On Androgyny
On Women
By Susan Sontag, edited by David Rieff
MACMILLAN, MAY 2023, 208 PP.
REVIEWED BY S.C. CORNELL
S
usan Rosenblatt was born in
1933 into a household that she
would later describe as an utter cultural wasteland. Her family
moved frequently, from New York to
Arizona to California. Her father, a
fur trader who worked in China, died
of tuberculosis when she was five.
Her stepfather, Nathan Sontag, a fatuous army captain whose last name
Susan was nevertheless happy to
take—“I didn’t enjoy being called a
dirty kike”—told her to read less if
she ever wanted to get married. At
sixteen, she fled to college. At seventeen, after a courtship of several
days, she became the child bride of
her University of Chicago professor Philip Rieff. Their marriage was
unhappy and largely sexless; in her
diary she compared it to that of Dorothea Brooke and Mr. Casaubon. They had one child and
a live-in nanny. They socialized with other faculty couples and worked together on a book about Freud.
Like most people in the 1950s, Sontag did not consider herself a feminist. It would have been a ludicrous
position in her academic circles, and besides, she had
never felt at a disadvantage in her own relations with
men. Seven years into her marriage, she nevertheless
undertook that most reviled of feminist acts—the abandonment of husband and child—and, insult to injury,
took up with a woman lover in Paris. Back in the United States a year later, she moved to New York, initiated
divorce, and “indignantly rejected [her] lawyer’s au-
36
tomatic bid for alimony.” For the
custody trial, under pressure to renounce her lesbianism, she put on
lipstick and heels, and won. Later
that year, apparently as stipulated
by their divorce settlement, Rieff
published the Freud book without
crediting Sontag as co-author.
Post-divorce, Sontag lived with
her son, now old enough to accompany her to parties, and with
a rotating cast of mostly women
lovers. In her new posthumous
collection of feminist writing—the
cheeky cover reads SUSAN SONTAG ON WOMEN—she remarks
that life as a so-called liberated woman was “embarrassingly
easy.” She went to the movies almost daily. All her intellectual
idols, with the early exception of
Simone Weil, and the later one of Elizabeth Hardwick,
were men. Towards the wives of her magazine or university colleagues—women who stayed at home, raised
many children, depended on their husband’s income—
she felt scorn and pity. She had something in her of the
self-made tycoon who scoffs at those still flailing at their
bootstraps. “Probably her deepest assumption,” her son
David Rieff wrote, “was that she could remake herself,
that we all can remake ourselves, and that backgrounds
could be jettisoned or transcended virtually at will, or
rather, if one had the will.”
The feminist movement of the late ’60s and early
’70s would convince Sontag that the position of women
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Portrait of Italian actress Adriana Asti (left) and Sontag, 1970. Sontag directed
Asti in her 1969 film Duet for Cannibals. Photo by Susan Wood.
in society was a political rather than a personal failing,
and, if only briefly, make her question how she told her
own story. A liberated woman, she wrote, “has no right
to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or
less full of compromise than it is.” But her impatience
with femininity remained, as did her irritation with the
feminist movement’s gooeyness and anti-intellectualism.
Particularly wrongheaded for Sontag was its essentialist
tendency. Some second-wave feminists, known as cultural feminists, were of the opinion that women were,
naturally and inevitably, kinder than men and more
peaceful, nurturing, and egalitarian. As such, they sought
to create a separate world in which women could live
according to their own standards and away from men’s
avarice and lust. Sontag saw the short-term advantages
of separatism: say, all-girl rock groups, or political lesbians. But these were consciousness-raising ploys in a time
of emergency, not a vision of utopia. In the long run, she
was a “pure integrationist.”
The goal of feminism, Sontag thought, should not
be the upward revaluation of the “natural” female traits
but instead the abolition of that very idea of natural
difference—the purging of all sex-stereotypes, however
apparently positive. “The femininity of women and the
masculinity of men are morally defective and historically obsolete conceptions,” she wrote.
“Masculinity” is identified with competence, autonomy, selfcontrol, ambition, risk-taking, independence, rationality;
“femininity” is identified with incompetence, helplessness, irrationality, passivity, non-competitiveness, being
nice. Women are trained for second-class adulthood, most
of what is cherished as typically “feminine” behavior being
simply behavior that is childish, servile, weak, immature.
It is striking how quickly these myths can switch:
a 2020 Brookings Institution survey found that both
liberal and conservative parents are more likely to describe their daughters as resilient and to say they worry
about their sons becoming “successful adults.” And it is
remarkable how little faith Sontag had in such female-associated traits as “being nice” when pitted against the
seduction of manly self-determination. But however much Sontag admired and imitated men—Adrienne
Rich called her “male-identified”; Elizabeth Hardwick
said that she wasn’t “really a woman”—her allegiance
was not to the masculine ideal, but to the androgyne one.
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Sontag makes this position clear in “The Third World
with her breezy bootstrap optimism, she declares that
of Women,” a manifesto in questionnaire form that was
once women have two or fewer children—and no longer
published in the early ’70s in Libre, a Spanish-language
spend most of their adult lives birthing infants who will
Marxist magazine, and in the original English in Partidie—the matter will solve itself.
san Review. It now appears as the centerpiece essay
Obviously, it didn’t. The “long-run child penalty,” a
of On Women. The collection also include three esterm used by economists to measure the average persays on beauty and aging, in which we learn that aging
centage by which women’s earnings fall behind men’s
is a double standard and beauty a trap; Sontag’s fafive to ten years after the arrival of their first child is, in
mous takedown of Leni Riefenstahl, included so as to
the United States, about 40 percent. Further depolarcontextualize the absolutely bitching exchange that it
ization in work and wages would require that abortion
provoked with Adrienne Rich on the limits of female
be legal and accessible, that men enter into the tradisolidarity; and an interview with a college magazine
tionally female domestic spheres of labor with the same
in which a tedious Sontag repeatedly criticizes Philgusto and skill that women have shown in their entrance
ip Rieff’s work without mentioning that they were
into the male ones; that care-based jobs such as nursing,
once married.
public school teaching, housework, and home health aid
The sparseness of the collection is not really the fault
work be paid commensurate with their social worth; and
of its editor, her son David Rieff, who is also Sontag’s
that we follow the lead of other wealthy countries and inliterary executor. Having decided to rescue Sontag’s repstitute paid paternity and maternity leave and universal
utation as a feminist thinker, he had few essays from
free or low-cost childcare. We might also consider more
which to choose. Compared to her
widespread systems of surrogacy,
output on, say, Antonin Artaud,
or at least payment for gestational
Sontag wrote little about women,
labor, given that pregnancy is both
and many of her best-known essays
socially necessary, and, according to
on would-be feminist themes, like
the Bureau of Labor Statistics and
camp and pornography, are really
the Centers for Disease Control,
essays on aesthetic theory. “The
two-and-a-half times more likely
“The Third World
Third World of Women” stands
to result in death than a year of poof Women” stands out . . .
out in the new collection for how
lice work.
for how clearly it
clearly it defines a feminist utopia
While the depolarization of work
(too clearly, in fact, for Sontag, who
might be a qualified and fragile sucdefines a feminist utopia.
would later claim to have dumbed
cess, the depolarization of our sex
down her ideas for the small generallives, at least as Sontag imagined
audience brain).
it, has been an utter failure. We do
“A non-repressive society,” Sonnot yet think of aging women as
tag writes, “a society in which
having the same sexual eligibiliwomen are subjectively and objecty as aging men. And it is rare for
tively the genuine equals of men, will necessarily be an
feminists today to claim, as did Sontag, that we are not
androgynous society.” By this Sontag did not primarily
born with a gender-specific sexuality. Sontag was of
mean an androgyny of physical appearance, and therethe opinion that “exclusive homosexuality” was just as
fore an equalizing of the sexes’ aesthetic burdens; this
much a learned behavior as “exclusive heterosexuality.”
was a first step, and almost trivial. More important was
In her utopia, there would be no need to learn either.
the depolarization of gender roles in work and in sexuThe increasing social acceptance of homosexual acts
al relations. How successful has this been?
has resulted not, as Sontag hoped, because they have
In school, the poles have actually switched: women
come to be viewed as interchangeable with heterosexare now more likely than men to graduate from all levual acts, but instead through a renewed commitment to
els of education. That they are still less likely to hold
born identity and to sexual diversity—a digging of heels
positions of extreme power is, depending on whom you
into the very notions of “nature” and “difference” that
ask, due to a natural lack of monomaniacal ambition or
Sontag despised.
to the sexist sabotage of women who don’t know their
Would sex in an androgynous society be better or
place. Certainly, everyone can agree that it is not unreworse? Sontag herself seemed of two minds. She was
lated to childbirth. Like many feminist thinkers before
capable of criticizing sex in our current world for merely
her, Sontag identifies the “biological division of labor”
reproducing the “right of each person, briefly, to exploit
as the original cause of the oppression of women. Then,
and dehumanize someone else” and she held out hope
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that we could “modify the most deeply rooted habits of
friendship and love.” At other times, she was aware of
the role of power and especially of gendered power in
eroticism. In several essays, she compares the “unisex
and asexual” imagery of communism with the sexiness
of fascism, in which the leader both rapes and titillates
his followers. She admired porn for addressing “the violence of the imagination” which “cannot be confined
within the optimistic and rationalist perceptions of
mainstream feminism.” She had an abiding intellectual interest in BDSM.
Either way, we might consider that good sex does not
a good life make. In a non-repressive, androgynous society, Sontag writes,
efforts, we have been spared some of the most psychologically deforming effects of sexism. My friends and
I, having by and large been raised in homes where we
were not constantly told to be ladylike, can admit without compromise the many good traits of the archetypal
lady—kindness toward the weak, willingness to apologize, concern for the feelings of others—and wish not to
purge these traits from ourselves but instead to encourage them in men. We who were not forced to be docile—a
reprieve we owe to the second wavers—can recognize in
our turn that female aggression and rudeness can easily
become Karenism. (Sontag, according to Sigrid Nunez,
was a great humiliator of waiters.) It is easier for someone who has never been denied a credit card because of
her gender to understand, contra lean-in feminism, that
[S]exuality will in another sense be less important than it
female war criminals or exploitative CEOs are no better
is now—because sexual relations will no longer be hysterithan male ones, just as it is easier for someone who has
cally craved as a substitute for genuine freedom and for so
never been forced into motherhood to see that wommany other pleasures (intimacy, intensity, feeling of belongen who abandon their children are no more heroic than
ing, blasphemy) which this society frustrates.
men who do so. “For a long time I
I know women who feel powerful,
felt I had done a very brave thing,”
who feel in control, who feel acuteDoris Lessing said about leaving
ly needed and admired, only when
her two small children with their
they are in bed with a man. In a
father so she could become a writNo use denying
more androgynous world, their sex
er. Bad behavior in women can be
might be worse. But I think their
courageous, but courage, as Sontag
that the loss of a
lives would be better.
famously wrote a few days after
strong gender identity
9/11, is a morally neutral virtue.
would be felt by
ork and love,” as Freud
Sex stereotypes are bad beonce said, “that’s all there
cause, as Sontag might say, they
some like the
is.” Sontag would point to a third
inhibit our remaking of ourselves.
loss of a language.
arena for androgyny: character. A
They deny us our individuality:
truly androgynous society would,
they attribute to a single person
for the first time ever, consider
the virtues and sins of a collective
virtue—character traits and their
history that person is presumed to
morality—in a genderless way. It
share. Of course, another way to
would realize that most strongly gendered traits, insay “virtues and sins of a collective history” is “culture.”
cluding almost all matters of physical appearance, are
There is no use denying that the loss of a strong gender
morally irrelevant. For most of Western history this has
identity would be felt by some people like the loss of
been out of the question. Each positive trait (patience,
chains and by others like the loss of a language. Or that
chivalry, stoicism) has slotted into, and indeed been crea completely gender-neutral approach would see nothated to fit, a male or female ideal. Over time, these ideals
ing specifically tragic in sex-selective abortion, just as a
have changed or even flipped, but morality has remained
completely race-blind approach would see nothing sad
double-stranded. If a trait undeniably appears in both
in Susan Rosenblatt wanting to change her name. There
women and men, it might be split into two—loyalty veris always a tradeoff between individual freedom and colsus constancy, judgment versus prudence, leadership
lective belonging, and between the past and the future.
versus bossiness—to clarify that the behavior really
An ethics requires a history, and history is full of gender.
takes a different form in the two sexes, or that it counts
In ridding ourselves of the crutches of “good womas a virtue only in one.
anhood” and “good manhood” which have for so long
I am hopeful that today’s young feminists will come
propped up “good personhood,” we might also stumble
closer to a genderless morality than any before. This
against the question of innate sex differences. What if
is not because we are particularly wise or benevolent,
boys and girls, even when given complete freedom from
but because, through our mothers’ and grandmothers’
gender expectations, still prove importantly different in
W
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their preferences and behaviors? If this is
true, would a push towards equality be coercive? Without that push for equality and
the accompanying fading of stereotypes,
how could we possibly know our true preferences? If a trait is found more commonly
in one gender, would it be discriminatory to
outlaw or discourage it? When would that
discrimination be justified?
These are difficult questions. A few
things seem clear. We should not forbid in
one gender something which is allowed in
the other. We should not repeat even positive gender stereotypes around children. We
should, as much as is possible without absolute historical or political amnesia, view
ourselves and one another as individual animals, variously stupid, variously malicious,
variously anxious; all, in our muddled and
contradicting ways, reeling from our formation within the cages of gender. We should
not treat the people who are most obviously in rebellion against these cages as valid
receptacles for hatred or fear born of our
own shame. However lacking or biased our
judgment, we should seek to achieve within
ourselves the best of both the “female” and
“male” traits. Only then, after long enough,
can we forget which was which. D
Further Reading:
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
by Susan Sontag
and
As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh:
Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980
by Susan Sontag
Sontag’s diaries, published posthumously,
are fascinating documents of self-invention.
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
by Sigrid Nunez
This account of living with Sontag informed
my understanding of her feminism.
Seduction and Betrayal: Women and
Literature by Elizabeth Hardwick
Sontag mentioned this in her exchange with
Adrienne Rich as an example of feminist
writing that doesn’t abandon intellectualism. The book considers the gendered ethics
of relationships, which Hardwick bemoans
but does not doubt.
—S.C.C.
40
Mother. Here. If.
If there are any heavens my mother will
(all by herself) have one.
—e.e.cummings
Cummings envisions heaven as a garden:
not a new idea, although a good one“Nothing startling,” my mother used to say.
Then he conjures his father
joining his mother in a flowery paradise
so she is finally not (all by herself).
If it is solitude that gardens offer,
It’s serial solitude.
Neglected gardens stubbornly persist.
They grow and change like memories.
As for my mother,
here in the garden’s gradual neglect
and periodic renewal,
digging, transplanting, theme and variations,
here in the quiet green of piled-up summers,
here in the green idea of piled-up summers:
if she is anywhere, she’s here.
Mother. Here. If.
Weigh these three words. Taste them.
Mother: universal, also private,
changeable and permanent and crucial.
Here: where? Whose land, sweat, boundary, and vision?
If: to whose fragile branch,
conditional, contingent, we are clinging.
A sunny July morning.
A fly walks on my forearm.
A hummingbird flies into the bell of a yellow foxglove
And out again into the throbbing silence.
Who planted that foxglove?
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—Rachel Hadas