Feminists Have No Sense
of Humor
On the second or third day we worked
together, my new supervisor, younger than me and male, asked me to define my
managerial style. Before I could answer, he had come to his own conclusion.
“You’re what the company calls a lion,” he said. “You leap, and pounce on any
problem.” I didn’t bother to remind him that lions actually spend most of their
time sleeping. It’s the lionesses who do the pouncing, after first stalking their
prey relentlessly. They attack, usually from behind, and go for the jugular.
This hardly sounds like my behavior at work, where I spend most of my time
dusting counters, and occasionally sell a book. Maybe he thought he should be
king of this small piece of the corporate jungle, or he wanted to fight me for
it, teeth and claws bared. Maybe I am like a lion after all, for I am
completely indifferent, and would much rather be home in bed.
This kind of male/female interaction
always makes me think of Doris Lessing, and specifically of The Golden Notebook. The male characters
in that book, all based on real people as far as I know, are so openly
arrogant, so sure of their place at the top of the totem pole. They parade
their superiority around, more like monkeys than lions. Instead of sleeping,
and rousing themselves to roar once in a while, these males are constantly
chattering and running around frantically pursuing any sexual opportunity or
advantage. But the book is not about the deeds of men, but concerns the lives
of women. They openly mock the seemingly all-powerful, and so reduce them to
their proper place. It’s so refreshing, not to mention revolutionary. It’s also
deeply funny. The two main characters, Anna and Molly, skewer their whole
experience, from marriage to work to children, with intelligence and wit that
is as self-deprecating as it is a type of whistling in the dark. I can imagine Molly drawling. “Well, it was
all because we just wanted to get laid properly.”
The
Golden Notebook was not my introduction to the devastating nature
(devastating to men, that is) of what could be called women’s humor. My best
friend is and was a master at it, able to spot pretension miles away. Of
course, I was one of the few people who found her funny, hilariously so at times.
She was not afraid to say what she truly thought in any situation. This is a
hard thing for some to live with, and her life has sometimes been difficult
because of her need to tell the truth as she sees it.
I remember reading The Golden Notebook one summer when I
was far from home. I was young and awkwardly trying to find my place in the
world, seeing if it was possible to define myself with the aid of family,
friends, or familiar landscape. I could relate to Anna’s feeling of smallness
and her extreme isolation. Reading that book was comforting in the way that a
nice fat book that will take you weeks to read is always comforting. You live
in the book as in a second reality. It never ceases to amaze how the two
realities, real and literary, permeate and inform each other.
I re-read The Golden Notebook recently, and this time I related to how Anna
and Molly were judged by everyone around them, especially the men. The talk between
these two intimate friends is their only defense against the constant pressure
of the needs of others. They both believe strongly that they deserve the
freedom to live their own, self-defined lives, and yet they both doubt their
strength in the face of so much outside meddling and criticism. They are
knowledgeable of their perceived roles as single/divorced women, and are rueful
in the face of the world’s random misogyny. Even the female psychiatrist that
Anna sees feels free to tell her not only what to do, but also how to be.
This is the hardest concept to express.
We take for granted now the freedoms that the personal liberation movements of
the 70’s gave voice to, at least in the abstract. Yet the statistics about women’s’
lives are just as dismal as they’ve always been. In fact, you don’t even need statistics.
All you have to do is strike up a conversation—on the bus, in the grocery
store, at work—and it is not difficult to figure out that women are constrained
by all kinds of barriers, at once economic, political, and personal. Most of the
women I talk to in just this casual way are taking care of someone, elder
parent, grandchild, or their own children, even if they are adults themselves.
Even as I write this, on my work commute, I see a young woman walking on the
opposite train platform. She is wheeling a huge suitcase, easily her own
weight, even without the extra burden of a small child who is draped over the suitcase,
clutching the handles so as not to fall off onto the third rail.
Maybe this is poignant to now because my
own daughter, at college now, is studying a combination of literature, art
history, and women’s studies. She hasn‘t read The Golden Notebook yet. I’ve told her about it, but I don’t like
to push books on her (or anybody), preferring to nod my head sagely as she
tells me her own revelations along the literary path. It’s strange, but I
almost hope she doesn’t like it when she reads it. I hope it sounds
old-fashioned and dated to her. That will be some kind of progress. She’s
already funny enough on her own.
