their capacity to do just the opposite, to pay attention to every offspring, to shower each child with every possible advantage. Men need women and children now, just as women and children are always thought to need their men.
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Human bonds are deep, as feral as civets, and for that, paradoxically, we have our brains to thank and rebuke. We love long and hard because we know too much. We know that we will die, and that awareness has shaped us profoundly. It has given us the world's religions. It has taken all our ancient hungers for power, esteem, love, connection and buffed them till they gleam like chrome, bouncing our reflections back at us. Stop for a moment, please, and talk. Stride away in full strength, but remember that time and space are curved and you will come back to talk again to me, your friend, your daughter, your mother, your love.
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I am a utopian pessimist by nature, a mechanistic phantasmagorist. I believe in permanent revolution of the mind and will. In 1987 I sat over dinner with my grandmother, who was then in her late seventies, my mother, and my eighteen-year-old cousin, Julie. We talked about whether we would choose to be men if we could. Yes, we all said, even, to my surprise, my grandmother. "Men have more freedom," she said.
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Recently I reminded my mother of that conversation. We agreed that we no longer felt the same. We no longer wanted to be men. It isn't merely a function of getting older and more accepting of ourselves. My grandmother was older than either of us when she said, I would if I could. Nor is it because I think women have made so much progress in the past decade, or that the prison door has melted and the merry inmates are now in charge. Instead, for me, and I think for my mother, the change of heart is the result of revelation, the realization that our strength and our anima stem in good part from our womanness, and from thinking about what it means to be a woman, here, now, in this culture, and in our imagined future. Our tribe is the tribe of woman. It is our tribe to define, and we're still doing it, and we will never give up. We live in a state of permanent revolution. The
frisson
of it! We will not abandon the tribe or the battle. We will not define the tribe as a default zone or a consolation prize. The wish to be a man is a capitulation to limits and strictures we never set for ourselves. It is lazy. It does not belong to us.
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I have a daughter now. She's still too young to know that she has any
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