This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

by Tabitha Carvan

Steel yourself, because here’s the result, an inventory of how women are supposed to be: nice in relationships, thin, modest, domestic, caring for children, invested in romantic relationships, sexually faithful, and invested in our appearance. Awesome list. Love it. I think “thin” is my favorite, because it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Just: thin! Another highlight is how many of these feminine attributes aren’t even about women but about other people and how women make them feel.

Something makes me happy, or brings me pleasure, and I ask, how does this make me look? Nice? Thin? Modest? Domestic? Caring? Invested in my relationship? Sexually faithful? Like a good wife? I put everything through a pressure test, to see if it will hold up under public scrutiny, to see if it’s okay. And if the pleasure doesn’t consider the needs of other people, and if it doesn’t attend to what other people require of me—if it’s just for me—then it will fail. No wonder so many women prefer to confine their pleasures to the privacy of their inner life, or to their supportive online communities. It’s the only way to escape the question of what your husband thinks about all this.

When it comes to sport, intense passion—the kind that inspires you to get tattooed—is so normal that no one is going to question my colleague about it. I don’t think people even see that his desk and my desk are of a kind. No one is going to ask him, “Can you explain to me this whole Dragons thing?” Instead, they’ll ask, “How about that game?” And fair enough! Sport is so embedded into our lives that it gets its own little bit on the news every night. It would be extremely unrealistic if I expected Benedict Cumberbatch to occupy the same position in our culture as football (but what a world that would be). So I happily accept my fate as someone in a minority, whose thing is always going to be, relatively speaking, not normal, and therefore weird.