Women - Good Enough for Buk, Good Enough for Me

Last we spoke I wrote a bit about the importance of the scientific method, and felt remiss shortly after the article went up not to have stressed more clearly that the aptness of the scientific method for questions of science is matched by its inaptness for other questions. In other words, it’s important to be able to recognize when a tool is useful and when it is useless. This week’s subject renders both the scientific method and the analysis I usually adopt here useless, so I’ll have to attempt a more appropriate style.

Women are hard. It’s not impossible to have them ‘figured out’ – it’s quite easy – but any kind of general system you work out will be applicable, for the most part, to women who are either not worth your time, or worth connecting with in no way but genitally. As with anything else pleasurable or worthwhile, it is best to think of them in the specific. This poses a problem to the writer of a brief internet article on women.

I don’t want to give a description of a specific girl from my life or a discussion of my views on women in general, but rather a loose and running list of attributes I’d think would make up a certain type of woman, a case of which I’ve never encountered and that may exist entirely or primarily in my imagination. As should be clear by the article’s end, it doesn’t really matter if she exists in reality.

I’ll take the few words to note what will be evident shortly, that this is a girl I’d be interested in having a relationship with, not just some abstracted woman I’d like to meet one day, following the meeting by going home and crossing ‘Meet Woman of Type X’ off the list of things I want to do before I die. This is a woman I want to talk to, eat with, watch movies with, go to art galleries with, fuck, watch in the bathroom, shower with, drink cheap red wine and bourbon with, drive around town with her and occasionally stealing glances over at her, run drunkenly around 4 A.M. streets throwing beer bottles at cars with, dance to funky music with, argue with, occasionally hate, meet the relatives of, invent games with, be curt and hostile with when I’m in a bad mood, discuss the films we’ve seen together with, be slapped by, joke and bullshit with, slip into her body-warmed bed with after a three day bender, read Bukowski to because I feel like it, care enough for to ‘mother,’ become so frustrated I can’t make sentences with, become so used to sexually I stop noticing other girls for a month of so, get in very few fights over, trust with secrets, know most of the secrets and quirks and eccentricities of, show things I’d written to, run out on checks in shitty restaurants with, etc. In other words, a girl I’d date for a long enough period of time to entertain, and possibly believe the truth of, the idea that I loved her.

These are arranged in approximate order of importance.

She is beautiful. There are many things about women I find beautiful and I’m not too particular as to which is to be found here.

She’s not radically different politically. I’m not particularly ardent about politics, but in America today there are enough deep-running and odious idiocies that this has become very important.

She is no more sentimental than I am. Preferably less, as I can be too sentimental. It’s not hard to be unsentimental, but very hard to remain so over months of emotional engagement. I don’t object to strong and mercurial emotions, but I want to experience them with some purity.

She is either actively or passively, but in any case genuinely, interested in one or more of the modes of artistic expression that interest me. This covers a lot of ground, and any slice of it is fine. I don’t care so much if we like the same things so long as the dislikes are not radically opposed. Best would be if she could tell me things I don’t know about the things I like.

She can talk on my level. This is not a matter of education but of having a bullshit detector, which no school teaches. It is more a way of talking and thinking than any particular subject matter.

She can bullshit on my level. In other words she has a similar sense of humor and is adept at slipping into the same kind of meaningless humor I am. If conversation’s important, being able to take and maintain the thread of a joke, to run with it and stretch it out until it’s as big as it can get, is at least as important as anything else.

We’re compatible sexually. No shit, but this is important. It entails approaching sex with a new partner as a long exploration of the particulars of this body and its pleasures, with ‘explore’ as a very important notion. And it should work in practice.

She’s like Vera to Nabokov or Nora to Joyce. If you know the biographies of those men you’ll know what I mean. I’m not a Nabokov or a Joyce, but I want the same level of support and connection. A woman who’s dedicated to me should be an equal in this way; I don’t just want a sexual slave. Whether or not I want a sexual slave at all is an entirely different question regarding women.

She doesn’t blind herself to it when we’ve grown past each other. Most girls can tell when they’re no longer getting more out of a relationship than they’re putting in, so this is not to be considered as the same as that. It has less to do with self-interest than with knowing and accepting when something’s dead. Tricky.

All of this said, the ultimate truth in the matter is that women will have to be accepted and loved on the terms that exist, not the ones I’d like to see exist, and that I’ll have to accept the girl who comes to me. Honestly, with the knowledge that she’s real and flawed, occasionally overly emotional and idiotic, and not ideal, but losing nothing through that knowledge. As a man I have to realize how good it is to be with a woman. Therein lies the rub, and it’s a real bitch of a rub to get through to, as should be evinced by the fact that I focused this article on an opposite notion.