Stuffing Myself With Immanence
The lengths we go to to avoid being free.
09/10/2012 Anna McConnell anorexia, bodies, body image, bulimia, feminism, immanence, mary gaitskill, mirrors,simone de beauvoir, simone weil, the second sex
Collage by Sonja, using watercolors by Lisa Smolkin
I was laughing when I caught myself playing with my shadow. I was running, and in the long afternoon my shadow looked really good. My upper arms looked wrung out and my shoulders were hunched in that skinny way. I was in jogging stance, my forearms raised and fists balled up, and the position of everything and of the sun made my shadow reveal that she had only two half-arms. And when I caught myself, I was playing with that formâshifting my body to perfect the amputations, pausing midstride to cut off a legâand I was laughing and full with triumph.
What was I doing. I should have been thinking, or at least studying the sky. So I looked at the sky. Still big. Hedges. McMansions. Thump thumpthump: sneakers smack against the concrete. The harder the thump the more calories burned per thump.
I placed myself in isolation this summer in my parentsâ empty house on the South Fork of Long Island in order to get serious. I was also working full-time at a clothing boutique, the kind where it is just me in a room full of mirrors and occasionally a super-skinny 55-year-old would walk in and sneer if I deigned to ask whether sheâd like to try it on. (Apparently, when she holds it out like that, one is simply supposed to go fetch and ring it upâwhy bother trying on 500 dollarsâ worth of cotton?) Anyhow. When I was not fetching, I was placed in front of my laptop, getting serious.
Thump thumpthump. Give in: walk down the hall, up the stairs, down another hall, and right up to the full-length mirror. Bend over. Slip my hands from behind my thighs and pull the meat back. Grab hold of the muffin top and yank it out of sight. Peel away the teacherâs flab. The habit becomes disgustingly obsessiveâI begin to do it what, I donât know, this is awful to admit, every 15 minutes? Ten?
What did he once tell me? If a woman spent half the time in front of the mirror, she could become fluent in Latin, and French, or something. Virginia Woolf?
This is not going to become an article on that kind of hunger.
I am not even hungry. Iâll never be ballsy enough for anorexiaâI eat; I eat just like a regular person. In fact, aside from the briefest of adolescent flings with bulimia, I probably ate far more than the average female because I was so hung up on not becoming one of those âstupid anorexic typesâ; I got off on proving my difference via stuffing my face in front of lovers.
I am not even hungry; I am not a stupid girl. I know what stupid girls look like. I had a loudly anorexic roommate in boarding school who drooled over her homepage, the Cold Stone Creamery website. (Kate Moss was her desktop.) She and her posse would parade around campus trading starvation tips and gnawing dried seaweed: she was a stupid girl. We would laugh at her. I would laugh, before excusing myself to go shimmy my fingers down to heave up Diet Peach Snapple Iced Tea. Whatever. I went to college. I discovered philosophy. WellâŚI met truly intelligent girls who were super into higher, intelligent things; they were beautiful, and thin, but their bodies seemed the design of the luck of the draw.
I ate, and read the assigned portions of Simone de Beauvoirâs The Second Sex from a used copy I got from a friend of a friend, a well-known misogynist. I remembered his comments more than I remembered the text: he wrote ugh, ugh, hahaha ha ha ha, wtf, et cetera, in the margins. I ate, and refused to exercise, because only weak girls who thought about their bodies instead of higher things did that; I continued to think about my body. I would sneak peeks of her; I would hate her; I would focus in on a single feature and feel all rightâbut this is precisely what the duped woman does: looks in the mirror and believes she has discovered herself; even the women who believe themselves to be ugly do that. The French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil said that âa beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.â But how can we trust Weil on the matter? Anorexia killed the mystic!
The other Simone knows better. De Beauvoir defines three attitudes that women take on to avoid the unknown depths/heights of their own freedom: the Narcissist, the Woman in Love, and the Mystic. All three of these figures submerge themselves in objects that take the place of true freedom: the Narcissist in herself, the Woman in Love in her beloved, and the Mystic in God.
In the section on the Narcissist, de Beauvoir explains the magic of the mirror:
It is above all in woman that the reflection allows itself to be assimilated to the self. Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanence: the latter alone is made to arrest manâs gaze and can thus be caught in the immobile trap of the mirrorâs silvering; man who feels and wants himself to be activity and subjectivity does not recognize himself in his immobile imageâŚwhile the woman, knowing she is and making herself object, really believes she is seeing herself in the mirror: passive and given, the reflection is a thing like herselfâŚ
Male beauty is a sign of transcendence, that of woman has the passivity of immanenceâŚÂ According to de Beauvoir, males understand their relationship to the world as one of transcendenceâmen are taught to act upon the world, toshape and create the world around them. The maleâs idea of who he âisâ is deeply enmeshed in this understandingâthe male understands himself as a creator. (Yes, these are all sweeping generalizations, but de Beauvoir was working out why, in 1949, women did not feel equal with men.) Women, on the other hand, come to understand the world in its immanence. Immanence means existing withinâin other words, they see the world as it already exists, and they are one of the things existing in it, with no power to control it.
So when de Beauvoir says that women live in immanence, she means that when a woman asks herself, Who am I? she does not answer, I am a person who will act upon the world and will be changed through my actions accordingly. Instead, she looks at herself as she is (her body, her preferences, her emotions) and thinks that these qualities define who she really âis.â This belief, that you are who you already âareâ and you will always be that way, is misguided and rather tragic. It makes it so that when you ask yourself, Who am I? you just look at yourself over and over, and it leads you to a lot of navel-gazing that takes up your time so you canât actually make stuff and have an influence on the world.
Society has changed a lot since de Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex, but there are still conventions all around us that enforce a femaleâs belief in her immanence, her permanent and unchanging identity as an object. Think, for example, of the many mainstream womenâs magazines that ask women what their âtrueâ color is, or to find out what kind of hairstyle or perfume fits who she really âisââthese are all subtle methods of telling a woman that she has a constant, âtrue,â unchanging self to uncover. This is quite different from the typical menâs magazine, where the common articles are about objects (cars, electronics, hot women) for the man to act with/upon. Women are told to be, not encouraged to do or make.
So the mirror does more than satisfy superficial urges; gazing into the mirror is, we are led to believe, a way to puzzle out who we are. The act of looking at yourself isâdespite your knowing betterâaffected by the swarmy men who whisper as you scurry down the street that you have beautiful windows to the soul; you go home to peer into glass and block out the âbadâ flesh to locate that soul. De Beauvoir spelled all this out 60-odd years ago so that bright, educated women like me would not fall into this trap of staring at our reflections to find ourselves in all our glorious immanence. And yet there I was, locking myself into the handicapped stallâthe one with the bigger mirrorâto study my appearance, just to make sure that I was still there, and hating myself for it.
And here I still am. The shame of my compulsion to look into mirrors has grown over the years, but the shame is not enough to break the habit. Hatred feeds hatred. âHating my bodyâ barely kisses the surface (I can block out the thighs, the arms, the fat that suffocates the cheekbones; besides, it is difficult for me to imagine sincerely hating flesh): it is hating myself for being such a female, such a bad woman, compulsively drawn to the mirror even though I know better. And thenâdigging deeper stillâhating myself for hating myself during these moments of entrapment. For I know that this hatred plays the same tricksâis as intoxicating, and provides the same false sense of fullnessâas the pure enthrallment of the mirror herself.
There is no hunger, only thoughts about hunger that gnaw away at the place where my mind should be: first, the desire to be hungry so I can look better; then, the desire to be full as punishment for being so stupid as to waste my life thinking about how I look. Next, hating feeling full because now I will get fat, and moreover I will be stuffed with silly thoughts like Iâm going to get fat. There is also the guilt of feeling full because I was duped into bad eating habits, which means weak womanhood, because I put the food to my mouth not out of hunger but because of some idea about what it means for me to be a woman; and the hatred of feeling full because feeling full is like feeling plenitude, immanence, weighed down to the ground and unable to transcend. The desire to be light enough to transcend: the desire for hunger.
Itchy. It feels itchy, like there are ants making an anthill out of the inside of my skull, their infinite tiny pricklish little legs tickling the tender bits of my mind. I see insects where there are none: jumping back at a nonexistent speck on the floor; nightmares of roaches tumbling onto my naked self when I turn on the shower faucet; close my eyes and there is a giant bedbug like a crest stuck on the wall in front of me. I feel like a hysterical woman. I feel like I cannot go on: voices and voices and voices breaking apart and doubling back and shouting and whimpering and apologizing and for every voice there is a new one yanking the other back from behind. They are digging a grave: scratching into the place where the mind should be a giantâŚdeepâŚholeâŚ
Hole? Like how a woman is a hole? Maybe I am just thinking like a real woman! I will write about it. If I cannot escape this hole then at least I can spit it out of my body by turning it into art! But wait. Arenât I not supposed to take symbols seriously? And who am I to suppose that other women have this paralyzing, spiraling anxiety? Bad me! âA woman is a person who defines herself as such,â I read somewhere. A woman is not a person desperately trying not to fall into their hole! You are a bad feminist for your thoughts: women are totally fine! Why put another weak woman out there in the world? You need to create strong women, role models to help out fools like yourself. Women are fine. If you are not fine, do not write. Wait, what are you doing? Why are you not writing? You are acting just like a woman: unable to finish anything that you start! Awwwww. Pity pitiless you, destined to be a weak woman just like all your forefathers and weaker still for believing such trash. Destined to be a weak woman and a bad feminist in aâwhat is it calledâpost-feminist world!
De Beauvoirâs second freedom-denying figure, the Woman in Love, puts aside the activities that once brought her pride and excitement, because attaching herself to her lover is enoughâwhat personality she once had falls away.
The Woman in Love traps herself in a cage where she sees herself only through her loverâs eyes. De Beauvoirâs Woman in Love (and here she talks mainly about heterosexual couplings, though I think it would be interesting and valuable to think about these dynamics in terms of queer relationships), destined for the male from her earliest childhood, used to seeing him as a sovereign being with whom equality is not permitted, dreams of surpassing the limits of herself, her body and her gender, by fusing herself to the sovereign being; she can think of no way out of her inferiority, her less-than-human-ness, other than losing her body and soul in the figure who has been designated to her as the absolute, as the definition of fully human.
Tricking herself into playing the Woman in Love allows a girl to dodge that horrific moment of confronting her endless freedom. It allows her to feel, for the moment, full, satiated, purposeful. (Does this remind you of yourself or anyone you know? It does me.) Even as she sacrifices herself to become one with her lover, she can still maintain her belief that sheâs taking action to make her life her own, so long as her boy-idol keeps up the lie that he still loves her for who she is, and does not tell her that she has fallen into some badly drawn shadow of himself and noon is rapidly approaching. De Beauvoir, again:
Love is the revealer that shows up in positive and clear traits the dull negative image as empty as a blank print; the womanâs face, the curves of her body, her childhood memories, her dried tears, her dresses, her habits, her universe, everything she is, everything that belongs to her, escapes contingence and becomes necessary: she is a marvelous gift at the foot of her godâs altar.
The Mysticâs decision to lose herself to God rather than a man-boy is a wise one. God is absent; man is present. If the woman cannot maintain the lie that her man is her godâor if he is good enough to call her out on the fact that she is no longer the person he fell in love with, that it would be difficult, in fact, to even call her a personâthen the woman becomes a masochist. Masochism occurs when âthe consciousness of the subject turns to the ego to grasp its humiliated situation.â
Hit me. Tie me up, I cried. He split.
Sometimes a woman will get so crippled by the fear that she is on the verge of becoming the Woman in Love that she will flood with anxiety, which causes her to cling to her bloated lifeboat of a boyfriend, clinging like she has never clung before, which only confirms and makes realer this fear; and so the water rises again and she clings harder and harder until the two are both sunk. Maybe. Or maybe the Woman in Love was inside of her all along.
The man from the liquor store barreled into my boutique the other night with a bottle of bubbly for seduction. All women are crazy, he announced. He then enticed me with a tale about how his brainy girlfriend of four years just dumped him because, she claimed, she felt like she was becoming submissive and losing her sense of self. Weak sauce was his verdict, the relationship changed me tooâthatâs what relationships do.Maybe he had a point: maybe their partnership was solid and it was simply some fear of becoming submissive that led her to misinterpret any sacrifices or shifts as spelling out doom. Or perhaps the itching insects laid their eggs inside her, too.
It is shocking, sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious, how relevant The Second Sex still feels. I have been so sick and tired of hearing the sound of my voice repeat the same threadbare stories and act out the same conviction-less roles that I have been reduced to silence. I have uttered pathetic lines like I would be happy just to make you a sandwich every day for the rest of my life, and have then punished myself by believing these words. I do not believe that I am alone. It is not necessary for me to repeat anecdotes about women I know who have acted out the Narcissist or the Woman in Love; I am sure that you, reader, can easily round up examples. Certainly, one need not be female to engage in narcissism or self-immolating love, but I do believe that the soul-destroying, crazy-making extremes of these games strike intelligent, independent girls harder than they strike smart boys. What begins as a healthy diet plunges into anorexia. To find the person that one is truly in love with breaks the glass between you and the world; you finally honestly care, and love the world unselfishly, and this is a precious gift from Godâbut it is fragile and quickly plummets into a bitter suicide. An invigorating dose of self-doubt morphs into a distracting degree of self-deprecation, or crippling bouts of anxiety. Whenever a woman has an ugly feeling, there is the accompanying guilt of feeling that she is a weak female, and then the double-guilt for feeling that guilt; the shame that comes with this layering magnifies the initial ugly feeling and leads a woman to punish herself by wallowing in the ugliness.
I say that I do not believe that I am alone, although I have yet to speak to other women about all of this. This does not deter me from my suspicions: part of what marks shame as shame (and makes the whole mess messier) is the secrecy involved. Cockroaches, again. My college roommate and I, too jumpy to kill, used to trap a roach in a Mason jar and let it starve slowly on the living room floor. At the worst of it, there would be several jars scattered in that abandoned roomâit would take one roach weeks to die. At times, one would lie inert, and we would think it dead: perhaps she felt the lonesomeness of dying in a sharp searing, the stomach gnaws at herself. But mostly they continued to scrabble up and down the glass walls as one does the city streets, witnessing the hideous bellies of others. It is shameful to watch, and you know you look exactly the same but it does not feel like that, and so we continue: gathered together, separated by glass, twitching in our bell jars.
I remember asking that roommate and another lady friend if they were interested in feminism. It was after a summer spent boozing with queer San Francisco anarchists in Oaxaca, and for once, the shame and anxiety I felt about my relationship with being female had turned to anger. I wanted it to stay like that, and was hungry for advocates. But soon after I returned to campus my blood once again became watery and I would quake at the thought of projecting my voice; needless to say, asking about feminism felt like an embarrassing question. They responded like it was an embarrassing question, or perhaps a dumb one. No, said the aesthete. No, said the Africanist. The gist: feminism had killed herself; there were smarter and sexier theories it had birthed; their mothers worked and they got great grades, so why would they consider feminism? The only self-proclaimed feminists I knew were men, but most of them ended up being interested in queer theory, which sounded nice but was 10 steps ahead of me and not the kind of personal, honest conversation that I sought. I felt too female, too weak, to approach the strangers that I knew called themselves feminists; I figured that they would not like me, that they would think me a bad feminist for being shy, clinging to my boyfriend, being jealous, worrying about my body, being weak. I was probably right. I considered enrolling in a gender theory class but backed off when I heard a rumor that the renowned (female) professor hated most women.
And that is why I wish I wasnât a woman: words from my ultra-tough super-smart friend when I told her that ladies who entered my store were reduced to middle-schoolers, squealing over cashmere.
Perhaps it is the sorry plight of the privileged girl who gets thrown into a scene hung up on intellectualism: we are too privileged to have explored the feminist bitâour lives are fine, so we donât âneedâ tired old feminism. And so we are taught to scorn all the shallow and weak feminine marks that were intaglioed into our bodies some time long, long ago; we scorn, but have yet to erase, these marks. We feel the secrecy of our shame, then we ask ourselves why we scorn, and are shamed, and question that, and question questioning questioning and question questioning questioning questioning questioning and so on and so forth until the weight of the emptiness of the hole that anxiety bores into our being is enough to make usâŚnothing. Blank. Silent.
My fear of feminine weakness is not satisfied by gnawing away at my own mind; it chomps down the rest of the world. I meet a great girl who is smart and confident, and then I catch a glimpse of her legs: they are grossly skinny; she is weak; she is a liar. I find out that a friend I desperately admire has suffered from an eating disorder, or has been wiped out by a boyâinstead of acting like a friend, I feel disgusted and betrayed; I run away. If a girlâs legs are just right and she seems like just the kind of girl I would want to hang around, then I assume that she would not understand me and would hate me, so I keep my distance. I am distrustful of most men for the regular reasons, but mostly I am jealous because they can cook and be weak and vain without it all burning a hole in their head.
One time, after fleeing a masochistic relationship with a false prophet, I did what I tend to do when I am tired of how it always ends: I tried to love Him. I buried myself in Simone Weil and was truly blown away by the passion of her writing and the truth behind her ideas. But when I discovered that she had starved herself to death (and it didnât matter to me how complex or noble her motives were), her words suddenly lost all value. Simply another weak female with the weak female disease rambling in her soapbox diaries. Even de Beauvoir was unable to escape unscathed. I read her book The Mandarins, and suddenly all her liberating theory seemed like a pretty lieâthere she was getting old as her boyfriend, Jean Paul Sartre, went out and fucked younger women, and she has to go all the way to the U.S. to sleep with a scummy jazz musician just so she can prove her theory is right and she is free and equal and all that, but the whole time she hates it and feels old and sad and pathetic.
Fed up with women who come off as having transcended the hellish bodiliness of being female but clearly have not, I turned to Mary Gaitskill, who once slipped the word soul into an interview before correcting herself, claiming that soul was too big a word for her. Her book Two Girls, Fat and Thin is chockfull of vivid descriptions of the two protagonists mistaking their bodies for their beings, and being nauseatingly female. There is Justine, who at the age of 11 begins to learn that the sex of her body grants her access to participate in the outside world:
Sometimes glamorous older boys would follow [Justine and her posse] saying âIâd like to pet your pussyâ and other dirty things; this was exciting, like the poem about the crucified man, only it made her feel queasier as it was real and in public. It was horrible to be in front of people having the same feeling that she had while masturbating⌠She was sure that Edie and Pam didnât have feelings like that; probably they didnât even masturbate. They blushed and giggled and said âYou guys better stop itâ but they swung their purses and arched their backs, their eyes half-closed and their lips set in lewd, malicious smiles. Justine would imitate them, and when she did, sometimes a door would open and sheâd step into a world where it was really very chic to walk around in public with wet underpants, giggling while strange boys in leather jackets and pointed shoes called you a slut. The world of Justine alone under the covers with her own smells, her fingers stuck in her wet crotch, was now the world of the mall filled with fat, ugly people walking around eating and staring. It was a huge world without boundaries; the clothes and record and ice cream stores seemed like cardboard houses she could knock down, the waddling mothers and pimple-faced loners like dazed pedestrians she was passing on a motorcycle.
Then there is fat Dotty, who feels fullness and the truth of herself by being swallowed in the hatred of her body, which she finds in the mirror:
I went into the bathroom and turned on the light and took off my shirt to stare at and hate my body. There were pimples on my chest and I welcomed them, wishing they were boils or scars, anything to more fully degrade this bodyâŚI had the fleeting thought that my roommate could come home at any minute, and I hoped she would so that I could display the truth of how loathsome I was and feel her contempt as well as my own.
The passion with which I first hated this book was of the variety that I generally reserve for the people closest to me. I jumped up and down, screeching at the boyfriend who had recommended it that the book was trash, utter trash, before he quieted me by asking why I insisted on using that peculiar word, trash?
Trash: to be thrown in the dump and not looked back on. Trash: unironically lowbrow; undeserving of serious attention. Trash: all of my weaknesses and markedly feminine qualities that I have tried desperately to bury because if I am a woman living in an age that has supposedly surpassed feminism and I know better than to fall into traps and am still having weak thoughts that I pin to my femaleness, then I must be weak, and I must not utter these thoughts out loud, for they are undeserving: trash.
I do not want this piece of writing to be unapproachable. At the same time, I am so fed up with so many contemporary female writersâwith females in general, myself includedâwho fear coming off as untouchable, and so hide their weaknesses or broach them from a safe distance. Certainly, plenty of women writers make nods towards the banal hardships involved in growing up female. These women tend to approach that subject from a safe, non-embarrassing distance; they take a healthy dose of âperspectiveâ in their writing: either cutting lines of anxiety with self-deprecating humor, or speaking from the height of wisdomâthey have suffered, but risen from the mire without a mark. And many women choose to dodge the subject, either writing in the voice of a male protagonist or simply in a manner that skirts the female experience. This option, like the former two, is fine. Pleasant to read and face-saving and not embarrassing to the author or her audience. Properly post-feminist, if post-feminism means that we female artists have overcome the anxieties involved in confronting our femalenessâŚ
This is what I want: female artists, please risk embarrassing yourself, put on your ugliest face, climb inside your mind at its worst. I want writing, art, communication among females that makes me cringe. Iâm talking about hatred of our bodies, dependence on men and mirrors, passivityâŚall those generic âun-liberated womanâ traits that are not supposed to apply to us intelligent 21st century girls and women who âknow betterâ than to fall into these traps. letâs talk about all of it!
Indoctrination from an age before we even realized we were being indoctrinated into a world that taught us that we are bodies leaves stains. Stains that are worth talking about. And the shame and anxiety that come with the feeling that we should âknow betterâ make the whole matter worseââknowing betterâ doesnât help. Itâs worth very little.
You might ask, Whatâs wrong with wanting to present the best version of me to the world? Shouldnât we be producing strong female characters to serve as role models? And, you know, point taken. But hereâs another point: our society still teaches us women and girls to stew in our immanence. In our being, rather than our acting and creating. Reading books by women who act like theyâve transcended the traps that society has laid for us can leave a girl feeling alienated and ashamed. This is precisely whyâdespite my initial revulsionâI now love Mary Gaitskill so much: not only could I find comfort in reading about females who suffered from the same shameful habits as me, but I found a role model in the author: by diving deep and unapologetically into the psychologies of her protagonists, Gaitskill writes in a new and explosive manner that is truly inspiring.
De Beauvoir contends that a womanâs greatest concern is to please, and this is particularly true of the woman writer. She writes that âthe writer who is original, as long as he is not dead, is always scandalous; what is new disturbs and antagonizesâ; and that the hypothetical women writer, who is still trying to write for a masculine world, âwatches her manners, she does not dare to irritate, explore, explode.â In mainstream fiction, this is still too true.
Wasting the limited hours that you have on this earth to explore and explode the depths of your imagination to worrying about what he (or she!) would think is not going to leave you with sufficient time to explore or explode. Perhaps you fear that nobody wants to hear about the crippling and shameful thinking that bores holes in your head when you try to write down what it is like to be confronted with weak, female thoughts in an age where we have supposedly come so far that we no longer even need feminism; maybe you do not want the reaction from the male-controlled world to be polite silence, like a witness to a train wreck every time; you are fed up with the I-canât-comment-on-this- because-it-is-so-far-from-my-experience line. It is a frustrating reaction, yes, but better it be them who are forced to grapple with understanding. Listen, girl: you have the advantage here. There are relatively few contemporary female writers that have submerged themselves in all that hideousness that crosses and cripples the female mind. Most women are still too ashamed to discuss these bleak thoughts that we should not be having. For this reason, write it. Write it, and put it out there. Make art about your shame! Transform your anger into something shocking! Create! And if you write in a manner that is not dried-up and that employs an appropriate dose of self-deprecation, then you are sure to embarrass and disturb and antagonize your readers; you are certain to explode. And if explosion does not entice you, then at the very least you might perform an unintentional act of goodwill: you might make some young woman who is drowning in her very female anxiety feel a tad better. Join her: risk embarrassing yourself, put on your ugliest face, climb inside your mind at its worstâand perhaps she will find in you a confidante; perhaps she will feel a little less lonesome, a little less ashamed. âŚ
Anna McConnell travels around the USA with her partner Nigh, and currently works at an organic goat farm in New Mexico. Sheâs from New York City, and studied philosophy and Arabic at the University of Chicago.
A version of this article first appeared on The Hypocrite Reader.
