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精华 资深外嫁女情爱大吐槽:东方食不厌精，西方性不厌繁
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Other Women
By Francine Prose Granta Issue 115: The F Word
THIS IS THE STORY I tell: In the spring of 1972, I was twenty five years old, unhappily married, and living in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Like many women I knew then, I joined a feminist consciousness-raising group, to which I belonged for
six months until I left my husband and moved across the country. A year later, when I briefly returned to pick up some
possessions, I learned that, after my departure, my husband had serially and systematically slept with all the women in
my group.
He’d been my college boyfriend and was a graduate student in mathematics. We’d gotten married during my senior year.
The day before the wedding, my mother said, “You can still call it off.” Though I would have like to, it seemed like too
much trouble. I knew the marriage was a mistake. The hot buzz of romance had worn off, and there we were, stuck
with each other at a historical moment when – or so we heard – the so-called sexual revolution was boiling all around us.
Another mistake: after college, I went to graduate school, where I spiraled into a long, persistent, low-grade nervous break
down. Officially, I was a PhD candidate in medieval English literature. Unofficially, I was a semi-agoraphobic stoner who
stayed in bed for days watching TV and tried never to leave the house except to attend an intermediate Latin class I needed
to fulfill a language requirement. The class was on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I truly loved, but I failed all the quizzes and
eventually stopped going.
Among my terrors was the fear of a certain street near my apartment. For some reason the block had become an impromptu
gathering spot for flashers, who sat in cars and exposed themselves to young women passing by. What scared me was not
the sight of their pink, innocent-looking genitals but the looks on their faces, the paradoxical mix of shame and goofy ecstatic
triumph.
Feminism was big news then; a groundswell political movement. Gloria Steinem was a star. Literary celebrities – Kate Millett,
Germaine Greer – were created overnight; lost classics were resurrected. There were public and private conversations about
the truly egregious ways in which women were underpaid, underrated, excluded from certain professions, and restricted to
others. Such things were debated on talk show!
One thing people said was: the personal is political. It was an attractive idea because it suggested that the most quotidian
events were reflective and emblematic of the dramas enacted in the wider world. Of course, this is true, and it isn’t. Having
a stranger assume you are stupid simply because you have a vagina is related to the problem but is not the same problem
as being subjected to an involuntary clitoridectomy. Sometimes it wasn’t clear to me how well this difference was understood,
but the general feeling was that if you looked at (and got together and talked about) how women were treated as second-class
citizens in the home and office and classroom, your perspective would broaden to include societies in which women were
bought, sold, altered, bred, and worked like barnyard animals.
Everywhere, women were staging protests, issuing manifestos, publishing newsletters that represented a broad spectrum from
separatist radical lesbians to moderates who wanted respect, equal pay, and a seat at the table. Like any social change, this
one whipped up a mini-tornado of opposition: Norman Mailer had no problem writing that books by women (including Virginia
Woolf) were humorless, sentimental, narrow-minded, and unreadable. The more judicious worried about the damage to the
American family if moms put their kids in day care and went out and got jobs. To be fair, there were excesses on both sides:
women used words like foremother and phallocratic with straight faces and had debates about makeup.
I too, began to question certain things I’d taken for granted. I noted, for example, the passive hostility of the distinguished
professor who asked me, with disinterested curiosity, why women students were always in the dead middle of the class and
never at the top or the bottom. Why couldn’t I remember once seeing my father clear the table, even though he and my
mother both worked long hours as doctors? Was my slide into marriage, graduate school, and madness the result of an
early indoctrination by Cinderella and Jane Eyre? Were the flashers on Kirkland Street only the psycho-expression of the
outer reaches of men’s true feelings about women?
And so it happened that I joined a consciousness-raising group. A possible explanation for my psychic decline had suggested
itself: the too-early marriage, the too0easy path, the phobias, and the weed. Had I wound up in this sorry state because
I was a woman? This was the sort of question a women’s group was supposed to address as we compared our experiences
with those of our newfound sisters.
I don’t know what I expected. A new way of being, I guess.. Once we identified and divested ourselves of the bogus values
imposed on use by the patriarchy, everyone would be equal and helpful and nice to each other. Our consciousness would be
raised!
Half a dozen women, all in their twenties or early thirties, met in each other’s homes ( I always tried to persuade them to meet
in my apartment) to talk about feminism in general and our lives in particular, to discuss the books and essays that had become
iconic, and to report on our successes or failures in teaching our boyfriends or husbands how to use a vacuum cleaner.
Through I have hazy memories of some women in the group, I’m fairly sure that most were connected to the university or
livingwith someone who was. Some were working or looking for the sort of young-people jobs (arts administrator, lab
assistant) that suggest that adulthood will have some relation to one’s college major. As I recall, only one of us had a child:
a sweet woman with nice husband; they both seemed overwhelmed. I remember two slightly older married women with
stable lives and nicerapartments and a maternal but slightly judgmental air that made the rest of us want to please them.
Then there was the pretty one, who’d brought me into the group.
The first disappointment was the rapidity with which we fell into roles that replicated junior high. As much as we critiqued the
ways in which male culture had taught us to objectify our bodies, the same hierarchies applied: the plump deferred to the thin,
the short to the tall, the homely to the handsome. The older women exerted a subtle maternal leadership, though the actual
mother, the overburdened one, was considered slightly pitiful for having gotten herself into that situation. I also assumed a
familiar role, a fallback position from grade school. Self-protective, watchful, stiff with social discomfort, at once too proud,
too removed, and too lazy to mention the phobias, the cannabis, the TV, the forlorn marriage, the secret novel forever
“in progress”.
None of that rose to the surface as I joined my sisters in complaining about the patriarchal creepiness of the men I knew.
I described how my husband used to torment me by staring theatrically and somewhat apishly at every beautiful woman
we passed until he was sure I noticed, and then he would give me a horrible smile, like the rictus grin of Kirkland Street flashers.
I wondered why the other women so often rose to his defense and asked why I was being so hard on a guy who was tall,
reasonably nice, intelligent, and so forth.
If I’d imagined that the group would collectively generate a higher consciousness about ourselves in relation to other women
and men, I soon realized we’d re-created in microcosm the Darminian power relationships of the boardroom, the cabinet
meeting, the office, the nursery school.
We, too, had our outcast: the future social worker’s wife. Objectively she was smart and attractive as anyone else. But her
mistake was being too honest and unguarded about her motivation for joining the group. She made the mistake of saying
what no one else would admit. She was sick of her marriage. Her perfectly pleasant husband had been her first lover.
And to quote John Berryman, she was heavy bored. My guess is that all of us were bored and erotically restless;
my sense is that the madly-in-love didn’t rush to join women’s groups. But the obsessiveness and nakedness of this
women’s discontent allowed the rest of us to pity her, to condescend and patronize her for focusing on something trivial and
self-indulgent. When conversation lagged, the meetings devolved into scenarios in which she bemoaned her romantic ennui
while the rest of us rolled our eyes and smirked. Watching her, I was reminded of the schoolyard lesson about the risks of
volunteering too much information. But secrecy has its drawbacks, too – it can make you feel cornered.
Backed into a corner, I began to joke around – some of my jokes were funny, some not, some appropriate, some not. Some
were probably hostile. No one else thought there were funny. I remember suggesting we read Valerie Solanas’s SCUM
Manifesto, a book I still think is hilariously weird. I especially love Solanas’s fantastic suggestion (I might be getting this slightly
wrong) that the only way for men to rehabilitate themselves was to gather in groups and ritually chant in unison, “I am a lowly
abject turd!”
I remember telling this to the group. I recall no one laughing. A current joke was: how many feminist does it take to change
a light bulb? Answer: That’s not funny. But it wasn’t the women’s fault. None of them were stupid. Some had a sense of
humor. They could tell that I wasn’t trying to amuse but to provoke.
All this time, though sick with loathing and doubt, I was working on my novel. I wrote a first draft and put it away and rewrote
it from scratch. Eventually, I got brave enough to show it to a former college professor.
Then, an unexpected event occurred. And editor called from New York. My former professor had sent him my novel, and he
wanted to publish it.
A single phone call affected my brain like a jolt of ECT without the mouth guard, the electrodes, or the memory loss. It was a
miracle cure. I moved to San Francisco.
And so I returned a year later to collect my things. And that was when I found out that my husband had, so to speak, worked
his way through the group. One of the women told me and excused herself; she wasn’t the only one! No wonder he’d always
seemed so pleased when the group met me at our house. No wonder they’d always taken his side.
In fact, this was not how it happened. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my husband only slept with two of the women in the group.
I don’t know why I tell this story, or tell it the way I do. Obviously, saying all women in the group makes a better story
than saying two of the women in the group. But under the circumstances, two seems like more than two; two seems
like more than twice as much as one. It seems like a statement, which it was. I know he slept with the pretty one and (I think)
one of the maternal know-it-alls and for good measure both of the girls who lived in the apartment upstairs in our weathered
Cambridge three-decker.
If our true desired and disappointments are buried deep in our dreams, they’re closer to the surface in the stories we tell and
retell, in the mythologies we ourselves have come to believe. Does saying all the women express how betrayed I felt by my
husband and my feminist sisters?
Actually, I was surprised by how little it upset me. Though I hadn’t had he encyclopedic sexual experience that people of my
generation are supposed to have had, I’d had enough to know: sex trumps politics, common sense, and better judgment.
And my husband’s bad behavior wasn’t entirely unexpected. One gift of a faltering marriage is a heightened sensitivity to the
frequencies of flirtation. And however misused, the word liberation was very much in the air, often to mean having sex with
someone because it was more trouble to say no.
The truth is that when I think of that time, I feel neither outrage nor betrayal but gratitude: my consciousness was raised.
Do I think that women are better than men and the world would be a better place if women ran it? I can thank my Cambridge
women’s group (along with Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi) for having cured me of the notion that women are no more
or less likely than men to treat people well or badly. Perhaps the problem lies with institutions rather than people, and a group,
no matter how small, is an institution.
Yet somehow, in the process, I became a feminist. Almost forty years later, feminism is as basic to my sense of self as the
fact that I have brown eyes, as integral to my sense of the world as the fact that gravity keeps us from flying off the planet.
…
后面还有一些 Francine Prose 写她现在的家庭、生活、与及评论，小朋友就不打了，
而有兴趣的朋友可以去 granta.com 找来看。文章看着有点长，但Francine Prose
不止文笔好，思路与观点都是很清晰的。最后揭晓关于她丈夫是否"slept with all the
women in the group"的时候，我是哈哈哈大笑了。。。但当笑声停摆的那一刻，也
是完全认同她的观点的同一秒。 希望 您也会喜欢!
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