XLIX. girls just wanna have fun

on being a city-stomping giant

Last month my nails were so long and beautiful and I didn’t write at all. They are peeled to the quick now—the tops of my fingers jagged, pink, and throbbing a little. I pick at my nails when I’m thinking or when I am anxious. I guess in April I was either very stupid or very calm. Instead of writing, I read and read. Perhaps the waters of inspiration can only flow one way: pouring in or spilling out.

I read a lot of books by and/or about men: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcom. Their relationships with the women in their lives—their hatred and dependence—was fascinating and very funny, superseded only by their feelings towards to other men: barely concealed lust, envy, admiration. Though I have been wary of writing about Men and Women (it feels like I’m sealing myself in a tomb of gender-essentialism), there was something tantalizing in considering these relationships, what they reveal about how women are taught to relate. This year I have felt something in me uncoil, a selfishness or self-centeredness that I have both tried to smother and keep coming back to peek at. I’m a little bit thrilled by it. Just how big and bad could I get?

There is a primacy of experience for the men I came across that I am intrigued by; they are the central point around which women turn, but also, conversely, they only exist as reflected by their women. They crumble in solitude or in the exclusive company of other men. Take the husbands of The Good Soldier, John Dowell and Captain Edward Ashburnham, who were driven to madness and suicide over perceived abandonments by their wives. Set in the early twentieth century, against a backdrop of English manors and German spas, John, the novel’s narrator, spins out several theories as to “the relation of the sexes.”

Of the question of the sex-instinct I know very little and I do not think it counts for very much in a really great passion. It can be aroused by such nothings—by an untied shoelace, by a glance of the eye in passing—that I think it might be left out of the calculation. I don’t mean to say that any great passion can exist without a desire for consummation…But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man is the craving for identity with the woman he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for cutting asunder his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier p.97

Taken alone, this is maybe not so bad. His conclusion—We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist—is one of the truest things ever written down. To lean on someone, to share a burden, these are not terrible behaviors; and in fact I have written before about how we ought to do this more, expect more from each other, get entangled the sticky web of humanity. However, there’s a nifty little turn in Dowell’s argument and it reminded me so much of a passage I wrote down a year ago, almost to the date.

That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking glass shrinks: his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own p.35

At first, Dowell has two independent primary subjects: the man longs to identify with the woman, who, thus far, has all the action—she is doing the seeing, the touching. Then, interesting, he wants to become one, to actually obliterate his “self” and merge into hers, to lose his identity. And just when we think we have a new world order: to be enveloped, to be supported…that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. Reverse! It is actually she who must be obliterated. Woman as man’s counterpart, to renew his courage and ease his path. She is demoted to a secondary role, existing, as named by Woolf, as a fun-house mirror reflecting a giant who can go forth and conquer. In the simplest terms: a woman must care for a man so a man can care for the world. Boo.

Happily, I do not have a romantic relationship like that. It is such a gift to read these marriages and not see Q and me reflected. However, it does make me think about care and availability in general. And I do think there is something to the roles ambition and self-interest are supposed to play in a woman’s life, which is to say a very small one. Or, ok, it’s 2025, maybe ambition is lauded (girl boss) but self-interest is not, and I am finding, to a certain extent they go hand in hand.

Leonora Carrington “The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg)” 1947, tempera on wood panel. Collection Miguel S. Escobedo, Estate of Leonora Carrington

Sometimes I imagine myself at total remove. Somewhere where everything is provided. And someone brings me delicious little cups of coffee in delicate porcelain cups. Except for when I descend to the kitchen myself (a kitchen that is bright and clean and stocked by someone else’s hand) and fire up the moka pot while looking out of a sea-facing window but seeing nothing. Remaining mentally in the margins of my notebook until the burble of boiling coffee, its acrid about-to-burn scent draws me into the real world, but only long enough that whatever incredible idea I have been catching only the edges of can finally swim up from the unconscious. And then I float back up to my attic office with huge windows that’s always a little too warm so I am bare-legged and barefooted and maybe kind of sleepy, which is totally fine because I have a cozy little couch in a perfect sunspot so I can nap when I need to. Then I could really write. If only I were rich and alone…but then I come back from that amazing daydream and I’m like…well what would I even write about? Anything interesting I have ever produced creatively has come as a result of being deeply invested in the world and the people in it. There’s nothing for me in isolation.

But how to deal with the endless list of stuff that demands attention? Things and people with their inexhaustible needs getting in the way of all those big ideas! Podiatrist appointments and slack messages and relationships! Relationships! I have this nasty little desire to slough everyone off like dead skin. At first I thought this was very bad. That it meant something more true and fundamental about me than the me I thought I knew. Now I am tickled. I came across this line in a profile Maggie Nelson did of Carollee Schneemann, “a great woman may be a woman more interested in herself than in anything else,” and outright cackled. That said, I don’t think I will be throwing a universal middle finger up anytime soon. I love all my people. I am thankful for them. I am invested in their lives and wellbeing. But there is something very freeing in entertaining the idea of craven self-interest. It is a feeling, and like all feelings is morally neutral and must be accepted to be let go.

The “bad woman” is haunting contemporary fiction. These women are getting divorced, having affairs, not caring so much about their kids. Though I like some of these books (looking at you All Fours), it is a trend I kind of eye-roll at, probably because these women are usually painfully white and rich. But then, I love to read about the rich white women of the past, so what is the difference? Perhaps they used to be written with less malaise. They don’t slide into selfishness from exhaustion or numbness, they seek it out. They have a plan and take action, bending the world to their will. They insist on being the most important person in the room with the biggest problems and biggest wants. I’m thinking of my favorite main character Undine Spragg, sacrificing literally everyone at the altar of her desire. I’ve read them and loved them—these women peppered throughout history, hurling themselves against the gates of propriety—I don’t want to be them, but I do want to salute them, honestly. So cheers.

xx

Mia