Journalist Jana Antonissen and author/theatre maker Julie Cafmeyer take turns talking about life
Julie Cafmeyer27 August 2023, 10:04
I can’t get a painting out of my head. At the age of thirty-five, artist Nina Vandeweghe painted two women with fried eggs on their breasts, symbolizing her rotting eggs. As an attachment a text with the title: ‘Optimistic barbaric egg freezing’.
She writes that her ex has a new sweetheart of twenty-two years old. “He can push aside his fears about great responsibilities and I am on the shortest route to my personal hell. Being childless and single.” I like her brutal language, I like a fury with a body in disrepair, furious with Peter Pan men.
She writes: “Being a woman. Delicious, isn’t it?”
Transman Paul B. Preciado reports on how he self-administered testosterone gel in his book Testo Junkie. He’s tired of being a woman. According to him, a woman is programmed to wait. Waiting for someone to hold you in his arms, waiting for you to be loved, waiting for pleasure, waiting for life to begin. A body as a waiting room.
Preciado talks about a scientific study that proves that a woman loses her value in the heterosexual dating market three times faster than a man. A woman is out at forty-five, a man at sixty-five. He talks about a formula that – despite our age – increases or decreases our value. As a woman, your value increases if you have beautiful breasts, are thin, have long and thick hair. Your value is lowered by ‘social handicaps’ such as a divorce, children and being unemployed. I apply the formula to myself and I end up with a woman with nice breasts, not really thin, not fat either, but with a tummy, not divorced, but working, no children, but still thirty-six.
The more I think about this calculation, the harder I laugh. Ominous roar. How can you enjoy being a woman if you are constantly confronted with statistics and formulas that indicate that – no matter what you do – your value decreases? (I’m tasting it!)
Today’s woman can do nothing but transform the place for herself into a discotheque of celebratory resistance where she honors her rotting eggs and transience. Was it ever her ambition to look eternally fresh and wrinkle-free? Her apartment, not a waiting room, but a refuge where she receives the written off. Balding, with a tummy, divorced. Men and women inventing new formulas, a new language. Words no one knows because the letters are in the wrong order. Sensuality and tenderness that has no value whatsoever in the straight-I-know-a-many market. A room where men and women are devoted to each other without any prospect of financial gain. No house to build, no offspring to come. A hellish paradise of revolutionary sluts and Peter Pan men who get caught up in orgasm races and tantra rituals. Addicted to each other’s discarded bodies.
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2023-08-27 08:04:00
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