in conversation with myself
the unified theory of the female sexual fantasy, body as performance art and scripting the epicentre of a woman
I have been falling asleep easily lately, slipping into slumber until I wake in the middle of the night again. I can’t poke and prod my boyfriend’s arm because he has no trouble staying asleep – fuck him! – which means that around 4-6 am I am tethered into my mind, accompanied by the swift breeze outside slapping against the window panes and the rhythmic white noise of his quiet breathing. Cornered in a room with my own thoughts, this is when we have our little chats.
Recently, I was appalled to know that some people do not have an internal monologue, I always thought it was a given to have a constant critical commentary going in the back of your head, one that leers and sneers and lurks at every move you make and develops several trains of thoughts that tag along with you everywhere you go. I do not think I could do without an internal monologue, more than often, they sound scripted and somewhere in the wake of the cold night, they split into two distinct voices. The discursive nature of my thoughts isn’t really concerning if you just see it as a default other who is always there to scribe my tirades, question and judge them, especially at nights. The conversation transforms from a skimmed paragraph to a succinct dialogue in no time and then we have our little chats.
RF – Hi.
RF – Hi, you look nice.
RF – no I don’t.
RF – not this conversation again.
RF – I am glad we can sit down and have a decent conversation, I appreciate it.
RF – of course.
R – I am so exhausted all the time, I can’t sleep I can’t get myself to write and If I don’t write, I get so exhausted again. I feel so pathetic complaining about this.
RF - There is nothing pathetic about pain. Neither is it pathetic to express that you are in pain.
R – I wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to myself, it’s embarrassing, it feels like an act.
RF – You and I both know very well that it isn’t and even if it was an act, so what? Women are taught to perform pain and anguish all their lives with the arch of their back in place and Hollywood sexy smile that puts their broken jaw in place. I do not really blame you though, Leslie Jameson in her essay, “The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” writes of the post wounded woman, she says, “What I’ll call “post-wounded” isn’t a shift in deep feeling (we understand these women still hurt) but a shift away from wounded affect: These women are aware that “woundedness” is overdone and overrated. They are wary of melodrama, so they stay numb or clever instead. Post-wounded women make jokes about being wounded or get impatient with women who hurt too much. The post-wounded woman conducts herself as if pre-empting certain accusations: Don’t cry too loud; don’t play victim. Don’t ask for pain meds you don’t need; don’t give those doctors another reason to doubt. Post-wounded women fuck men who don’t love them and then they feel mildly sad about it, or just blasé about it; they refuse to hurt about it or to admit they hurt about it—or else they are endlessly self-aware about it, if they do allow themselves this hurting.” You see, performed pain is still pain and you get into a pissing contest with yourself, a constant strife of distancing yourself from the wound that is your body, you guise your pain with jadedness, clever antics and mild discomfort.
RF - fuck you.
RF – You think of that too sometimes. You are very enamoured by the idea of fucking the self and the psychoanalytic primary narcissism that comes along with it.
RF – Why would I do that when I hate my body? Don’t you think it is so fundamentally miserable to be plagued by your own body so much so that you unabashedly write about it ever so frequently?
RF – I try not to dwell on my pain, but I think it is almost a reflex now, I have to fight against my better instincts and keep myself from eroticizing my own pain. Women are so often accused of eroticizing their bodies, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy really. You know the same happened after fleabag came out, you had a barrage of young girls on the internet so in love with their own pain, that the romanticization of suffering had turned into the digital category of the female body. Of course, that must be called out but it feels like toeing a very taut rope, because women are distilled to their bare essentials so often – troubled, a willing body and the lobotomized blank stare, so even the most genuine bar symptoms of the troubled woman stand at the risk of being eroticized and sexualised upon arrival. The pained women when she arrives is transformed by the mythology of her own body, and as long as her body is young and suffering, the myth remains. To be a woman, is to be plagued by the caricature of your own body.
RF – That sounds reductive, to take all my qualms with my self and shove it under the umbrella of the woman sounds dishonest, like an escapism of sorts.
RF – You’re being pedantic, I have spoken to enough women to understand the shared experiences of the female body, you aren’t evading accountability by acknowledging the wound that dwells within us.
RF – But what if I am the wound? What if, and you must consider this, that I have been wounded in so many places in so many parts of my body that I have transformed into the wound, a big old wound incapable of speaking for itself. I have excelled in the art of wanting to have my body articulate for me ever since I was a child. At age 8, after the incident with mother, my mother put me in a backless top and took me to school to collect my grades. Everyone kept asking me what the marks and bruises on my back were, I felt like an exhibit, I have tried so fucking hard all my life to have my body speak for me and the one time I desperately didn’t want it to, it screamed yelled threw a sucker punch and made itself seen. The one time I would have done anything to cover up and have my body stay mute in the language I speak in, it arrived and announced ‘I am here. Notice me.” My body has failed me in every way possible, it refuses to be my telephone line, I have begged and pushed it to translate my need to be captured into the world and it has failed me. It pains me to say this and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, my body is the ultimate wound, the ultimate betrayal of the self.
RF – It is interesting you say that because I do agree to an extent. Anne Carson, in her poem “the glass essay” describes the wound as “an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle”. And here you are, describing your body as the wound, the exposed column where the inside meets the outside, it is no man’s land, the inexorable land in between, like in Toba Tek Singh. Women’s bodies are characterised by their wounds, Phoebe Waller Bridger in one of her episodes has a character say, that women are born with pain inside them, while men have to seek it out. It is no surprise that you see your body that way. You say it “pains” you to say what you said, you understand how the act of admitting one wound creates and forges another, it is a dance you cannot stop dancing and that’s okay.
RF – Don’t you think that’s an outdated way of thinking of womanhood though? “Born with pain built in?” Some would call it bio essentialist, and even if I were to agree, it sounds cartoonish and made up.
RF – You’re playing devil’s advocate and you’re doing it terribly because why does it matter, some women are and some aren’t. Some women subscribe to the idea as a form of revolt against the wounds forming around them and some like to externalize their pathology. You aren’t just being projected upon, your body is very much real, it isn’t mythology. It might be the topic of contention of several proto feminist debates and academic texts, but your body is far from made up.
RF – I guess so. I mean, I know but sometimes, it does feel made up, something I willed into existence. The phrase "Out of Body” experience has always been so alien to me because I always feel like I am having an Out of Body experience. There is a disconnect between who I see myself as and the body, and no it’s not a dysphoria thing, I do not want to secretly have a willy before you suggest it but it always feels like the call is coming from inside the house, except I am on the outside and nobody’s letting me in. My body won’t let me in after a barrage of knocks and frankly, that’s humiliating. All the sensations in my body feel like they’re coming from miles away, I am hungry but why is my hunger standing at the door refusing to ring the doorbell? I want to take a piss, so why is my bladder not bending backwards to fulfil my whim? I feel like running away and that feeling is situated so far out of reach.
RF – The woman is situated in the centre of discourse every now and then and yet she is so out of reach – like an enigma. The objet petit a, as Lacan puts it, is projected upon ever so frequently by the desire of the other that now you cannot even find her even if she is right before. The woman’s body is post discursive; the fantasy of the woman’s body negates the individual woman’s fantasy. Her body is so used and avowed to existing in the public domain, maid palatable and digestible for perverse consumption and commodification, the individual woman cannot situate herself anymore. As a result of this contradiction, the universal female fantasy revolves around being seen, it is never about your own pleasure as must as it is about the aesthetic value your sight brings to you. Your sexual tension is rendered inanimate by the sight of the body, your body you scribe. Women get off to the conjured image of themselves, almost idyllic and photographic, the female body simply cannot escape the photographic gaze, Laura Mulvey talks about this in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, as a result of the superimposition of the gaze, your body exists in a frame perpetually.
RF – That is an interesting way of saying I can’t finish without picturing how I look in the moment, nice save.
RF – You are doing that thing again, the post wounded woman syndrome.
RF – Fine, I am sorry, I agree though. The situation of the woman’s body is forever going to be a topic of contention, and I am tired of it. I am tired of having to constantly locate the woman, in the subcontinent, in geopolitics, in the dominant discourse, even in my own body. This thing is supposed to be my own, my flesh and blood and yet it is an estranged appendage I want to get rid of.
R – Have you ever thought if whether you are the estranged appendage to your body? You constantly loathe and ridicule it, food for thought.
RF – You think I haven’t? You think I haven’t pressed up my ear against it and tried to listen ever so closely? I can tell when the butcher sharpens the knife, I press my ear against the beehive and hear the cacophony, I listen so well I can tell when my mother is going to well up in tears by the pace of her breathing, I was relieved for my father when his mother passed away because I knew how tormented he felt by his helplessness, I concealed details from my therapist because I could tell she was beginning to give up on me and then I listened some more, at the shopping mart, the whispers on the metro, the subway, in the long queues to pay the bills, at the retail store, I listen so much I have turned into a caveat of vacuum and yet I can’t tell what the fuck my body wants from me, I can’t tell what the gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach is and I can’t tell hunger apart from love.
RF – You keep rummaging your body for hints and treasures hunts in the middle of the night not realising your body is strangling you with the peaceful lull of sleep on its way. You are being cooed to dip into the newly washed sheets and you can’t tell that it’s your body’s way of telling you, that you’ve suffered enough. I don’t blame you; women make light of their suffering until they’re a beloved blueprint of it. They have been conditioned that they are walking trajectories of femininity and womanhood, that they embody the experience and it is their duty to perform and strip the guide to its barest essentials. You’ve seen it happen to women’s bodies time and time again, from Marilyn Monroe to Brittney Spears, these women have been the pinnacle of suffering and yet what that category does is mock their pain. The infamous picture of Marilyn Monroe in her bed with her posing with her legs crossed, and a come-hither look was taken at the peak of her depressive episodes, even in her most vulnerable time which was quite literally a cry for help, she is sexy and desired. It is thus no surprise you cannot listen to your body; you are exhausting all your resources and energy into looking desirable while you pretend to listen.
RF – When does it stop then?
RF – When does what stop?
RF – The pursuit of finding my body, the pursuit of integration, the need to be one with her, the pain that comes from the irreconcilable distance between us? When does that stop?
RF – I think it is a life long pursuit, to historicize your body is to know that you are never going to be resolved, there isn’t going to be a time where you feel “one” with your body, I don’t think anybody does and that’s okay, I don’t think there’s a point to waiting it out. You know for someone who loves La La Land, your need for resolution is unwavering and rich.
RF – what if it gets too much to bear?
RF– you keep going. You know Zizek says it is often the obstacle that sustains the ideal of perfection, maybe you need this more than you know.
RF – what if it gets too much to bear?
RF – You’ll live, especially when you realise that you’re no longer a girl waiting at the brim of things waiting to be believed, you need to stop expecting your body to do the labour of love by speaking for itself, you know this is a symbiotic relationship, you cannot leech off of your body.
RF – That’s very self-critical of you.
RF – Would you rather I sugar-coat?
RF- No, you’re right, I place the onus of communication on my body and get dejected when I have to end up articulating for it. I cannot control what happens, what is interpreted when I am looked at. My pathological need for control is driving me into places where I wouldn’t go without a gun, maybe abandoning self-portraiture is abandoning the visceral urge to control.
RF – Exactly, abandoning the pain project will not rid you of the pain but it could relieve you of the travesty that is experiencing pain so you can journal about it at the end of the day.
RF – But then what do I do with it? I take my sadness down to the river and I throw it away, but then I am still left with my hands.
RF – You don’t let it exhume your body.
RF – There is gutting guilt, my intestines are all lopsided, it’s dog shitting on the floor shame and I do not know what to do with it. Do I throw it away in the bin or do I keep it as memorabilia, there is so much of it, my body will not shed it every month for me.
RF – I don’t think your problem is the guilt as much as it is you thinking you feel a normal amount of guilt, you do not trust yourself or your body to know that you aren’t going to be transformed by the guilt and shame that haunts you, you have so little faith in yourself that you think something is going to click, you’ll give in to depravity and then you’ll have more guilt. You think you’re irreproachable –
RF - But I am
RF– cut the crap, your fatal flaw isn’t the disconcerting lacuna with your body or the pit in your stomach or fallible guilt that your body stores for you in parts and places, it is the lack of love for yourself, you are so obsessed with scripting the self and your body that you forget to be kind to it. You place so many statutes, limitations and barricades on your body that you forget that you’re only 19 and learning. You are so self-critical when your body is begging you for a brief moment of unironic kindness.
RF - I am sorry.
RF – It’s okay.
RF – Are you mad at me?
RF – No why would I be, it’s not your fault.
RF – you’re being too kind to me.
RF – well someone has to.
RF – I’ll talk to you soon, I am sorry again, today was very out of character.
RF – Hey it happens, you don’t have to worry about it, please get some sleep.
RF – You know Rishabh said something really sweet last night, I was feeling rather self-conscious about my body in the mirror and I told him it was okay and it’s my burden to keep, he said “Your burdens are ours to bear”
RF – I am in agreement with him, it has always been ours.
RF – I love you, sleep well.