Your Needs, My Needs
What Was I Made For? What was made for me? Governments, cities, institutions, and suburbs were designed by men for men. Where does that leave women?
August 18, 2024
Caveat: this is not a peer reviewed article, it started out as an emotional journal entry and therefore I say some things in here that aren’t necessarily factually or universally true, but sometimes it feels like it.
“I’m sad again, don’t tell my boyfriend it’s not what he’s made for.” Billie Eilish & Finneas O’Connell
Feeling glum. Suddenly and unexpectedly, but right on schedule. Lonely. Resentful that the world I live in has been designed with only Raj’s needs in mind (he’s not to blame, these problems are systemic not individual); his tax-payer subsidized public tennis courts, multiple conveniently located casinos for poker (I wouldn’t be surprised if casinos get breaks from the municipalities where they operate). His brain is more naturally suited to the capitalist/market/patriarchal society we live in. The work environment doesn’t stifle his personality or sap his energy (there are men this doesn’t apply to probably — may not be exclusively a Y chromosome thing ;). The smart phone, the apps, the suburbs, the roads, the cars, the megalopolis that is Phoenix — constant variety and stimulation, superficial rarely turning into deep connection — all designed by the man for the man.
His experience is not my experience. My yoga studio membership is an expensive luxury few can afford even though the health benefits of yoga are superior to tennis and won’t destroy your shoulder. The work he does is prestigious and highly paid. Never mind that his work is connected to weapons building. The jobs women tend to fill, even though more vital and just as hard if not harder, have less status and are paid less. Why should a teacher get paid less than an engineer? Do we not depend on social services? How come daycare is so unaffordable and yet daycare workers get paid peanuts? Isn’t the nurse’s skill-set just as essential to recovery as the doctor’s? Why is housework not a part of the economy? Don’t we all absolutely depend on it? Isn’t it work? Isn’t it important and ceaseless? And anyone who does it knows it’s skilled demanding labor. Labor that we used to enjoy in the company of other women as we worked together, strengthening bonds, increasing our emotional resilience. Not anymore.
The patriarchal/capitalist system isolates people, but especially women from other women. Female friendship is a vital need for women, and nothing about the systems and institutions in our society supports and facilitates that need. In fact, obstacles are thrown up to prevent us making and maintaining close, frequent, deep relationships. I have to carve out time, travel, coordinate and schedule visits with friends. Time with friends isn’t built into the fabric of my life — it exists outside my life. My daily routines and work have little room for companionship, talk, connection. We don’t live next door to each other or around the block. We can’t have morning coffee together before we start our days, or visit while we do the dishes, work in the yard, fold laundry.
Talking on the phone and Marco Polo are emergency measures — they stave off a crisis, but they are no real long-term substitute for the real thing — and yet we are compelled to try and make them fit our needs.
If that wasn’t bad enough monogamous hetero marriage and households have been imposed on us — again all designed to meet the man’s needs and deny the woman’s. He gets constant access to her time, attention, care, and labor. What does he give in return? Silence, absence, the occasional gift of his indulgence. He rarely provides deep connection, understanding, or sympathy. Her needs are a burden and a sign of weakness, and not his job to meet. If he’s in a good mood and feeling indulgent he might (at a lower quality than almost any woman could provide), but she has to ask first, and she better be grateful. Ideally, she should feel a little guilty too — and she will. Our deeply misogynistic culture has trained her well.
Patriarchal/capitalist society has isolated, shamed, and silenced women. The man’s position of power and control in society depends on women’s physical/geographical separation, depends on our silence, our lack of time and means to connect and organize. I think this is the deeper, big-picture cause of Betty Friedan’s “nameless aching dissatisfaction.” Women are meant to live in close proximity with other women for our emotional well-being, for support in our labor, and to consolidate power so we can protect ourselves against man’s tyrannical tendencies.
The happiest times in my life have been when I was living with women; as a college student living with other women and in easy proximity to friends, and later as an adult, my mom, sister, and I lived together with our cats. We split expenses and chores three ways. Each responsible for planning and cooking two dinners a week! We each had full-time jobs. The house belonged to all three of us. Then my other sister and her young son joined us — and we all knew we were living in a magical time-out-of-time that we automatically assumed could never last because real life, legitimate life is living with a man. Right? Of course right. And so we did, we went our separate ways, and set up households with men. (The best part of the breakup of that divine happy household that I don’t regret is that my mom is finally getting to live alone after 60 years of having some part of her life subject to someone else’s needs or psychosis. (See Sharon Blackie talk about the menopausal woman’s need for a room of her own.) We’re not unhappy, we love our guys, but it’s hard lonely work and a rough road living with a man. It doesn’t help that our culturally ingrained expectation was that hetero marriage — living with a man — was supposed to be a dream come true, an arrival, the prize, and absolutely fulfilling. Turns out we had been living the ideal when we were living with women, with friends, with compassionate, emotionally intelligent, eloquent, women who were excellent listeners and motivated primarily by love rather than ego. I don’t regret transitioning to another phase of life, for letting myself grow from the challenge of loving a man. I just wonder why can’t I be in relationship with a man and still have the daily physical companionship and support of the women I love most in this world? Do I really have to be so alone? So far away from my best friends, sisters, and mother? Is that the price of intimacy with a man? Why does it seem like one has to be sacrificed for the other?
I don’t know, but I got to get through today, and the week, and the rest of the year. So, what’s the solution? How do I take care of myself? What can I do right now?
I try to write, I try to lose myself in some sort of creative expression, but when I’m low-key depressed it’s difficult — especially since it’s external stimulation that spurs my creativity, gets my brain humming, yet I live in so much isolation. (In fact when it got really bad a couple of years ago yoga saved my health and my relationship. I’ve gotten better at taking care of myself, but that hasn’t fixed any of the systemic ills and I still suffer from the effects). I guess today, the solution I’ve come up with is this journal entry that I think I will publish on substack despite my fears of exposure, of being seen in this angry, vulnerable way. I can anticipate the backlash — even from women. It’s why I’ve been silent for so long. I guess I’ll finally screw up my courage. Here goes nothing. Besides, I’m a nobody and nobody reads this. So why not? Send it out into the universe. Tired of keeping everything bottled up, and spewing it over the ether to the choir who already knows and feels the same.
For your viewing pleasure some more Cat Bohannon on the Daily Show with Sarah Silverman. She wrote Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution which I devoured. I think this book is an important part of the healing process especially for women and a book I’d been waiting for.
Note: Later that same day I went to a special gathering for women yoga teachers and had a serendipitously lovely time that stretched into beer at the bar and an evening swim in my pool with two new friends. The universe provides?!
Another book that has informed my views: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari
A highly selective list of recent reads that have shaped me:
The Life Council: Ten Friends Every Woman Needs, Laura Tremaine
Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, Mirabai Starr
Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind the Mind-Body Connection, Candace B. Pert, PhD.
Why Religion?, Elaine Pagels
Thanks for sharing your feelings and experiences. You are not alone in feeling this way.