<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - men]]> 10 <![CDATA[Dystopian ecstasy]]> Will I be able to become a man one day, as Ursula K. Le Guin was in her nineties performances, when, with her genuine sense of humor, she said: “I was born before women were invented, and I have spent the last decades trying to be a good man and I forgot to stay young, so I got old. [...] I can't stop thinking that a real man would have been able to do something. [...] But I failed. I did nothing. I utterly failed to stay young”? Like Ursula, I too have aged; this year I am moving into my fifties and I want to dedicate myself to a kind of urea mediocritas horaciana and to an asceticism that distances me from the worldly noise. I find myself, therefore, 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 a 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 no longer being a man – although it is impossible not to be one – and no longer being young, I am still crossed by the same concerns of the heterosexual symbolic order: the fantasy of being the chosen one among the rest of the competitors, the value of my abilities placed above all in their verdict. I am, therefore, neither a man nor young; but I don't exist as a woman either. Forgive me if I don't explain myself completely well, but I am still learning to transform my phallic language into a more poetic one.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 maturational structural shift 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 she doubt that it was within me or I all wrapped up in Him.”Much like the mystic, in a kind of escape or dystopian ecstasy that occurred 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 a garden is tilled and only the fruits that belong 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 ever used me to satisfy their 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 mother, no longer secretary, no longer savior of lost egos. No longer waiting for male validation. I had completed the first dwellings of my decolonizing journey and the nun Teresa was calling me to deepen in contemplation: to soften the gaze of the inner dwelling, 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 leave the market of male desire. To no longer want to please, but only to be accountable to my body and make decisions beyond what is reasonable. Light as the arms of a child who simultaneously holds and plays with the weight of new words, and allows herself this poetic parenthesis.In the full 21st century, although one of the advantages of age and maturity 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 to me in my particular rapture with the approval 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 that I include myself in. Relating to other socially feminized bodies and supporting each other in what we commonly experience is the only antidote I have discovered to become more sexually free. This and age, of course.

]]> <![CDATA[Art and parity]]> Following the recent awarding of the prize for best novel of the year, the controversy surrounding the underrepresentation of women in the shortlist of ten nominated novels has resurfaced. Although the winner was a woman, Antònia Carré-Pons, she made sure to point out in her acceptance speech that there were only two novels written by women on the list of ten finalists (which included a novel by the author of this piece). Did it include me, or did it include my novel? Those who seem to have a certain notion of parity are the very juries that compile these lists. If women publish four out of every ten books, at least this proportion should be reflected in the awards and distinctions, unless we are being told that they do a worse job—which we perhaps cannot deduce if they are ultimately the ones honored…

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Men, generally speaking, care very little about feminism. Some are outright opposed, saying that women are exaggerating, or that the grievances and inequalities they claim are no longer justified in an egalitarian and democratic society, or that it's all just a charade to look good or to collect subsidies by playing the victim. Others try to understand it beyond International Women's Day and attempt to bring some sense to a set of demands that, in my opinion, make perfect sense, especially when we see the statistics on domestic and sexual violence, or the glaring economic inequalities. However, it's difficult for a man to feel directly involved in these demands. It's as if the women around us were a foreign country with its own wars, miseries, and injustices, which we can understand, but we're not expected to do more than sympathize from afar and not show ourselves to be too supportive—or complicit—with the oppressors. Even among younger generations, this issue seems to have a bad reputation, as if it were a settled debate, or as if women don't need any help or support, or as if feminism itself creates the problem by highlighting a set of inequalities that should already be invisible. There are also some women who feel more comfortable thinking of the battle as already won, or as unnecessary or awkwardly framed. Or who find the traditionally domestic role of women liberating and wonderful, a promised land lost. However, even if we were to approach the solution from a left-wing perspective, it's often unclear what kind of policies could be implemented.

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