Combat in the Erogenous Zone

Despite its humerous title, this is a tragic book. Its theme—the condition of women in today's society—is a tragic enough subject in itself. And Ingrid Bengis is offering, not theoretical commentary, but a personal account of her own raw, anguished feelings.

Sometimes, in social issues, direct experience can provide more insight than any amount of armchair analysis. It is one thing to generalize about casual sex, sex as a cheerful romp; it is another to find that "when we finished making love, I couldn't understand what he was doing in my bed. I didn't want him to be there. When the sexual drive was exhausted, all that remained was a sense of the gap between sex and love." It is one thing to theorize about multiple relationships; it is another to realize that "one or the other of you is going to spend the night with him, the weekend with him, Christmas with him. If you're the wife or the woman he lives with, the woman he 'comes home to,' you become increasingly aware that he's never at home... or that he arrives at midnight glowing with an unexpected warmth and affection that you know you've done nothing to provoke." It is one thing to plan brave new worlds in which women will be liberated from sexual commitments; it is another to find that sex "transformed everything, that for me and for most women, making love with a man several times created unpredictable bonds—which weren't broken by saying: 'This was a trial marriage for which the contract has expired.' " It is one thing to say that one should not hate men; it is another to know that one does.

Men seldom fully realize what a paralyzing web of indignities an independent woman must put up with in our society. Combat in the Erogenous Zone can provide some valuable lessons on this score. Bengis tells of men who, picking her up as a hitchhiker, automatically assume that she is going to repay them sexually; and of men who cannot seem to grasp the fact that a woman might want to be alone. "Sitting at a bar, even if you just want to watch what's going on or do some thinking over a glass of something or other, means that you are waiting to be picked up, and if you walk down the street alone at night, your solitude implies to many men that you are sexually available."

Women's Lib, in Bengis' opinion, is not much of a solution to such problems. " 'Liberated' society decreed that sex and even exclusive love were oppressive to women. The seventies interpretation of 'women's place' made the emancipation I had struggled (and never succeeded) to achieve a symbol of sexism. The loves I'd committed myself to were part of a male-dominated, Hollywood plot." In fact, the feminism of the seventies constituted "a kind of neo-Victorianism.... Once again, in the name of pseudo-liberation, people (this time it was the women themselves rather than the men) began to claim that it was impossible for a woman to enjoy sex with a man, tainted as it always was by the poison of sexist oppression."

What, then, is the alternative? Is there a third way, better than either Victorianism or neo-Victorianism? Can love be salvaged from the wreckage of conventional sex mores? Ingrid Bengis does not have the answers. But she seems to understand, better than most of us, the nature of the questions.

Reviewed by Robert Masters / Psychology (209 pages) / BFL Price $1.95