Men Without Women
Novak, Michael
"Men Without Women" surely it is naive to assume, in the absence of other controls, that anonymity of response guarantees candor, or that candor is the same thing as truthfulness or accuracy. One might as well attempt...
...There was always an elderly lady being waited on when you went in to make a purchase, and it sometimes took ten or fifteen minutes of studying laxative labels before conditions were right to step up and murmur, "a pack of Trojans...
...Second, if homosexuality is a matter of nature, it lies in the realm of necessity...
...Homo16 The American Spectator October 1978 sexuals know that powerful social pressures may induce behavior otherwise not freely chosen...
...Can anyone doubt the inevitable result if this charade continues, long after the public has seen through the symbolic form...
...peculiar paradox emerges from recent debates about homosexuality...
...The brute demands of running a house, of keeping order, of teaching all that one must teach, and of encountering the daily struggles of self-will and self-assertion on the part of each parent and each child are of great moral significance...
...It acts out in the flesh a communion of two separate persons who are not, at the beginning of their marriage, or at their fifteenth or any other anniversary, nearly as united in fact as this symbol pledges them to become...
...In past ages, such homosexuality was sometimes construed as a danger to the human race because it meant (a) a decline in population, or (b) a decline in those masculine qualities essential for survival...
...They keep looking for deeper, more complicated explanations...
...Our introduction on the streets of the Bronx, some years before we could possibly have found any use for the things, was not to contraceptives or prophylactics, but, forgive me, to scum bags...
...TOUCH, "so thin it's the closest thing to nature's way yet...
...For the source of this rage is not merely an anger at being different...
...On the other hand, they speak of being "trapped," of "having been given a different nature...
...The state should be kept as much as possible outside such questions...
...The second is the instability of homosexual relationships, an instability that arises from the lack of the full dimension of raising a family...
...Unless I am mistaken, even today society is in a more troubled state about male homosexuality than about female homosexuality...
...so also few human psyches...
...Now oft when on my couch I lie In sensuous and receptive mood I murmur what I can't deny: There was no bliss in solitude...
...it is hard enough for everybody...
...The one thing none of us thought to do when it came to condoms was discuss them with the girl of our dreams...
...We didn't know for sure whether the condoms were better as prophylactics or as contraceptives, but being equally terrified of babies as of having our I laundered, lonely as a crowd That bloats the pages Riesman fills, When pharmacology endowed My life with contraceptive pills...
...In the hubris of pursuing "progress" through affluence, mobility, and the promotion of individual hedonism on a vast scale, we have destroyed most of these supports...
...Recent publicity about women has served to shield us from an event of far greater significance: the decline of value, status, and the need of "masculine" qualities...
...This does not mean mere self-expression, or doing what one feels like doing...
...Second, a peculiar sickness fell upon the rhetoric of blacks during the past decade...
...Still, it would be good for laws specifically aimed against homosexuality to be stricken from the books, so that the coercions of the state do not enter into private life...
...Of course, it is often argued that nature has made no mistake, that the homosexual is fully endowed, and that it is society that is the cheat...
...The deep and wide-ranging changes in our experience of maleness have been too little explored...
...Tolerance for individuals does not entail moral approval, however...
...In a democracy, one must live and let live...
...As often happens in life, their own inner sources of adversity are often transformed by courage into unusual creativity...
...To do so without injuring those homosexuals who are without choice, and to establish conditions in which their lives may be tolerably creative and satisfying, is an important social task...
...The play is an almost perfect metaphor for the rage of the homosexual against himself...
...The fact that so many men cave in before the rhetoric of militant feminists must only increase the rage, by proving its unconscious point...
...It is self-centered in a way that is structural, independent of the goodwill of the individual...
...Sometimes the moral life of families is taken to be conventional and easy...
...It is not a wholly rational sphere...
...One might as well attempt to construct an adequate image of male sexuality by examining the anonymous and candid graffiti in every twentieth toilet stall in American railroad stations...
...The effort to nourish strong families in such a system places huge burdens upon each solitary couple...
...The moral argument about this second alternative is sometimes simply expressed as "Do what comes naturally," or "To yourself be true...
...Aristotle, indeed, argued that men could only be true friends with men, not with women, because friendship depends on equality, and men and women did not have equality...
...Sexual relations between men and women are enormously complex, so that one short lifetime is normally insufficient to plumb even one such relationship...
...Suppose that some women, unconsciously, seek the male principle and cannot find it realized in the corporate men around them...
...One knows one has been left out of something...
...Moral health must be won against great odds by each couple and each family, starting from scratch, and battled for over and over...
...Honesty" may mean something different to males and to females...
...In a system as fantastically successful, rich, and centrifugal as ours, the casualties must be many...
...Society has a special stake in the development of married family life...
...Society has a great—an overwhelming—interest in the battle between the sexes, and in its successful negotiation by its millions of couples...
...Democratic capitalism necessarily develops powerful contradictions, as Daniel Bell has spelled out...
...the dialogue was unmistakably that of the soul in rage against itself...
...Heterosexual relations are full of terror...
...Hite herself concludes from her gossipy evidence that "There is no standard of sexual performance 'out there,' against which you must measure yourself...
...a degree of occasional physical danger is as necessary for male living as air...
...Who would trust politicians to do the job...
...It is a metaphor for (and an enactment of) God's union with mankind...
...freedom involved in this alternative constitutes a moral defect, like kleptomania, pyromania, or other "natural" psychic flaws...
...There are also particular dangers in homosexuality...
...Not much along these lines can be done for the diaphragm or the intrauterine device, but our admen have discovered potent aphrodisiac qualities in the common condom, or, as one firm has renamed it, the Conceptrol Shield...
...On the one hand, proponents of homosexuality speak of "sexual preference" and "alternative choices...
...It is not easy for men and women to understand each other, or to learn to be honest with each other...
...Yet we each do become responsible for what we make of it...
...The argument then does not reach so high a moral level...
...The pill, super-weapon of the revolution, is no longer in favor...
...Even given the full social supports of an economic and cultural and spiritual system, such as we do not now have, not all couples can be expected to be successful...
...We are learning in our generation how many social supports are necessary to make family life successful...
...Self-fulfillment is at stake...
...What happened in the socialization of the young male was perceived to be of greater significance, and of greater risk, to the race than what happened to the female...
...Great strides have been made in recent years—strides which I welcome—in winning tolerance for homosexuals...
...Few human bodies fulfill classical possibilities of form...
...Without strong, enlightened, spiritually nourishing families, the future of society looks bleak indeed...
...Is it true that the number of homosexuals is multiplying in our day...
...Here, to be sure, is the wisdom of the Old World, a wisdom that accepts the limiting condition of St...
...Each of us carries serious flaws...
...Paul's obscuring mirror...
...It was duly reported by the media as authentic...
...The rage will then, be directed against society...
...How many blood clots is an orgasm worth...
...That they are often among our most talented, creative, and successful citizens is obvious...
...It is probably important to distinguish between male and female homosexuality...
...The problem is deeper than that of homosexuality alone...
...But the married person with family has so many demands made by others upon the self that many painful blows are struck from outside-in, so to speak, and this is an inestimable advantage...
...Female homosexuality seems somehow more natural, perhaps harmless...
...I must add here that I am a Catholic—not to say that other traditions do not have analogous concerns, but only to give my own comments moral concreteness...
...It celebrates the future...
...In some ways, friendships are indeed easier between persons of the same sex...
...If it is true that the homosexual is lacking something that nature usually intends, then that lack is bound to be felt, at least unconsciously...
...Indeed, in this view Bluebeard's horrors, no less than P.B...
...you aren't ruled by 'hormones' or `biology.' " And here once more we see the paradox of gossip...
...Excluded from this struggle, whether by choice or by psychic endowment, the homosexual is deprived of its fruits...
...Often those deprived in one way are the most sensitive and creative in others...
...Saturday afternoons given over to holding swatches up to the light, testing for durability, checking, out Consumer Reports, together...
...It is, in fact, the most acceptable kind of gossip about sex at the present time, and insofar as it attempts to revise the norms of sexual conduct downward, its affinity is with malicious gossip...
...The inside dope he reveals about the best, brightest, handsomest, and richest is that they are mainly motivated by lust...
...Homosexuality is not a preference of equal moral weight...
...In the meantime, however, he connects with the economy of pornography in all directions...
...Edward Albee's hideous play about a marriage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only appeared to be about a man and wife...
...Listen...
...In addition, one anticipates the probability that the natural endowment—hormonal, neural, emotional, whatever—of a certain percentage of children will not follow the norm...
...For homosexuals, however, rage against society will not alleviate rage against the self...
...I say "male" rather than "masculine" to emphasize the high animal spirits involved, the instinctual base on which culture works...
...It was kept under the counter along with, we imagined, the opium and Spanish fly...
...Pharmacal Laboratories in Chicago you can get four new sheaths: MAN-FORM PLUS, with its "scientific shape for greater freedom of movement...
...They may also—in an odd way—help to cast light on at least part of the inexplicable rage among contemporary women...
...Still, there are those who believe that our romance with black gossip will have, after the fashion of romances, a happy ending: that we are witnessing something like the cleansing of the Augean stables of the American psyche...
...It makes people suffer, but does not make happiness or moral courage impossible...
...Not much like my generation's approach...
...In time, refinement caused us to drop the adjective, but it was not until we actually went to do commerce with druggists that we got much more elegant...
...Men have done most of the world's writing, so we are well The American Spectator October 1978 15 informed about how little, and how poorly, men understand women...
...This is not the perspective on the nature of our nature that we get from the late C.S...
...Female handholding, public exchanges of tenderness, and the like indicate that females are permitted a more relaxed attitude than males with members of their own sex...
...Lewis, who once remarked: "To know how bad we are in the condition of mere nature is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse...
...Other social forces (the arts, the schools, the churches) can do such things...
...Who could marvel if it were...
...This is also true of most contemporary inside dopesters, who, often with the best will in the world, must not only compete with but must move towardthe fanatic simplicities of pornography...
...Those fruits are a distinctive honesty, realism, and wisdom taught by each sex to the other: that complementarity in which our humanity is rejoined and fulfilled...
...Morals do not come down to us in some universalist language of the lowest common denominator, but in the concrete rituals, voices, affects, and symbols of long historical traditions, internalized by individuals who carry them...
...For thousands of years, masculine culture and feminine culture have been quite different...
...There is no doubt that women can truly love women, and that men can have profound love for other men...
...Women's liberation" was the second...
...Those involved are not really free to choose an alternative...
...Indeed, the thing one would really like to know—what sort of people under what circumstances even bother to answer a questionnaire of this sort—is forever unknowable...
...The truth is so simple, I think whimsically, that many women cannot bring themselves to believe it...
...We are learning the hard way...
...Karen Durbin, writing in Mademoiselle, is convinced that the report establishes a new definition of normal in female sexuality...
...Similarly, no one should be coerced by the state into giving approval for a way of life of which he does not approve...
...But it is also good for all of us to lighten the burdens of homosexuals, as we would have them lightened for ourselves...
...When the hour did finally strike, it meant something of a scramble through pants pockets and wallets only to find, as often as not, that the latex, purchased at the height of adolescent expectations four years earlier, had turned to dust...
...Howsoever poignant the stories to be told, they now come out as canned, bowdlerized, third-rate imitations...
...But all of these objections are beside the point once it is clear (from the enthusiastic response to it) that the report performs the same public service that gossip does...
...Lesbianism may suggest infantile pleasure and regression, but it does not threaten the public, at least not to the same extent that male homosexuality does...
...Walter Goodman Family Planning Made Tasteful A note on the latex revolution...
...It is, in addition, an awakener of fierce counteraction...
...That there are, and always will be, homosexuals among us (among our friends, in our families, among those we work with, throughout society) is certain...
...First, if homosexuality is a matter of choice or preference, it lies in the realm of freedom...
...The student as nigger" was the first act...
...Individuals (and societies) can make their own moral vision clear without undue coercion upon those who do not, or who cannot, share it...
...The politicizing of almost everything—I call it "Nixonizing"—is a symptom of civil corruption...
...I am not in favor of one that treats heterosexuality and homosexuality as equals, or as matters of indifference...
...Rather, basic systems of identity have been profoundly altered by the technology and organization of modern life...
...Then everyone who wished to gain the benefits accruing to the "oppressed" through the media began aping militant blacks of that period (now already out of style...
...Most likely, the merchandise would then be placed in the least accessible niche of one's wallet, there to remain while the need for its services, alas, kept not arriving...
...It would be foolish to believe—all experience tells against it—that women understand men any better...
...What wonder that sales of condoms will reach $150 million this year, with all those young folks just starting out, color-coordinating their contraceptives with their bedroom drapes...
...From Federal Walter Goodman is a writer in New York City...
...it is deeper than that...
...Demonstrations of fist-waving homosexuals carrying placards fulfill stereotypes in the public mind surrealistically...
...Oh, occasionally a wag would blow up a bag at a party and the girls would giggle and pretend to blush and the boys would guffaw and try not to blush, but by and large this was man's business...
...A raw realism develops...
...With luck, the druggist would be sharp of hearing and the transaction would be speedily consummated, three for a quarter...
...That rage must be dealt with by the self...
...And, setting the machine on "spin," I doffed my tim'rous sense of sin...
...Not only is politics a blunt and destructive instrument, supplanting precise reason with slogans, stereotypes, namecalling, and other campaign necessities...
...But one is free to argue against...
...In other moral traditions, however, the limitation of Michael Novak, Ledden Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, is currently a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...IF:The/mina Washworth The American Spectator October 1978 17...
...From my point of view, homosexuals absent themselves from the most central struggle of the individual, the struggle to enter into communion with a person of the opposite sex...
...Incredible poses were struck, rage was faked, pantomime was acted out...
...They have certainly induced vast sexual confusion...
...Yet no social system completely determines behavior, and in any healthy social system there must be room to experiment and to live in many different ways...
...It is an especially important experience to exercise the authority of a parent, having rebelled against mother, or father, or both, for so many years...
...But the marital ideal nourishes every other ideal we have...
...Apart from this civilizing struggle there is a lack, an emptiness, a loss of realism...
...The relationship is not merely that of a mechanical linking, putting genitals here or there...
...Instead of seeing this charade for what it was, many good liberals employed a double standard: Blacks act "funny," so this play-acting must be true...
...One can make something heroic out of a flaw in oneself, but not by lying...
...Politics is a clumsy instrument for the teaching of tolerance or the spreading of moral enlightenment...
...Certain boys were suspected of actually discarding one of the package-81/3 cents' worth—so they could find a pretext for showing off the remaining two with a smirk...
...From a firm called World Population Control, situated inside a post-office box in Newark, you can get "gossamer-thin, super-sensitive condoms" in unmarked wrappers...
...In some traditions, homosexuality is such a flaw...
...The structure of family life—the same onerous structure that feels like a " trap" — places the married couple in a context larger than themselves, shields them from one another, so to speak, and opens up new avenues of realism and honesty...
...That is the battle most at the heart of life...
...Only thus does one see things from the other side...
...What a vast disappointment there seems to be among women today about the men of their acquaintance...
...Fulfillment does not depend on being heterosexual, or married, or familial...
...Thirdly, the homosexual faces a particular sort of solipsism, which is difficult to escape simply through companionship...
...The rules of corporate bureaucracy may be more decisive in altering sex roles than the pill...
...It is significant that the success of the action in All the President's Men depended crucially on an insider dopester called "Deep Throat," with the implication that any honest effort to discover the truth must in some sense or other have a vital connection with the pornographic...
...Rewards do not come from taking risks, being aggressive, speaking out...
...In fact, the climate of the last ten years—just the years in which tolerance and "understanding" have been growing in unprecedented ways—has encouraged the growth of rage among homosexuals...
...Homosexual love is somehow apart from the fundamental mystery of bringing life into the world, and sharing in the birth and death of the generations...
...These rules weaken masculine qualities in obvious ways...
...Male infants have a hurdle to jump—I speak as a nonscientist—which females do not have to jump: viz., a transference of their sexual identity away from their mother, with her sensual closeness, to their father...
...The argument then concerns whether such choices ought to be encouraged or discouraged...
...whether, in a word, homosexuality is a good choice...
...MARDI-GRAS, "unusual and exotic colortones for a new sensual experience...
...The future depends on it...
...Innumerous as the golden sands That sift and shift on Nilus' banks, Repairmen, each with wrench in hand, Arrived to probe my clunks and clanks...
...If it fails to teach honesty, courage, a desire for excellence, and a whole host of basic skills, it is exceedingly difficult for any other agency to make up for its failures...
...And as they showed their Sears ID's I welcomed them with open knees...
...It is not just that "sex-role stereotypes" are breaking down...
...Men find it perplexing to be male...
...The modern era suffocates the male principle...
...Indeed, the more the public might seem to approve of homosexuality, the more one would expect homosexuals to begin punishing themselves...
...Marital intercourse thus reenacts the basic act of creation...
...In a secret area of bias, I confess to believing that men, at least sexually, are simpler to understand...
...But what if they mean that we are not even males, that they can have no respect for us...
...Marital love has a structural role in continuing the human race that is independent of the failures of the individuals who share it...
...In the rationalized, smooth world of government and corporate life, "going along to get along" wins more certain rewards...
...Most of what one learns is failure...
...The family is the original, and still the most effective, department of health, education, and welfare...
...So there are really two different possibilities involved...
...Yet the homosexual condition offers rather more inner suffering and sorrow, even with its normal quotient of human happiness, than I would wish for my children or for others...
...Females may even seem to him repulsive, surrounded by an aura of conflict or disinterest...
...If one is seeking tolerance and solid shifts in underlying values, politics defeats one's efforts by stimulating and crystallizing opposition...
...None of us ever chose our nature...
...Late dispatches from correspondents on the erotic front report that the sexual revolution has entered a postrevolutionary phase, and appears to be taking a detour into domesticity...
...Drugstores turned into boutiques and druggists into extremely interior designers...
...In addition, the raising of children is morally demanding in a special way...
...Negati- ism and hostility are in the air...
...A distance must be established between the male and the mother, and an identification made with the father...
...Jones' obscenities, might seem to be the grim product of our sin-obsessed and therefore perversely anti-Aquarian culture—which, having induced us to misconceive the nature of our nature, now suffers the Nemesis of an obsession with black gossip...
...Michael Novak Men Without Women Meditations on the half-life of the homosexual...
...They suffer from a diminished range of freedom...
...One must appreciate the fact that, in a percentage of cases, this transition will be handled very rudely...
...I am in favor of a tolerant and open system...
...Male homosexuality seems to represent a breakdown in an important form of socialization...
...Heterosexuality is the full and complete human ideal...
...Lest this prove a downer to those who emerged from puberty at a time when the Chairman Maos of sex were preaching spontaneity at all costs, merchandisers of old favorites have taken to pushing not their contraceptive but their romantic connotations...
...Seeking the male principle, some women are trying to supply it themselves...
...When the male infant does not make a successful transfer in sexual identity to the father, the male is attracted to other males...
...In fact, the "Deep Throat" connection with Watergate has the effect of authenticating a story which is otherwise woefully lacking in gossipy departures from traditional sexual norms...
...Gay Power" came third upon the stage...
...Jones enough rein his effect may be in the same direction...
...Personal confusion abounds...
...On the other hand, God knows, there are compensating riches of the spirit...
...not to mention PASSION PLUS, a special "sexual aid used by the male partner...
...It is not...
...Self-fulfillment is doubly difficult for the homosexual...
...In modern corporate life, "mother bureaucracy" swallows the strong ego...
...and that we have some reason to expect conditions of authentic life, which are now realities only for those intrepid few who are able to realize their essential innocence along what Theodore Roszak has called the Aquarian Frontier...
...Yet the joys of sex once experienced are not so readily put aside...
...Once heralded as the liberator of women's randier instincts, unlocker of the heart, unchainer of the libido, uncrosser of the legs, estrogen has now been associated with too many side effects for comfort, and young women are backing off...
...The point may need elaboration...
...But it sends individuals off every which way, in general moral incoherence...
...But one does not wish to be told lies in the process...
...First, it has become conventional to rage against society...
...They tell us that we are "male chauvinist pigs...
...Homosexuals have psychic desert enough without adding to it...
...To my mind, the human body is a dwelling place of God, and the joining of a man's and a woman's body in matrimony is a privileged form of union with God...
...A certain rage against nature is likely to be felt, and perhaps internalized and directed at the self...
...The perspective from this position, if one can believe Professor Roszak, yields an image of human nature radically different from that suggested by Bluebeard's gossip-inciting chamber of horrors...
...Yet even in this case, one will expect to see the rage turned inward, and one will not really expect it to beassuaged by public approval...
...The first is a preoccupation with one's own sex...
...And as my — with -- fills, I bless the-liberating pills...
...Apart from having and raising children, a couple can hardly help a degree of self-preoccupation...
...Of course, if Capote gives his P.B...
...They are not as rosy and cheerful as Playboy and Penthouse would puff for our infantile fantasies...
...There are three features in the very structure of homosexual life that tell against it...
...More than that, society has an important stake in nourishing that special wisdom and powerful realism learned in marriage in the battle between the sexes...
...One wishes to be accepted for what one is...
...not politics...
...Aristotle pointed out long ago that nature does not work flawlessly, but only "for the most part," i.e., with considerable looseness and randomness, producing a spectrum of individuals from the nearly flawless to the seriously aber14 The American Spectator October 1978 rant...
...And since babies are not popular among the nubile these days, recourse is being had to old-style birth-inhibitors...
...For the good of all of us, homosexuals included, it is well that society should prefer heterosexuality and specially nourish it...
...Yet the male spirit leads one to put one's own body at risk...
...Society has a strong interest, in private and in public, in encouraging heterosexuality and in discouraging homosexuality...
...Our introduction to Homer...
...that we are beginning at last to face up to our true nature...
...At the drugstore, the merchandise was not out there among the cosmetics...
...Psychiatrists have ceased calling homosexuality a sickness, or a lack, but one is not sure that they—or others—have ceased thinking that way about it (or that they should...
...Politics awakens irrational forces...
...But if Lewis proves to be right, the Aquarian Frontier, for all its glorious promise, will turn out to be one more chimera land...
...The Hite Report might function like gossip for its readers, and might in fact keep some of them sane, but the norms of sexual conduct that it advocates are as hostile to the spirit of gossip (to say nothing of the spirit of romance) as was the Sandstone experiment...
...It is the freest system ever devised by mankind...
...Half the human mystery is evaded...
Vol. 11 • October 1978 • No. 10
