Review of the Arts
Combat ta the Erogenous Zone
Ingrid Bengis
Alfred A. Knopf 1973
KJS
*
Ingrid Bengis is to women’s literature what Joni Mitchell is to
rock lyrics: she has dignified the confessional.
Hie women's movement has elicited a variety of literary
response, ranging from Millett’s doctoral thesis to Alix-Kate
Shulman's fictional, soap-apery Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.
Ingrid Bengis has done something different. She has published a
new collection of essays, Combat in the Erogenous Zone, and it is
original not only in the intelligence of its content, but in the form it
takes-a combination of essay and anecdote, autobiography and
observation.
All kinds of fiction may leave you surprised and sad but it is
unusual for a collection of personal essays to have the same effect
as an old-fashioned romantic novel. Maybe this non-fiction book is
a new romanticism. It is certainly as strong as a gothic plot,
gallantly dashing to the ground the old ways and simultaneously
drawing up blue prints for the new. And while it is almost im
possible to separate objectively the success of Ingrid Bengis’ book
from my personal entanglements with its themes, I can’t help but
feel that it is an unusual book, one which will stay with me as long
as many of the finest pieces of fiction I have ever read.
Combat in the Erogenous Zone is filled with the ramblings of a
woman whose obsessive search for the perfect lifestyle, evidently
unfinished, comes stumbling out of her 28-year old analytical mind
like the passionate sobs of a kid who has just fallen while skipping
rope. She structures what amounts to an autobiography around
several major thanes, buttressing her arguments with anecdotal
evidence of the aches and pains she has experienced herself and
witnessed among ha friends, all of them striking out in search of
the perfect job, the perfect place, and moat important, the per
fect man to complement this whole beautiful new world.
I can’t claim that the book doesn’t seem overly insistent and
self-consciously intone at times, but my reaction to it is so positive
and complete that I feel there must be something universal and
human about what die describes, something which goes beyond my
own involvement with the intricacies of her argument. To read this
made me aware of things I could only begin to speak about before,
and as a result I have been converted to a casdonBew which no
other piece of “women’s” literature ever managed to inspire.
The subjects which Bengis chooses to attack are sprawling and
abstract: love, marriage, sex. Taking some amount of pride in her
ability to tackle things passionately, Bengis details a rush of im
pressions and memories; the result is a dense compression of
feelings familiar enough to establish the beginnings of a great new
awareness.
Bengis has glorified ambiguity in Combat, identified it as basic
to her approach to herself and to others, made it comprehensible to
her readers. (How often have you fallen in love with looks and
hated yourself for bothering, judged a woman by the way she
dresses and hated yourself for caring?) Bengis has got these
tensions down an paper. She writes:
Believing in marriage, I have never risked it. Iam
occasionally attracted to men exclusively on the
basis of their sexuality, but am appalled when they
are attracted to me on the basis of mine. I care
about affection and doubt my capacities for it_I
• say friendship is superior to passion even as my
throat is locking with the effort to suppress the
effects of my latest passion. I long for liberation
and don’t know what it is.
What she does know » a great deal about those who have been
caught in the badly coordinated cultural transition between late
fifties and early seventies. She wderstands what it is to be spoiled
and sorry far oneself and to realize, far instance, that one hates
communes, five months after deciding communal life is the answer
to all America’s problems. This is precisely the kind of impatience
Bengis articulates, with none of the apologies and all of the
passions of an exceptionally interesting person.
Combat is a woman’s book because nowhere do we see
evidence of one man who is all good things; there are instead
aspects of different men who appear variously throughout the book.
Women, on the other hand, are real and whole and we want to meet
all of than. It is a woman’s book because it doesn’t stop short of
expressing total, uncompromised, female bewilderment-if Bengis
weren’t so articulate and if she didn’t manage to convey such
remarkable depth and sensitivity we would be offended by her
bewilderment, wondering how anyone could ever expect to find
perfection in tins crazy world. Instead, her out-cries, so insistent,
and so, so impatient, seem painfully familiar and the result of
emotional highs and lows which most of us would prefer to ignore.
While I was living in San Francisco, that paradise far the
mobile and the liberated, I was frightened by the recklessness of
those around me; I was scared, too, when I recognized my own
thoughtless impulses in others. Eventually I fled the city, hoping to
leave behind all the confusion, the identity mix-ups, the sexual
anarchy, the fears and misgivings of that inhaly society. But the
mix-ups are basic to being alive right now, and they are real and
powerful and hardly unique to the Bay Area. Now that someone
else has gone through the agony of articulating than, I fed as if
they can be dealt with in an authentic, lasting fashion. In a sense,
after reading this too, I’m beginning to fed free to discard all the
the old ideals, to establish a new romanticism. Now, at last, we can
sweep into the decade with real style.
Debby Baldwin
. 1972 331 pp.
A recently married woman dreamed she was in a line of young
women like herself, and as she looked ahead to where they were
going she saw that as each came to the head of the line she was
decapitated by a guillotine. Without any fear the dreamer
remained in line, presumably perfectly willing to submit to the
same treatment when her turn came.
Enter the oracle, doctor, master, priest — psychiatrist Dr.
Joseph Henderson — who was so proud of his clarification of this
dream be included it in his essay, Ancient Myths and Modern Man.
“I erplamed to her,” said Henderson, “the dream meant she was
ready to give up the habit of living in her head; she must learn to
free her body to discover its natural sexual response and the
fulfillment of its biological role in motherhood ... she must now
change herself into a more submissive type of woman.”
I dreamed I was impaled on the Empire State Building, doctor,
I dreamed seven vampire snakes slithered over my naked body,
binding me down, leaving me pale, wet and gleaming.
Ah, mental health at last, my child, all is well and go in peace:
you are finally becoming a woman.
That is not it at all says Phyllis Chester in Women and Mad
ness. Chester attempts to reclaim women’s dreams, reinterpret our
visions, redefine our capacities — invent a new standard for what
is, in us, mental health. And for ho* multi-faceted analysis she uses
many voices: “1 speak as a psychological researcher, theoretician
and clinician, as well as a literary and philosophical person, a lover
of poetry and myths,” says she.
Almost in spite of herself she is largely successful in this
monumental indertaking. I’ve never been so moved by a book that
is so poorly written. In places the ugly, stilted language obscures
her meaning, overwhelms any reader even moderately sensitive to
language use. There are a painful number of sentences like: “Our
society does not overly like old age.” What she probably intended
as sarcasm marched from her pen as pomposity.
Often she sounds like she didn’t ask herself what she really
wanted i> say, but instead pasted what she hoped were elegant or at
least educated phrases together. She speaks of a “rather fatal
allegiance” and a “rather incomprehensible turn of events.”
Occasionally she pitches wildly past meaning, like for
example: “Demeter was grieved beyond and before reasoning,”
and “In America, the world’s ‘richest’ country, more nan-white
women of all ages die than do white women.” (Some of us white
women are immortal, maybe?)
Her worst writing appears in her retelling of ancient myths, a
subject riie plunges right into in the introduction, “Demeter
Revisited.” Completely stilted and overwritten, it will discourage
all but the most determined from reading further.
But those who are determined and continue reading will gain a
great deal. First, Chester offers women who are dealing with both
private and public psychiatric institutions insights which will help
them survive that experience.
“Perhaps one of the reasons women embark and re-embark an
psychiatric careers more than men do is because they fed, quite
horribly, at home within them,” says Chesler. Mental asylums
caricature the female rather than the male experience within the
family.
It is probably for this reason that Erving Goff man in his book
Asylums considers psychiatric hospitalisation mare self
destructive for its inmates than criminal incarceration. “Like most
people,” says Chesler, “Goffrnan is primarily thinking of the
debilitating effect —- on men — of being treated like women (as
helpless, dependent, unreasonable — as ‘ crazy.’) Bid what about
the effect of being treated like a woman when you are a woman?
(Continued on Page 11)