The Feminine Mystique: Chapter 11 Summary & Analysis

When Friedan asked housewives what they did with their time when they were not doing chores, or asked them about their interests or ambitions, the subject usually came around to sex. Women were eager to talk about their sexual adventures but, when they spoke, Friedan noted that they sounded “unsexual.”

Women talked about having sex to “feel alive.” One woman had affairs to enjoy the feeling of giving herself over to someone completely. She had first felt that feeling with her husband when they married, but then he became too preoccupied with his work. She then experienced the feeling again after her children were born. The feeling only occurred when she was in love. So, she went to Mexico to have an affair with a man with whom she was not in love, but who had inspired the feeling that she desired. She returned six months later, having failed to recover “her phantom feeling,” and resume her marriage.

The suburban “sex-seekers” could not expand housework or community work to fill the time available, so they turned to sex to feel fulfilled. Sex was “the only frontier,” available to women living according to the feminine mystique. American women, according to Friedan, had been reduced to sex creatures as a result. The culture, too, had become “sex-glutted,” but it had not resulted in fulfillment for women. Worse, their “aggressive pursuit of sexual fulfillment” caused sexual disinterest in American men and bred hostility toward women.

According to Alfred Kinsey, there was an enormous increase in sexual preoccupation in the postwar era, but no “outlet.” There were constant references to sex in media and an increase in the publication and sales of lascivious best-selling novels marketed to women. Women seemed to be more preoccupied with sex than men and this avidity played out in films and novels in the late-1950s and early-1960s, including La Dolce Vita—an Italian film that drew American audiences for “its much-advertised sexual titillation”—and novels, like Peyton Place and The Chapman Report, which also drew on the image of the “over-lusting female.”

Suburban women were usually “sex-seekers,” not “sex-finders” due to needing to look after their children, trying to avoid being the subject of gossip, and the fact that men were usually absent and less preoccupied with sex as a result of having other things to do and think about.

Many housewives staked their identities on their sex role, using sex to feel “alive” and thus, placing impossible demands on their “femaleness” and their husbands’ “maleness” to make up for their failure “to achieve goals and satisfactions in the wider community.” Kinsey found, based on a survey of 5,940 women, that the sexual appetites of wives seemed to increase while those of their husbands waned. More disturbingly, sexual anxieties were causing reproductive dysfunction.

Obstetricians observed that women who had dedicated their lives to having babies were usually the ones who had the most trouble—backaches, bleeding, and difficult pregnancies and deliveries—while, those who had other interests had easier pregnancies and deliveries.

A gynecologist spoke of women who had not attained fulfillment from having babies or sexual intercourse. They continued to have babies for a lack of anything else to do. Other patients were college girls for whom “going to bed [meant] nothing.” It was merely something to do for a lack of anything better to do.

Friedan wonders if the high incidence of “cramps with menstruation,” “depression with childbirth,” and other “female troubles” are natural to women or if they are related to the “choice between femininity and human growth.”

Friedan reports on an island where attractive young housewives spent their summers. There, they enjoyed the company of “sexless boys right out of the world of Tennessee Williams,” while their husbands were working in the city.

Women demanded too much satisfaction from their husbands—not only sexual satisfaction, but also the status-seeking that they could only realize vicariously through their husbands. Young men began to feel trapped by their wives who had turned men into “the sex-instrument” or the “man around the house.” Those husbands began to seek divorces and felt growing hostility, not only toward their wives, but also toward their mothers, female co-workers, and women in general.

Alfred Kinsey found that “the majority of middle-class” American men stopped having sex with their wives after fifteen years of marriage. They had affairs instead—office romances, casual or intense affairs—in an attempt to escape from the devouring wife. Some chose to have affairs with Lolita types, either in fantasy or in fact, to escape from the grown-up woman at home and “her aggressive energies.”

Male hostility toward women was particularly evident in postwar literature, which was full of “images of the predatory female.” The male outrage, according to Friedan, was the result of “parasitic women” who stunted their sons’ and husbands’ development.

Friedan wonders if the increase in “overt male homosexuality” is attached to the feminine mystique. She thinks that there is a correlation, due to the tendency of women to live through their sons, rendering them “child-like” and hateful toward all women as a reaction to the one woman who prevented them from achieving manhood. Friedan writes that, like the daughters of the feminine mystique who raised them, homosexual men often live in sexual fantasy, and were characterized by immaturity and promiscuity. They lacked commitments “in life outside of sex.”

Friedan found a correlation between education and the postponement of sexual activity. Better-educated people usually waited to have sex. Young women who continued their education into college and graduate school also reported more sexual satisfaction.

Psychiatrists believed that compulsive sexual activity, whether homosexual or heterosexual, was a sign of low self-esteem. College girls, for instance, sometimes sought security through sexual relationships with boys to assuage "feelings of inadequacy.”

Friedan voices concern over the prevalence of “sex without self,” or using sex to evade the responsibilities of enduring discomfort, which was a part of growing up. The “pursuit of pleasure and things” merely shielded young people from their complex reality.