In How Should a Person Be?, Sheila Heti’s narrator attempts to fuck her way to a better place. She’s feeling lost after being abandoned by a rightly offended best friend, and she responds by letting herself become the sexual plaything of a cold, heartless man.
At one point, she says she’s indifferent to the possibility of having the man’s child...she’d as soon kiss the head of his baby as the head of his penis. It’s all the same to her.
There’s a stunning vulgarity to this sentiment, a sentiment that carries with it the essence of the mess we’ve created in the secular Western world.
Is it too conservative, too reductive, too cliche, to suggest a lack of respect for the sacredness of certain parts of life — in this case, the creation of children — contributes to our general sense of societal malaise? This passage found a place in Heti’s book for a reason. She clearly felt it meant something.
Our old cultural and spiritual edifices have come crashing down — the religions and social orders that taught so many generations of our ancestors what to think — but maybe, just maybe, those legends and structures, proscriptions and rules were based on a real, biological, evolutionary-derived sense of what matters in our lives. Maybe we’re destined to find certain things sacred.
There’s a reason Heti’s narrator’s account inspires derision in a reader. Violent sex as equal to parenthood? We don’t need any tradition to tell us the very idea is profane.
