In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays (Original Harvest Book; Hb333) Read Online Free

to ask for space for herself.
    I want this quality of the sense of the person, the sense of direct contact with human beings to be preserved by woman, not as something bad, but as something that could make a totally different world where intellectual capacity would be fused with intuition and with a sense of the personal.
    Now, when I wrote the diary and when I wrote fiction, I was trying to say that we need both intimacy and a deep knowledge of a few human beings. We also need mythology and fiction which is a little further away, and art is always a little further away from the entirely personal world of the woman. But I want to tell you the story of Colette. When her name was suggested for the Académie française, which is considered the highest honor given to writers, there was much discussion because she hadn’t written about war, she hadn’t written about any large event, she had only written about love. They admired her as a writer, as a stylist—she was one of our best stylists—but somehow the personal world of Colette was not supposed to have been very important. And I think it is extremely important, because we have lost that intimacy and that person-to-person sense, which she developed because she had been more constricted and less active in the world. So the family was very important, the neighbor was very important, and the friend was very important.
    It would be nice if men could share that too, of course. And they will, on the day they recognize the femininity in themselves, which is what Jung has been trying to tell us. I was asked once how I felt about men who cried, and I said that I loved men who cried, because it showed they had feeling. The day that woman admits what we call her masculine qualities, and man admits his so-called feminine qualities, will mean that we admit we are androgynous, that we have many personalities, many sides to fulfill. A woman can be courageous, can be adventurous, she can be all these things. And this new woman who is coming up is very inspiring, very wonderful. And I love her.

Anaïs Nin Talks About Being a Woman: An Interview
     
From
Vogue
, 15 October 1971.
     
    QUESTIONER: Are you surprised by your rediscovery by the young and your power as a force with them?
    ANAÏS NIN: The young, after all, were the first to come to me after my return from Europe at the beginning of World War II. The young find in me a similarity in attitude—living with the senses, intuition, magic, using the psychic, an awareness of a different set of values. They find in me a primary interest in life and intimacy, in knowing each other. When I lecture in colleges, I talk about
funawn,
a Welsh word that means the kind of talk that leads to intimacy. We talk about their lives and personal things, and then they open up to me. At first, I wondered why they wanted me to lecture and now I realize they simply wanted to see if I were real.
    Q : Kate Millett in her controversial book
Sexual Politics
attacks your friend Henry Miller for the way he, a male writer, has influenced our thinking about sex. Because of your intimacy with and support of Miller, do you feel you compromised yourself as a woman?
    AN: Not at all. He was my opposite. As I wrote in my diary, I didn’t like his attitude towards sex. But even Freud behaved entirely differently with Lou Andreas-Salomé. You see, it’s a matter of the woman. Miller treated me differently. I took his antipuritanism as comic. By asserting his appetites, he changed both men and women. I think I saw Miller very clearly, but I don’t feel now I have to attack or defend him. Miller did a lot to remove the puritanical superstitions of other men. At that moment, women were inaccessible. He brought them nearer. He made them real.
    Q: You observed once you had not “imitated man.” What role do men have in your work?
    AN: No, I didn’t imitate men. Men, for me, were doctor, psychiatrist, astronomer, astrologer. It was their knowledge I needed. I followed men