Read Online The Women's Room by Marilyn French - Free Book Online

offered herwas not the role she coveted. She continued to refuse to sleep with him.
    He began to call her less often, and when they did go out together, he would not speak to her. He was always in the center of a group of friends. Sometimes he abandoned her completely, and someone else would have to take her home. But no one made a pass at her. It was clear that she was Lanny’s property. She became aware that she had developed a reputation at school. She never fully understood how this happened. She was outspoken and free-thinking in class and out, and she would talk about anything. She had frequent serious discussions of conventional morality, and even about sex, which she approached dispassionately and abstractly, and with very little knowledge. She freely admitted to atheism; she attacked contemptuously bigotry and any sort of sloppy thinking, and she tolerated dull minds poorly.
    Increasingly, people regarded her strangely and made odd remarks. It was, however, not her mind or her manners that they criticized; it was her morals. She was loose, but a bitch, whatever that meant. It was clear that people believed she was sleeping not only with Lanny but with others as well. She applied for a job in the college bookstore and was told by the manager, a thin-necked, pimply-faced man in his twenties, that he not only wouldn’t hire her, but he felt sorry for the man she married. She was astonished by this, since she had never met him before, but he shook his head knowingly at her: He had heard plenty about her, he said. She was a castrater, domineering. Some people told her that others thought she was a snob. One day a young man from her history class came up to her on campus, smoking a pipe. He seemed to want to talk, and she was glad. She liked him – he seemed a gentle, intelligent fellow. He asked her a few questions: were her parents divorced? had she ever been taught Christian doctrine? As she grew wary and gazed at him intently, he pointed to her cigarette and told her that she should know she was not supposed to be smoking while walking across campus. It was forbidden to women, he said.
    The presumption of these males in telling her what she was supposed to be enraged her, but beneath the anger and contempt was a profound sense of discomfort, wrongness in the world. She felt that people were in league against her, trying to force her to give up what she had gone on calling ‘myself.’ However, she had some good friends – Lanny, Biff, Tommy, Dan – who were unfailingly kind and respectful, and with whom she felt easy and had fun. She did not care at all what people said behind her back, and although she wished they wouldnot say such things to her face, she dismissed the people and their comments as stupid and insignificant.
    Nor did she worry about what people might be saying about her to Lanny. She was sure he knew she loved him, and also that she mistrusted him; she was sure he knew that if she would not sleep with him, she would not sleep with anyone. But their friendship soured. They had several bad fights. When they did not openly fight, they pulled against each other, as if they tugged at different ends of a one-foot rope, neither moving far in any direction. He called her rarely now; he told her that because of her he had been forced to resort to dating Ada, the campus prostitute. For the first time in her life, Mira felt jealous.
    Still, she could not give in. She didn’t want to be in a power struggle with him, but each of his actions convinced her of the rightness of her original judgment of him as untrustworthy. She was too frightened of sex to risk it without a sense that he was, and would be, there for her. Now, when they were together, he talked only about how much fun he had with his male friends; and pressured her toward sex. He seemed to have no other interest in her; when she spoke he barely listened. He never asked her about herself. Eventually, he stopped calling altogether.
    She was