How to Hear Stars Laugh

Antoine de St. Exupery was an amazing soul, and he wrote the most beautiful book in the universe called The Little Prince. I have read it in three languages, but it's best in the original French. The most fascinating passage to me is the chapter where the little prince meets the fox, and the fox asks the little prince to tame him.

"My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat. . ."

I'm going to skip Derrida and non-binary gender theory not because I don't value individuals who defy hetero-binary gender, but because I'm literally interested in the moiety dynamics in a culture that accepts and functions under fairly strict gender definitions.

I have read many accounts online and heard firsthand stories of how women's embodied experience differs from men's. And we mid-singles (unmarried people between the ages of 31 and 45) are obsessed, at least online, with the problems that keep us single, whether we blame ourselves, our peers, or our counterparts. We identify with the embodied experiences of our gender-peers, whether that experience is rejection, cruelty, dismissal, or judgment, and we point at the opposing gender in retaliation.

I can and have argued (for hours at the top of my lungs in a crowded restaurant) that male privilege actually exists in Mormon culture, but it's impossible to argue that vehemently without some opposition: there are men who argue just as loudly and impolitely that it does not exist, and use as evidence their personal embodied experience.

My mathematical instinct is that with enough embodied experiences we can statistically prove institutional bias, but the rhetoric doesn't work. No matter how much anecdotal evidence you gather, statistics can only be proven with statistics, and no amount of personal experience, no matter how overwhelming, functions as a substitute, even if that personal experience amounts to a statistic. The form doesn't translate. Individual embodied experience does not function in the same plane as institutions and statistics, no matter how much we are a literal victim of those institutions and statistics.

It's why "not all men" doesn't work. "Not all men" is an embodied, individual appeal against a statistical claim. It's also a jerk move to change the subject, but you can read plenty of that somewhere else.

Sexism exists, no matter how many men and women claim that they personally treat men and women equally. Samuel R. Delany makes a similar argument about racism in his essay "Racism and Science Fiction," and although racism and sexism function differently and simultaneously, the rhetorico-mathematical principle still applies. We fight a systemic problem systemically, and an individual problem individually.

And there's still the TRUTH that even if a majority of men are not misogynistic, but if all (or most, or even many) women experience misogyny, it still exists as a problem that should be remedied.

I think it is wise, kind, and useful to believe a person when they describe their firsthand experiences, and to believe a statistic when you have investigated it and found it credible - even when the two are in conflict, or when they seem to undermine your standing beliefs. Because Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. ~Le Petit Prince

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