Talking to Amy and analyzing the interesting and multivarious personalities in the fam, and I remembered a thought experiment that my 1977 women’s studies class introduced me to—“how would you be different if you were the opposite sex?”—an interesting question (but not what I’m doing right here, although I think I might be a lot more like Dave). So my thoughts ran in a well-worn pattern: No non-gay (or otherwise non-traditionally gendered) man I’ve ever met has considered this question. Because male = normal human whereas female = other, yada yada [insert traditional second wave feminist rhetoric here—“second wave” meaning “straight white educated middle-class older”]. Why does that equation/non-equation resonate so closely with my experience? I thought to myself. Because when I was very young, I answered, I read omnivorously from Freud and Jung to Hemingway to Vonnegut to Dostoyevsky to Dickens to Mailer to Joyce, amazed at their insights into the human condition, and my “click” moment of consciousness raising was when I began to notice (at probably about 13 years old) the occasional statement such as: “women are not like us,” or “the female experience is diametrically opposite what has here been described”*, or the even more obvious and simple absence of women from the awareness of these great thinkers except when sex was concerned (an absence painfully and blatantly apparent after the moment of that "click").
Which was as far as I had gotten until now. Pain—so how am I human then?—and profound alienation from the Enlightenment culture and the canon and so forth that I loved, that I was steeped, soaked, and buried in, because dang, when Freud talks about defenses against anxiety, I get it, gut-deep, and when Melville talks about the whale coming up from fathoms below the boat, and even when Hemingway looks with male eyes at his lover’s pregnant belly and then out at the hills like white elephants, I get that as well, even at 13 or 14, because I am human too. It was my feminine protest—that great phrase Freud invented meaning (to him) resentment at not having a penis, but which really means envy of all the advantages and power in this culture associated with being male.
But all these years I never really took it to the next level. It felt like simply too much injustice to deal with—I wanted to point at the sexism and keep pointing until it was finally, adequately, acknowledged. Or I took these men’s unconscious subjectivity and bias too seriously, at face value, and couldn’t move beyond it.
Here is my recent 51-year-old emotional insight: In reality, these great thinkers were describing the human (inclusive) condition, under varying circumstances (and “male” was not always the most important one), and therefore their insights were/are applicable to me, because, although female, I am human too. Their sexist blind spots are regrettable, but totally and completely understandable, given the era(s) in which they lived. I don’t have to be wounded by them anymore. I’m not being betrayed. Their sexism--that is, their belief that men were human and women were "other"--is not much different than Joyce being Irish or Tolstoy Russian, and I can look at it, acknowledge it, and move on. I don’t have to believe it anymore.
That's the weird thing that I didn't know, and just barely realized. I believed it for too long.
*not that these are actual quotes, but similar ones wouldn't be hard to find
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