Unraised Consciousness

By Melvin Maddocks

THE NEW CHASTITY AND OTHER ARGUMENTS AGAINST WOMEN'S LIBERATION

by MIDGE DECTER 188 pages. Coward, McCann &

Geoghegan. $5.95.

There's no thrill quite like signing up with an idea whose time has come --except, of course, the thrill of opposing it if you happen to be a loner. For her present foolhardiness, roughly comparable to throwing herself in front of a juggernaut with a Molotov cocktail, Midge Decter deserves to be named 1972's Daughter of the Anti-Zeitgeist.

Miss Decter, a Harper's editor under Willie Morris, and in private life the wife of Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, has chosen this perilous moment to announce, among other unspeakable things, that "every woman wants to marry." Worse--dare one even repeat it?--that woman's problem is not too little freedom but too much. For her pains, Midge Decter has already been called "neurotic," described as plumbing "new depths in the art of petty arrogance," and summarily notified she is "full of s--" in the letters column of the Atlantic, where an excerpt from her case against Women's Liberation appeared.

What outrageous things does The New Chastity say to produce these outraged responses? True, Miss Decter calls Betty (The Feminine Mystique) Friedan a "would-be intellectual" and grades Kate (Sexual Politics) Millett's celebrated textual analyses as "vulgarity almost not to be credited." But for the most part, she soberly reasons with her adversaries. For instance: Is society, as charged, "a vast cultural conspiracy" against women, who are "tricked or, let us say, massively guided into opting for housewifery"? Quite the contrary, Miss Decter decides. To assume so is to assume that women are either incredibly stupid or weak. The fact is, she argues, woman is the architect rather than the victim of her fate. Marriage is not only woman's choice but woman's arrangement, to which man is left to acquiesce.

But what about that modern Holy Grail the career, which woman either sacrifices for marriage or is condemned to pursue as a second-class competitor? Miss Decter believes she knows a dirty little secret. Women don't really want work-as-necessity, work as it is for a man. "Discovering for themselves how very difficult--how fraught with stress and anxiety--is the activity of making one's way in the world of work," most women, in their hearts, cherish smaller ambitions than they may militantly pretend.

As for the alleged curse of motherhood, Miss Decter, the mother of four, judges "Women's Liberation's diatribes against the impositions of motherhood" to be "an expression of self-hatred." Here she senses the movement's "true grievance": "Not that women are mistreated, discriminated against, oppressed, enslaved, but that they are ...women." Kicking against "the womb itself," Women's Liberation perversely drifts, like a bad update of Lysistrata, toward "female chastity," and a world of boycotted relationships.

What about men?--enmity for whom, Miss Decter asserts, is the "basic, one might say founding passion" of Women's Liberation. Beleaguered male chauvinists could hardly find a better champion. "A husband's kindnesses and attentions to his wife, along with his concern that she be well housed and well fed and sexually gratified, are," Miss Decter protests, hysterically misinterpreted, as if they were sinister "plans from which he means to construct a towering edifice to his own vanity."

Foreclosure. Miss Decter is even willing to relieve man of part of those sexual responsibilities. "The pursuit of orgasm for a woman," she argues, "is an entirely irrelevant undertaking." Nothing has agitated Miss Decter's early women readers more than this extraordinary pronouncement. One of the printable responses: "Few feminists are opting for chastity or lesbianism or the foreclosure of the vagina." Miss Decter's counterrebuttal: the sexual revolution has assigned to women "the obligations of an impersonal lust they did not feel but only believed in"--constituting, in other words, just one more unwanted freedom.

Women's Liberation, Miss Decter concludes, is a rather messy living testimony to "the difficulties women are experiencing with the rights and freedoms they already enjoy." Though she may speak in "the language of social justice," the Women's Liberationist is really afraid of the risks of being human: "the rhythms of time and mortality." She lacks "the courage to rec ognize the extent of one's frailty and dependence on others." What she re fuses to come to terms with is not a man's world but life itself.

Miss Decter has drawn up a severe indictment. It generalizes too wildly about Women's Liberation and is too personal to be documented. It is also clumsily written. Still The New Chas tity serves as a provocative act of overcompensation on a topic that, for the moment, lacks spokeswomen (to say nothing of spokesmen) in the center.

Can a woman find happiness with out her orgasm? Is motherhood a uni versal female urge resisted at one's own risk? Will day centers save the sanity, if not the very life, of the mad house wife? Not even Ann Landers knows, certainly not Midge Decter, who is at her weakest when -- especially on sex -- she seems to be passing off private views as nature's laws. What Miss Decter does know is that these issues are not the issue, that the real question is whether or not ideology can or should define life so that all human griefs, all failures in fulfillment, tend to get blamed on a single cause.

It is this antiromantic posture that finally counts. The author has insisted that while people are unfair, life is unfair too, and that one primary human re sponsibility is to discriminate between the two. Are we talking about agony or are we talking about boredom, "identity crisis," and so on? -- forms of agony, to be sure, but deserving less total met aphors. Every revolution requires its Midge Decter, the citizen not easily buf faloed, who keeps asking embarrassing questions.

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