Free What Do Women Want? by Erica Jong

spirit must then be nurtured. This is hardly easy—because women writers tend to be damned no matter what they do. If we are sweet and tender, we are damned for not being “powerful” enough (not having blood and guts), and if we rage, we are said to be “castrating,” amazonian, lacking in tenderness. It is a real dilemma. What is the authentic voice of the woman writer? Does anyone know? Does anyone know what the authentic voice of woman is? Is it sweet and low like the voice of Shakespeare’s Cordelia, or is it raging and powerful like the voice of Lady Macbeth?
    The problem is, I suppose, that women have never been left alone to be themselves and to find out for themselves. Men need us so badly and are so terrified of losing us that they have used their power to imprison us—in castles of stone as long as that was possible, and in castles of myth thereafter. The myths, most of them ways of keeping us out of touch with our own strength, confused many generations of women. We were told we were weak; yet as we grew older, we increasingly knew that we were strong. We were told that men loved us for our dependency; yet as we grew older, we observed that, despite themselves, they loved us for our independence—and if they didn’t, we found we didn’t always care. We discovered that we could grow only by loving ourselves a little, and loving our strengths, and so, paradoxically, we found we could grow up only by doing the opposite of all the things our culture told us to do. We were told our charm lay in weakness, yet in order to survive, we had to be strong. We were told we were by nature indecisive, yet our survival often seemed to depend on our own decisions. We were told that certain mythic definitions of women were immutable natural laws, biological “facts,” but often our very endurance depended upon changing those supposedly unchangeable things, even upon embracing a life credo of change.
    In fact, when I look back on the years since I left college and try to sum up what I have learned, it is precisely that: not to fear change, not to expect my life to be immutable. All the good things that have happened to me in the last several years have come, without exception, from a willingness to change, to risk the unknown, to do the very things I feared most. Every poem, every page of fiction I have written has been written with anxiety, occasionally panic, and always with uncertainty about its reception. Every life decision I have made—from changing jobs to changing partners to changing homes—has been taken with trepidation. I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me. I have accepted fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear of the unknown. I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back, turn back; you’ll die if you venture too far.
    I regard myself as a fairly typical member of the female sex. In my fears and feelings, I am just like my readers. Writing may propel me into places and situations where I wouldn’t otherwise find myself, but in the dark of night, insomniac, I think the thoughts any woman thinks. I am impatient with successful women who feel that their success has lifted them out of the ordinary stream of women’s lives. I cringe when I hear them say to their fearful, unfledged sisters: I did it against the odds. You can, too. As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we all are similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict. I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers’ frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.
    I know I would not mind a