Dystopian ecstasy

Will I be able to become a man one day, as Ursula K. Le Guin was in her performances of the nineties, when, with her genuine sense of humor, she said: I was born before women were invented, and I have spent the last few decades trying to be a good man and have forgotten to stay young, so I have aged. [...] I can't stop thinking that a real man would have been able to do something. [...] But I failed. I did nothing. I failed utterly in trying to stay young.Like Ursula, I too have aged; this year I am moving into my fifties and I want to surrender to a kind of aurea mediocritasHoratian and an asceticism that will take me away from the madding crowd. I find myself, then, in an icy void, not knowing which direction to take, adjusting the tone of this transition and making efforts to step into my mature gallantry in the most dignified way possible.After much meditation and reading Ursula, I have come to a conclusion: it is absurd to continue trying to be a good man. For a long time I have wanted to be one in order to exercise my inherited rights to splash the toilet bowl with yellow water without breaking down over it, to dominate public space and feel empowered. The intensity of my youth is coming to an end. I too have failed everywhere: I am neither a man nor have I been able to stay young; however, her gaze still corrodes me from within. Let's admit it: it happens to me and it happens to all of us.At almost fifty, I still put my sexual energy at the service of anyone who notices an aspect that I myself am unable to see or value. I am excessively complacent, submissively pleasant, I perceive the desires of others as priority and I exploit myself to feel productive and useful as sexual capital in the market. It is impossible to get rid of it. Despite the fact that I am no longer a man – although it is impossible not to be one – and that I am no longer young, the same concerns of the heterosexual symbolic order continue to run through me: the fantasy of being the chosen one among the rest of the competitors, the value of my abilities placed above all on their verdict. I am, therefore, neither a man nor young; but I also do not exist as a woman. Forgive me if I do not explain myself fully, but I am still learning to transform my phallic language into one that is more poetic.To avoid falling into delirium, I will try to make the right decisions. Perhaps this perspective will bring me closer to myself. The inspiration for this structural maturational turn is Doctor of the Church Saint Teresa of Ávila, who in one of her ineffable and spontaneous ecstasies felt the presence of God, and "in no case could I doubt that it was within me or I all engulfed in Him".Much like the mystic, in a kind of flight or dystopian ecstasy that came upon me in one of my meditations, I experienced myself –Margaret Atwood saw it clearly– as a 'woman with a man inside observing a woman''. The rapture had transformed the masculine gaze into an eroticism that desired my body with the same intensity and care with which the land of an orchard is tilled and only the fruits belonging to the one who cultivates them and for whose taking there is permission are harvested. I saw myself with a man inside observing a complete woman, free and in control of herself. All the men who once used me to satisfy voids and exploited my body, like the master who with his extractivist logic exhausts the resources of the South, would cease to exist in my daily cognitive habits as a result of the phenomenological illumination.No longer a mother, no longer a secretary, no longer a savior of lost egos. No longer concerned with male validation. I had completed the first stages of my decolonizing journey and the nun Teresa was calling me to deepen my contemplation: to soften the gaze of the inner chamber, to understand it, to transform it. The following mansions took me even further from the conditioning world of heterosexual thought. The stillness of maturity moved me to transcend polarities and demands, to shed the 'heteroetheric' dandruff, to love and fuck without guilt; to finally exit the market of male desire. To no longer want to please, only to be accountable to my body and make decisions beyond what is reasonable. Light as the arms of a child who holds and plays at the same time with the weight of new words, and allows herself this poetic parenthesis.In the 21st century, although one of the advantages of aging and becoming mature is that one's own desire is freer and less conditioned, women have not yet been invented, but we don't care; or at least this embodied contemplative vision came upon me in my particular rapture with the consent of the Carmelite mystic and the impulse of the writer of Earthsea. Both the poetic thought of Saint Teresa and the beautiful dystopian scenarios of Ursula are inspiring in my work with other women. All of them, young and mature, continue to be inhabited by the same patriarchal pressures in which I include myself. Relating to other female-socialized bodies and supporting each other in what we have in common is the only antidote I have discovered to become more sexually free. That and getting older, of course.