Hunger and Living in a Feminine Space

There’s a Sex in the City episode where Samantha goes to a plastic surgeon and ends up with a body heavily marked with lines where he could cut and change, remove, pull. She had entered the appointment buoyant with the idea of youth reclaimed, and she ended in tears, distraught.

There is a price to having a woman’s body, and that is the burden of existing of a vessel, one that holds life, pleasure, and the feeling of home for others. Having a woman’s body is not a personal thing: a woman’s body is the world’s body, and the world can do with it what it wants for its own pleasure because the body of a woman is not a living, private thing. It is an our thing.

When Australian Sheperd puppies are born, a tiny elastic band is wrapped around the stump of the tail so circulation will fail and the tail will eventually die and fall off. The ears are glued in a way so the ear will fall in a pleasing forward flap. Apparently the universe did not know what it was doing when it created this herding dog, and so we are fixing it.

Apparently the universe made a mistake when it made woman’s bodies so themselves, so irregular and hard and soft and crooked and straight and bulging. Apparently the universe misunderstood what happens as we age, that change happens. The universe forgot that the value of a woman is how much she pleases the eye of another, and so it let women’s bodies go from baby to bone over a span of a lifetime, from young to old, but the world is here to correct this error, to find way to keep everything as upright and youthful as possible.

The price of fighting what is most woman in yourself, your body, your soul, your spirit, is that you lose yourself and you end up floating in space, knowing only a sense of existence when someone looks at your body and tells you how you appear to them.

I live in a very feminine space, and recently a man walked me through the property and told me all the things that needed to be done in order to make the place more presentable. He may as well have had a marker and been drawing on Samantha’s body. His vision of the property had to do with order and predictability and a regimented kind of beauty. Grasses in straight lines. Old plants pulled. Unruly plants pulled or controlled.

Having a well-manicured yard is often based on privilege. Who has the time and resources to make what grows outside perfect? The same is true with the body. Who has the resources for a tummy tuck, a boob job, eyelids lifted, vaginal tissued brightened?

The pursuit of perfection is a suckhole of terror. It’s like spitting into the wind that blows into your face and thinking things will go well.

I don’t think of the feminine as pursuing perfection. I think of it as messy, as muddy, as bloody and wild. When the place I live is most itself, it looks out of control. It looks like it has taken over. It looks wild and staggeringly beautiful.

It’s so itself when it is overgrown.

As are women. They spill over and the world has no idea what to do with such abundance.

Oh! The hunger of the earth! The hunger of the feminine body! Feeding both is a full time job, only the earth feels no shame.

We have not been respectful of the earth, and so it is falling away from us. The earth is a body, and it’s telling us it needs love and attention and care, not just to thrive, but to exist.

The earth is not a thing to control or overcome. It is a thing to feed.

When you are most wild, how do you feel? What terrifies the world when you are overgrown? What terrifies you?