No illusions

I've undertaken one of the biggest projects of the season: cleaning my apartment. It's been going on for over a week now and finally the end is in sight. Meanwhile, I've been finding a lot of old quotes. I write down a lot of what people say around me and it is always pleasing to find these tid bits later. It is like an archeological dig into dusty, peeling conversations that laid the foundation for something greater: where we are today.

Today I found a poem I wrote, I'm not sure who it is about or when it is from, and it is not very good. I hold no illusions about it but, I share it here because I think the end captures a particular honesty that relates to the project at hand.

horns blowing
& guitars picking
& we are sailing around the room
on the wings of our bad dancing,
hard laughter

what i love the most
is getting so comfortable around someone

we can sing
dressed in excited
off pitch voices
to our favorite songs
& head bang to the beat
of tired pop

our stomachs make weird
space ship sounds w/o our control
& we are a little embarrassed
but we don't wish we were dead

Hey Shange: a letter from the East Bay

Dear Ntozake,

I bought your book, For Colored Girls, the summer of 2005 when I was 19 and working in St. Augustine, Trinidad. I read it once through and at the time I was totally endeared to the lady in brown whose love affair with books inspired her to run away with an imaginary Toussaint L'Overture. I was also alone at the time, having just begun college, and happiest between the pages of books.

I would think about the book every so often once I returned to New York, but I didn't give it much thought again until 2007 when some people I knew performed your choreopoem at the New School and I went with my friend Melody to see it performed. The room was so packed we could only lean against the wall near the stage. Sometimes I think it took seeing your play performed live to show me all that I had been through in those two short years.

I felt vindicated for months of abuse when the lady in red said, without any assistance or guidance from you / i have loved you assiduously for 8 months 2 wks & a day / i have been stood up four times / i've left 7 packages on yr doorstep / forty poems 2 plants & 3 handmade notecards... i want you to know / this was an experiment / to see how selfish i cd be / if i wd really carry on to snare a possible lover / if i waz capable of debasin my self for the love of another / if i cd stand not being wanted / when i wanted to be wanted / & i cannot / so / with no further assistance & no guidance from you / i am endin this affair / this note is attached to a plant / i've been waterin since the day i met you / you may water it / yr damn self (13-14).

The lady in blue is with me every time a particular man tells me sorry. Every time he runs out into the street to find me to repeat a script we wrote together. lady in blue said, i cant get to the clothes in my closet / for alla the sorries / i'm gonna tack a sign to my door / leave a message by the phone / 'if you called / to say yr sorry / call somebody / else / i dont use em anymore' (52). I thought I'd memorize her words so I could call upon her strength when my own fails me.

When I fell in love you were there, Ntozake, when I told him i loved you on purpose (54). And there still, when he broke my heart and tried to walk off wid alla my stuff (49).

Today, I am writing to you because I recently moved to Oakland and although I love it here, I feel the world closing in around me. i usedta live in the world / then i moved to OAKLAND & my universe is now six blocks (36). I hate it, I am not free. I wonder sometimes if the rainbow is enuf if I can only see it from behind a pane of glass. When I walk down the street men guess at my genealogy, talk to my hair instead of me. When I was little I used to tell my mom that I was going to dress as a boy so that I could travel the world without being bothered. Today I daydream about shaving my head again cuz it took so long to learn that I am not this hair and I am in danger of losing that revelation.

Some old man was talking to me about religion on the bus yesterday and as I lost my attention, he brought it back by talking about my "vagina" to me. Old men ask me for hugs in the street. But, if I shave my head, I will be giving in to another sort of pressure not altogether different from the pressure to shave other parts of my body. Only this time, shaving would be in self-defense, groping after the mask of anonymity so that i can ride anywhere / remaining a stranger (36).

When I say that I want to be alone many people feel the need to save me. Surely, I've just been disillusioned and I need to hold on until I meet someone wonderful like so-and-so met last month. They say it just takes time. Well, I am not interested in time or being saved or reclaiming illusions, so let me go my way and I'll let you go yours. If this means we won't be able to communicate on a certain level, then maybe we need to accept that words aren't necessarily our strong suit and they aren't so capable of saying much anyway.

If You're Not Fucking You're Not Feeling

I spoke with my uncle last night for the first time in many years. I haven't seen him since I was about 12 years old. I think he is a telemarketer and has a pizza shop in Missouri. It was so great talking to him. He said, "I'm glad I'm a Christian. You know why? Because I know Bush is going to hell." I laughed and said, "I say the same thing about my ex-boyfriend."

He was surprised I could ever have dated someone that would merit such condemnation. I told him the story about Shane and the pressure to shave my legs and have sex. He said that was terrible and described to me his current relationship and how they've only had sex once in 9 months. I thought at first he was telling this story to give an example of a successful, loving relationship where sex was not a priority. Wrong. He told me he gave his girlfriend an ultimatum: that even though they love each other and have never been happier, she needs to put out or move out and just be friends.

You'd think living alone and ruminating on this very subject for nights on end would have prepared me to say something, anything. Well, it didn't.

What do you say when you realize your loved ones abide by the very same philosophy of intimacy that almost got you caught in a crossfire of hormones and desperate hopes to be cared for the most, horizontalism be damned?

And yet, here was the possibility to intervene on behalf of this woman I will never meet, to help lay a foundation of understanding that could potentially save their relationship or at least alleviate the pressure on her to conform to traditional notions of what is necessary for "success" (sucsex).

Without an adequate response, the conversation eventually got turned over on me and he began to lecture me as though it were his duty as my elder to make me understand that penetration is essential. "You might not agree with me but you have to admit that it's not a real relationship without having sex." He continued to insist for a half an hour that I will never really become close to anyone without having sex with them.

The two things that interested me most in what he had to say were first, the notion of "realness" and second, his need to have his position affirmed ("you have to admit"). If something were inherently real, why would I need to admit it? Wouldn't it's realness persist in spite of me?

You know what's really real? Thirty-three percent of American women have low libidos and fifteen percent of men lack interest in sex all together. If we take this statistic at face value, that would translate to 1/3 of women and almost 1/6 of men. What exactly qualifies as the normal level of sexual desire against which we are to measure ourselves? Sandra Pertot writes in her article, "Perfectly Normal: Living and Loving with Low Libido," about the need to challenge "the illusion of sexual individuality." She says, "It's difficult to believe that such a large proportion of our population is sexually inadequate," and I have to agree. Perhaps what is most revealing about the study is that the participants rated their own levels of desire instead of being clinically evaluated. When couples undergo counseling because of discrepancies in libido levels, the partner less desiring of sex is the one pressured to measure up because they have been construed as the half of the equation that isn't adding up. In light of this, Pertot argues that those in the "self-selected group aren't dysfunctional at all but are either variations on the norm or comparing themselves unrealistically with an ideal."

So, what is real? We need to stop thinking of low libido or disinterest in the act of sex as an individual problem; it is part of our libidinal economy, no less valuable. How to can we begin to connect ourselves to a spectrum of sexual desire that is able to appreciate the many ways that people desire and experience love? Perhaps it requires that we rethink the entire landscape of sexual desire all together. We've done it before with Kinsey. I'm sure we can do it again.

"The emergence of sex therapy in the 1970s encouraged the view that everyone has the same sexual potential. Behavioral programs to teach women to be orgasmic and men to delay ejaculation assumed that with the right strategies, everyone could achieve these goals. If these programs didn't work for some people, the usual conclusion was that they were suffering from some form of sexual pathology that was loosely labeled sexual inhibition. The logical conclusion that perhaps the particular goals or techniques weren't right for those people wasn't even discussed. Although sex therapy has undergone many shifts in recent times, the idea that there may be many definitions of a successful sexual relationship is still not usually addressed by either therapists or clients. Instead, we have spent a lot of energy trying to identify the factors associated with sexual "failure"." --(Petrot, Sandra. "Sexual Potential: Not Created Equal.")

After speaking with my uncle I felt the possibilities for abolishing the sex-progression narrative to be even bleaker. I'm tired of being talked down to about how be fully conscious of the human mission or more fully experienced. Who knows me well enough to tell me that fucking is the way to cement my spiritual foundations and teach me how to care about the nooks and crannies of the most fallible of God's creatures? Fuck that. What depths have they plumbed and in whose name? I'm sick of being told how to live my life and how to love the people in it. Remembering the woman in my uncle's story the next day reminded me that I am not alone and that my writing and reflection is important for someone out there. Even some twenty-four percent of Americans, perhaps.

In the mean time, I am beaming out this message into the universe hoping it reaches her: sister stay strong.

Thrusting Toward Maturity: a hetero sex polemic

"The myth of the virgin land is also the myth of the empty land, involving both a gender and a racial dispossession. Within patriarchal narratives, to be virgin is to be empty of desire and void of sexual agency, passively awaiting the thrusting, male insemination of history, language and reason. Within colonial narratives, the eroticizing of "virgin" space also effects a territorial appropriation, for if the land is virgin, colonized peoples cannot claim aboriginal territorial rights and white male patrimony is violently assured as the sexual and military insemination of an interior void."
--McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest 1995, pg 30.

This passage fully contextualizes my aversion to the term "virgin" as a descriptor for women's sexual development. The term assumes a dichotomy (pre-/post-penetration) and a necessary progression in an andro-centric and -determined direction: thrusting toward maturity. It belies the non-virgin (read: "experienced") figure's assumption of a conquering role where he inscribes his (sexual) values on the subordinate's body, planting a (phallic) flag in the valley of female power (the site of life force generation). This "male insemination of history, language and reason" that McClintock describes is the recreation of the "virgin" in the conquering male's own image, where the mile-marker of maturity is placed, according to his will, in the threshold of this tired "transformation." The history of the woman in a heterosexual union is rewritten, her identity is overhauled so she can now speak (however limited) from the privileged place of full "womanhood" accorded to her through this (w)rite of passage. A new language is also accorded: those who have been penetrated by authority speak with authority; she is authorized. Because she has demonstrated (or been ushered into) socially determined and sanctioned desire, she is no longer an irrational being outside of heteronormative culture. She fills her pre-determined role in sexual conquer-culture.

Heterosexual men bound to a hierarchical ordering of sexuality need to convert women, need them to subscribe to their language, their history and reason, or else they will be forced to admit a multiplicity of erotics and aims. When I was sixteen I was dating a guy named Rich who was older than me. When his insistence on sex was not met he was forced by his subscription to patriarchy to develop explanations. He asked if I would rather have a girl finger me. He asked if I had been molested as a child. His hypotheses at once threatened his seat of power (wedded to the chronology of sexual progression) yet simultaneously cast me as a dismissible Other (lesbian, molest victim/survivor) in order to shape my resistance (or natural state and aboriginal claim to my own body) to fit into his narrative and reasoning. The thought process: The only reason a girl would not have sex with me is because she is damaged (read: lesbian, assaulted, etc). He once told me that if he learned I were queer that he would finally accept that God exists so that he would have someone "to punch in the face." The failure, in essence, could not be his own. Therefore, even at the cost of his own philosophical underpinnings (atheism), he would look for a higher authority to blame for the rupture of his monolithic (godless) reality in order to avoid developing a critical erotic praxis.




*Please note: I am not addressing physically coercive sex or sexual assault in the piece above; I am in no way making the case that such an experience renders the subject "privileged because of the encounter." On a separate note however, psychic coercion is often the impetus for pseudo-voluntary participation in sexual conquest-culture and while the "privilege" of experience can be claimed, the silences inherent in her claim stem in part from the social script that necessarily casts her as converted, a receiver, and assigns her, ultimately, to subordination.