Long before personal pronouns were a thing, Mike and I spent hours talking about a philosopher named Luce Irigaray and the gendered nature of language, the limits it puts upon our ability to express the fullness of our realities to one another. Masculine ways of knowing were built right into grammar: the subject of a sentence wants an object, not another subject. How to speak to one another without violence, without reducing one gender to a lesser status, if the structures and forms of our sentences tacitly lead us to do just that?
Actually, I don’t know if I’m remembering any of this right. I do remember a sense of overwhelm, confronting the depths of masculine privilege that plumbed right down to the ways I speak and think. My impression of it all is hazy mostly because her work is difficult and Mike, who was extraordinary at translating complex theory into comprehensible language, could only speculate as to what the heck she was trying to say. He wanted my help figuring it out.
Before Mike, time fit into years in school – this or that happened when I had Mrs. Craig in the fourth grade, or during my junior year of college. After Mike, and before the children, I can identify memories by sorting them into a series of inscrutable continental philosophers. As in: we would run in Prospect Park on Sunday afternoons the fall when Mike was reading Gadamer. We moved into that fantastic apartment during the summer of Merleau-Ponty. Levinas came and went and came again; one of his more memorable returns was while I was in the shower one morning and Mike burst in, excitedly explaining a new approach to his dissertation in which he would differentiate the early work, in which we humans are fugitives, from his later work, in which we are hostages. From and to The Other, I suppose. I had just started a new job then.
I never read any of it, but I might as well have. I was a naïve philosophy midwife, asking questions and trying to grasp some part Mike's inner world and thus helping him clarify his own thought. Sometimes I felt like a frustrating (and frustrated) piece of furniture as he talked and talked and I simply didn’t get it. Yep, there were some serious subject-object moments. Sometimes we transcended the specifics and had thrilling dialogues about things like whether or not men and women can truly communicate intersubjectively, despite the limits of grammar. Those talks about Irigaray fell into the latter category.
But I’d never thought about the masculine structure and logic of stories as limiting what we are able to imagine, see, and know until I read Brit Marling in the Sunday Times over the weekend. She is outrageously smart and cool and, incidentally, I think she should be my friend. But anyway. I loved her piece on rejecting the premise of the ‘strong female lead’ because it’s really just a strong male lead who looks hot naked – meaning she typically embodies masculine virtues of domination, power, linear ambition. These are not values that guide my own life, yet as I thought more about it I began to see that I have often judged myself against them, and when I do I am always lacking.
(Including during some of those long philosophy talks with Mike. If I had an intuitive objection to an idea Mike was testing out, I could never out-argue him to prove my point. I couldn’t prove any point. I talk in circles, I seek collaboration in my thinking, I look for narrative. I would always drag his pure abstraction down to the ground, testing out ideas in the real world, which was complex and multilinear and troubled just about any bold claim about the way morality, or existence, or human subjectivity works. This could drive Mike absolutely nuts.)
Marling is honest about confronting the limits of all our imaginations – colonized as they are by stories by and about men since forever – in envisioning a female protagonist that does not respond to male desires so much as acts and speaks for herself, from her own desires. A female hero. What even is that?
The story we all know of the hero’s journey, from epic poems and books and movies and songs and fairy tales, is structured, she explains, as follows: inciting incident – rising tension – explosive climx – denouement. Which sounds a lot like a male orgasm.
But really, why wouldn’t our stories reflect our sexuality, which reflects the totality of our gendered, embodied experience in a world that seems to want to polarize, exaggerate and ultimately distort masculinity and femininity?
A male orgasm is an excellent, exciting thing. But it is only one way. The linear nature of it is what doesn’t map onto my own inclinations and ways of understanding. I can never be the hero of a story like that.
A female orgasm is something else. Or rather a female erotic experience, because I don’t think the beginning-middle-end structure necessarily works for a female hero – the female sexual experience is often multilinear, diffuse, complex, shifting in intensities, inclusive of one’s whole being, driven not so much by a singular, directed urgency. One orgasm can just set the stage for another. Anything might happen.
That sounds more like the structure of a plot about someone like me. Anything might happen, and it often does. Denouement? What’s that? This story keeps spinning out in many directions, touching many levels of experience, intimacy and imagination. But I have no idea how one might tell that story.
I think of a friend I had in high school who was marvelously charismatic and funny and smart but also, over time, increasingly abusive and manipulative to the people around her. I struggled for many months with private thoughts of anger, hurt and confusion over how to protect myself in a situation that was decidedly bad and getting worse all the time. But she was part of a network of relationships that I knew I would risk losing if I separated from her. The social costs would be painful to bear. Eventually I made a series of quiet gestures that indicated I was pulling away. She objected, demanded I explain myself. I passively demurred, spent a lot of time with my boyfriend, and avoided her as much as possible, until it was finally clear we were no longer friends. I hated what I then saw as total, despicable cowardice on my part. Why couldn’t I have confronted her as some better version of myself might have in a movie? (A glamorized masculine narrative type movie!) Why didn’t I stand on a table and spit all my anger at her in the middle of the cafeteria for all to see?
For years I considered this episode as illustrative of my interpersonal wimpiness, my inability to make a hard and fast break in a blaze of confrontational glory.
That is, until a few months ago, when I reunited with a few friends from high school. We hadn’t stayed in touch. I had been right about the social costs to separating from that friend, who came up in conversation that night. My closest friend from that time pulled me aside. I envied you, she said. You were the only one brave enough to get away. The rest of us got sucked down into the shit.
Huh. That was a complete surprise. As we talked more, I saw through her eyes, and came to see that trying to preserve other relationships and ultimately choosing self care was, in its own way, brave. Braver than staying for the abuse. Heroic, even. I got out the only way I could: messily, quietly, and with many conflicted feelings. But I did get out.
The only time I have exploded in violence and anger at another human (besides my children, God forgive me) (oh yeah and my parents and sister when I was growing up, forgive me those tantrums too please) was when I arrived home from the hospital in a terrified, free-falling state after a doctor suggested that the only sensible explanation for the inexplicable fevers Mike was suffering - after every possible alternative had been ruled out - was that his lymphoma was back. That relapse was a devastating moment unlike any other. I had parked down the street from our house as the space out front was blocked by a delivery truck. Another neighbor pulled in just after me, and as I ran up the walk I could hear him muttering loudly, clearly so that I would hear, about how rude some people were who parked in his spot right in front of his house.
I stopped, breathless and shaking. I turned to him, glaring, and said excuse me? Are you talking to me right now?
You can imagine where things went. I was furious. I yelled that a city street was not anyone’s personal parking spot. I yelled that I was coming home for JUST A MINUTE to get a charger for my husband who is in the hospital with CANCER. Because he has cancer AGAIN.
I couldn’t speak afterwards. I shook on and off for hours. It was terrible, terrible. Treating another human like that (whom I learned later was attached to that parking spot because his wife is chronically ill and has difficulty walking any distance at all) was awful for me. Turns out the triumphant take down of the movies isn’t really my thing. Explosive climax, sure. That sounds great! As long as I’m up for the traumatized, anxiety-driven full-body shaking afterwards.
So. If the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are stories undergirded by a particular, somewhat extreme version of masculine desire and sexual release, maybe we have to retell our stories, and retell them again. All of us, not just women. Widowhood has brought me a loneliness deeper than any I have ever known, but it would be only partly true to stop there – it has also brought me a new willingness to uncover my own tangled up ferocity, my own desires which do not line up with the male hero’s. To reach down and invite my imagination and intuition and curiosity and weird circular tangential embodied way of thinking to consider whether I have been more heroic than I ever knew, or even wanted to know. Being a social outlier has some unexpected silver linings.
What does it mean to be the hero of your own story? I reframe and rewrite personal narratives with my clients all the time, because it’s powerful and gets us closer to the truth. And I think people are good simply because they are. I love that about us. Which suggests the ways of knowing and being that are gendered feminine, just as ways gendered masculine, are good simply because they are, too. So how to reimagine a story that takes into account your many ways: feminine, masculine, a mix of the two, something outside of that binary completely?
Some of my ways are
talking and thinking circuitously
valuing connetion, empathy, relationships
expressing creativity and curiosity
a keenly embodied, sensory-attuned way of understanding my response to the world
feeling a kinship with animals, especially other mammals
bringing my feelings into every part of my life as a way to live more deeply, including and most especially in my work as a therapist and mother
honoring and supporting other people
moving
listening to stories
telling the truth
embracing expansiveness and inclusion
fearing conflicts
longing to see and touch the natural world
crying easily and often
Now. What are your many good ways of approaching this broken tender world, and living out your story within it?
