Sex, Text and My Other Body

I'm sure there's a literary/sociological/psychological theory* that addresses this, but I've been thinking about something I can best describe as "my other body."

This is not my actual, physical body, but my symbolic one--not how I experience the world as flesh and blood, but how the world chooses to experience me. Perhaps I can explain.

I might see someone I don't know and based on his appearance alone conclude that he is smart, dumb, nerdy, a douchebag, etc.

Another person might see me and based on appearance alone conclude that I am not American and must be from a different country.

Or a person might view my body as a sexual object, no matter that I am not (an object).

I'll put aside for the moment the question of whether our bodies do have any inherent value, worth, or beauty. Let it suffice for this blog that there are in fact two very different bodies in play. [I imagine someone who saw the two bodies as one and the same would have some kind of body dysmorphia.]

I find this concept extremely helpful as a writer. From the earliest days of literature, writers have identified their works with their own bodies--often as mother or father to an errant child. Anne Bradstreet famously wrote a poem titled "The Author to Her Book" in which she chides the "ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain." In this conception, the work is both intimately associated with the writer's body (as child) and dissociated and excused for its flaws and imperfections (the text as orphan).

Another Renaissance writer wrote of having undergone "pressing" to produce his book (don't you just love a good suggestive pun?). Both of these metaphors indicate the vulnerability (to criticism, etc.) of not only the author, but the author's body.

I'm sure every writer can relate to this in one way or another. You write something. You put a little (or a lot) of yourself into it, then the editor/publisher changes a word here, a phrase there and completely changes what you wished to say.

[I used to metaphorically hit the ceiling every time the school paper came out and the editors had once again marred my flawless copy with one or more grammatical, typographical, or idiomatic errors. Did I mention I was a joy to work with?]

Or someone reads something you've written and takes it completely out of context, interpreting it to mean something it doesn't mean or imputing to you a belief you hate.

And for whatever reason, women's symbolic bodies have always been more vulnerable then the symbolic bodies of men: witness online (or in print) attacks on a woman's looks or sexual history or anatomy, all because she wrote about, I dunno, anything. I can understand why authors like Charlotte Bronte wrote under a male pseudonym. Protection. Safety. No one drawing attention to the vulnerability of your body as female.

I feel this vulnerability--as much as I have tried to protect this other body so intimately associated with my own. I've tried to protect it in the way that I dress (that doesn't really work, by the way). I've stopped writing because a man read my words and thought that he knew me, thought that he could read me, thought that he could take liberties because hadn't I put myself (my body) out there for everyone to read?

I've despaired to think that in the career path I wish to pursue, my male coworkers will see me primarily as the cute girl (with "deep, dark, and soulful eyes," direct quote from one confessional email) and not as competent, smart, or talented.

I know I've been stressing the disconnect between my actual, physical body and this other body, but truthfully, they're not always so disconnected. It's this other body, I think, that causes men to casually touch my leg, my waist, my butt (without, as one friend so memorably put it, even bothering to buy me a happy meal first). It can't be me, right?

I don't know what it's like to be white, male, and heterosexual (a girl can dream), but I imagine there's less of a gap between the way other people perceive you and the way you perceive yourself. I imagine there are fewer moments of disconnect. I could try to primarily see myself as a sexual object, but I think that would get in the way of my writing.


[Based on this, one of the major feats that women in our culture are expected to achieve to become adults is internalizing the male gaze, or viewing themselves as primarily sexually attractive or not. Thus, being sexy is a culturally conditioned behavior that requires seeing a reverse image of yourself (as sexy) and then projecting it back to the world.]


*This might be Lacan and the mirror stage. Or Marx and alienation (alienated from work, from your body, from other people's bodies which then become instruments of production?). Or feminism and the male gaze.