I Who Have Never Known Men

I dunno, some of the ideas here /did/ speak to me as metaphors: a group of women struggling in isolation in a lonely and desolate place, trying (possibly in vain) to find their way toward others, toward lives, toward familiarity; and most burning out and settling for strained comfort and predictability—even given the emptiness of this existence for them—pretty Real, yea?

But then… i dunno, it's also weirdly reactionary, too. Women finding love with one-another is always a half-measure substitute for men, none of them are canonically gay; women can't be beautiful for themselves, and beauty is thought useless without men; etc. It feels as though these women's lives are nothing without men, which… i dunno, for straight women, there must be a genuine truth there! It /must/ be lonesome to wander, looking in vain for compassionate men who can meet you at your level, knowing you may never find them. I /do/ see a place for this. But it didn't always feel great as a queer person reading this. I also found the narrator's motivations kind of mysterious at times; i thought her decisions could feel inconsistent… i dunno. There's also this bit about how she may have uterine cancer, but maybe she wouldn't have had it if she had been able to get pregnant in her lifetime? What? I think i can read a metaphor there (that for a woman who wants a family with a genuine partner, not having one hurts her deep down, creates a rot in her), but it's also one of those… i dunno, kind of frustratingly ableist metaphors, given our social context, in which a life without children (especially for those able to bear children) is thought a half-lived life, a waste, selfish and useless, or whatever; and thus this rot could also be read in this light. Just… lots of little things like this that ate at me, and… i dunno, it's possible that if i thought about it more, i'd unearth more, but… i don't think it drew me in enough to /want/ to spend more time thinking on it, especially with these bits that rubbed me the wrong way.

For me: it was Fine, but that's about all.