I don't mean to be treating this blog like it's a Twitter account, but I've not finished the post I'm writing and all these delicious titbits keep on being thrown in my general direction.
The latest? The awesome human soufflé that is Susie Bright has reposted the interview I did with her last summer on her blog. She's also given the link for her free iTunes podcasts, so you can even download play Susie (though not my interview with her...yet) on your iPod.
I both love and hate it when someone does something so genius that it immediately makes anything I might write completely irrelevant. I love it because I love good cultural criticism (especially when it's funny) and I hate it because I didn't freakin' come up with the idea first.
This piece from Kristen Schaal of The Daily Show pretty much nails my issue with the term "Cougar," and it does so with deft, sly humor. I kind of fell in love with her watching it. I'll probably end up writing on the word anyway, just because I have poor impulse control.
Here's the clip for those of you who either missed it or don't have cable. (I got it from Gawker, if you're interested in following the link.)
I received word from Tristan Taormino that my story "Stuck at Work and Late for a Date" will be in her Best Lesbian Erotica 2009. It's kind of nice to have a story a) published, b) published twice and c) published in a best of anything. That it's a story originally chosen by Rachel Kramer Bussel for her anthology Yes, Sir! Stories of Female Submission was the cupcake and that it was picked by Tristan is the icing on it. You can go to Amazon to visit the book until such time as you can hold it in your hott, hott little hands, or you can simply buy the story in its original RKB-edited incarnation.
Speaking of which, the collection will be available at some point in November of this year, and it will include the following scintillating stories by the following luminous authors:
The Virgin of G Jean Casse The Diner on the Corner Zaedryn Meade Operation Butch Ambush Tawanna Sullivan Bait and Switch Nairne Holtz Park Sex Jessica Swafford Spike Jodi Payne Punk Love Victoria Gimpelevich Lipstick on Her Collar Sacchi Green Dream Date Radclyffe On Snow-White Wings Shanna Germain Tough Enough to Wear a Dress Teresa Noelle Roberts A Night at the Opera Evan Mora Please (Act III) Linda Suzuki Hard to Get Rachel Kramer Bussel Waiting Dylynn DeSaint The Placement of Modifiers Jean Roberta Velvet by Lisabet Sarai Stuck at Work and Late for a Date Chelsea G. Summers Bandanna Kiss by Moxzi Lantana Flipping the Script D. Alexandria The Breaking Point Lucinda L. Flanary The Christmas Gift Thea Leticia Blade, Ink, Steel Sharon Wachsler Beneath the Carpet is the Floor Anna Watson
It's all really very groovy. I love getting paid validation.
“Girls come to New York looking for the two Ls—labels and love,” says Carrie Bradshaw, opening the Sex and the City movie with a line that aims for the aphoristic impact of something from Charles Dickens. And now a few days after seeing the SatC movie, I’m reminded of nothing as much as a Victorian novel—and not just because of the film’s having a narrator in protagonist Carrie Bradshaw.
On the surface, SatC is supposed to be a twenty-first-century romp centering on four fun, fearless females. It is, theoretically, a narrative of women who live—and love—life on their own empowered terms. It is, supposedly, a defiantly modern take on what it means to be an independently single woman in the greatest city in the world, New York. As much as the cultural hype about Sex and the City has been that of a Destiny’s Child-inspired girl who buys her own rings and “fucks like a man,” as much as the television series might have centered on burning issues like “funky spunk” and the inalienable charms of the rabbit vibrator, the film embodies all of the conservative mores of Queen Victoria. Sex is for married people; men are inscrutable objects of desire; and women are the angels in the house, or at least the closet.
To wed or not to wed? When should it be a question?
In the past fifteen years, I have had the opportunity to “settle”—that is, to marry a man whom I knew was unquestionably less than perfect—twice. The first time was in my early thirties; the second was in my early forties. Now 45, decidedly single, sprouting the occasional grey hair, and fully aware of my own tick-tick-tick mortality, I remain resolutely glad I didn’t choose to marry either of these men.
Settling is quite the hot topic for single women right now. Since Atlantic Monthly published Lori Gottlieb’s article “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough” in March, this concept of women taking a long, cold, appraising stare at their paramour and deciding, “You’ll do!” has gained astonishing cultural legs. Not merely has Ms Gottlieb garnered a book contract, but she has sold the rights to the movie as well. Do a quick Technorati search for the article’s link, and you’ll find over 600 blogs have written about the piece. A Google search for the term “Marry Him! Lori Gottlieb” gets you almost 200,000 results. It’s a great, big watershed of an article.
Forgive me. I’m sure you receive letters all the time. After all, you’re a very famous crotch, attached at the hips to a very famous woman, Madonna. You, dear Crotch, are legendary. Dare I say it—I think I dare—without you, Madonna herself would be impossible. You are the wind beneath her wings. You, dear Crotch, make the people come together. You make the rebel and the bourgeoisie come…well, you know the rest.
I think, and do correct me if I’m wrong, you first came to light in those frothy days of True Blue—just another one of those wonderful things that 1986 brought us. Along with Hands Across America, the Mets winning the World Series, and Geraldo’s opening of Al Capone’s vault, there was you: the birth of The Crotch.
Ok, not exactly a birth. You’d been hiding there in the shadows all along. I might be overstepping my bounds in hypothesizing this, but I think it was the performance at the previous year’s MTV awards that brought you out of hiding. Too long had you been shrouded in tulle, wrapped in layers of Cotton-Lycra, overshadowed by multiple rosaries and the belly: in 1986, you’d had enough and you struck out with a vengeance.
This shot by Herb Ritts and published, I think, in Rolling Stone, was your grand debut, no? Sure, you’d made it big in “Open Your Heart To Me,” that lyrical homage to peep shows, Liza Minelli and young boys with a yen for musical theatre. But it was really this photo, so insouciant, so saucy, so sassy, so gender-bendingly adorable, that really transformed you from just another crotch into the unstoppable juggernaut that is The Crotch. (Click to embiggen, should you want to revel in your decades-old glory.)
1989: The world was your oyster. It’s not an overstatement to say that Jean Paul Gautier created his most famous garment—the cone-bra corset—around not the bosoms, formidable in their own right, but around you. You were the point of the piece, the apex of the triangle, the cherry on the sundae, and certainly it was this time period that you, The Crotch, was made the most of. She could hardly keep her hands off you, and who could blame her. Express yourself, indeed.
Crotch, you were on a roll. You ruled the early ‘90s. And even if “Justify My Love” overlooked your considerable assets in favor of other, lesser crotches, you know that the Sex book was yours. You own that book. You strode it like a colossus; you kicked ass and you took names. Befurred by a pubic bounty, sheathed in leather, pressed against the blindfolded face of some undiscovered beauty, The Crotch made Sex. Sex without you would have just been a vanity project, but you made it compelling. Compelling enough that people like me bought the book despite its spiral binding that fell apart in one viewing and its dumb matte paper. Steven Meisel worships at the altar of The Crotch.
It’s no wonder that after the heady success of the early ‘90s that you took a bit of break. Laid low. Hunkered down. Recouped, regrouped and reassessed. You had been a very busy Crotch, and it can’t be easy to be so often so much in motion. No one can blame you for becoming so much of a recluse. And after all, it’s not like you were idle. You took the time to have a kid or two, to learn how to ride horseback, and you did a lot of yoga.
Then suddenly The Crotch was back and it was better than ever. Lean, mean, sculpted. A veritable adamantine carapace of a pubic mons. In 2005, tired of giving the limelight up to the Arms, you returned. But you were coy about it. You showed what a knowing Crotch you were, what separates you from all the other crotches of the world, why they are merely a crotch and you, The Crotch. It is the picture for Confessions on a Dance Floor that fully illustrates your genius. Because even though you’re invisible, you seem to be present, crotch, all Crotch; even hidden from our view, we can’t help but see you. Crotch the uncanny, the invisible visible, the Crotch that isn’t, and because it isn’t, it looms larger than life. Oh, clever Crotch!
At this point in time, perhaps drunk with your own undeniable success, you were suddenly everywhere. Shrink-wrapped in pink, The Crotch undeniably had a quest for world domination, and I think it’s not too far out of bounds to say you’ve achieved it. You are unquestionably the first Crotch, the noble Crotch, the Crotch that launched a thousand quips. You are a Crotch above the rest. All other crotches cower in the tenebrous shadows thrown by you. Other crotches quake in you wake. Perhaps a few, only a handful, don’t fear you. I hear Chuck Norris remains unsubdued.
Which is what brings me to write today. Understand that I myself do fear you. I am cowed by The Crotch. I have no doubt that you could beat my mere mortal’s crotch into a bloody, tattered pulp with your steely Crotch power. It’s only with great respect that I suggest that perhaps you’ve grown too flush with power. After all, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power, well, let’s just say that crotches smaller than you have gone over to the dark side.
See, the thing is that a while now, you’ve lead a split life. You tend to appear either in the assertive clothing that is your in-our-collect-our-faces wont, or in a dress pilfered from the wardrobe to Atonement (or in gym clothes, but that’s been a constant for decades). Lately, though the boundaries have begun to bleed. Lately, its as if The Crotch must assert its will every day, whenever it wants. Take, for example, the dress you wore to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Note its undeniable 40’s styling, but note too how it’s sheer—and sheer where? That’s right, just where The Crotch is.
Note too the photos adorning the covers of two recent publications, Elle and VanityFair. Both of them are all Crotch all the time—Elle takes the R&R HoF sartorial mixed message and Vanity Fair typifies the classic Crotch shot. It is a lot of Crotch. Especially when you consider how much Crotch there is in the upcoming album. It’s a World of Crotch. It’s a Crotch-eats-crotch world. It’s a Crotch-Crotch-Crotch world. And maybe it should end.
Maybe, just maybe, you might relinquish your crown to another body part. What about Legs? They’ve rarely been given their shot, and they’re lovely enough, strong and supple. Or what if you stay there, but down-play your power a bit. No need to retreat into flowered muu-muus, but what about a nice pair of jeans. Wouldn’t you like a nice pair of jeans? Everyone loves jeans, even Crotch. Or maybe you’d like a dress that doesn’t look like it should be worn with a cloche. You’ve never done the sixties—how about rocking the Jean Shrimpton for a bit and taking a well-deserved rest?
See, Crotch, you are loved. Feared, even. But no god needs to be visible all the time. Always leave ‘em wanting more. It’s the first rule of show biz. And, really, a Crotch of your stature should know when to say when.
So essentially how I’m feeling is that in the kingdom of the annoyed, I’m wearing the Royal Crankypants. Everything—everything—is noisome. This feeling isn’t new. It’s been building like a tsunami in the open ocean of my unconscious.
That last sentence, that really irritates me. I’d cross it out and start again, but I’m going to let it sit as a silent, purple testament to exactly how prickly I feel. I’m tetchy, goddammit, tetchy as fuck. The world conspires to make me ill tempered.
I’m annoyed by my skin. It’s itching everywhere, particularly places I can’t reach. Yesterday, I ran into Donny’s cousin at one of the places I freelance. She’s looking to be there full-time. That was deeply irritating. Not to mention awkward. This whole thing about Jezebel being sold to Condé Nast is galling me, first because I thought they’d been sold, and then later because I realized it was an April Fool’s joke. My obtuseness rankles me.
I’m really maddened by the fact that Ernie, my X, has apparently gotten a job at a college here in Gotham. I was really looking forward to his being forced to move to a very different Congressional district. I’m angry at how long it’s taken GQ to send me a check for the freelance work I did—maybe all of my annoyance is really Condé Nast’s fault. Darn that Sy Newhouse, darn him all to heck. Also—my iTunes is really bothering me. 7,000+ songs and all it can play are the ones that suck. How many times do I need to hear “Everybody’s Kung Fu Fighting”? That is not a rhetorical question.
My stupid book proposal is really annoying me. It’s annoying me to infinity; it’s annoying me to the nth degree. Which is pretty much the same thing, and my repetition really irks me. It’s also annoying me that beyond “irritating” and “annoying” there are not that many good words with which to express the feeling of being irritated and/or annoyed. My thesaurus really abrades, affronts, aggravates, angers, bothers, bugs, burns, chafes, confuses, distempers, disturbs, enrages, exasperates, frets, galls, gets, grates, harasses, incenses, inflames, infuriates, irks, maddens, needles, nettles, offends, pains, peeves, pesters, piques, provokes, rankles, rasps, rattles, riles, roils, ruffles, sours, tries, vexes me.
My sleep has been choppy of late. It’s infuriating. My sleep comes late, after much coaxing, many countings of breath, and too well into the inky blackness of night. When I do finally sleep, I toss fitfully. My sheets wad up like swaddling around my thighs. I sleep aware of my sleep, not plunged like a baptized infant in Lethean waters. And can I say, wow, this writing sucks like a pangolin. The sleeplessness and the sucking weary me. So does my pretentiousness. I should just fart in a wineglass, sniff it, and call it a day.
See, my sleep becomes all the more precious when, as I was early this morning, my unconscious gifts me with a sex dream, even one as David-Lynch weird as the one I had last night. (I might add that my cat chose the exact moments of my sex dream to walk over my head, press his wet nose into my eye sockets and purr loudly. I really, really hate my cat.) And it was weird, it was a strange dream, even as dreams go, but in it I got to kiss a woman who looked an awful lot like Madeline Zima. And that, unlike an echidna, does not suck.
In the dream, I was back visiting FlashDancers. They had remodled extensively since my last visit there in 2002, or at least they had in my unconscious. For one thing, it was a lot larger than it used to be. It sprawled all subterranean for blocks, like a parking garage stacked full of ecdysiasts. Plus, they’d installed these weird bidet-toilets that were separated from one another with iridescent blue shower curtains, apropos nothing. Really, the whole dressing room was the height of minimalist chic, as if Jacques Herzog, the architect for Prada, had redesigned it. It was pretty disconcerting, but I was accompanied by my Madeline-Zima look-alike stripper, so all was fine with the world when I had to squat over the weird bidet-toilet and my Frye boots kept skidding out from under me, threatening to deposit me in the toilet drink.
Of all the strippers in all the world, the one who glommed to me in my dream was this Madeline Zima creature. All big eyes and thin shoulders and white skin and black hair. All improbably young. Even in my dream, I was pinching myself that a woman like this would be interested in me for longer than it would take her to apply lip gloss. Yet here she improbably was, talking about hair cuts with a kind of improportionate fervor and dropping lines like “I think everyone needs both a boyfriend and a girlfriend, don’t you?” casually as used matches. I was—and am—inclined to agree.
In my dream, it was just a matter of time before we kissed, and soon—after wending through the new FlashDancer dining room (It looks like a Ponderosa, I said; she laughed), after downing monolithic dark drinks poured by my unconscious bartender with a very heavy hand, after my Madeline-Zima clone had instantaneously and inexplicably changed out of her long-gown stripper garb and into a pair of denim short-shorts and a tank top, and after she pulled me into a dark alcove, we kissed. It was, might I say, not at all annoying. It was, might I say, a really lush and lovely kiss. It was, might I say, too bad it wasn’t real. I'd like to pry her apart and eat her with my fingers.
Dream-drunk, I tried to write my phone number for my freshly bussed Madeline-Zima girl, but I couldn’t. I tried and I tried, but every number came out wrong, wrong as pork soda, wrong as culottes, wrong as creationism. No matter how many times I tried to crib my digits on a card, the numbers were all wrong. Not-Madeline-Zima sat looking expectant and only a little bit exasperated.
Which brings me back to my own irritation. The cat walking on my head and nose-butting my eyelids woke me. I hate my cat. And here I am, typing crappity-crap-crap in crankypants.
I’m going to meditate on pictures of the real Madeline Zima in hopes that they will soothe the snappish beast within. It could happen.
Last Thursday, writer, sex educator, lecturer and all around techno-diva Violet Blue wrote an entry for her column “Open Source Sex” published weekly in the San Francisco Gate. This piece, entitled “Ugly Violet: Every girl online is ugly, fat and unsexy. Here’s how to get over it,” centered on the web phenomenon of trolls who use blog comments to denigrate a woman specifically for her looks and sexual orientation or proclivities.
Violet Blue writes:
[E]very woman on the Internet gets called slutty and ugly and fat (to put it lightly) no matter what; all we have to be is female. In dinner conversation, my friend Lori reminded me of the Oscar Wilde quote, "Give a man a mask, and he'll tell you the truth." I restated it for the Internet, replying, "Give a man a mask, and he'll slit your throat." The application here is, "Give a man (or a woman) an anonymous account, and he'll eviscerate your self-esteem."
Certainly Ms Blue has a point. Commenters have gone out of their way to call, for example, me not only ugly, slutty and fat, but also talentless, chunky, lame, stupid, crazy, narcissistic, lazy, immoral, a whore and a loser. I don’t know a female blogger who hasn’t gotten that kind of fetid salmagundi slung in her general direction. On the other hand, I don’t know of a single male blogger who has experienced anything similar. Perhaps men are reluctant to talk about it when, rather than the sticks and the stones, the words have hurt them. But I’m inclined to think that it just doesn’t happen as often to men.
A few facile reasons spring to mind to explain why female bloggers are targeted far more frequently than their male counterparts. Certainly, calling a man “fat, ugly and unsexy” simply doesn’t hold the same kind of emotional weight. Men, as the burlesque performer Bombshell Betty posits in Ms Blue’s column, “tend to be seen in more of a gestalt fashion: People look at the whole package — including personality.” Men can enjoy a wide latitude of attractiveness. Women consider a wide spectrum of men to be sexy; men from actor Dennis Frantz to philosopher Jacques Derrida to rocker Pete Doherty to mogul Steven Jobs to convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer have wide legions of women who find them sexy. Women, however, don’t seem to enjoy that kind of flexible sexiness in the eyes of men, at least not publicly.
So calling a man “fat, ugly and unsexy” is far more easily dismissed because men have a lot more to go for them attractive-wise than just their looks. Plus there’s the fact that men have a more fertile basis for their self-worth than merely their looks or attractiveness. Women, not so much. One needs only to look at the epithets thrown at Hilary Clinton in her presidential campaign. No one has ever considered a man too ugly to elect. Think of Nixon, or Taft, or Cleveland. Not lookers, they. And while, sure, it’s nice to have a pretty president (JFK, for example), it has never been a prerequisite. Men simply get to base their feelings of self-worth on a broader pedestal than women.
Looks-based insults pack a broader whallop when they’re aimed at women. And certainly, one could argue, as many people have done, that a strong, assertive, articulate woman poses a greater threat to dominant culture than a strong, assertive, articulate man, and that is why women bloggers garner the lion’s share of trolls. We just make people feel more uneasy more easily; when people feel uneasy, they lash out, usually in the most simplistic, schoolyard manner possible.
None of this analysis is news. None of it is saying anything radical or wildly speculative. So let me then take the moment to interject a bit of the new. Inherent in Ms Blue’s column is the assumption that the trolls who target female bloggers are male. In the excerpt I quoted above, while Ms Blue does parenthetically grant the possibility that trolls can be females, dominant pronoun in the major clause in the sentence suggests that they aren’t. This assumption, sadly, is nothing new in the writing of Violet Blue.
Ms Blue, for whose work I do have the deepest respect—it takes tremendous courage to be out and about and unfailingly honest as she is in her writing, has a blind spot when it comes to women harassing other women. In the piece titled “When A Man Hates A Woman: The ugly side of sex and the Web”also from Ms Blue’s column in the SF Gate, published on March 29, 2007, she writes about a friend, another female tech blogger, who was targeted by a hate site where “the tone and content of the hate site centers around sexually threatening [her], suggesting ways [she] could be killed and have [her] corpse defiled, stating that [she is] a "slut" and that [her] gender is also in question.” Unquestionably, Ms Blue’s friend had a horrendous experience that was compounded by an article in the NY Times that took a risible look at the whole situation. The woman in question deserves support from everyone—not just female tech bloggers like Ms Blue.
But my problem with this piece is the insinuation that the title makes: that only men attack female bloggers, an idea that Ms Blue’s most recent piece continues to make. I know from my own experience that this simply isn’t the case. We women know what wounds, and we too can be trolls. I’ve had many trolls. At least three of them I know to be women, either because they outed themselves or because I discovered the true identity behind the masculine or gender-neuter screen-name. Certainly, my experience isn’t singular. You only need to look at the story of Megan Meier, the thirteen year-old girl who killed herself after being cyberstalked by a former friend’s mother posing as a teenage boy. Women harass women online. All the time. It’s sad, really.
At the end of the day, we women owe it to each other to be a little bit nicer to each other. At the end of the day, when Ms Blue, who in response to being called “fat, ugly and unsexy” herself, asks the rhetorical question, “would political sex and culture commentary from someone who looks like Pamela Anderson actually be taken seriously?” I have to answer, yes, it should be, if it’s astute, well thought-out, and articulate commentary. What I mean to say is that it shouldn’t matter what a female writer, banker, lawyer, sanitation worker, firefighter, cattle rancher, engineer or advertising executive looks like—at least not any more than it matters what their male counterparts look like.
Yes, there are professions where looks matter—modeling, acting, maybe newscasting. But especially when the profession in question is writing, looks—weight, attractiveness, relative sexiness—absolutely don’t matter. Moreover, it’s not fair to attack anyone based on her or his looks, sexuality, or gender. It’s just dumb, cruel, and mean—and ultimately it reflects far more on the character of the attacker than on attractiveness of the attacked. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.
Here’s what I’m suggesting: we women need to look out for one another because we owe it to one another to do so. It's not easy to be a chick, and we need to make it easier for each other. There's no reason to be our own worst enemies. I’m not saying that men have an implicit get out of jail free card for bad behavior, but I am calling for women to take the time to treat one another more thoughtfully.
What you say gets heard. Often by other women. Take a moment before you call another woman a slut. Consider whether castigating another woman for her looks is the moral thing to do—even if it’s a woman like a celebrity who will never hear you. Pause and think a moment before you wholesale buy into the looks-based economy of women. And for the love of all things holy and female, don’t be a troll. You’re better than that. We all are.
I end this rant with a clip of one of my female heroes, Tina Fey, in Mean Girls. Remember the part when her character, Ms Norbury, says, “Ok, so we're all here 'cause of this book, right? Well, I don't know who wrote this book, but you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores. Who here has ever been called a slut?”
To answer Ms Norbury's query, I've been called a slut. And in the distant past, I’ve called other women sluts. I’m not every going to do it again. Neither should you. While you're at it, add "fat," "ugly" and "unsexy" too. I'm going to.
I am kind of the queen of unfortunate sex dreams. Sometimes—albeit rarely—I am gifted with sex dreams I could narrate without a flicker of shame. For example, the one time my unconscious gifted me with a dream wherein I made out with a Cool-Hand-Luke-era Paul Newman on the wide back seat of a Greyhound bus. That’s a dream about which I can feel unabashed joy. Thumbs up to my unconscious for choosing that particular scenario.
Less shame-free, but still well within the narrow perimeters of jubilant sex dream, is the one I had where I was lap-dancing for Adrian Grenier in the Deadwood-era town square. That was a dream weird enough that I have to stop and question it: why a town square? Whither the dust? And why the booty shorts? Adrian Grenier, inherent skankiness, hirsute face and all, him I get. The surroundings, less so. They call the dream into question.
I’ve certainly had multiple sex dreams about people I know, and people I don't, that fail to fall into the overly eldritch territory. I’ve had enough of them that they’ve faded into a greyed memory wash. I’ve had enough dreams about my X I call here C that I could fill multiple scrapbooks in my mind. Though those dreams were sometimes tinged with the musky brown of emo, rarely were they weird. They were just painful, even if they held me hostage and made me come quick and quiet in the slipping fields of the night.
And then there are the just flat-out effing creepy dreams I’ve had in my life. Usually these dreams don’t fall under the category of “Sex Circus of the Stars.” Usually these dreams have people I know, or are related to, or both. These are the ones that make me want to go running to my therapist the Freudian, so she can whip out her Li’l Sigmund Analysis Kit and have a go at them. (And frankly, these dreams make me happy I’m not a Jungian and therefore fucking myself in some strange psychic hall of mirrors; this kind of dream makes me glad I’m under a Freudian’s care and therefore can open the unsavory can of frugging worms to a limitless range of narratives.)
I have, in the past, dreamed of compromising positions not only with relatives, but with bosses, co-workers, and, when I was teaching, former students. (Oddly, I never had a dream about a current student, though it’s possible I’ve just squelched the memory if I had. When I taught, I resolutely saw my students as non-sexual beings, much as when I stripped I envisioned the men I danced for to have nothing more than those sloping, gentle Ken-doll bumps where their genitals should have been. It just made it easier for me.) Each and every time I have woken after one of those strange dreams, I have felt faintly dirty.
My libido is a dangerous muse. I see my libido as a Mata Hari kind of character. Some squat Dutch woman masquerading as an Indonesian princess, working both sides of the war. I can’t trust my libido, for it will fuck me, and such was the case the other morning when I woke from a high-def, surround-sound, smellorama dream about one of my friend’s wives.
My friend is quite the talker. He tells great stories with gusto. He is also much enamored of his wife. When he’s with her, he compliments her to everyone and kisses her hair tenderly. When he’s not, he just talks about her. I know things about her that she might or might not be comfortable with my knowing—I don’t know her very well, so it’s hard for me to judge accurately what her reaction might be. I like her fine. She’s very nice and quite cute and plenty smart.
My unconscious, however, apparently really likes her, for the other night it served her up like a tiny, brown and hairless banquet for me in my dreams. In my dream, she reclined like a pasha on a bed of white pillows as I licked her pink and completely bald pussy. This bareness being a detail my unconscious was able to borrow from my conscious mind because her husband divulged it, and this being one of the things I know about her that may or may not sit right with her. In my dream, her clit was engorged like a strawberry. It was unnaturally plump and round, this being a detail my unconscious pulled out of its fecund dark ass and having no bearing, as far as I know, in reality. In my dream, I had slipped one finger into her pussy, and I was about to slip in another, when I woke up, abruptly.
The same night I dreamt of my friend’s wife, another friend was dreaming of me. I got an email describing to me my smell and taste and my friend’s mourning the morning shower and an inquiry about what I actually smell and taste like. I can only imagine that my own concept of my smell and taste must be akin to when John Malkovich goes through his own portal.
Malkovich? Malkovich? My smell or taste resonates in my senses. MAL-KO-VICH!
I’ve often wondered if when I’ve dreamt of others, they too have dreamt of me. I have wondered if they could tell when they see me, as if the dream has hung around me in some kind of nocturnal neon aura. I’ve wondered if they could see the embarrassment I’ve tried to suppress and if they could discern its source. It’s funny to me that as I slept sexy-dreaming of someone else, another person across the globe was dreaming of me. It’s as if every night as we sleep, these spectral selves take off and flit about, lodging for a time in another brain, leaving the glistening trails of nocturnal erotics, like something Tinkerbell would leave behind, if she were feeling frisky.
Google the word “va-jay-jay,” or its linguistic twin “vajajay,” and you’ll get around 114,000 hits. It’s a lot, especially when you consider that the word wasn’t even on the cultural radar until two years ago when it dropped like a fluffy little bomb from the mouth of Dr. Miranda Baily, a character on the television show Grey’s Anatomy.
The term, like so many other things—olive oil potato chips, Spanx undergarments and A Million Little Pieces, for example—seemed to come into being when Oprah uttered it. While dangling from a harness and swinging through space, the somewhat freaked-out-looking Oprah exclaimed, “My va-jay-jay’s paining me,” and a euphemism was born. If Oprah’s audience of 46 million wasn’t enough to give “va-jay-jay” a certain cultural heft, the 28 October 2007 New York Times’ piece titled “What Did You Call It?” tracing the term’s movement into mainstream culture pretty much completely legitimized it.
The cover of this month’s Cosmopolitan boasts the headline “Your Va-Jay-Jay; Fascinating Facts About Your Lovely Lady Parts,” thus proving that the word is safe for shopping-line voyeuristic consumption. You can imagine Cosmo’s editorial board sitting around discussing the cover, wanting desperately to catch the eye of all of us women who harbor a deep desire for information on our genitals (and look to Helen Gurley Brown et al for it). You can see them proposing terms in quick succession and dropping them like little verbal hot potatoes. Pussy? Too pornified. Vagina? Too medical. Cooter? Too Junior High. Muff? Too 70’s, plus there’s that Willie Nelson beard imagery. Whatever can a fun, fearless female call it? Eureka! Va-jay-jay it is.
Last October, right after the Times piece came out, I was at a social function with a bunch of chicks (there were dudes there too, but as they’re less germane to this discussion, I’m going to pretend they were off in the corner discussing their P-spots). The Times article, and the Oprah beatification of the term, arose as a topic of conversation.
“Well,” said a woman to my left, “I’m just glad that we women finally have a word for it.”
A pronouncement that, unsurprisingly, provoked me into an acid-tongued response. What? I said, because “vagina” wasn’t working?
“No, no,” the woman stammered, “I just mean that it’s a word that we women can use.”
It took all the strength I had not to roll my eyes at her. My tone, however, was beyond my control. My voice turned icy and patrician. We women, I said, have had many terms for our genitalia. Words that run from the absolutely medical to the purely prurient. I can hardly see what the infantilizing “va-jay-jay” adds to the discussion, I said. And turned away.
And this is exactly the main issue that I have with “va-jay-jay.” It’s precisely the way that the term is feminized through making it sound like baby talk. As a woman, I work very hard not to be viewed as a child. I bristle at attitudes, clothing, rhetoric, manners, music, advertisements, decorations, and language that treats me as if I am a girl. I was a girl. It was fine. I grew up. Now I’m a woman. Treat me like one.
Moreover, don’t force feed me words that inherently suggest that the part of me that most makes me an adult woman—my genitals, my vagina, my pussy, my twat, my cunt—is childish.
I’m sure that when Grey’s Anatomy, Oprah, 30 Rock, Tyra Banks, The Jimmy Kimmel Show, Cosmo and every other media outlet has used the term, they didn’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. I’m sure too that part of my intense dislike of the term is that I am a white Northern woman, and the term “va-jay-jay” has distinctly Southern roots; linguist Dr. John H. McWhorter suggests in the Times article that the term has caught on because “there is a black — Southern especially — naming tradition, which is to have names like Ray Ray and Boo Boo and things like that…It sounds warm and familiar and it almost makes the vagina feel like a little cartoon character with eyes that walks around.” I recognize that I am alien to a culture with this kind of "naming tradition," and my race may be part of my antipathy.
However. Forgive my bitchy dissent, but I don’t need to displace my genitals onto a cartoon character. I don’t feel the need to have my genitals tamed, sanitized and made cute for anyone’s protection. I’m fine with “vagina,” if the medical term is contextually proper; “pussy,” if I’m feeling frisky; “twat,” if I’m feeling saucy; “cunt,” if I’m feeling earthy; and any one of a number of other terms if I’m feeling something else. In my writing here I’ve called my genitals by many names, from the twee “lady bits” to the coy “nethers” to the linguistic range above. I don’t see a need for “va-jay-jay.”
No one goes around feeling the need to call a man’s penis his pe-ne-ney, which, aside from sounding very much like a delicious pressed Italian sandwich, makes the man in question sound like he’s about six. No one wants to be fucked with a pe-ne-ney. No man would go to his doctor because his pe-ne-ney was burning when he urinated. And, in fact, were the male counterpart of Oprah to get into the exact same swing that caused Oprah to exclaim about her va-jay-jay, though his penis might hurt him, he wouldn’t shout out, “My pe-ne-ney’s paining me!”
We as a culture are exceedingly ready to accept the eternal babyishness of women, as evidenced in no small part by the ready embrace of the term “va-jay-jay.” We as a culture remain faintly grossed out by female genitals. We retain an ambient ooginess about vaginas that we don’t have about penises. It’s really, deeply problematic, and finding linguistic band-aids that cover our discomfort does nothing to address the underlying issue, beyond letting it fester under a fluffy pink wrapping.
It wearies me. As a woman who loves language and her genitals, I really wish we’d just grow up already. One very good place to start is to reject terms like “va-jay-jay.” Just stand up, be an adult, and say no to “va-jay-jay.”
So I gave my phone number to this girl last night. She hasn’t called, but color my fingers deep and vibrant sanguine with optimistic crossing.
Last night, I went with a friend and his wife first out to dinner and then to The Slipper Room for some burly-cue. It was pretty standard burlesque fare, which is to say that it treaded between the painful and the sublime, and when it was truly empyrean, it was both. The best piece by far was one by Miss Julie Atlas Muz, who is apparently a very big deal in burlesque, though she’s a tiny thing on stage, all densely packed muscle and sinuous curves. Her skin lies so tight over her flanks it’s like her hips have hospital corners.
“Breaking the Law” by Judas Priest may not be the first song that pops into your head when you think about dancing naked for strangers while making social commentary, but Miss Julie worked it. In the song’s 2:33 span, I counted four, maybe five laws that Miss Julie broke as she slithered, pranced, jetéd and jiggled on the stage. Beginning dressed in a loosely interpreted convict’s uniform of broad black-and-white striped top and shorts, a juvie-center sneer planted on her face, Miss Julie took the stage, pulled a cigarette from her bodice and lit it. Then, cigarette in mouth and eyes narrowed, she defiantly shredded a dollar bill into pieces and flung them like confetti. Retreating to the back of the stage, she denuded her self to pasties and a black jock strap. After a few Trocadero-style ballet moves, she ripped off the pasties and the latex below, grinned, and dropped her jock strap and turned her back on the audience.
She then bent over and rhythmically spread her ass cheeks to the lyrics. “Bwa bwa-bwa ba-bwa,” her ass sang. One or two lines later, she turned to face us, slumped over her pelvis, put a finger or two on either side of her labia, and made her pussy sing the same tune, thereby bringing the house down while being in violation of the following laws: smoking in a New York City bar; destroying currency; performing topless in an unlicensed nightclub; performing naked in a nightclub that sells alcohol; and possibly lewd and lascivious behavior, depending on your interpretation. It was, in short, a performance brilliant, transgressive and hott.
I laughed hard at Miss Julie and clapped heartily, but I didn’t give her my full attention because sitting across from me was this rockabilly goddess with short-chopped bangs, milk-gleaming skin, and total tool for a boyfriend. This woman had been making eyes at me for the whole first few acts and then suddenly stopped because, I think, she noticed that my group had noticed her looking at me and smiling.
“That girl over there is devouring you with her eyes,” said my married friend.
I know, I said. It’s wicked cool, I said, and looked back at her. She had been flirting shamelessly, doing that thing where you make your eyes run the length of your object’s body like a lambent flame. She did that—ran her eyes up and down me and then when her eyes met mine, she paused a divine moment and smiled. I could have leaped over the stage and dived into the depths of her cool cleavage. I sat there smiling at her, trying not to be too self-conscious and creepy, and probably failing, as the acts went on. Her boyfriend pawed at her thighs and her hands, but she shrugged him off and angled her body away.
My heart jumped.
And she was young and fresh and had these pencil thin eyebrows and looked like she should be posed in leopard print and black thigh highs next to a hi-fi; she had that Betty Page thing going on, and that dumb-ass boyfriend stroking her, and she was looking at me and smiling so warmly that even my friend noticed.
But then she stopped. All smiles stopped all together. I fretted. I sat there watching the show, distracted, divided, the image of this girl’s sweet white flesh lobbed into the forefront of my frontal lobe. I willed the boyfriend to leave.
Get up, get up, get up, I said to him in my head. Just. Get. Up. I watched a girl with fantastic tattoos and a pointy tongue and sweetly perverse perma-smile take off a corset to the song from…something, and I listened to the MC make fun of My Girl’s walking tool of a boyfriend, and I laughed, but I kept on willing him to leave, and then, suddenly, he did.
Joy. Numb and shaky with nerves, I took a piece of paper out of my purse and wrote my digits in purple pen and clear handwriting. I stood up, strode across the room, and placed the note in her hand. Our eyes me, she took it. I turned and walked away, toward the bathroom, where the boyfriend was. I stood behind him. I considered complimenting him on her luminous and milky beauty. I didn’t. He was yet more of tool close up.
When they left, her eyes lingered on mine. I watched her leave and regretted that I hadn’t written something else on the white slip of paper, this blog’s address, maybe. My blog could be my pimp, I thought. It would be the gift that kept on giving. I regretted not paying her some beatific compliment or giving her some curt command. I regretted not giving her another reason to call me, something to make her clit switch-twitch like fringe on a tassel. I regretted not being more forthright.
Last night, and early this morning, as I lay in my bed tingly with the lucid dreaming, I saw her face get impossibly close. I felt her kiss and tasted her fruit-flavored tongue. I gripped her hair in my fists and I torqued her head to bare her throat. I ate the white flesh of her neck, the tender flesh of her inner thighs, the succulent flesh of her labia, the thickening flesh of her clit. In my bed, I felt her pussy tighten around my fingers as she came, this embrace of wet velvet and black-light paintings. I saw her hide our fucking from her tool of a boyfriend, and I felt her skin under my palms. I smelled her in my bed when I woke; when I woke, it was her warm body that pressed the sheets like a carnal snow angel.
She hasn’t called; she probably won’t. I’ll stop thinking about her, eventually, but today she lingers, fresh as paint.
NB: As Minstrel Boy correctly noted, destroying currency is in fact a crime. I simply forgot to add it in the list, probably because it's just such a dull one. Thank you, MB
Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Supreme Court decision known as Roe V. Wade, the ruling that made abortion legal in America. Over the past thirty-five years, access to abortions has slowly eroded as individual states began to put roadblocks in the way of women desiring a safe, legal, and medical abortion. Today, only 87% of women living in the United States live in counties with an abortion provider, a statistic means that only 13% of all of the women here in America can easily get an abortion on demand.
I have written twicebefore on abortion. It’s no secret that I’ve had seven abortions, which is, I admit, a lot. I have narrated my abortions in stark detail, and I have discussed how people who identified themselves as pro-choice castigated me for my recurrent choice to terminate my pregnancies. Looking back on my life and the fifteen-year period of these abortions, I believe that my choice to abort was absolutely correct, even if my fuzzy choices that led to my getting pregnant were not. Faced with the same decision again—an unlikely scenario as I’m now about as likely to get pregnant as I am to die in my bathtub—I would unhesitatingly choose to terminate the pregnancy.
I’ve written about how difficult it was for me to come forward and tell the story of my abortions. I haven’t written so much about how rewarding it has been to hear from other women who have suffered as I did in the shadow of their silence. These women were afraid of voicing their experience of choosing to terminate a pregnancy, just as I was. We all lived in fear of being judged. Reading my story, many women came forward and thanked me.
Lots of them sent gratitude in the form of comments to one of the two posts I wrote. A few, however, also wrote me emails. Most of the emails have vanished over time, but I have a couple of recent ones. One woman wrote this:
I could have written it. I too am a smart self destructive woman with a past that includes eight abortions. Two failed marriages, and two children. At forty two I am wise, successful, and in control of my life.
My abortions are something I live with and the shame of them is a heavy burden to me some days. I commend you for being so brave, you have spoken directly to all of the feelings that I haven't had the courage to write about, let alone tell anyone….
I often say as humans we are more alike then we are different. Today I feel that to be truer. Thank you. Thank you for telling the truth. Thank you for helping me find my own voice the on deep inside of me that is silenced by guilt and shame. Thank you for the reminder that we are only human. And our imperfections are the very things that make us perfect.
Another wrote to tell me this:
Mostly, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for your honesty, your courage, your stoicisim and your sincerity. It was such an honourable thing to do.Thank you for making me feel better about something I didn't know I felt badly about, didn't know was upsetting me so much on one level while politically, intellectually I felt utterly fine about it.
I had my first abortion almost a year ago, and since then, three more. I'm 30, been on the pill since I was 18 and not missed one for as long as I can remember. I don't know why I got pregnant; neither do the doctors. As you say: simply exceptionally fecund, maybe….
What I really wanted to say was what I started off saying... that you have made me feel better both about feeling bad about it and not feeling bad. I don't mean guilty - I actually wish it were that simple (almost). But you make me feel ok about the huge, horrid, hurt that digs away despite everything.
I feel less alone, which is such a gift. Thank you, again.
For years, I would lie about how many abortions I had. I’d size up the person to whom I was talking and I’d calculate a number I thought the listener could deal with. One, maybe two was the usual figure. Occasionally, when I was feeling bad-ass and bitchy, I’d make an off-hand remark about filling a mini-van with my aborted fetuses and I’d watch for the predictably shocked reaction. I couldn’t be honest without cynicism because I felt ashamed.
No more. I will never feel shame about my choice to have abortions, and if you’ve ever had an abortion and have felt shame about it, I urge you to let go of that shame too. I’m not suggesting that every woman who exits a clinic with a maxi-pad in her panties should fist-bump her caregiver (though if that emotional response works for you, rock on), nor am I suggesting that a woman who has had an abortion shouldn’t feel a sense of loss or sadness about it. It can be a tough thing to go through and sadness or loss is natural.
What I am suggesting is that when I—or any other woman—experience shame for exercising my choice to terminate a pregnancy, then I have given in to those forces—political, religious and cultural—who tell me that what I have done is wrong. My abortions may have been painful, they may have been necessary, they may have been problematic, they may have been something I wish I hadn’t put myself through repeatedly, but they were not—not a single one of them—wrong. And I will stand up and say so, though it is difficult, though emotion chokes my voice, though I take a risk and though it frightens me, despite all of the impulse to hesitate, I will say I had abortions and I feel no shame because this is something I know to be important and true.
I have two people, one I know and one I don’t, to thank for this recent realization. One is Susie Bright who wrote about her happy, shiny, warm, fuzzy experience at a San Francisco abortion clinic; the other is a commenter who wrote about her pragmatic and compassionate experience getting an abortion in Germany. Both of these women’s stories helped me recognize what is wrong with the pro-choice movement today and that is that condone women’s feeling embarrassed or shamed over their choices to terminate. We need to stop judging other women for their choices, and we need to stop now.
We also need to stop judging ourselves. We didn’t have an abortion because we were selfish—who would ever fault a man’s choice for not having a baby as selfish? We didn’t have an abortion because we were lazy. We didn’t have an abortion because we were bad women or bad mothers. We had an abortion because right then in our lives for whatever innumerable bundle of reasons, we simply could not bear a child. And that is all that needs to be said.
The theme of this year’s Blogging for Choice day is “why it’s important to vote pro-choice.” Everyone who writes about this matter will come up with various permutations of the same thing, but for me it comes down to this: it’s important to vote pro-choice because the personal is political. Only when abortion is safe, legal, and available to every single woman in the United States, only when we can all easily walk into a clinic without fear have we won.
I’m pro-choice and I vote. What’s more: I’m fearless.
NB: A friend of mine who has appeared on this blog under several names, not the least of which was Genny Talia, the name she said she'd give her daughter but ultimately did not, wrote in with this factual correction:
Guttmacher.org says: "In 2005, 87% of U.S. counties had no abortion provider. 1/3 of American women lived in these counties, which meant they would have to travel outside their county to obtain an abortion."
Your blog entry says: Today, only 87% of women living in the United States live in counties with (should be without) an abortion provider, a statistic that means that only 13% of all of the women here in America can easily get an abortion on demand. (Given the clarification about the number of women who live in those provider-less counties - 1/3 of American women - your stats aren't exactly correct, but all for a good cause...)
Thanks, Genny aka Jenny aka Whatever. You may be a frustrated wanna-be editor, but at least you're my frustrated wanna-be editor.
There’s nothing that says “Happy New Year” like pubic hair. To that prickly end, I wish to address an email sent to me yesterday from a reader named David. He writes:
I've been reading your blog for quite a while. Something I don't understand and hope you can provide some insight on: why do so many women today shave their genitalia? It's so commonplace, one can not find a working woman who isn't shaved. I don't understand it. Smooth skin down there suggests a child--eeeeew! I'm not interested in sex with a child. I want a woman. A real one. One with a bush. Something you can feel through her panties (some of the time, anyways). Any thoughts?
Putting aside for the moment what the writer means by “a working woman,” David raises an interesting question. Our current culture puts a tremendous amount of emphasis on the women’s bush—how it should be kept, ways to maintain its topiary forms, manners for dressing it up. It is such a commonplace that women should be trimmed at the very least that waxing or shaving bare is almost the default setting for female pubic hair, and those women who do like their hair “down there” wild as the outback seem either defiant or apologetic about it.
(I should note that this hirsute demand is not for women only. Men have been feeling an increasing pressure to manscape. Perhaps this trend was most hilariously captured by a recent web advert for the Phillips Bodygroom that features a smug, milquetoast man wearing a white terry-cloth robe, judiciously bleeped-out words, and well-timed images of fruit.)
There’s a lot to argue in favor of a more topiary bush. Being waxed or shaved has health benefits such as a lowered chance of urinary tract infections and other issues—in fact, epidemiologists have argued recent lower rates of pubic lice, aka crabs, stems from more people having less pubic hair; lice have nothing to nest in when you’re bare. Additionally, naked labia are more sensitive, and some people—myself included—just think it feels better to be licked or fucked when hairless. Finally, many people find it more pleasant to lick a hair-free or hair-reduced pussy.
But these benefits aren’t in and of themselves enough to argue for the trend of hairless genitals. Most women aren’t sitting down and making a checklist of pubic hair pros and cons before they make their appointment with their waxer or get into the shower with a new blade and copious shaving cream. Most women, we would argue facilely, choose to wax or shave their nethers because culturally we are pressured to do so, and that pressure has come from the media.
I admit that I have a love/hate relationship with Jezebel, the visible lady parts of Gawker media. I have absolutely adored some of their posts, such as the LOLVogue series that puts I-Can-Has-Cheezburger-style captions to Vogue shoots, and I’ve been entertained by their self-explanatory crap email from a dude series, being that I’ve been the recipient of more than one crap email from a dude myself. Sometimes the site informs me about serious stories too, like Jezebel’s frequently updated coverage of the Jamie Leigh Jones/Halliburton rape scandal. Actually, Jezebel is pretty tops on rape. Kudos to that.
And yet, as much as I love to love about Jezebel, and there’s a lot, I have to admit that it really angers me when I read a story like yesterday’s post “How About You Don’t Ask to Come on My Face on the First Date,” filed under their subject heading “How Porn Ruined Sex.” The story, as the headline would lead you to believe, is about how a bunch of women have felt appalled by their dates’ sexual requests, including the titular face-coming. “Ewwww!” exclaims Moe, the writer of the post, in empathy to these women's spoogy travails.
In the piece, Moe gives a couple anecdotes of friends, provides a couple of her own, and informally polls the Jezebel staff, one of whom avers that men “don't think sex is 'good' unless it's somehow fetish-y.” Moe concludes by chalking the whole messy and distasteful kit and caboodle up to the evils of porn: “We all know it is true: porn is doing to sex what scotch is doing to your liver. And I mean, it makes sense! It's so easy to get, and so perfect for the beaten-down and emotionally unavailable! But seriously, it has to stop. That's all,” ends the post.
Reading knee-jerk reactions to porn like this one, or hearing them uttered on television or in casual conversation, always brings to my mind the Dick Cavett quote. “There’s so much comedy on television,” he said, “Does that cause comedy in the streets?” I have to wonder, if watching porn is so unquestioningly behavior changing, then why isn’t watching home improvement shows? Or football? Or cooking shows? A lot of men are cooking on television these days, and a lot of men are watching other men cook on television. So where’s my man-cooked meal? I’m frankly really rather hungry.
I’m troubled by facile associations between porn and badness, and yet I’m not going to be the first person to champion porn as unequivocally good either. I think that there are questions inherent to the hot-and-cold running porntastic world that we currently live in, but I’m not convinced that those problems are, as Jezebel suggests, along the lines of “how the proliferation of porn is forcing women to do ‘things they don't want to do’ in bed.” It seems to me that one thing that media outlets like Jezebel should be teaching is that women—and men—have the right to just say no to things that make them go “Ewww!” And likewise men—and women—have the right to request those things, even on a first date.
But beyond the dicey question of whether porn is good or bad—a proposition that seems to me to rest firmly in false dilemma territory, wherein either answer gives you a bona fide logical fallacy—is the way that Jezebel doesn’t seem to even question that there are women who like to have their face spooged upon. Or that there are women who want to be spanked, another sexual request to which a woman in the story reluctantly agrees. Or that there seems to be much room for women to maneuver in the territory beyond straight-up vanilla sex, the land that does twist and turn in tortuous kinkiness, the land that Moe would undoubtedly term “pornified.”
I happen to love vanilla sex. I also happen to love being tied up, spooged upon, spanked, folded, bent, spindled and mildly mutilated, not necessarily in that order. I like a lot of sex acts that would appear in your average mainstream streaming porn, and I like to fantasize about acts that would land squarely under the heading of “specialty.” I don’t need to be told by a feminist-friendly site like Jezebel that what I like should be banished to the outré world of the “fetish-y,” nor do I need to have it implied that I like what I like only because I’ve fallen victim to the evils of the porn industry. I will have a pearl necklace, and I'll enjoy it.
My liver—and my sex life—are both very healthy, thank you very much, Jezebel. Now why don’t you take your judgment and put it some place that deserves it. Like at the doorsteps of Halliburton. They’re the evil empire, not the porn industry.
There’s this way I’m feeling right now. Right now, every third, maybe second, maybe fourth, maybe every other man, I want to pour myself over him like melted butter. Right now, the way I’m feeling, I see men and I want to pry them open like oysters and pour them down my throat. I could sink my teeth into that guy’s thigh, him, right there, believe it or not. I imagine shucking him of his clothes and nibbling him to wet, sweet morsels. Right now the way I’m feeling is omnivorous. I see a man and I could devour him whole.
My vagina, maybe it has grown teeth. It is that voracious. (The LOLCat photo would show my kitteh going "Nar nar nar!" enthusiastically.)
Right now, it’s been over two months since I’ve been properly laid. Over eight weeks, more than 56 days, or 1,344 hours, or 80,640 seconds have passed since I’ve been penetrated, fornicated, fucked, in short. In the grand scheme of time, it’s not that long. Intellectually, I recognize the relative brevity. But in my panties, it feels like an eternity.
I don’t even exactly recall the details of my last copulation. Vague memories hang like the vestiges of those spray-on spiderwebs that remain in less well-kempt bars. I remember in thin sheets, the last time I fucked. It was, of course, with Donny, my then-boyfriend/now-X. That I know for absolute certain. I absolutely remember coming. I am fairly sure it happened in my bed. Beyond that, details haze and blow about like smoke at a Zeppelin concert. There was kissing, there was sucking, there was the piston-fornicating, and these details I am sure of because there is always kissing, sucking and piston-fornicating. Other points feel as blank as an empty Post-It note.
I walk around with this pelvis bone-deep hunger. Puissant as it is, this hunger crept up on me. The winds of the emotional vicissitudes of the past couple of months had buffeted me about so thoroughly that the dormant party in my panties was just about the last thing I was thinking about. I masturbated out of a sense of duty than joy. I had to remind myself to do it, like grieving people need to be reminded to eat. I would drag out toys, wash them off, lube them up and have a genital go of it more out of feeling like I ought to want to than out of a genuine desire. Now I find that dormancy has passed, and I am left with this gnawing need.
Donny and I have talked about sex. We warily circle the topic. We pick up the sex talk, but we drop it quickly, as quick as if it had singed our fingers. We neither of us seem ready or able to hop into bed like MDMA-laced bunnies, even if the rabbits keen silently when we are together—or when we’re apart. Unable, or unwilling, to strip naked and fuck, we hug passionately. We don’t even seem able to trust a kiss. Our kisses are closed mouth, a little more than a peck, but a lot less than a soul kiss. We press our lips together and they linger, but they don’t part. Our tongues don’t stray. We don’t let our libidos off the leash. We could bundle; we are that restrained, that delicate with one another’s hearts, that chary of one another’s naughty bits.
Which all leaves me with this hungry, hungry pussy. I could wind it up and toss plastic bits into it—shoes, shirts, tiny tin can replicas—and it would still be starving. I have tried. I have fed it vibrators and dildos and vibrating dildos and other buzzing plastic and silicone and stainless steel masturbatory flotsam and jetsam, and my pussy, indiscreet as a goat, has swallowed it all, burped, and asked for more.
Like the Mariner, I am surrounded by water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink. I can’t turn my head without seeing—and sometimes smelling, and if I’m on the subway, rubbing up against in a bonus urban frottage—men. They’re everywhere. I see them and I want. My nose is pressed up against the glass of the sweetshop that is heterosexual sex. I could cram them all into my greedy child’s mouth with my grubby fists. I am that hungry, hungry as a post-hibernation bear.
And yet, hungry as I am, needy, greedy and keening as my pussy might be, I deny it all with the remarkable self-abnegation of a holy man. No, I tell myself, no, and no again, and I wag my finger at my hungry self.
Not now, not yet, not with him, not with anyone, not until I feel ready and sure and able to digest it.
Last week on Halloween, I wrote a post that questioned the recent trend of fetish-wear inspired Halloween costumes for women, and in doing so I introduced my notion of Strip Nation. Not surprisingly given the intense media hype surrounding “Slutoween,” the post garnered some attention, both critical and laudatory.
To be honest, I’m a lot less interested in what women wear to Halloween parties than I am interested in what their choices are, how media interprets these choices and what these choices mean in terms of culture at large. In my mind, the proliferation of “Naughty” and “Sexy” Halloween costumes is neither something to chastise and wag my finger at nor to celebrate and raise the big foam finger to; rather, it’s an opportunity to look at our culture in general, and our attitudes toward sex in specific. We may not be what we wear on Halloween, but what we wear gives us something not just to look at but also to think about.
Strip Nation, as I suggested in my earlier ramblings, is the dissemination of the go-go world of gentlemen’s clubs, strip bars, and burlesque into dominant culture. From the rather innocuous pleasure of body piercing to the unquestionably dangerous pursuit of perfectly pink and perfectly sculpted labia, from the pursuit of pole-dancing to the wearing of Lucite platform shoes, from the girl-next-door to the Girls Next Door, we are a country permeated by a new strip aesthetic. It’s everywhere you look, and as I suggested previously it’s problematic.
But it’s not all bad.
There’s a lot about Strip Nation that looks pretty rosy. Empowering. Celebratory. Even, and I hate this term for its near-emptiness, Sex-Positive.
Power comes from the choice to objectify one’s self for money, and strippers know this. From the day we are born to the day we die, we are all of us objectified, every day that we come into contact with other humans. Objectification is just something that we humans do. We look at others, we evaluate them, and we ask our selves: would we fuck them? We base these fuckability decisions based in no small part upon their looks (we often don’t, or can’t, act upon finding a person fuckable, but that doesn’t mean we don’t constantly weigh people’s attractiveness). When you make the choice to perform this objectifying dance as your livelihood, you take control of this dynamic. In taking control, you assume power.
So the women who select the Red-Hot Devil costume for their Halloween party can temporarily appropriate this power for themselves, and when they choose a Sexy Cop or Hot Corrections Officer or other costume that erotically reinterprets an already inherently powerful cultural symbol, they’re increasing that appropriated power. Sexy Nurse may be powerful, but Hot Doctor = power(X)2. It’s almost algebraic.
It doesn’t have to be Halloween, though, for women to embody an empowering strip dynamic. Parties like Cake, a New York-based roving nightclub, offers chicks who want to try on sexual liberated behavior—from dancing in a bra and panties to making out with strange chicks to finding like-minded others for threesomes and moresomes—in a friendly environment are deeply imbued with stripper ethos. Strip clubs serve up the fantasy of sexually joyful girls, girls who are adventurous, uninhibited and eternally ready. It’s as intoxicating for a woman to imagine being one of these erotically free beings as it is for men to imagine being with one. Parties like Cake create a space where buttoned-up women can be unhinged girls, if only for one evening every couple of months.
Similarly, when chicks take pole-dancing or other strip exercise classes, they come to embody strippers, and it can be a profoundly transformative experience. I used to teach a strip work-out class. In the months that I taught, I saw this group of women comprised of mostly middle-class mommies learn how to move differently. Women who lived their lives in frozen pelvises, their shoulders hunched around their ears, found movement in their backs, found length in their necks. After the class ended, more than one husband thanked me profoundly. More importantly, though, these women did. I felt gratified to know that I’d made a difference in these people’s lives by teaching them how to access their inner stripper.
Nothing suggests the freedom, the power, and the erotic transgression inherent to stripping like the recent phenomenon of democratic burlesque. This topic deserves its own post—if not its own book—but the explosion of modern burlesque suggests exactly how powerful getting naked on stage can be. From the porcelain perfection of Dita Von Teese to the comic, carnivalesque, and culturally critiquing form of lesser known, and often more local,burlesque idols, burlesque has attained a popularity unequalled in its history. Moreover, the reappropriation of burlesque by women of wide-ranging body types and sexualities has given the art form a fresh and cheeky political power.
Strip Nation has absolutely granted no small power to American women. It has allowed women to be all the best a stripper can be: visibly and proudly in charge of her own sexual self.
But being the person that I am, I can’t look at all this celebration of Strip Nation and ask what it means. What is it about our culture that makes women embody the stripper, however briefly, in order to access their own sexuality? What does the need to assertively become a sex object suggest about all the other moments when aren’t choosing to be one? What does the public performance of erotic availability mean about our private understanding of erotic availability? And why do we need to look to the most two-dimensional figure of female sexuality—the stripper—to find our erotic power animals?
These are just a few of the questions I’m interested in considering, living here, as I do, in Strip Nation.
If the general media hue and cry is to be believed, there’s nary a girl over nine or a woman under ninety who is not dressing like a whore this Halloween. In recent days, there’s been a tremendous amount of media attention—both that of conventional media and that of its alternative counterparts—spent on how the range of female costumes has ranged widely from the mildly naughty to the downright fetishistic, with hardly any choice left for those chicks who want to dress up and not look like they’re selling hand-jobs for crack or taking a break from La Maison de Latex down the block.
It’s not like the sluttification of Halloween is a new thing. In season two of Buffy first aired in 1996, Buffy tried to convince her then very straight-laced best friend Willow to bare a bit of skin for the holiday.
“You're missing the whole point of Halloween,” says Buffy.
“Free candy?” Willow asks.
“It's come as you aren't night,” Buffy says, “the perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild with no repercussions.”
Oh,” says Willow, “I don't get wild. Wild on me equals spaz.” And then after gamely donning the navel-baring rock chick ensemble, hides her hottie light under a ghost-costume bushel, unable to follow through with the public performance of her inner wild girl.
I’m not particularly interested in getting my panties in a moralizing wedge over the choice of a fully-fledged adult woman to dress as a naughty nurse, or even over an uninformed kid’s choosing to wear some garb that’s age inappropriate. As much as I’m disinclined to suggest that this Ho-rrific trend is the second sign of the apocalypse—we all know the first was Xanadu, the Broadway musical—I am, however, interested in looking at what it means that the go-to Halloween garb for adults seems to be some variation of streetwalker.
I briefly attended a Halloween party this past weekend. In attendance was a Sexy Cop, a mini-skirted Marie Antoinette, a Gold-Digger, a Naughty Nurse, a Hot Devil and a woman with a deerstalker cap dressed as Sherlock Ho. (There was also a Tinkerbelle, a Marilyn Monroe, and a denim cut-offs wearing Amy Winehouse, but while those costumes may have some kind of intrinsic erotic charge, none of them were designed with sheer T&A-showing titillation in mind, so I’m not counting them.) Not including me, who dressed as a homicidal maniac, which meant I looked like everyone else, over half of the women at the party had dressed to thrill.
I have to wonder if women who choose to costume themselves in Fritz the Cat-esque appropriations of fetish and streetwalker wear do it for the facile reason that most people give: that Halloween gives the repressed a big Get out of Jail Free Card for their repressions. It just seems too simple an explanation for me, that old chestnut about how, as cultural philosopher Mikhail Bahktin suggested, the carnival give people the big fat transgressive blank check to live lives, however briefly, opposite to their own. Frankly, looking around me on Halloween, I’m not buying that.
Because for one thing, women have a limited lip service granting permission to be sexual. More than any time previous to our current millenium, we women own our own sexuality in a variety of ways never previously possible. We can talk about it. We can engage in it. We can attend workshops about it. We can educate ourselves. We can rightfully expect a life full of lots of orgasms of various shapes and sizes and colors. And most importantly, we can decide when or if we will ever reproduce, at least in most states and under most insurance plans. We certainly have the appearance of feeling joyously empowered with our own _____________ (insert favorite term for vagina here).
So perhaps this donning the fishnets and vinyl cowgirl gear has more to do with that pussy power (“pussy” remains my favorite vaginal term; don’t expect me to use “vajayjay” anytime soon), but I don’t think so. Because there’s something about this kind genre of costume’s use of excessive sexual force that gestures less towards empowerment and more towards something else.
To me, when “good girls” dress “bad” on Halloween, they are drawing the line in the sartorial sand between they, who have never chosen to support themselves by stripping in front of, talking on the phone to, or having sex with complete strangers, and those of us who have. They are, in effect, putting on these salacious clothes once a year to show that they have never had to be bad; therefore, they can choose to wear their badness as negligently and temporarily as a cheap Ricky's costume. And then once the cold, hard light of 1 November hits the sky, they can revert, like a showered if hungover Cinderella, to their properly chaste and culturally upright positions. No harm, no foul, no lasting memories of a stray hand, a cruel word, or an unexpected sex act tying the body, the money and the feeling into one greasy knot.
But even that explanation is a bit facile, even if it is correct, and I think it is, however unconsciously for the lion’s share of Sexy Hogwarts Students tipping over tonight in their Lucite platforms. Because this trend wherein women are dressing like they should be called next on main stage, as much as it speaks to their defining their 364-day selves against their Halloween fantasy, also speaks to the seduction of what I’ve come to call Strip Nation.
Strip Nation is the place where little girls wear body glitter for fun, where pole dancing is a fitness pursuit, where chicks have standing appointments for monthly Brazilians, and weekly tans, French manicures and matching pedicures. It’s the place where women purposefully show bra straps and g-strings. It’s where average women have the lower-back tattoo, body piercings, and t-shirts that read “Diva.” It’s the where women get breast implants, labiaplasty and anal bleaching. It’s a place where family restaurants have waitresses wearing orange short-shorts, and where drag-queen restaurants have banana deep-throat contests, and where eighteen year-old girls win them.
Strip Nation is where we live now. It’s not a bad place to live. Strip Nation gives us Carmen Electra and body butter. Strip Nation lets us shake our booty with abandon. Hell, Strip Nation, combined with Hip-Hop Nation—it’s a unified country of dual principalities—has given us the word “booty.” Without Strip Nation, we’d still be pogoing and wearing flat shoes and high-waisted pleated pants.
Strip Nation can be a lot of fun, but it’s a deeply problematic kind of fun. I am proud to have been a stripper, but I know that stripping is best kept in the strip club because stripping is about serving up a fantasy based on the most simplistic heterosexual male’s formulation of an uncomplicated woman. Most simply, Strip Nation provides a dreamscape based on a model of a two-dimensional woman and men’s desire for them. And while that is all well and fine for an eight-hour strip shift, it has major issues when it goes rampant, out into the streets, and disseminates like a virus into the culture at large.
I wonder how much women choosing to dress like a stripper for Halloween—whatever the flavor of the specific fantasy—isn’t centered on an unquestioning slide into the happy amnesia of Strip Nation: a place where men will be men, women will be girls, and no one need have a thought cross their untrammeled brows. I wonder how much the Naughty Nurse, the Sassy Satan, the Wanton Witch, the Reform School Drop Out, the Pirate Wench, and all the heaving bosom, exposed thigh rest, has more to with the prefeminist nostalgia that Strip Nation embodies. I wonder how much the naughty Halloween costume hasn’t less to do with getting one’s freak on as it does with doing so in a way that feels like you don’t have to think about it when you do.
Tomorrow, Halloween will just be a bunch of garbled stories and memories, gone for another year, But we’ll still be living in Strip Nation. Look around you, it’s everywhere. Fun, yes. But at what cost?
I just found out it's national Celebrate Bisexuality Day, and as I'm a chick who enjoys a celebration and bisexuality, I thought I'd post one of my on-going series in unrequited bisexual crushes that I've written for the blog at Sappho's Girls. Sometimes living in Gotham can feel like eternally pressing one's nose against the greatest sweetshop in the world...
She doesn’t know I exist. Sure, she takes my two clammy dollars and single quarter for my medium half-caf and she punches my card, and she puts the .13¢ in the ceramic jug that is labeled “Tips!” and adorned with jaunty daisies, but she doesn’t see me. I am reduced to my faceless caffeine addiction in the face of her casual neglect of my existence. I nothing but a cup of joe.
But her, she is a being of extraordinary beauty, and she knows it. She wears her beauty like a dress she found in a bargain bin at a church sale. It cost her little and therefore merits just that much regard. Her hair is defiantly highlighted in great swarthy swatches of blonde that stride strident against her natural oak brown. Her almond skin is bare of make-up, but for two level lines that march across her eyelids, just above her lashes, and streak out toward her temples. Sometimes her lips bear the lightest brunt of berry-hued gloss, but most usually not.
People already stop and stare, so why court their attention, or so I’d guess her thinking goes, for I’ve never spoken to her other than to order, obsequiously, my cup of coffee. What would I say? I quell and quake before her. She and her beauty and her disregard of it and her inescapable pulse of cool render me speechless. I am stuck dumb.
It’s just a short exchange, but it got me thinking. What, indeed, is wrong with being a fucking whore?
In an episode entitled “Popping Cherry” of season one of Dexter, the Showtime series about a benign serial killer, Dexter’s sister Deborah, a cop, visits a clutch of street prostitutes to query them about being witness to the abduction of the most recent victim in a string of serial killings. Deborah, who had been working undercover as a hooker in Vice, now approaches the group of girls she used to hang out with dressed as a cop—all conservative pants suit and graphite blue shirt and flashing badge—a far cry fro
I don't mean to be treating this blog like it's a Twitter account, but I've not finished the post I'm writing and all these delicious titbits keep on being thrown in my general direction.
