24: Book Review 9: A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
“‘My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,’ wrote Emily Dickinson.”
After initially finishing this tome of a book, my Goodreads review expressed how densely rich it is in information:
“This one was a honker of a nonfiction collection of essays but WOW. I learned so much in this and was particularly taken by the mind/brain explorations, the navigation of diseases in gendered systems, and how our minds or experiences can measurably affect the chemical (im)balances and physiology of our bodies.”
The largest theme of this research-packed and incredibly erudite contemplation was gender in light of artistic expression and illness.
Keeping in mind that this was a collection of essays, my book review will be taking a disjointed route in curating my favorite quotes and elaborating.
Siri Hustvedt.
Below are 20 quotes that stood out to me paired with a short commentary for each. (This book is 505 pages, you will forgive as you read lol) Enjoy!
“A 2001 study by Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick concluded with these words: ‘The prescription for female niceness is an implicit belief that penalizes women unless they temper their agency with niceness.’ In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don’t have to be nearly as nice as women.”(81)
Ah, a tale as old as time. Tempering our agency with niceness is a phrase that exposes what feigned politeness and small-making does: it gives away our power. Something I think we all can benefit from practicing is noticing if we see a woman in power and find her “grating”, “aggressive”, “bitchy”, or “annoying”, and then imagining her as a man. Would you still find her to be so terrible? Or is she just acting like a man? Or, when you find yourself being nice when you don’t want to when the situation warrants the opposite, flip the script. I will never forget reading “The 7 Necessary Sins of Women and Girls” By Mona Awad and her story of when she punched a man in the face after he groped her/sexually assaulted her in a club.
2.“A summary of the findings in Advances in psychiatric Treatment in 2005 begins with the following sentence: ‘Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations.’[....]the long-term effects when compared to controls include improved immune system functioning, lower blood pressure, improved liver function, and better mood.”(101)
Hustvedt revisits this idea later acknowledging how in writing, we achieve a kind of narrative voice that is self-conscious, almost separating ourselves from whatever it is we’re writing about. This is why journaling is so therapeutic. If you’d like to see some journaling prompts that have helped me heal, click here.
3. “Think of the widespread, popular notion that depression is caused by ‘a chemical imbalance’ in the brain and that SSRIs will address that imbalance. I remember talking to a psychiatrist seven or eight years ago who, in response to my comment that the scientific evidence about serotonin was far from conclusive, assured me that the drugs were effective for his patients---astonishingly, in fact. And yet, not then and not now is there evidence that low serotonin levels cause depression.”(103)
I thought I’d share this because, as someone with no personal experience with clinical or diagnosed depression, or prescriptions like SSRIs, I always took the words of people online as authority on this subject. The “chemical imbalance” theory is inconclusive and has still not been proven as of 2024. It doesn’t mean SSRI’s don’t work, just that there is no conclusive or measurable “cause” for depression in neuroscience or psychology at this time. This is a cheeky opposition to the phrase “the more you know!”, actually, “the more we don’t know!”. Lol
4. “Writing lifts us out of ourselves, and that leap onto paper, that objectification, spurs reflective self-consciousness, the examination of self as other.”(110)
Ooh this one ties in gorgeously with quote #2.
5.“As Hippocrates famously said, ‘It is more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.’”(111)
I remember when I first read this my jaw dropped and I re-read it about 8 times and shared it on Instagram and told everyone I knew! Wow.
6. “Furthermore, the fact that hormonal levels and endogenous opioids are affected by one’s culture, by one’s beliefs and desires, should make any thoughtful person think carefully about how he frames the question of what we mean by ‘biology’.”(203)
I just love this, because we too often assume science to be a definitive authority with clear edges, solutions, or conclusive findings, when it just isn’t. There is a lot more to us than science has yet been able to discover through the lens of biology. This is where science is threatened when ancient holistic wellness, ayurveda, etc. sometimes have more pseudo-scientific answers that get better results. I wonder if that has something to do with gendered authority in patriarchal, western science.
7. “Feminist theory has been locked in its own nature/nurture debates for years, usually framed as an argument between essentialism (women are naturally different from men and we should celebrate and think through those differences) and constructivism (women and men are different because culture or ‘nurture’ makes them that way). The question ‘What is a woman?’ has not been answered.”(229)
I appreciate this so much, because when I took a gender and sexuality course in college, I was finally exposed to the wide array of variation that naturally occurs in human physiology, sex, and gender. There were never hard lines.
8. “His essential point is that ‘traffic’ in the modern world ‘is overwhelmingly not so much the transmission of human bodies as the transmission of human information.’ One can certainly argue that Wiener’s statement was right then and is even more right now. We are drowning in information.”(235)
AHHH read my blog post on Baudrillard here, “In the chapter titled “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media”, he elaborates on how “we live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning”(79).
9. “Studies have shown that what we hear affects what we see. Similarly, what we hear can affect our tactile sensations.”(244)
Intermodal synesthesia is incredibly interesting in reference to experiencing art.
10. “Heisenburg once said, ‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’”(281)
“Questions elicit answers in their likeness; that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet.” - Krista Tippett
11. “Is this a rejection of the mortal body for a better model? In the Western tradition, hasn’t woman always been understood as more body and less reflection than man? Isn’t this still the case? Doesn’t the young, beautiful, voluptuous woman who reveals herself to be a formidable intellectual continue to create surprise and amazement? Do people harbor the same prejudices when the young, beautiful intellectual is a man?”(285)
Just thought these questions were great to ponder.
12. “In Problems of Art, [Susanne Langer] defined art: ‘A work of art is an expressive form created for our perception through sense or imagination, and what it expresses is human feeling. The word ‘feeling’ must be taken here in its broadest sense, meaning everything that can be felt, from physical sensation, pain and comfort, excitement and repose, to the most complex emotions, intellectual tensions, or the steady feeling-tones of a conscious human life.’”(317)
I often wonder what feelings my original artwork creates. I have gotten “warm” and “colorful” in a poll once. I wish to create work that makes people feel warm, so that’s good haha.
13. “The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man.”(334)
This is such a good quote, especially the attribution to the nearest man. Here is a short list of commonly misattributed discoveries of women.
14. “Beliefs and ideas alter physiology. This is philosophically explosive but true. Suggestion, hypnotic and otherwise, may well reside in the ‘we-centric- space, ‘the shared manifold of intersubjectivity.’ The placebo effect is a potent example.”(360)
The power of affirmations, the power of the dialogue in our brains, the “mind over matter” argument, is true and backed by science.
15. “Lakoff and Johnson echo, although less eloquently, the narrator of Middlemarch: ‘Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophesies.’”(361)
One of Don Miguel Ruiz’s four agreements is to “be impeccable with your word” for this very reason. “What we think, we become”, said the Buddha.
16. “This potential or imaginative space is where the child plays and the artist works; it is a ‘third area’, one Winnicott maintains we never outgrow but to which we continually return as part of ordinary human creativity[...]The making of art takes place in a borderland between self and other. It is an illusory and marginal but not hallucinatory space.”(374)
Is this what we call “flow state” in layman's terms?
17. “Without being conscious of it, our autobiographical or episodic memories are continually altered and re-created by the present in a process called reconsolidation. We do not recall an original memory but rather the last time we took it out and examined it.”(386)
Knowing this is so helpful because we all know that our memories are not accurate, that they change as time goes on, but to know how we recall them like a game of telephone is intriguing.
18. “To what degree do we conventionalize the images in front of us because we see the patterns we expect to see? How much do we miss? How much of vision is stereotyped? Do we always quash surprise to the degree that it is possible without even knowing we are doing it? And how much visual information do we take in without being at all conscious of it?”(456)
The other day I came across this, a completely blue, black, and white pixelated image of a can of Coca-Cola on Reddit, but the can appeared red. This happened to everyone in the comment section sharing our horror and fascination at how much repetition and branding literally altered an image to our preconceived notion of how it should be. Our brains recognize patterns, and sometimes, even have the power to create them and transpose them onto an objective world with a different reality than our own.
19. “It is fascinating to note that in the field of epigenetics there is mounting evidence that environmental stress on an animal creates molecular changes after DNA replication. The nucleotide sequence of the genes is not directly affected but gene expression or suppression is. Such changes, it appears, can be inherited, not forever, but for more than one generation.”(464)
This is so interesting to me because environmental factors are often overlooked as causes of disease, but have the same potential for mutagenic influence as food, drugs, topical products, etc. It’s why I won’t live in a big city because I mentally equate it to bathing in a vat of green, bio-hazardous liquid like the one that created the Hulk. (-:
20. “[from Pierre Janet] In reality definiteness does not exist in natural phenomena; it exists but in our systematic descriptions. It is the men of science who cut separate pieces out of a whole that nature has made continuous.”(482)
This reminds me of the idea of reciprocity as beautifully rendered in the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. It was once common knowledge, ancient wisdom passed down from generation to generation, that the world is an interconnected, interwoven and breathing organism of natural balance. It is only when scientists, inventors, and money-hungry capitalists seek to compartmentalize their brand of destruction by assuming wrongly that the world can be bent to their whims, cherry-picked of its profitable parts without consequence, that definiteness is wielded.
If you made it this far, well, I love you. Haha thank you so much for reading these quotes and my musings.
Comment below if anything in particular spoke to you or if you have anything to add to the conversation!
Gabby
