Black Milk - Elif Shafak [67]
Could she be right, I wonder. Maybe I did somehow turn myself into Madame Onion. A woman who refuses to draw attention to her Body because she wants to be respected for her Brain, who dresses up in layers when she goes out in public. I always hide myself behind clothes, using them like armor. And whenever I pose for an interview, I make sure I don’t smile too much, in order to not be taken lightly in a male-dominated environment. I try to look damn serious, and, often, older than I am.
“Now, those novels of yours . . .” mutters Blue Belle Bovary as she smoothes on a papaya hand cream—like an odalisque in an Orientalist painting.
“What’s with my novels?”
“Oh, nothing, it’s just that sometimes I get the impression that you female writers can’t write about sexuality as freely as male writers do. Your sex scenes are always short, almost nonexistent. You know how, in the old movies, when a couple was about to make love, the camera would drift off to the side? Well, that is precisely how you women write about sexuality. Your pens drift off the page when you run into a sex scene!”
“That’s so not true,” I protest. “There are plenty of women writers who write lavishly about eroticism and sexuality!”
“Yes, darling, but I’m not talking about romantic or erotic novels,” she says. “Just because I said I like satin and desire doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. Obviously I’m aware that most of the writers in these genres are women. But that is hardly the topic. I’m not talking about those kinds of books.”
Standing up, she flicks her hair with a quick toss of her head. “I’m talking about highbrow literature here. No offense, darling, but the number of women novelists who can write bluntly about sexuality is slim to none.”
“There must be a way,” I say, still not fully convinced.
“Oh, there is,” she says with an impish smile. “Female novelists can write freely about sex only under three conditions.”
“Which are?”
“The first condition is lesbianism. If the woman writer is lesbian and open about it, what does she have to fear? Lesbian writers tend to be better at writing about the body than your lot.”
While Blue Belle Bovary continues with her monologue, I find myself growing increasingly captive to her silky voice and exaggerated gestures. It is too late to wonder where this conversation is going. Instead I ask, “And why do you think that is?”
“Probably because since they are already stigmatized, they can speak about sensitive subjects without fear of stigma. This makes them more interesting and sincere.”
Of this I know a good example. The American writer Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking novel Rubyfruit Jungle came out in the 1970s and challenged the mainstream society’s approach to not only sex and sexuality but also lesbianism. Another example is Tipping the Velvet by the British novelist Sarah Waters, who calls her books “lesbo historical romps.”
“The second condition, darling, is age. When you are an ‘old woman writer’ in the eyes of society, you are free to write about sex as much as you want. Old women are thought to be above nature. They can talk about sexuality to their heart’s content and it will be called wisdom.”
Alexandra Kollontai comes to mind—Russian revolutionary, social theorist, writer. Though she wrote passionately all her life, criticizing bourgeois moral values, celebrating love and sexuality as positive forces in life, in her older age she expressed herself even more unreservedly about such topics. Kollontai defended the economic, social and sexual emancipation of women—views that did not make her popular among the ruling elite. She developed her theory on non-possessive love and sexuality in her novel Red Love and a controversial essay titled “Make Way for the Winged Eros,” which was bitterly criticized by the leading figures of the Communist regime.
In a charmingly honest and compelling essay for The New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver