In a forum like this, there’s a certain pressure to be current. I should be obsessively analyzing the latest round of primaries, or yucking it up over Super Bowl ads. But I just don’t think it’s fair that the accident of my birth should prevent me from responding to something that has deeply irritated me. So this week in Dig for Fire: a response to John Updike’s “The Disposable Rocket,” fourteen years too late. It first appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review and was anthologized in Tracy Kidder’s Best American Essays in 1994. It was in such an anthology that I recently encountered the offending prose. To avoid the horror of anachronism, I invite you, the reader, to take a little trip back in time.* Close your eyes and have someone else read the following text aloud in a spooky voice: it is the year 1994. Lorena Bobbitt cuts her husband’s pecker off and walks away a free woman. Kurt Cobain is dead. The Lion King rules the box office, and Finland is the newest member of the European Union (go Finland!). Most relevantly, the song “detachable penis” which might have inspired Updike’s title, is only two years old. If you’re in a 1994 frame of mind, open your eyes and keep reading.

“The Disposable Rocket” dilates on the physical differences between men and women. Rather than enumerating particulars, Updike celebrates the relationship between body and boy. “[A man’s] body is, like a delivery rocket that falls away in space, a disposable means. Men put their bodies at risk to experience the release from gravity.” For a space, the essay is intensely personal: Updike meditating on Updike.

Then, this: “Any accounting of male-female differences” –we’re inwardly cringing already– “must include the male’s superior recklessness, a drive not, I think, toward death, as the darker feminist cosmogonies would have it, but to test the limits, to see what the traffic will bear…” (Who are these dark feminists? Pro-choice necromancers?) I had an encounter, once, with the male’s superior recklessness. My brother and I were driving on a highway in Umbria. We had been hiking for hours in the hot sun, through golden hillsides crowned with toothy Etruscan ruins. My exhausted brother pulled over to take a nap and drove our rental car right into a ditch. When we got out, the car was pitched almost ninety degrees against the ground, with two wheels in the air. We made the call and waited in the shade for help to arrive.

It did arrive. Immediately. I don’t know if it’s because we were obviously foreigners, or if this is standard roadside courtesy in Italy, but within five minutes there were at least fifteen Italian men in a tight circle around my brother, gesturing at the car and yelling. One fetched a stout rope from the trunk of his SUV and explained to my brother, in broken English, how he would tie one end to our bumper and the other to his—an improvised towline—while my brother drove the almost-upended car out of the ditch. The seat-belts, maybe because of the weird angle, had stopped working. It was at this point that I tried to intervene. “Really, guys, we’ve already called the tow-truck. We’ll be fine. You can go.” Naturally, they ignored me. My brother hesitated, inly deliberating. Fifteen Italians waited expectantly for him to do the manly thing. I also deliberated—it probably wasn’t all that risky. It would probably be fine. But I couldn’t quell the rising mix of dread, panic and rage, or shake the image of the car flipping over and my brother’s brains dashed against the roof, or his neck crushed against the door. As my brother turned halting footsteps toward the car, I did what I thought I had to do. I bent over double and started to scream.

scream.jpg

I knew that forcing my brother to listen to me would emasculate him in front of the Italians. I was over-reacting, and the incident would always be remembered as the day when I, like a girl, had a fit in Italy. But I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would feel if something really did go wrong, and I hadn’t tried to stop it. My brother turned pale and sat down again in the shade. I apologized a dozen times. Four hours later, Enzo, the hero-mechanic, showed up with a real tow-truck and drove us back to our agriturismo, where we toasted him with red wine.

I don’t know who was more reckless—my brother for trying to get into an upended car, or me for having a voluntary seizure in front of a bunch of strangers—but after reading “The Disposable Rocket,” I think I’ll just let my brother drive out of the ditch next time, lest I be seduced to the dark side of feminism.

Updike doesn’t go on to explain why we should reckon up “male-female differences” (ie: why anyone should read his essay) but he has plenty more to say about them. He hints, without elaborating, at biological determinism, with oblique references to “post-simian, East African days,” as if everything that follows is genetically inevitable, the result of a long and undeviating evolutionary process. When he writes, “we were made for combat,” we picture him shrugging helplessly, as if to say, “men are just naturally more violent—what can I tell ya?”

He praises female interior space as being “active, interesting, and significant.” He goes on to propose that men, having relatively impoverished inner spaces, can only content themselves with such tedious outer happenings as “the jet fighter like a scarcely visible pinpoint nozzle laying down its vapor trail at forty thousand feet, the gazelle haunch flickering just beyond arrow-reach, the uncountable stars sprinkled on their great black wheel, the horizon, the mountaintop, the quasar…” This is a backhanded compliment, a polite way of saying that women aren’t just risk-averse, we’re less ambitious. Apparently, our uteri are so endlessly fascinating that we have no need of such trivial externalities as jet fighters, wild animals, or the cosmos. On a personal note, my uterus is so captivating that I’m planning to move into it permanently. It’s affordable, well-heated, stylishly upholstered in red, and it’s the perfect place to hide from the dangerous world that I’m biologically fated to be too bashful to explore.

Maybe John Updike would find my response hilariously jejune. Maybe he loves the idea of feminists getting their panties all-in-a-twist over his essay. Or maybe I’m being too hard on him; maybe it’s impossible to celebrate “what men are” without talking implicitly about what women aren’t. When you say that men are ambitious, are you also automatically saying that women are passive? Can you say that mothers are nurturing without also saying that fathers are indifferent?

It’s a risky proposition, but I’ll take a stab. If a man’s body is like a “disposable rocket,” then a woman’s body is like a disposable pocket—a convenient place to store contraband until customs catches on, at which point illegal items can be safely jettisoned in the nearest loo. To paraphrase Mark Twain: outside a uterus, a book is a girl’s best friend. Inside a uterus, it’s too dark to read.

*Disclaimer: time travel is dangerous and theoretically impossible. Dig for Fire will not be held responsible for lost or stolen items, personal injury or death, or the universe collapsing on itself.