I must confess that I never would have read the magazine if Eastern Airlines hadn’t provided free copies as I boarded the shuttle at LaGuardia airport. But as I thumbed the pages of Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine, waiting for my plane to take off, I was fascinated at the change that has come about in this magazine since I last read it.
Fourteen years ago, the magazine featured pre-marriage contracts obliging husbands to do half the dishes and the diapers, and housewives’ declarations of independence from essential housework. Today, there aren’t any husbands or babies to complain about.
The first article that caught my eye was entitled “Learning to Flirt at 37.” It was the confession of a mature feminist with a good job and an apartment of her own, who grew up in the sixties believing that flirting was “Victorian in the midst of the sexual revolution.” After all those years of buying her own flowers, opening her own doors, and cooking dinner for herself after going to the movies alone, she actually answered an ad in the local newspaper headlined “Learn to flirt.”
She called the number listed, and the flirting teacher convinced her that even a feminist can flirt, if she uses time-tested arts. The teacher taught this feminist such simple techniques as to cross, uncross, and recross your legs, but don’t cross your arms, and do imitate the seductive glances on soap operas, but don’t initiate conversations on toxic waste removal. Next there was a tear-jerker article by a female author commiserating with a friend who was still mourning a break-up with her live-in boyfriend a year after it happened. As he told her when he casually signed off a two-year relationship, he “wasn’t looking, it just happened; so don’t take it personally.”
The author then interviewed 87 victims of break-ups of live-in lovers. She found that the average duration of these extra-marital relationships was two years. The typical break-up occurs when the man wants out; but instead of saying so, he makes signals that the thrill is gone and leaves it to the woman to define the relationship as ended.
I turned to an article called “Star Wars” but, alas, it wasn’t about Reagan’s SDI. It was about how men feel threatened when women’s careers move faster and higher than their own. The illustration showed the man with a vacuum sweeper while the woman goes out with her briefcase; the unhappy look on the man’s face is a sure sign that he won’t be sticking around that household very long.
Another article confesses that the main topic on the conversation agenda of brainy, successful women is “the man shortage.” The author acknowledges painfully that, “after 15-plus years of consciousness-raising and general feminist hell-raising, most middle-class women who are single and heterosexual still confine their search for mates to men who are well upscale of them in income and status.”
Feminists since the 1970s have been trying to force us into a gender-neutral society and bring about sex-role reversals. Their ideology is based on the notion that gender differences are caused by stereotyped education and an oppressive male-dominated society.
So it was fascinating to read the article called “Designer Genes” which admits that men and women are naturally, biologically different. It proposes that “a committee of reputable biologists” engage in “genetic manipulation” to change human nature so that men and women will have an equal motivation, desire, and enjoyment of the sex act.
This September Ms. Magazine now tells us that “Mother Nature … made men and women so profoundly different that even if two people do manage somehow to agree that they wish to have sex, they will quickly discover that their purely physical needs differ greatly” in their psychological motivations, in the amount of time they want to spend in love-making, and in their attitudes toward sex. The author is so surprised to discover that “Women want sex to be part of a deeper relationship involving commitment, sensitivity to the other’s needs, understanding, tenderness, compassion, concern, sharing, and — above all — love,” but “men want sex.” Women’s perspective is, well, so different from men’s, that they “might as well be a different species altogether.”
There are still, as in its early years, ads in Ms. Magazine for sexual aids mailed in plain wrappers and for lesbian contacts, but, mirabile dictu, there are bigger ads for diamond engagement rings, make-up, and sheer panty hose, plus a large color ad for a $195 doll called Scarlett O’Hara. It looks like “voices from the post-feminist generation,” proclaimed three years ago by the New York Times Magazine, have even invaded Ms. Magazine.
