The Women's Room

Take a man and a woman both born to WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] families of note, both well educated, monied - both, in other words, with all the badges of legitimacy our society has to offer. And the man will be seen as serious, and the woman as trivial, no matter what she does or tries to do. And when a man loses his sense of legitimacy, what he is really losing is a sense of superiority. When a man loses superiority, he loses potency. That's what all this talk about castrating women is about. Castrating women are those who refuse to pretend men are better than they are and better than women are. The simple truth - that men are only equal - can undermine a culture more devastatingly than any bomb.

They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.

She would never be anybody’s secretary, she would have her own adventures. She would never let anybody rescue her. She would never read the recipes and dress patterns, but only the news and the funnies. And no matter what went on in her head about boys, she would never let them know it. She would never lick her lips and pinch her cheeks and giggle and whisper like the other girls. She would never let a boy know she even looked at him. She would not let drop her suspicion that men were only grown-up boys who had learned some manners and were not to be trusted, being also members of the inferior gender. She would never marry, having seen enough in her parents’ friends to warn her off that state. And she would never, never look like those women she had seen walking around with their bodies all popping out and deformed. Never.

All this while you are asking, 'What about Norm? Who is he, this shadow man, this figure-head husband?'
You may not believe this, but there isn't much I can tell you. I did know him, I even knew him fairly well, but there still isn't much I can tell you.
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I have, over the years, read a lot of novels by male novelists, and there is no question in my mind that their female characters - except for those of Henry James - are stick figures with padding in certain places. So maybe the problem is just that we don't know each other very well, men and women. Maybe we need each other too much to be able to know each other.