Points of Friction

That’s how I described an issue at work in a meeting today. “This is not a large problem, but it is a point of friction within the organization.”
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What I meant was that someone has a death grip on an old system while a sleek new system is already in place, leaving us with two competing systems. The tiniest point of friction. A minor annoyance, really. 

There are so many points of friction in my life, in all our lives. 

I try to streamline my mornings so that they are, if not frictionless, easy, sliding me toward the ultimate goal of the day. My clothes preselected and set out. The coffee maker set to finish brewing minutes before I come downstairs. Even the thirty minutes in the morning before my son and husband wake up are planned to make those pre-dawn moments liquid with ease. 

After that, there are a hundred points every moment that might create resistance, choices to be made, and friction encountered. A car driving 15 miles under the speed limit in front of me. An unexpected task that must be completed before I leave the house (but mom, I didn’t know that 32 cupcakes for school today). 

Imagine living without friction? Everything as set up for you as my mornings are (most days). 

Even worse, imagine believing that you should live without anyone ever telling you you’re wrong. A truly frictionless life. A life where whatever you choose to believe is the truth. 

I can’t stop thinking about what it must do to a person to believe so completely in themselves that they believe, no, to know that their version of the world is the only one that matters. 

Beyond main character syndrome. My son talks about these people in video game terms. Everyone else is an NPC, a non-player character. A hollow, computer-generated front only there to facilitate game play. Not human. Unthinking. There to be used. 

I learned today that I am that point of friction. Or, people like me. Women, too old now to be empty vessels of desire. No longer willing to laugh along to the jokes of facile men, to laud praise for every idea, every utterance, or better yet, to remain silent. 

I’m drawn inexorably to Elon Musk, a man so convinced of his own genius that he is unable to wrap his mind around his own failures. Of Donald Trump, who started a war out of ignorance and has turned his whole cabinet into fawning, bootlicking NPCs. These men want their worlds to be frictionless. 

Yet we are points of friction. 

How empty must life be without friction. How hollow days where you are alone in the world because no one can stand against your greatness. 

Was it Laura Loomer who brought the term micropenis into the national political lexicon? And was it, dare I say, the perfect slight?

These frictionless men are desperate to slide into every woman they desire, not to know them, not to romance them. How powerful must they feel to get everything they want? How small must they be to fear women who will speak back? Microscopic men. Unable to withstand the barest resistance. 

These were the men, the powerful men, who so feared women over forty with their minds, and their experience, and their educations, that these men convinced themselves that the only thing they desired was youth. 

Imagine only wanting the package of thing and not the thing itself.

Imagine never wanting to fall in love with an equal. Being too great, too brilliant, too drunk on your own myth to understand the entirety of another person.

It was all about sex. But it’s all about power, too. 

There were no adult women at the table when the men sat down to eat, or to drink, and talk about ideas. 

Why?

Friction. 

These men might wow a twenty-year-old with their ideas, their ‘genius’, an eighteen-year-old. A child. But a woman? She has her own ideas. She has read all the books they’ve read and some they haven’t. She has heard this idea before. She can see the flaws in the argument, and she is not afraid to say so. 

That’s what adults do when they talk with each other. That’s what equals do. 

And that’s exactly what they abhor.

But their fear shows us where the real power lies. What is friction but an interruption in their world? A glitch in their costume of perfection. 

The weight of society is working to flatten women into pretending that we are twenty again. New. Retinol to remove the lines of experience from our faces. Red light therapy to erase the thousands of books that we’ve read, the lives we lived, the people we’ve loved. 

So we can be frictionless again?

What if instead of microneedling and glycolic acid peels, we revealed the smallness of these fearful men, the thinness of their illusions of omnipotence? 

Enough friction brings even the most powerful machines to a standstill.