A Fragment on Gender and Knowability

At the time I wrote this I was unfamiliar with Pablo Neruda's line "I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees." Had I known it, I probably would've worked this in somewhere in the below. In which I muse on gender and epistemology, inspired by Norman Mailer's book on missing the point of the Apollo program, Of a Fire on the Moon:

Men say that women are unknowable because they want the world to work that way. They want women to have an aura of otherworldliness around them; they want the actions and sensations and desires of women to be a mystery. When men complain about not understanding women it’s either out of habit or an expression of this wish that femininity be a magical property of humanity always just beyond understanding.

Were the opposite to be true, were the distinction between manhood and womanhood to be nothing more than semantics and tradition, a certain vibrancy would be missing from the world. Men need to be able to empathize with women, to be able to communicate with them, and understand their world, but want to maintain a playful aloofness between the sexes. The sights and smells and touches of femaleness need to seem a little alien to keep the pleasant male perception of otherness alive. We like it that way. Don’t change, we tell the girls.

This quote by Norman Mailer is bullshit, for example:

“…Aquarius had long built his philosophical world on the firm conviction that nothing was finally knowable (an exact recompense to having spent his formative years and young manhood in searching for the true nature of women)…”

Maybe he’s just being cheeky, but the pretentiousness of his writing suggests otherwise. How in the world can the nature of womanhood be the greatest mystery to man? You want unknowable mystery? Look at religion. Quantum physics. Cosmology. Dark matter. Metaphysics. Morality. Consciousness. The sex of humanity opposite your own shouldn’t be anywhere near so baffling. I don’t believe that it is. This all implies willful self-deceit to me.

What, then, is a healthy way to look at masculinity and femininity as they relate to humanity? I think the wonder and sense of mystery reflect something real, but so does the empathy. I’m attracted to women because I see something exotic and skew and different from me, but also somewhere I can call home. To embrace the feminine and come to know her, for me, is like an avatar of growing up. As I set aside childish things for the greater world of adulthood, so do I wish to know woman. Maybe it’s the other way around. I just know that I crave intimacy with the feminine shade of humanity, and to call her home.