The Bride’s Toilet, Amrita Sher-Gil. National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi.
When the boys start talking about Plato you keep your mouth shut.
Years down the road when your lives have added up to something, you hope, and they interview you for a magazine profile (there’s a whole genre of these: Sasha and Beto, Sheila and Barack), you’ll say that you were content to let him play the star, you didn’t have anything to say about The Symposium anyway, and he and his housemate with the giant law books did. You hope you make a good sponge, that listening to other people will make up for your lack of a canonical education in college.
The housemate with the giant law books says, According to Plato true philosophy can’t be written.
So all working philosophers are frauds? you ask.
Well, not necessarily. It’s just that the stuff that’s written isn’t. True philosophy I mean.
Later, one of them: My favorite part is when Alcibiades walks in and talks about how Socrates fucked him.
Oh, you mean literally — ?
Yeah, it’s all about love between men, because you can’t truly love a woman, they’re not equals.
You think about Alcibiades and Socrates and the love between men and women when you brush your teeth, considering whether or not you should pee now or after sex, which you’re not sure is going to happen. You’d drink more water if it’s likely so you could pee a lot afterwards, a ritual that has sunk to the level of a superstition in your life because you’re not sure it does anything or if you’ve just been lucky. You know girls who do everything right and still get UTIs, there was your political science friend who ended up in the hospital with a fever and an IV stuck in her arm. She sent a picture. From the crinkles at the corners of her eyes you assumed she was smiling gamely. You couldn’t tell for sure because of the mask. All this trouble because of sex with some reticent out-of-towner who couldn’t manage dirty talk. A whole hour, she tells you indignantly, of fucking in silence.
It’s not romantic to ask someone what are the odds we’ll fuck so I can calibrate my hydration levels accordingly. You try to be romantic. You become docile and sweet around him, a little neutered. You pad softly around the house and speak in a different way sometimes. You know it’s disgusting but you can’t help it. There’s one day in the fall when you get on your knees and you scrub the toilet with disinfectant cloths, Kirkland Signature brand in a yellow plastic package. You press against the white porcelain so vigorously the disinfectant juice drips down onto the black grout.
You cleaned his bathroom? asks his friend — the birthday girl at a dinner — indignantly. You’re not his wife, don’t be doing wifey shit!
You’re sitting across from her on the patio of a brick restaurant that serves fancy pizzas and craft beers luminous under fairy lights. She seems so sure of things. The kind of person who you picture in your head as always wearing a blazer. Your age but married.
You wonder if the girl’s command, don’t be doing wifey shit, is actually the reverse of what the logic of hetero coupling would dictate, that if marriage is the normative end goal of dating and men (immature, Dionysian, frightened of commitment) have to be convinced to get there, then wouldn’t your happy homemaker pantomime be part of the audition? When you get the part, you needn’t try so hard. Except you have to keep the part, and then it subsumes you. In the show The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, she wakes up hours before her clueless sleeping husband to put on pancake makeup and curlers; he’s never actually seen her bare face.
Almost everyone you know sees only your bare face. In this regard you feel unburdened by high expectations. Still you’re afraid to be too feral sometimes, to show your unruly parts.
You save this for a night you see a friend, whose newly formalized relationship you learn about from Instagram. The two of you sit in the public parklet by a yuppie downtown bar, metal chairs cold against your legs, and talk loudly about yeast infections and IUDs and her famous gynecologist who you’ve heard on public radio. There’s a real joy to yelling about vaginas in public, even though it’s a conversation about pain.
My gynecologist said IUDs can get contaminated, she says.
Jesus Christ, you respond. I thought they figured that out after Dalkon Shield.
(The Dalkon Shield was an IUD introduced in the 1970s, that was phased out after injuries, loss of fertility, septic pregnancies, and deaths that were caused because its multifilament string transported bacteria into the uterus.)
You wonder why sometimes the closest you’ve ever felt to other women has been in these moments when you rail against your own bodies. You were trained by Girls on HBO and the Fleabag menopause soliloquoy and the Statue of Liberty in Big Mouth after Jessi gets her first period. You talk with women whose names you barely know about the blood when it’s too much, the blood when it doesn’t come. The shitting! You can run searches in your message history and find a whole sorority of anal fissures and lactose intolerance and IBS.
No one’s supposed to know I shit, your friend in the parklet says.
You howl with recognition. You laugh so much and then on your walk back in the night you think, Why are you talking so much about your bodies? Is this why you’ll never be philosopher-kings?
When you were a little kid you lived so much in the world of ideas. At bedtime your father read to you from biographies of philosophers and scientists. You cracked up at Descartes for being so cold one night he shut himself in a room with an oven. You went on walks with your mom and sister where you’d climb to the top of a boulder in the local park and deliver impromptu speeches. You watched the news with your parents and adopted their political allegiances, became a rah-rah baby partisan. In museums, your mother quizzed you to see if you’d read all the information plaques. She asked your friends if they liked the education system and what kind of world they wanted to live in and if they believed in God, and she asked you too. In those days, you never thought about your body unless there was an open wound.
Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex,
Man vainly forgets that his anatomy also includes hormones and testicles. He grasps his body as a direct and normal link with the world that he believes he apprehends in all objectivity, whereas he considers woman’s body an obstacle, a prison, burdened by everything that particularizes it. ‘The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities,’ Aristotle said. ‘We should regard women's nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.’ And Saint Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an ‘incomplete man,’ an ‘incidental’ being. This is what the Genesis story symbolizes, where Eve appears as if drawn from Adam's ‘supernumerary’ bone, in Bossuet’s words.
You didn’t need to read Aristotle to assume your own defectiveness, and maybe it’s inured you and other women to unthinking subservience or unremarked-upon pain. You step out of the way, write a too-long explanatory email, say sorry. How much sex have you had where it hurt? Almost always with people who would be horrified to know — both that it happened, and how little you’ve intervened.
A scene that’s probably happened more than once: naked with someone, stating matter-of-factly that you can lie down on the bare floor.
Are you sure?
Yeah, I don’t think you can handle it.
Not as a disparagement, only that it takes someone divorced from their own comfort to put their skin on cold concrete or hardwood boards or cheap gray institutional carpet, be pushed back and forth against an unforgiving surface that rains flat blows on your shoulders and spine and skin. You were trained for this, too. There was no length of stay in the world of ideas that would give you a language for some different answer. You can talk about utility and virtue and Simone de Beauvoir and you still wake up with this body. Still inconvenient and weary and finite, needy and pliable and desirous, apologetic and confused. How many times has there been a doorstop in your throat when someone asks, What do you want?
So you think and you think, tonguing the wound.
What you like about the speech by Alcibiades in The Symposium is that he’s wounded, too, reflecting on past love, a more recent night he spent at Socrates’ side where they no more slept together than a father and a son and he felt humiliated, rejected. I went around more completely enslaved to this person than anyone else has ever been to anyone. But here are some questions you’ll never know the answer to: did Socrates use lube when he fucked Alcibiades? Did Socrates and Alcibiades ever fuck on a hard floor or a public place, and if it hurt, if it hurt like hell, would one have said anything or would he have simply received every knock into the ground like a sacrament?
You can’t speculate; true philosophy isn’t done in writing, you’re told, and besides, you are a woman.
what I’ve been bringing up incessantly in conversations this week: Danielle Carr’s piece on attachment theory