This is everything. It is everything I have been thinking about and crying about and trying to write about these past few weeks. Last night in bed with someone I’ve been seeing I started to sob and I couldn’t quite understand why–why I was crying and why I felt so embarrassed letting him see me that way, messy mascara and reddened cheeks and the ugliness of vulnerability. To let someone see your weakness automatically grants them the agency to hurt you. It has been three months but I am not ready to be hurt again. Not right now. Not yet.
After reading this interview I know what I was trying to say to him last night, in between the apologies for “being crazy” and the jokes meant to derail my own derailment. It had nothing and everything to do with him–nothing because he could be anyone, everything because he is the perfect metaphor for my own internal contradictions: for the first time in a long time, I have no idea what I want.
I. Me
Last fall, when I found out that my stepmother was having a baby, my first thought was one that, as a feminist, I’m ashamed to admit. With guilt tightening in my chest, I clenched my fists and hoped, “Please don’t let the baby be a girl.”
I think women have it tougher: there, I’ve said it. And that is why I wished for a baby brother.
Some of you will undoubtedly disagree with this sentiment, and surely men face their own set of societal problems, but this essay is not about that. This essay is about the fact that at one point in my life I found it so difficult to be a woman that I didn’t want someone I loved–or would love, once those cells coalesced into a being–to have to go through life as a woman.
I don’t consider myself a casualty of “the patriarchy,” but sometimes I do feel victimized—particularly when walking home by myself late at night, or when wondering how many dates is a ‘proper’ amount to wait to sleep with someone. I do not want to be a victim—I am strong and independent, a modern woman—but sometimes I do feel like one, and that confuses and upsets me. I live in a time and place that is arguably one of the best for a young woman in this world to live. I come from a family who never made me feel that my gender was an obstacle. I went to a college where “dismantling heteronormativity” was brunch conversation. But I guess this essay isn’t about all that either.
This is about the endless amount of small things–things the world expects of me, and that I have come to expect of myself, because I wear my femaleness with skepticism. It is about the minor battles that I wage with myself every day because I have been taught one thing by society but have come to believe another. The feminism blogs I read are constantly taking swipes at each other–no one can seem to come to an agreement on whether or not “hook-up culture” is bad, for example. And so, equipped with feminist texts and fashion magazines and my own canon of disjointed experiences, I am left to figure these things out on my own.
Today as I was cleaning out my childhood bedroom and packing for my upcoming move to San Francisco, I came across a “manuscript” of my writing that I compiled five years ago at age 17. It was just a packet of printed out paper, in Times New Roman, with a cover page that had a black and white picture of me drinking a beer on it. It was called “Resolutions and Revelations.” Most of the stuff in it was really just awful–I mean, some of the poetry actually rhymed. But one of the pieces I’d written was a chronology of essays about the boys I’d dated until age sixteen, and it was fascinating to revisit how I felt and thought about boys and sex at that age. It reminded me of a quote from An Education, which I watched for the first time last night and loved mostly because I completely related to it. “One of the boys I dated, and they were boys,” says Jenny after getting her heartbroken by an older man, “suggested that we go to Paris, and I said I’d always wanted to see Paris. As if I’d never been!” The twist is that she had already lost her virginity in Paris, she’d lost her youthful naivety in Paris, but in order to keep herself from hardening, she steels against that memory. Jenny retains some of that purity of youth by giving herself a “do-over” of sorts–this time she will have those experiences with boys, not men. Not all of us have that strength of will, but I admired that in her.
In an article that most likely would’ve sent her into a rage, and most certainly sent me into one, the NYT Style Section decided to boil down all of Simone de Beavoir’s literary accomplishments into one shallow question: Was Simone de Beauvoir beautiful?
I seriously almost puked when I read that. Give me a break! When I lived in Paris I was inspired by my location to read a ton of de Beauvoir, and subsequently fell in love with her writing. The Mandarins is one of my favorite books at all time, and provides a detailed glimpse into the intimate lives of people struggling with romantic entanglements and political involvements following WWII. It’s an incredible book, as is, of course The Second Sex, which–with a recent reprint–is supposedly the impetus for this absurd NYT piece. It’s the Style Section, so I know that they’re not going to give her the ol’ Kakutani literary treatment; but this is also the New York Times, not Cosmopolitan, so the fact that they crystallize all of de Beauvoir’s amazing philosophical and literary thinking into an analysis of her wardrobe is just upsetting. They would never do this to a male writer. Imagine a feature on Hemingway’s wardrobe.
Yeah, not gonna happen.