Right-wing Women Read online

  lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt­

  ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by

  men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished

  to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately

  ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing

  that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or

  whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it

  so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused

  and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own

  lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as

  men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-

  defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,

  by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any

  individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the

  male in his scheme of things. This monstrous female quest for

  male-defined perfection, so intrinsically hostile to freedom and integrity, leads inevitably to bitterness, paralysis, or death, but like the mirage in the desert, the life-giving oasis that is not there, survival is promised in this conformity and nowhere else.

  Like the chameleon, the woman must blend into her environment, never calling attention to the qualities that distinguish her, because to do so would be to attract the predator’s deadly attention. She is, in fact, hunted meat— all the male auteurs, scientists, and homespun philosophers on street corners will say so proudly.

  Attempting to strike a bargain, the woman says: I come to you on

  your own terms. Her hope is that his murderous attention will

  focus on a female who conforms less artfully, less w illingly. In

  effect, she ransoms the remains of a life— what is left over after she

  has renounced willful individuality— by promising indifference to

  the fate of other women. This sexual, sociological, and spiritual

  adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is

  the prim ary imperative of survival for women who live under male-

  supremacist rule.

  *

  . . . I gradually came to see that I would have to

  stay within the survivor’s own perspective. This will

  perhaps bother the historian, with his distrust of

  personal evidence; but radical suffering transcends

  relativity, and when one survivor’s account of an

  event or circumstance is repeated in exactly the same

  way by dozens of other survivors, men and women

  in different camps, from different nations and cultures, then one comes to trust the validity of such reports and even to question rare departures from

  the general view . 2

  Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor:

  An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps

  The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical

  butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical

  mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and the other commonplaces of female experience that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the

  mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No

  matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or

  eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been

  whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they

  were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed,

  threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of

  female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt. Because women’s testimony is not and cannot be validated by the witness of men who have experienced the same events and given

  them the same value, the very reality of abuse sustained by

  women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is

  negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is

  negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those

  who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering.

  The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the exis-

  tence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her

  suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of

  women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real

  the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim

  to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some

  thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual

  woman m ultiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete

  existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own

  suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life,

  whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing w ill ever make up for it.

  No one can bear to live a meaningless life. Women fight for

  meaning just as women fight for survival: by attaching themselves

  to men and the values honored by men. By committing themselves

  to male values, women seek to acquire value. By advocating male

  meaning, women seek to acquire meaning. Subservient to male

  w ill, women believe that subservience itself is the meaning of a

  female life. In this w ay, women, whatever they suffer, do not suffer the anguish of a conscious recognition that, because they are women, they have been robbed of volition and choice, without

  which no life can have meaning.

  *

  The political Right in the United States today makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the

  perception that male violence against women is uncontrollable and

  unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are

  always subject to this violence. The Right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus sim plifying survival for women— to make the world slightly more habitable, in other

  words— by offering the following:

  Form. Women experience the world as mystery. Kept ignorant

  of technology, economics, most of the practical skills required to

  function autonomously, kept ignorant of the real social and sexual

  demands made on women, deprived of physical strength, excluded

  from forums for the development of intellectual acuity and public

  self-confidence, women are lost and mystified by the savage momentum of an ordinary life. Sounds, signs, promises, threats, w ildly crisscross, but what do they mean? The Right offers women

  a simple, fixed, predetermined social, biological, and sexual order.

  Form conquers chaos. Form banishes confusion. Form gives ignorance a shape, makes it look like something instead of nothing.

  Shelter. Women are brought up to maintain a husband’s home

  and to believe that women without men are homeless. Women

  have a deep fear of being homeless—at the mercy of the elements

  and of strange men. The Right claims to protect the home and the

  woman’s place in it.

  Safety. For women, the world is a very dangerous place. One

  wrong move, even an unintentional smile, can bring disaster—assault, shame, disgrace. The Right acknowledges the reali
ty of danger, the validity of fear. The Right then manipulates the fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.

  Rules. Living in a world she has not made and docs not understand, a woman needs rules to know what to do next. If she knows what she is supposed to do, she can find a way to do it. If

  she learns the rules by rote, she can perform with apparent effortlessness, which will considerably enhance her chances for survival. The Right, very considerately, tells women the rules of the game on which their lives depend. The Right also promises that,

  despite their absolute sovereignty, men too will follow specified

  rules.

  Love. Love is always crucial in effecting the allegiance of women.

  The Right offers women a concept of love based on order and stability, with formal areas of mutual accountability. A woman is loved for fulfilling her female functions: obedience is an expression

  of love and so are sexual submission and childbearing. In return,

  the man is supposed to be responsible for the material and emotional well-being of the woman. And, increasingly, to redeem the cruel inadequacies of mortal men, the Right offers women the love

  of Jesus, beautiful brother, tender lover, compassionate friend, perfect healer of sorrow and resentment, the one male to whom one can submit absolutely— be Woman as it were— without being sexually violated or psychologically abused.

  It is important and fascinating, of course, to note that women

  never, no matter how deluded or needy or desperate, worship

  Jesus as the perfect son. No faith is that blind. There is no religious or cultural palliative to deaden the raw pain of the son’s betrayal of the mother: only her own obedience to the same father,

  the sacrifice of her own life on the same cross, her own body nailed

  and bleeding, can enable her to accept that her son, like Jesus, has

  come to do his Father’s work. Feminist Leah Fritz, in Thinking Like

  a W oman, described the excruciating predicament of women who

  try to find worth in Christian submission: “Unloved, unrespected,

  unnoticed by the Heavenly Father, condescended to by the Son,

  and fucked by the Holy Ghost, western woman spends her entire

  life trying to please. ” 3

  But no matter how hard she tries to please, it is harder still for

  her to be pleased. In Bless This House, Anita Bryant describes how

  each day she must ask Jesus to “help me love my husband and

  children. ”4 In The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan explains that it is

  only through God’s power that “we can love and accept others,

  including our husbands. ” 5 In The Gift o f In ner H ealing, Ruth Carter

  Stapleton counsels a young woman who is in a desperately unhappy marriage: “T ry to spend a little time each day visualizing Jesus coming in the door from work. Then see yourself walking up

  to him, embracing him. Say to Jesus, i t ’s good to have you home

  N ick. ’” 6

  Ruth Carter Stapleton married at nineteen. Describing the early

  years of her marriage, she wrote:

  After moving four hundred fifty miles from my first family

  in order to save my marriage, I found myself in a cold, threatening, unprotected world, or so it seemed to my confused heart. In an effort to avoid total destruction, I indulged in escapes of every kind. . .

  A major crisis arose when I discovered I was pregnant with

  my first child. I knew that this was supposed to be one of the

  crowning moments of womanhood, but not for me.. . . When

  my baby was born, I wanted to be a good mother, but I felt

  even more trapped.. . . Then three more babies were born in

  rapid succession, and each one, so beautiful, terrified me. I did

  love them, but by the fourth child I was at the point of total

  desperation. 7

  Apparently the birth of her fourth child occasioned her surrender

  to Jesus. For a time, life seemed worthwhile. Then, a rupture in a

  cherished friendship plummeted her into an intolerable depression.

  During this period, she jumped out of a moving car in what she

  regards as a suicide attempt.

  A male religious mentor picked up the pieces. Stapleton took her

  own experience of breakdown and recovery and from it shaped a

  kind of faith psychotherapy. Nick’s transformation into Jesus has

  already been mentioned. A male homosexual, traumatized by an

  absent father who never played with him as a child, played baseball with Jesus under Stapleton’s tutelage—a whole nine innings.

  In finding Jesus as father and chum, he was healed of the hurt of

  an absent father and “cured” of his homosexuality. A woman who

  was forcibly raped by her father as a child was encouraged to remember the event, only this time Jesus had his hand on the father’s shoulder and was forgiving him. This enabled the woman to forgive her father too and to be reconciled with men. A woman who as a child was rejected by her father on the occasion of her first

  date—the father did not notice her pretty dress—was encouraged

  to imagine the presence of Jesus on that fateful night. Jesus loved

  her dress and found her very desirable. Stapleton claims that this

  devotional therapy, through the power of the Holy Spirit, enables

  Jesus to erase damaging memories.

  A secular analysis of Stapleton’s own newfound well-being

  seems, by contrast, pedestrian. A brilliant woman has found a socially acceptable w ay to use her intellect and compassion in the public domain— the dream of many women. Though fundamentalist male ministers have called her a witch, in typical female fashion Stapleton disclaims responsibility for her own inventiveness and

  credits the Holy Spirit, clearly male, thus soothing the savage misogyny of those who cannot bear for any woman to be both seen and heard. Also, having founded an evangelical m inistry that demands constant travel, Stapleton is rarely at home. She has not given birth again.

  Marabel Morgan’s description of her own miserable marriage in

  the years preceding her discovery of God’s will is best summarized

  in this one sentence: “I was helpless and unhappy. ” 8 She describes

  years of tension, conflict, boredom, and gloom. She took her fate

  into her own hands by asking the not-yet-classic question, What do

  men want? Her answer is stunningly accurate: “It is only when a

  woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships

  him, and is w illing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful

  to him . ”9 Or, more aphoristically, “A Total Woman caters to her

  man’s special quirks, whether it be in salads, sex, or sports. ” 10

  Citing God as the authority and submission to Jesus as the model,

  Morgan defines love as “unconditional acceptance of [a man] and

  his feelings. ” 11

  Morgan’s achievement in The Total Woman was to isolate the

  basic sexual scenarios of male dominance and female submission

  and to formulate a simple set of lessons, a pedagogy, that teaches

  women how to act out those scenarios within the context of a

  Christian value system: in other words, how to cater to male pornographic fantasies in the name of Jesus Christ. As Morgan explains in her own extraordinary prose style: “That great source

  book, the Bible, states, ‘Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed

  undefiled. . . ’ In other words, sex is for the marriage relationship

  only, but within those bounds, anything goes. Sex is as clean and

  pure as eating cottage cheese. ” 12 Morgan’s detailed instructions on

  how
to eat cottage cheese, the most famous of which involves

  Saran Wrap, make clear that female submission is a delicately balanced commingling of resourcefulness and lack of self-respect. Too little resourcefulness or too much self-respect will doom a woman

  to failure as a Total Woman. A submissive nature is the miracle for

  which religious women pray.

  No one has prayed harder, longer, and with less apparent success than Anita Bryant. She has spent a good part of her life on her knees begging Jesus to forgive her for the sin of existing. In Mine

  Eyes Have Seen the G lory, an autobiography first published in 1970,

  Bryant described herself as an aggressive, stubborn, bad-tempered

  child. Her early childhood was spent in brutal poverty. Through

  singing she began earning money when still a child. When she was

  very young, her parents divorced, then later remarried. When she

  was thirteen, her father abandoned her mother, younger sister, and

  herself, her parents were again divorced, and shortly thereafter her

  father remarried. At thirteen, “[w]hat stands out most of all in my

  memory are my feelings of intense ambition and a relentless drive

  to succeed at doing well the thing I loved [singing]. ” 13 She blamed

  herself, especially her driving ambition, for the loss of her father.

  She did not want to marry. In particular, she did not want to

  marry Bob Green. He “won” her through a war of attrition. Every

  “No” on her part was taken as a “Yes” by him. When, on several

  occasions, she told him that she did not want to see him again, he

  simply ignored what she said. Once, when she was making a trip

  to see a close male friend whom she described to Green as her

  fiance, he booked passage on the same plane and went along. He

  hounded her.

  Having got his hooks into her, especially knowing how to hit on

  her rawest nerve—guilt over the abnormality of her ambition, by

  definition unwom anly and potentially satanic— Green manipulated

  Bryant w ith a cruelty nearly unmatched in modem love stories.