[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_09

64 M. Yourcenar Marguerite, Memoirs of Hadrian, 1951

I use this book on Hadrian's life told through his letters as a pretext to present a memoir. In all the stages of the search for the “true me” (there have been several selves throughout my growth, and each self was the opposite of the previous one), I have always maintained a curiosity about what builds knowledge.

Culture was, for me, an indefinite and magical cauldron, a melting pot of lives and experiences, something sacred, sensual, and inexhaustible. I could have doubted anything, starting from myself, who I was, and what I wanted, but not Culture. Culture has remained my compass until I discovered that I’d become a male chauvinist - I thought I was immune because I was female - and that was precisely my dear friend Culture, which had made me this way.

The only truth I was hanging on to in my confusion was a lie. I don't want to report the “great” arguments that I pulled from Mary Poppin's bag every time I found myself arguing with an avowed feminist because I'm ashamed of them. But I have to admit that I found the girls who called themselves feminists all a bit holy. Those I had met were all wealthy people, daddy's girls with an academic pedigree as long as that of a pure-blooded white Chiwawa.

I wondered where so much of their anger came from, what great injustices could have been suffered by persons who take for granted things that most people have to work a lifetime to obtain or never manage to obtain.

All their resentment didn't seem genuine to me. Something in what they said quickly canceled out the way they lived. But I was never able to I explained this to them because I did not understand it either.

I was a daughter of proletarians on redundancy who worked three jobs to pay for rent and living; I was out of breath, with shattered nerves, and I had some girls in front of me, fresh from a vegan diet, Erasmus travels and with a let's-save- the-world halo, who told me that I should behave differently and be more committed. Isn't it a bit like if a random white Westerner person went to someone belonging to a discriminated minority to tell them how important it is to be active for human rights?

So I convinced myself that feminists were all like the ones I had met and that, Although I knew only two or three, there were already too many.

Due to an unforeseen limit of the Aristotelian syllogism, I wouldn't necessarily say I liked even those I didn't know. Both because I didn't understand what they were protesting for when I saw them in the newspapers with their bare breasts and their painted faces and because those who perhaps wanted to help me had never shown much understanding for me and my situation. I mean, if they saw me “inside the platonic cave” and convinced me to stay there, there were other things they could have done instead of blaming me for an alternative life that I couldn't afford to live. Anyway, for my part, the situation was obvious: it was a question of collective hysteria or politicized sentimentalism. This was feminism, nothing more than a hobby for wealthy, bored people.

There was no tremendous literary classic written by a woman, no great master of the art world, no female model comparable to the male one anywhere, if not a story of protests in the streets for the vote and for other things that school makes you learn almost unwillingly. I may have been a country girl who ran away from home, but I had one certainty: I read a lot. And I read with that sense of greed typical of those who dream of social revenge.

As a young girl, I even listed books that "must be read before you die" and constitute "the cornerstones of our Culture." When I made this list, it seemed infinite: it went from the Bible to Proust, passing through Russia (a single book by Tolstoj appears to require an essential chapter of your life).

I read the entire list, discovering with surprise that no texts were within my reach. But, beyond the fact that in this list of hundreds and hundreds of texts, only a handful of books written by women appeared, the content of almost all of them returned recurring female portraits: there was the dissolute woman prey to the devil, the naive one that has to be guided, the gossip who creates misunderstandings, the virtuous dead woman who serves as a model for posterity, the daughter without a dowry, the rebel who then conforms, the fake rebel who only wants love, the vengeful one who is punished, the adulteress unmasked, the inspiring muse, the deceiver who seduces to use, the lascivious servant who aims at the master, the widow in difficulty, the mystic who does not want to eat, the mother who sacrifices herself, the princess who waits to be saved, the sour spinster, the killjoy wife, and the wife who forgives.

One does not think that the cornerstones of Culture create caricatures or cement negative stereotypes; a person who approaches Culture as the ladder to truth thinks that what Culture presents to them is the profound analysis of reality and society of the time. And that any error or shortsightedness, if ever, can be found in one text, in two or three at most, not in hundreds! Otherwise, there would be a criticism that warns and contextualizes someone with glasses on the tip of their nose, saying: "It was successful, but it didn't age well."; there would be a yellow card in the Pantheon of Classics, a slowdown in theatrical performances. Suppose there are hundreds of forums on carbonara ingredients. In that case, there will surely be a counter-information site on the terrible sexism of The Three Musketeers, the most represented classic in the world. Suppose there is no documentation about its bitter misogynist gaze. In that case, if it continues to be a classic and they continue to make films about it, it must mean that there are no problems: people can continue to read The Three Musketeers, taking it as a positive example because its story remains seen positively on a social level.

Ancient writers and thinkers cannot all be wrong; all those tremendous laurel-crowned heads who have made the History and glory of the West; it's a question of statistics. If the world - for the entire life of the world - has gone one way, thinking one way, there must be a reason.

I had read too many books; I had Culture on my side. Culture told me that women don’t have a natural intellectual talent. And that many of them are embarrassing and annoying, like those feminists who advised me to do the same while I was closing the bar where I worked for a few pennies after listing their fabulous experiences abroad. I learned late not to elevate my experience into a system but to recognize dissonances, cognitive biases, and intersectional issues. I knew that a feminist bibliography existed, and I never cared about it: everything regarding the topic disturbed me, like any other ideology that I found comfortable, if not fashionable.

I didn't need to belong to a group to wrap myself in a flag; I tried to live with authenticity (I told myself precisely in these terms). For someone who is a victim of paranoia, I, too, was convinced that I already knew what there was to know without having to read up too much, and I found many confirmations in the opinions of those who shared my intolerance.

Seeing great support for the feminist movement had not raised the doubt that perhaps there was an underlying reason; on the contrary, it validated my idea that women blamed their inferiority on others. I used to think, "If you want to be better, you should work more on yourself and think less about shopping.” I was also convinced that all those who filled blogs and organized demonstrations didn't have much else to do other than worry about problems that, in most cases didn't even concern them, and this was an unmistakable mark of demerit on the credibility of the activists.

Alexander Pope would have said: “The truth loses its dignity when it protests too much”; the books I had befriended had left me an aphorism in my pocket for every situation, as well as the reassurance that my vision of the world was not the result of naivety but of a long and solid tradition of thought that I knew marvelously. Every lie has a truth that confirms it, just as every truth has a lie that discredits it.