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.
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