by Lisa Jervis
As a culture, we tell girls from the cradle that rape is the worst thing that can ever happen to them. We say it will destroy their lives and that they will lose their sense of purity. We tell those who were sexually abused that it is natural to feel dirty. We do this because it’s true, and we’re trying to prepare them so that they don’t feel alone when it happens. But aren’t we also setting them up to be destroyed, to feel dirty and impure? How much are we training ourselves to crumble? The convenient use of words like “survivor” and “victim” don’t really change the messages we are given. While there is no positive side to rape and abuse that could be emphasized, we should tell another, fuller truth. We should say, “This may wreck your life for a while,” or “Sometimes you’ll feel dirty.” But we don’t, and we are left with the impression that there is no healthy response other than breakdown. It’s as if we see moving beyond the trauma as denying its impact.
A violated woman is expected to fall apart, and not just privately, either; she must disintegrate publicly, in front of friends, in front of professionals, in front of Starbucks. It satiates our craving for arena-style pathos. We want to cheer our gladiators for bravery while they hack themselves to bits in the ring. If a woman chooses not to play, but to find her own private way back, we say she’s “in denial.” If we don’t see her fragment, we say that she’s not “dealing with it.”
We must question the belief that a cathartic experience is necessary for sanity and healing. I have seen some women push themselves, trying to trigger a dam break, and instead become trapped in neurotic fear. I have seen the release that follows catharsis replaced by a gnawing sense that the revelation wasn’t quite deep enough; I have watched as women blame themselves for their inability to fall apart. Instead of being honored for an unwillingness to break, they are dismissed as “not quite ready.” It becomes her fault for not being spiritually developed enough to crack. Until she cracks, she can’t forgive, and until she forgives, she will never be fully healed. Breaking itself has become the goal.
The way out of this bind is to discover and create new images for woman and the aftermath of rape. But before we can talk about introducing new images, we must first examine how we see the experience itself.
If you have been raped or abused, you’re scarred for life. You will never be as you were before the experience. This is also true for falling in love, getting your heart broken, going to war, having a child, or reading a great book. Everything that cuts deeply marks us. We’re all scarred for life the second that we intimately relate to the outside world. With rape, the difference is in the nature of the wound.
In recent years, feminists have fought hard to portray rape as an act of violence and not lust. While this has been necessary and difficult, it is somewhat misguided. The real problem is not that we treat rape as sex, but that we treat it as theft. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines rape as forced sex and also plunder—“robbing or despoiling,” to be exact. You weren’t just violated, we tell a raped woman. You were pillaged. Something of intrinsic value was stolen from you. The fervent belief that this is true is evident on all sides of the issue. From traditional cultures that treat a raped woman as bankrupt to progressive movements that speak in terms of “reclaiming” oneself and “owning” the experience, we tell a woman loudly and clearly that if she was sexually violated she has been robbed, and that the objects stolen were purity and innocence. With the best of motives, we still say to her, “I’m sorry for your loss.” We will ask her to “reclaim” her experience, rather than realize its effects. The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The lowlife who did it threw his soul in the trash, but yours is intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman’s worth and sense of self lie in her sexual purity, and we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is an absolute objectification of women.
Furthermore, the well-intentioned but limited reframing of rape as violence, though seemingly intuitive, is difficult and insufficient. When someone is violently, but not sexually, attacked, he or she naturally feels invaded—but the sense of invasion stems more from the metaphorical than from the physical. Anyone who is raped, however, is invaded. Someone else is inside of you. It’s not metaphor. It’s real. Rape is, therefore, forced intimacy as well as violence. We can’t look at it as a sexless crime because it isn’t one. Some rapes are motivated by a desire for power through violence and others are motivated by lust and selfish rationalization. Either way, the act itself involves sex. When you’re raped, it is not a simple attack—it’s complete violation of both body and sex along with a very ugly reminder of several thousand years of female subjugation.
The biggest block to introducing new models of acceptable response to rape and abuse is our own good intentions. After years of hearing “Get over it,” doctrines that urged us to be as soft as children were a welcome change. There is a point, however, at which tenderizing oneself can cease to be a release and become a debilitating obsession. Unfortunately, the meanings of words like “strong” and “weak” have turned to taffy, so that even discussing a new direction for our response becomes fraught with unintended political bias. Today, in self-help culture, a strong person is someone who shows her emotional weakness and a weak person is someone who hides behind a wall of strength. This kind of groupspeak has become its own dogma and can make debate confusing at best, and at worst, impossible.
At its core, America still dotes on stoics. We romanticize the role of the tearless hero, even when we know better. In many ways, this is the heart of our national identity. It defined the ideal American male up until the ’50s, and it affects all of us. We may have tried to kill it in therapy, or squash it under the heel of the sensitized New Age, but it’s bred into us. On the surface it represents a brutish mentality that stops at nothing and tunes out emotion like white noise on the radio, and yet we can’t shake it off—because underneath this ode to repression lies something much more powerful. Throughout every formulaic John Wayne story is the message that we can survive anything. You don’t have to compromise, it says; you can get through without letting them break you. As demented as the packaging is, the message itself has some value.
The limited imagination of backlash feminists in the ’80s brought forth a model of feminine power that was no more than a mirror image of the ’50s male. It adopted only the bad packaging of the power-hungry aggressor, rather than the quieter message of survival. Unfortunately, sexually abused or raped women, unconvinced by current images of recovery, often fall back on this model of repression and false toughness. The brassy, swaggering bravado of some poor girl who’s afraid of her own emotions is a sad statement on what we’re offering her as a way out.
There was a scene in a movie, I think it was Mi Vida Loca, in which one girl turns to another girl who’s been screwed over and tells her to “be a macha” and take care of herself. Instead of “macha” being the feminine twin of “macho,” the bullheaded brute, here it is more like the Yiddish mensch: Be a stand-up guy. Be a human. Show some dignity. The command to be a macha could be a call from one woman to another to find her guts and get through whatever is trying to destroy her without losing her pride. Sadly, we have no language in our current dialogue on rape or abuse to convey this to each other. Our history leads us to interpret such a statement as an order to feel nothing and achieve. We automatically assume that vulnerability, compassion, and the need to rely on others have no place in this kind of thinking because we relate it back to the bravado model of feminine strength borrowed from the ’50s male.
The question then becomes how to disentangle the powerful call to be a macha from the callous expectation of bravado and repression. In the context of an America that glorifies the iron will of the individual, even introducing
a macha model alongside the ravaged image of a sexually abused or raped woman is difficult. We are culturally trained, traditionally, to see these ideals as opposites and interpret the “stronger,” stereotypically male model as the preferred one. Paradoxically, in self-help culture, we are trained to throw out the “stronger” model and favor the ravaged, traditionally female one for its emotional demonstration. This polarization is an unnecessary construct; I am suggesting that we widen the range to include something more representative of our true potential.
We need to articulate a new vision that equates feminine strength not with repression and bravado, but with compassion and grit. The single model of recovery from sexual abuse and rape that requires a woman to live in a cocoon of self-obsession and call it a safe environment has the same potential for social isolation as ’50s, middle-class suburbs. It also bears an eerie resemblance to the “separate sphere” mentality that early feminists fought so hard to destroy. In the Victorian age, for example, it was popular to be sick. There were even fainting couches, furniture designed to collapse on. The idea was to wane visibly because it was better to be honored for a tragic demise than not honored at all.
Idealizing a state of breakdown, however, rather than the strength it takes to get past one, traps women into believing that moving beyond the trauma is heresy. We need to be able to turn to each other and say, “Be a macha,” and know that that means, “I’ll cry with you, hold your hand, and give you time. But I won’t watch you lie down.” Until we can whisper the truth—nothing was stolen from you, that was a lie—and honor women for both their compassion and their guts, we won’t stop unraveling. We will always be the collapsible woman.
The Princess and the Prankster
Two Performers Take on Art, Ethnicity, and Sexuality
Karen End / FALL 2002
IT’S SUCH A TRUISM, IT’S BORING. TYPE A PHRASE AS INNOCUOUS as “Asian woman” into a web search engine, and hundreds of sites featuring undressed Asian cuties to suit every sexual taste materialize; elsewhere, web-based mail-order-bride services tout the benefits of the legendary Asian disposition. Personally, when not making snarky remarks about it, I prefer to ignore the ubiquity of Asian-lady porn, if not out of exasperation then just to stay sane. Artists Kristina Sheryl Wong and Gennifer Hirano, however, feel differently. Wong’s website, Big Bad Chinese Mama (www.bigbadchinesemama.com), corners web surfers looking for porn and confronts them instead with hilarious and gross mail-order brides who bite. Hirano’s work, some of which can be seen at www.asianprincessartifacts.com, explores the dynamics of sexual assault through photography, writing, and performance. Her Asianprincess character is an Asian cowgirl in pink braids, bikini top, and thong who often sings “Coal Miner’s Daughter” while giving an Asian man a lap dance. Some would call these women’s Venus-flytrap approaches to consciousness-raising politically incorrect, even potentially destructive. But Hirano and Wong, in choosing to embrace rather than avoid the exhausted myths of Asian female sexuality, turn the tables on the oppressor—and on the groupthink of the oppressed.
Though they met only in the last year, the two have led somewhat parallel lives: Both are from Asian-friendly, progressive San Francisco, and both came of age in a time when the popularity of Margaret Cho, Giant Robot, Pokémon, Bollywood, Hong Kong action films, and other Asian products began edging Asian-American subcultures closer to the mainstream. And while neither woman’s work could be considered conventional, both take an accessible, pop culture approach to Asian-American politics, as have contemporary entertainers like the comedy troupe 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors and actor/comedian Kate Rigg (of the one-woman show Kate’s Chink-O-Rama). Using a surefire sales tactic—sex—Hirano’s and Wong’s alter egos commodify and then topple expectations about Asian women’s sexuality, luring in and confronting those who need it most (not just men who fetishize Asian women but also fellow Asian Americans complacent in their ideas of political correctness). Both women explore the possibility of reclaiming porn as a vehicle for probing identity, sexual expression, and self-portraiture, and both dose their politically charged art with unapologetic humor. The results have jangled nerves, provoked arguments, and raised plenty of eyebrows—and they wouldn’t have it any other way.
The Prankster: Kristina Sheryl Wong
Go to Big Bad Chinese Mama and you’ll be greeted by images of an Asian woman in a long blue Chinese dress inviting you to check out the “demure lotus blossoms … the geishas … the Oriental sluts”—“whatever you had imagined in your patriarchal, colonialist longings.” Click on the angry Hello Kitty icon and you’ll come face-to-face with the Big Bad Mama herself, clutching a bag of Chee-tos and mugging as hideously as she can. “Hi there,” says the greeting. “I am the Big Bad Chinese Mama. As you can tell, I am a sweet and lovely lotus blossom. This is just like many [mail-order] sites you have seen before but better … I have gathered lovely ‘Oriental Creatures’ from all over the world, who are just as sweet and pretty as me. They will show you just how demure Asian women really are.”
The motives behind BBCM are complex. Wong’s primary goal is “to catch the oppressor in the act of oppression and use my personal sense of humor as a political force,” as the site’s manifesto states. “I wanted to subvert the expectations of a nasty guy in search of petite naked Asian bodies by showing him the full ugliness of ‘sweet Asian girls.’”
Inside, the Harem of Angst offers a menu of distinctly unappetizing choices. Madame Bootiefly sits on the toilet, trousers around her shins, face obscured. Annie, “an expert in the ancient and delicate art of flower arranging,” lolls in a red wig, toting a vacuum cleaner and dragging off a long cigarette. Mikki, a man in drag, is “thirteen, and still in pigtails.” She says, “You will also notice my dainty feet, large and unbound, perfect for giving the oriental (back walking) massages. I’m sure you will cry tears of joy with my petite 200 pounds crushing the small of your back.”
The site also features such treats as downloadable audio pranks, in which BBCM and her friends crank-call sex-industry companies; the BBCM’s Memoirs of an Anti-Geisha (“I have gigantic size 9½ feet, crater zits that break out through my ‘silky skin’ … I have a little pot-belly, I have an ass that needs to go to the gym”); and a Frequently Unasked Questions page that addresses questions commonly asked on mail-order-bride sites.
Q: Will my bride make an easy adjustment from her Asian Culture to the liberal American lifestyle? A: … You may be able to buy yourself a nice little Asian Porno, a buddhist bracelet, or some other object that your capitalistic lifestyle Orientatize[s]—but you cannot buy these women. They are not for sale.
Wong—who lives in Los Angeles and works as an actor, performance artist, and writer, supplementing her income by selling random items (Iron Chef promotional fridge magnets, for example) on eBay—explains that her porn/mail-order-bride spoof site was built as a final project for an Asian-American studies class at UCLA and came out of the evolution of her political consciousness. When Wong was introduced to Asian-American studies, she suddenly felt she had a context for “every awkward experience I had growing up.” With her newfound sense of political awareness, she says, “I was literally walking on campus and fuming.” By her second year, she was exploring ways of expressing herself through performance and art. She had also begun to notice that the political agenda in Asian-American studies classes was annoyingly homogeneous. “A lot of the same issues kept coming up, especially about stereotypes and representation.” All anyone wanted to do, it seemed, was tear apart Asian Americans on TV, in media, in literature: Amy Tan emasculates Asian men, Margaret Cho isn’t funny, Lucy Liu is a dragon lady, and so on. In her eyes, her peers’ attitudes limited Asian-American identity to narrow, fragmented roles. Such attitudes, says Wong, also imply that individual Asian Americans should be held accountable for representing the whole group.
Wong created Big Bad Chinese Mama as much to poke fun at the righteous indignation of her classmates as to put herself on the front li
nes. She wanted to confront the “nitpicky people”—who she felt were getting too comfortable in their academic bubble—with the reality of racism in the real world. The site’s metatags, which juxtapose keywords like “American,” “Asia,” “feminism,” and “ass-kicking anti-geishas” with “mail-order,” “Orientals,” “cock,” “suck,” “lesbians,” and “teen on teen,” bring the two worlds skidding toward each other. Wong expected her peers to be insulted. “I expected [them] to say, ‘How can Kristina Wong represent Asians that way?’ Then I want them to look at the [negative] responses in my guest book from all the white men, and black men, and Asian people … and see [that] this is the ignorance out there that we’re not experiencing in our highfalutin class where we get to talk about how wrong sweatshops are as we wear sweatshop clothing.” Instead, more people than she expected responded positively, posting congratulatory messages indicating that they understand what Wong is up to.
As for the response from the public at large, BBCM’s message boards are clogged with white-supremacist rants from people who accidentally stumbled in looking for porn. (“Another clueless lesbian feminist bitch who doesn’t know jackshit about the motives of either Western men or East Asian women who use online dating services. Fuck all of you or, better yet, let the BBCMs fuck one another.”) Some are lucid; most are just hateful spam. The site receives twenty to thirty messages a day, and they’re all there, untouched. Wong doesn’t edit them because she doesn’t want to take a defensive position, censor, or, as she puts it, “micromanage” people’s politics. Wong admits she initially felt extremely nervous about porn-seeking strangers looking at her pictures at all hours of the day and night, but she stood by her conviction to take her project into an “unsafe” space. She now feels her highest intentions are being fulfilled when visitors interact on the boards, and she points out the political empowerment that comes from being unfazed. “Why are we so scared to accept rejection? That in itself is art. I would rather see the hate on my site than on the KKK site … I would rather all that racism pour out, and people who live in their own little bubble look at that and be completely shocked and wake up a little.
