Having dispensed with the Hemingways (hew many of you still think that Mary Hemingway - despite having murdered her husband - is a "strong, independent woman and a good role model for wives everywhere"? Show of hands. Almost all of you. Big surprise.) I now prepare for the next complete waste of my own time and energy: my promised "last word on gender" entitled "Tangent".
All males (as opposed to men) sound like social workers and/or voodoo profession wannabe's, so it came as no surprise - when the fellow turned to me and asked "Where do you think your ideas about women come fiom?" - at the saccharine undertone was there ("When we share our experiences with others, it helps us to get in touch with our innermost feelings and emotions").
"Where do you think your ideas about women come from?"
Two things:
Foremost, they originate from the research that I did for Mothers & Daughters. Not the voluminous reading of everything from nurse novels to voodoo pop (My Mother, My Self; Our Bodies, Our Selves; Our House-pets, Our, Selves, et al) to Women's Studies ["...and after all correlatives of the societal norm have been maximized through the intuitive, the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, through the hard-won maturation of our collective emotive a priori dispensation-construct: regarded (herein) not as the mere imitative imposition of the aforementioned "will to power" (the now universally discredited patriarchal model) but a new model founded upon, to reiterate, the intuitive, the nurturing and spiritually nutritive, pursuant to, but not inextricably bound within the ad hoc antecedent culture and/or cultural imperative blah blah blah"]. All I got out of that research, I already knew: a) women want to be raped by rich, muscular, handsome doctors b) women are completely self-absorbed and, thus, see themselves in everything around them and c) feminism is no different from communism in that all of its literature is founded upon convoluted syntax, bafflegab and academic jargon which paints a false (albeit attractive) picture of an unattainable utopia which can be achieved - easily! - by everyone in the world simply and simultaneously (in both feminist and communist literature the "crux point" is invariable) changing their basic nature overaight. Acknowledging - (grudgingly) the small likelihood of so sweeping a societal change coming about on its own, "a rigorous and thorough program of (communist and feminist literature share an admiration for the euphemism) re-education may be called for." That is, all "non-comrades, non-fellow travellers" must be subjected to unrelenting political indoctrination, sloganeering and brainwashing ("A woman's right to choose! A woman's right to choose!").
(I sense that my situation with feminism is comparable to that of pre-1989 writers faced with the task of "debunking" communism: how extensive, lengthy and intricate an explanation can one pursue in explaining that two-plus-two do not equal five, but in fact, equal four without - even in one's own view - treading well within the lunatic borders of the excruciatingly self-evident? I suspect that feminism, like communism, must be allowed to "strut and fret its hour upon the stage," "playing out" its manifold absurdities until even the most ardent and most willfully ignorant "true believer" comes to realize - as has happened with communism - that "there is no there, there.")
No. The research which most contributed to my "ideas about women" was the series of informal interviews I conducted with mothers and daughters - with mothers about their daughters, with daughters about their mothers, with daughters about their daughters, with mothers about their mothers. It was really the first time in my adult life that I spoke to women who I found physically unattractive and the first time I spoke to women with any motive besides getting them into bed. In the case of the attractive women that I interviewed, it was a guarantee that I was not going to get them into bed - "mothers and daughters," as subject, existing at the opposite end of the conversational spectrum from those topics which lead to sex - and (knowing that) for the first time in my adult life the intellectual, reasoning, "writerly" part of my mind was engaged when talking to women.
For the first while, I couldn't figure out what was wrong.