Men/Women/People
No I don’t watch Better Call Saul since I don’t generally watch television at all but ever since I saw a photoset of Kim Wexler responding to someone telling her, “All the girls were in love with Gregory Peck” with “No, I wasn’t in love with him. Well, a little, but… No, I wanted to be him,” I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I used to half-joke when I was younger that I couldn’t ever date a Byronic hero because I was a Byronic hero and you know what, I’m not even joking about it anymore, I’m admitting to it.
I don’t mean this in a pathetic Josh Hawley way but when Jon Bernthal said, “The biggest and most missing element of masculinity right now is empathy. We have a masculinity crisis in this country, where people think it’s all about acting tough and being loud and being rigid and unbending. And I think being empathetic and open and emotional, that’s what being a man is about,” I think he was onto something. As a radical feminist (or something), I’m very opposed to gender essentialism like actually, I don’t think men are inherently bad due to the patriarchy because that absolves them of their agency that they exercise to do reprehensible things. If people, men or women, are born bad, they can’t be blamed for being bad since they don’t know any better. In my mind at least, people should be held accountable for the pain they do unto others, and I demand restitution, no matter what bullshit Mariame Kaba spouts about restorative justice.
When Ursula K. Le Guin said, “But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?” I really felt that!! My friend Anita pointed out that while I’m extremely girly, I’m not remotely ditzy and like, she’s not wrong. I sometimes feel alienated by a lot of women in the public eye because I’m not smart like them, and if I’m being real with you, I feel like I’m smart in a very masculine way, all logical and extremely precise, which is further exacerbated by the fact I genuinely don’t think I owe other people things on a societal level.
Maybe it’s the west coast in my blood but I agree with Joan Didion when she said, “I’ve always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary. I grew up in the West, and we had this theory that if you kept a snake in your eye line, it wasn’t going to bite you. That’s the way I feel about confronting pain. I want to know where it is.” I instinctively pick things apart even when doing so causes me hurt, and I sometimes wish I didn’t because more often than not, I’m right about why things came about the way they did, and for the record, it doesn’t make it feel better to know why it went bad. I’m confrontational like men supposedly are, and for the millionth time, I wish I were a man not in the sense I want to be a man on a physical level but in the sense I feel like I, with the hardness in my heart and sharpness in my mind, would find life easier to live if I were a man.
Lidia Yuknavitch once wrote, “Or was my rage my mother’s? Or her mother’s? Or hers? An inherited creature?” and I was thinking, while I pretty regularly talk about the mess that is my father’s side of the family, I’m also unequivocally my mother’s daughter. When I read what Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born,” I’m reminded of my mother. Without her, I wouldn’t be alive, I wouldn’t be the person I am, and I mean that in more ways than just this one.
I’ll leave this newsletter with a picture of my parents and me circa 1995. Needless to say, my fashion sense has not changed much.
