Recollections of My Nonexistence A Memoir - Rebecca Solnit Page 0,25

the first place, or being assumed not to be qualified to participate. Eventually that would become one of my subjects.

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Sometimes having a body seemed to be the problem, having a body that exposed me to danger and potential harm and also to shame and shortcomings and the problems of how to connect and how to fit in, whatever that meant, whatever feeling I imagined people who were confident about their bodies and their movements and their memberships felt. Having a body of my gender was a vulnerability and shame so vast that I still find myself casting about for defenses, for versions of that armor I dreamed of in my twenties.

I was convinced that my body was a failure. It was a tall, thin, white body, which is supposed to be the best thing to be in terms of how the culture as a whole values and rates female bodies. But I saw my own version of this as a catalogue of wrongnesses and failures and confirmed and potential shame. The rules about women’s bodies were exacting, and you could always measure your distance from the ideal, even if it was not a great distance. And even if you got over your imperfections of form, the realities of biology, of bodily functions and fluids, were always at odds with the feminine ideal, and a host of products and jokes and sneers reminded you of that. Perhaps it’s that a woman exists in a perpetual state of wrongness, and the only way to triumph is to refuse the terms by which this is so.

No one is ever beautiful enough, and everyone is free to judge you. In her memoir Under My Skin, Doris Lessing describes how, when she was a young woman at a dance, a middle-aged stranger told her that she had an almost perfect body but one breast was a third of an inch too high or too low—I can’t remember which, just that a stranger thought her body was under his jurisdiction and announced what must have been a wholly imaginary fault to demonstrate his right and capacity to render judgment and her subjection to it.

Men were always telling me what to do and be; once in my emaciated youth I was walking through North Beach eating a pastry from one of the Italian bakeries when a portly middle-aged man chastised me for eating it because I should be watching my weight. Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.

The problem isn’t really with bodies, but with the relentless scrutiny to which they’re subjected. The problem is being a woman. Or being a woman subject to men. My once-Catholic mother’s deep shame about the female body’s functions and form had been passed on with vigor, and my father’s tendency to criticize her anatomy and then mine and sometimes those of women passing by in the most clinical terms didn’t help, nor did it that these were not unusual but ordinary parts of a culture that obsessed over bodies and in those days quantified female beauty according to precise measurements and sizes, and told us that the rewards were boundless for meeting them, the punishments for failing endless, and punished all of us anyway, because these were ultimately standards everyone would fail to meet.

And so there I was where so many young women were, trying to locate ourselves somewhere between being disdained or shut out for being unattractive and being menaced or resented for being attractive, to hover between two zones of punishment in space that was itself so thin that perhaps it never existed, trying to find some impossible balance of being desirable to those we desired and being safe from those we did not.

We were trained to please men, and that made it hard to please ourselves. We were trained to make ourselves desirable in ways that made us reject ourselves and our desires. So I fled. My body was a lonely house. I was not always home; I was often elsewhere. I imagined when I was young some science-fiction version of humans