Last Friday night, a terrifying existential insight struck me – and it happened during an already terrifying activity: spinning class.
Across from me, the fitness coach was cycling with a hypnotizingly equal cadence. All around, gym-goers were dripping sweat, electrolytes and dignity. And just when I thought the cardio was approaching its grand finale, my heart rate took an unauthorized swerve upwards.
“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus once thought – and that is the question of whether life is worth living.
But that’s not the question that got my blood boiling. I got possessed by MY feminine serious philosophical conundrum:
Do I hate men? Or do I actually wish to become them?
My epiphany wasn’t random. After all, a guy had introduced me to this class, together with another addictive torture machine – Body Pump. And it is not the first time that taking a detour by the way of men has led me to a new hobby or micro-fixation.
Stuck in Zone 4 for another couple of minutes, I wondered – am I truly the person who goes to the gym on a Friday night? Or am I doing it because I cling to an identity I constructed for the male gaze (as well as for a particular set of eyes)?
I’m completely lost. In fact, I’ve always been lost but I didn’t feel it before. I was busy conforming to their wishes. But I was more than half absent. I was on the other side. – Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One
So who am I? As I continued pedaling, and the mirror on my left side became too foggy to see clearly, I felt my identity equally muddled.
To make matters worse, I recently ignored the highest avalanche warning to go snowboarding with yet another questionable commitment-phobic contender for my heart. As a direct result of this high-risk courtship, my algorithm (which apparently oscillates between affirming and recreating my identity) now paints me as THE Snowboarder Girl.
Since that Friday night, I’ve revisited countless past versions of myself, only to panic-realize that each Krisi version (major.minor.patch) came with a matching guy. Like, an accessory Ken to enhance Barbie’s outfit.
Only I am Ken. Or rather, a good-looking female Sisyphus pushing her boulder up a snowy Alpine peak…
Just to watch it fall every time it reaches the top and hit her right in the face.
My empirical research on the Sisyphean hike I call my dating life has generated some data points worth making an Excel sheet for:
| Object of my desire | Micro-fixation that followed | Did the fixation stick? | Current relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| First high-school crush, a metalhead drummer | Metal music Trying to learn the drums | No and no | Still doesn’t know I exist |
| First serious boyfriend - biologist and ornithologist | The Matrix Birdwatching | Yes and wtf was I thinking NO. | Occasional small talk on Facebook |
| Jewish-American philosophy boy I had a crush on in my Bachelor’s | Indoor bouldering The Grateful Dead History of Marxist Zionism | Yes, yes, and ¿why, God why?, did I take a History of Zionism elective after he had already rejected me? | No contact |
| Berliner hipster crush from my old climbing gym who was still sleeping with his ex! | Indoor + outdoor rope climbing | Yes and yes (albeit not as active) | No contact |
| French roommate lover | Weight-lifting / gym | Partly | No contact |
And many more – YOU GET THE POINT.
Boulders and ropes may break my bones, but anthropological research excites me.
As one might observe, the results show the ratio between hobbies and men retention (thankfully) weighs in favor of the hobbies. While surely, romance fizzling out is rarely a pleasant affair (no wonder why in Bulgarian we say farting out – “разпърдяха се нещата”), I cannot help but also be glad to have discovered some activities, music or sports along the way.
If spinning or snowboarding are next, so be it. But also, this year, I started trampoline and have promised a friend to try cross-country skiing – are the last two automatically more emancipating because of their origin?
After all, I do not actively reminisce over the boy who got me into climbing every time I climb. Nor do I even vaguely associate my academic obsession with Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981) with my first boyfriend with whom I first watched The Matrix, et cetera, et cetera…
“What’s the big deal, then?” some of my friends have been kindly asking. It appears that with enough time, my life balances out and my authentic desires – I keep, and the rest – à la poubelle ! 🗑️
Yet, during my spinning krisis, it felt like a self-imposed slap in the face to admit to myself how I often get so absorbed by the worlds of my objects of desire that I start to unconsciously mimic them. And I am not quite certain if the inversed phenomenon occurs.
Much like Lara Jean Covey, I wondered: Have I left a lasting piece of myself with all the boys I’ve loved before?
Maybe in a different way, yes, as truly getting to know somebody always leaves some marks: memories, affection, borrowed intuitions.
But have boys become more like me? Have they become fixated on something I was fixated on? Did they discover a new hobby by the way of me?
I regret now it is not common practice to send an exit survey to lovers upon rupture:
Dear disqualified contender,
Thank you for your time and contributions to my life. As you prepare to leave, I would appreciate you answering a couple of questions.
Do you feel more inclined to start your own blog?
Are you planning to take Bulgarian folk dance lessons?
Throughout our acquaintance, did you read a John Steinbeck novel? Elena Ferrante, Rabecca Solnit, or any author you have seen on my bookshelf?
Can you differentiate between the terms 1) simulation, 2) simulacrum, 3) hyperreality and 4) Absolute Fake?
Your responses will be kept anonymous.
Bisous, Krisi
Alas, such data points are currently missing. No exit surveys, no post-romantic peer reviews.
I intuitively found one common trend that has been bothering me for years.
The men I date tend to all have A Thing. Not a casual semi-interest you are in and out of – rather, something that can at times be so all-consuming that they can talk to me about it for hours, or fully surrender to outside my presence.
And me? I don’t really have one thing. Certainly not in the way these guys did.
The birdwatcher could identify hundreds of bird calls and name them in three languages (literally, he had an app for it and I was testing him). The Grateful Dead fan was on a personal mission to archive every live performance ever played by the group and have it on his mp3… For whatever reason I found that hot?
So, my self-imposed hobby-related inferiority complex made me question further: What would these guys have to absorb from me?
I don’t really have one single lasting hobby – or a sport I am particularly above average at. And while I don’t consider myself ignorant, I also lack a subject in which I have the comparable detailed knowledge as the bird-mating-sound-recognition.
I guess there seems to be no proper equivalent as intellectualizing your dating life, citing Slavoj Zizek, and casually doing different sports seems qualitatively different from cathedral-like fixations and mastery of rope climbing, mountain biking, trail running, caving, etc.
Therefore, I just oscillate. Between hobbies, men, and identities…
For years I translated this oscillation as inadequacy. As if without one towering main fixation, I am merely a decorative extra in someone else’s documentary about Passion. That someone else being a man…
In This Sex Which is Not One (1985) – a university-assigned reading that has forever changed me – philosopher Luce Irigaray uses Alice from Through The Looking-Glass as well as Alice from the Swiss movie The Surveyors to expose the deeply disturbing struggle for women to identify themselves outside the reference points of male subjectivity.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice and the Red Queen move across the chessboard landscape when Alice enters a strange wood where things have no names. Then, she realizes in dismay that she has forgotten her own name:
And now, who am I? I will remember, if I can! I am determined to do it! But being determined didn’t help her much, and all she could say, after a great deal of puzzling, was: ‘L, I know it begins with L.’
In The Surveyors, Alice and another woman keep being mixed up by men, even by those who are supposed to love them. They come and go from the house, sometimes seeing Alice, sometimes the other woman, confusing them as if they were interchangeable.
How can I be distinguished from her? Only if I keep on pushing to the other side, if I’m always beyond, because on this side of the screen of their projections, on this plane of their representations, I can’t live. I’m stuck, paralyzed […] So either I don’t have any “self,” or else I have a multitude of “selves” appropriated by them, for them, according to their needs or desires.
One of Irigaray’s main claims is that what we call woman is created by the male system as its Inverted Other through which the masculine can project himself as Subject and the feminine be left the Object or multiple objects for men, to be exchanged by men.
Further, in this historical construction of selfhoods, in which women never took any part of, the feminine got whatever men have historically not wanted to define themselves as.
Which makes my spinning-class existential crisis look slightly less ridiculous…
Maybe my intuition urges me to appropriate masculine subjectivity in order to escape the inverted projections of femininity as the pathetic scraps men didn’t want? Like, men are good at spatial orientation – women get lost; men are rational – women can’t think clearly; et cetera: a story as old as time.
Hence, if a guy I see can snowboard – so must I! (Question Mark?)
And just to be clear – whenever I speak of the male system that has defined women, I speak of a centuries-old Western culture, that I lay no blame for on the particular lover boys I have dated (most of whom I hold in good esteem and have warm feelings for).
Nobody has menaced me into liking anything. Nobody told me “You better start caring about psychedelic rock, or become better at climbing or else you have no value to me, woman!!!”
Yet, if masculine subjectivity has long been associated with mastery – with singular expertise, with the figure of the man who knows something deeply and completely – then perhaps it is not surprising that I instinctively read that model as more legitimate.
A (scarcely) living mirror, she/it is frozen, mute. More lifelike. The ebb and flow of our lives spent in the exhausting labor of copying, miming. Dedicated to reproducing – that sameness in which we have remained for centuries, as the other. – Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which is Not One
To be clear – I do not wish to perpetuate the narrative that women don’t have hobbies or passions. Clearly, that is not the case and there are many women who have equally all-consuming fixations as the men I have been attracted to – my friend Rea’s lifelong nerdy devotion to Playmobil, or my sister’s fiction-writing-without-a-break can immediately testify.
I am beyond willing to accept that they (as well as many other female readers) might not find my musings particularly relatable. I’ve even asked myself: Am I just twisting this into a gender issue, when it’s actually just a bizarre complex I personally have convinced myself of???
But nonetheless, I do contend there is a gendered aspect to it.
Little girls are socialized to be well-rounded, attentive to others, adaptable, eventually oriented toward family life. Singular obsession is rarely encouraged with the same enthusiasm.
When I was a teenager, I had to wage a multi-month emotional campaign to convince my parents to let me do hip-hop dances five times a week. The negotiations involved tears, promises that my grades would not drop, and incremental escalation: first two classes per week, then three, then four.
Meanwhile, my grandmother the other day casually informed me that nobody worries about my little cousin’s grades and he does sports every single day of the week. He has always been “the sporty one,” my grandma tells me…
It seems to me, we are stuck in the trap of women (whoever we are, whatever we are) not being able to fundamentally reflect ourselves, speak ourselves into authentic being outside the frameworks of masculine mono-subjectivity. If we embrace without questioning the dubious “feminine essence” assigned to us, we are left with a definition that was created without our participation. And if we try to liberate ourselves from it, we might end up appropriating and thus valorizing even more the “masculine essence.”
Which brings me back to the existential cardio question that started this entire reflection.
Do I hate men? Or do I simply envy the clarity of their cultural script?
When I first tried to articulate this intuition years ago, my friend Rea looked at me with genuine concern and asked:
When you see J—- with his Grateful Dead obsession, do you really think: That’s healthy. That’s what I want?
Fair point.
And perhaps Irigaray would remind me that the real danger lies elsewhere: if we keep speaking in the same conceptual language that has shaped subjectivity for centuries, we risk missing ourselves entirely – becoming, as she puts it, speaking machines wrapped in identities that are not quite our own.
Which makes me see that my hobby-related inferiority complex might simply come from measuring myself against cultural values that were never designed for me in the first place.
Like, what if I’m just a fairly well-rounded woman and a hybrid athlete? Also, why do men not start getting into an existential crisis about not having women’s level of emotional maturity or multi-focus?
Finally, after forty-five minutes of cardio and weeks of distracted-from-snowboarder occasional writing, I got two revelations.
First – in my life, all I need is a little bit of both: men-hating and men-over-loving.
Second – it became increasingly clear that the class had been grossly misnamed all along. They call it spinning… But I call it SPIRALING.