Women in Clothes

by Sheila Heti

  ONE

  I bought it at Halloween Adventure. It cost $6.99. A bright blond natural-hair mustache, with a net, that you attach with spirit gum to either side of the philtrum, that dip above the lips. I couldn’t smile very much, or the mustache would start to peel off. Maybe that’s why I felt so much less feminine. I couldn’t smile.

  It’s wonderful to be a woman if you are young, thin, and pleasing to men. Otherwise there’s not so much that’s wonderful about it. We were told to be sexy, that without children we wouldn’t be fulfilled as women, but raising them in decent conditions is practically impossible. It seems essential to capitalism that women be made to feel that they are failing all the time. Every choice is the wrong choice. I wanted to break free of convention.

  TWO

  My husband has long hair. When we met, we both had long hair, mine a few shades blonder than his. We would walk the streets in matching leather jeans, and when we went to brunch at Teddy’s the hostess would say, “Here you go, ladies.”

  “Does it bother you that people think we are both women?” I asked him while we were dating.

  “Not really,” he said. Sometimes it made me uncomfortable on his behalf, sometimes I was proud of how gender-bendery we were.

  THREE

  We got married in Sydney, on his home turf, and when he said, “I take you as my husband,” everyone twittered politely, thinking he had made a mistake. When I said, “I take you as my wife,” our guests realized it was a joke of sorts and laughed.

  When I told my shrink there was women’s underwear in his drawer, she said, “Well, there’s a few possible scenarios. One, he’s a cross-dresser. Two, he’s just super-careless and messy and doesn’t even realize they are there. Or three, he’s seeing someone now. I bet it’s one or two.”

  I was like, Huh, okay. I have no problem with that.

  If you dress up in women’s clothes, who am I supposed to be?

  FOUR

  The night my daughter was born, at home, she nursed and sucked her thumb and slept, curled in my arm. She was perfect and pink and I was not worried about her health. I was worried about her growing up with me as a mother. My self-loathing came bursting out. I thought all night, “Am I a good enough feminist to be a mother to a daughter?” I barely slept. Never mind that this question would have been just as valid had I asked it when her brother was born five years earlier. I spent all night in an extended anxiety attack. “I’m not a good enough feminist. I’ve stayed home with my son, he hasn’t seen me work very much, and my daughter needs a stronger role model.” It all boiled down to that familiar feeling: “I’m not good enough.”

  FIVE

  When my daughter was one, and my son was six, and my husband was forty-seven, I was thirty-eight, in the throes of my midlife crisis.

  “You’re too young to have a midlife crisis!” a well-known academic in his fifties crowed to me while we visited his summer house in the Catskills. “Life doesn’t even begin until you are twenty!”

  I just laughed and said something like “My life expectancy as a white woman with a master’s degree in NYC is seventy-six, I think, so I’m right on time!” But what I really wanted to say was, “I was raped when I was fifteen, so you can believe my life started way before twenty. By the time I was twenty I had already been to orgies and had a few female lovers. So don’t tell me when I’m allowed to have a midlife crisis. And stop dyeing your hair, dude, it doesn’t make you look any younger.”

  SIX

  I was so good at being sexy I should have been a sex worker. I was good at 1980s sexy—a bob, tight short skirts, red lips. I did everything right to be a woman. I was told to be sexy, get married, have babies. I did it all.

  SEVEN

  I don’t care about being pretty. Because pretty makes me feel like it’s something I owe to the world. I have to be pretty.

  Now, attractiveness is real. Popular science shows that good-looking people get more attention, and are therefore smarter, whatever. So it’s not like I want to give up my symmetry. I just gave up on colorful floral patterns, girly decorations, and the idea of youthfulness.

  EIGHT

  I’ll be jolie laide.

  NINE

  Maybe the mustache is a preemptive strike. My mother spent many hours in front of the TV with her magnifying mirror set in a white beaded glass dish, her tweezers plucking valiantly, trying to eradicate the mustache and beard that appeared as her estrogen declined. I thought I would take hormones to stay juicy as I got older, but in the last year, two of my three sisters have been diagnosed with breast cancer, so now I don’t think I’m going to do that. I’ll grow a ’stache and wear tailored suits and look like Peggy Shaw.

  TEN

  Becoming less feminine isn’t a decision. It’s happening. I see it. I feel it. I will never be as good at yoga as I was at twenty-eight, my chin has flesh under it, that deep crack between my eyes only goes away after a nap. It’s not a decision to not be pretty. I’m not pretty. Aging is real. I am entering my Artsy Lady phase. I buy asymmetrical clothes in good fabrics that I can wear forever.

  “Why are you doing the supershort-hair-big-glasses thing already? You still have a few years of pretty left in you.”

  Thanks. A lot. Seriously, thank you. Unfortunately, that still means something to me.

  ELEVEN

  I was pretty. Weird pretty. I did some modeling in my teens when weird blondes were kind of in. I had a platinum bob, was tall, and had attitude. At thirteen, I was a local winner of a Seventeen magazine Look of the Year contest. I modeled in suburban department stores in and around Buffalo, bridal wear, even lingerie. I went to try my hand in New York and did a runway show. “Make love to the coat!” a man with an indistinguishable accent told me as I teetered up makeshift stairs behind the curtain that led to the runway. I was thirteen. I did not know how to “make love to the coat.”

  TWELVE

  Giving up femininity is a relief. It makes me less eager to please. By not dressing in a traditionally feminine way, I have been able to stop making everything better for everyone else.

  To give myself the entitlement of a man, I have had to look like a man. I don’t feel the need to live as a man, or dress like one all the time, but I like being able to play with it. And yes, it does feel dirty, like I’m getting away with something that other people can’t. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, but it has worked for me.

  THIRTEEN

  When I dress in drag, I take up more room at the bar when I order a drink.

  When I order a drink as a woman, I often put my elbows on the bar, my shoulders are hunched, my upper arms pushing my small breasts into a bit of cleavage, on my tippy toes even though I’m tall, my hands clasped together with a twenty, an expectant, searching smile on my face. It’s as if I am silently saying “Pick me” to the bartender, as if my getting a drink faster will prove my worth.

  When I order a drink as a man, I don’t give a shit what the bartender thinks of me, if he is silently laughing because I don’t really look like a man, if he thinks I’m a freak. I stand looking out at the room, one elbow on the bar, shoulders wide, feet planted, a twenty casually in front of me. I don’t think about changing my posture. I just do.

  FOURTEEN

  “You still read very feminine,” a friend said recently.

  “Well, I don’t feel very sexy lately. I don’t like my body right now, I don’t like that my weight goes up and down. I don’t feel like I look good in my clothes.”

  I’m on my way to being a sexless woman in khaki capri pants. And yes, I am being judgmental. Short gray hair, no shape, boxy bright T-shirts, sneakers. A wacky piece of jewelry. My worst nightmare. Or, god forbid, Eileen Fisher. Mud-colored linen.

  FIFTEEN

  I didn’t try to look more masculine.

  All these years of mothering a daughter, of dealing directly with her femininity, with her eventual womanness, of looking at her tiny labia and using unscented wipes and thinking, “Please god, don’t let her
get raped,” even though I don’t believe in god and even though that’s a terrible sentence, it’s what came to me then. And figuring out what it meant to me to be a woman, what femininity meant to me, what feminism meant to me, what being female meant to me, what it meant to be a cis white female, a cis white queerish female with kids, and on top of all of this dealing with the Princess Industry (not buying that pink plastic crap for my house; she can play it with her friends but I won’t do it—when little girls want to play princess with me I tell them I am a King).

  Age was creeping up on me, and I had all of this art in my head that I loved—I loved the women performance artists of the late ’80s and early ’90s. I really needed to do this idea I had in my head about using my Rape Tape (an actual audiocassette on which my attacker’s friends made a recording of themselves mocking the attack). I guess I wanted to explore this fear of my daughter being raped, though I wouldn’t have said that even a few years ago. I was thirty-eight, I had a daughter, and I couldn’t hide from myself anymore.

  I started doing remixes and mash-ups of feminist performance art with my own work. Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Annie Sprinkle, Ana Mendieta, Kara Walker, Yayoi Kusama, Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, Lenora Champagne, Barbara T. Smith, Penny Arcade.

  My biggest fear is of my daughter getting raped.

  I was raped at fifteen and again in my twenties. I don’t want history to repeat itself. Yet what I did to stave off my fears of history repeating itself was to repeat history.

  And here we delve into psychoanalytic theory; everything is repetition, from Freud on.

  SIXTEEN

  I had an older boyfriend who liked to be humiliated; he was forty-three to my eighteen. His cultural references were different. To him, being humiliated was being forced to dress as a woman.

  When men want to dress as women, they want to be the sexy version, in lace. Men never want to be a stay-at-home mom still in her period underwear and nothing else at four p.m., nursing a baby and zombie-ing her way through the house, not picking up anything, crying in front of the dishwasher.

  SEVENTEEN

  Before I started dressing like a man in public, I had a cock in private. I had experience fucking. Like a man, but not. A strap-on. Well, a few actually. There’s the leather dildo harness that my partner had when I met him, and the simple black one we bought together, and the silver glitter one (comfy and sparkly), and the RodeoH underwear, black and gray with a cock ring attached. These are good, because they make the cock so close to my body that it feels warm and a part of me. But it doesn’t fit a double dildo. For that I need the leather one without the backing snapped in. Then I feel like we are fucking each other. It’s pretty amazing.

  EIGHTEEN

  When I was in London recently, as an actor in a play, I was the Chechen whore. “Typecast as usual!” I laughed with my martini. I walked by a bar at night. It was a pub on one of those small cobblestone alleyways off an alleyway not far from St. James’s Park. It had open windows, and a small shelf outside. Men in dark suits and white shirts and ties—youngish, rakish—were standing in the alleyway, drinking and smoking, leaning on the shelf. I walked by, so attracted to that scene. I went back and tried to find it. Did I want to be a young woman in a sexy dress, getting their attention? In a previous life, yes.

  I went back and ordered a drink. I sat inside at a corner table, my bags on the stools nearby (a lady never puts her bag on the floor!), solemnly drinking my pint.

  I wanted to be them. I wanted to be one of them, dressed so, well, Britishly, with that easy laddish behavior. At one point one of them took off his shoe and threw it at the building across the street and they all laughed. A dare? A bet? A girl living there? I wanted to be like them, like with that downtown writer I dated. I didn’t want to date him; I wanted to be him. I still kind of do.

  NINETEEN

  Maybe I will take testosterone someday. The great thing about being a woman and knowing I will go through menopause is that I kind of feel like I will get to be both sexes, naturally. Like, “You aren’t losing femininity, you’re gaining masculinity!”

  TWENTY

  I’m always telling my kids they can change genders when they get older. “You’re weird, Mom,” my son said.

  “Yes,” I said happily. “I am.”

  HOW TO DRESS

  IN OUR NEW WORLD

  BY MARGAUX WILLIAMSON

  1. We see now that every part of our lives needs cleaning up for the new world—for the contemporary situation. Like what we wear.

  2. We can just start here. We can see what we have. Recent face science has shown us that our faces communicate almost everything we thought we were hiding or enhancing with our clothes.

  3. The new face science has shown us that most communication happens with the twitches of our muscles, with the way we move our eyes and lean our heads in. We have learned that people see who we are before they even look down.

  4. There used to be seminars on how to dress like a strong woman, how to dress like a deer. We used to dress to show the real us, or the other us, or of course to stay warm or without shame; to show our sex, our carelessness, our professionalism, our nihilism, our money; to be camouflage, a glossy magazine, a protest sign. But now we see—this old game is only a game of playing matchy-matchy with our souls.

  5. The new game is to be misunderstood. And the new challenge is to learn how to be misunderstood.

  6. Being misunderstood makes everything easier. It makes clothing acquisition less time-consuming. The contemporary situation is taking up plenty of your time, no time to waste.

  7. Getting dressed used to be a game that happened too quickly, lasted forever, and was boring to win. Like Monopoly. But things are different now. Things are worse, but also better.

  8. The stores are dying, or being killed. It is a new time of not so many private helicopters to take you to old ground, not so many fur coats on racks so far away from the forest, not so many black-and-white balls where we pour champagne down the gutter in the ceremony to remember where we came from. We must find new ways to acquire clothing, new ways to show we are both of the sky and of the earth.

  9. So now, if you find a T-shirt on the street and it is 100% cotton, maybe it is time to put it on. That is a great find, to find cotton on the street, so far away from the fields. And though it probably advertises a bad system that you don’t believe in, everyone knows from your face what’s in your heart. And besides, our personal investigations are as valuable as our speeches. See what it is like to match your face with the bad system. There are not so many vacations anymore, but we still must go places.

  10. If a kindly older woman gives you a coat that makes you look like you’re on the wrong side of the money wars, wear that coat to your comrade’s or nemesis’s dinner party. If we can’t practice our beliefs and our empathy and our experiments over dinner, what is the point of dinner?

  11. It might seem like, in the new world, clothes are nowhere to be found, but they are everywhere. In the desert, at the funeral home, in the garbage.

  12. There will never not be enough clothes. We made so many. Galaxies of factories were born in the name of individuality. Our person-to-clothing ratio spiraled out of control and the resulting great piles of clothes made more visible the meaninglessness of our individual lives on earth.

  13. Stores were built up with marble bricks and were filled with empty clothes. They were guarded by kindly workers or menacing security guards in an attempt to show that a dress was still hard to come by, still meant, maybe, just for you.

  14. But they needed the marble again, for the marble wars, so the game now is to make meaning of that more visibly depressive pile of production.

  15. Now, we must remember, the less effort we spend before that pile of production, the more meaning. It is not about finding the perfect you in that garbage heap, it is about economical movement and effort—what we can find here, at our feet. Since you are very much you, and anything else is, again, a juxtaposition, a
gift.

  16. So now, if you easily come across a dress that fits you like a glove, but makes you look like a stranger, remember, this is a fortune-telling game of meaning and ease—we must turn in the direction of what fits.

  17. If you are worried you might be inappropriately dressed, just keep in mind there is always a funeral somewhere.

  18. What we love now are worn things, things that have made it through experiences with what appear to be travel scars and thick skin. We think, these dull blue boots are strong, I can tell they have been to the woods and the jungle and the floods and the dinner. Maybe we can’t tell what the shoes mean, since we haven’t been there, but we know they are still here. Sometimes, not knowing the meaning is not meaninglessness, but love.

  19. We get dressed now like we are in love. We don’t need mirrors anymore, or the sides of the old shiny buildings or the placid lake, to see what is good. Mirrors are for amateurs, for people from the old tragic mirror era. We can use our bodies to feel what’s happening.

  20. What we are talking about is something we have always known but have forgotten: Our bodies are smarter than our eyes. Our bodies are the newest mirrors and the ancient way.

  21. Also, don’t look down. We now know that clothes can’t change the information on our face, but what we do with all of the time we have saved can. There used to be secret meetings about how to get people to look down, they always want you to look down. But we know, and maybe always knew, that looking down is more time-consuming than heroin, academia, or beer.