pretty dumb things

On the Anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Thoughts on Shame

Yesterday was the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. It passed with very little fanfare, a smattering of articles, a few blog posts, a bunch of tweets, the usual call to give money to Planned Parenthood. Which is odd, when you consider how much a woman’s right to exercise choice has eroded in the past decade or so—87 percent of US counties don’t have an abortion provider, for example, and as more state governments vote to defund of Planned Parenthood, that number will rise. Rachel Maddow devoted herself to a series of segments exploring the real-life consequences of Roe v. Wade’s slow erosion. Hers was a lone voice in the reproductive rights wilderness. 

In many ways, I was fortunate to turn 18 in 1980. I spent a good six years having sex before AIDS began to be a poorly understood concern. Abortion was fairly cheap and widely available. Reproductive Rights, even with the Moral Majority groaning in the background, was pretty much a given. I also had the good luck of growing up in the Northeast, so liberalism was a default setting, at least in politics. 

If I was fortunate in timing and location, I was less lucky in biology. I was a very fecund young woman. I was also depressed (I wouldn’t get an accurate diagnosis of Bipolar 3 until my early 40s; Bipolar 3 says I’m mostly depressed with the occasional pharm-induced bout of mania), and as my bad biological luck would have it, my depression was made more acute by taking birth control pills.

I’d go on the pill, grow so depressed that I was suicidal, go off the pill, and get pregnant. Then I’d have an abortion. This happened seven times over a span of sixteen years, beginning at 18 and ending with my last abortion at 34. In the interest of full disclosure, I also had an ectopic pregnancy, which raises my pregnancy total to eight, which is a lot. Even I will admit that is a lot.

A couple of the abortions I had were full-on D&Cs; the rest were vacuum aspirations. None were pharmacological, aka RU4-86, aka Mifepristone, because that didn’t become available until 2000, five years after my last abortion. Five of them I endured entirely awake, and two I had under “twilight” anesthesia. 

I give these specifics to show you that while I might have gotten pregnant easily, I was not unaware of my actions. I knew precisely what an abortion was, how to prevent pregnancy, what the outcome of unprotected sex might be. I still had a lot of sex, much of it unprotected, and I got pregnant. Sometimes in telling this story, I say that I got pregnant while on the pill. In the stark light of truth, that didn’t happen. I just had sex and I just got pregnant. Often.

These days, as I slough off into menopause, I wonder how different my life might have been had birth control pills not made me certifiably insane. No hyperbole here: I actually was committed to a locked ward for two weeks. My mom signed the papers. I had attempted suicide twice. I was on Ortho-Novum at the time. The birth control pills of the ‘80s were not the happy, friendly, acne-reducing birth control pills of today. They were not low dose or very low dose. They were serious and they fucked me up righteously.

I also wonder how different my life might have been had the morning after pill been an OTC med when I was still young, dumb and filled with come. I’ll never know. I suspect I’d have spent more than one day puking my innards out, and much less time staring up at the poster of a setting sun plastered on Planned Parenthood’s ceiling, tasting the Novocain the nurse just shot into my cervix.

To have one abortion, commonplace narratives seem to suggest, is difficult. To have two is distressing, and to have three or more is simply bad taste. I am, according to my numbers, a wanton slut. Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m not. Perhaps—and this is the point I’d like to drive home—it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, abortion is a medical procedure, and no one should be judged for having it. Lizz Winstead argued this point yesterday, though even she was quick to point out that she’d only had one abortion. You know, lest you think she’d been irresponsible. You know, lest you think she’d been someone like me.

 As The Daily Beast reports, women experience abortion guilt by association. Kate Crosby, who researches the stigma of abortion at the University of California, San Francisco, has found that “women who have abortions specifically try to distance themselves from others who have had the same experience. They don't want to consider themselves part of the stereotype, the woman who is sexually promiscuous and careless about birth control.” In other words, they want to distance themselves from women like me. I was sexually promiscuous and careless about birth control. I was, horrors, one of them. 

Perhaps women’s need to distance themselves helps to explain why on several occasions self-professed feminists have tried—and failed—to hide their horror when I admitted how many pregnancies I’ve had. I’m steeled for condemnation from Conservatives, Fundamentalists, Republicans, and Right-to-Lifers of various stripes, and, frankly, they can condemn me until their hearts turn cast-iron black with it; I don’t care. I’m not, however, given to protecting myself in the company of fellow Progressive Democrats, of Anarchists, Polyamorists, Socialists, Feminists and Libertines. I should learn to be, because they judge me. 

Perhaps you do too.

Here’s the thing, and the real point of this piece: we who believe ardently in a woman’s right to choose, we who believe that right is inalienable, we who believe that we should trust women, we who call ourselves feminists, we shouldn’t give a flying fuck whether that person has had one abortion or fifteen; whether she’s promiscuous and careless or monogamous and mighty unlucky; whether, in short, she’s like you or whether she’s like me.

You know, yeah, I did get pregnant eight times. But six of them were with boyfriends, men who told me they loved me, men to whom I said the same. Only two of those pregnancies came from having casual sex, if there is such a thing. (As I grow old, I’m inclined to think there isn’t.) Those six men never stopped me, never said, “Hey, let’s not do this. Here’s a condom.” None of those men said no, none were forced, and all pledged their love. And that “But” in the second sentence, and indeed the entirety of this paragraph, shows that I’m not immune to the cultural tool of control that is shame. I shouldn’t feel shame, but I do. Some gossamer vestige. I shred it under my harridan’s heels. 

It’s an ouroboros of a thing. Women won’t have equality until they have agency over their bodies. Women won’t have agency over their bodies until they have equality. One thing is for certain, however, shaming women for having abortions—one, or more than one—only helps the side who’d gladly wrest that right from our cold, desperate hands. 

Which side are you on? Me, I speak aloud, again, for the right to choose. For the right of women to have children or not. For the idea that women should be considered first as people and only distantly as potential mothers. For the idea that women have the right to say yes or no, to fuck or not fuck, to fuck up and to make right, to create their own destinies, inside, outside, upward, and beyond.

Related articles

13 ways of looking at an abortion

bitchslapping 101

Last Saturday, I went to a play. It was, and I wish I could be more charitable, really pretty awful. It did, however, give me the platform to indulge in what very likely is the bitchiest bundle of prose I've yet committed to .doc and which was published today on one of my favorite blogs, Tits and Sass. The play in question, Stripper Lesbians (or possibly Lesbian Strippers, I can never remember), raised my ire not merely for its unabashed sloppy writing but also its lack of fundamental knowledge about strippers and stripping. Here's a choice morsel of my T&S post for you:

I also had difficulty following the logic of this play. To wit: Aisha is both a stripper and, as DJ reads from Evan’s thesis, “unemployed.” DJ himself is actually unemployed, although he does audition for Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night using a monologue taken from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and appears to live with Evan post-breakup under her good graces and on the money that she earns as a stripper, despite the fact that she was a finalist in “Glamour’s College Student of the Year” for her article that “Mak[es] Anti-Sex Trafficking Sexy,” which was taken from the thesis she wrote while working at Wildlands, a strip club that does not appear to dabble in sex trafficking but has attracted the interest of Playboy, which wants Aisha to pose, to which Evan is opposed to because it’s anti-feminist, which they discuss in a scene that takes place after one showing on-stage discourse that culls equally from a Gender Studies 101 syllabus and any episode of South Park featuring Cartman’s mom’s scheisse films (suffice to say that Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, spanking and German accents make cameos). Oh, Aisha is also a cellist. She plays not for money but because it’s her “passion.”

However, I suspect my greatest antipathy to Stripper Lesbians came not so much from the kind of sense it made—which was none—and more from the fact that it didn’t seem as if anyone connected with this show had ever been inside a strip club, much less talked to an actual stripper. 

You can go here to read the rest.

I found it an interesting exercise writing about a play, especially one this rife with issues. This play held a deep-fried King Rat of problems, really, and its dusting of condescension only made it more perplexing. In short, I had to make some really hard decisions.  

For example, I had to cut any discussion of the moment when DJ, the ex-boyfriend and thus token heterosexual male, auditions for Long Day's Journey Into Night by reciting a passage from feminist bible Our Bodies, Ourselves. On the surface, it's a joke that works. It's a funny conceit for anyone--male or female--to give a monologue gleaned from Our Bodies, Ourselves, and the surface concept that someone would do it to get a role in Eugene O'Neill's quintessential American drama of addiction is even funnier. 

And yet.

The passage that Stripper Lesbians playwright Kate Foster chose for the script is one centering on sex-workers. It is, in fact, this:

Some feminists have been critical of prostitutes for reinforcing sex-role stereotypes, by allowing themselves to be sex objects or for participating in the sex industry… and contributing to violence against women, as some see sex work as a form of violence in and of itself. Others insist that it is a legitimate way for women to earn money from men. As one prostitute said, "It's my body; why shouldn't I be the one to decide how I should use it?" In the words of an ex-prostitute: “I've worked in straight jobs where I've felt more like I was prostituting my being than in prostitution. I had less control over my life, and the powerlessness wasn't even up front. People didn't see me as selling myself, but with the minimum wage so little and my boss so insulting, I felt like I was selling my soul.”

Again, it could work dramatically. DJ, the former boyfriend, is angry. He is angry not only that his girlfriend has become a lesbian but that now that his girlfriend is now a stripper she is no longer his girlfriend. His anger permeates the play, driving the dramatic action, such as it is. So, ok. I can see the logic for why this is the excerpt.

It could work, but for the way that the actor performs the monologue, and the way he performs it is this: he puts on his very best crack-ho voice, slouching in the corner, pretending to smoke a cigarette, like he'd just walked off a street corner.

Because, you know, prostitutes are funny. As are strippers. And, I guess, lesbians.

There's this thing that The Atlantic and The New York Times do when they write about sexytime sexy sex, and it's kind of like my mom's face when she talks about my former strip job or my fake boobs. It's this pursing of the lips that liberals do that shows their genteel distaste for certain kinds of sex. Look around you, and you'll see the liberal in the corner clucking over the perverts. It's a thing, and it's in this play, and it's in Tina Fey, and it's in major media, and it's all about us.

This play was steeped in righteous condescension, but because the underlying message is "See? Strippers (and lesbians) are just like us!" the play gets off the hook--and the audience can feel validated as they laugh along. 

I'm not suggesting that there's not anything funny about strippers, stripping or strip clubs. There is. Lots. I'm also not suggesting that it's not a place for parody. It is. Boy howdy, is it ever. I'm just suggesting that there's laughing at us strippers and there's laughing with us. And that we're smart enough to know the difference.

 

pubes, politics, pop and words, words, words

The crickets chirping on this blog wouldn’t make you suspect it, but I actually have been kind of busy the last few months. For one thing, I’ve been enjoying a simply crushing melancholy, one that has come complete with a charming shame spiral and the consumption many big blocks of cheese. It has been simply fabulous trying to get out of bed in the morning (and usually succeeding). Fortunately for those who love me, or even those who love to loathe me, it remains as difficult now as it ever has been to find a guillotine on EBay, and thus I suspect I'll be with you for a while longer.

Beyond going fetal early and often combined with cheese-eating, I’ve done some writing for pay on the website 4-Letter E-Books. The site is also publishing one of my fave erotica writers—and by “fave” I mean one whose writing I admire enough to have stolen whole clauses—a woman who goes by the name Remittance Girl. You should check her out.

“The Honeypot,” my column for 4-L E-B, takes an analytic look at sexytime stuff happening in media, on the news, or in popular culture here in the States. It’s sort of “Love, American-Style” for curmudgeons, misanthropes and anhedoniacs, which is to say my people. I might start writing about actual sex should I start to have actual sex again, but in the meantime, I’m feeling like the Dorothy Parker of sexuality, so I’m just going to stick my tart tongue out and go with it.

The first piece I wrote is about pubic hair. More specifically, it’s about the clucking liberal-in-the-corner Atlantic magazine take on pubic hair written by Ashley Fetters. Here’s a choice follicle plucked for your reading pleasure:

Porn is the cause for all this missing pubic hair, according to not only Fetters’ piece but also conventional wisdom—both the LA Times and The Guardian responded to The Atlantic article with scathing opinion pieces condemning in one huffing breath cosmetic surgery and porn, as if the two industries are holding hands, if not swapping fluids. Commonplace says that the sight of bare, glistening, wet, split, open and, above all, shaved beavers has driven women on both sides of the pond to extreme acts of depilation. Shaving’s passé; waxing is, like, so totally late ‘90s; everyone who’s barely anyone, Fetters suggests at the end of her article, gets lasered. It’s a whole big, bare thing, really, and Fetters’ piece caused, as Fashionista reported, women to get their muffs in a huff—so much so that Londoners took to the streets last Saturday for the Muff March, a protest in favor of natural genitals.

The easy way out of this hairy situation is to state obliquely that it’s a woman’s choice. You can shave it, you can save it. You can let it grow, you can make it go. It’s your pubic hair, and as in other things vagina-related, it’s your choice. The problem is that while we would like to pretend that it’s simple, it’s not. You can hum along to Amanda Palmer’s “Map of Tasmania,” the woolly-happy-spirited pubic anthem while twirling your armpit hair around your fingers as much as you like, but hair is never just hair.

You can go here to read the whole ball of wax.

I wrote my next piece on Newt Gingrich. It’s kind of awesome to see a Republican presidential nominee with Gingrich's mind-bending hypocrisy become the accidental posterboy for open marriage, at least it is if you’re a Progressive Democrat with serious perverse leanings, as I am. So I wrote about Maryanne Gingrich and how her announcing that Newt wanted an open marriage made for some very, very strange bedfellows in the polyamorous community. Below is an excerpt, but go here to read the full Gingrichian orgy. (If you want to see something really fun, compare these two Google Trend graphs of Newt Gingrich and Open Marriage. They're like Castor and Pollux.)

Gingrich has a famously problematic marital history. Currently, he is wed to wife #3, Callista Bisek, for whom Gingrich both converted to Catholicism and left wife #2, Marianne Ginther, who had just been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when Gingrich left her. Gingrich has a pattern; he began sleeping with Ginther before he’d divorced wife #1, Jackie Battley, who was just beginning her battle with cancer when he announced to her that he wanted a divorce. It’s a whole big thing, really, and all this Newt and Callista and Marianne and Jackie history only serves to complicate any connection between Newt and polyamory, 

Not that this complication doesn’t mean that advocates of open relationships haven’t tried.

And then last week, I wrote the piece that I feel proudest of. It all started when I tweeted, “Oh, I get it, Lana Del Rey is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction. Dirgetastic!” And then I wrote a whole piece about death and sex and repression and white skin and eyelet tops. It’s a whole big thing, and here’s a snippet:

Here’s my simple explanation for the LDR phenomenon: LDR is to pop music as Twilight is to young adult fiction.

Stay with me here, setting aside your feelings for either entity, or both, if need be.

LDR and Twilight share a deep, abiding love of all things dead or dying. Life is just the thing in the way standing between you and your eternal white-toothed youthful glory. Life is that dead part, that portion where you’re standing around, beer in hand, rivulets of dew running down your teenage wrist, waiting for your boyfriend to put down the joystick and notice you in your blue-jeans. Life is roaming the halls and the hills in your godforsaken small town dreaming of a better death. Life is that inconvenient bit where you’re clothed, however attractively.

You can go here to read the full chewy thanatos and eros black-and-white cookie.

Look for my 4-L E-B column the last week of every month, or just follow me on Twitter. I’m delighted to know what you think or if you’ve any suggestions. You’re the meerkat’s monocle just for reading.

 

13 ways of looking at an abortion

Thirty-nine years ago, the decision known as the Supreme Court handed down the decision known as Roe v. Wade, giving American women the legal right to abortion. I’ve had a few abortions, and I’d like to celebrate this decision by listing a few ways that Roe v. Wade has enriched my life.

Because of Roe v. Wade:

1) My labia, perineum and pelvic floor remain in their original pristine showroom condition. No one likes to depend on Depends.

2) I worked to support myself for six years by stripping. And then I got to write about it. Roe v. Wade is the gift that keeps on giving.

3) I didn’t have to spend the ‘80s driving a mini-van.

4) My breasts are fake and they are spectacular.

5) I had the freedom to go to graduate school to pursue my Ph.D. in English Literature. And then when I realized I didn’t want to be an academic, I had the freedom to drop out. Freedom is totes the coolest.

6) I never, not once, had to marry a man I wasn’t sure I wanted to be bound to by law. And therefore, I never, not once, had to get divorced when it all went asunder. I hear that it's really rather unpleasant.

7) I neither have a kid who’s turning thirty this year, nor do I have one who’s graduating from high school. Most delightingly, I don't have to keep track of all the others in between. So confusing.

8) I get to wear this groovy t-shirt that reads “Ask Me About My Multiple Abortions.”

9) I’ve never had to endure the peculiar hell of having my child walk in as I was blowing some dude.

 10) I can be as lazy, solipsistic, narcissistic, workaholic and/or hedonistic as I want to be, and I don’t feel one iota guilty about it.

11) I have relatively few stretch-marks. See above.

12) Baby-free, I am a free bitch, baby. 

13) I feel fine about my choice not to bear children. I didn’t want to be a mother, and I didn’t have to become one. It’s a happy ending that one should really see in a fairytale.

To support women's right to choose, go here. I did.

 

ovunque, ma qui

The wood is wet. Sadly, this is not a euphemism. The wood is wet despite my purchasing of a large, sturdy and reinforced tarp the exact color of the Green Bay Packers. It’s wet despite my diligent carting of it via wheelbarrow down the steep, stony incline to the villa. It’s wet despite my careful stacking of it in neat piles according to shape and size on the villa’s porch. It’s wet despite my thoughtful piling of it next to—but not too near to—the tiny fireplace that burns said wood, my sole source of heat in this stony Tuscan lonesome. 

That’s not strictly true, actually. There is water that is hot most of the time, or at least as often as there are sunny days, which here in Tuscany is usually. There is also a small, somewhat ineffective portable heater, likely German in origin, that I use sparingly in my large stony bedroom. I turn it on for an hour as I get into bed. It emits an orange glow that gives at least the affect of warmth, if not the experience of it. 

When I returned to Gotham from Italy last June, I found myself in an abject funk of impressive length and weight. It was a Great Blue Whale of a funk, and I swam in its belly like Jonah for a good, painful six weeks. I was surrounded by funk, unable to press my fingers to anything but its solid, mucousy walls. A thick miasma of funk stood between me and my friends, me and my dog, me and my city, me and all that I had once remembered loving.

Clearly the only way to extricate my self from my funk was, I thought, to get back to Italy. I must eject myself out of this funky butt and find myself whence I came. Which is to say, here, in Italy, the land of loss. And thus I am living alone for five weeks in the middle of Nowhere, Tuscany, relying on a fireplace for heat.

This seventeenth-century villa has made yet more vexed my relationship with fire. I was very young, three or four, when my best friend’s house went up in flames. It stood two doors down from my own. I stood outside and watched it burn, as did the whole neighborhood. There are few flame-retardant metaphors for a quick swallowing up of a home by fire. There are beasts and there are juggernauts and there are giant jaws with gnashing flaming teeth. There are balls of fire and walls of fire and tunnels too. So many metaphors used so often, and all crumbled to ashy cliché. 

My friend’s house was eaten by fire, consumed by it, nearly utterly. Her family watched, she in jammies; her parents in that interstitial state of dress that adults affect between work and bed. This generational clothing divide was mirrored by the people in the neighborhood who stood back and let the firemen do their work. The house burned bright, fast and black; it flamed out, like a marshmallow on a stick.

No surprise then my worrisome relationship with fire. About ten years later, my own house would catch fire—some faulty electrical connection in the baseboard heater would send a fast lick of flame up a wall, creating the possibility for an artful renovation. It was a happy accident, eventually, but the night it happened, I lay on the damp grass of my lawn in the black of an April night and wretched. There wasn’t much to do but give into the nausea.

The night I arrived here at the stony lonesome from Rome, I carried the groceries in with my friend, who had to drop and dash to take care of her multiple kids, and nervously lit a fire in the board-game-sized fireplace. The plan originally was to stay with here another friend, here in this beautiful, bohemian, rambling villa that telescopes out magically like the Weasley manse in Harry Potter. But this friend found a job up in Piemonte, and so it’s just me in this three-centuries-old five-bedroom house.

It is a beautiful house. The first thing I wanted to write about it was this phrase: I want to share this with you. This Montalcino sunset seen from the porch, all lambet apricot and lavender greys: I want to share this with you. These stone floors, old as my nation: I want to share these with you. These grapes growing on the arbor, steps from my door: I want to share them with you. This night sky speckled as a robin’s egg, this quiet that’s deep and inexorable as water, this air that’s fresher than homemade bread, this wide bed and its butter-thick down comforter: I want to share it with you. 

It’s a testament to the searing, inescapable and tedious cold that this romantic vision lasted, oh, about five days. Not coincidentally, it ended the same day that I accidentally set a hillside on fire. 

I’d say it wasn’t my fault, except that I grew up with wood stoves and ashes in Vermont. I know well and true not to throw out live embers. I’d say I thought all the ashes were out, but I wasn’t entirely certain, and I thought to myself as I threw the ashes on the compost pile that the soup-stock-spent vegetables I’d put on the pile at the same time would extinguish any embers. I might have seen a flash of orange; I might not have. In the hideous 20/20 that is hindsight, who can say.

I threw the compost and the ashes on the pile. I went out running. I returned, panting and sweaty and breathing rough, so I decided to cart yet more wood from the pile down to the house. As I approached the crest of the hill with the wheelbarrow,  and I heard it. That snap, that pop, that crackle, those flames. And then I smelled smoke. And then I saw great fat billows of smoke wafting like a child’s drawing off the hill.

I ran down the hill, past the pomegranate tree, the persimmon tree, the vegetable garden, and I saw a sheet of fire from the compost pile rising up the hill, a great amber tiger of flame, about the area of a very spacious Manhattan studio. Vicious hot, the flames spread like wildfire because that’s exactly what it was. A wildfire, and I was perched on the brink of becoming the accidental arsonist Foxy Knoxy.

My Italian cellphone wasn’t working. And even if it had been, the Montalcino fire department is whimsical about answering phone calls. And even if someone did answer, there was no counting on their speaking English. And even if they did speak English, I didn’t know my address. I did a quick mental calculation of running back to the house and Skyping my friend to have her call for me. I fast imagined the Montalcino fire department showing up, some motley crew of hip-wader-booted Italians, and as fetching an image as it was, I shoved it out of my head and ran for the hose.

Which didn’t reach. 

I saw a bucket abandoned by the apple tree, half full of water and bobbing with a few citrus fruits. I tossed the contents on the fire and heard a satisfying hiss. For an hour and a half, I ran back and forth toting buckets of water, foot by foot, bucket by bucket, ragged breath by ragged breath, putting out the fire. After about an hour, only the compost heap itself was smoldering. I took it apart, poured water on its archeological layers, and only then did I call my friend. She came over, surveyed the toasty mess, and phoned her friend on the local fire brigade.

“Mia amica ha avuto un piccola conflagrazione,” she said.

A little conflagration, indeed. I put it out, this fire. I started it, but I also extinguished it by myself, a snapping, blazing metaphor for how I’m living my life right now. I made it, I made it go away. 

Today, almost two weeks later, my feet are cold and the ambient beauty of this legendary whatever has dimmed. There are, however, little tufts of green grass growing amidst the toasted black on the hillside. Looking forward with the great, panting eager, I’ve already made my reservation for my hotel in Rome, a city where any fire I come across won’t be made by me, a city with heat and hot water and well-dressed men. In two weeks, I’ll be there.

I’d like to share it with you.

 

not fade away

I went to only one Grateful Dead show. It was such a perfect experience that despite having chances to go again, and despite trying to prolong that perfect Dead-space by driving around in my '80 Sirocco and listening only to bogarted tapes from some Red Rocks concert that I didn’t even attend, I never went to another. It was at SPAC, this natural outdoor amphitheater a few miles outside of the bucolic town of Saratoga, and I had gone with this other boyfriend and a few friends. We’d all piled in someone’s car, and we’d all dropped acid, everyone except whoever it was who was driving home.

The show was sold out. We parked in a field and hiked to the metal gates of SPAC, and someone kept watch for renta-cops as the rest of us clambered over the seven-foot fence. A tree helped. When I hit the ground, the acid hit too. I spent the next few hours somewhere near the Dead’s sound board, transfixed by the lights going flashy-flash, the noodle-dancers’ languid arms, and the music that echoed my very soul itself, man.

The last song was The Crickets’ “Not Fade Away.” “A love for real, not fade away,” and the last few chords echoed into oblivion well after Jerry and the boys had left the stage a glittering blank, all but its magic carpet and the violence of flowers strewn as at a bull ring.

This past Saturday night, I got an email from an ex-boyfriend, a man whom I’ve not seen in almost thirty years. I dated Ben when I was twenty; he was sixteen. It was in lots of ways both the last teenage relationship of my life and the first adult one. When I rifle through my internal Rolodex, I realize that Ben was the first man I fell in love with (not, however, the first human; that was Marta), and he’s one of the very few whom I continue to love, across time and distance and absence and all that goes with nearly thirty years of time passing like a sludgy quicksilver second.

So there it was, an email in my box with Ben’s name. I read it with that crawling horrorsloth of delight doing that frisson dance in my entrails. It’s an eldritch fucking experience to have someone reach out and touch you from decades away. As it turns out, it’s really rather painful to have the first man you ever loved, a man who wasn’t a man then but given his Gmail profile picture of a graying dude a bit wispy at the temples clutching a baby like a life-raft in a storm is a man now, email you out of the digital black. As it turns out, even when he writes to you lovely things, things about how lucky he was to have you introduce him to sex—and you did, you were his first, but then he was yours too, you just didn’t know it then—even when he writes lovely things like that, it turns out it's really rather painful.

As it turns out, when you get a series of emails (only three, but three makes a series, at least it does in serial killings and baseball; you need at least three, not all at once, to make a series) and one after another laves you with the love and the language, the quirkiness, the remembrance of making out in police cruisers, and the whimsy that made you fall in love all those years ago, as it turns out it’s really rather painful.

So the analytic part of the brain kicks in. You look at the picture of the man white-knuckling his new babe and the time-stamp on the email, and you imagine him and his baby and his new baby’s mother and you know how it is with sex and men and new babies. What with the crying and the leaking and the general ambiance of what-the-fuckedness. The past glows extra-Polaroid rosy when you and yours have been sleepless, or he and his, to be clear. It’s no small eight-pound red-faced squalling nothing that drives a man to wonder what the beauty he to whom he offered his virginity is doing these days. Or nights. Whatever.

And so too kicks in the part that defends with the well-shined armor of snark. It’s hard to pull the dead humor punches when you’re returning emails to a man whom you loved and he’s hoping that your writing is thick with love because that is the word that still gives him the internal flicker-flips. You find it hard not to get your inner Brit on and respond with the humor so arid-it’s-acid. You do your best not to. You do, but it’s so goddamn painful.

And you distance yourself with pop music and too many episodes of mindless television that you boot like heroin, if you had ever done heroin, which you didn’t. It’s not a classic lost weekend, but it’s lost all the same. Because there’s nothing like the email in the dead of night from the first man you ever loved to bring it home that you’re home alone. Another Saturday Night and you ain’t got nobody. Your use of the second-person pronoun is tiresome even to you.

The vampire movie The Hunger came out when I was dating Ben. It played at the one independent movie theatre that Burlington, Vermont had. We walked past the marquee and read the tagline for the film. “Nothing human loves forever,” it said.

I do, I mean I will, I said to him. Ben laughed and told me that was impossible. I’d forget him, he said. He broke up with me a few weeks later. It wasn’t his fault; I understood that the time had passed. I was still in love with him, and so my understanding was shot through with hurt. I got it, but I still loved.

Buddy Holly wrote “Not Fade Away” for his band, The Crickets, when he was twenty. He had the luxury of dying young. 

 

stand back. woman with a sword.

Oh, Doctor Who. You showed such promise with the creation of Dr River Song. Whatever happened? Whither the love for the single, childless, middle-aged woman?

I realize that I react as a single, childless, middle-aged woman myself, and that my reactions to your most recent episode, “The Girl Who Waited,” speak as much about you as they do about me; my anxieties; my nightmares; my things that, while silent, go bump in the night. And yet, even as I recognize that I view this episode through my own “Rory-cam,” that is to say lenses that show you what you cannot see and what I can, I cannot forebear expressing that it is deeply, profoundly, and unremittingly bullshit. It is an episode simply fetid with bullshit, and yet more troubling, it continues a thought-free streak earlier exhibited in “Let’s Kill Hitler.”

Which is to say a troubling representation of women in general, and single, childless, middle-aged women in particular.

Dr River Song (see, I use the UK version of “Dr” here in deference to your cultural genesis, such is my respect) seemed so terribly fantastic. Beautiful in an atypical and even feline way, lusty with life, smart and competent, wry and sanguine, River Song is pretty much everything a SCMAW could hope to see on the little screen. That she is played by the incomparable Alex Kingston is merely a delicious cherry curled mop-top on the already very cool cake. And that River Song is also secretly a time-lord? Oh, dear sweet timey-wimey goodness. Be still my beating hearts.

Yet in the episode “Let’s Kill Hitler,” you gave an inkling that all is not self-empowered, if a touch melancholy, with River Song, for after Mels regenerates into River, the character is preoccupied with only one thing: her looks.

“Excuse me, you lot. I need to weigh myself!” She exclaims joyously.

Trust me. Women may enjoy their hair, their curves, their bodies and their clothes, but there is one thing women do not ever enjoy, and that is stepping on a scale. But let’s shelve that troubling moment and ask why for the love of all things wibbly-wobbly, when River regenerates her entire identity is centered on what she looks like and not, for example, what nourishes her. There is no fish-fingers-and-custard moment for River Song. There is only “shopping.” This episode suggests that a woman, even one as unique as River Song, is defined by what she looks like, and what River Song looks like is “mature.”

“I might take the age down a bit,” she says, “just to freak people out.”

Indeed. You’ve succeeded, Not-Quite-Dr-Song.

All of this ambient kowtowing to conventional representations of women and of sacrifice on the part of the SCMAW that “Let’s Kill Hitler” showed was nothing—nothing, I say—but sad preparation to what happened in the most recent episode, “The Girl Who Waited.”

"Spoilers!" below. Read on at your own discretion.

feeding the dream of The Impossible Girl

I don’t remember when I started following Kim Boekbinder, The Artist Also Known as The Impossible Girl (or TAAKaTIG, for brevity), but I do remember when she first responded to one of my Tweets. I posted a picture of myself in her “Kim Boekbinder believes in me” t-shirt with commentary along the lines that I wear it whenever I feel immersed in a pit of self-doubt. Kim said, “So all the time, basically.”

Yup, pretty much, I wrote back.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason. I’m more of one of those people who believes that everything happens. And yet every once in a while, something happens that makes me reconsider that pragmatic if chaos-loving stance. Becoming friends with Kim is one of those things.

We’re not close friends. We don’t call each other up or braid one another’s hair. When I have a problem or a celebration, Kim is not the first person I text. She’s not even the seventh. That’s not Kim’s role in my life, though I’d be open to it if it were. We occasionally do things together like go places and eat dinner; we’re often at the same parties. Sometimes we Gchat. We’re not close, but we are friends.

Despite my ethos of chaos cut with pragmatism, I do believe that Kim is in my life for a reason. I believe that Kim shows me that sometimes, if you work hard and are genuinely nice to people and completely true to yourself and do your best to make art that means something to you, if you do all this (and even if, or perhaps especially if, you fall down and fail and then come back again with a radical tactic and a galvanized sense of purpose), you will do something new, something wonderful, something magical, and something transcendent.

Kim may call herself the Impossible Girl, but I’ve come to think of her as the “Anything is Possible Girl.”

Last spring, Kim had a disheartening touring experience when attendance at venues was low because the club hadn’t really marketed her well, or properly, or at all. It made Kim sad, so she drank whisky, which got her drunk and in turn gave her an epiphany. She decided to create a tour based on her fans’ desires and to use Kickstarter to presell her own tour. I’ve already bought my ticket for her New York show, but if you live in San Diego, LA, San Fran, Seattle, Portland (the one in OR), Minneapolis, NOLA, Boston, or Hartford, you can also see her there. Or you can just throw money at her. She’ll catch it.

I believe in Kim Boekbinder, and not merely because my shirt says that she believes in me. She’s got this combination of artistry, savvy and grace. It’s a combination that’s unicorn rare, and it’s why I feed her dream. This and the fact that she does make some really good music.

 

her name isn't bubbles

My friend Bubbles Burbujas, also known as the amazing StripperTweets on Twitter, wrote a post about my joining the My Name Is Me campaign for her communal blog Tits and Sass, a website devoted to the intelligent, often funny, always real, voices of sex-workers. Bubbles says:

Google is becoming like that irritating customer who thinks he’s so clever for figuring out that stripper probably really isn’t named Fantasia, what with asking people, “No, really, what’s your real name?” Welcome to our world, online handle users! Choosing a work name is one of the first things nearly every sex worker does when entering the business. My name isn’t really Bubbles, Kat’s driver’s license says something else, and Charlotte wasn’t given that name at birth. We all have different reasons for using other identities online from the frivolous (to bitch about work without trouble) to the very serious (malevolent stalkers).

As a former stripper, I'm fascinated with identity--the ones we choose for ourselves, the ones we find society pastes upon us like so many adverts for Mila Kunis rom-coms, the ones that chafe, the ones towards which we aspire. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but I'm fairly certain that the Society of American Florists would rebrand it if its name were stinkweed. Stripping for six years, I saw many dancers change their names when they realized that no one wanted to get a dance from Suede.

I've written often about identity; it's not just an idle concept for me. There was this post about navigating the choppy waters between my strip self and being in grad school. There was this post about choosing the strip name CeeCee, and this post about what it meant. And then there's the pice that I wrote for Tits and Sass on the weirdness of being a sex writer. I don't know if I became interested interested in the smoke and mirrors of identity because I was a stripper or if I became a stripper in part because identity was always smoke and mirrors.

"I am my mane, my mane is me," my friend Rita would say every night she geared up to swivel another shift at FlashDancers. And, really, it's as good a strip mantra as any I've heard. Flattening your self into glossy swinging strands can seem to work well in the ever-plastic world of a strip club. It's way more snarled in the world of the real, which if you're a stripper includes the plastic playland of silky Lycra, Lucite shoes and fake names. 

Real, fake, digital, analog, call it what you will, it's always complicated.

 

 

my name is me

I wrote something for My Name Is Me, the campaign against requiring "real names" on social media, a recent requirement by both Facebook and Google+. I wrote obliquely about my experience because my silence wasn't helping to protect anyone--least of all myself. Everyone who knows me knows my pseudonymic identity, and, frankly, my stalkers had made sure that anyone who Googled me could put my "real" name with the one I had chosen to write under. I decided to make a stand against this charade that somehow "real names" protect people or keep them honest.

They don't. 

Long-time readers know that I've had issues with stalkers. My stalkers--and I know who they are--drove me to the lintel of suicide. They were pretty damn effective, actually. I'm a sensititve person, for all my bravado. But as time went on, I realized they couldn't really hurt me. When my worst fears were realized and my college students found out about my blog, nothing happened. When I got another job in academia, nothing happened. When I left that job and got another, now writing for a living, nothing happened.

I'll probably keep on writing under "chelsea g. summers." I've garnered some sliver of fame and a healthy Twitter following. People still read this blog, even when I've not posted recently. I like the way the name I gave myself looks in print, though I like the name my parents gave me looks as well. There's no reason why I have to choose, which is a luxury of being a writer in a coddled country with a strong history of freedom of speech. Dissidents in other countries don't have my priveleged position. They don't have a choice and, often, they don't have a voice. 

As I explained in my post on My Name is Me, it's not our names that define us. My stalkers chose to go by hundreds of different, equally plausible, names. None of them real, and none of them scented like roses. All of them created with the sole intent to hurt me. We are not characters from Restoration comedies, penny dreadfuls or Dickens novels. Our names don't define us, whether we choose them or accept the ones we've been given. Our actions define us, and I can hold my head up high and claim both of my identities.

 

 

tits and sass and wits and class

I'm a friend of Bubbles, one of the unstoppable forces of seduction and intelligence behind the sexworker blog site, Tits and Sass. I'm half in awe and half in love and more than a little scared by Bubbles, particularly her hipster cred and music nerd chops. An added bonus to our relationship is the ability to drop phrases like "as my friend Bubbles said" into conversation; however piquant that may be, the actual friendship is far more meaningful and rewarding.

Bubbles asked me to contribute a piece or two to Tits and Sass, and my first one, "Shaking Tail and Spinning Tales, From Shaking It to Spinning Them," is up today. The piece explores the intersection of stripping and writing erotica. Here's an excerpt:

Strippers and erotica writers choose to write under names not only because they fear personal and professional reprisals—sex is a dangerous business, even if you’re just depicting it in words; you don’t even need to airfuck for cash to make sex dangerous; never mind the zip code, just living in the Congressional district of sex is dangerous and implicating—but because the fantasy of being someone else isn’t just for the audience. In some way, it’s there for you as the stripper or the writer too. I call this “The Sasha Fierce Effect.”

Beyoncé created her alternate wild-girl persona Sasha Fierce in order to do the stuff on stage that she as Beyoncé wasn’t entirely comfortable doing. If, like a person with multiple personality disorder, you fracture your self into discrete (and ideally discreet) units, you might find you can deal with the perceived dangers of that freakish enterprise. 

Go here to read the rest. It's free. While you're at it, take some time to read the site's coverage of the Ashton Kutcher/Village Voice sex-trafficking "Real Men Don't Pay for Sex" kerfuffle. Both sides could gain from reading what Tits and Sass have posted, frankly. 

In my post, I namedrop a series of posts that I've written here (as well as a couple of Penthouse articles, stories for anthologies and the like). For those readers who might like to read those posts, I thought I'd give some links. Here they are, in order:

The one about the time my boyfriend bound me, blindfolded me, and made me come like a yowling banshee. 

The one about the time I had the world's fasted threesome.

The one about the time I was the girlmeat in the boy sandwich.

The one about the time I fucked a clown.

The one about the times I gave head. Really, there's a lot of head giving.

The one about the time I first squirted.

The one about the time I admitted my ambivalence over nipple clamps.

And if that's not enough, here's the whole smut enchilada, and here are the oral parts and the anal parts. It's like Freud's stages, but without the shaming or the cigars. And finally, here are all my strip tales, starting at the beginning. Because as long as we're talking about tits and sass, we might as well go full circle.

 Ps. I also write about a lot of stuff that has little if anything to do with sex. Because there's also rock 'n roll, zombies and Buffy.

atmospheric entry

I wrote about returning to Gotham from Italy. Read it or listen to it or both. Sorry about the soothing white noise in the background.

 

mospheric entry 

 

For the past three weeks, I’ve been feeling like Ben Braddock, Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate. Vague, befuddled, ineffably disillusioned, and suffering some inarticulate loss, I have attended people’s parties with no real idea of what I’m doing there.

“How was Italy?” They ask, and then before I can answer, they exclaim, “I’ll bet it was fantastic.  Was it fantastic?” 

Yes, I say, it was. It’s easier to answer that way. I can’t quite live up to their excitement. The truth is too complex, and even when I indulge it, the truth sounds false.

“So what are you going to do now?” they ask. I want to tell them that I’m going to go upstairs and lie down, but I don’t. Mostly I say little. I keep on expecting someone to pull me aside tell me a word, one word, perhaps “plastics.” I too want to sit at the bottom of a pool and hear nothing but the gurgle of filters and the quick-quick twostep of my heartbeat.

Re-entry, as any astrophysicist will tell you, is difficult. It’s a major problem of pyrotechnically flaming thermodynamic proportions. It’s hard not to burn up when  foreign matter hits the atmosphere of a celestial body. I hedge on hyperbole, of course, but when have I not? Hyperbole is my bread and butter and metaphor my jam. I have felt moments from spontaneous combustion. I’ve imagined my sleek Betty Draper blonde hair going up in a poof of Michael Jackson flames. It hasn’t happened, not in real life, not yet.

In truth what it is, or so I hear, is culture shock. The form my culture shock has been taking, beyond pervasive sense of living in The Graduate without Anne Bancroft, is a profound feeling of being paralyzed by not caring very much (if at all) and an endless game of Anywhere But Here. No matter where I go, I don’t want to be there. Everything is wrong. It’s off. The cars are too big and the roads are too wide. The portions are too big and the berries too tasteless. The asses are too big and there are too many people having conversations that I can understand and don’t want to hear. Gotham is dirty and ugly. I hardly remember what I loved about it. Gotham’s far away, though I am in it. I am here but not here. I am Schrödinger’s cat.

I still do the math. It’s 7:45 p.m. here so it is 1:45 a.m. in Italy. It’s 8:13 a.m. here so it is 2:13 p.m. in Italy. I do the math, but I do it less and less. I’ve lost the will to order my food and coffee in Italian, but I still catch myself answering “Si” or “No, per favore” when asked anything by a waitperson. Details have begun to slip away, like pollen they drift and flow on quiet currents, somewhere else.

I suppose I am readjusting. At any rate, I begin to solidify. Gotham grows more real, my friends more important, my dog more lovable. I don’t quite want to chew my own arm off. I’m not anxiously scanning last-minute plane fares. I’m stolidly, thoughtfully planning a trip in September; I placate myself with the thought of six weeks in the fall. I’m growing in, perhaps growing up, here in this city that I used to love with untrammeled abandon and now have to fake it, lying back and thinking of Montalcino.

Which is all very weird because I didn’t come to love Italy until I’d been there for months and months, perhaps months and months and months. I still couldn’t speak the language, though I could understand it well enough (Capisco abbastanza bene ma non parlo bene, mi dispiace.) It wasn’t home, not by a long shot. It was weird and wild and foreign and things, magical things, wonderful things, transformative things, seemed possible there.

Which is to put my finger on the conflagratory problem. Here, surrounded by my stuff, in my city, near my friends, my Romans, my countrymen, I actually have to make those changes I envisioned while I was away. I’m no longer literally distant from my own life; I’m not removed. I’m here, present, accountable, and the real smacks me hard as rushing ground to a falling body. As it turns out, I like escape in multiple forms. I thought it was just narratives and games of solitaire. Travel too must go on the list.

I am going through the motions, walking through the part. Nothing seems to penetrate my heart. Not even, I might add, Buffy. This, if nothing else, alerts me to the gravity of the sitch. There is loss of country, loss of freedom, loss of love and loss of loss. There is loss piled upon loss piled upon loss, and all I want is to be anywhere but here.

Every day gets a little bit better. I suppose it does. It does, I suppose. It gets better, or something like it. It goes, and I’m here stroking my loss that grows transparent, bare and shining under my furtive hands.

 

she was a young american

Sorry to those of you who enjoy the sound of my voice. There's no audio for this piece because I don't do accents.

So, I ask him, how does it feel to be written about?

He narrows his eyes at me and does that thing with his shoulders and his mouth, that particularly Italian gesture where his lower lip and his shoulders make this twin parabolic arc, two parentheses echoing one another. He sets his fork down on his plate next to the brown bits and blubs of rabbit.

“You want to know?” He asks. He’s got these blue eyes. He chooses clothes in colors that match, blue and white as the sea and the wakes of boats trailing away in the distance. (He says his favorite color is green. I’ve yet to see it.) 

Yeah, I tell him. Lay it on me. 

His left shoulder does a quick jut forward; the left corner of his mouth pulls down.  It’s like his speech is Michael Jackson and his body is the remaining four of the Jackson Five. There’s always that somatic Greek chorus providing back-up, counter harmonies, vital subtext.

“It wasn’t about me.” He says. 

Yes. It was. I say. 

He blinks and looks at me. “It wasn’t,” he says. “It was flat. It was…” He searches his polyglot Rolodex for the word. “Predictable.” 

Predictable, I say. 

“You are an American. You come to Italy. You fall in love with the land, with the food, with the strawberries. You fall in love with Italy. Of course, you fall in love with an Italian. It’s not about me. It’s a story that everyone has heard, everyone has read. It’s flat. It’s…” 

Cliché, I suggest. 

“Yes. Cliché.” He picks up the rabbit with his fingers and takes a bite, chews, and swallows. “You don’t name me. I’m not a real person. I’m just an Italian. Like the strawberries.” 

I don’t name people on my blog, I say. My stomach presses like a subway fondler against my solar plexus. 

“It’s not about love. It wasn’t about love,” he says. “You want to read about love, read Pablo Neruda.” This conversation is going nowhere good. My ego looks at the door and wants to bolt my body. My superego considers the pragmatism of walking down the long, black and tortuous road back to Recco. I hear the siren song of my interior Verdi opera calling. I hear the rise of the emo aria, and I want to sing it, loudly and ferociously, all the way from my beleaguered solar plexus. I play a quick game of anywhere but here.

“It wasn’t about love,” he continues. “It was about sufferance.” 

Sufferance, I say. 

“Yes,” he says. “Me dica. It’s your loneliness. You don’t have anyone to tell all these things to. You think about telling the panificio lady but you can’t. It’s not about love or falling in love or Italy. It’s about you, alone.” He spears a potato and eats it. He’s so thin. His cheeks hold hollows that compel me to fill them. In bed, and sometimes out of it, I press my cheekbones, my nose, my mouth in those hollows. I want to fill him.

“You could have left off the last part. You don’t want to talk about love. You want to talk about loneliness but you make it this story that everyone knows, this American girl who comes to Italy and falls in love. It’s flat.” 

He looks at me. “If you didn’t want to know, you shouldn’t have asked.” His voice is rough with decades of cigarettes, and his accent is flecked with French, with British English. He sprinkles his conversation with Brit slang. There’s a lot of knackered and fuck-alls. When he denies something, he says “not-a-tall,” all Queen’s inflection and clotted cream. He’s the first man who has ever first used my preferred term of endearment to me.

“My love,” he says, “I don’t mean to upset you. I am honest. I could tell you something you want to hear—when you first showed the writing to me, I said ‘It’s good. I like it’ because I didn’t want to say to you things you don’t want to know. But you asked and I will be honest.”

He is, of course, right, and that’s the thing that pains me the most. The piece was pat. It was cliché. It was flat. It was—most horribly—not honest. The one emotion that has defined my time here in Italy has been loneliness. I thought I knew loneliness before; I have spent my life alone and know loneliness like my own shadow. Its expansion and its contraction, its dark, diaphanous shape and its sinuous movement, always there and always shifting with my life’s light’s slant. I have never known the loneliness I've come to know in Italy. Here, I've felt this disassociating whirl of absolute alienation, a removal so surgical that I can't even parse the body language--and yet, the vertiginous pull of the familiar. American pop songs, American t-shirts, the cultural markers of a familiar landscape slapped like posters on a world I don't know and doesn't want me. My loneliness here has curled on my body like the weight of a constant cat.

I listen to him and come to recognize that frottage of stomach and solar plexus comes because I wrote and I relied on cliché. Its blankness pains me for everything that I thought I knew about myself.

I’m accustomed to men kissing my cupcake ass and quailing in the power of my tiger eyes. I’m used to being on top. Rare is the man who can stand up to my titanium-clad bitchiness that strides as a colossus. Of all the things I expected to find in Italy—and I admit that a lover was one of them—I didn’t expect to meet a man who has the ability to see me for who I am and to tell me when I’m not being real. I didn’t expect this man.

His name is Alessandro. He likes to be called Alex. When Italians say his nickname, they leave off the “x” and say “Allay.” I don’t often call him anything. Words fail me. And who am I, when I cannot trust my power, my words.

 

mi dica

If you're the kind of person who enjoys thrilling to my dulcet tones and poorly accented Italian, you can also listen to this here:

Mi dica

“Mi dica,” the woman in the panaficio says to me. She juts her chin for emphasis. “Tell me.”

Mi dica. Tell me. It’s what the salespeople who spend their workaday lives behind counters say here, or what they say to you once they recognize you. When you’re a stranger, they just say hello. 

“Salve,” they say. They say, “Buon giorno”; they say, “Buena sera.” Sometimes they cut it to the quick and say merely, ”Sera.” But once they know you, they jut their chins at you and say, “Mi dica.”

Tell me.

Tell you what, exactly? Tell you that I’ve lost my keening need for a cheeseburger but I’ve still not lost my hot desire for brunch? Tell you that I retain my fear of acciuga, those hairy little fish we call anchovy, despite having eaten and enjoyed them? That the Sicilian strawberries seduce me anew every day? That I’ve had to recalibrate everything I thought I knew about zucchini? That I forget what it’s like to get delivery?

That I’ve seen the olive trees and the pinetta, the only green when I first arrived, lose themselves in the hills’ aggressively verdant growth? That the smell of the jasmine here will cut a bitch? That nowhere should poppies and lilies be wildflowers. That every time I see those poppies, fat and wide as a longshoreman’s fist, blooming beside the railroad tracks or dotting the center of some landscape of urban sublime, that it breaks my heart open just a little bit?

Tell you that the ceilings are high here, that the walls are thick, that the doors are medieval? That even while here, I’m grieving this loss of space, of air, of time? That though I’m here for another three weeks, I’ve already begun a slow adieu to the view of blue sea and green mountains and creamsicle buildings? And yet when I’m stressed—and it happens even in this paradise, I get stressed, I feel stress, anxiety will clutch my heart in its knobby grip and it will squeeze—I long for the city, the anonymous bustle of busy people with places to go and people to see and none of them me? Tell you that Gotham hangs like a chimera, some hideously beautiful thing I love and loathe, want and reject, miss and forget, in equal, if impassioned, portions?

Tell you that I dream in Italian and I don’t understand it? 

The ladies behind the counter don’t want to hear any of this. And even if they did, I couldn’t tell them. Capisco abbastanza bene, ma non parlo bene—I understand well enough, but I don’t speak well. Which is, of course, a lie. I don’t understand.  It’s true that I latch onto more language than I used to. I can grab verbs and nouns out of sibilant streams of syntax. I can pluck out these words, like pomegranate seeds, but they they’re not enough to nourish me. I’m usually left wanting.

I have much to tell and yet I’ve held it close, as if in the telling it’ll lose its glamour. Or if in the telling, I’ll come to understand it. I’m not sure I want the pellucid truth. I’m finding the charm in the fuzzily experienced, and I’m finding less value in the entirely anatomized known. In choosing not to write, in opting not to tell, I’m choosing to prolong this experience of living in a world whose language I don’t understand. Being a person whose identity is so very tied up in being very clever, in being terribly witty, in negotiating every moment in a relentless torrent of words, this existence where I can neither understand nor express myself is freeing. (Sometimes writing is a terrible burden; sometimes writing is just another word for alienation.) 

I could, I suppose, tell that I’ve moved from terror to freedom. There is that. Though I suppose that metaphorical movement would get lost in translation, as so much does.

I have, in the past three months, fallen in love. I can say this: I fell in love with Italy. I think it happened, as it so often does, somewhere in Tuscany. I was on a train going to visit the only female friends I’ve made here—two expats with names so closely matched that only one consonant separates them—and somewhere on that train between Camogli and Grossetto, fields of flowers and sheep and mountains and cypress spinning past me like a hackneyed rom-com montage—I exhaled and fell in love. Spring in Italy is hard to resist. After a while, it wears a cynic down. You stand in the center of a thousand-year-old olive tree split by lightening, its trunk lacy with age. You walk through Rome and you feel the improbable anachronistic weight of centuries piled upon themselves. You find yourself eating langoustines and sucking their little crustacean heads with gusto. You realize you’re in love. It happens.

As also so often happens, I have fallen in love with an Italian. And of this, the less said the better. He is, I will tell you, extraordinary, unexpected and dusted gently with magic. He speaks English, and though my language throws him regularly, we can talk. I tell him; he tells me. Sometimes it happens beyond language, which is interesting and too valuable to tell. 

Mi dica. Una focaccia, per favore. Anche una brioche. Va bene. Grazie mille.

What else is there to tell? Everything, and nothing. Waves crash. A dog barks. My Italian lover asks how I am feeling. The smallest questions can have the biggest answers.

 

in praise of roman men

For those of you who like it aural, I made a voice recording of this post. Forgive the vocal stumbles toward the end; I couldn't bear to read the whole thing again.

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 If walking through Rome doesn’t make you want to divide and conquer, you need to take a look at your testosterone. Those hills undulate around you like a heaving bosom, like parted thighs, like dimpled buttocks. The cypresses stand proud and erect like so many martial pricks. The river runs through it, wet and mossy smelling. I have spent the past two decades in New York, a city that wafts faintly with the funk of sex, but only Rome has made me wish I had a cock.

Italy is, of course, sexy as fuck. I’ve now traveled up and down Liguria and journeyed all over Tuscany’s hills and dales. This next week, I’ll venture into Trentino-Aldo Adige, Friuli and Piedmont. Next month, I’m going to Umbria, Campania and Sicilia. I’ll have seen a goodly portion of this absurd country by the time I return to Gotham in June. But judging solely from the slender share that I’ve seen thus far, I can say that Italy lives up to its sexy reputation. The land is beautiful. The food is beautiful. The wine is beautiful. And the women are badass. But what really makes this country hot as hell is the men, and nowhere are the men as smoldering as they are in Rome.

Thus I genuflect and render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. I give praise to the men of Rome.

If we as humans like to project our complex and often conflicting sexual desires onto the body of women, the personification of that woman is the city of Rome. Its terrain, its buildings, its topography, its strange creative anachronisms so complex and mind-bending that they make steam-punk look like child’s play: Rome is a singular city, if one with a dual consciousness. To be succinct: Rome embodies the violated virgin and the wanton woman. It both looks as if it wants it, and it looks away, more terrified than demure. Everywhere—from the ruins that punctuate the landscape with the scattered littered look of children’s toys to the fascist white birthday cake that is the Monumento Vittorio Emanuele II—the city has the aspect of a victim and of a mistress. Only the outskirts smack of the Borghese wife. It is a landscape that you can’t help but objectify, and as much as it makes you feel dirty to do so, it nonetheless makes you feel empowered.

You want to take Rome with vigor, and you want to make it cry for more. 

On one of the buildings of the piazza surrounding the Musei Capitolini Roma is a frieze of some mythological figure or other. The god may be Neptune or he may be Zeus, but whoever he is, he looks intently at a large, horn-like implement. It looks like nothing as much as catching a man in deep conversation with his cock. In a similar vein, the Piazza del Popolo holds two basilicas separated by an obelisk. Which, from a distance, looks like nothing as much as two giant testicles and a long, if spindly, phallus.

Cocks abound in Rome. You can’t swing a dead pussy without hitting a dick, or something dick-like, a building reminiscent of dick, or a dickish monument. It might be that this city, home to the Catholic church and thus invested in the extreme regulation of sexual behavior, might be the testament to the veracity of the theory that Michel Foucault laid out in his History of Sexuality: the discourse that works to prohibit sexuality in effect incites sexual activity. Or it may merely be that the only place that could possibly house the Vatican was the most testosterone-driven city on earth. In any case, the defining visual characteristic of Rome is the penis, and, as far as I’m concerned, bully for Rome. God bless it and all its phallic glory.

For it’s really as simple as this: the men of Rome are things of beauty. In other places and at other times, I’ve lamented the fact that men have since the Industrial Revolution forsaken their plumage. Like the Gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I feel that men have given up something important when they relinquished their right to wear scarlet trousers. The choice to dress in clothes as dull as starlings is one that makes eyes glide off men as if they were coated in Teflon. I like clothes that extend an implicit blank check to let my eyes linger. And that is why I cherish the men of Rome.

The second day I wandered Rome, I walked to the Jewish quarter, where I had the questionable pleasure of enjoying the cultural tradition of the fregatura romana, or the Roman rip-off. This is when a restaurant sizes up a customer for the exact usurious limit that he or she will pay without raising too big a fuss, and charging it. My limit, it turned out, was €33, or about $45 in American dollars. It’s not merely a lot for a lunch, it was also a giant gutload for this specific lunch. But I knew when I got the check what the score was, and I had to hand it to the host; he had pegged me correctly. I would pay this bill even knowing full fucking well how much I was being ripped off, and I would do it with not unpleasurable chagrin.

Sitting down in Rome long enough to pick at a plate of food and drink some not bad Kosher Vermentino, I had the chance to confirm what I had suspected for the past couple of days. Roman men were hot. More than hot, they were smoldering. They dressed without fear, and they oozed cool upon cool. They were, as a group, the most solidly stylish bunch of men I’d ever ogled to my loins’ content. 

And ambling past the Pantheon down the Via del Corso to Piazza del Popolo and then back up the Via del Babuino, I had the sublime experience of having that suspicion validated again and again. Old men, young men, middle-aged men, men in suits and men in jeans, men on bikes, men pushing strollers, men leading packs of track-suited athletes—they were everywhere and they looked amazing. They strutted with all the smug satisfaction of peacocks; they lolled like well-fed lions; they strode with the iron-thighed cool of silver-backed gorillas. They were fucking men, and they dared you to look.

Tight pants have an insouciant charm. They invoke the gaze. Your eyes are drawn to that golden bulging triangle. It’s a thing, and you want to see it. American men tend to choose pants that do all but erase their masculinity. American men wear pants as if their towering pubic mounds were mere bumps, smooth and burnished as a Ken doll’s. American men, at least the ones who dress coded as straight, tend toward pants that don’t fit. Italian men, however, like pants that show what their poppa gave them.

 I like it, in short. I like the gift that my imagination keeps on giving. I like the permission to objectify. I like that I’m not only constrained to women’s décolletage for my sexual imaginings, or to fashioning some full-fledged three-D phallus out of some pale and pallid flap of fabric. I like the invitation, and I’ll take it. I can’t say that my short stay in Rome did the conflagration of my libido any favors. It was one prolonged giant clit-tease, and yet I wouldn’t take the experience back for all the dildos in Dallas. If anything, I want to move to Rome.

It’s hard to say how much the energy of a place is the fabrication of all the mythologies of that imagined space. How much of my phallic vision of Rome is the combined force of every Antonioni movie I’ve ever watched, every Verdi opera I’ve ever listened to, every bottle of Sangiovese I’ve ever drunk, every Forster novel I’ve ever read, every Vespa or Ducati I’ve ever wished were snuggled tight between my thighs? How much of it is the weight of my high school, college and grad school Latin and all of its rapacious syntax? And how much is simply intrinsic to this mythical place, this city built and ravaged and built and ravaged and built and ravaged and built again, a cycle of Greeks and Gauls and Visogoths and Fascists and so on for millennia? How much of it is the ineffable magic of the lemon-lavender light that lingers over Circo Massimo, this light that glows with the aura of Aurelius? How much of it is there, and how much of it nestles quietly in the succulent grey matter between my ears?

It’s hard to say. You can never extract the empirical real from the subjective experience, and that, when you’re talking about an eternal city, is a good thing. It’s a thing of magical hardness and velvety softness and the quicksilver scent of musk and smoldering glances. It’s a thing of kinetic electric and atavistic mysteries and beautiful, beautiful men. Long live the Roman man, there in that eternal city. When they and their mythic potency are lost, then we truly have reason to weep. In the meantime, let me rejoice and linger and remember those men and their cool air and their hot, hot trousers.

If you like these pictures, you might want to check out my photo blog from time to time.  All the cool kids tumblr for you.