What better way to close out a year than to discover a new excellent writer? Helen Garner, an Australian author who is now in her eighties, is my most recent find. In this post, I’ll talk about her and in the next about a book of hers that will be my last completed read this year.
Garner attracted controversy in the 1990s because of her negative portrayal of the birth of the #MeToo-type movement in Australia. She saw that feminism was morphing into a philosophy that celebrated female fragility and thought it was a dangerous development. Garner was massively criticized for this but today we can see how right she was. The self-absorbed dramas of tender snowflakes who are shattered by unsuccessful dates yet utterly indifferent to actual suffering of women around the world are the order of the day.
Garner is a beautiful writer of the kind that can produce a shopping list that will keep you on the edge of your seat. She also has a very male sensibility which is deeply interested in the workings of the self and massively unconcerned with how others perceive oneself. And it’s mesmerizing to read a book by this kind of female author.
A male sensibility makes life a lot more enjoyable which explains the popularity of the trans movement among young girls. Obviously, bodily modifications can’t give you a different way of relating to the world but this is what these poor kids are chasing.
To understand what I mean by male vs female sensibility, let’s look at the famous concept of “men explain things to me” created by Rebecca Solnit and embraced by an extraordinary number of women under the title of “mansplaining”. The concept is based on an anecdote about a social occasion where a man lectured Solnit on a subject in which she considered herself an expert. This is typical female sensibility that places an extraordinary value on how the self is perceived by others. Instead of simply ending a boring conversation and moving on, Solnit feels wounded by it and delivers a passionate screed condemning her interlocutor… to other people. Because she cannot even comprehend her own self without constantly negotiating and trying to shape how different people perceive it.
Female sensibility sees the self through the eyes of another. It’s never just me. It’s me as perceived by an imaginary, endlessly judgmental crowd. In this sensibility, there’s always a barrier between my self and my perception of it. It took me forever to figure this out because, like Helen Garner, I have a male sensibility and it’s very hard for me to understand how the female sensibility works without getting massively bored.
This sensibility is a heavy burden but it doesn’t mean that women’s lives are harder than men’s. Given that the nature of civilization is anti-male, it’s harder to be a man than a woman in civilized societies. Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation that I’ll discuss in the next post is the perfect demonstration of this fact.
Clarissa's Blog 
Thank you for this deply perceptive analysis which helped me to make sense of my (mostly) female sensibility from which I’ve been trying to disentangle myself for the past ten years. Now a lot of things make a lot more sense.
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Care to elaborate your statement about nature of civilization being anti-male?
Are you alluding to the evolutionary aspect of societal constructions: where women being child bearers are naturally the primary receivers of protection and nurturing (along with offsprings) from other members of the tribe, given their critical role in continuation and proliferation of a species?
Or is there some sociological aspect that you have in mind? I do not see how the setup of modern society — beyond these survivalist instincts — corroborates this impression of yours.
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Sedentary pursuits are rewarded, physically demanding work is the least remunerated, monogamy is rewarded, risk-taking and adventurousness lose out to safety and comfort, physical aggression is forbidden.
Starting from preschool, boys are punished, medicated and pathologized for not behaving like girls. The more civilized a society is, the more it values safety, comfort, gentleness, quietude, etc. Men have to be schooled into these values because they make life better for women. Not that I’m complaining. 🙂
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Clarissa, you hit the nail on the head. I’ll read some Helen Garner.
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Australian female writers?
Oh, by all means do Kathy Lette next. 🙂
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I looked her up, and the book covers look like the books are funny. Do I look like a person who reads funny books? I have no sense of humor.
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Huh. I had a very female sensibility, as you call it, when I was a teenager and it switched to a very male sensibility (more so than most of the guys I know) as I grew up. Maybe it’s because of that that I think of it as an adolescent sensibility, hell knows teenage boys are like that as well…
Something to be said about arrested or even reversed development in female bildungsromane of the contemporary era, I can’t quite remember who said it though 😃
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I was talking to a writer friend a couple of weeks ago on a related topic: men and women writing fiction with a significant romantic-relationship component. You can always tell when these are written by a man because the woman’s perspective might as well be that of an alien; the dude protagonist is completely baffled by the woman’s not particularly baffling behavior. Neurotypical men don’t really seem to wonder about the workings of the mind of others until they’re in romantic relationship where they’re emotionally invested. Then they are basically like deer in the headlights, terrified and confused, unable to figure out where to even start from because they never had to do it before. (My guess is this issue is even more pronounced for men on the autism spectrum, and perhaps it also holds to some degree for autistic women.) The above is where the whole “manic pixie dream girl” trope comes from, with the female creature enthralling yet unknowable.
Neurotypical women spend a lot of time since childhood trying to figure out the viewpoint of those around them, making temporary hypotheses on why someone has done something, based on incomplete data, and using their model of the other’s mind to try and predict what the person is likely to do next; they don’t seem thrown off by the other person, but mostly busy adjusting their model on the fly based as new data becomes available. The model may or may not be crappy, but the point is that women don’t hesitate to put themselves in the dude’s shoes as they’ve been doing it their whole lives, whereas men basically avoid it their whole lives, so when they eventually have to do it, they don’t know how and find it disorienting and distressing.
I also usually find it soothing to read fiction from the male perspective, as the inward focus and this detachment, this remove from probing the inner working of others makes for less emotionally draining reads and imbues even mundane interactions with a bit of mystery. Ah, to be romanticized as unknowable! 😁
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That’s exactly it. I’m right now writing about a novel where the male protagonist got drunk on the day when his girlfriend was getting tested for a serious disease. Not only did he show no interest in her diagnosis, but he got so inebriated that he defecated on the floor of their shared apartment and then fell messily asleep.
He was stunned – absolutely shocked – when she became upset by this behavior and decided to break up.
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“he got so inebriated that he defecated on the floor of their shared apartment and then fell messily asleep.”
Australian….
More seriously, this doesn’t sound typically male at all and sounds seriously disordered (which is I guess the point).
Where men stereotypically fail is in missing pragmatic factors and taking statements at face value.
man: Do you want me to go to the clinic with you?
woman: …not really…. I think it would be easier to go by myself.
man: Okay….
woman: ????????
Or this (from Family Guy) I saw it a whooole bunch of times and had no idea what was going on (until I read the explanation in the comments).
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Ok, I watched it. I thought about it for a couple of minutes and… did she expect him to offer to walk with her to algebra class, after covertly informing him that she likes him? Do we know from watching the show previously what the relationship is between them? I feel like a detective here. (now I’m gonna go read the comments and see if I got it right)
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“what the relationship is between them?”
It’s a “cutaway” a single short thing that has no relation to anything else (one of the very characteristic things in that series) and the character never appeared before or after.
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Ok, so all context needed to get the joke, is there in the clip. Yay, I guessed correctly. But also… I really want there to be some complex backstory there that explains why her actions aren’t completely insane, because this sort of thing makes my head hurt.
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I mean, her jumping out the window is obviously over the top, but the rest is pretty on point. The girl asking if the guy was going to class was a suggestion they walk together and an expression of interest, and him taking her words literally was received as rejection, which it kind of was because dudes tend to be less clueless when actually interested. I loved how the friend called him a monster or whatever after the rejection. He’s adorably but predictably clueless and baffled. LOL I thought the skit worked great.
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I get that the jumping out the window was hyperbole, but I really had to stretch to figure out why she had any kind of intense emotional reaction to such a banal interaction. I’m not quite as bad as an actual guy, I think– I can logic this out based on the prior information that this is a funny joke that women grok and men don’t but it doesn’t make any sense, instinctively.
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“why her actions aren’t completely insane”
Part of the humor was that yes, her actions were completely insane and out of proportion. Again, that’s a defining feature of the show in question.
Another part, that some may miss, is that he might actually be interested in her but just not see any particular point in walking to class together (or doesn’t want to seem like a ‘creep’).
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Salvadoran. 🙂
This is a novel about what happens to masculinity when its attacked and subdued. The title of the novel is “El hombre amansado.”
The women from your example… I absolutely bloody detest such people. Detest them!!! Bastards!!!! Anybody who tries to make me guess is my sworn enemy.
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Autistic woman: can’t speak for the whole tribe, but I feel like I have, for large parts of my life (I fight it, for my own sanity), obsessed unhealthily on the inner workings of other people, because their actions are so mystifying. I suspect, but cannot know for sure, that these ruminations are qualitatively different from those of normal women, and tend to be… instrumental rather than relational. I don’t obsess over other people’s thoughts when things are going well, we get along, etc. (and frankly, I probably should put more effort into that– I gather women are supposed to think about other people’s needs and making people comfortable and stuff, and I… just don’t, most of the time). I do it when there’s a problem, that problem is in the way of me getting something I need/want, and I need/want to find a way to work around that problem. So it’s not “does W like me?” but “Why is W obstructing my access to (thing) and how can I change that?” And the reason turns out to be something completely incomprehensible that I can only begin to grasp by getting a few outside opinions, like “W has an adversarial relationship with your mom and is taking it out on you” (yay small-town problems) or “W is overcommitted and has high levels of personal anxiety” or “The Ws have administered a social litmus test and you have failed it.” Reading female-oriented literature is enjoyable, because it explains the inner life, and makes me feel, temporarily, like I understand people’s motives– it’s easy when those motives are spelled out on a page. I enjoy male-oriented stories as well, but for different reasons. And yeah, you can tell when it’s a guy writing it for all the reasons you cite. Women are black boxes.
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