In my current mood I am rampaging through all the happy girly films I can think of, decimating my collection within days and making regular pilgrimages to a second hand store to pick up classics for £1-2.
Some people I know disparage my taste for happy girly films, especially the ones which are often written off as chick flicks or rom coms. For some reason (many reasons, which I won't get into now) those kinds of films are routinely disparaged, and my liking for them is met with incredulity. In addition to their obvious trashiness, my presentation, some seem to think, suggests that I would be into boyish trashy films rather than girly trashy films. (That connotative gap between "boyish" and "girly", by the way, could make a whole other post.) But while I enjoy a silly action movie with muscles and explosions as much as the next person (and I really do, I'm not being sarcastic), chick flicks have a special place in my heart, and when I need comfort, nurturing and joy, that's where I go.
I'm not saying that they're shining beacons of perfect filmmaking, although some of them are. I'm not even arguing that any of them are any good, in a technical sense. I wouldn't know a 'good' film if I saw it. But, like many a derided art consumer, I know what I like.
Last night, whilst eating my lonely supper and filing and painting my nails (in my newest shade, a pretty opalescent pink called, gloriously, "ethereal"), I watched an old favourite: Legally Blonde, starring the delightful Reese Witherspoon, the gorgeous Selma Blair and the teen-movie staple Luke Wilson.
Legally Blonde is gratifyingly silly. A 'dumb blonde' from California is dumped by her boyfriend, who wants somebody "serious", and when she discovers that one of his brothers is engaged to a first year student at Yale law school, she decides to follow Warner to Harvard and prove to him that she is worth his attentions. Shenanigans ensue. I'm not going to recount the whole plot, but there will be spoilers ahead.
There's plenty not to like about Legally Blonde. It has moments of awful homophobia and horrifying racism / xenophobia, some pretty fucked-up narratives about sexuality/prudishness, and more sexism and gender essentialism than you can shake a stick at. This is not about being blind to the faults in the thing that you love. As someone who's into social justice issues, and dislikes jokes that punch down at any marginalised community, there's really very little media that I can consume completely happily. Nothing's perfect, is what I'm saying, and if I wrote off everything that had an offensive joke or a problematic message, I would never get to consume anything, and that would make me sad. The trick, for me anyway, is to tread the line between 'perfect' (ie. nothing = sadness) and 'so offensive it ruins the whole thing' (many things = sadness). In between there is a wealth of stuff which makes me laugh, makes me think, makes me reflect, makes me happy.
Incidentally, there's something weird going on with feminism in Legally Blonde. There is only one openly feminist character - not that she calls herself a feminist or anything, but we are intended to understand that she is one of those militants because she has a degree in women's studies from Berkeley, including a specialism in the history of combat, is probably a lesbian (she suggests to Elle that Elle would have called her a dyke, although this doesn't necessarily mean that she is a lesbian, only that she imagines that Elle would assume that she is one), and argues with Warner about the subliminal domination of the English language, telling him that she is petitioning to have the Winter semester referred to as the Winter ovester in an attempt to combat the school's discriminatory preference of semen to ovaries. A straw-feminist if ever there was one. On the other hand, this little exchange is immediately followed by Elle, wearing the traditional sexy bunny girl costume, approaching Warner and being told "Wow! Don't you look like a walking felony?!" to which she replies "Thank you. You're so sweet" and Enid, our feminist friend, rolls her eyes incredulously and stalks off. Now it looks to me as if we're meant to empathise with Enid here, despite the fact that she has just been dismissed as a ludicrous feminist harpy. What's interesting is that this scene seems to disparage feminism by setting up a "god, feminists are just so ridiculous" moment using a trivial argument that I've never seen any feminist espouse, but follows it up with an actual feminist position (rape is not a compliment, one's attire does not invite rape, etc) with which we are intended to sympathise. Warner is an arse: he doesn't have one redeeming feature, and everything he says, from "I need a Jackie, not a Marilyn" to "You're just not smart enough, sweetie" to "If you tell him [the alibi] he'll probably hire you as a summer associate. Who cares about Brooke? Think about yourself" is intended to show us what an awful, vacuous person he is. By using him here to oppose a feminist position, the film sets up the position as something we can agree with, all the while openly deriding feminists and their positions. Stealth feminism indeed.
I could go on for hours about the weird back-and-forth of feminism in this film, but that's not actually what I was going to talk about. During last night's screening of Legally Blonde, I realised just what it is that is so great about the film. Femme-bonding. Although the whole premise of the film is that feminine grooming is frivolous and somewhat contemptible, its joyful moments come, again and again, from rituals of grooming and bonding. When Elle is dumped by Warner, her friends take her to a beauty salon, where she has the epiphanic realisation that she must follow him to Harvard. When she discovers that he is engaged to Vivian, she is driving at random when she spots another salon, which she makes a desperate beeline for, and plants herself in front of an employee, saying tearfully "Are you free? It's an emergency." The employee, Paulette, asks "Bad day?" and then, as she puts aside her sandwich, "Spill." Elle recounts her tale one miserable exhalation of breath, and Paulette sympathises, empathises, and advises, culminating in her counseling Elle to "Steal the bastard back!" OK, so it's not brilliant advice, but the point is the ritual of grooming that provides the environment for the counseling, the regrouping, the finding of common ground and the regaining of strength. Later, the whole contingent of customers and staff bond over Elle's famous technique for getting the attention of a man when she advises Paulette on how to flirt with the UPS guy. Later again, when Elle tells Paulette that she is quitting after her professor hits on her in his office, the salon again provides the backdrop for fortification and resistance, as Elle's other (female) professor is revealed behind a hairdryer and tells her "If you're going to let one stupid prick ruin your life, you're not the girl I thought you were." This professor, who is "tough", who smirks at Elle's 'fluffy' demeanour and kicks her out of her first class, becomes Elle's ally when relocated in that centre of female-bonding, the beauty salon.
There are some less joyful moments related to female grooming. Elle discredits a witness by proving that he is gay after he correctly identifies her shoes as Prada, which is apparently all the evidence that she needs. And she finally wins the trial by using her knowledge of perm technicalities, which doesn't really say much for her abilities as a lawyer. Female grooming isn't only a force for good in this film. But what's important about it to me - what keeps me coming back to this film - is its status as a source of power and comfort for the women involved, particularly Elle who is trying to prove herself in the face of crushing contempt which is mostly based on her high-femme appearance. The salon and what it represents is a safe space for Elle to be honest about her emotions and her drives (personal and professional). Although there are plenty of unpleasant messages to be picked up from Legally Blonde, (and even this one - that grooming rituals are powerful - is balancing on a fine line and could easily be used for evil rather than good), the central theme of female friendship and support that is grounded in the often-disparaged pastime of female-grooming is something I can really get behind.
I also find it refreshing, if I'm honest, to see a film which celebrates the the joy the main character takes in grooming, rather than celebrating the endearing ignorance of the 'plain' girl who is in fact a natural beauty, who doesn't own any makeup or use straighteners, who doesn't know what an eyelash curler is, who wins the guy in the end, and who is throughout pitted against the mean girl who is perfectly coiffed, depilated, made-up - in short, groomed to within an inch of her life. That girl is always mean and vacuous, contemptuous of the 'plain' girl who doesn't subscribe to these silly, frivolous notions of beauty, and she is always, always, taught a lesson by the end. She loses the guy. She is exposed as a fraud. Her friends discover she is two-faced and ditch her. The beauty rituals are revealed to be inadequate to mask the ugliness of the person beneath them, and it is the plain girl who is kind and sweet and, above all, smart. Elle gets to be all of these things, which may not seem revolutionary, but which feels to me like a small victory won over the mechanics of competitive femininity, which insists that you can be beautiful or you can be smart/nice, but you can't be both.
This brings me back to my opening suggestion that films like this are routinely disparaged. As I said, there are many reasons for this disparagement, but I think that what I have described in this post is in fact central to their reputation as frivolous bits of fluff. Women, talking to each other about their lives, bonding over things that women are taught to find important, and taking strength and joy from those very things which are routinely used to dismiss and belittle them. That's what I want from my happy girly films, and it crops up again and again in my lists of favourites. And I won't apologise for it, and I will, as I've just demonstrated, talk your ear off about their qualities if given half a chance.
Sunday, 22 July 2012
Wednesday, 4 July 2012
The boy at Charing X
I followed you up the steps from the platform, unaware until you
stood aside and sweetly gestured for me to go ahead of you
up the escalator.
I stood flutteringly ahead of you, watching the posters glide past,
thinking of you perched reassuringly behind me, my
guardian.
Did I intentionally allow you to get ahead of me
in the station proper? and was I secretly pleased when
you walked the way I wanted to walk?
I followed you out into the bright, admiring your impossibly thin
calves, angular, endearingly knobbly, disappearing into
heeled boots.
I've enjoyed for myself the feeling of sway and poise that heels
promote, and in you I saw embodied the glorious taut swish that I
wishfully imagine in myself
swinging down the road.
Dark trousers, elegant fawn coat, flashes of colour at your
neckline, the flirtatious pride of
peacock silk. The glances of strangers,
confused or
anxious, but
I saw your pride and your beauty, and I thought you saw mine
When you stood aside and sweetly gestured, and in our quick
meeting of eyes
there was
home.
stood aside and sweetly gestured for me to go ahead of you
up the escalator.
I stood flutteringly ahead of you, watching the posters glide past,
thinking of you perched reassuringly behind me, my
guardian.
Did I intentionally allow you to get ahead of me
in the station proper? and was I secretly pleased when
you walked the way I wanted to walk?
I followed you out into the bright, admiring your impossibly thin
calves, angular, endearingly knobbly, disappearing into
heeled boots.
I've enjoyed for myself the feeling of sway and poise that heels
promote, and in you I saw embodied the glorious taut swish that I
wishfully imagine in myself
swinging down the road.
Dark trousers, elegant fawn coat, flashes of colour at your
neckline, the flirtatious pride of
peacock silk. The glances of strangers,
confused or
anxious, but
I saw your pride and your beauty, and I thought you saw mine
When you stood aside and sweetly gestured, and in our quick
meeting of eyes
there was
home.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
The Happiness Project
I have been absent from this blog for a long while, for a variety of reasons practical, emotional, temporal and financial. In plain English, I've been busy, distracted, and miserable. But no more! Here I am today to lay out my plan to be happy both now and in the future. This is only a starting point - it will probably expand and evolve as I go along.
1) Set targets. Reasonable, visible, achievable targets are crucial to step one of my plan. I try not to berate myself for my inability to 'live spontaneously' as the trite expression goes. I like plans, I like goals, and if I don't have them I incline towards lethargy both spiritual and physical, which leads to boredom and is a recipe for frustration and misery. This is just one of many vicious circles that my happiness project intends to negotiate.
2) Make lists. This is obviously related to the above: lists are a way of visualising my targets, whether they are lifelong lists of goals or daily lists of chores. It's so well documented as to be a cliche, but there's nothing more satisfying than a meaty list of tasks that can be regularly whittled down. Lists also remind me that my life is varied, if in a seemingly trivial way: my daily list might include doing some laundry, reading a chapter of something for my PhD, preparing meals to take to work, painting my toenails, texting a friend to suggest a catch-up, and checking my tax documents. Inconsequential things, perhaps, but by documenting the trivial I find it easier to keep my life in perspective, remember 'the big picture' and more successfully circumnavigate the bleakness of the endlessly-trivial.
3) Work hard. Self-explanatory? Perhaps it ought to be, but by writing it down (typing it down? this post is alarmingly meta) I can, again, remind myself of its importance. Every single time I emerge from my pit of despair I see that the pit has produced no work of any kind, except the work of making myself feel like arse for days/weeks/months on end. How to avoid the pit of despair? Work hard. Although I sometimes dread my work - I'm talking specifically about my academic pursuits here, although this is really applicable to any endeavour I undertake - the more I do of it, the better I feel about it, regardless of the success / quality of what I produce. Not working hard is likely to lead to the pit of despair, in which I do no work at all, then castigate myself when I emerge for the failure to achieve anything. Another vicious circle, and one which I need to break if I'm ever to achieve anything at all, let alone anything worthwhile!
4) Get exercise. This is for both physical and mental health. I intend to return to regular judo training, partly because I love and miss judo, partly because I want some frequent and structured exercise and judo seems like an 'easy' option since I have a decade of it under my belt already (albeit with a decade of gap in between then and now!). I'd like to identify and work on a physical skill, not urgently but slowly and methodically, starting from a position of enthusiasm and commitment and seeing where it takes me. This has the double advantage of being good for my body (physical exercise makes me feel strong, healthy and capable, helps me sleep better, increases my enjoyment of food, and improves my performance at my physically demanding jobs) and good for my mind (rightly or wrongly I feel morally 'good' when I exercise; more importantly, I theorise that a commitment to development of a skill will make me feel good about myself, both in and of itself and by giving me a focus for growth discrete from my academic pursuits and my employed life).
5) Be discriminately sociable. This starts with recognising what kinds of sociality are mentally good for me, and which are not. I have a crude idea of this, which begins with the notion that small-scale socialising (one-to-one coffee dates, intimate-ish dinner arrangements with friends etc) is more enjoyable for me than big group outings or parties. There are exceptions, of course, and there is also plenty of potential to integrate the two, by which I mean incorporate the former into the latter. A group outing which includes one or two close friends can be enjoyable: a group outing of mostly acquaintances and casual friends (people I would hesitate to confide in) is very bad for me. This is in no way a criticism of those people or those events. Those people are not inadequate and I have not deemed them unworthy of my oh-so-worthwhile confidences. Those events are not superficial and I don't think that every occasion requires the potential for confidence-exchange. The important part for me, I think, is that there is someone there with whom I can exchange/have exchanged confidences. It's something of a security blanket I guess: even if I am highly unlikely to bear my soul at a work bowling trip, the presence of someone with whom I would feel comfortable doing that if the need were to arise is crucial.
6) Practice radical caring. I want to avoid engaging in forms of socialising that are harmful to me, but I also want to be an active friend to those who desire it. This is not really radical at all, but I use the word radical to highlight the purpose behind the notion: radical as opposed to casual or passive caring. I don't want to be the person that someone asks - or doesn't ask - for friendship. I want to be available for that, and I don't want to push my friendship or caring on someone who doesn't want it, but I also want to actively participate in a friendship, which to me means simply keeping in touch. This is flexible depending on the people and the dynamic involved, of course. In some cases it may mean checking in by text once a month, in others it may mean a bi-weekly dinner or drink. Some might require structure, some may be more freely arranged. Some friendships mean "how are you feeling today?" texts, some mean "fancy a drink after work?", some mean long email exchanges or skype chats with little physical contact, and most involve a combination of these and other interactions. All I mean by this little point is that I love my friends and they are important to me, and I want to invest our relationships with the time and care that they deserve.
7) Be diverse. To finish up today, I am going to explicitly highlight the importance of variety. I find it all too easy to focus my negative energy on one aspect of my life, which ends up feeling like the end of the world, and then negatively impacts on the other aspects of my life, until everything is infected with despondency and misery. One way to combat this is, I think, to expand the parameters of my life. It will be easier, I hope, to keep in perspective the not-so-greatness of one aspect of my life if I have plenty of other aspects which are great, or pretty positive, or plodding along tolerably. This blog can be one of those things! It hasn't escaped my notice that, when things started to go downhill, I stopped working on my blog completely. Although there was nothing wrong with my writings here, and they often made me feel good about myself, they were infected in my mind by negativity from other parts of my life and I simply stopped engaging. I think it may be more helpful to me to continue engaging if I possibly can, because one thing I know about myself is that I am always more miserable about what I don't do than about what I do do. The more things I have going on in my life, no matter how small or trivial, the less likely I am to fall at the hurdle of an obstacle in only one thing.
1) Set targets. Reasonable, visible, achievable targets are crucial to step one of my plan. I try not to berate myself for my inability to 'live spontaneously' as the trite expression goes. I like plans, I like goals, and if I don't have them I incline towards lethargy both spiritual and physical, which leads to boredom and is a recipe for frustration and misery. This is just one of many vicious circles that my happiness project intends to negotiate.
2) Make lists. This is obviously related to the above: lists are a way of visualising my targets, whether they are lifelong lists of goals or daily lists of chores. It's so well documented as to be a cliche, but there's nothing more satisfying than a meaty list of tasks that can be regularly whittled down. Lists also remind me that my life is varied, if in a seemingly trivial way: my daily list might include doing some laundry, reading a chapter of something for my PhD, preparing meals to take to work, painting my toenails, texting a friend to suggest a catch-up, and checking my tax documents. Inconsequential things, perhaps, but by documenting the trivial I find it easier to keep my life in perspective, remember 'the big picture' and more successfully circumnavigate the bleakness of the endlessly-trivial.
3) Work hard. Self-explanatory? Perhaps it ought to be, but by writing it down (typing it down? this post is alarmingly meta) I can, again, remind myself of its importance. Every single time I emerge from my pit of despair I see that the pit has produced no work of any kind, except the work of making myself feel like arse for days/weeks/months on end. How to avoid the pit of despair? Work hard. Although I sometimes dread my work - I'm talking specifically about my academic pursuits here, although this is really applicable to any endeavour I undertake - the more I do of it, the better I feel about it, regardless of the success / quality of what I produce. Not working hard is likely to lead to the pit of despair, in which I do no work at all, then castigate myself when I emerge for the failure to achieve anything. Another vicious circle, and one which I need to break if I'm ever to achieve anything at all, let alone anything worthwhile!
4) Get exercise. This is for both physical and mental health. I intend to return to regular judo training, partly because I love and miss judo, partly because I want some frequent and structured exercise and judo seems like an 'easy' option since I have a decade of it under my belt already (albeit with a decade of gap in between then and now!). I'd like to identify and work on a physical skill, not urgently but slowly and methodically, starting from a position of enthusiasm and commitment and seeing where it takes me. This has the double advantage of being good for my body (physical exercise makes me feel strong, healthy and capable, helps me sleep better, increases my enjoyment of food, and improves my performance at my physically demanding jobs) and good for my mind (rightly or wrongly I feel morally 'good' when I exercise; more importantly, I theorise that a commitment to development of a skill will make me feel good about myself, both in and of itself and by giving me a focus for growth discrete from my academic pursuits and my employed life).
5) Be discriminately sociable. This starts with recognising what kinds of sociality are mentally good for me, and which are not. I have a crude idea of this, which begins with the notion that small-scale socialising (one-to-one coffee dates, intimate-ish dinner arrangements with friends etc) is more enjoyable for me than big group outings or parties. There are exceptions, of course, and there is also plenty of potential to integrate the two, by which I mean incorporate the former into the latter. A group outing which includes one or two close friends can be enjoyable: a group outing of mostly acquaintances and casual friends (people I would hesitate to confide in) is very bad for me. This is in no way a criticism of those people or those events. Those people are not inadequate and I have not deemed them unworthy of my oh-so-worthwhile confidences. Those events are not superficial and I don't think that every occasion requires the potential for confidence-exchange. The important part for me, I think, is that there is someone there with whom I can exchange/have exchanged confidences. It's something of a security blanket I guess: even if I am highly unlikely to bear my soul at a work bowling trip, the presence of someone with whom I would feel comfortable doing that if the need were to arise is crucial.
6) Practice radical caring. I want to avoid engaging in forms of socialising that are harmful to me, but I also want to be an active friend to those who desire it. This is not really radical at all, but I use the word radical to highlight the purpose behind the notion: radical as opposed to casual or passive caring. I don't want to be the person that someone asks - or doesn't ask - for friendship. I want to be available for that, and I don't want to push my friendship or caring on someone who doesn't want it, but I also want to actively participate in a friendship, which to me means simply keeping in touch. This is flexible depending on the people and the dynamic involved, of course. In some cases it may mean checking in by text once a month, in others it may mean a bi-weekly dinner or drink. Some might require structure, some may be more freely arranged. Some friendships mean "how are you feeling today?" texts, some mean "fancy a drink after work?", some mean long email exchanges or skype chats with little physical contact, and most involve a combination of these and other interactions. All I mean by this little point is that I love my friends and they are important to me, and I want to invest our relationships with the time and care that they deserve.
7) Be diverse. To finish up today, I am going to explicitly highlight the importance of variety. I find it all too easy to focus my negative energy on one aspect of my life, which ends up feeling like the end of the world, and then negatively impacts on the other aspects of my life, until everything is infected with despondency and misery. One way to combat this is, I think, to expand the parameters of my life. It will be easier, I hope, to keep in perspective the not-so-greatness of one aspect of my life if I have plenty of other aspects which are great, or pretty positive, or plodding along tolerably. This blog can be one of those things! It hasn't escaped my notice that, when things started to go downhill, I stopped working on my blog completely. Although there was nothing wrong with my writings here, and they often made me feel good about myself, they were infected in my mind by negativity from other parts of my life and I simply stopped engaging. I think it may be more helpful to me to continue engaging if I possibly can, because one thing I know about myself is that I am always more miserable about what I don't do than about what I do do. The more things I have going on in my life, no matter how small or trivial, the less likely I am to fall at the hurdle of an obstacle in only one thing.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Female-Bodied
Today I have such dreadful cramps that when I get up out of my chair, I make an involuntary sound of pain. That's pretty pathetic, right? But I'm not going to talk about how pathetic I am - not today. I'm going to talk about what my body means to me.
As a confusedly-gendered person, I spend a lot of time in conflict with my body. Sometimes I hate my breasts, which no amount of binding would disguise, even if binding wasn't so preposterously uncomfortable that I never even made it out of the house whilst sporting it. Sometimes I hate my hips, which are pretty unhappy about fitting into boy-trousers. Sometimes I hate my legs, which remain uncompromisingly short, and which ensure that I have never worn a pair of trousers that I haven't had to shorten, regardless of what gender they're intended for. And yes, sometimes I have hated my periods, hated them to the point of tears. I'm not going to claim that my hatred wasn't gender-related. In a way, how could it not be? In a culture where schoolgirls are shamed for having tampons or pads in their bags, where grown men as well as schoolboys make jokes about PMS and have gross-out competitions about period-sex, where many non-period-having humans genuinely believe that menstruation makes one "crazy", how can I be sure that my resentment of my periods was divorced from that sexist nonsense? I'm sure that it affected me on some level: one can't grow up steeped in misogyny and expect to emerge unscathed.
However, for the most part, my period-hatred was to do with the inconvenience of it all. I was never the girl who belonged in a Lil-Lets advert, dancing around joyfully with nary a rusty stain in sight. I was the girl whose periods were wilfully irregular, turning up at random with no warning seemingly just to toy with me, bringing with them days of disruption, discomfort and pain. Some of that is still true today - they're still painful and annoying, and my cycle is still anything but regular. And I'm still slightly resentful of the extra planning I have to do to accommodate them. But honestly? I actually kind of love having periods. Although I don't exactly enjoy the pain and the clock-watching, I don't hate it. I like the sense of control that I get from dealing with it, even when it's so fundamentally uncontrollable. Okay, so I can't dictate (or even predict!) when my period is going to turn up, but I can predict the kind of steps I'll need to take in order to deal with it when it does happen. And that makes me feel at peace with my body in a way that has very little to do with gender.
I hear a lot of anecdotal evidence from trans-men, trans-masculine folk and the like who hate having periods, much as they hate their breasts, because for them menstruation is incontrovertible evidence of their 'female bodies', which they often don't like to be reminded of. I have a lot of sympathy for that feeling - I have felt it myself, about many aspects of my body. On the other side of the same coin, I've also heard a lot of people describing that "female bonding" thing of having periods: it's something that all women share, and men don't understand! Actually, no. Not all women have periods, for a variety of reasons, and some men do, also for a variety of reasons. I don't really subscribe to either of these views in their entirety, although I understand the drive behind both. I hope that my acceptance of my menstruation stems from a growing empathy with the idea that no biological functions are inherently male or female, meaning that my periods are not an irrefutable sign of my womanhood. They may be an indicator that I'm capable of getting pregnant, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish.
I'm getting so sick of the essentialist language that is used to describe us. Progressives often use "female-bodied" in a well-meaning attempt to show that they know that not all people who have breasts or uteri are women, and I do appreciate the intent. But it's terribly unhelpful for all sorts of people, particularly trans and genderqueer people, who often don't want or need to alter their bodies, and would rather not be put into any particular box due to their personal choices (or lack thereof). I really don't appreciate being reduced to my biology in any case, particularly when it's just yet another stick to be used to beat my supposed gender into me. On a slight tangent, could we stop referring to male-heavy spaces as "sausage-fests"? A) it's gross, and b) it's factually incorrect, disturbingly erasing and personally insulting.
I like my periods ... they don't mean I'm a woman. I don't have a cock ... that doesn't mean I'm any less of a man. I am not female-bodied, and I never have been.
As a confusedly-gendered person, I spend a lot of time in conflict with my body. Sometimes I hate my breasts, which no amount of binding would disguise, even if binding wasn't so preposterously uncomfortable that I never even made it out of the house whilst sporting it. Sometimes I hate my hips, which are pretty unhappy about fitting into boy-trousers. Sometimes I hate my legs, which remain uncompromisingly short, and which ensure that I have never worn a pair of trousers that I haven't had to shorten, regardless of what gender they're intended for. And yes, sometimes I have hated my periods, hated them to the point of tears. I'm not going to claim that my hatred wasn't gender-related. In a way, how could it not be? In a culture where schoolgirls are shamed for having tampons or pads in their bags, where grown men as well as schoolboys make jokes about PMS and have gross-out competitions about period-sex, where many non-period-having humans genuinely believe that menstruation makes one "crazy", how can I be sure that my resentment of my periods was divorced from that sexist nonsense? I'm sure that it affected me on some level: one can't grow up steeped in misogyny and expect to emerge unscathed.
However, for the most part, my period-hatred was to do with the inconvenience of it all. I was never the girl who belonged in a Lil-Lets advert, dancing around joyfully with nary a rusty stain in sight. I was the girl whose periods were wilfully irregular, turning up at random with no warning seemingly just to toy with me, bringing with them days of disruption, discomfort and pain. Some of that is still true today - they're still painful and annoying, and my cycle is still anything but regular. And I'm still slightly resentful of the extra planning I have to do to accommodate them. But honestly? I actually kind of love having periods. Although I don't exactly enjoy the pain and the clock-watching, I don't hate it. I like the sense of control that I get from dealing with it, even when it's so fundamentally uncontrollable. Okay, so I can't dictate (or even predict!) when my period is going to turn up, but I can predict the kind of steps I'll need to take in order to deal with it when it does happen. And that makes me feel at peace with my body in a way that has very little to do with gender.
I hear a lot of anecdotal evidence from trans-men, trans-masculine folk and the like who hate having periods, much as they hate their breasts, because for them menstruation is incontrovertible evidence of their 'female bodies', which they often don't like to be reminded of. I have a lot of sympathy for that feeling - I have felt it myself, about many aspects of my body. On the other side of the same coin, I've also heard a lot of people describing that "female bonding" thing of having periods: it's something that all women share, and men don't understand! Actually, no. Not all women have periods, for a variety of reasons, and some men do, also for a variety of reasons. I don't really subscribe to either of these views in their entirety, although I understand the drive behind both. I hope that my acceptance of my menstruation stems from a growing empathy with the idea that no biological functions are inherently male or female, meaning that my periods are not an irrefutable sign of my womanhood. They may be an indicator that I'm capable of getting pregnant, but that's an entirely different kettle of fish.
I'm getting so sick of the essentialist language that is used to describe us. Progressives often use "female-bodied" in a well-meaning attempt to show that they know that not all people who have breasts or uteri are women, and I do appreciate the intent. But it's terribly unhelpful for all sorts of people, particularly trans and genderqueer people, who often don't want or need to alter their bodies, and would rather not be put into any particular box due to their personal choices (or lack thereof). I really don't appreciate being reduced to my biology in any case, particularly when it's just yet another stick to be used to beat my supposed gender into me. On a slight tangent, could we stop referring to male-heavy spaces as "sausage-fests"? A) it's gross, and b) it's factually incorrect, disturbingly erasing and personally insulting.
I like my periods ... they don't mean I'm a woman. I don't have a cock ... that doesn't mean I'm any less of a man. I am not female-bodied, and I never have been.
Monday, 23 April 2012
Consent
This post is personal and has no great revelations about life or love. It's not even about gender! Well, I suppose gender comes into it a bit. Sneaky little thing gets everywhere! It's about unwanted intercourse, and me, and an unpleasant episode with a partner. Please be aware it gets a bit brutal, and click past this post right now if you're not up for it. If you are, read on ...
I liked intercourse, once, but I often found it painful. Whether that's due to a physical issue or a mental one, I don't know. It was frustrating for me, of course, and some of my partners found it extremely difficult to deal with. I had a turbulent eight-month relationship with one such person, who made a good show - for the most part - of being accepting and tolerant, and generally acting as though this was reasonable behaviour on my part. He was patient and kind, taking his time with 'foreplay', as I'd told him that this was helpful for me.
Once I suggested that we focus more on the non-penetrative aspects of sex, since I found these parts pleasurable, and would be able to relax into them more if I wasn't worried about how the penetration would feel when we got to it. He wasn't terribly keen on the idea, as for him the most enjoyable part of sex was the intercourse itself, and he didn't really see the point, he told me, of sex which didn't end in intercourse. I couldn't orgasm with him - I never had - and he thought this made foreplay even more pointless. Nevertheless, he wanted to make me happy, and he genuinely wanted me to enjoy sex, so we agreed to shelve penetration for a little while and see how it went.
I was practically living with him at this point. My room on the other side of London was cold, bare and lonely, and it was much nicer to spend time with A in his cosy flat. He had to get up early in the mornings to commute to the opposite corner of London for work, so it was easy for me to go partway with him and be at college for a 9am start. We had settled quickly into a routine - mundane and domestic but cosy and comforting at the same time. We argued about the washing up, but we shopped and cooked and decorated together, and were happy. I was 19.
We 'foreplayed' for a while after that, kissing and touching and stroking and sucking. I tried to enjoy it as I'd said that I would. I tried to relax, like the books said I should. I wanted to make A happy, to let him see me enjoying myself. I wanted to enjoy myself. I started pretended to, hoping to trick myself into feeling pleasure. It didn't work on me, but it worked on A, who read in my responses only what he wanted to read, and moved to penetrate me. I was tense and confused, paralysed with shame and guilt and fear. If there was something wrong with me, this wasn't the way to fix it. What was? How could I find out? Not like this ... a problem for another time, then. I moved to accommodate him and tried to relax my muscles and my mind.
We fucked.
I moved as much as I dared, trying to tread the fine line between stillness and movement that didn't make me an inert lump of meat, but didn't hurt too much either. He pushed his face into my shoulder, kissing my collarbone, his fingers on my nipple. I closed my eyes to stop the tears. I retreated from the pain and my eyes dried, my mind emptied. I watched him from somewhere else, trying to smile at him, thinking maybe this isn't so bad. I can do this. Look how easy it is.
Lying together afterwards, damp and clammy, somewhere between relieved, resigned and resentful, I realised I had to tell him the truth about 'how it was for me'. I apologised a lot. I thanked him for trying the foreplay thing. I apologised again if I'd given him the wrong signals. I told him I hadn't enjoyed it. I asked him if he'd seen my tears. I told him it was my fault for not asking him to stop. I said sorry.
His mouth tightened then, and he pulled away, and shouted into my face that I'd made him rape me. After a while I started crying, and he held me and soothed me, murmuring into my ear and stroking my back. I quieted.
We had dinner.
Later, he cried, and held his face in his hands, and I looked at him as if he was my child, thinking I must protect him from this.
I said at the top that gender didn't come into this one. It doesn't, really, except that as I wrote that I thought about all the ways that gender had influenced this particular incident, as well as sex more generally. Had I not been socialised as a woman, would I have been more vocal about what I wanted and didn't want, like A was? Perhaps I wouldn't have internalised so many damaging 'truths' about sex: intercourse is the only bit that matters; I should want intercourse because if I didn't I was a prude, I was broken; foreplay is something that happens before intercourse, as a warmup, and if I wanted it to last longer than it did I was selfish and immature and not doing it right; intercourse is something that I owed my partner. Perhaps if A and I had had different sex education (not just formal education but social education, a casual on-the-job learning with our peers and partners) he wouldn't have set so much store by intercourse, and nor would I, and both of us would have thought that there was value in exploring other aspects of sex. That one isn't so much about gender, but so much of it comes down to gender in the end, at a root level. A was older than I, but he probably had the same experience of being separated from 'the other' gender at school to learn about sex, to gigglingly observe condoms and bananas and cold line drawings of female anatomy. He was probably taught, as I was, that I was the possessor of untold riches and that he would get them if he only behaved in the right way, and that this was normal. He was probably taught, as I was, that if the carefully applied formula didn't work, it meant that one or other of us must be broken, and since he wasn't broken, it must be me. And he probably would have agreed with me that he needed to be protected from my brokenness. I think, in the end, he would rather not have known at all.
I liked intercourse, once, but I often found it painful. Whether that's due to a physical issue or a mental one, I don't know. It was frustrating for me, of course, and some of my partners found it extremely difficult to deal with. I had a turbulent eight-month relationship with one such person, who made a good show - for the most part - of being accepting and tolerant, and generally acting as though this was reasonable behaviour on my part. He was patient and kind, taking his time with 'foreplay', as I'd told him that this was helpful for me.
Once I suggested that we focus more on the non-penetrative aspects of sex, since I found these parts pleasurable, and would be able to relax into them more if I wasn't worried about how the penetration would feel when we got to it. He wasn't terribly keen on the idea, as for him the most enjoyable part of sex was the intercourse itself, and he didn't really see the point, he told me, of sex which didn't end in intercourse. I couldn't orgasm with him - I never had - and he thought this made foreplay even more pointless. Nevertheless, he wanted to make me happy, and he genuinely wanted me to enjoy sex, so we agreed to shelve penetration for a little while and see how it went.
I was practically living with him at this point. My room on the other side of London was cold, bare and lonely, and it was much nicer to spend time with A in his cosy flat. He had to get up early in the mornings to commute to the opposite corner of London for work, so it was easy for me to go partway with him and be at college for a 9am start. We had settled quickly into a routine - mundane and domestic but cosy and comforting at the same time. We argued about the washing up, but we shopped and cooked and decorated together, and were happy. I was 19.
We 'foreplayed' for a while after that, kissing and touching and stroking and sucking. I tried to enjoy it as I'd said that I would. I tried to relax, like the books said I should. I wanted to make A happy, to let him see me enjoying myself. I wanted to enjoy myself. I started pretended to, hoping to trick myself into feeling pleasure. It didn't work on me, but it worked on A, who read in my responses only what he wanted to read, and moved to penetrate me. I was tense and confused, paralysed with shame and guilt and fear. If there was something wrong with me, this wasn't the way to fix it. What was? How could I find out? Not like this ... a problem for another time, then. I moved to accommodate him and tried to relax my muscles and my mind.
We fucked.
I moved as much as I dared, trying to tread the fine line between stillness and movement that didn't make me an inert lump of meat, but didn't hurt too much either. He pushed his face into my shoulder, kissing my collarbone, his fingers on my nipple. I closed my eyes to stop the tears. I retreated from the pain and my eyes dried, my mind emptied. I watched him from somewhere else, trying to smile at him, thinking maybe this isn't so bad. I can do this. Look how easy it is.
Lying together afterwards, damp and clammy, somewhere between relieved, resigned and resentful, I realised I had to tell him the truth about 'how it was for me'. I apologised a lot. I thanked him for trying the foreplay thing. I apologised again if I'd given him the wrong signals. I told him I hadn't enjoyed it. I asked him if he'd seen my tears. I told him it was my fault for not asking him to stop. I said sorry.
His mouth tightened then, and he pulled away, and shouted into my face that I'd made him rape me. After a while I started crying, and he held me and soothed me, murmuring into my ear and stroking my back. I quieted.
We had dinner.
Later, he cried, and held his face in his hands, and I looked at him as if he was my child, thinking I must protect him from this.
I said at the top that gender didn't come into this one. It doesn't, really, except that as I wrote that I thought about all the ways that gender had influenced this particular incident, as well as sex more generally. Had I not been socialised as a woman, would I have been more vocal about what I wanted and didn't want, like A was? Perhaps I wouldn't have internalised so many damaging 'truths' about sex: intercourse is the only bit that matters; I should want intercourse because if I didn't I was a prude, I was broken; foreplay is something that happens before intercourse, as a warmup, and if I wanted it to last longer than it did I was selfish and immature and not doing it right; intercourse is something that I owed my partner. Perhaps if A and I had had different sex education (not just formal education but social education, a casual on-the-job learning with our peers and partners) he wouldn't have set so much store by intercourse, and nor would I, and both of us would have thought that there was value in exploring other aspects of sex. That one isn't so much about gender, but so much of it comes down to gender in the end, at a root level. A was older than I, but he probably had the same experience of being separated from 'the other' gender at school to learn about sex, to gigglingly observe condoms and bananas and cold line drawings of female anatomy. He was probably taught, as I was, that I was the possessor of untold riches and that he would get them if he only behaved in the right way, and that this was normal. He was probably taught, as I was, that if the carefully applied formula didn't work, it meant that one or other of us must be broken, and since he wasn't broken, it must be me. And he probably would have agreed with me that he needed to be protected from my brokenness. I think, in the end, he would rather not have known at all.
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