Naked Conversations

Change of Venue

2011-07-20T13:01:00.000-05:00

LJ's posts on all and sundry will now be appearing at: http://sistersunderthemink.blogspot.com/

Not that she has that much to say, but if she's saying it, she's saying it there. Comments welcome. Talk soon.

--LJ

Rememberance of Things Past (or, In Search of Lost Time)

2011-01-20T19:31:00.001-06:00

Laura,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

Lisa

P.S. It still sucks.

I Want Candy?

2011-01-18T17:15:00.004-06:00

Lisa,

What do I know about my own sexual desire?

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:

Girl: I was telling my psychiatrist that I had an orgasm last week. He told me it wasn’t the right kind.

Woody: Really? Not the right kind? Funny… every one of mine is always right on the money…

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.

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.

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.

But this is really back story.

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.
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.

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.

Still, as time passed things did 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.

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!”

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…

L

Is This Desire?

2011-01-14T14:59:00.003-06:00

Laura,

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 The Atlantic: Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s piece “Hard Core,” 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:

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.

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.

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 The Atlantic, a piece by Caitlin Flanagan entitled “The Hazards of Duke” that undertakes a rather bizarrely unsubstantiated, though weirdly plausible, reading of the infamous “Duke Fuck List” composed, in PowerPoint format, by the woman a Slate Double-X 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.

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?

Lisa

2010-12-31T11:52:00.001-06:00

Lisa,

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?

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.

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?

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.
Our friendship, our commitment to this experiment of conversation, is solid. Make no mistake.

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.

As for our disagreeing and its profound repercussions: it is often through the harshest discussion that I have learned the most about myself.

I am standing right here.

In Art and Madness,
Laura

Cool Hands and Civil Wars

2010-12-30T18:45:00.000-06:00

‘What we’ve got here is…failure to communicate.’

Laura,

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).

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?

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?

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.

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:

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind. (Anne Sexton, “Her Kind”)

And:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul. (William Ernest Henley, “Invictus”)

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.

Lisa

From Rhett to Scarlett...

2010-12-28T18:16:00.003-06:00

Hi L,

Whoosh! There it is again…they are afraid of us. Is it the cunt with teeth thing again?

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.

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.

And that line was what caused some of the consternation last time. Men don’t want to be hated by women.

We have misunderstood; not all men are bad. Sheesh. Fine.

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.

I don’t think all men hate women; frankly, tonight, right now, I could give a shit.

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.

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.

And how are you? : ) LOL

“She’s fabulous. But she’s evil.”

2010-12-23T18:58:00.005-06:00

Laura,

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.

I haven’t actually watched Mean Girls. 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, Mean Girls 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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lisa

Of Country Cottages?

2010-10-15T22:03:00.003-05:00

Laura,

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.

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 primarily in terms of her sexuality.

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.

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.

Two Kinds of Sirens?

2010-10-14T08:07:00.004-05:00

Hi Lisa,

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.

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.

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.?

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.

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.

What I was writing about was a lead-in to our discussion of Agatha Christie, and in particular, Miss Marple.

I want to continue our talk.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?

Fear of a Binary Planet

2010-10-04T10:33:00.002-05:00

Lisa,

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.

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.

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.
Where do I belong now?

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.

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.

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.

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.

My future seems mostly behind me today. I don’t feel like this on all days, but the thoughts come more often lately.

Where do I belong?

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.

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?

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.

So, to avoid more loneliness?

Ach, I can hear the chorus already: volunteer, reach out, join join join!
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.

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.

Is this too much to ask?

Strangers in a Stranger Still Land

2010-09-26T14:44:00.004-05:00

Lisa,

It’s been lonely with you out of town. I feel like a stranger in this here place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Another Lady from Shanghai

2010-09-13T11:34:00.003-05:00

Lisa,

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.

And this leads me to thinking again about what do women want. My friend Jonah used to repeat, I want, I need, I must have, 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.

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?

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 be loved, or accept love on the other’s terms.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would have real power but for the need to be loved/approved of. Love makes vassals of us all: shanghaied.

First We Get the Guns...

2010-09-06T16:16:00.003-05:00

Laura,

Sunday morning at breakfast, talking about The Lady from Shanghai, 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 The Maltese Falcon as evidence for our viewpoint:

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:

“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.”

Spade’s face reddened and he looked down at the floor, muttering: “Now you are dangerous” (38).

The question raised by this pivotal moment in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Scarface: “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?

Bodies and Balloons

2010-09-02T21:54:00.004-05:00

Lisa,

Tonight I was smirking to myself about all the talking about relationships, relating, understanding…

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…

Shit.

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.

Merde.

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.

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.

I am really good at entertaining myself, but tonight I am not amused.

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 am 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.

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.

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:

Hi, would you like to fuck a fellow American down on her luck?

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.

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 did make all the difference: it hurt, it cost me, but I did learn exactly what I am made of.

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.

Bodies of Water

A child’s body is more than eighty percent water (enough for a globe)
A man’s body is two thirds water (enough to bleed)
Half of my body is water (enough to support a new life)

Can water be touched?

I have cupped water to my face
Drank it
Poured it over my neck and hands

I have lain down in water
And on water
Supported by the tension of its body

The tension of one half of my body does not allow touch

Water is contained
Yet water will always join with other water
If it is allowed

Half of my body would join and touch

In stillness
Water always finds its symmetry
Always in harmony with itself

As water meets substance
It polishes and smoothes
Shaping it anew

Half of my body is perfect

Water in the body diminishes with age
Or fat
Or starvation

Half of my body is water

The ways of water must live in me
Enough to be touched

Bodies That Matter

2010-09-02T15:31:00.005-05:00

Laura,

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 in any of us so much as it is in the air we breathe, the space we inhabit.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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.

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?

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?

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 Basic Instinct, and I want to share it with you:

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:

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)

Hanson’s analysis points to two key issues for Basic Instinct. 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 Basic Instinct 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.

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.

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.

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 Basic Instinct—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?

Seeing and Believing

2010-08-31T09:50:00.003-05:00

Lisa,

When we begin to talk about recognition it really opens the discussion, as we realized on the phone last night.

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.

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.

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.

So when these women writers are publicly angry regarding the heralding of yet another man’s “talent” I get it.

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.

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?

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.

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?

The Mind That Burns

What can one possibly say to her
When she is like this
there is nothing you can say

Her voice fires a wild angry arrow
over us past us rushing through us pointing at everything
looking for the target and the surety that
She is right

Of course she knows she isn’t
As do we
Right?

Of course it is an abomination what happens to women
The rapes stonings murders mutilations
Women
Denied objectified erased

But wrathful and negative
Everything and everyone to blame she wants
To take no prisoners

We know and we understand
And she herself said well
What’s to be done
Write a shitty poem and feel it’s done the contribution made

Then she brought up the monks
remembering the shorn heads aflame
Perhaps this is what she is doing
Sitting here igniting herself with condemnation for men
for herself
for all of us

In the heat of the conflagration she says
Unlike the monks
She is not willing to die for this
what would be the point
For those she would burn with her
do not even see her

Of course we don’t know what can make it right
What is to be done
What warmth before the embers of her retreating fury?

Instead we look into our hearts and worry
Wondering what stance to take
Wondering what weapons we have

Beyond Sex and Civility

2010-08-29T16:41:00.002-05:00

Dear Laura,

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

No Apologies

2010-08-28T12:13:00.005-05:00

If 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.

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.

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.

Dignity is mine through my sense of self, my 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 am seen as the Wise One, mother of the thousand four letter words, and so, also “mantle-ized” and my dignity(which is based on my vision, my 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.

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.

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.

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.

All Apologies

2010-08-27T16:19:00.001-05:00

I 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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

She's So Hormonal

2010-08-25T16:11:00.007-05:00

Lisa and I were talking on the phone this afternoon about men and testosterone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Ya think?

Smarter minds, and more patient ones, have engaged this discussion. I am only asking questions.

Why do men, who ought to know better, continue to see women as less than fully human and more as objects of sexual gratification?

Even the most enlightened men can avoid the controversial discussion with themselves about sexual objectification because it has to do with power.

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.

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 that seductive baby, not the tits.

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?

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.

Ex Marks the Spot

2010-08-20T15:01:00.002-05:00

Just 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Is this not, perhaps, more frightening than being alone?

Like a Natural Woman

2010-08-19T14:56:00.004-05:00

I’m going to get my hair colored.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I was being seated in the salon the other stylists came over to say Hi and ask what I was getting done.

“She’s embracing her gray,” my stylist informed them loudly, with a proud tone in his voice.

I could have hugged him.

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.

He was suddenly quiet, and I realized.

“Shit, of course you don’t remember you probably weren’t even born.”

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.

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.

Phone Girl

2010-08-11T10:27:00.003-05:00

Sex 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.

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.

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.
“Are you white, black, or Hispanic?” I asked this every call, every two to five minutes, for twelve hours a day.
“How did you hear about us? How is…”fill in the name they give.

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.

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.

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?”
I thought about it for a minute and then I said, “I guess that would be me.”

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.

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.

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.

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.
“What’s the catch?”

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.

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.

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?
“Our girls hug and kiss and you can have as many releases as you want during your time.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

“Ah, business is not so good. Buildings go down, all my clients go up in the sky.”
As she said this she threw her hands violently toward the ceiling.

Love in an Elevator

2010-05-25T15:09:00.002-05:00

I’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.”

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.”

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?

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?

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.

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.

My Eating Disorder: Action!

2010-05-24T09:42:00.003-05:00

Last night I saw a short piece on the public television station about boomers dating. Two women, one a sociologist, the other a former LA Fox News somebody (now with her own something as “cool” as Fox but not them) and a male therapist were talking about what dating is like after 55.

The therapist said, yes, at first, the men are mainly interested in sex. Jeez, I had no idea. The host said that his recently singled friend had joined an online dating network. His friend (described as late 50s) found a woman he really connected with. They exchanged emails and talked on the phone; the host said the friend was very enthusiastic about this woman until he saw her photo. He stopped writing; she lost twenty pounds and sent him a new photo with email. The host goes on to beam that last week he attended their wedding.

I went to the refrigerator to find something to swallow other than this crap.

The sociologist says you have to forget the body issues and ask yourself what you want more: love or loneliness. She said that the body stuff after fifty is bullshit (okay she said something else, but that was the gist) and then went on to say that women with mastectomies have found love and been able to bare their bodies and have sex. So we should all “get over it” (this time I am not paraphrasing).

Still nothing good in the fridge.

Is it me, or is there a weird kind of disconnect here? I just heard that fat caused a near miss in the love department, missing breasts are no reason women cannot have sex (and presumably love) and that if women fear the body rejection issues that complicate dating we should just grow up and get over it.

Fat is immoral.

Women with mastectomies have terrible scars: physical, emotional, maybe spiritual. They have bodies that are ravaged and potentially unappealing to men, but through no fault of their own. Those bodies are not corrupt through any depravity of their own making. There it is. The rub.

Fat is evil and it is my fault. My most grievous fault. I have not learned how to tame my feelings and my fat by thrashing my body around in a gym and starving myself. Those who do not have this blight, this shame, have no idea how much hearing about the man who loved the woman who lost weight hurts. And enrages.

I am over 55. I am lonely. And fat. And I don’t think that someone who can only love me if I lose twenty pounds is worth being with. Why did everyone on that panel think that was a win for that woman? The statistics say that she will gain that twenty back and more, especially if she is over fifty, but the thing is she won’t. This woman will do what women have been doing for as long as I can remember: make herself appealing for a man.

Ah, there’s cookies in the cupboard!

Sounds of Silence

2010-02-20T10:06:00.000-06:00

Coming back from a long break always proves to be a challenge. Where to re-enter the conversation? What, if anything, to say about the hiatus? The silence could be brushed aside as the result of the demands of my work, and to some extent that would be true. However, it’s much closer to the truth to say I took some time to regroup, to realize, all over again, who I am. To realize, perhaps both once more and for the first time, who I am becoming.

Some people have spaces into which they will retreat—I, for lack of a better getaway, retreat to someplace deep inside myself. The self who is capable of engaging with the world recedes into slumber, and is replaced, albeit temporarily, with the automaton that confronts only the necessary. Waking out of this state, back into my life, can be a challenge.

I wake through a series of moments: an article I enjoyed reading, ideas I enjoyed having, the instant of pure being while playing with my dog, the flash of honesty in conversations with people I love. I see, when I wake, life as full and possible. I see from a place of love. In those moments I am not sorry to be a woman.

But this is also a frightening place to be. Frightening for me, anyway. It involves a confrontation with the world in which I will be vulnerable. I could be hurt. And if I’m really present, I’ll feel it. This means radical acceptance of life’s contingency. This means being naked.

What is writing, if not a space to a space from which to aspire to nakedness, to radical honesty? What is life, if not writing? When I was sixteen, seventeen, I was in love, or at least in the sixteen, seventeen-year-old version of love. It was wonderful. It was devastating. It hurt. It was complicated and revelatory and terrifying. I’ve been running from that love ever since.

But my life has opened up, lately, in ways that make it possible to try to be awake. In ways that make it feel like a great gift that awake is possible. I have moments where I can imagine rising from bed, stepping naked out the door into the sun, and it is warm and good.

Yet as good as it is to think of the warmth of that sun, I’m terrified that I’ll step out that door and the world will point and laugh, or shake its heads in disgust, or, worst of all, misunderstand the gesture. Misrecognize me. And I will hurt.

But the moments of recognition by those I love, those small moments of grace, promise a hope for the future. A hope of the future. And so, forth from the silence. We can. We must. We will.

Late Valentine

2010-02-15T11:49:00.002-06:00

I call my mother every few days. It is unusual for me to feel angry when we speak these days. We laugh quite a lot; I ask her questions about her past and she tells me what I want to know. We are able to avoid, or at least gracefully skirt (okay, I am the graceful one, not wanting to make this waltz we are doing into a mosh pit; but still, I find it interesting that I am even concerned with being graceful in our conversations now) around, issues that often brought us, literally, to blows. I wonder if this unspoken truce is a function of age, or tolerance. Or it is love.

For as long as I can remember, girls and women have talked about their mothers to one another.

I grew up in Queens, NY amid tall brick buildings six stories each. It was the kind of urban development that seems like a small town to New York kids. Everyone in the “buildings” knew everyone else’s business, just like a small town. That wasn’t really hard to do, as most of the citizens of Windsor Park, which was the actual name for “the buildings”, seemed to live much of their lives in the open. Like one kid’s father who, having reached a point of frustration in an argument with his wife, cranked open the casement window as far as it would go, stuck his neck through it and screamed from the fourth floor to the watching world below, “I’m a schmuuck….I’m a shmuuuck!”

While these nearly daily events were amusing, they made me realize, as did the yentas on the benches who murmured to each other as anyone walked by, that we were all being watched. As the token shiksa, my family and I seemed to get more than the average attention, aside from the occasional yelling out the windows, from them. So when the girls in the neighborhood bragged about their mother’s beauty, cooking/baking talent, or general good motherliness, I held my tongue.

I held my feelings as well. My mother never seemed comfortable being a mother. Living in the fishbowl of Windsor Park didn’t help. But there was something deeper that I couldn’t fathom, but sensed, that made my mother different. I knew, without any evidence other than my gut feeling that this made me different as well.

My mother wore tight slacks with arty looking turtle necked sweaters made with loopy, multi-colored yarn. She wore white Keds with no socks and her hair hung long and loose past her shoulders.

The other mothers wore dresses (and girdles, my mother didn’t even own a bra) had shellacked hair that stood in place until it was re-arranged once a week at the beauty parlor, and pumps on their feet. They never wore sneakers. It was hard to be a young girl with a beautiful, bohemian looking mother.

Our mothers, ourselves, it was a constant theme; as I grew older women were trying to understand their female identity by looking at their mothers and their mother’s lives. Look in the mirror and find your mother yet see yourself and see how the world sees you. Those conversations in consciousness-raising about our mothers were like looking in a fun-house mirror, or rushing along a roller coaster ride, with all the attendant distortion, oscillation of emotions, and sometimes nausea, of the experience.

For all the talking I did, still do about my mother, I don’t know if I have gotten so much closer to understanding my own sense of self, of female, by examining her life. These days I look in the mirror and I am always surprised to see my mother’s face. I never expected to feel kindly toward this woman in the mirror. My mother, myself.

Together and Alone

2010-02-05T13:46:00.003-06:00

Hi CB,

Thanks for your comments! In mentioning the individual, I was referring to this Calvinistic, capitalistic idea of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps, the self-made man, etc.

I am not comfortable with this idea of braving and conquering the frontier, the unknown, alone. I am not too hot on the conquering part either really, but I do not believe that is ever the truth. It would seem that in every case of someone being "self-made" there were those unnamed exploited people under their boot heels.

So, yes of course individual experience is important, whether for oneself, or to share. In this case, I felt that change can better be made through sharing our angels and demons. But don't hold me to it....I reserve the right to change my mind tomorrow!!

Again, thank you for being part of the conversation.

An Honorary Man

2010-02-05T13:35:00.005-06:00

It is hard to talk about this without hearing female voices saying “I’ve always had more men-friends”. This isn’t what I am thinking of. I am thinking about how I have moved through the man’s world and for so much of that time been accepted by men almost as though I was one of them.

I was never the kind of female that men chased after. I am good looking, although always plumper than the accepted standard. I am very smart. I am direct. I am not particularly ambitious or driven. The last may be one of the reasons why they can accept me so easily. If I am not seen as threatening it is fine. It has not been my experience that men dislike intelligent women. Nor have I found men to be disdainful of women who can be direct. But I have seen both responses from men toward women other than myself. Why should I be treated differently?

I remember my father telling me that I was like a truck driver. Mostly I believed because of my facility with four letter words. That is not the only reason. I am not a delicate flower, but I am not a woodsy outdoor jock type either. There is something solid, dependable and relentless in me that made my father think of a blue collar worker.

I understand men. I know the fear that society has placed in them about appearing too female (you know, being a pussy) the anger they feel about having to “man-up” for so much of life, and the confusion they feel about women, about sexuality, about emotions. It is this sympathy, empathy, that I believe allows me in where most women are not allowed. I know their fears and identify with them. I also was/am afraid of being too female. It is dangerous for us both.

I like shopping (when I have the money) I like jewelry and cosmetics and bath products. I like a warm luxurious bed piled high with comforters to sleep in. I am a sensual animal. Animal. I remember that there are also parts of me that enjoy walking on a rocky beach on the coast of Maine in January. I like hot chiles on my burritos. I recognize power. I recognize that I am an animal and do not resent its implications. Men understand this. Few women want to.

There are women who will say that they too feel this way, but unlike me they are doing it to make men comfortable. I am not concerned with whether men like or dislike my type of femininity because I am not trying to have a man. I am not looking for a husband, boyfriend, partner.

Men know when you are looking and women have been taught to look. Even if you are married, you must look. It is an internal looking. It is the desirable quotient. You must be desirable and you must gauge that by your marriage-ablility. There are women today who will disagree with this statement. But I have watched them marry the men they pretended not to pursue.

So why do I believe that men accept me as one of their own?

One time, I organized a brunch after a meeting. We met in a really great café on Ave A. I had extended invitations to my friends, men and women alike, but for some reason only the men showed up.

We had a great time, lots of laughing, sharing stories and gossip. At the end of the gathering as we were getting ready to leave, one of them said to me:

“This was a great idea Laura. Next time why don’t you invite some women?”

I was standing, preparing to leave, when he made this remark. I was so stunned I sat back down into my chair with a thump.

I looked at no one in particular, but I threw out my hands across the table and said,
“What am I—wood !??”

This got a huge laugh, and I did laugh myself, but it has always stuck with me.
Men like me, but for some reason, most of them don’t see me as female. Or so it would seem.

Maybe it’s because I have a brother; maybe because I have a son. Maybe it’s because I read “Iron John” that men find me other, not really a woman. I suppose I am posting this partially to assert, despite the belief of some male readers, that I do not hate men. Shit, I am an honorary member of the tribe.

Baby It's Cold Outside

2010-02-03T14:56:00.005-06:00

This is really hard to write about. I find it difficult to give my thoughts their full measure in words. It is late at night nearly into the morning, poised between not day not night and brutally cold, despite the hissing and spitting of the radiator. I am trying to express what is going through my mind about women, about what was/is the women’s movement, feminism, post-feminism, third wave, politics, power…

In recent times I have seen women move away from allowing themselves the pleasure (and the freedom) to have a choice about how they behave, define themselves, and live their lives. Women believed they could wear makeup or not, they could diet or not, they could work, they could have children or not, marry or not, have sex with whomever they pleased including other women…the list seemed endless. Women could expect pressure to stay in line, and they could expect support from other women to leave the line. Yet now, I see things I thought were gone forever; women are registering for showers for weddings and babies, and there seems to be more pressure (or is it the same old pressure?) to get that man and keep him. There is a website devoted to supporting celebrity partners to help them do this, keep their men from wandering, leaving, cheating. The site is created by women. Are these the women who know that fish need those bicycles?

I have been reading, trying to understand what women want these days. Do we still want the kind of promises the ERA was going to give us? I think women are not sure what to want anymore. Do we want freedom from violence against us, do we want freedom from poverty forced on us by cultures that undervalue us, do we want to see women’s faces representing us in courts, women’s faces representing us in politics, do we want to see women’s faces speaking to us about child care, health care, aging care, do we want to know that our concerns are the concerns of all of society?

I believe that the “transform yourself from within” message, the message to stretch out and reach your potential, the kind of message I heard from the Esalen people, the kind of message we now get from Oprah, has not given us what we want. We may be fully self-actualized, but if the culture does not recognize us as fully developed individuals we still cannot locate ourselves except in many of the same old ways. What is a woman’s value in our society? I can rattle off the clichés, but I am honestly wondering what women think their value is today.

Perhaps there are too many things to excel at for women today. I have heard this before, but it may be truer now than ever. A woman can choose to go in many directions in her life today, simultaneously. But it may be that she must make these choices alone. I get the sense that we are all feeling that all of our pleasure, work, learning, must be done alone. It seems that without a real movement of women coming together to support one another, to work for the changes that mean something to them, we are lost, and we can’t find our way home.

Where is home for women now? Mainly on the internet it seems. Not that this is a bad thing, I mean duh! I am here doing the same thing: searching for connection and a place to come to where they know where I begin, where not much need be explained, but so much can be shared, discussed, and thought about.

How can women, young and older, meet in balance today? Can we meet without judgment so that women who want cosmetic surgery can still feel they have a place at the table? This may be the only way we can move on from here. At least right now. It is important that we share all the information we come across, all of our ideas, to enable all women to grow and find freedom, but I believe this idea of the individual is not the best way.

We have different feelings about what is most important. Some of us believe that change can only happen through typical political strategies like voting. Some believe that we can work within the culture as it exists to offer women new thoughts, new ideas that can move them forward to be full citizens. Some women feel they are already full citizens.

Can we meet on moving ground, holding different beliefs, and agendas? I think we will have to if we are to be effective in the world. In America, we may feel like fully arrived human citizens, and for some of us that may be enough. Some of us know that none are free unless all are free. This may be a dream. Maybe we can dream together not in opposition, distrust, or cynicism. Maybe we can dream.

For me, at this hour, I am thinking that without a change in the system itself we will find no enduring change. I don’t believe it will matter who has the supposed power or where it comes from. As long as the footprint of capitalism is embedded on the culture, there will be no change in the weather. It will be as though we are standing between the worlds, dark, cold, and alone.

...Or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

2010-01-31T14:20:00.011-06:00

Oh my dear rdemay,

It’s so hard to explain. Being an older hetero woman, even among male peers, I am the walrus—er, pickle.

Prickly pickle I guess. Yes, of course we all get a turn in the barrel. Look, the thing is, I know most men don’t want to feel badly that they are mostly attracted to women that are young, thin, pretty, trendy….but they are most often. Is it a function of the world we live in, received information? Probably. So should they choose the pickle like some affirmative action reaction? Maybe. Maybe they should.

And maybe, as my brother said to me this morning, I should think about how I have already determined that I am, always will be, seen as the pickle.

Of course, absolutely, this is affected by my psychology. I cannot, who knows maybe will not, eliminate that possibility, probability. I am placing myself, albeit in what may appear to be the whiniest of ways, on the front line, the barrel line, the fucking pickle (picket) line.

The thing is, that day I described, LJ was not burning. She was pretty damned quiet. But as you well know, gives off something bright. As do I—very much so.

What we, me and good ole LJ (I miss you terribly JD) are trying to do here is to reveal ourselves; in my angry, whiny, or loquacious way, I am offering a window into what I, and possibly many women, want, think, and feel. What I am hoping is that we will all disclose as well as theorize and contemplate. You know, the old writerly bit: show don't tell.

I dunno, sometimes I am so screwed up, so damaged, that I want to be the fucking plate!

So, here’s the thing…we were remiss in not figuring out the best way to respond sooner. So, be personal. Tell me what you want, what frightens you, point fingers or chew them off. Be naked.

Naked Conversations

2010-01-31T13:57:00.002-06:00

**Naked Conversations labels those posts addressed directly to the comments we receive on this blog. If we can manage a more effective way of responding to comments in the future we'll let you know. (Suggestions on format always welcome.)

rdemay raises an important question by asking what we want from our readers, and makes an important point by noting the lack of dialogue. We do want a back and forth conversation with our readers, and I haven’t been holding up my end of that bargain. So I want to speak to questions of kindness alongside questions of objectification under the broader umbrella of, as CB says, what it means to be a woman, as a way of opening that door.

The question of kindness seems to me very germane to the discussion of objectification, perhaps because it seems to me a counter to objectification. I’m reminded from a story by David Foster Wallace in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, where a young man recounts the story of an even younger woman who was raped and almost murdered, but was able to reach the psychopath who intended to kill her with a sort of boundless love. The man recounting the tale is one of the hideous sort, and he had planned to use the woman for sex and move on quickly, but he was dissuaded by her tale. He said he had fallen in love with her. What, I wonder, is the relationship between love as elaborated in this story and kindness as I’ve invoked it? Or, even more to the point, as SJ has invoked it: a kindness beyond the language of ownership and law of property. An ethical kindness. Isn’t ethical kindness at least coincident with, if not identical to, this kind of boundless love?

And what has all of this to do with objectification, you might ask? Well, I’m wondering if the only counter to the kind of objectification that hurts—and I’m not sure that all kinds hurt—is love, an ethical kindness, for from that position you remain a subject. This was, of course, not possible for the young woman I mentioned—she was in no position to situate herself as subject or otherwise. But it is, of course, possible for me as I ride the bus, go to coffee shops, go to work, spend time with friends. The real fear for me when it comes to objectification is that I might want it, might want to debase myself that way. I’m less afraid of being objectified by others than I am of objectifying myself. And the assumption of my role as an ethically kind subject is the best medicine I can find for what ails me.

Now, for being a woman. This tendency toward self-debasement seems to me a bit more common on the female side, though I could be wrong. (Am I wrong?) I’m more concerned about this tendency than I am about how femininity is perceived. This is what I think I’m angry about when I’m angry about being a woman. I’m not worried that the world won’t let me have a life of my own. I’m worried that I’ll never consider myself worthy of going after one. Yikes. Not something I like to have to say about myself, but there it is. My biggest concern as a feminist is how we women have taken into our bodies and ourselves the language of gender oppression, and what we can do to think outside that language. What we can do to be beyond the language of ownership and the law of property.

What we can do, I suppose, is to have these conversations as openly and honestly as they seem to be happening in the comments. We’ve agreed to be intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually naked, and that’s all we ask in return. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

Wanna Grow Up to Be, Be a Debaser?

2010-01-31T09:40:00.001-06:00

When I was fifteen years old, I spent the summer with some cousins on a lake near Orofino, Idaho. The lake was clean and warm, the sand hot and white. I loved the sultry summer days, the feeling of the sun on my Midwestern skin. I loved spending time with my older cousin, Nikki, who was both significantly less bookish and more worldly than I. One night, Nikki and I went into Orofino, where we were invited to a party. I was excited—Nikki taught me how to dress, wear makeup, hold myself. She loaned me some clothes. I looked like what I was to about to become, a slightly older version of Lolita. At the party, I overheard something fairly disconcerting. Not entirely accurate to say I overheard: the news was broadcast. A young woman, a girl, I suppose, was drunk and giving blow-jobs for beer in the back room. I never forgot this moment.

What does it mean to be just an object? What does it mean to be not fully human? There’s little question that the girl in the back room was being treated as an object rather than a subject, but clear-cut cases like that are the exception, however dishearteningly frequent an exception they may be. The trickier situations involve our day to day interactions with people we don’t yet know, or don’t know well, or perhaps know altogether too well. They involve the complicated realm where the other person is both subject and object. I’ve been frustrated, in the past, by the men who would ask me out without knowing the first thing about me, beyond how I look. Men I met on buses, in coffee shops, in bars. But I’ve also had to admit to the unfairness of this frustration: you can tell a great deal about me based on how I dress, the bright pink color I’ve dyed my hair, how I carry myself, the books I’m constantly reading on the bus. But more than this, I have to admit to being “guilty” of the same behavior: I’ve asked out men I don’t know before, and I imagine I’d do it again if the spirit moved me. Does this mean I think of them as sex objects? I’m pretty sure I don’t.

There’s a rather loathsome old saying which pretty much sums up the problem: “The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.” This, I think, is insulting to everyone involved. This is why my frustration troubles me: it marks a potential failure to treat myself and other people with respect. I’m not saying that other people are always deserving of my respect—the man who spends the entire conversation staring at my tits has forfeited his right to my respect. Likewise the man on the bus who persists in trying to engage me in conversation after I’ve made it clear I prefer to be left alone. But, again, irritating as they are, these are the exceptions. The fact that they’re exceptions certainly doesn’t render them less worthy of attention—we always have the right to demand that we be treated with dignity and respect. But my concern here is that the exceptions not color the rest of our experiences, not keep us from recognizing the possibility for real, meaningful interactions between human beings.

This is, I think, an important conversation to have—how do we treat one another? How do we want to be treated? What are the pitfalls of interactions between men and women? Gender (and the specter of sex) certainly complicates these interactions, rendering them fraught in a unique way. Again, these questions aren’t rhetorical: I really do want to know what people think about this. How do we navigate our anxieties about being treated as objects, about treating others as objects? The object is the means to an end, something to use to reach gratification. The girl in the back room basically became, for the men who used her—and men were moving in and out of that space with some regularity—just a collection of body parts. A mouth for sucking cock, hair to hold while guiding her head back and forth until they reached their climax, cum shot, I imagine, down her throat or on her face.

I think about this girl. I worry about her, because I’ve known her. Hell, I’ve been her. Maybe nothing quite so public, but intentional black-out drinking leading to sex with strangers is pretty much in the same camp. Why would I want to be treated this way? Honestly, I don’t know. But I’m not getting any closer to an answer by staying silent. None of us are.

I, Object

2010-01-30T15:55:00.004-06:00

I was an object: a thing.

I first learned this in the 60s when the words “sex object” seemed to float through the consciousness and media. I didn’t understand it exactly: I thought it was good to be thought desirable, sexy. It took me a while to see that to be treated like a possession, a curio, an inanimate object whose only value was the ability to arouse sexual sensation or pleasure in others, was dehumanizing. I didn’t know then that half the world probably did not concern themselves with my thoughts, feelings, or needs. I was only a teenager.

I married very young (still a teenager) mostly to get away from my mother and everything about my family that I abhorred. My mother understood my behavior, as she appears to have done the same herself, and told me that running away (I had done some of that as well before the impending wedding) was not going to change anything. She said, “Just remember, the last bag you pack has you in it.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought she was referring to me as an object, like an article of clothing. Now I get that she wasn’t saying that at all, but it is interesting that in some way she was unconsciously telling me exactly that.

I became a woman, but I was not a sex object. I had never been the girl that men wanted. I was the girl that men were scared of. I was direct, I was competitive with them, and I could get really angry when aroused. I was an alien, very different, thorny kind of object. This kind of objectivity was harder to talk about. I was supposed to be glad that men did not treat me as merely a body, but I was not treated at all. I was made invisible.

As an older woman I am visible, but not seen. Now I am a talking, laughing, engaging but useless thing. Men will talk to me; they will acknowledge my physical presence, but not me as person. Most often they engage with me because they must. They have to go through me to get to what it is they want.

Today LJ and I attended an orientation for a course that we are going facilitate. It is for an experimental college. We were required to go to this event. What followed was apparently well meaning, but juvenile and a colossal waste of time. Well, not for all attendees.

A young (and I mean young -- the guy looked to be all of twenty) man approached LJ and I as we prepared to leave at the end of the meeting. His first query was about our “relationship”. I took this to mean he wanted to know if I was her lover. I assured him we were friends, knowing full well that he was only interested in making contact with LJ. I talked my sincere head off. I asked him kind and probingly interested questions about his course, we talked about the trajectory of our studies, and on and on.

Upshot: he only wanted LJ’s phone number. I felt like I was an appetizer that came free with the meal but is completely ignored. True, he did not ignore me, if anything we talked quite a bit: mostly as I am trying to not be cynical toward men.

As nice and polite as he was being, I was not part of the main course. I felt like the pickle that is offered on the side with your sandwich that is never eaten, but thrown away.

I am not the goddamn pickle. And it isn’t just young men who behave this way. So now, I am not an object, I am not a thing, I am not threatening, and I am not scary. I am without any value at all. I cannot decide what is worse: to be invisible, or to be completely and utterly valueless.

Scrape

2010-01-19T19:38:00.000-06:00

I ripped my knee open on a 8th grade class field trip to Fargo to watch a film for health class. I don’t remember which film we were in town to see. But I do remember slipping in the parking lot, the realization that I was about to hit the ground, and the last minute thrust of hands and arms out front to catch the impact. I remember the small rocks embedded in my palms, and the four deep swaths of asphalt caught in the knee that took the pavement at a sharp angle. I remember the sharp thrill of the pain and the gradual nausea of the shame. I remember becoming the unintended center of attention at precisely the moment I most wanted to fade quietly into the background, camouflaged and ready to defend my position by any means necessary.

I still have four faint lines under the skin of my left knee from the asphalt, but the emotional scars from that period of my life are certainly more profound. More profound than I like to consider, it would seem.

I’ve spent the last couple days in a space of un-reality, a space I visit from time to time. There’s not much here, to be honest. There’s an easy, sensual feeling, something summery and voyeuristic. It’s like a small room in a small cabin as the sun is setting. There’s a sultry, close atmosphere, and a wooden chair facing the window. Outside something is happening to a woman who looks strangely familiar. I watch and watch and watch.

I go to this space when the feelings get too intense, as they altogether too often do. When I can’t quite make it to the space, when a rainstorm has washed away the gravel road leading to that small cabin, I stage a storm of my own. I obliterate myself. And I wake to a world ravished and in desperate need of rebuilding. I get to work, forgetting all about the eerie feeling of the calm before the storm.

The refusal of pain, the attempt to construct the self as totally invulnerable, is an act. It is a deliberate expression of a particular self in a particular world; it is a staging, the playing of a part. I’ve written a play of the past, one where I was liberated rather than afraid, where I was determined rather than confused, one in which the desire of the other was always more my desire than theirs.

When, in reality: I’m twenty years old. It’s summer, and I’m living off campus and dating a frat boy. I’m confused, I’m unhappy, I’m drinking too much and smoking too much pot. I’m at a party at the frat house, drunk enough to take the edge off the feeling of anxiety that lives at the edges of my existence. I’m flirting with every man in range, but the flirtation is fueled by anger, rage, rather than attraction. I’m furious that I’m a woman, furious that I’m the object of male desire, furious that I can’t find a way to rearrange the space in which I live, to gain some purchase for a life of my own. I’m furious that I want them to like me, to tell me that I’m valuable.

The night wears on. I drink more, flirt with a friend of my then-boyfriend, and find myself, half-dazed, in a dark room with this boy. I remember nothing until I come to with him on top of me and inside of me, fucking me. I try to figure out where I am and what has happened. Was I passed out? Did I black out? I’ve got no sense of what’s led to this moment, and I begin to shake my head: no, no, no. I say it out loud, but he’s almost finished. And then he’s finished. My then-boyfriend finds out. He’s devastated, but I don’t care. I don’t care about anything at all.

One day you fall. You skin your knee. You should have it cleaned out, but you’re so humiliated by your own clumsiness that you pretend it hasn’t happened. You limp on, through the pain, while the dirt remains somewhere inside. You heal, but the traces remain, traced in the very body, just underneath the skin.

Exposed, In Danger, At Risk...or Vulnerable?

2010-01-18T15:52:00.002-06:00

LJ and G and I were talking about vulnerability; how did feeling or being vulnerable inform our beliefs about ourselves and our ability to be autonomous in the world. I was trying to describe my first memory of being vulnerable because I was female.

It was 1963 and I was twelve. I walked to and from school every day along a series of sidewalks that were a straight shot to my apartment building. The lengths of sidewalk ended at my building in a dead end.

It was fall; the neighborhood was park-like with many large old oak and maple trees lining the sidewalks. The leaves had been falling, but there were still many golden and red ones on the branches high over my head; they made a muted scratching sound in the light breeze. It was misty that day; a fog had settled down as I walked home. It wasn’t too thick, just foggy enough to be wonderful to a near adolescent romantic.

I was very happy that day. This was not a usual occurrence for me. I was not popular in school, but seen as a sort of freak. I was teased and laughed at for appearing to be unsophisticated, and indeed I was. I did not know much about how to navigate the world. Since this was a fairly small neighborhood elementary school, my reputation followed me to the sixth grade. One of the things that was known about me was that I did not know how to tie my sneakers in the third grade without making two separate loops and crossing them together. I was not very coordinated and was picked last, if at all, for any sports. I made friends with the other weirdoes, and that was the absolute clincher. So, being happy that day was not in direct relation to anything that happened that day in school.

It was the sweater.

All the girls in my class that fall were wearing mohair sweaters. The sweaters had a large round neck and three quarter sleeves; one wore a turtle neck underneath. This was the costume, along with a short pencil skirt (mine not as short as they were allowed; all of them could wear anything shorter than I, which also contributed to my freak status) white crew socks twirled so that the ribbing made a vortex design around each sock, and black ankle boots. I was not thin as a child, or ever, except for the years as a speed freak, so a pencil skirt was not very becoming for me. I also had bigger breasts than my peers (more freakishness) at that time, and my mother, along with rejecting any of my stabs at being like the others, disallowed a bra with the declaration that I was too young. Big ass, bouncing breasts…freak.

I don’t know how or why it happened, but that previous evening my mother presented me with a Kelly green mohair sweater, just like the ones the other girls had. I was beside myself. It did not matter that my skirt made me look fat, or that I didn’t have the boots, but dirty white sneakers. I had the sweater and a turtleneck and I pulled it on that morning with pride.

The day went well in school. I was complimented on my sweater and almost treated like a peer. I had to stay late that day for some infraction, but I don’t remember what it was. I didn’t care, it had been a day made distinctive by finally fitting in.

I walked home alone. There was not much traffic in that neighborhood most times and no one was out walking that day. The day was hushed and misty, like something out of Jane Eyre. I was so happy to have the walk to myself, no teasing boys remarking on my body. I hugged my books to my chest and closed my eyes tilting my face to the sky catching the slight water droplets there.

As I brought my face down and opened my eyes I saw him. A man was two sidewalks ahead of me walking toward me. He walked with his hands in his pockets, had what seemed like some type of bomber jacket on, and a pompadour hairstyle. I was staring and I realized it, so I quickly lowered my eyes. I didn’t think he saw me but I didn’t want to be rude. I raised my head and noticed that now he was walking away from me; in the same direction, along the same path, but now in the opposite direction. He was also continuously looking over his shoulder at me. I saw his profile and I knew he was gauging my progress, keeping track of me.

I knew I was in trouble. I continued to walk. I looked around; not a car, bicycle or person walking. Now the mist made me chilled even though I was sweating, my lovely mohair sweater had become a horror of itching, and my breasts seemed to jump out from my body larger than ever. I no longer felt happy, or pretty, or free.

I kept watching as he kept watching. Finally, I neared the block of my building and the dead end. He was standing with his back to me on the corner. He knew I had to come to him now. There was a ramp to the basement on my left and I could catch the elevator there—maybe. My mother told me all the time, never go in that basement, always come to the front of the building. Don’t go in the basement.

I ran for the basement as fast as I could. I rang for the elevator and threw myself into it as the doors began to close and his hands tried to reach to stop them. I saw his dirty fingernails as the doors closed.

I never told anyone because nothing really happened. I took off the Kelly green mohair sweater, rolled it into a ball and stuffed it into the back of my closet on the floor. I never wore it again, and oddly my mother never asked about it.

A month later Kennedy was killed, the world was not the same place even for the adults, and I made a new friend. She was also a freak, but she didn’t care, and I felt saved.

A year later I was raped by her brother’s best friend.

I don’t know how to be vulnerable in the way most of the women I know talk about. I don’t think they do either. All of our experiences are not the same; some of us were violated emotionally, some physically, most of us endured a combination of many incidents of infringement on our selves, our private spaces.

I don’t know. I just know that despite all I have learned about myself and living, I still see men as I did in my earliest experiences. I would like to bring down the wall, but being vulnerable means I can be hurt. I don’t mean hurt like I will cry I mean hurt like I will be damaged. The thing is: I already am.

Do Not Go Gentle, or, Have You Ever Really Seen a Woman?

2010-01-11T16:45:00.001-06:00

For my mother, it’s kindness. For my father, it’s you-can-do-anything. For me, it’s a rock and a hard place, this question of gender in the 21st century. I missed something in the conversation I recently had with them about what their hopes for me and my sisters are and had been. Or, rather, I thought I could bridge the gulf between these two positions. Turns out I got tired of being walked over.

What does it mean to live like a man, if you just happen (?) to be (?) a woman? I want to live the life my father hoped for me, but I don’t want to forget about my mother’s concern. Maybe what I really want is the chance to find a term we both can live with. I want to be ethical, rather than kind. I want to finish the damn PhD, write the best books I can, teach the best classes I can, make a living, and a life. But I also want companionship and conversation. I want good sex. I want excitement and possibility. I want not just a life, but one bursting at the seams. Is this something I can have as a woman?

I don’t pretend to know what it means to be a woman, really. I’ve no fucking idea. But I do know that the goals my parents set for me, if not carefully parsed, appear to be in tension. It’s not kind, precisely, to put your work ahead of the needs of those you love. Not kind, precisely, to be jealous of your time and space. But it is, perhaps, ethical, insofar as an ethical decision is one you make because you must.

The question then, as I see it, is whether the decision to live ethically, and to do-anything, is a tenable decision in today’s world. Fact is, we’re not collectively as far away as I wish from the notion that the unwed mother, the sexually active yet uncontrolled woman, is the height of abjection. We may have forgiven the bastard child her impossible sins, but the mother is another story.

And what a story she is. Wed or unwed, mothers terrify us. As women, they terrify us with their demands—for connection, for comfort, for kindness—but more than that, with the demand that we remain theirs. Mothers have a certain under-acknowledged power, and for that we hate them. We are inextricably caught between the kindness of our mothers and the law of our fathers, and the net is that much tighter if you happen to be a woman.

I’m not saying that all mothers are kind. But the system begins to break down when they’re not. Some crack opens up in the space we occupy, and we find that we’ve learned something all too terrible all too soon. You can catch a glimpse of this via other paths, but the journey will shape you differently. My mother was kind, and my approach is perhaps a bit gentler as a result. But I’m not sure gentle is what’s needed here.

I’ve been trying to live, at least in part, like a man. I’ve been trying to carve out space in the world for myself and my life. I don’t know that this is actually what living like a man means, but right now that’s what it means to me. I remember well the scene in Hemmingway’s unfinished novel, The Garden of Eden, where Catherine tells a family friend that she’s spent the morning walking through a museum as a man. An Indian Chief, to be specific, if also to participate in something a bit politically retrograde. Catherine wanted a bit of freedom from gender, for which I admire her. Too bad Hemmingway soon after showed her going off her nut.

The imperative for kindness is something I sometimes resent, sometimes value, and always very much want to understand. Is this a female thing? If not, how does it play on the other side of the gender divide? Do we even know what we mean by kindness? Is it in tension with self-determination? These questions are neither rhetorical nor facetious. I just really wish I knew.

Birthing the Bastard Nation

2010-01-09T15:49:00.005-06:00

My granddaughter was born this week. All of the energy of the last nine months was released in her birth. Now all the questions of her gender, how her arrival would play out, and how everyone would respond have been answered.

There is a new flurry of emotion and activity around her entrance. For me it involves more contact than usual with family, my ex-husband, and friends. There are more phone calls daily, and emails asking for photos nearly immediately after she was born. (To me this is an acknowledgement of the ever increasing belief that information of any kind needs to be transmitted as it happens, as though we are all reporters embedded in the outlying foreign regions of our daily lives recounting the struggles of living: “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat”) They ask for my explanations and recounting of the details of her birth, her looks, her parents, and the plans for visits.

For me it also involves thoughts of the invisible child. The one no one would call about, ask for photos of (none were ever going to be available) or ask to hear about the details of her birth.

I had a child when I was sixteen in 1969. She was illegitimate. I was not allowed to admit her existence. My granddaughter was born on January 5th; my first child, a daughter, was born on January 7th forty-one years ago. The pressure of the dates, gender, and family fill my mind with reflections on relationships and guilt, freedom and repression, women and society.

In American culture at that time, or in any time in any place in the history (or lack of history) of women’s lives, this was the shame and ruin of a good girl/woman. Once a girl/woman was in this predicament she was no longer good, but the effort that went into hiding, denying, even ending, the child’s existence, and the success or failure of this effort, could redeem her, creating a new type of good woman, the one who was silently repentant, and so was redeemed: a woman who was humbled; she had learned her place and the length of her tether. Without this silence and surrender she would remain a whore with a bastard child, enduring the scourge that comes with lack of obedience to the world as shaped by the beliefs of men.

We of the unwed mother world of the pre-talk show discussions of baby daddies, famous couples with children and no license of marriage, and single women choosing motherhood without a partner, are ghosts. Unless of course, we are among the women who have the joyful, tearful reunions also viewed on national television. Today these mothers and bastards are heralded with a kind of warmth that supposedly reaches all of us and speaks to the importance of love and family connection.

What happened to these women inside as they were forced to give up these children is not so uplifting. Where were the cameras then? What would these people who are the understanding, supportive millions who make this televised redemption a kind of gladiator event, a kind of resurrection after the crucifixion, have thought in my day? Nothing kind. I can assure you.

I want to open the conversation to include these thoughts on wayward or wanton women. Was it different for the men who fathered these children? I never heard men called unwed fathers with derision. The man/boy who fathered my first child was not held up to public scrutiny; if anything it seemed to verify his virility and attractiveness.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Richard Wagner, August Strindberg, Confucius, Eva Peron, Edith Piaf, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe were all bastards. Perhaps this marked them for a less ordinary life; but what about the women who birthed them, they were most likely ordinary women in an untenable situation. How extraordinary to be asked, directed, to surrender a child for the comfort of the society that has no time for you even before your transgression. For if these women were considered valuable to society perhaps their progeny, conceived on the other side of the sheets, would not be so vilified, consequently pulling the mother and child bond to pieces. On the other hand, if women matter not, then why the need to monitor their sexual behavior at all. So what if these wanton, boundless women brought children into the world without marriage, without a man?

If society in America appears more tolerant of bastards and the women who bring them into the world, it may be temporary. If this appears to be accepted now, it does not seem to me it is due to women being valued more as free individuals. In the right circumstances this could all change back.

This is not an essay. I am not postulating an answer. These posts are merely prompts to help us discuss, question, and comment. It is to continue the conversation of a woman’s worth. Ask the questions, struggle for answers. Our lives may depend on it.

Talk amongst yourselves.

(What) To Do (?)

2010-01-06T09:39:00.000-06:00

One of my ex-boyfriends puts together, each year, a list of lists—the end of year list as commentary on the art of listing. I suppose the idea is that these lists can tell us something about who we were, who we are, or who we want to be. To be honest, like LLL, I’m not one for these yearly recountings and remembrances of things past, but I’ve got to admit to a peculiar fondness for the forward-looking list, particularly the infamous to-do list. This is not because I believe in progress: I believe in the notion of looking forward just about as much as I believe in the notion of looking back. But, as someone I know and love used to remind me, that won’t stop those looks (which here generate some semblance of linear time) from believing in me.

When I was home for the holidays, I had a conversation with my youngest sister about her intense desire to become a mother, and right quick. As someone who has never wanted to be a mother, this desire is both fascinating and puzzling to me. So I asked her: why do you want this so badly right now? What she told me surprised me. She said she’d accomplished what she wanted to accomplish in the current phase of her life, and she is ready to move on to the next stage. This surprised me because I don’t think life this way: in stages. I think it as something more akin to an endless circling and repetition, with an intense occupation of the moment that I’m in. This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in change. It just means I also believe in some kind of constancy—something shining and eternal. Maybe it means I believe in love.

The conversation with my sister reminded me of why I believe so thoroughly in conversation, in the need to really engage with one another, ask each other difficult questions, care so profoundly about the answers. The moments that we occupy, at whatever degree of intensity, are certainly informed by what we learn about ourselves, and one another, through these conversations. So it proves possible to believe in fully inhabiting the present all the while still believing in change, agreeing with Emerson’s contention that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

We grow, we change, and yet, in each moment, we deeply and abidingly are. The question for this blog, I suppose, is: how can we employ conversation to grow and change in more meaningful and honest ways? And, perhaps more specifically: how can we, how must we, address gender as part of this growth and change? Which brings me back to my sister. I am in no way critical of her desire to be a mother. I believe she’ll be a kind and generous parent, and learn much about herself along the way. But I do wonder why the best we can do, in so many of our conversations, is to invoke conventional notions of what it means to proceed through life: stage one, stage two, stage three, and on and on unto the final stage, the one we must not discuss at all, conventionally or otherwise. Add minor variations for gender, race, and mix well. Instant recipe for life. Just add eggs. I don’t believe my sister gave me the whole answer when she told me she was ready for the next stage. Her desire is too deep, her need too pronounced, for this to be all.

I’ll keep talking with my sister about this, because I love her and I really want to know her better. I’ll keep talking with her because, through our conversations, hopefully we’ll both learn something about ourselves, about our relationship, about our world. I’ll keep talking with her because I want each instant of my life to be full of possibility, and conversations are the only way I know to create such possibility. I suppose this is what I love about the to-do-list: the possibility that I may, still, be becoming the person I want to be. That there is hope. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, the next day. The to-do-list is the conversation you have with yourself about your hopes and your fears. It’s a space for bearing the soul. So, as the new year begins to unwind, I think about my list. To do: keep talking, keep listening, keep hoping.

Holla Back?

2010-01-04T12:58:00.005-06:00

I am not much interested in end of decade lists. The best film, book, science project, these I find boring and somehow too entrenched in the commercial culture to be interesting. Scanning them as they popped up in periodicals and blogs weeks before the end of 2009 my mind wandered and I gave over to reverie.

When I was young I daydreamed what the world would be like at the turn of the century. I knew that I would be alarmingly old by the year 2000 (48, which in itself staggered my imagination) but I knew that I would live to see a brand new world.

Okay, maybe I was a silly child, but I thought by this time we would have developed cities with the kinds of infrastructure that made life wonderful. The buildings would allow for sunlight, warmth, community, safety, and beauty. The old artfully created buildings would be kept up well and cared for so that new could live along with old peacefully and respectfully. I told you I was most likely a silly child.

I thought our methods of travel would be faster, cleaner, plentiful. I thought that mass transit would be the wave of the future as vehicles plodding along with one occupant could not nearly keep up with trackless, incredibly fast trains (yes, I got this idea from a film). There would even be space travel and space cities. Most of all there would be harmony. I thought that the people of Earth were going to advance so much that the need for war would no longer exist. We would live longer and better through amazing advances in medicine and we would appreciate life around us.

Today, of course we know that the one thing that has really shown a startling advance in the 21st century is communications. I don’t even have to enumerate the changes here. Maybe I am a silly adult, but I think with all the advancements we might be using them better. I am impressed with how much networking tools are used to connect people with struggles going on around the world. In Iran, we can see the news that is not allowed to be transmitted. In Myanmar we heard and saw the reality of the resistance. This I believe is important. For the most part though it appears that most of these tools are being used for not very interesting communications. Facebook sells us many things: one another, friendship (makes us friends or not) starts or ends careers, and sometimes lives.

I do not participate in these social networking systems. I did not care to be part of the Myspace community (and it appears not many do anymore) or Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all the new ones that I cannot keep up with. The thing is I am not sure that these tools are creating any deeper, richer, or more meaningful connections than before. However, the blog idea appealed to me because it can provide some of what I have been searching for now for some time.

What I have been looking for is the kind of discussion (sometimes outright heated arguments that included violence to cups, saucers, tables and astoundingly books(unfortunately thrown across rooms in the passion of the debate)) that I once overheard and later participated in in cafes, and coffee shops.

Obviously, not all blogs are alike, and we don’t care for or find interest in all or many of them. But they do create discussion, and I do get to see part of life that I otherwise might not. I can interact and comment and discuss. This is important for me, especially in this new century. I want to know how we are all doing, and of course for me, I want to know how the women are doing.

What is the point of this post? Not to discuss the current culture exactly, but to help me locate (there I go again) myself at 57 in this not so brave new world.

So this is a call to comment to connect, perhaps to write, here. You need to want to be naked, despite how scary that may be. This is the other compelling benefit of this new world. We can be as anonymous as we need to be and still be part of the conversation.

Homecoming (for my mother)

2009-12-29T17:49:00.001-06:00

I realized a couple things over the week I spent at my parents’ home during the holidays. First, my parents are surprisingly kind and emotionally generous people who take me precisely as I am. Or, at least, they sure try. Second, it’s possible that I really need not to be taken precisely as I am. At least not all the time; not in a totalizing way. Now, I’m not suggesting that I want my parents to squeeze me into the mold of their choosing, that they should chisel away at me until I fit their notion of who I ought to be. Far from it. But I am really wondering about what it means to live altogether too unchallenged, untested.

While I was home, S wrote to me, and his words have been on my mind for days, particularly because they tapped so clearly into the conversation I was having with my mother all week. S wrote that he is uncomfortable with the demand we make when we speak, that he wishes to be unassuming. My mother wishes to be unassuming as well, though my father and I certainly don’t. This leads to conflict between the two of us at times, though nothing that we can’t work through, usually with the help of my mother.

I’m lucky to have, in my family, the kinds of relationships that enable reflection, growth, and love. But I’m wondering—not at all sure, just wondering—whether those relationships are possible only because of my mother’s refusal to assume. Family relationships are strange relationships: you don’t choose these people. They are chosen for you. And then you live with them for years, under their roof and their rules. Absent the gentleness, the kindness of the unassuming parent, do the conditions for real conversations, for real relationships, even exist?

My father always says that “when LJ is doing well, she can do anything. When she’s not, she will do anything.” He wants me to be successful, accomplished, fully engaged and living to my full capacity. And he wants me to straighten-up-and-fly-right. My mother values success and accomplishment, but she values kindness more. She wants most of all for my sisters and me to be kind people. She’ll love me, whoever I am, but she wants this in me, for me. This may be the gift of the unassuming parent—to remind those of us who must assume that we need to take it seriously.

I believe that, in many ways, we only become thinking people, we only become full subjects, in relationships. I have relationships with the authors I read, the film-makers I watch, the poets, the playwrights. I have relationships with my friends. And I have relationships with my family. These relationships I see, I feel. But my mother, from her position of non-assumption, reminds me that being in the world means constantly being in relation to all of its other inhabitants. She reminds me that I should only make demands in the knowledge of those relationships.

Absent the influence of my mother, I don’t know that I would have surrounded myself with people who remind me of that. I may have been callous, or even cruel. I am sometimes: callous and cruel. But because I am in constant conversation with the unassuming, I do try not to be. My mother can feel the rightness of the kind act, the embrace. I have to take the rightness of kindness on faith. I have to choose to believe. I don’t know that I would have chosen, would continue to choose, absent her example.

When I see my parents, I know the experience of nostalgia, the longing for home. I feel that longing, even while I’m being welcomed into their arms, accepted, embraced. I can tell them this, so I do. Upon reflection, I’ve decided that I do need to be taken precisely as I am. But I also need to remember the position of the unassuming, that position so beautifully inhabited by my mother. Maybe over time I’ll learn to carry home, and my mother’s example, with me. Even then I’ll need to go back to my family, time and again, to remember who I want to be.

To Grandmother's House We Go?

2009-12-28T15:22:00.005-06:00

Until very recently I was excited about becoming a grandmother.

I had no idea why. I didn’t consider it; I just thought it would be a meaningful experience. For all of my sense of myself as a woman, and critical thinker, I assimilated this received information without a thought. Somehow in my mind being a grandmother seemed a warm and wonderful next step in my life as a woman and mother, sharing love, sharing ideas and experiences with a younger person, a child, and as I write this, I realize a kind of immortality. There must be something about watching a child of our child take a first step or say a first word that hurtles us back in time, our own lives flashing before us as we hold out hands for balance. I think this last bit is why people go crazy for grandchildren.

When my son’s wife did become pregnant I voiced my excitement. I looked at baby clothes online, and thought about how cute the clothes were. I also thought about how I couldn’t stand how most parents these days expected the populace at large to care for and about their less than well behaved children. Sometimes I didn’t like kids, and sometimes I didn’t think of them at all. I would hear people talk about the suffering of little children in war-torn and impoverished countries and I would think of children then. Otherwise, I was not aware of their existence except as poorly behaved small people. Cute clothes and creepy parents and children: a conflict.

As my son’s wife’s pregnancy continued my relationship to her became muddied. My expressions of what I thought were excitement and support irritated her to the point that she sent me a really sharp, unkind email. Suddenly I took a look at myself. Why the hell was I so involved in this idea of a grandchild? I decided to see what other feminists had to say on the subject.

There is little to nothing to say it seems. It is a barren plain marked only by silence or worse the cloying sentimentality of women afraid to be alone, afraid to age.

I saw enormous amounts of posts and writings with declaimers. They were insuring the reader that they were not man-hating feminists, or whining women, or lesbians, or non make-up wearing fat unfashionable women. Reading this material was exhausting. It made me realize that today, as in my time, for too many women feminist is the F Word. Still. I cannot understand how we have arrived here, and yet in my discussions with LJ and others, it appears that for most women the feeling is that women have gotten what they needed and there is no valid reason for feminism today. This is referring to feminism outside the academy.

For the woman who is not interested or invested in reading and discussing feminist theory, there appears to be no place that it fits into their lives. The feeling is that we are getting equal pay for equal work (no) we are able to construct lives outside the need to please men whether in looks or behavior(no) and we are considered full and equal citizens under the law (no again).

What will it take for women to realize that we are still struggling, world-wide, to be treated as fully realized humans with the right to safety, choice, and freedom?

There is a lot of received information out there to be aware of. I received from what source I know not, that being a grandmother was a rite of passage that I must long for and love. As I have most times had the best relationship with my son and his wife, I thought that a child would make it more: meaningful, loving, connected…

The women who have written about being grandmothers (I have searched and searched for alternative thoughts on this) all seem to be in love. They write saying that you get to have all the “fun” of having a child without the “mess”. They write that having a grandchild connects you to a bloodline. This scared me seven ways from Sunday and I am still trying to process it. Mostly that statement made me feel like a slave.

It appears from what I have been able to find so far that being a grandparent exonerates feminists who feel that perhaps their zeal to be fully realized people made them bad mothers. Seeing one’s child parenting her/his own child with love and a certain amount of confidence confirms that it all came out right in the end, and no fatal errors have been made.

We don’t have to age alone and unnecessary. This is also what comes across in the readings. We can continue to thrive as we pass on our knowledge to a newer generation--while we are babysitting. No joke, the women I read and one I talked to said that these were the times they really enjoyed with a grandchild: stolen moments when the parental figures could not intervene.
I have spent way too much time in my life hiding myself under the covers to have this feel liberating or like something I get to look forward to. It sounds like what it is: I get to hide who I am one more time.

For relationships to work well they need to be based on something more than heredity and tradition. Not for everyone obviously; but for me at this point in my life, yes. So, I will let the grandchild get to know me and I will get to know the grandchild. I will try not to bring along any of this creepy baggage, and see if despite all of the crap, we can be friends.

I don’t know how I really feel about becoming a grandmother. I can say that I am ambivalent. This is scary to admit to. I fear I am being what people called feminists in my day: a frigid bitch.

Find a Penny, Pick it Up…

2009-12-17T19:39:00.002-06:00

When I was a child, I’d lie awake in bed nights reviewing the lies and half-truths, the misunderstandings of the day, promising myself that unless I could speak honestly, and in a way that could be clearly apprehended, I wouldn’t speak at all. The next morning, I’d try desperately hard not to speak unless it was both necessary and true, but I’d fail almost immediately. Even as a child, I was a talker. Still am. If to speak is to lie, I’m in serious trouble.

And often to speak is to lie. Though it seems to me primarily a question of position. Or, as L says: location, location, location. From what position am I speaking; from what positions do I speak? So much seems to be a question of position—not just how we speak, but how we hear and see. Annie Dillard tells of leaving pennies as surprises for passers-by, of drawing an arrow on the sidewalk accompanied by the words “surprise ahead.” Many people, as you may imagine, were not sufficiently surprised by the pennies. But, from the right position, a penny can be a delightful surprise.

I want to be surprised by pennies, but some days, moving as a woman through this world, I’m too busy looking over my shoulder. Or worse, some days I forget to do so, and am reminded by those who care about me, who value my safety, that I must do so. How can one be conscious, alive in the world, as a woman?

A friend of mine told me that he believes it is possible to live in and from a place of love all the time. I want so badly for that to be true. Annie Dillard, after describing the pennies, informs us that only the lover and the scholar can see certain small things—they’re the only ones looking for them. I guess that I want to believe I can look back over my shoulder, be on-the-lookout, and still have my eyes wide open.

When I think of what it means to be naked, fully available to the gaze of the world, I think of openness. On the best days, my heart is wide-open. I can, and will, take so much in. But I find it difficult to live like this all of the time. Perhaps some positions render such things more difficult to accomplish. I can be in love and be a daughter, a sister, a friend, a lover, a student. However, I cannot be in love and be only an object. It isn’t tenable.

As a child, I loved choose-your-own-ending books. As an adult, I begin to know why. Back then, when I didn’t like the directions things were going, I could change course. It was easy—the book had called for me to just that. But people don’t often call for you to change as you need to change. Not, at least, when they need you to be something specific for them. This is the danger of adult relationships. We can forget that the other person is a full person, with her own needs, desires, dreams. We can forget to see her as a subject of the world.

There is no choose-your-own-ending in adult relationships. But there is, however sad it might sometimes be, surprise. Sometimes, when you’re recognized, you’re even offered a penny for your thoughts.

This Is Me: Or, Location, Location, Location

2009-12-14T15:46:00.003-06:00

This morning I was checking posts on my students’ discussion board. One man was exclaiming how self-confidence can be misread as arrogance. He also claimed that self-assurance can tip over into unwarranted and ungrounded confidence on the part of the person confirming her/his abilities. (This is a business writing class, and so all of the posts refer to presenting oneself in business scenarios) In essence he was saying that tooting one’s own horn is the same as claiming excellence in one’s field, and therefore should be omitted in a cover letter, or in an interview.
For some reason this morning I could not make my usual written sounds of, “In business it is often the case that…” Instead, I began to explain how the society we live in creates an atmosphere more conducive to arrogance and greed than humility and moderation, but that representing oneself honestly should not be eschewed because self-confidence is suspect. I began to back up my statement by using popular culture, reality television in particular, to underline why the public feels that most people are not honest about their abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. We expect manipulation of the truth, we know that aggressive self-aggrandizement is the way to win, and winning is as we all know the only important part of any game. Winning in business is a big deal. I was beginning to type fast, the way I do when I am preparing something for this blog: my mind racing, full of thoughts I want to share.

I stopped short. I remembered that I was at work, and that I had to be careful about revealing myself. One would assume, yes recall that moldy old assume joke, that as an instructor I have not only the right, but the obligation to reveal certain aspects of my thoughts about the world we are investigating. Or supposed to be. And there’s the thing, I am not hired to do that. I am hired to instruct on the best methods to write emails, and sundry other office type communications, not to critique the corporate world. But this corporate world is something my students are leery of. With good reason I believe. Yet, I refrain from opening this door with them. My posts are monitored.

Last week I gave away, to LJ, a person whom I find to be a source of fun and comfort and therefore the best candidate for this giving, my last remaining items of favorite clothing that I no longer will ever wear. This, for those of you who are too young to have had this experience, and I am assuming (yes, there’s the old joke again) that you will be, was difficult. It was not difficult to want LJ to have these items; I knew she would appreciate their uniqueness as much as I did; it was difficult to have another ending, to see a part of myself yet again in the past tense. This closing of doors makes me grasp harder at parts of myself that I have held back and begin to shake them loose so that they are visible, no longer held behind.

I remember something I read Rosalyn Russell said in an interview. Her definition of acting was that acting was, “...like being naked onstage and turning around. (long pause) Slowly.”

The reason we decided to be naked on this blog was to find ourselves in life, in time, in history if you will. To position ourselves in the world as if on a Google map of the Earth—there I am, and there, and there.

As I need to wear different hats (and here is my discomfort—do I really need this variety of millinery?) I feel less honest; I become less honest within myself. I suppose that in a society, for the greater good, it is best to comply. How do I maintain my integrity?
I think women are particularly vulnerable in this location. I am a mother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I decide (do I decide—that’s the question here) to compartmentalize some of my life for the sake of the relationships. Yet, it creates a deceitful atmosphere for me, in me. I don’t like it, and feel thoroughly hemmed in by it.

I have nominated anonymity, to try to find the true voice. Is this dishonest? The problem with seeing me in the past tense so often as things change, as I age, as my son has a child of his own, is that I struggle to stay current with my life. I do not want to be Miss Haversham, or any other spinster, waiting for her life and only having life pass rather than move forward. I fear that as I edit parts of my life for the sake of getting by and getting along, I am losing vast parts of consciousness that are imperative.

In order for me to locate myself in this world, on that map, I need to be able to express my true self. I am an excellent: writer, teacher, mother, mentor, and friend. I don’t care if it makes anyone uncomfortable, and yet, I must or I would not edit myself. So I try to live (without stating so in the places where I am vulnerable) as an excellent woman.

If assuming that the world agrees I have the right to say these things makes an ass of you and me—so be it.

No Country for Bold Women

2009-12-12T12:08:00.000-06:00

I’ve been trying to figure out a thing or two about my life. This is hard work, this life thing. Harder still when you want your own life, not the life proscribed by the society we inhabit. I’m back, as ever, to my father and the hard way. Why don’t you want to settle down, have children, buy a house, raise a family? Why must you do everything the hard way? Because I must, that’s why. There is no other way.

But, still. If I don’t want all of that business, all the things my father wishes I would want, what do I want? I’m reminded again of the feminist re-rendering of Freud’s rather problematic question: “What? Do women want?!?” Because I want. I may not know precisely what I want, but I sure as hell know that I want.

And perhaps this is where, as women, we begin. It’s hard to want. Harder still to admit to it—that wanting. I too want my own life. I want the struggle and the pain of figuring out precisely what that means. I want no labels, nothing holding me back. Virginia Woolf famously wrote: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman, I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world!” This, I think, is a wonderful statement. The vagaries of gender have given us this particular gift from the universe, the ability to be a subject of the world. Men can accomplish this as well, but I’ll wager it’s a bit harder. We paid our ticket for world-travel. Most of them have yet to do so.

I wouldn’t trade this purchase on world-subjecthood for all the privilege that comes with being male. Sure, it’s harder to know precisely who I am. I’m stuck taking the hard way. But I get to take that less-traveled path, I get to stumble and struggle and find out who I am. I get to participate in the enormous mystery of this thing we call life.

I agree that if anonymous was, for much of our history, a woman, that’s because there’s some profound power in anonymity. My preferred definition of the term is: a person whose name is not given. Given that I want to coin my own name, not have it determined for me, this anonymity is precisely the thing I need for becoming. I want no country. I want no name. I simply want to live my desire. Is that too much to ask?

In my high-school Spanish class, when we had to choose our Spanish names, I chose Alise, a name incredibly similar to my own. I chose it because, by that time, I came to realize that I had named myself. The Spanish version of the name references nobility, the English version of my name references a promise. These things I choose. I choose them because I desire. Say my name.

We must never forget that these are choices. Surely, they may be choices made in some form of negotiation with a world which doesn’t want women to choose. But if we know ourselves, if we own our names, perhaps we can choose to be subjects of the world. And, then, we can make the world our subject.

It's My Life -- and I'll Do What I Want?

2009-12-10T14:58:00.002-06:00

I have been thinking about anonymity. Not as in twelve step recovery, but as the political idea it was when Virginia Wolff made the point about women’s silence. She saw anonymity as the power women had to relinquish to be able to traverse this world safely. In some cases, anonymity was the only way we could participate.

We don’t need to protect ourselves as much as then. Or do we? As we struggle, you and I LJ, to find our way as writers, as women, to be free to stand on our own and live openly, as we please, we are still aware that we do need to be careful of revealing ourselves, of being naked. Sometimes our thoughts about revelation are for the sake of other’s feelings, but even in considering this, the concern for others, we find ourselves hamstrung; not free.

To have a life of one’s own is what we desire. What is it to be free to live one’s own life? For me, it is to be without that partnership that so many women feel absolutely needed to feel complete.

In my day, “a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle.” But even then, most women were not interested in the irony of the bicycles, but were interested in having a man. It seems no different now. Despite using partner rather than husband or wife, regardless of keeping one’s name, regardless of marrying just for the legalities that make living together easier and affordable, they clamor for the actual marriage. Weddings are again in style; they are again a rite of passage.

I know of women older than me, in their sixties, who lament that there aren’t enough eligible men, or who have learned to be way more technologically savvy than I am so that they can negotiate internet social networking. They mention online dating and chatting sites I have never heard of. But then I am not looking, or wishing or hoping.

It is fine with me; everyone can do what they want. I want to live free to live alone, never to commit, never to compromise. It does sound awfully self-indulgent, I fear. I fear the judgment, but I go on. Some will say that I have made my choice by default; I am a woman not chosen. But I don’t think I have to be alone if I don’t want to. I do want to. I want to live my life my way; so far it has been so wonderful.

I do get lonely. I got lonely when in a relationship. Perhaps I am a natural nostalgic, maybe I am melancholic. Many people have had that feeling, even in happy, growing relationships. Loneliness is not a sin, nor does it last forever. I love my life, and often hate living. It is my human condition. I feel most alive when writing, when sharing thoughts with intelligent, interesting, courageous people.

I fear that if I give my name to this blog, if I am accessible on the web, I will lose my freedom. I don’t want to share my life in that way, but I want to share my written thoughts and ideas.
We have talked about using our faces, putting video of our conversations here. I think in the end we must decide not to. I think this anonymity has given us a type power, a kind of strength in our writing that should be fully investigated, explored and experienced, before we jettison it. It may be that anonymous is not just a woman, but the seat of her power to choose freedom, and the key to a life of one’s own.

Your Sex Life and Mine

2009-12-06T15:33:00.006-06:00

L J is having sex. A lot of sex. With multiple partners. What investment could I possibly have in her sex life?

I am way out of the loop as regards women and their sex lives. I don’t have many women friends who talk openly about it anymore. Once our sex lives, or lack of them, were topics of discussion nearly every time any of us got together. When I was a teenager we worried about orgasms --would we know if we had them? These were the days when women were called frigid if they didn’t respond enough sexually, according to their husbands, and we were really frightened of it—frigidity. We didn’t know that men could be bad in bed.

In my twenties and thirties, talk about sex, what we liked, didn’t like, hadn’t done and wanted to do, was conversation over coffee, while waiting to pick up the kids from nursery school, and of course in consciousness raising groups. We learned to demand satisfaction, to demand good sex.
My friend (the one who is having all the sex) and I talk about sex frequently now that she is doing it so often. Previously, we talked about it only cerebrally, or as part of another longer discussion. But these days we talk about it straight up.

I haven’t had sex in years. This makes me a freak if it comes up in conversation with women; not a freak exactly, but definitely someone to be pitied, and a bit scared of. It could be catching.
The thing is this kind of conversation does not happen much among women anymore. I have asked around, and it seems to be true. I think women are afraid of not fitting in, even in feminist circles. Is there such a thing as the good feminist?

I think we are talking about authenticity. Or at least partly.

One can buy in. For instance, in the 90s people covered themselves with tattoos, perhaps identifying with an ancient or indigenous culture. I have them; I wanted them since I was an adolescent in the early 60s. I was told that only criminals and sailors got tattoos. People will align themselves with cultures (not necessarily ones they were born to) as identifying markers, to create belonging. Witness how many white kids are enveloped in hip-hop culture, taking on the language of black culture, even to the point of tying to assimilate the n-word.

The thing about being genuine is that too often now it is mistaken for standing out, or being an outsider. People like to think of themselves as outsiders, as though there is power in it. Being an outsider carries a kind of cool cache, and this has become the problem, especially if all that is required for membership can be acquired with the flip of a credit card.

Why is “Sex and the City” considered good feminist viewing? Think about it. There is something shallow about what pretends to be alternative (for lack of a better word) culture now. It was of course existent (in ways) as banal and shallow always, but underneath there seemed to be a kernel of authenticity to those who could not (stress could not) fit into normal society. As these zones of authenticity stretched to bring lesbians, gays, the transgendered, into a society already being demanded to acknowledge the rights of the “other” in society we became nations within a nation. This supposedly should have given us immediate entrance into a tribe of belonging, a home in the world; it actually may have given us less to push against and brought us more (welcome or not) into the mainstream.

This is not necessarily a good thing. For women this may be especially problematic. If a woman is not only not asked to the table, but does not continually recognize that there is a table, that there is a place where she is not welcomed or acknowledged, she clings (often without realizing it) to what she has been allowed. She desires Jimmy Choo shoes for her feminist feet, and a smoothly veneered image of a free sex life.

Without the press of the absolute need to be genuine, to inhabit our authenticity, we stop talking about the things that are nearly impossible to talk about because they seem so big and unwieldy, or worse, embarrassing. The things that are easier to discuss like theories and political agendas, and voting, have moved out the original idea of women and politics: the personal is political.

So I am personally invested in LJ’s sex life. It is the power of her personal struggle, and her honesty, that binds me to the tribe I am searching for.

Love the One You’re With, or, The Song is You

2009-12-06T09:53:00.001-06:00

It’s 4:30 in the morning, and I’m suddenly, without warning, thinking obsessively about Woody Allen quoting Groucho Marx on not wanting to belong to any club that would have him as a member. This is a painful thing to be thinking of at 4:30 in the morning.

It brings back, perhaps inevitably, the discussion I had yesterday with L and G about sex. Well, maybe it was really a conversation about sex and love. I’m not really sure. I find it really difficult to identify the latter. I’m bad with love, a beautiful mess with desire.

A friend has said, on numerous occasions, that he sees me as the hysteric par excellance. Until yesterday I think I didn’t really know what he meant. Now that I’m closer to getting his point, I’m not sure how to feel about it. I wrestle, perhaps more than I ought, with my desire—for independence, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, for power and control. I wonder: does this make me a bad woman? Even more to the point, is a bad woman precisely the thing I want to be?

Why so much consternation over the question? Well, it’s a problem of belonging. Where, pray tell, does the bad woman belong? With whom? Does she belong only in and to herself? If so, will she be lonely? I really want to believe that the answer to that question is no. That the bad woman can find other bad women, or men who appreciate bad women, and have a sense of community, of belonging. However, she’ll have to work much harder at it than the good woman. The world doesn’t address itself to the bad woman. After all, to the meek go the Earth. Hell, let ‘em have it. As it stands, I want little to do with the place.

Somerset Maugham said: A woman may be as wicked as she likes, but if she isn’t pretty it won’t do her much good. This brings to mind a conversation I had with L about passing. Because I look the way the world wants me to look, at least for now, I can get away with being the bad woman—up to a point. Because let’s face it, the world at large punishes the bad woman. Most femmes fatale, those breakers of hearts, get their necks broken for their pains. The woman who kills is a monster, a demon; the woman who seeks her own desire a slut. The world is not safe for the bad woman.

I’m happy, and safe, only with those people who get me, who get the desire to reject the role I’ve been assigned. Which brings me back to Woody Allen and Groucho Marx. I need the people in my life desperately, but sometimes I worry, altogether too humanly, that I’m missing out on something out there in the world. That life for the good woman is better, happier. Of course, deep down I know that I can’t have it any other way—I am, at the very core of me, a bad woman, however hard it is to be one. And as one, I’m lucky to have a community of—let’s call ourselves feminists—who love and support me the way I am. I only wish there were more of us. That’s why this conversation, the one we almost never have, is so important.

To be a feminist in today’s world is every bit as difficult as it was at the outset of the movement—it’s just that the tactics used to keep us in check have changed. If we can’t talk about what feminism means today, and what we’re really up against, too many of us will suffer needlessly alone. We owe it to ourselves to be a better community.

The Hard Way

2009-11-30T17:34:00.002-06:00

I’m riding next to my father in his pickup, my dog sitting rather awkwardly on my lap looking happily out the window, when my father reprises one of his most persistent questions: Do you have to do everything the hard way? Of course, I answer this question precisely the same way each time: Yes, I do. But the real answer to his question is much longer, and involves closer contention with the question itself.

What does it mean, exactly, to do things the hard way? To me, doing things the hard way means asking things of myself that I would never ask of anyone else. It means working and living only where my heart is. I do things the hard way because the hard way is the only way. I don’t, any more than anyone else, relish suffering and struggle. But neither am I afraid to struggle or to suffer, if I do so honestly. This lack of fear pains my father, perhaps understandably. He wants life to be gentle to me. I want life to challenge me, to make me work for it.

The funny thing about the conversation with my father is that I came to feel this way about life, in large part, because of him. He has shown me, in thought and in word, that being honest, particularly with yourself, is so terribly important. And being honest, for me, means coming to know myself the way I only can through the clash of life, through facing all of its challenges.

I remember, often, a particular moment with my father. I was young, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. And I was suffering. I have no recollection why, but in the memory of it I can feel the pain deep in my body, the ache of it. My father, seeing my suffering, spoke to it. He asked me to join him on the couch in the rec room, where through the window I could see the sun setting. He put The Moody Blues on the record player, and we sat, silently, listening. This was, he told me, what he did when the fact of life was hurting him.

I’m not a fan of The Moody Blues, but that moment with my father was one of the most significant of my life. He taught me something, something I hope I’ll never forget. He taught me I wasn’t alone. And that knowledge has made me fearless. If I have to do things the hard way, my father has only himself to blame. He taught me that I could.

I value the freedom and independence that fearlessness has bought me almost as much as a value the honesty for which I fearlessly strive. Of course, I’m not always honest. But the only suffering I can’t bear is the suffering that comes of my own dishonesty, especially my dishonesty with myself. That is the suffering that brings no solace, the suffering of despair, the sickness unto death.

I did things the hard way the day, when I was perhaps seventeen years old, when my father wouldn’t let me borrow the car to drive to the nearby town. I, angry, set out on foot, a distance of perhaps fifteen miles. I walked all day long, accepting a ride only once I reached town, and then only to another town a good fifteen miles away. Walking home, bone tired, I watched as the sun began to set. That moment I passed over a culvert, the vibration of my steps awakening the dozens of birds lingering beneath. They flew over me in a magnificent arc, disappearing, finally, into the sky. When I arrived at home, my father was furious. But, I think he was also proud.

Boxless

2009-11-29T13:48:00.005-06:00

Yesterday my father said he was sad that he had two fat kids. My brother is 55 and starves so as not to be fat; I am 57 and a long term weight cycler, currently fat. My father does not see his thinking as needing any new information regarding size-ism.

My mother is uncomfortable with a black man as President. She is not political per se; she is merely a listener of talk radio: long time insomniac as long time listener. I cannot say this habit has created her thinking, but for a chronically anxious person, talk radio (overwhelmingly manned by frightened, reactionary, extreme right-wing conservative men at the microphones) surely creates a fertile breeding ground for ignorance. When I mention this to her she tells me not to try to change her.

My brother also confesses to hating fat people. He uses the word hate, and does not, at least not in our conversations, see how he was/is manipulated, and coerced into that thinking by my father’s oft proclaimed issue with body image and fat.

I do not think like my family, and it ain’t easy.

During my adolescence, like most, I was rebellious, unhappy, and angry. I was awfully lucky to be coming of age during the hellacious times of the 60s. I searched for and found others who thought as I did. And when my thinking differed I was challenged, sometimes harshly or humiliatingly, so that I learned, read, and investigated where my ideas came from, and how they might need revising.

I have continued this pattern all of my life to this point. Often my ideas do not mesh with those who would appear to be as open-minded as I try to be. I don’t care. I cannot afford to care. I value my independence far too much.
This is not the kind of independence most of my friends would talk about. I have not as many friends as I once did, as my sense of personal freedom in my thinking has made relationships uncomfortable for others: I refuse more and more often to be dishonest. In any case, for many women I do know at this time, when the topic of independence comes up it often refers to physical autonomy. I remember many young women friends telling me that I needed to learn to drive. I grew up in NYC and a car seemed ridiculous. They insisted that I would be more independent, and while they had a point, it seemed a basically unimportant one considering the availability of mass transit.

Years later as a young mother on Long Island, my women friends continued the argument for a vehicle. I did learn, hated to drive, and gave up on it. I relied on my then husband, friends, and neighbors for any transportation other than my feet. I got along.

Friends exclaimed constantly that a woman like me should drive, that I could not be independent without it. It seemed that not driving negated the validity of any feminist or otherwise intellectual thoughts I might have. These were the same women who would capitulate time and again to their husbands, fathers, brothers, and their mothers who also were under the thumb of the “way it is” as my mother called it when I was young. The way was that for good or ill, men made the call.

Today, as I continue to strike out for my independence, it is clearly and most importantly the right, the need, to think independently.

Even more importantly, I have the right to change my mind, even moments after stating what I think or believe. I reserve the right, the full self-determining right, to my thinking, and consequently to my writing and speech.

In our society we have protected the right to free speech. Sometimes we cannot say exactly what we want to say in order to give the right of independence to all. It can be confusing, but it is imperative that we all be allowed to think independently. So, when my mother deliberately mispronounces the President’s name, or my father and brother rate people and their value by a BMI score, I celebrate their right to believe what they want.

I celebrate my absolute fortune to have been able to grow up as an independent thinker who reserves the right to have a mind and change it, and to challenge others to do the same.

Between Freedom and Desire: A Conversation

2009-11-25T12:53:00.002-06:00

LJ: There is no model for female desire. Our desire traditionally situates itself in relation to the other. I want you to want me. I need you to need me. What happens if I don't want to be needed? If I want to be wanted in the way I want to be wanted? Our earlier discussion of my desire for non-conventional relationships led me to wonder about the complex nexus of power and desire which informs our choices in with whom, and when, we will be intimate. I said I wanted to control desire, but I realize it's more complicated than that. I also want to be wrecked by desire. My desire. Not the desire of the other. Is what I want now really some masturbatory investment in my own desire? I'll leave it there for a moment to await your response to any, or all, of the above.

LLL: It seems that we want relationships, intimate personal relationships with men, to be more like the relationships we have with women. I have been hearing this, and talking about this, for years and years.

What makes a relationship satisfying (outside of sex)? The amount of time I have spent, do spend, with women friends in discussion, on the phone, via email, and face-to-face is enormous. I rarely feel cheated, or ignored, or like I need to listen more than talk. I cannot believe that I am saying this at the point that it is almost 2010. Can I be exaggerating? It seems to me after our talk that I might not be.

I have been out of a relationship a long time, as you know. At this point in my life I do not want to live with anyone again. Ever. Let me cut to the chase. During tea, you used a phrase that I have not heard for some time--free love. It is the thing we are talking about I think, and so I was surprised, and yet not, to hear you utter it. To be free to love, including sexual expression (or maybe we are talking entirely about sex) without the hindrance of cultural, familial, and political ideas of who we (any of us, male or female) must, or should, be placed upon us is the freedom to live our lives in independent expression of who we are.

I do not think this is masturbatory, this desire to be "wrecked" by our own desires, enflamed by our capacity to feel passion, to express it. How do we want to be wanted? Is this what I am talking about when I say that it seems we want our relationships with men to be more like the ones we have with women.

I never concern myself with your desire for my friendship. I was surprised by it, and am extremely happy to have it, and I do not question it. I know you feel the same. So, we can move forward without all that. Is this possible in sexual relationships? What describes intimacy in those relationships that is different from the day we spent together today, where I grabbed your arm and said, "...because you are not happy." and we both felt the weight of that statement?

LJ: I think your point about wanting our sexual relationships (and I'm deliberately avoiding the word intimate, because you are right--sexual relationships are not the only intimate relationships) to be more like our relationships with women is right on. The question then becomes, what do we want in any relationship?

This ought not even be necessary to articulate, let alone to be, but I'm finally at a point in my life where I only want to have sex with people I like. I mean really like. I want to want when I'm in bed with someone--I want to want them. Some knowledge of them. Some real, profound communication. There should be real desire. We should all be capable of it.

What I value now, more than anything, though I struggle with it from time to time, is honesty. Honesty and dignity. These are difficult to achieve in a sexual relationship, at least for me, because I so often make the mistake of acting as I believe the other person wants me to act. This, I think, is the supreme act of hubris. I don't actually *know* how the other wants me to act. I just like to think I do. If I'm really being honest, I should act as I would act, and come what may. But this, we know, is scary.

Why are we so vulnerable in sexual relationships?

LLL: For myself, I would say that I am so vulnerable in sexual relationships because of the body issue. But there is much more than that.

To be naked, as we are trying to do here, and living in a country that still punctuates itself saying this is a Christian country, and unfortunately whether this is the case or not we get this information, this Christian identity as Americans, all to subliminally and often, then we are working against the shame of Eve-- right?

Long story short, inherited shame. I think it goes back to Eve's desire and we are still under that influence. Not to continually blame Christians, because religion has, and much more of late it would seem, deflated, outright outlawed, sexual desire for women. It is risky to want sex, to let someone know you want sex, and even when you are about to have sex, there must be a moment when this thought is there for a flash. I am a woman allowing myself the pleasure of sex, the instigation of this act even, and women cannot have this kind of power.

So here we are again I believe. Power. To want what I want, no matter what the other wants, and intending to have it, sounds like more power than we are allowed without retribution.

But I could be wrong...

Workplace (Non-) Violence (Or Destroy, She Said—for Marguerite Duras)

2009-11-22T21:52:00.002-06:00

--I love my job. I love the way it makes me and unmakes me. A friend of mine, who has seen me in and out of the context of work, recently admitted to being surprised by my “violence” in everyday life, wondering whether its absence in my teaching be something of a mode or something of a whim. I love being able to say the truth of this, that it is both. The truth is these contradictions exist in my teaching because they exist in my life as a student, and I love my job most when I consider myself student, in the purest sense of the word.

--The very first definition of student listed in the OED (that great reference work of students everywhere) is “One who is engaged in or addicted to study.” I am, perhaps not surprisingly, of the addict variety. I want, I want, I want. An obsolete definition sheds almost as much light: “One who strives after or studies to attain.” Hardly obsolete in my case, at any rate. In the position of the student I am greedy, I am violent. I am the subject if not supposed to know, then desiring of knowledge. I want it all. It. All.

--And so I write. I write because I am watching. I am watching myself being watched. You can’t tell what color my eyes are. Such a lovely position we occupy when we write. The opposite of the mother, the abject. The refusal of the position of the hysteric. The creation of the position of the neurotic. Catch me if you can.

--I love the part of me, here, which is never silent. I know too much of silence. A child of thirteen, I used to lie in bed promising myself I’d speak nothing if I could not speak the truth. I make no such promises today.

--As a younger child I’d pile all my toys in a line, resting them underneath the sheets. A perfect decoy. This much I will replicate.

--I will digress. I will escape the confines of my bed and roam, eyes to the night stars. Try and stop me.

The Wages of Sin

2009-11-19T15:58:00.002-06:00

Work is employment, an occupation, consisting of tasks that one must do, usually for pay.

Work is also a calling, something that occupies your mind and heart, made up of things like imagining, researching, trying out ideas, and enjoyment of these undertakings, not always for pay.

I do not like to work. I work because, living under late capitalism, I have no choice. Work seems to be full of sin to me, full of pressures and punishments that cause me to rehearse penitent emails constantly in my head, awaiting the axe. I do this work for money. I must have money in order to live my life. I do not earn much money, and I have some physical problems that have made it hard to work a full time job for the last few years. I work at home. I am good at what I do, but I fear that what I do does no good.

My calling, as if you have not guessed, is writing. I want to connect, to discuss, to consider, and I do not want to do that alone. You may think this an odd statement considering that most people think of writers as solitary. I assume most of us are when in the physical act of writing, but I am always writing. As I walk down the street, ride on the bus, pick out produce at the Farmer’s Market, I want tell others about the world as I experience it, and I think about how I want to say it.

As a young mother I was home for the first years of my son’s life; I began working (only part time) in a health food store when he turned four. This was a vast improvement over my previous status as mother at home with small child without pay. I did not expect to be paid to be a mother, but it would have been nice to have respect. At that time women were fighting to be treated with dignity for choosing to stay home with young children. I was writing then, but it seemed to me that my writing was considered by many not to be real work, because I was not being paid for it. Just as the volunteer work I did with at-risk youth later on was not real work. Just like working with homeless women for free was not work. I am not trying to make the point that I am a saint. The point is that, essentially, most people think of work as what you are paid for. And when I have stated that I need a job that I can love, that matters, I was told with contempt, “That’s why they call it work and not play.”

I am suspicious when someone says they love their job, especially when I understand, after some talking, that they love it for the perks, and the money. It’s true that most people do not really love their jobs, but in place of a calling, I have seen that humans absolutely do need to do work that matters, they insert the job.

I have said that it is hard to locate myself without inhabiting a body I can be at peace with. I have found it hard to occupy my calling without pay. For as much as I have said that my writing is important to me, I have never really had a firm belief that my work matters without it. Writing is hard work, but not real work unless you are paid for it.

I have worked with two men who became successful writers. They were at the job, but working on their writing; I heard how they pushed some of their work onto naive co-workers so that they could leave work earlier with more time to write. When they became successful, and it became known that this was part of the path on their way to accomplishment, they were lauded with the title “ambitious”.

I think of women who wrote (or did not have time to write but wrote about that years later) through the hardships of raising families, like Tillie Olsen. I don’t know if those women felt that they could take the chance of jeopardizing a job to write rather than do that job. Perhaps it was because many of the women had jobs that made it impossible to hide, the service positions, or support positions in offices, where one is constantly needed—like mothers.

Hide and Seek

2009-11-16T15:39:00.003-06:00

As I walk down the street I am very careful not to look for my reflection in store windows. Or bus shelters. Or car mirrors.

I often see women, I see them all the time actually, check themselves in any object that will reflect their image. The bold ones will make no bones about staring at themselves. Others will act like the head, of its own will, turned on the neck, putting the visage before them.

Some are young girls who look at themselves without shame but always with some regret. As these young women are often not alone, they will remark to the other, see the fat, see the awful hair, see, see, see.
I resist looking because I am afraid of what I will find there. Yet, the pull to look, to see, is so strong I feel like I have won some as yet unnamed but significant battle when I can walk past without acknowledging myself.

What am I winning?

The battle appears to be, in my case, to not need a body and therefore be spared the torment of not having the right kind. I have spoken to enough women to understand that, almost to a woman, they too do not inhabit the correct body.

It is hard to live without a body. I cannot locate myself in this world. And the women who can find themselves can only have the body worth having: the thin body, the youthful body, the yielding body. Any sign of resistance to any of these can only result in, at the least confusion, at the worst desolation.

I feel alone when I try to find myself through my female body. Writing leaves me words on a page, and my body could be anything, anywhere, or nothing at all. The body at this point does not matter, and it is here that I have found myself. But I still struggle not to see.

What is it we are searching for in the windows and mirrors?

Of course we, I, am looking for the “self” the me. But further, I am looking for what tells me to whom I belong, where I belong. It is about connection. I belong to the tribe of woman; they have breasts and wombs. That should be enough, but alas.

I refuse to belong to the tribe of women as viewed by the other. Ah, there it is! The rub.

We need, I need, desire, the other. The one to whom I can show my self and be seen. It is in the other’s eyes I find the woman, find her body, her self. And as I rush toward this other, this reflection of the good, the admirable, the lovable in me, I am stopped short by my body. I renege. I turn and stare into the glass, scared of what I might not find.

Courting the Gaze

2009-11-16T08:23:00.001-06:00

I’m twelve, maybe thirteen. It’s winter; that much I’m sure of. Still, the house is almost steamy. Up before anyone else, except my father, who left at five for work, I've turned the thermometer past eighty. Though my mother dutifully turned it back down when she woke at seven, a certain heat lingers. And so, I am perfectly comfortable in my usual pajamas: one of my father’s work shirts, gray, v-necked and short sleeved, with pocket, and barely grazing the top of my thighs.

--Though not yet pretty, I’m admittedly cute: chin length blond wavy hair, an adorable smile with a small gap between the front teeth, an athlete’s body, somewhat boyish yet beginning to become feminine. This I have not yet realized. While I have some interest in boys, and a naive curiosity about sex, I come to these things like the child I am, seeing only mystery and wonder, understanding nothing but the taboo nature of such things without understanding the allure of the taboo. It will be impossible, later, to fully recapture such a time.

--So when there comes a knock at the door that morning, I go to answer it with no shame. What could I know of shame when I’ve not yet tasted the forbidden fruit? The scenario is entirely banal: a UPS man, strangely interchangeable with the others in that dark brown uniform, with a package for my mother. It’s nearing Christmas, and must have been a gift, though this I can’t remember with any certainty. What I do remember clearly is the cold burst of air from the open door, and how alive I feel. It’s when I move to accept the package, short shirt shifting with the switch of my steps, that I see the look he is giving me, I recognize, without having reference, that look, and I know. I blush slightly, and hurry from the door with my mother’s package, wanting to spare us both the embarrassment I’ve brought about, but also wanting to sit alone with this new feeling, not entirely unpleasant. For, in the moment of my shame, I felt something of desire. I felt the desire to be the object of desire.

--Years later the complexities of power will enter into the equation, but the moment of delivery was simply the fall at its purest, alone in the garden with the gaze of God. It will not be until I am fifteen, and overhear two boys talking of the girl at a party giving blow-jobs for beer, that the fact of desire will make me cry. It will not be until I’m eighteen, and about to leave for college, that my own incapacity to rule by desire will reduce me to real tears. In this initiating moment, the desire to be desired was so seemingly simple in its complexity, making me aware, without sure consequence, of my own power. The gaze became something to court.

--Of course there were consequences. Though I continued in the smart and studious mode of my naiveté for a time, by fifteen or sixteen I was getting drunk with sex, fascinated with the power of desire. I was the bad girl in good girl’s clothing, and then I was the bad girl in bad girl’s clothing. Short shorts, crop tops, high heels, my parents were appalled, but I was impossible to reason with. Much of the time the attention I attracted was frightening to me, but the fear produced the most intoxicating highs.

--Still, every addict knows that the lows, come they must. By my early twenties I was drinking hard to contend with the shame, which, try as I might, wouldn’t go away. The desire to be desired was powerful, but the shame was more than its equal. And so, an endless pattern of drinking, flirtation, sex, and drinking to forget. But even when I could forget on the conscious level, the shame would come on sideways.

--Why, I wonder, is this so hard to talk about? I much less needed the talk about safe sex, which I knew how to address years before my mother shared her insights, than I needed to talk about negotiating desire as a woman. But where do you turn for that conversation, and how do you begin to articulate the nearly unspeakable? I want to initiate this conversation for those young women I see, drunk as I was on their own supposed power. I want to initiate it for my friends, whose stories break my heart. I want to initiate it for myself. I know little of how to do so, but I do know that age won’t solve the problems of desire—it will only carry its own attendant complications.

--What I would say, I do not know. Perhaps that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to be a woman in our society without being caught in the net of desire. Perhaps that speaking of desire, and of the desire to be desired, is the only way to confront the shame it brings. Perhaps that there must, or at least there should, be a way to experience the highs of desire without debilitating shame. Or, perhaps, simply that I care, and I’d like to hear your story.