Women Authors made by Betty Crocker | Why I want to do girl things as a boy.

Dear Jane Austin,

Please stay dead. There is some sort of rampant nostalgia, burgeoning on necrophilia, and I worry that were they to succeed in their nefarious plans, the world will brim with knitting and women will only use vocabulary to gossip with the tones of propriety. You have done quite enough.

Thank you,

Cristina

Today, I was reading A Woman of Independent Means by Elizabeth Forsythe Halley. From the title, I suppose I expected characters with the tenacity of Bovary or Karenina. The title was apparently either ironically intended or a grave misuse of the term ‘independent.’ At least male authors pepper their works with a little salaciousness, a sexual or romantic zeal that in its wantonness rebels against the banality of the traditional roles assigned a woman. However, a bland story that writes pretty words about the trials of a banal existence is like adding parsley to cartilage boiled in dishwater and calling it consommé.

I resent that the domestic theatre has been the sole prisoner which women have, even as novelists, been chained to to warden. What is with these women author’s made by Betty Crocker and ravenously consumed by the female readers who, while feeling un-romanced at home, dream of lives when women took whatever daddy told them was good. By eighteen the full tenacious bloom was grown, plucked, and hidden away during pregnancies. Now the modern woman fantasizes that the workplace has stolen her vagina, robbed her of the unconditional love seeded in marriages of economic necessity? The entire idea of “women’s issues and perspectives” as a genre sets women into a charming, almost provincial subset the way children’s drawings are comparable to higher art. It’s finger painting. “Women’s issues” in the works of men like Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy have a more humanistic appeal. They call into question the motives and tensions in the automation of loveless marriage and sexual politics. They question the dehumanization in sociocultural habits and mores. Those books talk and evoke sentiments about alienation in a greater humanistic perspective and forward a campaign for fierce individualism and authentic freedom, using the woman as a symbol of a human problem. They imbue a compassion for the heroic woman who chooses freedom, even at the cost of tragedy, more so than in the works of a good number of women authors, like Austen and Halley.

Even when these sentimentally-revisionist authoresses of women’s literature write what they think to be heroic females, the despair or scavenged strength that epitomizes their female protagonists comes from within a complacent and romanticized role.  Pride and Prejudice might as well be renamed Propriety and Fearful Rebuff. It is absurd that a male author, in using the woman as a symbolic category, can advocate for liberation more than authoresses who mire in the sense and sensibility of a woman’s place. Writing as a “woman” instead of a human being who exists in the position of a woman is exactly the deferential and subjugate place that makes “women’s literature” something lesser than Literature. These authoresses write as women, not as authors; they do not seek to transcend hegemonic paradigms and seek a broader human audience that may relate to the pure experience. They write as victims of womanhood in a way that seeks permission to be humanized. It continues the existence of women as confined to a class separate but not equal, affected and tolerated as part of a society they occupy like pets and not as agents who participate-in and define culture. They cower and take part and seek to validate the worldviews that hold them hostage and apart in separate spheres instead of taking a sledgehammer to the walls that have barred women and men from finding a companion that’s based on the freedom not to be married unless we damn well want to. I’m not saying a writer can’t be a woman. But I am saying the cost of being a woman is not innately the abandonment of self-determination for the pretty frocks of roles. Just imagine the hard-on Prince Charming got when he passed Xena on his way to save some princess from sleeping in. The romanticism of Victorian identity politics are diminishing. These works are as boring as is the tomes of virility that seek to, at the same time, apologize for cruelty and make it the domain of the penis itself. And like all contradictions, they leave the readership and other acolytes spinning in circles instead of getting anywhere. Very neatly absurd, but written with little self-conscious to that absurdity.

A work in which a woman is too self-conscious about being a woman means that she is not conscious enough about being a self; she lacks the necessary ego of effectual authorship. So much so that even the role models of the 20th and 21st centuries for women claiming independence demand a man to complete their identity. We are not derivative. I do not want anymore guidebooks on how to hook a man—whether it is Hoochie Hoochie Ho-Ho’s Guidette Style Guide to baiting a man or Jane Austen’s guide to Persuasion and Matrimony. This is exactly why I sit at the men’s table at weddings; it is the only place there where I am not harangued about not having a boyfriend or child. Older women whisper like I showed up missing a leg. Some resort to sympathy, “Oh, poor Cristina. You know, it’s just that she…” At the boys table, we talk politics, survivor stories, tall tales, and video games and at least a few people think I’m charming. I don’t know the rest of women out there, but I feel complete unto myself. I don’t think that my erotic or romantic wants is the result of a penis shaped hole inside my being. I didn’t take the framework of penetration into me. I prefer to think of myself as a hungry and complete system, constantly in creation as is any solar system, and eager for visitors and exploration. It is not my telos, but the playful expression of my ongoing progress and dialectic. And so writing is like sex. Both can come/cum from outside. But there’s an alternate way. Expression can change the palimpsest into an evocative text, an invitation. When anything comes from within, and flows outward wanting to receive the same from another, whether this is dialectic or sex or a shared pot of tea, The process deepens our limitlessness–our boundless expansion. Waiting for definition from without confirms our limits. it begs the question, is your project freedom or security?