feminish

I try to be here in my body as often as I can.

I remember my feet, and let them sink into the floor under my desk. I feel my bottom where it meets the chair, and my elbows on the desk. And I notice my forehead sinking towards this screen, and reel it in.

The Patterner sat well this morning. His breath furled and unfurled, he said. Like a long, soft banner into the wind. (Or like a chameleon’s tongue, I said. Or like one of those plastic party horns, I might have added, but didn’t.)

Sometimes my breath is steady, falling into my lungs and breezing out again gently. Sometimes it bathes me like water lapping in and out of the shore. Other times it gets caught, taut around my chest, like apron strings in the washing machine.

Which is what happened yesterday, when I read this:

There is a species of philosophy which flourishes still, and will no doubt continue to flourish as long as men continue to meditate on their moral nature and situation. I refer to that kind of more or less systematic reflection on the human situation which one finds in the work of, say, Heidegger, Sartre and Nietzsche… a kind of reflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human life and experience.

The analytical philosopher, on the other hand - at least as I conceive him - promises no such new and revealing vision. His aim is something quite different.

What is it, then, his aim? What is he concerned with? Well, with ideas or concepts, surely. So his self-awarding title of ‘analytical philosopher’ suggests ‘conceptual analysis’ as the favoured description of his favoured activity.

This is from the opening to An Introduction to Philosophy by P.F.Strawson (”one of the most distinguished of living philosophers”, published Feb 28, 2006) which I was flicking through on Amazon’s bookreader.

I’m quite a slow reader, mostly because I read the words out silently in my head as I go along. And I’m a girl, and I was taught that ‘his’ could never mean ‘mine’, and that to talk about ‘him’ was to talk about someone who could never be me - because he has a willy and I do not. So it’s very hard, as I’m reading these words silently in my head, to think this abstract vision of a philosopher could possibly refer to me. For the first time in the day I felt like I was cast into an entirely separate, parallel, female, dimension - a huge glass wall dividing me and all these philosopher men, meditating away, “self-awarding” themselves titles.

Playing around with Amazon’s book-search tool, I learned that the pronoun “he” appears no less than 59 times in this book - and “she” once, in a sentence mildly mocking Isabella of Castille. The book uses the possessive pronoun “his” 45 times and “her” twice - the first time it’s a woman being kissed and the second it’s Isabella being confused again.

I then played this game with the whole of the web - a bit of a one-dimensional quantitative version of Twisty’s Friday Patriarchy Check googling “women”:

“he”: 1,980,000,000
“she”: 911,000,000
“his”: 1,810,000,000
“her”: 93,000,000

Who’s disappearing us away? There are more women in the world than men, no?

I try to be here in my body as often as I can.

I remember my feet, and let them sink into the floor under my desk. I feel my bottom where it meets the chair, and my elbows on the desk. And I notice my forehead sinking towards this screen, and reel it in.

The Patterner sat well this morning. His breath furled and unfurled, he said. Like a long, soft banner into the wind. (Or like a chameleon’s tongue, I said. Or like one of those plastic party horns, I might have added, but didn’t.)

Sometimes my breath is steady, falling into my lungs and breezing out again gently. Sometimes it bathes me like water lapping in and out of the shore. Other times it gets caught, taut around my chest, like apron strings in the washing machine.

Which is what happened yesterday, when I read this:

There is a species of philosophy which flourishes still, and will no doubt continue to flourish as long as men continue to meditate on their moral nature and situation. I refer to that kind of more or less systematic reflection on the human situation which one finds in the work of, say, Heidegger, Sartre and Nietzsche… a kind of reflection which can sometimes lead to a new perspective on human life and experience.

The analytical philosopher, on the other hand - at least as I conceive him - promises no such new and revealing vision. His aim is something quite different.

What is it, then, his aim? What is he concerned with? Well, with ideas or concepts, surely. So his self-awarding title of ‘analytical philosopher’ suggests ‘conceptual analysis’ as the favoured description of his favoured activity.

This is from the opening to An Introduction to Philosophy by P.F.Strawson (”one of the most distinguished of living philosophers”, published Feb 28, 2006) which I was flicking through on Amazon’s bookreader.

I’m quite a slow reader, mostly because I read the words out silently in my head as I go along. And I’m a girl, and I was taught that ‘his’ could never mean ‘mine’, and that to talk about ‘him’ was to talk about someone who could never be me - because he has a willy and I do not. So it’s very hard, as I’m reading these words silently in my head, to think this abstract vision of a philosopher could possibly refer to me. For the first time in the day I felt like I was cast into an entirely separate, parallel, female, dimension - a huge glass wall dividing me and all these philosopher men, meditating away, “self-awarding” themselves titles.

Playing around with Amazon’s book-search tool, I learned that the pronoun “he” appears no less than 59 times in this book - and “she” once, in a sentence mildly mocking Isabella of Castille. The book uses the possessive pronoun “his” 45 times and “her” twice - the first time it’s a woman being kissed and the second it’s Isabella being confused again.

I then played this game with the whole of the web - a bit of a one-dimensional quantitative version of Twisty’s Friday Patriarchy Check googling “women”:

“he”: 1,980,000,000
“she”: 911,000,000
“his”: 1,810,000,000
“her”: 93,000,000

Who’s disappearing us away? There are more women in the world than men, no?