The Nature of Women, and Sociopolitical Observations

 "What do women want?" is an age-old question and one that is particularly relevant for writers of fiction -- male authors in particular, I suppose.

With men it is easy: they want power, money, sex and celebrity in no particular order since one of those objectives often brings all or most of the others along with it.  Endless books revolve around such themes. 

With women it has been more of a puzzle, but two articles in the Nov. 11, 2021 New York Times may be of some help. Both -- one in the arts section and the other in the sports section -- involve violence on the part of women toward other women.

The arts section article concerns "Yellowjackets," a film about to appear on "Showtime" that depicts first what happens when a place carrying a U.S. girl's soccer team crashes in a remote location and then what happens to the survivors. Essentially, as the NYT article suggests, it's a gender-reverse version of "Lord of the Flies." Instead of young boys turning against each other in a sadistic fashion, this time it is girls.

"It argues for the savagery of girlhood -- with or without an aviation disaster -- and how that savagery reverberates throughout women's lives," the article says.

Let's pause for a moment and consider a major current of sociopolitical thought these days: that white males are responsible for most if not all of the world's ills.  Suppose the patriarchy is successfully toppled; what sort of a world are we in for next?

"The show abounds with strong women, none of whom you would want to share a bottle of chardonnay with," is one observation contained therein. Another is: "There's a very specific feminine way of brutalizing each other."

But even before the plane crash, some of the girls are depicted as malevolent at home in up-scale suburbia. One betrays a friend and another grievously injures a teammate.

Which brings me to the NYT sports section article. It reports on the arrest -- and subsequent release -- of a French professional woman soccer player suspected of being instrumental in the beating of one of her teammates by a couple of thugs who concentrated on injuring the victim's legs while stealing nothing from her. The accused woman was described to be an understudy of the victim and, indeed, replaced her as a starter when the victim, a French national team veteran, was unable to play in a subsequent match.

While no charges have been filed, an investigation by French authorities is continuing,

It is now necessary to pause for a second time and consider another prevailing sociopolitical issue: racism.

The two NYT articles on the incident -- reporting the arrest and then the release -- did not mention the race of either of the two women, but large photos accompanying the pieces showed clearly that one -- the suspected perpetrator based on names in the caption -- is black and the victim white.

Let's think about that for a moment. If this incident had occurred in the U.S. and the race of the victim had been black as opposed to white and the alleged perpetrator white rather than black, this incident would have been trumped as another example of the endemic racism that is said to characterize American society.

A Couple of Reasons to Read "Hello, Goodbye" by Yiyun Li

 Did you meet someone in your first year of college who became a friend for life?  Are you a parent who has difficulty, or memorably had difficulty, dealing with the wisdom of young children?

If the answer to either of those questions is "yes," you might enjoy Yiyun Li's short story in the Nov. 15, 2021 edition of The New Yorker entitled "Hello, Goodbye."

The story, like a lot of  contemporary literary fiction, doesn't go much of anywhere at the end of the day, but it's well written. It's a partial exploration of certain interpersonal relationships as opposed to a tale that ends in the resolution of a plot or a set of issues.

The friendship is between two women, Nina, a daughter of Chinese immigrants, and Katie, who is apparently white and of European descent. Brought up in Kansas and Indiana, respectively, they went to U.C. Berkeley and ended up saying in California, both working in marketing (of course) for Silicon Valley firms. This was back in the late 1990s.

After that backdrop, the story jumps 20 years or so forward, into the current pandemic. Nina has a couple of precocious young daughters and a reliable, but boring husband. Katie, who has never had a child, wants to get out of her marriage to a wealthy jerk considerably older than she is and arrives on Nina's doorstep in need of help. Nina tries to balance her friend's needs with those of her children, the latter exacerbated by the pandemic and her husband's rather passive attitude toward parenting. 

If that sounds interesting, perhaps because you can identify with one or more aspects of the situation, I recommend "Hello, Goodbye."  The dialog in particular is good. If not, forget it. 

Perhaps the most memorable sentence in the entire story comes near the beginning. It goes as follows: "Nina was 27, not helplessly young, yet far from being trapped in a mildewed marriage, as she tended to believe many middle-aged women were." Readers can decide for themselves the extent to which she may have ended up in one. 

In the usual New Yorker author interview, Ms Li said that when it comes to relationships, she believes "muddling through" is better than wrecking things by opting for more extreme measures. The story is definitely in that vein.

Anna Sui, G.F Handel And Girls Who Are Careless of Time

Do you ever read an article and have a phrase jump out and get you thinking about something different?

That happened to me recently when I was reading a profile of fashion designer Anna Sui in a recent edition of "T, the New York Times Style Magazine."

The clothes she makes aren’t totems of some inaccessibly glamorous life but an invitation: to join the party, to be one of those girls, careless of time and most alive in a crowd, in the crush and heave of friends and strangers who by the end of the night will also be friends.

"One of those girls, careless of time" is the phrase that jumped out at me and got me thinking of an outstanding performance of George Fredrick Handel's first oratorio, "The Triumph of Time," which premiered in 1707 in Rome.  The performance was by Seattle-based Pacific Musicworks and you can listen to it by clicking on that link.

The libretto, a cautionary tale, was written by a Catholic Cardinal named Benedetto Pamphili. In essence, beautiful women are warned against devoting themselves to earthly pleasure and urged to instead make them themselves fit for heaven before it is too late. Delay is dangerous because Time will inevitably triumph.

Could an Anna Sui dress be dangerous, making a woman "careless of time" in the vein of Handel's oratorio?  Or perhaps the author had something else in mind when penning that phrase, but what could it be?

Time, of course, does eventually triumph when it comes to mortals and Handel, himself, eventually succumbed.  Interestingly, a revised version of "The Triumph of Time," with the libretto reworked into English by Thomas Morell, was performed in 1757 when Handel was blind. He died in 1759.