely. |
Question 1 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 2 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 3 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 4 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 5 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale Question 6 Susie Bright Betty Dodson Nancy Friday Daphne Merkin Sallie Tisdale |
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