be a man

I'm behind on blog posting, and I don't know if or when I'll catch up. For today, here's an excerpt from the On Being podcast with Elizabeth Gilbert that struck a chord with me (my transcription, edited for clarity):

I spent my twenties writing about men for men. And it was very much a reflection of where I was in my life at that time. I was very interested in masculinity, I think because I wanted to be a guy. And the reason I wanted to be a guy (and I don't mean literally, like when somebody's born in a women's body and wants to be a man, that's not what I'm talking about) is that I wanted to live the way men live. And the reason for that was because it was better, you know? I grew up watching what many of us grew up watching, which was men who had a great deal of freedom and women who followed them around and took care of their every need. And when I looked at those two models, one of them seemed very clearly better than the other one. So I just threw myself into men's worlds. I worked in bars, I worked on a ranch in Wyoming, I became a writer for GQ and Esquire and Spin - very much men's worlds. I threw myself into men's worlds where they were studying masculinity too. I was just as interested in that as they were. And I felt comfortable in those worlds. I even did a story for GQ where I dressed up as a man for a week and lived as a man in New York, and felt what that felt like - which, interestingly, I didn't enjoy, because I felt very constrained in that gender, once I was in it. I much preferred being a woman among men than being a sort of fake-man among men. But what happened with Eat Pray Love was, it was a time in my life when I sort of came out of the closet as a woman. And I needed to do this because the questions that I was grappling with were very much women's questions, and...there were certainly universal spiritual questions that I was grappling with, but the main one that I was grappling with, and that ended my marriage, was the question of whether or not to become a mother. And certainly that is the ultimate women's question: what is my biological destiny? Am I meant to be part of the story of motherhood and nourishing and nurturing or am I not meant to? and what I am I supposed to do with society's expectations around that, what am I supposed to do with the biological expectations around that? What does it mean if I don't have children? What does it mean if I take a different path? Am I still a woman? 

I've thought a lot about how I ended up frittering away so many years of my life in science. Was it purely the intellectual stimulation? The challenge of doing something just because it was there? Was I trying to embody some societal ideal of success? Was I just trying to please my parents? Or maybe...I, too, grew up watching men who had a great deal of freedom and women who [literally] followed them around [the world] and picked up after them. And one of these options did - still does - indeed seem a lot better than the other. But eventually I, too, was forced out of the closet. I became a mother and stopped working in predominantly-male worlds at just about the same time. Coincidence? Probably not.