FOR MOM, TO WHOM I OWE EVERYTHING AND FROM
WHOM I HEARD ALL OF IT FIRST
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Abandon Me
Whip Smart
Destruction is thus always restoration—that is, the destruction of a set
of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise
unified ontology.
—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity,
should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can
sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this
strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you
thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none
then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we
who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history,
if we are not to give ourselves away.
—Adrienne Rich, “Sources”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The story went like this: I was a happy child, if also a strange one. There
were griefs, but I was safe and well-loved. The age of ten or eleven—the
time when my childhood became more distinctly a girlhood—marked a
violent turn from this. Everyone knows that adolescents rebel, girls in
particular. Still, my own girlhood felt tinged by a darkness that the story of
adolescent rebellion did not suffice to explain. In the years since, I have
worried the question: What was wrong with me? I did not deserve to have
been so tormented.
Despite how unspeakable it felt at the time, I no longer think that the
pains or darkness of my own girlhood were exceptional. It is a darker time
for many than we are often willing to acknowledge. During it, we learn to
adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is
harmful and what is normal—and to privilege the feelings, comfort,
perceptions, and power of others over our own. This training of our minds
can lead to the exile of many parts of the self, to hatred for and the abuse of
our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to
values that do not prioritize our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.
Though mine was among the last girlhoods untouched by the internet, I
have found many of the same challenges among those who’ve grown up
since.
For years, I considered it impossible to undo much of this indoctrination.
Knowing about it was not enough. But I have found its undoing more
possible than I suspected. The same way that I have taught my mind and my
body to collaborate in a habitual set of practices that eventually coalesce
into a skill that can be strengthened, such as throwing a softball, singing,
jogging long distances, or writing—so I have found it possible to train my
mind to act in accordance with my beliefs (and sometimes to discover what
those are). Like any process of conditioning, it is tedious, minute, and
demands rigorous attention. It cannot be done alone.
It is in part by writing this book that I have corrected the story of my
own girlhood and found ways to recover myself. I have found company in
the stories of other women, and the revelation of all our ordinariness has
itself been curative. Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived
experience with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof). My
hope is that these essays do some of that work for you, too.
—Melissa Febos
March 2020
New York, New York
PROLOGUE
SCARIFICATION
1. First, the knees. They meet the gravel, the street, the blunt hips of
curbs. Pain is the bright light flashing, forgotten for Vega’s colors, then
Halley’s Comet—a burning streak behind the clouds. Your father holds
you up to the sky, tells you, Look. Tells you, Remember this. You,
small animal in the pink dress from your abuela, dirty sneakers, bloody
knees, looking up.
2. The oven is eye level and your forearms striped with burns. A tally of
each time you reach over your depth. Are you just a child, or already
Einstein’s definition of insanity? You like to be marked. Your mother,
though, wails when she drops a blueberry pie from that height, sinks
into the gory glory of its mess just before your father leaves port again.
Oh, to stripe the floor with your own scalding compote. You stay
closed, you hot box, you little teapot. You fill, but never empty. You
stay striped.
3. They call it a faggot test. Do you know what a faggot is, or only that
you are part boy? Rub the pencil’s pink end across the back of your
hand until it erases you. The circle of boys claps when you draw blood.
After school, your mother’s stricken face scares you, but later, you are
glad she saw the peeled pink of it—saw that it was in you.
4. Your best friend flowers your limbs with bruises—Indian sunburn,
snake bite, monkey bite, her pale knuckles vised into your thigh. Her
fingernails carve you, one time permanently. Only your body flinches.
You know the need to engrave things. After baseball practice, still in
cleats, when she presses her mouth against your neck under the
mildewed blanket in your basement, you are sorry her hot mouth
leaves no mark.
5. Your mother watches you watch a boy on your baseball team. She
never meets your first love, a Cape Verdean boy to whom you barely
speak. Verdean, verdant, you whisper, craving sounds that fill your
mouth. What are you? he asks, as so many have. You whisper
cerulean, figlia, Melitta, querida. You are nothing, just a shard beating
the shore. Just a small animal you fling into the sea. Behind the mall,
break dancers spin on sheets of cardboard, and from that circle of
boys, he throws a rock that finds your face. Blood on your mouth, you
call your father from a pay phone. Baseball at dusk? You know better,
he says, though he is proud. He has coached your teams since Little
League. He wraps ice packs in dish towels, makes you hold them
against the new scar. Your eyes blacken anyway.
6. In the locker room, you perfect the art of changing your clothes under
your clothes. Your body is a secret you keep, a white rabbit, and you
the magician who disappears it. Remember: this is a hard hustle to
break. It is difficult to keep some secrets and not others. Hustle now,
across that field, forgetting your body as only this allows, and reach for
the ball that scorches your hand with pain. See what happens when you
forget yourself? It is better to choose your pain than to let it choose
you.
7. In the tiny bathroom of your father’s house, you tuck your fingers into
your mouth until sweat beads your body and your throat bitters. All
day, you rub your tongue against the scraped inside, the bitten knuckle.
You are sore for days, but it doesn’t keep. You choose it, and then it
chooses you.
8. At sixteen, you shave your head, disappointed that no curb or wall or
rock has altered its perfect sphere. Your father’s stricken face pleases
you. When you pierce your nose, he tells you no one will ever see your
face again for the glare. You don’t tell him that’s the point. When he
looks at you, he sees only the message you carry, written in a language
he never taught you, not Spanish, but the other language of his
childhood, the one that leaves marks. You quit baseball and move out
of his house.
9. Instead of ten holes, your body now has twenty-three. You stop
returning your father’s phone calls. You don’t listen to his messages.
At night, you touch each opening, drawing the constellation of your
body: Lyra, Libra, Big Dipper, flickering Vega, binary Mizar, you
bucket of light, you horse and rider. You lick your fingers and tuck
them inside, tug on these mouths and others, the knots of skin between
you, and you, and you.
10. The first time, you look away as your lover slides the needle into the
crook of your arm. Your body beads with sweat and your throat bitters.
You choose it—this pale boy, this new hole, this fill, this empty, this
orphaning—and then it chooses you.
11. Your father once gave you a picture book of knots, a smooth length of
rope looped around its spine. Half Hitch, Figure Eight, Clove Hitch,
Bowline, Anchor Bend, Slip Knot. The only one you remember the first
time you tie two wrists together is a square knot, but it’s the only one
you need. The first time a man pays to tie your wrists, he doesn’t know
right over left, left over right. Only a Better Bow, rabbit in the hole,
but not disappeared. Every time, you slip away—pinched nerves,
pinked thighs, wax stars sealing your dark parts. They tuck their
fingers into your mouth and tug until your body beads with sweat and
your throat bitters. You choose them, and then they choose you.
12. Like you, he is part feral, part vessel. Nights, he tucks into the curve of
you, sings a rippled sigh across your pillow. In sleep you burn, a
glowing ember, soaking the sheets. You wake sticky-chested, heart a
drum, and listen to him cry. You clench his twitching paws. Like you,
he fears his own kind and leads with his teeth. You fling yourself into
his fights—tooth to knuckle, street to knee, and you never make a
sound, forget yourself as only this allows. After, you touch each
opening with trembling hands, drawing the constellation of this
animal: Sirius, dog star, Polaris, and you Orioned with bloody hands.
You pick the gravel out of your knees, wince every time you close
your hand, but he makes you a hunter.
13. The year your father leaves port for the last time, you draw the needle
out. Your body beads with sweat and your throat bitters. In sleep, you
burn, and wake shaking wet. Remember this supernova, you black
hole, you cosmic shard, your dark matter spilling out. When it lifts,
you are peeled pink, pain the bright light flashing, but in it you see
everything.
14. You don’t choose her but she finds you, smooth shard, and tucks you
away. In love, your hair and fingernails grow bone-bright, wax-white,
needle-thin, then tear off and fall away. You run. Marked thing, you
run until your knees throb, toenails loosen, skull’s bowl tipping open.
You fling yourself against her. You wear yourself away. Hot ember in
her hands, you glow. At night, she touches every opening, drawing the
constellation of your burning body, and when you leave her, it finally
cools.
15. This time, you choose the needle and the hand that holds it. You carve
the things you want to remember into your shoulder, your hip, the
crook of your arm. You carve yourself into paper. These are not
secrets, but they keep. You bare these new marks and your father says
nothing, but he looks at you. You look, too, and finally, you both see it.
Cepheus and Andromeda, Mizar and Alcor, Zeus and Athena, you
binary creatures, you star and sextant, navigator and horizon. You draw
the constellation of your history, connecting the dots of your heavenly
body. This is your celestial heart. You choose it, and it chooses you.
KETTLE HOLES
“What do you like?” the men would ask. “Spitting,” I’d say. To even utter
the word felt like the worst kind of cuss, and I trained myself not to flinch
or look away or offer a compensatory smile after I said it. In the dungeon’s
dim rooms, I unlearned my instinct for apology. I learned to hold a gaze. I
learned the pleasure of cruelty.
It was not true cruelty, of course. My clients paid $75 an hour to enact
their disempowerment. The sex industry is a service industry, and I served
humiliation to order. But the pageant of it was the key. To spit in an
unwilling face was inconceivable to me and still is. But at a man who had
paid for it?
They knelt at my feet. They crawled naked across gleaming wood floors.
They begged to touch me, begged for forgiveness. I refused. I leaned over
their plaintive faces and gathered the wet in my mouth. I spat. Their hard
flinch, eyes clenched. The shock of it radiated through my body, then
settled, then swelled into something else.
“Do you hate men?” people sometimes asked.
“Not at all,” I answered.
“You must work out a lot of anger that way,” they suggested.
“I never felt angry in my sessions,” I told them. I often explained that the
dominatrix’s most useful tool was a well-developed empathic sense. What I
did not acknowledge to any curious stranger, or to myself, was that empathy
and anger are not mutually exclusive.
We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And feeling
something neither proves nor disproves its existence. Conscious feelings are
no accurate map to the psychic imprint of our experiences; they are the
messy catalog of emotions once and twice and thrice removed, often the
symptoms of what we won’t let ourselves feel. They are not Jane Eyre’s
locked-away Bertha Mason, but her cries that leak through the floorboards,
the fire she sets while we sleep and the wet nightgown of its quenching.
I didn’t derive any sexual pleasure from spitting, I assured people. Only
psychological. Now, this dichotomy seems flimsy at best. How is the
pleasure of giving one’s spit to another’s hungry mouth not sexual? I
needed to distinguish that desire from what I might feel with a lover. I
wanted to divorce the pleasure of violence from that of sex. But that didn’t
make it so.
It was the thrill of transgression, I said. Of occupying a male space of
power. It was the exhilaration of doing the thing I would never do, was
forbidden to do by my culture and by my conscience. I believed my own
explanations, though now it is easy to poke holes in them.
I did not want to be angry. What did I have to be angry about? My
clients sought catharsis through the reenactment of childhood traumas.
They were hostages to their pasts, to the people who had disempowered
them. I was no such hostage—I did not even want to consider it. I wanted
only to be brave and curious and in control. I did not want my pleasure to
be any kind of redemption. One can only redeem a thing that has already
been lost or taken. I did not want to admit that someone had taken
something from me.
His name was Alex, and he lived at the end of a long unpaved driveway off
the same wooded road that my family did. It took ten minutes to walk
between our homes, both of which sat on the bank of Deep Pond. Like
many of the ponds on Cape Cod, ours formed some fifteen thousand years
ago when a block of ice broke from a melting glacier and drove deep into
the solidifying land of my future backyard. When the ice block melted, the
deep depression filled with water and became what is called a kettle-hole
lake.
Despite its small circumference, our pond plummeted fifty feet at its
deepest point. My brother and I and all the children raised on the pond spent
our summers getting wet, chasing one another through invented games, our
happy screams garbled with water. I often swam out to the deepest point—
not the center of the pond, but to its left—and trod water over this heart
cavity. In summer, the sun warmed the surface to bath temperatures, but a
few feet deeper it went cold. Face warm, arms flapping, I dangled my feet
into that colder depth and shivered. Fifty feet was taller than any building in
our town, was more than ten of me laid head to foot. It was a mystery big
enough to hold a whole city. I could swim in it my whole life and never
know what lay at its bottom.
An entry in my diary from age ten announces: “Today Alex came over
and swam with us. I think he likes me.”
Alex was a grade ahead of me and a foot taller. He had a wide mouth,
tapered brown eyes, and a laugh that brayed clouds in the chill of fall
mornings at our bus stop. He wore the same shirt for four out of five school
days, and I thought he was beautiful. I had known Alex for years, but that
recorded swim is the first clear memory I have of him. A few months later,
he spat on me for the first time.
When I turned eleven, I enrolled in the public middle school with all the
other fifth- and sixth-graders in our town. The new bus stop was farther
down the wooded road, where it ended at the perpendicular intersection of
another. On that corner was a large house, owned by Robert Ballard, the
oceanographer who discovered the wreck of the Titanic in 1985. Early in
his career, Ballard had worked with the nearby Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, and it was during his deep-sea dives off the coast of
Massachusetts that his obsession with shipwrecks was born. Sometimes I
studied that house—its many gleaming windows and ivy-choked tennis
court—and thought about the difference between Ballard and my father,
who was a captain in the merchant marines. One man carried his cargo
across oceans; the other ventured deep inside them to discover his. I was
drawn to the romance of each: to slice across the glittering surface, and also
to plunge into the cold depths. A stone wall wrapped around Ballard’s yard.
Here, we waited for the school bus.
I read books as I walked to the bus stop. Reading ate time. Whole hours
disappeared in stretches. It shortened the length of my father’s voyages,
moved me closer to his returns with every page. I was a magician with a
single power: to disappear the world. I emerged from whole afternoons of
reading, my life a foggy half-dream through which I drifted as my self bled
back into me like steeping tea.
The start of fifth grade marked more change than the location of my bus
stop. My parents had separated that summer. My body, that once reliable
vessel, began to transform. But what emerged from it was no happy magic,
no abracadabra. It went kaboom. The new body was harder to disappear.
“I wish people didn’t change sometimes,” I wrote in my diary. By
people, I meant my parents. I meant me. I meant the boy who swam across
that lake toward my new body with its power to compel but not control.
Before puberty, I moved through the world and toward other people without
hesitance or self-consciousness. I read hungrily and kept lists of all the
words I wanted to look up in a notebook with a red velvet cover. I still have
the notebook. “Ersatz,” it reads. “Entropy. Mnemonic. Morass. Corpulent.
Hoary.” I was smart and strong and my power lay in these things alone. My
parents loved me well and mirrored these strengths back to me.
Perhaps more so than other girls’, my early world was a safe one. My
mother banned cable TV and sugar cereals, and made feminist corrections
to my children’s books with a Sharpie. When he was home from sea, my
father taught me how to throw a baseball and a punch, how to find the
North Star, and start a fire. I was protected from the darker leagues of what
it meant to be female. I think now of the Titanic—not the familiar tragedy
of its wreck, the scream of ice against her starboard flank, the thunder of
seawater gushing through her cracked hull. I think of the short miracle of
her passage. The 375 miles she floated, immaculate, across the Atlantic. My
early passage was a miracle, too. Like the Titanic’s, it did not last.
My mother noticed first. “Your body is a temple,” she told me. But the bra
she bought me felt more straitjacket than vestment. I wore baggy T-shirts
and hunched my shoulders. I tried to bury my body. It was too big in all the
wrong ways. My hips went purple from crashing them into table corners; I
no longer knew my own shape. My mother brought home a book called The
What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Girls. It explained hormonal
shifts, the science of breasts and pubic hair. It was not The What’s
Happening to the World as I Knew It? Book for Girls and did not explain
why being the only girl on the baseball team no longer felt like a triumph. It
did not explain why grown men in passing cars, to whom I had always been
happily invisible, now leered at me. It did not explain why or even
acknowledge that what was happening to my body changed my value in the
world.
I did not ask about these other changes. Maybe some children do. But
what if I asked and my parents did not have answers? It already seemed a
risk to reveal myself. If the changes I felt were not indexed in the book they
gave me, perhaps they were mine alone.
Children know so little of the world. Every new thing might be our own
creation. If a logic is not given, we invent one. How would my mother have
explained it to me, at ten? I can’t imagine.
One autumn afternoon, Alex invited me and my little brother to his house to
play soccer. I was not a soccer player, but I dragged my little brother down
the road and up that dirt driveway to where Alex and his cousin kicked the
ball back and forth across the patchy grass. The sky hung low over his dusty
yard and silvery clouds ripened overhead. At eleven, I could still win a race
against the boys on my baseball team. Even holding my T-shirt tented in
front of my chest, I could win. They still called me Mrs. Babe Ruth. But
Alex was a year older than me and twice as big. He did not let me win.
He pummeled the net with goals. He kicked the ball so hard that I
jumped out of its path, then burned with shame and chased it into the
woods.
“Eat that!” he sneered and spat into the cloud of dust kicked up by our
feet. He sauntered back to his side of our makeshift field and swiped his
forehead with the hem of his T-shirt, baring his flat stomach, ridged with
muscle.
An hour into our game, the sky broke, dumping water onto our dusty
field. Alex didn’t stop, so neither did I. I ran, wet hair plastered to my face
and neck. My oversize T-shirt clung to my chest, translucent and sopping.
Even that didn’t stop me. I ran, thighs burning, lungs heaving, mud
splattered up the legs of my jeans. Alex was a machine, dribbling the ball
through inches-deep puddles of mud, driving it into our goal. He barely
looked at me, but every kick felt personal, aimed at my body. I did not
understand what we were fighting for, only that I could not surrender.
I drilled into that day with everything I had, and it was not enough. Not
even close. It was the last day that I believed my body’s power lay in its
strength.
Twenty-five years later, I read that day’s entry in my diary. “Today,” I
wrote, “I played soccer at Alex’s house for FOUR HOURS! It was SO
FUN!”
It was not fun. It was a humiliation. It was a mystery. It was a
punishment, though I did not know for what. The instinct in me to hide it
was so strong that I lied in my diary. I wanted no record of that wreck.
The Titanic was named after the Greek Titans, an order of divine beings that
preceded the Olympic deities. I loved Greek mythology as a girl, and
among my favorite gods was Mnemosyne, a Titaness and the mother of the
Muses. According to fourth-century B.C. Greek texts, the dead were given a
choice to drink either from the river Lethe, which would erase their
memories of the life before reincarnation, or from the river Mnemosyne,
and carry those memories with them into the next life. In his Aeneid, Virgil
wrote that the dead could not achieve reincarnation without forgetting. At
the age of twelve, I had made my choice.
The other regulars on the stone wall of our bus stop were two girls, Sarah
and Chloe. They were also a grade ahead of me. Sarah was blond and
nervous. Chloe and Alex were cousins.
Alex had ignored all three of us at our previous bus stop, but not
anymore. Sometimes he whispered to one girl about the other two, mean
words that we laughed at with the faint hysteria of relief that it was not our
turn. He teased Chloe about boys in their class or how small she was. Once,
he picked her up and pretended to throw her over the stone wall.
“Stop it, Alex!” she shouted. She blushed furiously and rolled her eyes
while Sarah and I envied her. Sarah blanched when bullied, and we could
immediately see the crumple behind her face that preceded tears. Alex
always stopped before she cried. Eventually, he didn’t bother with her
anymore. With me he was relentless.
My insults were not as effective, but I always fought back. He
challenged me to contests, with Sarah as the enthusiastic judge. Races that I
could never win. Staring contests. Arm wrestling matches in which we knelt
in the damp grass and he slammed the back of my hand onto the stone
wall’s surface. He pretended it was a game or a joke, and though they all
laughed, we knew it wasn’t. There was none of the coddling he gave to
Chloe or the caution with which he approached Sarah. Still, I would not
accept victimhood. Though I woke filled with sickening dread every
morning and went to sleep with it every night, to tell my mother or ask her
to drive me to school was unthinkable; the idea was abhorrent to me.
I was the daughter of a sea captain. I would not be rescued. Idiom,
maritime tradition, and even law have insisted that the captain goes down
with the ship. The rule implies a sense of responsibility both to the rescue of
a captain’s passengers and to his pride. Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic
was seen on the ship’s bridge moments before it was engulfed in water. My
own stubbornness reflected this same ethos—to protect my tenderest wards,
or go down trying, alone.
One day he began chasing me. I don’t know what he planned to do if he
caught me, and I don’t think he knew either. To my relief, the bus arrived
before we found out. He chased me up the bus steps but stopped short
behind me and strolled past as I slid into a seat. I didn’t realize that he’d
spat on me until I felt the wet between my hair and the vinyl bus seat. I
reached behind my head and pulled my fingers away, wiping them on the
leg of my jeans as I stared out the bus window. I felt a new sensation in my
chest, behind my breastbone. It pulled, a hand gathering cloth.
The second time, I spat back. Over a period of weeks, he spat in my hair,
my face, my books, my backpack. I rarely got him back, but I always tried.
Once, I dodged him well enough to board the bus behind him, unscathed.
At the last minute, as I stepped onto the bus, he bounded back down the
aisle and hocked a great wad of mucus onto my cheek.
I knew that if I gave in to tears or stopped fighting back, he would stop. I
could not. My defiance matched my suffering.
One afternoon I did not see him on the bus after school and realized,
with tentative relief, that I would not have to fight my way home. I hurried
off the bus to get a head start on Sarah and Chloe, uninterested in the
conversation that we three might share in his absence. I retrieved my book
from my backpack as I passed the end of Alex’s street.
I felt him behind me before I heard him. I flinched so hard and my
despair came so fast and strong that I did not have time to steel myself
before the tears fell. I pushed out a single, gasped “Fuck you,” but could not
form words after that. He followed silently, watching me in profile. I raised
my book between our faces to block his view. He pushed it down.
“I’m sorry,” he said. I cried harder, my breath stuttering, and raised my
book again. He pushed it down again. “I didn’t know it bothered you,” he
said. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think you could take it,” he said. “It’s not
because I don’t like you,” he said. “I do.”
I believed him. Superstition makes Greek fishermen spit three times in
their nets before setting sail, to ward off evil. King Minos forced the seer
Polyidus to teach his foolish son magic, and when granted freedom, the
philosopher asked the fool to spit into his mouth, to make him forget.
Perhaps there is no spit given without desire, without a fear of powers
enormous enough to destroy you. But Alex’s mouth was my awakening. In
some inchoate way, I understood that desire led to fear that could lead to
hate—all without ever obliterating that original want. It was a power
struggle that would take me twenty more years to truly understand.
After that day, Alex let me be. I read my books at the bus stop. But I
understood something new. That he had wanted something from me and
hated me for it. That there was nothing I could have given or withheld or
done to change that. In the year that followed, I came to better understand
the lessons about my female body, the ones that tell us punishment is a
reward, that disempowerment is power. I quit baseball. When one of the
boys I used to play with wanted to put his hands under my clothes, I did not
stop him. Perhaps to let them win was the better way, after all.
The other girls at school pranced in bathing suits in carpeted basements
in front of huge televisions. They stuffed their mothers’ bras and mimicked
the poses of models in lingerie magazines. They talked endlessly about the
boys who’d begun calling my house in the evening. At twelve, I already had
a body like those women in the magazines, but it was no prize and they
offered me no congratulations. It was a race that I had won without trying,
and to win it was the greatest loss of all.
Eventually I understood the strength that was no strength, that was a
punishment no matter what I did or did not do. So I let my friend’s older
brother close the closet door. I let the persistent older boy dig under my
clothes and between my legs. My once-strong body became a passive thing,
tossed and splintered, its corners rounded from use. Unrecognizable.
There was a pleasure in compelling them. The way they could not stay
away. But as soon as they touched me, it was gone. I had no control over
what happened next, the names they called me in school, the crude gestures,
the prank phone calls—not even when my mother answered the phone. She
wanted to help me, but I had no words for what was happening. My
chambers were breached. They filled with that weight. I was sunk.
How could she have prepared me for this? You cannot win against an
ocean. There is no good strategy in a rigged game. There are only new ways
to lose.
There was a difference between my body in the world and my body at
home. At eleven, I soaked in the bath, a damp book in one hand, the other
lazily exploring the tender handfuls of my breasts and new bloom of my
hips, the soft pocket of my sex. The first time I slid on my back to the
bottom of the tub, propped my heels on the wall aside the faucet and let that
hot water pummel me, I understood that to crack my own hull was a glory, a
power summoned instead of submerged. Alone, I was both ship and sea,
and I felt no shame, only the cascade of pleasure, my body shuddering
against the smooth porcelain.
I stole My Secret Garden from my mother’s bedroom bookshelf and kept
it tucked under my mattress. Nancy Friday’s 1973 volume of real women’s
fantasies is organized by headings that include “The Lesbians,”
“Anonymity,” “Rape,” and “The Zoo.” I came to all of them, even the one
story about a woman who fucks a dog. I felt no embarrassment or shock at
the stories nor at my own pleasure. Only orgasm after orgasm. I discovered
that after the first one I could come again and again and again with only
seconds in between—a capacity no lover discovered for another twenty
years. I came on my back, my belly, straddling my pillows. I came with the
handle of a wooden hairbrush inside me, a carrot, a cucumber, the plastic
leg of a doll. I tasted my new wetness, the consistency of spit, but salted
and sweet. I came on my knees on my bedroom floor with a hand mirror
between my legs.
Alone in my bedroom, my body was miles deeper than I had ever
fathomed. Under my hands, it quaked from floor to tidal swell. The world
was more enormous than I had known, its power crushing. I was also
enormous, I found, a seething world of which men knew so little.
After the prank phone calls, after the pull in my chest grew so familiar I
couldn’t tell if it was in me or was me, after my father read my diary and
the long cold catalog of every boy that touched me but never how little I felt
under their hands, after the screaming fights about where I had really spent
my Saturday afternoon, after they found the liquor bottles in my sock
drawer, after they changed the phone number and sent me to private school
for a year, but shortly before I started kissing girls, I went back to public
school in eighth grade and returned to Ballard’s stone wall.
This time, when Alex kept walking beside me past his own street and led
me into the woods across from my family’s mailbox, I knew what he
wanted. We lay in the damp leaves, twigs cracking under us, amid the smell
of pine needles and dirt. I stared up at the spires of treetops, the green
glowed stars of leaves, and listened to the coo of mourning doves.
There, Alex covered my mouth with his. Though we had traded spit
before, ours had never mingled like this. For the first time, I tasted that
mixture of desire and violence. It had always been both. He pushed my T-
shirt up over my belly and chest, where it bunched in my armpits. I let him.
It was a thing I had done many times before, or let be done to me. This time
it filled me with a terrible sadness. In those woods where I had played all
my life, so close to my own home, the bright flicker of light on the pond
nearly visible through the trees, it felt as though I was killing something, or
letting him kill it. Still, I did not stop him. Eventually, he stopped on his
own. I sat up and pulled down my shirt. We parted without speaking. I
knew we would never speak of it, might never speak again. I didn’t care. I
didn’t want anything from him, except what he’d already taken.
Bob Ballard always dreamed of finding the Titanic. As a boy, he had
idolized Captain Nemo. I used to imagine the glory of that moment when he
discovered it. How magnificent it must have looked, the hulking remains
seventy years buried on the ocean floor, one thousand miles out to sea from
where I grew up. The glory of that moment was dampened, Ballard later
claimed, by the sobering reality that it was a gravesite he’d found. Fifteen
hundred people died in the wreck, and when his crew found it, they could
see where the bodies had fallen.
What if they hadn’t known about those bodies? What if Ballard had not
even been searching for the Titanic when he found it? A mystery solved is
always a death: that of possibility, denial, the dream of our own
invincibility.
I believed all the reasons that I gave for ending up in the dungeon. That the
pleasure I took from spitting in men’s faces was no kind of redemption. I
did not think of Alex until years later, when I was writing a book about
having been a dominatrix. I was a grown woman, alone at my desk. When I
remembered—the flinch I would not give him, the terrible clutching dread
—I became that girl with her feet dangled into the cold of Deep Pond, then
suddenly touching down. I saw it all, my own ghosted wreck glowing at the
bottom.
In the dungeon, my identity was distilled once again to its objective
meaning. Those men, like all the men before them, prescribed my body’s
uses. This time, my job was to deny instead of acquiesce, to say no instead
of yes. Maybe it was the best way to learn how to form those sounds in my
own mouth.
“I want you,” they said over and over.
“You cannot have me,” I replied every time.
“Please,” they insisted.
“No,” I said. Like Charybdis chained to the ocean floor, I spat the sea
into their eyes and roared. “No. No. No. No. No.” Inside those two letters
stretched a fifty-foot microcosm, a world over which I had treaded water for
decades. I had not known how tired I was until I stopped. Then, I grew
strong. What more perfect a redemption could I have designed? I did not
have to understand it to enjoy it. When I did understand, I felt as I imagine
Ballard must have when he glimpsed his Titanic for the first time.
I saw Alex once. Years later, when I was a domme, or shortly thereafter.
One sunny summer afternoon on the porch of his brother’s house. He
looked the same. He would not look at me, though I ached to show him this
new me, this mistress of no. In that wish was the knowledge of my still-soft
parts, how they shook in his presence, how innocent they remained.
They say that to love someone else, you have to love yourself first. It is not
true. Being loved, the relentless care of my family, my lovers, my friends,
has sewn me back together. Sometimes the warmth of a mouth that loves
me is enough to break me open, to unravel all that careful control. I am
shocked and so relieved to find that I am still soft inside. That I can give my
body to a lover and still keep it for myself. It is that lost girl they love, too,
whether I can or not.
When I think back to that boy, his big hands and wet mouth, sometimes I
want to go back, to tell him no, to preserve the piece of me that was driven
deep underground. More than anything, I want to apologize to that girl.
How could she have known? She survived the best way she knew how. The
true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the
ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve
some mysteries. We don’t need the truth to survive, and sometimes our
survival depends on its denial. That wreck appeared to me both magnificent
and tragic. How had I hidden it for so long? It did feel like a gravesite. Not
of anything that Alex had killed in me, but of something I had killed in my
burying. Whatever river you drink from, forgetting does not erase your past.
It only hides what wrecks you carry into the next life.
THE MIRROR TEST
What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe.
—Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
1
When I teach Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl,” which I do a few times
each year, I often play for the class a video of the author reading her work at
the 2015 Chicago Humanities Festival. The story consists of a single long
paragraph composed of imperative statements made by an implied mother
character. Between instructions for domestic tasks like how to properly
launder clothes and set a table are those for not behaving or appearing like
“the slut you are so bent on becoming”—a phrase that recurs throughout the
story. In the recording, each time Kincaid repeats this line—the word slut a
glittering shard in the smooth putty of her voice—the audience laughs.
There is nothing about the story or the refrain, nor in the author’s
countenance, that implies humor.
“This is how you set a table for tea,” the mother explains. “This is how
you sweep a whole house.” Bread, she tells the girl, should always be
squeezed to ascertain its freshness, “but what if the baker won’t let me feel
the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind
of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?”
In the eighteenth century, “slut’s pennies” were hard nuggets in a loaf of
bread that resulted from incomplete kneading. I imagine them salty and
dense, soft enough to sink your tooth into, but tough enough to stick. What
could a handful of slut’s pennies buy you? Nothing—a hard word, a slap in
the face, a fast hand for your slow ones.
Before it carried any sexual connotation, the word slut was a term for a
slovenly woman, a poor housekeeper. A slut was the maid who left dust on
the floor—“slut’s wool”—or who left a corner of the room overlooked in
her cleaning—a “slut’s corner”—or who let dirt collect in a sewer or hole in
a ground—“a slut’s hole.” An untidy man might occasionally be referred to
as “sluttish,” but for his sloppy jacket, not his unswept floor, because a slut
was a doer of menial housework, a drudge, a maid, a servant—a woman.
A slut was a careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, broom
stilled against her shoulder—eyes cast out the window, mouth humming a
song, always thinking of something else.
Oh, was I ever a messy child. A real slut in the making. My clothes
entangled on the floor; my books splayed open and dog-eared, their
bindings split. Dirty dishes on the bookshelf, sticky spoons glued to the rug.
I would never have bathed if not commanded.
At a certain point, when I got in trouble and wanted to be seen as good
again, I would clean my room. But only when I wanted to be good, not
because I wanted to be clean. I already understood that goodness was
something you earned, that existed only in the esteem of others. Alone in
my room, I was always good. Or, I was never good. It was not a thing to
care about alone in my room, unless I was thinking about the people outside
and the ways I might need them to see me.
The story goes like this: In March 1838, Darwin visited the Zoological
Society of London’s gardens. The zoo had just acquired Jenny, a female
orangutan. The scientist watched a zookeeper tease the ape with an apple.
Jenny flung herself on the ground in frustration, “precisely like a naughty
child.” Later, he watched her study a mirror in her cage. The visit led him to
wonder about the animal’s emotional landscape. Did she have a sense of
fairness to offend? Did she feel wronged, and what sense of selfhood would
such a reaction imply? What did Jenny recognize in her own reflection?
More than a century later, Darwin’s musings led to the mirror test,
developed in 1970 by the psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. It is sometimes
called the mirror self-recognition test (MSR), and is used to assess an
animal’s ability to visually recognize itself. In it, an animal is marked with a
sticker or paint in an area it cannot normally see. Then it is shown a mirror.
If the animal subsequently investigates the mark on its own body, it is seen
to perform this self-recognition. Great apes, Eurasian magpies, bottlenose
dolphins, orcas, ants, and one Asian elephant are the most frequently cited
animals to have passed the test.
Just think of all the things a woman could do rather than clean. Which is to
say, think of all the pastimes that might make her a slut: reading; talking;
listening; thinking; masturbating; eating; observing the sky, the ground,
other people, or herself; picking a scab; smoking; painting; building
something; daydreaming; sleeping; hatching a plan; conspiring; laughing;
communing with animals; communing with God; imagining herself a god;
imagining a future in which her time is her own.
In Samuel Johnson’s 1755 dictionary (the precursor to the Oxford
English) a slut is simply a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation. In
the nineteenth century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped
in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the twentieth century its
meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, a woman with the morals of a
man, it isn’t until the 1960s that a slut finally becomes a sexually
promiscuous woman, “a woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered
shamefully excessive.”
It is a brilliant linguistic trajectory. Make the bad housekeeper a woman
of poor morals. Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other
act becomes a potentially immoral one. Make her a bitch, a dog, a pig, any
kind of subservient or inferior beast. Create one word for them all. Make
sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish
her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do
anything you want to her.
One of the first orgasms I remember having was to the 1983 movie Valley
Girl, starring Nicolas Cage. I was not interested in the chaste romance
between Cage’s punk Randy and Deborah Foreman’s Valley girl Julie.
There was a scene, however, in which Randy goes to the punk club and runs
into his ex, Samantha, a smoldering brunette. Their urgent exchange in the
shadows of that club was so compelling that I ignored the fact of my
grandmother dozing on the sofa behind me as I masturbated to climax, then
again, and again, and again. I had no concept that my behavior might
approach “a degree considered shamefully excessive.”
Female pleasure or any indication of it was nowhere found in our
school’s sex ed curriculum. Wet dreams and male masturbation, of course.
Boys, I knew, could masturbate excessively, though this cliché was treated
with a kind of jocular resignation. “No one ever tried to hide a man’s penis
from him,” writes Cara Kulwicki in her essay, “Real Sex Education.” In
order to talk about reproduction, sex ed curriculums can’t avoid describing
men’s most common route to orgasm. Conversely, “women enter adulthood
all too often without knowing what a clitoris is, where it is, and/or what to
do with it,” writes Kulwicki. Girls’ sex ed was all periods and unwanted
pregnancy. We learned how to put a condom on a banana, where our cervix
and fallopian tubes were located on a simple anatomical diagram, but not
how or even if women masturbated.
Tanaïs, a thirty-six-year-old artist I interviewed, articulates it easily:
“Kids are sexual, you have to help them navigate that and not be like,
ashamed of it, but also not be sexual, because it’s not appropriate.” But how
difficult this is, in a culture that offers so many encouragements to be sexual
and to feel ashamed of it. Good guidance most likely comes from someone
who received it themselves and can easily be drowned out amid the
cacophony of so many contradictory sources.
Despite the inherent sexism of our public school sex education, I
suppose I am glad we were not preemptively shamed in class for our
pleasure, that it was simply absent, left up to us to determine how it might
be found in our bodies or situated in our lives and minds.
I was lucky to have no family or religious dogma that condemned sexual
pleasure, and so my relationship to it had an untamed beginning. I was as
enthusiastic and messy in exploring my body as I was in exploring the
woods around our home, the murky bottom of the pond. No one was
watching, and I was free of the consciousness of self that a gaze brings. An
orgasm was a private thing, a firework in the dark of one’s body.
The psychologist Henri Wallon observed that both humans and
chimpanzees seem to recognize their own reflections around six months of
age. In 1931 he published a paper in which he argued that mirrors aid in the
development of a child’s self-conception.
Five years later, Jacques Lacan presented his development of this idea at
the Fourteenth Annual Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad. He called
it le stade du miroir, the mirror stage. Before it reaches the mirror stage, the
infant is simply a conduit for its own experience. (The Lacanian baby is
always male, adding yet another layer of distance for the female reader
considering her self-conception, though I will close it here.) Self-conception
is piecemeal—here is a foot, here a hand—but perhaps closer to what Lacan
would later call the Real. There is no I. Experience is not mediated by
signification or perception. Then the baby sees herself in the mirror. The
image of her own body disturbs and then delights her as she identifies with
it. The self becomes unified and objectified simultaneously, and the uneasy
grasping for a fixed subject begins. The baby cannot tell the difference
between the mirror self and the actual self. It is the first story she tells
herself about herself: that is me. It is the beginning of self-alienation.
In fourth grade, Vicki and I were friends, which meant that we attended
sleepovers at each other’s houses, played invented games during recess with
the same group of girl classmates, and our mothers had each other’s
numbers. Vicki and I had the same birthday, though by the summer before
fifth grade, I understood that our differences far outweighed our similarities.
Vicki lived in a characterless mansion on the west side of our town, in a
housing development of identical mansions. I lived in a gray-shingled house
in the woods with a tiny black-and-white television, and cabinets full of
foods no one at school had ever heard of. Vicki had more Barbies than
friends, and she was very popular. Most notably, Vicki had a pale white
Popsicle body and freckled cheeks, while I was the first girl in our grade
with breasts.
Vicki had an early pool party for her birthday—our birthday—but she
didn’t ask me to share it, and it didn’t occur to me that she might have for
many years. Now I can see how shrewd that choice, how better for both of
us. How awkward it would have been for her to preside over both of our
birthdays. In her spacious backyard, she commanded us as she did on the
school playground, except on that day she did so in a pink bikini.
The other girls also scampered around her yard in their bathing suits,
legs straight as clothespins, bellies bright white, chests flat and unmoving as
they ran. I kept my T-shirt on. Underneath it I wore a bright green one-piece
with a decorative zipper on the front, bought on sale at the T.J. Maxx in
town, not the Gap or Puritan, places where I thought only rich people like
Vicki shopped. I would have worn a snowsuit if I could.
As we sat around the patio table eating pizza, a girl complimented Vicki
on her suit. Vicki waved dismissively as she took a bite and then swiped a
dribble of grease from her chin with a paper napkin. We all watched her
chew and then regally swallow.
“This is for babies without boobs,” she explained. “When I have boobs,
I’m going to get one of those suits with a zipper right here.” She pointed
coyly at her pink top. “And I’m going to unzip it all the way down to here.”
She dragged her finger down until the whole cohort laughed, even me, with
my heart in my gut.
The role of the mirror stage is ultimately “to establish a relationship
between an organism and its reality—or, as they say, between the Innenwelt
and the Umwelt.”
The baby, Lacan tells us, can see herself before she can control herself. It
is this temporal dialectic that makes the mirror stage “a drama whose
internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation.”
This fragmented self is reconciled by the creation of an anticipatory body,
an “ ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality.” The creation of a story about the body
—I will have boobs, I will have a bathing suit, I will unzip it all the way to
here—to reconcile the distance between the image of the self and the
experience of the self allows us to move through space, to have a
conception of identity that feels solid, though it is not. It is the construction
of a fiction that will eventually harden into something else.
After presents, Vicki ordered us all into the pool. I lingered at the table and
tried to demur, but she insisted and so I waded into the shallow end with my
T-shirt on, its wet hem sticking to my thighs as the whole party watched.
“No, Melissa,” Vicki shouted, exasperated. “Take your T-shirt off! You
can’t play with a T-shirt on.” Someone giggled. I stared down at the blue
water, my feet rippling at the bottom. Then I squeezed my eyes shut and
pulled off my shirt.
No one said anything. They didn’t have to. If I had hoped that it might
be seen as luck—me in possession of that thing they all wanted, most of all
Vicki—then my hope sank before my shirt hit the concrete. They stared at
my zippered swimsuit. No, they stared at my body, and in those scorching
moments—the blue water turned flame—I knew that there are some people
we love for having the things we don’t, and some people we hate for the
same reason.
Though I spent hours staring in the mirror at that age, I hadn’t yet
learned how to see my own changed body. That afternoon I glimpsed her, a
glimmering double that others could also see, that was the only thing they
could see of me. Vicki and I never played again, not because what girls did
at recess or on the weekends was no longer playing—instead a kind of work
to become an impossible thing and to discipline the bodies that failed worst
at this—but because she had recognized that we were different, a fact I’d
already known. It would be another year before Alex would spit in my face,
before Vicki or anyone would call me a slut, or threaten me, or prank-call
my home, but by the time it happened, I already knew who they meant.
Gallup’s mirror test answered the question of an animal’s ability to
recognize itself in its reflection, but it did not answer Darwin’s first
question: Did she have a sense of fairness to offend? Did she feel wronged,
and what sense of selfhood did such a reaction imply? A sense of fairness
and a capacity for feeling wronged seemed to suggest humanity to Darwin.
The scientist’s ultimate question about Jenny was always the same: How
human is she? The acceptance of poor treatment has often been interpreted
as a validation of such treatment, at least by its enactors, who are not
interested in questioning their own humanity.
Queen Victoria, who visited the ape in May 1842, described Jenny in her
diary as “frightful & painfully and disagreeably human.”
Say the ape, the Eurasian magpie, or the elephant looks in the mirror and
recognizes the paint smeared on her body by the researcher. The animal
who passes the mirror test then investigates her own body for the offending
mark. Say she finds nothing. How long before she trusts the reflection over
her own body? Say the mark on her reflection is confirmed by all the other
elephants. How long before her reflection replaces herself? Say the mark is
not of paint but instead a word applied to her.
“I got my period when I was ten, and I’d been reading Judy Blume books
for a while so I knew it was coming,” said Tanaïs. “And when it came, I
wasn’t prepared for it anymore.” A 2011 American Association of
University Women (AAUW) school survey shows that early development is
the most common attribute of sexually harassed students, followed closely
by perceived prettiness.
“You sort of feel alien in your own skin and ashamed for existing,” said
another woman I interviewed. “Being a busty eleven-year-old was
difficult,” said another. “My breasts were a burden to me. I felt ashamed of
them because of the constant comments and attention they got from
everyone of all ages.”
“In my cultural milieu of Bangladeshi people living in America,”
explains Tanaïs, “being light-skinned and slender and straight as a fucking
arrow is beautiful … I knew very early on: I’m not a light-skinned, skinny,
fuckin’ straight-as-an-arrow bitch. I’m not that person at all.” She goes on,
“I had very thick Coke-bottle glasses, braces, hairy upper lip and legs, acne,
and an adolescent, emerging voluptuous body—my face didn’t change until
four or so years later.”
Most of the literature on this topic, including a 2009 Social Psychology
Quarterly article, “The Double Standard and Adolescent Peer Acceptance,”
finds that “the term ‘slut’ is typically applied by females to other females
whose bodies or behaviors deviate from group norms. Exotic beauty or
premature physical development may then be enough to threaten the status
quo and result in a girl’s exclusion from female peer groups.”
“ ‘Shame’ is the word I keep coming back to,” Tanaïs, who is strikingly
beautiful, continues. “The way that my body developed did make me feel
shame in that space … I felt undesired by all, since South Asians were
considered ugly and unfuckable, and I suspected a list circulating about the
ugliest girls in middle school included me.” She adds, “In ’90s heroin-chic
white hegemonic beauty standards America—without Black women and
Bollywood (even with its light-skinnedness) I’m not sure I’d ever come to
find my beauty.”
Leora Tanenbaum, the author of two books about slut-shaming, adds, “
‘Slut’ serves as an all-purpose insult for any female outsider. All the social
distinctions that make a teenage girl ‘other’ are collapsed into a sexual
distinction.” I interviewed twenty-two women who’d experienced this kind
of sexual harassment before writing this essay, and nearly all of them
qualified during adolescence as some kind of “other,” whether it was a
designation earned by race, body shape, economic class, gender
presentation, or family background.
There was another way to be collapsed into a sexual distinction, though.
Now I can see the perfect trap of it, how the solution to feeling disgusting
would become the proof to all that I was.
It was the first real hot day of summer, the summer before I turned twelve,
and we were watching boys play basketball in Kimmy’s driveway. There
was Ty, a pretty-faced sixteen-year-old with tennis-ball biceps, and three of
Kimmy’s brothers. My hair stuck to the back of my neck, and the cars were
too hot to lean against. Down the potholed street, a mirage shimmered, a
puddle of heat.
They were huge, these boys. They smelled of Old Spice and menthol
cigarettes. There was anger pushing up inside them; I could hear it in their
clipped voices, feel it in the sharpness of their gazes. Their bodies, even in
graceful motion, were always fighting. Their limbs swung and flew, threads
of sweat tumbling off them. They were louder when we watched. When
they glanced at us, I shimmered like that mirage at the end of the street.
Their attention quickened me, turned me into something lithe and bright—
less body than flash of light. What a relief it was.
When an older guy sauntered up and one of the boys yelled his name,
Vega, I lurched in recognition. When I was younger, my father would lift
me onto his shoulders and teach me the names of stars. One arm wrapped
around my shin, the other pointing up, he’d breathe their strange sounds
into the dark: Sirius, Polaris, Arcturus, Vega. In summer, Vega could always
be found above the top of our street, flickering its changing colors. That
was its atmosphere shifting, my father had told me. It became my favorite
star, this celestial body that was always becoming a different kind of
beautiful. This Vega in Kimmy’s driveway was kind of beautiful, too, with
his tiny mustache and golden arms. He was, in the way of men and space,
both unfathomable and familiar.
“This one’s for you,” Ty said with a wink, and wove his way through the
grunting clot of bodies to sink the ball through the hoop. Kimmy screamed.
She had fallen on a tree branch, and a piece of wood the thickness of a
finger had lodged itself into her thigh. She wailed, suddenly a child. Her
brother carried her into a car, and someone drove them to the hospital. I
managed to get left behind.
“In body dysmorphic disorder,” writes Thomas Fuchs in a 2003 Journal of
Phenomenological Psychology article, “the patient is overwhelmed by the
others’ perspective on himself, while feeling his own self-devaluation in
their gazes.” Living inside my body had already become a fraught
existence. If I were going to be defined by the gaze of other people, why
wouldn’t I step toward the ones that made me feel beautiful? I didn’t know
yet how temporary that feeling was. “Since this devaluating
(self-)perception, as we saw, is corporealizing at the same time, it prepares
the ground for a reified body perception … The vicious circle of
corporealization and shameful self-awareness has become fixed. The ‘body-
for-others’ now dominates the lived-body.”
Wanted was the only thing I was sure I ought to be. There it was, bright
in the eyes of every boy in that driveway. A reflection of me that bore a
different mark—at least, it felt different—and I wanted to feel another kind
of different.
Vega carried two cans out of the kitchen and handed me one. He seemed so
comfortable in Kimmy’s house, as if it were his own.
“Here, mamacita.” Milwaukee’s Best, it read. I set mine down on the
carpet by my foot. I had only ever tasted the foam from my father’s
occasional Dos Equis. I perched on the edge of the couch and sucked in my
belly. Vega sat beside me. MTV was on and a man and woman rolled
around on the beach, sand stuck to their bodies. He took a long drink from
his can, then balanced it on the arm of the couch, the muscles of his back
shifting through his white T-shirt. It was new; I could make out the creases
from its fold inside the plastic package. A black tattoo crept out of the
sleeve and down his arm. He was handsome, with sharp features and long
eyelashes, but at least twenty-five, a grown man.
On the TV a woman stood beside a poster of a fatter version of herself.
She kicked the picture away from her and marched toward me, holding her
arms out to display her new skinny body.
“So, you got a boyfriend?” Vega asked.
“No,” I said.
“Oh yeah? You ever date a Puerto Rican boy?”
“No,” I told him, “but my dad is Puerto Rican.”
“Oh yeah?” he says. “So you are a little mamacita, huh?”
I was unfamiliar with the term, and though I didn’t speak Spanish, I knew
enough to parse out its literal meaning. If it had been my abuela who had
said it, maybe after she taught me to cook plátanos maduros fritos, I would
have glowed with pride. But in the mouth of this strange man, I knew it
meant something different. I smiled nervously in agreement, because he
seemed so pleased and I wanted to please him so badly, this strange grown
man, without knowing why. His tone was thick with knowing, and I
understood that he recognized something in me.
I didn’t know then that mamacita is different from mamita, that though
the literal translation is also little mother, “the moniker is never really used
to describe an actual mother,” as Laura Martinez wrote in a 2014 op-ed for
NPR. She explains that the term is “inextricably linked to a man’s
perception of a woman as an object of sexual desire.” Which is to say that it
communicates a desire to impregnate a girl—to make her into a mother—
more than any sense of diminutive endearment.
I was not a little mother or a hot mama. I was an eleven-year-old girl.
Now, it seems to me a startlingly efficient way to age a child in a single
word. Sometimes the word itself matters less than the authority with which
it is spoken. It is the act of naming that claims you.
When I walked across the room toward the bathroom, my sneakers sank
into the carpet like it was sand. I closed the door, but the lock was broken. I
peed, running the faucet to hide the sound. After washing my hands, I
leaned toward the mirror to inspect my face.
When the door opened, I was surprised and not surprised at the same
time. He slid his body into the narrow space behind me, and I hunched
forward, as if to let him pass. He didn’t pass. My hips pressed against the
sink. Afraid to see his face in the mirror, I looked down at the shape of my
breasts under my T-shirt. I could feel the outline of his body, its heat an
image reflected on me.
He leaned down and kissed the side of my neck. Hot breath against my
skin, his face in my hair, huge hands clasped around my waist, fingers
pressed into the bare skin above the belt of my jeans. My breath came
shallow, like it did when I was afraid. I was afraid. The empty house around
was suddenly vast, as if we were flung into space. Vega’s stubbly cheek
grazed the back of my neck, and his hands slid upward.
A car door thunked outside. I raised my eyes, and they met his in the
mirror. It felt like bursting up out of water, into light. I could move
suddenly, and I did, clasping my chest. I felt his fingers shift beneath my
hands, and even with the fabric of my shirt between us, his felt as if they
were inside of me, a part of my own body.
“I am suddenly caught,” explains Fuchs, “as it were, in a force field, in a
suction that attracts me, or in a stream that floods me. I am torn out of the
centrality of my lived-body and become an object inside another world. The
other’s gaze decentralizes my world.”
Here is a story: around other girls I was fat and misfit, condemned by
some inherent flaw in my body’s constitution. Here is another story: around
men I was desirable, possessed of a flickering power that I did not know
how to control. Here is another story: when Kimmy got back from the
hospital, she asked why I hadn’t come. You stayed here? she said. By
yourself? I told her Vega had stayed, too. Her face twisted, and I flushed
with shame. Or did I flush with shame and then she made a face? In any
case, we built it together: a story that wasn’t true, but which we both
believed. Eventually, she told it to others. Here is another story: around my
family I was messy and loved. Then I was a liar. I was possessed by a
power they did not know how to control.
My body seemed to literally transform, depending on what eyes beheld
it, like a superhero or a monster. Years later I would feel it when I went
home, all those child selves clamoring back into being. I would itch to get
away and return to my adult life, so that my body could morph back with
each mile’s distance.
The specular self does not stay in the mirror, of course. Fuchs explains,
“The mirror represents the perspective of the others on my body: by taking
over this perspective on myself, self-consciousness is constituted. An
essential step in this process is marked by the development of shame.”
The story of the self will be written no longer by the child’s anticipation,
or what she knows as inevitable in the Innenwelt. It will be written by the
birthday girl with the greased chin. It will be written by the men whose
hands mold her into being. It will be written by the mother and the father
and the neighbor and the magazine and all who stand to benefit from
claiming her. In Lacan’s words: “This moment at which the mirror stage
comes to an end inaugurates … the dialectic that will henceforth link the I
to socially elaborated situations.”
The self becomes a collaboration with other people, a series of fantasies
that lead to “the armour of an alienating identity.” Have you seen a suit of
armor? There are so many pieces. Here is where a strange man named me.
Here is where the girls stared. Here is the school report card. The plates
clink and move together like one. The self underneath is invisible to others.
We are completely alone inside ourselves.
“Once grasped by the other’s gaze,” Fuchs writes, “the lived-body has
changed fundamentally: from now on, it bears the imprint of the other; it
has become body-for-others, i.e., object, thing, naked body.” It is a cliché
that adolescents care too much what their peers think, more sobering to
think of the power we give to others at that age. Not Like me, but Conjure
me.
2
“She’s tight,” they kept saying with glee about this girl or that. This was
before tight meant good or mad and after it meant drunk or cheap.
“What about me?” Is it possible that I actually asked this? That I was
once so plaintive? Of course. I was a child.
“No, you’re loose as a goose.”
I remember exactly what I wore that day: button-fly jeans, short-sleeved
shirt with a floral pattern. It must have seemed important. I must have
looked down to see what they saw. There was no red mark, but that didn’t
mean it wasn’t there.
The geese in our town shat everywhere. Their long black necks were fat as
the pipes under our kitchen sink, their sleek heads identical, with white-
feathered cheeks. Their wingspan was enormous. Sometimes they flew in a
V formation, their muscular wings beating in unison, their bodies’
improbable masses gliding over us in an arrow, honking as they sliced into
the sky.
I did not feel loose as a goose in the bathroom with Vega. I did not feel
loose as a goose later that summer, with Kimmy’s cousin in the kitchen. I
did not feel loose as a goose with my other friend’s brother in the closet, or
another friend’s brother’s friend behind the mall after school.
I felt loose as a goose alone in my bedroom, my magnificent wings
beating the air, flapping the pages of all my books.
Still, I let them touch me. It seemed that my desire and theirs ought to be
connected, that what drew together ought to have some shared reward,
though it never did in practice. My desire found its dead end in them, and
there was no easy route out.
I recently reread Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and found it almost
too painful to finish. I had not remembered that it was a novel about dying
of a bad reputation. I only remembered that Lily Bart was beautiful, that she
becomes addicted to “chloral,” and that such a fate seemed either likely or
appealing to me.
I loved tragic stories of smart women whose difference led to ruin. Better
yet if they were also beautiful. The romance of tragedy was a balm I could
apply to my own sorrows. I felt different in so many ways, not least of
which in the way I looked—not blond and freckled like the most popular
kids, but tan and green-eyed, with the body of a woman. I had always been
told I was exotic—what are you?—but it had started to feel like an insult.
“This is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move
quick so that it doesn’t fall on you,” the speaker of “Girl” teaches her
daughter—I always imagine by wordless example. You can be loose as a
goose so long as you make sure that no one sees you.
I have never felt sympathy for the mother voice of the Kincaid story
until now. “The slut you are bent on becoming” is not a sexually
promiscuous woman. The mother doesn’t think her daughter is bent on
sleeping around. The slut is what she will become if people call her one, if
she does not manage her reputation. To be called a slut is tantamount to
being one, she tells her daughter. Society creates you. They already want to
believe this about you; in some way, they already do. Don’t give them
confirmation.
A woman must cultivate a double self: the public self and the real self.
Somehow, you must keep that fragmented self, no matter if Lacan tells you
it’s impossible. Your life depends on its management. You can dream and
think and spit and fuck as long as you don’t keep a sloppy house. As long as
you don’t leave fingerprints or pennies in the bread. If you do, that’s it.
They can do anything they want to you.
I had heard that Easy A was a feminist teen movie about slut-shaming. In
the 2010 film Olive (played by Emma Stone) is a virgin, a smart student
who is moved by the plight of Hester Prynne in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet
Letter, which her English class is reading. On a whim in the girl’s restroom
at their high school, Olive lies to her best friend that she’s lost her virginity
to an older guy in community college. The lie is overheard, and the rumor
mill churns. Soon everyone knows about the imaginary community college
student, and Olive (sort of) enjoys the increased social visibility. Subtlety is
not one of Easy A’s strengths, though it needn’t be—the double bind that
insists that teen girls exhibit performative sexuality and then ostracizes
them for doing so is not subtle either.
“There were rumors started about me that I sucked dick, that I, you know,
liked to get it from behind, all this stuff,” Tanaïs tells me about the time
after she was raped by her first boyfriend, and subsequently became
sexually active. “And it was perpetuated by young women too, it wasn’t just
young men, it was younger women … I remember my chemistry teacher
was like, ‘There’s really ugly things being said about you in the girls’
bathroom, do you want us to get rid of it?’ ” Instead, she decided to check it
out first. “They spelled my name right, which I was like, really, really
impressed by.” She laughs. “I was like, okay, this is my entire name, no
confusing who the fuck it could be, and I was like, ‘You know what? Just
leave it.’ And I wore it as this weird badge of honor.
“I would rather be this bitch that’s talked about and people are kind of
jealous of, obviously, than to be someone who’s in pain and trauma and
suffering because of this thing that happened to me,” Tanaïs elaborates,
with a shrug. “Even though I would cry a lot about feeling really lost and
not being able to share with my parents or even my younger sister what I’d
gone through, or even friends, or anybody really.”
When a gay classmate begs Olive to pretend that she’s had sex with him,
too, to refute the truer rumors about his sexuality, she agrees. They pretend
to have sex at a party where all their classmates overhear. Soon her best
friend feels compelled to tell her that their classmates are referring to her as
a “cum dumpster.”
“Do you think I’m a cum dumpster?” Olive asks.
“If the dumpster fits,” her friend replies. Soon Olive is dressing the part,
in a bustier and full face of makeup, a scarlet letter affixed to her chest.
Tiffany was not a close friend, more of a school friend, and it would likely
have been the only sleepover we ever had anyway. The smells of other
people’s houses sometimes allured me in their novelty, but the too-sweet
smell of Tiffany’s house made me instantly homesick.
Tiffany’s older brother was more interesting than either Tiffany or her
ruffled bedroom. When she introduced us, I felt burnished by his attention,
the kind I’d already become an expert at detecting. I could feel a man’s gaze
when it heavied with interest, like the birds who flitted at the feeder in our
yard could feel mine. Desire filled my bones with air. Tiffany noticed, too.
Later, when she suggested we play Truth or Dare, she dared me to ask him
to join us. Then she dared us to go in the closet. There he kissed me,
probing the inside of my mouth with his tongue. As the dresses shifted on
their hangers in the dark, I recognized the mix of fear and excitement that
fizzed in me. The same sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed.
Not girl, but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon
bumping the closet ceiling.
On Monday, I was summoned to the principal’s office and arrived to find
Tiffany waiting there, a tissue clenched in her hand, I was confused. She
told the vice principal that I was going to get a bad reputation. She thought I
ought to be punished for her hurt feelings. She felt used, she said. I did not
think to apply the same word to myself. I did not feel wronged by her
brother, though it had not exactly felt like a choice. When the vice principal
suggested that I apologize to Tiffany, I did, my face burning, without
knowing exactly for what.
Ray is a twenty-six-year-old PhD student at an Ivy League university. A
Brooklyn native, she describes her seventh-grade self as having “uneven
bangs and braces and bruises all over my body from skateboarding and
climbing trees.” Athletic and academically gifted, Ray mostly made friends
with boys her own age. “I was very aware that I couldn’t really confide in
my female friends,” she explains. “It felt like anything I said could be used
against me and that I was someone other girls wanted to take down.”
One night during seventh grade, upon the request of a boy she
skateboarded with, who went to a different school, she recorded a video of
herself masturbating and sent it to him in exchange for a dick pic. By the
next day, she was receiving questions from other kids on AOL Instant
Messenger: Did she really send out a video of her pussy? “Some boys sent
me messages saying they had seen it,” she tells me, “asking if we could
come up with an arrangement of sorts.”
She was sitting in class when the seventh-grade dean walked in and
shouted her name. He walked her to his office in silence. There, he
referenced the video that had circulated. “He didn’t ask me whether or not it
was true,” she explains, “he didn’t really ask me what my side of the story
was, but seemed to have accepted that I had sent a video of my dirty pussy
to some kid he didn’t even know … because I was a slut.” She shrugs. “He
shamed me in ways I can’t really put words to.”
In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart’s mother also teaches her daughter that
society’s regard is everything. That “a beauty needs more tact than the
possessor of an average set of features.” That she must manipulate and
manage both her gifts and society’s esteem to get what she needs, to be
safe. It makes sense that Lily is always looking in mirrors; she knows very
well that the specular self is the social self, the one on which her life
depends.
But there are two Lilys: the one ravenous for approval and security, who
believes entirely in “the great gilt cage in which they were all huddled,” and
another, more private one. When she disobeys society’s rules, the rules of
her mother, in that grace period before the other inhabitants of the cage
begin to punish her for her transgressions, she can feel it, “one drawing
deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little
black prison-house of fears.”
First, it was just the other students in my class, kids I’d known since first
grade. I was loose as a goose, I was easy and fast, mostly because of the
way I looked. It only took a few true stories to stoke that fire.
One night I was eating dinner with my family, and the phone rang. A
tiny bolt of lightning struck in my chest, and I leapt up to answer the call.
“Don’t answer that,” said my father. “No phone calls during dinner.” I
ignored him and snatched the phone from its cradle in the next room. There
was a shuffling at the other end of the line and then a gravelly girl’s voice
shouted, “You’re a fucking whore!” into my ear. At first I wasn’t sure if the
voice had filled our whole house, or just me. Had my parents heard? They
hadn’t. I fixed my face and went back to dinner.
That first time it happened, I wondered if I should have apologized more
sincerely to Tiffany.
It is Gus Trenor’s wife, Judy, who is Lily’s best friend early in the book. It
is she who warns Lily, in her pursuit of a potential husband, about the
dangers of being perceived as “what his mother would call fast—oh, well,
you know what I mean. Don’t wear your scarlet crepe-de-chine for dinner,
and don’t smoke if you can help it, Lily dear!”
Lily doesn’t marry that man, and she doesn’t fuck Judy Trenor’s
husband, but she does accept something she needs from him: money. That
is enough.
Olive doesn’t accept money from the other nerds whose reputations she
agrees to rehabilitate at the cost of her own, but she does accept gift cards,
preferably from the Gap, Amazon, or OfficeMax. Soon her best friend joins
the high school Christian clique to picket outside the school with enormous
signs proclaiming that Olive is a whore.
The most frequent caller, she of the gravelly voice, was Jenny, a sophomore
at the high school. One day after school, Jenny’s older boyfriend and his
friends had noticed me. Their attention, like all of that from older boys,
dazzled me like headlights on a dark road. I froze, exhilarated and scared.
Nothing physical had happened between Jenny’s boyfriend and me—just an
exchange of light. That was enough.
I became the mistress of the telephone. No one got to it faster. I came
directly home after school and parked myself next to the beige contraption
with its long, curly cord. It was not always Jenny—sometimes other voices
told me I was a slut and described the ways they were going to punish me
for it—but I came to know that gravelly voice. I only saw her face once or
twice from a distance, but I thought of her more than any boy, more than
any friend I no longer trusted, more than anyone but myself.
Only the boys made gestures. Why should that one be imprinted in my
memory so deeply? My memory, so often a bag of muddy cloth, and this
stone hardly rounded by time. The skinny boy fingers, splayed around his
mouth, the leering eyes.
The tongue is the only muscle in the human body that is only connected
to bone at one end. It is the only muscle that never tires. It is relentless,
wagging luridly at me across twenty-five years.
There were times that we exchanged more than light. Every one of them, I
got burned. They were all a version of that afternoon with Vega, but often
less lucky, less interrupted—a different boy, a different bathroom, a
different place beneath my clothes. Every time, I was that mirage, or they
were. I was gone. I was sorry before it ended, hot with regret by the time I
got home. I already knew the story, knew that I was helping to build it with
the kindling of my own body.
They told us to say no to so many things in school, but never how. My
father insisted that boys were not to be trusted under any circumstances. My
parents encouraged me to respect my body, to protect it. But what did that
mean? For better and worse, I’ve rarely been capable of summoning respect
simply because I was told to. Sometimes the things I did felt like a kind of
protection.
“In that moment,” Ray says of her meeting with the seventh-grade dean, “I
believed in my disembodiment, I believed that I wasn’t the sum of my parts,
I believed that some of my parts weren’t mine, they were for sharing with
horny boys on the internet. I also believed that I was smart. And smarter
than the horny boys, and smarter than the idiot seventh-grade dean.”
I believe that she was, too, but her intelligence couldn’t stop the dean
from bringing a petition around to all the seventh- and eighth-grade
classrooms regarding whether Ray had sent the video. An eighth-grade girl
told Ray that the dean had made everyone sign it and that at least a hundred
kids had. “I think she also told me she had signed it,” Ray remembers.
The part of me that knew how to climb trees and disagree with my teachers,
who drew “deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration” without thinking, she
was not gone. She felt gone, though. The other one, the one “gasping for air
in a little black prison-house of fears,” her dark smoke had obscured
everything else.
I had not been a fearful child. Now I was afraid to go to school. I was
terrified of Jenny, of the violence she might do to my body. I was terrified
of my body, how it had gotten me into such trouble. I was terrified of my
family discovering how reviled I had become. I would protect them from
the punishment my body had earned.
Here’s the thing: they were already calling me a slut. Before they ever
said the word. Before I let any boy touch me. Like the mirror-tested
animals, they saw the mark on me, and though I didn’t see it, I came to
believe it was there. In hindsight, it makes sense of the shame every girl
feels at this kind of bullying. It’s not that we are ashamed at being
humiliated but that the story of us has been revised to include the thing that
warrants humiliation. Even when we know it’s not true, or at least not right,
a part of us believes it. To tell my mother that they called me a slut would
have been to reveal that I was one.
For months, Trenor insists that Lily pay him special attention. She avoids
him, but he will not be placated. In their final, terrifying encounter, he sends
her an invitation under the guise of his wife’s name. Lily arrives at his door
that evening to find that his wife is not even in town. His whining swells to
menace. He feels owed, not only because “the man who pays for the dinner
is generally allowed to have a seat at table,” but simply because he wants
her. As Lily rebuffs him and tries to leave, the careful manners that govern
the world inside their gilded cage evaporate from him like steam. How
quickly his desire, when thwarted, turns to hatred. It is on this grave
miscalculation of Lily’s that the whole book, and her life, turns.
Though she does not pay that debt with her body, she pays it with her
reputation, which often amounts to the same in the end. Whatever power
she has held depends entirely on the esteem of others, and once that falters,
it becomes clear to both Lily and the reader that he can do anything he
wants to her.
Olive’s degradation reaches its nadir when, in the midst of her ostracization,
a boy at school asks her out on a date. Unbelievably, she accepts. After a
pleasant dinner, they stroll through the restaurant’s parking lot, and the boy
hands her a $500 gift card to Home Depot. Olive’s face falls. Resignedly
assuming he wants the same ruse as the others, she asks him what
supposedly transpired on their so-called date.
“Whatever five hundred dollars gets me,” he answers, and forcibly kisses
her.
We barely knew each other, Jake and I, had hardly ever spoken. He was the
older brother of a classmate I’d known since elementary school. What he
thought he knew about me was enough. In the busy hallway of school, he
stopped directly in front of me, so I stopped, too. He reached out a hand and
roughly groped my breast through my shirt, his gaze steady on my face. I
froze. He withdrew his hand, smirked, and walked away. I had no idea if
anyone had seen. In twenty-five years, I have never spoken of it aloud,
though I have thought many times how lucky I was to be confronted by him
in a school hallway and not behind a closed door, at someone’s home, after
a few beers.
I was terrified of that gesture—the gruesome tongue tucked between two
fingers. A part of me will never stop being shocked by it, by the ease and
cruelty with which those boys conjured my twelve-year-old genitals. The
concept of my sexual pleasure had become an obscenity, a mean joke
delivered for their own amusement. I’m sure they could not have clarified
their meaning, were simply exhilarated at their new power, but I
understood: they could claim that part of me in any spirit they wanted, in
the school hallway with unwashed hands, as a joke between them, as an act
of humiliation or violence.
We had known each other since we were little kids. I had helped them
with their homework. I had seen them pee in their pants and cry in school,
been to their birthday parties, and watched their mothers wipe their faces.
Loyalty, I began to understand then, can rarely be taken for granted.
Like Ray, I knew that I was smarter than them and could still beat most
of them in a fight. You don’t have to recognize power for it to be wielded
over you, it turns out. And what power they suddenly wielded over me,
what willingness to use it as a hammer.
When the first social outcast asks Olive to cosign the lie of their intimacy in
exchange for payment, she refuses. The nerd sputters that he doesn’t need
her permission, visibly elated and terrified by the realization that he could
do it anyway. They both understand that Olive is already compromised, her
word so quickly devalued by her alleged sexual activity that any boy’s is
worth more.
When Lily contrives to escape the brewing social hell that her contract with
Gus Trenor has inspired, she goes on a cruise with a longtime frenemy:
Bertha Dorset. When Bertha is caught cheating on her husband, she deftly
obscures her own wrong by accusing Lily of sleeping with him. Whatever
resurrection of her name our heroine hopes to nurture is quickly dashed.
“What is truth?” she asks. “Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story
that’s easiest to believe. In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha
Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and
it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.”
That is, everyone knows it unlikely and unfair, but everyone signs the
petition anyway.
We were studying some aspect of American history, discussing a true rumor
about some dead president, when my teacher said, “The thing about
reputations is that they are usually true.”
There it was: my reluctant sense of fairness, my feeling of being
wronged. It bloomed in me like a corpse flower, rare and putrid. I was
afraid to be angry. If I let myself get angry, I would have to face my own
sense of the injustice, the true breadth of my own powerlessness. There are
benefits to believing what they say about you.
Did I argue with him? Probably not, though I knew he was wrong. Not
only on behalf of my own bad reputation. What is a reputation but the story
most often told about a person? Perhaps the bad stories told about white
men throughout history have mostly been true. After all, the threat of
punishment for telling false stories about white men has often been great.
Likewise, the ability of white men to correct the record. But the stories
those men tell about women, queers, or anyone who is not white? Power is
required to inflict punishment and to revise the public record. You need a
weapon to defend your own name. If you don’t have one, they can say
anything they want about you.
I don’t think my teacher meant that reputations are usually true in the
Lacanian sense of a self that is built by social collaboration. He meant that
if they say you’re a slut, you’re probably a slut. Which implies that a slut is
a kind of woman, rather than a word used to control women’s bodies.
In 1487 a Dominican monk in Germany, Heinrich Kramer, published the
treatise Malleus Maleficarum on the tail of a bill that allowed men to
prosecute witches as heretics. Kramer—like most men of the church, from
the Christian Fathers to his contemporaries—was obsessed with the sexual
purity and inferiority of women, though his obsession reached such
demented extremes that he was eventually exiled. Women, he thought, were
lower even than other animals, as Eve was an unfinished animal. Witchcraft
was the result of their insatiable desires, Kramer argued, and the most
common culprits were those “hot to fulfill their corrupt lusts, such as
adulteresses, fornicators, and the mistresses of rich and powerful men.” The
result? They fucked demons, stole men’s penises, ate babies and made
ointments out of their pulverized bodies. It was a rationale for and guide to
the persecution of witches—the greatest threat to society, the church, and
men that history had ever seen.
Before he wrote the Malleus, Kramer asked for the arrests and torture of
fifty women who he accused of witchcraft, including those who had
reputations for being independent or free with their views or who disagreed
with him publicly. Kramer was so obsessed with the sexual practices of one
such woman that his local bishop expelled him and suspended the trial. No
matter, he wrote the Malleus, which became a bestseller for two hundred
years, surpassed only by the Bible.
Sometimes I think of the men who bemoan their ruined reputations after
women come forward to expose the ways in which they have been abused
or mistreated by these men. The men seem shocked by the consequences,
which is unsurprising, as men have been allowed to abuse and mistreat
women for centuries without consequence.
I think of their lawsuits, their indignant editorials, their secret votes, the
other men who must murmur sympathy to them in private, balls shrunk with
the fear that they will be next to face consequences for their actions, how
they cry that it’s a witch hunt!
Sometimes I think of these men, and I think ha! Mostly I don’t find it
funny at all.
The thing about Easy A is that we are allowed to be aghast at Olive’s
treatment because it isn’t “true.” However alone our heroine feels, the
viewer is always there to witness her “innocence.” She is not alone in the
truth of herself. Whereas we who were punished for the things we did or
didn’t do, we were alone. There was no one to confirm the truth of us.
There was not even a way to speak it.
However feminist in its intention, the premise the movie takes for
granted is that a slut is a thing you can be, and that you get to be one by
having consensual sex. Sure, all the horrific holy-roller high schoolers come
off badly, but the movie never challenges the idea that a girl ought to be
pure and manage her reputation to avoid being ostracized and raped. I
would have liked the movie immeasurably better if, instead of being about a
beautiful, smart virgin who acquired an unearned reputation and then
cleared her name and bagged the super-nice boyfriend, it was a movie about
a girl who actually had extremely hot sex with her queer best friend and
then fucked a bunch of nerds for Home Depot gift cards and was still
presented as a sympathetic protagonist.
I am still waiting for the movie that tells us that nothing a woman can do
or wear earns her that kind of treatment, that presents the concept of a slut
as the battering ram it is, used to keep women isolated from their own
pleasure, their true selves, and one another, and to prevent them from
challenging any aspect of male domination.
Just think of all the things that could get a woman called a witch. Which is
to say, all the things that could get a woman killed: having opinions, being
poor, being rich, having female friends, not having female friends,
disagreeing with a female friend, refusing to testify that another woman is a
witch, disagreeing with a man, looking askance at a man, not having sex
with a man, having sex with a man, a man’s impotence, being very old,
being very young, being a healer, being a slave, having no children, having
too few children, being stubborn, being strange, being smart, being
beautiful, being ugly, having spoiled milk in your home, floating, having a
mole or a wart or even a swollen clitoris that might be interpreted as a
telltale third teat, meant to suckle your familiar.
The most common way to kill a witch in Europe was to burn her; in New
England it was hanging. But there was also crushing, drowning, and
beheading. Torture that didn’t draw blood was not even considered torture.
It is a brilliant legal trajectory. Invent the witch who is a threat to your
religion and everyone’s souls. Make witchcraft illegal and put men in
charge of trying the accused. Make the woman a beast of low morals and
perverse passions. Make any behavior that threatens you a sign of
witchcraft. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her
humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her. You are the
hammer of sorceresses.
Not everyone believed the wild misogynistic tales of Kramer’s Malleus,
but plenty did. What was it but a story about women?
In the video that I show my students of Jamaica Kincaid reading her short
story “Girl,” the laughter of the audience when she reads the line “the slut
you are so bent on becoming” is disturbing because nothing about her story
or its reading is funny. The laughter of the audience is disturbing, also,
because it is the laughter of a white audience, and Kincaid is a Black
woman.
“Black women sometimes experience discrimination in ways similar to
white women’s experiences; sometimes they share very similar experiences
with Black men,” writes Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term
intersectionality. “Yet often they experience double-discrimination—the
combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race, and
on the basis of sex. And sometimes, they experience discrimination as
Black women—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as Black
women.” Every time I have examined an aspect of discrimination on the
basis of sex, it has led me back to this fact: whenever systems of oppression
intersect, their power compounds—those of sexism and racism in particular.
Because my essays arise from my own experiences, which do not sit at that
intersection, I rarely follow it to any substantive depth beyond recognition.
(There are copious writers doing brilliant work on the subject, some of
which are mentioned in this book’s bibliography.) On the subject of slut-
shaming, however, it arose so often in my interviews with other women and
in my reading on this subject that it seemed important to do more than
simply recognize or refer to that experience.
“The two names I was called in seventh grade were slut and nigger,” Mira
tells me. “It was always white children who called me these words.” Like
all the women of color I interviewed, Mira acknowledged the intersections
of her experiences with racism and slut-shaming. Now a forty-two-year-old
high school teacher, she grew up middle-class in a small city in Southern
California. “I was one of the few Mexican students on campus,” she says,
“and I think that my racial ‘othering’ was what precipitated the slut-
shaming.”
Though in seventh grade she did not even know what sex was, Mira
found herself “constantly sexually harassed and assaulted by white
classmates. They grabbed my butt, thighs, crotch and breasts and did so in
front of male teachers … [who] chuckled or blushed and looked the other
way.” The physical molestations led to further harassment. “When boys
would grab me sexually,” she tells me, “they would hiss the word ‘nigger’
into my face.”
“I always think about Halloween, my senior year of high school,” says Aja,
a forty-year-old Black woman and former college classmate of mine who
now lives in Oakland, California, where she was raised. During high school
Aja attended an elite East Coast boarding school where she was one of few
students of color and even fewer Black students. “There was a faculty-
judged costume contest in the dining hall … I dressed up as Jem, from Jem
and the Holograms. A cartoon I’d watched as a kid. Lots of makeup, side
ponytail, shiny clothes, short skirt. I overheard the judges conferencing on
who they would cut first. ‘So obviously the hooker has to go, and who
else?’ I was confused at first. There was no one in a hooker costume. Then I
realized it was me. I was the hooker.
“I wonder,” she continues, “if I hadn’t been black, would they have been
able to imagine that I was a kid dressed up as a cartoon character? But
honestly, the wondering is overstated. I know. I have been a black woman
long enough now to know. Black people are criminal. Painted women are
promiscuous. Ergo, black painted woman = criminal sexuality. Hooker. It
would be surprising in America if they didn’t go there.”
“In the United States,” the feminist group Black Women’s Blueprint’s
“Open Letter from Black Women to the SlutWalk” (2011) reads, “where
slavery constructed Black female sexualities, Jim Crow kidnappings, rape
and lynchings, gender misrepresentations, and more recently, where the
Black female immigrant struggles combine, ‘slut’ has different associations
for Black women.”
SlutWalk was an action organized by Canadian feminists after a Toronto
cop quipped during a routine safety lecture that “women should avoid
dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” After the first march in
Toronto, SlutWalks spread across the United States, and then Argentina,
Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK.
Black women in the United States balked at the SlutWalk’s supposed
reclamation of the word because, in the words of the “Open Letter,” “it is
tied to institutionalized ideology about our bodies as sexualized objects of
property, as spectacles of sexuality and deviant sexual desire. It is tied to
notions about our clothed or unclothed bodies as unable to be raped whether
on the auction block, in the fields or on living room television screens.”
While she was an undergraduate at the liberal arts college where we met,
Aja had “an older Trinidadian boyfriend who was violent, and raped [her] at
least twice.” She confided in a professor, who accompanied her to the
precinct of the neighborhood in which the rape happened to report it and to
file a restraining order. “The officer who took the report was perfunctory
and even seemed annoyed,” Aja remembers. “Until I mentioned my
attacker was on parole and in violation.” At that, the officer’s eyes visibly
lit up. “He got some other cops and ushered me into a paddy wagon. He
was gonna use me as sting bait,” she explains. “They did not give a shit that
I was raped. They gave a shit about their collar. Like every goddamn thing a
black man does is criminal in their eyes except raping a black woman.”
If a slut is a thing a white woman can become because anyone decides it,
then what of a Black woman, whose innocence and purity have never been
invented by white men to protect or rescind? In the history of this country,
she has already been deemed unrapable. The story of her sexuality has
already been written to justify her complete disempowerment, to erase her
humanity.
Likewise the woman indigenous to any colonized land, the transwoman,
the inmate, the refugee, the undocumented immigrant. In addition to her
femaleness, each aspect of identity that moves a woman further from white
heterosexual manhood increases the impact of discrimination against her,
the justification for men of doing anything they want to her.
Living two lives distorts the temporal experience. Misery dilates time. It
only lasted a year, but that was a forever. At school, I was harassed. At
home, I became angry and sullen. On the weekends I sought relief in the
gaze of men, though their hands always left me empty. Like Vega, their
colors were ineffable, always changing. We look up at stars and like the
way their light falls on us, but if you try to touch a star it will burn you to
nothing. I burned with self-hatred, as if I’d ingested a poison that was
slowly blackening my insides.
Some Buddhists believe in hungry ghosts. When a person dies and is
consigned to this role, the experience that follows is considered a milder
version of hell. The hungry ghost might have an enormous belly and a long,
needle-thin neck. Invisible during daylight, she roams the night, ravenous.
Maybe the food turns to flames in her mouth. Maybe she can only eat
corpses. Maybe her mouth itself has gone putrid. In any case, she can never
satisfy her hunger. She is always disappointed and she is never full.
I longed to be the Lily who “had at last arrived at an understanding with
herself: had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a
uniform system of self-government, under which all vagrant tendencies
were either held captive or forced into the service of the state.”
But that was not even Lily, in the end. We were both of us hungry
ghosts.
“That year was the same year I started snorting coke and drinking alone
while I showered and stealing my mom’s painkillers,” Ray tells me. “It was
the same year as so many events I cannot or will not recall in this moment.”
After it, her reputation as a slut “wasn’t something people questioned.” A
friend asked her for a hand job on his birthday, and she gave it. “He told
everyone,” she reports. “I didn’t really care. I was so unattached to myself
and to my reputation that one more dick didn’t mean anything.”
Flash forward two years or so, and she “was sitting in a psychiatrist’s
office at a lockdown boarding school in the middle of nowhere. I’d taken at
least three or four HIV tests since I’d been in rehabs and institutions.” The
psychiatrist explained that even though she had gotten multiple negative
tests back, “there was still a chance I was positive. He explained that my
promiscuity put me at high risk. He left our meeting saying something to
the effect of, ‘Bet you wouldn’t have slept around like that if you knew this
then.’ ”
“My mother calls those my ‘sexy girl’ years,” Ray says. “But I didn’t
orgasm with male partners until I was in college. Sex with men, beginning
at age twelve, always felt mechanical. I dissociated and tried to stay as far
away as I could. Even when I started sleeping with women, also around age
twelve, I felt like I had to put my partners’ desires first. I was the
disembodied fragment of my seventh-grade pussy on the internet.”
In her book Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the
Witch in Early Modern Germany, Sigrid Brauner writes, the Malleus
Maleficaram develops “a powerful gender-specific theory of witchcraft
based on a hierarchical and dualistic view of the world … Perfection is
defined not as the integration or preservation of opposites, but rather as the
extermination of the negative element in a polar pair. Because women are
the negative counterpart to men, they corrupt male perfection through
witchcraft and must be destroyed.”
It was hard to know which half of myself to destroy. The versions of me
that other people saw and created: the slut, the sullen daughter, the outsider;
or the other one, who read until her eyes crossed and mind burned with
ideas, who loved the power and possibility of her own young body, who
glimpsed the cage of society and its open door? To have faith in the latter
was tempting, but a risk. She was so capable of being hurt.
I tried to hide, to starve, to gorge, to detach, to escape, to deny, but
nothing worked for any length of time. Some days, I knew that the only
way to find relief would be to destroy them both, and that, I already knew
how to do.
In 2016, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
published a data analysis that showed suicide rates rising 200 percent
among girls age ten to fourteen between 1999 and 2014.
If I were to reiterate even a portion of the documented cases of
adolescent girls who killed themselves over bad reputations, many of which
occurred after they were assaulted, I would have to make this essay a book.
Thankfully, such books have already been written.
When I imagine there having been an internet, social media, or
smartphones when I was an adolescent, the future—my present—goes hazy.
It’s tempting to believe in my own underlying integrity at that age, to
believe that I would have prevailed even then to whatever extent I have, but
in truth I suspect I might not have survived at all.
Lily doesn’t want to die; she just wants to sleep. Her life, now one of
poverty and isolation, offers that only relief. She is so tormented by the
events that led to her ruin that the opiate sleeping draught is her lone route
to “the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach of
passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in the
darkness.”
I would also have found it “delicious to lean over and look down into the
dim abysses of unconsciousness,” to “[wonder] languidly what had made
[me] feel so uneasy and excited.” But I did not find my chloral for a few
more years, and that was lucky, because otherwise my story would have
ended the same as Lily’s.
It is how the story of the slut almost always ends. Sometimes she is
exiled, like Little Em’ly in David Copperfield or Hester Prynne. Rarely is
she redeemed—in Easy A, her sex is a farce and her virginity intact, thus
she emerges unscathed. Mostly, the slut dies. The trope of the murdered slut
in horror movies is so familiar that it has a name: “Death by Sex.” By
contrast, only one woman is ever allowed to survive a typical horror movie:
the “Final Girl,” who must be as pure as her dead friends are dirty.
Daisy Miller dies of Roman fever. Nana Coupeau dies of smallpox.
Ophelia dies by drowning herself. Tess Durbeyfield dies by execution.
Emma Bovary dies by swallowing arsenic. Anna Karenina dies by throwing
herself under a train.
I did not die.
3
At the time, I would have said that even worse had happened: my father
read my diary. Though I didn’t have words then to describe what had been
happening to me, I did keep a detailed log of my sexual interactions. Even
now, twenty-five years later, I blanch inside to imagine him reading that
unannotated inventory. I have never been more humiliated and relieved at
once.
My parents sent me to the only private school in our town for seventh
grade. Nothing was very different there, except me, in new ways. At the
private school, the girls got professional manicures, lived in homes with
four bathrooms, and vacationed in Europe.
Only a few of us at the private school were unrich enough to take the
chartered school bus, and I quickly became familiar with the small handful
of others. A ninth-grade boy with whom I struck up a friendly acquaintance
said to me one day, “You’re the only oversexed seventh-grader.” He didn’t
mean to be cruel, said it like a fact we both already knew. He might have
thrown a rock at me, it struck so hard.
What did he know of me? Only what he could see: my body. Maybe the
way I had learned how to inhabit it. That I, like him, was different from the
other students. I wanted to tell him that I was a virgin, as if this technical
qualification would prove his assumption wrong. What did oversexed even
mean—that I had too much sex or that I wanted too much sex? I wanted to
tear him apart like the maenad he thought I was. I wanted to cry. Instead, I
laughed and looked out the bus window.
All the way through The House of Mirth, I just want Lily to stop playing
along. To step outside the mirror and keep walking. The other self inside
her is clearly loose as a goose, ready to sprawl across the sky vaulted over
the frilly dinner tables at which she suffers. She sees it, more clearly than I
could at thirteen.
“How alluring the world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard
its door clang on her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it
stood always open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and
having once flown in, could never regain their freedom.”
I find myself thinking, How could she? Though I have known for a long
time that while freedom requires knowing, knowing does not guarantee
freedom. The ability to see that the door is open does not render us able to
step through it—perhaps that is the most torturous part, and those who can
see most clearly the most tortured people.
It is not only that Lily believes in the self that society sees, or in society
itself, but also that she is alone. There is no other set of eyes to sew her
back together, to confirm the truth of her Innenwelt. Despite all of her
annoying materialism, the agency she never assumes, the terrible choices
and wasted privilege, it is one of the loneliest stories I have ever read.
The worst and most lasting part of that time was how completely alone I
felt. This is the brilliance of shame as a tactic of domination: it conditions
us to maintain our own isolation. The genius of a social structure is that you
cannot see it; it is built to be invisible to you, this machine that compels you
to perpetuate it. But I was not alone. None of us were, or are.
When I returned to public school for eighth grade, a classmate told me,
“You should meet Jessica. She’s like you.” I still don’t know what he meant
exactly. That she was called a slut, like me? That she had a secret self inside
herself? That she listened to different music than the rest of our classmates
and dressed in thrift-store T-shirts? All of those things were true. We
recognized each other at first sight. From then on, she became a different
kind of mirror, one that I desperately needed.
Jessica and I both had messy rooms and hair. We both got good grades
and hated school. We both had deadbeat birth fathers and premature boobs.
Soon we had a list of running jokes long enough to last the whole school
day and a habit of talking on the phone until we fell asleep. We listened to
Nirvana and never talked about what we had done with any boys.
Sometimes they still called us sluts, and then they called us lesbians. The
difference between being called a slut alone and being called a slut or a
lesbian with your best friend cannot be overstated. “So what,” we said, and
laughed. “If we weren’t such good friends,” we said, “we would absolutely
be sleeping together.”
Lily only feels the freedom of her Real self in those rare moments when she
is around the person who cosigns its reality. Then “gradually the captive’s
gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon
expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight. She
could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed to lift
and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet.”
When my parents sent me to Unitarian summer camp, I imagined that it
would be a tour of compulsory activities as boring as they were wholesome:
hiking and campfires and trust falls into the arms of teens who swore they’d
never let a cigarette soil their lips. If I had known then about the sex
education program that Unitarians offer their youth—in the Our Whole
Lives (OWL) program, they definitely talk about female orgasms—I would
have known to expect different.
To my great surprise, this camp offered workshops like “existential
crises on the back porch,” zine making, and creative writing led by a Nick
Cave look-alike named Dave, who gave us Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
and said only one sentence all afternoon: “I hate white people,” even though
camp was mostly attended by white people.
The camp director that year was a woman named Nadia. In her early
twenties, Nadia was six feet tall in combat boots and overalls, with a shaved
head and arms emblazoned with tattoos. She stomped rather than walked
and used the word fuck as though it were the interstitial glue that held all
other words together.
I hadn’t known that women like her existed, that her kind of beautiful
was an option. When she looked down at me, I felt more seen than I’d ever
felt under another person’s gaze. I have since learned that recognizing the
invisible parts of oneself in another person can feel like a radiant kind of
love. It can make those parts stronger inside you.
“I remember the queer kids,” Tanaïs recollects, “mostly in my drama and art
class vibes, that was another avenue in which I could just be my slutty self
and hook up with people and not even be a judgment. It was just like, I’m
hooking up with people. And those people were mostly white, I will say,
white queer people who were open. I never really thought of those people
as the white girls, they were my gay white friends and they were separate
for me. Even today, in my heart”—she laughs—“my closest white friends
are all queer people.”
After three weeks at camp, I understood a lot of things that I hadn’t before,
including that being good friends does not preclude being lovers. Within
days of my return, Jessica and I kissed. Her mouth was so soft! I’d never
touched a breast not my own. Hers were different, smaller, nipples the color
of Band-Aids instead of dark like mine. I did not empty of myself. I was not
left with any oily after-feeling. This, too, was a knowledge that grew the
world and what I understood as possible in it.
On the weekends, I made a queer feminist zine that I copied at my local
library and distributed all over town. Every hand-cut issue I left—in a
napkin holder at the diner, on the tables in the school library, under the
windshield wipers of cars on Main Street—was like picking back up a piece
of myself. Even when one of my teachers pulled me aside after class and
suggested I might be suffering from mental health issues, I did not waver.
The self inside me had been recognized. Nothing could undo that, not the
boys who said that being bisexual made me a slut or even the dissolution of
my friendship with Jessica, six months after it became sexual. I was flying
the cage, however long it took.
“Thank god we had that voice that allowed us to emerge out of these
shitty downs and these stupid family dynamics and cultural dynamics that
try to steal your power and your love for yourself,” says Tanaïs. “I’m really
grateful to her, that fourteen-year-old, for being who she was.”
The summer after eighth grade, a year after my return to public school, I
worked as a maid for a roadside motel in town. There, one of my coworkers
was an older girl who it took me a few shifts to recognize: Jenny, my most
frequent prank caller. She still had that gravelly voice, smoked menthols,
and used a lot of hair spray, but there were stretch marks on her belly and
dark shadows around her eyes. There, both of us sluts in the oldest sense of
the word, we became a kind of friends. We traded complaints about filthy
guests and shared her cigarettes while we waited for the washing machines
to complete their cycles. We both remembered those calls she made to my
home, each of us breathing into the strange darkness of the other, but we
never spoke of it, because while there were so many words for what back
then, there weren’t yet any for why.
There is a part of me that still can’t bear to see it in other women—the slut
you are bent on becoming—that shimmer, that man-sourcing of self, that
vaporous need to please, to fill the invisible belly with the thing they told us
was food. It hurts to look at them, and even I feel a twinge of that muddy
desire: to punish them, to prevent them, to protect them.
I suspect that as long as a part of me hates them, it is the persisting part
of me that hates my young self, that is still afraid of being the girl in the
mirror. Or even the less young self, who sought attention as if playing the
slots, handed herself over for the impossible chance that it might pay off in
some lasting way. She didn’t get punished the way I had as a kid for
entering that mean lottery, but she did go broke in other ways.
I can’t undo the years of my life I spent marked. When you leave the
cage, you take the mirror with you. It took a bunch more years for me to
smash it.
“I forgive myself for ingesting shame I did not choose but was fed
anyway,” says Aja. “I may not yet be unashamed, but I am wholly
unapologetic.”
My story is an ordinary one. All of ours are. Many worse iterations of it are
playing out right now and will continue to until we all understand that slut
is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and
to keep them in service to men. Hatred and fear of female sexuality is baked
into the foundation of civilization as we know it, and sluts are most often
women who threaten the colonial regimes of patriarchy and white
supremacy.
It turns out that almost everything they will call you a slut for being is a
thing I want to be. I am finally loose as a goose, my wingspan unfolded its
full length, my powerful neck raised as I slice into the sky. I am the same
woman in the Innenwelt and the Umwelt. I am that careless girl, hands sunk
haphazardly into the dough, bedroom a sty, pen stilled against her hand,
eyes cast out the window, mouth humming a song, thinking of something
else. I am that outspoken witch; I will disagree with any man. I am a
firework gone off in the dark, a spectacle of disobedience, a grand finale of
orgasms anytime I want.
I don’t want to take the word slut back, like I don’t want to own a gun. It
was never mine. You’ll never hear me say it to any woman, not as a joke,
not with pride or affection or irony.
The only definition of the word that I claim is the one of a rag dipped in
lard and set afire. Call me that kind of a slut. Call me flashlight. Carry me
through the dark if it helps. Here, take this story and watch it burn.
WILD AMERICA
NARRATOR: You’re a girl, not an animal.
VALERIE: A she-mammal or a female child. I was on the borderline between human being
and chaos.
—Sara Stridsberg, Valerie
Eloise Brill and I sat on the beach at Goodwill Pond while nearby our
fellow campers ate cellophane-wrapped sandwiches on rotting picnic tables.
It was the summer of 1989, and our parents had enrolled us in afternoon
swim camp at the public pond. Rumor among the elementary school set was
that the water in Goodwill Pond was warm and yellow because of not
sunshine and pollen but rather a high concentration of pee. It seemed
plausible, given that we all definitely peed in the water. I didn’t care. I had
just won the afternoon’s timed race and was buoyant with my victory.
“Are you a lesbian?” Eloise asked me, smug as only a nine-year-old with
a new word can be.
“I don’t know,” I said. “What’s a lesbian?”
“Give me your hand,” she said. When I did, she pressed hers against
mine, the grit of sand between our sticky palms. Someone’s happy scream
bounced across the water, followed by a splash. Eloise squinted at the tops
of our fingers. “See?” she said. “Your ring finger is longer than your pointer
finger. That means you’re a lesbian.”
I drew back my hand to examine it. She was right. What else might my
body reveal about me that even I didn’t know? The thought crept through
me like a shadow. I shrugged. “Let’s go eat lunch,” I said and brushed off
my hand on my swimsuit, as if I could leave the worry there in the cool
sand.
Consider the Hecatoncheires. Three children of Uranus and Gaea, they were
named for their hundred hands. Cottus, the striker; Gyges, the big-limbed;
and Briareus, the sea-goat, maker of storms. They were giants who grew up
to defeat the Titans. They were earthquakes and sea storms, powerful
beyond measure.
Now, consider the Hecatoncheires before all of that. Not as triumphant
warriors, not as the guardians of Tartarus. At the beginning. What is a sea
storm as a child? How does an earthquake begin to know itself? That first
rumble you hear and think: me. Our power may be innate, but we learn its
meaning from others. No one is born knowing the difference between a sea
god and a sea monster. What if no one told you that you were a
Hecatoncheire? Where would you hide all those hands? How could you not
start to hate them?
Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I was a passionate
child with callused feet and lots of words. I talked fast and moved faster—
through the woods around our Cape Cod home, up trees, and into the
ocean’s crashing surf. Finely tuned to the swells of my own and others’
hearts, I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that
linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the
trivia of our daily lives. Its channel was not always open, and what opened
it was not always predictable: often songs and poems, a shaft of late-
afternoon light, an unexpected pool of memory, the coo of doves at dusk
whose knell ached my own throat and seemed the cry of loneliness itself. It
was often possible to open the channel by will, an option that I found both
terrifying and irresistible. I would read or think or feel myself into a
brimming state—not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the
raw matter from which each was made—then lie with my back to the
ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid
that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much.
Though this state seemed obviously the most real and potent form of
consciousness, I knew that it was not “reality.” Later, this understanding
evolved into a fear of my own susceptibility to madness, but as a child I
simply understood that a person could not live with an open channel to the
sublime inside them; it was impossible to hold on to the collective story of
human life with that live cord writhing through you, showering sparks like a
downed wire in a hurricane. Human life was defined by composure and
linearity, school bus routes and homework and gender and bedtimes and
taxes. Though I could meet its requirements most of the time, I knew my
adherence to the logic of reality was tenuous, that a more feral sensibility
reigned beneath it.
The resiliency and strength of my young body was a source of comfort
in the face of this dissonance between inner and outer worlds, because it
offered a link between them. The body was a weird unfathomable
masterpiece, a perfect shard of what coursed through that channel. My body
was not, however, subject to radical shifts in consciousness. It was always
real. It always felt good to know that I could easily climb the enormous oak
tree beside our driveway, swim to the center of our pond, exert a concrete
power on the physical world with my own two hands. Indeed, my hands
seemed the locus of my body’s ability, their pliant strength leading every
physical encounter, their size—larger than most other children’s—a
measurable proof of substantiality and of a creative intelligence far beyond
the human.
The game was this: alone, I would trudge to that place in the woods where
the pines were tallest and, at the right time of year, the ground a bed of their
smooth needles. Close to our house but not in view of any human construct,
I would lie on the ground, close my eyes, and clean my mind like a
chalkboard. Sometimes I made a story for myself, but it was crude and
beside the point: I was from another planet, I had been struck amnesiac—all
that mattered was that I’d fallen from the sky a stranger. My eyes would
flutter open and carefully absorb my surroundings. I might clutch a handful
of pine needles to my face, inhale their green scent, touch a slender spoke to
my tongue. In summer I would wade into the pond, imagine it was the first
water ever to close around my ankles like two cool mouths.
In the outskirts of our yard, I stalked our family dog, my heart pounding.
I discovered the garden hose and drank the contents of its sun-warmed
belly. Sometimes I made it all the way inside the house without detection.
Oh, the frightful pleasure of making the most known place in the world an
alien landscape. The cool shadows of an interior. The naked smoothness of
floors. The absurd bounty of cabinets stuffed with food. My wonder was
bottomless for the world empty of stories, mine alone to name.
“The higher the animal, the more it plays,” Wild America host Marty
Stouffer explained in one episode. “Once the demands of instinct, such as
the need for food or sleep, have been satisfied, animals have the time and
inclination to play.” Wild America was a half-hour show that aired on PBS
from 1982 to 1994, created by Stouffer, a native Arkansan and nature
conservationist. Each episode began with its triumphant horn-laden theme
and an introduction by Stouffer himself, clad in a colorful sweater and
groomed beard.
“True play is aimless, with no goal other than to experience new
sensations,” he elaborated. Nonetheless, he went on to explain, often play is
also constructive. Young mountain goats strengthen their legs by leaping
and romping mere minutes after they are born. Juvenile martens stalk
squirrels in a pageant of the hunting techniques they will use as adults. “I
think we can learn something from this,” Stouffer mused in his voiceover.
“Perhaps we could find a way to play less desperately, and to learn more
playfully.”
I loved Wild America not for Marty Stouffer’s philosophical digressions
but because, like my game in the woods, it reset the context of the familiar.
However often Stouffer imposed human narratives on the animals depicted
(very often), it was still always clear that survival was the priority that
assigned value to everything in the animal world. If the wild marten was
overcome by her own feelings, she didn’t let it stop her from procuring
dinner for her babies. I might have had to close my eyes during the part of
the nature documentary when the pack of hyenas felled an antelope, but
they had no qualms about tearing warm mouthfuls from her while she still
kicked with frantic life.
My mother had raised me vegetarian, and though I harbored no real desire
to eat meat, sometimes, in summer, I would take a hunk of watermelon to a
remote corner of our yard and pretend it was a fresh carcass. On all fours, I
would bury my face in the sweet red fruit-meat and tear away mouthfuls.
Sometimes I’d rip handfuls out and cram them between my teeth, which
wasn’t much like any animal I knew of. It was less playing a particular kind
of animal than enacting a form of wildness that I recognized in myself but
that had no appropriate expression in human culture.
I watched Wild America, along with the more savage nature specials on
public television, and thought, Maybe. Maybe no one else recognized
themselves in the hyena’s blood-soaked grin, her ruthless hunger. Maybe no
one else’s heart raced, fists clenched, neck tensed—unable to tell if she was
more impala or lion. Well, I did. Alone in the woods behind our house I had
beaten my chest, acted out my own invented stories without a thought to
how another’s gaze might see me. I sympathized with the jittery business of
squirrels and fanatical obsessions of our golden retriever. I was confounded
by silverware, why it should exist when we had such perfect instruments at
the ends of our arms.
Walt Whitman claimed our distinction from animals to be that “they do not
sweat and whine about their condition,” and “not one is dissatisfied, not one
is demented with the mania of owning things.” I learned in elementary
school that we were animals, but unlike other animals, we did not seem
driven by the instinct for physical survival. We were so far up the food
chain that it was no longer even visible to us. We were beyond survival, in a
dark and lofty realm wherein our obsolete instincts had been perverted into
atrocities like capitalism and bikini waxing. I might not have been able to
name this, but I recognized it.
Sometimes, when I momentarily detached from the narrative of human
life that we all took for granted—the one that presumes that money, cars,
shopping malls, pollution, and all of industry are not a catastrophic misuse
of our resources—and glimpsed it from a more evolutionary angle, it
seemed so bizarre as to be unlikely. Was this life or some strange dystopian
movie, a dream we were all having and from which we would soon wake to
resume our sensible animal lives, in which “nature” was not a category of
television show or a variety of experience to cultivate a preference for
consuming, but the only thing, the everything?
In elementary school, however, we kids were not making an ontological
study of late-twentieth-century middle-class American life. We were neither
learning about capitalism nor reading Whitman. We were learning how to
be human. We were learning the exact way in which, though we were
animals, we should not look or act like them. To call someone an animal
was an insult. As my peers and I approached puberty, this was unfortunate,
because I had trouble keeping track of the narrative. I was covered in scabs
and bruises. I was sun-browned, full of sighs, and interested in every
orifice. I was an animal.
By middle school, this felt like an especially disgusting secret, because I
was also a girl.
Sometimes I think about going back. I imagine reversing the film of my
personhood, reeling the spool to find the single frame where it all changes.
As though there would be one murky celluloid square in which my body
was taken away from me. Not just my body, but all the pleasures that came
through it. A hand reaching into the frame and snatching it all away—the
sting of salt water on my skinned knees, the ache of a palm tendered by oak
bark, the pelt of gravel against my calves as my bike flew downhill, the
hum of my legs after running all day, my own voice ringing in that
cathedral of pine trees, the perfect freedom of caring only about what my
body could do and never about how it was seen.
There wouldn’t be just one frame, of course. It was so many things. The
skinny girls splashed all over movie screens. The television set my mother
tried to keep out of our house. The slippery issues of Teen Magazine that
started arriving in our mailbox. That classmate at her pool party, silently
commenting on my precociously developed figure. The rich girl who
pinched my thigh and pointed out how much thicker it was than her own.
I didn’t learn to hate my hands until the end of fourth grade, when my body
exploded—almost a year after Eloise Brill and I sat on the beach at
Goodwill Pond. It was mutiny, flesh swelling from my chest and thighs
before it did in anyone else my age. I was enormous, I thought, Alice after
eating the wrong pill, busting through the house of what a girl should be. I
was the Incredible Hulk, but instead of a superpower, my size and strength
were a damnation. Girls were not supposed to be enormous. They were not
supposed to be scabby and strong. Inexplicably, strong and big were what
every animal wanted except us.
To be human meant that unlike in most other species, females were the
cultivators of meticulous plumage. We competed to be the weakest and
smallest and most infantile. We seemed to spend all of our resources
withering ourselves to be attractive to males. The goal was to be as soft and
tidy and delicate as possible. It made no sense at all. I was not in the habit
of withering myself. I was not tidy or delicate.
I had always eaten the same way I did everything—with speed and vigor.
One day at lunch, after I polished off a soggy square of cafeteria pizza, the
girl next to me stared with bald observation.
“What?” I said, self-consciousness radiating through me.
“You eat so fast,” she said with a touch of self-satisfaction. “I can’t even
finish a whole piece of that. It’s so big.”
Wild America had taught me that wolves could go more than a week
without eating, but I could only make it one day. I won’t eat anything but
string cheese this week, I promised myself. One Saturday, the only thing I
consumed was a bag of sugar-free Jell-O powder. I licked my fingertip and
dipped it into the tiny bag of red sand until it glowed crimson, until my
mouth was aflame with chemicals, as though I had poisoned myself. I
would have poisoned myself if I thought it would transform me into a
smaller animal.
In hindsight, the extreme reversal of values—big and strong going from
best to worst—shocks me. Men seemed to have it all, to be considered
superior in all perceivable ways, and yet we were discouraged from striving
for any form of dominance deemed masculine. To be described in any way
as “manly” was the vilest of insults. Such adaptability was required of us to
perform this internal U-turn, to conform our loyalties to this crackpot
framework, rife with contradiction. I can see now that our ability to do so
was evidence not of a lacking survival instinct but of a finely tuned one.
What I needed to survive middle school just happened to be the opposite of
what I would have needed to survive on Wild America.
Instead of eating contests, we had starving contests. Instead of boasting
of our strengths, we forged friendships by denigrating ourselves. Instead of
arm-wrestling each other, we compared the size of our arms, competing not
for strength and size but puniness. It didn’t take long for someone to point
out that I had “man hands,” an insult I subsequently used to abase myself
well into adulthood.
I inherited a lot from my mother, though I first recognized my hands. We
have long fingers, wide palms, and strong nails. They don’t carry our ring
sizes at mall kiosks. We shop for gloves in the men’s section of department
stores. We don’t bother with bangle bracelets. In adolescence, it struck me
as unfair because my mother was beautiful, with fine features and dizzying
cheekbones. No one was ever going to be distracted from her face by her
hands. But me? My hands gave me away. I was a Hecatoncheire among
humans. My two miracles had become monsters.
In school, I learned to talk less. I moved slower and hid my body in
oversize clothes. I longed to be a smaller and cooler thing, less wanting,
less everything. Though I felt gigantic, I wasn’t. It was not the first time I
mistook the feeling for the object, and not the last. This is what happens
when you give your body away, or when it gets taken from you. Its physical
form becomes impossible to see because your own eyes are no longer the
expert. Your body is no longer a body but a perceived distance from what a
body should be, a condition of never being correct, because being is
incorrect. Virtue lies only in the interminable act of erasing yourself.
My body, though fickle in conception, was starvable, concealable,
subject to the reconfiguration of desire—when someone thought it pretty, so
it became. Not my hands. No matter how my self-conception changed from
moment to moment, my hands remained long and strong and wide and
scarred. They were maps that led to the truth of me. I was no petaled thing.
I was not a ballerina. I was a third baseman. I was a puller, a pusher, a
runner, a climber, a swimmer, a grabber, a sniffer, a taster, a throw-my-
head-back laugher. I used my hands—they were marked by things and left
marks. They would never let me become the kind of girl I had learned I
should be.
What of the girl I actually was, the one who rose from a bed of pine
needles to name her own world? She was exiled. The channel that
connected the wild in me with the wild outside could not be destroyed, but I
did my best to seal it, as I strove to tame my own nature and wither my
form. I turned away from the real inside of me and oriented myself outward.
I did not look back for a long time.
What we hate or fear most in ourselves tends to be among the things we
first notice in others. As anorexics read cookbooks, I started to read hands.
They reveal us all, it turns out. Even our fingerprints are the evidence of
how we touch. First, when we are three-month-old fetuses, our fingertips’
skin outgrows its outer layers, buckles under the swiftness of change. Then
we form their ridges by grasping the walls of our mothers’ wombs and our
own bodies, feeling our way through that first small world. In this way, that
world shapes us, defines our physical selves more permanently, more
individually, than any part of this greater one.
As a teenager, I learned to mute a person’s words and watch their hands.
Chewed cuticles, jagged or polished nails, knuckles lumped with scars—the
motion of a person’s hands often mimics the motion of her thoughts. Hands
grope for elusive ideas and clench the ones we want to hide. They flutter
like propellers, moving us closer to the right words. They pinch and
squeeze to police us, the silent gestapo of our inhibitions.
My hands were undisguisable, so I learned to hide them in my pockets
and sleeves, behind my back, under my thighs, and in fists—my two
anemones, closed in the perpetual nighttime of shame.
By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced
parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. I needed her and
hated her all the more for it. Despite my deep sympathy for all other
animals, I was sociopathic in my cruelty toward this one. When she
disobeyed me—in her hunger, in her clumsiness—I was punitive and
withholding. I scrutinized and criticized and denigrated her ceaselessly,
even in dreams. Not before or since have I felt such animosity toward
another being.
There were moments, though. As a teenager, at night, alone in my
bedroom, sometimes the illusion of autonomy from my body would
crumble and I would be flooded by the most profound sorrow and
tenderness. I would look at my strong legs, each scar on my knees a
memory. My soft little belly that had absorbed so much hate. Even my
hands—like two loyal dogs that no amount of cruelty would banish. I
suddenly saw my body as I would any animal that had been so mistreated.
My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way?
My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune
disease of the mind. In these moments I had the thought that I was mentally
ill—in a literal sense, for what else could describe this hostile relationship
to my very own body? I had no way to differentiate what aspects of my
behavior were inherently me and what were cultural impositions—insofar
as this task is ever possible. What I could see clearly was the violence with
which I treated the body that held custody of those other ineffable aspects
that I considered to be myself. It held me, and I ought to have held it with
equal care. I was unspeakably remorseful, as I imagine any abuser would be
in such a moment of self-appraisal. I sat in the dark and hugged myself.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered and squeezed my own shoulder. “I love you,” I
said. While I slept, the veil would draw once more. In the morning, I rose
from my bed and looked in the mirror with disdain: You again.
Now those moments seem proof that self-love is an instinct, as animal as
any other function of the self. The ferocity of my affection could not be
erased, only suppressed under total vigilance. My self-hatred was not self-
generated. It was an expression of the environment outside of my body,
which, it eventually turned out, I could change.
My first girlfriend, Lillian, confused me. Her short, matted hair and
carpenter’s pants. The duct tape that sealed the rips in her down coat. Her
soft voice and easy tears. Her delicate hands that rustled thoughtlessly in
her pockets or against my face. Even paint-flecked, with perpetual crescents
of dirt under her nails, she was more girl in this way. I wanted to kiss her all
the time. I also envied her the freedom of that ethereal form. In it, she could
be herself and still be beautiful. What did I think would happen if I did the
same? I’d be seen an ogre, all my hundred hands exposed.
For most of my sixteenth year I spent most of my free time with her,
which was a considerable amount, as I’d dropped out of high school. I
might have been self-possessed enough to insist upon homeschooling
myself, but I was consumed by insecurity around the one person whose
esteem I desperately sought. Whatever power they had held over me and
however they had shaped my thinking, by fifteen I saw my former
classmates and teachers as irrelevant, characters with walk-on parts that
would never appear again in the story of my life, whereas I needed Lillian
to love me, and that meant I had to scrupulously hide the aspects of myself
that I suspected might repel her. This was sheer projection—Lillian may
well have been attracted to me for those very qualities—I simply had no
reference but the most base heterosexual model of how to be attractive to
another human.
I spent the majority of my time in her company tense with control. My
body was bigger than hers in so many ways, and I feared drawing attention
to this fact by being too flagrant in my movements, my laughter, my
opinions. I had successfully internalized the belief that all my animal
aspects—including, and perhaps most of all, the inherent vigor with which I
approached life itself—were an affront to my femininity and should be
annihilated if possible, and, failing that, vigilantly suppressed and
camouflaged. My experiences in school had taught me to hate my body, to
mute any protruding aspects of myself that might draw attention, but my
relationship with Lillian refined this skill. With her, I could be openly queer.
I wore men’s shirts and battered Doc Martens. I didn’t wear makeup, but I
was still in disguise. A fascistic watchfulness governed my body.
After observing us together, a friend of my mother’s once commented
that I seemed “so much more mature” than Lillian. It was true that there
was something childlike in the way my girlfriend inhabited her body. She
sat with her legs either akimbo or improbably knotted, fidgeted restlessly,
ate with her hands, and regularly stared into space for whole minutes. I
found her seeming lack of self-consciousness mesmerizing and worshipped
it as yet another corporeal ideal unattainable to me, a freedom that could be
afforded only by those more finely constructed. That is, because she was
beautiful, she could be uninhibited, even slovenly. I was young enough to
still suffer from the misapprehension of beauty as freedom, the idea that if a
woman succeeded by the impossible terms of patriarchy she might graduate
in some way from its hold. For years I longed to affect this appealing
tension between elegance and dishevelment. My mother’s friend could not
have been more wrong, I thought, in her assessment of the difference
between Lillian and me. Nevertheless, I met her error with an uneasy
mixture of relief, pride, and anguish—an experience that would become
familiar in the years that followed, and likely is to any truly secretive
person. It was proof that my fastidious efforts to conceal both my real self,
whatever that was, and my profound insecurity were working. I was again
alone in the truth of myself, but this time under my own direction.
But how to indulge any genuine impulse in this landscape of control and
obfuscation? My desire for Lillian was real. We’d kiss for hours in her
messy bedroom, stopping only to flip the cassette tape or gulp a glass of
water. My desire was a galloping thing, and her touch, unlike that of boys,
didn’t snuff it out. If my body had been a passive machine from which men
made withdrawals, like an ATM whose code they were handed on the day
of their first erection, then with her it was a winning slot machine,
screaming jangly music and spewing coins.
Sexual pleasure was equally thrilling and terrifying, not for the usual
reasons. We had not gotten far beyond heavy make-out sessions, and though
I longed for more, I did not dare. My desire was a portal, the single
permitted link to my wild and true self that Lillian had access to. I lived in
fear that were I sufficiently possessed by lust, I might expose too much of
myself and drive her away. I was well enough versed in the scripts for
female desire to know that we were supposed to have it, or at least perform
it, but in a girlish, mewling way. My desire was not that. Like the right
poem or song or slant of light, it was a doorway that opened directly into
the part of me that understood hyenas better than humans. I sensed that
there was a threshold over which I would completely lose the ability to
monitor myself. Like a power surge or septic tank failure, I might flood the
room with my putrid worst: make guttural noises, contort myself in
grotesque positions, reveal the bestial facts of me.
I was cautious in our exertions, rarely daring to touch her in some way
she had not already touched me. After hours of kissing and groping, my
hips would rock with frustration. What next? We didn’t have the internet
then. We didn’t know what else to do. We weren’t brave enough to try
something. Which one of us was the boy? I wondered. I was terrified and
certain that it would turn out to be me.
One day we lay on a blanket in the grass of her backyard. The trees
hummed with insects, the air was hazy with pollen. I read a novel, peering
over it occasionally to watch her dip a paintbrush in a slick of watercolor
and drag it along her sketchpad, the wet tip like a tiny black tongue,
streaking the white with purple.
Eventually she tore out the paper and handed it to me.
“For you,” she said and kissed the top of my head.
I took the paper, suddenly buoyant with hope. I had not known enough to
want this, but still, it had found me. For a moment, anything seemed
possible. Even my own happiness.
I smiled at her and then turned to study my gift. Next to the colorful
figure of a woman’s nude form and a tree with tangled branches she had
painted a short poem.
“Sometimes you touch me more like a bear than a butterfly,” read one
line. Shame shot through me in hot streaks. Me, with my clumsy bear paws.
Wild America had long ago taught me that a bear needs her enormous paws
for climbing, swimming, swiping, and navigating landscapes of ice—what
good were mine? I felt ugly and crude, prehistoric in my proportions. I felt
like Lennie in Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men: crippled by my own hands,
misfit for human society, terrified of crushing the things most precious to
me.
It’s a lesbian cliché—the first-date hand comparison, not so widely known
as the U-Haul joke, but a hallmark of every romance I’ve ever had with a
woman. Straight people do it, too, but the interaction doesn’t hold quite the
same charge because men and women don’t primarily fuck each other with
their hands.
In my twenties I started announcing “I have really big hands” whenever I
saw the moment coming. “So do I,” my dates often replied, but mine were
always bigger. My fingers stretched longer and my palms wider that those
of women six inches taller than me. The rest of me was muscular and
curved but concealable, mitigated by my petite stature and the heels I wore
every single day. I had spent decades disguising the rest of my body with
sartorial modifications, but my hands were brazenly big, unabashedly big.
There was no getting around them.
If I had been fucking my lovers more, I would have gotten over it faster,
and if I didn’t hate my hands, I surely would have been fucking my lovers
more. The women I loved dressed in men’s clothes, were always taller and
bigger than me in most ways. And mostly, they fucked me. From the
moment I began really having sex with women, I was grateful to be queer,
to realize that my attraction to my partners had nothing to do with their
adherence to oppressive definitions of femininity. Lillian remains the only
female lover I’ve had with whom I confused wanting and wanting to be in
that particular configuration; the opposite was true of all my subsequent
paramours—my attraction to them had nothing to do with that old idea of
beauty as delicacy. I cherished the spread of their thighs across chairs and
their weight on top of me, inhaled their musky scents with relish. I craved
the animal in them. Nevertheless, to offer myself the same freedom was still
inconceivable.
Though I recognized the gift of a sexual experience so much less bound
by heterosexual prescription, I was not free. No lover had ever seen me
naked with the lights on. I never forgot myself. Whenever a lover looked at
me, so did I, fastidiously monitoring the position of my limbs and torso lest
they give away their secret enormity. I still feared what my body might
reveal before I could.
It wasn’t that I rationally thought any of them would stop loving me if I
stopped striving for an ideal I’d settled on at twelve years old. It was a
belief and a set of behaviors so deeply implanted in me that it resided
beneath my intellectual functioning. I had “known” better for years.
Knowing that we’ve been conditioned doesn’t undo it. I had surveilled
myself for two decades, nurtured the fear that if I didn’t, I’d expose some
hideous corporeal reality that would repel those whose affections I most
craved. I couldn’t just decide to stop, nor had I. I lived then, as many
women do, like a house inhabited by dueling caretakers. One always
papering the walls for some anticipated guest, the other tearing them down.
One cooking elaborate meals just for the other to throw them in the trash.
Imagine the energetic waste! Probably you don’t have to, because you know
yourself the way one can build a life around fighting the patriarchy and still
have parts of your own mind believe that your worth correlates exactly to
your desirability to men. Consciousness doesn’t preclude false
consciousness. It is one of feminism’s raisons d’être.
This imbalance in sex worried me, though I never spoke of it. I don’t
believe, and didn’t then, that all sex ought to be perfectly reciprocal. But I
knew that ours wasn’t, in part, because I was afraid. I was afraid that if I
fucked a lover, she wouldn’t like it, or that I wouldn’t. I was afraid that I
would like it and find myself repulsive. Worse, that she would find me
repulsive. I was still afraid of being the boy.
In her essay “Uses of Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde defines the
erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and
spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or
unrecognized feeling.” Our oppression, she claims, is predicated on the
suppression of this resource and its inherent power; “As women we have
come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational
knowledge.” I had read Lorde’s essay in college and loved it, without
comprehending the full breadth of its relevance to my own life. A mercy,
because I was not yet ready to change. When I read it again, I was ready.
In my early thirties, I became conscious of the fact that I had been in
consecutive monogamous relationships since my teenage years. It was
notable, I thought, but also fairly ordinary. Lots of people were always in
relationships. I was just a relationship person, I told myself, though even in
the privacy of my own mind it had the ring of rationalization.
“Don’t you think you should take a break?” my mother asked me when I
was thirty-two. I had just ended a three-year domestic partnership.
“Probably,” I said, though I had already begun the next one. When it
ended, I decided that I really ought to take a break. I wanted a different kind
of relationship and knew that it was me who needed to change. Then I got
into four or five much shorter consecutive relationships. By thirty-five, I
understood that the decision to take a break could not be a casual one. Too
much of me for too long had been oriented toward other people and their
attraction to me. A break would only be possible if I drew a solid line
between not only myself and those most overt entanglements of sex and
love but all the precursory activities as well. There could be no flirtation, no
friendship even partially predicated on sexual tension, no voyeuristic
perusal of dating apps. I was a person so habitually attuned to the charge of
attraction that I accidentally got into committed partnerships.
Since middle school, when I rejected the power and pleasure of my body
as a sublime vehicle and traded it for the framework insisted upon by the
rest of world, I had considered the value of my body primarily as it related
to other people, namely men. By my thirties, though I rarely saw men as
potential partners, that framework still defined much of my experience. A
part of me still loathed my physical self—hated my big hands, thought my
proportions cartoonish and grotesque—and that part of me found the
transformative power of others’ desire an irresistible relief. Being in a
relationship provided a constant source of this relief, while reinforcing my
habitual reliance on others’ perceptions of me as a condition of self-
acceptance.
It was hard, at first. I had to restart a few times, so rote was my behavior.
But when I truly committed to the quest of being alone and of turning
inward, the change was immediate. Like a plant growing toward the sun,
my life began to open. Or something began to open in me that let more of
life in. My time was suddenly my own, which subtly but completely
changed the texture of beingness. I ran and slept and taught my students and
talked for hours on the phone to my friends and family. For the most part,
these were the same things I had previously done, but they felt different, as
if I had taken off a pair of gloves that I hadn’t known I was wearing. I
reread “Uses of the Erotic,” in which Lorde explains that “the erotic is not a
question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we
can feel in the doing,” and sighed with recognition.
I wrote all day, until I wasn’t sure if I even remembered how to talk to
other humans, a strangeness that I inhabited first with trepidation and then
glee. Free from the bondage of another’s gaze, my own loosened. I felt the
doing as I had not since those days in the woods as a child. I shook loose
the context of my life and explored it anew. I tasted the pine needles and ate
watermelon by the fistful. I reopened the channel inside myself, old enough
now to know I was not alone, nor mad, but capable even of finding words
for its fiery power.
Most of all, I experienced a radical change in my relationship to my own
body. That instinct for self-love that I had glimpsed at twelve and worked
so hard to exile had been waiting for me all those years. I bought a new bed,
and every morning I woke alone and gently patted myself down, as if taking
inventory of my valuable cargo. Good morning, hips. Good morning,
thighs. Good morning, hands. I stared at them with that old sense of
wonder. It was just us, for three whole months, and then the better part of a
year. Eating whatever I hungered for. The late-night reading and list
writing. The silvery wordless mornings.
How wrong I had been about freedom. I had mistakenly thought that
beauty was the price of it, that I must succeed at erasing myself in order to
be myself. In fact, it was the opposite. Only when I divested from the
systems that benefited from my self-hatred could I relinquish it and glimpse
freedom. As Lorde promised, “when we begin to live from within outward,
in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves … then we begin to
be responsible for ourselves in the deepest sense.”
I had only wanted to change my way of loving and being loved. I didn’t
know that doing so would return me to myself. If the erotic is “a measure
between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest
feelings,” my hands are, and have always been, erotic instruments. They
were the first conduits, the first actors of that chaos of strongest feelings,
inextricably bound to my sense of self as a child. After years of
estrangement, they pointed the way back.
That year I began assigning my creative writing students the task of
writing a love letter to the part of their body with which they have the most
fraught relationship. It has ever since been a regular part of my curriculum.
The students find it extremely difficult. However painful, we often cherish
our own self-hatreds, mistake them as intrinsic to our survival. After they
write these letters, however, after they read them with tremorous voices and
flushed faces, there is wildness in their eyes, as if a door has opened, as if a
tiny flame has lit deep inside them. I would cup my hands around each one
if I could.
Six months into our relationship, a year after my celibacy ended, Donika
and I spent a long sunny Saturday wandering around Toronto, holding
hands.
“Will you tell me something that you like about me?” I asked as the sun
heavied with afternoon, made everything slow and golden.
“Of course,” she said. “What kind of thing?”
“Hmm,” I said. “A shallow thing?” It was the sort of exchange that had
already become a convention of our relationship. In the very beginning, we
had agreed to ask for exactly what we wanted from each other and had both
kept that promise. How simple it was, and how long it had taken. It had
required all of my previous relationships, a decade of therapy, and nearly a
year of celibacy to learn how to identify what I needed, how to ask for it,
and finally, how to receive it. In this and so many other ways our love felt
like the culmination of so many years’ work.
“Something that I like about you”—she smiled—“is that you are not
very tall.”
I laughed. Moments before, I had commented on how comfortable I was
in the sneakers I’d worn for our day of walking. It was rare for me to wear
sneakers for anything but jogging. I had worn heels of some kind almost
every day since my late teens.
“But if I were taller, I could wear shoes like that,” I said, stopping at a
boutique window to point at a sleek pair of oxfords.
“Why can’t you wear them now?” she asked, genuinely baffled.
I grimaced. “My legs are so short and my hands and feet are so big. I’d
look like a little troll,” I explained. I’d never been this honest with a lover
about my preoccupation with disguising my true form, my belief that it
needed a disguise. I might have learned what freedom was, but my ability to
live it was still limited in these small and tenacious ways.
Like my past lovers, Donika is taller than me and dresses mostly in
clothes designed for men. The similarities end there. I don’t mean that her
hands are bigger than mine, though they are. I mean that the roles we
assume in our relationship don’t fall into gendered categories, in or out of
the bedroom. It’s part of what makes it possible for me to share with her
these inhibitions; I am certain that she doesn’t need me to play the girl. We
just get to be ourselves.
“Do you know what else has a small body and big hands and feet?” she
asked me.
I shook my head.
“A baby tiger,” she said. “They are very strong and nimble. They are
excellent swimmers and climbers, in addition to being extremely cute.”
As I laughed, she turned her body to face mine. When she spoke, her
voice was gentle but firm. “Little friend,” she said, “I am charmed by your
proportions. Just because you have an issue with them doesn’t mean that
anyone else does.” She looked back at the window. “I think you’d look
great in those shoes.”
Part of learning to receive things is learning to do so when you haven’t
even asked for them. To let love sneak up on you with its warm splash of
light and just stand there squinting. It can be a lot to take. I stood there for a
minute, not sure if I was going to cry. I didn’t. We kept walking.
In canto 6 of his epic satire Don Juan, Byron contemplates his own
adoration of all women, and muses about the Hecatoncheire, “enviable
Briareus … with thy hands and heads … hads’t all things multiplied in
proportion.” To which I say: only a man would think one hundred dicks
better than one. Only a person who doesn’t know that thy hands and heads
can indeed be all things.
Today, my love has no aversion to being fucked. Our fucking is no
partially clothed, one-way activity. When my long fingers, my strong
fingers, slide inside her, she writhes and mews and grunts. Yes, like an
animal. We are animals, never more than now.
For a sliver of time, I sometimes step out of myself, like a wheel that’s
lost its track. I see my body crouched over her, thighs flexed, back slick
with sweat, face dumb with desire, mouth open—and I shudder, ready to
tuck it all back in and make myself small again. To do that would mean
leaving her here alone in this bed, leaving this here that exists only between
both of our bodies. So, I don’t. I blink twice and step back into myself.
More, she instructs me, and I have more to give her. My hands are
enormous. They are brazenly big, unabashedly big, hungry and huge and
beloved. The desire they enact, this desire we share, is earthquakes and sea
storms. It blinds our thoughts and clenches our eyes and makes us pray to
gods we don’t believe in. It washes us onto the shore of the bed, slack and
salt-crusted, wrecked by pleasure. All that time, I thought it was my hands
who needed to shrink, when it was I who needed to grow into them.
Once, after fucking me, she said, “There is a word in my mind, but I don’t
know if I can say it. It’s going to sound silly.”
“Tell me,” I said, my head on her chest, mouth briny with her.
“Sublime. Fucking you feels like the sublime.”
I laughed and rolled onto my back, threw my arm over my eyes.
“It is!” she insisted. “Sometimes it scares me. I feel like I could just lose
myself in it.”
“We call that sublime,” Kant wrote, “which is absolutely great” and
marked by “beyond all comparison.” A thing that can inspire us to feel a
fearfulness, “without being afraid of it.” An earthquake, for example, Kant
understood as a sublime event.
I knew exactly what Donika meant, but I had no words to name it. My
knowing was from a time before I knew such experience was speakable.
Our sex does not feel like an exchange of power, but like a natural event
that can only occur when both of us stop thinking of ourselves and trust our
bodies completely. No one plays the boy, because no one plays anything. It
can’t happen unless we trust that we’ll be loved at our most animal.
Intimacy, I’ve found, has little to do with romance. Maybe it is the
opposite of romance, which is based on a story written by someone else. It
is a closeness to another person that requires closeness with oneself. It is
not watching lightning strike from the window but being struck by it.
True love is not the reward for a successful campaign to domesticate
oneself. It is the thing I was practicing all of those years ago, in my own
constructive play. It is entering the woods a stranger, shaking loose the
stories assigned you, and naming the world as you meet it, together.
It is true that I am loved now for exactly the things I have tried to erase in
myself, but this isn’t a story about love teaching me to love myself. It’s not
even about the decision to love myself. Loving myself has never been
something I was able to do simply by deciding to.
This is a love story, though. The kind where the lover laments all the
years she lost at the altar of some false god. When regret seeps in, I try to
remember the Hecatoncheires. They did not defeat the Titans as children.
They lived under their power. They were of the Titans. It took years for
their strength to surpass that of the old gods. But when they did? They
threw mountains, a hundred at a time, one for each great hand. And what if
they had been taught to hate their own strength? Maybe it would have taken
a hundred years for them to grasp a mountain in hand, to understand what
they could do, that they could make their own Olympus.
INTRUSIONS
In the summer of 2004, when Montrose Avenue was still Bushwick, and
George W. Bush was the incumbent president, my best friend and I moved
into a duplex on the same block as the L train with her two pit bulls. It was
the nicest apartment I’d ever lived in, cheaply refurbished with parquet
floors and shiny fixtures that went wobbly within our first month. My friend
took the basement and my bedroom was on the building’s ground floor,
with two big street-facing windows. Every few minutes the train rumbled
underneath us, but despite the stream of commuters that rushed by my
windows all day, I kept my curtains open, reveling in the abundance of
natural light.
I was near the end of my four-year tenure as a pro-domme. I was also
newly sober. All of which to say that I spent a lot of time at home reading
novels and self-help books instead of drinking and shooting heroin.
One night, after I’d turned off my reading light but not yet sunk into
sleep, an uneasy feeling swept up my back. John Cheever, in his story “The
Cure,” which tells of a suburban man being peeped on by his male
neighbor, aptly describes the physical response to being watched as a
“terrible hardening of the flesh.” I was accustomed to the sweep of shadows
along the walls as the train emptied its passengers and they marched next to
my windows, and cars braked at the corner stoplight, but one shadow had
stopped, its source blocking the stripe of light at the corner of my closest
window.
“Hey, baby,” a voice murmured from outside. “Are you sleeping?”
My face went cold and my body stiffened. My heart battered inside my
chest.
“Pretty girl,” said the voice. “You touching yourself?”
The voice was so close, just a couple yards away from my bed. I wanted
to scream, to flee the room, but was too terrified of indicating my presence
to move. Instead, I started to pray—whether to God or the interloper, I
didn’t know. Please stop, I pleaded silently. Please let this not be
happening. Please go away. After a few more murmurings, he did. The
light reappeared at the crack of my curtains and his shadow slid along the
length of the windows, a twin darkness slipping across the wall inside my
bedroom.
My pulse thrummed and I remained still for a long time after that,
petrified that he would return, but he didn’t. Not that night. When my mind
settled enough to think, I realized that he couldn’t possibly have seen me.
The curtains covered the windows, and anyway, peering into my dark
bedroom from the streetlight-bathed sidewalk, he would only have seen his
own reflection in the glass.
How could he have known that I was even a woman? It seemed wildly
unlikely that he would have gambled on any random inhabitant. I might
have been a bodybuilder or an off-duty cop, watching Unsolved Mysteries
or the UFC semifinals, tossing raw meat to my monstrous dog. No, I
realized, he hadn’t seen me then. He had seen me before. I frantically
scrolled through days past to remember if I had noticed anyone lurking,
noticed anyone specific outside my windows at all. I hadn’t. Then I
skimmed my daytime bedroom activities, imagined the night prowler
secretly observing me staring at my computer, reading in bed, carelessly
returning from a shower without remembering to close the curtains for a
few naked moments as I stared into my closet or the mirror.
This revelation that my privacy had been an illusion made me feel
skinless. He could have been stalking me for weeks or months before
mustering the nerve or will to speak. That unknown span of time seethed
behind me, a room filling with smoke.
I grew up in the woods of New England, where we didn’t even have
curtains on our bedroom windows, as there was no light pollution, no
passersby, and hardly a neighbor within yelling distance. When I moved to
New York City, I was shocked by the relentless verbal appraisal of men in
public spaces. “Street harassment” wasn’t a common phrase in 1999, but
the experience was as common as rats on the subway tracks. By 2004 I was
used to it, deft at discerning the likelihood of a catcaller’s retaliation if I
ignored him, instinctively knowing whether to smile demurely or stonewall.
In all cases, a woman had to keep it moving and could never argue without
threat of physical violence. The constant vigilance required outdoors
rendered domestic spaces holy in their privacy. Every woman in New York,
and perhaps any city, knows her bodily relief after the apartment door is
shut and locked behind her. The violation of that sanctity filled me with
panic.
Why me? I wondered. Had I unknowingly done something to court the
midnight lurker? Was it possible that I had masturbated while he was
watching some afternoon past? In hindsight, the innocence of my former
self seemed irresponsible. Culpable, even. How naive, how brazenly
uncareful, I had been to stand naked in my own bedroom. I had never heard
of such a thing happening to anyone I knew. Of course, I had never asked if
such things had happened to anyone I knew, and it is counterinstinctual to
volunteer these stories. The belief in our own culpability encourages our
silence, and our silence protects the lie of our culpability.
As a precociously developed eleven-year-old, I never told anyone about
Alex, who spat on me every day at the bus stop. At twelve, I never told
anyone about the grown man who groped me in a friend’s bathroom. At
thirteen, I never spoke a word of the sexual harassment I withstood for a
year of junior high school. At fourteen, I never told anyone about the sixty-
year-old manager of the tackle shop that employed me and his endless
stream of dirty jokes. At nineteen, I never told anyone about the man who
jerked off onto my back while I was asleep after I refused to have sex with
him.
No doubt, my internalization of our victim-blaming culture is largely to
blame for this silence. Of course the man outside my window hadn’t seen
me masturbating, but while we have no familiar narrative for why men do
such things, we all know the ways women invite their victimization by
walking after dark, wearing short skirts, or having big breasts. The
pathology of victimhood would also claim that self-blaming and shame
were my very ordinary attempt to explain what had happened to me, to
assert control over it by assuming responsibility.
But also, consider Body Double. In Brian De Palma’s homage to
Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo, a woman dances provocatively
before her window every night dressed in only lacy panties and a belly
chain (proof of the film’s 1984 release date). The performance ends with a
stagy roll around on the bed that gestures toward masturbation but is pure
performance for the male viewer.
Had I seen Body Double? I don’t remember, and it doesn’t matter—this
narrative, of the woman self-consciously performing for an invisible male
audience, has saturated our culture. I’m not saying that it’s never sexy to be
watched. Exhibitionism is as real as voyeurism. One of the many friends
and acquaintances I interviewed about being peeped on claimed of her
reclusive neighbor: “I allow him to, as it’s probably the most exciting part
of his life. I pretend not to see him until the very end, when I turn the
shower off. Then I just look at him briefly. It’s kind of hot.”
There is an everydayness to the eroticism of her story, partly because
we’ve all been indoctrinated by the onslaught of messaging that this is hot,
partly because it’s hot to be wanted. “Didn’t you like the attention?” asked
the boyfriend of a woman I interviewed after she told him about her peeper.
It is also a narrative that exonerates men. The more plausible it seems
that women are always performing, the less indictable the watching. If we
want it, where is the crime? Better yet, make us seductresses, inverting
men’s role even more extremely: they are our victims! In the fourth episode
of David Fincher’s popular Netflix series Mindhunter, after two FBI agents
interview the rapist and serial killer of five women, Monte Rissell, one of
them, observes: “So Rissell’s the real victim here?” His partner responds,
“That’s how he sees it.” One of the most shared qualities of all predators is
their self-conception of victimhood.
The term “peeping Tom” originates from Lady Godiva’s alleged
eleventh-century ride through Coventry nude on horseback, an event still
commemorated by Coventry citizens every year by a (clothed) march
through the city. Supposedly the townspeople swore to avert their eyes, and
all made good on the promise except for one “peeping Tom.” It is no
cautionary tale. After all, who could blame the original Tom for not
enjoying the spectacle freely offered?
We are bombarded not just with suggestions that women are always
performing for men but also with prescriptions for doing so, from the
moment we are able to take direction. “A man’s presence,” John Berger
writes in Ways of Seeing, “is dependent on the promise of power he
embodies … A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you
or for you.” Conversely, “how a woman appears to a man can determine
how she is treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must
contain it and interiorize it.”
By my early twenties, I had already undergone a long education in this. I
had suffered the consequences of all the ways I could not or did not control
how I appeared to men. I had implanted that gaze inside myself. I had tried
to suppress my animal nature, to change the shape of my body, to erase
myself in a hundred ways, to give men exactly what they wanted, and none
of it had worked. I understood how easy it was for men to justify doing
anything they wanted to a woman. I had learned about the male gaze in
women’s studies classes, but knew no way to dig it out of me.
My own continued attention to the gazes of men felt incriminating.
Wasn’t it my job to be desired by them? I had even found a way to get paid
for it. In Berger’s words, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves
being looked at … Thus she turns herself into an object—and most
particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Like Lady Godiva, I had turned
myself into a sight, I thought. Of course the stranger had looked.
It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that
patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently
inside our own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own
jewelry.
The day after that first (known) visit, I taped the curtains to the window
frame so there was not even a sliver through which to look. That night I
brought Red, the bigger of my roommate’s dogs, to bed with me. I lay under
the covers, his heavy body curled against my legs as he gently snored. Cars
hissed by, the curtains glowing with their passing headlights. I was wide
awake when he came.
“Hey baby,” he said, his form darkening the window. “Are you ready for
me?” My body tingled with adrenaline, and I squeezed Red’s paw with one
hand. “Is that pussy wet for me?” the voice asked. Red’s ears jumped, from
the sound, my touch, or the scent of my fear. He was more interested in
snuggling and treats than guarding against intruders, but he was easily
disturbed by noises outside and made an imposing figure at seventy pounds
of pure muscle. He raised himself up and gave a hearty bark.
The wave of relief I felt simply at having another presence validate the
disturbance was so great that I took a heaving breath. Red stood on the bed
now, ears trembling, and emitted a low whine. My relief created a tiny
breach in the fear, and through it rushed a geyser of fury. Under a lifetime
of vigilance and fear of bodily harm often lies a bedrock of rage. Who was
this asshole? I was suddenly irate at the thought of having been paralyzed
with fear in my own bed.
I pushed back the covers and sat up, my bare feet thudding the floor. Red
followed me out of my bedroom, where I slipped into a coat and sneakers
and clipped a leash onto his collar. I exited the apartment and the building’s
front door. I must have assumed that the culprit would have fled at the
barking, because I was surprised to find him still standing outside my
window. A man in his twenties, brown hair, black puffer jacket. He casually
loped toward me.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I asked, holding Red’s leash close to
give the impression that he was bloodthirsty when actually I wanted to
prevent him from lunging forward to lick the stranger’s hands in friendly
greeting.
“Hey girl,” he said, looking me up and down. “How’s your night going?
You busy?”
“Are you kidding me?” I asked.
“You have a boyfriend?” he asked.
“You need to get the fuck out of here and never come back,” I said. “I’ll
be calling the cops.” Before he could answer, I spun around and dragged
Red back into the building. My pulse pounding in my ears, I wondered if it
had been a mistake to let him see my face.
He didn’t come back that night, but I still couldn’t sleep. His reaction
had confused me. There had been no evidence of shame on his face, no
acknowledgment that he had done anything inappropriate, let alone
threatening. There hadn’t been any particular menace in his manner as he
propositioned me. He’d acted just like so many men I passed in the street
every day: as though I were a legitimate sexual interest, a woman drinking
at the same bar instead of someone he’d been harassing and stalking. As
though these behaviors all fell under the same umbrella of romantic pursuit.
In Body Double, our protagonist peeps on his neighbor, stalks her for an
entire day, watches her in a lingerie-store dressing room, eavesdrops at a
pay phone on her conversation, and recovers a pair of her newly purchased
panties from a trash can. When she finally confronts him, barely a few
words shared between them, she falls into his arms and they start madly
kissing. Not only is she is attracted to him despite his stalking, but it is
offered as the only evidence of seduction. That this makes any narrative
sense is owed to the entire first third of the movie being devoted to
humanizing the hero. In the opening scene, he returns home to find his
girlfriend in bed with another man, and we go on to witness his tearful
recall of childhood bullying, his episodes of crippling claustrophobia, and
his trials as a struggling actor.
Had my stalker seen Body Double? Who knows. He had plenty other
opportunities to observe this narrative. The 1983 hit movie Revenge of the
Nerds, for instance, in which a group of lovable college outcasts plant a
camera in the showers of the women’s dormitory and sell nude photos of
one of its inhabitants. After one of the nerds tricks the woman into having
sex with him while disguised as another man, she unveils his true identity
and admits that she is in love with him. That is: peeping, humiliation, and
rape constitute the courtship of their romance.
There is also Malicious, Animal House, Stripes, Porky’s, Once Upon a
Time in America, American Beauty, The Girl Next Door, You Will Meet a
Tall Dark Stranger, and Stranger Things. I could go on and on and on.
Just as these productions encourage men to believe that stalking and
peeping are acceptable forms of courtship, likely to resolve in a love match,
so do they prescribe to women a desire to be the object of such behavior. I
did wonder, as I lay in bed fully clothed after our confrontation: Had I
somehow misread the experience and overreacted? I knew that I hadn’t.
A few years previous, I might have been more able to perform the
mental acrobatics necessary to discredit my own instincts, to exile the
feeling of profound violation. Maybe that inability is partially owed to the
narrative as familiar as that of the benevolent love interest peeper: the
voyeuristic killer. So prevalent is this depiction that, again, a full catalog
isn’t needed. A few years ago I instituted a personal ban on television
shows that featured the violent assaults of women as central plot points.
They are too many to count, and they saturate the spectrum from lowbrow
tabloid crime dramas to award-winning paid cable network shows directed
by and starring Hollywood royalty: Prime Suspect, The Fall, The Killing,
True Detective, Mindhunter, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the
second-longest-running scripted prime-time television show in history. To
think of the millions of Americans absorbing these images of peeped and
stalked and subsequently mutilated women’s bodies chills me. They keep
making them because we keep watching them. I didn’t stop watching for
political reasons, though. It wasn’t a boycott. I stopped watching because I
couldn’t bear to collect any more of those images in my imagination,
especially as a woman living alone in New York City.
A big difference between the two cultural narratives about peeping—that
of the harmless romantic lead and that of the violent—is that one is much
truer than the other. Homicide Studies reports that 89 percent of murdered
women were also stalked within twelve months of their killing, and 54
percent of murdered women reported stalking to the police beforehand.
Carmen, one of my interviewees, reported spotting a peeper outside her
window just a few nights before an intruder broke into her apartment and
raped her roommate. He was never caught, though a series of similar crimes
were reported a year or so later. Another woman was reluctant to call the
police on her peeping neighbor and later read of his suicide just before a
third conviction of pedophilia.
Many of those television narratives boast of being pulled from real
headlines, a fact that obscures the reality that nearly half of all murders of
women are not done by sociopathic strangers but by romantic partners. The
headlines about such murders often include phrases like “Romeo and Juliet
Style Attack” and “Murdered for Love.”
This is why the narratives in which the line between danger and romance
gets purposefully blurred are most troubling to me. In Body Double, a
different stalker is offered as the dangerous one, rendering our hero even
more benign in relief. While our protagonist is stalking his neighbor, so is a
grotesque giant—“The Indian”—who ends up gruesomely murdering the
woman with an electric drill and is later revealed to be a different handsome
white man in disguise. Peeping, Body Double insists, is as likely to be a
precursor to romance as it is to murder. When we are supposed to yield to
our stalkers and when to run from them is left up to us. It is a compelling
plot device and a timeworn method of gaslighting women out of trusting
their instincts; De Palma far from invented it.
Body Double is a tribute to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and borrows
generously from its plot, in which Scottie, a private eye played by James
Stewart who suffers from extreme vertigo, is hired to tail Kim Novak’s
Madeline. As in Body Double, our heroine falls in love with the man on
seemingly no basis beyond his stalking her. There is another bad man
covertly orchestrating his own macabre plot, and Madeline is also murdered
at the film’s conclusion. De Palma’s other inspiration for Body Double,
Hitchcock’s Rear Window, similarly features James Stewart as a heroic
peeper who spies on his comely dancing neighbor and eventually reveals
another neighbor who has murdered his own wife.
My mother loved Rear Window as a girl, and my whole family watched it
during my childhood, laughing together in surprise at every plot twist.
Vertigo was also a favorite of mine as a younger woman—I spent a few
months in pencil skirts, trying to wrestle my hair into a French twist as
sleek as Kim Novak’s. Revisiting all of these films, however, left me
glancing over my shoulder every time I left the apartment, torn between
wanting to stay home and to punch every man who walked too close behind
me.
The only famous peeping film I hadn’t seen before writing this was
Peeping Tom. Widely hailed as a masterpiece, it is distinct for its
abandonment of the dichotomy between the benevolent stalker and the
murderous one; its subject embodies both. The handsome blond Mark is a
serial killer who videotapes the terrified faces of his female victims at the
moment of death and compulsively rewatches them. When his guileless
downstairs neighbor Helen (who he meets by peering into her window)
attempts to draw him out, he reveals to her that his father was a famous
psychologist who performed experiments on his son like putting lizards on
his bed and filming the boy’s terrified responses. Helen volleys between
falling in love with Mark, sympathizing with his trauma, and fearing for her
own safety. It is a comprehensive illustration of what women are expected
to be for the man in their lives: the person he exerts power over, the one
who listens to and sympathizes with him, the object on which to project his
romantic fantasies of purity and exceptionalism, and his savior.
“Sure,” a friend quipped about the film, “being a woman and getting
murdered sucks, but it’s not as bad as having a MEAN DADDY.”
It shouldn’t come as any great surprise, I guess, to find that the creators
of narratives that humanize dangerous men and confuse fear with seduction
often have a personal investment in this depiction. Tippi Hedren, the star of
Hitchcock’s The Birds and Marnie, explains in her 2016 memoir that the
auteur sexually assaulted her more than once and retaliated after she
rejected him by tormenting her on set. Hitchcock allegedly insisted that
other cast members ostracize Hedren, subjected her to the pecking of live
birds for five days of filming, and then blackballed her career, which never
recovered.
Woody Allen, who features peeping in Radio Days and You Will Meet a
Tall Dark Stranger, has gone unpunished for his crimes, though they are
well known by now, as are those of the fugitive rapist Roman Polanski, in
whose films peeping and stalking are a hallmark.
While gathering sources for this essay, I immediately thought of James
Ellroy, the celebrated crime writer of The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential,
and My Dark Places, who has featured peeping Toms in many of his novels.
A cursory search led me to a 2013 video interview with Walter Kirn, in
which Ellroy describes his own history of peeping on women in Los
Angeles in the late 1960s, and breaking into their homes by way of their pet
doors to steal their underwear. Upon first watch, I was aghast, and rewound
the video to watch it again.
“Here’s the thing about this, Walter,” says Ellroy about halfway through,
clearly enjoying himself. “I broke into houses, in the manner I just
described, seventeen, eighteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-three times,
tops. From late ’66 to the summer of ’69.” Ellroy doesn’t just describe the
events; he brags about them. After recounting one such “great night,” he
slowly intones, “Missy M’s bra … It’s indelible.” He tells Kirn, “You take it
home with you, brother.”
“You could’ve put these skills to actual use,” Kirn muses in response.
“’Cause you’re describing a reporter to me!” Kirn may have been horrified.
His smile as Ellroy speaks looks unnatural. Instead of objecting, however,
he plays the amiable interviewer and characterizes the predatory behavior
as journalistic. By accepting the other man’s invitation to bond over the
violation of those women, he reinforces the long tradition of men bonding
over the dehumanization of women.
Revenge of the Nerds, after all, isn’t a movie about men seducing women
by humiliating and assaulting them; that is just a plot device to support the
real story, about the bonding of a group of underdogs against a group of
more powerful men.
The Cheever story is also solely interested in women as a backdrop for
his tableau of masculinity, though in this case featuring conflict rather than
collaboration. When the narrator of “The Cure” spots his peeping neighbor
on the train platform, the apparent purity of the man’s daughter persuades
our narrator not to confront the peeper. Instead, seemingly as consolation,
the narrator follows a different young woman off of the train. “She looked
at me once,” he tells the reader, “and she knew that I was following her, but
I felt sure she was the kind of woman who would not readily call for help.”
He goes on to explain, “It was all I could do to keep from saying to her,
very, very softly, ‘Madame, will you please let me put my hand around your
ankle? That’s all I want to do, madame. It will save my life.’ ” We are
meant to be impressed by how deeply the protagonist is affected by the
neighbor’s violation, and by his impending divorce. His behavior is weird,
but not unsympathetic. Bachelorhood and the intrusion on his privacy seem
to have agitated a deep well of aggression whose contents require some
receptacle or outlet. He’s not a creep; he is reclaiming his masculine
presence, so “dependent on the promise of power he embodies,” and
passing on the baton of victimhood. The woman’s fear assures him that he
is no longer the object, but the subject.
Though I threatened it, I didn’t seriously consider calling the police. My
instinct was to blame myself, and I assumed that they would too. They
would say that I was overreacting, and on some level, I hoped that I was. I
didn’t share the entitlement of the narrator of “The Cure,” who says, “The
situation, on the surface, was ridiculous, and I could see that, but the dread
of seeing his face in the window again was real and cumulative, and I didn’t
see why I should have to endure it, particularly at a time when I was trying
to overhaul my whole way of living.” His belief in his right to pursue his
better life undisturbed allows him to call the local police, though when he
does, the cop claims the force is too small to send a guard to his house.
Masculinity, as we know, is no cakewalk, but at least he is permitted to
address his trauma by paying it forward almost immediately afterward in
the disempowerment of the woman on the train.
That dynamic corroborates much of the research on the pathology of
voyeurs, which claims that they, like so many predators, are paying the
power trip forward. A 2016 article in the journal Sexual Addiction &
Compulsivity tells us that a large percentage of paraphiliacs report early
sexual abuse and, especially in the case of voyeurs, a slew of other social
and psychiatric burdens that include negative relationships with their
fathers.
Still, we don’t need to trace these behaviors back to early trauma to explain
them, because the male ego doesn’t need to suffer a wound so grave as that
of childhood abuse to enact this response. Rejection is sometimes enough.
One can simply look at the men in New York City’s streets, who will often
respond venomously to being simply ignored, or to Brent Ball, a classmate
of mine in high school.
Brent was a legend in tenth grade. A year behind him, I had heard all of
the stories. Girls who had sworn to wait until marriage lost their minds
when he entered a room, and later, their virginities. He was a heartbreaker,
but he didn’t break my heart, not in the rumored way. At a party one night
he cornered me, and after some cursory making out, tried to solicit a blow
job. I refused, wrongly assuming our intimacy would end with that brief
physical transaction. We didn’t speak again for a year.
A few months after that incident, I became involved with my first
girlfriend, Lillian. I was madly in love for the first time and spent weekends
biking across town to her home, which was nestled amid cranberry bogs—
dry moors in the off season, but crimson when the berries bloomed, before
they were flooded. One afternoon, on a long walk, we stopped to kiss on a
path beside one of these bogs. Kissing became groping, and for a few
minutes we rolled around in the dried leaves, tugging at each other’s
clothing to expose precious patches of bare skin. We were normally
somewhat chaste, and so that tousle by the bog was, for about eighteen
hours, one of my sweetest and most exhilarating memories.
The next morning in school, I passed Brent in the hallway, a not
uncommon occurrence. To my surprise, he paused to speak.
“Hey, Melissa,” he said with a smirk. “I saw you yesterday.”
“What?” I said, baffled. “Where?”
“On the bog, with your friend.” He stared at me for a moment longer, to
watch it sink in, and then sauntered away. My face hot, I scrolled back
through time, just as I would a decade later, after my talking Tom’s first
visit. Had he been following us? Had he followed me other times? Where
had he been hiding? The unknowable details clouded the whole day
previous, and possible other days. I pictured him crouched in the woods,
leering at us, and my own past ignorance, the searing vulnerability of it.
There was no way then to name that violation, and no one to name it to. So
I just swallowed it. Like so many other things, I suspected that I had
brought it upon myself.
My stalker returned to the window, sometimes two or three times per week.
Each time, I clutched the barking Red and stared at the knife I’d begun
keeping beside the bed, but I didn’t go outside again. I had already
forgotten his face and worried during the days that I might pass him in the
street and be recognized. As one of the women I interviewed said after
expressing similar fear, “it could have been anyone.”
There were other reasons that I didn’t want to go to the police. At the
time, I was still a sex worker, which further complicated things, both
externally and internally. I wasn’t interested in the police discovering what I
did for a living. It was also literally my job at that time to perform the erotic
fantasies of men. As Berger said, I had made myself an object, a sight. It
was impossible for me not to internalize the idea that my purpose was to
perform erotically for men, even if the form that performance usually took
was of their own humiliation. The difference between what happened at
work and when my stalker came at night felt clear inside me—labor versus
terror—but while I understood the concept of consent when it came to my
clients and the world of S&M, it didn’t occur to me in those terms when
that man spoke into my window. In 2017, Alana Massey wrote an editorial
in Self that asserts, “Sex workers do not exist to save abusive men from
themselves, or to save non-sex-working women from abusive men. Every
sex worker ought to have the ability to establish her own boundaries, her
own rates, and not face intimidation when she does not give consent for any
reason.” But at twenty-three, I hadn’t read anything like that.
I was also deeply invested in a nonjudgmental view of kinks and
fetishes, among which voyeurism is ordinary. Paraphiliacs were my bread
and butter, and my friends. Even now, writing this, I am reluctant to
publicize the pathological contexts. I know now, as I did then, that kink can
be healthy, that its practitioners are often highly processed persons capable
of profound intimacy. I’m well aware of how the pathologization of
“atypical” sexual practices has been used to punish, oppress, criminalize,
and stigmatize people like me and my former clients for centuries. Because
those practices have been marginalized for so long, there still isn’t a
familiar enough public discourse on them for the layperson to differentiate
between the healthy and the harmful. I worry that the casual reader will
conflate them, as our culture has been so long doing. The difference
between consensual voyeuristic practices and nonconsensual is analogous
to that between sex and rape. By condemning these practices wholesale, we
make it that much easier to erase their complexity, the vast spectrum on
which they function.
As a domme, my voyeuristic clients seemed especially harmless. The
men who came into the dungeon with fantasies of peeping seemed a far cry
from the ones who wanted us to crush bugs with our bare feet, tell stories of
cannibalism, or shit on them. Whatever my personal feeling about their
fetishes, none of these people were abusive. The difference between my
clients, who had our consent to play out these fantasies, and those who
practice voyeurism without their victims’ consent is not only critical but
criminal. Still, the authors of “Varieties of Intrusion: Exhibitionism and
Voyeurism” write: “Historically, exhibitionism and voyeurism were often
viewed as nuisance crimes which had little impact on the victim and
occurred in isolation.” This impression is likely due to the representations
in popular culture, but also because the impulse to peep isn’t so strange.
I like to look in people’s windows, too. As the subway trundles home, I
peer into the yellow-lit windows of strangers’ apartments, coveting those
glimpses into their dioramic lives. Passing through wealthier
neighborhoods, who doesn’t like to spy through the windows of
brownstones and ogle the glamorous chandeliers and custom bookshelves?
Most of us are curious about each other, enjoy imagining the alternate lives
we might be living, the rooms we might inhabit. Also, it can be titillating. A
2006 study found that 83 percent of men and 74 percent of women claimed
that they would watch someone undressing if they would not be caught.
How do we reconcile that number with the 1987 study that found 37
percent of voyeurs involved in rape and 52 percent in pedophilia? Or
another, which concluded that a quarter of all serial victim murderers are
voyeurs? We don’t have to. “Varieties of Intrusion: Exhibitionism and
Voyeurism” claims that “the roots of these behaviors are integrated into the
normative sexual template; however, individuals engaging in exhibitionism
and voyeurism display these normative behaviors in pathological or
addictive patterns, rather than in the course of adaptive relationship
development.” The argument has long been made that all our harmful
actions progress out of a perversion of “natural” instincts, and that the
prosecution of thought crimes would find all of us guilty. Despite our
acknowledged impulses, however, only a small percentage of the general
population has been found to practice voyeurism. A minority of those who
practice voyeurism progress to other behaviors, though my peeper was one
of those.
“I was sitting by the window of my Portland apartment one night,”
explained Hallie. “And this man slid a ripped-out page from a porn
magazine through the cracked window. It was a woman giving a blow job.”
She laughed. “As if I was going to be like, ‘Oh, that looks really fun.’ ”
When I asked her how she responded, she said, “I just waved a gun around,
like, ‘Hey baby, where are you?’ and heard this mad crashing in the bushes
outside as he ran away.” Hallie was an outlier among my interviews, most
of whom didn’t have a boyfriend at the time who was “the type to keep a lot
of guns around.”
Jill, for instance, was working as a stripper and had just moved out of an
apartment she shared with an abusive boyfriend. “I felt free and safe,” she
said of living alone. Until a note appeared on her front door that read: “My
friends and I love watching you work out. We have been watching you for
over a week now. We particularly like it when you bend over and we can
see your pussy in your underwear from behind. We talk about how we’re
going to fuck you from behind. We will make you cum and feel really
good.” Terrified and furious, she resolved to get blackout shades, but that
same night she found another note, this time taped to her bedroom window:
“We are looking into your bedroom window. We can’t wait to bend you
every way over the bed. We are going to fuck you till you bleed and scream.
I hope you don’t mind, we find you very sexy. Signed, your secret
admirers.”
“What the ever-loving fuck?” she commented. “ ‘We hope you don’t
mind’? That was the scariest part. The nice handwriting, the good grammar,
the faux-gentlemanly interest in my feelings and pleasure.” She called
friends to come stay over that night, but still couldn’t sleep. Three days later
there was a third letter: “We hope you have considered our offer. You are
very sexy. We look forward to fucking you in all three holes while you
scream and cry. Signed, your secret admirers.” She didn’t trust the police,
but still called them. “That’s how scared I was.”
“What do you want us to do?” the police officer asked.
“What can you do?”
“We can drive by your house a couple of times. But we can’t sit outside
and watch.”
“Do you think this will get worse? Do you think they’ll actually do
something?” she asked.
“My guess is that they will.”
“What would you do if you were me?”
“Lady …” The cop sighed. “I hate to tell you this, but if I were you, I
would move.”
So she did.
Jill’s story horrified me more than most, because it was the closest to my
own. I suspected that the voyeur who graduated to dirty talk might be the
kind who would progress to other actions. Despite my reservations, I
walked the half mile to the nearest police station.
I wore a collared shirt with long sleeves to cover my tattoos, which
quickly dampened with sweat in the summer heat. The counter rose almost
to my chin, and I peered over it on tiptoes as I shivered in the chilly air-
conditioned precinct. I explained my situation to an officer who listened
with a patience that seemed overperformed. When I finished speaking, he
squinted at me.
“Now, do you know this man?”
“No,” I said. “I told you, I only saw him the one time, when I confronted
him. I’d never seen him before.”
He grimaced slightly. “You’re sure? You never went out with him? This
isn’t some boyfriend of yours?”
I was shocked, though I shouldn’t have been.
“What I want to know is what you can do about it,” I said after a pause.
“Well, since you don’t know him, you can’t file a restraining order.”
“Can you send someone to watch for him?”
The cop didn’t laugh, but almost. “The best thing you can do is call
when he’s there, and we can send someone over.”
I wrote down the number to call with shaking hands, knowing how
unlikely it was. The last thing I wanted to do was speak when he was
outside the window. Though in general I was loathe to call the police, I had
done it years before when a man was attempting to rape a woman outside
my previous apartment. I had been amazed by how long they took to arrive.
They ended up finding him, that time, a man convicted of previous rapes,
and I had served as a witness in a hearing.
One of the most common denominators in the stories I heard from women
was of other men dismissing the peeping, as has long been done to so many
forms of abuse. Freud himself considered the incest reports of his female
patients to be fantasies. A high school friend of one of my interviews
admitted to her years later that he and many of her other male friends used
to spy on her getting undressed with binoculars. “He seemed to think it was
a compliment,” she told me. Another woman managed to get video footage
and the license plate number of her peeper, and still the police did nothing.
One woman didn’t ever call the police on her peeping mail carrier because
she feared being judged for walking naked in her own home. We have all
fielded this response to one thing or another. We are exaggerating. We are
overreacting. We are villainizing hapless men. Besides, it’s flattering. After
all, in the hit 1990s sitcom Married with Children, when a peeping Tom
targets neighborhood women, Peggy Bundy is miffed that she hasn’t been
victimized and begs her husband, Al, to peep on her.
It is why I cringe when the topic of sexual harassment comes up in the
company of men. I fear what they might say, what they might reveal about
themselves. Most of them have never experienced it, never even had to
think about it before, and their responses reveal the assumptions that line
their ignorance.
I thought of this the other night when a friend told me an anecdote over
dinner. The school she attends is equipped with an enormous adjacent
parking structure—a place, she and I agreed, that all women consider a
likely site of assault. My friend happens to be a rape survivor. Like most of
the women I know, when returning to her car, she moves speedily with her
keys in hand, constantly scanning for potential attackers. One day a man
followed behind her, closer than normal, until she finally spun around and
shouted, “Where are you going?” He simply pointed to his nearby car.
When she recounted this experience to her boyfriend—a man everyone
remarks upon as a consummate sweetheart—he said, “Well, how do you
think it made him feel that you were so afraid of him?”
Not all men! cry the good ones. They don’t want to be feared, so it is our
job to fix our fear. That is, sure, being a woman who gets assaulted and
fears it at every turn sucks, but it’s not as bad as getting your feelings hurt.
It is the job of women to caretake the feelings of good men, even at the cost
of our own safety. We are trained from birth to accommodate them and their
uncontrollable urges. Take, for example, the interviewee who caught her
onsite landlord peeping on her multiple times. When she went to his wife to
complain, the wife simply bought her a pair of blackout curtains.
In 1999 Debra Gwartney’s fourteen-year-old daughter saw a man outside
her bedroom window, his hand curled around a Panasonic video camera.
The police found an upturned bucket taken from their carport and multiple
circular rings of indentation in the surrounding dirt where the bucket had
been stood upon untold times. (In another interview, a woman found a milk
crate outside her window, similar indentations, and a slit in the window
screen.)
A year and half later a friend faxed Gwartney a report of William
Green’s arrest in her town of Eugene, Oregon, when he sent a roll of film to
be developed that included an image of an eleven-year-old girl lying on top
of him. When the police searched his home, they found dozens of
videotapes, going back five years, that included footage of Gwartney’s four
daughters and more than a hundred others getting dressed and undressed,
sleeping, and watching television. A second search found a secret
compartment in Green’s garage containing more videotapes—including
ones of him masturbating in the girls’ beds, their panties clutched in his fist
—underwear, swimsuits, clots of hair pulled from drains, and photos stolen
from Gwartney’s family albums.
As I read her account of these horrors, I thought of James Ellroy,
celebrated novelist. There is a difference, we say, between victimizing
children in this manner and victimizing adults. One of these men acted upon
a desire that we abhor and one upon a desire we find more relatable, but
they committed many of the same crimes and showed a similar disregard
for the rights of their victims.
Just before his trial, Green pleaded guilty as part of a deal. Gwartney’s
daughters were the only victims to testify at his sentencing hearing. “At the
end of the last hearing,” Gwartney explained, “the judge said that, really, we
were so very lucky that the girls hadn’t been touched. This wasn’t much of
a crime after all: the only things stolen from us were a few pictures, a
couple of pairs of underpants. Not one girl’s body, he said, had been
violated.” Though a detective promised Gwartney that Green would never
be released from prison, the judge sentenced him only for the burglary
charges.
“William Green would not be listed as a sexual predator,” said Gwartney.
“He would not be denied, upon his release, access to cameras. Schools and
neighbors would not be notified of his past behavior. The judge looked
down at my daughters from his chair and told them to count themselves
fortunate for what had not been done to them. He told my children to leave
the courtroom and get on with their lives.” Green was released from prison
in 2014.
At the conclusion of “The Cure,” Cheever’s protagonist reunites with his
estranged wife. “We’ve been happy ever since,” he writes. As the title
suggests, the hero’s experience was a foray into his own darkness, a route
back to wholesomeness. For a moment, he occupied the violent space of
man alone in the world, subject to both the victimization by other men and
the violence of his own instincts. In the end, as the final line of the story
states, “Everyone here is well.”
Not so for the women I interviewed. Their journey was not a foray into
their own darknesses, but a subsumption into those of men. “In some
ways,” Gwartney explains, “the five of us will never get over what
happened. We’ll not get over the violation of our most private sanctuary by
a man who said that as long as he wasn’t seen filming girls, he felt he was
inflicting harm on no one.”
The harm, however, bleeds far into the futures of all the women I
interviewed, most of whom struggle to feel at ease in their own homes.
“Am I still affected?” asked one woman. “Paranoid is probably the best
term for it.” Though “paranoid” implies that her vigilance is unwarranted. It
points to another lasting effect on many of my interviewees: the worry of
their own culpability. “One question burns in me,” Gwartney claims, “and I
suppose it will keep on burning until the end of my days: When William
Green was coming after your children, where the fuck were you?”
Unlike the women I interviewed, I wasn’t conscious of how deeply the
experience had affected me until recently. Just before I began writing this
essay, I told my girlfriend the story of my peeper.
“I never think about it anymore,” I explained. “It was terrifying when it
happened, but I don’t think it stuck with me much after that.”
She gave me a quizzical look. “Really? How about the way you keep
your curtains closed with double-sided tape?”
“Oh,” I said. “I guess I do.”
“Or how you won’t walk through any windowed room without first
putting clothes on, even in the middle of the night?”
“Especially in the middle of the night,” I added.
I had never considered how that violation disciplines the way that I
inhabit my own home, nearly fifteen years later. How much I had since
feared being seen as sexually available to any man passing by. I took for
granted that it was always so, because for most of my life, it has been.
This may be the longest effect of a lifetime of being looked at, being told
that it is a duty, a compliment, even a source of power: it has eroded my
sense of entitlement to privacy. I should never not be thinking of the man
who might be watching me, even alone in my bedroom. I should not and
cannot refuse a gaze through a window, a neighbor with a camera, a closely
following stranger, a comment on the street. How different is a gaze from a
hand, after all? What a powerful message it is, that your body ought to be
available to any man passing by. It will only inconvenience you to protest.
Better to tolerate it. Reframe it as nothing memorable, as a joke, as
journalism, as privilege, even as a precursor to love.
My story could have ended any number of ways, and none of them include
a romance with my stalker. Like most of the women I interviewed, I moved
apartments and rarely thought about this terrifying series of months because
it was but one in an endless series of ordinary violations against which I felt
impotent to protect myself, except retroactively, in my own words, from
many years’ distance.
I am lucky that it ended that way, because unlike Lady Godiva, I did not
choose to be a spectacle. I cannot make any man promise to look away.
Eventually, he stopped coming. But I could never sleep easy after that. I
was always listening for some breach in the quiet, some shadow stilled
across my bed. Though I moved a few months later and have many times
since, I kept waiting.
THESMOPHORIA
1. Kathodos
Rome, July. The midsummer air thick with cigarette smoke and exhaust. By
the time my plane touched down, I’d been awake for almost twenty-four
hours, three of which I’d spent waiting at the airport for a rental car. I’d
driven into the city amid bleating horns and darting mopeds, parked in a
questionable spot, and woven through the crowded sidewalks until I found
the address of the tiny apartment I’d rented. Upstairs, I pulled the curtains
shut and crawled into the strange bed with its coarse white sheets. I posted a
photo on Facebook of my exhausted face—Italia!—and instantly fell
asleep.
I woke to three text messages from my mother.
You’re in Italy??
My ticket is for next month!
Melly???
Months previous, she’d cleared her schedule of psychotherapy patients
to meet me in Naples. From there, our plan was to drive to the tiny fishing
town on the Sorrento coast where her grandmother had been born, and
where I’d rented another apartment for a week. I frantically scrolled
through our e-mails, scanning for dates.
It was true. I’d typed the wrong month in our initial correspondence
about the trip. Weeks later, we’d forwarded each other our ticket
confirmations, which obviously neither of us had closely read.
The panic I felt was more than my disappointment at the ruin of our
shared vacation, to which I had so been looking forward. It was more than
the sorrow I felt at what must have been her hours of panic while I slept or
her imminent disappointment as she corroborated the facts herself. It was
more than the fear that she’d be angry with me (who wouldn’t be angry
with me?), because my mother’s anger never lasted.
Imagine a structure as delicate and intricate as honeycomb. One that has
weathered many blows, some more careless than others, that could so easily
be crushed by the sweeping hand of error. The dread did not rise from my
thoughts but from my gut, from some corporeal logic that had kept
meticulous track of every mistake before this one. That believed there was a
finite number of times one could break someone’s heart before it hardened
to you.
My mother had wanted a daughter. Melissa, she explained to me, as soon as
I was old enough to learn the story, means honeybee. Later I learned that it
was the name of the priestesses of Demeter. Melissa, from meli, which
means honey, like Melindia or Melinoia, those pseudonyms of Persephone.
Is it too obvious to compare us to those two?
I don’t know how it feels to create a body with my own. Maybe I never
will. I remember, though, how my mother nursed me until I was nearly two
years old and already speaking in full sentences. When I moved to solid
food, she fed me bananas and kefir, whose tartness I still crave. She sang
me to sleep against her freckled chest. She read to me and cooked for me
and carried me with her everywhere.
What a gift it was to be so loved, to trust in my own safety. All children
are built for this, but not all parents rise to the task. Not my birth father, so
she left him. We moved in with her mother then. One day on the shore we
found him strumming a guitar, the man who became my real father. From
the day he and my mother met, he never knew one of us without the other.
Now, whenever I see him, one of the first things he always says to me is,
“Ah! Just now, you looked exactly like your mother.”
They doted on the memory of me as a child, just as they had doted on me
when I was a child. Fat and happy, always talking. “You were so cute,”
they’d say. “We had to watch you. You would have walked off with
anyone.”
When my father was at sea, it was just my mother and me again. After
my brother was born, it was me in whom she confided how much harder it
became to say goodbye to my father, year after year. Her tears smelled like
sea mist, cool against my cheek. Like they had doted on me, I doted on my
brother, our baby.
After my parents separated, they tried nesting—an arrangement where
they rotated in and out of the family home while the children remained. The
first time my father returned from sea and my mother slept in a room she
rented across town, I missed her with a force so terrible it made me sick.
My longing felt like a disintegration of self, or a distillation of self—
everything concentrated into a single panicked obsession. My toys were
drained of all their pleasure. No story could rescue me. To protect my
father, whose heart was also broken and who I loved equally but depended
upon less, I hid my despair. In secret, I called my mother on the telephone
and cried. I had never been apart from her. I hadn’t known that she was my
home.
My birthday falls during Pyanepsion, the fourth month of the ancient Greek
calendar. It is the month of Persephone’s abduction, the month Demeter’s
despair laid all the earth to waste, and during which the women of Athens
celebrated the Thesmophoria—a fertility festival that lasted three days, each
with its own title: Kathodos, Nēsteia, and Kalligeneia. The rites of the
Thesmophoria were kept secret from men and included the burying of
sacrifices and the retrieval of the previous year’s oblations—often the
bodies of slain pigs—whose remains were offered on altars to the goddesses
and then scattered in the fields with the year’s seeds.
When I got my first period at thirteen, my mother wanted to have a party.
“Just small, all women,” she said. “I want to celebrate you.” It was already
too late. I seethed with something greater than the advent of my own
fertility, the hormones catapulting through my body, the fact of our severed
family, or the end of my child form. I’d been taught by my mother to honor
these changes, but there were things for which she could not prepare me.
The sum of it all was unspeakable. I would rather have died than celebrate
this metamorphosis with her. It is so painful to be loved sometimes.
Intolerable, even.
Psychologists and philosophers have numerous explanations for the anger
that attends this cleaving between parents and children. I have read about
separation and differentiation and individuation. It is a most ordinary
disruption, necessarily awful, sometimes severe—especially for mothers
and daughters. The closer the mother and the daughter are, the more violent
the daughter’s effort to disentangle herself can be. I’m not looking for
permission or assurance that ours was a normal break; rather, a different
kind of understanding. For that, I need to retell our story.
I imagine myself as my mother—which is to say, a lover, and my
beloved as someone with whom I spend twelve years of uninterrupted,
undifferentiated intimacy. It is an affair in which the burden of
responsibility, of care, lies solely upon me. I imagine, also, simultaneous
duties, now seemingly less important since my child’s arrival: in Demeter’s
case, the earth’s fertility, the nourishment of all its people, and the cycle of
life and death. After twelve years, my beloved rejects me. She does not
leave. She does not cease to depend on me—I still must clothe and feed her,
ferry her through each day, attend to her health, and occasionally offer her
comfort. Mostly, though, she becomes unwilling to accept my tenderness.
She exiles me from her interior world almost entirely. She is furious. She is
clearly in pain and possibly in danger. Every step I take toward her, she
backs further away.
Of course, this is a flawed analogy. I turn to it because we have so many
narratives to make sense of romantic love, sexual love, marriage, but none
that feel adequate to both the heartbreak my mother must have felt and the
kinds of love I have known since. The attachment styles that define our
adult relationships are determined in that first emotional connection with
our parents, aren’t they? More than a few times I have felt the shock of
losing access to a lover; it doesn’t matter who leaves. It feels like a crime
against nature, a kind of torture, to be robbed of that presence. It must have
been thus for my mother—for Demeter, as she watched Persephone be
carried away in that black chariot, and then the earth broke open to swallow
her.
2. Nēsteia
Cape Cod, April. I was thirteen and had spent that Saturday at the library
with Stacy. At least, that was what I had told my mother when I got in her
car that evening. The sun was half sunk behind a cluster of storefronts, the
afternoon’s warmth had turned cool, a breeze from the nearby harbor
carrying the soft clang of a buoy’s bell. I buckled my seat belt and waved
goodbye to Stacy, who turned to walk home. My mother and I watched her
stiff, straight-backed gait, the edge of her T-shirt rippling in the wind. She
did walk a little bit like a robot, as Ben had observed when she left us in his
room together, and then he fumbled in my underwear.
“You smell like sex,” my mother said. Her tone was one of exhaustion.
Please, it said, just tell me the truth. I know it already. Let’s be in this
together.
It was easy to present the shock of my humiliation and incredulity. I’d
done so before, and we both knew it.
“I’ve never had sex,” I said. I believed this.
My mother shifted into gear and turned toward the exit. “Sex isn’t just
intercourse,” she said.
We drove home in silence. I don’t know if we had a conversation about
trust that night. We’d had them so many times before, my mother trying to
broker an understanding, to cast a single line across the distance between
us. If trust was broken, my mother explained, it had to be rebuilt. But the
sanctity of our trust held no currency with me, so broken trust came to mean
the loss of certain freedoms. She didn’t want to revoke my privileges; she
wanted me to come home to her. Probably I knew this. If she didn’t like the
distance my lies created, then she would like even less my silence and
sulks, my slammed bedroom door. Of course I won these battles. We each
had something the other wanted, but I alone had conviction.
How many times could she call me a liar, or believe me to be one? I was
relentless in my refusal to acknowledge what we both knew. I went on drug
deliveries with a friend’s mother who sold them, snuck boys into our home
or met them behind the movie theater. Grown men groped me in backyards
and basements, on docks and in doorways, and there was nothing my
mother could do to protect me.
The Rape of Persephone is depicted by hundreds of artists, across thousands
of years. In epic poetry the word rape is often translated as a synonym for
abduction to temper its violence. In most sculpture, Persephone writhes in
the arms of Hades, torquing her soft body away from his muscled arms and
enormous legs. Consider Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous Baroque version,
in which Hades’s fingers press into her thighs and waist. The white stone is
so yielding as to seem fleshlike, Persephone’s arms fully extended while her
hands push against his face and head. In Rembrandt’s Rape of Proserpina,
as Hades’s chariot plunges through foaming water into darkness and the
Oceanids cling to her satin skirts, he grasps Persephone’s leg and pulls her
into his pelvis. Her gown hides the rest.
My mother surely feared that I would be raped. It was a legitimate
concern. In hindsight I am surprised it never happened. Perhaps because I
feared it as much as she did. Or because I so often yielded to or negotiated
with those who would have otherwise forced themselves on me.
It must have felt like an abduction to my mother, as if someone had
stolen her daughter and replaced her with a harpy. I chose to leave her, to
lie, to rush to places where men might lay their hands on me, but I was still
a child. Who, then, was my abductor? Can we call it Hades, the desire that
filled me like smoke, that chased everything else out? I was frightened, yes,
but I went willingly. Perhaps that was the scariest part.
In Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson explores the term poikilos nomos
—given in Plato’s Symposium to describe a “contradictory ethic” in which
upper-class men were encouraged to fall in love with beautiful boys who
spurned their pursuit. While nomos means law or convention, “poikilos is
an adjective applicable to anything variegated, complex or shifting”; “This
erotic code,” Carson tells us, “is a social expression of the division within a
lover’s heart.”
A convention of Spartan weddings widely adopted across Greece was for
a groom to seize his writhing bride across his body and “abduct” her by
chariot, in a seemingly perfect simulacrum of Persephone’s rape.
“The Athenian nomos is poikilos,” writes Carson, “in that it recommends
an ambivalent code of behavior … But the nomos is also poikilos in that it
applies to a phenomenon whose essence and loveliness is in its
ambivalence.”
We all know the allure of the reluctant lover. But what of our own
divided hearts? My ambivalence tormented and compelled me. That eros
was an engine that hummed in me, propelled me away from our home into
the darkness. I knew it was dangerous. I couldn’t tell the difference between
my fear and desire—both thrilled my body, itself already a stranger to me.
There was a nomos for this. Daughters were supposed to leave their
mothers, to grope for the bulging shapes of men and then resist them. My
mother must have anticipated this, must have hoped she would be spared.
Wasn’t my mother also my beloved, my captor? If eros is lack, then it
existed between us. Wasn’t it against her arms that I fought most viciously?
Like the Spartan bride, I would have lost my heart if she had truly let me
go. A daughter is wedded to her mother first.
In the “Hymn to Demeter,” the Homeric poet tells that “for nine days did
the Lady Demeter / wander all over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her
hands.” After that, she takes a human form and becomes the caretaker of an
Eleusinian boy, who she tries and fails to make immortal.
When I was thirteen, my mother went back to school to become a
psychotherapist. She rode a Greyhound bus to Boston each week for class,
textbooks propped on her lap. The job of a therapist is not so different from
a mother’s, although it is safer. It is collaboration and care, but not
symbiosis. It is not reciprocal in its need. Her patients may have been the
Eleusinian children who could never be made immortal, but she did not set
them on fire as Demeter did that boy. She helped them as I would not allow
myself to be helped.
When I told her, just a few months short of seventeen, that I was moving
out, she didn’t try to stop me. I knew she didn’t want me to go. “Maybe I
should have tried to stop you,” she has said to me more than once. “But I
was afraid that I would lose you for good.”
Zeus insisted Hades return Persephone to her mother, and the dark lord
capitulated, on one condition: if Persephone had tasted any food of the
underworld, she would be consigned to return to Hades for half of every
year. Did Persephone know? Yes and no. In some versions, she thinks she is
smart enough to evade him, to taste and still go home. There are so many
holes in the myth, so many versions and mutations, most unstamped by
chronology. A myth is the memory of a story passed through time. Like any
memory, it changes. Sometimes by will, or necessity, or forgetting, or even
for aesthetic purpose.
The pomegranate seeds were so lovely, like rubies, and so sweet. In
every version of the story, Persephone tastes them.
It was winter in Boston. I was seventeen. I didn’t start with heroin. I started
with meth, though we called it crystal, which sounded much prettier than
the burnt clumps of tinfoil that littered our apartment and whose singed
smell hung in the air, as if an oven had been left on too long.
Imagine Persephone’s first season in hell. When I phoned home, I
apologized to my mother for not calling. “I’ve been busy with classes. I’m
making such nice friends.”
These were half-truths. I wasn’t missing classes. I did make friends. I
had a job and homework and a bedroom without a door that cost me $150
per month in rent. My mother would have paid for more, but with it she
would have also bought more claim on the truth.
When I rode that same Greyhound bus home and ate the meals she made
and slept in my old room, it was like rising from some underworld to the
golden light of earth. I missed it so much. I couldn’t wait to leave.
Imagine Persephone loving Hades. Is it so impossible? She could not
have escaped him by dying, after all. We often love the things that abduct
us. I imagine I would find a way, if I were bound to someone for the rest of
my life—for half of eternity.
It was Christmas or Thanksgiving. My mother, brother, and I joined hands
around the table, the steaming food encircled by our arms. We squeezed
each other’s fingers, pressed our thumbs into each other’s palms. That small
triad, who had been so sad and strong and fiercely loving.
After the dishes were washed, my mother sank into the sofa and smiled
at us. “Should we play a game?” she asked. “Watch a movie?”
“I need to borrow your car,” I said.
I can hardly bear to remember her disappointed face.
“Where could you possibly have to go tonight?”
I don’t remember what I answered, only that she let me and how much it
hurt to leave them. I pulled the front door shut behind me, and something
tore inside, like a chapped lip that rends at a word. Still, the quickening as I
lit a cigarette in the dark and turned off our road toward the highway. I
imagine that this is the way a man feels, leaving his family for his mistress.
I did feel part father, part husband, and maybe every daughter does. Or just
the ones whose fathers are gone.
I didn’t tell her when I got clean. She’d never known I started. She knew
what she saw, and that was bad enough. You can’t crawl up to your mother
from hell and not look like it. If I told her why she didn’t have to worry
anymore, I’d have to confirm why she’d worried. I’d have to be done for
good. What if Persephone had told Demeter not only what happened in hell,
but that she might be coming home for good? What daughter would do that?
Another holiday. After dinner, all of us draped over the couch, drowsy with
food.
“I need to borrow your car,” I said.
Her pleading face. “Where could you possibly be going?”
I took a breath. “I have to go to a meeting,” I said. Then I had to explain.
“Things have been bad.”
She wanted to know how bad. Or thought she did.
I revealed very little. As she listened, her expression grew tired. “It all
makes so much more sense now,” she said, wearily.
I wanted to take it all back. How much are you supposed to tell someone
who loves you that much, who you want to protect? Is it worse for them to
find out later, when you’re safely on the other side? I hated to watch my
mother sort through the past, solving the puzzle of my inconsistencies with
the pieces I’d withheld. Lies make fools of the people we love. It’s a careful
equation, protecting them at the cost of your betrayal. Like mortgaging the
house again to pay for the car. I was also always protecting myself. There
were things I would no longer be able to believe if I had to say them aloud.
I could only tell her the truth when I faced it.
Three years later, I sent her the book I’d written.
“You can’t call me until you’ve finished reading it,” I said. In it were all
the things I’d never told her, or anyone. “Take as much time as you need,” I
said, hoping that she’d take long enough to not need to talk to me about
how it felt to know those things.
She agreed.
The phone rang the next morning at seven o’clock.
“I couldn’t stop reading it,” she said. “I kept putting it down and turning
out the light and then turning it back on and picking up the book again.”
When I asked what she found so riveting about it, she said, “I had to
know you were going to be all right.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to read,” she said. “It’s
wonderful.”
In the years that followed, she sometimes told me about the awkward
things her colleagues said to her about the book, the ways she had to
explain my past and the ways she couldn’t.
“I’ve had my own experience of it,” she once said. I knew she meant that
she wanted me to make room for how it had been hard for her, too—the
living and the telling. I had made a choice to tell the world the things I
couldn’t talk about. In doing so, I had forced myself to talk about them,
though I still barely could with her. My choice revealed those things to her
and simultaneously forced her to have a conversation with the world. Even
more unfair, I didn’t want to know about it. I couldn’t bear to listen.
Five years after I sent my mother that book, I had a lover who wanted me to
always be thinking of her. When I was, she lavished me with gifts and
grand gestures of affection. When I wasn’t, she punished me, mostly by
withdrawing. At this, I felt a touch of that old disintegration, that sickened
longing. It was a torment—a compelling cycle to which I consented.
The first time I brought her home to meet my mother, she only looked at
me. At dinner, she answered my mother’s questions but did not ask any. Her
eyes sought mine as if tending something there. It was hard for me to look
anywhere else.
“She’s so focused on you,” my mother said. “It’s odd.” I could tell she
was being generous.
My lover had brought a gift for my mother, a necklace made of lavender
beads, smooth as the inside of a mussel shell. In the bedroom, she removed
the small box from her suitcase and handed it to me.
“Give it to her,” my lover said.
“But it’s from you,” I said.
“It’s better if you give it to her,” she said.
I knew that my mother would also find this odd, just like her need to be
alone with me so much during such a short visit.
“We’ll give it to her together,” I said.
In the months after I left her, it was tempting to interpret this behavior as
an expression of my lover’s guilty conscience, but I don’t think she knew
enough about herself to feel guilty in front of my mother. More likely, she
saw my mother as a competitor. I suspect that she feared my mother would
see something in her that I couldn’t yet. Still, for the two years we were
together I withdrew from my mother almost entirely. I could not see what
was happening to me and didn’t want to. Like my lover, I refused to look at
my mother. I didn’t want to see what she saw.
A few times, I called her, sobbing. I’d also done this when I was on
heroin.
“Do you think I’m a good person?” I asked.
“Of course,” she said and I could hear her brow’s furrow. I could feel
how much she still wanted to help me. I hung up the phone. I missed her so
much, worse than ever before. Please come get me, I wanted to say, as I had
when I was a child. This time, there was no way for her to bring me home.
The morning that I finally decided to leave the relationship, I called my
mother. This time, I didn’t wait three years to write a book about it and then
send it to her.
“I’m leaving her,” I said. “It’s been so much worse than I told you.”
“How?” she asked. After I revealed everything, she wanted to know why
I hadn’t confided in her.
“I don’t know,” I said. I was weeping. “What if I’d told you and then
didn’t leave her?”
She was quiet for a moment. “Did you think that I would hold that
against you?”
I wept harder and covered my eyes with my hand.
“Listen to me,” she said, her voice as firm as a hand under my chin.
“You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life.”
When I didn’t answer, she said, “Do you hear me? There is nothing you
could do to make me stop loving you.”
3. Kalligeneia
When I sent my second book to my mother, we had an hours-long
conversation. I explained how my writing created a place where I could
look at and talk to parts of myself that I otherwise couldn’t. She explained
to me that this was exactly what her mode of therapy allowed her patients to
do. We had talked about this before, but never in such depth.
A few months later, at a conference my mother attends every year, we
stood in front of a room packed with therapists. She began the workshop by
leading them through an explanation of the model she trains clinicians in
around the world. She was warm and funny, expert and charismatic. You
could easily see why our mailbox filled with heartfelt cards from patients
she’d stopped seeing decades ago. When she was done, I stood and spoke
about how writing allows me to retread the most painful parts of the past
and find not only new meaning but also healing there. Then I led the
audience through a writing exercise that exemplified this and drew upon my
mother’s therapy model. Afterward I invited a few of the therapists to share
their work. As they read, the group nodded and laughed. A few people
wept.
That whole weekend, people clasped our hands and praised our work
together. They marveled at the miracle of our collaboration. “How special,”
they said. “Whose idea was this?”
“Hers,” I told them.
As the memories of stories are changed with each telling, they are more
irrevocably changed with each conquest, each colonizer, each assimilation
of one people into another. There are older versions of Demeter’s story,
precursors to the Greek, that emerged from a system of matrifocal
mythology and likely a society whose values it reflected.
There was no rape, no abduction. The mother, goddess of the cycle of
life and death, passed freely from underworld to earth, receiving those who
died as they passed from one to the next. Her daughter, some of these older
versions say, was simply the maiden version of that goddess, imbued with
the same powers. Others suggest that Persephone was the very old goddess
of the underworld, and always had been.
It used to scare me that I wanted things my mother wouldn’t understand.
I think we both feared our difference. In hiding it from her, I often created
exactly the thing I wished to avoid. It’s not that I should have told her
everything; that would have been its own kind of cruelty, though I could
have trusted her more. That younger version of our story, the one I’ve
carried for most of my life, the one I’ve mostly told of here, is also true: I
hurt myself and I hurt her, over and over. But like the matrifocal myth, there
is another version, a wiser one.
In it, Persephone is already home. Her time spent in the dark is not an
aberration of nature but its enactment. I’ve come to see mine the same way.
My darkness has become my work on this earth. I return to my mother
again and again, and both realms are my home. There is no Hades, no
abductor. There is only me. There is nothing down there that I haven’t
found a piece of in myself. I am glad to have learned that I do not have to
hide this from her. It helps that the darkness is now less likely than ever to
kill me.
I can hold both of these stories inside me. There is room for one in the
other. The first myth of mother and daughter I sacrifice on the first day of
the Thesmophoria, Kathodos, a ritual violence. The other, I retrieve on the
third day, Kalligeneia, and sprinkle in the fields. All of my violences might
be seen this way: a descent, a rise, a sowing. If we sow them, every
sacrifice becomes a harvest.
As the Rome traffic heaved outside the window of that tiny apartment, I
stared at my phone while dread thickened in me. I understood that I could
sink this whole trip into it, spend every day punishing myself for my
mistake. I didn’t have to, though. The part of me who feared the bond
between my mother and me too fragile to withstand this blow was a
younger self. I had to tell her about this new story, that there was nothing I
could do that would make my mother stop loving me. I promised her. Then,
I called my mother.
She was mad, of course, and disappointed, but by the end of the call we
were laughing.
A few days later I phoned her from the town where her grandmother was
born.
“You are going to love it here,” I said.
There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves
you and the danger of losing them. For a long time, I couldn’t separate
these. It has taken me some work to discern the difference between the pain
of hurting those I love and my fear of what I might lose. Hurting those we
love is survivable. It is inevitable. I wish that I could have done less of it.
A year later I picked my mother up at the Naples airport and we drove
down the coast to that town, Vico Equense. For two weeks, we ate fresh
tomatoes and mozzarella and walked the same streets that her grandmother
had. I drove us down the entire Amalfi coast and only scratched the rental
car a little.
As I drove, my mother held my phone up to film the shocking blue
waters that rippled below, the sheer drop from the highway’s edge, the
wheeling birds that seemed to follow us, and the tiny villages built into the
hillside. It was terrifying and beautiful, like all my favorite journeys.
Back home the following week, I sort through the pictures, deleting
doubles and smiling at our happy faces. When I get to that video and play it,
I see an image of her sandaled foot—wide like my own—on the gritty floor
of our rented Fiat. Our voices, recorded with perfect clarity, comment on
the scenery. She is holding the phone’s camera upside down, I realize, while
the GPS map fills the display. I snort and continue watching her foot shift as
our voices remark on a passing bus. Then, alone at my desk in Brooklyn, I
close my eyes and listen to our conversation rippling eagerly through time,
our gasps as mopeds speed by us on hairpin turns, and our laughter ringing
on and on.
THANK YOU FOR TAKING CARE OF YOURSELF
In a series of famously sadistic experiments conducted throughout the
1960s, Harry Harlow isolated infant rhesus monkeys and deprived them of
touch for up to a full year. Harlow was interested in reproducing the human
experience of depression in his monkeys, and at this he succeeded,
surprising no one. After thirty days, isolated monkeys were assessed as
“enormously disturbed,” and those isolated for longer periods displayed
“severe deficits in virtually every aspect of social behavior,” weakened
immune systems, overproduction of stress hormones, inability to have
sexual relations, and tendencies to self-harm and starve themselves.
Monkeys isolated for a full year were largely incapable of rehabilitation.
His results are reproduced each year by the estimated eighty thousand
American prison inmates held in solitary confinement, and on a smaller
scale, by the immeasurable number of people who live in societies that
discourage regular forms of touch, like ours. Psychologists call it “skin
hunger” and posit that many experiences of depression are actually
symptoms of touch deprivation.
I have been reading about Harry Harlow and skin hunger since my friend
Mairo sent me an e-mail with the subject heading “this seems like
something you’d be interested in” and a link to something called a “cuddle
party.” I followed the link to a website and immediately rolled my eyes. I
did not suffer from skin hunger. In fact, I had spent most of the year before I
met my girlfriend intentionally celibate, during which time I experienced
very little touch aside from that of my chiropractor. Those months had
arguably been the best of my life. Nonetheless, my interest was piqued. The
immediacy of my aversion to the cuddle party made me curious. As the
people we hate on sight are usually those in whom we recognize ourselves
and no one more dismissive of sobriety than the alcoholic, knee-jerk
repulsion is a kind of metal detector. Experience has taught me that when
such an alarm sounds, there is usually something buried nearby.
“Would you be comfortable with my attending something called a cuddle
party?” I asked Donika. While I had been luxuriating in my voluntary
respite from touch in New York City, my girlfriend then lived in western
New York State, one hundred miles from the nearest city. That is, in a
location known for its long and bitter winters and so remote that few friends
came to visit her. Most of her days there passed without her seeing a single
other Black person or getting a hug.
“Absolutely,” she said without hesitation. “Would you be comfortable
with my joining you?”
Cuddle Party was founded by Reid Mihalko and Marcia Baczynski in 2004
and incorporated in 2016. Over the last fourteen years, they have hosted
cuddle parties across the United States and internationally, and trained over
two hundred professional cuddlers to meet the needs of the touch-deprived.
Similar organizations have sprung up, like Cuddle Sanctuary in Los
Angeles, and Cuddlist in New York City.
In the days leading up to the event, I read copious articles and scoured
the official Cuddle Party website, which was designed with the obvious
questions in mind. The rules for cuddle parties are prominently listed and
focused on consent and a clear boundary between sexual and nonsexual
touching. Attendees are instructed to wear full pajamas, and touching in any
“bikini areas” is prohibited. Part of their stated mission is to differentiate
between sex and cuddling and to offer access to healthy touch that isn’t
confused with sex. All of this seemed appealing to me in the abstract, if not
personally.
During the years in my early twenties when I worked as a pro-domme, the
sessions in which a client wanted some form of tenderness or sensuality
were just as common as the ones that included insults. My clients were
often profoundly lonely men. They were often trauma survivors. I have no
doubt that a significant percentage suffered from skin hunger. It sometimes
felt to me as though their skin was a tapestry of invisible mouths, all
clamoring to be fed.
In my first year on the job, I preferred the sessions in which a client
wanted to be held or tended to with affection rather than corporal
punishment or humiliation, because I already knew how to perform that
service. Over time, my comfort with more sensual sessions became distaste,
and then my distaste became disgust, and finally my disgust became
loathing. To enact tenderness felt like a greater betrayal of self than any act
of violence and many sexual acts. To let those needy, entitled strangers into
a space—both physical and metaphysical—reserved for people I loved
would contaminate it. I instinctually understood that I could not let them in,
or else the meaning of those actions would change for me. So I locked them
out. That is, I detached myself from the experience. It may be more
accurate to say that I locked myself in. I took the part of me that screamed
at their touch, and I put her away where I could not hear her. I dimmed the
lights in the house of myself and locked the bedroom doors.
Later, when people asked me what I felt during these sessions, I
answered honestly: “Nothing.”
I don’t refer to any of my experiences in sex work as traumatic because
it is an inexact description, and the assumptions that such a statement
prompts in the minds of others are incorrect. Trauma, especially in the
context of sex work, is associated with victimhood. Unlike many of the
world’s sex workers, I did not have sex work forced upon me by another
person or circumstance. Etymologically, the word trauma originates from
the Greek word for “wound,” and that is typically how we use it today, to
describe both physical and metaphysical wounds. My experiences in sex
work were not wounding per se, though the longitudinal effects that I have
observed in myself do overlap some—in their tenacity and their affect—
with those of people who have been wounded. I have had to think closely
about this because much of how I understand trauma is as an event that
changes a person, or for which a person changes herself, in order to
withstand—an event that redraws the psychic or emotional map in some
lasting way that later proves inhibitive. All of these do describe my
experience with sex work. That starting place, however, that initial
wounding, the connotation of victimization—I can’t align my own
experience with it. I have often wished for a different word, one that implies
profound, often inhibitive, change, but precludes the wound and
victimization inherent in trauma, which has become such a charged and
overused term outside its clinical definition. For now, I will use event, a
word whose etymology suggests consequences rather than wounds. I am not
interested in defining my experiences as wounds so much as in examining
their consequences.
I do imagine that this dimming, this voluntary dissociation, produced a
similar effect on my brain as on those of trauma survivors. In a brain scan
of a patient experiencing this detachment—referred to in extreme cases as
“depersonalization”—the brain is an empty field, marred only by pixelated
blemishes here and there. There is dramatically decreased activity in every
area, and the dissociated person’s thoughts slow like a spoon in thickening
paste. One woman I later interviewed called it “that frozen feeling.” It is
often described as an out-of-body feeling, the sense of a consciousness
detached from the corporeal self, perhaps watching it as one would a figure
in a diorama. Which is exactly why it is so effective as a survival
mechanism. The frozen self doesn’t feel the affect of that self, though it is
recorded in the body. The body, it turns out, is an abacus that never forgets,
even when our memories do.
That detachment only worked for a time. By my third year, I could
hardly stand for my clients to touch me at all. Toward the end of my time in
the job, I remember seeing a regular who used to come for a thirty-minute
session every week or two and ask me to massage his legs for the whole
half hour. Sometimes, with his taut, bristly calves in my hands, I would
startle awake inside myself and fill with a rage so seething I’d have to leave
the room.
I wasn’t thinking of any of this when I went to the cuddle party.
I drove Donika, Mairo, and myself from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side
on a Saturday afternoon. It was springtime. Mairo had agreed to join us,
though she expressed the most emphatic skepticism.
“I mean, who are these people?” she said from the back seat as we
cruised up Third Avenue. “I can’t believe I agreed to this.”
We arrived at the address and were buzzed into what, in the RSVP e-
mail, had been called “Holistic Loft.” At the top of a narrow stairway
slumped rows of discarded shoes. We slid ours off and pushed open the
cracked door. Inside was a crush of people, including a man who took our
names and checked them off a list. “I’m Adam,” he said, and I recognized
him as the founder of Cuddlist. For $25 we had reserved our first-come
first-serve tickets, which had quickly sold out.
A few sock-footed people waited in line for the restroom, and two others
held up a sheet in the small kitchen area while a third person changed into
their pajamas behind it. Having worn our pajamas to the party, we inched
our way through this small hubbub and into the open space of the loft. My
first impression was that it was mostly men, about two-thirds. I suspected
that, as with coed sex parties (of which I’d attended only a couple in my
early twenties, but in whose vicinity I had circulated for years) and many
nightclubs, there was a regular surplus of eager men, and the organizers had
to strategize their appeal to women. I figured that the three of us were a
welcome sight, a hunch confirmed by the stares as we navigated the room.
It made me a little nervous, as if we’d just stepped onto the altar of lonely
men.
The loft had been arranged as an enormous bed, the floor laid with wide
cushions, blankets, pillows, and low couches against the wall. The late-
afternoon light spilled in through two windows on whose sills sat an
assortment of crystals.
The three of us picked our way to a clearing on the floor and carefully
settled. The age range of the group seemed to span from folks in their
twenties through those in their fifties. A young man with a nervous,
handsome face sat nearby, as well as a man and a woman who looked to be
in their thirties and were already cuddling—the woman leaned back against
the man, his arm intimately wrapped around her torso. The sensual nature
of their touch seemed at odds with the tone of the cuddle party, and I
assumed they were a couple. My girlfriend and I had agreed beforehand not
to cuddle with one another—primarily because that seemed to defeat the
purpose of attending the party, and secondarily, because we didn’t want to
risk violating the platonic rule. This couple seemed less conscientious. The
woman wore a skimpy pair of shorts with a T-shirt, despite what the website
and e-mails to attendees had advised: “Sweats are fine, but no shorts or tank
tops, please. Think less lace, more flannel. No lingerie.” When the woman
introduced herself to me, her friendliness seemed both suggestive and
performative. It was her first cuddle party, she said. The swingerish energy
that she and her partner emanated was familiar to me. It reminded me of the
couples I would sometimes see as a domme. Women never came in for
sessions alone, and when couples did, it was almost always the man’s idea.
I leaned away from them.
The nervous young man and I smiled politely at one another and
introduced ourselves. It was his first time as well. Across the floor I saw a
man about my age in a teal onesie—like adult-size footie pajamas—
stroking the arm of a jovial blond woman in fleece pants and a worn T-shirt.
Unlike the couple, they seemed at ease, platonic, regulars to the cuddle
party. A number of men sat awkwardly not talking to anyone. The regulars
were easier to pick out—they chatted and embraced one another, and
cheerfully introduced themselves to the loners. It was a very white space.
There appeared to be even fewer people of color than there were women.
Aside from my companions—both Black women—there seemed fewer than
five other people of color among the thirty or so attendees.
Soon Adam gathered us in a circle that covered the entire perimeter of
the room. He spoke in a warm tone as he reviewed the rules of the cuddle
party. These had been emailed to all attendees prior to the party as follows:
1. Pajamas stay on the whole time.
2. You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a Cuddle Party, ever.
3. You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before you
touch anyone. (Be as specific in your request as you can.)
4. If you’re a yes, say YES. If you’re a no, say NO.
5. If you’re a maybe, say NO.
6. You are encouraged to change your mind.
7. Respect your relationship agreements and communicate with
your partner.
8. Get your Cuddle Party Facilitator or the Cuddle Assistant if you
have a question or concern or need assistance with anything
during the Cuddle Party.
9. Tears and laughter are both welcome.
10. Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties.
11. Keep the Cuddle space tidy
Some of these seemed more obvious, such as “Pajamas stay on at all
times” and “Respect people’s privacy when sharing about Cuddle Parties.”
Others, while comprehensible, were sentiments I’d never seen before, like
“You are encouraged to change your mind.” I had reviewed all of the rules
before deciding to attend and been heartened by the emphasis on consent,
but that emphasis was even more pronounced in practice.
Adam acknowledged how difficult it can be to establish clear boundaries
around touch. Many of us, he said, did not learn how to say no in our
families, or how to differentiate between different kinds of touch. When we
got to rule 3, “You must ask permission and receive a verbal YES before
you touch anyone,” he asked us to turn to a nearby person and perform a
role-play. One person was to ask, “Do you want to cuddle?” The other was
to answer, “No.” The first would then respond, “Thank you for taking care
of yourself.”
The young man and I faced one another.
“Do you want to cuddle?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and my mouth involuntarily stretched into a smile, as if I
needed to soften the refusal. My face grew hot, and I felt myself blinking
quickly. Was it really so hard for me to give an anticipated no? I felt uneasy
in my body, surprised by the strength of my reaction to the exercise.
Next, Adam asked us to repeat the role-play, but this time to ask our
partners, “Can I kiss you?” Kissing is not allowed at the cuddle party, so
this exercise was even more moot than the previous one. Still, I had no
interest whatsoever in kissing the young man, and to feign one, even in this
transparent context, increased my discomfort exponentially. I understood
that to pretend a sexual interest was a greater compromise for me than it
was for him. A woman’s sexual invitation carries implications that felt
dangerous even in this prescribed simulation. My voice croaked when I
asked, and his face flushed when he said no. When he asked me and I
refused him again, my tone was so apologetic that it seemed farcical. I
couldn’t seem to control my affect; like a pinched hose, the words eked out
of me in odd directions. I was relieved when we turned back toward Adam
to continue our study of the rules.
The emphasis on not simply consent but enthusiastic consent was
heartening. I thought of myself as someone fluent in the contemporary
dialogue around consent. But this was the first space outside of a
monogamous relationship that I’d encountered where my own enthusiastic
consent was encouraged and where I was encouraged to change my mind.
BDSM culture similarly emphasizes ongoing enthusiastic consent and
clearly delineated boundaries, but my experience was in the commercial
realm of BDSM; while there had been things I wouldn’t ever do, for the
most part my clients paid for my consent and the illusion of its enthusiasm.
By the time we finished the orientation portion of the cuddle party, I
would have been happy to leave. I had no desire to cuddle with anyone and
felt exhausted by the role-play. A soundtrack of instrumental spa music
played as people crawled around the soft floor and entwined. The man in
the teal onesie crawled over to me. He was handsome, with olive skin and
hazel eyes, and disconcertingly infantilized by the onesie. I had no
particular feeling about him. He was just a man.
“Hi,” he said affably. “Would you like to spoon with me?”
“Sure,” I said. I did not hesitate to assess if I really wanted to spoon with
him. I had no lucid thought about it at all. I simply agreed, and we settled
on the chenille-blanketed floor. He curled around me as the big spoon. I did
not think: I do not want this man’s body curled around me. My uneasiness
did not occur as a thought at all. It was more like a shift in temperature, a
change in the light, a texture inside me that roughened.
“Can I rub your arm?” he asked.
I nodded my assent. I did not think of the cuddle party’s requirement of
verbal consent. His body was warm against mine, and his touch didn’t
wander from my upper arm. I felt the nubs on the sleeve of his onesie rub
against my bare skin. I wondered what my girlfriend was doing, if she was
similarly spooned with some warm stranger, if it felt good to her. I
wondered how long I needed to remain in this position to avoid seeming
rude. To describe the way that I felt as a “maybe” would be generous, but I
did not think of rule 5: “If you’re a maybe, say no.” I did not feel
“encouraged to change my mind.” That is, whatever the culture of the
cuddle party, the culture inside me presented its own dictates. It was not the
warmly lit Holistic Loft of my late thirties. It was a twilit space in which
thoughts moved like half-remembered dreams. It was a hallway with a
closed door at the end. In it, I was half stranger.
“Can I join you guys?” asked a woman’s voice. I looked up to see the
woman from the swingerish couple kneeling over us.
“Fine with me,” sang my big spoon. She didn’t wait for me to answer,
but scooted up behind him. Sandwiched between us, my big spoon sighed
with contentment. I felt his breath on my hair and began to study the
blanket under me, whose lavender fabric looked exhausted. I wondered how
often the bedding was laundered.
When the woman’s hand slipped over his waist and began to stroke
mine, I felt confused. First, about who was touching me, and second, about
why it felt so wrong. She hadn’t asked, I realized. Her touch seemed to
vibrate with the same quality as her voice. There was something unhinged
about her performative openness, the current of sexual suggestion that
flowed from her. I had been such a performer as a younger woman. I knew
that that sort of act was inherently ironic: the actual meaning was the
opposite of what it expressed. The true desires of such performers are
hidden, sometimes even from themselves, and this detachment renders them
unreliable communicators of their own consent and unreliable detectors of
others’. As she touched me, I recognized all of this—not in thoughts, but in
my body’s instinctive revulsion. Then I finally had the thought: I don’t have
to do this.
I broke away, smiling. “I’m going to wander around,” I told them, and
crept into the kitchen. If I could have shaken my entire body to release the
tension that had accumulated, like a dog after a bath, I would have. Instead,
I walked into the small kitchen and grazed from an assortment of silver
bowls that held baby carrots, almonds, and squares of chocolate. I stood
alone in the kitchen area and looked out at the landscape of cuddlers. They
reminded me of the prairie dogs I’d once observed in an exhibit at the
Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which cuddled together in soft clusters, or
stood leaning into one another, seeming always to prefer touching to not
touching.
When Adam warned the group that there were only twenty minutes left,
I took a deep breath. One cuddle was not enough to experience the cuddle
party, was it? My companions looked so contented. Perhaps I had simply
begun with some incompatible partners. I gingerly ventured back onto the
floor and took a seat near the wall. The young man with whom I’d role-
played during the orientation workshop quickly found me and stiffly asked
if I’d like to cuddle. I smiled at him and made a noncommittal sound, as
though a breeze were slipping through a cracked window in me.
“What sort of cuddling?” I asked.
“Like that?” he said, and indicated a pair nearby, entwined face-to-face,
one’s leg thrown over the other’s hip.
The no rung like a gong in me. A ripple of panic followed. “How about
something a little … lighter,” I suggested. As I spoke, I felt my face scrunch
into a grimace, as if I, too, were disappointed that I did not want to entwine
with this stranger.
Despite his obvious nerves, I detected a note of annoyance when he said,
“Like what?”
“Hand-holding?” I offered. I could not control my face.
“How about I massage your shoulders?” he countered.
I nodded. He sat behind me, the heat and tension of his body cast like a
shadow over my back. I tried not to lean away from him. For a few minutes
his hands fumbled inexpertly at my shoulders. I could feel their clamminess
through my cotton shirt. When Adam announced that we should begin
regathering for a closing circle, I pulled away and smiled at my abysmal
masseur.
The attendees slowly crawled into formation, encircling the space,
bodies looser, cheeks aglow, very much as if their hungry skin had been
heartily fed. They leaned together and in some cases remained entangled
even as we all held hands. Adam led us through a brief meditation and
invited people to share a few words about their experience.
“Wonderful!” someone shouted and was answered by gentle laughter.
When the closing circle ended, and Donika returned from the other side
of the room, I wrapped my arms around her waist and burrowed into her
like a child, as if her touch were a corrective that I badly needed.
“Hi, friend,” she said, and kissed my forehead.
The three of us slipped out the door before the rush and found our shoes
in the pile on the landing. As we descended the narrow staircase, a wave of
giddy relief washed over me.
It had grown dark outside. As I drove us back to Brooklyn, the lights of
restaurants and delis on Third Avenue glided over our faces, and I listened
to my companions recount the pleasures of their experience. Mairo had
surprised herself at her readiness to cuddle, and her laughter was shy but
happy as we gently teased her. Donika, too, seemed easy with the success of
her cuddling. She had remained with the same woman for nearly the entire
cuddling portion of the party. Neither she nor Mairo exhibited any trace of
the sticky web of feelings that still ensnared me. As I listened to them and
observed the dramatic difference between our experiences, I grew quieter.
There was something—a touch of shame or embarrassment—that arose in
me.
“That was exactly what I wanted,” said Donika. “How about you,
sweetie?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. I tried to explain the feeling I’d had in that
room. I had only been half cognizant of it in the loft, but even with this
short hindsight it came into focus. The particular combination of
desperation, loneliness, and entitlement that some of the men at the cuddle
party had exuded struck me the way an ex’s perfume on the neck of a
passing stranger can. They were so vulnerable, and there was also a
coldness in them. Desperation can be a profoundly self-centered state. The
desperate do not necessarily see the world and its other people with the easy
detachment of the contented. They have a heightened sense of potential
resources. My past had taught me that the devotion of the needy—which I
had known from both sides—while complete, is not always loving. There
can be a mercenary quality to it.
“It was like being in a room scattered with my clients when I was a
domme,” I told them.
“Except you weren’t getting paid?” said Mairo with a rueful chuckle.
It went deeper than that. They reminded me of my birth father, a career
alcoholic I’d only met in my thirties and who had died shortly after. For the
few months we knew each other, he’d acted as if he wanted to forge an
emotional connection that I had no interest in. I suspect that what he
actually wanted was money.
My friends had also recognized the pitiful quality of men, but it hadn’t
marked their experience at the event. They had simply moved past those
men, who made up a minority of the attendees, and connected with the
people with whom they had wanted to cuddle. Why, I wondered, had I been
so particularly affected by them? I felt unnerved by the cuddle party, and it
wasn’t just those men. It was how powerful my instinct was to give them
what they wanted, as if I didn’t have a choice.
In the dream, there is always a man. He wants to get inside. I know that he
means me harm, but I cannot let him know that I know this. To do so would
provoke him to act in ways against which I will not be able to defend
myself. He stands at the door and poses as a deliveryman, a handyman, a
man with an acceptable motive for standing at my door. Sometimes my dog,
now five years dead, furiously barks at the windows and paces the house’s
interior. It is my mother’s house, dark as a cabin, unremodeled, as it looked
during my childhood. I am friendly. I smile. I play dumb. I must not let him
in. I must not tell him no.
I have had this dream since I was a girl. I had it after the cuddle party. I
had it, mysteriously, every night for most of my twenty-seventh year. I had
it last week. Sometimes it isn’t my mother’s house. Sometimes there is no
house. But always, I must evade the man who means me harm. I must not
reveal my fear. I must not provoke him.
I have never been a victim of home intrusion. I have never been raped. It
is not a reenactment of such a trauma but a preoccupation with the threat of
it, with the problem and necessity of refusing without ever saying no.
Near the end of the cuddle party, a man approached Donika and asked if she
wanted to cuddle. He explained to her that most of the participants at the
cuddle party had rebuffed him. He had thanked them for taking care of
themselves. He was sad at the prospect of leaving with his skin hunger still
so voracious. My girlfriend felt no obligation to him, but she did feel
sympathy. He was desperate, but not entitled. He had come to the place for
cuddling and not been cuddled. She did not want to cuddle with him, but
she asked herself what sort of touch she would be comfortable with, if any.
“We could sit on that bench and hold hands for a bit,” she told him. He
agreed, and so they did. “It was nice,” she told me afterward.
Donika is the kind of person who fast-forwards to the end of the porn
video after her orgasm to make sure that everybody comes. She is deeply
empathic and sensitive to others’ feelings, but I cannot imagine her ever
giving consent to someone with whom she did not want to cuddle. Which is
to say that empathy and accommodation are not synonymous. In fact, I
suspect that the instinct to subsume one’s own desires or comfort for the
desires or comfort of another may ultimately inhibit empathy. Donika’s
impression of the cuddle party was not marked particularly by the
desperation of others because she did not feel threatened by their need. She
said no easily. Also, she was interested in cuddling. Which is all to say that
it wasn’t the cuddle party; it was me.
As we continued our conversation over the days that followed, I came to
understand that my consenting to cuddling that I did not want had been
motivated by not empathy but something else. When the man in the teal
onesie had proposed spooning, my yes had traveled down some well-worn
pathway, sure as a streetcar in its laid track. My body seemed to have
recognized the situation as one in which complacency was the only option.
Its own interests instantly became secondary to this instinct. As the days
passed, I was increasingly shocked by how deftly the mechanisms of
accommodation had engaged. My lights had instantly dimmed. I
remembered staring at the worn blanket as the man had stroked my arm, my
silence as that woman had touched me without asking, the way I’d
bargained with the young man for a massage that I did not want.
I told Donika how I’d grimaced like a frightened dog during the role-
play, when we’d been instructed to say no. What had possessed me to
negotiate with that young man, as if I were obligated to strike a deal in the
exchange of my body? I knew it wasn’t just pity. The world was full of
lonely people to whom I owed nothing. Why had the air of annoyance in his
voice not deterred me? More importantly, why not my own lack of interest?
I was mystified and more than a little unnerved by my response.
“I think we should go back,” she said.
I gave her a stricken look.
“I think we should go back so that you can say no to all of them. With
the express intention of saying no to all of them.”
“Isn’t that sort of rude?” I said. “Like going to a nice restaurant and
ordering just a glass of water?”
“You don’t have to cuddle anyone at a cuddle party, ever,” she reminded
me. “It seems like part of their mission is to help folks practice this sort of
thing.”
I agreed that it was a good idea. But what would prevent me from going
into the same twilit mode of passivity? After I quit my job as a domme, I
had worked hard to recover the feelings I hadn’t felt in those dim hours.
The body’s truth, I’d learned, is indelibly engraved, whether behind a
closed door or in a dark place. What happens in the dark still happens, even
if you can’t see it.
In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explains that
“people can recover from trauma only when the brain structures that were
knocked out during the original experience are fully online.” Anyone who
has conducted successful psychotherapy knows from experience that being
grounded in the present while revisiting the past is fundamental to its
potential for healing, and “opens the possibility of deeply knowing that the
terrible events belong in the past.” The cuddle party had been not a trauma
but a place where some old script had been triggered. If I returned to it, I
would be seeking a kind of therapeutic experience, which would require
that I be more grounded than I was on the first round. For that, I needed
more information. If I wanted to discard that script, I needed to understand
when and why it had been written.
“You were possessed by the patriarchy!” said my friend Ada when I
explained my experience at the cuddle party. “Remember when I was
possessed by the patriarchy?” I did. One afternoon, during an afternoon sex
date with Tim, a corporate lawyer she regularly slept with, he did not have
an orgasm. “I think I’m overstimulated,” he had told her, without any angst,
and then realized that he had to get back to work. Though Tim had always
climaxed during their sex, Ada only did about half the time, which was fine
with her. Nonetheless, in this case she was struck by a sudden
overwhelming insecurity and panic. He had ridden the train all the way to
her home from Midtown, and she had wasted his time! As he dressed to
return to his office, she found herself uncontrollably babbling these
questions aloud and, to her great dismay, weeping.
“I couldn’t stop!” she’d told me. “Somewhere in my brain I still knew
that it had nothing to do with me, that he did find me attractive and that
anyway, who really cared, but still I couldn’t stop. It was literally as though
I were possessed.”
I nodded, now seeing the parallel between our experiences, the way that
our psyches had prioritized the needs of men over our own, contrary to our
actual beliefs and to the reality of our situations.
When Ada told another friend about her episode, the friend had
exclaimed, “You had a patriarchy attack! Like a panic attack or a heart
attack—but a patriarchy attack.”
She shook her head now as we remembered the incident. “Patriarchy
colonizes our brains like a virus,” she said. It was an apt comparison. Like a
virus, patriarchy harms the systems that it infects and relies on replication to
survive. It flourishes in those who are not aware of its presence, and
sometimes even in those actively working to expel it.
Patriarchy is the house in which we all live. It possesses all of Western
culture and industry and has for centuries. But I knew what she meant, the
way that a part of one’s mind that one has worked hard to expunge of
patriarchal values can suddenly regress. Even the most self-actualized
women I know have embedded voices in them still faithful to the power
structures they have long intellectually condemned. Unbidden, they pipe up:
Don’t eat that!
In the broadest terms, yes, I was possessed by the patriarchy. Still, I had
already uninstalled so many of those mechanisms. I no longer hated my
body. I loved my big hands and my passionate nature. Never would I suffer
a stalker as I had in my early twenties, nor even a creepy gawker on the
subway. I didn’t even have sex with men anymore, and hadn’t for years.
Was I still afraid for my reputation? Did I think that all men were
versions of Gus Trenor from The House of Mirth, who believed that “the
man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table,”
and might ruin my life if I rebuffed them? Whatever the mechanism, it
seemed pristinely preserved. To understand it, I had to find the version of
myself that had adopted it wholesale. Perhaps it could be said more
accurately that I was possessed by that younger part of myself. I knew that I
couldn’t go back to the cuddle party and have a different experience unless I
found her first.
It made sense to start with sex work. It was the experience most obviously
evoked by the cuddle party. For more than three years, it had been my
actual job to override my own desire or lack of desire to accommodate the
erotic fantasies of men. It made sense that I would have a powerful aversion
to a room full of men who reminded me of those men, that the neural
pathways seared during that time would so easily crackle to life and
produce their old responses.
But I had gone back and performed the emotional retrieval of those lost
feelings. I’d written an entire book about it. Those years were also the first
in which I’d ever spoken directly about limits and consent. There had been
no written code of conduct, but before every session we’d had a forthright
conversation with our client about what we would and wouldn’t do. There
were safe words. However sex work had conditioned me to override my
own comfort, it had also given me a vocabulary with which to name my
boundaries.
I found myself longing to talk with other former sex workers, so I
reached out to some friends.
“Well, sure,” said Lara, who is also a writer. “You could technically end
a session whenever you wanted, but you weren’t expected to. I mean, did
you ever?”
Lara is a knockout blonde with a devastating wit who worked as a
stripper on and off for most of her twenties. She described once working a
golf tournament as a “bikini girl,” meant to ride around in the gold carts
with the golfers and give them “table dances” out in the blazing sun if they
asked for it. “They didn’t ask for shit,” she told me. “One guy tried to grab
my breast and put it in his mouth. I managed to slip out of his grip and ran
all the way back to the bus. The other strippers just rolled their eyes at me.
They thought I was a moron, because of course I made no money.”
When I asked each of my interviewees if they’d ever consented on the
job to touching that they didn’t want or enjoy, their answers were
unanimous.
“Almost every day that I worked,” said Molly, another longtime friend
I’d first met at the dungeon where we both worked.
“I mean, I never enjoyed sex that I was paid for,” said Brynn, a former
colleague of mine and mother of two. “But I often wanted it because of the
money. And, like anything, sometimes it was more bearable than other
times.”
“Of course,” said Sophie, a Russian immigrant and artist who’d begun
stripping in her teens. “But I wasn’t inside my own body enough to really
hate it.”
They were similarly unanimous about the tools with which it had
equipped them.
“Working as an escort taught me a lot about negotiating consent,”
explained Brynn. “And because as an escort I got used to saying up front
what I would and wouldn’t do for money, I figured out how to say what I
would and wouldn’t do in private sex situations.”
Similarly, Molly said, “I think sex work taught me to negotiate consent,
at least in an explicit way. The layer beneath—when I say yes, but perhaps
there are unspoken footnotes—is difficult to unpack.”
None of their answers gave me new insight into why I’d reacted so
powerfully to the predicament of the cuddle party. It wasn’t until I asked if
they’d ever consented to touch that they didn’t want or felt ambivalent
about before they’d become sex workers that something bloomed in my
mind.
“All the time,” said Brynn. “I thought that’s what I was there for. I had
no idea that I had any other worth besides what pleasure I could provide for
men and boys … I was very confused for a long time about who my body
belonged to. So during the years of fifteen to twentyish, if someone wanted
my body I tended to give it to them. I didn’t want or enjoy sex until I was
about fifteen, and at that point I’d been having it for about three years. I
didn’t even realize girls were supposed to, or could, enjoy sex!”
Molly added, “I think I always had a disconnect between desire for touch
and the negotiation of what that touch would mean. I had sex for many
reasons, but physical desire was, at that time, rarely one of them.”
“On a very basic level I feared not pleasing,” explained Sophie.
“I honestly think ambivalence was as good as it ever got for me sexually
until I was like twenty-three or so, and I had sex a lot—beginning at age
sixteen,” said Lara with a shrug.
The stories of these former sex workers, if anything, made a case against
sex work increasing the likelihood of their consenting to touch they didn’t
want. I wondered more about the other factors they shared that might have
primed them for what I began to think of as “empty” consent. I decided to
survey some women who had not ever participated in the sex industry. I
designed the survey with my own experience in mind. I offered it to friends
and friends of friends. In the end, I looked at thirty responses. Mostly, the
respondents were women in their thirties and forties, educated, and middle-
class. Half of them identified as white, and half of them as Black, Latinx,
Indigenous, or multi-racial. They were, of course, a self-selecting group.
I was not prepared for the experience of reading these surveys. They were
often lengthy, detailed accounts—entire lives punctuated by unwanted
touch. Many of the women wrote at the end of the survey that they had
never articulated the events therein to anyone, sometimes including
themselves. Even if you didn’t read this, they said, I’d be glad I got to write
it. They hadn’t known how much they’d had to say until someone asked.
However excoriating the reading experience, I was immediately glad that I
had.
I opened the survey by asking if they had ever experienced nonconsensual
touch. All of them had, from rape to the groping of strangers in public to
creepy hugs from their bosses to “the Quaker rub,” as one subject’s fellow
congregation members privately referred to a common aspect of their
hugging tradition.
“From my twenties until my early thirties (when I married), being
touched without consent was honestly just part of ‘being a woman,’ ”
explained one. “It happened all the time. My job as a woman was to roll my
eyes or laugh and move on. I am certain there are many, many incidents I
have buried. When the #MeToo movement hit social media, my first
thought was ‘I can’t believe I know so many women who have been
assaulted.’ But when I did a personal inventory, it was a revelation. I was
physically assaulted/touched/manipulated on several occasions every year
for nearly two decades.”
We know this, don’t we? At least how common sexual assault is—about
one in four women—but I’ve not found the research on how often we are
touched by men without our consent, from childhood: belly and cheek
pinches, shoulder squeezes, hands on thighs, unwelcome hugs, the hand of a
passing stranger in a bar grazing our back. Really, one need look no further
to understand why a woman would be “very confused about who her body
belonged to.” Or even why she would consent to being cuddled by a
stranger. We are socialized from birth not to reject the hands of others,
except in the rare case that they emerge from a suspicious van holding a
lollypop. It is perfect training for a lifetime of consenting to touch one
doesn’t want. It is one thing to yell at a man whispering obscenities outside
your window at midnight and another to reject a form of touch you’ve
tolerated since infancy. How do we even learn to recognize it?
“I guess you could say that losing my virginity qualifies as a moment
when I consented to [sexual] touching that I felt ambivalent about,” said
Ella, when I asked if she’d ever given empty consent.
“Hmmm, every time I’ve had sex? Literally. Every sexual encounter,
there has always been an element of ambivalence,” said Holly.
“Oh honey, lord yes,” said Allison.
Every single one of them had, often for decades, some for their whole
lives.
Derek and I were both twelve, our bodies simmering with new hormones.
We had known each other since elementary school. Sometimes on the
weekends I’d walk over to his house—a small Cape Cod with red trim—
and we would kiss on the floor of his bedroom amid the lacrosse pads and
video-game controllers. This would never have flown in my own house, but
Derek’s mother was not so vigilant as mine. His older sister, a senior in high
school, had just given birth to her first baby. His older brother, Pat, a junior,
was more handsome than Derek in a cruel sort of way, and though he had
never before acknowledged me, I had a crush on him.
One afternoon, as Derek and I shared a bag of chips in his kitchen, Pat
arrived home with a handful of friends, one of whom I recognized as the
boyfriend of a neighbor of mine. These boys were loud and brash, and it
wasn’t possible to tease apart the allure and threat of them. When Pat’s eyes
alit on me for the first time, my mind jittered. I was old enough to recognize
that he was showing off for his friends, that they all were, and I felt the
careening wildness of that instinct, like a bike with an uncertain wheel.
When Pat asked me to step into the bathroom with them, and I saw the look
on Derek’s face—Don’t, it said—I couldn’t stop. I might have stood on the
deck of a departing ship and he the shore.
By twelve, I already knew the threat of being alone with a group of boys.
As they circled me, my heart sped and my body twitched. I don’t think they
had a plan or any particular intention to harm me. They had probably
expected me to decline. Now there was a crackling blue energy between
them that my presence kindled. I think we all felt its heat, what was
suddenly possible. When Pat asked me which one of them I liked best, I did
not say him, despite my crush, because there was a hardness that I sensed
more palpably in him than in the rest, a curiosity in his own strength and an
eagerness to test it. Now that they’d finally seen me, his eyes were flat as an
animal’s, or maybe as those of a boy who’d caught one.
I named my neighbor’s boyfriend, likely out of some instinct that his
loyalty to her might offer me some incidental protection. Were the rest
relieved or disappointed when they filed out of that dark bathroom? Both, it
seemed.
It was different to kiss someone so much larger than me, so unknown to
me. He shoved his fingers past the waist of my jeans, then inside me. Then
he pushed down on my shoulder, just firmly enough to indicate what he
wanted. I demurred as softly as I could, indicating that they were all just
outside the door. I came as close to no as I could without saying it. To my
great relief, he accepted a hand job instead. I don’t remember anything
about the act or his penis, but I remember the pattern of the hand towel that
hung behind him: blue flowers.
I don’t remember the embarrassment of exiting that bathroom. I don’t
remember anything else about that day. What I remember is that I never
again met Derek—a friend I had sort of loved—at his house after school. I
remember how our close mutual friend, a big gentle boy I adored, said,
“Derek told me what happened on Saturday.” I will never forget the look on
his face—part disgust, part hurt. He never looked at me the same again.
Early in my relationship with Donika, after I’d shared with her some of my
first sexual experiences with boys and men, she commented that they
sounded somewhat traumatic.
“No,” I said quickly. “It was completely consensual.”
She made a skeptical noise. “Even when it’s technically consensual, if
there’s a big power differential—”
I shook my head. I knew women who had experienced sexual trauma,
and what I had experienced did not compare to what they had survived. I
would not even consider it.
Now, looking back at that afternoon, I consider the empty fields of those
brain scans, the memory of blue flowers, my disembodied thoughts rising
like a balloon to the ceiling of Tiffany’s closet, the green glowed stars of
leaves above as the boy who spat on me finally kissed me. These, once
again, were events—not assaults, not victimizations, but not what I would
call a healthy sexual experimentation. That is, experiences that separated
rather than integrated. I want to say that they were not “normal”
experiences, but unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons we have no
language to distinguish them is that such experiences are quite normal.
Given how much nonconsensual touch the women I surveyed experienced
through their whole lives, I was not surprised to see how often they
described empty consenting because they feared something worse. Often
they negotiated a lesser act than the one a man wanted. One woman, after
being twice digitally penetrated without her consent by a man after a date,
said she told him to “slow down again and then thought I’m going to have
to get out of my apartment somehow. He was big. I was scared. I asked if I
could get us glasses of water, we drank them, and then I basically walked
out the door and into the street.” I might have used that very tactic in one of
my recurrent nightmares.
Sarah, a thirty-four-year-old writer, described an incident during a
college semester abroad in Paris. After being groped so forcefully by a
fellow American student in a cab on the way back to her dorm that she felt
almost certain the boy would rape her if she declined, she agreed to go back
to his room. “I decided going along with it was far preferable to voicing my
opposition and risking his decision to assault me … Even the slight chance
(and it didn’t seem slight) that he wouldn’t listen to my ‘no’ made me want
to withhold it. It was my last opportunity to salvage any power, to decide
what would happen and what it would mean.” Afterward, she told her
boyfriend back home that she’d “slept with someone,” a telling that “broke
his heart and blew up our relationship. I didn’t explain how it had
happened, the calculations I’d made. I didn’t understand them then.”
“I would almost say this has always been the reason behind my
consenting to unwanted touching,” said Rita. “It always felt easier to just do
what they wanted me to do, rather than risk losing that fight.”
Lara described “one really violent gangster who basically wanted to
choke me whenever we had sex. I didn’t dare to stand up to him because it
would not have broken my way. He would have kicked my ass.”
“It was just easier to have sex with them than to explain to them that I
didn’t want to or to make them angry,” said Charlotte.
In the years that followed that incident in the bathroom, I sometimes saw
my neighbor’s boyfriend. A few years later our social circles overlapped a
bit, and we were sometimes at the same parties and a few times in the same
car. Each time, I wondered if he remembered. (Of course he did.) Whenever
I saw him, I felt deeply embarrassed, not only for myself and what I’d
consented to but also somehow for him, because I knew he’d done wrong.
Rather, it was that his wrongs—both in pressuring me and in cheating on
his girlfriend—somehow embarrassed me, as if it were rude of me to even
know of it. I certainly never spoke of it to anyone. These are the first words
I’ve ever put to the experience.
Not speaking of a subject can turn it into a secret. Secrets, if initially a
source of power to their keepers, often transmute into a source of shame
over time. If you act as though a happening is unspeakable, then you begin
to think of it as such. A year of threatening phone calls and obscene
gestures, for instance. A classmate who spies on you and your girlfriend.
The stranger who whispers dirty talk outside your bedroom window. Your
hatred of your own body. What is more unspeakable than the terrible? The
grotesque? The shameful? One of the dictionary definitions of the word
unspeakable is “too bad or horrific to express in words.”
Here, I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage
empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of
men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their
own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame,
our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.
After describing the incident during her semester in Paris, Sarah
explained, “There was real shame in making a man feel bad about himself
because he’d done something bad. It was somehow embarrassing to all
involved, and God forbid.” Like me, Sarah consented to acts she did not
want in order to avoid a worse trauma. Then she absorbed the consequences
of that man’s actions—both in her social life and in her own psyche.
In her early twenties, when Jessica Valenti woke up to find the man she was
dating on top of her, she knew it was not okay for him to have sex with her
while she was passed out drunk. “I don’t know if I said Don’t do this,” she
writes in her memoir Sex Object, “or if I said That’s nice, or if I said
nothing, which seems the likely possibility given my state.” The next day,
when she woke, still drunk, she said, “You’re not supposed to have sex with
someone who is passed out,” but she made it into a joke, and then “he
smiled and promised me he ate me out first.”
“I have never called this assault,” she explains. “I’m not really sure why.
As a feminist writer I’ve encouraged others to name the thing that happened
to them so our stories can be laid bare in a way that is inescapable and
impossible to argue with. And I realize, and I realized then, that by
definition penetrating someone while they are unconscious—even if you’ve
had sex before with this person—is rape. I just have never wanted to call it
that.”
Reading her story, I thought of Donika describing my early sexual
experiences as traumatic and my resistance to that definition. By contrast,
Valenti asserts that her rape “did not have a lasting impact on me, and about
that I feel … strange.” Whereas my experiences did have a lasting impact,
but did not in my assessment ever qualify as assault, her experience
qualified as assault but did not produce the lasting symptoms of trauma.
Neither of us want to use those words partly, it seems, because the two are
so entwined: sexual assault (or rape) and trauma.
“I believed in boundaries—could even set boundaries,” memoirist
Jeannie Vanasco writes in her second book, Things We Didn’t Talk About
When I Was a Girl. “The problem: in the moment, I found it hard to
articulate what those boundaries were—because doing so might embarrass
the man.” Vanasco experienced both what she understood as a technical
assault and the longitudinal symptoms of trauma, and still found it hard to
hold her perpetrator accountable. She decided to write Things We Didn’t
Talk About When I Was a Girl in part because she wanted “to show what
nice guys are capable of.” In her early thirties she decided to get in touch
with her former best friend, the man who sexually assaulted her when they
were both nineteen. They subsequently shared a series of long phone
conversations that Vanasco recorded, and sections of which appear verbatim
in the memoir.
“I told myself, Don’t reassure him—and then I reassured him,” she
writes. In the first phone call, she tells him, “I want to write about it, but I
don’t want to write it in a way that would be hurtful to you. That’s why I
reached out. So that I could explain, so that you would understand my
intentions.” Afterward Vanasco is shocked at these words, which are both
impossible and untrue. It is as if, in his presence—the presence of his voice
alone—she gets possessed by the same aspect of her that during the assault
“didn’t stop Mark partly because I didn’t want to embarrass him.”
It is impossible to read Vanasco’s account and not recall my negotiations
with men at the cuddle party, my uncontrollably grimacing face, my
inability to say no.
During almost every single conversation Vanasco reassures the man who
assaulted her, thanks him, apologizes, and minimizes the ongoing effects of
the trauma on her. She admits feeling “more concerned about the reader’s
impressions of [him] than … about sharing [her] own memories of the
assault.” At one point she considers researching sliding-scale therapists in
his area and actually calling them to ask if they would consider seeing a
perpetrator of sexual assault. Her ongoing frustration with this dynamic is
the primary source of tension in the book, and it was equally fascinating
and frustrating to me as a reader. Why won’t she just stop? I thought, with
mounting frustration. Eventually she does, but only after performing
exhaustive vivisections of their interactions with the help of her own
research, friends, and her therapist.
My recurring dream, then, is a perfect enactment of this dynamic: to protect
ourselves, we must protect them, devise a way to avoid ever rejecting them,
ever forcing them to confront their own wrongs. Our bodies are often the
only currency we have in this effort. It is not a matter of how to avoid
compromising ourselves, but how to mitigate that compromise. Our bind is
not double, like a Chinese finger trap (the German name for which,
Mädchenfänger, translates to “girl catcher”); it is more decuple than double,
or unquantifiable n-tuple. It radiates in multiple directions, forms a complex
web of conflicting instructions and according punishments for failing to
follow them.
We shouldn’t be sluts, we shouldn’t be prudes, we shouldn’t say no
because they might rape us, because we might embarrass them with our no
or by holding them responsible for their actions or even by remembering
what wrongs they did us. Perhaps the most powerful encouragement for
empty consent is that saying no isn’t nice. Women friends of mine who
identify as feminists convulse with apology when they decline an invitation
from a friend, so I suppose it’s no wonder that when it comes to sex, as
Jenny put it, “It would have made me extremely anxious to set that
boundary when it was clearly in conflict with what they wanted. It was less
stressful somehow to just do what they wanted.”
Here is the distinction between giving empty consent for physical safety
and giving it for emotional relief. Jenny describes the latter. That is, it was
preferable to tolerate sex she didn’t want than to tolerate the displeasure of
men. One woman I surveyed described being groped, in her forties, by an
elderly man in an adjoining seat at the opera. She said nothing because she
didn’t want to “make a scene or disturb the performance.”
“I felt I was ‘supposed to,’ ” said Kate. “That I shouldn’t let men down
… but also somehow I owed it to society?”
The tinge of astonishment in Kate’s articulation of this motive is born of
a set of values with which both she and I have been raised: that sex and
romance are key aspects of our self-actualization, not our dues to society.
These values are a result of late capitalism and relatively recent social
movements. Sex and “love” were dues we owed to society for much, much
longer than they have been voluntary routes to our own fulfillment.
In ancient Roman weddings, the vows would be taken between the
husband and the bride’s father. A woman was traded like chattel for her
value, for breeding purposes, for an alliance between two families, not ever
for her own fulfillment. It wasn’t until a thousand years after Christ’s birth
that a pope decreed that the bride ought to be the one who said, “I do.” Still,
not until the late eighteenth century were young people, rather than their
families, permitted to choose their own spouses.
Western white people often relish their horror at those cultures whose
languages do not have a word for rape, or whose laws do not distinguish
between rape and adultery, or those who marry their young girls to adult
men. They conveniently forget that during the formation of the United
States, “Nearly every state legislature enacted laws that shielded husbands
from criminal punishment for raping their wives, and sometimes even their
girlfriends.” Remember, too, that rape was not even a crime if perpetrated
by a white man against a woman who wasn’t white.
In 1993, North Carolina was the last state to rescind the marital rape
exemption—that is, “Conceptually and legally, wives’ sexuality and sexual
independence bundled within the ambit of property rights conferred to
husbands.” This standard was derived from British law, articulated in the
1736 treatise by Sir Matthew Hale, in which “Hale proclaimed that a
‘husband cannot be guilty of rape’ because marriage conveys unconditional
consent, whereby wives have entered a binding contract and ‘hath given up
herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.’ ”
In light of this history, the entire concept of enthusiastic consent is
revealed as a radical new idea. The women I surveyed were profoundly
burdened, as we all are, by the legacy of this history—barely even in our
legal rearview. “Consent wasn’t something I was taught about,” said Ella.
“Boundaries weren’t something we discussed in sex ed. I thought that if I
let a boy take my pants off, that meant I had consented to whatever he
wanted to do when my pants were off.”
It’s no wonder that I encountered so many descriptions of dissociation or
“freezing,” my own preferred mechanism for tolerating any kind of
touching I did not want and felt obligated to.
“I can say yes when I’m frozen, and it’s not a true yes,” clarified Diana.
“It’s not really consensual if I’m not feeling sensual. It’s just easier than
saying no.” Or, as Holly explained, “It’s almost like I forget that I exist and
that I get to not do things I don’t want to do. Now I remember sooner than
later it’s not true. Maybe one day I’ll remember before I forget.” If
neurologists and psychologists conducted a study of women who had given
empty consent, how many symptoms would they identify that we
commonly associate with trauma?
Reading these descriptions, I empathized with Kate, who hopes “that if I
were ever in a situation akin to what I experienced in middle school that I
would unfreeze and just scream ‘Fucking stop it, motherfucker!’ to the guy
and slam a book on his hand or something. Because I don’t ever want to
freeze up like that again.” I wish I could tell her that it would be likely, but
after my experience at the cuddle party, I’m not so sure.
For her 2016 book Girls and Sex, Peggy Orenstein interviewed over
seventy young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Her
demographic was similar to those I surveyed: most were college-bound or
college students, and they were racially diverse, though a majority
identified as white. She “specifically wanted to talk to those who felt they
had all the options open to them, the ones who had most benefited from
women’s economic and political progress.” That is, her subjects were this
latest generation’s version of the women I surveyed, at the ages most of
them referred to.
“Sometimes,” a freshman at a small West Coast college told Orenstein,
“a girl will give a guy a blow job at the end of the night because she doesn’t
want to have sex with him and he expects to be satisfied. So if I want him to
leave and I don’t want anything to happen …” Every part of her statement
rings familiar, from the assumption that a young man will expect to be
sexually satisfied to that of it being her obligation to the implication that a
blow job “isn’t anything,” or that “anything” might include assault.
In a 2007 study on oral sex among ninth- and tenth-graders, researchers
found that the overwhelming majority of young men engaged in oral sex for
their own physical pleasure and were twice as likely as girls to report
feeling good about themselves after oral sex. Girls, meanwhile, were three
times more likely to say that they felt used.
Deborah Tolman at Hunter College, one of the foremost researchers on
girls’ sexuality, has stated that recently girls have begun answering
“questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or
arousal—by describing how they think they look.”
Sarah McClelland, who coined the term intimate justice, found that
among the college students she studied, “women tended to use their
partner’s physical pleasure as a yardstick of their satisfaction … For men it
was the opposite: the measure was their own orgasm.”
In light of those units of measurement, it seems generous that women at
every age orgasm 29 percent of the time that they have sex with men, while
men orgasm three-quarters of the time. In the same way, it seems unlikely
that, as a 2002 longitudinal study on adolescent sexuality found, girls were
only four times more likely to engage “repeatedly in sexual activities that
they disliked.”
These younger women have undeniably benefited in myriad ways from
women’s economic and political progress—the evidence is clear in their
educational and professional success, their access to resources and
protections. Their relationships to sex, however, seem as troubling as ever.
For all the sexual liberation they purport to embody, they seem as far as
ever from the truths of their own bodies, their own desires, their sexuality as
it exists independent of the perceptions and desires of men.
While reading about these girls measuring their own satisfaction by their
partner’s pleasure, I was reminded of the two years that I spent in a
particularly controlling relationship. After just a few months of dating that
girlfriend, when my friends, family, or therapist asked how I was, I would
reliably respond by saying how I perceived my girlfriend’s disposition
toward me that day, how likely it was that I had upset her in some
unforeseen way. It is the shared technique of abusive partners, corporations,
cult leaders, despotic governments, and many who benefit from unequal
power structures and wish to continue benefiting from them: to convince
the disempowered to identify with the needs of the powerful instead of their
own.
Here again we meet the problem of diction, its suggestion of definitive
boundaries between experiences and conditions, between the self and
cultural impositions. When the dynamics of abuse underlie all of
heterosexuality’s conventions, even consensual interactions share trauma-
related effects. A girl can experience or reinforce harmful symptomatic
consequences as a result of a sexual experience without having been
victimized by her partner, without the experience qualifying as a trauma. I
suspect that the task of undoing those abusive dynamics depends upon a
more common acknowledgment of these consequences and a vocabulary for
talking about them. Without it, terms like abuse and trauma get overused
and misapplied, while other profound forms of psychological affect get
overlooked completely.
One night in my early teens, I consented to a half-wanted sexual tumble
with an older boy named Matt. As we kissed, he asked me to stroke his hair.
When I did, he began to cry, and whispered that I felt simultaneously like
his mother, his sister, and his lover. I murmured encouragingly, though
inside I felt panicked and desperate to extricate myself. That he imposed the
bizarre intimacy of this on me felt more intrusive than any sexual act I
might have ambivalently consented to. To be alone in a one-way exchange
of intimacy is sometimes a devastatingly lonely place. It has never been
expected that a man ask a woman’s consent before using her emotionally.
In Catherine Lacey’s 2017 novel The Answers, a celebrity actor devises a
pseudoscientific vanity project called the Girlfriend Experiment (GX),
which “assigns the roles fulfilled by a life partner to a team of specialized
team members to enact Relational Experiments.” The celebrity has an
Intimacy Team, an Anger Girlfriend, a Maternal Girlfriend, a Mundane
Girlfriend, and an Emotional Girlfriend, each with her highly specified
duties. The alleged goal of the GX is “to devise a scientifically proven
system for making human pair bonding behavior more perfect and
satisfying.”
Much of the book follows Mary, the woman hired as the celebrity’s
Emotional Girlfriend after a rigorous interview process that includes
repeating phrases such as “How was your day?” and “I love you” into a
camera. Mary suffers from a debilitating and undiagnosed illness, the
abatement of which depends on her completion of a series of healing
sessions—sessions that, without the generous salary of the GX, she would
be unable to afford.
As the Emotional Girlfriend, her duties include “listening to [the
celebrity] talk while remaining fully engaged by asking questions,
maintaining eye contact, affirming his opinions, and offering limited advice
or guidance that may or may not be entertained.” Every aspect of her
behavior is dictated by the GX handbook, from how often she is expected to
text the celebrity to, eventually, how long she should spoon with him before
falling asleep in one of the prescribed positions.
Mary’s healer continuously asks if she is dating anyone. He expresses
concern about what he calls “psychic cords.”
“They’re fixations,” he tells her. “Psychic energy that one person directs
toward another, often in a nonconsensual manner.’ ” He explains that such
cords can inhibit the effectiveness of his treatments. Mary denies that she is
dating anyone, which is technically true, but omits her work for the GX.
Eventually the healer refuses to continue seeing her.
It is, in some ways, a dystopian novel, though while reading it, I had the
cynical thought that at least the emotional labors so often required of
women in heterosexual relationships were acknowledged as such in the GX.
Not only was the work of attending to this man remunerated, but it was also
divided by category, a division of labor that seemed fairer and more feasible
than expecting one woman to do all of it for free. During fleeting casual
sexual encounters, women and girls are expected to place a man’s physical
and emotional interests above their own, to assume responsibility for
ensuring that they are met. But in committed relationships, they are often
expected to do this every minute of their lives.
The supposition of contemporary romantic partnerships that my
demographic subscribes to is that the work is mutual, shared, as are the
rewards of that work. Over the course of my adult life, I have had a number
of long-term relationships with both men and women, and in those
relationships with men, the work was never mutual. Not even close. In fact,
when I was in relationships with men, it felt like I became possessed
gradually but inexorably by an increasing amount of domestic and
emotional labor—the laundry, the cooking, the cleaning, the initiation of
hard conversations—until, in one case, the sum total of the emotional and
domestic labor in the relationship was my responsibility.
As a queer woman, I suspect that I have spent less time around men as
an adult than most straight women my age, and a lot less time catering to
them. Nonetheless, with the hours I have spent listening to men, “while
remaining fully engaged by asking questions, maintaining eye contact,
affirming [their] opinions, and offering limited advice or guidance that may
or may not be entertained,” I could have written many more books. If I had
been paid for that labor, I would not be concerned about my eventual
retirement.
However perverse the premise of the GX, it is built on solid logic, on the
idea that a woman cannot simultaneously fulfill all of these forms of labor
successfully. It would simply be too exhausting.
I wasn’t at all surprised by how many of the women I surveyed regularly
gave empty consent to their primary partners. This is a well-known facet of
many long-term romantic partnerships. It is not simply the vestige of legally
owing sex to our spouses, but a symptom of genuinely caring for our
partners and their needs, as well as a route to emotional intimacy.
One woman I surveyed, who has a clinical practice as a psychotherapist,
described how the exhaustion of being available to her patients all day
affected her interest in intimacy with her partner. “The reality is that I am
pretty much never in the mood to be physically close Monday through
Friday,” she said. “I love my partner, and I am super attracted to him, and I
love having sex with him … but I feel so spent emotionally, like I have
worked so hard to be intimately connected to people while also having
boundaries around myself, and I feel done and like I need space and time.”
She regularly consents to sex despite feeling this way, though in doing so,
she often feels “more connected.” Though her consent is empty, she
explained that, after sex, “I come back to myself and my body. I feel loved
and cared for and able to be more alive in myself. Ironically, it probably
makes me more alive in my mind as well, and therefore more available to
my work.”
I think of Mary, how the labor she performs as the Emotional Girlfriend
renders her physically unavailable for the healing her body desperately
needs. Is it the emotional exhaustion? Or is it the dissociation of performing
that labor with someone she does not love, as I did, massaging my client’s
legs? Likely, it would be both. Regardless, the lesson of the book is clear:
we cannot ignore our body’s truth and heal its wounds. Attending to the
body without an investment in self-prioritization, in listening to the self, is
like cleaning a wound with one hand while smearing dirt in it with the
other.
When I read about Harry Harlow’s experiments, I considered the obvious
analogy between the rhesus monkeys that he tortured and the touch-
deprived humans who were the impetus for the cuddle party. I wonder now
if the more apt comparison is between Harlow himself and the people who
prioritize their own desires—perhaps even their own curiosity—over the
sovereignty and comfort of other bodies. The common denominator seems
to be the dehumanization of the subjugated. It seems unlikely that Harlow
would have replicated the tortures of these experiments if his subjects were
human infants—at least until I consider the ongoing imprisonment and
isolation of migrant children, some of whom may never be reunited with
their parents by the US government. Isolation and touch deprivation have,
of course, long been the purview of colonizers and abusers of all stripes. It
is much easier to dominate a body that has learned from infancy that it has
no sovereignty.
In the late eighteenth century, English philosopher and social theorist
Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, a prison model that features a
windowed tower in the center of a circular structure made up of cells. The
watchman in the tower can’t possibly surveille all of the prisoners all of the
time, but the prisoners become conditioned by the ceaseless possibility of
being watched. They internalize the eye of the watchman and so learn to
discipline their own bodies. In his widely read Discipline and Punish,
Michel Foucault argues that the development of modern political systems,
while increasing certain freedoms, also brings a new system of disciplines
that the state enacts upon the bodies of its constituents. The Panopticon, he
claims, has informed much more than the design of modern prisons.
Foucault sees corollary disciplinary practices at work in the modern school,
army, hospital, factory, and any institutions that serve the state.
“All that is needed,” explains Foucault, “is to place a supervisor in a
central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned
man, a worker, or a schoolboy.” The body that does not comply suffers
immediate sanctions, and soon the supervisor resides in the minds and
bodies of the surveilled. “What was then being formed,” writes Foucault,
“was a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation
of its elements, its gestures, its behavior … It defined how one may have a
hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes, but
so that they may operate as one wishes … Thus, discipline produces
subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.”
The disciplined bodies in Foucault, like the baby in Lacan’s “The Mirror
Stage,” are gendered male and therefore assumed universal. But if a docile
body is created vis-à-vis ceaseless performance for an imagined supervisor,
then consider, as Judith Butler puts it, how “gender reality is created
through sustained social performances.” The manner in which we are
compelled to perform for the state is not universal. What bodies are more
docile, more reflexively policed, than women’s? Not even those of children,
I suspect.
In her 1988 essay “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
Patriarchal Power,” Sandra Lee Bartky writes: “In contemporary patriarchal
culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of
most women: they stand perpetually before his gaze and under his
judgement. Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous
patriarchal Other.” This is yet another description of what film critic Laura
Mulvey coined “the male gaze” and what John Berger referred to when
describing the dual consciousness of women in Ways of Seeing as “the
surveyor and the surveyed.” It is an integral part of the mechanism that
induced my own bifurcated self-image at eleven years old, at fourteen, at
twenty-three.
The patriarchal Other polices our bodies from birth with the same
“micro-physics of power” that Foucault describes in Discipline and Punish.
The supposition is that female bodies, like prisoners’ bodies, are defined by
their violation of rule. Instead of criminal, women’s bodies are inherently
defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost
solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall,
too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding,
too assertive, too weak, or too strong. Our faces must be disguised and
modified with makeup and corsets and clothing. All of our body hair must
be removed. Aging, whose wrinkles and gray hair depict men as
increasingly powerful, is something we must “reverse” and “fight” by
smoothing solutions onto our faces using a circular motion and paying
exorbitant prices for elective surgeries. We must show our “good side,”
protrude our lips, raise our eyebrows, “smize,” suck in our cheeks, and tilt
our chins down. As I stand in front of the mirror in the women’s bathroom
at the college where I teach, one in a line of poised faces whose eyes meet
those of their reflections, I think: if only Foucault could have seen the
astonishing influence of social media, that coup of panoptical technology.
Now we are never not posing, never not posting the evidence of our well-
disciplined bodies.
I know all of this. I have known it since girlhood. I knew it when I began
shaving my legs at eleven years old, the same year that I smuggled secret
makeup in my backpack to apply in the middle school bathroom. I have
been living and reconciling this bifurcation for most of my life. With great
effort I have reconciled it in some areas: the realm of my body, sexual
interaction, my intimate relationships. What I have not examined as
carefully is how this lifelong discipline has also conditioned my every
interaction with men.
What we are taught as a practice of beauty, of femininity, is also a
practice of submission. A trans woman friend of mine recently explained to
me how the technique for training your voice to sound more feminine has a
lot to do “with speaking less or asking more questions or deferring to other
people more.” We must not exhibit creases in our faces that indicate any
critical emotion, because we should not express any critical emotion.
Remember: women have been burned to death for as much. We must
constantly grimace like cowed dogs, make ourselves ever smaller and more
childlike, while dribbling a constant stream of apology. It is not a
coincidence that the apex of feminine beauty is nearly identical to that of
physical powerlessness.
“Women’s typical body language,” explains Bartky, “is understood to be
the language of subordination when it is enacted by men in male status
hierarchies.” Indeed, men whose gestures and body language are interpreted
as “feminine” know better than anyone how such presentation inspires
discipline and domination by other men.
While the disciplining force of the state in a prison or a school or an
army is clear—at least in conception—and is enforced by designated prison
guards, generals, and teachers, the panoptical agents that coerce women’s
bodies are largely anonymous. “The absence of formal institutional
structure and of authorities invested with the power to carry out institutional
directives creates the impression that the production of femininity is either
entirely voluntary or natural,” writes Bartky. We are expressing ourselves
with makeup. We like to shave our legs because it makes us feel feminine.
We dress for ourselves and for other women. It isn’t that these things are
never true, or that there aren’t plenty of other compelling reasons, only that
they exist alongside internalized directives. The call is coming from inside
the house. That is, patriarchal coercion is a ghost. A specter that possessed
me as a girl and possesses me still, that squeezes a yes out of my mouth
when my body tells me no.
In 2014, California was the first state to pass affirmative consent standards
for colleges to apply to sexual assault cases. Illinois, New York, and
Connecticut followed, and more than twenty others have legislation under
consideration. The shared definition of affirmative consent guidelines is
strikingly similar to the code of conduct for the cuddle party: consent
should be ongoing; should apply to each progressive act; can be rescinded
at any time; cannot be given if a person is incapacitated or under coercion,
intimidation, or force. The school where I teach employs exactly such an
affirmative consent policy for cases of sexual misconduct.
The consensus among those who oppose a “Yes means yes” policy
around sexual assault is “That’s not how sex happens.” When I first read of
it, I felt a twinge of the same reaction. Like all of us, I’d been well schooled
by capitalism and patriarchy in all the things that sex was, and the
conditions of affirmative consent were not among them. Also, because
that’s not how sex happens, especially among young people. It represents a
radical departure from how sex happens. The idea is that sex is driven
spontaneously by desire. And so it is—by the spontaneous desire of men
and boys.
The rules that governed sexual assault before affirmative consent—“No
means no” policy—are strikingly similar to those that once governed a
woman or girl’s consent to marriage. According to the Roman Digest, “A
daughter who does not openly resist her father’s wishes is assumed to have
consented.” Of course, back then, a woman would have had to openly defy
the wishes of her family, her potential groom, indeed her society at large.
Sexual consent is no different, according to the women I surveyed.
The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that anyone realistically
expects young women to easily say no to anything, least of all the sexual
desires of men. If I struggle to say no to a lunch invitation, a work request,
any number of less fraught entreaties, when I have some pressing personal
reason, how can a teenager be expected to stop a man’s hand as it reaches
under her clothes? Some do, of course, which seems miraculous.
It would be awkward, detractors of affirmative consent laws cry. As if
having sex you don’t want is not awkward. As if interrupting a man whose
spontaneous desire is prompting him to remove your clothes or penetrate
you is not awkward for women who have spent their entire lives being
socialized not to upset or disappoint people. The only thing that renders the
awkwardness of affirmative consent greater any of these awkwardnesses is
that the onus of it does not rest entirely on the shoulders of the most
vulnerable.
There is an enormous difference between touch that feels bad and touch that
is forced upon us. Still, the psychic mechanisms that deploy to help us
tolerate acts to which we have given empty consent are often the same ones
used during assault.
I recently read an essay by a woman who’d had an affair with an older
man that began when she was in her early twenties and he his forties. It
sounded like there had been a great power disparity, though the man had not
been her employer nor her professor, nor existed in any role of direct power
over her. The relationship had left her feeling used, and probably she had
been, though to me it didn’t square with the claim of abuse that the essay
made.
Patriarchy has trained many of us to pursue those with more power than
us. I don’t think that a power differential equals abuse, though much abuse
includes a power differential. The older man’s behavior sounds questionable
in a number of ways, but not abusive. There was no coercion, except
perhaps that of the panoptical patriarchal culture that had conditioned her.
Where we should draw the line between the abusive nature of a patriarchal
society and abusive acts by individuals is not always clear. As Ada said,
“Patriarchy colonizes our brains like a virus.” I do think that detangling
concepts of abuse and trauma to identify them as discreet categories and
finding words for the in-between events is an important step toward that
clarification. Such work allows me to acknowledge the nature of my earliest
sexual experiences. It might allow women with experiences like Jessica
Valenti’s to more easily name their assaults. It is a necessary step in
undoing the toxic dynamics that undergird our most intimate physical
interactions.
I would like to change the culture. I would not like to punish people for
who they are attracted to, unless those people are imperiled by that
attraction, or do not have the power to refuse it. I also think that empty
consent is harmful, and the legacy of centuries of abuse and oppression. I
think the person to whom it is given is often partly responsible. I want
everyone to agree that the only sex worth having is that in which all parties’
consent is genuine, enthusiastic, and ongoing. I want us all to be attracted to
people with whom we can have sex that feels safe and hot and
nonexploitative (unless exploitation is your thing).
I do not have a definitive proposal for what should constitute abuse and
what should not. More expert people have made this their work. What I do
have is a growing certainty about the ways in which I have collaborated in
the mistreatment of my own body. What I have is the will and freedom and
resources to stop harming myself in the subtle ways that I have been
conditioned. If I have learned anything from my study of empty consent, it
is that I must turn on the lights and welcome every part of me into the room.
If I want my yes to mean yes, there can be no locked doors in the house of
me.
As Donika and I drove uptown toward our second cuddle party, a quiet
dread accumulated in me, like lightly falling snow. It had been eighteen
months since our first trip to the Holistic Loft.
“We can leave anytime we want,” she reminded me. I knew that my very
dread was a reason to follow through with it—to teach the dreading part of
me that she did not have to do anything she did not want.
Again, we ascended the narrow staircase and deposited our shoes in the
mass outside the loft. Inside, we made our way to the only clearing left on
the soft floor. As we settled in, I fought the urge to cling to Donika, an
unusual feeling for me. Though the room was more diverse overall, the
particular corner we’d sat in was congested with men. On one side of me sat
a young man whose anxiety radiated from him in waves, like heat
corrugating the air.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Jack.” He had a bright patch of razor burn on his
neck, and his face looked clammy. I lifted my hand to offer it to him and
then realized that I did not want to shake his hand, so I waved instead. “It’s
my first time at one of these,” he told me. “My friend was supposed to meet
me, but they didn’t show up.”
I smiled at him, but distantly.
“I’m sorry my socks don’t match,” he went on.
“I don’t think it’ll be a problem for anyone,” I said, glancing down. “You
don’t have to apologize.”
“You’re right,” he said with a giggle. “I’m probably just showing off
because there are so many hot people here.”
I suppressed a sudden urge to lurch away from him and crawl across the
floor in the opposite direction just as Donika leaned toward my ear and
murmured, “Are you doing any unnecessary emotional labor?”
I grimaced at her. If only someone were there to whisper this every hour
of my life. A moment later Adam announced that the workshop portion of
the cuddle party would soon begin. A young woman found her way to our
corner and gingerly sat in the only available clearing. She introduced
herself as Emma, and I immediately liked her round, kind face.
“This is so weird,” Jack said. “I’m not used to being around this many
people. I’m more used to sitting at home and playing video games.”
Emma and I nodded. Was that emotional labor? I wondered where to
locate the line between sympathy and labor. I knew that they were not
mutually exclusive, but also that there was a difference between caring for
someone and performing care. How did a person know exactly when
genuine expression became emotional labor?
Did I even feel sympathy for Jack? Maybe not. Sympathy, from the Latin
sympathia, meaning a fellow feeling, implies an emotional connection
based in similarity between the sympathizer and her object. I was fairly
certain that such a connection did not exist between us. Did I simply pity
Jack? The word seems more distant than sympathy, and even the OED
acknowledges a touch of contempt in it for the inferiority of the pitied, but
it also indicates a sorrow in the pitier that, to my surprise, I could not
actually locate in myself. Perhaps I simply recognized him as pitiable. The
overwhelming feeling I felt toward Jack was repulsion. I saw that he was
sad and found him sad, but abstractly. I did not feel any tenderness toward
him and in fact felt a little threatened by the extremity of his piteousness. I
also understood, even as it was happening, that the threat I felt from him
was a projection. I feared myself, mistrusted my ability to say no. That was
why I had come back.
Scraping down to the bone of my response to Jack made me feel
ungenerous, but why should it have been my job to care for this man? He
was of no connection to me, not to mention sitting in a room full of people
more willing to touch him than I was. That seemed the heart of it: that both
men and women prioritize the comfort and well-being of men over
women’s safety, comfort, even the truth of their bodily experience. It is the
habit I have been trying to undo in myself, and it has been a life’s work.
When the workshop began, Adam led us through the familiar cuddle-
party rules. When he got to rule 6, “You are encouraged to change your
mind,” he clarified that it was okay to try something and decide at any point
that it was not working.
“You can simply say, ‘I’m done,’ or ‘This isn’t working,’ ” he told us. As
he spoke, I felt my eyes prickle with tears. What a simple and gorgeous idea
that was. I thought of myself as a girl and as a younger woman—with all
those boys and men and even women who I had never wanted to touch me.
I thought of all the women whose stories I now carried in me. What if we
had all been taught that we could walk away whenever we wanted? What if
we had learned that saying no was a necessary way of taking care of
ourselves? I imagined living in a society that acknowledged that fact as the
cuddle party did.
As Adam neared the end of the list, I remembered the role-play portion
of the workshop. I became obsessed with the prospect of being partnered
with Jack. My gaze skittered around the surrounding area, looking for a
reason to shift my seat.
I had consciously given my body an invitation and the space to feel what
it really wanted and did not want. My body had turned out to have very
strong feelings. I thought of all the other times that I’d spent years
suppressing a bodily truth, and the force with which those feelings returned
when I became willing to receive them. The year of crying after I got sober,
and again after I quit smoking. The furious anger after I ended that
controlling relationship. Why should I have been surprised? I’d been
silencing my body in this minute and exhaustive way for longer than I’d
done almost anything. In order to commit that silencing, I had spent most of
my life thinking of my body as an instrument, an object connected to my
psyche but not integrated with it. My body, I was realizing, was not the box
that held myself, it was my self.
This realization came like a slow dawning, one that had begun years
before, when I was a girl, during those moments when the fog of my
learned self-loathing would part and I would fill with love for my body and
remorse for my cruelty toward it. It made me think of Harlow’s rhesus
monkeys again. I considered the way that we treat animals like objects, as if
their bodies are empty containers, their instinct to survive rattling like a
marble at the bottom. The more we want to exploit a body, the less
humanity we allow it. Here I had been believing my own body an object
that I could yield to others without harming.
It wasn’t enough to “love” my body in the privacy of myself or my
primary partnership. Like any kind of love, my self-love needed to manifest
as an active practice of care. I had learned this about relationships with
lovers, that “love is as love does,” but I had not internalized it. A body isn’t
very well loved by the person who abandons it when its needs conflict with
the desires of strangers.
During the role-play, I ended up paired with a man named Bart. Rather
than pajamas, he was dressed in lumpy black jeans. Despite the repeated
instruction to not use phones in the cuddle-party space, he had been staring
at his phone while Adam spoke. When we introduced ourselves, he
stammered with nervousness.
“Can I kiss you?” Bart asked, as Adam had instructed us, for the express
purpose of practicing saying no.
“No,” I said, and felt the way that I softened the word in my mouth, like
a cracker I didn’t want to make a sound when I crushed it.
“Can I kiss you?” he asked again, to my surprise.
“Uh, no,” I said, less gently.
“Pretty please?” he said. If I hadn’t been horrified, I might have laughed.
His response was so counter to the point of the exercise that I felt I’d been
set up to have the most opportunities possible to exercise my new “no”
muscles.
At last Bart delivered his scripted line: “Thank you for taking care of
yourself.”
The final exercise required that we all stand and hug as many people as
possible. When I stood, faced with the trunks of their bodies, I felt like I
was in a forest of men.
“Can I give you a hug?” asked Jack.
“No, thank you,” I said. I cringed inwardly, as I did when scooping the
detritus out of the kitchen-sink drain or squashing a bug with my bare hand.
Not at Jack, but at the simple act of refusing him. I made a mental note to
scrub the “thank you” from my response.
“Thank you for taking care of yourself,” he said, and it was almost a
question. We both turned a few degrees away from each other.
“Can I hug you?” asked a second man, a third, and a fourth.
“No,” I said to all of them, clenching inside each time. When a small
man in plaid pajamas I read as gay asked me, I checked inside and found
that I wouldn’t mind hugging him. Before I could say yes, I became acutely
conscious of the fact that we were surrounded by men I’d refused. Surely
they would notice if I said yes to him after I’d rebuffed them. I smiled at
him, genuinely, and said, “Not right now, thank you.”
He smiled back. Even with clearly set intentions and will, it was not so
easy to stop taking care of men. Apparently it was even possible for me to
set boundaries I didn’t need, if I thought it would spare the feelings of the
men around me. I thought of Jeannie Vanasco’s experience during those
phone calls with her former friend and rapist: “In the moment, I found it
hard to articulate what those boundaries were—because doing so might
embarrass the man.”
Vanasco chose that experience. She conscientiously set the intention to
prioritize her own need for clarity. The entire premise of her book is based
on centering her own interests. Still, she found it impossible not to
apologize and prioritize the comfort of that man over herself. “I told myself,
Don’t reassure him—and then I reassured him,” she writes.
When I said no to the most persistent of those men at the cuddle party, I
watched the quick but transparent digestion of the word move through
them, producing flickers of surprise, hurt, disappointment, anger, and a kind
of surrender as they finally uttered the phrase “Thank you for taking care of
yourself.” I understood that I was watching, and enacting, a resocialization
beyond my own. Afterward I suggested to Donika that the cuddle party was
a kind of incel prevention.
I remembered first reading about the incels, those men radicalized by the
combustive combination of their own entitlement, sexual frustration, and
misogyny, who believe that women owe them sex. Their complaints and
manifestos are easy to find but too sickening to linger over. A few minutes’
perusal will answer any questions one might have about whether Elliot
Rodgers, who killed six people and injured many more in the 2014 Isla
Vista killings, is alone in his violent rage and hatred toward women for
refusing him sex. It is an abhorrent set of beliefs but not a mysterious one.
Women all over the world have owed men sex for centuries. Belief in the
sovereignty of female bodies is far from universal and still so new where
adopted that our own minds have yet to catch up. Our culture and thus our
minds are riddled with contradictions.
What if boys were socialized as they are at the cuddle party? I wondered.
What if Alex, my childhood neighbor, had learned to redirect that route
from desire to fear to hate and aggression? Thank you for taking care of
yourself. From a certain perspective, it would be so easy to change
everything. If only we hadn’t been spoiled for so long. If only we all wanted
to.
“Is there anyone you want to cuddle with?” Donika asked me. I shrugged.
Her return experience of the cuddle party seemed markedly different than
the first time, and she later confirmed this. “When we came to the first
party,” she said, “I was really touch-deprived. I had been living in a place
where no one hugged, and I was depressed and isolated. I had that skin
hunger.” That, I understood, was the purpose of the cuddle party. While my
own use of it to practice identifying and articulating my boundaries was not
inappropriate, it wasn’t entirely the point. The air of desperation in some of
its attendees that so unsettled me was evidence that they were in exactly the
right place.
As we consulted each other, a man approached us. I had declined his
invitation to hug during the earlier exercise. We all made easy conversation
for a few minutes.
“Can I hug you?” he asked, his gaze shifting from me to Donika.
“Sure,” she said with a shrug. He immediately reached his arms around
both of us.
“Whoa, hold on a minute,” Donika said, raising her hands. “Melissa
didn’t give her consent.”
“Ah, right,” he said amenably, though I detected a faint trace of
annoyance. “Can I hug you?”
“Okay,” I said. He resumed, and during the few moments that he hugged
us both, I understood that I had not actually wanted him to. It reminded me
of the anxiety I feel whenever I set a boundary with a friend or colleague. If
they receive it gracefully or demonstrate their respect for it, I often fight an
urge to express my “gratitude” by erasing the boundary. In the moment,
agreeing to hug him had felt like the only option. His accommodation had
bought him the hug. Here was the mechanism, so deeply embedded, its
belief that asserting my body’s sovereignty was rude, or a breach of some
unspoken contract.
I wandered into the kitchen to gnaw on some baby carrots, and a tall
woman with long brown hair joined me. Her name was Brenda, and she had
freckles and a steady gaze.
“Would you like to cuddle, Melissa?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said. “What kind of cuddling are you interested in?”
“Maybe something like that?” she said, and indicated two people
spooning tightly on the floor.
“Hmmm,” I said. “Maybe just sitting and hugging?” She agreed, and we
located a clearing on the floor and sat. After some adjusting, we found a
comfortable arrangement of arms and torsos. I kept scanning myself to see
if I was still comfortable. Are you okay? I asked. Is this okay? It was so
easy when I remembered to ask.
There was room for this kind of internal dialogue during my interaction
with Brenda as there hadn’t been with most of the men I’d encountered.
Their needs were expressed offensively; they intruded into the space where
my own feelings occurred, scrambled the signals by creating new,
reactionary ones.
Boundaries can be an opaque concept; it has so many applications,
though it is often quite clear where they exist and where they don’t. The
capaciousness of my interaction with Brenda told me that she recognized
the metaphysical boundary between us. She did not rate her own agency
over mine, nor was she interested in manipulating or directing me. Brenda
was interested in a mutually consensual interaction. My exchange with her
clarified how those men had wanted to reach into my space and prod me
toward what they wanted, how they valued my interest less than the touch
they sought.
Misogyny filters so granularly into action. Those men did not hate me, as
a hungry person does not hate a refrigerator. They simply valued their own
needs above mine. And I had seen that flash in their eyes when I refused
them, as a hungry person might grow frustrated with a refrigerator that does
not open. Probably that was the only method they had been taught. Like the
narrator of Cheever’s “The Cure,” they might have asked me, with the same
combination of good manners and disregard for my comfort: “Madame, will
you please let me put my hand around your ankle? That’s all I want to do,
madame.”
When we left the loft, and the cold air splashed against my face, I wanted to
scream. Not with any particular feeling, but to release the tension of paying
such close attention to myself.
In the weeks that followed, I thought of the man who had hugged us near
the end of the party with increasing resentment. My own sensitivity amazed
me. How many times had I been hugged without permission before then?
How often when I preferred not to be hugged? Surely there were thousands.
It had happened so often that I didn’t even register the minute override of
my body’s own wishes when that man reached for me at the party. That
didn’t mean there hadn’t been consequences. Now, I was feeling them.
What is the effect of ignoring your body’s wishes for decades? I suppose
that is the premise of this essay, the answer to the question that drove me to
write it. Why did I have such a challenging experience at the cuddle party?
Because I had so long ignored my body’s wishes that they had become
illegible to me.
As the days pass, I am increasingly grateful to the cuddle party. The
work that these parties are doing and making space for is revolutionary. It
has the power to transform the most devastating aspects of our society. I
don’t think that our society can be transformed without such work. I don’t
know what else would have prompted me to collect this detailed
information about my own comfort, about what kinds of touch felt
acceptable and what kinds did not. After decades of not listening, I had to
invite my body to tell me. I had to invite other women to tell me. I had to
recognize the recurrent experiences that I did not yet have words for. I
needed a space where I could say no with explicit support. None of this
might have happened if I had not gone there. I suspect that it has been an
enormous leap in the quest to care for my own body with the same subtle
attention that I have given to others my whole life. I once thought that to
realize the importance of this, to believe in it, was enough. It never was.
My therapist once told me a story about a woman she knew who had
injured her arm. For years, the injured arm caused her chronic pain. It also
inhibited her movement. When the woman walked, her able arm would
swing, but the injured arm could not. Eventually, she underwent a surgery
to repair the damaged arm. After she healed from the surgery, the pain
stopped, but the arm still did not move when she walked. It remained stiff at
her side. There was nothing the doctor could see wrong with it. One day,
while out walking, the woman clasped her arm and thought about all of the
suffering it had undergone. She closed her eyes and spoke to her arm. “You
can move,” she whispered tenderly. When she began walking again, the arm
swung easily with each step, as if it had simply been waiting for permission.
If I have learned anything by writing this, it is that consent is a form of
communication that happens first within the self. Above all, this is an essay
about listening. It was by listening to the truths of other women that I
learned how to better listen to my own. It is by writing this that I learned
about the words we must say to our bodies, how truly we must mean them.
It’s too soon, really, for me to know exactly how this will filter into my
daily life, though I trust that it will. When I think about healing in the
abstract, I imagine a closing-up, or a lifting-up. In my fantasies, healing
comes like a plane to pull me out of the water. Real healing is the opposite
of that. It is an opening. It is dropping down into the lost parts of yourself to
reclaim them. It is slow, and there is no shortcut. Sometimes what I mean
by healing is changing. A lasting, conscientious change in the self is similar
to one in society: it requires consistent tending. It is sometimes painful and
often tedious. We must choose it over and over.
That said, a few days ago I ran into a friend of a friend, someone toward
whom I felt friendly but not familiar. “Hey!” he said and stepped toward
me, his hands open. It wasn’t a hug, but the micro-gesture that precedes
one, which I was expected to reciprocate so that we could move into the
next phase. I smiled, but didn’t lean in. “Nice to see you,” I said, and
silently thanked myself for taking care of myself.
LES CALANQUES
I have seen pictures of Cassis, and so am unsurprised though still seduced
by its beauty—the narrow winding roads and stucco buildings that lead
downward, the shocking turquoise blue of the bay, or the castle-topped
cliffs that rise around the nestled port town. No one has told me about the
cicadas, though. When my taxi from Marseille stops at my destination and I
open the door, I startle at their song. It surges from the trees, blankets
everything in its pulsing whir. It sounds machinelike, though I know it is
thousands of giant insects, their bodies heaving with desire.
I have come to Cassis for a month, along with ten other artists. I will live
alone in a small apartment on the top floor of a building whose tall
windows overlook the bay with its green-eyed lighthouse (Fitzgerald
finished The Great Gatsby not far from here, and it is rumored that its green
light was inspired by this one), the cliff of Cap Canaille that changes color
with the position of the sun, the town beach crowded with bodies, and the
relentless blue Mediterranean that stretches to the horizon where it meets
the relentless blue sky.
Every morning I pull open the windows and bathe in the early-morning
breeze off the water. I have recently suffered a back spasm whose
symptoms cascaded down my body in a manner so painful no medicine
could assuage it. While no longer in pain, I have learned something of my
body’s fragility. At thirty-seven years old, I do not expect it to reverse.
When all of the windows are open, I eat a perfectly ripe peach over the
porcelain sink in the tiny kitchen, its juice streaming down my forearm.
Then I perform a series of gentle stretches that were not possible eight
weeks ago. By the time I finish, the cicadas have risen with the sun, its heat
engorging their abdominal membranes enough to produce that sound. I
meditate for twenty minutes. My eyes closed, I imagine their thrumming as
a ring of light that surrounds the building, each insect body a bright ember.
The call of a male cicada can be heard by a female a mile away, and
some are so loud they would cause hearing loss in humans were the insect
to sing close enough to the ear. Cicada nymphs drop from the trees in which
they hatch and burrow into the ground, often eight feet below the surface.
The cicadas in southern France spend almost four years underground,
though a brood rises every summer to sing and screw for a few months
before they die. All of the souvenir shops in Cassis sell porcelain cicadas,
wooden cicadas, tea towels with cicadas printed on them. North American
species of cicadas, those of my own childhood, have longer life cycles and
often spend seventeen years underground before tunneling their way to the
sunlight and climbing out of their old bodies.
It has been seventeen years since my last visit to France, a trip I haven’t
thought about in a long time, but whose details start returning to me the way
the language does. Words emerge from my mouth at the market that I didn’t
know were buried there—seulement, les fenêtres, désolée—jostled loose by
the voices around me, risen from wherever they have been sleeping for
nearly two decades.
In the summer of 2001, before my final semester of college, I got a job at
the New Press, an independent leftist publisher whose list included works
by Noam Chomsky, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Simone de Beauvoir. My job
was to sit in the air-conditioned Manhattan loft and, among other light
administrative tasks, respond to the novelists who often mailed us their
entire printed manuscripts for consideration. “Dear Author,” I would type.
“The New Press rarely publishes novels and never those by American
authors.” This fact was immediately obvious if one simply glanced at our
catalog. Still, myself an aspiring novelist, I pitied them as I dropped their
manuscripts into the recycling bin with a funereal thunk.
Most mornings I wandered through the cavernous storeroom with its
twelve-foot industrial shelves of books and selected one or two to read that
day at my desk. If I liked a book especially, I brought it home in my purse. I
still have my stolen copy of Studs Terkel’s Working. It would have been a
great job for the person I would have been if I had not been addicted to
heroin.
I was only twenty, but already beyond the charmed phase of believing I
could outsmart the drug. I had begun trying to stop and still thought I might
be able to do so without help. Certainly my boyfriend, who’d been a junkie
much longer than me, wasn’t offering any. I’d moved to New York two
years before, under the mistaken impression that Boston and the boyfriend
were my problem. My habit had followed me, and eventually so did he.
When I got my first paycheck from the New Press, he waited with me in
the icy lobby of a Fifth Avenue bank to cash it. As the sweat turned cold on
our backs, my boyfriend sucked on a free lollipop and tried to convince me
to buy dope with the money, to find some cocaine for speedballs. The hard
candy rattled against his teeth as he whispered in my ear. Sick of the
cloying red smell, I left the teller and tucked the bills into my wallet.
“Stop it!” I hissed. The inside of my arm was still bruised from our last
binge, visible even through the makeup I’d smeared there. I already sensed
the crawly feeling in my skin that I’d come to recognize as the first sign of
withdrawal, but I didn’t want to use again. I wanted to spend my paycheck
like a normal college student: on a trip or books or my credit card debt. As
we pushed through the heavy double doors and stepped onto the steamy
sidewalk, I shouted at him. “We’re fucking junkies! It’s not okay!”
He rolled his eyes and spat the cardboard stick onto the concrete. “Stop
being dramatic.”
A week later, I quit my job and spent my entire second paycheck —and
some supplemental funds from my parents— on a one-way ticket to Paris.
A white yacht draws a line across the blue water like fabric scissors. Two
men unload orange sea kayaks from a truck on the shore. I sit in a wooden
chair in front of the window and slowly lift my left leg as I tilt my head
back. The exercise is called nerve-flossing. I imagine my sciatic nerve—
pink and tensile as fishing wire—disentangling from the soft tissue that
surrounds it.
As I perform the repetitions, I try to remember the dream that woke me.
It was a familiar one, a version of which I have had for twenty years. In it, I
am trying to shake that old junkie boyfriend, the one who first gave me
heroin. Everywhere I go, there he is like a stray dog with his slumped
shoulders and vacant, hungry eyes. Go away! I shout at him. In the dream, I
am my present-day self, fully aware of how absurd it is that he should
appear, wanting to get high with me. The only time I’ve seen him in the last
eighteen years was when he showed up drunk to my first book party. In the
dream, every time he appears, I fill with fury and panic. Why won’t he go
away? Why doesn’t he know that he is already gone?
After thirty motions I am ready to scream. Not in pain, but from
boredom. The thing they don’t tell you about physical therapy is how
torturously boring it is. It has never taken me this long to heal from an
injury. I haven’t had many in my lifetime. Since childhood, I have
catapulted through life as if spring-loaded. My knees are smudged with
scars, and I still skin them at least a couple of times per year. My ankles roll
out of the heels I’ve worn since my teens, and I fall off bikes as though the
ground were magnetized. My body has always snapped back into place like
hearty elastic.
When the back spasm had eased after a couple of days, I shook with
relief. I made plans with friends, assuming that I’d be fully recovered in a
few more days. Then the ache began to move down my leg. One day it
hammered my left thigh. The next, my shin. Then my foot. It felt like a
burning wire, threaded from the base of my spine, through my buttock, all
the way into my big toe. It twisted in me, its frayed end showering hot
sparks of pain across my ankle and foot. I could only stand for seven or
eight minutes at a time before it became unbearable and I had to lie panting
on the floor. It was days and many treatments later before I could walk
through the pain.
For twenty years I have been an almost daily runner, have considered it a
form of medicine that treats my anxiety. I rarely stretched because
stretching was boring, and there weren’t any recognizable consequences for
not doing so. This has always been my way: to do the thing that feels good,
to do it fast and frequently. The doctors told me that this strategy had made
me vulnerable to injury. The nine weeks after my spasm were the longest
I’d gone without running since I was eighteen years old. I also wasn’t able
to attend my recovery meetings or enjoy much social interaction. Though
the injury didn’t prevent me from my daily journaling, meditation, and
writing practices, for a while my panic did.
My beloved refers to these activities as my “modules.” A few months
into our relationship, she observed the set of practices of which I make sure
to include two or three in any given day, though my best days include all
six: morning journaling, a meeting, exercise, meditation, writing, and
meaningful contact with friends. Most of these activities serve other roles in
my life and are motivated by multiple intentions, but my emotional balance
depends on all of them. The regularity with which I practice each one is a
routine of personal maintenance without which I would undergo a
personality shift so dramatic that it isn’t hyperbole to say that I would be a
different person.
“A different person?” she asked, soon after we met.
“A different person,” I said.
The only luggage I’d brought to Paris was my backpack. When I landed at
the Charles de Gaulle airport at midday, I carried it off the plane, groggy
with sleep. The airport teemed with people, a cloud of cigarette smoke
wafting over their heads. (Smoking wasn’t banned in French airports,
hospitals, or schools until 2008.) I pulled a pack of Parliaments out of my
pocket and lit one, then followed the signs toward the exit.
I studied French until I dropped out of high school, and then followed it
with four more years in college. I had an aptitude and a decent knowledge
of grammar and vocabulary, though I’d never tested it among native
speakers. Words that I recognized jumped out of passing conversations, but
I was surprised by how little I understood. My accent was good, so when I
asked for directions, people assumed I spoke fluently and rattled off
instructions far faster than I could comprehend them. I nodded, merci
beaucoup, and continued on, still lost.
Using my Lonely Planet guidebook and the free map of the Paris Metro,
I found my way to the first hostel on my list. The drab building was on a
residential street, and the young woman at the front desk ignored me until I
began speaking. As soon as I struggled for a word, she interrupted me in
English. After I’d paid, she led me to a room with bunk beds lining the
walls, barracks style. The afternoon light filtered weakly onto the floor from
a small barred window. I thanked her and climbed the metal ladder to the
bunk that she indicated. I had hardly slept on the plane and was numb with
fatigue. The guidebook suggested that I avoid being robbed by paying for
one of the lockers in the lobby. I didn’t want to waste the francs, so I stuffed
my backpack under the pilled blanket between my legs and struggled to
find a comfortable position to sleep. There wasn’t anyone else in the room.
As the room darkened, I heard people return and settle on the couches in
the lobby and listened to their voices laugh and chatter in words I didn’t
understand. My body ached with exhaustion, but worse, a kind of loneliness
that transcended that of a twenty-year-old in a strange country, which can
be acute in its own way. I had run away from a set of troubles that had
plagued me for years—my addiction, my troubled relationship, and most of
all the compulsion to make choices that contradicted what I believed, the
person I believed myself to be. Beneath these behaviors lay a chasm of
despair and fear more profound than any misery of my body. I had tried to
stop and could not. I had isolated myself from everyone who loved me to
protect my secrets. My life at that point was a small and lonely place,
grooved with the routine of compulsion. The only person who knew the
consistency of my days was the person I most wanted to escape.
Here I was, not dope-sick, five thousand miles away from my life. I
should have felt free. It is a particularly crushing disappointment to realize,
again, that your problem is yourself. I had carried that chasm of darkness
across an ocean. It was in me. Maybe, I thought, it was me. That is the fear
that every addict, every person who hates themselves, shares: the terrible
possibility that what torments you, what you loathe in yourself, is the truest
part of you—the singed and poisonous center that can never be scraped out.
There was a satisfaction in the way my hurts never manifested
outwardly. For years, that fact allowed me to deny my problem. I had gotten
good grades in college. I kept jobs. I looked healthy. No matter how many
drugs I consumed, how much sleep or sustenance I denied my body, my
physical self persisted. Sometimes it felt like a test. How much could my
body take? What would prove that I needed help? To pass, every time, was
a triumph and a catastrophe. As time progressed, it seemed more and more
likely that the only way to fail that test, to free myself, was to die.
Sometimes it felt like I was trying.
At twenty I had already reached the foxhole in which I had whispered,
Please, tell me what to do. I will do anything. No answer came. So I ran. I
had no other plan. I had prayed that running wouldn’t fail again, but as I lay
in that narrow bed, I knew that it had. That it probably always would. Tears
silently dripped from the corners of my eyes and down my temples into my
hair. I didn’t know any other prayers or to whom I should offer them. I
longed for my familiar solution, the one from which I was running. What I
would have given for what had killed Lily Bart: “the gradual cessation of
the inner throb, the soft approach of passiveness, as though an invisible
hand made magic passes over her in the darkness.”
I had no long history of suicidal thoughts, but back in my Brooklyn
bedroom I had a packet of razor blades tucked between my mattress and
box spring. I didn’t plan to use them, but I found relief in the tangible
reminder that there was always one more way out. In that hostel bed, I
thought about those small blades, their smooth silver faces and perfect
edges. It was a comfort, like searching in the dark of a theater for the red
glow of an exit sign.
The date of my flight to Cassis was six weeks after my injury. As it
approached, I grew increasingly nervous. It would be an entire day of
travel, most of it seated. On the flight, I was that awkward person
meandering up and down the aisles, performing stretches by the restrooms,
but I arrived without incident.
My first response to my own distress is still the superlative panic of a
child. The hardest part of sadness or pain or the surprisingly slow process of
healing is almost always my fear that it will never pass. It tells me that I
will never fully recover, that this particular experience of discomfort is my
new life. The only way to calm this part of me is to gently repeat true
statements. This too shall pass. Feelings are not facts. It will pass more
easily if you let yourself feel it. I’ve gotten pretty good at self-soothing in
the fifteen years since I got clean. Those years have formed a bank of proof
that what hurts eventually heals, that everything passes, that I have gathered
the resources to survive my own pain.
I am so grateful to have made it to Cassis unscathed, to be here at all,
that I spend hours devoted to my neglected modules. The entire first week,
all that I accomplish is journaling, meditation, stretches, and my physical
therapy exercises, during which I listen to twelve-step podcasts, tearing up
at every far-flung stranger’s story of recovery.
By the end of the first sweltering week, I have figured out that if I want
to spend any active time outside, I have to get up before the sun. I have
grown so accustomed to the ceaseless noise of the cicadas that the silence at
6:00 A.M. is startling, spooky. I pull on my running shoes and walk the
winding road that leads from our building into Les Calanques, a national
park half a mile away.
The calanques themselves, which reach from Cap Canaille in Cassis to
Marseille, are a series of inlets between steep limestone cliffs that reach like
jagged fingers toward the horizon. In some of their clefts are rock beaches,
in some caves, in some just staggering rock faces. The bases of these mini-
fjords are often toothed where sections of the limestone were quarried for
export until the twentieth century. These calanques are thought to have
formed almost six million years ago, when the Strait of Gibraltar closed and
the Mediterranean became isolated from the Atlantic. Its water evaporated
faster than it could be replenished, and desiccated almost completely. The
sea level fell by fifteen hundred meters, and the rivers that flowed into its
waters drove canyons into the land to meet it. When the strait reopened, the
Atlantic flooded the Mediterranean basin. It filled those canyons and
collapsed the weakened land, deepening those clefts and forming the
calanques. The saltier quality of the Mediterranean’s water is considered a
symptom of that time period, known as the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
I taste that salt in the air as I climb the hills toward the park. The ground
turns from concrete to a pale compacted limestone, littered with gravel and
larger toothy chunks of stone. I cross a wooded parking lot, empty at this
hour, and follow a sign for “le Sentier du Petit-Prince.” The author of the
beloved children’s book The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, died
in a plane crash off this coastline on July 31, 1944. Some speculate that
when the Little Prince describes his small planet as “the most beautiful and
saddest countryside in the world,” he is also describing this place.
At the edge of this first and smallest calanque, I look down at a row of
pristine white sailboats and out at Cap Canaille, its top warming in the sun
to the color of rust. The water at this hour has not yet turned the glamorous
turquoise that it gleams all day, but is a deep navy blue, choppier where it
leads out toward the Algerian coast. I breathe in that salty breeze and close
my eyes, feel my body strong on the edge of that cliff. When I turn back, I
break into a jog. Careful to avoid the loose rocks, I pay close attention to
my softened muscles and feel the familiar heat of their exertion. I make it
all the way back to the sloping road beyond the parking lot. When I slow to
a walk, my back is damp with sweat and the cicadas’ song rings
triumphantly from the trees. Blood hums through my body. I am filled with
a joy so exuberant I nearly shout.
It was still dark outside when I woke in the hostel bed. The occupant of a
nearby bunk gently snored. I located my bag, wedged against the wall, and
found that I was wildly thirsty. I prodded my misery to see if it was still
there, and it was, transmitting its hopeless report like a TV left on while I
slept. I carefully peeled the blanket off me and slipped my arms through the
backpack’s straps. Fearing thieves, I had slept in my shoes. I climbed down
the bed’s metal ladder, past the sleeping lump of my unknown bunkmate. In
the restroom, I gulped water straight from the tap and avoided the mirror.
When I left through the unmanned lobby, the door locked behind me.
I had no idea where I was, and it didn’t really matter. I walked for an
hour, until the streetlamps flicked off and sunlight began to spill down the
narrow cobblestone alleys. I’d never seen buildings that looked like these—
each corner as elegantly detailed as if it had been carved by hand, which it
probably was. The yeasty smell of baking bread wafted from shops with
their doors still locked. My mouth watered as my eyes marveled, but as a
body won’t forget its injury, my mind never forgot its pain. The picturesque
scenery felt doused in loneliness. Foreign beauty is of no comfort to the
homesick. At its core, maybe every despair is marked by a longing to find a
home in oneself.
I stopped at a pay phone, calculating the time back home. It was just past
midnight. My mother might be asleep, but she’d still answer the phone. My
boyfriend would definitely be up, if he was home. I longed for comfort as
the cold long for warmth or the hungry for food: my need was imperative,
undistractable. I often had an urge to call my mother when I felt this way,
though it rarely helped. Even the fiercest love can’t treat what you conceal
from it.
I dug into the front pocket of my backpack and withdrew a handful of
coins. I had no idea how much it would cost to call the United States, so I
pushed them all into the slot. I stared at the keypad. A recorded operator
demanded that I dial a number for my call. A call to my mother would only
worry her. I could call my boyfriend. He would tell me to come home,
which a part of me wanted to hear. I wanted to go home so badly. But with
the disappointment of having brought my misery to France so keen in me, I
couldn’t muster any hope that I might be able to leave it there. There was no
one to call. I punched the coin return with my thumb and listened to the
money jangle back to me.
I crossed the Seine on a pedestrian bridge and stopped in the middle to
look down at the glimmering water. It was gray, like the light, though the air
was already warming. I imagined sinking into it, the cool quiet slipping
over my mouth and eyes. It was just a fantasy; the water was probably less
than a hundred feet below.
By 9:00 A.M., I had reached the Arc de Triomphe. The monument sits at
the intersection of twelve avenues that radiate from its center in an asterisk.
I stared up at the limestone behemoth, its sculpted pillars that commemorate
the victories of Napoleon, who commissioned it in 1806. When I was little
and felt overwhelmed by my own feelings, I used to go to the beach and
stare out at the Atlantic. Beside it, I felt so small. I was inconsequential and
thus free. The ocean didn’t care about my feelings, and it would be there
after they passed, after my whole life passed. Standing under that hundred-
foot arch, I searched for that feeling but found nothing. My problem was
not one of perspective, at least not only, and could not be relieved by a shift
in scale. I stared down at my travel guide, which assured me that there was
a hostel just a few blocks from here that I hoped would be an improvement
on the previous night’s.
On my way, I stopped at a small grocery to buy a bottle of water. As I
approached the counter, the man in front of me turned to leave. For a
moment, our eyes met. He was tall and lean, the fabric of his white T-shirt
darkened by sweat under his arms. Beads of it gathered in the hollow of his
neck, despite the relative cool of the shop. His face was handsome but
haunted, and from his eyes hung dark circles and a look that I instantly
recognized. The moment passed and he brushed by me, hurried into the
street. I had only a few seconds to decide. I abandoned my bottle of water
beside the register and followed him out the door.
“Attendez!” I called after him. “Monsieur, attendez s’il vous plait!”
The stranger glanced over his shoulder, and I waved, jogging to catch up
to him. I groped in my mind for the right words to ask him what I wanted.
“Ah, pouvez-vous en obtenir pour moi aussi?” I asked, hoping it was close
enough to Can you get me some, too?
He shook his head in confusion or feigned confusion, and walked faster
to lose me.
“Attendez!” I pleaded. “I have money!” I dug in my pocket and pulled
out a fold of bills.
He stopped and half turned toward me.
“Pour vous, aussi,” I promised, holding out the money.
He studied my face. I nodded and held his gaze long enough for him to
recognize in me what I had seen in him. Finally, his shoulders dropped and
he beckoned. “Allons-y.”
My relapse dreams are always the same. I have shot dope, snorted coke,
smoked a joint, whatever it is, and then I remember that I am sober. In the
dream, I panic. I decide to hide it, to lie, a thing I would never do if I
relapsed, but the person in the dream is not me, she is the old me dressed in
the trappings of this life. Sometimes it is not drugs I have relapsed on, but
an ex-lover or sex work—any of the things I struggled most to let go.
The cicadas are already up when I wake panting, the stiff white sheets
twined around my legs. I have slept late enough that the sun is high, the
bedroom soupy with heat and my chest wet. I remember where I am and
sigh with relief.
At a potluck during our second week in Cassis, I tell another resident—a
painter—that I watched a video of a cicada molting.
“It was disgusting,” I tell her. “You should definitely watch it.” The
cicada’s body pulsed as if heaving with breath and the new body emerged
from the old, soft and green. Within moments its wings filled with fluid,
like an inflatable toy, and its new body hardened. The old body still clung to
the branch, an immaculate husk. How sad and gorgeous I found it, like an
abandoned mansion. What a job to perform! The cicada’s nymph body
serves underground for years, sleeping in that dark dirt long enough to
forget whatever glimpse of the world it saw when it hatched. Finally it digs
its way out, clawing the dark like some risen dead, until it breaches the
surface, born into that shocking light a second time. Then it is discarded.
The painter and I discuss hiking routes that we have researched in the
park and decide to hike to d’En Vau, the farthest calanque reachable on
foot. The views from its bluff are astonishing, even in the tiny thumbnail
photos online. The beach at its bottom, they say, is exquisite; the hike there
from Cassis, grueling. We agree to go on a morning during the following
week.
My days have found their routine here. Since that first jog, I have beaten
the sun every morning but this one and walked those hills to carefully jog
the nearest paths of the park. I have begun to recognize the regulars, just as
I do back home in Prospect Park: a woman with blunt bangs who walks her
old golden retriever, the shirtless young men who unload the sea kayaks for
their rental station, and the older man with the grizzled face and the walking
sticks who angrily picks up litter but always nods as I pass.
After my morning constitutional, I do my stretches, my meditation and
journaling, and then I write, facing the windows, stopping every hour or so
to drink a glass of water and do a physical therapy exercise. At two or three
P.M., I eat a lunch of salad with fresh vegetables and strong, salty cheese
from the market. Then I work for another hour or so. At peak hours, the
temperature regularly reaches ninety-five degrees. By five or six it begins to
cool slightly. Almost every day at this time, I put on my bathing suit and
walk to the nearby beach.
I often think about all the years during which I expended enormous
amounts of energy hating my body, obsessively monitoring my food intake
and performing exhaustive exercise regimens. My goal was exactly as
prescribed by American culture: to embody a concept of beauty that defied
my natural form. I measured much of my worth by my progress toward that
goal. What a job that was. Sometimes I would consider the thoughts I might
have had if I were not constantly thinking about how to control and
manipulate my body. Everywhere I went, men stared at me, tried to talk to
me, and commented on my degree of success at this quest. I loathed and
craved this attention. I often looked eagerly forward to what I imagined as
the sexual invisibility of middle age.
Now I walk slowly to the beach in a pair of rubber water shoes that I
bought for ten euros in town. My bathing suit is a one-piece. I have smeared
my exposed skin with sunscreen and I wear a cheap straw hat that I bought
with the water shoes. I am not wearing waterproof mascara. I have not
shaved my armpits or worn antiperspirant in over a year. If my younger self
could recognize me, she would be horrified. Or maybe not. Maybe she
would feel as relieved as I now do to live in a body that I do not hate and
have some idea how to care for. I’m grateful that I didn’t even have to wait
until middle age, that my sexual visibility to men on the street has
decreased in direct proportion to the increase in my own sexual fulfillment.
I leave my towel on the smooth rocks of the beach and make my way
into the water. It is cooler than other Mediterranean beaches due to the
geologic history of the calanques, but warmer than the waters of the Cape
where I grew up. I ease in and swim a slow breaststroke out beyond where
the children play, until my feet can no longer reach the bottom. I make my
way across the area designated by white buoys threaded with plastic rope,
enjoying how the water’s cool hands cradle every part of me. I feel the
work of my arms, the motion of my powerful thighs, the sun on my flexing
back.
I am ambivalent about the hike. I have only my running shoes, no hiking
boots, and am wary of my tendency to push my body too far. Extremity
holds an allure for me that will likely never wane. I have learned to resist it
in so many ways, but I am still learning. On the heels of this painful recent
lesson, I am wary of asking my body to do anything touted as “grueling.”
While a part of me withers at the careful person I’m becoming, another part
rejoices. I am finally under the care of someone who is careful with me.
I text my painter friend the day before our hike. “If it doesn’t feel safe,” I
say, “I’ll want to just turn back, if that’s okay.” She agrees and we plan to
depart at seven the following morning. That afternoon I fill a backpack with
the largest bottle of water that will fit in it. I add a beach towel, sunscreen,
granola bars, and grapes that I carefully wash and pack in a resealable
plastic bag. I set the pack by the door and go to bed before the cicadas have
quieted.
Instead of tiny glassine bags, the French heroin came in a packet of tinfoil.
The powder inside wasn’t white but brownish, the color of tea water, and
we had to snort more of it than I was used to. Once high, we both stopped
sweating. We didn’t part ways, but that doesn’t surprise me. Active
addiction is a lonely condition, and it feels good to share your relief with
someone. We wandered around the neighborhood to a small park where we
sat on a bench and smoked. Ahmed was Algerian, had come to Paris as a
teenager with his father. When I asked where his father was now, he just
shrugged.
He didn’t speak any English, so we spoke in simple French. Because I
was high, I didn’t hesitate to interrupt and ask him to repeat a word or
explain to me what it meant. To do so, he pantomimed, offered synonyms,
and often employed additional words that I needed him to explain. I’ll never
know if he was patient because he was high or because he was patient, but I
suspect the latter. Junkies are often sweet-natured people, embroiled in the
cycle of dependency precisely because they otherwise feel too permeable
for this world. Of all drugs, opiates are the most effective (short-term)
treatment for anxiety. What’s the difference between a junkie and an
alcoholic? the joke goes. They will both steal your wallet, but a junkie will
help you look for it.
He helped me find the second hostel and waited while I checked in. Was
it so much better than the first, or was I just high and happy to have made a
friend? Ahmed and I agreed to meet the next day at noon.
After we got high that second day, I made him walk to the Eiffel Tower
with me, though he rolled his eyes at my request. “I know,” I told him. “It’s
like the Statue of Liberty, in New York. For tourists only.” I shrugged. “Je
suis une touriste!”
On the way, I bought a bag of licorice and we shared it on a bench in the
small park near the tower, gnawing on the candy as we watched more
obvious tourists sweat in fanny packs and point their cameras. He had
begun correcting my French, which I welcomed.
“Je suis lesbienne,” I told him. It was more than half true, but that’s not
why I said it. We were having such a good time, and a come-on might sour
it. I hadn’t detected any sleazy vibes from him, and a sated junkie is a pretty
safe bet, as far as men are concerned, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“Moi aussi,” he said with a shrug, “je suis gay,” and rooted around in the
paper bag for another coconut-coated licorice, his favorite. I laughed in
happy surprise. I hadn’t even considered that he might be gay. He didn’t
emit the familiar signals, but then, I lived in a place where it was relatively
safe to do so. I had grown up in a home where it was welcomed. It was
possible for me to forget sometimes how rare that was, how many of us
must learn how not to reveal ourselves.
When he found his candy, he looked up and smiled at me. His first real
smile. Ahmed looked about thirty but could have been anywhere within six
or seven years of that. Sometimes, when his eyes began to close and the
creases in his face deepened, he looked ancient. His teeth were crooked and
yellowed, but that smile transformed his face into a child’s. When people
expose their innocence like that, I almost have to look away. I can’t bear to
see all that sweetness, how one glimpse throws into relief all the ways it has
been compromised.
He wasn’t the only man I spoke to. The men of Paris were interested in
talking. They stopped me in the street and commented as I passed.
Sometimes they followed me. The men in New York were similar, though I
had more practice at rebuffing them. In the evenings, I would often find a
rickety table at one of the ubiquitous Parisian cafés and sit with my
notebook or a novel. Not one time did a man fail to interrupt me. It seemed
that my Americanness tipped them off that I would be easy, or at least more
reluctant to tell them no. I did not easily tell them no. After a few minutes
of conversation, I’d ask the waiter for my check.
“Stay,” they’d say. “Have dinner with me.” I’d try to demur. I struggled
to draw boundaries with men back home, but it was even harder in Paris. To
have so many fewer words felt exponentially more vulnerable. In English,
words were my best defense, but in French I could only communicate at the
level of a child. I already understood that masculinity was a volatile thing.
Rejection could easily turn sexual interest to cruelty. If they were cruel, I
might not even have understood them. When they persisted, I’d agree, but
explain that I had to return to my hotel first. They would try to accompany
me, of course, but I’d dissuade them, promising to rejoin them later. Then
I’d hide in my hostel for the remainder of the evening. Ahmed was the only
man whose company interested me. As the days passed, my fear grew that I
would run into one of these foiled suitors as we traipsed around the city. I
loathed the prospect and often scanned streets as we turned onto them, but
felt safer with Ahmed than I did alone.
We fell into a routine. I met him in the mornings near the Arc, and then
we’d walk to his cop spot. Mostly I paid, but not always. Then we would
wander the city, sometimes until sundown. He took me to Montmarte and
the Notre-Dame cathedral, a place that felt so holy I lit a candle and prayed
to whatever god resided there that I would soon be done with heroin and
that it wouldn’t kill me first. I felt closer to that better ending in Paris. Our
new friendship dulled the teeth of our pastime, lent it a kind of innocence.
Besides, I was only snorting the Parisian dope.
On my sixth day we stood in the Louvre, faced with the Mona Lisa.
I shrugged. “Elle est très petite,” I observed, with a touch of
disappointment.
“Oui,” he agreed solemnly. “Mais toi aussi.” I couldn’t stop giggling
after that.
By the end of the first week, I began dreaming in French. Our
conversations were no longer so frequently interrupted by my questions or
his corrections. It was the perfect way to find fluency: to speak
conversationally all day long with someone who didn’t speak English and
with whom I felt perfectly comfortable.
Other young people cycled through the hostel. It always began the same,
with them asking me in French, or whatever their language, if I was
Portuguese or Brazilian or Spanish. Walking outside all day in the summer
sun had darkened my olive complexion considerably. I felt a tiny surge of
pride that I wasn’t immediately legible as American. We were the worst
tourists—the most entitled and conspicuous, shouting in our own language
and commenting rudely on things as though the French found us as
unintelligible as we did them. Before going to Paris, I had understood many
of the good reasons to hate Americans. While I was there, I saw how many
people did and counted myself among them.
When a handsome hostel employee held forth one evening on the
grotesqueries of Americans as a few of us lounged in his room, drinking
and smoking, I couldn’t disagree, though I did dislike him, the way he
talked on and on, never letting even the French women redirect the
conversation or interrupt his dominance of it. Still, after everyone else had
gone to bed I rode on the back of his moped to a bar and later fucked him
on his flimsy mattress as the windows grayed with early morning light. I
was relieved when he didn’t work another shift for the rest of my time
there.
I liked some of my fellow travelers—college students or recent grads
who seemed to be living the wholesome existence that I longed for and to
which I also felt superior. In the mornings, they would hoist their enormous
backpacks on and invite me to wherever they were going.
“No, thank you,” I always said. “I’m meeting a friend.” As they walked
away, I sometimes felt a painful twinge, as if I stood on a dark street
looking up at a bright window, imagining the warmth of the lives inside.
After climbing a steep dirt path, we descend the first calanque to reach Port
Pin, which is named for the Aleppo pine trees that flourish here. In its bay
we find a rock beach surrounded by slabs of limestone that make a
disheveled but dramatic amphitheater, the clear green water its stage. The
descent was rigorous—steep enough that we had to hold onto the chunks of
stone that protruded from the ground, crawling like slow spiders down its
face. The sun has barely broken over the hills, but I am already slick with
sweat. We stop to admire the beach and drink some water.
“Ready?” asks my friend.
“Ready.” We continue up another steep incline, toward the top of the
third calanque. This path is surrounded by trees so close that their branches
almost canopy the trail. Alongside it crowd the sort of tough, spiny flora
that can survive in the desertlike climate of the calanques, whose sister
terrain are badlands. The plants here have no soil to grow in and must make
do with limestone, rooting themselves in its cracks. I spot sarsaparilla and
the bright purple petals of terrestrial orchids, their toughness belied by their
delicate appearance. We pick our way through a bumpy combination of
roots and rocks, great hunks of limestone worn smooth by human feet that
gleam like creamy dinosaur bones, half risen from underground. They offer
the firmest surface for a foothold but are so smooth there is a danger of
slipping. When it happens, I catch myself and gasp, feel the sweat surge
from my scalp and neck.
We stop to let a string of men with bright high-tech outfits pass us. I am
gratified to see that their faces are also dripping and flushed. I take a couple
of minutes to stretch my tightened hamstrings and check in with my
piriformis. One of the masseuses who treated me suggested that I might be
holding some repressed emotion in the muscle. “You might want to try
journaling from its point of view,” she said. “See what it might be angry or
uptight about.” While the younger me would have screamed with laughter
at this, and a part of me still wanted to, I took the suggestion. My angry
muscle didn’t confide much, but I have since developed a habit of
personifying it. How are you doing? I think to my left butt-muscle. I think
she’s doing okay, so we continue.
When we reach the top of the trail, it feels like we have earned a view,
but there are only more rocks and desert shrubs and a rickety hand-painted
sign that points forward to d’En Vau. This is the final stretch before we
reach our destination, and our last chance to turn back and save ourselves
some of the return journey. My entire body is soaked in sweat now, my
muscles buzzing. We gulp more water and then peer over the edge to what
comes. Though the sign makes clear that this is the only route to our
destination, it looks as though the trail ends where we stand. There is a
slope steeper than either of those we’ve encountered, littered with loose
rocks and jagged teeth of limestone. It just looks like the side of a very
steep mountain, not a hiking trail.
“I’ve never been rock climbing,” I tell my friend.
“Me neither,” she says. The park is a popular site for rock climbers, I
will later learn with little surprise. As we grimace down at the perilous
slope, a tall blond family crests the previous trail and joins us in looking
down. They are all wearing hiking boots—a man and a woman, two
children, and a grandmother. The parents descend a few yards and then
return, red-faced, shaking their heads and muttering in what sounds like
Danish. They all turn back.
“It must be a series of switchbacks, yeah?” I say.
“It can’t go straight down,” my friend agrees.
“Maybe we could just try it and then come back if it’s too scary.”
She agrees and we begin to slowly pick our way down, choosing
carefully where to place each foot and hand. I offer corrections to my route
as she follows me.
Once, I whisper, “What if it never ends?” and she huffs, but we are both
too busy to laugh. It feels like we descend that incline for hours. Can I call
it fun? It is. The way difficult writing is fun, in its perfect freedom of self-
forgetting. For all my meditation, there is nothing like the presence of mind
I can maintain when my physical safety requires it. I scrutinize the space
before me, holding the fact of my own vulnerability so close. Maybe I have
never been so careful. I once heard someone say that there are no “natural
disasters”; there are only human disasters. That is, those made by and which
happen to us. Nature isn’t cruel, but unconcerned with human frailty. I have
always found relief in that, but especially now that I am able to better
concern myself with my own frailty.
The incline finally graduates into a rocky trail. My arms and legs visibly
shake from the effort, and I have to concentrate on my footing in the loose
rocks. The trail leads through a dense patch of vegetation, a humming
tunnel of leaves. When we emerge from it, we see the beach.
The inlet, sometimes known as the Emerald and the Queen of Creeks, is
a glimmering blue avenue of water within two staggering walls of
limestone. These are scattered with moss and pines that grow from their
crevices and remind me of classic Chinese landscape paintings. As I look
up, I remember that the term for “landscape” in Chinese is a combination of
the characters for mountain and water. The larger cliff belongs to the En
Vau Cape. Its peak is eight hundred meters tall, and called God’s Finger. At
its underwater base is a cave known as the Hole of the Devil. The shore is a
field of rocks, smooth as eggs.
We pick our way down the beach and sit to pull off our shoes and pass
the water bottle between us. I eat one of the granola bars. As the rising sun
spills light into our inlet, the water begins to glow turquoise. The steep
stone walls burn so white it hurts to look at them.
The water is almost completely still, and warmer than the beach where I
swim every day. It is so clear that I squint at it. I scoop a handful up to my
mouth and taste it. I know that it is seawater, but I’ve never seen seawater
like this before. It is more transparent than any lake I’ve ever swum in. I
ease under the surface, let the water fill my ears and hair, wash all the grit
away.
“I want to take you somewhere,” Ahmed said on the afternoon of my last
day in Paris.
“Ou?”
“C’est une surprise.”
We rode the train to a station in the north of the city, where most of the
people looked North African. When I asked, he told me that this was where
he had lived when he first came to Paris. When I asked more, he smiled and
shook his head. He didn’t want to elaborate, but I understood that he didn’t
mind me knowing that it meant something to have brought me there. I
wanted to thank him for that, whatever trust it entailed. More than that, I
wanted to somehow express to him that I cared where he came from, how
he got to be here beside me—my skinny, funny, haunted friend. Sometimes
I loved fellow junkies more than any other people in the world. Despite the
inherent detachment of addiction, their wounds were so close to the surface.
Maybe it was a way of loving myself when that seemed most impossible.
Or maybe it was that we could see in each other what no one else could.
Ahmed and I couldn’t heal each other. We had no good solutions. But we
had both found some comfort, and that isn’t a small thing to those who
would rather die than spend a whole life as they are.
After a lengthy walk, the houses thinned, and I could see the blinking
lights of a Ferris wheel.
“Ah!” I shouted. “A fair! I love fairs! Comment dit-on ‘fair’ en
français?”
“Parc d’attraction,” he said, smiling. To me, it looked smaller than what I
knew of amusement parks, more like a county fair—a small labyrinth of
rented rides and game booths in a trampled field, bald dirt patches strewn
with hay and cigarette butts.
Together, we screamed with children on the whirling rides, ate sweets,
and pointed at people in ridiculous outfits. We shared a cigarette at the top
of the Ferris wheel, looking out over the lights of Paris, the distant Eiffel
Tower a glowing figurine. It felt strangely romantic, and I suppose it was.
As we meandered back through the neighborhood, the noise of the park
shifting to the night noises of the street, I wanted to tell him that I loved
him, because I did. We were in a kind of love, I think. The kind that two
lonely people with similar hearts and the same problem can fall in, that has
nothing to do with sex. I didn’t, though, because I had no words to explain
what kind of love I meant. Maybe I wouldn’t have had them in my own
language, either.
I hated goodbyes and opted to avoid them whenever possible. When that
wasn’t possible, I sometimes went strangely blank. Empty of feeling, I
would woodenly perform the correct motions, eager to get away from
people who I loved and would surely miss. When we reached the metro
station where our respective trains parted, that was how I felt. Ahmed didn’t
want to let me go. He offered to escort me back to the hostel, but I said no.
He kept telling jokes and finding reasons for me to wait for the next train. I
started to grow impatient. When we finally hugged goodbye, his wiry arms
were so fierce around my body that it scared me a little. He let me go fast
enough that it was almost a push and walked away quickly without looking
back.
I slept the whole flight home to New York and woke up terrified. I knew
that within hours I would be dope-sick. I was also unemployed. The only
money I had was a pocketful of francs that I needed to exchange and spend
on subway tokens to get home. As the train trundled through the dark, I
watched flashes of graffitied concrete interrupt my own tired reflection. I
felt homesick again, this time for Ahmed and Paris and the way my days
there had come after all to feel like a respite from my life in New York, and
from myself.
I woke up the next morning and the following morning, and by some
miracle, I never got sick. I gave my boyfriend crabs that I must have caught
from the pompous hostel employee, but I never got sick. Probably we had
just been snorting morphine instead of heroin. It was a lucky accident, but it
felt like mercy.
It wasn’t over, wouldn’t be for four more years. A week after my return,
I used again. A month later, the planes crashed into the World Trade Center,
and my boyfriend and I watched the second tower fall from our Brooklyn
roof. A few months after that, I kicked him out for good.
My time in Paris was a failure by some measure, maybe the most
important one: I didn’t get clean. I didn’t even learn to take better care of
myself. It was also a soft spot in an otherwise very hard stretch of living. I
don’t like to use terms like self-destructive when I talk about addiction,
mine or anyone else’s. Once in a while, I’ll give a few dollars to a
panhandler who I know is going to spend it on dope. There are days when
the next high is the only mercy available to us. Sometimes our best efforts
at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
Ahmed called me once. I tried to return the call, but the number he’d
given me was disconnected. He left a message on our tiny answering
machine, and I saved it for years, until the machine broke. Allo? Melissa?
he said. C’est Ahmed. I can still hear it perfectly in my mind, like the voice
of the past calling to remind me that it was.
The first morning after the hike, I limp around the apartment. My injured
parts are quiet, but my other muscles have a lot to say about the climb back
to Cassis. We spent an hour at that beach, and then my friend and I climbed
partway up the rock face of d’En Vau to look down at the inlet. “What the
fuck,” I whispered as we stared at the radiant emerald water, its surface
flexing like an enormous living jewel. I knew that the photos I took would
only frustrate me with their ineptitude. The hike back was faster, but
punishing, our eagerness mounting with our bodies’ exhaustion as we
neared the end.
When we returned that afternoon, I carefully stretched my whole body
for an hour. Then I stood in the shower and let the water pound my
shoulders as the swirl around the drain turned gray and then clear again. I
scrubbed my arms and thighs, kneading the tender places with my thumbs,
picturing the weary muscles inside, the textures that bound them to my
bones.
By the second morning, I can go for a walk. On the third, I can jog again.
I came here with a list of things to write. But these memories keep
returning to me. Instead of writing the things I intended, I write about the
last time I was in this country. The more I write, the more I remember. I
spend so much time with that younger self, her savage despair and fleeting
reliefs, that I start to feel as though she is here with me.
In the moments after waking, when I blink in the quiet, my body still as
the tide of dreams recedes, I sense her there, like a language I cannot speak
but have not forgotten. She follows me up those hills in the thin morning
light and watches as I stretch my body. While I type at my standing desk,
she slumps on the couch, flipping through my journal. In the afternoon, she
trails me into the kitchen and watches me slice vegetables against my hand
with the dull paring knife. As I swim my daily lap across the water, she
waits on the shore with the other young women, their bodies soft and
unmarked, perhaps hated like hers. I strike a match to light the stove and
see her face aglow, the shadows hung beneath her eyes, the shine of her
round cheeks. I heat a bowl of soup and read a novel while I eat it, her eyes
following mine across the pages.
We are like cicadas, I want to tell her. When we rise from the ground, we
shed our old bodies, but we don’t forget them. We call the thing we need
until it answers. Sometimes, the one who finds us is a surprise. If we are
lucky, we don’t die. We get to live for a while inside that new life.
At night, we crawl into the bed and let them sing us to sleep. Our bodies
curl in identical parentheses, make of the rough white sheet a palimpsest.
Near the end of the month, a group of us hire the captain of a small boat to
take us out to the farther calanques. It is a windy day, and out on the water
the boat surges up and down. I can’t stop looking at the horizon, that perfect
line where blue meets blue. We pass d’En Vau and move on to the next
calanque, L’Oule, whose cove is beachless and only accessible by boat. Our
captain pulls into it and drops anchor. We are surrounded by massive white
cliffs. He points at the base, and we look. There is an opening, narrow and
triangular, the pale rock on either side smooth as parted thighs. There is a
cave, he tells us, and we stare blankly at him until he urges us out of the
boat.
The water is warm and clean and has that green feeling to it. The cliffs
tower over us and the sea stretches out and down and I feel very small.
Floating there, my hands stroking the warm water, I am frightened and
elated at the same time—the way I felt climbing down that rock, the way I
felt looking out at the ocean as a girl. I think again of that ancient time
when the sea was cut off from the ocean, how low she sank, the way the
rivers carved canyons to replenish her. I picture the flood of the Atlantic’s
return, collapsing the weakened ground, carving these caves and then filling
them. Such beauty often requires a kind of devastation. Maybe the saddest
landscapes are always the most beautiful.
We swim into the dark corridor of stone. Wind slaps the water against its
base, and the acoustics turn it into a growl. L’Oule gets its name from the
Provençal oulo, which means “cauldron,” and as we inch through the dark
passage, it begins to feel like we are in one. The water roils around the
barnacled rock as if it cooks a stew and we are its meat.
Just as my arms begin to tire, the rock canal opens into a vaulted
cathedral. Murmuring in wonder, we kick to its far wall, where the rock
glitters red, encrusted with what look like tiny gems. When I look back, the
setting sun’s light streams through the far opening, and it glows like a hot
diamond, turns the water achingly blue. I look down at my legs, and they
are blue as the sky over Cassis, the blue of a marble or an eye, blue as
potion risen up from the center of the earth to cool whatever hot thing burns
inside us.
I float on my back in that rock cathedral and listen to the water and the
ricocheting voices of my friends. I stare up at the arched stone ceiling as it
glistens in the waning light.
A touchstone is a tool against which one can measure the relative value
of something, like a text, though the term comes from an older use. It was a
stone tablet used for testing the purity of soft metals. With a sample of
known purity, for instance, one can test a piece of gold by drawing a line
with it on a touchstone. From different alloys will emerge different colors,
ones that reveal the relative contents, and thus the value of the unknown
sample.
As a young woman I struck myself against everything—other bodies,
cities, myself—but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them,
or the marks they made on me. A thing of unknown value has no value, and
I treated myself as such. I beat against my life as if it could tell me how to
stop hurting, until I was black and blue on the inside. The small softnesses I
found, however fleeting, were precious. They may have saved my life.
Now, I am so careful. The more I know my own worth, the less I have to
fling myself against anything. When I go back, I can see all the marks that
girl made so long ago. I reach my hand through the water and touch their
familiar shapes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe enormous thanks to many, among them my agent, Ethan Bassoff,
without whom this book would not be. Liese Mayer, dream editor—I wish
every author the gift of such a patient, warm, brilliant soul to guide their
books. Everyone at Bloomsbury, including Grace McNamee, Miranda
Ottewell, Akshaya Iyer, Katya Mezhibovskaya, Marie Coolman, Nancy
Miller, and Emily Fisher. Many thanks also to Kathy Daneman and Elaine
Trevorrow.
Heartfelt gratitude to all of the people who appear in this book, under
their own names or pseudonyms, in words or in spirit. I thank you most
truly for your time and your stories. I might not have survived my own
girlhood without the stories of others, and I could not have written this book
without yours.
Thanks to the publications in which some of these essays first appeared,
often in excerpted or very different form: “Thesmophoria” in the Sewanee
Review and the anthology What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About;
“Intrusions” in Tin House; “Kettle Holes” in Granta; “Scarification” in
Guernica; “Les Calanques” in The Sun; “The Mirror Test” in The Paris
Review, and to their editors Adam Ross, Michele Filgate and Karyn
Marcus, Thomas Ross, Luke Neima, Raluca Albu, Andrew Snee, and Emily
Nemens.
Time and other resources were given to complete this book by the
Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the BAU Institute at the
Camargo Foundation, and Monmouth University, which granted me a
Summer Faculty Fellowship and many other kinds of support during the
writing of this book, including that of multiple graduate research assistants
and the phenomenal English Department—I owe deep thanks to all.
Forsyth Harmon, friend and collaborator—what fun it was to work with
you. Let’s keep making things together.
To my pals and mentors and chosen family, among them many early
readers and favorite writers (an incomplete list): Caitlin Delohery, Liza
Buzytsky, Erin Stark, Shanté Smalls, Jean Okie, May Conley, Margo
Steines, Hallie Goodman, Syreeta McFadden, Hossannah Asuncion, Anna
deVries, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Elissa Washuta, Jill Jarvis, Emily Anderson,
Helen Macdonald, Lydia Conklin, John D’Agata, Amy Gall, Melissa
Faliveno, David Adjmi, Domenica Ruta, Lidia Yuknavitch, Jo Ann Beard,
Vijay Seshadri, Lacy Johnson, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, Alena Graedon,
Veronica Davidov, Melissa Chadburn, Lynn Melnick, Suleika Jaouad, Tara
Westover, Jordan Kisner, Jayson Greene, Scott Frank, Jon Batiste, Leni
Zumas, Lance Cleland, Marisa Siegel, Grace Lavery, Danny Lavery,
Carmen Maria Machado, Wendy S. Walters, Ariel Levy, Stephanie Danler,
Jami Attenberg, Melissa Broder, and all my fellows in the rooms—I owe
you my life, this book, and then some.
My family—how did I get so lucky? You have taught me what love is,
and I also happen to like you all so much. I promise someday I’ll go back to
writing fiction.
Last and most of all, Donika, my best reader and friend, my beloved, you
have made me better in so many ways, made a good life complete—I am so
grateful to spend it with you.
SOURCES & WORKS CONSULTED
The Mirror Test
Black Women’s Blueprint. “An Open Letter from Black Women to the Slutwalk.” Gender & Society
30, no. 1 (February 2016): 9–13.
Brison, Susan. “An Open Letter from Black Women to SlutWalk Organizers.” HuffPost, 27
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A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Melissa Febos is the author of Whip Smart and Abandon Me, a LAMBDA
Literary Award finalist and Triangle Publishing Award finalist. Her essays
have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, the New York Times, The Paris
Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. Febos is the inaugural winner of the
Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Prize from LAMBDA Literary and the recipient
of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the BAU Institute, the Barbara
Deming Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and others. She is an
associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the
Nonfiction Writing Program. melissafebos.com
Also Available from Melissa Febos
ABANDON ME
For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, a fierce and dazzling
personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are
shaped by love and loss.
In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the
intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest
examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.
In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love
and the need for connection —with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her
birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native
American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects,
she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by
compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely
tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent
as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the
hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman,
marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos
captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession—and the
terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.
At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of
art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion,
psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer’s
life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.
“[A] bold collection … The sheer fearlessness of the narrative is
captivating.” —The New Yorker
“Anyone who’s read Febos … knows that her work explores boundaries as
deftly as it defies categorization. In this new collection of essays, she once
again obliterates convention with her erotically charged and intellectually
astute recollections of family, relationships and the search for identity.” —
Esquire.com, “The Best Books of 2017 (So Far)”
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Material from Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Copyright © 2019 by Jeannie
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“Michele Goodwin, Marital Rape: The Long Arch of Sexual Violence Against Women and Girls,”
here, reproduced with permission.
“The Phenomenology of Shame, Guilt and the Body in Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Depression”
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