Molly - Love & Disgust
Last week I got to visit my best friends in Iowa as they prepare for a big and very wanted move to California. I've been close to my friend - let's call her the Daupine - since 2020, but in the past few years I've had the pleasure of deepening my relationship with her fiancee, Smee. So I think it's safe to say best friends plural.
When I was pregnant and learned we were having a boy, Paul and I both had a short period of...not exactly disappointment...but ambivalence and trepidation. There were a lot of reasons for this. The simple one is that I've never been a boy or experienced male childhood so my brain just defaulted to imagining girlhood and girl things. I also felt that I might be destined/cursed to have a Generations of Women sort of deal. Paul is the oldest of four boys, and I think he wanted to see a different experience. The most complicated reason is that almost no dents have been made in the great "defining what could be good about masculinity" endeavor. Some other day maybe I'll get into the idea that girls are overvalued (derogatory) and boys are undervalued (derogatory). The oppressive room of both mirrors and video cameras we force girls to grow up in means that we do have much more of a vocabulary for what girlhood is. Having a boy seemed a little like preparing for an expedition that every previous team had failed at.
I not only grew to like the baby who was kicking and hiccuping more and more as my pregnancy went on, but I came to an important understanding. Having a son meant that I would get to keep my feminity my own. My personal expression of it wouldn't meld into my daughter's and get gradually aged down and liquified. This is just me! I know many women find great joy in sharing that with their children, but I find great joy in generating and imposing the household feminine influence. But that means I'm the power source of it and it's harder to rest in something you are also reponsible for manufacturing.
It's refreshing to visit my friends and be in a canoe instead of a kayak. I feel so boosted and comforted by it. It's not just the material beauty and hospitality that comes with being around women - though I always appreciate that visiting Dauphine and Smee means that forgetting a toiletry item or even clothes won't pose much of a problem. It's not just the well-appointed and deliberate way the house is decorated or that the offer of a cup of tea is never far away.
I recently took and then inflicted my friends and family with the Eristics Test, a personality test structured around how people use the "arguments" of their forefronted emotions. More on that later undoubtedly. I also bought the e-book by its creator, the enigmatically slim-online-presence-having Rex Riepe. On disgust as the other side of love's coin, Riepe writes:
Disgust demands a removal from the extended self. Love is the force that pushes the extended self out, including new things. Disgust does the opposite, removing the unwanted. While it may be associated with vile or repulsive things, a disgust argument has the same powerful payoff as love. It arms and reinforces the self. It has every bit of the power and addiction potential of love. Love is sometimes touted as the ultimate emotion, but disgust is right there with it, love's permanent shadow.
Later, in a quick section on sexuality:
Love and disgust looks like heterosexuality vs. homosexuality. Heterosexuals seek disgust and the sex that’s unlike them. Homosexuals seek love and the sex that’s like them.
Take that generalizing sentiment with a grain of salt if you'd like but I do see something to it. I am fairly obsessed with the eristics conceptualization of disgust in particular. There is a tension to loving and living with a man that never completely goes away. In the worst relationships with men someone is using a positron canon to breach someone else's A.T. Field. In the best, there's a push and pull or at the very least it's just A.T. Field to A.T. Field combat. Sweet Jesus that makes other women an anti-A.T. Field. But seriously. Having truly deep and abiding friendships with other women do feel like my defenses being neutralized vs. breached. Is that why heterodox guys are afraid of the longhouse? They think it will lead to instrumentality? Love - extending the boundaries of the self towards other people and things - is, if you think about it, kind of microdosing instrumentality.
Stepping into the natural communitarian atmosphere of other women can be like a long exhale. It hasn't always been so for me. I never felt at at home or at ease in dance studio break rooms or gym locker rooms and their humid femininity, which I'm sure is in large part the narcissism of self-loathing, but that's hard to shake. "Ah, people think I'm weird" is just a little automatic protocol my brain does when I step into a barre class. (though you know what I'm ok with...sento...maybe because I am weird there) All this is to say that my relationship with Dauphine and now the whole royal family is not just positive, comfortable, and all the things friendships should presumably be but it has in no small way healed my relationship to femininity. That healing makes it possible to recognize how rare and beautiful it really is to have friends like them and be able to have visits like these.