This is what the sex education textbooks call it. “I wanted to be swept away,” a sentence heard so often from women with unintended pregnancies that it has become the name of the malady.
The women whose fantasies fill this book sound like a new generation, one that is immune to the Swept Away Phenomenon. Many of them have had varied and exciting real sexual lives, and the language in which they describe what they’ve done, how they masturbate, and the extraordinary images that run through their minds suggests an equally new level of sexual independence and responsibility.
The latest American statistics on unintended pregnancies would suggest, however, that the Swept Away Phenomenon is alive and well. They do not reflect just poor girls in the ghetto but also educated, middle-and upper¬middle-class women. The statistics are alarming. They say louder than words how sexually ambivalent the new generation is. For instance: some 70 percent of all abortion patients are white, according to the National Abortion Federation, although black and Hispanic women have higher rates of abortion. After 18 years of a declining birth rate in teenagers, there has been an abrupt reversal in the late 1980s – a startling increase of 10 per¬cent in the years 1986-1988 alone. And according to statistics from the early 1990s, more than half of all pregnancies result from unintended con¬ception.
The apparent contradiction between the women in this book and these statistics is not a contradiction at all. It is possible to be sexually knowing, sexually active and still be controlled by an even more powerful, though unconscious, need to be taken care of. While these women speak and act like a brave new breed, their unconscious feelings about sex are what inter¬est me more because these deep feelings of right and wrong, which we get from our parents, motivate us more powerfully and are the slowest to change.
It would be absurd to suggest that masturbation alone would have taught these young women to take better care of themselves contraceptively, to know the difference between sex and love. Many pressures are working on a young woman who allows herself to become pregnant. But I do not know a better lesson than that which masturbation teaches, or one that lasts a whole lifetime.
To put it another way, if women are guilty about masturbation, they are reluctant to use any form of contraception that involves touching their geni¬tals. As stated in a paper published in the Journal of Sex Research in 1985, “Masturbation guilt appeared to account specifically for reluctance to use the diaphragm as a contraceptive device.”
I have no way of knowing whether the women in this book are sexually responsible. Most remember a harsh critical attitude toward masturbation when they were young. Or they remember silence, which in its open-endedness allows for an eternity of recriminations. But they mastur¬bate today in spite of what mother said or felt.
“When I was a young girl (about six or seven), I had my first orgasm through masturbation,” says Kristen, a 26-year-old woman. “My mother always hid her sexuality and would beat me whenever she caught me mas¬turbating. Nevertheless, I continued to masturbate in secret.” In her fan¬tasy, Kristen poses nude for a handsome young photographer, who not only approves of her genitals but also adores it when she masturbates. In sexual fantasy, Kristen rewrites history.
The new woman has more in common with her older, traditional sister than she probably realizes; not enough time has gone by to know whether the freedoms expressed by the women in this book will hold. We don’t know what effect the increasingly restrictive times in which we live will have on the avowed sexual acceptance these women feel.
We meet in adolescence like people from two different planets. We make unspoken bargains within these young relationships based on a common need but diametrically opposite past sexual experiences and expectations. Years later we may lie down together with the same conscious objective – sexual pleasure – but the union reawakens old needs: when sex is done, he rolls over, satisfied; she lies there, desperately wanting to continue the bond. She thinks he is cold; he fears she wants to own him. When she be¬comes pregnant, her doctor asks, “Why didn’t you use contraceptives?”
“I just couldn’t. I didn’t want to get up and go into that cold bathroom and spoil the moment. I wanted to be swept away.”
What does it mean, “swept away”? This is not an adolescent talking now, but a grown woman, someone who pays her own rent, is responsible at work, takes care of herself. In all matters but sexual. When it comes to being kissed and held and having a man enter her body, the giving over of herself becomes just that, not a mutual exchange but a deal – a hard word perhaps, but we are not talking about love here, we are talking about sex.
The man may also want to lose himself in the sexual experience, but it is a temporary giving up of the control he must otherwise exert in the daily business of being, proving himself male. Once he has reached orgasm, he knows from past sexual experiences in masturbation and intercourse, he will subside, return to that known level on which he lives.
I’ve never heard a man explain sex as a desire to be Swept Away. For openers, there are too many jobs a man must perform during sex with a woman that automatically eliminate any idea of his losing consciousness: he must orchestrate the seduction, arouse the woman, and keep himself from coming long enough for her to get close to orgasm. Not all men are this considerate, but even if reaching his own orgasm is the goal of the ex¬ercise, he is not going to get there by lying back and waiting for the woman to sweep him away.
No, the Swept Away Phenomenon is indeed peculiar to women raised to think that sex is not their responsibility, not something they want to have a hand in. Be party to our own seduction? Tell the man what it is we want, give him some guidance about what we desire, what turns us on, speak the words out loud? Absolutely not!
Being contraceptively prepared goes against a lifelong addiction to love, a state of mind that includes sexual feeling but has never been differenti¬ated from it.
Is it love/romance we want or is it sex? Wouldn’t it be helpful to know, and also to know that we can have the one without the other? Maybe it’s preferable to love the person with whom you are having sex, but not neces¬sarily all the time. Sometimes it feels good to have sex with someone who is just a friend; sometimes it feels good to masturbate.
Does that sound like a man? The notion that men masturbate and/or have sex with strangers/whores because men need sex in a way that women do not, that they are animals, predators, leads to the opposite notion that women are the poor little victims who are preyed upon. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The truth is that some of us are born with higher libidos than others; some of the low scorers are men, some of the high scorers women. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what our true sexual appetite is? No one can tell us better than our own bodies.
When we mate, marry, we choose one another for reasons as various as a shared love of dancing, walks in the woods, Chinese food. Wouldn’t it make sense to select a partner who has a common interest or disinterest in sex?
Whatever our libido, sex is an energy, a source of life to be felt, enjoyed, and also used to fuel and feed all the other areas of our life – social, intel¬lectual, abstract as well as physical. Some of us are less social, less intel¬lectual than others; we know this and therefore apply ourselves elsewhere so that we may enjoy life more. What a waste of life not to learn from our own bodies the true level of our sexual interest so that we may better know who we are.
Raised to believe that we come alive sexually only when somebody “out there” ignites us, we use sex to get what we want, to capture a man, to make him love us. Sex becomes a means to an end. Once the honeymoon is over, we don’t understand why we are no longer interested in sex. We wake up ten years later and ask, is this all there is? Angry, we withhold sex, still not even aware that the person we may be hurting most is ourself.
How could we know? Sex has become something external that we have used up, like money.
We say men are unfeeling, when in fact a man knows exactly what it is that he is feeling. He knows that last night it was sex and this morning he feels great but it isn’t/wasn’t love. We say men are cold because they won’t “commit,” a terrible word that sounds like jail, which is just what the man feels women’s idea of commitment is all about.
We resent it that men can have an extraordinary night of sex, then bound out of bed in the morning refreshed, refueled, more independent than ever. He will have a better day at work because of his wonderful erotic adventure with us. We loved the night of sex too, but in the morning we are reluctant to leave the bed; we lie there waiting for him to stop whistling around the bedroom and come sit beside us, touch us, reconnect. We want him to say what he said last night and to tell us when we will be together again. We don’t have a better day at the office; we are less focused on work because we are listening for the phone, his voice, the words that will say when and where. Far from being refueled by a night of sex, we are weakened, having left part of ourself in that bed.
Men are no crueler than women. They simply approach sex and love from a different point of view. Let’s say the man waits four days to tele¬phone. Not because the night was like any other but precisely because it was so very special. He needs to regain his sense of independence, of sepa¬rateness, not because he doesn’t like/love us but because he came so very close to those emotions. Men overplay the role of the lone cowboy because women exaggerate their role of being the emotional ones, the sirens who would love to wrap their arms around him and never let go. Or so he thinks.
Who could not want the transcendency of wonderful sex? To enjoy that deep, powerful sense of loss of self in the other person, to be able for a few moments to drop the iron controls by which we all live – that is a human wish, exclusive to neither sex. But only the person with a strong sense of identity can emerge whole and happily walk away from the bliss of tran¬scendency.
For many women it isn’t a matter of choice. We can’t emerge from the deep pool of togetherness. It’s as though we never really left this sweet place. He is gone, but even without him we can keep ourselves in the trance. We listen to romantic music; heartbreaking songs of desperate yearning are what we crave; quivering violins, voices that break under the weight of the soulfully killing words mirror exactly what we feel and keep us connected to him and the night.
It is not the sounds, smell, and sweat of abandoned sex we want to recre¬ate; it is the union, the oneness, romance, love. We sip a brandy, light an¬other cigarette, giving ourselves over to it, wallowing in it: Without you I will die, the music says. And we will, or so it feels.
“Better not get involved with men,” many women say today. “I feel good about my life, and every time I start up with a guy, I lose that. Who needs it?”
We don’t need men the way we used to. Many of us don’t need them to take care of us, pay for our food and the roof over our heads. We don’t need them for an identity or a place in the community. Economic independ¬ence is indeed thrilling, discovering in our twenties or later that we can ac¬tually make it all by ourselves.
When I was writing My Mother/My Self fifteen years ago, I thought eco¬nomic independence, more than anything, would help grown women throw off the emotional need to lose themselves in relationships. Ideally, emo¬tional separation and individuation is something that should be learned and practiced in the first years of life. But if we didn’t get it then, all is not lost; it is harder later on, but we can teach ourselves.
What I didn’t realize in the mid-seventies however, was that women would confuse economic independence with honest emotional separation. How separate are we if we cannot risk a relationship with a man out of fear of becoming enslaved to romance/love? We worry that sex with a man would turn into that desperate “I need you” that destroys the control over our lives. Before you know it, there would be a lovers’ quarrel and he would slam out the door, leaving us once again by the telephone while he roamed the streets, picked up women in bars, maybe even went to a whore.
Chances are he would do none of this, being as in love with us as we are with him. But he could. He could have sex out of anger, he could have sex for the sake of sex because he doesn’t confuse it with love.
We denigrate men for going to whores, for feeding their masturbatory fantasies with pornographic magazines. Could part of our devaluation of men be envy, an angry resentment that they have access to a life from which we feel barred? Envy is a bitter, destructive emotion; the envious comparison makes our lives feel shabby, empty. We cannot abide it that the enviable one has certain freedoms, power, pleasure, that are unavailable to us. Some part of our psyche wishes, hopes that the enviable person will come to a bad end. Only then can our own life regain some of its pleasure.
Envy is such a destructive emotion that most of us deny it. “Who me, envy men?” we say. Absolutely not! Men are uncaring, power-crazed, overly competitive, sexual animals who degrade women. The trouble with the world, we say, is that more women don’t have the power – a transfor¬mation that would automatically make the world a better place.
And so we punish men with a guilt-free heart, so sure are we of our vir¬tuousness opposite the Brute; we leave men out of the act of creation, the most powerful act in human life: we have babies by ourselves. We say there are no good men around, when in fact we are getting back at men. We are not thinking of the child; we are thinking of ourselves.
We control our lives only through the exclusion of men. Maybe in the workplace we can see ourselves as equal; even if we haven’t yet found eco¬nomic parity, we can compete with men for it. But when it comes to sex, we are not equal at all. He is not a slave to love. He owns his sexuality and we do not.
Here now is the heart of the issue, what this essay is about, and what we must take in if the next generation of women is to be more integrated, more independent and sexually responsible: we can learn economic independence at any time, but age has a lot to do with learning to believe in one’s sex¬ual independence, learning the difference between love and sex. Cash in the hand that pays the rent on a repeated basis, month after month, year after year, becomes a cold fact of life that tells the “littlest” woman she doesn’t have to be taken care of. But it is very, very difficult to learn to believe in ourselves as sexual entities, with responsibility for our sexuality, late in life. Adolescence is late.
The best time is the first years of life and the best teacher is mother. There is no better way to learn the lessons masturbation teaches than as a baby learns, at the beginning. If mother doesn’t allow us to believe that our body belongs to us alone, that we own it and are therefore responsible for it, then anything we do with our body later will refer back to her, reawak¬ening our need of her, reawakening her attitudes, her judgment. When we have sex and don’t protect ourselves, we are her bad little girl.
Here are two letters, I received from readers of My Mother/Myself. They capture in a highly personal and, I think, charming way how very present mother is in our most intimate sexual moments. The first is from a woman in Holland.
Somewhere in the middle of your book I did have to get some sleep and during that night came the following dream:
I was traveling by train. My mother was with me and we were sitting at a little table by the window. We both had the same little red handbags almost like purses. My mother wanted something from her handbag and took the wrong one from the table. She opened it and saw it was mine.
“Mom, you have my bag.” “Oh, do I, well never mind, they are similar anyway.” “But I have all my things in there.” “Oh, well, if you are being so childish about it…” And there, as she absentmindedly gave me my way, she wrote her name
in my bag! I couldn’t utter one word in astonishment. Case closed.
Hours later I realized in a shock what those intriguing red purses meant – she had stolen my sexuality and my person with it. She stole them so easily as if they meant nothing at all. And I just sat there and let her do it.
(In Dutch there is an old fashioned word for purse that is also used for vagina in slang.) This was all. I couldn’t resist sending my simple, beautiful and shocking dream to you.
The second letter is a poem sent to me by a man.
Here is a poem I wrote to you, Nancy:
CUNTROL – MOTHER OR DAUGHTER?
If I were an artist, I would draw for you and send A picture of Everygirl, nude from bend to bend. No pubic hair nor slit, but in that fire place A recent, sweet photograph of dear mother’s face Smiling out at every guy, her lips stretched West to East, Inviting him to her home for their sym-bi-ot-ic feast. What mother has between her legs Is anybody’s guess.
If you are smart you’ll never part Them – for grandma’s there to bless.