Gender is an abyss of pain

A week or so ago, I bawled while listening to

Ruth Whippman

interview

Francesca Cavallo

.

Though, to be fair, I was more than a bit out of sorts for other reasons when I hit play.

I’d recently noticed a dip in my number of paid subscribers.

It hurt my feelings and made me doubt myself. I (felt like I was) publishing good stuff at high volumes. The thought of having to get a salaried job had me in bed for longer than usual for a few days. I started punishing myself by saying “The market has spoken.”

I finally put it off by telling myself I’ll publish a book before giving up. I copied and pasted all my essays on men from the past two years together in one Google Doc. I’m skimming through and organizing all 107,521 words into chapters now.

Let’s get back to the bawling, though. Francesca Cavallo is a children’s book author. She’s written at least one best-seller about girls. Whipmann was interviewing her about her follow-up, aimed at boys.

The first gut punch from Cavallo was her description of children’s stories: “[Boys] were learning that they were either saving the princess, or they didn’t have a reason to be in the story.”

Damn.

Then Cavallo hit me with the best way to describe masculinity I’ve ever heard:

“An abyss of pain.”

I love the image of an abyss. It’s immense, and also dark. It implies areas that are hard to access, which remain uncharted. It evokes volumes unmeasured.

A boy is not allowed to have an inner life, Cavallo explained. Whatever interiority he manages to develop he must never examine.

In that moment, I felt the pain I’m in all the time. And I sobbed.

I realized that I’m obsessed with men and their pain because gender hurt me too.

All I have is inner life. I’m obsessed with examining (and sharing) my interiority. And yet, I’ve never felt like I was girling right. I was never selfless enough, friendly enough, pretty enough, good enough. I was too blunt, too horny, too opinionated, too angry. Things that were supposed to come easy to me didn’t.

Men who read bits and pieces of my writing sometimes tell me they think I think I’m better than them.