My Experiments With Gender

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I could, even for five minutes, think, feel, and act as a woman. Precisely in what ways would I 'see', perceive, or experience the world differently? Would the sky, the flowers and the trees, the birds and the dogs, the people on the streets, the milkman in the morning, the young lady at the ticket-counter, the old bus-driver in a white beard, my male cousins and my close friends, my uncles and my aunts, would they all look or 'feel' the same way as they do to me right now? And here I don't mean what I think or feel the way a woman thinks or feels is (I can, of course, build up an imaginative 'mental picture' for this) but the 'lived or felt experience' of the way a woman thinks and feels from the 'inside'. My male friends, for example : if I were to beome a woman for the next five minutes, would I then see them as stupid, idiotic, moronic, dumb, likeable, attractive, desirable, warm, compassionate, kind, cool, funny, snazzy, cheerful, or what?

Till such a miracle gender-switch becomes possible (perhaps through a Star-Trek style Experience Machine that you can plug onto), I must perhaps satisfy myself with carrying out thought Experiments on Gender. Here then is one attempt, my female (?) persona writing to herself.

Dear Miss Ironist,

Yes, coming back to what I was saying, I was wondering the other day about this strange thing that we women have, the need for strong, powerful, and lasting bonds that endure throughout our fragile lives, a need which would seem impossible to be fulfilled in this fleeting world of ours that stands under the sign of impermanence where things dissolve and decay with the passing years. I wonder if men ever quite manage to get their thick heads around this thing of ours; for even when they superficially seem to do so, they immediately subsume it under technical terms of their own devising, thereby expropriating our corporeal experiences to further some etherealised theory of theirs with a view to obtaining an academic promotion. Consequently, I feel that men completely miss the visceral quality of our aches, joys, tortures, smiles, and hopes, treating these are mere categories for building up their elaborately structured conceptual cathedrals.

And yes, I even wonder whether men quite understand the deep attraction that the promise of future happiness holds out for us, an attraction that sometimes leads us to stake our entire lives on one individual, goal, or end even without being sure which way they will lead us. Men, of course, like to boast that they are singularly capable of such heroic leaps of faith into the hazy and distant unknown; however, when they do finally get around, after a lot of quasi-solipsistic cogitation, to making the long-awaited leap, they usually leave behind a smoky trail of violence, destruction, bloodshed, tyranny, and anarchy.
And yet, looking back now at all the men whom I have met, interacted with, and known in the last sixty years of my life, I cannot bring myself around to condemning them in unequivocal terms as a perfidious lump of malignant evil. Indeed, I have met my fair share of men whom I have known to be capable of perpetrating horrific evils on women by propagating their pet theories, at once bizarre and ludicruous, about their physical, mental, biological, logical, emotional, and spiritual superiority. But in spite of all that, the more men that I have got to know, the more that I have felt that there is something achingly human about this rather obstuse (and, at times, stubborn) species of our genus. Perhaps men need a bit of reminding now and then, especially every time they go running after the far end of the rainbow, that they are, after all, mortal beings made out of the clay of the earth. If only they could stop being so childish and grow up soon, for heaven's sake! Sigh.
Anyways, my dear, I have taken up too much of your time again blabbering away like an old fool. How silly of me to detain you with all this men-talk! Surely you are wise and old enough by now (oh dear, I hope I don't sound grandmotherly now, I really wouldn't wish to) to know that whereas some men aren't quite what they seem to be on the surface, some of them, for all their childish stupidities, are indeed pretty much what they seem to be, all the way up and all the way down. Knowing which is which usually turns out, believe me, to be every (?) woman's worst nightmare! (Or should I say that the worst is actually that vainglorious man who deliberately tries to pretend that he is not, in his depths, what he displays of himself on the surface, and vice versa?)
You know, in the German Rhineland where I grew up before the Second World War, there is a rural proverb that the older that women grow, the more (and not less!) obsessed that they become with men. Trust me, even at my old age of sixty today, men haven't stopped fascinating me one whit : those joyful little bundles of contradictions, slippages, and complexities, from which there emanate, once in a while, those delightfully warm rays of radiant light that make your stomach churn and urge you to overlook all their ambiguities (yet again!). Yes, we women really become such fools when it comes to our men! We would readily forgive foibles in a man that we would never put up with if a woman had committed them.

So long, you must now get back to your rings of conceptual paradoxes! And so must I too --- to be with my men!
With best wishes,

Miss Ironist