A companion to: A woman out in the world

Recent readings on the intimate and the political.

May 25, 2021

This is a companion letter to: A woman out in the world.

As part of my #2020readingchallenge, I read a bunch of books that touch on how women navigate identity, love, sex, sexism, assault, and other thorny aspects of womanhood. Perhaps spurred by #metoo and perhaps because I had started seeing someone again, I was interested in probing the shadowed corners of intimate relations and their political dimensions. (But also, many of these books were simply popular in Berlin’s bookshops last year.)

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

Where female difficulty once seemed perverse, the refusal of difficulty now seems perverse. The entire interpretive framework is becoming untenable. We can analyze difficult women from the traditional point of view and find them controversial, and we can analyze bland women from the feminist point of view and find them controversial, too. […] Feminists have worked so hard, with such good intentions to justify female difficulty that the concept has ballooned to something all-encompassing: a blanket defence, an automatic celebration, a tarp of self-delusion that can cover up any sin. […]
I have wondered if we’re entering a period in which the line between valuing a woman in the face of mistreatment and valuing her because of that mistreatment is blurring; if the legitimate need to defend women from unfair criticism has morphed into an illegitimate need to defend women from criticism categorically; if it’s become possible to praise a woman specifically because she is criticized—for that featureless fact alone.

Not all the essays are compelling, but it’s worth your time overall. It deals with how much the internet makes us who we are, modern feminism’s limitations due to a lack of imagination, and the optimization of beauty for success in a rampantly capitalist society, among other things.

Lauren Oyler has a biting review of Tolentino and her book, also equally worth reading. I think it would be hard for most of us not to feel implicated too.

The Temporary by Rachel Cusk

Watching him, she caught an expression on his face for which she was unable to find an explanation. It was as if he had forgotten she was there, and looking at him she had a sense of glancing through a window at something she shouldn’t see, something private. Seconds later he caught her eye and the expression disappeared hastily, as though he were embarrassed. She had sat many times at tables such as this, the face opposite her but a mirror in which her successes, her charms, every flicker of her loveliness were clearly reflected. Ralph’s face was unkind to her image, and Francine was unnerved by her suspicion that behind his barred eyes whole worlds turned, lives of thought were born and flourished, and that at the centre of its operations was a presence before whom she was powerless. She shrank slightly from this unpleasant notion of his complexity, and then returned with redoubled boldness, determined to conquer it.

A skewering novel about the vanities we bring to modern dating.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

All I can see is the legs. Oh, it looks good. Trump and Billy Bush were evaluating a woman, not in passing or from memory, but on the bus that was slowly pulling up to her. She was present, visible but excluded. I imagine her standing outside, smiling and waiting patiently. She is the deer while we are made aware of the mountain lions lurking in the bushes, and I am whispering at her to perk up her ears. Run. When the two men descended the bus steps, their crude talk switched off as they turned into their public selves. How about a little hug for the Donald. As I watched her greet them warmly, walking in between them with linked arms, I was filled with dread, reminded of all the ways we are unaware.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

Sloane could see that Jenny was serious. That she wanted to hear every detail. But Sloane knew she couldn’t tell a woman the ways in which Sloane had been her man’s fantasy. She was also aware enough to know that she was lucky—that she was her own husband’s fantasy while other women were often not what their husbands thought of to get themselves off in the shower. […]
She cannot tell Jenny that Richard can be an asshole, but the kind of asshole he can be is never the unforgivable kind. It is never the kind who lies about where he has been. She cannot tell Jenny that when he is fantasising, it is not about a friend of hers or even a porn star, it is always, always about Sloane. Perhaps it is about Sloane with the porn star, but she is always in there. She cannot tell Jenny that she never has to worry about her husband in precisely the way that Jenny was shown she had to worry about hers.

Compulsive stuff: a deep dive into how desire manifests for three women, whose stories Taddeo follows over the course of eight years. If you’re looking for an analytical dissection and some thought-unraveling on female desire, this isn’t really it; the book is more anecdotal and built wholly around the individual narratives of the three women, and makes you feel like you’re sitting down with a close friend as she tells all, and can make you feel like something of a voyeur. The book doesn’t make female desire—or desire, period—any more graspable as an idea, and that might be the point: its inexplicability being its very, sometimes destructive, allure.

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

While I let myself into the apartment I thought about Nick entering the room while everybody applauded. This now felt perfect to me, so perfect that I was glad he had missed the performance. Maybe having him witness how much others approved of me, without taking any of the risks necessary to earn Nick’s personal approval, made me feel capable of speaking to him again, as if I also was an important person with lots of admirers like he was, as if there was nothing inferior about me. But the acclaim also felt like part of the performance itself, the best part, and the most pure expression of what I was trying to do, which was to make myself into this kind of person: someone worthy of praise, worthy of love.

In Rooney’s first novel, her characters seem so self-aware as to confuse what they project and what they are. She writes about human contradiction and miscommunication so well—the fear of vulnerability on the one hand and the urge to destroy before being destroyed, and the desire to give in completely to another person on the other. We know what we’ve been told to believe about what constitutes “healthy” and “unhealthy” relationships, what you can stand and cannot stand for, but all that, in Rooney’s books, seems beside the point. Human relations are messy. And maybe retaining one’s sense of self is not always the most important thing. There is no ideal way to be with a person, and the sorrows lovers mean or don’t mean to inflict on one another, and one’s utter surrender, can also be redeeming. It’s a difficult thing to swallow, and not a little depressing. But you can see the truth of it.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

She used to wonder if he really loved her. In bed he would say lovingly: You’re going to do exactly what I say now, aren’t you? He knew how to give her what she wanted, to leave her open, weak, powerless, sometimes crying. He understood that it wasn’t necessary to hurt her: he could let her submit willingly, without violence. This all seemed to happen on the deepest level of her personality. But on what level fit it happen to him? Was it just a game, or a favour he was doing her? Did he feel it, the way she did? Every day, in the ordinary activity of their lives, he showed patience and consideration for her feelings. He took care of her when she was sick, he read drafts of her college essays, he sat and listened while she talked about her ideas, disagreeing with herself out loud and changing her mind. But did he love her?

There are things you can pick at—perhaps one instance too many of human miscommunication that felt just a little contrived? A touch too many instances of inadequately explained self-destruction?—but it’s as compelling as everyone says it is. Could not put it down for even a second, read the whole thing in a few hours. Watched the mini TV series adaptation too, which is marked by some subtle but fairly important shifts in the dynamic between Marianne or Connell, more as it relates to Marianne’s character. It’s all about human relationships, and what it means to be truly close to somebody. (I confess to being the sort of person for whom true intimacy means being able to leave nothing unsaid—a treatment that’s terribly, terribly selectively deployed precisely because of how it flays you; sometimes you ask for answers to questions you don’t necessarily want to hear.) But more than a love story, this novel feels to me like an indictment of group friendships: how, even as they provide comfort, they also sometimes misshape the purity of our individual desires, even our innermost ones.

Future Sex: A New Kind of Free Love by Emily Witt

If a woman thought she would most likely sabotage her future happiness through her sexual choices, it followed that it would be difficult to plainly state one’s desires, or even to describe in explicit language the sex she wanted to have. Every sexual repression raised the question of false consciousness: women were described as “objectifying themselves,” “degrading themselves,” or “submitting unthinkingly to contemporary pressures.” They were accused of succumbing to the “pornification of society” and altering their bodies to please men. Rather than following the natural impulse of an adventurous young person a woman was “adopting the sexual behaviour of the most opportunistic guy on campus” or “masquerading her desperation as freedom.” Once married, a woman who became a swinger was accommodating the desires of her philandering partner rather than acting no her own free will. A woman could not even give a blow job without a voice in the back of her head suggesting she had been “used.”

Published a number of years back, I’m coming late to this, having stumbled upon it in one of my accommodations in Berlin. The questions it asks are still relevant, though the attempted answers, the experiments, seem already to have been left trailing behind in our culture.

Bookmarked shorts

In a Perpetual Present by Erika Hayasaki
Where Loneliness Can Lead by Samantha Rose Hill
Britney Spears Was Never In Control by Tavi Gevinson
The Emily Ratajkowski effect by Haley Nahman—with links to The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino and Has Self-Awareness Gone Too Far in Fiction? by Katy Waldman
Making Meaning: Against “Relevance” in Art by Garth Greenwell
The Morality Wars by Wesley Morris
Bad Dog: Why live with a difficult animal? by Anna Heyward
On Marriage, and why I'm engaged by Alicia Kennedy—with links to Jessa Crispin’s work, including Feminism in Lockdown
My Parents Got Sick. It Changed How I Thought About My Marriage by Mary H.K. Choi
My Highly Unexpected Heterosexual Pandemic Zoom Wedding — I know what it sounds like, but this is a different story because it’s Laurie Penny’s
When your Imposter Syndrome gets Imposter Syndrome by Kirsten Han