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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The women in Candace Bushnell's new novel are rich, smart, hardworking lovelies. So why do they need men to dominate them?
Sep 6, 2005 | "What is it with S/M? Since I got divorced, every woman I've dated has wanted me to tie her up or spank her. Is it something about me or is this what women want these days?" My friend Bill is a cultivated, mild-mannered blazer and khaki pants kind of guy in his late 40s, and his girlfriends tend to be 30-ish bankers or lawyers as buttoned-down and Upper East Side-looking as he is. I understood Bill's confusion, but I tried to explain.
Almost any woman Bill would date in New York would be up for some highly stylized submission. These women are tired of androgyny, sick of men who treat them like pals. And they want to feel the boot occasionally. The wish to be dominated doesn't extend to important stuff, however, like choosing restaurants and movies. As my friend John says, American women want to be "forced" to do the things they already want to do. It's sexy to be tied up and kissed, but boring to be dragged along for an afternoon of auto parts shopping.
In the absence of most other symbols of femininity and masculinity, and the disappearance of most of the rituals of courtship, S/M reintroduces the powerfully erotic idea of gender difference. And of course it's the most successful women who are into it. It's the successful men who hire dominatrixes, too. But if women are now able to embrace symbolic submissiveness, it's because they are starting to have a choice, and because they're nostalgic -- not for a submissive role, but for a world with any roles and rules at all.
Candace Bushnell's new novel, "Lipstick Jungle," is set in this landscape of female progress and disillusionment, where the question of the moment is how a woman can feel sexy even if she far out-earns her husband. After all, in a culture where masculine sex appeal is equated with high earnings, a woman who is more successful than almost all men is desexed. For Victory, the one single character, this pretzels into a question of ego when she dates a man whose wealth dwarfs hers: "How can I be a successful woman when I'm with an even more successful man?" And so, because Bushnell's three fortysomething heroines are the sort of Manhattanites who haven't been in the subway in years, buy private jet shares, and lunch at Michaels, they're also the sort who want to be dominated in bed. "All she could think about was Kirby and that glorious feeling of being overcome," Nico O'Reilly muses in the opening scene of "Lipstick Jungle." Nico (supposedly modeled on Anna Wintour) has an even-keeled, practical partnership with her banker-turned-househusband Seymour. She loves him and their daughter and prizes their smooth life together, but at 42 she hasn't had sex with Seymour for three years.
For Seymour -- as for the stereotypical corporate wife he's modeled on, down to his expertise on early American antiques and interest in showing purebred dogs -- sex is far down on the list of enjoyable activities. So Nico falls into the arms of pantyhose-cutting Kirby Atwood, a verbally challenged underwear model with nothing to do all day but make love. (If I wore pantyhose, maybe I'd think a guy named Kirby sounded hot, but to a downtown gal like me, "Kirby" is a nice name for a cat.)
Nico's pal Wendy Healy, 44, is a high-earning film producer who has supported her shiftless, vain wannabe director husband Shane for all of their marriage. Eventually Shane asks for a divorce and tries to milk Wendy for all she's worth -- and get custody of the kids. Not that they're any prize; rarely has fiction shown us such authentically charmless upper-caste Manhattan children. I like to imagine that Bushnell, who is childless, took some pleasure in crafting the scene where Wendy's 6-year-old son punches her in the face. And in this novel of role reversals, of course Wendy wouldn't dream of spanking him.
Eventually Wendy finds happiness in the arms of her erstwhile competitor Selden Rose, who appeared in Bushnell's last novel,"Trading Up," as the exploited husband of Bushnell's main character Janey (herself first introduced in Bushnell's "Four Blondes") and is a lonely divorced guy in "Lipstick Jungle." (Since I reviewed "Four Blondes" and came to the conclusion that Candace Bushnell is not Jane Austen, I didn't feel obligated to read "Trading Up," so I cribbed that detail from Amazon.) The details of Selden and Wendy's sex life is left to the imagination, but perhaps their clothes enact a drama of submission and dominance, for we're told that Selden's "tailored navy suit, worn with an open, white dress shirt, screamed casual power."
The third relationship option Bushnell portrays is the one we're meant to root for. Plucky, outspoken and refreshingly reckless fashion designer Victory Ford ends up with a strapping, hypercompetitive, just this side of manic billionaire named Lyne Bennett. He's the only manly man in the book, despite his epicene name. (And what about "Selden Rose"? What's up with Bushnell's penchant for naming her male characters like law firms? Law firms without any Jews, too. Then again, Lyne's surname might be a gender-bending allusion to "Pride and Prejudice's" heroine Elizabeth Bennett.)
Bushnell is also discreet about Lyne's sexual prowess; when she discusses men with big jobs like Bennett and Rose, she's bashful, almost as though she were forgetting that they're all fictional characters and aren't going to use their influence to get back at her! But Lyne has the potential for domination, as Victory realizes: "Even in her heels, he was at least six inches taller than she was, so she couldn't exactly protest physically." Lyne is only pulling Victory into the Whitney Biennial opening, but you get the idea.
