BEING DIRECTED
After about twenty minutes and going around the same block a few times, it was clear to Mary that Tom was lost. She finally suggested that he call for help. Tom became very silent. They eventually arrived at the party, but the tension…persisted the whole evening. Mary had no idea of why he was so upset.—JOHN GRAY, PH.D., Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
“They're making a Lost in Space movie. The Robinson family is still lost. Even after thirty years, the dad still refuses to pull over and ask for directions”—ROSIE O'DONNELL, The Rosie O'DonnellShow
When Freud was lost in Italy, going round in circles in the street of painted women, did he eventually ask for directions? He makes a point in his account to tell us that, once he determined its unsavory character, he “hastened to leave the narrow street” and “wandered about for a while without being directed,” only to find himself returned to the same spot. He is less forthcoming about the denouement of his anxious adventure, and all he tells us is that he “was glad enough to abandon [his] exploratory walk and get straight back to the plaza [he] had left a short while before.” It is a truism among American women (and pop psychology books about relationships between the sexes) that men almost never ask for directions.31 Indeed, their whole identity seems to depend on the sense that they can get about the world on their own. Hansel takes charge of finding the way home from the forest, and Freud tells us (in passing) that he wandered “without being directed” but manages to say not a word about how he managed to find his way back to known territory. Women laugh among themselves about what seems to us a libidinal overinvestment in men's negotiation of worldly space. We think it childish that the very idea of being lost (let alone the act of asking for directions) so threatens men's identity that they tend to evidence what seems disproportionate defensiveness, anger, or even hysteria when they are—what must seem to them—“caught out” in a “shameful” instance of—what seems to us—minor spatial disorientation.32
Although it has real and critical consequences in people's actual relationships, this gender difference is so familiar as to seem comic or banal.33 It is apposite, then, that getting lost provides a key scenario of gender conflict in many best-selling pop psychology books, among them John Gray, Ph.D.'s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and Deborah Tannen, Ph.D.'s slightly less condescending (and less sexist) You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.34 For Gray, if a woman acknowledges a man is lost by casually suggesting he ask for directions, she is heard by the man as saying, “I don't trust you to get us there. You are incompetent!” Better for her, he suggests, to indulge in benevolent tolerance—and silence: “Tom greatly appreciated her warm acceptance and trust.”35 For Tannen, the conflict engendered in this scenario can be attributed to the fact that women in our culture see the exchange of information as an acknowledgment of community, whereas men see it as an articulation of unequal power relations: “To the extent that giving information, directions, or help is of use to another, it reinforces bonds between people. But to the extent that it is asymmetrical, it creates hierarchy.”36 Although these analyses of the different psychic investments of men and women in getting—and appearing—lost don't seem untrue, they do seem somewhat superficial. They are, quite literally, not yet fleshed out, their truth not substantiated at the deeper, carnal levels of our existence.
Being a “master of the universe” presumes an existential relationship and reciprocity with space that is centered in, tethered to, and organized contiguously around one's embodied intentionality and its perceived possibility of realizing projects in the world. This is a relationship informed by the confidence that one is immanently and transcendently, as both a body and a consciousness, the constitutive source of meaningful space—that one is, indeed, the compass of the world. And space, thus constituted, is a space in which one should not be able to really get lost, a space in which one should never need guidance. This is the existential space of the young world-making child—and, in our culture, also the presumed (and assumed) existential space of the adult man. It is very rarely the space of the adult woman.
In a phenomenological description of the reciprocity between culturally informed, engendered bodies and the morphology of worldly space, philosopher Iris Marion Young has distinguished the general forms through which men and women differently perceive and live space in our culture.37 This difference is less a function of sexual difference than it is of situational difference. All human beings experience their existence as embodied and therefore immanent, that is, as materially situated in a specific “here” at a specific “now.” All human beings also experience their existence as conscious and therefore as transcendent, that is, as able to transcend their material immanence through intentional projection to a “where” and “when” they are not but might be. However, given this universal condition of human existence as both immanent and transcendent, the ratio—or rationality—of their relationship each to the other is often different for men and women in our culture. More often than men, women are the objects of gazes that locate and invite their bodies to live as merely material “things” immanently positioned in space rather than as conscious subjects with the capacity to transcend their immanence and posit space. Thus, according to Young, there is a dominant tendency for “feminine spatial existence” to be “positioned by a system of coordinates that does not have its origins in [women's] intentional capacities” (152).38 Certainly, women also exist as intentional subjects who can and do transcend their immanence, but, because of their prominent objectification, they do so ambivalently and with greater difficulty. That is, feminine spatial experience in our culture, Young suggests, exhibits “an ambiguous transcendence, an inhibited intentionality, and a discontinuous unity with its surroundings. A source of these contradictory modalities is the bodily self-reference of feminine comportment, which derives from the woman's experience of her body as a thing at the same time she experiences it as a capacity” (147). Women, therefore, tend to inhabit space tentatively, in a structure of self-contradiction that is inhibiting and self-distancing and that makes their bodies—as related to their intentionality—less a transparent capacity for action and movement than a hermeneutic problem. As a consequence, women in our culture tend not to enjoy the synthetic, transparent, and unreflective unity of immanence and transcendence that is a common experience among men.
Although “any” body lives worldly space as encounters with both “opacities and resistances correlative to [the body's] own limits and frustrations” and with a horizon of open possibilities for action, to women, for whom “feminine bodily existence is an inhibited intentionality,…the same set of possibilities that appears to be correlative to [their] intentions also appears to be a system of frustrations correlative to [their] hesitancies.” A woman's possibilities for action and self-realization of her projects—even mundane ones like finding her own way from here to there—are certainly perceived as possibilities but, more often than not, “as the possibilities of ‘someone,' and not truly her possibilities” (149). Correlative to this ambiguous transcendence and inhibited intentionality, Young also stresses the “discontinuous unity” experienced by women—both in relation to themselves and to their surroundings. There is an intentional gap between the space of “here” that is the spatial “position” I can and do occupy and the spatial “positing” of a “yonder” that I grasp in its possibilities but, as a woman in our culture, do not quite comprehend as potentially mine. Examining this sense of “double spatiality” (152), Young glosses various psychological studies that show women as more “field-dependent” than men. Males demonstrate “a greater capacity for lifting a figure out of its spatial surroundings and viewing relations in space as fluid and interchangeable, whereas females have a greater tendency to regard figures as embedded within and fixed by their surroundings.” Young suggests that women's field dependence is