I haven’t been getting along very well with women lately. I don’t like admitting this. To admit this is, I have been told, is to admit that I don’t like myself. That I have a problem with myself.
What’s wrong with you? Why do you hate yourself so much?
Most days, I like myself, and most days, I try very hard to get along with people, but I can’t deny that my relationships with women are much more complicated than they are with men. They are, honestly, so much more frequently unpleasant. I have left groups of women disliking myself, feeling sad and upset, in a way I have never felt leaving a group of men. A man wants to sleep with you or he doesn’t. If he wants to sleep with you, and you reject him, things can become tricky, though this is usually easily solved. He will want to be your friend, despite your disinterest in him, or he won’t, and he’ll make this clear.
I am friends with a number of men that I’ve turned down sexually, and these relationships are easy. I go to their homes and eat dinner. We go out drinking and they pass out on my couch and do not stumble into my room on accident. (Are the women in the audience thinking how full of myself I am? Do I need to say that men want to sleep with everyone, all of the time, and I’m nothing special?)
Oh, women. I am having such a hard time with you right now.
I am having such a hard time with myself.
I should mention that it’s five o’clock on a Friday and I’ve been drinking since noon. I had a bad time with a woman today. This has been brewing for some time. But, really, I just felt like drinking.
I digress.
With men, there is no subtext beyond sex. I can sit and talk with a man and not wonder whether he thinks I’m aiming to steal his lover, whether he thinks I’m smarter or more talented or more capable than he is. Whether he is more popular, younger. And, perhaps, more importantly, I don’t wonder about the path he has chosen, and how it differs from mine. Many of my friends in Mississippi married early, had children, joined country clubs and the Junior League. They have fake breasts and gigantic houses. They have husbands who ask me, every time, without fail, whether I am dating someone. I drink their beer and hate myself and feel like a loser because no matter what I tell them, they will think I’m a loser. My friends, their wives, dye their hair platinum and spend their days buying things and working out. When I go to their dinner parties, I hate them, and I hate myself, and I hate myself for hating them and I hate myself for not being what other people wanted me to be. And I wonder if I have failed or succeeded and I just don’t know. I have no idea.
All I know is that that isn’t my path, that I would not be happy with their lives, and yet I hate myself for not being able to be the kind of person who could be happy with that life.
There are so many ways in which I have failed to be what other people wanted.
Most days, I don’t think about it. We make choices. This is my choice and I wouldn’t change it and I’m okay with it, but then I talk to my mother and feel like a failure all over again.
I am attractive and unmarried. My looks could have bought me something I’m not cashing in on and looks don’t last forever. I am a bigger failure because I am divorced, and it was my decision to leave. I had everything a woman should want—money, a kind and attractive husband, a comfortable house—and none of it was enough. Not nearly enough.
I should add that I grew up in Mississippi, earned a BA in Psychology, and got married at twenty-two, which is to say I had no context, was unemployable, was a baby.
We were married on April Fools’ Day.
Perhaps this is simply a personality issue, or I am mentally unstable.
I’m a writer.
Have you seen the statistics? Fucking brutal.
What do you want, woman?
I don’t even know what I’m talking about anymore.
I’m sorry.
God, I’m so frequently sorry.
Are the women in the audience doubting my attractiveness? Perhaps they’ve seen photos on Facebook and would like to disagree?
I’m not gorgeous or anything.
I am sorry, women.
This isn’t really about you.
And I swear if I read another essay about how your life is hard because you’re female and men yell at you out their car windows and honk their horns and you feel objectified and silenced and marginalized, I am going to feel very, very violent. I don’t want to write one of those essays. I don’t want to talk about these things because I want to pretend they don’t exist. I want them all to go away. I want to insist that life has been good to me, that men have been good to me, that no one has ever hurt me.
But here I am writing one. Or a variation of one: why it sucks to be female. Why females have it so hard. How we hate each other and make our lives harder.
This is what I want to tell myself: GO FUCK YOURSELF.
It is true, then.
At a reading recently, my boyfriend had this conversation with multiple people:
Person at reading: So, you’re dating Mary Miller?
Boyfriend: Yes.
Person: Have you read her stories?
Boyfriend: Yes.
Person: [Walks away shaking head, feeling very sorry for boyfriend.]
People are uncomfortable with people like me, those who want to tell everything. Those who can’t keep quiet. You can do these things, and you can feel them and talk about them, but you can’t write them down. Just don’t write them down.
I don’t know what this essay is about anymore.
I am sorry.
***
Rumpus original art by Rachael Schafer.
32 responses
“Have you read her stories?” Ha!
This was raw and beautiful.
I’m sad at how much I can relate to this. And I’m relieved at how much I can relate to this. Thank you for writing it.
Thank God someone said this. It needed to be done.
The subtext with men is not always about sex. Sometimes it’s about the car you drive.
“I had a bad time with a woman today.” That is an essay I hope you also write. It almost feels like the cryptosubject some of this writing is trying to avoid.
Mary, I loved this. But then I’m a man. And unfortunately, nobody honks their horn at me or talks about my ass from their car windows.
Mary, you rock. I have felt like you many, many times. But these types — boobed women and their husbands — are not your people. Seek out your people.
Clearly you aren’t hanging out with GAY men. Also, you aren’t hanging out with the right women. But then again, if you’re insecure around women you AREN’T like, just imagine hanging with women that are as expressive, honest, independent, and “fuck all-y’all” as you.
“All I know is that that isn’t my path, that I would not be happy with their lives, and yet I hate myself for not being able to be the kind of person who could be happy with that life.”
This is my exact experience when I go home to Atlanta. Which is why I live in Pittsburgh.
I don’t relate to this at all. Maybe it’s because I’m a lesbian, but I don’t care what other people think of me and my life choices. I’m a success because I like my life. Those other people can do what they want. I ignore the men who honk or whistle at me, I shrug if women get catty with me. It just doesn’t matter.
It’s nice to hear a woman accepting what is so blatantly, and, I would THINK, endearingly true, that the subtext of hanging out with a man is sex. Always sex. So many American women seem to want to find something horrible in that, and turn it into a power-dynamic or an insult or a political football. It’s kind of like going around being angry at dogs because they constantly want to feltch a tennis ball. Imagine how boring your (heterosexual) life would be if men weren’t interested in having sex with you, i.e., if you were invisible to them the way men are to other men.
Be wary of equating a certain ‘type’ of women with ‘women’. These people who are not your people are not that way because they are women. They are simply not your crowd and you don’t need to worry about them. I agree with jsa that it feels like you’re avoiding a more real conflict.
Me, I’ve had simple, mutually supportive relationships with women and I’ve had convoluted relationships with men who were supposed to be my friends. And of course vice versa.
Thank you for writing this, I can very much relate. This made me cry and laugh at the same time.
Maybe it’s because I hang out with women who are as flawed, messy, fucked-up, creative, honest, struggling, thinking, working-shit-out-as it-happens, as me, but my experience with women is the complete opposite of what Mary talks about in this essay. Or maybe it’s just because I discovered riot grrrl and subversive, feminist, punk rock musicians, writers and thinkers way back in the nineties and my life (and view of the women in my world) was altered permanently for the better. Probably a combination of the two, but whatever it is, there’s no room for hate.
i dunno, mary. i think i like myself just fine. OTHER PEOPLE (read: women) want to make me not like me, and don’t like me because i’m not them. i’m supposed to be less smart or less attractive or less capable or more shallow or more nitpicky or more apologetic. or something. too many criteria that don’t interest me at all. men are far more accepting – fuckable or not is the limit of their criteria and i’m 100 percent good with that, even if i’m deemed not fuckable. either way, i don’t give a rat’s ass about boob jobs or marriage or kids – wanna be my friend? i could sure use a drink.
Mary,
I appreciate you had been drinking for 5 hours when you wrote this piece. Did you ever stop to think that there may be men in your life who want to hang with you because they want an intelligent or stimulating or emotionally challenging conversation with an adult as opposed to the boring as fuck conversations they invariably have with men about sport or chicks or cars or whatever other superficial crap they put up to prevent the exposure of any vulnerability? Then again, maybe you are hot and all guys just want to dance in your pants.
G
hmm. i remember clearly feeling this way throughout elementary school. and high school, and university. i was jealous of the apparent simplicity of relationships that men (and before them, boys) seemed to have with one another. simultaneously i have always known myself to be an extremely emotionally turbulent person who probably wasn’t capable of having these kinds of relationships. lately though i find that people are people. some people are more honest than others and those people are always absolutely the ones who are easiest to comprehend and be honest to in return, regardless of whether it’s in a friendly or non-friendly way. i think honesty is the key and it has nothing to do with what kind of junk you’ve got. – also, a more presicse comment – i think you calling these bleached rich ladies you hate your friends is a big lie and, maybe, a big part of why you feel so terrible about them. if you didn’t pretend to care about their petty shit you wouldn’t feel burdened by pretending, at the very least.
Hello from NYC! I don’t know your work. Just keep writing. That is your priority. Alot of the problems you refer to in your piece connect with the fact that US society is falling apart, so I don’t think I would be so harsh on myself if I was having problems communicating with men. Also…you don’t have to spend time in Mississippi, do you? My best wishes to you.
This is one of the major reasons why I disabled my Facebook account, except I can’t blame the women alone for it.
This is so funny. I love: “This is what I want to tell myself: GO FUCK YOURSELF.” I’m not sure why someone expressing a feeling like that would seem funny to me, because it’s not funny, even though you make it funny. Maybe it’s because I know that feeling all too well.
Be gentle with yourself off the page.
You don’t have to be sorry, we know who we are.
Perhaps we should feel sorry for them. Those unimaginative shallow bitches who crunch under our feet.
Lovely read.
In my reading of this piece – well, it isn’t “my experience” it’s Mary Miller’s, and that’s what I like about it. When I read it, I thought hard about the lines we cross, how hard it can be to write the kind of fiction that uses life like a landscape.
I tell old friends and family who aren’t writers, who don’t love me for my writing, that it’s fiction and it has become almost a joke with them. We try so hard to put something earnest and true in our work, and when it gets gobbled up by others out there it can be hard. They think they know our sex lives, our boyfriends, our husbands, our kids.
To me this is a very honest, ambivalent reflection on what it is to be both a writer and a “writer” – the persona – and all the problematic things that entails. It is also about being a woman, looking back to the people and places you came from. It is about a lot of things, and feels like a late-night conversation, sprawling and thoughtful and maybe unfinished, and that’s another reason I like it.
Mary,
The supreme honesty and vulnerability of this essay are only matched by its simple lyricism. And I relate, relate, relate. Thank you for writing the brave. I just finished BIG WORLD on Chloe Caldwell’s recommendation, and I think your work is so exciting.
lol, that was fantastic, yay you.
Hi there,
I like how your piece levitates over a few issues, which sort of how shame feels before the shame shitstorm hits, in my experience. Have you read Brene Brown’s work? I love her webs of critical awareness. Not that your piece asks for further reading. But Rumpus asks for comments! So there! Ha! I envision this piece printed on vellum paper, and underneath a web of the shame triggers in your life, watercolor, by Rachael Schafer. 🙂
I accept your apology on behalf of women in general. 😉 Your piece is beautiful.
There are many great women out there that are waiting to meet you. Your current crop of friends are not cutting it.
Thanks so much for taking the time to comment, y’all!
I’m glad you understood that this is how I felt at one time on one day, while drinking, and not how I feel in general.
I know lots of amazing women, and count many of them as friends.
Also: there’s some hyperbole here, quite a bit, actually, and I’m glad most of you understood that, too.
Mary, I loved it. It made me want to drink and write. In that order.
RAY RAY SAYS:
November 21st, 2012 at 9:41 am
The subtext with men is not always about sex. Sometimes it’s about the car you drive.
The subtext of the car you drive, is sex.
I was also married at 22, with a psych degree, to a very successful man.
Yawn. I also left and no one understands (it was 15 years ago). Yes, it is always sex, men always want sex, and that is ok. A dog always wants table scraps, good ones, bad ones, and he does not always get them, but we still love the dog; he is simply being a dog, and we still love the men, too. Undertones are sometimes the only things turning a dull day into something worth getting dressed for.
Greatest piece.
Thank you for writing this. I love this so much. I understand and I love it.
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