WATCH ME FAILING

Good women. They are nowhere to be found. They were either born to remain beyond reach, or – and this is even more probable – they were not born at all.

I know for sure I am not one of the good ones.
Another thing that I do know is that there is a frightening uniformity of thought among women, which – please trust me on this – expresses anything but solidarity. And there is also a frightening uniformity of look among women which expresses anything but aesthetic agreement.

I know and I sense that there is something deeply wrong with this inability of making a difference as a woman in a late modern world. Deeply wrong and extremely hypocritical!

Although, over the years, women gained a sense of vanity, of competition and existential despair that were once specific to men, they rarely do anything interesting and original with these. They get to ask themselves “what do I really want?”, and then they end up becoming oversimplified cliché-examples of a feministic ethos.

So she is never herself. She loses herself and she also loses, in the process, her kindness and her strength. She becomes, instead, weak in the heart. She thinks she is proud, but she has become a coward. She thinks of herself as some kind of Amazon woman, but the truth is she has become just like everybody else: selfish, depressed, unhappy, on and off Prozac.

Whatever might have been different and unique about her has been (successfully) erased. No, this is not self-loath, it is self-deceiving.

She thinks she has finally reached a point where she can safely say that she has “embraced” her body and mind, but – make no mistake! – the exact opposite is true. She has no contact with herself! She does not approve of her own physiology, she feels trapped in every way by her own metabolism (from the way she stores fat to the unfortunate ability of carrying children). She is exasperated by the way her brain engages in decision-making and problem-solving, and she cannot stand her underdeveloped muscles. When she goes to the gym late in night to lift weights after a hard day’s work in a man’s career field, she knows she does the right thing: she is strong and getting stronger.

She is so free, she does not live in her body and mind anymore; she only lives outside herself, outside herself, spending her days and nights camping on a battlefield. She has completely forgotten how it is like not to be at war.

She misunderstands her own physical appearance and her innermost will. She is too fat or too skinny for her own taste (depending on the ideological model du jour), and she never ceases trying to overcome her need to “compromise” herself by meeting a man halfway.

She is not human because she has no genuine human experience. She is a woman because she transcends every human limitation. And no one f***s with her. Or with her cause.
That is why her solemnity looks fake; her children (if she has any) – disordered gamers; her husband – porn-addicted; her designer dress – meaningless; and this text – a failure.

failing(Foto: Dead-end Street/Adela Toplean)

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De Adela Toplean

Adela Toplean este doctor în filologie, activează din 2003 în Death Studies cercetând atitudinile contemporane în fața morții, a publicat numeroase studii de sociologia morții în Marea Britanie, Suedia și Germania. A studiat la Universitatea din București, Sorbona (Paris V) și Universitatea din Lund, a fost bursieră a Institutului Suedez și a Colegiului Noua Europă, este membru al Association for the Study of Death and Society. Din 2011 este asistent universitar la Facultatea de Litere a Universității din București.

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