Susan Sontag

On Women brings together Susan Sontag's most fearless and incisive writing on women, a crucial aspect of her work that has not until now received the attention it deserves. For the most part written in the 1970s during the height of second-wave feminism, Sontag's essays are strikingly relevant to our contemporary conversations. At times powerfully in sync and at others powerfully at odds with them, they are always characteristically original in their examinations of the 'biological division of labour', the double-standard for ageing and the dynamics of women's powerlessness and women's power. As Merve Emre writes in her introduction, 'They offer us the spectacle of a ferocious intellect setting itself to the task at hand: to articulate the politics and aesthetics of being a woman in the United States, the Americas and the world.' 'One of America's greatest public intellectuals' Observer 'Susan Sontag offers enough food for thought to satisfy the most intellectual of appetites' The Times 'At the time she died, she was America's best-known public intellectual. To my mind, she was also the most exemplary' John Gray, New Statesman WITH A PREFACE BY MERVE EMRE

A new collection of feminist essays from the influential writer, activist and critic, Susan Sontag

On Women

Marion

Women should lobby, demonstrate, march. They should take karate lessons. They should whistle at men in the streets, raid beauty parlors, picket toy manufacturers who produce sexist toys, convert in sizeable numbers to militant lesbianism, operate their own free psychiatric and abortion clinics, provide feminist divorce counseling, establish makeup withdrawal centers, adopt their mothers' family names as their last names, deface billboard advertising that insults romen, disrupt public events by singing in honot of the docile wives of male celebrities and politicians, collect pledges to renounce alimony and giggling, bring lawsuits for defamation against the mass-circulation "women's magazines, conduct telephone harassment campaigns against male psychiatrists who have sexual relations with their women patients, organize beauty contests for men, put up feminist candidates for all public offices. Though no single action is necessary, the "extremist" acts are valuable in themselves, because they help women to raise their own conscioujusness. And, however much people claim to be shocked or put off by such acts, their rhetoric does have a positive effect upon the silent majority. Performed by even a small minority, this guerrilla theater forces millions to become defensive about hitherto barely conscious sexist attitudes, accustoming them to the idea that these attitudes are at least not self-evident. (I do not exclude the utility of real guerrilla violence as well.)

Beauty is a class system, operating within the sexist code; its ruthless rating procedures and intractable encouragement to feelings of superiority and inferiority persist in spite of (and maybe because of a striking amount of upward and downward mobility. Beauty is endless social climbing-rendered particularly arduous by the fact that, in our society, the terms that confer membership in the aristocracy of beauty keep changing. At the top of the hierarchy are "stars" who monopolize the right to launch a new insolent idea of beauty— which is then taken up and imitated by large numbers of people.

Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.

The arts of psychological coercion and conciliation for which women are notorious-flattery, charm, wheedling, glamour, tears-are a servile substitute for real influence and autonomy.

The question is: What sexuality are women to be liberated to enjoy? The only sexual ethic liberating for women is one which challenges the primacy of genital heterosexuality. A nonrepressive society, a society in which women are subjectively and objectively the genuine equals of men, will necessarily be an androgynous society. Why? Because the only other plausible terms on which the oppression of women could be ended are that men and women decide to live apart, and that is impossible. 

The modern "nuclear" family is a psychological and moral disaster. It is a prison of sexual repression, a playing fed of inconsistent moral laxity, a museum of possessiveness, a guilt producing factory, and a school of selfishness.

Yet despite the frightful price its members pay in anxiety and a backlog of murderous feelings, the modern family does allow some positive experiences. Particularly in capiralist society today, as Juliet Mitchell has pointed out, the family is often the only place where something approximating unalienated personal relations (of warmth, trust, dialogue, uncompetitiveness, loyalty, spontaneity, sexual pleasure, fun) are still permitted. It is no accident that one of the slogans of capitalist society, the form of society which promotes the greatest alienation in work and all communal bonds, is the sanctity of the family. (By the family is meant, though never said, the patriarchal "nuclear" family only.) 

Family life is the anachronistic reserve of exactly those "human-scale" values which industrial ur: ban society destroys- but which it must somehow manage to conserve.

Taira Robles

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier - and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

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