Closed questions tend to be unfriendly
Rebecca Solnit was giving a talk on Virginia Woolf a few years ago, and the audience for some reason wanted to talk about whether Woolf should have had children…as opposed to talking about the thing that makes Woolf of interest: what she wrote.
In the talk I had quoted with approval her description of murdering “the angel of the house,” the inner voice that tells many women to be self-sacrificing handmaidens to domesticity and male vanity. I was surprised that advocating for throttling the spirit of conventional femininity should lead to this conversation.
What I should have said to that crowd was that our interrogation of Woolf’s reproductive status was a soporific and pointless detour from the magnificent questions her work poses. (I think at some point I said, “Fuck this shit,” which carried the same general message and moved everyone on from the discussion.) After all, many people have children; only one made To the Lighthouse and The Waves, and we were discussing Woolf because of the books, not the babies.
But she was a woman, so let’s talk about the babies anyway.
The line of questioning was familiar enough to me. A decade ago, during a conversation that was supposed to be about a book I had written on politics, the British man interviewing me insisted that instead of talking about the products of my mind, we should talk about the fruit of my loins, or the lack thereof. Onstage, he hounded me about why I didn’t have children. No answer I gave could satisfy him. His position seemed to be that I must have children, that it was incomprehensible that I did not, and so we had to talk about why I didn’t, rather than about the books I did have.
I guess she should consider herself lucky he didn’t ask her about her penis envy.
The interviewer’s question was indecent, because it presumed that women should have children, and that a woman’s reproductive activities were naturally public business. More fundamentally, the question assumed that there was only one proper way for a woman to live.
But even to say that there’s one proper way may be putting the case too optimistically, given that mothers are consistently found wanting, too.
Women are the permanent children of the world, always subject to questioning and scolding by the adults.
We talk about open questions, but there are closed questions, too, questions to which there is only one right answer, at least as far as the interrogator is concerned. These are questions that push you into the herd or nip at you for diverging from it, questions that contain their own answers and whose aim is enforcement and punishment. One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, “Why are you asking that?” This, I’ve found, is always a good answer to an unfriendly question, and closed questions tend to be unfriendly.
Yes indeed they do.
While I was in a recent playwriting class, I was given a play to read about Emilie du Chatelet. It was referencing her legacy. There was a very unnecessary secondary plot running in parallel, a modern day plot about a woman who wanted a child, but because she was smart, talented, educated, and worked out side the home, apparently she was infertile (in literature, these automatically seem to go together; that’s why I worded it the way I did). So she hired a surrogate mother.
In the end, the long and the short of it, the surrogate mother turned out to be a direct descendant of the daughter du Chatelet had raised and who married a little known noble and was lost to history (this is pure speculation on the playwright’s part; we really don’t know the history of this daughter, as far as I understand). The conclusion of the play? du Chatelet, who is sometimes referred to as the woman who put the square in E=MC squared, had made her most important contribution to the world by having this daughter. The most important thing she had done was have a child that would have a descendent that would some day allow a poor infertile woman to have a baby.
I was thoroughly disgusted. I’m sure my mentor who assigned the play is still trying to recover from my scathing review!
“One of my goals in life is to become truly rabbinical, to be able to answer closed questions with open questions, to have the internal authority to be a good gatekeeper when intruders approach, and to at least remember to ask, “Why are you asking that?” This, I’ve found, is always a good answer to an unfriendly question, and closed questions tend to be unfriendly.”
Yes! I started deploying this approach in my late teens with my parents, and then later with lab. bullies and also with passive aggressive and manipulative colleagues. Not just in response to closed questions, but also to prying insistent questions used to gain information for the purpose of manipulation and/or exploitation. I still find the problem then though, is that no matter how kindly I phrase the question, often the aggressor at that point turns from manipulative to resentful and sometimes hostile, which can have a whole other set of negative consequences.