A Plea for Eros

that often seem to happen without my directives, a strange process altogether and one that is put in play when I become another person in my work. And yet the act of writing consists of one thing only—putting words on a page to be read by someone else. In the end, the words are everything and, strictly speaking, they are sexless. In English, unlike many other languages, our nouns don’t even have gender, but it’s interesting to ask whether a text can be male or female and what would make it one or the other.
    Every parent and anyone who’s spent time with young children knows that sexual identity takes a while to fix itself and that toddlers rarely know if they are boys or girls. When my daughter was three, she asked my husband whether she would get a penis when she grew up. She posed this question during a period in her life I call the tutu-party-shoe phase, an era of glitter and gold, rhinestone tiaras and plastic high heels. While the little boys were puffing out their chests and playing superheroes, my daughter was tripping around the house like a mad, rather smudged version of Titania. At the same age, the daughter of a friend of mine donned a platinum Marilyn Monroe wig and refused to take it off. She ate, played, went to the park, the toilet, and bed under the increasingly ratty white peruke, which, according to her mother, made her look more like Rumplestiltskin than a blond bombshell. However comic they may look to adults, children play hard at finding out what they are—boys or girls—and they live the difference through an often furious imaginary drama of sex roles. Despite the optimism of some researchers, where biology ends and culture begins is probably a question beyond science. Even infants, whose borderless existence makes the question of sexual identity seem absurd from the inside, have been born into a world in which the boy/girl question is crucial from the outside, is the first question asked after birth: “Is it a boy or a girl?” In other words, before they know, we know. And what we know is part of a vast symbolic landscape in which the lines are drawn between one thing and another in the linguistic act of naming. Once children feel sure of themselves as either boys or girls, the Zorro capes, Superman outfits, crowns, and princess costumes are replaced by more androgynous clothing. The external trappings of femininity and masculinity can be discarded at the moment the knowledge of sexual identity becomes internal, and part of that inner certainty happens in language. A six-year-old can usually state with confidence that he or she is a boy or girl, will grow up to be a man or a woman, and, barring an operation, will not change sex along the way. At the same time, the wider meanings of femininity and masculinity are far more ambiguous.
Male
and
female
are words that carry associations so dense, so old, so public, but also so private, that drawing a clear line between the two is riddled with difficulty. It must be said, however, that the categories male and female are very much alive in the language and are laden with our own deep cultural and personal histories that continue to evolve and change and that it is wildly naïve to suppose that dropping
chairman
for
chairperson,
for example, will purge language of its sexual connotations.
    We were four daughters in my family. My parents had the name Lars ready before each birth, but it turned out that they had to wait a generation for him. My sister’s first son was named Lars in honor of our grandfather and the phantom Hustvedt boy who was never born. I have often thought it was easier that we were all girls. Had there been a boy, we might have been compared and opposed to him, and the differences might have confined all of us. We were born in pairs. I was first. Then, nineteen months later, my sister Liv was born. A gap of five years followed before Asti appeared, and only fifteen months later Ingrid arrived. The four of us were very close and loyal to one another as children and remain devoted friends as adults, something we have more or less taken for granted. My husband, on the other hand, has always regarded our harmony as both remarkable and somewhat puzzling. Why are there so few conflicts among us? When Liv and I were very young, we liked disaster games—shipwreck, tornado, flood, and war. Liv was always John, and I was always Mary, which usually meant that John got to save Mary. I liked being rescued, and in life as well as in