but cannot change it. Depression is commonplace among women
because women are often angry at the conditions of their lives, at
what they must do because they are women, at the way they are
treated because they are women; and depression truly is anger
turned inward. Depression is commonplace among women because
a woman’s life is often a series of dead ends, joy in which is the
measure of femininity. A decade or two ago, doctors prescribed
amphetamines with a reckless abandon. Now they are more cautious, and not only because amphetamines wreak havoc on the human body: amphetamines lead women away from femininity toward aggression, social dysphoria, and a paranoia that threatens
the women’s compliance as a sexual partner; tranquilizers and
sleeping pills interfere much less with the female life as it should be
lived, no matter how serious the addiction. Doctors justify the use
of amphetamines—by those 12 million women users in one year,
for instance—in terms of getting women thinner. Women get the
drug by saying they want or need to be thinner no matter how thin
they are; or doctors prescribe the drug without explanation as to its
qualities and effects—especially they make no reference to its addictive nature and to the high it produces. The woman knows her value is in becoming what the man wants to have; she has no sense
of self outside his evaluation of what she should be. Male doctors
essentially share the same male values; and women accept their
authority as men, not just as doctors. The woman’s body is evaluated according to a sexual aesthetic, not according to a medical ethic. Amphetamines prescribed by a doctor reinforce the misogynist rule that a woman’s only wealth is her body as an object; and that any act of self- destruction—like taking amphetamines— is
both justified and sexually enhancing if it makes her what men
want. Doctors accept and sometimes encourage this logic; doctors
often subscribe to it and pass it on to women. If women are not
thin, what are they? This is not a standard that can be applied to a
respected or self-respecting individual or to a respected or self-
respecting group; it is applied ruthlessly to women and it is not
applied to men.
But the doctors know that women use amphetamines not just to
get thinner but also to stay awake in the course of brutally soporific
days; to push aw ay paralyzing bouts of depression that come from
the quality of the woman’s life— her accurate perception of it; to
get the energy to put one foot in front of another in a life she hates
but feels powerless to change. So that even the use of amphetamines— with effects that are apparently opposite to those of tranquilizers and sedatives— keeps the woman in her life as it is and as a male-dominated society wants it to be; it keeps her functioning in
the domestic sphere, whether exclusively or not; it keeps her going
through the habits of being female; it keeps her executing the routines of a life that dissatisfies her profoundly. And the social imperative is to keep her there, no matter what the cost to her as an individual. So the doctors write the prescriptions. Prescribed
amphetamines keep the woman conforming when she was ready to
stop dead in her tracks, keep her female when she would rather be
genuinely inert and inanimate, keep her doing what she could not
bring herself to do without them.
These drugs— amphetamines,
tranquilizers,
sedatives— are
agents of social control; an elite male group does the controlling;
