I remember, with shame but also some amusement at what a small-minded fuckwit I was, an occasion when I was a teenager yelling in the street at an old lady I did not know. An unhappy, flailing-but-clowning-to-hide-it teenager who often felt she could slide off the edge of her own self. It amuses me and saddens me when I think of that old lady going inside her house after I yelled, "Oh, shut up, you stupid old bag!"
She would have had the distinct feeling of unsafety, of the world being full of awful teenagers, of the world going to rack and ruin, of how tiresome it was living in such a shitty world that did not value its older people, like other cultures. And I would have been the cause of those thoughts. I'm sorry, old lady, wherever you are, not least because my response, flung over my shoulder as I left the scene, just demonstrates the likelihood that though I can't remember what happened for her to tell me off, I can pretty much guarantee that I deserved it.
I remember the disrespect I felt, the alienation between me and this woman who I would be one day. What stupid ill-formed people we are when we are young. It takes forever for us to grow up. At least 100 years. I looked at that woman and I saw a zero, a no-space.
I think, if you had dug in deeper, what you would have found was a sheer, thin ice sheet of terror.
Terror at what lay in my own future. The way old women are seen as big fat zeros with nothing to offer. The way they are seen by almost everybody as being pointless.
I think of all the old maids of history. All the ones that society looked down on with contempt as being barren because of their lack of children. I think of the sheer number of old maids hidden away who had such rich inner lives that contained universes that they were glad to be hidden awwy. Their wrinkled skin wnd lumpy bodies served just as effectively as veils or walls to safely hide them from dumbasses whose eyes cannot see what is in front of them. All those Julians, hidden away in cloisters in the Norwiches of the world, seeming to lack so much but so full to bursting even inside bodies whose husks are fraying and lined.
The term 'old maid' is not often used these days. It used to refer to an old woman who was unmarried and therefore a virgin. I laugh when I think of how many old maids must have shared quarters with other old maids and whose villages didn't have a clue. An old maid was defined by what she lacked - a man, a marriage, a family, progeny, security. All good things, but to only define someone in one way is to shut yourself off to all the other ways that complex person is, but which you can no longer see because of your defining.
I would have thought lots of women could understand how it feels to be so limited but I see so many of us limiting men in exactly the same way.
Don't matter whether dick or gash, us humans take a long time to grow up and see in Cinemascope.
I think of all the old virgin maids of history who were happy to be so. Even though people may have laughed at them behind closed doors for their lack of sophistication, I like to imagine the secrets all their lives held that may as well have been broadcast on their foreheads for all that most people wouldn't have noticed due to the fat label stuck there of barren dolt.
I like to think of what the feminist Marilyn Frye said in 1976:
“The word ‘virgin’ did not originally mean a woman whose vagina was untouched by any penis, but a free woman, one not betrothed, not bound to, not possessed by any man. It meant a female who is sexually and hence socially her own person. In any version of patriarchy, there are no Virgins in this sense.”
I like to think the patriarchy is fraying even more since those words spoke 42 years ago. It is. I'd like to imagine that we all sense something bigger and broader and better taking shape, even while everything else is fraying at this point in time. I like to imagine a world where gender is more fluid - which also includes traditionally masculine and feminine lives as well, if that's what people desire.
But most of all, I like to think of a future where the thin thinking so characteristic of our age, the labelling of others till we can't see them anymore, gives way and due respect to the broader, wiser way of thinking that lives right in the middle of our skulls too, and which remembers to look past the labels we put on people and things in order to make sense of the world.
One label slapped on each person requiring another, preferably paradoxical, label slapped down at the same time. Broaden the horizons.