Apr 29, 2005 16:01
what is a man, anyway? everything i see around me in popular culture tells me a man is he who screws and kills. but everything i see around me in life tells me a man is he who makes money. maybe these two are related, because making money in our world often requires careful avoidance of screwing and killing, so maybe the culture provides the unlived part. i don't claim to know, and i don't even care much. i figure that's their problem. women are trying hard these days to get out from under the images that have been imposed on them. the difficulty is that there is just enough truth in the images that to repudiate them often involves repudiating also part of what you really are. maybe men are in the same boat, but i don't think so. i think they rather like their images, find them serviceable. if they don't, it's up to them to change them. i do know that if that is what men are, i'm willing to dispense with them forever and have children only through parthenogenesis, which would mean i'd have only female children, which would suit me fine. but the other side of the image, the reality, is just as bad. because if the men i've known haven't much indulged in killing and are no great shakes at screwing and have made money (for the most part) only in moderate amounts, they haven't been anything else either. they're just dull. maybe that's the price of being on the winning side. because the women i know have gotten fucked, literally and figuratively, and they're great.
one advantage to being a despised species is that you have freedom, freedom to be any crazy thing you want. if you listen to a group of housewives talk, you'll hear a lot of nonsense, some it really crazy. this comes, i think, from being alone so much, and pursuing your own odd train of thought without impediment, which some call discipline. the result is craziness, or brilliance. ordinary women come out with the damnedest truth. you ignore them at your own risk. and they're permitted to go on making wild statements without being put away in one kind of jail or another (some of them anyway) because everyone knows they're crazy, and powerless too. if a woman is religious or earthy, passive or wildly assertive, loving or hating, she doesn't get much more flak than if she isn't; her choices lie between being castigated as a ball and chain or as a whore. what i don't understand is where women suddenly get power. because they do. the kids, who almost always turn out to be a pile of shit, are, we all know, mommy's fault. well, how did she manage that, this powerless creature? where was all her power during the year she was doing five loads of laundry a week and worrying about mixing the whites with the colours? how was she able to offset daddy's positive influence? how come she never knows she has this power until afterward, when it gets called responsibility?
what i'm trying to understand is winning and losing. now the rule of the game is that men win as long as they keep their noses comparatively clean, and the women lose, always, even extraordinary women. the Edith Piafs and Judy Garlands of the world become great by capitalising on their losing. that part is clear. what is not clear is what game we're playing. what do you win when you win? i know what you lose, having some experience with that side. what i don't know is what rewards are involved with winning besides money. maybe that's it; maybe that's all there is. i guess so, because when i look at the winners, all the Norms of the world, i can't see much else: money and a certain ease in the world, a sense of legitimacy.
'the women's room' - marilyn french