I
In 2020, I read the obituary of Shere Hite, about whom I knew very little. While in graduate school at Columbia, Hite was an Olivetti Girl model, but she picketed the Olivetti offices after she saw their ad taglines. The typewriter was smart so the typist could concentrate on being attractive.
Hite started attending NOW meetings. When the topic of female orgasm was broached, the room fell silent. Someone suggested she look into it. A lack of research led her to write The Hite Report. She left Columbia after they said she couldn’t do her dissertation on female sexuality.
Forty years later a presidential candidate boasted that he grabbed women “by the pussy.” When he was elected anyway, I attended the Women’s March. We bought ladies’ camo hats from a truck stop in Virginia and turned them inside out, their pink fleece lining the color of protest.
When the topic of female orgasm was broached, the room fell silent.
A colleague saw my pictures on Facebook and wrote an anonymous letter to my boss, saying my conduct was indecent.
Hite found women felt guilty and disillusioned about sex; 70% of them were unfulfilled. Men revealed marriages characterized by repressed anger and infidelity. The sexual revolution meant women were having more, not better, sex. Rather than thanking her for providing actionable information, Playboy dubbed her book “The Hate Report.”
“The Christian right saw her championing of women’s sexual pleasure as contributing to the dissolution of the family,” the NYT obit says. She received death threats, moved abroad, renouncing her citizenship.
II
The summer between high school and college I interned at a small advertising agency. I did a bit of everything, including covering the phones at lunch for a colleague who was being encouraged to become an account executive. She was finishing her degree while living at home on Long Island. There were a few other women in the office, including one who had just graduated from Barnard. I will be forever grateful to Henry, who told me to read Stop-Time, which I did and loved. The guys in the art department taught me about lettering.
It was a comfortable atmosphere that encouraged humor and creativity, made manifest in caption contests on the wall over the coffee machine. It was definitely humor based an older, male perspective, but everything seemed to be so back then.
It struck me then, in midtown Manhattan, that my native status, which I took for granted, was a rarity. People were mostly from somewhere else, and even when they had arrived, they commuted in. What was this thing they sought? And where would I go to find it? The process of wanting and becoming seemed endless. You never arrived.
If you were gay and from Queens, you lived in Chelsea and had lovers, but no ambition. If you were straight and from the suburbs, you had a family and love but you lacked excitement and youth. If you were young and poor and had worked your way up through education, you lived in a shoebox and yearned for the suburbs and a family.
My colleague and I went to Laura Ashley together and I gave her what I think in retrospect was bad advice about a dress.
III
The next summer, at 18, I worked at a slightly larger agency. The boss’s son asked me out. I declined. Were older men better in bed because they were more experienced or were they just older? I wondered. How did they get better without women to teach them? Who were those women? And where did they get the confidence?
I became friends with one of the copywriters. He invited me over for a drink after work. He lived in the plant district, where the sidewalks were fragrant and lush. The drinks were icy and vodka. There was a key in the door and he introduced me to his boyfriend. When he read the disappointment on my face he laughed.
While in graduate school, I wrote a story about a high school sexual encounter. “What about reciprocity?” asked a male classmate when the story was workshopped. What’s that?, I replied, silently, in the mortified and incredulous voice of my character.
IV
I drove by the Spy Store this morning and saw this sign:
Are you the side piece or the main?
Get proof & avoid the pain.
If you are the piece on the side, the pain is inevitable, unavoidable, but maybe the sex is okay because you have less to lose, less to worry about. And if you’re the main, there is pain implicit in the investigation, regardless of what you find out.
Here I am at my desk, fingertips on keys, hoping that my keyboard will be smart enough to find the words I want to say.