Sex, Lies and Contemporary History: The Necessary Discomforts of Sallie Tisdale's Literary Journalism By David Abrahamson Northwestern University AJHA, Mobile, AL 10/16/97 The title of our panel is "Literary Journalism and Cultural History: Bending, Breaking and Transforming Society's Myths," and, like my fellow presenters, I would argue that literary journalism does, in fact, do that. To illustrate, permit me to suggest a possible future scenario: Imagine that it is fifty years from now, and you are practicing the craft of social and cultural history. My argument is that a close reading of literary journalism -- with its narrative freedom, its command of detail, its evocative language and all the other things that define that elusive intersection between literature and journalism -- and literary journalists such as Sallie Tisdale can, and I predict will, offer a much-needed corrective to some of the myths that will be part of the received wisdom to be found in conventional historical interpretations concerning the 1980s and 1990s. My study subject is Sallie Tisdale, whom many of you know and admire. A summary bit of background on her would include the facts that she is a native of the Pacific Northwest, in her forties, a former registered nurse, and the mother of three high-school-age children. The one explicitly unconventional item in a superficial biography might note that she is also a devout Buddhist. What is truly exceptional about her, however, is her journalistic output. The standard databases will produce more than 80 citations under her name. Her work has appeared in a selection of quite prominent publications, including the New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Whole Earth Review, Audubon, Utne Reader and Salon, the relatively new on-line magazine that she contributes to. But she has also appeared in some less celebrated magazines; she has written for Parenting and Conde Nast Traveler, for Glamour and even for Vogue. She is also the author of four books: Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex, Stepping Westward: The Long Search for Home in the Pacific Northwest, Lot's Wife: Salt and the Human Condition and Harvest Moon: Portrait of a Nursing Home. My study texts today will be two of her pieces that appeared in Harper's. One, entitled "We Do Abortions here: A Nurse's Story," appeared in October 1997. The second, "Talk Dirty to Me: A Woman's Taste for Pornography," was published in February 1992. But before delving into the texts, the thought occurs that the title of the presentation, "Sex, Lies and Contemporary History: The Necessary Discomforts of Sallie Tisdale's literary journalism," could perhaps bear explanation. "Sex, lies and contemporary history" refers, in my judgment , to contemporary society's preoccupation, indeed self-deceit concerning matters sexual. In this regard, there is some truth, I would argue, in Bill Emmott's construction of American society as a collection of what he termed "decadent Puritans." The "necessary discomforts" of the title refer to Sallie Tisdale's willingness to explore such forbidden territory in deeply personal, completely honest and profoundly non-trivial ways. Yes, she is "transgressive" -- and we will be discussing matters sexual here today. But I am as confident as one is permitted to be about such things that future historians will find her work invaluable. Barthes, Campbell, Ellul and others have shown, of course, that every society, is informed by myths of many kinds. The point is, perhaps, that some of these are inaccurate, incomplete, even misleading -- and hence in need, as a panel title suggests, of bending, breaking and transformation. First, on the matter of abortion. It could be argued that there are at least two myths existing about the issue of abortion in America today. It is possible, in fact, that they may in the future form two of the defining realities of any historical treatment of the subject. One is that American society is rife with clear polarization on the issue, with strong opinions held with great certainty. And second that it is, at heart, an essentially moral and constitutional issue -- a matter of contested rights. Sallie Tisdale's take on abortion, however, speaks to other ideas; specifically, the idea of ambivalence rather than polarization, the notion that it is the personal dimension, rather than the constitutional or moral dimension, that is by far the most important. With your permission, a few readings. On the ambivalence question, Tisdale wrote the following based on her experiences as a nurse in an abortion clinic. Clearly, the narrator of the piece is pro-choice, but pro-choice with a large but after it: I look at abortion as if I am standing on a cliff with a telescope, gazing at some great vista. I can sweep the horizon with both eyes, survey the scene in all it's distance and size. Or I can put my eye to the lens and focus on the small details suddenly so close. In abortion the absolute always must be tempered with the contextual, because both are real, both valid, both terribly hard. How can we do this? How can we refuse? In a similar vein: We talk glibly about choice. But the choice for what? I see all the broken promises in lives lived like a series of impromptu obstacles. There are the sweet, light promises of love and intimacy, the glittering promise of education and progress, the warm promised of safe families, long years of innocence and community. And there is the promise of freedom: freedom from failure, from faithlessness. Freedom from biology. The early feminist defense of abortion asked many questions, but the one I remember is this: Is biology destiny? And the answer is yes, sometimes it is. Women who have the fewest choices of all exercise their right to abortion the most. And on the idea of a personal slightly longer passage, a narrative passage: I am learning to recognize the shadows that cross the faces of the women I hold [in the operating room.] While the doctor works between her spread legs, the paper drape hiding his intent expression, I stand beside the table. I hold the woman's hands in mine, resting them just below her ribs. I watch her eyes, finger her necklace, stroke her hair. I ask about her job, her family; in a haze she answers me; we chatter, faces close, eyes meeting and sliding apart. I watch the shadows that creep up unnoticed and suddenly darken her face as she screws up her features and pushes a tear out each side to slide down her cheeks. I have learned to anticipate the quiver of chin, the rapid intake of breath and the surprising sobs that rise soon after the machine starts to drum. I know this is when the cramp deepens, and the tears are partly the tears that follow pain -- the sharp, childish crying when one bumps one's head on a cabinet door. But a well of woe seems to open beneath many women when they hear that thumping sound. The anticipation of the moment has finally come to fruit; the moment has come when the loss is no longer an imagined one. It has come true. On the topic of pornography, there are perhaps three myths that historians might fall prey to. The first is that pornography is and exclusively a male preserve. Second, that pornography, like sexuality itself, is clearly suspect or dangerous or obscene. And third, that it can reasonably understood as a monolithic entity; that, like many other cultural artifacts -- sports or art or education come easily to mind -- there really are large generalizations that can safely be made about it Once again, Tisdale's work will offer future historians a much-needed corrective. In the first instance, she makes the point, based on her own experiences, that women too may have a taste for pornography. Her Harper's article, "Talk Dirty To Me" opens with the following passage: Once or twice a month I visit my neighborhood adult store, to rent a movie or buy a magazine. I am often the only woman there and I never see another woman alone. Some days there maybe be only a single clerk and a few customers; at other times I see a dozen men or more: heavyset working men, young men, businessmen. In their midst I often feel a little strange and sometimes scared. To enter I have to pass the flashing lights, the neon signs, the silvered windows, and go through the blank, reflecting door. It takes a certain pluck simply to enter. I can't visit on days when I am frail or timid. I open the door feeling eyes on me, hearing voices, and the eyes are my mother's eyes, and worse, my father's. The voices are the voices of my priest, my lover, my friends. They watch the little girl and chide her, a naïf no more. I don't make eye contact. Neither do the men. I drift from once section of the store to the other, going about my business. I like this particular store because it is large and well-lit; there are no dark corners in which to hide or be surprised. The men give me sidelong glances as I pass by, and then drop their eyes back to the box in their hands. Pornography at its roots, is about watching; but no one here openly watches. This is a place of librarian silences. As I move from shelf to shelf, male customers gather at the fringes of where I stand. I think they would like to know which movies I will choose. On the question of question of health: The images of pornography are many and varied; some are fragmented and idealized. Some are crude and unflattering. I like the dreamy, psychedelic qualities of certain scenes; I like the surprises in others, and I like the arousal, the heat which can be born in my body without warning, in an instant. I have all the curiosity of the anthropologist and the frank hope of the voyeur. Pornography's texture is shamelessness; it maps the limit of my shame. At times I find it harder to talk about pornography than my own sexual experience; what I like about pornography is as much a part of my sexuality as what I do, but it is more deeply psychological. What I do is the product of many factors, not all of them sexually motivated. But what I imagine doing is pure -- pure in the sense that the images come wholly from within, from the soil of the subconscious. The land of fantasy is the land of the not-done and the wished-for. There are private lessons there, things for me to learn, all alone about myself. And a last excerpt, concerning society's definitions of good and bad, as well as the indelibly personal nature of such matters. The author has been expressing, in effect, the harmlessness of pornography, when she suddenly embarks on an aside: I realize this is not the opinion of conservative feminists such as the lawyer Catherine MacKinnon, who believes that violence, even murder, is the endpoint of all pornography. Certainly a lot of violent material has sexual overtones; the mistake is assuming that anything with sex in it is primarily about sex. The tendency to assume so says something about the person making the assumption. One important point about this distinction is that the one kind of material is so much more readily available than the other: True [that my father brought home and read] and slasher films and tabloids [of today] are part of the common culture. My father bought True at the tobacco store. Scenes of nothing but mutual pleasure are the illicit ones. As journalists, as journalism educators and as media historians, the literary journalism of authors such as Sallie Tisdale challenges us. She invites us to explore difficult questions and offers answers of her own that some of us might find troubling. But if Tisdale's work will, as I've argued, newly illuminate aspects of today's sociocultural reality for future historians, perhaps a few other thoughts should come to mind. First, what other sources remain to be reclaimed? Who are the authors and what are the writings that we do not yet know about, but should? yet that we should? Second, as historians, how much of our view of the past could usefully be examined in the light of new and less traditional sources? What is it that we think we know that is already ripe for revision? And lastly, a closing thought: Despite its force of language, compelling tone and meticulous architecture, in the end it may not be its literariness that makes Sallie Tisdale's work so valuable, but rather its unflinching grasp of the actual reality of our times. In a word, it is not the literature, but rather its journalism. Copyright 1997 David Abrahamson. All rights reserved.