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A review by diana_skelton
Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell by Katherine Angel
3.0
'The talking is also a way to make you represent something, culturally, that my femininity does not. I want to feel your decisiveness, your force. In lieu, perhaps, of feeling my own. I want to feel your capacity to resist me, your unaccommodatingness. Because otherwise you will not be A Man in the eyes of the world.
Eyes which are, of course, also mine.'
'"We need scarcely be surprised," Ellis concluded, "that of the myriads who embark on the sea of love, so few women, so very few men, come safely into port."'
'I travel in a loop of gender.
I was weaned on this -- the hypostasised, brutal man; the yielding, deferring woman.
So, by the way, were you.'
'After the admin at Marie Stopes, I said goodbye to him; he went to work, and I went under in my green gown. Before the wave subsumed me: a hazy doctor and nurse, and injection in my arm (or was it a pill?), a counting to ten but only getting to three. And then waking up in the ward, a surge of nausea, and tears. A nurse turned me onto my side, away from the women waiting to go in. And then down, down, down, further and further and further I tumbled -- Alice, pointy boots, tressed hair, topsy turvy into a tunnel of grief, into its numbing, invisible embrace.'
'There is nothing worse, for middle-class intellectuals, raised in secular rationalism and its own peculiar fundamentalism, than being irrational. Than being -- God forbid! -- stupid.'
'It's hard to want more, to be more, than a man.
Let the boy win at tennis!
To him, then, to the Man I Loved, to my own personal Magus, the pain said: I want so much more, but I am not going anywhere. I shall not show you up with my life. I shall take a scythe to myself. I shall hack at my roots. And I shall keep you company.'
Eyes which are, of course, also mine.'
'"We need scarcely be surprised," Ellis concluded, "that of the myriads who embark on the sea of love, so few women, so very few men, come safely into port."'
'I travel in a loop of gender.
I was weaned on this -- the hypostasised, brutal man; the yielding, deferring woman.
So, by the way, were you.'
'After the admin at Marie Stopes, I said goodbye to him; he went to work, and I went under in my green gown. Before the wave subsumed me: a hazy doctor and nurse, and injection in my arm (or was it a pill?), a counting to ten but only getting to three. And then waking up in the ward, a surge of nausea, and tears. A nurse turned me onto my side, away from the women waiting to go in. And then down, down, down, further and further and further I tumbled -- Alice, pointy boots, tressed hair, topsy turvy into a tunnel of grief, into its numbing, invisible embrace.'
'There is nothing worse, for middle-class intellectuals, raised in secular rationalism and its own peculiar fundamentalism, than being irrational. Than being -- God forbid! -- stupid.'
'It's hard to want more, to be more, than a man.
Let the boy win at tennis!
To him, then, to the Man I Loved, to my own personal Magus, the pain said: I want so much more, but I am not going anywhere. I shall not show you up with my life. I shall take a scythe to myself. I shall hack at my roots. And I shall keep you company.'