Social Note:
Feminine?
29 June 2015
Before I mention the little problem that I’m having with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I want to say two things. First, I promise to stop calling him Klaus Ove. Lord, how embarrassing! Second (but really first), I don’t think that Knausgaard is in any way a misogynist, or that he regards women as inferior beings. He is simply a traditional European male: Vive la différence! Regarding any problems that he might have “understanding women,” he is inclined to portray himself as the stupid person.
I also want to note something that hadn’t occurred to me before I became aware of this little problem that I’m going to mention: there are no gay people in My Struggle. Perhaps, in passing, there’s a minor character whom I’ve forgotten, but no one in the narrator’s circle is gay. This hardly came up in Book 1, which involved late childhood and adolescence and the memories churned up by the death of the narrator’s father. And which was set almost entirely in Norway. I expect that whenever the young Karl Ove encountered a gay schoolmate who couldn’t manage to remain closeted, he simply looked the other way, as much out of kindness (however misguided) as anything else. I don’t think that Karl Ove Knausgaard is homophobic, either, although I’m not quite so sure of that as I am of his non-misogyny.
I say all of this so that no one sits waiting for me to excoriate either the author or the narrator of My Struggle. This really is a little problem — so far as Knausgaard is concerned.
On page 312 of Book 2, Karl Ove has made a trip with his friend Geir to visit some boxers whom Geir has written about, Paolo Roberto and Osman.
The one called Osman was wearing a T-shirt and even though his biceps were large, perhaps five times larger than mine, they were not disproportionately large but slim. The same was true for the whole of his upper body. He sat there, supple and relaxed, and every time my eyes rested on him it crossed my mind that he could smash me to pulp in seconds without my being able to do anything about it. The feeling it gave me was one of femininity.
Later, on page 491, Karl Ove is talking to Geir about “Whole people.”
Precisely because it’s not something they have given any thought to, they don’t think like that, that they should be good, they just are, and are unaware of it. They take care of their friends, they’re considerate to their partners, they’re good parents, but not in a feminine way, always do a good job, they want whatever is good, and do whatever is good.
In the second passage, it is somewhat disconcerting to discover that “people” does not include women, but that, too, is traditional. IIn calling it “traditional,” I don’t mean to give it a pass. It’s not okay thinking. It’s a bad habit of mind that Karl Ove picked up unreflectively, I suppose, in his Norwegian childhood. Perhaps, by Book 6, he will have outgrown it. I understand, however, why it makes sense to him. He likes women, he wants to be attractive to women — to attractive women, anyway. And he knows “from experience” that attractive women are not drawn to men whose manliness is questionable, or to milquetoasts.
My little problem, of course, is that the opposite of a strong man, an Osman who can beat you to a pulp, is a weak man. It is not a woman.
Perhaps this is a problem of translation — not that I’m picking a bone with Don Bartlett (although I should like to talk to him about “kitchen paper,” on page 350). Perhaps “feminine” in this context sounds, in Norwegian, rather more like our word, “effeminate.”
It was only a few years ago that I realized that effeminate women are as rare as effeminate men. “Effeminate” does not describe the behavior of most women. I have never been reminded by any woman I know of a drag queen. Drag queens are, from head to toe, men. “Effeminate” men are men. To say that they’re behaving like women is a sort of cultural libel.
“Strident” women are sometimes said to be “mannish,” which is bosh of the same kind; but of course weak women are never charged with “masculinity.” To associate strength with masculinity, however, is to propose that biceps are everything, that the essence of strength is the ability to knock someone down. In most cases, ie drunken brawls, the ability to knock someone down is the essence of stupidity.
I don’t care for either word, “feminine” or “masculine.” They strike me as highly artificial; they remind me of vitamin supplements. They are spoken of as aspects of personality that ought to be enhanced. Women and men are told to be, respectively, more feminine or more masculine. It’s a classic border patrol problem, betraying anxieties and insecurities about social stability. It is not Vive la différence! but La différence or else! Its silliness is captured by Gene Wilders’s line in The Producers: “But where do you keep your wallet?”
Perhaps in a happier future, “masculine” and “feminine” will be classifiers for the bad habits to which each gender is prone. Women congregating in a doorway for a chat, or at either end of a stairway or an escalator — with a stroller as a bonus — comes to mind. (Kathleen claims to see men doing this “all the time,” but I still believe that, thanks to the Osmans of this world, men tend to have a sharper sense of where they’re standing in relation to others.) Men, talking among themselves, generalizing about women as idiots, and believing what they’re saying, even if they make exceptions for their mothers.
The demands of human reproduction, and the usually fixed implications of living in a body equipped one way or the other, to one side, the differences between men and women are either ornamental or regrettable. So say I.
It is also to be noted that Karl Ove Knausgaaard, even in his most philosophic transports, never generalizes about men and women. Which is nice, even if I think that the reason is his own anxieties about manliness.