tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68426546533667927292024-02-20T03:06:21.491-06:00Naked ConversationsTo Be Human is to Be a ConversationL.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-58197441101132603802011-07-20T13:01:00.000-05:002011-07-20T13:01:25.849-05:00Change of VenueLJ's posts on all and sundry will now be appearing at: http://sistersunderthemink.blogspot.com/<br />
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Not that she has that much to say, but if she's saying it, she's saying it there. Comments welcome. Talk soon.<br />
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--LJL.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-66163424862386540282011-01-20T19:31:00.001-06:002011-01-21T00:06:02.115-06:00Rememberance of Things Past (or, In Search of Lost Time)Laura,<br /><br />Your post was really brave and honest. Honest in that way you can even feel, experience in its call to memory. I read it and those moments I’m always either pushing away or subjecting to re-telling after re-telling, trying to make the wound at the center of the story disappear, those moments swim back to me. <br /><br />My experiences, as we’ve noted often, were very different from yours in some ways, and all too similar in others. This only drives home the likelihood that while there are different cultural manifestations of misogyny, some undoubtedly preferable to others in a lesser-of-two-evils kind of way, the fact of its impact on the bodies of women is undeniable. I’m surprised by how close to the surface some of my memories are, how vividly they come back, though whether their color is inflected by the meaning I discover there or the meaning I create, who can say. <br /><br />I’ve worn the hell out of the story (which you’ve certainly heard before) about my experience driving the family van home from Minneapolis when I was 15. Well, here it is, one more time, in all its glory, and perhaps in greater detail: I’d been in Minneapolis with my sisters, my mother, and my grandmother. We drove down to visit my great-aunt, who lived in Rodgers at the time. Friday night we stayed at my aunt’s house (she lived, at the time, on a hobby-farm with her husband, who’d worked in some kind of engineering-related corporate-relations kind of job that had him travelling much of his life, spending a fair amount of time in Japan). I think it was that first night that we drove into Minneapolis (my aunt driving her high-end car very aggressively and very fast, at least according to the standards of out-state Minnesota). We ate at Jerusalem’s (which is blissfully rehabilitated in my mind as the place you and I had Christmas lunch this year), where we saw belly dancers. Pretty big stuff for small town girls. The next day we visited the Mall of America. Need I say more? I, a very mature fifteen, was allowed to shop on my own and meet up with the group later. In the course of my shopping (gawking, really), I met a man (probably 30 years old, though it’s hard to say, and African-American) who claimed to be a member of Prince’s band. I don’t know if he was or not, but he did later write to me and offer to fly me out to Philadelphia, where he lived. I was totally energized by the experience—I had no idea I had so much power! My mother, understandably (from my 34 year old vantage point), was less thrilled. <br /><br />So, the stage is set for the fateful ride home. I am driving this god-awful champagne-colored van with wood-panel striping. I am wearing, I clearly remember, a red tank-top—boxy across the shoulders, in a way that flatters my adolescent frame—and those short-shorts with a wide belt that were in fashion briefly in the early nineties. (I think they came from “The Limited” or “Express.”) I’m nervous. I haven’t driven on the interstate before, haven’t driven this fast before, and have limited faith in my innate capabilities. (To this day, I’m not wild about driving.) A truck, hauling sod, pulls up alongside me in the passing lane. I don’t pay attention at first. But, about the time the continued presence of the truck has started to make me nervous, I notice that the two men in the truck, both, at least in memory, wearing baseball caps, were flirting with me. Here’s the thing: I’m flattered. I’m excited by the attention. But I’m also god-awful scared. I feel absolutely out-of-control. I can only deal with one thing at a time. And I start to slow down. My mother, seated next to me through all of this—and maybe more deeply fearing the consequences of this development on all kinds of levels—starts to get angry with me. She gets so frustrated, and so emotional, that my grandmother insists on sitting next to me, because my mother is freaking me out. I have a clear recollection of the enormous relief I felt when she replaced my mother in the passenger seat.<br /><br />I think, probably, this is a different version of the story than I’ve ever told you, though I imagine you were always able to read between the lines. That’s the remarkable thing about really being in conversation with somebody. The point is, your post prompted me to think about all of this in a way I maybe haven’t before, at least not publicly and openly, and that makes me enormously grateful. Because despite all the stuff that’s happening there—despite my own uncomfortable imbrication in my objectification, despite the trauma which couldn’t be spoken between three generations of women—my conversations with you make me feel like something else, something new, is really possible. Love,<br /><br />Lisa<br /><br />P.S. It still sucks.L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-44488129434976313142011-01-18T17:15:00.004-06:002011-01-18T17:22:35.909-06:00I Want Candy?Lisa,<br /><br />What do I know about my own sexual desire?<br /><br />Today I know that it is still, and I refuse to worry about that. This seems to be a core piece of the discussion: worry. I (loosely) remember lines from a Woody Allen movie:<br /><br />Girl: I was telling my psychiatrist that I had an orgasm last week. He told me it wasn’t the right kind.<br /><br />Woody: Really? Not the right kind? Funny… every one of mine is always right on the money…<br /><br />In my day women could still be frigid, and even though I was too young to deeply understand this notion, it was pervasive and real, especially within some of the books from which I was getting my information about sex: “The Group”. Later on I read “Candy” which, while assuring me that the young and beautiful were not prone to frigidity, they were expected to put out or be called frigid. What a wide Sargasso Sea that is.<br /><br />I was coming of age sexually in a time where women were beginning to refuse to assimilate any further in the land of the patriarchy, and were looking to revolt, or find a new land entirely. Patriarchy: it was a word I was hearing early and often, while all the neighbors in my building in Queens talked excitedly with a kind of awe about the daughter of the people who lived in 2D who was now a Playboy bunny. But frigid was still there, hanging about like the forbidding wraith the word invoked.<br /><br />With this underlying fear of being cold, of not “liking” sex, came this revolt or response from women older than me that demanded sexual freedom and placed the responsibility for “good” (not frigid) sex not on women, but on the idea that perhaps some women had shitty, uncaring, inexperienced, or frightened sexual partners. Suddenly the Kinsey report was not shocking, but helpful. There was talk about the clitoris, masturbation, and orgasm without having to hide and read about them in “those” books.<br /><br />But this is really back story.<br /><br />My first sexual experience was rape, and since only bad girls who deserved it, wanted it, were raped, that occurrence is what offered me the palette from which I could choose to color my desire.<br />Right after that night, I had a series of sexual encounters (I should mention that I was just barely 14) that I initiated with boys I knew had been trying to break me down. They were awkward unsatisfying comminglings that took place in the bedroom where friends were babysitting, the 50’s classic back seat of a car, and standing in alleys. Once there were back to back encounters. It was always fucking. I would never call it anything else.<br /><br />I was, like you, looking for something. In my case, along with the love, I was trying somehow to reclaim my choice. Rape had a way of removing that in my mind, and my fantasies still included that lack of choice, often to my chagrin. Yet, why should I feel embarrassed or uncomfortable with my fantasies and desires? Most likely because they did not come from me but from the culture around me, and I could not own them.<br /><br />Still, as time passed things <em>did</em> change and I remember coming into a time when I did not have that shame. I was encouraged, almost charged, to have sex as often, freely and openly (this also meant out in the open) as possible. The small culture in which I participated and toward which I gravitated, let me try to find my desires by experimentation, accident, and design. But I will say that as the times changed, so did my feelings about my desire. As the world became chilly, as the pandemic broke over us, as youth retreated, so did my desire.<br /><br />Today, as I have said, my libido is quiet. I know it isn’t dead, and the stillness may be my own doing, but that is exactly the point: it is mine. I would be lying if I didn’t say that once in a while I wonder if I am finally frigid, but then I laugh and say, “Oh fercrissakes, let’s believe in Santa while we’re at it!”<br /><br />Remind me to talk about the recent realizations around vibrators that I had via others responses to my having said I never used one. That was very interesting…<br /><br />LUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-76619356448480477012011-01-14T14:59:00.003-06:002011-01-14T15:08:33.448-06:00Is This Desire?Laura,<br /><br />For the second time in as many weeks, I have encountered a truism which may in fact be true, but which I would honestly prefer not to think about that deeply: namely, women too often fail to appreciate the reality of male sexual desire. My second run-in with that notion occurred via an article recently published in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Atlantic</span>: Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/8327/">Hard Core</a>,” which uses a discussion of the extreme nature of online pornography as a jumping off point for considering the impossibility of the sexual relationship, at least as conceived by a somewhat naïve feminism: <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Male desire is not a malleable entity that can be constructed through politics, language, or media. Sexuality is not neutral. A warring dynamic based on power and subjugation has always existed between men and women, and the egalitarian view of sex, with its utopian pretensions, offers little insight into the typical male psyche. Internet porn, on the other hand, shows us an unvarnished (albeit partial) view of male sexuality as an often dark force streaked with aggression.</span><br /><br />What internet porn in fact reveals, at least according to Vargas-Cooper, is the “uncomfortable truth that the women’s-liberation movement has successfully suppressed: men and women have conflicting sexual agendas.” It’s not clear to me what Vargas-Cooper believes to be the unified female agenda (though she seems to tie it closely to that above utopian egalitarianism, in principle if not in practice, where she acknowledges a more complex picture), but the male agenda—as much sex as possible, as often as possible, and preferably involving some display of aggression intended to make women feel uncomfortable, debased, or degraded, seems fairly clear. <br /><br />Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all of this. My befuddlement is further complicated by having just read another recent contribution to <span style="font-style:italic;">The Atlantic</span>, a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-hazards-of-duke/8328/">The Hazards of Duke</a>” that undertakes a rather bizarrely unsubstantiated, though weirdly plausible, reading of the infamous “Duke Fuck List” composed, in PowerPoint format, by the woman a <span style="font-style:italic;">Slate Double-X</span> commentator recently referred to as “poor Karen Owen.” Essentially, Flanagan suggests that reading between the lines of Karen Owen’s bravado-inflected prose (her list recounts sexual escapades and ranks the performance of sexual partners according to a somewhat ridiculous set of criteria) one might discover “a vulnerable creature whose desire for sex with campus big shots was at least partly motivated by a powerful and unmet desire for affection.” Does this suggestion bear any relationship to the truth of Karen Owen’s life? Who the hell knows? Maybe she was hoping for long-term relationships with one or more of these men, or maybe she just wanted a roll in the hay. What was striking, though, was how often her own sexual pleasure (and yes, I read the damn presentation) seemed to take a back seat—many of the encounters detailed were with men who lasted somewhere around the five-minute range, and happened sans substantial foreplay, making it somewhat unlikely that she was getting much sexual enjoyment along the way to the inevitable end of such transactions—the moment the guy came, and more or less (with some exceptions) lost interest in her existence. <br /><br />Having no moral investment in the frequency, spontaneity, or variety of other people’s sex lives, I’m not really interested in condemning the Karen Owen’s model of female sexuality (or weighing in on whether she has brought about her “ruin” as Flanagan suggests). My only concern is that, somehow, the discussion around sexuality, male and female, still seems to be so ill-conducted as to prohibit meaningful conversation about the kinds of issues that we (all of us, but perhaps particularly women) would benefit from exploring. I know that I wish a public discussion of such issues had been possible when I affected my own style of bravado to re-narrativize my own sexual experimentation during college. Not to say that I had no positive sexual experiences at that time—I did. But I also had a great deal of confusion regarding what I actually wanted—from sex, from relationships, from the culture. And so, at various times, I was the tough girl who slept around and didn’t want to hear from you the morning after. I was as likely to escape without saying goodbye as any of my male counterparts. But I was, often simultaneously, the sad and lonely girl who wanted, well, something. A relationship? Maybe. To feel attractive and desired? Maybe. To get off? Sometimes. To feel loved and accepted? Probably, desperately, all the time. I can’t really make full sense of my sexual ramblings during college, though I certainly don’t feel devalued or ruined by them. I only wish, for my then-self, and for women, perhaps women like Karen Owen (but then again, who knows), that there was somewhere to go with all the sadness, loneliness, and confusion. So, what I suppose I’m proposing, by way of awfully long prologue, is that we spend some time, you and I, here and now, talking about this problematic question of sexual desire. Our experiences, our questions, our hopes. What do you say? I know this post began with questions concerning male desire, and I do suppose I want to return to those questions, or continue to touch on them in our correspondence. But perhaps it makes most sense to start with what we know (or don’t) concerning our own desire? <br /><br />LisaL.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-89191403466964563062010-12-31T11:52:00.001-06:002010-12-31T11:54:02.201-06:00Lisa,<br /><br />Yes, I agree that in the case you (we) are describing, most of those mean, mean girls are not deliberately perpetrating acts of Meanness, but are responding to their own sexuality, and the culture at large. What the hell…I mean, women (according to what we can see in the culture) should be attractive at the very least, and sexy if at all possible, despite age and/or career position, and so many other things. I think we might exclude lesbians, although The L Word brought some new ideas about how lesbians can/should look to the popular culture at large. And that brings me to the ever-present idea of the popular culture being man (in my day the MAN in this word would be stressed) ufactured by a group with economic interests. Capitalism is part, perhaps the major part, of this problem. Are these girls (for me a girl is any female who is a teen and younger, and for the media it appears girls are any female) more visible now in response to a culture that asks them to be such, or are there other, deeper reasons?<br /><br />As for our communications: in my experience, women’s consciousness raising groups were seen as subversive. I don’t think your generation could know how fucking scary it was to the culture at large for women to talk, to not see one another as the enemy, to not view one another as the foe to beat for a man. In my day, it was terrifying to the culture at large for anyone outside the pale, anyone that was seen as Other, to come together and open dialog in the hopes of bonding over their otherness and so, gain a measure of confidence, of solidarity, of power.<br /><br />This legacy of divide and conquer keeps people of like background, gender, race, mind….keeps us apart to keep us oppressed, and perhaps this philosophy is why we (you and I) still feel it hard to express our need to communicate, our need/desire for our relationship to be maintained. Can we trust someone that the culture tells us cannot, should not be trusted? Can we, with our independent craziness and emotional hang-ups (I am going WAY back lol) trust ourselves?<br /><br />I know both of those poems very well. Poets are among those I rely on to save me. You told me that Middlemarch saved you at one point in your life, as Salinger did for me. I rely on the artists and mad ones. They seem to have steered me clear of much that would have destroyed me.<br />Our friendship, our commitment to this experiment of conversation, is solid. Make no mistake.<br /><br />The “weirdness” around the comments was you forgetting that I have little use for men, and not about what this means to me regarding you and this blog. I am not saying anything in code, and I am not being indirect. If women wanted to join this conversation I would be fine with it, and if your men friends feel compelled, interested, in responding to ideas they find here, they should start their own honest blog that we can read without getting our hands into it, thus giving everyone the freedom they need.<br /><br />As for our disagreeing and its profound repercussions: it is often through the harshest discussion that I have learned the most about myself.<br /><br />I am standing right here.<br /><br />In Art and Madness,<br />LauraUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-69483654511485694772010-12-30T18:45:00.000-06:002010-12-30T18:46:36.048-06:00Cool Hands and Civil Wars<span style="font-style:italic;">‘What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate.’<br /></span><br />Laura,<br /><br />Communication, or the lack thereof (which, anyway, communicates something all the same), seems so much at the center of each of our posts that I figured I’d just tackle the issue head-on. I want to trace what I see as the major moments of non-communication—moments that occur no matter how honest we’re trying to be in our communication. Here’s what I see, anyway: 1) what I failed to communicate, 2) where we are failing to communicate, 3) how we want (?) to communicate (broadly). <br /><br />1) I guess the thing that was initially interesting to me about the “mean girl” phenomenon is that I imagine in many instances the girl so-designated has no intention whatsoever toward the person who finds her mean—that person might not even be on her radar, or perhaps is registered as nothing more than a blip on the screen. So, one potential pitfall of communication: it is possible for communication (of a sort) to occur even when one party isn’t consciously transmitting any kind of message at all to the other. (This, especially insofar as I can shift our reading of the definition of communication to include the connecting line, passage, or opening itself—something like the communicating door between two rooms.) Is the mean girl even, really, mean?<br /><br />2) Here’s the weird space of you and me. I can’t say what I want to say without saying too much. So I’m going to get weirdly cryptic here. We will communicate in code. If I say more than I should, I count on you to tell me so. Insofar as that is possible. Is that possible? <br /><br />There was weirdness around our conversation about the comments. Weirdness that had nothing, I think, to do with whether this space (of the blog) was invaded, but about what we mean to each other. To what extent is my saying to you, “let’s consider opening this up,” always a statement of avoidance. I mean, I suppose, to what extent am I saying, “We can’t do this alone.” To what extent is your saying to me, “Let’s not go there,” an avoidance of a different kind? And here, I’m on much less certain ground. Because it’s you, not me, and I’m simply guessing. Or making educated guesses, I suppose. Are you saying to me, “I need the space we’re creating”—i.e. I need somewhere safe, that you are implicated in; or, are you saying to me, “I just don’t want to?” My response to you, as your friend, depends so much upon how I read that utterance. I don’t know how to read it. We talk about honesty, and nakedness, but in the last two posts we’ve both done our utmost to avoid each. Or at least I have. Maybe that’s all I’m responding to here—how my lack of directness could create such a situation.<br /><br />3) (Which is really only still #2.) Truth be told, I could give a fuck about the comments. I see the value in them, but I also see the detriment, one we’ve only avoided by being so unrecognized. We’ve been lucky insofar as the people who’ve commented here share a common goal with us—things tend to get pretty ugly when that is not the case. And, as someone who has been forced to restrict her own consumption of this precise form of media because of the dire misanthropy that was growing there, I’m not persuaded that comments are a universal good. In fact, I think what we’re doing—trying to be totally naked in the context of a real conversation—is a good in and of itself. I will never begrudge a moment of this. Our conversation—no matter how influential to the outside world—has had, is having, a profound impact on my life. I am deeply grateful to you for continuing in this conversation with me. That said, we will disagree. Sometimes mildly, and informally, and sometimes with more serious repercussions. There are two poems that are very much on my mind tonight. I want to share them with you: <br /><br />I have gone out, a possessed witch,<br />haunting the black air, braver at night;<br />dreaming evil, I have done my hitch<br />over the plain houses, light by light:<br />lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.<br />A woman like that is not a woman, quite.<br />I have been her kind.<br /><br />I have found the warm caves in the woods,<br />filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,<br />closets, silks, innumerable goods;<br />fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:<br />whining, rearranging the disaligned.<br />A woman like that is misunderstood.<br />I have been her kind.<br /><br />I have ridden in your cart, driver,<br />waved my nude arms at villages going by,<br />learning the last bright routes, survivor<br />where your flames still bite my thigh<br />and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.<br />A woman like that is not ashamed to die.<br />I have been her kind. (Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”)<br /><br />And: <br /><br />Out of the night that covers me,<br />Black as the Pit from pole to pole,<br />I thank whatever gods may be<br />For my unconquerable soul.<br /><br />In the fell clutch of circumstance<br />I have not winced nor cried aloud.<br />Under the bludgeonings of chance<br />My head is bloody, but unbowed.<br /><br />Beyond this place of wrath and tears<br />Looms but the Horror of the shade,<br />And yet the menace of the years<br />Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.<br /><br />It matters not how strait the gate,<br />How charged with punishments the scroll.<br />I am the master of my fate:<br />I am the captain of my soul. (William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”)<br /><br />Can you guess which of these speaks to our relationship? (Lest I be holding out on anyone, obviously I think the Anne Sexton poem speaks more closely to Laura and I than the other.) But, more than that, can you guess how terrified that makes me? Because I have to care about everything you say—even if it’s not what I believe. I suppose I don’t have to, really, but I do. I do. And that is terrifying, to me. I’m trying to keep my hands cool and dry, in the middle of my own private civil war. It’s not so civil, really. And, really, it’s not so private anymore. <br /><br />LisaL.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-90521745778012098772010-12-28T18:16:00.003-06:002010-12-28T18:21:41.965-06:00From Rhett to Scarlett...Hi L,<br /><br />Whoosh! There it is again…they are afraid of us. Is it the cunt with teeth thing again?<br /><br />I wish I could, tonight at any rate, have some sympathy for this, but after you mentioned that the men want to start commenting again I got ferocious.<br /><br />You and I agreed that the idea of men’s ideas permeating our space often kept us from the level of honesty (in our search to understand and live in our experiences of the world as women who are looking at (for?) the problems in living in the world of men) that we needed to write.<br /><br />And that line was what caused some of the consternation last time. Men don’t want to be hated by women.<br /><br />We have misunderstood; not all men are bad. Sheesh. Fine.<br /><br />The fact is (may be?) that women are pretty much still hated in this world. Maybe not the way it appears in the US but globally I think the evidence is there to support this.<br /><br />I don’t think all men hate women; frankly, tonight, right now, I could give a shit.<br /><br />I just want the women who don’t see this, and the young women who may be oblivious, and the girls who are not told, to have this alternative message: men don’t necessarily see you: as a person rather than a body, as a viable living creature with an agenda of your own, as someone with power, as someone with the right to not give a shit about men.<br /><br />The birth of the “mean girl” was a long time in coming in my day. I support the right for them to exist; it is still against the law to rape, harass, stalk, or murder them whether they are cock teasers, experiencing the power of their sexuality for the first time(s) or bad fucking dressers.<br /><br />And how are <em>you</em>? : ) LOLUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-36710971656072701642010-12-23T18:58:00.005-06:002010-12-23T19:55:21.550-06:00“She’s fabulous. But she’s evil.”Laura,<br /><br />It’s been quite some time since we posted. I guess I haven’t had much to say. I’m not going to waste time and space musing over why that is. Instead, I’m going to jump right in with something that isn’t an essay, but is an idea that needs some thinking through. Hopefully we can think through it together. <br /><br />I haven’t actually watched <span style="font-style:italic;">Mean Girls</span>. I may well get around to it. The fact that my day of reckoning has not yet come is not a judgment upon the film; in fact, I only mention the film because it so totally fucked up what I thought would be a simple yet telling experiment. But, <span style="font-style:italic;">Mean Girls</span> not excepted, I still find the results of my experiment worth noting. So I’m going to share. Ten minutes ago I typed some choice phrases into Google. (Hey, I’m not claiming any scientific validity here. I’m just saying I found this interesting. Bear with me.) The phrase “mean boys” returns approximately 244,000 results. The phrase “mean girls” pulls up about 3, 200,000 results. Sure, the film matters in this context. But let me assure you that even after a casual bit of browsing the results indicate that the film doesn’t account for the roughly 2,956,000 extra hits. It would seem that the concept of the mean girl is much more prevalent than that of the mean boy. (Admittedly, the term “bully” pulls up far more hits than “mean girls,” but that's a subject for a later post.) <br /><br />Here’s why I bothered with the silly Google experiment: I recently had a conversation with a male friend about being increasingly troubled by porn and porn culture. My decidedly ambivalent relationship to all aspects of the sex-work industry isn’t really the point here. (Some weeks I favor legalization of prostitution in the hopes of better protections for the people involved, some weeks I feel like the tacit acceptance by government of abuses against (primarily) women, simulated or not, is pretty gross and socially problematic. I know it doesn’t boil down to anything near this simple on either end, but I’ve already mentioned this isn’t the point and I’m just not going to get embroiled in my own messy thoughts on this complex question here and now.) The actual point is this—he said something that really got me thinking. In response to a point I was trying to make about a strange notion that seems to permeate much of our culture—namely, that women exist primarily, if not solely, to provide sexual pleasure to men—he mentioned the paranoia some men feel regarding women. <br /><br />Quick bit of backstory: I raised an example I often return to in my thinking about the issue—the shooting that took place in a Pittsburgh health club. You know, the one where George Sodini killed three women and injured nine others for reasons that I’m sure none of us will ever totally understand, but that seemed, even to the most conservative of journalists, to have an awful lot to do with a deep and abiding bitterness toward women, which was evidenced on his online journal. I mentioned this by way of a discussion of my own emerging bitterness regarding the way that gender gets discussed in the comments sections of online magazines like Salon and Slate. (At the time you could find a fair number of Sodini sympathizers in the comments on articles regarding his crime on both sites.) And this was only noteworthy because it seconds so much of what I’ve heard from actual, flesh-and-blood men, who are frustrated with dating, and women, generally. <br /><br />Back to paranoia. My friend basically tried to lay out the mind-set of these kinds of men more clearly. He mentioned that your average guy in a gym might—and everyone’s qualifying here, because this is just so messy and awful that we’re all bound to hurt each other’s feelings, and there’s no help for it—just might, see a cute girl dressed in somewhat provocative gym-wear who is also ignoring his (obvious?) desire and decide that she’s deliberately provoking, teasing, him, just to be mean. Who knows, maybe we up the ante if she’s at a night club in something skimpy and she dances with him. Maybe we don’t. I don’t fucking know. None of us really do, I imagine. And nobody seems to be talking about it, which seems to me to be the real problem.<br /><br />I’ve got to admit, I’m often one of those women dressed in somewhat provocative clothing. But it hadn’t really ever occurred to me that anyone would interpret my choice in dress as a deliberate meanness launched against them personally. I guess that’s because, like everybody else, I’ve got my own fucking problems. I’m still not sure if I buy my friend’s theory. But that, combined with my (totally unscientific) wanderings on the internet, have started me wondering. I wonder what you think. <br /><br />LisaL.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-13868532588166208202010-10-15T22:03:00.003-05:002010-10-15T22:16:32.606-05:00Of Country Cottages?Laura,<br /><br />I, too, have had Miss Marple much on my mind, although my consideration of spinsterhood has tended to focus not so much on age as on one of the mixed blessings age seems to confer upon women—let’s call it invisibility. We spoke of the perversely privileged position Miss Marple seems to occupy as she “gathers evidence” in the wake of a crime—if people take any notice of Miss Marple, which they often fail to do, they write her off as a harmless old woman, perhaps a bit nosy, but certainly nothing to be concerned with. They assume that she could not possibly matter, in any appreciable way, to their lives. Of course, as novel after novel (and Dame Christie was nothing if not prolific) proves, fatal consequences follow from this failure to appreciate the old woman. <br /><br />What is it, really, that keeps us from seeing older women? I imagine one could venture a number of explanations for why a woman’s visibility tends to decrease as she ages. I wonder, though, if at the center of these explanations we wouldn’t find one common cause: the older a woman is, the harder it is to conceive of her <i style="">primarily</i> in terms of her sexuality. <br /><br />I’ve got to say, there’s something appealing about the idea of being outside the economy of sex. Let’s set aside for a moment my sneaking suspicion that there is no such thing as being outside the economy of sex. Permit me to indulge in an investigation of a particular fantasy of mine, which I think helps define invisibility more clearly by indicating what it is not. I’ve been thinking much, as you know, about making a move to the country when I’ve finished my program. The dream right now is to find a job at a college located in a college-town, someplace mid-sized and somewhat cozy. I’ll rent a little house a mile or two out of town where I’ll live with my dog, who we both know could use a break from the city. Oed will frolic in the woods on our morning hikes, and I’ll take up gardening. This is a nice dream, and I have no real reservations about the desires that motivate it. I do best when I can find (and embrace) a certain degree of solitude. But this would be a different kind of dream altogether if it grew only out of a desire to cut myself off entirely from the world. And on bad days that desire motivates the dream. Still, I suppose this desire isn’t really a desire for invisibility so much as it is a desire to cease to exist. Because that’s the thing about invisibility—it doesn’t make you not exist.<br /><br />Miss Marple may not be visible while she tends the garden of her country cottage—at least not to those who aren’t looking for her. But she continues to matter. And it’s in that context that invisibility confers a certain subversive power. This is not to suggest that there is no problem with the fact that our culture renders women invisible after a certain age. But let’s save that issue for another day. What I really think matters here, and what I really think is important about Miss Marple, is that she doesn’t take the fact of her invisibility as an excuse to check out of life entirely. Rather, she turns the very problematic fact that women are less visible as they age to her advantage, using it as a tool in what can only be seen as one woman’s ongoing search for justice. And justice, I should note, continues to matter to her, even though she is altogether too aware of the inevitable recurrence of evil in the world and its relationship to the unconquerable frailty of human nature. She might be just a feminist hero for this moment.L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-72498971146925426292010-10-14T08:07:00.004-05:002010-10-14T08:26:45.728-05:00Two Kinds of Sirens?Hi Lisa,<br /><br />I just worked for an hour on a piece for this blog. I have my AIM shit on so that my students can reach me at “office hours”. AIM is very annoying. Participants have all kinds of sound effects they use to signal that they are now online and accessible. There is actually another faculty member who uses a siren sound when he arrives. I did not know this until a few minutes ago.<br /><br />After laboring on this piece and finding it very much to my liking I was about to save it via the “yes” button on the dialog box. Suddenly my computer gave off a terrifying wail; I jumped, my finger hit “no” and an hour of work vanished. I wanted to kill.<br /><br />Is it really so necessary to announce oneself in this unholy way? Should I start bringing an air horn with me when I enter rooms, buildings, etc.?<br /><br />We have talked quite a bit recently about the emergence into the culture of a disheartening level of selfishness and an unsavory kind of self-awareness. This event made me think of our conversations.<br /><br />I am certain that I am not so important as to require a sound effect to announce my comings and goings. Even some Britons feel that the amount of hoopla around the Queen’s forays is a bit much. The idea that we are all so important….yech, you know the drill.<br /><br />What I was writing about was a lead-in to our discussion of Agatha Christie, and in particular, Miss Marple.<br /><br />I want to continue our talk.<br /><br />Having recently become even more grey I am thinking more about age and being older, or old. I am not sure when “old” is correct. Am I old when I am past 50? One would think so as my recent experience would testify: in the thrift store the young clerk looks at me, then at my hair, then back at my face and asks if I get the senior discount. I ask him, "How do I know?" and he replies, “Are you 55 or older?” to which I respond with a resounding “Yes!” I am a senior at Savers.<br /><br />I am not a senior on the bus, or for federally subsidized health care; too bad, as that would really be helpful. Who decides where the line is? Certainly the young man didn’t know without asking (I suppose a blessing for me, although it doesn’t feel that way) and AARP says I am but then again the Feds disagree.<br /><br />Miss Marple is old. At the time Christie was writing these novels 50 was OLD (I seem to remember) and since I read them when I was young I think this idea stuck.<br /><br />Marple is a sturdy, independent, formidable old woman; she has all her marbles (a play on Marple?) and is not disinclined to offer her opinion with assuredness. I loved her immediately and wanted to be like her when I was old—all except for her fashion (blech) and the country cottage. Actually, the cottage sounded nice, but not as a steady diet, and St. Mary Mead sounded downright scary!<br /><br />The idea of an old woman, a single old woman, a spinster, as being someone to look to as a model of a kind seems silly, or maybe worse, sad. (That’s a lot of commas) Yet, I think she is viable as a source of inspiration for women.<br /><br />So, here’s your chance to chime in. This post is certainly not what I had hoped, and the jerk with the siren has my old lady curse upon him! WWMMD?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-33178207245411878672010-10-04T10:33:00.002-05:002010-10-04T13:56:03.685-05:00Fear of a Binary PlanetLisa,<br /><br />Since my son and his partner have had a child I have felt more and more that I need to find a family of my own. It is nothing that they have done, it is I imagine a passage many single women my age have discovered.<br /><br />For the last 34 years I have had my son’s interests at the center of my life. That is not to say I have not been living my own life, but so much of my concern in this world has been about him and his life. The feeling of love and care has over the years transferred to his partner, and now to my granddaughter.<br /><br />Still, this is now their family, and I am not excluded, but the central place is gone. This is natural, I assume, as I have no peers who are in this situation. Many of my friends have died, and most of the women I know chose not to have children, or are not in my age group.<br />Where do I belong now?<br /><br />My son, his wife and baby moved a thousand miles away for his doctoral work. I would follow to live closer by, but the rental market is difficult there. I am suddenly confronted with my own life and no near connection to relatives.<br /><br />Not that I ever felt connected to family much. My family was fractured by narcissistic parents who offered little education of familial love to their children. My brother and I do what we can to be warm towards one another, but the damage shows and it is sad.<br /><br />Maybe I should have done what my friend Kathy did: plan for the future. She got married after 50. Her mother was aging; she knew that someday she would be alone. Many women of my generation have been married for decades. They can have their “empty nest” syndrome with partners, and friends.<br /><br />My friends are decades younger than I, I have no partner, I did not prepare for my future. Now I am alone. My young friends are just that-- young, and busy feathering nests of career and future undertakings. The future is theirs.<br /><br />My future seems mostly behind me today. I don’t feel like this on all days, but the thoughts come more often lately.<br /><br />Where do I belong?<br /><br />As a woman nearing sixty, it would seem that I don’t belong much of anywhere. I have heard the sixty is the new forty crap; that only makes me feel that I need to run out to find a new wardrobe, a dermatologist for Botox, etc., and a man before it is utterly too late. No one wants to walk that final stretch alone.<br /><br />I know that it would be easier to have someone who has agreed to go the distance with you toward the unknown, but if that is not possible, if it would not work even if it was possible, is one (am I) doomed to live in some kind of netherworld until I die?<br /><br />The answer seems to be find pleasure, sustenance, and support in my work. Well, as a person who was never career-driven the actual work I do to stay afloat will not float my soul’s survival. The work I do for pleasure and sustenance is what you see here, and writing is a lonely business.<br /><br />So, to avoid more loneliness?<br /><br />Ach, I can hear the chorus already: volunteer, reach out, join join join!<br />I was listening to a speech over the weekend in which the speaker used the Noah’s Ark story to support social change. Nice idea, but all I hear in my head is the damned two by two. I see Cinderella’s little people happily heigh-hoing two by two.<br /><br />I am one. Singular. Maybe a sensation? Okay, so if you don’t know Broadway hits you don’t get it, but the upshot is the hag with her Tarot cards, black cat (my cat is actually black) and warts (I think I see them!). For all the world, I want to find a new path in my life that is meaningful, fun, and vibrant.<br /><br />Is this too much to ask?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-49655490372279156272010-09-26T14:44:00.004-05:002010-09-26T14:53:00.162-05:00Strangers in a Stranger Still Land<span style="font-family:georgia;">Lisa,<br /><br />It’s been lonely with you out of town. I feel like a stranger in this here place.<br /><br />Stranger still are the events surrounding my mother’s health. As you know she has been having some physical difficulties for some time, and now it seems that a sudden (or maybe just previously undetected) assault of dementia has emerged. I spoke with her yesterday, very briefly (she hung up abruptly because she was engaged in some intrigue and would only refer to it obliquely) and I came away from the “conversation” feeling rumpled.<br /><br />It is the only word I can think of for my state of mind and my emotions. There was a kind of dishevelment to our relationship from the outset. Actually that probably is putting it too mildly, but the sense of disarrangement, of mess, has always been a key element of how we lived together and apart.<br /><br />When I first encountered consciousness raising I was shocked at how openly the women spoke about their mothers. Up to that point I had spoken about my relationship with my mother only with close friends; many of these women were strangers to me and me to them. Yet they were confessing feelings of betrayal, competition, and loss, without obvious fear. That of course was the key piece for me. In time I would talk about the violence.<br /><br />We talked about our mothers and the secrets they kept from us. My mother hid that she had a sexual relationship with my father when she was not yet fourteen. She tried to hide the affair she had when my brother and I were still in elementary school. Most of my mother’s deceptions were around sex. Learning about these showed me that I was right, I was not crazy to feel that I was being lied to to keep me in line, to make me behave, to make me be the right kind of woman, not the whore she accused me of being when I was thirteen and still a virgin.<br /><br />It seems that for the women in my group our mothers were the locus of the angst we felt around our bodies, sex, and power and that was what we tried to untangle as we tried to find our woman selves by first examining our mothers.<br /><br />My mother’s dread came in many guises. It seemed that raising me filled her with anxiety very particularly, as she displayed none of the unease with my brother as she did with me. It seemed as if she could not depend on me to be recognizable, but instead expected me to jump out of one identity into a new one she could not negotiate. My brother always seemed more reliable as a person to her; she never expected him to change other than the change brought about by growing up.<br /><br />It may have been her silent but palpable expectation that I would constantly morph into some new and unknowable creature that gave me the idea, and then the permission (in a sense) to do just that.<br /><br />It has been a source of tension (and secret pride for her) that I have continued to try on lives, ways of living, often to her chagrin and loud protestation. Somehow, her fear about me as a person, as a woman, gave me the courage to be one, despite the fact that I nearly always (putting it mildly) disappointed her.<br /><br />Yesterday my mother was some kind of spy engaged in a conflict that could not be discussed over the phone. The day before she was laughing and joking, and visiting with dead relatives. Her dementia is allowing her to live multiple lives. Maybe it is a source of freedom that she never felt she had, to try on new ways of being in the world.<br /><br />It is strange to realize that I have tried to keep her in the box as my mother, and now due to a disease, she is able to resist that entrapment and find her own kind of freedom. I know that I am romanticizing, imbuing her situation with a kind of grace that is not only sentimental (some would say a form of denial, except that I am well aware of the reach here) but untrue, and yet it would be an interesting way to look at how this might be the only way she can break the imprisonment of the culture that she lived in that asked her to be only one type of woman(which most likely caused the suffering of the breakdowns and outbreaks of rage and violence).<br /><br />I am still trying to figure out my life as a woman by examining the stranger that is my mother. I am weirdly happy for her (if she is not suffering, and so far this seems to be true) that she can live outside the proscribed world and be an outlaw. She never really had the chance. </span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-2764669917824812482010-09-13T11:34:00.003-05:002010-09-13T11:38:44.075-05:00Another Lady from ShanghaiLisa,<br /><br />I finished watching The Lady from Shanghai. I thought about how I would tell my students to either choose a different title, or make the connection the character has to China, and its significance, clearer.<br /><br />And this leads me to thinking again about what do women want. My friend Jonah used to repeat, I want, <em>I need, I must have</em>, over and over as we were applying to graduate programs: asking for letters of recommendation, and writing personal statements. We laughed about it, but it never occurred to me that of course his desires, the unspoken ones or the ones that go without saying between men and women even if they aren’t involved, were significantly different than my own. The amount of times we used those parts of sentences: I want (“to be able to explore painting (in my case writing) in an environment that….”) I need (“a community of…”) was becoming meaningless (and comical) in the repetition. “I must have” was what we really wanted to say. It was too hard to demand rather than implore. Yet, Jonah said I must have as the punch line, the joke of the desperation to get in, to belong. Looking at it now it isn’t so funny.<br /><br />It was never clear to Jonah, or perhaps any of my men friends, what the women they knew wanted. We couldn’t tell them. Not clearly anyway. The chestnuts of equal pay, etc. were not the critical issues and the way I put it last night is way too broad. Having a dignified life of my own design sounds right, but just exactly what does it mean?<br /><br />The one thing I knew I was supposed to want was love. If I couldn’t get that then I was a deficient woman. But the real thing is that we are supposed to want to <em>be loved</em>, or accept love on the other’s terms.<br /><br />We talk often about what being loved can do for us. The love you got from your parents seems to have helped you to expect love (and accept it) easily. The lack of love I got from mine makes the idea of lovable compromised by the need to earn it, and not being pretty enough (ever) thin enough (ever) blonde enough (don’t laugh) made that a very tough go for me.<br /><br />It seems that women need to be loved by the world. Perhaps I mean approved of: due to my early lessons approval and love are the same. I bet this is not so different for other women.<br /><br />I decided long ago that I would not try to be approved of. It seemed the best and only way to be sure if I was lovable: face that gorgon and live, and you must approve of (love) me. But the joke was on me.<br /><br />Very similar to the femme fatale, I chose to love death. Not my actual death, but definitely the darker, annihilating edge of life. I dared life (desire?) to continue in me despite the lack of love or approval, and for some time. Then, I met a man that approved. He was nuts and of course it ended as the blasted tower. I rebuilt myself in her image again. She is like Hecate: she wants but refuses to need. Of course, I am not sure about any of this I am just talking out of my head.<br /><br />The thing is I feel that desire in the form of wanting it all has always been prescribed to women as love/approval. Love is all you need was a good idea, but for men it was not describing their own existence, but a way of living with others in the world. For me, the messages of love that I heard were about acquiescence, placidity, and approval. I don’t want to be Brigid O’Shaunessey, but I am more like her than not. I don’t have the real desire to take men toward their doom, but I have fantasized about it with real pleasure. I have to consciously fight that desire to take my desire to the limit every day. For O’Shaunessey, getting the dingus would have meant having the money and having beaten the men at their own game: she would have real power.<br /><br />I would have real power but for the need to be loved/approved of. Love makes vassals of us all: shanghaied.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-27502815591173094942010-09-06T16:16:00.003-05:002010-09-10T16:13:48.108-05:00First We Get the Guns...<span style="font-family:arial;">Laura,</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Sunday morning at breakfast, talking about <span style="font-style: italic;">The Lady from Shanghai</span>, you posed a question concerning the femme fatale and what we might make of her. This, as you know, is a subject dear to my heart, and I’ve been thinking much about what you asked. Some theorists have considered this figure a cipher, a screen onto which male fears and anxieties are projected. But you and I know better. I wrote about precisely this question during my preliminary exams, citing a famous passage from<span style="font-style: italic;"> The Maltese Falcon</span> as evidence for our viewpoint:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:arial;" >Following the exposure of a series of intricately woven lies and demurrals, Brigid O’Shaughnessy appeals once more to private investigator Sam Spade, pleading that he continue with her case. When Spade makes it clear he sees her latest cry for help as just another scene in a now fairly elaborate act, Brigid pulls out all the stops:</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:arial;" >“I deserve that,” she said. “I deserve it, but—oh!—I did want your help so much. I do want it, and need it, so much. And the lie was in the way I said it, and not at all in what I said.” She turned away, no longer holding herself erect. “It is my own fault that you can’t believe me now.”</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:arial;" >Spade’s face reddened and he looked down at the floor, muttering: “Now you are dangerous” (38).</span><br /><br /><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-family:arial;" >The question raised by this pivotal moment in Dashiell Hammett’s <span style="font-style: italic;">The Maltese Falcon</span> concerns, of course, just what it is that makes the femme fatale so dangerous. Is it, as Mary Ann Doane suggests in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis, that the femme fatale “is never really what she seems to be,” that she threatens “a potential epistemological trauma” through her failure to be “legible, predictable, or manageable” (1)? Or is it, rather, that the femme fatale is precisely what she seems to be? After all, as Spade admits, he and his partner Miles Archer didn’t believe a word of Miss O’Shaughnessy’s story even when she first delivered it under the telling alias of Miss Wonderly (Hammett 35). Might the problem be, then, that we know the femme fatale for what she is right from the beginning, but we also know that she has something we want, something which makes her worth the risk she so obviously poses? When it comes to the femme fatale, is the issue really that she cannot be read, or is it rather that we read her all too clearly? </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The question remains, though—what does the femme fatale have that we want? What makes her so appealing to the men who ultimately sacrifice their lives to her cause? With the notable exception of Sam Spade, they mostly do just that. </span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">The femme fatale is all about excess—she’s just too much. She’s greedy. She wants it all. She seduces us and draws us out beyond our limits. And in the end you can’t have her. She belongs to death alone. Slavoj Žižek has pointed to her alignment with the hysteric and used her as proof of Lacan’s infamous claim that Woman does not exist. Yet, she seems to be something more than the sum of her “symptoms.” For Žižek, behind the mask is yet another mask. I don’t buy it. Nor can she be readily aligned with Deleuze’s icy woman of masochism. Yes, she dolls out the punishment. But not in accordance with male desire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Freud famously posed the question: What does a woman want? Feminist theorists gave it a slight spin, asking, all tongue-in-cheek: What? Does a woman want?!? For me, the femme fatale is an attempt to grapple with that elusive thing we call female desire. That this desire calls upon (often quite literally) the spectre of death is no accident. Have you noticed that the femme fatale is never a mother? Yet she has something in common with the woman who says (if a woman ever says): by god, I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it. As my advisor once said to me, “if a woman is responsible for life, she dooms us all to death.” Take back the night, indeed.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">Female desire is a tricky thing. Women aren’t supposed to want. We are supposed to be the objects of desire, not the subjects. Perhaps it’s no small wonder that so many of us are left asking just what, precisely, we do want. I mentioned yesterday that I felt the femme fatale to be closely related to the woman revolutionary, two sides of the same coin. What they have in common is their desire— “I want, I need, I must have.” Imagine saying that without shame or embarrassment. I’m not sure if I can.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">At the same time, isn’t this the dangerous appeal of the femme fatale? In her we have before us that elusive figure, the woman who wants. Can she possibly be a model for thinking female desire? Do we want her to represent us to ourselves in any way, shape, or form? I mean, she is the quintessential bad girl of film, the one who lets what she wants get in the way of everything else. And what, pray tell, is everything else? Law and order, certainly. And, of course, male desire.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-family:arial;">We were talking the other day about how to create the kind of world we’d both like to live in, and I, in a mood, quoted <span style="font-style: italic;">Scarface</span>: “first we get the guns, then we get the money, then we get the women.” Now isn’t this, in some perverse way, the mantra of both the femme fatale and the revolutionary? We’re talking about women who are willing to go to any end to get what they want, right? So I would say that of course this figure has something to teach us. Now, perhaps, a different question remains—where do we get those guns?</span>L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-9858643088567256442010-09-02T21:54:00.004-05:002010-09-03T16:50:05.550-05:00Bodies and BalloonsLisa,<br /><br />Tonight I was smirking to myself about all the talking about relationships, relating, understanding…<br /><br />Tonight, at 8 pm this evening, I am thinking only about how alone I am. Tonight I feel heartbreakingly lonely, especially after to listening to the podcast you sent me from This American Life. The episode where the young Latina is so lonely, that despite her yearning and dream to have a vibrant, creative life, a dream of an office and a career in animation, she releases that dream, a luft balloon helium shiny pearlized pink helium balloon an airbrushed unicorn prancing…<br /><br />Shit.<br /><br />I sometimes think that the only romance I can have is with loneliness. How hard is it to strike up a conversation in a café? Somehow for me it seems impossible. Not that I do it much anymore, try to converse with strangers. The only ones that seem to desire my conversation or company are visitors from another planet. Here’s the rub: they recognize me. Oh to be recognized by people who yell into your face and ask if your tattoos hurt and tell you that they are also getting tattoos, but the ones they are going to get are going to be able to move and speak.<br /><br />Merde.<br /><br />I fantasize Paris where I too can be a crazy alien and so my lack of balance (both physical and emotional) will be recognized as proper for someone from my planet. Paris because once the art created there suggested my fat was beauty.<br /><br />What is this recipe I have concocted for my loneliness? One part age, two parts body fears issues? Being fat is no picnic in this culture. Neither is being fifty-eight. But those are only the beginnings of my sense of isolation. We would need to speak about class. I have none. I know that you can hear me laughing, but how often do I make a joke, self deprecating or not, only to be met with that lead balloon response. I seem to be working that balloon metaphor overtime and yet the image is so compelling for me: to float away able to transcend, to inhale some of the helium and crack myself up listening to my voice.<br /><br />I am really good at entertaining myself, but tonight I am not amused.<br /><br />I have said here before I am not at home in this collection of water blood and bones. I am always at war with it, and yes, I agree, I <em>am</em> my body. What the hell else am I? This is where all of me lives, happy with it or not. I cannot separate my mind from my body, and yet I suppose I do in conversation, but honestly I don’t even know where my mind is except in my body. Sometimes I love this body, being fat, proud of letting myself go; there is power in it and sometimes I am aware of that power.<br /><br />Sex. Yes, I suppose we need to break that open. I can only start with this statement: I have not had sex in ten years. That should create a hush yes? I am laughing trust me.<br /><br />It’s been so long for many reasons. I have told you how I lamented to Karen about it and she said that she didn’t know what could be done short of my wearing a sandwich board that said:<br /><br />Hi, would you like to fuck a fellow American down on her luck?<br /><br />How hard did I laugh that night and since in the retelling? For some reason I feel that I am supposed to be ashamed of my lack of sex, that I should apologize, or at least explain. I can’t do either.<br /><br />Having a body that is not the ideal makes me an alien, being old makes me an alien, having a low income makes me an alien. But I think I must love being an alien because in my mind’s eye I have seen me deliberately stopping by that road less traveled and feeling ownership for it as I laugh. I took that damn track and it <em>did</em> make all the difference: it hurt, it cost me, but I did learn exactly what I am made of.<br /><br />Am I even saying anything that makes sense? I will continue as I have; I am waiting to see where this all goes and for that to happen I have to stay right here with as much courage as I can pretend to have. To be real.<br /><br /><strong>Bodies of Water</strong><br /><br />A child’s body is more than eighty percent water (enough for a globe)<br />A man’s body is two thirds water (enough to bleed)<br />Half of my body is water (enough to support a new life)<br /><br />Can water be touched?<br /><br />I have cupped water to my face<br />Drank it<br />Poured it over my neck and hands<br /><br />I have lain down in water<br />And on water<br />Supported by the tension of its body<br /><br />The tension of one half of my body does not allow touch<br /><br />Water is contained<br />Yet water will always join with other water<br />If it is allowed<br /><br />Half of my body would join and touch<br /><br />In stillness<br />Water always finds its symmetry<br />Always in harmony with itself<br /><br />As water meets substance<br />It polishes and smoothes<br />Shaping it anew<br /><br />Half of my body is perfect<br /><br />Water in the body diminishes with age<br />Or fat<br />Or starvation<br /><br />Half of my body is water<br /><br />The ways of water must live in me<br />Enough to be touchedUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-25660251811740914402010-09-02T15:31:00.005-05:002010-09-02T15:55:23.285-05:00Bodies That Matter<meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"><meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 12"><link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CLisa%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_filelist.xml"><link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CLisa%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_themedata.thmx"><link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:%5CUsers%5CLisa%5CAppData%5CLocal%5CTemp%5Cmsohtmlclip1%5C01%5Cclip_colorschememapping.xml"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> 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mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; mso-ascii-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} --> </style><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">Laura,</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">This afternoon when we met for tea we were both feeling a bit at odds with the world around us. This feeling, which occasionally can seem to slide toward a sort of misanthropy, or even more specifically a misandry, devastates. And of course it doesn’t really become misanthropy or misandry—instead we do what women so often do and turn this feeling inward: what’s wrong with me? I must not be pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, what-have-you. Neither of these solutions—hating people (particularly men) or hating ourselves does anything to solve the problem, of course. In fact, neither of these solutions states the problem accurately. Because the problem isn’t really <i style="">in</i> any of us so much as it is in the air we breathe, the space we inhabit.
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">But that seems hopelessly vague, doesn’t it. Let’s take the question of the body, since we spoke of that today and it’s been very much in the air lately. You mentioned in your last post the experience of walking past the men on the corner near the luncheonette. The cat-calls, the comments, the groping. Most women I know have had this experience. So what gives birth to an experience like that one? What makes men believe that it’s ok to treat women this way? As a young girl I experienced this kind of thing with boys my age or slightly older. I remember C and M offering me a ride home from rollerblading when I was ten or eleven, a ride I spent fending off wandering hands. I remember C trying to put his hand up my skirt at lunchtime. And I remember learning to place this kind of thing in the context of flirtation. Becoming amenable to it, even flattered by it. Even as children we all believe it’s ok for boys to objectify girls.</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;font-family:arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">But it’s generally a much subtler thing than this for adults. Sure, there are still cat-calls, but the really tricky thing is that even in the best male-female relationships, sex is on the table. Or under the table. In some perplexing proximity to the table. Meanwhile, those attitudes toward women, which have been cultivated and developed for both men and women over the course of their lifetimes, compel us to treat women like objects. The men we love objectify us. We objectify ourselves. For me this quickly becomes a question of trust, with sex at the center of it. I have trouble trusting men where sex is involved, in part because I have trouble trusting myself where sex is involved. And sex is always involved.</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">Even in the best of relationships, where men are taking women seriously, not approaching them like sex objects, we are still embodied. And we, men and women both, still experience bodies, particularly female bodies (given the way the culture treats them), as objects. </span><span style=";font-size:85%;" > </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Talking with you today, I felt distant and distinct from my body, looking at it solely through a critical lens. You, on the other hand, seemed buried inside your body, feeling the pain of inhabiting a body quite acutely. We each have these unhappy relationships to our bodies. We don’t know what to do about them. And we particularly don’t know what to do about them where men are involved. Because men don’t know what to do with them either. They maybe desire our bodies, they maybe don’t. They maybe fear their own desire, or consider it an obstacle, or feel embarrassed by it. Meanwhile, we are trying to figure out how to feel about how they feel about our bodies. It’s a conundrum.
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I guess I want to begin where I feel I must begin: with my own relationship to my body. Much of the time I’m comfortable enough in it. I don’t have the same desire to change it that you’ve expressed. Sure, I could take better care of my body—quit smoking, start exercising—but for the most part I find my body livable. Take that as a starting point. I’m still obviously disconnected from my body. I talk about it as something that I’m tending to, or worse safeguarding, rather than something that I am. Because for all the ways that some feminists argue we are not our bodies, we are. I am not some “thing” independent of this body, I’m not the spiritual caretaker for the material edifice. My body is my being in a profound way, and to be at odds with it, whether by feeling indifference towards the body or by feeling hatred of it, is to be in despair.
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">How to get out of despair? This is the question we were asking today, and the one we had such difficulty answering. I think back to your statement that you have trouble believing me when I tell you I find you beautiful. You know that I mean it, but you also believe that I can’t mean it. And I don’t mean it in some drippy I-see-the-person-on-the-inside kind of way. I mean I look at you and see a beautiful woman. I get pleasure from seeing you—I experience you as beautiful. You asked in your last post, “Are you experienced?” I experience you. And I feel experienced by you. When you look at me, I believe you see me as I am. I feel whole. Now, why can’t I have this experience—this pure, uncomplicated experience—when being looked at by a man?
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">There are men I’m incredibly close with: for instance, S. When we are having a conversation I feel recognized. But how do I feel about being seen by S? Or by any man, for that matter? I worry about the nature of their interest in me. Even the men who recognize me. I worry about what role my body plays in our relationship. And I think this is a common experience for women. To feel like we’re being seen in terms of our bodies. Which, because our bodies are imbricated with our being, we are. What’s a girl to do?
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I think the only response we can make is to engage in more open, honest conversations about bodies, about objectification, about desire. That’s what we’re trying, both of us, to accomplish here and in our writing. I’ve been puzzling something out in my dissertation, in relation to the film <i style="">Basic Instinct</i>, and I want to share it with you:</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">The central irony of the film is that the good girl gets killed, and the bad girl gets the guy. Critics such as Helen Hanson have pointed to a danger inherent in films of this model, stating:</span></p><p style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;">The explicit, and active, sexual scenarios in which the neo-femme fatale is shown in the neo-noir thriller mark these films’ complex address. The visualizations of the sexually liberated woman, who is unapologetic about the often aggressive pursuit of her desire, coincide with the “new femininities” […] in which capital is constituted by the female body and sexual expertise which she exchanges as a “free” agent. The extent of this liberation, though, is precariously dependent upon sexual action, and upon a shifting mediascape in which the meanings of female sexual liberation and commodifications of it anxiously collide. (169)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1in; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">Hanson’s analysis points to two key issues for <i style="">Basic Instinct</i>. The first is the sexual liberation of Catherine Tramell, and the way in which the film figures that liberation as potential for a radical remapping of the sexual relationship. The second, equally important issue, concerns the anxiety to which Hanson alludes. The simple fact of <i style="">Basic Instinct </i>is that in order for the bad, sexually liberated girl to survive, the good, sexually repressed girl had to die. In other words, the absence of an option to withhold sex still persists in the film, meaning that women’s control over sexuality remains limited.
<br /></span></p><p style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102);font-size:85%;" >That said, Basic Instinct still offers the most ethically tenable position for the femme fatale that we’ve encountered thus far. Because, although Beth’s frigidity is punished by the film, this seems to have less to do with gender per se than with sexuality and the need for a disruptive excess within the realm of sexuality. The film situates Beth as a woman deeply, personally disapproving of excess of all sorts: early on in the film she questions Nick about his drinking and drug use and shows obvious pleasure when she hears he’s been abstaining from both. Even more pleasing to her is the fact that Nick quit smoking. Obviously there are good, common sense reasons to be on the side of Beth here. However, the film offers up a critique of precisely the kind of good, common sense reasoning that has constricted sexual identity and gender relationships.</span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></p> <p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I’m suggesting, I guess, that we need to find methods to disrupt the sexual relationship as it exists in our society. (I’m not even going to get into the issue of the non-existence of the sexual relationship here. Let’s save that for another day.) Now, I’m not suggesting that we all follow the path of the film’s heroine and grab our icepicks. But I am suggesting that we, men and women both, need to look closely at the kind of “good, common sense reasoning” that governs our interactions with each other.
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">
<br /></span></p><p style="font-family: arial;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I think part of what happens, in polite society, is that we don’t talk about these things. Rather than a disruptive excess we wind up with repression. The potential that I see in <i style="">Basic Instinct</i>—the excessive sexuality of Catherine, one that knows no boundaries (particularly gender boundaries)—is perhaps one model for change in the sexual relationship—and I’m working on the assumption, as I intimated above, that sex is always involved when two human beings are in conversation. By this I don’t mean that I want to have sex indiscriminately, all the time, with everyone I’m involved with. Rather, I mean that I want to approach sex, to put it right on the table, to talk about it, to make it part of the conversation. But that means I’ll have to get comfortable with talking about it. I’ll have to overcome my anxiety about it. I’ll have to go back in time to that moment in the pickup with M and C and say what I wanted to say then. “Don’t touch me, damn it. But I’d be happy to talk about why you think you should.” What would they have said to that, I wonder? </span></p> L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-75897450080298063642010-08-31T09:50:00.003-05:002010-08-31T09:57:21.226-05:00Seeing and BelievingLisa,<br /><br />When we begin to talk about recognition it really opens the discussion, as we realized on the phone last night.<br /><br />If women are not acknowledged in the many ways we have talked about, this most certainly affects women artists. I am thinking particularly of writers, as that is what we do, but also writers due to the fury surrounding Franzen’s new book.<br /><br />Several women authors are outraged at the fact that the NY Times reviewed his new book twice in the same week. Having never read much of his work (I only flipped through “The Corrections” and didn’t feel it) I am slightly suspicious of the hyperbole surrounding the new book; some women writers are less benign in their responses and I think with good reason.<br /><br />We have talked about, made the list of, talented women writers who commit suicide. This is a legacy offered many young women writers: we will most likely suffer for our work (mostly unrecognized) and then become martyr angels for the public that ignored us, or some craziness like that. For me self-hatred was seeded as a young girl having to walk past the gathering of men on the corner where the luncheonette was. I went to purchase the family Sunday papers and the catcalls, crude remarks (and often the grabbing) had made me not only self-conscious, but self reprimanding for some thing that I had done (that I could not identify) that caused me to be treated in that way. Later on it became a position of power, but as we know a tainted self-immolating power.<br /><br />So when these women writers are publicly angry regarding the heralding of yet another man’s “talent” I get it.<br /><br />When we met we were wary of one another I think. I was at any rate. But I also was the one that pursued the friendship, although you did come up to meet my overtures readily. We began with writing, and for me (I will not speak for you) everything begins with that. Talking about writing, finding confidence in our work when recognition for talent seems to move toward men’s work much more often, was the foundation of what has become a most important relationship for me as a writer and woman. I do hate to slice the pie into the woman/man sections so often, but it is really hard to ignore what I see. And I guess that the women who wrote to the Times and elsewhere are seeing it too.<br /><br />Sadly, for me, when this kind of controversy comes around, it does make me more aware of how hard it is to have a relationship with men. I don’t see them as the enemy, and yet I see them as the ones to beat. I am competitive with men not because I want to win so much as I want to be recognized. Can’t beat ‘em—join? Well, that doesn’t work, so how do we proceed?<br /><br />Part of me feels that men need to find their own way and if I sympathize (and actually I do) with the constraints and problems foisted upon them by the culture at large I will lose focus. This has played out truly enough for me to have to steel myself and keep my focus on what women, what I, need. This may be why I have difficulty in relationships with men.<br /><br />I would love to end this with some clever remark, but I feel this too much to be superficial. I will leave it at this: one definition for recognizing is to have been experienced before. Have you ever been experienced?<br /><br /><strong>The Mind That Burns</strong><br /><br />What can one possibly say to her<br />When she is like this<br />there is nothing you can say<br /><br />Her voice fires a wild angry arrow<br />over us past us rushing through us pointing at everything<br />looking for the target and the surety that<br />She is right<br /><br />Of course she knows she isn’t<br />As do we<br />Right?<br /><br />Of course it is an abomination what happens to women<br />The rapes stonings murders mutilations<br />Women<br />Denied objectified erased<br /><br />But wrathful and negative<br />Everything and everyone to blame she wants<br />To take no prisoners<br /><br />We know and we understand<br />And she herself said well<br />What’s to be done<br />Write a shitty poem and feel it’s done the contribution made<br /><br />Then she brought up the monks<br />remembering the shorn heads aflame<br />Perhaps this is what she is doing<br />Sitting here igniting herself with condemnation for men<br />for herself<br />for all of us<br /><br />In the heat of the conflagration she says<br />Unlike the monks<br />She is not willing to die for this<br />what would be the point<br />For those she would burn with her<br />do not even see her<br /><br />Of course we don’t know what can make it right<br />What is to be done<br />What warmth before the embers of her retreating fury?<br /><br />Instead we look into our hearts and worry<br />Wondering what stance to take<br />Wondering what weapons we haveUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-2380609368679960182010-08-29T16:41:00.002-05:002010-08-29T16:47:58.639-05:00Beyond Sex and CivilityDear Laura,<br /><br />You mention the kind of dignity and respect we discuss as good manners, as basic civility between human beings. I absolutely agree. But I think there’s something more, some ineffable thing that must be addressed as well. At coffee this morning we ran into one of my former partners. He was respectful, polite, as was I. Yet something more profound was missing, no? Truth be told, there was always something missing from that relationship, which was based entirely on sex and civility. What is that something more that comes up between people who are really in conversation? And how do men and women really enter into conversation together?<br /><br />I think, beyond manners and civil behavior, we’re looking for recognition, of a very particular kind. What brought us together as friends? At first, it was just a glimmer, catching one another’s eyes light up in particular moments of discussion, seeing one another navigate the world in ways we both found intriguing. Then, as we started to really talk with one another, it became something more. We recognized, in each other, a particular relationship to life and to love. We saw one another as fully human. We were vulnerable to one another.<br /><br />My former partner—let’s call him Kennedy—never recognized me. And honestly, I never recognized him. Kennedy did all the things good, engaged people are supposed to do—he worked hard, he read widely, he took care of himself physically, he volunteered, you name it—but he never seemed fully himself with me. He was this collection of disparate parts. He put up a good front. He was never vulnerable.<br /><br />When I think of how vulnerable we’ve been together—sometimes in this very space—I connect with something fundamental. There is a core to you, and you allow me to glimpse that core—both in moments of sadness and in moments of great joy. You share these moments with me, and for that I am deeply grateful. Because it is this kind of sharing that keeps me alive.<br /><br />Kennedy and I met on the bus coming home from downtown Minneapolis. We hit it off physically, but it never progressed beyond that. I can’t even picture him sharing his hopes and fears with me, or I mine with him. In the end, it was good that we let that relationship go. It was too casual for me. I want, particularly when I am in conversation with you, to live fiercely. Anything less has come to seem awfully unsatisfying.<br /><br />You ask about how we go about satisfying our desires as women. One place we satisfy those desires is in the company of the people we recognize. This is why we’ve begun thinking of creating a space of conversation for women artists—we want to speak with women openly and honestly, to recognize the humanity in one another. But is recognition more difficult between men and women? Perhaps. I know the turmoils and the triumphs of other women far better than I know those of men. Yet there are men whom I recognize, and who I believe recognize me. They are, most often, men who think a great deal about what it is to be a man, just as I spend much time considering what it means to be a woman.<br /><br />Take, for instance, S—your friend and mine. We may struggle at times to recognize one another, and I know that I sometimes find it difficult to see where S is coming from. Yet he is vulnerable with each of us, and we have each been vulnerable with him. Certainly there is much he doesn’t understand about women’s experience, and much we don’t understand about men’s. But we are, the three of us, having a real conversation. And that’s where it all begins.<br /><br />As you know, I went to the state fair with D yesterday. I spent much of the day thinking about what I’ve come to love in him. He holds nothing back. And because of that, I feel I can be fully myself with him. There’s not a thing I worry about saying. He gets me. Or at least he’s always willing to try. And for me, trying means a great deal. I expect to fail sometimes. The trying becomes important in the face of that inevitable failure.<br /><br />D and I rode the SkyLine up above the fair and gazed down on the crowds of people. The state fair is usually not my cup of tea. So many people. I forget the world is so full of us. But yesterday, that realization—that we are far from alone, that there are so many of us, made me thrilled with the possibility of it.<br /><br />Between the promise of possibility, and the certainty of cheese curds, the fair proved a much better experience than I had anticipated. And so has our back-and-forth over this question we are wrestling with. The question, for me, is one of recognition. So what do we do to recognize and be recognized? Particularly when it comes to relationships between men and women?L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-86434278784979868862010-08-28T12:13:00.005-05:002010-08-28T12:20:23.215-05:00No ApologiesIf straight men are denied sex with women, in prison for example, do they objectify the effeminate man, the “pretty” man? It seems so. This also seems to say something about power and sex. So, it isn’t necessarily about women and power, but power, the power to satisfy a need or desire.<br /><br />I wonder how much power most women have to get this kind of satisfaction. It is about agency, means. I think it is harder for women to satisfy desires for sex, security, society, and success, because of having to navigate through the world not feeling confident that their integrity is all that matters. It is a man’s world. I will not apologize for that statement. I can qualify it: a wealthy, connected, white man’s world perhaps, but still the world’s power is almost absolutely in the hands of men.<br /><br />Lisa, you say that some men try hard (the thought that they have to try hard would be something we should look at to help us understand some of this better; do they have to try hard with peers?) to treat us with dignity and respect. I am an equal. Yes, truth be known, quite often I feel superior, but I have been called on it and have tried to continue to work on that. It is a response to exactly this question of being “treated”. I don’t want to be treated, just act civilly as one would with anyone one meets. I am not asking for special treatment; I am demanding equal treatment. I don’t always have someone’s respect, and I don’t respect many people; but in a civilized (loosely used) world, I mind my manners and hold myself back from making any judgment through my actions about who should be treated respectfully. We all should have that, and it should not be something I try, but something I do.<br /><br />Dignity is mine through <em>my</em> sense of self, <em>my</em> self-esteem. I am the keeper of my dignity. This is often affected by objectification. As Lisa says, it is a form of objectification to be placed on the mantle as muse. For me, as an older woman, I am not often seen as a sexual object, but I <em>am</em> seen as the Wise One, mother of the thousand four letter words, and so, also “mantle-ized” and my dignity(which is based on <em>my</em> vision, <em>my</em> view of myself) is not acknowledged, even if I resist this placement. My dignity is affected when a man doesn’t understand (and act accordingly) that my sense of worth comes from me and not what he wants me to be (for him) or thinks that I am.<br /><br />Respect is tricky: we both seem to be respected for some innate quality that men interpret as something that needs to be pedestal-ized, and therefore robs of us real respect.<br /><br />This is all very often unintentional. I realize that. But until men realize that they do it, without the tap-dancing qualifications and explanations, it is still offensive.<br /><br />For the men who read this: ask not that I understand the male position: I do, all too well and often, with much kindness, compassion and giving; ask how you can learn.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-73035878061365745742010-08-27T16:19:00.001-05:002010-08-27T16:23:16.785-05:00All ApologiesI want to pick up where Laura left off. I want to begin by saying that I relate to the air of apology that permeates that final paragraph. The question that lingers: do I have the right to talk about this? I’m worrying about that too, even as I write this. I worry because in the writing of this I might have to speak some hard truths about myself and the people I love. But that’s the commitment here. We promised to get naked, and I’m going to try to overcome my guilt and shame and get down to it.<br /><br />It’s hard for me because I seem to have a built-in drive to coddle men. I think about the men I love and I immediately shy away from using the word objectification. How could I possibly accuse them of this? <br /><br />Which brings me to therapy. I hated therapy this week. My therapist wanted me to talk about how hard it was growing up with a largely absent father and a severely depressed mother. Now, I think my parents were really good parents. Kind and loving. But it’s actually just true that for much of my childhood they couldn’t care for me as much as they wanted to. That’s life, no blame necessary. But I can’t quite seem to get past the idea that talking about that hard period in my childhood would be blaming my parents for the things that have been hard in my life. As if my talking about this thing that happened to me would somehow be to betray them. Where do I get this idea?<br /><br />More to the point, why do I have this idea about men? I don’t have this issue with most men—just the ones I care for. I’m more than willing to critique the behavior of the man on the street, the one who catcalls or harasses or follows me home. Guys like this are chauvinist assholes, and there’s not much more to say about them. There’s plenty to say about the social circumstances that make them feel like it’s acceptable to treat women this way, but that’s a topic for another post. I’m thinking, rather, of the good guys—the guys who try hard to treat women with dignity and respect, but struggle a bit in the execution.<br /><br />I will admit that, as a woman, I’m not always sensitive to the difficulties of the male position. There seems to be something, probably partially testosterone (but almost certainly not just that), which drives even conscious, considerate men to approach women because, in complex part, of sexual attraction. I know that human motivations are not simple. We’re looking for an awful lot of things from one another, when we seek each other out seriously in friendship and in love. <br /><br />I wonder if the problem comes in not because we are too conscious of the fact we are men and women, but because we are not conscious enough. We either over-sexualize women or we under-sexualize them. We likely do the same thing to men, but with different consequences. <br /><br />What I want to talk about now is the woman’s side of the coin, the one I know best. I have a friend and former lover—let’s call him B—who seems to see me not just as fully woman, but The Woman. He has made of me a muse. I can’t bring myself to fully explain to him, though I have tried, how difficult this is for me. I don’t want to have to see myself that way, as somebody else’s inspiration. More than that, it would be dangerous for me to do so. I’d lose all sense of myself—and I’ve worked hard to gain what little I have. <br /><br />B both fully sees and fails to see me as a woman. He sees me as a woman in an idealized sense, as the kind of woman who doesn’t exist. But this keeps him from seeing that I have my own desires, that my desires matter. And, the hardest part is, I can’t bring myself to tell him this directly, because I care about him. Or, rather, I tell him, but then I back off, retreating into this relationship of turmoil and tenderness, a relationship that seems to be harming us both. <br /><br />I really do wonder if the problem is that we’re failing to see each other as man and woman. We’re failing to see what the other suffers, what unique struggles accompany these strange positions which we occupy. If I’m feeling particularly bold, I might even ask the question: can we occupy them differently? Can we occupy them at will?<br /><br />B positions me as an object—if not a sex object, then an object of a different kind. The muse on the mantelpiece. He doesn’t mean to harm me by this—I don’t believe that of him at all. But harm me he does, somewhere so deeply inherent to my sense of self that something of me is lost in his love. Lost for both of us. <br /><br />To be a woman in this world is to battle against a particular set of social conditions. Objectification happens. This much we know. I think what matters most is that we begin to recognize the firmly entrenched conventions that keep women in a state of objectification even via those we love.L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-35007766021292070262010-08-25T16:11:00.007-05:002010-08-25T16:29:13.097-05:00She's So HormonalLisa and I were talking on the phone this afternoon about men and testosterone.<br /><br />We have talked about this many times before. It seems that men are not responsible for the way that hormones affect their behavior toward women.<br /><br />Watching “Venus Boyz” one trans man said that he had to make a conscious effort not to stare at women’s breasts: not the tits, not the tits. As a woman, and as a trans man, he was/is a feminist, and yet this behavior continued to pop up. It would seem that hormones place men in a constant heightened sexual awareness that cannot be circumvented. Or maybe it is a combination of the power of the male hormone and the power of being male.<br /><br />Women, at least the women I know, are often trying to figure out why men, often the most “conscious” men, continue to sexually objectify women. Even when they are aware that it is offensive and wrong, I am not sure that most men truly understand what it is meant by a sexual object.<br /><br />If a woman refuses sexual intercourse with a man he personalizes it, in my experience at least. Often it enrages him, and this may be another theme entirely, but it is connected, perhaps only tangentially, (but I am not convinced) to testosterone and power. When a male friend in crisis will seek out the help or attention of a woman he finds sexually appealing over a close friend (unless the sexy one is not available) I find that to be objectification for both women. Possible sex partner or not seems to decide many of the decisions men make.<br /><br />Do positions of perceived power (or lack thereof) in the social strata contribute to this? Is there a kind of reverse objectification that men encounter and so transfer that to women?<br /><br />Ya think?<br /><br />Smarter minds, and more patient ones, have engaged this discussion. I am only asking questions.<br /><br />Why do men, who ought to know better, continue to see women as less than fully human and more as objects of sexual gratification?<br /><br />Even the most enlightened men can avoid the controversial discussion with themselves about sexual objectification because it has to do with power.<br /><br />I said to Lisa today that women are always called “hormonal” if they display emotional or very emotional (crying: something men don’t usually or ever do in public; not that women do it much anymore either; it seems women are trying to have power by being more like men, hence the lack of things like tears) responses to stresses, etc. Men are never called hormonal. Maybe they shouldn’t be, considering the way the law works it might be a case of being hormonal rather than physically abusive.<br /><br />So it would seem that power not merely testosterone, brings much to bear on this idea of objectification. I know this is obvious to everyone, I am just still stunned by men that I know and like who persist in this behavior and refuse to see it or acknowledge it: the desire for power is <em>that </em>seductive baby, not the tits.<br /><br />If I have had to learn how to curb my emotions (or my responses to estrogen) in the world in order to be taken seriously and to not be a target of derision (she’s hormonal) why then can’t men?<br /><br />I am not saying I have researched this, or thought it out to present as an academically sound essay. I am a woman trying to understand why this behavior continues, why even my well intentioned men friends, see the word objectification as something radical, ranting, and political, instead of the damn daily grind for women trying to live under patriarchy.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-42563940424655199192010-08-20T15:01:00.002-05:002010-08-20T15:06:57.060-05:00Ex Marks the SpotJust over a week ago I met an ex, my college boyfriend, for drinks downtown. He was in Minneapolis only briefly, on the way home from a high-school reunion, headed back to New York the next morning. Yesterday afternoon I spent time with a more recent ex, my husband of many years, when we took Oedipa to the dog park to run off some steam. <br /><br />These recent outings have left me thinking about love, and the end of love, and the ways in which love will not end. These were wonderful moments, these moments I spent with these men I used to love. With my college boyfriend, there was light-heartedness and wonder and surprise, I think, that we might still find one another vibrant and exciting. With my husband, there was a profundity, a sense of how big the thing we tried to accomplish was, and how sad it is that we won’t continue trying together. <br /><br />I keep thinking about the unbearable lightness of being. Not the Kundera novel, which I’ve largely managed to forget, but the phrase. I’m having trouble finding footing in my life right now, and I think it has something to do with this unbearable lightness. How can it be that these eruptions that occur when men and women come together and break apart are remembered, after time has passed, so lightly? How can it be that we can once again come together only to drift through each others’ lives?<br /><br />I have enormous difficulty with endings. It seems impossibly sad to me that there is such a thing as over. I guess I could chalk this up to my anxiety over that final ending—that death which lurks behind all the pain and pleasure of our lives. Someday I will die. And I will die alone. And maybe, more than death, it’s alone that I can’t quite stand. <br /><br />Last night I felt deeply, awfully alone. I wanted, very badly, to be comforted and held. Following my friend’s advice, I did what I desperately wanted but desperately feared to do. I called the man I’ve been dating and asked to see him. I wasn’t going to call him. I was going to drown myself in books and ideas and try to distract myself from the pain of being alone. I was going to try hard not to obsess over whether I found myself so alone because of some lack in me, some failure on my part. Some refusal to be the good girl, to settle down and create a life with someone. I was going to try hard not to feel like I well and truly deserved to be so alone. And I was going to fail. I believe I was determined to fail.<br /><br />When it comes down to it, I’d planned a night of suffering for myself. There is something wonderfully self-indulgent in suffering. When you suffer, it’s all about you. Forget about the complex world in which we live, the ways it ties us up in crazy knots as we try to wind our way through it. You are the only being in the world, and if the world is shit it’s because you made it so. Well, fuck that. <br /><br />The world sometimes proves an unforgiving place. There are constant pressures—from both sinister and well-meaning sources—to seek a particular form of happiness. Find a man, get married, buy a house, raise a family. Not that there’s anything wrong with this path. This path seems to work for some folks. It’s just not for me. And I was determined to suffer for that—in the absence of any punishment forthcoming from the world, I would punish myself. I would deny myself the love that I do not believe I deserve.<br /><br />How much of suffering is self-inflicted? I spent time, wonderful time, with my college boyfriend and with my husband, but instead of enjoying the fact that we can still drift lightly through one another’s lives, I would chastise myself for the failure of those relationships. I would seek out guilt, the better to suffer. Certainly I made my share of mistakes in each relationship—there’s no denying that. But we’ve all moved past our past mistakes, and I do believe that we’re all capable of accepting one another just as we are. Why can’t I simply enjoy that, the wonderful luck of that? <br /><br />Is it for the same reason that I could not, at first, bring myself to call the man I am dating, to admit my need, to come to him one human being to another and asked to be loved as I am? The men in my life are not the ones telling me I have failed. I’m doing enough of that for everyone involved. And though I may be getting that message from the world at large, I’m certainly listening for it. So hard, in fact, that I often fail to hear the other message that’s being communicated—by my college boyfriend, my husband, and the man I am dating. These men remind me that whatever I am, whatever my messy and muddled relationship with the world, I am loved. <br /><br />Is this not, perhaps, more frightening than being alone?L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-71244157774979180832010-08-19T14:56:00.004-05:002010-08-19T15:03:01.979-05:00Like a Natural WomanI’m going to get my hair colored.<br /><br />I want to be gray. I have lots and lots of scattered silver threads among the now fading brown box dye I used weeks ago. Not salt and pepper: more like sand and red-brown dirt. I am tired of hiding; I want to be who I am.<br /><br />When I told my mother I was going to be gray, deliberately, she was horrified and told me I would look old and terrible. Imagine. What is so bad about being fifty-eight and not trying to look younger? Women are made to fear getting older: not fearing the infirmity that might come with age, the loneliness or solitude, just panic at looking older.<br /><br />I don’t think this happens to men. There is the occasional ad for men’s hair dye, but it is never touted as a complete cover of the ugly gray. Rather, it enhances the distinguished salt and pepper. The culture tells us that age makes men sophisticated, sage, and charming. My father used to spray his hair with a silver coating, like the stuff for Halloween. He knew that gray looked good on him, better than his original color.<br /><br />I don’t know if it will be a good look for me, but I am determined; a tide inside of me will not be denied.<br /><br />As I was being seated in the salon the other stylists came over to say Hi and ask what I was getting done.<br /><br />“She’s embracing her gray,” my stylist informed them loudly, with a proud tone in his voice.<br /><br />I could have hugged him.<br /><br />We talked as he folded the tin foil over section after section of hair. Friendly salon small talk: hair styles, fashion (he likes my handbag: Kathy Van Zeeland golden multi animal print, and gold-tone dice charms) and makeup. Talking about bleaching hair, I ask him if he remembered the overly bleached hairstyle from the 1980s that made the hair stand out like fur.<br /><br />He was suddenly quiet, and I realized.<br /><br />“Shit, of course you don’t remember you probably weren’t even born.”<br /><br />Oh god -- I am becoming one of those sad old women who forget that they are old! For a moment I worried: will this gray be just the beginning? Am I crazy to announce I am old? People tell me not to say I am old. When is old, seventy-- eighty? Then I laugh, and so does the young man slicing through my hair with the point of his comb.<br /><br />When I got my first period, I “became a woman”. When I lost my virginity I became a woman, when I gave birth I was a woman. All of those experiences helped to shape my thinking about myself, about being a woman. Going gray, wanting the silver and steel, must be one more of those moments because I have never felt more like a woman in my life.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-77536145985379576632010-08-11T10:27:00.003-05:002010-08-11T16:51:48.935-05:00Phone GirlSex work isn’t only blow-jobs; not all the work is physical. I worked in the sex industry and I never fucked anyone except by proxy-- as the pimp.<br /><br /> I can’t tell you where the building was. I can tell you that it was in a tony neighborhood in mid-town. The woman I worked for had six apartments in different buildings in different parts of town. Not all the houses are swank, some are just terrible closets full of sad desperate people one step away from madness and death. This was not one of those places. This place, this house, was where the financial district crowd came for lunch, at dinner time, or after hours when the neighborhood was deafly quiet.<br /><br /> These guys wore suits by designers that I wouldn’t know the name of but I knew they were very expensive. You can tell by the way a man wears a suit that it costs more money than most shmucks every see in one place. These men had Rolex watches. I knew this because after they would leave the girls would say, “Did you see the Rolex?” I never saw their watches; I never got that close to them.<br /> “Are you white, black, or Hispanic?” I asked this every call, every two to five minutes, for twelve hours a day.<br /> “How did you hear about us? How is…”fill in the name they give. <br /> <br /> This business is by word of mouth mostly. Sometimes the owner of the house will advertise in magazines. Not the typical sex magazines like Screw. This owner will have a discreet ad for relaxing down-time in a chic atmosphere with beautiful, engaging, intelligent women. It’s an ad. That isn’t to say that some of the girls weren’t beautiful, they were, but engaging and intelligent was stretching it. We did have one girl (the only white girl besides the oldest hooker in New York who at 50 looked fantastic and supposedly was the blow-job queen, hence the corny sobriquet “Lips”) who was intelligent. She was a foreign language major studying for her master’s degree in some related field. I don’t remember well. We aren’t supposed to have real lives; real lives are for the normal people. I heard one girl say that she was engaged. When another girl asked her if her fiancé knew what she did for a living she said, “Yeah, I’m a translator at the United Nations.” Everyone heard it and everyone laughed so hard there was coughing all around. It is about fantasy—for the men, and for us.<br /> <br /> We ask a lot of questions, obviously because what we do is illegal and we don’t want to get caught. Me in particular. The house supplies an attorney. The hookers, the girls, if we get busted (if the house is rousted by cops) will go to jail for several hours or up to overnight if things go wrong. They will get out on a ticket to appear in court for a misdemeanor. I on the other hand would not do so well. Being a phone girl is a felony.<br /> <br /> When I first told my son about the job he was confused. He asked me if the women were all there in the apartment waiting for the “clients” then where was the pimp. He asked me again, flat out, after I explained again how it all worked, “Okay, so who’s the pimp?”<br />I thought about it for a minute and then I said, “I guess that would be me.”<br /><br /> You see, answering the phone and asking questions is one thing, but when I got to the part about go to such and such street, there will be a phone booth on the corner, call me from there and I will give you this address, then I was no longer merely answering the phone. I was procuring. I was arranging dates for these girls. In legal eyes I was the pimp.<br /><br /> Men and women get into this business because of the money yes. But there are reasons beyond finance. For some of us it is about the freedom to work without papers, identification, or taxes. We are who we say we are and that’s it. It was 1993, and I was having a nervous breakdown. I was forty-one and just finishing my undergraduate degree. My son was finishing high school and my boyfriend of five years took all the money and left. He had been paying the bills for the last eight months so I could finish my degree. He left for a younger woman, a waitress who had tattoo artist aspirations. I had forty dollars in the bank, a two pack a day cigarette habit, a voracious teenager and a hungry cat. Thank god it was summer and my son was going to stay with friends upstate for a while; that left only me and the cat. I sold some of my favorite clothes, the really cool stuff, on the corner of St. Marks and First Ave., making new friends among the crack heads, but I earned enough for cat food, cigarettes, and toilet paper.<br /> <br /> It was hard to find a job right away. I took out another student loan (emergency status of some kind) but that was going to take six weeks to process. I was crying too much to appear sane, at least that’s how I felt, and I was terrified to go on interviews. I had terrible skills, I couldn’t be in an office, and I wasn’t a regular person; that was my whole problem. I tried to be regular but I couldn’t really pull it off, somehow my oddness showed through, despite my fake confident smile.<br /> <br /> At about the time I was truly scared for my sanity a friend told me about a job answering phones. I didn’t have to dress up, it wasn’t typical office hours, I could work two or three days a week and make a lot of money. I needed to finish school. I had put off college too long already and I wanted to better myself. This job could be the answer: part time, low maintenance, pay bills, wrap up college. It sounded like a great plan. Yes, of course, too good.<br /> “What’s the catch?”<br /> <br /> He filled me in and I said yes. I knew I could handle it. Twelve hours, two-fifty for the shift, five bucks for every call that shows up. The lowest figure would equal out to around twenty dollars an hour if we got no clients at all. But the high end was high, possibly as high as a grand on a good night. Sometimes there were even better nights, it all depended. It was all paid in cash, job title: phone girl.<br /> <br /> This was one interview I didn’t worry about. I sat in the kitchen at a long rectangular glass table. On it was a cup with pens and pencils, two large yellow legal pads, folders, ashtrays, cigarette packs, match boxes, and the script that I would need to use until I got used to it, but I was told never to get used to it. I was told to stick to the script, that way it was harder to get busted; you never forget a detail of the questions and you lessen the chances of fucking up and having the cops show up. There were two cordless phones that rang almost constantly. Two phones, two different lines. The washing machine and dryer hummed day and night. Girls came through to put in or take out sheets and towels. They reached into the cabinets to get mouthwash, or glasses, or another box of condoms for one of the rooms. I answered Amber’s (the house owner) questions in between her doing the phones. It rang so often I was there a long time before we settled on days and shifts, because of who recommended me I got the job no problem. I was feeling slightly crazed, what with the girls rushing in and out talking and banging the cabinet doors or slamming the washer lid, the constant ringing of the phones, the crush of papers and ashtrays on the table, and a large Gap tote bag at my feet filled to the handles with money.<br /> <br /> The owner, Amber, was rail thin, European, and stylish. Uptown stylish, Kennedy-Onassis stylish. Who knew? And with a name like Amber. I find out later no one here uses a real name, even among ourselves. Some of the more popular names are Tiffany, Amber, Crystal, Desiree, Tammy, Dawn, and Cherie. Names I heard in all the poor rural neighborhoods I had ever lived in-- hooker names. I used my real name never knowing they thought it was a phony; I didn’t know enough to use a different one until I had been there three weeks, and by then who cared?<br /> “Our girls hug and kiss and you can have as many releases as you want during your time.” <br /> <br /> It’s a whole new world. I didn’t know that hugging and kissing, that kind of intimate contact, was unusual. It was a big selling point at our house that the women would do this. Releases, as many as a guy could manage, was also news. I thought it was one hit and you’re out; in this place if you were there for the hour, you were there for the hour. The other big selling point was that the guy got to take a shower with the girl before the session. It was a turn-on and kind to the girls; at least they could be guaranteed a non-offensive date. Also get them naked right away and nothing can be smuggled in like a weapon or a badge.<br /> <br /> The hour was mostly how it ran. One-sixty for the hour, ninety for the half. Most of the men took the hour. Out of that the girls got 40%. Not much when you consider the work they did, but the house was upscale, safe, and busy. No one complained, actually they were all pretty close, like a family. Most of them had been working together for years. They went to the beach together, or picnics, things like that. Not too often though because the house would have to be closed and that hardly ever happened. Regular holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving were days off and they often spent them together. Most of the girls were from Brazil and had no family nearby. It was really weird to me. I was the only one who was on the outside. It is fairly traditional for the phone girl to be sort of “off limits”. Unless you have been working in a house for years (I knew one “girl” who was at least sixty and worked with the same “owner” for twenty years) you don’t get familiar with anyone lest you be accused of favoritism while booking sessions. The jealousy in these places is rampant and some of the paybacks are truly a bitch, so a phone girl has to be really careful.<br /><br /> This house was in-call only. The girls stay in the house and the johns come to us. Out-call, like any of the other types of sex work, varies quite a bit. Most of the escort services are extremely upscale. This is where many of the high class hookers who are white work. There isn’t as much racial division as people think. Women (and men) of all colors (and ages—yes) work and make excellent to decent money as escorts. It really depends on the johns of course. Out-call can cost more because sometimes there is elaborate security, not only for the worker (and not as often really) but also for the owner. In one out-call only place I worked (there is a lot of freelance work available and some phone girls will work more than one place for more than one employer) there was a camera at street level. When you rang the first bell the camera came on and one could see who was at the street door. After you were buzzed in you went up an elevator to the second floor where you were buzzed in at another door after camera screening. This was for the girls when they came in and for the phone girls and drivers. The johns never came here. The security was tight, the clients were very high level, and the girls here got driven to their gigs and picked up after unless other arrangements had been made.<br /> <br /> Interestingly, I come by this work honestly. It’s in the blood, or the family at any rate. My great aunt was once a rival of Polly Adler’s. While Ms. Adler became famous my aunt tended her very, very, high profile clients in secure secrecy, right up until she got out of the game. I know that she maintained relationships with some of them because when she died there were sympathy cards from some really interesting people. I don’t think my father knew that I was working in this field but my mother did and she laughed saying that it was not surprising. <br /><br /> Not all the men who came to the house were high rollers and not all high rollers go to extreme upscale houses. Like in all things people vary in taste and style; sometimes you shop at Target for housewares and sometimes (if you can afford it) you go to Williams& Sonoma. There are Asian houses, Hispanic, every ethnicity under the sun, and these exclusive houses are for those in the same ethnic group. There are houses that have parties, everyone hangs out in a large living room and get together in two’s or three’s. Most houses only cater to men, but there are some have female clients that want female hookers. This usually carries a high price, it’s a specialty that isn’t often asked for and some of the girls at a “straight” house won’t do it. <br /><br /> I have answered phones at lots of types of places. I worked as a phone girl at a dungeon. At the dungeon I was referred to as the house manager. Same difference. I made the dates and would take the heat if the house was raided.<br />The dungeon was not as scary as the whore house though. In a dungeon, at least the one I worked in, there is only fantasy sex. That is not to say that men didn’t have orgasms, they did, and often at the “hands” of the mistress. But dungeon sex is not about the old in-out, in-out. <br /><br /> Most of the clients were professional, and they were often very open about what they did—if you believed them. Nothing (and no one) was what it seemed. <br /><br /> These people who own the houses know that this is business. They are sharp; they are shrewd. They are not very sympathetic, but they are philosophical. In the days after the World Trade Center collapsed one of the women who owned several elite houses was complaining about business.<br /><br /> “Ah, business is not so good. Buildings go down, all my clients go up in the sky.”<br />As she said this she threw her hands violently toward the ceiling.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6842654653366792729.post-78143323225358017602010-05-25T15:09:00.002-05:002010-08-11T10:28:51.946-05:00Love in an ElevatorI’ve been thinking lately about the elevator scene in The Maltese Falcon, where Sam Spade watches as Brigid O’Shaugnessy begins her descent to prison, or worse, the gallows. Before the cops arrived to take Brigid on that fatal journey, Sam and Brigid have a fascinating discussion on the subject of love. After she claims that their love for one another should be reason enough to find some alternative solution, one that doesn’t involve her doom, Sam replies: “I don’t care who loves who. I’m not going to play the sap for you.” Sam doesn’t cite his commitment to justice or the truth; rather, he insists upon his own status as the non-duped, a man who knows precisely from whence the threat to his (self) control comes. Of course, this makes him precisely the kind of fool he doesn’t want to be, and the conclusion of the film illustrates this. Rather than ending on this note of self-assurance, we return to Sam’s office where his dead partner’s wife, with whom he had an affair, awaits. Sam, who has been avoiding this nuisance of a woman for the better part of the film, shivers in disgust and tells his secretary to “send her in.” <br /><br />Wait. I’ve left something important out. After Sam tells Brigid he refuses to play the sap, he goes on to say “I won’t walk in Thursby’s—and I don’t know how many others—footsteps.” Aha. And again, later: “If all I’ve said doesn’t mean anything to you, we’ll make it just this. I won’t because all of me wants to—regardless of consequences—and you’ve counted on that with me the same as you counted on that with the others.” <br /><br />What is it about love that threatens to reduce us, to compromise our specialness? Slavoj Zizek mentions a passage in Lacan that seems on point: “Everyone knows Lacan’s definition of love (“Love is giving something one doesn’t have…”); what one often forgets is to add the other half which completes the sentence: “…to someone who doesn’t want it.” And is this not confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declared passionate love to us—is not the first reaction, preceding the possible positive reply, that something obscene, intrusive, is being forced upon us?” Don’t we worry, in one way or another, about our very “oneness,” our singularity? Don’t we worry, regardless of the possibility of other loves, that love will make us not one, but either less than one, or, perhaps even worse, two? <br /><br />Maybe the question isn’t what Sam is afraid of—after all, that seems fairly clear. Maybe the question is what Brigid is afraid of. Maybe the femme fatale isn’t a reflection of male fears and anxieties at all. Maybe, just maybe, she has fears and anxieties of her own. After all, she has been the primary searcher for the falcon, “the stuff that dreams are made of.” And doesn’t this bring us back, paradoxically, to blowjobs-for-beer? Maybe the question I should have asked wasn’t what those men wanted—maybe the entire point was: what did that young woman want? <br /><br />What does it mean to want to be the object of desire, even the object of desire of a non-subject? This speaks, in a way, to LLL’s most recent post, and the question of the woman who lost weight to get her man. Why, after all, should they be lauded for their triumph? What was it a triumph over? It was a triumph over all of our own feelings—I deserve. I deserve better. I deserve to be loved. This is no triumph. This is nothing but compromise.<br /><br />If Brigid wants the statue, it’s because it can promise her something more. I deserve. I deserve to be loved this much. I deserve to love. What are her anxieties? Precisely that she won’t be loved unconditionally, about which she was entirely right. Precisely that others won’t let go their fear. About which she was entirely right. Precisely that she won’t love herself. About which she was entirely right. Poor Brigid. Poor us.L.J.http://www.blogger.com/profile/02251606281671622306noreply@blogger.com