The XX Factor: What women really think.

Writing While Female

Meghan, I, too, felt Rebecca Traister's "The Great Girl Gross-Out" raises more questions than it answers. Moe Tkacik's tampon-gone-missing tale, Tracie Egan's female ejaculation chronicles, Miranda Purves' post-childbirth sex life—they're all a strange mix of the need to confess, the desire to shock, and the want of page-views. I don't think any of this "gross-out girl" writing is particularly feminist, postfeminist, or whatever else kind of feminist, nor do I think it is without import or solely designed to garner attention. It strikes me as copycat fratire—the boneheaded hijinks of Tucker Max meets the Farrelly brothers. How about: chicktire. Boys can sleep around? We can too! Boys can do gross-out stuff! We can too! Freud: "The sexual life of adult women is a dark continent for psychology." Taking the metaphor literally, they've located the dark continent between their legs and, scrutinizing it in public, presume themselves investigators of female sexuality by way of taking a trip up the river of their vaginal canals.

I'm more interested in Meghan's question: "Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting [the] female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect?" Perhaps "modest" isn't exactly what we're looking for here; maybe not "neutral" either. Can writing about the female body go beyond the literal, transcend the body itself, make a point that exposes something more than the fact that bad things happen when you leave your tampon in for 10 days?

Looking around, it's hard to come up with examples of writing that does so, frankly. Marguerite Duras? Hélène Cixous? Molly Bloom? Addie Bundren has a great line in As I Lay Dying: "I would think: The shape of my body where I used to be a virgin is in the shape of a ----- and I couldn't think Anse, couldn't remember Anse." The place where Faulkner "writes" what Addie "is" is a blank space on the page. Écriture féminine it ain't (or is it?), but the place where the words aren't may speak more to the totality of womanhood than any gross-out girl's words could ever hope to reveal about their writer's darkest places.

Gross-out Girls

Laughing about all the nasty shit -- or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it -- it's all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women's offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation.

Trend stories usually seem fake to me, but I think Traister’s right about this one—though we’ve seen waves of similar self-revelation in the past. (Do you all agree? Disagree?) As for me, I confess I’m both repelled by and attracted to all these bloody confessions—at times amused and impressed by the frankness of these women, at other half-put off by it. Perhaps that’s because I come from conflicted Catholic stock. But I think it’s also that the phenomenon Traister is describing is more multi- than single-faceted, in ways I wish she'd teased out more.

Which is to say: I have different reactions to different parts of Traister’s piece. Miranda Purves’ graphic description of her pregnancy in Elle seems to have a purpose that goes very beyond exhibitionism. You have to be graphic to write that piece in the first person, because the piece has to enact Purves’ own shock at what happened to her body and to convey her sense of feeling gypped that few people had spoken explicitly about this to her beforehand. She's onto something. In an age of disclosure, it’s (paradoxically) shocking how many women are surprised by what can happen to their bodies during delivery. (I remember reading a brutally honest description of birth in, of all places, Sylvia Plath’s diaries when I was 24, and thinking: Why on earth has no one ever told me this stuff? )

But I’m not sure I feel the same way about Charlotte Roche’s Wetlands, where, I’d say from my brief perusal of it to date, the reader finds a lot of youthful narcissistic exhibitionism on display. So far I don’t get the value of that exhibitionism; the writing seems bland, and the “rawness” is designed to shock—a stance I find increasingly tedious in our bare-our-souls-and-bodies culture.

Which brings me to a question for all of you: Is being relentlessly in-your-face the only way to write about the secret reality of the female body? Is this mode of brazen oversharing a kind of feminist reclaiming? Or is it mostly a canny method of self-packaging? Of course, as Traister herself notes, those two questions may not necessarily have mutually exclusive answers. The either/or approach is used far too much when it comes to women who write (or speak) provocatively about themselves.

So I’d like to ask the inverse question: Can you write effectively—that is, shockingly—about the actual reality of inhabiting female body while also being, well, more modest, or neutral, in affect? I’m trying to think of examples. … Sontag’s journals actually come to mind. She writes at times about female genitalia with a coolness in tone about that's eerie yet revelatory. What else?