But I want to be loved because I am. That's all.

I am a big Eileen Myles fan, so I wanted to juxtapose her essay, Being Female, with her new novel, Inferno because both offer a perspective on feminism that I was not familiar with until now.

In Being Female, Myles gives her opinion on where she believes women fit in the writing and publishing world and why this is.

Here is the link to the full essay: http://www.theawl.com/2011/02/being-female

Some excerpts I found interesting:
"So I try to conjure that for myself particularly when I’m writing or saying something that seems both vulnerable and important so I don’t have to be defending myself so hard. I try and act like its mine. The culture. That I’m its beloved son. It’s not an impossible conceit. But it’s hard. Because a woman, reflexively, often feels unloved" 

Here, Myles describes how she builds up the courage to present her work/speak in front of audiences. She thinks of men she admires deeply (like Paolo Pasolini) and wonders how they were able to do such amazing things in the midst of so much hate being put upon them. Myles believes men like Pasolini were able to prevail because they were loved. Therefore, Myles achieves her public speaking courage from influential men because culturally they are always loved. She becomes an embodiment of a man in this way. 

"Speaking frankly as a lesbian I have to say that the salient fact about the danger zone I call home is the persistent experience of witnessing the quick revulsion of people who believe that because I love women I am a bottom feeder. I am desperately running towards what anyone in their right mind would be running away from. Which is femaleness, which is failure. And one does after all want to be read as a man. As a man who is a woman perhaps. Can’t we just all be men and some have these genitals and some have those"


This excerpt is more self-explanatory. Myles makes the point that to be a woman means to be less valuable, especially in terms of publishing. In Being Female, Myles displays the same pie chart we all received on the first day of class, which displayed authors reviewed in 2010 by the New York Times. Men exceeding women reviews by almost double. By removing women from the "public reflection" to Myles is to say, "she doesn't know or I don't care if she thinks she knows." This removal as a result of "femaleness" is failure to Myles, therefore she rejects it and chooses to be read like "a man who is a woman." She carries herself with this same mentality and it is made obvious in the excerpt below.


An excerpt from Inferno: (178)

A thing that was always so difficult about feminism was that it didn’t contain a boy. Nobody wanted to deal with that part, so I just always felt dirty and poor. A boy was my secret part, so where should I put that? Even if I was a feminist I would still have a evil secret baby. Myself. I wrote a poem called Misogyny. Not for the book, I mean I had it hanging around so I sent it to them. It expressed my confusion. It was punk. Misogyny got rejected. I was destroyed. How would I ever get to be female. What was I? (178)

Again Myles brings up the idea of "a man who is a woman" presented in her essay, Being Female. It is hard for Myles to be a feminist because it did not include the male parts of her that helped her survive as a female. Myles' way of dealing with femininity and being female is though her "secret part" of boy. She can never see herself as female if she is not allowed to embrace the boy contained within her.


Being Female and Inferno were interesting to me because what Myles is essentially doing is rejecting parts of feminism like embracing her womanhood in order to become more of a feminist, which is to be different and to fight against those who believe women are not as legitimate as men. This approach interests me because Myles often comments on how without her "evil secret baby" she is just dirty and poor. This makes sense because she grew up during the time of second wave feminism and we know from reading the The Second Sex in class that working class and uneducated individuals were sort of "othered" from this movement and Myles puts herself into this category (and is seen in much of her writing).

So, my question to the class is do you think Myles is promoting inequality between men and women or helping feminism progress in a positive direction?