A wave of the purest panic rolls over me. I break into a sweat.
“Of course you’re sweating,” she says, as she cocks her head to one side. “You always dress up like Madame Onion, layer upon layer of clothing. If you wore something light and skimpy, you’d feel so much better.”
Could she be right, I wonder. Maybe I did somehow turn myself into Madame Onion. A woman who refuses to draw attention to her Body because she wants to be respected for her Brain, who dresses up in layers when she goes out in public. I always hide myself behind clothes, using them like armor. And whenever I pose for an interview, I make sure I don’t smile too much, in order to not be taken lightly in a male-dominated environment. I try to look damn serious, and, often, older than I am.
“Now, those novels of yours . . .” mutters Blue Belle Bovary as she smoothes on a papaya hand cream—like an odalisque in an Orientalist painting.
“What’s with my novels?”
“Oh, nothing, it’s just that sometimes I get the impression that you female writers can’t write about sexuality as freely as male writers do. Your sex scenes are always short, almost nonexistent. You know how, in the old movies, when a couple was about to make love, the camera would drift off to the side? Well, that is precisely how you women write about sexuality. Your pens drift off the page when you run into a sex scene!”
“That’s so not true,” I protest. “There are plenty of women writers who write lavishly about eroticism and sexuality!”
“Yes, darling, but I’m not talking about romantic or erotic novels,” she says. “Just because I said I like satin and desire doesn’t mean I’m ignorant. Obviously I’m aware that most of the writers in these genres are women. But that is hardly the topic. I’m not talking about those kinds of books.”
Standing up, she flicks her hair with a quick toss of her head. “I’m talking about highbrow literature here. No offense, darling, but the number of women novelists who can write bluntly about sexuality is slim to none.”
“There must be a way,” I say, still not fully convinced.
“Oh, there is,” she says with an impish smile. “Female novelists can write freely about sex only under three conditions.”
“Which are?”
“The first condition is lesbianism. If the woman writer is lesbian and open about it, what does she have to fear? Lesbian writers tend to be better at writing about the body than your lot.”
While Blue Belle Bovary continues with her monologue, I find myself growing increasingly captive to her silky voice and exaggerated gestures. It is too late to wonder where this conversation is going. Instead I ask, “And why do you think that is?”
“Probably because since they are already stigmatized, they can speak about sensitive subjects without fear of stigma. This makes them more interesting and sincere.”
Of this I know a good example. The American writer Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking novel Rubyfruit Jungle came out in the 1970s and challenged the mainstream society’s approach to not only sex and sexuality but also lesbianism. Another example is Tipping the Velvet by the British novelist Sarah Waters, who calls her books “lesbo historical romps.”
“The second condition, darling, is age. When you are an ‘old woman writer’ in the eyes of society, you are free to write about sex as much as you want. Old women are thought to be above nature. They can talk about sexuality to their heart’s content and it will be called wisdom.”
Alexandra Kollontai comes to mind—Russian revolutionary, social theorist, writer. Though she wrote passionately all her life, criticizing bourgeois moral values, celebrating love and sexuality as positive forces in life, in her older age she expressed herself even more unreservedly about such topics. Kollontai defended the economic, social and sexual emancipation of women—views that did not make her popular among the ruling elite. She developed her theory on non-possessive love and sexuality in her novel Red Love and a controversial essay titled “Make Way for the Winged Eros,” which was bitterly criticized by the leading figures of the Communist regime.
In a charmingly honest and compelling essay for The New York Times, Barbara Kingsolver says she used to write the shortest sex scenes ever— mostly by means of a space break. However, after two children and reaching the age forty, she dared to write an “unchaste novel,” breaking free.
“And the third condition?” I ask.
“Or else, you have to be reckless—ready to be the talk of the town, to be grain for the gossip mills. You have to be brazen enough so as not to care what people will think of you when they read your passages on sex.”
I think of what Erica Jong did in Fear of Flying. Once she said to a journalist that she had accepted fear as an inseparable part of life, especially the fear of change. But this acknowledgment had not held her back: “I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: Turn back.”
Blue Belle Bovary pauses in case I have anything to add, and when she sees that I don’t, she goes on, just as fervently.
“As for you, I am sorry to say you don’t fulfill any of these conditions. Seriously, darling, you are in some kind of a fix. You never write openly about the body. Of course, I am the one who bears the brunt. My entire existence is censored!”
She could have a point. But there is something she doesn’t recognize. It’s not only me or us female writers who as a matter of self-protection shy away from the depiction of graphic sexuality in our books. The same goes for female academics, female reporters, female politicians and those women who tread into the business world. We all are a little desexualized, a little defeminized. We can’t carry our bodies comfortably in a society that is so bent against women. In order to be a “brain” in the public realm, we control our “bodies.”
I remember Halide Edip Adivar—Ottoman Turkish feminist, political activist and novelist, the diva of Turkish literature. Though she passionately believed in gender equality and worked to improve women’s lives, Adivar often reiterated the good-woman/bad-woman dichotomy in her novels and desexualized the former. Her female characters were intelligent, strong-willed and so modest they did not undress even in front of their husbands. Rabia—the leading protagonist in her novel The Clown and His Daughter—changed into her nightgown inside the closet, and then came to bed where her husband awaited her.
In traditional Muslim society, where Rabia serves as an ideal woman, women can meet our bodies only inside closets or behind closed doors. The same impulse is reflected in our storytelling. More often than we care to admit, we women writers, especially those of us from non-Western backgrounds, are uncomfortable about writing on sexuality.
Could I ever be like Blue Belle Bovary? Could I wear ostentatious lipstick, teeny-tiny skirts and low-cut necklines like she does? Could I flip my hair as if I were in a shampoo commercial? Probably not. Two steps forward, and one of my heels would surely get stuck in a crack and break. I would never make it.
“Have you ever tried being sexy, darling?” she asks, as if she has read my thoughts.
It is a provocative question, when you come to think of it.
That same evening I ask Eyup to meet me for dinner at an elegant fish restaurant by the Bosphorus. I have never been there before, but it was highly recommended by a friend who called the place “as chic as Kate Moss.”
Eyup goes there at seven P.M. and starts to wait for me. Actually, I, too, am at the restaurant, except I am hiding in the bathroom, trying to muster the courage to walk out.
How did I end up here, in hiding? I went to a hairdresser this afternoon and had my hair dyed, my nails manicured and my eyebrows plucked. It was fun for the first ten minutes, but then I got so bored I could have run out with a towel on my head and my hands dripping soapy water. There are very few things to read at a salon, only hairstyle magazines that contain hundreds of photos but roughly only twenty words.
Yet I made it. And here I am, my hair nicely shaped, my face shining under layers of makeup, and though I did not dare to wear the crimson dres
s Blue Belle Bovary was wearing, I managed to get into a tight, long gown—black, of course—with a feather boa.
Thirty-five minutes later I walk out of the ladies’ room, not because I am ready but because there is an increasing number of women coming in and going out of the restroom, all of whom stop and eye me with a curiosity they don’t bother to hide. So I leave my shelter and, trying not to trip on the hem of my dress or break my four-inch heels, ask the waiter to take me to the table where Eyup is waiting patiently, having eaten three rolls of bread and half of the butter.
Under the inquiring eyes of the customers, the waiter and I cross the restaurant from one end to the other, he marching steadily, me hobbling behind, totally out of sync but with the same unnaturally serious expression carved on our faces.
Eyup looks up and sees me coming. His eyes pop open, his jaw slightly drops as if he has just witnessed wizardry.
“I warn you, my self-confidence is pretty low now, so please don’t say anything bad,” I say as soon as I sit.
“I wasn’t going to—” he says, suppressing a smile.
I feel the need to explain a little bit. “I am trying to resolve my internal conflicts, you know. I need to bury the hatchet and sign a cease-fire with my body.”
He bites his bottom lip but can’t help it, a chuckle escapes. “Is that why you are dressed up like this?”
That is when it occurs to me to look at the other customers more carefully. Though it is an elegant restaurant to be sure, posh and pricey, it is clear to me and everyone else that I am overdressed. I look like a wannabe actress who lost her way on the red carpet.
“Maybe I should ask for a shawl or—” I mumble, desperately needing something to hide my cleavage, and these silly feathers. I eye the tablecloth—but it wouldn’t do. It’s much too thick, too white.
“Don’t worry,” Eyup says. “Just sit back. Take a deep breath. I hear the butter isn’t bad.”
That’s what I do. I forget all my internal struggles, those I know well and those I am yet to see, and enjoy the moment. It is the best butter I have ever tasted.
In Praise of Selfishness
Ayn Rand is one of those rare female writers who has dedicated readers all over the globe, whose fame is of the lasting kind. In addition to being a novelist, she was also an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter and a philosopher. Since the 1940s numerous developments have contributed to the proliferation of her philosophy worldwide, the recent financial crisis being one of them. She is among the most loved and most hated writers in the literary world.
Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a Russian Jewish couple, Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum was a smart, gifted child. She had little interest in the world of her girlfriends and female relatives, preferring reading books to playing with dolls or worrying about her looks. In 1926, after graduating from the University of Petrograd with a degree in history, she moved to the United States with little money in her pocket and an urgent need to reinvent herself. She never returned to her country and never saw her family again. As if cutting a ravel of yarn, she thrust aside the past in no uncertain terms. Shortly after, she renamed herself, taking her surname from the typewriter she used—Remington Rand. “Ayn Rand” was the name she gave herself, the name with which she was reborn in the New World.
Rand was a passionate anticommunist, but, then, she was passionate about all her views. She married an actor named Charles Francis éO’Connor and wrote many low-budget Hollywood screenplays. Though her first semiautobiographical novel, We the Living, had attracted considerable attention, her real breakthrough came in 1943 with her best-selling novel The Fountainhead, which took her seven years to write. Her magnum opus was Atlas Shrugged, a science-fiction romance and a novel of ideas. It was here that she introduced what she saw as a new moral philosophy—the morality of rational self-interest.
Not a great fan of Kant, she called him “the most evil man in mankind’s history.” Her response to those who accused her of caricaturizing the fountainhead of Western philosophy was even harsher: “I didn’t caricature Kant. Nobody can do that. He did it himself.”
In time her name became synonymous with individualism, capitalism and rationalism. Firmly believing that a person had to choose his values by using his reason, she defended the individual’s rights against the community and the state, and opposed all sorts of governmental interference (hence her popularity today among those who oppose bank bailouts).
“No man can use his brain to think for another,” Ayn Rand was fond of saying. “All functions of the body and spirit are private. Therefore they cannot be shared or transferred.” Strikingly, she regarded “reason” not only as the basis for our individual choices but also as the foundation of love between opposite sexes. Even physical attraction, for her, was the working of the brain. Love, sex and desire might seem to be selfish if left untamed by society, but despite that, or perhaps precisely because of it, they rendered the human individual an object worthy of attraction and appreciation. As it was maintained in The Fountainhead, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’”
Her views on female sexuality could be regarded as problematic, to say the least. On the one hand, she was one of the few female novelists who could write about carnal desires and sexual fetishism without self-censure. On the other hand, her tone was visibly discriminatory at times, and the “beautiful woman” in her works was often “blond, fairskinned and long-legged”—the type of woman she was not and could never be. In almost all the sex scenes throughout her novels, there is a recurrent pattern: The woman first resists, the man insists, sometimes to the point of using physical force, and finally the woman surrenders.
Never a compliant personality, Ayn Rand loved to scandalize feminists with her views on women, especially her comments on how a female should admire her male. Ironically, such was not the pattern in her own marriage.
Increasingly over the years, Rand’s husband, Frank O’Connor, was overshadowed by his wife’s fame. Not an exceptionally talented actor or one who was popular with producers, he was often unemployed. From the moment they got married, the fact that she was the more famous and successful of the two was a burden on him. As if making fun of his predicament, he would often introduce himself as “Mr. Ayn Rand.”
In 1951, the year after they moved to New York, Ayn Rand met a nineteen-year-old psychology student named Nathaniel Branden. He appreciated, admired and, perhaps, feared her. Such was his adoration that he founded an institution to spread her ideas far and wide. What started as an intellectual attraction soon turned physical. It was a kind of magnetic pull that intensified between a middle-aged, celebrated and intelligent woman and a young, ambitious and emotional man. Without hiding the situation from her husband, Rand gradually built a love triangle, situating herself right at the center. Atlas Shrugged was dedicated to both Branden and O’Connor.
Though it was a complicated scheme that made no one happy, it lasted fourteen years. When Ayn Rand turned sixty-one, Nathaniel left her for a young model. The famous writer who perceived even a sexual relationship fundamentally as an “intellectual exchange,” could not possibly come to grips with her long-term lover’s choice of “body” over “mind.”
She never forgave him. Perhaps his renouncement of her philosophy hurt her more than the physical abandonment. In a bitter article in The Objectivist, she announced to everyone that they were on separate paths. They never saw each other again.
Ayn Rand was one of those female writers who chose, from the very start, not to have children. Just as children did not play a part in her life, they did not factor into her novels either.11 She was criticized for not writing about children and not even trying to understand them, but there is nothing in her notes to make us think that she paid this any heed. The only children she ever wanted to have were her books.
She was a writer with scintillating ideas and a woman of spectacular contradictions—as is her legacy. It is no coincidence that even after her death, both thos
e who admired her and those who disliked her have dug in their heels. Though she defended capitalism ardently, in her personal life she preferred to have relationships that bordered on totalitarianism. In theory she was on the side of individual freedom and critical thinking. But in reality, she absolutely hated being criticized; she cast out and held in contempt anyone who did not agree with her. She expected obedience and loyalty from her inner circle. Despite the fact that she was a headstrong woman, and that her novels were full of independent female characters, she argued that a woman had to surrender herself to her man. The fact that she did no such thing in her private life was a different matter.
Always a fighter, when she got cancer she didn’t want anyone to know about it. She saw even her illness as a mistake that needed to be corrected. And she did “correct it,” managing to beat the cancer. For her it was another victory of the brain over the body. A confirmation of her viewpoint.
But in 1982, she suddenly and unexpectedly died of a heart attack.
Today, literature enthusiasts from all around the world post their views on the Internet by asking questions such as “What kind of a psycho would I turn out to be if Ayn Rand had been my mother?” or “What would my life be like if I were married to Ayn Rand?”
Maybe they are right. Ayn Rand hadn’t been born to be a mother or a wife. If she had been a mother she would very likely have been a dominant one, seeing each of her children as a different scientific experiment. But perhaps we are all badly mistaken. She may have found motherhood to be a “wonderfully intense intellectual excitement”—the way she described school and classes as a young girl in her diary. I am curious to know what she would have done when her child turned into a rebellious teenager.
It is equally plausible that early on she realized that in the motherchild relationship, the child always wins. Perhaps that was the real reason why she didn’t want children. Ayn Rand liked to win.