What the Hell is This?

I haven’t had much time this week to write, unfortunately, due to various competing stressors in my personal life — the latest of which is the news that I’ll have to move again, oh, joy! So I thought I’d recycle this book review I wrote for a bookstore newsletter a few years back.

It seemed apropos, after all, on a warm spring day, when everything is budding and filling the air with strange nectars, and all of nature is participating in its most lascivious display of fecundity, to talk about both the Feminine and appetite. Not to mention that the authors of these books have made me feel somewhat less crazy (see Being an Alien, Baby) by assuring me “It’s not you, it’s the rest of the culture!”

Like Caroline Knapp, I’ve always been unhappy with the shape of my body (getting the ubiquitous message since before puberty that only the wasp-waisted deserve to be desired), but unlike her, love food too much to have ever been able to exist on one bagel or one yogurt a day. Like Carol Gilligan’s subjects, I know what it is to be shamed (within and without my family) for having inordinate or inappropriate feelings and desires, and to be effectively silenced by the alternate, less “emotional” version of interpersonal interaction given by some of the (straight) men in my life. Often I have found myself wondering if it might be necessary to kill off everything that feels alive in me simply to be able to exist successfully in the world.

So here’s a book review for all us crazy bitches.

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Let Her Be Filled:

Two books on women that begin to untangle “this knotted place in our souls”

Reading Freud’s famous analysis of Dora in college, many of my fellow students and I found it disturbing how little the good doctor appeared to actually listen to his “hysterical” young patient. For a man who asked the famous question “What do women want?” he seemed all too keen on replacing her words with his own.

The late Caroline Knapp, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Drinking: A Love Story, undertakes the illumination of the shadowy territory that is women’s desire in her introspective final book, Appetites: Why Women Want. With her elegiac prose, Knapp describes her own struggles with anorexia and alcoholism, and addresses the root issues of hunger, privation, and control.

“I’m so hungry,” she explains with the despairing logic of the anorexic, “I will never be fed.” Unlike the robust bathing goddesses of Renoir, whose images open the book, women in contemporary Western culture who exhibit too much appetite risk being seen as bad, out of control, gluttonous. She notes that every women’s magazine invariably boasts an article about becoming or staying thin, and how to please a man in bed — but what is this silence, she wonders, about what pleases oneself?

It is the swallowed and stifled longings and cravings of women driven underground, she asserts, that manifest themselves as these self-destructive compulsions.

So what do these out-of-control women crave? Knapp’s speculations are so simple as to seem deceptive: only what other human beings crave. Joy, beauty, self-determination, love — the pleasures of being and feeling fully alive.

If only Knapp had lived to see the publication of Carol Gilligan’s controversial new book, The Birth of Pleasure. Gilligan, best known for her women’s studies classic, In a Different Voice, expands her research on women and “voice” to explore how women’s loss of voice in adolescence facilitates the suffocation of authentic love relationships. The cultural mandates of hierarchical, patriarchal “reality,” she theorizes, which separate the mind from the body, and valid knowing from emotion, require dissociation from and denial of the reality of felt connections and intuitive knowledge — the stuff of love. The author finds the same refreshing honesty in preschool boys (who are still on the cusp of initiation into the enforced silences of traditional masculinity) as she does in preadolescent girls, who do not hesitate to say what they see, feel, and know.

Using the myth of Psyche and Cupid, Gilligan draws a map through the wilderness of standard tragic narratives, where love’s voice is denied and silenced, to a possible alternate destination where a child — a daughter named Pleasure — may be born. Like the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a contemporary of Freud and his ideological opposite, Gilligan envisions love as the setting for revolution, and women as its incendiaries.

Both of these beautifully written and thought-provoking books provide today’s embattled women with much-needed understanding and comfort, but they also present a challenge: to be not only the barometers of an ailing and oppressive culture, but the resistance.

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Wow, that sounds heroic, doesn’t it? I told you I had delusions of grandeur.