Inhabiting Internalized Misogyny and Freedom: a Reflection through Quarantine and Crisis
The fall of the Romans rippled through my ribcage-
I stir in my sleep as this line patters down the hallway from ear to ear. It whispers with childlike ecstasy, as though to remind a companion “I have a secret” in the dewy April grass during recess. This is not the first time this has happened, but I never learn. Recurring lines rattle until they fall flat or echo through this hall, with tin can ears connected by a string. I ceaselessly repeat it until I believe that it’s deeply etched onto the surface of my brain. Surely, it will require minimal effort to run my fingertips over it to collect it when I wake up. This almost never happens though. I just wake up wondering why I feel like I’ve forgotten something and hope that the next time it happens, I’ll wake myself up and write it down.
This time, I force myself to reach across the sheets and fumble for the phone with my eyes still clasped shut. (Sometimes, I hope that if I mimic sleep, I’ll be able to remain asleep after making note of this on an artificial iPhone notepad that never compares to the intimacy of paper, but will make do for now).
The date on this note tracks back to December 7, 2018, a moment in which I was deeply engulfed in Milton’s hell and faced with questions that challenged how I previously thought about my body, consent and the relationship the two had with my behaviors around men. I was involved with a man who, despite asking, never told me he was involved with another woman at the time. He must have assumed that because I knew he was leaving the state indefinitely, I never harbored any attachment toward him, or that because he was leaving anyway, I must have consented to an unprotected sexual relationship with him as well as his unprotected sexual relationship with his ex-girlfriend. I tossed steadily in my bed wondering if this burden was self-victimization and questioned if I had silently given permission to these circumstances.
I sit at my desk now, nearly 16 months later, as the world outside fumbles through a global pandemic that has left a seeming collective consciousness sequestered in the domestic. I process internalized misogyny and wonder how to be, think, and inhabit my cis-gender, female body; I process time, space, and art that evokes visceral responses; I wonder how these visceral responses chemically operate in our bodies and mind and I wonder how I can reconfigure my brain chemically, to reflect the mind I wish to dwell in. I feel the ripple in a way I haven’t before as I reflect upon the patterns I need to undo in order to love wholly and truly. I take a nap to cope with a world that is rapidly unraveling in spite of the mandated quarantine in New York state, but a three-month-old confession scurries down the same hallway that’s been carved from ear to ear.
“I need my freedom,” he sighed, as though my tenderness was too heavy for him to hold. To him, my yearning for closeness was tiring. The sound of his admission still echoes through my chest cavity. He grasped for my fingertips that I was already pulling into my lap, crossed and praying, reciting the word “freedom” incessantly — obsessively — until it didn’t feel or sound or look like a word or place or concept anymore.
For months, I began obsessing over what it meant to be “free” in a straight man’s world. Maybe if I could understand what this meant, I could outsmart heteronormative cycles I’d been a participant in, despite queer ways of thinking. Maybe this was part of my queer identity — being indigestible for a straight man who didn’t and couldn’t long for intimacy in the same ways I did. If I could understand freedom in his context though, maybe I’d be able to reconfigure my needs to make them palatable to others. But if freedom, to me, was a complete surrender to impermanence and living in spite of the inherent fleeting nature of spaces and people, then how could I understand anything else? How could I groom my mind to be open to other modes of freedom without compromising my own?
The short answer was that I couldn’t. I couldn’t reconstruct this subjective vision of freedom without relying on cycles of vile, external validation. There was no tenderness or state of “being” in this place alone, nevermind with a partner — there was solely performance and a perception of myself that didn’t exist unless I was being perceived. I tried this vision on regardless, but began questioning if my womanhood was just a medley of internalized misogyny that I let drive my life.
How much of my womanhood was contingent upon the empathy I had for men who had an enormous amount of work to do in solitude, but worked through my empathy as a medium to legitimize their pain? Was womanhood just a performative act of endurance and stamina until I couldn’t keep up anymore, until I recognized that I had swam out way too far with solely an abyss below me and I could no longer tread or move forward? Was womanhood just the resilience I emerged with when I was rejected by men who couldn’t understand my loneliness?
These questions surged through me in a way that I imagine shock treatments feel like. They held me hostage in my own body. I started wondering if the man who claimed to need freedom the most even knew what that meant. I wondered if he pined over its meaning like I had after that conversation for days, weeks, and even months. I told myself I was melodramatic. No, I wasn’t melodramatic — I was thoughtful, immersed in semantics and working through those questions, even if I internalized the rejection and insecurity simultaneously.
But then, another roadblock — I realized I was projecting all my anger toward this yearning for freedom onto him, and he didn’t deserve that. How do I continue to forgive if I’m working through stages of grief in a method too complex for my own understanding? His desires simply acted as a catalyst for questions that were already brewing and brimming the edges of my identity. I recognize that now.
A friend recently told me that she found the most forgivable tendencies (in men) to be the ones that they held themselves the most accountable for, while conversely, the most unforgivable tendencies were the ones that occurred as a result of thoughtlessness. The unforgivable existed primarily in the mundane. I let this roll through the same hallway, back and forth, until it settled.
The moments I found myself in silent rage were always thoughtless. The moment I sat at a barstool, listening to a man speak about his ex-lover who used to write him poetry while he asked if I wanted to read those poems she wrote for him. The moment I received a message on Instagram from an ex-girlfriend explaining that the man I had been sleeping with was actually simultaneously sleeping with her (though she was sorry for not reaching out sooner). The moment I woke up after a one night stand next to an Australian man who scoffed at me in disgust because I was “embarrassingly, identifiably American” for wearing eyeshadow. The moment that I watched the man I had sex with twelve hours prior grab my friend’s face and kiss her during my favorite artist’s set at a music festival, despite telling him that I was working through some terrifying intimacy issues. The moment I walked down the hallway in high school, at age seventeen and was screamed at by hoards of senior boys because they found out I gave their friend head. The moment an ex-lover compared me to his mother who abandoned and manipulated him throughout his childhood because I couldn’t handle his suicidal breakdowns alone. The moment that same man told me to “follow my bliss,” but told me I would never be an artist, or even artistic for that matter. The moment I was told that “seeing” me was “fine for now,” but when the summer time came, “he wanted to do what he wanted.” The moment I recognized that romantic “freedom” never included me. I was actually the cost of it.
All of these interactions pervaded the mundane — each thoughtless without consequence. I took candid snapshots of them, held them to my chest and let them flutter to the floor, leaving a tangible quilt of rejection, misogyny, and falsehood, threaded by a desire for freedom. I swallowed them each individually, internalized them, and then replayed them simultaneously.
About the Author
Kristine Kelsch (she/her) is a senior at Hunter College studying English literature with a minor in women’s, gender and sexuality studies. She discovered her love for reading, writing and storytelling as a child when her mother read Little Golden Books aloud with her on her bedroom floor. This love has transpired into a habit of dragging Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson into nearly any relevant (or irrelevant) conversations in adulthood, and still occurs today. When she’s not reading, writing, or making Shelley or Dickinson fit into circumstances they were previously left out of, she enjoys listening to artists such as Florence and the Machine and being outdoors.
