Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  In conversation about her work, Phoebe Gloeckner shifts arbitrarily between referring to “Minnie” and “me.” “I was so needy,” she remembers of herself as a teenager, followed immediately by, “In that sense, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Minnie.” Because of the permeable boundary between fact and fiction in Gloeckner’s life, I find myself, at times, picking peculiar arguments with her. “One of the things that interests me about Minnie,” I say, “is that she is very pretty. We talk a lot about the damage done to girls by unrealistic standards of beauty but not about the vulnerability that comes when you actually meet them.”

  Gloeckner replies: “I don’t think Minnie was beautiful. I honestly don’t.”

  “Well,” I say, “I think she probably was. She turns heads wherever she goes.” We both laugh awkwardly at the perversity of speaking in the third person.

  Gloeckner considers this for a moment. “I always hoped people would think I was pretty, but I always felt painfully ugly,” she says slowly. “Painfully. Whether that was the reality or not. I know a lot of girls feel that way. I could not deal with my appearance or my sexuality. I just wanted someone to see who I was for real and love me for it. So I would talk to anybody, go anyplace with anybody in the hope that they would see me and help me.” She shakes her head. “And I can’t even say how I meant that.”

  Gloeckner is the daughter of a librarian from a blue-collar family (her mother) and an unemployed artist from a blue-nosed one (her dad). Her parents divorced when she was four. Eight years later, her mother remarried and moved the family from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The early Minnie stories portray a stepfather who was arbitrarily cruel and who leered at Minnie and dropped sexual innuendos. In real life, the marriage quickly deteriorated, and to shield her from the tension, Phoebe was shipped off to an elite boarding school. By the time she returned home at fifteen, her mother was dating again.

  There is an image that Gloeckner returns to in her work that acts as a kind of pivot point, a defining moment both in her own life and her character’s. She drew it in one of her first comics at sixteen. It appears again, in writing this time, in Diary of a Teenage Girl. It is not one of the more lurid images in her repertoire, but it may be the most chilling: it shows one of her mother’s boyfriends, someone Minnie trusted and admired, running a casual finger across her bare midriff. It is his first tentative crossing of a line, quite literally sending out a feeler to gauge the girl’s vulnerability. “When he first made those advances, my initial thought was, ‘This is not right,’” she says. “But then I thought, Maybe it is and I don’t know. Minnie had been bombarded with adults who had no boundaries and were overtly sexual with children. You get used to that, and at a certain point you think of yourself and value yourself solely as a sexual being.”

  Whatever tenuous stability Minnie had felt at home crumbled as that initial touch turned into an affair. In “Minnie’s 3rd Love, or Nightmare on Polk Street,” a story in A Child’s Life, Gloeckner’s alter ego is seen on her knees in the laundry room of her apartment building. Next to her is a Hello Kitty diary. Minnie looks tearfully up at her lover/surrogate father, on whom she is about to perform fellatio, begging him to tell her he loves her. In her right hand, she clutches a bottle whose label reads, “The kind of good, cheap California wine that makes girls cry and give blow jobs to jerks.” To escape both her shame and her obsession with her mother’s boyfriend, Minnie runs away to Polk Street with another girl, a teenage junkie with whom she falls in love. She takes whatever drugs come her way, then is pimped by the girlfriend for more. “I was in a lot of pain, so I would do anything,” Gloeckner says about her own life at that time. “If someone said, ‘Shoot up this’ or ‘Take this pill,’ I’d do it. I guess I didn’t really care.”

  Though Frog Ltd. was eager to publish A Child’s Life, its printers balked. One refused outright, the other agreed, but backed off after staff members objected to the graphic imagery in “Minnie’s 3rd Love.” Eventually, the second company did print the book after work hours. Gloeckner had caused controversy before: in 1995, British customs officials seized an anthology of comics that included an earlier version of the same story, claiming the laundry-room panel was child pornography. “There’s resistance to something that’s drawn that wouldn’t exist if it were written,” says Frog’s Grossinger. “If you’re talking about child sexual abuse, Bastard out of Carolina is in many ways harsher than Phoebe’s work. If you drew that, you’d be marginalized.”

  A British judge eventually ruled in favor of the book’s distributor, but last year, when A Child’s Life was confiscated at the French border, there was no such reversal: the book never was allowed into the country (although, interestingly, R. Crumb’s comics depicting his sometimes violent sexual fantasies are readily available). “Some people think what I draw is pornography,” Gloeckner says. “But there are children who experience this, who have this penis in front of their faces. They see it, so why can’t I show it to make the impact clear?”

  It’s a question she hasn’t fully answered herself. Gloeckner describes her creative process as a wrestling match between the compulsive demands of her own vision and a fear of those who might label it “dirty.” There’s the voice of her publisher, who has—no pressure—mentioned that without the images of erect penises, her books would be easier to market. There’s the voice of her mother, who has “not been pleased” with the Minnie stories. There’s the voice of herself as a mother, fretful over what her daughters will think when they are old enough to see her work. There’s the voice of her own shame. “I’m constantly fighting with it,” she says, “but if I censor myself, it makes me feel sick. Actually physically ill.”

  Ultimately, Gloeckner says, she has no choice but rigorous honesty, including this: Gloeckner doesn’t flinch from the blurry lines between experimentation and exploitation. A panel in A Child’s Life shows Minnie reading Lolita. In Diary, Minnie describes her excitement at provoking desire in adult men in a bar (as well as her revulsion when they respond). She confides the thrill of picking up strangers in Golden Gate Park. And she admits to actively participating in the affair with her mother’s boyfriend after he made the first move. Even at her most debased, Minnie sometimes seems to be having fun. As Gloeckner’s fellow cartoonist Clowes says: “Phoebe doesn’t paint herself as either a hero or as a victim or say that this guy is evil and this guy is good. She’s just there in the world as she should be, and you have to interpret the events she depicts.” Minnie’s complicity doesn’t change the fact of her abuse, but it does provide insight into its dynamics. It’s a daring subtheme, and it is part of what makes Gloeckner’s work ring true, what makes it transcend the genre of most child-abuse memoirs.

  In a way, the European border patrol was onto something—Gloeckner’s cartoons may be devastating, but they can be arousing as well, because that, too, is part of Minnie’s experience. The most explicit images threaten to implicate the reader, transforming a sympathetic eye into a voyeuristic one. That quality may be what offends censors and raises red flags among the bookstore buyers who won’t carry her work. “Maybe it is titillating,” Gloeckner admits. “It can be titillating for the child in a way. But it’s also confusing, destructive and horrifying and can be rape and everything else. So to draw things as either black or white is a lie. Because that titillation is in you. I’m not saying it’s good, but it’s there.”

  Even so, Gloeckner remains ambivalent, veering in our conversations between self-righteousness and embarrassment, between dreaming of a larger audience and hoping no one she knows will ever see her books. When asked what her suburban neighbors think of her comics, she laughs. “I just tell them I’m a medical illustrator,” Gloeckner says. “I don’t think they would let their children play with my children if they knew what I drew.”

  Of course, she’s telling this to a reporter from the New York Times, which has a substantial circulation on Long Island. Chances are, she’s about to be outed. “I know, I know,”
she groans. “But I haven’t lived there that long and I don’t know anyone really well. . . .” She trails off for a moment, snared in her own loopy logic. “Well, I don’t know how many people will recognize my name,” she concludes, weakly. “So I think it’s not going to be that bad.”

  There was no great epiphany, no moment of being scared straight, no hitting bottom, despite how low she sank. Hers was an incremental awakening. At seventeen, Gloeckner was still prowling Polk Street, shoplifting on the side. She remembers thinking that in another year, if she were caught, she could be jailed, and that scared her. Then there was her grandmother, a doctor back in Philadelphia, whom Gloeckner admired and wanted to emulate. Instead, she seemed to be taking after her father, who had become irretrievably lost in drug and alcohol addiction. And Gloeckner knew she had a gift; even at her lowest ebb, she drew comics on paper bags or in her diary. “They weren’t very good, but they sustained me,” she says. “I felt good about that part of myself—and only that part of myself—but it was something I could feel good about. It made me feel there was some hope that I could do something if I tried.”

  She managed to squeak through what she describes as a “school for incorrigibles” and did well enough on her SATs to enroll at San Francisco State. “I don’t know exactly how I made that leap back to normal life,” she says. “I wish I did. I suppose that even though I got kicked out of all those private schools, they had given me a sense that there was something else to strive for. Other kids I knew didn’t have that.”

  Eventually, Gloeckner studied art and medicine, earning a master’s in medical illustration. It’s a career that suits an artist as meticulous as she. (“It’s really hard for me not to fill up every space with crosshatching,” she jokes.) But more than that, it’s the perfect day job for a person compelled to make the hidden visible, then present it for public display. “I was always aware that the interior was as much a part of my body as the exterior,” she says. “I’ve always done things like try to imagine what it looks like inside when I’m swallowing. Or what it looks like inside when you have sex. So I wanted to understand the interior better. I guess interior life in general.”

  There is a triptych of Minnie in A Child’s Life. In the first drawing, she is eating candy dots, those bits of colored sugar peeled from strips of paper, while gazing up at a chevron of migrating birds. In the next, which faces it, she holds a Tootsie Pop. Both are archetypal images of childhood. But turn the page and “Little Minnie” is about to kiss a grown woman, her mouth wet and open, her eyes glazed in anticipation. Is Minnie a child or an adult? Innocent or carnal? “That adult woman is me,” Gloeckner says. “I was having a hard time doing the book. I was really nervous about it. So I thought: ‘How do I feel about this little girl? Well, I like her, and I want to tell this story for her sake. And I just have to look at it that way and not worry about what people will say.’ So that picture is supposed to be me as an adult kissing Minnie. In a sense, it’s myself kissing myself. And there is something sexual about it because we’re blending in my brain. So I could see that people would interpret it differently.” She shrugs. “But that’s okay.”

  It may be that you have to be forty before you can reconcile with fourteen, before you can reach back in time and offer a consoling embrace. Gloeckner imagines teenage girls would be the natural audience for her work if it were more readily available in conventional bookstores. But for the most part, it doesn’t cross their paths. Even so, the dedication of Diary of a Teenage Girl reads, “For the girls after they’ve grown.”

  “Although I was exposed to all those things when I was a kid, I don’t think everyone should be, even through a book,” she says. “So the dedication is hopeful in that sense. It is for girls, but let them stay as ignorant as they can be of these things until they’re stronger or know more. Unless, of course, they’re forced to grow up too soon.”

  Caitlin Moran: They Don’t Make Feminists This Outrageous Anymore

  I love Caitlin Moran. She is seriously funny and comically serious. This piece ran in July 2012. I still see Moran from time to time—and I will never, ever let her forget about those espresso martinis she spilled on my head!

  Not long ago, a group of prominent British journalists, all female, went out for an evening to get drunk on gin. Very drunk on gin. One of them walked headlong into a door. Another confessed to having been caught in flagrante delicto at a funeral. Eventually, they settled into one of their favorite pastimes: bemoaning—increasingly loudly—the sorry state of contemporary feminism. How had a movement that had once been so incendiary, so vibrant, and so effective become so . . . tedious? How had it been hijacked not only by stodgy academics but by Sex and the City divas: women who, as Caitlin Moran, a columnist at the London Times (and, as it happens, the woman who banged into the door), said, would have us believe that “if we have fabulous underwear we’ll be somehow above the terrifying statistic that only one percent of the world’s wealth is owned by women.”

  Was it any wonder recent polls had found that 52 percent of British women and 71 percent of American women didn’t identify as feminists? The assembled ladies pounded their fists on the table. They tossed back more gin. Finally, someone—it’s unclear who—said that one of them needed to write a book: something raucous and real about why feminism still mattered. A taking-stock of womanhood in an age of unprecedented freedoms and nagging contradictions.

  And Caitlin Moran responded: “Okay, I’ll race you!”

  Five months later Moran finished her memoir-slash-manifesto, How to Be a Woman. The book, which will be released this week in the United States, spent nearly a year on the top 10 list in England. It has been published in eighteen countries (when we met it was being translated into Portuguese, leaving Moran, who spends several pages fulminating over the rise of pubic deforestation, wondering what Brazilians call a “Brazilian”). She has amassed nearly two hundred forty thousand Twitter followers (the modern metric of success) as well as a dedicated fan blog, fuckyeahcaitlinmoran, based on the viral meme popularized by Ryan Gosling enthusiasts. The photo from the book’s cover—Moran with her distinctive skunk-striped bouff of a hairdo and winged liquid eyeliner—was acquired by London’s National Portrait Gallery, tucked in among other superstars of the realm: King Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Paul McCartney.

  Moran typically describes How to Be a Woman as “an update of Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch written from a barstool.” The books actually have little in common, but the sound bite rightly places her on a continuum of liberationist bad girls stretching from Greer in the 1970s (notorious for urging women to empower themselves by tasting their menstrual blood) to the riot grrrl rockers of the 1990s (“I loved riot grrrl,” she said. “Not only was it a punk rock revolution, but it meant you could get dressed for a night out for less than two pounds!”).

  But funny. Like Greer, Moran’s feminism is as much attitude as analysis. She is, in equal measure, intellectual, rebel, and goofball: that’s part of her “let’s all be feminists at the pub” charm and why I both enjoyed her book (for which I provided a blurb) and wanted to meet her. She is a woman who has incorrectly pronounced her first name for nearly twenty-five years (née Catherine, she rechristened herself Cat-lin at age thirteen after a character in a racy novel whose name she’d misread). A thirty-seven-year-old who set a fire in her sink while trying to suavely light a cigarette in front of a guest. A woman who tripped while gawking at an aging pop star in a posh London club (“I can’t believe it! Kevin fucking Rowland!”) and dumped an entire tray of espresso martinis on my head.

  How to Be a Woman follows its antiheroine from her thirteenth birthday (182 pounds, friendless, fleeing from gravel-flinging yobs) onward, with stops along the way to praise masturbation, argue both for and against motherhood, celebrate her abortion, and more. Each self-deprecating chapter (“I Start Bleeding!” “I Become Furry!” “I Don’t Know What to Call My Breasts!”) is an occasion to explore how, from puberty through senescence, t
he modern female body has become a series of problems to be solved—usually at great expense to its inhabitant. There is, for instance, the upkeep of that new presumed depilation (“I can’t believe we’ve got to a point where it’s basically costing us money to have a vagina”); the tyranny of stratospheric heels (“The minimum I ask for my footwear: to be able to dance in it and that it not get me murdered”); ever-teenier underpants (“How can 52 percent of the population expect to win the war on terror if they can’t even sit down without wincing?”).

  Moran is all about sweating the small stuff. She justifies that choice by invoking the “broken windows” theory of criminology—the idea that ignoring one broken pane of glass in an empty building leads to increasing acts of vandalism. Similarly, minor slights against women—dismissing politically powerful women as “ugly” or using “you’re fat” as the ultimate trump card in an argument—make possible more brazen attacks, a takeover of rights by metaphoric squatters. Consider the male legislator in Michigan who, last month, had a female colleague banned from the House floor for using the word “vagina” during a debate over one of the most restrictive antiabortion bills ever proposed. The bill passed twenty minutes later. First you can’t speak the word for part of a woman’s anatomy; next you lose control of it.

  “If every woman in that room stood up and said ‘vagina!,’ what could they do?” Moran said. “Or, for total rock ’n’ roll, if every woman who’d had an abortion stood up and said, ‘I have had an abortion, and I would not be here now if this legislation had been passed back then.’ If every woman who’s had an abortion took tomorrow off in protest, America would grind to a halt. And that would be symbolic: because women grind to a halt if they are not in control of their fertility.”