Tag: feminism

No, it don’t feel right

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Looks like it was also used as the cover of Poems of Laughter & Violence, one of his zillions of volumes of poetry. The photo is by Eugene Doyen.

Lately the idea of—the fact of—emotional repression is popping everywhere I look. It’s something I’ve been doing some hard work on recently, learning to feel and name my emotions and not hate them and not be too scared to express them to another person—but the more awareness I have of this, the more I realize how common this problem is.

For instance. I wanted to tell you about this book I’ve been reading, an old RE/Search book from 1991 called Angry Women. The RE/Search books contained long-form interviews with fascinating artists of different kinds; some of my favorite people in the world have been profiled and probed in those books. I’ve got a framed picture on a shelf of the one and only Billy Childish, standing with Tracey Emin (his ex lover who went on to make a career out of more or less making fun of him) in a kitchen. It looks like a snapshot taken at a party in someone’s house, in the middle of some joke that’s making them both laugh. She’s wearing a 40s-style halter-tie bathing suit as a dress and he’s smoking a cigarette and smiling with his eyes. Point is, the photo is on the back cover of a RE/Search book that included an interview with Childish, and I loved the picture so much I tore the cover off the book and stuck it in a frame. 

A few months ago I ordered this Angry Women book from my friend Karen who runs an excellent secondhand books business, knowing it was the kind of book that would have made a massive impression on me if I’d read it as a young woman when it first came out. Sure enough, it’s packed full of enough ideas, photos, and inspiration that I think I’ll be carrying it around with me and picking through it for some time to come. One of the conversations is with the writer Sapphire from before she published her devastating novel Push, which inspired a bidding war and sold hundreds of thousands of copies, when she was still an underground poet whose “uncompromising writings deserve much wider publication,” as the RE/Search editors put it. The poem they reproduced alongside her interview, “Mickey Mouse Was a Scorpio,” which describes childhood sexual abuse, is so blistering it will melt the hair off your head, but in this context it feels like a natural extension of the zero-bullshit interview she gave, in which she aired dark family secrets that the people in her family still actively denied. 

(It’s superficial and me-centric, I guess, but I feel so proud and pleased to look at the pictures of Sapphire in this book and see that I have a long black dress and a wire-wrapped quartz necklace just like she wore here, in 1991. Like, Sapphire saved her own life with her art and her bravery, you know? And maybe in some small way I am like her. I like the thought of that.)

My scan of a photo of Sapphire from the book (photo credit: Chris Buck)

But yeah, the most refreshing— and frankly useful, even life-giving—thing about these artist interviews is their emotional honesty. I’ve always needed this from art: Songs, stories, poems, and essays in which the creator tells me just exactly how they feel. It gives me life. And yet talking about my own feelings can sometimes feel impossible to me. The word feelings, the word emotions: These have felt like such embarrassing things to say. Isn’t it loserish to be sloppy like that? Aren’t me and my big brain above that sort of thing? As I come to recognize this kind of thinking as a problem, I’m also realizing that I didn’t come by it naturally. It was passed on to me and has been reinforced on many levels, and it has hurt me badly, at times even sapped my life-force. And you know how that makes me feel? PISSED!

When you learn a new word, it has a way of showing up everywhere all of a sudden, as if for the first time. Similarly, when I opened the book just now to see which artists I wanted to tell you about, what did I see but this big pull quote from the performance artist and writer Karen Finley on heart v. brain:

“That’s the ‘male’* way of dealing with suffering: ‘thinking’ about it instead of feeling it. And my way is to feel it, acknowledge it. As a culture we kind of have the thinking part down pat, but not the feeling…”

It’s true, I think. (I feel that it’s true. Ha.) As a society, we really have a hard time feeling our feelings and not hating ourselves, or other people, for having them. Intellectualizing them is easier for a lot of people, as it takes the edge off the discomfort and pain—and doing so is often rewarded socially, while showing an honest emotion might well get you shamed or mocked right out the door.

Intellectualizing is one of those things that sounds kinda good but really isn’t, like perfectionism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a creative type brag about being a perfectionist, as if it’s a good thing to be so afraid of making a mistake that you never let a piece of work out into the world or even start working on it in the first place. It’s really just more fear: Fear of messy human stuff, like emotions and missteps and having an outburst when you were trying so hard to be polite. If your idea of being polite is never saying how you really feel because you’re “expected to sit and take some lesser man’s shit” (thanks Kevin Barnes), then cut it out! Name those feelings and get ’em out there!

*The conversations in this book are a little heavy on the gender binary approach so prevalent in 3rd-wave feminism, except for when the queer artists are talking. For instance, a performance artist and playwright named Holly Hughes, who I’d never heard of before I read this interview with her, talks about her public identity always being tied to her identity as a lesbian, and how reductive that can be for an artist when they are trying to express a range of ideas and feelings, including more “universal” life experiences, like her waitress job at Red Lobster. Andrea Juno, the editor who conducted most of the interviews in the book, says to Hughes, “It’s a trap for women to think they’re that separate. If you start defining what you ‘are,’ you start getting so many exceptions that any argument can be whittled down. Actually, there’s nothing you can say that women are, that men aren’t (and vice versa).”

Pockets of air

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I believe this is what the kids on the internet call a Whole Mood.

Dear friends, I write to you from deep inside late quarantine, the confusing place below decks where I hurry around looking for ways to rescue myself. Everything’s felt a bit bleak lately. But, ya know—books! Maybe books can be my little dinghy, my life preserver. My desperation fridge, even. I’ll take what I can get.

To this, and other much more cheerful ends, I am enrolled in a wonderful, challenging history class. It is asking me to try to understand what a history is and what it can be. So far we’ve looked at histories of nations and of the more liminal spaces where cultures meet. We’re also talking about social histories, which aim to show how groups like workers or women or racial minorities, who previously were depicted as spectators to history—the acted upon—were in reality doing some of the acting themselves.

I’ve been reading and reading and reading. I need new glasses, I’m reading so much. A reference to Shulamith Firestone and her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution jumped out at me during a day of reading last week, and I made a note to find out more. I’ve come across the name Shulamith Firestone many times in my years of feminist reading—and it’s such a pleasing name to say. Plus there’s the way Firestone conjures the image of something hot and glowing, a beautiful weapon.

I haven’t read The Dialectic of Sex. I did read the piece Susan Faludi wrote about Firestone for the New Yorker, published several months after Firestone’s 2012 death. In her essay Faludi traces the arc of Firestone’s life, beginning as an outcast from an observant Orthodox Jewish family—the daughter of a woman who had fled the Holocaust in Germany—to her time as a radical organizer in the early days of feminism’s “second wave” to her lonely death in a NYC apartment, the end of years of suffering with schizophrenia. Faludi writes that by the time Firestone’s outlandishly smart and fearless book was published, infighting in the women’s movement caused her band of fellow organizers to fracture; they took to throwing each other out of the political groups they had organized together and eventually drifted apart. She shows us how this left Firestone stranded, unable to step into the world she had envisioned in her book, which failed to materialize, and bereft of the world she’d lived in with her friends and compatriots, which no longer existed. She situates Firestone’s predicament inside a larger idea about how, as Meredith Tax argued in her 1970 essay “Woman and Her Mind,” “the condition of women constituted a state of ‘female schizophrenia'” in which a woman either belonged to a man or she had nothing, was nothing, even though she was still alive. In essence she asks us to ponder, at least a little, what schizophrenia is. Like, how much of a mental illness is “organic” when we know that social factors like isolation and displacement (as with immigrants and refugees, like in Firestone’s family) play a role in the likelihood that someone will develop it? It’s a question worth asking.

Faludi’s essay also describes a reading that was organized on the occasion of the publication of Firestone’s only other book, Airless Spaces, which came out in 1998, almost 30 years after the first one. Firestone’s old cronies Kate Millett and Phyllis Chesler read from the book for her because she was too afraid to do it herself. At this point she had already been sick for many years. Airless Spaces, Faludi writes, was comprised of “autobiographical vignettes” depicting “a population of what [Firestone] calls, with her usual directness, ‘losers,’ solitary exemplars of the state of ‘social defeat.'”

My kinda book! I ordered a copy. It’s a small Semiotext(e) volume, and the worlds described within it are small too, and bleak. They’re organized by section (“Hospital,” “Post-Hospital,” “Obits,” “Losers”); the final section is called “Suicides I Have Known,” and the last piece is a loving portrait called “Danny,” who we know was Firestone’s beloved but estranged brother who—though he didn’t leave a note—is thought to have shot himself to death. (“Did I say that my brother’s favorite colors were bright blue and orange? Or that he had a concentration of planets in the ninth house of higher education? … He swore he would never marry (so did I).”)

Firestone tells story after story about the odd, dislocated characters one meets in a mental hospital or afterward, maybe at the Y, where they’re killing time while they wait to get into some halfway house or vocational program. Still, though many of the people she depicts are hopeless, I find that the stories themselves aren’t. Some of them, while highly personal, frame an implied critique, and I can see that the scholar Firestone once was, the radical, is still in there somewhere. Others have a detached irony that makes them almost funny. (About a visit with Valerie Solanas, whose book The SCUM Manifesto Firestone found dangerous and unserious, after Solanas was released from the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, she writes sniffily: “I did not see this as a meeting with a fellow theorist.” I can’t tell if this was meant to make me smile, but it did.) And even though Firestone’s characters are loners they do, collected this way, show themselves to be a “population,” as Faludi called them, a group of people who have been cast out but haven’t quite disappeared.

Some of the vignettes are about Firestone herself, presumably, though they’re told in the third person. In one, a woman is too exhausted to make small decisions and moves in slow motion. “She” is forcibly and roughly showered by orderlies in the mental hospital; she buys a pair of old Levis and patches them with the help of a friend; she tries to write, but “the old excitement of creation did not return.” She’s sick, but she writes lucidly about her condition, about the people she meets—about everything in her life. What are the people who run the hospital to make of that?

For an answer you could look to Firestone’s old friend Kate Millett, who famously critiqued psychiatry and believed that mental illness was often a label given to people who don’t comply with the dominant narrative and a convenient way to shut them up. Like Firestone, Millett, also a second wave feminist, was committed involuntarily more than once.

Or you could just ask Eileen Myles, who is always right about everything. In a blurb on Airless Spaces‘ back cover, Myles writes that in “the 20th [century] the explosion was never-ending, the pieces tinier and tinier…all of us …vanishing in a century of institutions that take and take until everyone has gone away and there’s no one left to shut the door.” 

On possibility

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A Prayer
by C.P. Estés

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled. 
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven—
only you.
It is in the midst of misery 
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good came of this,
is not yet listening. 

Earlier this year I confided to a dear pen-pal that I was going through a tough time. I don’t often like to tell people about tender personal matters face to face, but I find I can “talk” about them in writing. I’ll put them down on paper and then send them off, like hopeful little paper airplanes, into the hands of a trusted friend, and see what comes back to me. 

So yes, in some ways I have had a sad, hard year. But as I told my friend in my letter, reading helps. Some books have been a downright salvation. I tore through Mark Haddon’s novel, The Porpoise, which is based on the ancient story of Pericles, a prince who goes to sea and has adventures. I had never read the myth before, and its details had me totally engrossed. There was something about the story, with its violence and passion; its birth, death, and rebirth; that I found uniquely comforting as I was dealing with the more elemental stuff of my own life. Using the strange, dream-like symbols of fantasy, myths like these cut to the heart of everything that’s real.

The stories we call fairytales and folk tales are like this too. My mother, when she was going through her own tough time, once mailed me a photocopy of the poem “A Prayer” by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. (I ask you, what would I do without my beloved pen-pals?) Estés is a Mestiza Latina psychoanalyst and a cantadora—a keeper of the old stories—who has recorded readings of several of her books. When my mom was feeling sad and lost, she listened to Estés read from Bedtime Stories, a collection of stories she learned from her family as a child, and they helped her get safely to sleep, where her unconscious, creative mind could start to sort out her troubles. 

I’m thankful to my mother for introducing me to Estés, who has a dreamy voice and so much to teach us. In another one of her collections, Mother Night: Myths, Stories, and Teachings for Learning to See in the Dark, she talks about the need for these kinds of fantasies. Mother Night, she explains, is an ancient archetype, sometimes called Mother Sleep: “…not sleep like unconscious, but sleep as in opening the door to stories, ideas, innovations, inventions, and dreams.” She’s the “medial force” who “stands between the two worlds, handing things back and forth, informing the world that has grown too dry with things that are moist and alive. Things that rise from the unconscious, that rise from the dark.” 

A few days after I sent my letter, my friend wrote back with another reading recommendation I’m thankful for: Feminist Folktales From Around the World. These are tales that were compiled and edited by a scholar named Ethel Johnston Phelps in the 70s and 80s, and that have recently been reissued in four volumes by the Feminist Press. “I love how sassy and possible the tales all are,” my friend wrote. This sounded like a very sound endorsement to me, so I got a copy of the first volume in the series, Tatterhood, and filled my head with its wild imagery while I reflected on the idea of possibility. 

Phelps, in an illuminating preface, explains that before these stories and others like them were written down, they were told orally, mainly by rural women, for well over 1,000 years. When in the early 19th century they began to be compiled and put into print, it was by outsiders who were usually well-educated men of a different social class—and in the case of stories collected in Africa and Asia, a different nationality and race. She posits that the bias of these story collectors, along with the possible reluctance of the women to share their stories with a person who might ridicule them, could account for the relative lack of strong female heroines in the fairytales we’re all so familiar with today. 

The stories in Tatterhood, by contrast, feature heroines who exist outside the made-up binary of young, beautiful, passive / old, ugly, horrible. Instead, they are adventuresome, sensible, brave, clever, and fun. Marriage is not the point of these stories, and it doesn’t usually matter what the women look like. The men, when they do appear, are more fully human, too—not boring stock heroes who do everything and save everyone, but real people who appreciate a woman with a bit of sense and sometimes need a hand themselves.

Take Tatterhood, the heroine from a Norwegian tale. She’s a charming and no-nonsense girl who saves the kingdom from a pack of destructive trolls, goes out adventuring on a ship by herself, and impresses the hell out of a young prince with her bravery and attitude, not her looks. I also loved “Janet and Tamlin,” a Scottish Borders tale, because when Janet falls in love with a knight, she goes out to rescue him from the fairy queen who’s holding him captive—at midnight on Halloween!

But my favorite heroine in this book is the plucky old woman in “The Hedley Kow,” a story from the north of England. Hard-working and undaunted by bad luck, she earns the friendship of a fun-loving goblin (the “kow”) who everyone else in the village thinks is scary and mean. This story in particular has a lot of humor in it, and as I read it I could hear the voice of my own hilarious grandmother, my mom’s mom, whose people come from that part of the world. When the old woman in the story finds a pot of gold by the side of the road, she says, “Ah! I feel so grand I don’t know myself rightly!” That’s just what my grandmother would say to me whenever anything special was about to happen. “You won’t know yourself!” she’d say approvingly, when my mother had gotten new furniture, or I’d won a prize in school. She’s the only person I’ve ever heard use that expression, and remembering her made me feel connected to the character in a way I could really feel. That’s the power of folk stories, I guess: the power of the folk themselves. 

In her preface, Phelps says something about the tradition of women storytellers that I really liked. “The phrase old wives’ tales, now used derisively, takes on a new and more positive meaning—for the old wives’ tales were, indeed, the very rich and varied source of each nation’s heritage of folk literature.” 

Yes! I promise to never again call a silly belief an old wive’s tale. The old wives sure know what they’re about, the grandmothers and the cantadoras. Let’s treat their stories with the love and respect they deserve—and let them teach us what’s possible.

Book pile

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Hi! I’ve just read a few books from the pile beside my chair. Wanna hear about them?

Smile, by Roddy Doyle

This one was a doozy. All of Doyle’s novels are doozies, and I love them. I love him.  I didn’t want to love this one the way I did as I was reading it, though, because I knew it was about childhood sexual abuse, and even though it is so, so easy to be pulled in by the ease and naturalness of his storytelling, the whole brief thing (it’s only 200 pages long, and has the taut shape of a novella) is tight with the tension of something huge and bad lurking, a shipwreck under a black ocean that we know is there but can’t see.

It’s not possible to talk about many details of this story without ruining its impact for someone who hasn’t read it, but I can tell you that if you love Doyle’s writing, as I do, for its economy of language and vivid dialogue—as bright and honest as a conversation you catch going past you on the street—then you will not be unsatisfied by this book. It’s also true that most of his stories, not just this one, deal with the heartbreak of—what should I call it? Fatalism? (In his review of Smile for the Washington Post, Ron Charles called it “crumpled hope.”) It’s a characteristic of a lot of Irish fiction, actually. Have you read Doyle’s Barrytown books, The Snapper, The Van, and The Commitments? I read them years ago and later reread them, and was surprised by how sad they were, when what I’d remembered was their good humor and charm. That stuff is in there too, though. And the thing that’s really killer about Doyle’s writing is the way he has of making everything that happens to his characters feel … inevitable. That’s a better word than fatalism. In Smile he deals with those kinds of ideas—those kinds of lives—once again, but in a way that is new and frankly horrifying.

I read an interview with Doyle yesterday, about a week after I’d finished the book. (Though, apparently, it hadn’t finished with me.) He told his interviewer, the writer Catherine Dunne, that he wrote the novel the way he did to shock readers, particularly Irish readers who may have thought they’d already heard it all regarding the Catholic Church and sex abuse. Shock. The word is so overused, it’s tempting to dismiss his comment as insignificant, but a few hours after I read the interview the penny dropped for me and I felt, with embarrassment, that I understood the novel completely for the first time since I’d finished it. The truth is that the ending is open to interpretation and more than a little confusing, which is why I was left hanging for a good few days. Sorting it all out may not be the point, though—I think I see that now. It’s the attempt to sort it out that informs a true understanding of this novel, the going over of details and memories that don’t line up, the sickly sense that some information is missing and that you know what happened but don’t know at the same time. Those are effects of shock, aren’t they: that fug of confusion, the delayed reaction. It’s often the effect of abuse, too. I think it’s possible that Doyle has done something extraordinary with this novel, something I haven’t quite experienced before in my lifetime of reading. He’s given us a painful story that hurts worse later than it does in the moment of reading it, because it’s our memories of the character’s life that get wrecked upon reflection. In a real way, the loss is ours, and the story functions like real grief in our minds. We experience the horror of having to remember again and again, as if for the first time, that something terrible has happened.

Black Wave, by Michelle Tea

I recently read this article in The Guardian about a study, released by the Living Planet Index toward the end of 2016, which reports that two-thirds of all wild animals on Earth will be gone by the year 2020. It sounded dire, which chimed with my mood, I must admit. I feel cheerful enough at the moment, actually, but it just seems end-timey out there, don’t you think? We’ve been post-everything for a while now, for starters, and although I am aware that people, whenever in time they find themselves, are always standing on the edge of history, that cliff seems extra steep right now. When I finally got off my ass and read Michelle Tea’s new novel, which came out last year from Feminist Press (what took me so long?), I was primed for it to be about the end of the world, as I’d read that it was. I was READY for the end of the world. BRING IT.

To my deep pleasure, the book is for-real about the apocalypse, and this end starts out ordinarily enough, with a ruined Earth—stinking oceans, dry patches of dirt where trees and plants once grew, undrinkable water—that people have gotten used to ignoring. (!) Then the whole thing ramps up and starts cycling faster, and it becomes clear that the human race only has about another year to go. Our scrappy protagonist, Michelle—drinking and drugging too hard, even after she wants to stop—ignores even this for as long as she can until finally she faces the truth and decides to wait out the end of everything in a used bookstore in L.A. Tea makes this part feel deliciously cozy, like a dreamy dust-mote-filled opium den, even as the streets outside get more violent and chaotic by the day. This book is about the end of the world, yes, and it is also about the way you have to kind of die in order to change.

I have loved Michelle Tea’s writing for a long time now. Her evocation of a certain “scene”—her own punky, dirty, resilient young queer community of 90s San Francisco—is one of the things to love the most about it (but if you thought it was the thing, you’d be forgetting how just plain good she is, how bright and surprising her use of language and metaphor). This loving wallowing around in that familiar world shapes the first part of the book, but about halfway through, after she’s told us a short novel’s worth of a very engaging story about a young woman’s life in decline, the book itself starts to disintegrate and “get meta,” in the words of a funny bookseller I talked to about the novel after I’d finished it. “I didn’t need it to get meta,” is what she said, and I took some offense at her glibness—this is MICHELLE TEA we’re talking about, lady—but it forced me to admit that I too had worried as I read it that the rest of the novel would keep referring to itself and shifting from one reality to another, and I didn’t want to lose my footing. I was glad when it righted itself and went back to being a good old-fashioned story. A science fiction story about the end of the world, no less, which made me appreciate why Tea had to tear the whole thing down and start again.

This is the most developed piece of Tea’s writing that I’ve read; like Roddy Doyle did with Smile, she did some things with form that I’ve never seen in her writing before. Black Wave is—in a really interesting way—a story about the way cities change over time, leaving us feeling like the lives we’ve lived in them are disappearing, too. More than that, it’s about addiction and survival, and beginnings as much as endings. It’s entertaining, incisive, and wonderfully hopeful. I think you should read it.

Learning to Drive, by Katha Pollitt

Everyone (every woman?) in the English-speaking world with half the interest has already read this book, it seems like, except for me. It came out ten years ago, and a well-thought-of film was made from the title essay starring Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson. (I haven’t seen that either.) And to look at the many reviews quoted inside the book, everyone seems to love it and its author, from Barbara Ehrenreich to Bust. After reading this collection of her essays, I can understand why.

Pollitt is a feminist who admits to having human weaknesses where romantic love is concerned, which is only an unpopular stance with people who refuse to tell their inner teenager to get a grip, and she’s great company, astute and funny and also surprising in the way that very smart people will continue to surprise you with their opinions even once you feel you’ve gotten the hang of the way they think. Mostly, she says exactly what she’s thinking, and nine times out of ten it’s what you’re thinking too. Pollitt, who has written for The Nation since the 90s, is probably best known for her cultural criticism, but these are personal essays of the best kind—they’re about her life and ideas, but they encompass bigger ideas too, and are likely to spark an interest in you on any number of topics—the Rubaiyat, council Communism, Danish painting. Her use of metaphor is poetic; well, she’s a poet too. Here’s how she describes the Internet: “It was like something a medieval rabbi might conjure up out of the Kabbalah: a magical set of propositions that acted as a mirror of reality and perhaps even allowed you to control it and change it.”

“Learning to Drive” is the most famous piece in the book and is about the lifelong New Yorker’s attempt to learn to drive a car after her cruddy little philandering “boyfriend” dumps her for one of his other ladies. (It always sounds so weird to me when grown adults use the words boyfriend and girlfriend.) Her disdain for men, on display throughout the book, might make you smile with pleasure or it might make you cringe a little, and I don’t think those two reactions break down all that neatly between the sexes. I winced a few times myself and found I didn’t even want to finish the essay “After the Men Are Dead,” but there were plenty of other times that I really enjoyed her cogent put-downs of men of the stupid, bullying variety, as well as her ability to pin-point precisely the ways that women’s lives are diminished by their behavior. She describes these things so confidently, she’s like Zorro: zip zip zip!

Pollitt’s opinions are only very occasionally strident, in my view, though your take on that may vary depending on how much you agree with what she’s saying. I almost always agree, but talk about wincing: When I read that “even the thought of rap makes [her] heart surge with sorrow and fury” because it makes her think about “the end of melody, the end of tender and delicate feelings, the end of any sort of verbal cleverness that requires a vocabulary of more than 300 words,” let me tell you, my heart surged with sorrow and fury. Because … what? How can someone so sensitive to nuance, and so knowledgable about art, hold such a doofy opinion? Verbal cleverness and vocabulary: Ever heard of Del the Funky Homosapien, Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, Aesop Rock, Outkast? How about Biggie Smalls? (I’m trying to be fair here and only mention people who were around back in 2007, when this book was published.) As for tender feelings, come ON. Killer Mike is so full of tender feeling and righteous rage he’s about to spark a revolution with his music. I don’t want to say that no older white person should write about hip-hop because that’s silly too, but maybe people should think twice before doing it. Or maybe I just need to think twice before I bother to read it.

Still, I only had to go a few pages further, in the same essay (“End Of”), and bam, Pollitt is making me cry on the train, talking about how the old things, and sometimes the really good things, slip away with the passage of time and there’s nothing you can do about it. “The truth is, by the time you find out what’s happening, it’s usually too late. … It’s like the turquoise frogs—by the time scientists figured out what was wrong with them, they were gone.” And all of her jabs at men aside, “Good-bye, Lenin” is an interesting and warm portrait of her father written shortly after he died. A lover of poetry, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party (his FBI file makes the Bureau look almost lovably inept), and a lawyer who remained devoted to not “selling out” for his entire life, he comes across as a sincerely lovely human being.

 

Tell Me Everything

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Hey again everybody. As I told you, I had surgery a week or so ago. Since then I’ve been too distracted by pain and the weird pain medication I’m on to concentrate on my own thoughts, so I’ve been reading like a demon to keep myself company. I find it interesting to note that for some reason, the type of writing I have the biggest appetite for right now is short-form memoir. Short-form memoir by women, that is. Women who are writing about grief and love, illness and death, their bodies and their families and their drug of choice. The blood and guts of their lives.

And god almighty, is there a lot of that kind of writing out there. I’ve been reading poorly edited junk on xoJane, the guilty pleasure web magazine I feel the need to “check” at least once a day when I’m bored. (Current headlines include: “I Hooked Up with Someone’s Boyfriend, and I Don’t Feel Guilty.” At least someone doesn’t feel guilty!) I’ve been reading better essays on similar (and similarly gendered) subjects in Lenny, Lena Dunham’s frankly excellent feminist email newsletter. In today’s issue the actress Amanda Peet has a smart, touching piece about her fear of aging, and the admiration she feels for her less-vain sister, who’s a physician. Plinking around the internet with no real destination, I discovered an Australian journalist named Julia Baird who writes for the New York  Times‘ OpEd section, and I read a bunch of her stuff, including a recent piece about the cancerous tumors she had growing in her abdomen. I’m not usually much for medical details but I read all the ones she laid out in that essay, and it was pretty good. The writing, I mean, not the subject matter. That was pretty bad.

From there I found my way to a writer and Moth storyteller named Tara Clancy, who I hadn’t heard of before. She’s good too! I got a huge kick out of the essay she wrote about the neighborhood bar her dad took her to when she was a kid, and the oddball, loving community they found there. And just this minute I remembered about Samantha Irby, who is one of my new Internet favorites but who I have so far failed to write about on this blog. Not long ago I discovered hers, and found her to be one of the most refreshingly frank and funny writers I have ever read. I plowed through her book of essays, Meaty—it is hilarious and totally original—and am waiting (sort of) patiently for her to finish her second one, which according to Facebook she is writing this very moment. Keep at it, lady!

Let me be clear: I have always been more interested in women’s stories than in men’s, and I also favor autobiographical work to novels, though I do read a ton of fiction. Memoir is the kind of writing I do myself, in my essays, zines, and books. These stories give me life, as both a writer and a reader. In the week or so since I got sick I haven’t had the energy to read much long-form writing, but I have started one book: Eileen Myles’ Chelsea Girls, which she calls a novel but is understood to be based on her own life. It’s as wonderful as I expected it to be, and even more unusual.

But I’m surprised to find how much I’ve needed it now, this female company. Why do I find it so comforting, and so useful, to hear women talking truthfully about their own lives? Maybe I don’t have enough female closeness in my life (though honestly, I talk to my mother so much, and so exclusively, that a pair of walkie talkies would be as useful to me as my overpriced cell phone). Maybe it has to do with, ya know, SOCIETY, and the fact that women’s behavior is so circumscribed that we don’t often say how we feel in a day-to-day kind of way. Whatever causes it, I have the the most intense longing to hear people tell the truth, and it never goes away.

Memoir is tinged with a certain sense of inferiority, at least in the eyes of the kinds of writers who think they need an MFA in order to be writers—though there are plenty of folks who break through the stigma of it in order to be respected as serious artists, as Myles has. (But then, she’s a poet first.) Writing fiction “from life” is looked down on, too. I think this attitude is stupid, and I have developed a pet theory about it as well: I think it’s sexist. So-called domestic fiction, “personal” essays—hell, anything where the writer cops to having, like, FEELINGS—these are so often the areas of expertise of women writers, and that is the only reason they are considered less worthwhile, less intellectual, less important. Don’t tell me it’s because there are so many bad memoirs. There is so much bad EVERYTHING, and you don’t rule out whole categories of experience because you didn’t like that one thing you had that one time. I’m not gonna stop eating pizza entirely because they make it too greasy at the place around the corner. STRETCH YOURSELF, PEOPLE.

Lucky for me, I don’t give a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut—I got that from the comments section on xoJane!—about literary careerism and elitist nonsense. That’s why I know that good writing is all around us, waiting to be discovered—because I’ll read literally anything, just to see what I think. Some of the best things I’ve read have been in zines and on blogs that few others have read, and were written by people who will most likely never find a large audience for their work.

Anyway, when all’s said and done, reading other people’s personal discoveries—whether those people arrive at them within the confines of a poem, or in the shimmering moments of a beautiful, lyrical novel, or at the end of a painful essay, like a birth—this gives me more joy and wisdom, entertainment and company, than almost anything else. It feels fucking good to write the truth, too. It’s like Myles says in Chelsea Girls: “I always think it’s such a secret story, this one, I just need to tell this story for me or else I will burst.” (Me too.) She goes on: “It’s lonely to be alive and never know the whole story. Everyone must walk with that thought. I would like to tell everything once, just my part, because this is my life, not yours.”

And it does, it feels like a secret, it is a secret until you tell it.

 

Storming the Castle

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Well THAT was a fucking letdown. JEEZ.

When was the last time someone you greatly admired gave a talk that made you feel so confounded and pissed off and disappointed that you literally ran out into the night but still missed your train, and then in your pain and confusion got on the wrong train and ended up in a suburb you’ve never even heard of even though you grew up taking these stupid trains because the one you got on by accident was an EXPRESS, and then you had to call home for a ride cuz it was cold and you were wretched? What, that hasn’t happened to you? Well I guess you were smart enough not to place your emotional and psychological well-being in the hands of the Penn Humanities Forum last night.

I’ve been looking forward to hearing Terry Castle give her talk at Penn for months now. It was initially scheduled for November and then got pushed back to February. No problem, my calendar flips by at an alarming rate these days anyway, so I decided I could handle the wait. But this is thing—I really, really looked forward to this. I love(d) Terry Castle. I have thought of her as a genius. She is so funny, and has such a fine, nuanced, unusual mind that she’s one of my favorite critics to read on contemporary culture and queer and gender issues, and one of my favorite writers, period, when it comes to the even more personal stuff that she writes about, i.e., her own life. She teaches at Stanford in California, so getting to see her at a university right here at home (the one I graduated from, go Quakers!), was a rare treat. She was appearing as part of a yearly, academic-year-long conference called the Humanities Forum that is open to the public and pretty reliably excellent. Every year I look through the schedule and choose a few lectures that I am excited to attend, and this year I hit the ceiling when I saw one of them would be given by one of my personal writing heroes. I could go hear Terry Castle say surprising, funny stuff in person, for free! Lucky me.

Maybe I should tell you that I gave some thought to what I’d wear to this lecture, because I think, rather a lot, about what I’ll wear every time I go anywhere, and about what those clothes—and other aspects of my physical appearance—might communicate to the people who will see me. In the end, I chose my trusty skin-tight black jeans because I think they’re becoming AND cool. I wore a little makeup, too, like I usually do. None of this was a very big deal and it didn’t take me away from my more SERIOUS, INTELLECTUAL interests for any longer than, say, I don’t know, putting on aftershave or organizing my fucking fishing lures would have done. Just so you know.

The talk was held in Penn’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, which happens to be one of my favorite places in the world. We knew the subject of the lecture: “I’m not a woman, I’m a not-a-woman,” which was Castle’s own coinage (obvi) to describe that unusual sort of woman who manages to live outside of the constraints of expectations of behavior and attitude that are typically placed on women. People who “fail” to “be women,” either willfully or because they can’t help it. It’s an interesting idea, and one I’ve given a lot of thought to myself.

Castle’s list of Western women through history who met these criteria—most of them artists or dramatic performers, since that’s her own personal bent—was a kind of queer history, but it was more complex than that. Claud Cahun, Eleanor Roosevelt, Madonna, Susan Sontag, Susan Boyle, H.D., Gertrude Stein. What do they all have in common? They are “not-a-woman” women. Some of them are gay, some aren’t. Some are cross-dressers, and some are skilled at and interested in cultivating the kind of female beauty that appeals to straight men. Some do not possess those skills but seem basically unaware of this fact, so uninterested in it are they. In one way or another, all of them have managed to circumvent, ignore, flout, or knowingly use to their own purposes the traditional gender role of a [heterosexual] woman.

It’s an interesting and provocative topic, though I’m sorry to say I didn’t find what she had to say about it especially deep or enlightening. I kept waiting for her to surprise me with these points, and she didn’t, much. This didn’t make me want to throw rotten eggs at her, though. That impulse came later, when Castle got to the part she prefaced by saying “You may want to get out your rotten eggs to throw at the stage now.” That’s when she read a passage from Karl Abraham on the female castration complex that frankly stunned me. I wish I could share the damn excerpt but I haven’t been able to find it because I don’t know what she was reading from. Abraham was Freud’s collaborator and best student, and Castle herself admitted to being a mostly unreconstructed Freudian, so brace yourself: She read two paragraphs in which Abraham explained that women wish they were men, whether they realize it or not. It’s like a penis envy thing, ya dig?

Does this seem true to Terry Castle? It does, yes. Does she think that an attraction to masculinity or a masculine presentation indicates a desire to be a man? Yep, she thinks that too. Hideously, Castle’s (admittedly anecdotal) evidence that all women would like to be men is that, when she has asked some women whether they would have chosen to be born male, if they had been given that option before birth and all other things being equal, they either said yes, perhaps they would, or they threw up such “walls” of anger or denial that they must simply be kidding themselves, and on some down-deep, sublimated, fucking Freudian subconscious level do actually wish they were men. So here we have Castle gas-lighting the people who disagree with her, which I must say is very … manly of her. She gave the weirdest little half-apologetic, half-angry, “what do you want me to say” sort of smile after she said these things. Like, Don’t get mad at me! It’s nature! Or perhaps, This is awful and I feel bad, but I’m saying it anyway. Also, fuck you!

Castle’s penis envy idea struck me as boring and dumb and wrong, since I—a real person, who was sitting right there—am a woman who likes being a woman. Theory debunked, dog! And you know, what exactly does Castle mean by “being a man”? She never really said. I assumed she meant having access to experiences, or to a way of being in the world, that women have historically not had (though some of us do now, sort of). But maybe she meant having a penis, plain and simple. Do you wish you had a penis, those of you who do not currently have one? Yes? No? If you answered yes, would that prove Castle’s point? Does the penis make the man? Aren’t these questions kind of retro? I grow tired.

But not too tired to go on complaining about this, because I had another problem with Castle’s talk, and that was the way she discussed gender vis a vis transgenderism. As I understood her, she seemed to be saying that she considers a person who is making a male-to-female gender transition to be a sort of polar opposite of her because of their desire to be a woman, or perhaps an exaggerated example of a cisgendered woman who really enjoys “being a woman,” in the sense that she likes those social markers of, maybe, wearing long hair and / or makeup and / or pretty “women’s” shoes. Like, no. Not all transwomen like those things and want them for themselves, first of all. And as I understand it, that’s not the fuck at all what being transgender is about. I mean, being a transwoman might include desiring to “look like” a woman and / or enjoy girly things like experimenting with different types of makeup, and maybe in a larger sense also gaining membership to the sisterhood of understanding and sharing those things with other women. MAYBE. SOMETIMES. Just as many cis-women do not wear makeup and / or subjugate themselves to men in order to attract them (you’re not the only one, Terry Castle!), many transwomen do not do those things either. Anyway, as I understand it, a transwoman is a person who was assigned the gender identity of male at birth but who knows that they are actually female, and any outer expression of this (via manner of dress, a name change, or a change in bodily presentation that may or may not be surgical) is an expression of the gender that was already there. I winced down to my toes listening to her talk about these “men” who “want to be” “women.” Did I misunderstand her? I might have, that’s totally possible. Please tell me I did.

She brought up Caitlyn Jenner a couple times, once to say that some comment Caitlyn made in an interview that she just wants to share makeup tips with her girlfriends (or something to that effect) was incomprehensible to her. Which, okay, fine, it’s a big world, there’s room for Caitlyn Jenner’s AND Terry Castle’s differing attitudes toward makeup in it. But she also said that she considers this kind of activity to be so pointless and degrading that she can’t understand why anyone would choose it. Huh? This is gender studies? Sounds more like some Cool Girl shit to me.

One of the ideas Castle brought up that I rather liked was her suggestion that some Not-a-Woman women are Femme Fatales: She named Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich, Madonna and Lady Gaga. (Interestingly, these Femme Fatales are all also “gay icons,” a fact I don’t remember Castle bringing up.) She considers them to be outsider women, but ones who are interested enough in worldly gain that they knowingly, self-consciously amp up those feminine markers in order to get what they want. (Unlike lowlier, regular, yes-a-woman women, I guess, who just brainlessly, helplessly participate in some master-slave set-up every time they look in the mirror and put on their lipgloss.)

Is this feminism? Hahaha, nope, but then Castle didn’t say it was. It’s not scholarly either, a fact she also acknowledged. So what is it then? A personal, idiosyncratic, mostly eloquent disquisition on the subject of gender. There’s a place for that, for sure. Furthermore, I greatly appreciate a little controversy in these kinds of conversations. After all, her talk got me writing this blog post, trying to articulate my own ideas, and I’m thankful for that. Nothing wrong with a good old-fashioned conversation starter. I just—I’m shocked at how poorly thought-out her ideas seemed to be, and how insulting her perspective on the topic was. Sitting there, I felt humiliated, as though she’d tripped me just for the pleasure of watching me fall down.

There are two more things to say about last night’s lecture. First, Castle told us that she’s only presented the ideas in this talk once before (she didn’t say where), and there were some prominent feminists in the crowd, Vivian Gornick among them. Apparently she was ENRAGED. Second, Heather K. Love, the Penn professor who was the Topic Director for the Humanities Forum this year, introduced Castle by saying that she agrees with the people who have called Castle our greatest living critic. Hearing this made me smile, since I’ve been so admiring of Castle too. Then, after Castle had gone off the rails and wrecked her train right there in the auditorium—and during the Q&A—Love chimed in with something useful. She said that she has long been interested in the same women Castle mentioned, for the same sorts of reasons, and that she personally sympathizes with Castle’s lack of interest in makeup (or whatever; I’m having the damnedest time encapsulating the “regular woman” category), but she likes to keep her personal taste separate from her politics and would like to see enough change in the world that no one should have to conflate wanting equality with wanting to be a man.

So thank goodness for Heather K. Love. But I still have so many thoughts.

I am reminded of a talk I heard last year, given by the extraordinary war photographer Lynsey Addario. She has made beautiful pictures of, among other subjects, Afghan women living with extreme restrictions on their daily lives. Addario is interested in, and actively seeks, justice for women around the world. And yet someone in the audience asked some question or other about these women, and Addario reminded us that many of the women she met in Afghanistan are happy and that, though they were all too well-mannered to say such a thing, she knew many of them felt sorry for her, putting herself at risk to do her work, alone; what some of us see as personal liberty is viewed by some others as the unfortunate circumstance of a person who has no one to care for them. Make no mistake, yours is not the only way of looking at the world.

I’m also thinking about the Barbara Pym novel I read a few weeks ago. It’s one of her first, Excellent Women, a hilarious and touching comedy of manners that deals with midcentury, just-after-the-war-and-still-all-bombed-out-and-deprived England. More specifically, the England of bachelor vicars and their quirky households, “nice” families with comically impeccable manners, socially awkward lonelyhearts, blazing eccentrics, and spinsters. OMG, spinsters. There are few topics dearer to my heart than that one. Spinsters, bluestockings, Pippi Longstockings, Ramona Clearys, Jessica Vyes. Tomboys! I’m straight—and now I’m married, to a man—and I have aligned myself with all of these identities for at least some part, but more or less all, of my life.

In Excellent Women—in the Jane Austen tradition—we have a main character who is an unmarried woman over the age of 30 and who ponders that situation pretty often. Mildred Lathbury lives alone in a flat with a shared bathroom in a boarding house, and because she is churchy and not married, she finds herself lumped in with a category of women who can always be counted on to help her married friends with their more sophisticated problems. She is one of the condescendingly-referred-to “excellent women” who are always on hand serve the tea. In a piece on Pym for The Guardian, the novelist Alexander McCall Smith writes, “Men, young and otherwise, were to form a major focal point of [Pym’s] writing; men, wryly and sometimes wistfully observed by a single female character, bring both excitement and disappointment – and mostly the latter – to the heroines of all her books. Excellent Women is as much about men as it is about women; the excellent women who populate this novel are excellent because they have been described as such by men.”

The wonderful joke of the book is that Mildred doesn’t view her life as dire at all; if anything she seems to feel a bit above the silliness of romance. She has almost-romances, though, and goes on dates, and her observations of these are hilarious. She sometimes feels lonely or left out, but she also seems curiously undriven to get to the social place where her married friends dwell. The wistful thing that Smith mentions is also certainly there; she has a touch of the kind of admiration of men that Castle talked about, though Pym’s treatment of it was vastly less ham-fisted than hers. Mildred is a type of woman that has always interested me, probably because, in my commitment to singleness and the vocation of my writing, I was so much this way myself for such a long time. Why do these ladies not want to do what most women want, or feel obliged, to do? In what way are they different? Why do some women remain different in these ways even after marrying? (Frida Kahlo, with her bisexuality and separate house away from her husband, comes to mind; she was incidentally one of Castle’s not-a-woman women too.) The answers are as varied as there are types of individuals, and failing to acknowledge this on a deep level seems like simple misogyny to me, which feels like the worst kind of treachery coming from a woman who loves women.

I don’t know, dude. Whatever the hell it was that happened last night, it was bad enough to make me get on the wrong train. Maybe I should stay in for a while.

That girl, she holds her head up so high I think I wanna be her best friend

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Years ago, when I was trying my hand at internet dating, I made friends with a guy from one of those sites, and we’d sometimes talk over the chat function. I asked him whether he’d ever gone out with a girl from another website, and he told me no, because “There are too many sluts on there.”

“WOW, I can’t believe you just said that to me,” I answered. “I don’t like that word. Don’t say that about anyone.” In response, he sent me a girl’s profile photo from the site, in which she was leaning over toward the camera with the word “slut” written across her chest.

Huh.

Showing me that photo didn’t excuse his calling her (or anyone else) a gendered slur, especially when he was talking to another woman, in my opinion. But it was thought provoking. What does it mean when a woman calls herself a slut, as opposed to when a guy calls her that? How about when other girls are the ones saying it, and everyone involved is 11 years old? Or when it’s the 90s and it’s Kathleen Hanna, and she’s performing on stage and she’s mad as hell?

slu*t

And what about now? Where do we stand with the word slut? I think it depends on who you ask.

In 2011 the Slutwalk was born. If you’re unfamiliar with that event you can read about it all over the internet, but in a nutshell, a group of women at a college in Toronto were enraged when a cop who had come to their campus to share self-defense techniques with them suggested that women could avoid physical attacks from men by not dressing in a “slutty” way. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’d had that idea run past them, I can tell you that. But I guess they were wishing it would be the last. They organized a rally that they called the Slutwalk, and the idea–and, I daresay, the name–caught on all around the world. We did a Slutwalk here in Philadelphia that year, and I was proud to participate in it. I met up with everybody in a small park downtown, and we marched with our signs and chants through the streets to City Hall, where speakers addressed the crowd.

But I had such complicated feelings about that name. I liked the idea of angrily taking it back–a la those riot grrrl punks who I so admired as a teenager trapped in a Catholic school lockdown–but, I don’t know, I didn’t really want to say it. I surely didn’t want to write it–not on my sign, which bore the slogan “DON’T PARTICIPATE IN GIRL HATE”–and not on my body.

I had to take the subway to the rally because I have to take the subway (or the bus, or the train) everywhere, because I don’t drive. Staying safe in public is something I spend a portion of every day thinking about, and that day was no different. Riding public transportation alone with the word SLUT anywhere on my person seemed like a bad idea.

I’m not mad that the event was called the Slutwalk; I get it, and more than anything I appreciate being asked to think about these ideas in more, and more nuanced, ways. But I was far from the only one who had issues with it. That day at City Hall, one of the speakers was the filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who said that she initially planned to skip the protest altogether because of the name, but decided to agree to speak about that very idea. She explained that many Black women in particular felt alienated or attacked by that word because they don’t have the same privilege white women do to “reclaim” it. What I heard was that the use of the word SLUT is one more way in which non-white women are made to feel ostracized from Feminism with a Capital F, which is so often, and so destructively and annoyingly, a white, middle-class, ivory tower sort of thing. Simmons’ talk (and other voices as well) made a big impact on me, and on the rally’s organizers too. The event has been renamed (somewhat clunkily) The March to End Rape Culture, and it’s still going strong. We’ll be marching again on October 3rd, which is why I’ve been thinking about this damn word again.

I’ve been reading SLUT, a play developed by Katie Cappiello, Meg McInerney, and the members of The Arts Effect All-Girl Theater Company. It’s a fictional story about a rape that was inspired by true events (which ought to go without saying) and is told in the realistic voices of girls in high school. In the print edition I’m reading, the play is preceded by several teenage girls telling their own stories of victimization around this word and its ideas. It’s one story after another of bullying, school-administration bullshit, humiliation, confusion, coercion, and sometimes physical attacks. These stories are disturbing because they are so very ordinary. They’re coming-of-age stories, in a way. I’d go so far as to say that no girl gets to grow up without being initiated into the SLUT mindset, and for many of us it’s a violent introduction. It makes me so angry, thinking of older women having gone through this stuff before me, and young women dealing with those same things now, but some days it just makes me feel blue.

But you know, the heart is a muscle the size of your fist: keep loving, keep fighting. The organizers of the March to End Rape Culture have been selling original art to raise funds for the event, so I spent a couple weeks embroidering the words NO, NOPE, and NO SIR! onto pretty floral tea towels. I’m going to make another sign and march again. (I think this year’s one will read TRUST GIRLS on one side and BELIEVE WOMEN on the other.) I’ve got my TRANS-INCLUSIVE FEMINISM ALWAYS badge to wear, and I’ll sew my self-defense patch onto the back of my sweater: It’s a picture of a woman kicking a dude in the crotch. I like it because when I first saw it, it made me smile. Once in a while, though, it makes me cry.