by Jill Soloway
And I surely can’t make the case that I never wanted to be an object. I was beset by my very own hunger as the need to be looked at became a colossal pull. By eighth grade I had forgotten what Bella Abzug looked like. I also lost all my smug bossiness. The hands-on-her-hips girl who boldly wore halter tops exposing her big tummy was gone. I traded in my great honking tortoise shell glasses for gas permeable contact lenses and moved across the divide to the ranks of the seen. I got my Ophelia card stamped, relieved to no longer be a seer and do tiring things like think and know.
I forgot about my presidency and everything else I cared about as a young women’s libber. My attractiveness was more important to me than anything. This took over and continued, through high school and summers, the loss of my virginity and parties at North Avenue Beach. I was finally good at being female, the right size (four) and the right age (sixteen). My real avocation—writing—was miles behind tanning, dieting, exercising, and shopping, things that helped me with my main hobby, Being Cute.
When I got to college, things changed. It took awhile. The first few years were still all about being adorable. But even while purchasing at least a tube of Bonne Bell Cotton Candy shimmer gloss a week, I found myself fascinated by the Wimmin on campus. Here was a group of chicks who not only didn’t shave, but wore tank tops and held long conversations at the Steep and Brew, folding their arms behind their heads and exhaling to make a point. They seemed as happy as anyone I knew—actually, happier—and they weren’t being looked at, they were looking.
I enrolled in Women’s Studies 101. I was lucky enough to have been at University of Wisconsin–Madison during the last reign of one of the greatest, hairiest clans of dyke teachers around. They finally put words to something I’d always felt—that everything, everything that had been written and filmed and painted positioned women as the object. And not just in your obvious “women are objects” way. Rather, I began to understand it more the way a sentence is diagrammed—the subject does, the object receives what the subject does. Men were the subjects, of everything.
Now I knew why all those presidents were male. Here was proof that the simple expression of thought had indeed originated with men. It might be about hunting or war or the wind or women, but if we were to exist, it was because a man saw us and put us in his poem. But where were we? Where were our ideas about ourselves and the world? Where and when did we originate, if not in the eyes of men?
I got curious. I got excited. For the first time, I actually went to class instead of buying the notes. I read a bunch and thought a bunch and started to ask questions, the same kinds of questions our books and handouts were asking. There was even one question I felt I was the first person in the world to ask: Why was it so hard for so many women to have an orgasm? And why was it so easy for men?
I explored this in a paper for the class, interviewing all my friends under pseudonyms. My TA, who may or may not have been KD Lang, gave me a C. That’s right, a C for the first paper I had written in my entire life that had intention and excitement and wasn’t copied out of the The World Book Encyclopedia.
I went to her crying. She told me I got a C because I didn’t include lesbians in my research. Shit. How was I supposed to know lesbians had feelings too? I didn’t have any lesbian friends yet, and it was still years before I would find out my own sister was one. KD was not moved by my tears. I didn’t know what to do to convince her I was a valid, thinking feminist. I knew she wouldn’t take me seriously until the hair on my head was shorter than the hair under my arms.
Introduction C or
Summer Needs to Come Already
After the Real Feminists banished me from their midst, I went back to focusing on being cute. But things were starting to look different. I had knowledge. I couldn’t just enjoy being looked at without noticing what parts of myself I was giving up. The dichotomies screamed out at me: get dressed up, look away if someone looks at you. Move through the crowded bars in a tight t-shirt, get indignant if a guy brushes past you and gets a feel. Be desirable, never admit desire.
We had always just bought the notion that sex was something boys wanted and girls gave. Gigantic loads of propaganda had been taught to us since forever. High school sex-ed films assured us in fatherly voice-overs that boys think about sex constantly and girls think about it never. Our instructors exhorted us toward success in our main job—to fend boys off, slap hands away and zip up sweaters with a huff. They offered us no evidence that as girls we might want to have sex one day.
We turned to our literature. Okay, we turned to Judy Blume. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and Then Again Maybe I Won’t were read in tandem. But Margaret’s rite of passage was getting her period, while Joel got to have a wet dream. Finally, Judy wrote about real sex for girls in Forever, but Katherine’s long-awaited first time came off like a story about someone accidentally farting on her. In college, a few people had that Nancy Friday book they’d stolen from their moms’ shelves. But like a poem only as good as it’s worst simile, My Secret Garden had an unfortunate anecdote involving a peeled banana. And Dr. Ruth, bless her heart, was just too damn short to matter as a sex writer.
What we needed were strong fabulous women we could look up to, women who liked sex and had sex and were still okay. What we needed was Sex and the City, but it was still fifteen years in the future. In my worlds—high school in Chicago and college at Wisconsin, amid the sweeping cold plains winds and dairy legacy—admitting you actually wanted to have sex was equivalent to sending out engraved invitations to your very own gang rape.
And the love propaganda drove me nuts. Our main source of information was General Hospital, with its Greatest Love Story Ever Told, Luke and Laura. This was a love so fiercely romantic—from the depths of such an infinite truth—that it had to start with a rape. Although Genie Francis’ creamery beige skin, emphatic eyebrows, and flat hair foretold today’s modern pornified woman, she exemplified what we were all to believe—the only thing women want is Love, Love, Happy Happy Love Love. Men give love to get sex, women give sex to get love.
Finally, in my senior year, I took another class in the Women’s Studies Department, in evolutionary biology. This time, I went without any make-up on. I started talking to some of the TAs, pondering more versions of the same old question: Wouldn’t the spread of the species be simpler and more straightforward if everyone simply loved having sex all the time? If so, why would our culture evolve in a way to make sex something that it was okay for men to want, but not women? Why were men who had lots of girlfriends envied, while women had to minimize their experience?
One book theorized that male = outside (penis ’n’ balls hanging around outside of the body) and female = inside (vagina and distant ovaries, hidden up up and away from the world). Thus, ergo and other words I never heard again after college, male sexuality was simply meant to be outside—seen and known, while female sexuality, at it’s most actualized, was hidden.
My new TA, who may have been Joan Armatrading, posited that an exposed, available, come-n-get me vagina projects expectation, simply putting too much pressure on that needed-for-evolution erection. Much like a child who can only do the cannonball dive when no one is watching, there’s nothing worse for a penis’s pride than someone waiting on it.
But my professor had my favorite theory: that everything men do to control the world is based on jealousy. Way back in ye olden days, ancient man saw that not only did women bleed without dying, but also bled in time with the lunar cycle. It didn’t matter that men could kill a woolly mammoth; women held an 81-billion-ton trump card—the moon—in their very uteruses. This totally freaked men out, so as epochs passed that I don’t have the historical knowledge to fill in, men crafted more ways to make us feel like shit about ourselves. They invented a religion with a male God. To make matters worse they invented another religion where a really cute male God was born to a woman who was so great she got pregnant without even having sex. Now women who resorted to base desire to make babi
es were heathen and dirty and wrong. The idea of the holy chaste woman was born.
(Please don’t try to understand the logic in the above paragraph. I went through epochs very quickly for a reason, combining what I remember from my professor plus stuff I’m making up as I go. Additionally, as long as I’m inside a parenthetical, I’ve been meaning to explain why this Introduction is still going on: my mom said it was too long. And she was right. Other people told me to cut this part entirely. But I can’t, it feels important and I don’t know why. If I get my way, Free Press will do a special run with introductions A, B, and C printed on pink transparent plastic instead of paper, maybe even perforated for easy removal.)
Yes, Christianity, and it’s worship of a woman for her chastity. To this day, women are forced to teeter on the beams of this ancient triangular equation. A man, the seer of all things, sits at his vantage point at the top of the triangle, looking at two choices. A woman must reside at either of the two remaining available points. She can look away and be the good, beloved Madonna, or return the gaze—see—and be the bad, fucked and forgotten whore. The girl at the top of the telephone pole looked away, ignorant and unknowing, so she was desired. In Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close looked back, admitting desire, and had to die.
This push me–pull you festival was ubiquitous. As young women we were always on shaky ground when it came to desire. Even though my friends and I talked about sex all the time, we knew on some level that we had to use indirect means to get it. The main way toward intercourse—outside of a loving, sanctioned partnership—was to follow the script: Smoke too much pot, drink way too much, then find yourself getting talked into it.
If sex did unfold, we knew the worst thing we could do was act too hungry or too experienced. The expected pose was an imitation of a centerfold, wide-eyed, hand over her mouth, afraid and surprised at the erection, wondering, “What is that?”
It didn’t even matter when time passed and entertainment became a little more liberal—female desire for desire’s sake still had to be invisible. In fact, even when Sex and the City finally did come on the air, the horny woman profile was relegated to the cartoonish Samantha, while our heroine Carrie made sound judgments, usually only having sex when at least the possibility of love was imminent. Finally, Samantha ended up with breast cancer to punish her years of frolic.
In horror movies, the girl getting fucked in the top bunk of the cabin in the opening scene is always the first to die. In TV cop dramas, prostitutes are routinely bound and burned and slashed. I had a friend who was an actress who swore that all she auditioned for were dark-haired sexy girls who got in car accidents. The message—look for sex and end up raped, dead, or boiling a rabbit.
And if female desire was nonexistent or punished in film and on television, the literal portrayal of sexual satisfaction was even more elusive. Recently, I was reading a New York Times article about what the network censors will and won’t allow. It said that on The OC this past season, when Seth and Summer were having sex, the network okayed portraying Seth’s orgasm but not Summer’s. It was so strange to me that a bunch of people in an office could actually hold a meeting and form this idea— yes for his, no for hers. Why? I for one would have loved to have seen Rachel Bilson attempt that acting exercise.
It occurred to me that in some ways we are like Sudan, or wherever those places are in Africa that perform clitoridectomies—female circumcisions. Articles about these mutilations say they are used to control female sexuality by controlling young women. Turns out if you cut off their clits, they don’t initiate sex, probably because it’s a bit of an ouchy for the first year, and after that, it doesn’t feel so good, what with not having a clit and all.
My theory is that keeping women’s desire shrouded in secrecy is a metaphorical clitoridectomy. That’s right, the genitals of young women are being mutilated every day and it’s all Aaron Spelling’s fault. I know he didn’t create The OC but I want to blame him anyway. I have to blame someone. When, oh, when, will we get to feel beautiful, proud, sexual, and free?
I probably should admit my theories are problematic. Just when I’ve sewn up my metaphorical clitoridectomy argument, I find my arguments are passé. Jenna Jameson and Pamela Anderson are on the bestseller list. Ex-ballerina Toni Bentley’s Surrender, documenting two years of nothing but anal sex, is called “of note” and “possibly brilliant.” Sex-filled paperbacks like Abigail Vona’s Bad Girl, Catherine’s M.’s Secret Life, and Melissa P.’s One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed are at the airport bookstore. Porn star, hooker, and stripper have replaced baker, tinker, and tailor as the jobs everyone’s writing about. The previously cited Porno-ization of America is not just in the fashions of the high school girls in the food court at the mall, but at the bookstore as well.
So what of my argument? You might wish to pull the previous fifteen pages out, roll them up, and bonk me on the forehead with them. But I don’t think I got you all excited about injustice for nothing. Yes, these books are a step in the right direction because they have women’s names on the covers. But there’s still something that ends up feeling wrong. Toni Bentley just seems like the girl at the top of the telephone pole. I worry about her, that maybe her urge to “bear witness to herself” by describing 217 occurrences of booty-sex was used by a lot of men to convince a lot of women to let them into more places on their bodies. Were her positive responses from men just more boys gathered around the foot of the telephone pole, throwing glowing reviews at her instead of quarters?
And Paris Hilton can hardly be called a sex-positive role model. The quintessential twirling pink princess wore her shy smile, faux-downcast-eyes, hands out at each side, pink nails upturned, as she cried out, “Oopsie! Did you see my special girl place when I accidentally lifted my tutu and you saw that night vision porno tape rolling? Oopsie doopsie daisy!” Naughty Paris carefully put her tiara back on her head, scwunched her eyes up and giggled, then handed in her literary contribution that made no mention of sex at all, just taught us how to pose on the red carpet. Of course, I bought Confessions of an Heiress immediately. My love for Paris is like my love for pageants—a Media Representation research project all jumbled up, with purse-puppy envy instead of ermine envy.
I guess I can’t have it all. Here I was asking for freedom for more women to write about sex. So who am I to be pissed that other people are having their say first? Maybe my college feminist desire for a lovable whore heroine is finally coming to pass, a meme-like part of the Zeitgeist. Maybe the pink, commercially viable ballerina girls are going to get their say first, making room for my kind of sex writing, the super-terrific, really great, keepin’ it real kind.
And lest we get too excited about this seeming acceptance of women owning their sexuality, remember that an even bigger bestseller came out, making more money and getting more publicity than all of the previously mentioned Prideful Hoor Collection combined. Called He’s Just Not That Into You, it manages to reiterate in chapter after chapter that there’s nothing a man despises more than a woman who is sexually available to him. Eve Ensler can say we should love our beautiful vaginas and Toni Bentley can go on about how God resides in her anus, but if you’re looking for a husband, it still seems best to keep that stuff in your journal and lock it shut.
He’s Just Not That Into You reminds us that by putting women’s desire up, up and away, hidden from the world, a genetic agenda is winning out. We can’t forget that women-owned sexuality contributes to fatherless children. Man-initiated sex and the elusive female orgasm may be an adaptation that rewards men willing to stick around long enough to convince the woman to have sex and spend the time it might take to make her come. This naturally selects for men willing to stick around long enough to bring home money and meats and empty the diaper genie, making stable, quality offspring instead of unstable, quantity offspring.
For a man, choosing a woman who desires threatens his paternity. Women know the baby is ours because it came out of us. Men have to just trust
that the baby is theirs. They don’t want to find out they’ve been emptying the diaper genie for nothing all those years. Choosing a woman who enjoys and seeks out sex increases the chance she may have slept with someone else and that baby is someone else’s.
After figuring this out—that there’s an evolutionary reason (not just a conspiracy) why we find ourselves hating loose women—it occurred to me that my twenty years of propagandizing for them might be proof that I’m the Antichrist. I asked a good friend. “Seriously,” I said. “Do you think I’m the devil? Tell me. I can handle it.”
But my friend just laughed and shook his head and said that whatever it’s called—god or nature or evolution—it made humans who made condoms and the birth control pill—which had a lot more to do with sexual freedom for women than anything else—and it made Paris Hilton and Jenna Jameson and gave them literary gifts, and it made the greasy grimy Girls Gone Wild girls and the belly-shirt-wearing high school girls in every hamlet, and even you, too, Jill.
Perhaps he’s right and it made me so I could bring some balance, change the world. Perhaps it’s my mission to wedge in a little space on the shelves next to the books by the sugar-coated, shaved-pussy girls. In fact, in the same way men have historically swung their giant literary cocks or cupped their massive literary balls, I can make room for women who wish to openly brandish their gigantic Jewish literary bushes.
Not that I have a gigantic Jewish bush. I really believe mine’s right in the middle, cute as can be and not at all offensive. So, if you’re still on your way to the bookstore to throw this thing in someone’s face, you can turn around. There might be some sex in here after all. Also, please wait until you get home to finish reading. I have no idea why you were reading and driving at the same time.
