Authors: Betsy Israel
Tags: #Social Science, #Women's Studies, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Media Studies
As much as she looked like an
L.A. Law
alumnas, she had distinct elements of Lucille Ball, or Lucille Ball on LSD. As part of almost every script, Ally hallucinated. For a while she saw singer Al Green in many peculiar situations; of course there was the dancing baby, the diapered metaphor of female failure that appeared in her living room. (She was a good sport and danced with it.) Her sex fantasies took up most of her mental life—a much more realistic approach than the
Sex and the City
model, in which professional single urban women have sex at least four times a day.
Women loved Ally because she tried yet couldn’t pull all of this together, couldn’t make herself any emotionally or intellectually neater, resolved. She was always in flux—as if flux were a physical condition—and she couldn’t imagine, like most women, what personal earthquake might occur to make it better.
Her British counterpart, Bridget Jones, is less professionally accom
plished; in fact, she hasn’t done much to speak of at all, but she has the ability to see and understand every nuance of single social life, and to record her observations in the now notorious diary. Women love her slangy comments on “smug marrieds” and “fuckwit” men. And they love that she can’t
do
anything more to change the social order than can Ally McBeal. And Ally McBeal is
cute
. Bridget Jones is overweight. But unlike previous chubby single icons, for example, Rhoda Morgenstern, Mary Tyler’s Moore’s old housemate, she doesn’t work the obvious fact into every sentence (the Phyllis Diller school of self-appraisal). Bridget simply records it, along with her cigarette and alcohol intake, and gets on with her life, which often consists of sorting dirty clothes in order to find clean ones. Like Ally, she is self-possessed and funny about her singleton status (an eighteenth-century term updated). She also defends it. One of my favorite scenes in the recent movie adaptation occurs when after a wretched workday Bridget has to attend a dinner party with a horrifying posse of “smug marrieds.” That means a long table full of couples pressed up next to each other in units of two. She’s placed at the head—the evening’s sociological specimen. A man points to his wife’s pregnant belly and makes a tick-tock sound; another man asks why so many career women in their thirties are still not married. She says (I paraphrase), “Maybe it’s because of the fact that their bodies are covered in hideous scales.” No one laughs.
I use the term “slacker spinsters” because these two, like so many women I know in their thirties, seem to be kind of hanging out in the lives that have evolved around them, making sporadic efforts to connect with men, then retreating back to the couch, the TV, or the phone or into an elaborate fantasy. They believe in the possibilities of love, though it’s not clear they fully believe in the beautiful possibilities of marriage. They’ve lived through the same kind of chaos that baby brides list on their résumés. But they’ve come to different conclusions. Primarily, getting married will never guarantee a feeling of safety.
Not that they won’t try. Try hard. Christ, in a desperate situation, they might even read
The Rules,
or its sort-of sequel, the new “Surrendered Single,” conduct guides for the twenty-first century, as if interpreted by Helen Gurley Brown. But chances are they’d just crack up and throw those books
across the room. Where they would land either on the dry cleaning or on a pile of unsorted clothes.
A SINGULAR FURY
Many real-life single women have read
The Rules,
and now
The Surrendered Single,
if only from an “anthropological” point of view, or else as a kind of joke. Because how could
any
intelligent life-form take this best-selling advice as less than hilarious?
Act as if you were born happy!…don’t leave the house without wearing make-up. Put lipstick on even if you’re jogging! If you have a bad nose, get a nose job! Grow your hair long. Men prefer long hair…. Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are the head of your own company…. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes. Don’t be a loud knee-slapping girl.
The Rules
and
Rules
mentality—manipulate, grovel, and lie to get a man—or the Surrendered Single stance—no control, give in, just lie there—does not strike everyone as hilarious or even mildly funny. It makes some women angry. And this angry woman—a New Mad Woman for the Modern Age—gives us a final, more decisive if less adorable archetype than the bemused Ally/Bridget slacker spinster.
“The concept of a person who is out to land men in a deliberately manipulative manner, suggests a frightening dream world,” says Marjorie, twenty-five, unwed, and “seriously not sorry. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I travel all the time. And as a woman I couldn’t take the time out to plot ‘Getting Men.’ This isn’t junior high. Wear lipstick when you are jogging? If this is to be the basis for a relationship, then you might as well not bother…. At least you’d better stop reading. It is so sickening and unfair.”
For these women—the documentary filmmakers, med students, marketing executives, serious artists—dodging the media has become a task as basic to everyday life as recycling plastic seltzer bottles.
For example, there is nothing on the single calendar more irritating than holidays, with all their attendant advice about what it is the single person should do to “survive” them. At least as far as other people are concerned. One particularly annoying festival is the national day of single dread, Valentine’s Day. How many times can a grown woman be expected to read (and I quote from last year, a major newspaper): “Single in New York and Looking for Love: A Special Report on Dating in the New Century,” which here sounds remarkably like the old. A small excerpt:
Looking for love in New York City is harder than finding a seat on an F train to Queens at rush hour. You can get swamped on the platform. Somebody can cut in front of you. The train can go out of service. When it comes to finding that special person—and we’re talking about relationships here, not just sex—a lot of New Yorkers never leave the station…. [these] are a complicated time for singles, between crushing work obligations and confused notions of how men and women should relate to each other.
“It really makes me want to puke,” says Helen, twenty-six, a currently unemployed copywriter who has lived through many Valentine’s Days and found them “more oppressive than Christmas.” She continues:
There is always the huge Valentine story—about how the creative guy proposed to his girlfriend by glueing letters to a Scrabble board. And they are as a couple so urban chic. They are only twenty-three, and yet they live in some amazing loft in TriBeCa and the skinny-girl delicate little bride-to-be is called Amelie or Chantal and she designs, oh, laced gloves or petite evening bags for dogs. And He, the man, wears those nerd glasses and has on a tie for some reason…. You think, these aren’t real people, or these people are models. And of course they
have
been styled. To get your attention. And to get your goat. TO PISS YOU OFF. I shouldn’t let it happen, have that response, but it’s just very effective advertising.
There’s a kind of story, a series of images, even more bothersome than the corny all-alone holiday story. That is the thousands of stories, in every known form of media—“the relentless hailstorm,” as one former colleague put it—all about having babies and raising kids.
“I think it started with
thirtysomething,
in the eighties,” says Gail, thirty-nine, a nature photographer.
It was that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a forty-room house…. I don’t dislike children, please! I just can’t stand the way you are forced to “react” to them in a way that somehow expresses wonderment with a hint of jealousy because you don’t have any. It’s so sad! Another sad reminder…. I feel like I’m watching [on TV] old fifties footage of the baby boom in the ’burbs only it’s set in the present…. You walk down the street, you’re late and rushing, but wait, you can hear it in the distance getting louder—it’s a stampede! Strollers. And these women never think to move their triplets’ stroller. It’s like, okay, I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over.
Some, like Gail, call this confrontation “pure arrogance on the part of anxious younger women…the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shit.” Some wish only to clarify their own views on the child issue. Martha, forty-four, says:
I’m not childless, I am child-free. And neither is my dog a substitute child. My dog is a fine dog. I am not confused on this point…. It’s hard to believe, but I like my life…. I feel like I earned my life and my feelings about it. Because believe me, living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are young and not following the feminine script…. I write nothing permanently out of my own personal script! I’m ready now to do these things, if they come up. I just wasn’t before
and that doesn’t make me a monster or a rule-breaker or a bitch who just, obviously, doesn’t like kids because she complains when she is nearly flattened by strollers on Seventy-second Street…. Mothers take a perverse pleasure in punishing nonmothers. “How dare she speak that way? Oh, that hostile body language!
She
must not have any children!” That’s the refrain of our age.
The media refrain has variations, but in essence it remains the same: No matter what the single woman says, she can’t really be happy. Her life is barren and disappointing. Friends consider her a social exile. She is in danger at all times when on her own, and she could miss out on becoming a mother. She is, as Anthony Trollope wrote of his thinned-out, run-down Lily Dale, “blank, lonely and loveless.” She is living the “long afternoon of unmarried life.” I quote from a classic 1930s spinster novel: “Librarians never marry. And they never die.”
Repeat.
Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.
But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.
During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of
Sex and the City
. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues
(premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.
And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie
Kate and Leopold,
starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like…a man. Her ex-boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”
He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.
I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in school: “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”