One of those days where nothing I am seeking seems to be available - in the petty sense - at the grocery store, no creme fraiche or red lentils, at the bookstore, couldn't find the Athill book I was looking for. Plus everyone around me is suffering from the malaise again. It must be Mercury retrograde because the connection between seeking and finding feels utterly broken right now. And my plants are spontaneously dying. No matter how much I water them or talk to them, they're not taking to the summer weather well. My ficas is sprouting yellow leaves for the first time, and no amount of cajoling or fertilizer will pull it out of it's depression. And I'm tired of things. I am seeking that novelty that always temporarily feeds me and then leaves me terribly ambivalent about more than one aspect of my life.
Anyway, the bookstore thing was annoying because I wanted to pick up Diana Athill's memoir because she's old and led this amazing life and was friends with Simone de Beauvoir and is okay about death and dying. I had put off getting it since I have like 50 other things on my book list right now, but then I came across this passage that intrigued me, and that relates to the ongoing dialogue I've been having with my mother and friends about heternormativity and finding some sort of solution to it. Athill does have an answer: getting old. Thanks, Diana. I was hoping 30 was going to put a full stop on all my angst, but it turns out 70 is more like it.
“An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex. I have tried to believe that most of this difference comes from conditioning, but can’t do so. Conditioning reinforces it, but essentially it is a matter of biological function. There is no physical reason why a man shouldn’t turn and walk away from any act of sex he performs, whereas every act of sex performed by a woman has the potential of changing her mode of being for the rest of her life. He simply triggers the existence of another human being; she has to build it out of her own physical substance, carry it inside her, bond with it whether she likes it or not — and to say that she has been freed from this by the pill is nonsense. She can prevent it, but only by drastic chemical intervention which throws her body’s natural behaviour out of gear. Having bodies designed to bear children means that many generations will have to pass before women are freed from the psychic patterns dictated by their physique, however easy it is for them to swallow a pill; and it is possible that they will never be able to achieve such psychic freedom. [ …] Because of all this, when they are at the peak of their physical activity women often disappear into it, many of them discovering what kind of people they are apart from it only in middle age, some of them never. I had started to have glimpses of myself earlier than most, as a result of being deprived of marriage and child-bearing, but not with the clarity I discovered once sex had fallen right away. My atheism is an example: it became much more firmly established.”
I don't know if her matter-of-fact confidence in her ideas comes from being old, or having chosen and lived an unconventional life, or because you really have to reach this age to know what kind of woman you are.
But beyond this, it makes me realize that engaging in the discussion of biological determinism is still like walking a tightrope. Which is sort of annoying because it's perfectly acceptable if it's discussed within the scope of pop culture (He's Just Not That Into You, Sex and the City) but any sort of serious discussion of it leaves people pissed off and/or just dissatisfied. I've never been able to have a discussion about this topic with a man that leaves me satisfied, and when I have it with women, we're generally all in agreement, but feeling dissatisfied still, because it's clear that the male component, or the male challenge, I should say, is a necessary element to the discussion. And Athill fails to offer up any sort of solution to the issue aside from "Wait till you're old." And maybe it's not entirely surprising despite her accomplishments, that someone of her generation would think of gender determinism in slightly stultifying terms, but shit, I feel stultified sometimes, and I have to believe that all my obsession with energy and the psychic element of something as important as gender plays a role in the way I see the world.
The emphasis of the whole gender discussion in liberal communities and schools and even my home, growing up, was so much on equality - the whole - "You can do anything you want and blah blah blah" was so prevalent that the idea of difference was eschewed altogether. It was as though the mere mention of it could pierce this precariously held-together notion of post-feminist equality and so no one could even speak of inherent embodied differences without being accused of being sexist. And to be truthful, that line is a sticky one and I get irritated when men assume I am bad at certain things (like understanding how my car works) because I am a woman (hence the inability to have this discussion with even very intelligent and open men because it somehow manages to venture into the petty minutae of some pop-cultural cliffs-notes guide to gender). This is maybe a really easy and petty example of how men pigeon-hole women but there have been other more nuanced ones that I can't remember at the moment.
In college, gender studies classes and reading all that Foucault did make me reflect on ideas of embodiment and the sexual/psychic link, but I couldn't really integrate all these ideas into my own personal experience till recently because it's only in the past couple of years that I feel like I've exited some sort of emotional puberty and am officially *drum roll* a woman. No turning back now.
Perhaps finding yourself afloat in the midst of your child-bearing years, without truly having thought about the biological experience of having a child before, forces you to really reflect on these issues. But truthfully, I'm more concerned about how this unconscious lens affects me as a writer than someone capable of bearing children. There seems to be some sort of critical pruning process that takes place at this stage and it's like I'm trying to figure out how intrinsically connected "writer" and "woman" are as far as my own personal identity. To be honest, I don't know if this is really a productive activity; I say this because a friend who is constantly assessing all activities on the basis of their merit asked me about that the other day, and I'm not sure what's productive or what isn't. But I have to believe that any kind of reflection on the self is more than a mere act of narcissism. And I have to add that I can clearly see now that the way I am embodied affects the way I write (and think and connect with people - both women and men), and even if I did see this before, I feel like I am better able to integrate it into my being and make sense of it. And hopefully it makes me a better writer. Perhaps this is why I am less bothered by the acknoweledgement of difference than than the years-long denial of it while I was growing up.
It clearly served a purpose during those years - the community I was a part of, the schools I went to carried the primary function of breeding overachivers, with the presumption that achievement was the path to opportunity and therefore happiness - whether this assumption was an accurate one could be left to debate -but in order to effectively maintain it's mandate, the message served up to young women by this particular world that I was a part of, was that they didn't have an excuse not to succeed. That's all good and well, but then you enter the real world, and realize within minutes that there is very little you have a real roadmap for, and this is a critical issue where any sort of basic instruction on how to interact with the world has been omitted from your course syllabus all your life.
And instead of being able to sort that out, you develop all kids of coping mechanisms as a young woman in order to deal with the world. Like always bringing a guy with you to the mechanic because he talks to you like a retard, or flirting to get out of speeding tickets. Anyway, there are varying degrees of using your gender/sexuality as a tool in your arsenal to get what you want/need, but I don't know too many self-aware women who enjoy using these tactics. Even if they are remarkably effective. They are coping mechanisms, but a lot of us would acknowledge that they are bad ones and leave us feeling strange and unfamiliar with our true selves, and even hollow. Just generally, as a person, and not even as a woman, when I start thinking of all the conscious and unconscious ways I've learned to cope in the world since I graduated from high school and made the adjustment from a bookwormy isolated nerd to a seemingly well-adjusted person, I don't know if it's been entirely worth the price. And I scream of my need for authenticity from myself and others from the rooftops.
But anyway, that's why I found the Athill passage intriguing, particularly the idea that getting older changes everything. It's not just the child-bearing and rearing, when you look at all the ways in which gender becomes a distraction, even if it is used as a means to achieve things, it's sort of exhausting. And then you think of how complexly ingrained these patterns are and how difficult it is to break them because you can't break out of yourself. But the passage kind of makes me excited to get old. And despite the fact that the discussion might be unproductive or even too up-in-it's-own-ass-mired-in-biological-determinism, it resonates with me pretty strongly given the place that I'm finding myself recently.
Anyway, the bookstore thing was annoying because I wanted to pick up Diana Athill's memoir because she's old and led this amazing life and was friends with Simone de Beauvoir and is okay about death and dying. I had put off getting it since I have like 50 other things on my book list right now, but then I came across this passage that intrigued me, and that relates to the ongoing dialogue I've been having with my mother and friends about heternormativity and finding some sort of solution to it. Athill does have an answer: getting old. Thanks, Diana. I was hoping 30 was going to put a full stop on all my angst, but it turns out 70 is more like it.
“An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became more interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than of a man is used by sex. I have tried to believe that most of this difference comes from conditioning, but can’t do so. Conditioning reinforces it, but essentially it is a matter of biological function. There is no physical reason why a man shouldn’t turn and walk away from any act of sex he performs, whereas every act of sex performed by a woman has the potential of changing her mode of being for the rest of her life. He simply triggers the existence of another human being; she has to build it out of her own physical substance, carry it inside her, bond with it whether she likes it or not — and to say that she has been freed from this by the pill is nonsense. She can prevent it, but only by drastic chemical intervention which throws her body’s natural behaviour out of gear. Having bodies designed to bear children means that many generations will have to pass before women are freed from the psychic patterns dictated by their physique, however easy it is for them to swallow a pill; and it is possible that they will never be able to achieve such psychic freedom. [ …] Because of all this, when they are at the peak of their physical activity women often disappear into it, many of them discovering what kind of people they are apart from it only in middle age, some of them never. I had started to have glimpses of myself earlier than most, as a result of being deprived of marriage and child-bearing, but not with the clarity I discovered once sex had fallen right away. My atheism is an example: it became much more firmly established.”
I don't know if her matter-of-fact confidence in her ideas comes from being old, or having chosen and lived an unconventional life, or because you really have to reach this age to know what kind of woman you are.
But beyond this, it makes me realize that engaging in the discussion of biological determinism is still like walking a tightrope. Which is sort of annoying because it's perfectly acceptable if it's discussed within the scope of pop culture (He's Just Not That Into You, Sex and the City) but any sort of serious discussion of it leaves people pissed off and/or just dissatisfied. I've never been able to have a discussion about this topic with a man that leaves me satisfied, and when I have it with women, we're generally all in agreement, but feeling dissatisfied still, because it's clear that the male component, or the male challenge, I should say, is a necessary element to the discussion. And Athill fails to offer up any sort of solution to the issue aside from "Wait till you're old." And maybe it's not entirely surprising despite her accomplishments, that someone of her generation would think of gender determinism in slightly stultifying terms, but shit, I feel stultified sometimes, and I have to believe that all my obsession with energy and the psychic element of something as important as gender plays a role in the way I see the world.
The emphasis of the whole gender discussion in liberal communities and schools and even my home, growing up, was so much on equality - the whole - "You can do anything you want and blah blah blah" was so prevalent that the idea of difference was eschewed altogether. It was as though the mere mention of it could pierce this precariously held-together notion of post-feminist equality and so no one could even speak of inherent embodied differences without being accused of being sexist. And to be truthful, that line is a sticky one and I get irritated when men assume I am bad at certain things (like understanding how my car works) because I am a woman (hence the inability to have this discussion with even very intelligent and open men because it somehow manages to venture into the petty minutae of some pop-cultural cliffs-notes guide to gender). This is maybe a really easy and petty example of how men pigeon-hole women but there have been other more nuanced ones that I can't remember at the moment.
In college, gender studies classes and reading all that Foucault did make me reflect on ideas of embodiment and the sexual/psychic link, but I couldn't really integrate all these ideas into my own personal experience till recently because it's only in the past couple of years that I feel like I've exited some sort of emotional puberty and am officially *drum roll* a woman. No turning back now.
Perhaps finding yourself afloat in the midst of your child-bearing years, without truly having thought about the biological experience of having a child before, forces you to really reflect on these issues. But truthfully, I'm more concerned about how this unconscious lens affects me as a writer than someone capable of bearing children. There seems to be some sort of critical pruning process that takes place at this stage and it's like I'm trying to figure out how intrinsically connected "writer" and "woman" are as far as my own personal identity. To be honest, I don't know if this is really a productive activity; I say this because a friend who is constantly assessing all activities on the basis of their merit asked me about that the other day, and I'm not sure what's productive or what isn't. But I have to believe that any kind of reflection on the self is more than a mere act of narcissism. And I have to add that I can clearly see now that the way I am embodied affects the way I write (and think and connect with people - both women and men), and even if I did see this before, I feel like I am better able to integrate it into my being and make sense of it. And hopefully it makes me a better writer. Perhaps this is why I am less bothered by the acknoweledgement of difference than than the years-long denial of it while I was growing up.
It clearly served a purpose during those years - the community I was a part of, the schools I went to carried the primary function of breeding overachivers, with the presumption that achievement was the path to opportunity and therefore happiness - whether this assumption was an accurate one could be left to debate -but in order to effectively maintain it's mandate, the message served up to young women by this particular world that I was a part of, was that they didn't have an excuse not to succeed. That's all good and well, but then you enter the real world, and realize within minutes that there is very little you have a real roadmap for, and this is a critical issue where any sort of basic instruction on how to interact with the world has been omitted from your course syllabus all your life.
And instead of being able to sort that out, you develop all kids of coping mechanisms as a young woman in order to deal with the world. Like always bringing a guy with you to the mechanic because he talks to you like a retard, or flirting to get out of speeding tickets. Anyway, there are varying degrees of using your gender/sexuality as a tool in your arsenal to get what you want/need, but I don't know too many self-aware women who enjoy using these tactics. Even if they are remarkably effective. They are coping mechanisms, but a lot of us would acknowledge that they are bad ones and leave us feeling strange and unfamiliar with our true selves, and even hollow. Just generally, as a person, and not even as a woman, when I start thinking of all the conscious and unconscious ways I've learned to cope in the world since I graduated from high school and made the adjustment from a bookwormy isolated nerd to a seemingly well-adjusted person, I don't know if it's been entirely worth the price. And I scream of my need for authenticity from myself and others from the rooftops.
But anyway, that's why I found the Athill passage intriguing, particularly the idea that getting older changes everything. It's not just the child-bearing and rearing, when you look at all the ways in which gender becomes a distraction, even if it is used as a means to achieve things, it's sort of exhausting. And then you think of how complexly ingrained these patterns are and how difficult it is to break them because you can't break out of yourself. But the passage kind of makes me excited to get old. And despite the fact that the discussion might be unproductive or even too up-in-it's-own-ass-mired-in-biological-determinism, it resonates with me pretty strongly given the place that I'm finding myself recently.
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