Where are all the women hermits? – Rhian Sasseen – Aeon

She wants to be alone

When even a simple stroll down the sidewalk is an exercise in self-loathing, why don't more women run away to the woods?

For decades, went the story, books, candy and propane tanks had gone missing from a small community called Pine Tree on North Pond in central Maine. This was a place surrounded by wilderness; in the winter, it was a wilderness buried in snow. Its residents grew perplexed. Who among them would steal? The stories multiplied: it was a stranger, a phantom, a ghost… A hermit. He metamorphosed, over the years, into a legend. No one was sure if the hermit was real.
One night, while stealing food from a kitchen, he was caught out by a motion-detector linked to an alarm. There he was: the North Pond hermit. He was real. The police were called and, in April 2013, the hermit was arrested. Later, he was sent to jail.
This is where the outside world began to intrude, and the story's borders began to blur. A few months after the arrest, GQ magazine sent the writer Michael Finkel to meet the hermit. A profile, titled 'The Strange and Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit', ensued. It seemed we were in for an adventure story, a real-life Hardy Boys: man rejects society, man is lured back into society and, in the end, we all learn a lesson about human nature and self-reliance.
But the story veered off-course.  Despite heady preconceptions of Hemingway and Kipling and all the other great white male adventurers, the writer could see that the hermit's tale was one of these man-conquers-wilderness stories only insofar as it included both a man and some woods. Instead, the Maine hermit's story resembled something far older: a fairy tale. Young man walks into the woods, becomes spellbound, only to emerge years later, older, stranger and forever transformed.
This didn't stop the writer from trying. Why did he do it? he asked the hermit. Surely, 'There must have been some grand insight,' something – enlightenment, tranquility, even a poem – 'revealed to him in the wild.' But what?
Nothing really, said the hermit. He simply wanted the freedom to be alone.
thought about him often, the Maine hermit, after I read this profile, and I sat and wondered about the speed with which I was whirring through my own ordinary life. How, exactly, did he do it? The winters are cold in Maine, and his shelter was only a tent. Why did he do it? I too found it hard to take 'no motivation' for an answer. What, exactly, was it like, to be so alone?
I began to wonder if I had it in me. I lived in a city, after all; the whole endeavour seemed difficult, even suicidal. One night, I searched 'woman alone in the woods' online, just for kicks. The results were discouraging: a stock photo on the first page was named, tellingly: 'Sad Lonely Woman Walking Alone Into the Woods'. A few other hits explained that women, if we're sane, simply couldn't go hiking alone; it wasn't safe. We're weak, and besides, there are bears – you don't want to be mauled and eaten, do you?
I didn't. But the results still bothered me. I was reminded of the medieval anchoress, of Virgil's wandering sibyl; she who, 'with raging mouth', wrote Heraclitus, 'utter[s] things solemn, rude, and unadorned'. I recognised in myself, too, a certain stirring that occurred whenever I was reminded of Henry David Thoreau's axiom: 'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.' But Thoreau was a part of the problem: Walden (1854), his journal of two years of solitude among nature, can't even conceive of a woman alone.
Again and again, the most famous, the most celebrated, hermits and recluses are men: Thoreau, of course, but also Christopher McCandless who lived (and died) alone in Alaska, as portrayed in the film Into the Wild (2007); J D Salinger, a recluse after the success of The Catcher in the Rye (1951) until his death in 2010; the polar explorer Richard Byrd, author of the memoir Alone (1938); the American poet Thomas Merton who became a Trappist monk.

today, we don't burn witches, we just shame them

Going back further: the ascetic Saint Jerome; Laozi, founder of Taoism; but also Muhammad, Jesus, Gautama Buddha. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Books on recluses are always quoting Rousseau: 'Man is born pure, it is society that corrupts.'
And Rousseau's plan for women? From Émile, or On Education (1762):
The women's entire education should be planned in relation to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, care for them as adults… these are women's duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood.
'Sad Lonely Woman Walking Alone Into the Woods': if the hermit is always a man, if there's nobility in his solitude, then what's left for women? Old maid. Hag. There must be something wrong with her. Don't pretend that these aren't still true; today, we don't burn witches, we just shame them.
But for those of us who want to be alone, who still crave it even after all the abuse and skepticism, there are few guides and even fewer celebrations of female solitude. Who is the female hermit? Does she exist? Who is the woman who can look out at the world and in all seriousness say: 'I want to be alone'?
To be alone, after all, is to admit to that rare quality: a contentment with one's self.
he word 'hermit' comes from the Latin translation of the Greek word for 'of the desert', and the hermit's history is almost as garbled as its linguistic origins. While ascetics crop up rather frequently in antiquity – the Greeks, through Alexander, were aware of the forest hermits of what is now Pakistan, and had their own Cynics, besides – 'hermit' as a term is used most often to denote the desert dwellers of the early Christian church and the religious orders that followed. Paul of Thebes, the first of these so-called 'Desert Fathers', fled to the Egyptian desert in the mid third century C.E. His only companion, supposedly, was a raven that visited him daily, clutching half a loaf of bread in its claws.
What would compel a person to do this, to run into the desert and wander, unabashed, until either her soul was scrubbed clean or she died? To love, sometimes, is to peel back the skin, and watch the bone bleach white beneath the sun.
'I was like a fire of public debauch,' Mary of Egypt told Zosimas of Palestine, the priest who found her wandering the desert 47 years after she first escaped. After Paul of Thebes, Saint Anthony popularised the hermit practice; scholars speculate that hermitdom, with its code of self-denial, spread as a replacement for martyrdom, no longer an option in the newly Christian Roman Empire. Christianity is built on sacrifice, and in this Mary of Egypt, the first female hermit, excelled.

Like Mary Magdalene before her, Mary entered her religious awakening a dissolute woman and emerged from it a saint. 'And how can I tell you about the thoughts which urged me to fornication, how can I express them to you, Abba?' she asked Zosimas. 'A fire was kindled in my miserable heart… As soon as this craving came to me, I flung myself on the earth and watered it with my tears.'

At 17, the story goes, Mary began giving her body to passing pilgrims, not out of economic necessity but as a method of self-immolation. This is familiar territory; one of the many, now cliché, ways in which women are supposed to act out our pain: we hurt ourselves, while men hurt others. One-night stands, self-harm, our tenuous relationship with food: the question it most often comes down to is: how can we best escape our bodies? At 29, Mary attempted to enter a church, and found that she couldn't cross its threshold. Something, be it God or some other mystery, barred her; she understood, in this moment, that she needed to get out. She needed to run. She needed to be free.
She went to the desert with only three loaves of bread, and this is where, 47 years later, Zosimas found her, transformed. Now she was an old woman of 76. In the desert, Mary told Zosimas, she battled wild animals and tore at wild herbs for food and baked beneath the endless sun. She would not admit to inner peace. 'Why do you wish, Abba Zosimas,' she asked him, 'to see a sinful woman? What do you wish to hear or learn from me, you who have not shrunk from such struggles?'
I bring up Mary not because I am trying to convert anyone, but because in her public struggle, I see an aspect of myself. Hers were the problems and self-hatreds that we women are still taught to torture ourselves with today: sex as a bartering chip, sex as a method of validation, of proving one's credentials – credentials that, more often than not, men get to define. 'Men look at women,' the art historian John Berger wrote in his survey of European art, Ways of Seeing (1972). 'Women watch themselves being looked at. …The surveyor of women in herself is male: the surveyed female.' What did Mary see when she looked at her own reflection?  Herself? Or someone else's vision?
We're lying to ourselves if we think that this is what freedom looks like.
To be alone, though, is not the same thing as loneliness. Is there anything lonelier, after all, than lying next to a person who doesn't love you, and knowing that they never will? Sometimes, it's healthy to tell the outside world to go to hell. Sometimes, for the sake of one's integrity, one's sanity, you need to say no. I will not, I am not, I won't – but what won't you do? Where is the line? To be alone, you need to know who exactly you are.
There is a reason why humans prefer groups of two or more: it's easier. It's easier to delegate tasks, to point to one person and say: You will find our food; to tell another: You will lead us along the way. In fairy tales, kings and hermits are always finding each other. An Italian fairy tale features a holy hermit (male, of course) who, after helping a youth win both a princess and a kingdom's worth of gold, demands half of everything, princess included. When the youth draws his sword, moving to cut the princess apart, the hermit relents, happy to see that the young man 'held his honour dearer than his wife'.
The princess is the prize. But Mary of Egypt was no princess. Alone, only one person makes the decisions. Food, shelter, water – they're all one person's responsibility. This is what true freedom looks like: if you fuck up, you're dead. If you don't, you survive. If you survive, congratulations: no one owns you.

To create anything, we need to have the freedom to lead, unimpeded, into the murkiness of our own minds

Mary survived. A medieval icon depicts the moment Zosimas found her: clothed, he offers her a robe, a cloak, anything to protect her from the cruelty of the elements, the cruelty of our eager eyes. Her arm is outstretched. She'll take the robe, sure – but not quite yet. This is a pictorial representation of our bated breaths. In this moment, the halfway point between yes and no, Mary's back is bent forward; like an animal, there's power in the spine. Also like an animal: the gold fur that covers her body, the same gold as the halo that crowns her head. One corner of her mouth turns upward, approaching something that can't exactly be called a smile. From something wild comes beauty; from solitude, contentment.
Mary did it. You could do it. Why haven't you?
Because not all women can be alone.
Often, our supposed weaknesses are used against us. It's too dangerous, we're told if we want to travel. You're not strong enough, we're told if we express any desire to hike, to build, to boat, to dream. We'll die if we go outside. Even the men who say that they like smart women, independent women, mean something different from how women define the words: when those men say smart, they mean: I have strong opinions and she agrees with them. Independent as in: she'll choose to follow where I lead.
But to work, we need to be alone. To create anything, we need to have the freedom to lead, unimpeded, into the murkiness of our own minds. 'To be female and to demand such things as a retreat from life and from loved ones,' writes the poet Leslie A Miller in her essay 'Alone in the Temple' (1992), 'is difficult and different. To assert the need for retreat when one is young, a wife… seems selfish, stubborn, even crazy.'
To voice this need is difficult. A thousand years after Mary of Egypt and half a world away, a woman named Ji Xian wanted to be a nun. This was the late Ming dynasty, and there was a precedent: early Buddhist nuns, writes Susan Murcott in First Buddhist Women (1991), were 'a radical experiment', consisting, in their earliest phase, of '"female wanderers" who could live in the forest alone'. The scholar Grace S Fong, writing in the journal Early Modern Women in 2007, elaborates: for a woman such as Ji Xian, a daughter of the elite, there were, 'except for Buddhist or Daoist nuns', a 'distinct lack of models and contexts for female reclusion'. Noblemen had options: recluse-poets, who gave up their court lives in favour of a life spent composing stanzas, were a viable tradition. Ji Xian was a poet, too, but her work portrays poignantly the full extent in which her art was limited by her sex. 'I desire to imitate the recluse at Deer Gate,' she writes. 'But being a wife, what can I do?'
What could she do? What can any of us do? It's difficult to navigate the boundaries of one's own life. 'You tell people what you're doing, and they say, "You're crazy,"' the Swiss hiker Sarah Marquis told the New York Times in 2014, after walking 10,000 miles across the world by herself. 'It's never: "Cool project, Sarah! Go for it."' The potential for catastrophe is implicit: what if we're lost? The means of production. Even for those women who, unlike Ji Xian, were able to become recluses, their womanhood becomes a disadvantage. Orgyen Chökyi, a 17th century Tibetan Buddhist nun known in the West as the 'Himalayan Hermitess', wrote: 'May I not be born again in a female body. …I could do without the misery of this female life. / How I lament this broken chest, this female body.' Femininity, as it turns out, can be a barrier to enlightenment.
A woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction – but what could Ji Xian have produced if she could have just been given the opportunity to be alone? How many women are there, before and after Ji Xian, named and nameless, elite or otherwise, who couldn't be alone? 'My deep appreciation is for high mountains,' goes another of Ji Xian's poems. 'Lofty feelings – in vain there are dreams. / I always lodge them amongst the white clouds.'
Don't you dare forget her name.
ut why would anyone want to be alone? Try it for a moment. Lock yourself in another room, one entirely without the presence of other people, other voices. Disconnect your internet, turn off your phone. Allow yourself, for just a few minutes, to let the poses fall away. The angles. Let your public persona, so exhausting to maintain, disappear.
Breathe. There is your throat. There is the fly, buzzing in the ceiling corner. There is, also, something else: the silence. A silent room has its own timbre, its own weight. Breathe again; keep breathing. Allow life, with its heaviness, its dust, to slip away, unimpeded.
This is the feeling, sadly rare, of no longer being watched. The psychotherapist Carl Jung, after seeing a photo of the Arctic explorer Augustine Courtauld, remarked that Courtauld's was the face of a man 'stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world'. For women, this is doubly true: a woman's life is one lived under surveillance, a system of inner and outer regulations even more restrictive than a man's. Even a simple stroll down the sidewalk becomes an exercise in self-loathing. Suck in your stomach. Straighten your hem. (What if it rides up, exposing you?) Every shop window offers a glimpse of your own reflection. Adjust, adjust, adjust.
It's enough to drive a woman crazy (and isn't this what we're always being accused of?). It's enough to drive any woman to the woods. It was this, a life lived under the eyes of men, their needs and their demands, that led Sarah Bishop, the hermit of Connecticut's West Mountain, to the cave she called home. The writer Samuel Goodrich wrote a poem about her in 1823; in 1856, he recalled her story:
Male hermits have been frequently heard of, but a woman hermit is a rare occurrence. Nevertheless, Ridgefield could boast one of these among its curiosities. Sarah Bishop was, at the period of my boyhood, a thin, ghostly old woman, bent and wrinkled, but still possessing a good deal of activity. She lived in a cave, formed by nature, in a mass of projecting rocks that overhung a deep valley or gorge in West Mountain.
Bishop's hermitdom, he goes on to observe, could be traced back to the Revolutionary War, when she was a young woman. During the war, the story goes, her father's house was burnt down by the passing British troops and she, as has happened to women since time immemorial, was raped by a soldier.
All we know of Bishop comes from Goodrich, the last in a long line of men who defined the course of her life for her. For his muse, Goodrich allots a few pretty stanzas, some paragraphs in the memoir devoted to his own long life; he calls her the 'nun of the mountain', a nice term for a woman whose body was violated in the name of her country's freedom. If Bishop kept a diary, perhaps it would have gone like this: Don't tread on me.

'I felt that the creation of a rustic cabin would be the solution to my homelessness'

And perhaps Thoreau was thinking of Bishop, and the precedent she set, when he built his cabin in the woods of Walden Pond. Probably not. Walden is a work central to national self-mythologising; Americans' image of ourselves as a nation of individuals. There are precious few equivalents for America's women, and little evidence in our ability to survive alone. But Anne LaBastille's Woodswoman series of memoirs, which recount the cabin that the late American author and ecologist built on the shores of a remote Adirondack lake in the 1960s, could be one of them.
Woodswoman (1976), published during the height of the feminist Second Wave, begins with a divorce. LaBastille, who married young and, worse yet, married her employer, is given a month to find a new home for herself; 'I had no place to go,' she writes. 'My own family was either dead or scattered, leaving me with no relatives to turn to. …Intuitively now, I made my decision. I would build a log cabin in the Adirondack wilderness. I hoped that a withdrawal to the peace of nature might remedy my despair.' Most importantly: 'I felt that the creation of a rustic cabin would be the solution to my homelessness.'
LaBastille's writing lacks the lyricism of Thoreau, but it has its own considerable charms. Her books – Woodswoman, Woodswoman II (1987), Woodswoman III (1997), and Woodswoman IIII (2004) – are practical guides in homesteading, giving the impression that, if she could do it, so could anyone. LaBastille grew up outside New York City; though a keen interest in the outdoors was a major part of her childhood, the occasional camping trip does not make a wilderness expert. She made mistakes and, during one winter described in the first volume, almost died. But she survived.
In her second volume, LaBastille builds another cabin, explicitly taking her inspiration from Walden for what she calls 'Thoreau II'. Like Thoreau the first, she provides a list of expenses: the total spent on building the cabin and obtaining the necessary permits is $578.05 in today's money. Thoreau, on the other hand, spent $742.64. For less than $1,000 today, and for less than one of history's most revered recluses, LaBastille builds herself a private oasis, an escape route, a home.
LaBastille is not the only woman to do so. There are more: the English modern-day hermit Rachel Denton, profiled in The Guardian in 2009. The 13th century Mugai Nyodai, the first female Zen master in the world. Martha Frock, who lived in the 1940s in a shack in the middle of the Florida Everglades. Anastasia the Patrician, a sixth century lady-in-waiting to a Byzantine empress who founded a monastery in Egypt. Margaret Kirkby, a second-generation hermit in 14th century England. Suchitra Sen, the Greta Garbo of Indian cinema. Despina Achladioti, the Greek patriot known as the Lady of Ro, after the deserted island where she took refuge during the Second World War. The Christian mystic Julian of Norwich. Robyn Davidson who trekked across the deserts of west Australia by camels. Even the poet Dorothy Wordsworth, to an extent.
All women who wanted to be alone.
ingle: The Art of Being Satisfied, Fulfilled, and Independent (2004). Choosing Me Before We (2009). Living Alone and Loving It: A Guide to Relishing the Solo Life (2002). Falling for Me: How I Hung Curtains, Learned to Cook, Traveled to Seville, and Fell in Love (2011). Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After (2006). Today, single women can support a cottage industry of self-help books. But the single woman, unlike the hermit, isn't really alone – she's simply, momentarily or forever, without a man.
So why aren't there more women really alone, women hermits? A hermit, of course, is not just single, not just alone, but alone in a particular way: free from the dizzying pressures and possibilities of public life. The hermit is truly free from acting as lord or master, proprietor or minister, soldier or citizen, serf or king. The hermit is free even from the simple expectations of being a neighbour.
For women, for most of history, it's been mother or maiden, daughter or wife. The roles shuffle, their names and details changing, but all share one feature: which man does she care for, which man does she take care of? Woman as defined by man; woman as seen by man. How unappealing. With so few choices, it's clear why we know of so few women hermits, and why solitude is viewed as male.
This was the hierarchy that Mary of Egypt scorched herself of in the desert; the hierarchy that Ji Xian wandered away from in the corners of her mind; the hierarchy that Anne LaBastille wrote a guide against. By some miracle, these women were, in one way or another, hermits. But their escape was rare.
A woman alone, unwatched, unchaperoned and without children is impossible for us to process. What does she do with her time? Burn the witch. She doesn't exist. But what of those women who, against all odds, refuse these rules? We don't remember them. So here, instead, a commemoration to those few who did: 'I want to be alone.' That famous phrase. Think of it as another option, one so recognisable that, in a single breath, it created an enigma. Garbo made it seem so easy. Years later, she would claim: 'I only said, "I want to be let alone." There is all the difference.' But too late. The words were spoken. The myth was made.
We imagine her clearly: glamorous, intelligent, those eyebrows, that face. 'Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side, and don't be stingy, baby.' An actress is defined by her audience; after a decade in Hollywood, she must have been tired of watching herself being watched. Instead, a refusal: no one got to look at her, and she disappeared, transformed into a modern fairy tale.  A woman alone is either a mystery or an object of pity; you tell me which was Garbo.
18 February 2015

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WHAT I'M READING: The invention of the heterosexual / Salon

The history of straightness is much shorter than you'd think. An expert explains its origins

Blank mentions her personal story at the beginning of her provocative new history of heterosexuality, "Straight," as a way of illustrating just how artificial our notions of "straightness" really are. In her book, Blank, a writer and historian who has written extensively about sexuality and culture, looks at the ways in which social trends and the rise of psychiatry conspired to create this new category in the late 19th and early 20th century. Along the way, she examines the changing definition of marriage, which evolved from a businesslike agreement into a romantic union centered around love, and how social Darwinist ideas shaped the divisions between gay and straight. With her eye-opening book, Blank tactfully deconstructs a facet of modern sexuality that most of us take for granted.If you met Hanne Blank and her partner on the street, you might have a lot of trouble classifying them. While Blank looks like a feminine woman, her partner is extremely androgynous, with little to no facial hair and a fine smooth complexion. Hanne's partner is neither fully male, nor fully female; he was born with an unconventional set of chromosomes, XXY, that provide him with both male genitalia and feminine characteristics. As a result, Blank's partner has been mistaken for a gay woman, a straight man, a transman — and their relationship has been classified as gay, straight and everything in between.
Salon spoke to Blank over the phone about the origins of heterosexuality, the evolution of marriage and why the rise of the "bromance" is a very good thing.
Men and woman have been having sex for as long as there have been humans. So how can we talk about there being a "history" of heterosexuality?
We can talk about there being a history of heterosexuality in the same way that we can talk about there being a history of religions. People have been praying to God for a really long time too, and yet the ways people relate to the divine have specific histories. They come from particular places, they take particular trajectories, there are particular texts, and individuals that are important in them. There are events, names, places, dates. It's really very similar.
So where does the term "heterosexual" come from?

"Heterosexual" was actually coined in a letter at the same time as the word "homosexual," [in the mid-19thcentury], by an Austro-Hungarian journalist named Károly Mária Kertbeny. He created these words as part of his response to a piece of Prussian legislation that made same-sex erotic behavior illegal, even in cases where the identical act performed by a man and a woman would be considered legal. And he was one of a couple of people who did a lot of writing and campaigning and pamphleteering to try to change legal opinion on that matter. He coined the words "heterosexual" and "homosexual" in a really very clever bid to try to equalize same-sex and different-sex. His intent was to suggest that there are these two categories in which human beings could be sexual, that they were not part of a hierarchy, that they were just two different flavors of the same thing.
But the term took quite a while to catch on. How did it spread?
Thanks to psychiatrists in the 1880s and 1890s — a part of the medical profession that was deeply unscientific at that time. It meant that somebody with a medical degree and all of the authority it brings could stand up and start making value judgments using specialized medical vocabulary and pass it off as authoritative, and basically unquestionable.
Psychiatry is responsible for creating the heterosexual in largely the same way that it is responsible for creating the various categories of sexual deviance that we are familiar with and recognize and define ourselves in opposition to. The period lasting from the late Victorian era to the first 20 or 30 years of the 20th century was a time of tremendous socioeconomic change, and people desperately wanted to give themselves a valid identity in this new world order. One of the ways people did that was establish themselves as sexually normative. And it wasn't the people who were running around thinking, "Oh, I'm a man and I like to sleep with other men, that makes me different," who were creating this groundswell of change; it was the other people, the men who were running around going, "I'm not a degenerate, I don't want to sleep with other men, I am this thing over here that is normative and acceptable and good and not pathological and right, that's what I am. That's what I need people to understand about me, because I need people to understand that I am a valid person and I need to be taken seriously."
This also has to do with the popularity of social Darwinism at the time.
Social Darwinism comes into play in a big way. It became important to prove that you were part of the solution and not part of the problem in this pell-mell, hurly-burly, crazy new social order [of the late 1800s and early 20th century].
So how did this change in terminology play itself out in the real world?
I actually talked to my grandmother about this. My grandmother is 88 and she came to consciousness in a world that didn't have heterosexuals in it, where nobody knew that word, and certainly nobody used it to refer to themselves. And she associates this change with Freud, whom she's never read but whom she's heard a lot about. So there was this sort of culture-wide game of telephone, if you will, in which these authoritative medicalized ideas coming from very rarefied circles trickled down into the larger culture. I think that for people of my grandmother's generation particularly, heterosexual simply became a synecdoche for normal. And that's certainly the way Freud talks about it, that you know, you attain heterosexuality. There's this process of attaining normality. When you manage to develop yourself, or to become developed, in the proper way, in an appropriate way, in the way that Freud says you're supposed to, what you end up with is a heterosexual.
In his book "Gay New York," George Chauncey writes about the flip side of this, how previous to the invention of "homosexuality," men's sexualities were much more fluid. Do you think that's the case?
Oh, absolutely. When you start operating on the principle that you indeed can divide people into sheep and goats, then there's also the idea that you must divide people into sheep and goats and there are certain boundaries that cannot be crossed without reclassifying.
As you point out in the book, for much of human history, marriage had absolutely nothing to do with sexuality or sex.
It's more that marriage didn't have a lot to do with desire. Marriage has always had to do with sex, and the ability to have marital sex and preferably procreate has always been central to marriage. But what was not so important was whether or not you necessarily wanted to have sex with that person. It was your duty, it was paying the marriage debt, and you were gonna do it, by golly, but  this was a co-worker, this a partner in business enterprise — not a person you chose to satisfy your own personal whims and desires with. If you happen to also like them and think that they were swell or pretty or handsome then that's great. But that's not what you were in it for.
And now everything has changed, because we now prioritize attraction, desire, love, romance, over the strictly economic and community-building aspects of marriage. We live in a culture now where we find it very odd when women don't support themselves, if somebody chooses to be a stay-at-home mother. That is a huge change, and that's a huge change just in my lifetime. I'm in my early 40s and I know that when I was a very small child those discussions were not happening in the same way. The economic and legal enfranchisement of women has gone hand-in-hand with both women's and men's ability to choose marriage partners based on their own desire, desires for sex, love, companionship, all of those things, and to put that first.
How do the successes of the women's movement impact our concept of heterosexuality?
I think that referring to it as the success of the women's movement is a little bit of a misnomer because there've been multiple women's movements, and also because it's not entirely to be credited to or blamed on organized feminism. There's been a lot of other enfranchisement of women that's gone on as well that has actually been not identifiably feminist, but definitely comes out of a very 18thcentury spirit of egalitarianism. But in general I think that equal rights egalitarianism has had an enormous amount to do with changing heterosexuality. Simply because once you give women and men equal or nearly equal rights to their own economic autonomy, political autonomy, social autonomy, you change the playing field, you change the dependency relationship.
Over the last decade, there's been a lot of science arguing that there are physical differences between gay people and straight people, in their brains and even the direction of their hair whirls. You're skeptical of this research. Why?
I question their validity primarily because nobody has established or in fact attempted to establish that there is a canonical straight body. And if you don't have characterized control, you can bet your bottom dollar I am not going to believe your hypothesis. It's really that simple.
All of this research that is purporting to look for physiological material differences between gay bodies and straight bodies: What are they comparing it to?  Their assumption that they know magically what a heterosexual body is?  When no one has actually established what that is.  That's bad science.
OK. Then do you think it's possible to establish what a heterosexual body looks like?
Well, you know, if you're going to stipulate that it's possible to establish what a non-heterosexual body is, it better damn well be possible to find out what a heterosexual body is.  And if one of those things is not possible, then, chances are, the other is not either.
I'm quite attached to my identity as a gay man — and, to be honest, I would feel a little troubled having my category taken away from me.
See, that's the thing, no one is going to take that away from you.  No one can take that away from you. The only thing they can take away from you is the illusion that this is not something that is constructed.  And that's very, very different.  Just because something is constructed as a social category, doesn't mean that it's not enormously meaningful.  It doesn't mean that we haven't built a whole damn civilization on it. Doesn't mean that we don't live our daily lives on it, doesn't mean that we don't use it all the time every time we're walking down the street.  This is real.  It's stuff that has physical manifestations in the real world. But that does not mean that it is organic.
Or innate.
Or inevitable.
But these categories have also been very practical. Gay rights wouldn't be imaginable without them.
Well, you know, minority politics has been a lot easier to sell than to just say, "Being human ought to get you human dignity," full stop. If you can pin down the difference, if you can make the difference the salient issue, it somehow makes it easier for people to stomach the fact that they can't go out and just beat people over the head.  I don't know why that is.  I find it intensely frustrating.
Do you think the success of the gay rights movement is helping broaden our ideas of sexuality?
I think that it is having an interesting effect of making the boundaries of the categories more permeable.  Simply because we now have this doxa [omnipresent acknowledgement] of gayness in our culture where we believe that gayness is a thing, we believe that it exists, we believe that we know what it looks like, we believe that we know what it acts like, and therefore, when we see it, we're actually very likely to say, "Hey, that over there, that looks really gay," regardless of whether or not that person may be, in fact, gay.
Those boundaries are becoming more porous. The term "bromance" cracks me up, but it is also promising. For the past hundred years or so, a lot of men have found it very difficult to express affection and love for other men without having it assumed that that love is necessarily sexual.  And now we're actually coming around to a place where at least some people, some of the time, are able to avail themselves of a category in which they can say, "Oh, OK, here's a way that men can be affectionate toward each other and one another and love one another and we don't have to assume that we know more about it than that."  I think that that adds something to the conversation.
Women, in particular, seem to be eschewing the traditional between binaries of gay and straight these days, at least in pop culture. The same thing doesn't seem to be true of men.
There's a reason for that. Every queer woman I know — and I'm a queer woman — understands intuitively that a lot of people don't consider what two women do together sexually as sex.  It's a whole lot easier to fly under the radar when what you're doing is not something that a lot of people are even going to consider as sex.
But men, for various other cultural reasons also seem to be more attached to categories. It functions partly as a sort of safety mechanism. 
I think there is a lot of safety in categories.  And there's a hell of a lot of safety in a binary. When you can just say, you know, anything that is not this is automatically that.  You know, it frees up a lot of spare time.
I have a number of friends who are negotiating the reverse of this, in that they for a long time identified as lesbians and have now started dating transmen and now have to negotiate the awkwardness of being in what ostensibly looks like a heterosexual relationship. I've been around several friends who, when they mention their boyfriend in a queer setting, reflexively say, "Oh, but he's trans."
And I think that really points as well to the fact that these are constructed categories.  This is about your subjectivity, it's about your allegiance, it's about where your social networks are, it's about the kinds of cultural priorities that you embrace and that you endorse. This is not just what gets you hard or what gets you wet. This is not just about what kinds of sex you have, or the congenital configurations of the people you have sex with.  It's very much about what cultures you participate in.  What cultures you ally yourself with, you know, whose flag you fly.
It's interesting that transgender men and women could marry their partners long before gay people could get married, even though they are probably far more despised by conservatives in this country, simply because they fit into this heterosexual idea of marriage.
Although, that's not uniformly true and there have been cases, like Littleton v. Prange in Texas — which still to this day breaks my heart — where jurisdictions refused to uphold the legality of marriage or partnerships involving a trans person, because they basically take the stance that you can't change genetics and this is person was never a whatever.  And therefore the marriage is not valid.  So it does cut both ways.  I do think that the issue of gay marriage is a very interesting one to look at in the context of the history of sexuality, because what I think it testifies to is not so much the tendency that non-heterosexuality has to destabilize heterosexual culture, but the incredible depth of the investment that our culture and our government have in regulating the kinds of relationships that people have in their lives.

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WHAT I'M READING: Black, queer, feminist, erased from history: Meet the most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of... / Salon

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is this Supreme Court's liberal hero, but her work sits on the shoulders of Dr. Pauli Murray

In a recent interview with MSNBC, Ginsburg reflected on the history behind one of her key legal accomplishments, the 1971 case of Reed v. Reed. After an estranged couple lost their son, his mother, Sally Reed, petitioned to administer his estate. But Idaho law maintained that "males must be preferred to females," in such matters. Ginsburg authored the plaintiff's brief for the case when it reached the Supreme Court, arguing that the 14th amendment protected against discrimination based upon sex. When the court ruled in Sally Reed's favor, it was the first time that the Equal Protection Clause had been applied to a case of sex discrimination.Ruth Bader Ginsburg has emerged as the liberal hero of a hopelessly right-wing Supreme Court, a ram in the bush for those of us who look on in horror as the court presides over the dismantling of key pieces of legislation like the Voting Rights Act, anti-discrimination law and affirmative action policy, which have been so critical to African-American advancement since the 1960s.
But much of the legal groundwork for that argument can be attributed to Dr. Pauli Murray, a Howard University-trained lawyer, who began to argue in the 1960s, that the Equal Protection Clause should be applied to cases of sex discrimination in much the same way that it had been applied to cases of racial discrimination. Murray's argument constituted what legal historian Serena Mayeri termed "reasoning from race," in which race analogies were used to make clear the subordinate status of women. Though today we speak of these matters in the language of intersections, a term gleaned from legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, it is Pauli Murray's initial invocation of the race-sex analogy for black women's positionality within the law that is the most direct precursor to Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality.
Ginsburg named Murray and Judge Dorothy Kenyon as co-authors of her brief in the Reed case, because even though they didn't help to write it, these two women had been pioneers in creating the legal strategy for fighting sex discrimination. Ginsburg's choice to name these women as co-authors is a model for how to solve contemporary issues among young feminists over white feminists' appropriation without attribution of the intellectual and political labor of women of color.

Pauli Murray is one of the most pivotal figures in 20th century African-American civil rights history, but beyond academic circles, she is not very well known. In 1944, she graduated as the valedictorian of her Howard University law class, producing a senior thesis titled "Should the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy Be Overruled?" Trained by William Howard Hastie and Leon Ransom at Howard, Pauli Murray had been witness to their early legal strategy of combating separate but equal doctrine by forcing states to either make black institutions equal to their white counterparts or integrate white institutions, if they failed to do so. However, she argued that Plessy v. Ferguson was inherently immoral and discriminatory and should be overturned. When she brought up this argument to her classmates, she noted that her suggestion was received with "hoots of derisive laughter." Murray coined the term "Jane Crow" to name the forms of sexist derision she frequently encountered during her time at Howard. It was the piece she co-authored in 1965 called "Jane Crow and the Law" that Ginsburg cites as so influential in her thinking about legal remedies for sex discrimination. Nearly 10 years later, in 1953, Spottswood Robinson, Thurgood Marshall and others pulled out a copy of her senior paper and used it as a guide to strategize how they would argue the Brown v. Board case. They didn't bother to mention this until about 10 years later, when she ran into Robinson at Howard Law School.
In 1966, as a board member of the ACLU alongside Dorothy Kenyon, Murray co-wrote the brief used in the Lowndes County, Alabama, case of White v. Crook. This case struck down the constitutionality of the all-white, all-male jury system. When the all-female, nearly all-white jury in the George Zimmerman trial failed to return a satisfactory verdict in that case, I thought about the supreme irony of Pauli Murray's legacy, wondering if perhaps she was, at that moment, turning over in her grave.
But it is not just racism and sexism that shaped her experiences as an attorney, activist and civil rights leader in the early to mid-20thcentury. Pauli Murray was a gender nonconforming person, who favored a masculine-of-center gender performance during her 20s and 30s. She struggled both with her sense of gender identity and with her sexual attraction to women. She asked doctors to administer male hormones to her in the 1930s, and tried to convince one doctor to perform exploratory surgery to see if she had "secreted male genitals."
In today's terms, she very probably would have embraced transgender identity, and might have identified as a trans* man. That terminology was not available to Murray in the 1930s and 1940s, since it was not invented until the 1950s. Like so many other facets of Murray's life, she was a couple of decades ahead of her time. Throughout her life she chose to openly pursue passionate, romantic partnerships and friendships with women. She was never in the closet; her family and friends and other civil rights leaders knew of her queer identity.  But by the 1950s, Murray was an established and up-and-coming civil rights attorney.  That, coupled with her past participation with the Communist Party in her early adulthood, made her a target of the Red Scare. By the time she wrote her autobiography, "Song in a Weary Throat," she wiped all mention of her same-sex relationships from explicit mention in the text, though she left clear traces of these interactions and struggles in her archives.
It is incredibly important to situate Murray within these lesser-known genealogies of queer and feminist black civil rights activism. The civil rights struggle demanded respectable performances of black manhood and womanhood, particularly from its heroes and heroines, and respectability meant being educated, heterosexual, married and Christian. Murray's open lesbian relationships and her gender nonconforming identity disrupted the dictates of respectability, making it easier to erase her five decades of important intellectual and political contributions from our broader narrative of civil rights.
By the end of her life, Murray chose to pursue her passion for Christianity and the ministry, becoming the first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest in 1977, and helping along the way to lay the groundwork for what we now know as womanist theology.
Part of the work of Black History Month is to rectify the erasures of African-American contributions, and Pauli Murray's accomplishments and firsts are so voluminous as to need multiple books to fully appreciate the magnitude of her contributions. But Ruth Bader Ginsburg's courageous choice to name and highlight "the shoulders on which she stands" remind us that even though no African-American woman yet sits on the Supreme Court, and Loretta Lynch has yet to be confirmed as attorney general, the political legacy of black women's contributions to the American freedom project are present and powerful even when we cannot see them.

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