The clock is ticking

Women's desirability and their fears.

Time has not been on my side today. I arrived earlier than the Central train station's opening time, and I also landed at an ungodly time in Geneva. In the 1 km walk from the gate to the exit, I counted 10 watch brand ads. I like those ads; I like how refined they are. I’d gladly give my life a Patek Philippe touch if I had a magic wand. That grace and poise of those who are not rushed, who are confident of the value of their past and undoubtedly convinced the future will be just as good as it has always been, if not better. Ignorance and hope are great cosmetics, pretty much like love.

I met an Argentinian lady, and on the trip from the station to the airport, she told me her life story. In telling her story, she often repeated, “Me ha costado mucho tiempo”. “It cost me much time”. I sighed internally because “time” and my inability to handle it has always been the cross I have to carry. Perhaps that’s one of the main reasons I have beef with Switzerland. The country’s landmarks are their watches. It’s a memento mori of a country, you know? I know you will come to its defence with “but they have great chocolate”. And I will remind you immediately that people seem to be jogging that chocolate off right as they finish chewing it. I can’t respect this level of health self-dictatorial behaviour. I am self-proclaimed as a bonne vivante.

But we were talking about time. I have always been way in advance of an appointment with others at the cost of betraying myself. The person who waits is always afraid the other person won’t show up, and while she waits, she asks herself why the other person didn’t respect them enough to come on time. Or I have been late, and while I run to my destination, I practised excuses in my mind, battled with guilt and cursed my inability to handle time. Time to me feels like an enemy. It is my biggest life focus at the moment, I want to finally befriend it.

Lately, I see on Instagram a lot of quotes from “Alice in Wonderland”, a book that has always scared me too much to read. I watched parts of the cartoon when I was a child, and it always felt unsettling to me. It is weird because I was the type of kid who actually enjoyed and understood the sides of the Disney villains. Especially Cruella Devil, I had a fascination for her. But Alice scared the shit out of me, and she was the heroin of that cartoon. I see excerpts from that book way too often lately, and I feel the book is calling me. This entire period of my life is calling me to reflect on how I have priced my time. There was another book that had to do with time; it is a kids’ book, too, that I have always loved. See, the topic has been a continuous in my mind. It is called the “Timeskipper”, and it so beautifully portrays the chasms created in us when our emotional clock, our dreams’ clock, and our work personae clock are so at war with each other.

You only have to promise me that you will keep your watches as an important and precious thing, not betray one or the other. The one of daily toil and the one of possible worlds, the one that counts your steps on the ground and the one that counts your dreams. The one that flows and the one that turns. The one that steals your loved ones and the one that brings them back. The one that kills your enemies and the one that makes you imagine how many different ways you would kill them. The one that makes you love and the one that makes you be loved.

Timeskipper - Stefano Benni

Here, this is the sound of the clock inside. This measures a time that does not go straight, but back and forth, makes twists and turns, rolls up, invents, and re-enacts. It is a time you cannot measure. It is your time, it measures your life, which is unique.

Timeskipper - Stefano Benni

I don’t own a wristwatch. But I do have a daily planner, weekly planner, monthly planner on my desk and a yearly wall calendar. You cannot say I am not trying to tame time, to see it, shape it, control it, or make it serve me. I am trying with all my being. But apart from my personal experience as an individual who battles with time and often loses, I want to discuss how messed up time is for women. How time is the only luxury women are not afforded. And when I think deeply about this, I am once again humbled by something called biology. Let me explain.

Men seem to have an obsession with women’s age. If I had a penny for how many times I posted a particularly flattering picture of me and a random dude commented with, “When was this taken??????” with the alacrity of the Italian taxation authority, I’d be rich. It did not happen once but multiple times. So, I see a pattern now. Initially, I used to say the year it was taken, but now I am straightforward: “Do not worry, I am still hot, and I still wouldn’t date you”. No mercy for boors. But I wonder what I will do when I will stop being hot. Is it true, like some older women say, that one turns invisible? Or is time used as a stick to scare us off? I wonder how many women pushed themselves into relationships that did not meet their expectations at all. Relationships that served to meet societal expectations and to shush external pressures down.

This is the incriminated picture

I am saying nothing new here: women “fade”, and men “flourish” with time, according to society. In the battle against being sexualised that is fought by getting starkly naked (cough cough Emily Ratajkowski), I would like to take upon arms to fight the battle for the freedom to get old, a battle I will fight by getting riddles on my face. It seems like an easier fight; you don’t risk getting cold and not being sexualised while you are being sexy. But it is more difficult as a woman to accept the passing of time. It seems to have to do with power accepting the passing of time without freaking out. By freaking out, I mean killing yourself at the gym to get back a body you had a 20, starting to do Botox and so on.

“The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes. It is equivalent to a sense of abusing the present.”

―Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

This fear of getting old, do men perceive it as much as we do? I don’t think so. We are the ones not allowing ourselves to live on our terms. We often don’t even know our terms. Again, perhaps we have this because our desirability is subconsciously connected with our fertility and our health, and our fertility depends so much on age. Our desirability span is so different. This fear of getting old is a fear we inherit from our mothers. It is a fear we receive as a dowry. And we don’t decline it because it comes from our first model of womanhood.

But I wonder, with all the progress made on health care and so on, will things change? I also wonder why men are so attracted to women of an age span we, as women, would never date. Are men profiting from daddy issues other men provoked? What will happen when women start dating younger men just as much? As women stop considering motherhood as their most defining role, will we also be profiting from the mommy issues other women have created and dating younger hot guys that “relax” us? I can’t wait to see how it all plays out.

Vilma Djala