Women's Sexuality
This article first appeared in the Minden Times in June 2024.
Alice Munroe looks like a church lady and writes like a renegade. She takes people and places we’re sure we know and peels them to reveal human nature that we have been taught to ignore and despise.
I don’t recall that we said this so much when she was still alive – she died on May 13 at age 92 – but a recurring theme since she died is that she ‘discovered’ that women’s sexuality doesn’t follow the rules. That within the breasts of perfectly nice women flamed feelings appropriate for prostitutes and nymphomaniacs. That these raging hormones led them to do the unthinkable, which is to have affairs, walk out of perfectly good marriages and leave perfectly deserving children in the care of others.
The thing is, unless I wasn’t paying attention, her stories don’t heave with sex half as much as more modern writing does. In current literature and movies, the meet-kiss-copulate sequence happens with gay abandon, lickety-split, sometimes even the kiss part missing. And then they get on with their lives as if it hadn’t happened. The hook-up phenomenon, putting sex in its proper place as a physical necessity like going to the toilet, unencumbered with feelings and, god forbid, relationships. Rating sexual prowess right along with earning capacity and athletic skill.
I think a lot about how patriarchy gives with one hand and takes with the other. It twirled Betty Freidan around: You want out of the house? Fine, you can work full-time at two jobs, one in and one out of the house. Oh, and at part-pay because we think you aren’t as productive because you don’t focus on the outside-the-house job as much as men do.
And then there was The Pill which first offered Sexual Freedom but quickly morphed to requiring it. Which was understood as women being sexually active as men had been: letting lust do the thinking, love ‘em and leave ‘em, the precursors, I think, to the hook-up mentality. It left women with solo responsibility for protection against pregnancy and, later, STDs of all sorts, including chlamydia for which there was no routine screening, perhaps because it primarily affected young women and was usually symptomless until it rusted out their reproductive system.
Alice clued into how frustrated women were with this shifting but relentlessly unfair situation. Her women were socialized to niceness; they knew what the rules were. They toiled in the traces of compliance, they shouldered their assigned share, they went along to get along. Until they didn’t.
And then they revolted. They walked away. Without explanation. That’s Alice’s most potent play. Because there are no words a woman can say that will move patriarchy. Patriarchy does not speak woman, it does not hear woman. Patriarchy is like gravity; it just is, no use trying to explain it or change it, just live with it.
Sometimes Alice’s women, having transgressed for no apparent reason, return to the situation they transgressed. We, the hopeful, are disappointed because we expected that having experienced freedom, they would leap and spin and twirl into a better life. But perhaps they figured there was no better life, that patriarchy, like gravity, was everywhere and the best bargain available was at best a different slice of life, not necessarily a better one.
Or maybe they felt the freedom, having transgressed once, to do it again should the need reappear. A safety valve of sorts. Better than some other options that truly desperate women have ‘chosen’, like driving your vehicle with your dependent children in it into a body of water and drowning together. Or like Toni Morrison’s Sethe who killed her daughter to protect her from a life of slavery. Or minion mothers of all classes, countries and times who cannot or do not prevent their daughters from being pimped for financial or social security.
I think what we find compelling in Alice Munroe’s writing is not so much the lure of sex leading good women astray, but rather the constrictions of relationship pushing women to explore other options. Her women don’t leave bad relationships as much as they wander away from empty relationships. Which perhaps spotlights a commonality between the apparent randiness of the hook-up culture and the apparent okayness of the settled life in Munroe’s stories. Both fill a void in human connection.
I wish Alice had told us how to fix this before she departed this plane. I don’t think she thought good relationships were unattainable, but rather that writing about them did no good. Or perhaps that relationships are so in the moment, so evanescent, so kaleidoscopic that they can’t be captured in words, but only in life. Which is an invitation to be as revolutionary as Alice Munroe’s writing. If you dare.
