The Female Persuasion Read online

  A decision was handed down within an hour. The head of the disciplinary committee, a young, female assistant dean, announced that Darren would be allowed to stay on campus if he agreed to undergo three counseling sessions with a local behavioral therapist, Melanie Stapp, MSW, whose website said her specialty was impulse control. An illustration showed a man frantically puffing away at a cigarette, and an unhappy woman eating a doughnut.

  There was a strong but diffuse outcry on campus. “This is misogyny in action,” said a senior when they were all sitting in the Woolley lounge late one night.

  “And it’s just amazing that the head of the committee apparently had no sympathy for the victims,” said a sophomore.

  “She’s probably one of those women who hates women,” said Zee. “A total cunt.” Then she began to sing her own version of a song from a musical that her parents used to like: “Women . . . women who hate women . . . are the cuntiest women . . . in the world . . .”

  Greer said, “That’s terrible! You shouldn’t say cunt.”

  Zee said, “Cunt,” and everyone laughed. “Oh, come on,” Zee went on. “I can say what I want. That’s having agency.”

  “You shouldn’t say agency,” said Greer. “That’s worse.”

  Greer and Zee were part of long conversations about Darren with other people in the dining hall; they stayed until the food service workers kicked them out. Anger was hard to sustain, and despite these conversations and a tightly reasoned op-ed by a senior in the Ryland Clarion, two of the girls involved said they didn’t want the case to drag on any longer.

  Still Greer kept thinking about him. It wasn’t the actual encounter that remained—that was almost gone except for a trace memory—but instead she fixed on how unfair it was that he was tolerated there. Unfair: the word sounded like a child’s complaint hollered bitterly to a parent.

  “Sorry, I am done with thinking about him,” Ariel Diski said one morning in the student union, after Greer tentatively approached her. “I’m super-busy,” said Ariel, “and he’s just a dick.”

  “I know he is,” said Greer. “But maybe there’s more to do. My friend Zee thinks there is.”

  “Look, I know you’re still invested in this,” said Ariel, “but no offense, I’m pre-law, and I can’t get stressed. Sorry, Greer, I’m done.”

  That night, Zee and Greer and Chloe sat in Zee’s room, painting their toenails the brownish green of army fatigues. The room gave off a fermented chemical smell that made them all feel a little sick and a little wild. “You could go to the Women’s Alliance,” Zee offered. “They might have some advice.”

  “Or not. My roommate went to one of their meetings,” Chloe said. “She said all they do is bake brownies against genital mutilation.”

  Ryland wasn’t a very political place, so you took what you could get. Every once in a while a wave of protest unexpectedly lifted up. A few years into the clanking Iraq War, Zee and two sophomores were sometimes seen out on the steps of the Metzger with a megaphone and handouts. Then there was a series of protests by the very small but well-organized Black Students Association. The climate change group had become a persistently grave presence, and Zee was part of it as well. The sky was falling, they told everyone again and again, the hot and seething sky.

  “You know,” said Zee, “I once made and sold T-shirts to raise money to stop animal cruelty back in Scarsdale when I was a kid. I’m thinking we could make T-shirts with Darren Tinzler’s face on them and give them away. And beneath it could be the word ‘Unwanted.’”

  Money was pooled, and fifty cheap T-shirts were quickly purchased from an online closeout wholesaler, and Greer, Zee, and Chloe stayed up late in the basement of Woolley among the stored bikes and chugging laundry machines and the sluice of toilet water through overhead pipes, ironing transfers of Darren Tinzler’s face onto synthetic fabric because it was cheaper than having them printed. By four a.m. Greer’s arm was still strong as she ran the hot, pointy anvil over and over the image of Darren’s bland paleness—the baseball cap worn low, the unusually wide-set eyes. He had a stupid face, she thought, but buried in it was a brutish, cunning instinct.

  Soon afterward, Chloe gave up, standing and reaching out her arms, saying, “Must. Have. Bed,” so a few hours later it was just Greer and Zee who sat yawning in the bright entrance to the dining hall, trying to get people to take their T-shirts. “Free T-shirts!” they told everyone, but in the end they gave away only five. It was a disappointment, a sad failure. Still, Greer and Zee wore theirs as often as they could, though the fabric shrank a little in the wash and Darren Tinzler’s face was stretched and slightly distorted, as if he’d put his head in a copy machine.

  They were both wearing the T-shirts the night Faith Frank came to speak.

  Zee had seen the announcement for the lecture in the Weekly Blast and was very excited. “I’ve always loved her,” she said to Greer. They had become friends in an accelerated way because of the night they’d spent with the T-shirts, scheming, talking, free-associating. “I know she represents this kind of outdated idea of feminism,” said Zee, “that focuses on issues that mostly affect privileged women. I totally see that. But you know what? She’s done a lot of good, and I think she’s amazing. Also, the thing about Faith Frank,” she went on, “is that while she’s this famous, iconic person, she also seems so approachable. We have to go see her, Greer. You have to talk to her, tell her what’s happened. Tell her. She’ll know what to do.”

  Greer knew shamefully little about Faith Frank, though the night before the lecture she fortified herself with some intensive Googling. Looking facts up online comforted her; the world could be out of control, but still there were answers that could easily be found. Yet while Google provided timeline and context, it gave her no real sense of how a person like Faith actually became her whole self.

  In the early 1970s, Greer saw, Faith Frank had been one of the founders of Bloomer magazine, named for Amelia Bloomer, the feminist and social reformer who published the first newspaper for women. Bloomer was known as the scrappier, less famous little sister to Ms. magazine. The magazine had been very good in the beginning, not as polished or sophisticated as Ms., never particularly well-designed but often filled with columns and articles that were absorbing and charged. Over the decades, readership had gone way down, and finally the magazine, once seen as a bulletin from the front, became as thin as a manual that came with a small appliance.

  But Faith, who had been described as “a couple of steps down from Gloria Steinem in fame,” remained visible. In the late 1970s she began writing books for a popular audience that sold well, with their feisty, encouraging messages of empowerment. Then in 1984 she had an enormous hit with her manifesto The Female Persuasion, which essentially implored women to see that there was a great deal more to being female than padded shoulders and acting tough. Corporate America had tried to get women to behave as badly as men, Faith Frank said, but women did not have to capitulate. They could be strong and powerful, all the while keeping their integrity and decency.

  People really seemed to want to hear this message, including every woman who had gone to Wall Street and ended up miserable. Women could get out, Faith said; they could start cooperatives, or at least they could challenge the prevailing culture at their firms. And men, she added, could use some persuading to balance their long-established toughness with a new gentleness. Balance, she told them, was everything. The book had never gone out of print, though each new edition needed to be severely updated.

  Because Faith was poised and articulate and effective when interviewed, she had been given her own short segment on PBS’s nighttime magazine-format TV show Recap, where she interviewed other people; sometimes she chose sexist men as her subjects, and in their vanity they seemed to have no idea of why they had been selected. They appeared on-screen, occasionally preening and making objectionable remarks, and she calmly and wittily corrected them�
��and sometimes just easily took them down.

  But though Faith’s interviews were popular, by the mid-nineties the whole show was canceled. Faith was still writing books by then, but they had stopped selling well. Over the years she had continued publishing more modest sequels to The Female Persuasion. (The most recent one, in the late nineties, about women and technology, was The Email Persuasion.) Finally she stopped writing books entirely.

  In the earliest photographs Greer found, Faith Frank, a tall, slender woman with long, dark curls, looked tenderly youthful, open. In one shot she was seen marching in DC. In another, she was gesticulating intensely on the set of one of those cultural-roundtable talk shows that used to be on late at night, with the guests on white swivel chairs in bell-bottoms, chain-smoking and yelling. Faith had gotten into a notorious debate on-air with the proudly male chauvinist novelist Holt Rayburn. He’d tried to shout her down that night, but she’d kept speaking in her calm and logical way, and in the end she’d won. It made the papers, and ultimately ended up being the reason she was offered her interview segment on Recap. Another photo showed her wearing her infant son in a sling while squinting at a magazine layout over his loosely screwed-on head. The photos kept moving forward through time, with Faith Frank still retaining a version of her elegant, lustrous self into her forties, fifties, sixties.

  In most of the photos she was wearing a pair of tall, sexy suede boots, her signature look. There were interviews and profiles; one made reference to her “surprising impatience.” Faith could apparently get angry quickly, and not just at chauvinistic male novelists. She was depicted as kind but human, sometimes difficult, always generous and wonderful. But by the time she came to speak at Ryland College, she was seen as someone from the past, who was often spoken of with admiration, and with a special tone of voice reserved for very few people. She was like a pilot light that burned continuously, comfortingly.

  The chapel, when Greer and Zee arrived that night, was only two-thirds filled. The weather was unusually bad for fall, flurries spiraling widely, and the place had the smell and feel of a children’s coatroom, with slick, streaked floors, and people trying to find a place to stow their damp outerwear, only to end up bunching it up and holding it awkwardly against their bodies. Many of the students had come because their professors had made the lecture mandatory. “She’s been very important to a lot of people, myself included. Be there,” one sociology professor had said in a mildly threatening tone.

  The event was supposed to start at seven, but apparently Faith’s driver had gotten lost. The sign at the entrance of Ryland was so modest that it might have advertised a small-town pediatric practice. At 7:25 there came a squall of activity from over on the other side of the chapel, and then a raw front of incoming damp night air as the double doors were pushed open and several people powered in. First came the college president, and then the dean, followed by a couple of others, all excited in their coats and unflattering hats. Then, hatless and shockingly recognizable, Faith Frank entered with a few people, including the provost, and stood unspooling a blood-colored scarf from her throat. Greer watched as the scarf unwound and unwound, a trick scarf as long as a river. Faith’s cheeks were so bright they looked freshly slapped. Her hair was the same dark brown mass of curls it had always been in pictures, and when she shook it out, snowflakes sprang off it as delicately as atoms scattering.

  As in the photos of her from over the decades, she had a striking and sympathetic face with a very strong, elegant nose. The effect was one of glamour and importance and gravitas and friendly curiosity as she looked around at the medium-sized crowd, and Greer supposed that she might have perceived the chapel as half-empty or half-full, depending on her perspective.

  The incoming party quickly got seated up front, and then the college president, stuffed thickly into the upholstery of a flowered dress, stood at the podium and gave a worshipful introduction, her hand on her heart. Finally Faith Frank rose. She was sixty-three years old and a forceful presence in a dark wool dress that hewed to her long, rangy middle; of course, she wore her suede boots. These particular ones were smoke gray, though she still owned a whole color spectrum of boots, which let everyone know she had once been a knockout, a sexual powerhouse, and maybe still was. She wore several rings on the fingers of both hands: chunky, arty bursts of gemstone and silver. She looked completely composed, not at all rattled, though she had been late to her own speech.

  The first thing she did up there was to smile down at everyone and say, “Thanks for braving the snow. Extra credit for that.” Her speaking voice was specific, appealingly throaty. Then she went quiet for a few seconds, and it seemed as if she was only just now coming up with what she might tell them. She held no notes. Apparently she was going to wing it, which was unimaginable to Greer, whose intense academic life up until now had been spent making full, reassuring use of binders and color-coded dividers and highlighter pens that lent her reading material the colors of two different kinds of lemonade—a wash of yellow or pink.

  Greer had never known anyone in Macopee who was at all like Faith Frank. Certainly not her ragged and ineffectual parents. Cory, even in his short time at Princeton, was surrounded by people who had traveled widely and lived lives in which they had often been in the presence of worldly, formidable figures. But Greer hadn’t been exposed to anyone like that. In truth, she didn’t even realize it was a possibility. “My head was cracking open,” she told Cory the next day.

  At the podium Faith said, “Whenever I give a talk at colleges I meet young women who say, ‘I’m not a feminist, but . . .’ By which they mean, ‘I don’t call myself a feminist, but I want equal pay, and I want to have equal relationships with men, and of course I want to have an equal right to sexual pleasure. I want to have a fair and good life. I don’t want to be held back because I’m a woman.’”

  Later, Greer understood that what Faith had actually said in her speech was only one part of the whole effect; really, it was about more than her words. What also mattered was that it was her speaking them, meaning them, conveying them with such feeling to everyone in this room. “And I always want to reply,” said Faith, “‘What do you think feminism is, other than that? How do you think you’re going to get those things if you deny the political movement that is all about obtaining that life that you want?’” She stopped for a moment, and they all thought about this, some of them surely thinking about themselves. They watched her take a slow and deliberate drink of water, which was somehow, Greer realized, highly interesting.

  “To me,” Faith continued, “there are two aspects to feminism. The first is individualism, which is that I get to shape my own life. That I don’t have to fit into a stereotype, doing what my mother tells me, conforming to someone else’s idea of what a woman is. But there’s a second aspect too, and here I want to use the old-fashioned word ‘sisterhood,’ which may make you groan a little and head for the exits in a stampede, but I’ll just have to take that chance.” There was laughter; they were all listening, they were all with her now, and they wanted her to know it. “Sisterhood,” she said, “is about being together with other women in a cause that allows all women to make the individual choices they want. Because as long as women are separate from one another, organized around competition—like in a children’s game where only one person gets to be the princess—then it will be the rare woman who is not in the end narrowed and limited by our society’s idea of what a woman should be.

  “I’m here to tell you,” said Faith, “that while college is the most formative experience you will ever have as an individual—a moment when you can read and explore and make friends and make mistakes—it’s also a moment when you can think about how you can play a social and political role in the great cause of women’s equality. Now, when you graduate, you probably don’t want to do what I did, which is to go off to Las Vegas to be a cocktail waitress in order to get away from my parents, Sylvia and Martin Frank. You wouldn’t like
the little ruffled uniform I had to wear. Or maybe you would.”

  There was more laughter, indulgent, approving. “Me in Las Vegas—this is a true story. I was desperate to get away because my parents had made me live at home during college. They wanted to make sure I would stay a virgin. God, that was no fun.” More laughter. “And I’m happy to say things have changed since then. It’s so wonderful that all of you have so much more freedom than I did. But along with that freedom can sometimes come a sense that you don’t need other women. And that isn’t true.”

  She stopped again and looked out over the whole room, sweeping her gaze across them. “So the next time you say, ‘I’m not a feminist,’ remember all of this. And do what you can to join the fight, which is ongoing.” She paused. “Oh, and here’s a final thought. Along the way, as you’re fighting for what matters, you will definitely come up against resistance, and that can sometimes be upsetting and even throw you off course. The truth is that not everyone is going to agree with you. Not everyone is going to like you. Or love you. That’s right, some people will be really mad at you, and maybe even hate you, and that is going to be hard to accept. But my feeling is that if you’re out there doing what matters—if it’s any consolation at all, I love you.”

  She smiled a brief, encouraging smile at them, and that was it; Greer folded, she was taken in completely, taken up, wanting more of this forever. Faith had made her little joke about loving them, but as Greer listened to Faith, what she herself felt seemed closely related to falling in love. Greer knew all about falling in love—the way discovering Cory had shaken her around, messed with her cells. This was like that, but without the physical desire. The sensation wasn’t sexual, but the word love still seemed relevant here; love, which pollinated the air around Faith Frank.