Snowed In

I had this idea recently to use false names for people in blog posts, the idea being that this would allow me to write a little more freely. I expect people reading about themselves will know it is them, as will people close to them. But in that case, I’m not really revealling much they didn’t already know. It might not work, but I think I’ll give it a try.

I just read a passage in Confessions of an Economic Hitman in which John Perkins, the author, is essentially chewed out by a women who is one of a party he’s having coffee with. She is direct, telling him that what he’s doing, as part of the corrupt long arm of the global American economic engine, is doomed for catastrophe, and that we, as Americans must overcome or arrogance, or face certain demise at the hands of the rising Islamic revolution.

After quoting her at length, he says…

“The memory of that dalang stuck with me. So did the words of the beautiful English major.”

At this point in his life, Perkins was, essentially, hard up. He craved female contact, and was highly engrossed in any kind of female contact he made. I get the same vibe from Jeffrey Brown (a comic artist I’ve been enjoying) to some extent. And I feel that vibe in myself sometimes.

And I’ve been thinking about women who have played this role in my life. When I first started really spending time with Enomwoyi in college, we had extensive conversations about religion. She stated her beliefs and I probed them, questioning them relentlessly into the night. I loved it, she hated it. It was transformative for me, and I think it ended up being a bonding experience for us in some way. But I wonder if she would have preferred not to go through all of it.

And recently Hiari, and to a lesser extend Azibo, have played this role too. I have a lot of traditional beliefs about relationships and marriage and love and intimacy, and I brough all of these into my relationship with Hiari and she resoundedly rejected them. And since then I’ve questioned all of those things, usually in private, and sometimes out loud to her and other people, although I’m not sure I’ve found a receptive audience anywhere. Maybe Enomwoyi wasn’t really a receptive audience either, so much as a captive one.

But nonetheless, I think I’ve changed more in the last few months than I have in years, due in large part to Hiari’s rejection of my beliefs and my subsequent intellectual thrashing about. The fact that I thought she was beautiful and interesting, and that I was sexually attracted to her, and that I could easily imagine her in all sorts of romantic visions of the future certainly fueled this thrashing. And although I think I accept the course of our relationship now, and my interest in romance is highly atrophied, my continued self-analysis probably continues to be fueled by my desire to find a way though the thicket of rejection.

So here’s the punchline: all of this fits right in line with the old notion of woman as man’s conscience, and women as man’s muse. I’d always thought I was honoring women by paying such close attention to their beliefs and how they differed from mine, but I wonder if there’s a deeply set bit of sexism in these relationships in my life.