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Tom, such as it is, lasts seven years, the last three or four punctuated by a long series of physical brawls—“He cut my nose. I sprained his wrist. He blackened my eye. I pulled out about five square inches of his curls.… He smashed me so hard on the side of my head that he knocked me down, and my ear was ripped open from his ring.…” And so forth. The acts of violence become so commonplace in this book that at one point, when one Vanessa Van Durant is locked in her apartment by her boyfriendand beaten and buggered for two weeks, I found myself shrugging and thinking, Ah, yes, the old lock-her-in-the-apartment-and-beat-her-and-bugger-her routine. What is most frightening about all these fights is not just their frequency but that the women accept it as a matter of course, and even blame themselves for it. “I’ll get a little pushy or a little whiny,” one explains, “and a man will haul off and smack me. It’s usually my own fault.” I’m a masochist, he’s a sadist; I drove him to it; it’s as simple as that. It is, of course nowhere near as simple as that. I don’t pretend to be able to provide an answer as to why these women put up with what they do, but some of it has to do with a society structured in such a way as to make women believe that to be with a man—any man, on whatever terms—is better than being alone. Only one of the women sees the women’s movement as providing any relevance to her situation. The rest want nothing to do with it. Says one: “I endorse the economic side of Women’s Lib completely, but I don’t go around marching or burning my bra, because I think things like that only tend to emasculate men, and the New York male has already been emasculated beyond recognition.”
    The men in this book are in every way as pathetic as the women they victimize. I could give example after example. There is a chronically impotent married man who attempts to seduce several of the women in this book and always insists the problem has merely to do with too much liquor. (“Foreplay is fine for about an hour,” says one of the women who becomes involved with him, “but when it goes on for a month, that’s a pretty good sign something’s very wrong.”) There is an executive, Peter-principled into a job he cannot handle, who hangs on and spends his time whacking off while dictating lettersto his secretary. There is another man who becomes so disturbed when his girl breaks off their affair that he sends her a hot-pepper explosive in the mail, telephones her all night and hangs up, substitutes Drano for salt in her salt shakers, and slips a vial of acid into her loafers which burns her toes.
    One of the themes the women return to frequently in
The Girls in the Office
is their belief that men are just little boys, infants with “hang-ups in their brains like spider webs.” I have heard this theme song so many times from so many women; and every time I hear it, I recoil. It is, quite obviously, a profoundly anti-male remark; it is also, I’m afraid, partly true. Saying it’s so gets us nowhere, though. The unhappy corollary to the fact that a lot of men are just little boys is the fact that so many women put up with it—cater to it, in fact, mother them, bolster their egos by subjugating their own—and feed right into the real problem, which is not that men are little boys but that men don’t like women very much, can’t deal with their demands, their sexuality, their equality. The role of a corporation like Time-Life in this—which underlines the pattern by delivering to each male employee a secretary or researcher he can dominate—would make an interesting book. The lives of fifteen single women in New York would also make an interesting book someday. This one isn’t it.
    September, 1972

Reunion
    A boy and a girl are taking a shower together in the bathroom. How to explain the significance of it? It is a Friday night in June, the first night of the tenth reunion of the Class of