An awful lot of the readers of this newsletter are women, which means a lot to me. This is in part because women just read more generally, one of the many qualities I, as an ambulant literary node, like about them. I think what a lot of women like, and feel oddly starved of by the publishing industry, is the perspective of an ordinary man writing honestly about his life. Indeed, female readers have told me that they feel frustrated that so much of the writing done about the male experience is by women, and, though I see nothing wrong with getting that perspective, women will never be the defining authorities on what it is to be a man. Some essential criteria is missing.
The inverse applies too – that men can never offer an insider’s view of the female view of the world, tho the history of literature shows that men have certainly tried.
As a man, I do think about women a lot; I started out wanting to understand women in order to get them to like me, and as I get older just want to understand women because they are like me. And also not.
As I get older, there are fewer and fewer women I relate to sexually and more on more to whom I have a different, more considered relationship. Some men find this shift difficult, particularly in their becoming being irrelevant to younger women – tho from where I sit trying to keep up the life of a roué just seems humiliating after a certain age.
It takes a lot of men a long while to get to that stage and some never do. Even as a stereotypical empathetic liberal I'm sorry to say it took me decades to get to the point where, for example, I consumed books by female writers without obsessing unduly about their author’s gender. By now I am deep into the process of interacting with the words of women and deepening my sense of the female experience. It’s all there for anyone who wants to find out. Sometimes you hear men still talk about the ‘unknowability’ of women, their ‘Sphinx-like nature’, all in face of a vast body of words by women and about being women; ‘Who could ever hope to understand the mysteries of woman!’
Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s de facto impermissible for a man to share his thoughts on the female experience. Some would argue the precise opposite, that the male monopolizing of female experiences over the centuries mean men should now refrain from commenting on women’s lives at all; as my tutor at university used to tell me, it was time for women to tell their own stories from their own mouths.
And that it was time to men to shut up and listen.
I get that desire for male silence, that we have delighted you long enough, but fundamentally I think men and women have the same rights as ever to write about each other’s lives whatever the historical context. You can’t honestly say the world would be better without Madame Bovary, or John Ames, or Clarice Starling, or Mr Rochester - all characters created by authors of the opposite sex. Indeed, one of the greatest films I’ve ever seen on the subject of masculinity, ‘Beau Travail’, was made by a female director. I do believe the sexes can get each other, and not just because we’re all people, but in the sense of intuitively understanding each other’s differences.
Indeed, I’d wager they’re more capable of doing so now than ever, the modern male and female experiences being, at least in Western Europe, less segregated than in previous eras. Certainly, until children come onto the scene, I think the experiences of men and women in the modern Western world are characterized as much by similarity as difference.
And yet I remain convinced men and women are different. That we have different experiences of life. You can explain this by culture or biology or both but for me it’s above all a subject. The writer Theodore Zeldin said, talking about his decision to interview so many women for his books, that he was interested in women because he wasn’t one. Indeed, I believe that, just as there are things both sexes fundamentally misunderstand about each other’s experience, there are some things only the opposite sex can perceive about the other’s position – in the same way it seems to be evident to everyone outside liberal America that Joe Biden is now too old to President.
I am sure many of my female readers object to women being treated as a class at all. Not least because the experiences of individual women are always so different. Indeed, the most common negative response I will get from female readers to a piece like this is, no matter how I try to stress that my account of matters is inevitably partial, they do not see their own experience reflected within it1.
Yet of course all women do have a unifying experience; their oppression as a sex. Which means, as De Beauvoir said, that the fact of being a woman is more significant to a woman than being a man is to a man. To a certain extent, it is oppression which creates a class of people; oppression which forces them to consider themselves, no matter how little they feel they have in common, as a group.
I have been thinking, in this vein, about women and freedom. Perhaps I just like the words, in the way I like one of my favourite novel titles, ‘Kvinnor och äppelträd’, ‘Women and apple trees’. But there’s something I’m trying to get at it, that I want to look into more, in the way women relate to what we understand in the West as freedom, the freedom to shape our adult lives.
In my female friends, I see the coupling of their desire for women’s greater societal freedom to be profited from and maintained alongside a difficulty in acknowledging the contradictions and discontent it brings, a strange and anxious sense of ‘It was supposed to be different than this.’
The result seems to me to be that a lot of modern women aren’t having a very good time. Of course, many men aren’t either, but there are features of the modern female unhappiness which seem more specific to the sex. I always find the expectations around social media presentation particularly toxic for women, with the unspoken constant performing of people’s best lives over the top of the ordinary miseries of the human experience; #blessed is female-coded.
Often I’ll see a woman posting a whirl of images and items of her ‘best life’, photographed in exotic climates, Aperol Spritz and sun hat, captioned with messages as to how she is happier than ever before – only to be followed by a post a few months later about how the last period had been the worst of her life. Why is it so hard for some women to admit their ordinary human unhappiness?
I do think social media can be particularly unhelpful for women by offering a means to solicit the constant assessment of their own beauty and popularity. There is no end to the seeking of online approval, as the approval of strangers can never truly satisfy.