Do You Wanna Dance, Under the Moonlight?

There's something so innocent and wonderful about the Beach Boys. I don't care that they couldn't surf and that their harmonies are weak in places. I love the era before pop music became synthetic and hinting at sexuality was edgy, and when they didn't rerecord to get rid of the lyrics mistakes.

My post from earlier this morning has had me thinking all day about gender and whatnot. Most of the time, I don't feel like a girl. (woman, chick, dame, insert your gender signifier of choice here) I do most of the time feel like I have tits, which you'd think would tie in to the gender question pretty closely, but actually no.

Now I'm not suggesting that I have Issues, that perhaps I am some sort of profoundly confused person and might wish to consider surgery. I'm just remarking on the diminished role this idea of gender plays in my life.

Except when I realize that it's been sneaking around under my feet and quietly shaping my opinions on a lot of things. Like my bookshelf, which contains the following female authors: Jane Austen, (so maybe I am a girl after all, except I only like P&P and Persuasion, I pretty much hate everything else) Kate Chopin, (see below) Helen Fielding, (oops, but I did like Bridget Jones's Diary in that harmless fluffy sort of way plus I'm a sucker for british slang) Ayn Rand, (who is crazy and this cannot be said enough but has two good ideas: know your worth, and keep your identity in relationships) and J.K. Rowling. Five. Oh, and I suppose Elizabeth Barrett Browning, so six.

Six women authors. And you know what? I never, ever go to the bookstore and say "oh, I'd like to read some more female authors." I don't feel that this is a hole in my literature at all. If there are worthy books to be read, I will read them without much concern for the author. If I find an author I like, I will buy his/her books until s/he bores me, as in the case of Auturo Perez Reverte, who drew me in in a big way with The Club Dumas which was brilliant, but apparently a fluke. Or maybe he sold his soul to the devil for it--it'd be thematically appropriate.

I digress. I do that a lot. Anyway, the point is that I tend to ignore the author of a book unless I am specifically looking for more, and this leads me to the conclusion that I do not much like female authors. This means that the writing styles I absorb are predominately male, and this isn't an isolated phenomenon.

Most of my professors, mentors, and friends are male. I have a core group of maybe five very close girlfriends, but other than them the people I am surrounded with are male. I've been painstakingly taught how to think like a man--to great effect, since that's what one has to do in a physics setting. I like male language, with its precision and effectiveness, I like talking directly to a point, and look! I said "tits" just up a few lines.

Use of possibly offensive words aside, I feel like I write like a girl, all tangents and circles, not that Hugo didn't write like that but that's not really the point. Part of the point of writing every day here is to discover who I am as a writer--what my sentences and lines sound, look, and feel like. Not Whitman's. Not Heaney's. Not Steinbeck's. Just me.

I'll probably always have an inferiority complex when it comes to writing because I am, after all, still a girl, tits and all. But I'll feel better knowing it's my style, not a cheap knockoff of someone else's. Finding something to say in that style is another matter entirely.