If I could read only one of the many publications that drift into THE SUN office, I’d pick Woman’s Choice. Why? CoEvolution Quarterly Editor Stewart Brand said it best: “. . . It’s tiny, regular as menses, and fascinating as reading other people’s mail.”

It’s difficult to publish personal journalism without promoting material that is cloyingly confessional, a grandstand for “openness” and “sharing.” Woman’s Choice editor and publisher Louise Lacey pulls it off, by attracting contributors who are uninterested in pat solutions, heroine success stories, feminist tantruming, or reductions of life to logic. Instead, she attracts contributors who come off as intelligent intuitives, interested in broadening the base of feminine expression, honestly and with no pretensions.

Woman’s Choice is a monthly magazine of essays, poetry, letters, interviews and artwork that focuses on a particular topic in each issue, such as dreams, creativity, success, fertility. Subscriptions are $10 for six months, or $2 per issue (PO Box 489, Berkeley, Ca. 94701). The magazine deserves your support.

The costs of starting a publication, financially and psychically, are staggering. Louise, author of Lunaception, A Feminine Odyssey into Fertility and Contraception, sold her house to finance Woman’s Choice. Issue No. 1 appeared in November 1978; fifteen months later, it has expanded from 8 pages to 16, with an active network of subscriber/contributors.

— Elizabeth Campbell

 

Biological Sisters

“Biological sisters!” she roared at me. “Do I have a story for you!”

I said, “But I can’t write shorthand.”

She said, “You’ll remember it. It’s so simple.”

I did. Here it is.

Frances Peavey was walking on the Stanford University campus with a male companion some time ago when she saw some people gathered in a natural glen. Wondering what was going on, she walked over and found the crowd gathered in a loose circle, with cameras and videotape equipment and everybody watching the action in the center. She joined the circle and saw:

A male chimpanzee was being introduced to a female chimpanzee. The press had been invited because it was hoped that the chimps would get it on. The male was enthusiastic, no doubt about it. He was making faces and reaching for the female, who was shackled on a long chain which dragged around after her. He was not chained. He made grunting, “Mow, mow, mow,” noises. The press and scientists, about thirty of them, were very excited because the female was whimpering and kept backing away and the suspense was building.

The male chimp got impatient. He grabbed at her chain and started hauling the female toward him. She pulled back. He hauled her toward him again. Frances said their faces were very expressive and she was feeling an agony of empathy for the female chimp, especially because the crowd was almost entirely male and their sympathies were obviously for the male chimp.

Finally the female chimp yanked loose one last time, walked straight to Frances and grabbed her hand. Frances said she got goose bumps all over her. Then the female chimp led her across to the only other two women in the entire crowd, who were standing together. The chimp then also grasped the hand of one of the other women and got into a little group with them, facing the males.

“Talk about biological sisterhood!” Frances said.

“Well,” I asked, breathless. “What happened?”

“We all stood there for a few minutes looking at one another. The scientists and press people were disgusted that nothing was happening. Finally they gave up and went away, taking the chimps their separate ways. It was over. They got the message.”

Frances thought that the female chimp had made a powerful statement by organizing her own support group, and she mentioned her admiration to her male companion. He stared at her blankly. He hadn’t noticed that. He just noticed the conclusion: So far as he was concerned, there wasn’t any action. If the male chimp hadn’t gotten his way, why, then, nothing had happened.

Sharon Ryals
(as told to Louise Lacey)

Friends

. . . The most important rule I have in sexual etiquette is: Never make love to a friend of a friend. There are other rules, like not having a sexual relationship with employees or people you work with, or your neighbors, and there are very clear reasons for those things. But the most important one involves the close friend — or lover, for that matter — of one of your friends. The reason is very straightforward: If you were my close friend, or my lover, and you had a very close friend who seemed to be interested in me, or in whom I was interested, if I were to follow through with that interest it might put our friendship in jeopardy. Most sexual relationships have a probability of frustration; high meaning maybe 25% of the people who become sexual partners do not remain friends. There’s something about the sexual relationship that increases the probability of friction. Not that the other 75% can’t be wonderful and spectacular, but something like 25% of the time you can have some friction that’s unwanted and unnecessary. The consequence of that is that it reflects back on your friendship, because then your close friend has some strong feeling against or about me. I realized long ago that sexual relations are much easier to come by than friends and therefore they should be given a lower priority. The friendship, because it’s rarer and much more important in your life, should be given a higher priority.

Michael Phillips

Creativity

. . . I exercise my creativity because it feels good. Desire is really the keynote to me, the essence of creativity — the desire to feel good and to feel part of everyone and everything. That’s how it makes me feel. It also has to be a joyful thing to be of value. But at the same time there’s often a lot of pain, the fear is certainly not joyful. Fear seems always to be hanging around the creative act, and to avoid the fear means avoiding the creative act.

Even when I avoid the big fear, it’s still there, it’s just very dull and easy to deal with because it’s a habit, the dull fear of everyday living. In the creative act I allow myself to feel it totally, face it, and be scared and say to myself, “I’m going to let the desire overwhelm the fear, let the desire be the main emotion.” So even though the fear is really strong, the main force or energy is one of joy. When you get those two contenders there, it’s a real struggle. And when fear wins, which it does sometimes, it’s really a big defeat. That’s not just the petty everyday defeat, it’s a major setback. When I go through this big struggle, and experience a lot of energy and emotion, and allow a big change to metamorphose my consciousness — and then the fear wins — then I’m just: whsst, like being sucked into a vacuum backwards in time, and it’s a real loss, it’s a failure, and I have to start all over again. . . .

. . . My times of greatest creativity have been when I gave birth to my daughter, and one time when I was singing, and another time when I was screaming my head off. During those times I was frightened that if I let these things pass through me, like letting the baby out, I would disappear and be gone and just cease to exist. The more I opened up and let the child out, or the music or the scream out, it was as though my body was opening and I was losing the concept of myself as I usually think of it, with the head telling the hands what to do. The head was not making any judgments or controlling what I was doing. I was just letting it out. That required suspension of the mind, which required a lot of will power and a lot of respect for raw emotions and raw force. I had to tell the head, this is not the place or the time for you now, I’m letting the emotions out, I’m letting the baby out or the music out now. It’s a really intense struggle. The fear comes in from the conscious mind and says, “You’re losing control, get back.” So the direction creativity takes is coming not from the head, where things usually come from, but from the heart or the soul. It’s all so new and so powerful for me that it’s just awesome.

Cathy Powell

Loneliness

. . . Loneliness may be, after all, simply the awareness of a perception of lack of love. If that’s the case, then we may be looking in the wrong place for relief. Perhaps we should learn to love ourselves first. Then, when we can do that, we can feel ourselves as a part of a whole. And then, too, we can afford to love one another.

My mother’s injunction not to let myself be stuck alone had an implication behind it that to be alone is to be miserable. She certainly felt that way, and I guess she was warning me to avoid doing what she had done. Yet I have always (except for a period of a year and a half when a partner and I were inseparable 24 hours a day), spent a great deal of time alone, by choice. I was never miserable about it. Nor did I ever think of myself as lonely.

Just a few years ago I learned to my surprise that I was sometimes lonely. I had effectively refused to label the feeling that I had, and defined loneliness as something else. If you had asked me what loneliness was I would have told you that it was being unhappy when alone, because of being alone. And since I knew I liked being alone, I knew I wasn’t lonely. Simple. And I was successfully refusing to acknowledge what my body and emotions were telling me.

I stumbled on the secret I was keeping from myself when I began a concerted effort to rid myself of my addictions. I found out that it wasn’t enough, for me, to plumb the psychological depths and understand the psychological stratagems I was using on myself. There was more to it than that. So I acknowledged my loneliness and faced my essential aloneness. The more I tried to understand it, which I did by experiencing it when it came, the more I perceived new aspects of it.

For example, I have localized my loneliness in my solar plexus. In fact, I am aware that I draw smoke into my lungs, and stuff my mouth, to fill the hole that I perceive there. Of course, this stratagem that my subconscious has worked out for me doesn’t get to the substance of the problem. It just eases the symptoms.

When I focus in on that vacant place in myself, it isn’t human communion that I find myself missing. The times I feel lonely are those times when I feel insecure in my place in the universe. I see those times as times of spiritual need. So now, while I still fill my lungs and my stomach to ease my discomfort, I seek a spiritual, rather than psychological, solution. Just meditating eases that pain in the gut as well as any dish of ice cream. And for about as long.

The yawning abyss within me is there anytime I want to pay attention to it. But I clearly disconnect it now with bodily proximity to a loved one. This is a soul matter.

And no matter how I look at this, as a psychological, sociological or spiritual dilemma, still the fact is that my attitude is the crux of it. If loneliness is the dejection over awareness of being alone, and I am responsible for my emotions, then I can decide not to be dejected about it. It’s my choice.

Louise Lacey

Depression

I figure the recipe for getting depressed is: Don’t get any exercise, don’t see your friends, don’t eat a balanced diet, don’t do the things you enjoy doing most, don’t take responsibility for the odds and ends of life that need to be attended to whether you enjoy them or not; postpone them. Instead, do: spend a lot of time on the things that you enjoy least, stay indoors, and get lots of sleep.

The best thing I’ve found to fight depression is to get exercise. I started playing tennis about eight months ago. I have never done any kind of sport and always felt I couldn’t do anything. I was brought up to think that. Now I know that if I can drag myself to the backboard at the tennis court by myself, I will feel better.

I experience depression as a state of no energy. I don’t feel like doing anything. I remember that there are things that I usually enjoy doing, and people I usually enjoy seeing. But at that time I don’t enjoy seeing or doing them.

When I get depressed I can’t remember why I used to enjoy living. But I don’t have the energy to make a plan to commit suicide. It’s like psychic death has already taken place, because I’ve somehow gone out of what I love in myself, and while I don’t make a physical plan for physically dying, it’s an academic difference, anyway, because for that time the psychic death is already there.

Getting depressed, to me, is hating myself. It’s doing nothing because I feel so bad about myself that nothing pleases me. When it happens I try to figure out what caused it so I’ll know what I have to do to get undepressed. It works unless there’s some massive and long-range thing. I do now know that I have tools to deal with it. But I don’t always use them.

Ruth Sullivan

Humor

. . . Part of my dilemma is that underneath all my ha ha is a very serious, intent little girl who was not allowed to be that. The admonitions from my parental world were things like, “Don’t take yourself so seriously, who do you think you are?” — that kind of thing. So I found ways to stop it.

I got a lot of attention for being cute and funny, and so I would play cute and funny. I would be serious behind that, but not let anyone see it. Then my father remarried, and I adored my stepmother. She was a very intelligent woman, and we would have long, long conversations where she took me seriously. She would just wave past all my interventions with little things, and go on talking. That was very exciting to me, as a young teenager, that she took me seriously. I learned a lot from her. . . .

. . . Many women use the word incredible a great deal. If you take them seriously in their use of that word, you have to assume that the world really baffles them. I think that’s a difference between men and women in our culture. For men, what happens is credible. They may be miserable or awful or any number of other things, but credible they are. And to a woman, they are not credible because she doesn’t know and operate under the rules he goes by. It’s very hard for her to move in a world where so much is impossible to believe. It makes you crazy.

Maybe women are particularly attracted to the absurd forms of humor because women understand the experience of going crazy. Very few men understand the going crazy feeling. A man will do something else with the same experience. He’ll put it in another place. He doesn’t have a grasp of what it feels like to think that you’re actually losing your mind. She finds much more of the world incredible, inexplicable. It all makes perfect sense to him, even if it isn’t working for him. He forces an order, a mold, on the situation. . . .

Beth Olson

Competition

Very few women will admit any knowledge about or interest in this subject. It is not nice.

The Woman’s Choice editorial board for each issue is comprised of people who come to an evening discussion on the subject some months before publication. Each group is different because Network members only come when they are particularly interested in the topic, and have something they think is of value to pass on. Sometimes only five people come. Other topics draw as many as thirty. On the night scheduled for the meeting on competition, no one came.

Aha! A hidden taboo uncovered! Let’s drag this subject out in the light and see what it’s all about.

I took my tape recorder out into the network and started asking questions. I talked to a dozen women, at length, before I found one who would admit to consciously competing. It took even longer to find a woman who enjoyed it. But all the time these contributors were disaffirming any connection with this “not nice” activity, they were describing, in actuality, the various kinds of competition they’d experienced.

The way they got around having to confront the issued directly involved making a subtle distinction: It transpired that they did strive for goals, were achievement motivated, but they did so in what amounted to a philosophical vacuum. They were “competing against myself, if at all.” They weren’t thinking about the other contestants when they tried for a prize, weren’t trying to beat anybody. It was as though they had all decided that it was consistent with being ladylike to play the game, and even to win, so long as their motives didn’t involve conscious triumph over someone else.

Curiouser and curiouser: Even in those few areas where traditional social norms allow women to compete — e.g. for love, possessions, security — her intentions are often subconscious, her methods are usually covert, and almost always the word, as a label for what she is doing, is denied.

Again and again they told me that the subject wasn’t an issue for them. And then they would describe the pretenses they used to rationalize their positions. By this time I was fascinated, and it was clear to me that most of these women had little background in the concept or practice of deliberate competition. The ultimate feminine form was exhibited in beauty contests, and was never modeled on the sports/military handbook of rules taught to most males. . . .

Louise Lacey

How (Some) Men See Women

. . . I grew up experiencing women as placing me in a perpetual Catch-22. A “perfect, compassionate, and fragile” mother was too often capricious, dominating, and unfair. I think it was from these experiences that I developed my most fundamental gut reaction to women: Women Are Unfair. The sole exception was women to whom I related in a brotherly fashion. But it seemed that whenever my emotional or sensual needs became involved, this judgement would prevail.

Here, I believe, is the root of the problem. A tragic root in the sense that I am dependent upon women, and especially the woman I love, to verify an important element of my self-worth. But any dependence upon a person felt to be basically capricious and unfair cannot but also breed a feeling of insecurity. The vulnerability accompanying love then becomes the very Achilles heel of that love. The best approach to this situation is to feel at ease with the rightness of my own needs, and express them when I feel them, so that problems will not pile up to the point of triggering a needless crisis. But if, as is the case with myself, I am somewhat insecure about the legitimacy of my own sexual needs, then I have created an emotional bind out of which it is very difficult to break.

I do not think this dilemma is so strong as to doom us to be perpetual victims. Nevertheless, I do think the cultural dice are loaded against our achieving good, gentle, loving relationships. And I think men are victims as much as women, and that for many of us the roots are found in the emotional whiplash we get as little boys from our mothers. A whiplash that breeds a deep ambivalence on the part of men towards women.

I suspect that many of the traditionally male privileges and characteristics in our society have served as a sort of trade-off between the sexes. Male emotional and sexual insecurity and dependence upon women were compensated by women looking to men for support, for male competence (such as it is) in dealing with the external world. The results of this arrangement have been pretty negative for both sexes, I think. . . .

John Barrett

Fear And Courage

. . . I think courage is a beautiful word. Sometimes, when I’m driving on the thruway and shaking my boots, or white knuckling the steering wheel, I think of the word and it gives me courage, because it’s such a pretty word. It’s from the very bottom of your soul that you’ve got to scrape around to find your courage to do something. It’s really reaching to the bottom — I don’t want to say “the pits” but you might be in the pits when you’re scraping around in the bottom of your soul for it. And so I think it’s really important.

All agoraphobics have a fear of a loss of control, in the sense that they fear they’re going to go crazy. Anxiety is the beginning of it. Then, as the fear proceeds and you stay in it long enough, it just becomes so ugly that there’s no way of shutting it off. You’re afraid that you’ll lose control, lose your mind, do something harmful to yourself. When it hits me I’m not afraid of other people doing things to me. I’m afraid of doing something myself that would be harmful to somebody. I’m afraid I’ll go screaming out of a theater or make a scene in a supermarket or go nutty down the thruway. But it’d be interesting, I think. Agoraphobia is apparently triggered in some people by a prolonged amount of stress. For example, I’ve learned that some people in England who were under bombing sieges during W.W. II, seeing a lot of death around them, never being quite sure when their number was going to be up, became agoraphobics. People who’ve had prolonged surgical procedures or had to stay in a hospital for long periods also have a tendency toward agoraphobia. I’ve also read that we are people-pleasers, extremely aware of what people’s opinions of us are. That’s why we’re afraid that we will make a scene in public.

Other articles that I read said that we are women who are in unhappy marriages, who don’t feel like we have a way of really getting out of it or solving our problems. Where other people might respond to this situation with depression, or just say, “Good bye,” and take off, we develop these symptoms instead. Part of the training I’ve gotten is to be more assertive. Although now that I’ve been more assertive and have alienated my in-laws and a whole bunch of neighbors, I can’t say I’m all that much happier. Now I have to take a course in tact and diplomacy. . . .

Mary Ellen Bartlett