Since I finished Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to read in a female body. There’s a cognitive dissonance that comes with connecting deeply to philosophical, spiritual, and fictional writings that describe the human spirit while being periodically reminded that, in the logic of these works, one is not fully human.
I’m lifting weights, listening to my buddy Marcus talk about judgement, decency, the place of mankind in the universe. I nod and think, my God, he’s talking to me. He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking, putting my own unspoken musings to words, to reality. My mind is connected to thousands of years of the tradition of human thought and wrestling with the divine. I put the weights down, look up. A 20-something young woman looks back at me from the gym mirror. In my ear, Marcus remarks on how glad he was that in his youth he resisted the urge to rape his slaves. Gee, Marcus, I guess I’m glad about that too. He says, “Consider the deformity of these characters, […]the effeminate, the savage, the beastly, the childish, the foolish, the crafty, the buffoonish, the faithless, the tyrannical.” I consider it.
I go on to read The Odyssey and The Illiad. I get invested in characters that periodically squabble about the women they’ve taken as war prizes.
I open a random short story submitted to a fantasy fiction contest on Substack about a warlord raising the son of his enemy. The man’s going against tradition by not killing the child, and he’s venerated for it in the narrative. A passing sentence mentions his bedslaves.
In the case of ancient Greek and Roman literature, I don’t resent this. I understand the context in which these stories written. I will not cancel Marcus fucking Aurelius, but nor will I ignore ideas in his work because they are inconvenient. I understand and interpret them as part of the whole.
So please don’t lecture me about all writers being “of their time.” Consider, instead, the simple and horrifying truth that every woman, and every slave, through all of history, has been exactly as human as you and I. They have been exactly as capable of intelligence, honor, strength, and creativity as any person in the modern era. No matter how “of their time” a writer was, this has always been true. Always. It is a difficult fact to comprehend, because comprehending it opens a vast pit beneath your feet into which you must fall, a pit of suffering — suffering, that is, of intellect, of creativity, of philosophical principle — on a scale you are not equipped to comprehend. But it must be comprehended. It is a logical truth.
When I read, despite all the castles of spiritual and natural wonder being built around me, I am periodically punted back into my own body with the realization that this is not about me. This is not for me. I am not a player in this. I am not the intended partner in this conversation. My engagement with these ideas on equal terms is explicitly precluded.
The best evidence available to me is my own experience, and I know that I am a woman, and I am human. I am thus aware, by my existence within my own consciousness, that women are capable of ambition, intelligence, and spiritual depth, such a large blind spot tends to call into question everything else that a work, fictional or otherwise, is trying to say about human nature or the natural way things are. If someone starts their treatise on meteorology by saying that the sky is green, one would naturally have some doubts about what follows.
Perhaps the great strength of womanhood is that it never, ever allows you to take things at face value.
(from This Goth Fox Predicted the Atom Bomb)
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