And We Shall Purify

Boy howdy, some year, huh? We women are getting us some justice after a lifetime of abuse, or possibly the whole of human history--anyway we're finally holding the boys to account, and it's exhilarating. We got 'em by the balls and we're dribbling down the court for the score. Seems like the good guys were due for some kind of win, since it didn't work out for Colin Kaepernick and the gang when they tried to respectfully point out that the police were getting away with murdering them. You could sort of see why they might be aggrieved, what with all the death, not to mention the previous three hundred years of dehumanization, but unfortunately for them it turned out they were just overpaid niggers who hated America, as the President clarified, and they didn't get much traction. Maybe some other year. Maybe more death. Maybe it's not quite their time yet.

But it's sure our time now, right, ladies? We are done with being groped and cat-called and having to keep quiet lest we lose our jobs and the whole bit, which we get to call the Rape Culture because there's nothing that can be said that hyperbole doesn't say even better and louder. Women are refusing to remain silent in the face of oppression and men are finally learning how pervasive it has been. This is a good thing. Many men were unaware of what we've been going through, especially the ones who up till now had labored under the delusion they were innocent even though they are clearly equipped to be on the rapist side of the rape culture ledger.

This is particularly fun for me because I've never been in a mob. I was only one year old when Joe McCarthy was in his heyday, so my memory of it is patchy, although I certainly remember "the Commies" serving as the bad guys for decades. (We call them Muslims now.) Of course this is different. All those people accused weren't actual Commies and it shouldn't have mattered if they were, whereas now we know who's truly guilty on account of all the penises. It's wonderful to see men getting what they deserve. From off-color jokes to rape, it's all the same. We're through.

Show you just how much we mean it: we'll take down good ol' Al Franken. He's been an effective senator on the right side of durn near everything when we don't have any good senators to spare, but he engaged in shenanigans. Sometime. Probably. Ha ha! Take that, Al! Bet you're sorry you allegedly did all that stuff you probably might have done! Sure, it's the kind of stuff I've done myself, like butt-grabbing without permission, and if you'd done it to me it probably wouldn't have offended me or the next fifteen women, but it offended at least a few, and that should be that. It's our time now, baby. We've got a big net and we're fixing to catch a lot of men in it. We've all been groped and leered at but we ourselves are pure and we're taking you down. Zero tolerance, baby. It's the very definition of principled.

Maybe another day we'll have time to take aim at some other principles. Maybe we'll take a hatchet to radical capitalism and the party that primarily promotes it, the politicians who serve none but the rich and have seen no commons that shouldn't be privatized for profit, no resource that shouldn't be mined or harvested for profit, no population that shouldn't be demonized or destabilized or destroyed to smooth the way for more profit, no warmaking that can't be turned to profit. Who feel no shame about stumping for guns and against abortion whether they care about those things or not, because it will fool so many people into voting for them, so they can continue to wreck everything for profit. Who will happily devastate the living earth. For profit.

Talk about your rape culture.


[Author's note: today is International Margaret Day! You all know what to do!]

The Phallically Burdened

Well goodness gracious, it hardly seems possible that it's been such a big secret all this time that women (A) are frequently devalued and harassed and worse and (B) don't like it, but evidently that's the latest news. Like, we've had five thousand years of recorded history and it's just coming up now.

I don't know why, to take a common yet current example, a man would grab a woman and jam his tongue into her face. I do know that it always comes as a shock--you don't see it coming. And that it's not trivial. It's gross as hell. It feels like you're being probed by an alien, but not in a good way.

Some of us are mad as hell and aren't going to take it anymore, and others of us have a more nuanced reaction. The really angry, take-no-prisoners women tend to skew younger, in my observation. Some of us elders perhaps have more expectation that things will change. We're having a moment here, and things are going to be different. We base this on having had more decades of seeing things actually change. The degree to which women used to be considered a decorative, inferior form of human can hardly be imagined now. It used to be a staple of comedy that "girls" were to be chased around the boss's desk, or sit around home waiting to be comforted when their cakes fell flat. Our concerns were trivial, and our reactions childlike. We were lesser beings. We were inconsequential.

When I was a kid, I accumulated some forty-plus stuffed animals and every one of them was a male, except for rubber-faced Mrs. Teddybear, who was a hand-me-down. She wasn't interesting. The rest had jobs and hobbies and personalities. Almost none of my classmates' moms worked outside the home. We grew up to be "Women's Libbers." That was a pejorative, but it did get us out and about, and able to have our very own checking accounts, even if we were still expected to cook the brown rice casseroles for the boys running the revolution.

One reason this old broad gives more leeway to certain miscreants than others is that I remember being a part of it all, doing things that shouldn't have been done, going along with things that used to be considered comedic, playing it for laughs. It's well established that I couldn't enter politics if I wanted to because there's way too much shit in my closet. There's not much (and not many) I haven't done. I've got plenty to be ashamed of, if I were inclined that way and had a memory. And even so, I think I'm an okay person with stuff to offer the world. I think some of the men who have something to atone for are, too. Check for signs of authentic contrition: it exists. We need way more women in positions of power in every field, but males should be allowed to evolve. And I trust they will.

I'm not saying my former complicity with the patriarchy is on a par with the unearned, malignant power of the males who exploited it. I don't suppose much of what I did actually hurt anyone. I probably haven't even broken any hearts, except for that one guy back in '71, and he really wasn't emotionally stable, just between you and me.

So yes, I think things can and will change. I never thought people would stop lighting up cigarettes any damn where they wanted. I never though people would pick up dog poop. Yet the air is fresh and I can go months without having to scrape my shoes against the curb.

Many men are now worried that "anything" they might do or say will be misinterpreted. But, guys, it's pretty simple. Pretend, as hard as you can, that women are fully your equals, until it starts to feel natural. And be willing to take no for an answer. It's quite easy to know when a line is being crossed. At least, it is for us. We've negotiated and enjoyed years of friendly banter and flirtation and never had any trouble finding that line. We can feel it. We know when someone is looking right through us and not seeing us. We know when we've been discounted. We know when someone is assuming ownership, is prepared to take possession. When we have a situation on our hands.

Let's get it all out there and put men on notice their secrets are no longer safe with us, and things will change. They will. It's happened before. But let's remember there are degrees of offense. A humiliating or dismissive ass-pat isn't as bad as a forcible kiss. Which is not as bad as rape. Which is not as bad as murder. Which is not as bad as war.

Which is not as bad as plundering a sweet planet and extinguishing its life-forms and enslaving its humans in order to shovel ever more treasure into a few, fat pockets. Focus, people, focus.

Me Too

Me too, naturally.

I'll start with just a couple, for now. The earliest ones. Nothing too dreadful, or too early--I was raised in a family of decent people and well shielded.  I knew not to take candy from strangers, but what designs those strangers might have had on me were a mystery. Art Linkletter was on the tube, not Girls Gone Wild.

No, my introduction to the peril of being female began only when I'd just started to develop. Eleven, maybe, or twelve. It's not a good time of life. It's the beginning of the end of innocence, and by that I mean the condition of being whole in oneself, the pilot of one's own consciousness, the skinner of knees and the collector of caterpillars. If you're as lucky as I am, you get to be that child for a good while, rowing your own boat in a protective flotilla, allowed to drift at will with a cargo of your own imagination.

Then things start to change, and it becomes ever clearer that navigating the world and its demands and betrayals is going to require some compromise of the spirit, some deceit and pretense. And that's just to keep your head above water among your peers. But there's a wider world.

The first time, I was walking down the block to Robertson's Five and Dime, as I had done for years, every time I found a few pennies in the sofa cushions. I was nearly there when a man, a grown man, pointed at me and grinned. "Hey, I know you," he said.

I probably looked perplexed, and I probably smiled back. As one does.

"You work at the bar, right? That's it! I've seen you dancing at the bar. Oh, yesss." He was really grinning now.

I can't remember what used to be on that corner next to the dime store, but now it was a topless joint. That was a new thing then, and a scandal in the neighborhood. The man grinned harder and his eyes traveled down my body. My new body. I smiled again, probably, and told him I didn't work at the bar.

"You sure look like her though. You could."

I ducked into the dime store, bought a Maryjane, and peered through the window to make sure the man was gone before I walked home. Not that he wasn't friendly. He was real friendly.

It's a mild enough story, but as poor as my memory is, it stands out. What's interesting about it is not the man's ploy, his game, his easy, casual assertion of his own power. There's nothing special about that. "When you're famous, they'll let you," a powerful man says, but even those with nothing going for them will play up any edge they can conceive of, and that edge is often over women. All women, any woman. We're all in the same lower caste and they'll make sure we don't forget it. There's nothing more mundane than that story. What's interesting to me about this story, and the next, is my own reaction.

First, a sense of menace, accompanied by the first realization that I would have to negotiate life more carefully from now on, and take other people into account in a way I'd never had to do. I was suddenly not a little girl anymore, but a little girl in costume, in drag, and people were going to look at me in a different way, and at the same time no longer see me at all. So I felt menace, and loss. But also something else. 

Do I really look like the dancer at the bar? Could I really be mistaken for the dancer at the bar?

[No, eleven-year-old little Mary B., no, no, no. Christ on a stick. That man knew you were not a dancer at a bar.]

And so I felt as though I had dodged a bullet, but also that I might have some power of my own, something that made other people notice me. That I had some new currency in this new world, something from the props department I could use as I climbed the big stage and learned how to act.

That night, I took my shirt off, threw my shoulders back, and examined the progress in the mirror. It's a strange bit of business to witness on yourself. I did not want to grow up, but as long as I had to, I wanted something I could work with.

This is how it starts. If you ever wondered why some women accept this situation as normal and consider unsolicited attentions a compliment, become accomplices in their own subjugation, this is how it starts.

That's not entirely fair, of course. Most people, anywhere on the sexual spectrum, try to attract. It's all part of the game. The unfair part is that men can really mess you up. They can kill you.

Story Two, not long after. I'd been in the church choir since I was little. I'd graduated to the adult choir with my dad, and Ronnie Oldham was acting different. Mr. Oldham was old and fat and had never paid me any mind at all, but now he was waggling his eyebrows and making low whistles at me as I walked past. "Oh, brother, George," I heard an adult say to my father. "You know your little girl is growing up when Ronnie starts taking an interest." Everyone chuckled. It was general knowledge.

I'd gone into the empty rehearsal room to retrieve something when Mr. Oldham came in behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. When I turned around, he covered my mouth with his and forced in his tongue, squeezed my breasts with both hands, and backed me into a wall. One of the women in the choir came in and said, "Now, Ronnie, you know better than that," and he left the room immediately. My reaction? I was really relieved that lady came in when she did. And I was also as embarrassed as I'd ever felt in my life. Absolutely humiliated, eight shades of crimson, paralyzed, incapable of speech. Exactly as if I'd been caught doing something wrong. What else could I have done? I had never been given a script in which I could say "no" to an adult.

But somehow I was partly to blame.