pretty dumb things

on cougars, part 1; or why I {heart} Kristen Schaal

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.)

to Joss Whedon and for Dr. Horrible

It’s no secret that Joss Whedon has, on occasion, saved my life. All right, pardon the hyperbole, but more than once I’ve contemplated the thrilling surrender of death but sat on my couch and watched Buffy instead. I’ve learned my lesson; I’d never actually put those ghastly feelings into motion—I’ve seen the horror of suicide’s collateral damage, and I would never put my friends and family through that particular emotional grist mill. But even removing the temptation to actual action doesn’t keep me from laving myself in some high-quality suicidality. However, Buffy does.

There are reasons aplenty why I love Buffy with such a deep and infinite ardor (I love Firefly, and I like Angel quite a bit, until it gets to the super-creepy faintly incestuous part in season 3 and 4, but neither matches the deep visceral response that Buffy evokes). There’s the constant play in language, for one thing. The way that adjectives become nouns, as in “It gives me a happy.” The way that the characters invent new slang, as in “That’s the kick!” for saying something’s cool, or “Five-by-five” to say A-OK. The way that the show employs neologisms like “vampification” and “lesbidar.” The way that the show pokes fun at cultural idiom, as when Buffy refers to vampires as “undead Americans.” All of that flavor of lexicographical jump-roping makes me get a good-down low tingle.

There’s the constant nodding to high-brow, low-brow, no-brow and pop cultures. I love it when Buffy describes her principal-enforced tenure selling candy bars as “going all Willy Loman,” a moment I love as much as when Willow bemoans her SAT scores by exclaiming she’s “Cletis, the slack-jawed yokel!” I love the moment when, after Xander tries to say something profound about fear, he finds himself mired in a morass of elliptical platitudes and Buffy responds, “Thank you for the Dadaist pep-talk. I’m feeling much more abstract now.” I live for moments when I can trot out lines of Buffy dialog.

But all of that is nothing but the shiny. It’s the glittery tinsel bits of why I love Buffy—and therefore Whedon—with such an inordinately intense extra-flamey white-hot burning passion. Seriously, if I could meet one person in Hollywood, it would be Whedon, if only to inarticulately stammer out my appreciation for his oeuvre. And were he then interested in why I was so abjectly devoted, I’d get the opportunity to tell him, and that is this: he makes  a mess of gender stereotypes, and it’s a lovely trashing.

Buffy herself is the most obvious example of messing with gender. She’s blonde and tiny and ostensibly weak, but she is the chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.

And yet.

More than Buffy’s sweet, sweet ass-kicking abilities, and they are prodigious and lovely, she is a complex internal mess. Sure, that the skinny blonde chick turns the tables on victimhood is already a gendered reversal, but there are plenty of booty-stomping cuties ready to open up a fresh can of whip-ass in the action/adventure/comic universe. What sets Buffy apart is that she has conflict about her destiny. She suffers. And she feels badly about suffering. She has a superiority complex and then an inferiority complex about her superiority complex. It’s a whole big thing. And it makes me identify with her like mad.

But it’s not just Buffy, see. Because suffering is an equal-opportunity sport. In fact, the mark of humanity is the ability to suffer in the Whedonverse. Whether it’s Angel, the vampire with a soul, or Spike, also the vampire with the soul and also a world-class pervert and so in the great mythical debate of which undead to bed you can guess my pick, or any of Buffy’s Slayerettes, or pretty much anyone one with a spark of humanity glinting brightly in the forest of the night, there is suffering. The mark of true evil is the inability to feel pain. I kind of love that.

Men and women are absolutely equal in the Whedonverse—that area of media conceived by Whedon himself, well, Whedon and his team of crack henchpeople. They fight each other and they don’t hold back (unless it’s Buffy who does hold back a little when she spars with Riley, her boyfriend the steroided-out Initiative guy). Men and women are equally strong and equally weak. They are equally needing of saving, and they are equal saviors (although Buffy is a bit more savioresque than anyone; she’s just a damn fine savoir). Finally, they are this: equally good and equally evil.

It’s this last point upon which I must hand it to Whedon and his team. Most media has a hard time depicting women as evil. There’s a Victorian restraint guiding the hand that draws the evil chick. She often gets a white glove treatment, wherein she gets all kinds of explanatory notes for why she’s so goddamned bad. Male villains rarely get the back-story. They’re just bad, and we the audience accept that. Cruella de Vil is motivated by her desire for the soft fur of pure Dalmatian puppies. Catwoman has a history of abuse. However ill thought-out, Poison Ivy wants to protect the environment. Male supervillains just have an endless, ambient hunger for power. ‘Nuff said. Supervillainesses, though, get the full narrative treatment.

Not so in the Whedonverse. Women, like men, can just be bad, and like the girl with the curl, when they’re bad, they’re very, very bad, while the men often are just bumbling. Whether it’s Glory, the God, who wants the end of the world, or Willow, when she goes all dark magics, who wants the end of the world, girls gone bad are girls gone pyrotechnically, supernovally, atomically bad. You have to respect Whedon’s willingness to draw these dark ladies with a free hand. I do.

There is, however, one area that Whedon doesn’t do well and that is sex. In all three series—Buffy, Angel and Firefly—no one can have sex very successfully, except for maybe the lesbians. Everyone else, which is pretty much just a bunch of heterosexuals getting their naughty on and doing it badly, but not in a good-bad kind of way, nor even a bad-bad kind of way, but really a rather lame-bad kind of way, get punished. The Whedonverse is pretty much a hotbed of sexual repression. Buffy loses her virginity to Angel, and he loses his soul. Buffy goes on a sex rampage with her boyfriend Riley, and a house grows vines. Willow gets frisky for Oz and he goes all wolfy. Buffy has some fine, fine nasty sex with Spike and she hates herself. Angel gets naughty with Darla and she gets pregnant out of wedlock with his son who then later, after spending time in an alternate dimension, has sex with Cordelia and brings about yet another apocalypse. Even Inara, the trained companion, can’t manage to seduce the eternally hard-up Captain Tightpants, Malcom Reynolds. Seriously, sex in the Whedonverse makes STDs look positively rosy. It will be interesting to see how Whedon copes with the sex issue in The Dollhouse, his project that debuts this fall.

The fleshy messiness of sex aside, Whedon does beautiful things with gender—and with genre. No one puts a little bit of horror, a smidge of comedy, a dash of satire, a heaping helping of noir, a soupcon of the Western, a fistful of Sci-fi in a blender, pushes puree and then tops it off with a musical number like Whedon. He mix-masters genres with such fluidity that it looks easy, and that’s the mark of a genius.

It is, then, with great excitement that I will view Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, his latest mixy thing, online tomorrow, when it will pop hot and fresh from the virtual oven. The fact that it stars Neil Patrick Harris and the eminently lickable Nathan Fillion (about whom I had a sex dream yesterday) is only icing on the Whedonverse cake. Watch it fast, because it’s not gonna last. I’ve no doubt it’ll be gender-genre-mixilicious. In any case, it’s Joss Whedon, and that’s got to be gender-bustingly good.

the magic seven

As attractive as I find my friend Debauchette, new shit has come to light, and it's clear we are not compatible. The best I can hope for from her is a long and companionable but not particularly intimate friendship. Which is a shame because not only is her taste in accessories exquisite, but she has a knowledge of first-class travel that is just, well, first class.

I became ruefully aware of our essential incompatibility when she posted her current summer play list. No offense to the extremely intelligent and always natty Debauchette, but her playlist kind of makes me work too hard to be relaxed. If I'm going to get sleepy with heavy machinery, I can't be bothered to decipher French. That kind of thing gets my mind all awhirring with wondering whether I've got the tenses right, and generally as I don't, it makes me tense.

So as the ever prurient, infallibly polite, and always spiffy Debauchette tagged me in the Magic Seven meme, I'm going to respond, no doubt to her Munch-like horror.

Here are the rules (which I got from Debauchette and she got from Reverse Cowgirl):

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring summer. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

And here is my list:

Cory Branan, "Tall Green Grass" With its simple, repeatable guitar hook, this song just has that major summer feel, and while I downloaded it a really long time ago, it took me until recently to listen to it. Now I'm kind of loving it a lot. Also, I bought the disc, once more showing the wonder, the power, the glory of file-sharing because if I hadn't gotten this song in a quasi-legal fashion from yewknee.com, I'd never have heard it, and Cory Branan never would have become the unwitting recipient of my hard-earned dollars.

Deb et Ben, "I Once Knew" The divine Lady G left a recording of this song at my apartment when she stayed there to watch my pussy-cat. Like the song above, it lay gathering dust. Now I am addicted to its plinky-plink, shakey-shake beat and the imperative to shake it like a snow-globe.

Playaz Circle, "Dufflebag Boy" It's like movie Independence Day: once it starts, I can't turn away or it off. I don't know why. It's so melodramatic, but whoever it is who sings the chorus has this really raspy voice, and I like this song's overproduced ghettoperatic feel.

Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm" I love Blood on the Tracks with an inordinate extra-flamey passion. I think Californication protagonist Hank Moody is correct: it is the best break-up album ever. I love this particular song so much that if I could, I'd marry it.

Ted Leo, "Since You Been Gone" Remakes slay me and this one is an exemplar of why. First, I love Kelly Clarkson. Then I love Ted Leo. Next, I love acoustic music. Add in how much I love irony and "Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and you pretty much have a song that gives me a glowy happy.

Raconteurs, "Steady as She Goes" Another shout-out for the file-sharing because I first got this song from my third-favorite Canadians, Vanmega.com, and then I bought this disc and the new one. This song with its herky-jerky guitar line and its this-is-the-way-the-farmer-rides beat remains my favorite.

Mike Doughty, "I Hear the Bells" My love for Mike Doughty is well-documented. I love him so much I could burst open like a dehiscent fruit. I love him so much I want to rub his shorn head across my bosom. Right now, I'm loving one line from this song: "They say you snooze, you lose/ Well, I have snost and lost." I have to listen to the whole song over and over just to hear that line.

I've made a mixtape of my magic seven at muxtape.com. I'm not going to tag anyone, but I do admit I'd love to know what my friend  Eric Spitznagel, that guy over at deeper shade, the man behind gentle indifference,  Karl Elvis, Madeline and Tracy Eagen are listening to.

a little Trollope in bed (or Sex and the City: love, Victorian style)

“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.

reprise/reprieve

From what I’ve noticed, the same woman who would laugh open-mouthed and darkly at a dead baby joke will upon becoming pregnant blanch and flap her hands at the telling of one. It’s kind of like what your mom said is right—it really is all fun and games until someone loses an eye. And then all you can do is make a post-modern I Claudius joke, and hope that its sheer intellectualism acts as a chilly buffer between you and the original one-eyed chicklet in the kingdom of the blind.

Which introduction is to suggest simply this: that one’s circumstances always color one’s view. Circumstances color one’s ideas of conversations, jokes, art, music and film—especially film. Film because it is everything all together in one great unspooling roll of light and sound—narrative, visuals, music, dialog, emotion, the whole arty enchilada—has a peculiarly kaleidoscopic  relationship to its audience. You can’t watch a good film without investing it with your own experiences, however imperceptibly. At least I can’t.

And that is why might not have been a particularly good idea for me to go with a friend to see the Norwegian film Reprise last night.

Reprise, a first film from director Joachim Trier, written by Trier and longtime friend Eskil Vogt, is a very good film. It, as New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis said in her lovely review, has savored, ingested, and ruminated on the very best tidbits of French New Wave directors Godard and Truffault. It’s a film that, as Ms. Dargis aptly says, “borrows from film history promiscuously, sampling strategies, gestures and ideas, and breathing movie love like air.” The film sings a punky paean to European filmmaking as much as anything else.

Reprise centers on the fluid relationship between its two male leads, Philip and Erik, their relationship to women, their relationship to their group of friends (a group that seems to swell and burble like a paramecium), and—above all—their relationship to their writing. Philip and Erik, like the narrative of the film itself, seem to live in a possible future, a nostalgic past and a shaky present all the time and all at once, and as much as you might expect that kind of toying with narrative time to be somehow disconcerting or hard to follow, it’s not. It’s a film that trusts that its audience has read a book or two, and it’s a film that relies on that collective book-reading experience to hold its narrative together.

Books sit at the center of this film. Within the first few minutes of Reprise, Philip and Erik have mailed manuscripts off to publishers, Philip’s manuscript has succeeded wildly, and Erik’s has been rejected, and Philip is heralded as the next big Norwegian thing. But this is a film that follows the age-old trope Boy Writes Book, Boy Publishes Book, Boy Loses Mind, even if it does so unexpectedly and with a cheerfully willful abandon.

Reprise is as much a rumination on writing as it is anything else—and it is a frisky, fast-paced film that gleefully tosses the intellectually heady and the emotionally heavy into the air like so many brightly-colored balls. It’s a film that pretty aptly depicts the stupidity, the vulnerability and the sheer insanity of writers, those people who masochistically devote their lives to trying to make sense and narrative out of the banality, the chaos, and the ineffability that is human life. Mostly, though, it’s a film that gives shaky, unutterable life to the anxiety that writers feel about their books—writing them, selling them, and then seeing them in the cold, hard light of the public eye.

Which is why I should not have watched this film last night. My book proposal sits somewhere at someone’s desk at the Very Large Publishing House, waiting for unknown legions of Very Important People to read it and then decide to publish it—or not. I am fairly buzzing with distraction.

A writer friend of mine told me that he’s made some of the worst, most impulsive decisions in his life while waiting to hear from publishers about his manuscripts. He’s tried to steal cars. He’s attempted to elope with girls he’d just met. I’m not quite there, but I can see the appeal of the grand, dramatic gesture. I’ve still kind of got one combative eye peeled for Alec Baldwin.

It’s going to be a long week or so until I hear back from VLPH. I wish I could rein in my scampering mind; it likes to go off into dark, fantastic corners. I can’t help but see my life as a flickering shadow of Reprise, this story that has been told and told again, told and retold, always differently, and always imbued with the jangly hot-pink of anxiety.

I’m just reminding myself that Reprise ends well. If Philip and Erik can make unexpected peace with themselves, with each other, and with their writing, perhaps so too can I.

(In case you're interested, here's a preview for Reprise. I'd recommend it highly unless you've a manuscript at a VLPH.)

on clowns and fear, itself

Like clowns, fear is a funny thing. Like clowns, fear is something that isn’t necessarily what it seems to be. Like clowns, fear sometimes sneaks in and bops you over the head with a rubber haddock, while other times it comes up flapping up on squeaky shoes. Even as fear approaches, you can’t always believe what you’re seeing. Fear and clowns have many similarities.

And then there’s this: in the end, fear, like clowns, often turns out to be not nearly as bad as you'd imagined. Such is the case of my college students finding out about my pretty dumb things, this blog that confesses everything from my predilection for spanking to my experiences of multiple abortions to my unabashed love of my previous dog, Spencer.

I started writing my pretty dumb things three years and a couple of months ago. At first, I wrote because I was motivated by spite; I felt the need to show this man who had a blog, who had publicly devoted himself to me on his blog, and then had quietly dumped me on it, that I could do what he did, but better. I wanted to spite him, and I guess I did.

Then I wrote because I had to. It felt as if there was this huge backlog of stuff I had to say, all these stories I had to tell, all these moments, thoughts and feelings I had to share, and share them I did. Catharsis is write, I’ve said before and will say again until I grow tired of the phrase. Without writing, I’d still be the monumentally fragmented and profoundly unhappy individual I used to be and not the relatively sane and oddly content individual I am now. Without writing, I’d still be stuck I a rut. I’ve given my gratitude to my readers more than once, for without you, I’d be not nothing, but a lot less.

My one fear in writing this blog was that my students would discover it. I didn’t worry about the administration of the school finding out, for I’d told my Department Chairs about it. I don’t keep my own secrets, though I do keep those of others, and so it wasn’t a big secret that I had a blog, that much of what I wrote was dirty, and that people were free to read it or not. It just didn’t matter to me because I knew that my need to write loomed larger than my fear of being discovered.

I could write about why much of the content of this blog has been explicitly sexual, especially at the beginning, and perhaps some day I shall, but today is not that day, that post is not this post, for this post is about the day that I realized that my students had discovered my blog. It was, actually, on Super Tuesday, the same day that I met with two editors from a large publishing house who were—and are still—interested in publishing my book. I went home from the lunch I’d had with these two editors and my friend who’d set the whole thing up, I signed into my stat-counter, and I discovered  a thick handful of people with IP numbers from my college were avidly reading my blog. They were downing pages like M&Ms, that is to say, endlessly, quickly, and without much evident digestion. Though I couldn't know exactly the identity of each blip on the screen, I knew that only my students would be that interested in this blog.

My initial reaction was to completely effing freak the fuck out. I’d always maintained that I could deal with anyone discovering my blog—except my students. I imagined them hating me. I imagined them disrespecting me. I imagined them hijacking the classroom. I imagined my authority yanked out from underneath me like a tablecloth. I imagined me tumbling down to the floor, my sprawling limbs messy as broken plates, awash and red with shame. I imagined the worst.

So, apparently, did my stalkers, for it was their attempts to out me that led my students to my blog. On New Year’s Eve of 2006, my stalkers bombarded sites that college students use. I discovered my stalkers’ attempts very early after these stalkers had begun their attack.Despite my attempts to control the situation, eventually, these stalkers were successful. An ex-boyfriend found me this way. So did my biological father. And so, finally, a year after my stalkers first tried to out me, did my students.

On that Tuesday in February, after reading my stat-counter compulsively and discovering more and more of my college’s IP appearing, I freaked and did all that I could do. I spoke to friends, who reassured me. I took deep breaths and several shots of whiskey. I went to bed. The next day I was on campus, I went to my Department Chair and I told her the story. Then, bracing myself for the worst, I went to class. I taught. I taught again. And nothing happened.

No one said anything. Not word one. Nothing changed. Not a bit. Not an iota. No one said anything about anal. No one said anything about my love of being dirty-talked to. No one said anything about my history of depression. No one said anything. After a couple of classes, I exhaled, relaxed, and moved on. I did have one conversation with a former student who admitted he read my blog, but as bad as that was, it wasn’t that bad. At the end of our conversation, I realized that my fear had been a hundred gajillion times worse than the reality, for the reality was…nothing.

I must admit that knowing that my students were reading my blog absolutely colored my content for the past few months. Every time I felt like singing paeans to my raw pink pussy, I checked myself. Every time I felt like bemoaning my dearth of anal and my ambivalence about it, I stopped. Every time I felt I was saying something that I would not want brought up in class, I paused. Sometimes I wrote it anyway; other times I did not. I am profoundly glad that I’m no longer teaching and that I have the freedom to write freely. I’m the sort of person who believes that things happen when you’re ready for them to happen, and all of this—the meeting with the publishers, the students reading, my decision to bid adieu to academia—happened as I needed it to. (As ever, click to embiggen the pictures—if you dare.)

It’s all a lot like the Buffy episode of season 5 called “Fear, Itself.” It’s Halloween, Buffy and company get trapped in a frat party haunted house, and systematically, all their fears come true: Xander feels abandoned; Willow’s magic overcomes her; Oz turns into a werewolf; and Buffy finds herself alone. They each get funneled into the top room of the house, and there they discover that Gachnar, the Fear Demon, had been summoned. As they stare at the gaping floor boards pulsating with light, their fear grows.

Rising slowly up from the eldritch light, Gachnar appears, all helmeted, swathed in black leather and wrapped in wires. He is also about six inches tall. Buffy squashes him with her sneaker, and the metaphor is complete.

Fear is a lot bigger in our heads than it is in real life. In real life, it’s almost always not that bad. And here’s the other thing: those people who wanted to instill fear in me by attempting to out my blog identity to my students, they just wanted power over me. They succeeded; I was afraid. But then I saw the fear for what it was: puny, insignificant and meaningless. And the fear, like clowns, became something to laugh at.

I’m no longer afraid. I’m fearless, I’m powerful, and I’m strong. What’s even better? Soon, I’m going to be published.

an open letter to The Crotch

Dear Crotch,

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 Vanity Fair. 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.

kissykiss,
chelsea g.

a near doughty paean to mike doughty

It all began with “Screenwriter’s Blues,” off the 1994 disc Ruby Vroom. The plodding synth opening, the chunka-chunka-chunk-chunk bass and drum lines, the antic tikka-tikka-tikka that chimes in anxiously, the weird vertiginous sense of music swirling around you like garbage caught in an updraft, and above it all, the slow unrolling poetry of the words: “Gone savage/ for teenagers with/automatic weapons and/ boundless love./ Gone savage for/ teenagers who are/ aesthetically/ pleasing,/ in other words,/ fly.” The voice, worn as a second-hand suit intones. “Los Angeles beckons/ the teenagers/ to come to her/ on buses;/Los Angeles loves,” it pauses, “love.”

This song got me. It gripped me in its weird jazzy hooks and its self-consciously ironic earnestness, and I felt fine with it. Sure, that disc by Soul Coughing was chock full of chewy musical goodness with “Janine” and “True Dreams of Wichita” and others, but it was this song that got me.

Mostly, it was Mike Doughty, who then called himself “M. Doughty.” It was he—and in particular his voice, frayed at the edges; and his lyrics, so thick and purple with possibility; and his attitude, ironic and woebegone—that I held close to my breast. I held it close and primal as kittens.

There have been a few songs/discs/bands that, like the DJ and the chanteuse of the disco song, have saved my life. There was Elvis Costello and the Attractions Imperial Bedroom, and once for about two months there was The Tom-Tom Club’s “Man With the Four-Way Hips,” and most recently, there has been Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. (There have also been flickers of songs that have risen meaningfully as comets and fallen just as quickly.) Few, if any, have done so with the regularity and consistency of Mike Doughty and his former band, Soul Coughing.

I apologize for my slavish worship at the alter of this artist. Rare, I know, is it that I rave about anything, and rarer is it that I effectively kowtow with such abject supplication, but there you go. This man’s music has that embarrassing effect on me, and as I am still fresh with the glow of seeing him perform last night at the Highline Ballroom here in glamorous Gotham, I can be forgiven, I hope.

Ok, seriously, if there were a Tiger Beat for post-college, self-referential, jazz-inflected alt-rock, eco-friendly, ironic bands, Mike Doughty’s pull-out poster would be on my locker. (It’s a magazine whose 60% post-consumer-fiber pages I have to pause and imagine. It would have articles about Dave Matthews recycling accompanied by pictures of him sorting his High Times and Greenpeace membership renewal requests from his cans of Trader Joe’s garbanzo beans and bottles of micro-brews. The headline would probably read something along the lines of “Hot 2 Recycle 2! Dave Loves 2 Reuse! Recycle! Reduce! (And So Can U!)” And then there would be an accompanying side bar with Ani Di Franco and Aimee Mann in a tank top and floral dress, respectively, carrying their bundled magazines to the curb. There’d be articles on Karen O and her favorite organic cosmetics, on Ben Folds and his turn-ons—Snoop Dogg, girls in glasses, perfectly tuned pianos—and turn-offs—fighting in orchestra halls, censorship and impossibly heavy piano stools, and on Michael Stipe “So He’s Gay! Bald! And 48! He’s Still Hott!”)

Last night’s show was pretty awesome. And while I recoil at having written that last sentence, let me attempt to redeem myself that while Mike Doughty and company—a tall, skinny bass player with random tattoos, a drummer who looked so incandescent with happiness he might at any moment have gone supernova, and a keyboardist who oscillated between ecstasy and brooding—were superswell, the crowd was not, even if they were incredibly decorous. Last night, I found myself part of a company that I hoped would reject me. It was a crowd best defined by their lack of make-up, devotion to the organic cotton ironic t-shirt, history of very expensive education, and undoubted unqualified, unquestioned, and inarticulate devotion to Obama. My friend Betty who went with me said that she was probably the only registered Republican in the room; she was no doubt correct.

But mmm…Mike Doughty. Like him, my default position is that of an apparent  cynic—but within every cynical candy shell beats the warm, gooey heart of a romantic; we are no exception to that truism. Many of Doughty’s songs center on an elusive and elevated woman, a woman who, as he sings of the unnamed woman in the blue dress represents “the perfect hourglass of my loneliness” and whom he just wants to keep dancing. There’s a lot of loneliness in Doughty’s songs. I feel his solitariness it rings the bells, joyful and triumphant, that I hear ring within me. Ring with genre-busting, pleasurably guitar-heavy, complex and ironic, rock aesthetic.

Which is, of course, the mark of any artist: how much you can see yourself in him or her. The artist has this weird catoptric relationship with his or her fan—if  the artist’s work does what it’s supposed to, it does more than just evoke the artist’s own  experience; it reflects that of the fan. I’ve always seen the shadowy shapes of my pain, my joys and my thoughts in Mike Doughty’s music, and for this I am profoundly thankful.

Mike Doughty is a blogger; you can find his blog here. Also, he {hearts} myspace. If you live in Gotham, you might be interested to know that he has another show in Brooklyn on 10 April at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. And finally, here’s a video to “Screenwriter’s Blues,” so you can hear what started me on my journey to Doughty genuflection.

imitation of art

1979 had some pretty fucking great films. Apocalypse Now. Norma Rae. The China Syndrome. Being There. Breaking Away. Kramer vs. Kramer. La Cage Aux Folles. It’s tough to argue with that kind of cinematographic breadth. That year’s Oscar awards, Sally Fields observed that we liked her, we really, really liked her. Dustin Hoffman received his first Oscar, as did Meryl Streep. No one remembers what Cher wore, if she even went.

I turned seventeen in 1979. It was a profoundly bleak year, one I remember primarily for its complete absence of colors. It was the year I turned suicidal, the year I first entered therapy. It was a year that remains a frozen tundra in my memory; I was in an emotional gulag that year; I read a tremendous amount of Solzynitsin. In retrospect, it probably didn’t help matters.

I’ve long found solace in other people’s narratives. I grew up reading books like my classmates breathed air: without remarking upon it because it was just that necessary. But in 1979, I realized that books weren’t alone in offering me the kind comfort of stories, for in 1979, I discovered movies. Or given how important they became to me, and to honor that importance in language, I should say that I discovered film.

their va-jay-jay is paining me

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.”

on his royal highness's royal boxers

Lately, I’ve become fascinated with the Showtime series The Tudors. Starring the very toothsome Jonathan Rhys Meyers, as well as the equally esculent Jeremy Northam, the show centers on the reign of Henry VIII when he was a young, lithe and decidedly randy man. It’s filled with pretty people wearing pretty clothes having pretty sex while high drama and many servants and the occasional inexplicable plague creates a compelling backdrop. It’s a lot of fun.

It is not, however, particularly historically accurate. The show, for example, lumps both of Henry’s sisters, Margaret and Mary, into one composite character, and then they play fast and lose with her, marrying Margaret off to an aged King of Portugal (she was really married to King James IV of Scotland and was the grandmother to Mary Queen of Scots) and then having her dispatch him handily with an overstuffed pillow so that she could marry her lover, the Duke of Suffolk (it was really Mary who married an old man, though he was King Louis XII of France and then, after indirectly causing his death by excessively athletic sex, she married Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. So they did at least get that part correct). But, really, history is written if not by the heroes, then by the television corporations who broadcast it, so who cares.

Essentially, The Tudors is “history” with really good personal hygiene and completely historically inaccurate, if more attractive, hairstyles. And I felt really fine with being swept up in the drama, the brocade, the rat-free lifestyle of these super-scrubbed fifteenth-century folk filtered through a twenty-first-century lens until the episode with His Royal Majesty’s Boxers.

star catharsis: heath ledger, naked and dead

To be naked fluorescent light-bulb honest, last week was a supreme keening bitch. Between suffering simply exquisite PMS and the eddying swirls of my break-up from Donny, I cried early and often. Some weeks are better than others and last week was not one of the stellar ones. It was one of those spans of time when I felt nanoseconds from tears just about every waking moment of every single day.

Not merely content with resting close to tears, I actually courted them. I’m not particularly proud of it, but I pretty much marinated in the tragedy of Heath Ledger’s early and as-yet unspecified demise. It’s sad when people die young. It’s especially sad when it’s an artist as extraordinarily talented and audacious as Heath Ledger was. He had a luminous and fascinating career ahead of him; his death is a great loss not merely to his family and his friends but to film and the people who love it.

And yet with all due respect to Heath Ledger, his family, and his work, my reaction to his death was completely out of rational proportion.

grabbing it by the short curlies: thoughts on the hair down there

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.

on the evil proliferation of comedy and pearl necklaces

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.

having gotten the led out

I’ve admitted it before: I am often a highly impressionable person. I am disconcertingly open to idle suggestion. I also fixate rather easily. Like a terrier, I get a hold of an idea and not much can separate me from it. The confluence of these two traits—impressionability and obduracy—explains, kind of, why I recently bought the entire Led Zeppelin catalog.

See, I have this terrible passion for cheesy biographies, generally those of people immersed in, or hanging on the margins of, the music business. I read and loved Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt; that love flowered into this petit obsession. After The Dirt came Pamela Des Barre’s I’m With The Band, Janice Dickinson’s No Lifeguard on Duty, Bebe Buell’s Rebel Heart, and Traci Lords’ Underneath It All. There was also No One Get Out of Here Alive, the Doors story; Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil;  Stanley Booth’s excellent The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones; Dave Navarro’s seriously self-indulgent Don’t Try This at Home; Fargo Rock City, which I love a lot; a couple of books about Kiss; and penultimately, Paul Trynka’s Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed.

And then, naturally, I had to read Hammer of the Gods, the Led Zeppelin story. Let’s face it; my not having read the ür-rock-book about the ür-rock band was a lacuna through which you could drive an Antonov An-225, were you wont to do such a thing. And I have to say, that even lacking the glittery-clever prose of The Dirt’s Neil Strauss or the gritty reality of Legs McNeil, Hammer was a pretty fucking great read. It had the perfectly mixed proportions of a well-created cocktail—just enough dirt, just enough art, just enough pathos, just enough of every important component to make it feel as if you were being given a pretty holistic eye’s view into the life and death of what might be The Greatest Rock Band In The World, or the one that gave us "Stairway to Heaven," anyway.

The thing is this: I was never much of a Led Zeppelin fan.

dispatches from Strip Nation, part 1, halloween

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?

wearing out

There is a profound cognitive dissonance about going out in Gotham on the Friday before Halloween. You look at the crowd around you, and you can’t exactly tell what is costume and what is just fashion. The lead singer, there on stage. The chalky rectangles carefully painted down his nose, across his cheekbones and dotting his chin. Costume? Or pretense? The two dudes in full-on special-ops paratrooper regalia. Costume? Or party garb? The man waiting for a drink in a black velvet cape. Costume? Or life-style choice?

It can be pretty disorienting, trying to parse the outfits. Sure, some costumes are clear. The chick in a eighteenth-century Heidi-Ho dress replete with big white wig and Bo-Peep staff is unquestionably dressing up, while the guy in the Misfits t-shirt with the jet-black pointy hair slicked and stiffened to priapic proportions seems just to be stuck in deadly earnest Hot Topic stereotypy. But many of the people surrounding me in the low-ceilinged and desperately cool bar last night defied clear sartorial readings. They slipped between the lines of costume and outfit.

Which is, you know, fine. It all adds to the general, though rarely genial, carnivalesque atmosphere that envelops going out on a weekend night in New York, something I rarely do.

Last night I went out with my friend DaisyDukes and a friend of hers to go see another friend’s band, the Bush Tetras, which was having a CD release party. I didn’t really know Bush Tetras' music—what I knew of them mostly came from watching YouTube videos of past performances. They’ve been singing for around 27 years, which is by any standard a really long time. And it shows, though less in the Tetras themselves who spiritedly rocked through their set, but in the crowd, a gleefully pogoing bunch of grey-haired Gothamites who devoured the Tetras with a kind of happy avidity usual reserved for the consumption of crab cakes at a wedding buffet.

The Tetras crowd was clear from the moment they showed up—a punctual 9:45, making it just on time to catch the Tetras and then to leave promptly, therefore not subjecting themselves to the bands fore and aft. These Tetras fans  looked like they could have spawned the bar’s usual twenty-something crowd sometime after college and just before their second career. These people had that aging post-punk grace that comes with having done too many lines, drunk too many shots, mainlined perhaps a bit too much junk in their wizened lives. They had seen the world, heard it, smelled it, fucked in its bathrooms, and lived to tell the gritty tales, and there is an unquestionable beauty in this kind of specifically urban survivor.

One man sat with his elbows digging into his raw-boned knees, pewter hair escaping his baseball cap, red and black checked shirt rolled up to his deltoids. His bared arms dotted with the Silly Putty smudge-and-blur of old tattoos, his skin puddled like an old lady’s pantyhose. A bunch of women, garbed universally in multi-layered black garments that trailed in places like a frenetic mummy’s wrapping, greeted one another ecstatically. Each had hair dyed violent shades of red; together they formed a conflagration. Everywhere, men in tiny fedoras, women with spiky hair, everyone laden in multiple layers of silver jewelry that knotted in sparkly pointy lumps around their wrists, their waists, their throats.

Watching the crowd mill and close around the stage, this group of people who clearly had the smell of CBGBs burned into their Proustian memory, I didn’t get it, really. But then the band started playing, and I did. It wasn’t about the music, which was truly fine, it was about the time, which was gone and never to return. But which could be recaptured, like a hologram, brief and flickering, enough to fill the void, even if it not enough to satiate.

The fifty-somethings pogoed gently, mindful of tender ACLs and plantar fasciitis and arthritis and whatever else their bodies suffer, but it was there, that ineffable something that comes with being young and hearing bands and feeling their bass and their drum rip through you and that kind of ecstatic saturnalia that only the newly adult can abandon themselves to. That moment when you become the band. That moment that you shake and bop and jump and twitch and can’t be bothered to care about anything but what you feel and the limitless and inexpressible joy therein.

I remember that, that moment of band oneness. For me it happened in Burlington, Vermont, and it happened with bands with names too cheesy to be truly ironic: The Cuts. The Decentz. Pinhead. I remember giving myself over totally to the night with a kind of consciously planned unselfconsciousness. I ruined so many t-shirts cutting them up into the perfect shoulder-baring shape. I would step out and be embraced in the warm bosom of the night—or if it was winter, bundle myself in swathing layers of clothes to be discarded as soon as I entered Hunt’s, the temple of the music at which I prostrated myself.

I remember it well. Those long sweaty and flush hours I spent dancing, literally jumping for new wave joy. I remember like they were yesterday, which of course they were. It’s nice to be reminded of those times—gone and never to return—when I was new and bold and free, if only for a few hours, if only because of a driving 4/4 beat, a singer to humorously whine my pain, a staccato guitar and a bass to keep them—and me—all together.

a lady, some lad mags, and my inner bitch

Last week, London’s The Daily Mail published an article written by former British Esquire Editor Rosie Boycott (a name that is just pregnant with punnish possibility) that has garnered a bit of attention here on the Web. In this article titled “Women Blame Lads’ Mags Sexual Exploitation—Yet Are They Just as Guilty?”, Boycott seems to skirt taking responsibility for her own hand in the arguable sexual exploitation of women while at Esquire and instead to lay it squarely in the bikini-clad laps of her own gender. (Guardian writer Aitkenhead lays blame similarly in an article a day earlier.)

In her own defense Boycott writes, “I never published a photograph that I thought made the woman look subjugated: they always looked as though they were having as much fun as anyone and they were always wearing bikinis,” and then in the next paragraph she condemns “lad mags”—those magazines published by and for guys about 16-25 like Maxim here in the US and Nuts and Zoo in the UK—for publishing “something much more sinister” than the agreeable shots she herself chose.

Boycott avers that these magazines, unlike Esquire presumably, don’t have female writers and strive to publish pictures of  women who are “younger, more vulnerable-looking” in an effort to boost circulation. The Daily Mail provides a helpful chart of four of the top British lad mags and a tally of each magazine’s number of women—in bikinis and topless—as well as a breakdown of the headlines of the current issue. Front and Maxim vie for the largest numbers of both the topless and bikini categories.

These magazines, Boycott argues, depict sex as “Ice-cold, passionless and cruel: it depicts a world where relationships in any meaningful sense don't exist, their place taken by bondage, exploitation and a certain cruelty.” And while that seems bad enough, Boycott continues that this “already grim content has plumbed new depths” because young women themselves are opting to play along.

Boycott points out young women sending their own pictures into the magazines for publication and their choosing to send photos to “Assess My Breasts,” a fairly self-explanatory website sponsored by Nuts magazine. These kinds of actions—as well as the commonplace posting of bikini-clad MySpace and Facebook photos—causes Boycott to ask this: “just how much are women themselves complicit in this exploitative and degrading business?”

According to Boycott, quite a bit, actually. And to great detriment to all women everywhere.

It seems to me that to take lad mags to task for cream-puff pictures of chicks is tantamount to bemoaning the amount of blood and violence in Saw or Hostel, or lamenting the amount of political news in The Washington Post. Lad mags exist in order to show women in states of near undress, and in doing so, present a fantasy that will encourage the magazines’ consumers to buy things. It’s pretty straight-forward, really, and any person who has spent a decade at the helm of a slightly more upscale version of the exact same enterprise can hardly split hairs by saying that she picked only happy, shiny bikini photos.

That said, Boycott has a point in discussing young women’s choices to objectify themselves to a large and often annoying public. I was a stripper for six years. I chose to objectify myself. I did it at the age of thirty, having the luxury of really good genetic structure, and I admit that this choice absolutely took a massive psychic toll. I worry about young women who do the same. I worry about their ability to hold on to a sense of self when barraged with that kind of one-dimensional attention.

I do not, however, castigate them for their choice to do so. Nor, for that matter, do I think a woman’s bikini shot on Facebook automatically makes certain that “every young man looking will think [that] she's available for sex and she wants it,” as Boycott claims.  I do not, as Boycott does, ask, “How can that be combined with an attitude of respect and equality?” Because unlike Boycott, I think a woman, whether young or old, conventionally pretty or not so much, scantily dressed or shrouded in a burqa,  can be both sexual and justly expecting of equality.

Sure, a young woman might want to rethink her Facebook/MySpace bikini photo because there are scary people out there who do scary things. And she definitely might want to take them down before she goes out on interviews for internships or jobs because prospective employers do look at these sites, and fair or not, they probably will judge her. A young woman might want to consider whether she really, really wants to have pictures of her sternum and belly up on these sites or any others just because her friends do and whether she really, really feels comfortable with that public display. But if she does, then why not? Who am I to say she’s being exploited?

To me, toplessness is not exploitation. I admit my feminist self balks at porn shots where girls lick jism out of other people’s orifices. I wonder whether these women are being exploited—especially when the porn is being shot in nations with notoriously low employment rates for women. I don’t, however, automatically leap to exploitation.

And I certainly take issue with Boycott’s “good girls regret” attitude, her final parry that closes the article. First, Boycott observes that shows like Sex in the City “spread the idea that promiscuous sex is a cool and cultish goal for young women to pursue,” an idea that I find offensive because it assumes that women can’t think for themselves and ridiculous because the only cool and cultish goals that Sex in the City sets up to pursue are female friendships and designer shoes—the men seem mostly springboards for angst until one by one each of the four falls supine to True Love. Then Boycott admits, “ I went through a wildly promiscuous phase