Lauren

“Back in Svetlana’s room, we listened to the CDs she had bought—Joni Mitchell’s Blue and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion—and made necklaces, periodically holding up the strands and comparing them. Svetlana explained how her necklace was characteristic of her and mine was characteristic of me, and I thought about how probably, as long as civilization had existed, women had been threading beads onto strings or reeds or whatever. Then I wondered whether it had always been women. Maybe in ancient times men had been into beads. Today, though, it was hard to imagine boys sitting around on beanbags, listening to Joni Mitchell, holding necklaces against each other’s necks, and talking about Svetlana’s sister. Some part of me worried that this was why women would never amount to anything, that we were somehow holding ourselves back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot