"Hysteria"--applying both to women's laughter and to our tears--operates on a kind of emotional borderland where extreme moments of both joy and sorrow meet.
And that's why women call our friends in the middle of the night.
You do this because your friend will try to retrieve your sense of perspective by introducing humor.
Your partner left you? Your friend knew right from the start that you should have chosen somebody higher up the food chain.
Your old boyfriend just called to say you should get together again and he has two tickets to Hawaii? Tell him to sell both tickets and use the money to see a doctor, because he’s obviously a very sick man.
Our disappointments can be transformed through our ability to tell the story to someone else. Traditional forms of therapy work on the same principle—tell somebody your troubles, and it’ll help solve them.
The world tells us that it’s all wrong to complain, but that we can secure permission to complain as long as we don’t seem self-pitying and narcissistic. In other words, we get permission to talk about ourselves if we present our pain in such a way that it will not disturb others. “If men complain about their lives,” says my friend PK, “It might be called tragic--the loss of potental, the sense of a life thrown away. But when women complain, they’re not being universal; they're always seen as individual; they’re seen as being merely neurotic women. They're dismissed as either wanting a baby or else they’re menopausal. With men it appears as a crisis of existential conflicts. With women it appears hormonal. That’s how it works.”
In other words, when women complain about our lives, we’d better make it comedic if we want an audience.
Women’s material isn’t seen as being about people—it’s seen as being about women.
“Universal” examples include the “universal” struggle: man against nature, man’s flight from himself, man’s search for truth. The central figure here is "man" and if you change the pronoun, the mechanism behind the so-called "universal" alters considerably.
Joanna Russ writes in her article “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write” about the ways in which, when the sex of the protagonists is changed, the plots no longer work, thus proving that the so-called universal plot depends heavily on the sex of the main character.
In the supposedly universal plots we’ve all read in “great” literature (that is, literature by men), changing the sex of the main character changes the paradigm so completely it becomes comic.
Russ’s examples include the following: “1. Two strong women battle for supremacy in the early West. 2. A young girl in Minnesota finds her womanhood by killing a bear. 3. A phosphorescently doomed poetess sponges off her husband and drinks herself to death, thus alienating the community of Philistines and businesswomen who would have continued to give her lecture dates. 4. A young man who unwisely puts his success in business before his personal fulfillment loses his masculinity and ends up as a neurotic, lonely eunuch.”
Russ argued that the sex of the character in a story is never a neutral matter—it always has an implication. She first made the argument, however, in 1972. What I'm asking you now is this: Has anything changed? Do films like "The Hunger Game" trilogy, or the new film based on Cheryl Strayed'"Wild" or, for that matter, Disney's wildly popular "Frozen" illustrate that thing have changed in terms of the power held by center female figure?
--adapted from They Used to Call Me Snow White, But I Drifted