Virgins, Whores and Bullshit

My intention was to tell you all about the past 48 hours or so in the life of Jill, which included a marathon writing session, a trip to McDonald's with a six year old, a really long trek through Manhattan, a trip to a pub with some cool new friends, cooking for some old friends, seeing some interesting theater, and minimal sleep. Alas, my brain has gone off on a new tangent and my typing will have to follow.

Lately, I've been a bit concerned about my writing preoccupations. No, not my preoccupation with writing--I've had that since I started writing backstories for all my Barbie dolls instead of doing my religion homework in grade school. (Yes, I went to Catholic school. Yes, we had religion homework of the written kind.) Mostly the concern is with other people's concerns with my writing about men and sexuality. And it makes me angry that I'm even concerned.

I mean, I've embraced my pop culture obsession--hell, I even signed up for a highly enjoyable 8 week writing workshop devoted solely to pop culture writing. (Thus the new friends and the pub.) But you can put a spin on pop culture. You can write highfalutin' analyses of the kind that will get you fellowships into prestigious phd programs. You can engage in verbal sparring in a fascinating interview. You can write plays about your obsession with pop culture--plays for which you can partially earn a master's degree and then go on to sell out the house every night at fringe festivals. You can be a dis-affected Gen X'er--how else could you have turned out, wearing Wonder Women underoos at four, Batman flip-flops at five...? And people may look at you a bit odd, when you're the only woman poolside reading Japanese anime because you want to explore the Wachowski brothers' influences in creating The Matrix trilogy. Um...you call that vacation reading? But if your pop cultural tastes are within certain parameters, people respect you. People are also kinda freaked out by you, but they don't assume that you're just a dumb chick in a designer bikini.

But if you write about men, if you write about relationships with men, if you write entries of the kind that I've been writing on this website, or essays of the kind that I've been working on, certain people have certain reactions. And I know I shouldn't care, but they make me angry. All of a sudden I'm "wasting my brain," as if writing about the perennial questions of what it means to be a man or a woman is somehow not good enough, and I should be off somewhere in a lab coat doing experiments on poor defenseless monkeys for the glory of science. Of course this isn't new to me; I’ve heard stuff like this dating back to my high school days, but the writing about that phase of my life is pretty low on the priority list right now.

Unless you're doing what you love, you come home at night a bitter person, and that's not who I want to be.

Human beings have a variety of dimensions to their awareness and their intellect. Somehow, I hit some sort of genetic lottery that allows me to score ridiculously high on the kind of tests that our educational system is obsessed with. But just because our system doesn't test other things doesn't mean these other elements don't exist. So while being a writer draws heavily upon linguistic skills, other vital elements come into play. Like: interpersonal intelligence, "the ability to notice distinctions in the moods, temperaments, motivations, and intentions of others," (aka, studying people until you figure out what makes them tick. Then acting accordingly. Some people require less studying than others). And then there's intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to "access one's own feeling life, one's own range of emotions...to eventually label them...It requires evidence from language, music, or some other more expressive form of intelligence if the observer is to detect it at work." (Aka, studying yourself to eventually express what you discover artistically.)

(Quotes from Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences. He's co-director of Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education, just in case you really love those Ivy League credentials. Oh yeah, he also teaches Neurology and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.)

Now, I long ago decided to use my powers for good. I long ago became very cynical about the way we attempt to educate people, and the way we make people feel bad for their supposed inadequacies. I love books, but I don’t expect everyone to. I’m not condoning illiteracy, because we all need to get along in the world, and that requires the ability to read. But some people learn best by action—they need to feel things in their hands and participate to feel alive. And no matter how much I derive enjoyment from reading, I retain most by listening. I have a freakish ability to play back lectures, discussions and conversations in my head. So even though I’ve been historically successful in utilizing the skills that society pays lip service to, they’re not the skills that I necessarily want to rely on to make my living or define the way I live. My love of math could easily have earned me several vacation homes and a few sports cars by now. But I much prefer to study people.

If one is to exercise interpersonal or intrapersonal intelligence, one will discover the motivator of sex. Often. We're humans. We're here because other humans before us mated. And other non-humans before them. We mate. You cannot disassociate our physical needs and desires from the rest of our existence; without them, we wouldn't have an existence. It is interesting; it is intriguing; it happens to everyone. It's not shameful--it's life. If everyone experiences it, then why exactly is it not worthy to explore thoughts and feelings that other people really want to read about and discuss?

Organized religion has done a heckuva job at attempting such a disassociation, especially when it comes to women: virgins and whores, huh? Where exactly do the smart women go? For centuries, education & intellect was considered the man's realm, and women who fancied themselves philosophers were lumped with the whores. Today, though, women's intelligence seems repeatedly lumped with virginity. Smart girls are nerdy and therefore not desirable. Or smart girls are expected to "contribute to the world" and should not write about human desire. If you're attractive and like fashionable clothes (whore!), you must be stupid.

Many parts of the world are still filled with blatant sexism. I count myself lucky to have not been born in a country run by men who think female circumcision is the only way to validate their manhood. But we have biases of a different, more insidious nature. Many a respectable every-man (or every-woman) has been laden with subtle, hard-to-pin-down assumptions about how women should be--assumptions that preclude them from recognizing that there are alternatives to their worldview. And these people are in your life, though very well-disguised. When you least expect it, they're very very embarrassed of you or for you. (But unadmittedly, it's themselves that they're truly ashamed of.)

I'm not even talking about anything hard-core. I'm just talking about real, true evaluations what happens in people's minds, what happens between men and women. The truth hurts when you've been brainwashed that it shouldn't even exist. Women's desire is one of the most purposely-ignored truths.