pretty dumb things

just ask hester prynne

Slut-shaming is a new term, but it’s an old premise. Being a woman who has rarely let the roaring crowds define my life choices, I’m relatively accustomed to being called a slut, and I’ve certainly matured immune to people making me feel ashamed for behavior they see as sluttish.

It’s my belief that I’m free to kiss, canoodle, make out, grope, hump, frottage, finger, fuck, suck and otherwise fornicate with as many humans of whatever gender as I wish, as often as I wish, to the extent I wish, and with the frequency I wish. It also is my belief that I’m free not to. I’ve got the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in short, and in no small part the way I’ve chosen to express those rights is sexually. I am, therefore, fairly impervious to sexual shame.

And yet people try.

To be honest, while I always operated under the sneaking suspicion that I had the right to have sex as much or as little as I wanted, I only fully came to inhabit that credo as an adult. As a teen, I still bought a bit into the good-girls-don’t dominant male-monkey-motherfucker culture. As a teen, I felt shame; people would try to make me feel it, and they succeeded, or they succeeded and failed in equal ratio. It was a war within myself, but that battle has long since ended. I don’t feel shame for sex. I feel shame over the actions I’ve knowingly taken that have hurt someone. Only one or two of those actions are sexual in nature. Real shame comes from treating others badly, not fucking great big swaths of humanity.

So it was, then, an odd experience to have that age-old shame waved in front of my eyes like a pair of dirty cotton panties.

Last Thursday, I had a visit from the last dude I dated. We saw each other from just after the first of this year to a couple of weeks into March, when it became abundantly clear that I found him annoying. Our parts didn’t fit in that ineffable emotional geometry. And despite the fact that he gave, hands down—a phrase I use fairly literally here—the best head I’ve ever gotten, I dumped him.

It was a dumping that he required me to do again and again. I didn’t want to dump and redump. I wanted to dump once and be done. I did it as gently as I could because this man was clearly walking wounded. His narratives didn’t make sense, and not in that lying, prevaricating way; they didn’t make sense in that way that his head was muddled with lingering hurt. He was nice enough; thus, though our relationship had been spiked a bit too prickly with Moonlighting-screwball-comedy skewering, I wanted to let him go gently into that good night.

He wouldn’t let me. I had to break up with him about four times, but then it finally seemed to stick, finally.

This dude came over to drop off my copy of Deadwood Season 3. I lend out my books and my dvds. It’s just a thing. I’d lent him this final chapter of the Deadwood, and though I would’ve chalked that one up to the loss column, I was happy to get it back. This last week, the dude came over to my apartment, DVD in hand. We kissed hello on the cheek, we made uncomfortable small talk.

He asked what was new.

Nothing, I said. Really, nothing.

My mind was kind of a blank. I could dredge up stuff, but I knew everything would make this dude feel down. It didn’t seem to make sense to tell him about the t-shirt with the Molly Crabapple illustration of me in my skivvies being on sale, for example. My mind white as a clean sheet of paper, I seized on something I could tell him.

Oh, I said, I’m going to my thirtieth high school reunion.

“Yeah?” He said and grinned lop-sided, “Are you going to fuck everyone there for old time’s sake?”

Yeah, I said. I’ll text you. I’ll send you pictures.

I looked him in the eye and smiled broad and scary.

On the inside, I was calling him a limber-dicked cocksucker. Because dude was trying to make me feel shame about my past, a past I made peace with a very long time ago, and a peace toward which he clearly felt anger, resentment and even a soupcon of bitterness. This dude was one pissed-off dude and, thank all things perverse and profane, that anger was not my problem.

I ushered the dude out the door. He had in that one question shown himself not to be worthy of an iota of my attention and caring. I knew that I could have taken the opportunity to call the dude on his full ration of crazy and bitter, but to do so would be to engage with him. Fuck him and the shame he rode in on. That wasn’t my pony, and I wasn’t going to hop on it.

See, the thing is this: when people try to make you feel bad about something that you didn’t do to them, when people try to make you feel bad about behavior that has nothing to do with them, when people try to make you feel bad about behavior that never hurt anyone else, those people are showing you who they are. And who they are is small, petty, frightened, angry and threatened.

It’s a strange gig when a full-fledged adult tries to raise the specter of adolescent sex shame from the dead. It’s a weird vertiginous sensation to see your fears waved again in front of your eyes—for I’ll admit that part of my trepidation over going to my reunion is revisiting the people who heaped such abuse on me for…what? Making out at keggers? Giving blow jobs? Having fully protected, fully consensual sex? I have avoided seeing these people for three decades, though now I feel quite proud about attending my reunion. I look good for my age, and I have stories to tell. It’s nonetheless canny of the dude to recognize my trepidation.

But it was mean and a low-down dirty dog move to try to make me feel like crap. For that, he should feel shame… and I can feel consoled with the knowledge that one thing he will never, ever feel again is me.

Shameless, proud, spectacular and irreplaceable me.

object lessons

 Last November, I stood dressed in my tattered skivvies for Molly Crabapple. She sat on the floor with her legs folded under her looking like a wayward flower-seller. She drew me, pausing periodically to hold up her brush mathematically to capture the angle of my arm or my thigh. We talked about the healthcare debate and academic life, and when I tipped a pot of ink over onto her carpet, she was kind. I blotted up the mess, and she said the shadow blotch added character.

Two of these illustrations are now available on t-shirts. You can buy them at Fred Segal, if you live in LA; you can buy them at Atrium starting in mid-June, if you live in Gotham; and if you live otherwhere, you can buy them online. I have bought one of each of the t-shirts myself so that I can wear myself in stereo. I can, from time to time, endorse my own narcissism, a quality I like to rebrand á la Gala Darling as a tepid flavor of radical self-love. (I can’t quite call my self-love radical; it remains timid as weasels and twice as unpredictable.)

 Molly’s drawing of me called “Strut” by Dirtee Hollywood is at the framing shop. Soon it’ll sit bright and shiny and new on one of my old and dingy walls. It’s art, and I love it, and I know few people who can say that they have adorned Fival Stewart’s chest. I have, or an image of me has, anyway. I am one degree of separation away from Twilight franchise teen-tart tit. Che Guevara and I now have something in common, presumably.

Make no mistake about it: posing for an artist is gratifying in profound ways. It’s fantastic to stand for five or ten minutes, to take pride in holding a pose, to feel your muscles quiver tight as a racehorse, to keep your chin tilted just so, to hold tight and hold tighter, and to see at the end yourself represented through someone else’s gifted eyes and talented hand. I’ve modeled for artists only a few times in my life, and I’ve never felt anything but a rarified form of aerie elation. It’s a bit high-making, in all honesty. It beats drugs because rather than a hangover and a headache, you inevitably get a lovely two-dimensional parting gift rolled in your hand.

Which is to say, in short, that there is joy in being an object. I have loved the slipping feeling of turning into a thing and losing my being. I spent so many years as a stripper in a happy vague state of bland awareness, and I enjoyed much of that time. Consciousness is a curse, I’ve often felt, and felt keenly, bright and sharp and shiny as an expensive German knife. My consciousness has often been unkind; it has lit my life in the unforgiving gaze of overhead fluorescent lighting. I have been grateful for the Lethean waters of objectification.

Though I’ve not known why until recently. At the beginning of March, a team of researchers from the New School for Social Research released their findings from a study of objectification of women. The study, as reported widely on the web, suggested that women are objectified, their cognitive abilities falter. The researchers suggest that this decrease in cognitive function is due to a splitting of self—an awareness both of oneself as viewed and as viewing one’s self being viewed—and that this splitting of consciousness makes it, well, hard to think.

Objectification is hard, let’s go shopping.

The research leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, it acts as if women’s objectification of women is inconsequential. For another, it acts as if women’s objectification of men doesn’t exist. It also studied only 25 women, and the methods of the study—filming women from the neck down, asking them to fill out a questionnaire about their own self-objectification, and then subjecting them to cognitive tests—seem to this layperson to be a bit fragmented. There’s no question that the study leaves a lot to be desired before we take it as anything more than an interesting cocktail niblet.

And yet. My experience as a professional is that there is a delightful slip-sliding of self that happens during an attenuated moment of objectification. I can’t speak for all strippers across all time, but I can say that one of the things I most treasured about becoming CiCi (at least in the first few years) was how much it made my mind go blissfully blank. I felt like a silver screen, a blank spot for the projection of fantasies, and I liked it. I called it "my blonde lobotomy," and I still hold it close with nostalgia, even as it cloys with the scent of too much perfume and tanning lotion.

I miss that blonde blandness. Granted, not all the time—and certainly that was one of the many reasons why CiCi died that long slow death; I grew to resent the object-becoming, I fought the fugue, and I stayed more solidly myself—but when I’m with my lover, I like to be an object. I like to feel my mind go blank, white and flat, clean as a clean sheet of paper. Ready to be drawn upon, or merely drawn.

I write today as I wrote yesterday as I will write tomorrow as a feminist. Yet I can’t say that there isn’t value in being objectified, in losing yourself to those sublime blank moments. The problem isn’t becoming an object; it’s staying one. That’s what I’ve learned from my time in two dimensions. You can choose to be three-D in a shiny neuro-second. In a moment, you can take back your presence. I’d be interested to see these sociologists study a passel of strippers. I’ve no doubt they could turn off and on the objectification faster than a strobe light

These are object lessons, and they’re illustrative. Pretty pictures don’t tell the whole story, neither being one nor making one. Speaking as a sentient carbon-based life-form with an insatiable need for lip-gloss, I quite like being an object from time to time, even if I enjoy being a fully embodied person most of the time. Nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

more rejected tailpieces: fumbling deaf, dumb and blind

Sometimes even I find it hard to tell the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard to tell. I wrote this story for a collection, one edited by a person I know. I wrote it painfully, haltingly, stutteringly. It took an inordinately long time to write this piece of just over a thousand words; it might have taken weeks. Anyway, it was hard to write, but I wrote it, submitted it, and revisited it periodically in my head because even the telling of the tale didn't quite bear it away.  

The editor of the collection dithered with it, promising me edits and then not giving them to me. Last night I heard that the piece would need substantial revision, and rather than revisit and rewrite, I killed the piece. Like my other rejected piece, it's about sodomy. There seems to be a trend.

Anyway, this collection's piquant loss is your salty gain. You'll find my rejected tailpiece of erotica #2 below the fold.

miss remiss or links and things to feed the savage beasts

I have been lax. I’ve been remiss. I’ve been a bad blogger, and I should be spanked, except that I often enjoy spanking, so therefore I should suffer some other kind of corporal punishment for my egregious behavior.

To all outward appearances, I haven’t been writing, but the truth is that I have been writing, just not very much or very often. (Perhaps I also haven’t been writing very well; you can tell me that, and perhaps you shall in the comments below.) In the past two months, I’ve had three pieces published by Filthy Gorgeous Things, two free, one not, and none of them have I linked, until now.

One reader wrote to tell me that he was tired of seeing the guy with the cockles on his shoulders every time he checked to see if I’d posted something new. Well, dear Guy-Who-Hates-Mollusk-Inspired-Menswear, this is for you.

First, way back in April, the month of taxes, I had two pieces published in FGT’s Commerce issue. The free one, ironically, is on writing erotica for cash; the other is an interview with New York School of Burlesque Headmistress and all-around Queen of Cool, Jo Weldon.

I begin “What I Write for Money, Honey” thusly:

Anaïs Nin makes it look easy. (Or maybe she doesn’t because to be honest I haven’t read much of her beyond the sexytime stories, and they kind of make me want to cock-punch her. I’d like to see Anaïs Nin in a cage-fight with Dr. Maya Angelou.) I’m sure there are parts in Nin’s voluminous diaries wherein she describes in satin prose how difficult it is to write erotica. I just haven’t read them, nor will I.

After this, I go on to talk about the pangs of pay. I guess some people could consider it heavyweight whinging, like, oh, god, I get fucking paid to write about fucking and my wallet’s too small for my fifties. I maintain that writing about sex has a cost not attached to writing about less sweaty, less somatic, less emotional acts. It’s a crossing of consciousnesses that feels to me a lot like stripping, but then perhaps that is due to my work history. I write what I know, and perhaps too close to the bone.

My piece on Jo, which again will cost you a small fee to read, begins like this:

Jo “Boobs” Weldon, Headmistress of the New York School of Burlesque, is gorgeous; she also has all the poise and all the fearsomeness you’d expect from a woman who commands a school. There’s a heady mix of control and perversion contained in the tiny package that is Jo Weldon, but then Jo has worn many hats in her lifetime: stripper, pro-Domme, feature dancer, burlesque performer, adult video producer, teacher and writer. The doyenne of duende, Jo has had a hand in shaping the burlesque scene of today—and with the June release of her book, The New York School of Burlesque Handbook, Jo will continue to influence the burlesque stars of tomorrow. I sat Jo down to talk about the collision of money and sex, the evils of white slavery, eating cat food, and when she might consider exploiting a developing nation for commercial purposes. 

Jo dishes the dirt on community and cash and why burlesque audiences enjoy watching the fur hit the floor. She is one smart, funny woman. I’m delighted I got to spend time on her couch drinking her tea.

Most recently, I wrote "You Say Taboo, I Say I Do," a piece for FGT’s Taboo issue on my experiences of SlutFest 2004. I’ve gotten a lot of narrative mileage from those three months, three women, and 18 men. This might be my last telling of that particular tale. It starts here with a lavish photograph:

As it turns out, being raised by wolves in the wilds of Vermont doesn’t work to create taboos. Nor does it help that I was raised by a woman who hit the sexual revolution running or that she had a fast and loose relationship with her childhood faith, which was Unitarianism and therefore more a list of manners than an actual faith. Given that the role models who around me were hippies, freaks, geeks, junkies and jazz musicians, I wasn’t surrounded by models of the moral majority. Sex was something one did, apparently, and did early and often. My mom’s first major piece of advice to me was this: “It’s ok to touch yourself as long as your hands are clean.” I’ve lived by that motto; it has served me well, childhood into adulthood.

It ends with stripping.

Really, I should get out more. At least my 27-year-old lover is coming to visit me in a few weeks, for I've been living the kind of life that makes me pallid with boredom.

I’d also like to mention that one of my friends, the incomparable Bubbles, aka StripperTweets, also had two pieces published in the Commerce issue. I love Bubbles more than sliced ham: she’s twice as sweet and just as salty. Really, she’s someone to watch, a woman of great wit and immeasurable charm. You want to check out her pieces because she’s swell in all the right places.

Finally, I’m working on something for The Rumpus, about which I’m wicked excited—no details now, but they are forthcoming and they include shooting stars. I’m also recommitting myself to writing early and often. If the muse wants to find me, she’ll have an easier time if I’m sitting at my desk. I’m going to try this whole writing on a regular basis thing again. You never know what will happen.

If nothing else, maybe I’ll have an idea more sustained than a 140-character Tweet.