from a women’s magazine in the 1950s

The distinction one has to make is that this has got nothing to do with feminist politics at all. Having minored in Gender/Women Studies at Douglas College in Rutgers, I think I have some idea of what I am talking about. To be the obedient 50s wife is a creative choice. It is a decision to recreate and live in a diorama that Stephanie Coontz has termed “the way it never was.” It has been well-documented that the portrayal of the 50s housewife was a sociological invention to redirect women back into the homes once the men returned from war. How else would they free up the traditional male jobs occupied by the women during wartime? The Harriets and June Cleavers were fictitious cosmologies that instructed women to return to their Levittown homes. Betty Friedan gave that detour a name.

The difference here is that there is a choice. Now I can’t speak for any other trans women. But I’ve had good jobs, a good paying career, and the freedom to pursue whatever occupation my heart desired. Of freewill, I left all that behind and am choosing (a work still in progress) the occupation of stay-at-home wife. As a gauge of how far removed this concept is from a woman forced to return to the home (or in my case, the popular association to the docile, submissive mail-order Asian bride), I can actually recreate the entire setting without a husband or a man. It’s something I have only recently realized. Of course, it would be far better to have someone to dote on, wave off at the beginning of the workday and greet at the end of one.

In Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, there is one passage that tolled like wedding bells:

It turned out that the whores of The Curtain were the most old-fashioned and conventional women in Jahilia. Their work, which could so easily have made them cynical and disillusioned (and they were, of course, capable of entertaining ferocious notions about their visitors), had turned them into dreamers instead. Sequestered from the outside world, they had conceived a fantasy of ‘ordinary life’ in which they wanted nothing more than to be obedient, and yes – submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving, and strong. That is to say: the years of enacting the fantasies of men had finally corrupted their dreams, so that even in their hearts of hearts they wished to turn themselves into the oldest male fantasy of all. The added spice of acting out the home life of the Prophet had got them all into a state of high excitement…and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have.

Over the weekend, a friend was talking about his favorite writer Jerzy Kosinski, being found a hoax some time ago: he had ghost-writers, made up half of the details of his life story, and never gone through the experiences he said he did.

My friend said he hed been disillusioned by the discovery, and found himself eventually needing to reassess his love of Kosinski.

I said that it all depended on whether one was a devout follower of a writer or his ideas (or perhaps here, the ideas he came to be associated with). If the case belonged to the former, then the revelation would shatter the cult of personality many have come to substitute for one’s substance these days.

If one were a follower of a writer’s ideas however, the revelation of ghost writer’s would not jar the follower’s conviction about those ideas. Kocinski’s ideas were good. I’m sure many people had them before. Ideas are not exclusive, but rather, a continuum of past ideas.

Do we continue to absorb new ideas or do we trudge back into the dusty halls of the past looking for clues to where we came from? One could argue that if knowledge is indeed a continuum of ideas, then there is no need to look back. But O how much of the glorious past has been lost! This year alone, I had the great fortune to stumble upon Juan Del Enzina’s villancicos, the fantastic comic talent of Salman Rushdie (everyone’s heard of his Satanic Verses, few have actually read it) and his ability to carry on the proud tradition of creating labyrinths a la Jorges Luis Borges, Temur Kevhishvili’s Gorgian polyphony, and Yasujiro Ozu’s and Jean-Luc Goddard’s disjointed films.

Sure, a film student or a music major (I am neither) may have heard these names, but it frightens me that if there are actual aspiring screenplaywrights who have never seen a Bergman film, novelists who know nothing of Honore de Balzac, and jazz majors who think accomplishment is to play the horn like Michael Brecker…

…how little I must know while I search and grope in the darkness of ignorance to establish a cross-discipline of knowledge.