Why Don’t Women Submit?

February 3, 2011 by 13 Comments

AWP starts today in DC, and VIDA is getting a lot of news for their breakdown of the lack of women published in major magazines. The pie charts are undeniable.

One of the explanations is that women don’t submit their work as often as men do. This reminds me of The Awl’s look at the difference in pitches between men and women, showing that women often diminished themselves in the pitch and assumed the attitude of a thankful street urchin, while dudes cocked it out and were like “yo, I wanna write. You wanna read.”

I more or less quit submitting my fiction to literary journals about three years ago. I never assumed anybody wanted to read what I was sending. When I was applying to MFA programs, one of the heady experiences of that process was knowing the esteemed faculty where I was applying might actually glance at a page of my work.  It was insane to think they would actually like it, or read all of it. But I also thought my work was really good.  The assumption, from the beginning, was that it was hard to get attention as a writer, but that talent does indeed out.

The path that made sense as an undergraduate watching a mentor is to keep your head down, and follow the prescribed way: B.A. in English, MFA in Fiction, minor publications, writer’s retreats,  major publications, agent, book, teaching job.  If one of the blocks failed, it meant one just didn’t quite have the special oomph of someone with a real shot. And since writers are often betting their entire life on the assumption of their own talent, I think they are especially sensitive to external signs about that talent’s reality.  If it wasn’t going to shake out, I wanted to know early,  and couldn’t think of a worse fate than being one of those people who think they have talent when they really don’t. This sometimes keeps me up at night.

I wonder if because women are more conditioned to external appraisals of their worth, this makes them overly realist, negatively realist,  in their assessment of their chances at a writing career.  I was super brassy, and successful, while all the chips were falling into place. I won awards, got into fancy schools, had the attention of fancy mentors, and I was still sure that I was going to be one of the few: the writers who really make it (I figure it is like college football, with 1% making it pro).

But the next step didn’t come as easily as the rest had. I got way less brassy. Publishing was an insane void, a party that nobody cared I was at.  I started thinking of the odds. In smaller contests, and general application pools, you were only working with a sample of writers. In publishing, all writers alive were submitting. It made sense the rejections were piling up. It was a lottery, and lottery winning is nothing to be planned around.  At first, things like wonderful rejections seemed like nudges forward. But after years of only receiving no dice or “we love you, but no” letters, it seemed like there were smarter ways to spend my time. Smarter ways to get published. I never considered the editors rejected me to be idiots, unaware of the beauty of my work. I did sometimes think they were clique-ish, and because I wasn’t annointed, they weren’t having me.

The gender thing never occurred to me. But, of all the writers I’ve known who think they’re geniuses even though there is no proof otherwise, the majority have been men. They will keep submitting their work until Armageddon because they know it should be published and applauded (as the Awl pitches prove). And out of sheer ratio, they have a better chance at winning the lottery because of this. External praise is grand, but the absence of it would never hinder them.  I’ve always thought of them as having blinders on. Big ego blinders that  might make them look like an asshole, but they can’t see it, so it doesn’t matter.

I have never admired these people. An admirable writer is classically one who is humble, and who works hard and articulates well. And yet, these are the same writers who know they have made a fine thing, and are just lucky enough that the world has also seen it. I quit submitting because it seemed like dieting: a frittering away of thought, time and money that could all be better used elsewhere.

I didn’t stop writing, but I did start writing bigger projects. Short stories no longer seem like the way to break in.  The ideal is that you write a short story, get it published in The Atlantic, get an agent, and then you’re set. But it seems just as possible (in the impossible sense) to write a novel, and find an agent, and then be somewhere further ahead. The only reason to publish in literary journals seems to be for ego, admiration of your peers, the chance of an agent finding your story, and to have something to list in your bio. It might be a building block for larger things, but there is also the solid, very solid, chance that only 4 people will buy the journal and 2 of them will actually read your story. And if you are very very very lucky, you might make $50.

At least with blogging you know how many people read your work, know that your work can be seen in other countries and communities outside of a specific literary group, and take part in discussions about the work. And while you don’t make any money, you also don’t have to wait two months for anybody to decide whether or not your voice is worthy.  And you get to have conversations. And sometimes a lot of people read your work, and show it to their friends, and put it on facebook, and tweet, and the blog stats are in the thousands, and for a week or so, you are LIVING THE DREAM.

My guess is women and men, early in their careers, submit the same amount, but that women submit less as they get older. There are a lot of women out there still pounding the literary world with manila folders and “send” buttons, but not as many as the menfolk. I’d like to say that this has all convinced me to up my ratio, get back in the saddle, and flog away to all the literary journals. But I’m still not convinced that the literary journals are the best gate to try to pry open for hopes of literary glory.  Since I’ve left off submitting my writing, I’ve seen that the writing world is bigger than what I thought it was when my only goal was to get a work-study at Breadloaf and one day go to AWP to promote my book.

Of course, I’m also just playing in another kind of lottery, hoping that when I finish my awesome novel, that I can easily get it published and join the ranks of those who do good work and never had to sweat about people not noticing. Then I can leapfrog over all this litmag struggle, and give interviews about the synchronicity of popular taste, literature, and the best-sellers list. I’m hoping I can say something like “the academy never quite knew what to do with me,” or “oh yes, I was rejected by everybody.” And then we will laugh, and some 14-year-old will be watching and aspire to be rejected a lot, too.

So, Millicent, what say you?  Is the answer to save our energy and just work on good work? Or get steel blinders, and rack up a thousand more papercuts to the soul?

Yours,

CF

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Consent Beyond the Bedroom

January 26, 2011 by 4 Comments

Dear Millicent,

While navigating the new world of enthusiastic consent, I’m finding a lot of places outside of the bedroom where the same patterns exist. A quick list:

  • If Mr. CF and I are in the car, he always drives
  • If Mr. CF and I are in the grocery store, he pushes the cart
  • Mr. CF handles the majority of our bill paying
  • Mr. CF also purchases and prepares the majority of our food, therefore making the majority of our food decisions
  • I go to bed when Mr. CF is tired
  • When choosing restaurants or meeting places with friends, I usually say “what sounds good to you?” Most of us do, creating widespread exasperation.
  • When a female friend is aggressively particular about what she wants us to do, I am taken aback. When a male friend makes specific plans, I am relieved.
  • I rarely invite friends out, but will often respond to their invitations
  • If somebody requests something, I usually do it, then only later process it and either agree or grumble about it

The first 5 with Mr. CF  have evolved partly from the same long term relationship pattern of assumptive consent that got me thinking about all of this in the first place. Sometimes assumptive consent exists because it is practical. I have worse night-vision, so he always drives at night, and that slowly shifted to him driving whenever we are both in the car.  Since he plans most of the food, he drives the grocery cart because he knows what we need to buy. He’s a grand cook who enjoys making food, and I enjoy eating his cooking more than my own.  He is more meticulous about accounting and cares about it in a way that I don’t, so his taking care of the bills is a win win. We both know that I can drive the car, that I can drive the cart, that I can take care of the bills. But we both also know that I assumptively defer to his choices he assumptively makes (yes, assumptively). These household chores bring up the territory of consent in a long-term relationship that is the opposite of pronouncing desire, kinda. It’s about pronouncing responsibility, and pronouncing that very hard thing that consent protects: balance.

I really love that I don’t have to do these chores. I don’t want to verbally ask to participate in them.  Besides Mr. CF, who really enjoys paying bills? However, the answer here is the hard one. I wish it could just be a case of enthusiastic consent, with the answer being a hearty “no! I don’t want to cook! Please a go ahead!” but, of course it’s not that simple. When I look at all the items of the above list, I get a little frightened. They add up to a big pile of passive.  A person who can’t cook for herself, who doesn’t have a clear sense of when her bills are due, who has luxuriously let go of the some of the reins, is not doing herself (let alone her relationship) a solid.

The detriments of our arrangements are minor, but telling. I don’t know the city as well as Mr. CF because he does more of the driving (as a passenger, I never absorb orientation). My cooking skills have atrophied. When he travels and I am home alone, I am always astounded that I used to feed myself three meals a day on a regular basis when I lived alone, and it was more than turkey sandwiches and Trader Joe salads. We have even got to the point where he, like a 1950s housewife, prepares meals ahead and leaves them in the fridge or freezer with notes on how to reheat. I have a very fuzzy general sense of what we have in the bank, and often guess if it’s okay to use the debit card or not. If I make a big purchase, I will call him first to make sure it’s okay (something he doesn’t like, because we both feel the ridiculous daddy structure of it). In short, I have kind of infantilized myself.  That is, I am half baby, half Don Draper.

Since consent has recently climbed into the spotlight of our marital relations, we’ve talked about all of the above. It’s hard to tackle, because we have made all of these choices for a reason, I take on other chores, and the pattern does work well. I’m noticing I’m resistant because, just like with enthusiastic consent in sex, it means more work for me. I have to do more, and I love lazy. There’s also a lot of effort that doesn’t exactly give rewards: if I cook dinner, it doesn’t taste as good as if he did it and I forget about bills until the day they are due.

So, I have taken on making breakfast. It turns out that oatmeal is basically foolproof, something we both like, and feels like real cooking because I have to boil water first. I also offer to make dinner on days where I have more time, or if there is a recipe I specifically want. I haven’t even looked at recipes in years, but it’s good now because it forces me out to grocery shop, and to re-learn the kitchen. These are both minor things, but they force me to pronounce that I am part of the kitchen, that I can easily cook something I want when I am hungry, and that I want specific things.

Driving has been the most interesting because it hasn’t really changed. When we both get in the car to go somewhere, Mr. CF now asks “do you want to drive?” which is new, but my answer isn’t.  I say no–I really love looking out the window.  The change is he doesn’t ask out of routine, but instead out of genuine inquiry. I could say yes and it wouldn’t be a surprise.  While our actions are the same, they’ve shifted from assumptive decision making to conscious consent.

I’m still working on navigating the bills and on resisting going to bed because he is tired.  A lot of it is about not going on auto-pilot, and again realizing that my auto-pilot captain is quieter and more passive than I ever dreamed. Redefining consent in the bedroom, getting all baboon, announcing the freedom of no assumption or expectation in what comes next (except of course, love and respect) has been about work and liberation.  I imagine it works the same way in the kitchen and checkbook as well.

Am very much still learning, still confused.

I’m interested in how consent works in friendships, too. What passive approaches continue because we don’t want to offend? When nobody says where they want to go to lunch, does anybody end up eating what they want? Are dudes more likely to make the call with female friends? Where there is less intimacy, are we assumptively bound to less consent for the sake of polite interaction?

I’ve been reading the collected works of Miss Manners, who deserves a post of her own. As a great defender of personal boundaries, she often advises against the immense acrobatics of polite society.  Overall, she suggests that saying exactly what you mean is one of the most elegant existences. Pronunciation is key.

More soon,

Yours,

CF

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What I Didn’t Know About Consent

January 10, 2011 by 7 Comments

Dear Millicent,

I’m diving in to what blogs do best, and am about to get all personal and tell you about my bedroom. Excited? Me too. I want to look specifically at:

  • How does consent happen in long-term sexual relationships (including the business time dilemma)?
  • Even when we think we are empowered and in the know, what scripts are we really relying on?

Mr. Carla Fran and I recently had an awkward encounter where, in what was otherwise a normal scene of marital conjugality, he did not hear my protestations that a particular gesture hurt. I didn’t say it particularly loudly, and we both had been drinking. I said it again and he did not change his actions. I decided to  move along, confused if alarm was called for or not. We finished the act, I felt discombobulated, and when we talked about it the next day, I realized I was in a streak of turmoil about something that to him was an unheard note: a miscommunication with the unfortunate outcome of my discomfort.

I explained how this was problematic, even if it happened in our stable, well-built long-ass time together–how it triggered two immediate fears for me: the fear of assault, and the fear that I simply let it happen. I wanted him to realize the immense power imbalance that makes any insult in this realm scary, that rape is real and huge and terrifying, and that if anything that even is a hint of rape-like protocol is called out, that immediate concern and authentic apology are called for, and enough conversation to understand why alarm bells went off, and what everything actually meant.

So I started reading about what was a fairly undealt with word to me, consent. I thought I had the privilege of never really having to examine consent because I always had loving partners, and that “consent” was a word used primarily in lectures to teenagers or in examinations of rape.  Finding things to read was easy, because, in a strangely-timed way, this is an ideal moment to have this conflict.  With the Assange case, there have been so many helpful discussions and definitions put forward that it makes talking about such a scary subject easier, especially with the honesty some writers put forward. And I learned some things, huge things, when I really was just hoping to find language to help describe what I was feeling.

The key posts that were the most helpful were Scarleteen’s Driver’s Ed for the Sexual Superhighway: Navigating Consent, Jaclyn Friedman’s The (Nonexistent) Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Consequences of Enthusiastic Consent, and Heather Corinna’s Immodest Proposal. Here is a quick bullet list of my own revelations:

  • Being a sexual partner doesn’t meant going along with whatever because it’s all fine, but instead enthusiastically agreeing, where, according to Corinna, ideally “by the time anyone gets near anyone else’s genitals they are puffed up with arousal like a baboon’s bright red behind.” She also suggests that sex is quite a feat of timing really, since it demands that two people want to tear each others’ clothes off at the same time. If they don’t want to (let’s say one partner is really ready to get their partner naked, and the other partner isn’t against the idea but also wants to read a magazine) then they shouldn’t proceed.  Lukewarm and superhot does not a tryst make.  I think this is more difficult in the long-term not because desire fades, but because the hot hot heat of that stages is so hot and babooned up, whereas in the long-haul there is a assumption that happiness is very much based on perfunctory business time, or compromise (i.e. Dan Savage’s hearty salute to the GGG partner, though the Game part of that does assume a kind of enthusiastic consent). “I’m tired, I have to go to work in the morning” does not stand as enthusiastic consent, but is a script I know well, and one of the reasons the Flight of the Conchords nailed it, hard.
  • The corollary to this is that it is okay to withdraw consent whenever and both parties know this without worry of insult. Kissing does not have to lead to hot kissing and hot kissing does not have to lead to sex, which sounds obvious, but I think is a common issue in long-term relationships where it is well known that certain gestures lead to certain outcomes.  A peck on the cheek, sex isn’t exactly on the table. A long kiss with some tongue, and it could easily be assumed that sex is en route. That is unless, you’re practicing enthusiastic consent, and the pressure evaporates because you are only going to hot kiss if you clearly really really wanna hot kiss.  There’s no obligation in good sex, even of the sweetest kind. {Except of course the obligation of respect and sexual health and birth control and all that jazz}.
  • Consent is not just a verbal thing about saying yes or no. I was so used to making consent the stuff of high-school assembly speeches, that I had reduced it to a quick “no means no” existence. In  movies, if a woman says “no” we know absolutely this is a rape scene. If she’s crying or upset, or says “that hurts” pretty much the same deal. But a lack of consent can also be defined by the contrast of what counts as consent. Interest vs. passivity, reaching vs. pushing away, sounds of pleasure vs. sounds of discomfort, joy vs. stress.  Enthusiastic consent is a thing of great beauty, and logically leads to great sex.
  • In our discussions about consent, my partner had to take responsibility for not ensuring consent before moving forward, and I had to take responsibility for not loudly and concretely confirming my consent status either physically or verbally.  I don’t mean to overemphasize this, but we have a solid relationship built on equality and respect both in and out of the bedroom. We also had gotten ourselves into an intoxicated situation where consent was missing. This event made us both examine important aspects we had been blind to, how quiet I had been, how much we were assuming, and how used we were to this.  It made bad moments of power imbalance inevitable, sooner or later. Looking back, mutual enthusiastic consent has certainly been part of our sex-life at times, but it wasn’t something I was paying enough attention to, because I honestly didn’t think of it.
  • And that’s because there is a lot of shit in the world that has affected my view of gender, performance, and what goes on in the bedroom (or wherever you bold souls may take it). I very much agree with Friedman’s take that saying no is hard for lots of reasons, and saying no isn’t just about rape:

Similarly, when we learn as young girls to tolerate “low-level” boundary violations like the ones we often are forced to suffer in silence at school, at home and on the street – bra-snapping, boob-grabbing, ass pinching, catcalling, dick flashing “all in good fun” relentless violations that adults and authorities routinely ignore – it makes it harder for us to notice when even greater boundaries are being violated, eventually leading to the reality that many women who are raped just freeze and fall silent, because that’s what they’ve been taught to do over and over since day one.  You tell me what’s more infantilizing: repeatedly letting boys (and grown men) off the hook for their behavior because “boys will be boys” and we can’t ever expect any differently, or creating a consent standard in which all partners take active responsibility for their partner’s safety, and which acknowledges the truly diseased sexual culture we’re soaking in every day.

In Immodest Proposal, looking at the lack of female desire in our cultural expectations of sex, Corinna says:

We’ve long idealized or enabled the romance-novel script of ravishment: reluctant women and passive girls swayed into sex by strong partners. While we’re slowly coming around to the notion that violent force is not romantic, and rape not sex, but assault, “gentle persuasion” is still swoon-worthy stuff. The young woman who is provided a sexual awakening by an almost-paternal male partner remains an ideal, common fantasy or a profound fear if those roles can’t be adequately performed for or by women and men alike.

The chastity-belts of yesteryear are on display in our museums; those of the current day live on the mutilated genitals of poor women of color in Africa and wealthy white women in Los Angeles alike, in sex education curricula and the tiresome continuance of good girl/bad girl binaries, and in suburban households everywhere where a male partner has a hard-drive full of porn everyone knows is there and recognizes he may bring in his head to sex with partners while his female other makes sure her vibrator is well-hidden and would never consider asking her partner to use it during sex together for fear of making him feel insecure.

And all of this and more has gone on for so long and been so widespread that what should be a simple given of our yes can often seem an unattainable ideal.

  • All of which opened my eyes, took a burden off, and put another, much happier one back on.  Apparently, until this past week, I have been a bit of a sexual mute. A mature, strong, confident woman, who didn’t know the basic idea that she was supposed to say yes when she wanted (and not just in an effort to be sexy for the partner’s pleasure, or to fulfill some dumb rule prescribed by the Millionaire Matchmaker), and to say no when she wanted as well.  I thought the abstract idea of my desire meant that I had to be pro-sex (not prudish, NSFW Fleshbot savvy, aggressive enough to change positions or suggest a lighter touch) and that my idea of consent in a stable relationship was that it was invisible and moot. I have to learn to use my voice in the way that I always thought I was, but was obviously only superficially doing.
  • Now I’m learning.  My partner and I are re-approaching consent, starting at the very beginning with a lot of talk.  We both feel liberated by the idea that there is no set pattern for how things must be, and that neither of us knows what the coming pattern is.  And I’m a little scared, because now I have to do way more work in the bedroom than I am used to doing, and I can’t blame anything on things I haven’t said. I have to find a vocabulary, and that scariest of things, I have to use it.
  • Another benefit of this ugly moment in our bed is that my partner had to examine his own preconceptions, and voice his concerns about patterns we had so set that they were in the running to be part of our general makeup forever and ever. I think he also took on a little bit more of how scary sexual inequality is, shedding light on larger struggles affecting way more people than the two of us in our cozy home.

Corinna ends her piece, which was part of Friedman’s collection Yes Means Yes, with a vision of what enthusiastic consent is, and where our girl goes off into the world, and finds her very healthy way:

Without the assurance or expectation that she has an age-old script to follow that wasn’t written by her, she not only knows she will have to be more creative sexually than women before her, she’s looking forward to it. She has no expectation of being asked to perform or of asking a partner to perform: her expectations are all about both of them engaging in expression, not performance. She’s not expecting porn or a romance novel: she’s expecting an interpretive dance.

M., you and I have written a lot here about the dynamics of desire, the facility of fantasy, and the complexities possible in each. I think I have been maybe off angle–thinking that, more or less, the only choices were porn, romance novel, or the awareness of settling for the real world. Like an unhappy malcontent on his birthday, pissed that he didn’t get any of the gifts he made up in his or  head, I didn’t realize that I was part of that big day. This all sounds so broad, but I mean it in the most specific of ways. Pronouncing desire is an important part of life, as long as everybody’s pronouncements (likes and dislikes) are heard and understood. And that it can be really hard to pronounce desire because the words can feel clunky and weird in our mouths, or are just plain unknown. I’m sure this will be as obvious as Early Bird Money Pie from Peep Show to many people, but for all my talk about the importance of voice and empowerment, this was a bit of a blindside. And a windfall.

Again, Corinna writes something awesome and helpful:

Consent is absolutely foundational for any kind of healthy sexuality. But our sexual revolution can only begin not only after every woman is at yes, with every invitation, but after – be it to man, woman or someone else entirely, and spoken by anyone – that yes is less one person’s answer to another’s request and more an expression or validation of any person’s own or shared desire….

Which brings me back to Business Time. That sketch blew my mind when I first saw it because I thought it was being wonderfully honest. Now I see it as a representation of what we accept as the diluted real thing. Business Time should not be something we can all relate to.  It’s still funny as it pokes at disheartening patterns, but much more brutal. Domestic dude wants sex, domestic lady doesn’t. He decides they are having sex, she vaguely gets into it, but in the end she is dissatisfied and he had a two minute encounter that could have been masturbatory at best. If consent has reared it’s forgotten head, at the worst, Sally would have slept well and Jemaine would have taken care of himself. In the best case scenario, the Flight of Conchords would have a whole other song about the surprise of awesome sexy times, and the recycling could still be taken out, cuz that’s important, too.

This American Life’s episode last week was called “Say Anything”, asking if talking really helps.  The first segment was about a book from the eighties called Please Read This For Me: How to Tell the Man You Love Things You Can’t Put into Words. The idea was that women could find the chapter on their problem, bookmark it, and have their partner read it. I listened to this right as I was spelunking in the internet to find out how to talk to Mr. Carla Fran about what had happened, why it scared me, and why it was important. We read these blog posts together, and we talked. And the answer is yes, TAL, talking really helps, as does action, and research, and checking blindspots.

Marriage is built on consent. Consent to not sleep with other people, consent to share finances, consent to mutually lift the burden of adulthood together.  And one of the greatest struggles I have found in partnering, one that you and I have parsed here enough that it seems we haven’t found satisfaction in articulation, is the boundaries of domestic space. We have asked how to share work and time with a partner, and what limits are necessary, what limits are the least flexible. Living together is the concrete of the larger, scarier and abstract boundary that is tested and wrestled when we  join up eternally with somebody in the eyes of the establishment: self vs. other. Relationships, and especially marriage, can be a challenge to voice, especially for women, but I’m starting to realize that even voice isn’t what I thought it was.  Claiming self, space, and desire isn’t the stuff of scripts and movie roles, or blog posts.  Finding words is hard. I get why women bought that book in the eighties. I get why Sally sleeps with Jemaine. I get why Mr. Carla Fran and I had to have a major talk about hard to say things. But I’m also really excited about interpretive dance.

To recap, the lessons being learned:

  1. only have sex when you really really want to
  2. say no when you don’t want to, there’s no risk of being impolite
  3. consent is part of even established relationships
  4. find a way to say what you want, it’s important
  5. assumptions aren’t doing you any favors
  6. be like a baboon. A lucky lucky baboon.

Yours,

CF

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Lady Parts Tagged with , , , , , , ,

A Very Cervical January

January 10, 2011 by Leave a comment

Dear Millicent,

Just as I was absolutely wondering about the origins of Flying Fish, I bet you were wondering about Cervical Health Awareness Month, which turns out to be right now.  Here’s an interesting cervical fact from Our Bodies, Ourselves: when local anesthesia is injected into the cervix, a possible side effect is a numbness of the lips and tongue.

Do you remember the 1998 Drew Barrymore Luke Wilson movie Home Fries? It’s an insane movie, Shakespearean in plot,  and one that I loved in high school.  It’s all up on Youtube. One of the oddest moments is when they make a birth education class, with all its huffing, puffing, and caressing, into a scene fraught with sexual tension. I can’t find the right clip, but I distinctly remember a scene were the couple kisses (complicated by the fact that Wilson is the baby’s daddy’s stepson), after which a very pregnant Barrymore happily proclaims that an open mouth is an open vagina. Shocking stuff in 1998–well, even the word vagina uttered on a screen was shocking to me then.  And now, we know that a numb cervix is a numb mouth.  Happy Cervical Awareness Month!

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Should’ve Known, Just Found (SKJF)

January 7, 2011 by 1 Comment

Dear Millicent,

I have been absorbing an array of books and movies lately, and while larger ideas have existed in all of them, I thought I would share a list of  facts that knocked my block off a bit over the past few weeks.

  • From Rebecca Traister’s fantastic Big Girls Don’t Cry (which is the first non-fiction book I have ever read that feels like it is part of my life. We were alive and part of the recent history it covers, I know of the people she’s talking about, her analysis is actually talking to people like me), Hillary Rodham Clinton was Hillary Rodham until 1982, two years after Chelsea’s birth, several after her marriage to Bill.  She added the Clinton after it had affected Bill’s second term as governor in Arkansas. Elizabeth Edwards was Elizabeth Anania until her son’s death in 1996, where she said “I took my son’s name; I didn’t take my husband’s name.”  Why this shocked me, I don’t know, but it proved how easy it is to assume that political spouses have always been slightly diminutive and always a supporting role, even if they are proven powerhouses in their own right.  The name thing illuminated how much gets tweaked for politics, and how these women have been fighting the game in more concrete ways than the media output of their public persona suggests, and how much adapting and explanation these careers demand.
  • FromRadiolab all the way back in 2008, did you know sperm actually goes all the way up into the fallopian tube, where the tube provides it a special cocktail to keep it happy while it waits for the egg to come to the party? I idiotically thought conception happened in the big living room of the uterus (this is probably due to the Look Who’s Talking opening credits).  My favorite part of the story is that the researcher who proved this did so by having intercourse, and then the next day having her doctor do a tubal ligation and take out the section of her tube. They counted 20 of her husband’s sperm hanging out in what Radiolab deemed “the sugar room.”  The entire episode on sperm is great, though harrowing. For some reason many of the segments end with a haunting sadness. But, the hosts also do a great job of explaining why we need men to reproduce…it turns out that without dudes, there wouldn’t be any evolution.
  • Sidebar: do feminists often refer to men as “dudes” because it disassociates them from the incorporated power and privilege of patriarchy and whatnot? When I refer to a dude, he is a much more approachable abstract fellow than a man or male, but also not talked down to like a boy or asshat.
  • More bio wonders, this time from Our Bodies Ourselves, that great tome that has always been respected, but which I have never read. Turns out I should have been. It is astoundingly well written, and gets political in a wonderfully direct and useful way. My great aha from the 2005 edition was simple, but one I had never known.  The opening of the cervix is called the os (a strange, primal word, no?) and women who have not had a vaginal birth have an os that feels like a rosebud. Women who have had a vaginal birth have an os that “feels like the shape of a smile.”  This made me understand the biology of birth more…which didn’t exactly comfort me, but now I get what all that dilation is about. As for the book, I more or less read it cover to cover, surprised that with all of the other good resources out there for sexuality and women’s health, this one sets the standard, and still does things nobody else is doing.
  • And for other things I never knew about, the Magdalen laundries. For centuries, these were homes for “fallen women” which became institutions that often imprisoned any disenfranchised women that had been labeled as an unwed mother, rape victim, or just too sexy for common good.  Run by nuns, the establishments weren’t funded by the church and had to support themselves with profit from the laundries. The women had extreme work hours, and were not allowed to talk.  Many spent their whole lives in these institutions.  The laundries started receiving attention in 1993 when a convent sold off some land in Dublin and a mass grave was found of 115 inmates. Netflix had recommended the movie The Magdalen Sisters, which I watched with dutiful feminist horror. It’s a chilling and well made movie, but my jaw and every other jaw in the room dropped when it said the last of these laundries closed in 1996. That means in our lifetime. In our generation! What fucking what?!  Wikipedia also notes that Sinead O’Connor spent time in one of the Magdalen asylums as a teenager.

Yours,

CF

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Sloppy Jane

December 1, 2010 by 8 Comments

Dear Millicent,

Because the Nu woman is such a hard label to talk around (I say it out loud and it seems to mean nothing), I am renaming her the Sloppy Jane. No, the Sloppy Jane is not a new sexual position, but it is still for the advanced.  The Sloppy Jane is that rare female protagonist who is as flummoxed, average, and compelling as men are portrayed, and who usually has a messy life that is full of unguarded or foibled moments of humanity.

And, as we have talked about before, the Brits are really good at writing Sloppy Janes, and the Americans aren’t. I would even argue that the Brits are so good at it that they have created an overdose of the Sloppy Jane.  Julia Davis’ Nighty Night was recommended to me by commenters here, and I crown Davis The Uber Jane. She is one of the most, perhaps the most, uncomfortable and unlikeable women I have ever seen take on television. She finds a panty liner in shrimp salad that she is serving to guests at dinner, and simply picks it out before serving more.  Her dog poops on her kitchen floor, and she blames the turds on her wheelchair bound nemesis. She is as over the top as a classic Sloppy Joe, David Brent for example, but she is much much harder to excuse.

In 2004, The Guardian, in an article title “The Witches” wondered if Davis had changed sitcoms forever:

It wasn’t until Absolutely Fabulous unleashed upon the world Edina and Patsy – especially Patsy – that we really had a proper introduction to women behaving badly.

Yet no one is a patch on Jill. In evolutionary terms, she is a huge leap forward, a feat of genetic engineering. The Office might have popularised the comedy of embarrassment, but Nighty Night has moved it on. The monstrous woman has arrived. Best be nice to her.

Also of interest, several female comedians are asked their take on Davis’ character “Jill”, and several reference the impossibility of an unlikeable protagonist until Gervais’ The Office. The article is a fun read, especially for Catherine Tate’s take on unattractive characters in comedy:

Apart from Friends, comedy is rarely glamorous. You’ve got to compromise your dignity in some way for it to work and what’s nice about grotesque characters is that they display a lack of vanity. I think women now are not frightened to appear unattractive, as unpleasant characters. Characters work best when they’re a mixture of recognition and exaggeration and the funnier you can look within the realms of naturalism, the better. It’s through the mouths of these grotesques that you can get away with things you couldn’t otherwise. I do a character of an old woman who says things that, on a script in black and white, would be unacceptable. That these characters don’t believe they’re wrong is what makes it funny while taking the edge off the offence.

But that article was in 2004. Nighty Night went off the air in 2005 (though Darren Star is/was producing a US version). What monstrous Sloppy Janes are still out there, especially on this side of the pond?

Here’s my working list, with high hopes to add more. They range from empathetic three-dimensionality, to intense grotesqueries of heart and spirit.

  1. Toni Collette, United States of Tara
  2. Alexandra Goodworth, Head Case (a Netflix wonder)
  3. Lisa Kudrow, in most roles she takes
  4. Felicia Day, The Guild
  5. Jennifer Anniston, Management (and I could be argued out of this one)

Who else do we need to crown Ms. Sloppy Jane USA?

Yours,

CF

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Odd Saint: Shannon Plumb

October 14, 2010 by Leave a comment

Dear CF,

I’m nominating the weird and hilarious Shannon Plumb, also known as a present-day female Buster Keaton. Or, as I like to think of her, the love-child of Janis Joplin, Amy Sedaris and Charlie Chaplin. She’s probably best known for her series “The Park,” which was shown on four huge screens in Central Park, none of which come close to the (literally) plaintive brilliance of “Rattles and Cherries,” which you can and should watch below at 23:19. (Most of her films are less than five minutes long.)

She focuses (as she puts it) on “the imperfections of people,” and I’d say most of her characters fit into your concept of the “nu woman.”

The video below is from a talk she gave at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. I’m embedding it because it includes a collection of several silent Super 8 films she makes—by herself, for the most part. Scary, what this woman can do with a tripod.

I’m indexing them below, with special mentions for Shalmont Field (at 19:20) and THURSDAY, St. Patrick’s Day (at 31:12) which does a terrifyingly hilarious number on the performance of being boy and girl. “Discus” and “Hurdles” show women doing hurdles or throwing the discus in sexy strapless dresses or terrible wigs, with all the inelegance you might imagine that might produce. “Stewardess” is Howard Hughes’ worst nightmare.

Partial Index:

15:10 Stewardess

16:55 Nasal Cleanse

19:20 Shalmont Field

23:10  Rattles and Cherries

27:33 Discus

31:12 THURSDAY: St. Patrick’s Day

35:35 maximus

37:40 Madison and East 24th

41:25 “It’s fine,” she whispered.

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He’s Just Not That Into You And The Incidental Female Friend

September 6, 2010 by 4 Comments

Dear CF,

So glad to have you back, and just plain relieved to get your take on films du jour. I’ve almost stopped going to the movies (partly poverty, partly inertia) so I’m hopelessly behind. To give you a sense of where I stand re: our cultural capital: I haven’t seen Inception yet, but last night I finally got around to seeing He’s Just Not That Into You.

Re: the sad-sack zeitgeist of which Scott Pilgrim seems to be yet another instance, I wondered, watching HJNTIY yesterday, whether it was doing something with the female equivalent.

He’s Just Not That Into You tries pretty hard to be our generation’s When Harry Met Sally. It wants to articulate the sexual mores of our age—Drew Barrymore’s monologues are straight-up exposition on what the internet hath wrought, and though much of the movie leaves me agape, some of Barrymore’s stuff is actually entertaining. If back in Rob Reiner’s day the guiding question was whether or not men and women could be friends, now the question is whether men and women can rise above the pervasive insincerity of the flirtation—a basic dishonesty that infects every relationship, every marriage, every nonmarriage.

I’m not awfully interested in HJNTIY‘s framing of that question (and, one devastating Home Depot scene notwithstanding, I don’t think the movie handles it with much success), but I do think the film is hitting—tangentially, maybe even by accident—on something zeitgeisty about Filmic Female Friendships in America Today: namely, the extent to which that insincerity infects woman-woman relationships too. The movie spends some expository time on the tendency to lie charitably and to spin the story so that the friend is never forced to occupy that terrible unspoken category: The Undesired.

If the sad-sack Apatovian bromance consists of comfortably joking about each other’s undesirability until the glimmerings of homosocial mutual esteem erupt (as in I Love You, Man), the sororomance (ugh—seriously, we need a word for this) wallows and sometimes drowns in expressions of mutual esteem that must, eventually, turn fake. There comes a point when the friend assuring Gigi “don’t worry, he’ll call,” no longer believes it. She says it anyway. At that point, the female friend becomes an untrustworthy source of comfort. When Gigi says to Janine, quite seriously, that her husband’s infidelity isn’t her fault, Janine can’t hear her. She’s too used to the vocabulary of sugary consolation.

I wouldn’t argue that HJNTIY is about that—the insufficiency of female advice is what gets Gigi dependent on Alex for “truthful” masculine counsel, so it’s probably just a plot device—but it’s one of the few parts of the movie I find interesting. And while I don’t know to what extent it captures a *truth* about modern friendships, it’s definitely theorizing a different modern myth of lady-homosociality than, say, the easy bluntness, the comfortably skeptical chemistry Rosie O’Donnell has with Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle. Or Meg Ryan’s candor to Carrie Fisher in When Harry Met Sally (“he’s never going to leave her”).

Again, while the dilemma of masculine friendship remains at the fore these days, I’m panning for intelligent glimmers of the other. As I think of other films with multiple female protagonists—Mean Girls, Vicky Cristina Barcelona come to mind—I notice that none of them really take the problem by the horns. Whip It has other narrative agendas it puts first, although I have to say that friendship strikes me as more “real.”

I don’t begrudge the boys their time. Friendship is worth thinking about on both ends of the gendered spectrum. But I doubt Beaches and Thelma and Louise are really the best we can do. Until the existential isolation that frequently attends couplehood gets coded something other than exclusively male*, we might have to consign our female friendships to bit parts, and think of them as consolation prizes.

Fondly,
M

*Though actually, Janine’s existence in that half-built house in HJNTIY captures the feminine version of this surprisingly well.

PS: [SPOILER ALERT] That last scene, when Affleck proposes to Aniston after spending seven years on his principled unbelief in marriage! Intensely disappointing. Harriet Vane would have dropped him on the spot.

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Christian Boys on How Girls Can Stop Making Them “Stumble”: (Hint: Don’t Move. And Make Sure You’re Not-Moving On Purpose.)

July 27, 2010 by 5 Comments

I love the smell of sexism in the evening. Are you ready for “The Rebelution“? Where teenagers “rebel against low expectations”? Sociological Images published the results of a survey of 1600 Christians on how “modest” they consider various articles of clothing and behavior (and the corresponding “value” of the wearer/actor). Boys and girls took the survey and the behaviors of both genders were up for discussion. It was a productive conversation wherein both sides got to express their points of view and their spiritual and physical struggles with desire.

Ha. I kid.

Here’s what really happened: the only gender subjected to the “Modest or Not” test? Women. (Sorry, “girls.”) The 1600 respondents invited to minutely inspect and judge every aspect of female behavior, attire and deportment? Men. (Correction: “guys.”) The theological dimension? None—unless you count “stumbling,” an undefined expression the survey uses to describe a temporary lapse, always by a male in response to female lures.

The “Modesty Survey” got its start when a young woman suggested an “anonymous discussion on modesty” between boys and girls. The survey counts itself a rousing success at achieving this (potentially quite useful) goal. The number of female respondents? Zero. Girls were apparently encouraged to ask questions, just not answer them.

Respondents were given statements with which they could agree or disagree. The good part: the Christian boys often seemed to be quite a bit more thoughtful than whoever put this survey together. The bad part? Whoever designed it seems to have wilfully ignored two truths—boys have self-control, girls feel desire—and one claim: neither sex has any business policing the movements of the other.

Here are some sample statements boys are invited to have an opinion about. They can Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral [not a verb, that always bugs me], Disagree, or Strongly Disagree:

  • “Playing with jewelry, such as a necklace, is a stumbling block.” (Result: 58% “Disagree” or “Strongly Disagree.” Phew!)
  • “A purse with the strap diagonally across the chest draws too much attention to the bust.” (Result: 47% of respondents “Agree” or “Strongly Agree.” According to that bunch, messenger bags are  for whores.) To be fair, some guys were a little more sensible. One comments: “This is a case where if the guy is staring then he should check himself on that. I wear a messenger bag myself, so I can’t hold a double standard. I can, however, hold myself to a higher standard and just not look.”

    • Others had detailed procedures; some were ready to break out the measuring cups:

    “Depends upon how heavy the bag is. If the strap pushes on the shirt such that the breasts are separated as one looks down, it’s immodest.”

  • “Playing with hair is not a stumbling block.” 61% agree! Girls can play with their hair, but by gum, THERE ARE LIMITS:

    “Not in of itself, but if you spend a lot of time playing with your hair it makes a guy wonder if you aren’t trying to attract attention.”

    And if a guy is [count the qualifiers] wondering whether you might be trying to attract attention, you are conclusively IMMODEST. Someone else offers the following clarification:

    “Technically, it’s a flirting technique.”

    According to this young man, “flirting techniques” are not “stumbling blocks” in the pursuit of Christianity. An 18-year old respondent, however, does “find it hard to imagine a beautiful and modest woman doing it. It does perhaps exceed the bounds of propriety.”

Try this one on for size:

  • “It is a stumbling block to see a girl lying down, even if she’s just hanging out on the floor or on a couch with her friends.” (22% agreed.)

Or this one!

  • Seeing a girl’s chest bounce when she is walking or running is a stumbling block. No running, ladies. Or walking, unless you have strapped your boobs down like Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love. In sum, cross-dressing might be best.

How about this?

  • “The lines of undergarments, visible under clothing, cause guys to stumble.” (72% Agree or Strongly Agree). As this is virtually impossible with the majority of bras, you may want to dispense with them altogether. Or cross-dress (see above).
  • “Seeing a girl take off a pullover (i.e. a shirt that must be pulled over the head) is a stumbling block, even if she is wearing a modest shirt underneath.” Here’s a fascinating comment:

    “It kind of depends, if she is careful it is not a problem, but most girls don’t think about it and so it becomes one. It’s not that they don’t care, it just isn’t something they think usually think of.”

“It isn’t something they think usually of.” Amazing how much real understanding that shows, and how radically it goes off-track. That statement says something true about a basically “modest” existence—a perspective so pure  it doesn’t even suspect that the behavior in question might provoke lust—yet contains within it the injunction that she should “think of” the lust she is always in danger of provoking.  In other words, it’s not enough for her to be innocent. She needs to be intentional about her refusal to arouse. But not too much, because if she shows she understands too well, she’s in danger of (oh devilry!) abusing that knowledge to “get attention.” Not to court attention is insufficient: she should “be careful” when she takes a sweater off.  She needs to actively, deliberately not-arouse. She should become self-conscious, limit her movements, regard herself not as a thing that exists and sees, but as a terrible catalyst that can at any moment tempt men to their eternal damnation.

That’s not enough, of course. In order to understand how not to arouse her Christian brothers, she must first understand what does. (Like messenger bags.) To protect them properly, she has to become not just conversant but fluent in all possible masculine sexual fantasies. She has to learn their origin and derivation. She has to study how men can possibly convert an innocent movement (like walking) into an erotic stimulus. In fact, she has to become a virtual Ph.D. on masculine sexuality; she has to become a fantasizing male-by-proxy in order to avoid tempting any such male. She must call on all her resources, her empathy, her understanding, to imagine what it is like to be male and incorrigibly sexual. And she should perform these empathic acrobatics without having any sexual thoughts of her own.

Now, this is all ostensibly to protect the souls of her “Christian brothers.” What about her soul? From a Christian point of view, can there be a better recipe for temptation than to force a human being to become a theoretical expert in precisely the imaginary prurient scenarios that ostensibly jeopardize the souls of men?

Back to the survey. To state the obvious, here’s what all this teaches boys: All that matters is your reaction. The difference between a modest behavior and an immodest one is the desire it stirs or doesn’t stir in you. Ideally, a woman will fully understand her awful power and control it responsibly; if not, it’s her fault. But since a woman’s (I’m sorry, “girl’s”) intent is unknowable, what determines her success or failure at “modesty” is the effect she produces on you. Moreover, Christian boys, your subjective state of arousal at a particular moment trumps a “girl’s” liberty to exist freely (the way you do). Women should actively police their behaviors, their movements, their clothing and their faces so you don’t have to spend the occasional (and unavoidable) tempted minute staring into your own soul. And rest assured: girls feel no desire or temptation themselves, so you are free to be as attractive and flirtatious as you like without feeling a moment’s guilt. Your relationship to your body can be joyous. It doesn’t fall to you to labor under the metaphysical mindfuck of being told that your body—YOUR body! the one you were born in, the thing you are!—shares in the guilt it provokes in others the minute it takes any pleasure in its God-given beauty. Boys, you needn’t know that your beauty is also your disease (as a result of which you may end up among the damned; in the absence of which you may end up alone).

To state something equally obvious: none of this disaster of a philosophy is the boys’ fault. I have no doubt the Modesty Survey respondents have good hearts. They’re grappling with one of the great human problems: how to deal with the fact that you live in and through a body, and how to understand the complicated dance between desire and its fulfillment or diffusion. These are all large and complex issues of personhood and it is certainly not the boys’ fault that this survey invites toxic answers. (By virtue of its structure, the survey excludes any other kind). The fault lies with the pernicious idiots who invent “tools” like this one, tools that claim to measure but actually perpetuate the dehumanizing idea that one gender gets to dictate what the other one does.

Here is the real image for the survey. I wish I were kidding:

Maybe when Christians adopt the veil we’ll finally have world peace.

Or maybe, instead of turning girls into stones by making them feel guilty for the physics of their bodies when they walk, we can teach each sex not to blame the other when it “stumbles.” We could all work on getting better balance.

M

Filed under BEST OF Millicent and Carla Fran, Experiments, Lady Parts Tagged with , , , ,

Katharine Hepburn in “Holiday”: Did Chekhov Ever Write Tumbling Into a Scene?

July 27, 2010 by Leave a comment

Dear CF:

I realized something today as I researched Holiday in order to present you with the delicious clip below: many of the old movies I love, and several I quite like, come from the same director.  A Philadelphia Story, Gone With the Wind (part of it anyway), My Fair Lady, Gaslight, and now Holiday all come to us via George Cukor. Not to mention The Women, the remake of which made you fearful. I don’t know how I failed to notice this before. I suppose I ought to consider a director more of an author-figure than I typically do.

Holiday does sisterhood and siblinghood better than almost any film I’ve seen. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors. It has the sumptuary delights of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music (staircases! ballgowns!) but undercuts the sheer spectacle of money by making all the elegance seem like joyless work. Fun, in this film, is coextensive with the unmonied and therefore unscripted life.

Below is a seriously sensational cinematic treat. It’s seven minutes long. If all you want is the delightful hijinks, watch until 5:51. If you want to see how well the movie channels Chekhov, watch to the end of the clip.

What’s going on: Cary Grant (Johnny Case) is a by-his-bootstraps lad with a talent for business who wants to make a quick buck and “retire” to see what the world has to offer. He’s engaged to Julia, a socialite who (along with her father) wants him to work at the family bank. (Yes, this is a smarter, older version of My Best Friend’s Wedding.) Julia’s sister Linda is played by Katharine Hepburn—she, along with drunk brother Ned, are misfit siblings who feel trapped by the grandeur and refuse to behave like “important people.”

Katharine Hepburn’s character Linda is Mrs. Dalloway in a universe where she doesn’t get to throw the party. (The grief of that is treated with really extraordinary respect.) Her father takes over and turns it into a black-tie soiree—exactly the sort of thing she hates. She refuses to attend and stays upstairs instead. This is awkward for the family. She’s eventually joined by Johnny Case’s only friends in attendance, a wry liberal couple of professor-types who literally got lost en route to the gala and understand exactly how much they don’t belong at the “real” party downstairs. (Example: a butler takes away the man’s shoes when they first arrive and directs them several times to the elevator so that they don’t show up on the staircase, where they would be announced and seen.)

In this scene, Johnny has just joined them. (Puppets! A married couple doing “Punch and Judy” to teach their friend how uppity he’s gotten! Spankings! Tumbling! And maybe the single greatest line: “Wife, do we know anyone who smells of violet?”) They’re joined soon after by Linda’s snobby cousin and spouse. Then by her brother and father. Enjoy the absurdity and, if you continue, the nimble switch to sadness:

Fondly,

M

Filed under Lady Parts, Movies, Nitpicks

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