When it's me vs. the girls I always lose.
posted by jeremy on June 10, 2003
The female is of the same species as me, Homo Sapiens, but I am a male. Testicles. Penis. Hairy as a god-fucking goat. No tits, no ovaries & no uterus. Vastly different hormone levels. Alternate neuro-chemical arrangements & mostly, a completely parallel but somehow separate social continuum....
Still, the female is of me: The other half of my humanity. I am, as are all males, composed mostly of my mother's X chromosomes. How can I reconcile this reality & this abstraction of what I know? How can I step outside the framework of all I've ever known?
I suppose I can look back, scoping the origins of our cultural set-up; I can consider our biology: The primatology of the human, this animal we've slowly come to inhabit, with our ancient cellular lives, our constantly evolving societies, our lush & desperate individual minds...
& I have to realize, that the slight but magnificent difference between the genotypes, the ever-shifting & direly serious dance between that which is girl & that which is boy, is the exact reason most of us choose to breathe from day to day to wondrous day...
The city of Tacoma is purring past us at 85 MPH & we are hoping for coffee in Seattle & a warm bed by nightfall in Vancouver, B.C. I'm reading the Global Human Rights Watch Global Report on Woman's Human Rights. The first chapter is titled
' Rape as a Weapon of War.' & it's already worse than it already sounds.
It's 12:29 PM & the blue of this sky could trick you into thinking that everything was A-OK, that all our slow murder of the world was nothing but simple illusion...
Some say that maybe we are two species: The Male & the Female & that maybe the arrangement is symbiotic or maybe it's parasitic. I dally in these words conceptualizing as many of the implications as I can but it's only a meager portion of what I suspect is the actual complicity of this biological phenomena. The relationship is beyond the simple semantic receptacles of symbiotic, parasitic. Beyond anything we might know for centuries or millenia or forever... What I do know is that we are not two species but then again, we might as well be.
Again, trying to step outside of this fact is nearly impossible. Everything we've ever known works against it: To understand this duality. I think of all the ages of art, of poetry, of literature that we've thrown against this basic divide & I shudder....
& I look, with open eyes, at the driver of this car. Rachel R. is her name. She's brilliant in Mind. Good in heart. Yet she is she of so many contradictions, as am I. We've found that our worlds do not always match; That the orbits of us do not always align & so we collide & tumble. We love & scrap. We love & do not love perfectly, yet still... We love. We are so very very similar & yet so bafflingly different. We are mutual enigma.
She has deep brown hair. Darker skin than mine. Simple & wonderful tattoos. Her smaller finer features make her beautiful by most standards.... & I consider this: The subtle indescribable sense we have, as humans, for seeing beauty in the arrangement of the facial organs, the shape of a skull, the twine of limbs & torso. I laugh to see her so & so I tickle her, momentarily forgetting myself, seeing as how I am terrified of cars, especially when trapped in them... & she slaps at me, but she's laughing too...
...& presto: Her ticklish & alluring belly. Beneath the skin & muscle of which are the mechanisms, the latent capability, of generating new life.... A combination of her eggs & my sperm would trigger this; The quick twine of our DNA & suddenly a Third would slowly swell into the actuality of this world. This creature would be a miraculous splice of our genes, our strengths & weaknesses; Everything from bi-polar disorders to genius could be part of the inherited mix. Who knows what disastrous combinations, what beautiful amalgamations lurk in our blood? & this creature would slowly build itself, be built, while nestled in the womb of this carrier, this creator, this female....
Roughly nine months of development later & this large-skulled beast would pass, thru the bearers yells & it's own screams, into the manifold adventure of Terran existence... But this is only a factor in the equation of the female, it is not the whole of Her: The female is the factory of all mammalian life, but she is a fierce & sentient factory & me, in my static male-ness, stands in awe, as always, of the deviousness & stunning complexity of the human female mind, the product of four million years of evolution & 10,000 years of generally oppressive patriarchal civilization...
Rachel... Rachel, you are one of 3 billion sly survivors.
& The Hand Maid's Tale, set in the not-distant future where a fundamentalist Christian regime has acquired power over part of the former United States, reminds me of the darkening days of our own reality, the rough history of its idiot sociology, the ancient slimy tentacles of its many-faced theocracy...
In this book, women have slowly had their humanity eroded by the corrosive encroachment of theocratic law. Bank accounts are seized, property & voting rights disappear, a curfew is imposed & eventually, women are assigned to various camps, work details, & rehabilitation programs. They are told what they can wear, where they can go, what they can do. No more reading. No more schooling. The life of the female is no longer sovereign, it is firmly regulated & the punishment for disobedience is harsh, often deadly. & due to a mysterious widespread sterility, the few women who are still fertile are placed in breeding centers. These are the hand-maids & their final designated purpose is produce pups & this book is the personal history of one of those poor bitches. The name of the novel is taken from a biblical source. Genesis 30: 1-3. (Look it up. Look all that ancient useless hideous bullshit up & learn to dispel, despise it.)
Is this novel a farfetched chunk of fiction? I'm afraid not. An easy & modern nightmare? Aye. I only have to think of the now bombed-to-hell Taliban to find a parallel. Only in it's locale is this story skewed.
Women have only had (in theoretical terms) equal electoral rights in this nation for 82 years. & only how long ago was the Equal Rights Amendment tagged on? Remembering this, orienting with the perspective of where we stand in our history, I have to ask... How do these particular facts make you feel, Rachel? Debbie? Marie? Shannon? Bonnie? Marissa? Molly? All of my friends who happen to be female? It seems so long ago but it's not. It's not at all. How does that strike you? It seems so very precipitous to me. Does it to you? Women? C'mon, tell us. How much more are we going to have fight for? How long? & for what, what, what exactly?
Equal rights? Equal to who? A coal miner from West Virginia? A diamond miner in South Africa? A Kurdish tribesman from Iraq? So many miserable complications, regardless of sex, status & class. So whats the universal standard? What is equality?
So I'm still going, page by page, thru this Report on Women's Human Rights. The progress in some nations isn't even progress, it's a currently ongoing matter of digress.
Islamic fundamentalism & it's cancerous resurgence is reducing women the world over, once again, to the realm of chattel, right-less beast of vaguely human descent. In so many nations there were never rights for this other half of humanity. Raped, slaughtered, beaten, etc. There is a confusion of countries, provinces, cities, villages, homes, relation-ships where the female is a thing... subject to the whims of some terrible & greater emperor...
A woman in Nigeria was just recently sentenced to death by stoning for the crime of adultery; 'Adultery'. Her murder is to be delivered at the end of the weaning of her child. Buried to her neck & struck with rocks until dead, as required, supposedly, by Koranic law.
First, what about the man? The other half of this tryst? The pure bias of this action signifies an extreme disparity in the treatment of the male & the female, based mostly, I can only determine, in certain nations, on the ancient words of long dead superstitious sheep-herders who hadn't even the faintest of clues that the Earth is round or even, that it orbits, in its wobbly course, around that dense hydrogen sphere of nuclear fire which we call Sol. The same goat-fuckers, be them goat-fuckers of the Islamic or Christian persuasion, who considered the period of a woman's menstruation to be a manifestation of some filthy evil. (Leviticus 15: 19-30) But thus, are the origins of most of our world religions. Ancient ignorance-driven engines of false cause & false effect. Somebody had pre-marital sex: The crops failed due to a certain jealous god's infantile wrath. Deductions of nothing but the greatest primate elegance. Lightning is scary when you're a dog....
Second, what gives any human, male or female, the right to govern the sexual sentience of another human being? & why is it always so? Why are there so many many laws governing the sexual behavior of the human, in every nation? Where is this fear generated? Where did it come from? As I consider above, is it all simply tied to the fear of a god? In so cases, that's a yes. My parents despised fags & dykes both & lived in horror of my own pre-marital dickling, for the simple fact that the Bible decreed fag-dom & pre-marital love to be two of the worst of sins & for that reason alone they had issue. I think it is the same for so much of America's populace, this simple-minded heedence of a grater gawd, but I cannot speak for the rest of the world... Except, I suppose, for what I read of, every single fucking day.
But what I'm really curious about is this: Where did the strictures arise from in the first place? Thru-out all the holy books of all the religions, there are rules governing the Sexual. How, exactly, did these come into being? What happened that this particular person, here, there, every-when, everywhere, decided to sketch these rules out for the rest of their particular societies to abide by? Or did they sketch these rules out because their societies had already, for however long, had these mores in application? I'm guessing it was somewhere between the two. (I'm also guessing that one could spend the rest of their lives trying to find these answers...)
STDs probably gave rise to many of these restrictions & when you consider the lack of knowledge concerning viruses, vectors of transmission & treatment: Shit falls together. Still many questions remain. I wish I knew the answers, I wish I could make others understand that all these supposedly holy conjectures arose in a time & place devoid of the knowledge that we have now, but I cannot. All I do know is that that was then & this is now. We need, desperately, a newer comprehension of ourselves, our place in this universe. We need a better vision of ourselves, but whatever...
The absolute moral strictures of the planet should apply to war, rape, murder, theft, & environmental concerns. Nothing more. Everything else is but flexible details & this woman, destined for a savage un-necessary death, she deserves the goddam support of the state, not the death penalty...
But we live in an world of ridiculous idealist, maniacally vigorous visionaries: The concept of a complex & liberal humanity is not the way of Righteous. The Righteous shall not stop in the pursuit of their tight & mystical morality until it is imposed upon everyone within their reach... This is jihad, crusade, salvation. It has been this way for eons & might be so for a thousand years more.
& the Righteous are, for several reasons, incredibly focused on the sexual. The ultimate dissonance of suppression: Power. They can not abide the thought of easy fucking, of a loose & wondrous social structure, for fear of not being able to control the greatest of human past-times. The sensual is synonymous with sin & the strictures are clear; The loose cowgirl (tho usually not the loose cowboy) is the eternal enemy of their prudish gods & so easily enough, women are always the first to suffer. Women always have been, being who they are. This vision of perfection, of purity, nearly always turns women into property.
& some of us know this. I know it. I've seen it first-hand. I see it now, dripping from our Republican radios, our evangelist televisions. The actuality of it is burned into my retinas, my Mind. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, even the damn Buddhist: The insanity of this mental virus, this meme, this worship of the imaginary....
I grew up within the scriptural confinity of a hard-core Christian environment. Literally 1000's of times I had various elders explain to me the necessary 'place' of women, especially in relation to their sub-ordinance to the will of men & more importantly, to Jehovah, who, although I never saw an actual picture of his almighty cock, is most assuredly male. Some of those I grew up under thought that voting rights for women were un-godly & many thought that feminism was part of a secular & satanic plot by humanistic elements to achieve a world scenario ripe for the coming of the Anti-Christ. More than a few of the people who taught me these things were women themselves. Women submitting themselves to the greater glory of god.
Reading The Hand Maid's Tale brought too much of this back to me: This shit-starving incredibly ignorant world-view that these people tried, with all their best fucking intentions, to instill within my young mind. More than once through-out the horrendously descriptive narrative of this book, my anger morphed into a idiot fury with the memories of that meme-ish & brutal poison.....
....That mind-destroying life-crushing crutch of religion. From all I've that I've ever seen religion has almost never been about freedom or liberation (except maybe in the sense that heroin is a form of liberation) but about control & limitations. In most religions, life is the disease & death is the cure. & women? Women are the ultimate givers of life.
Determine from this what you will.
Even as I write this, I am cynical of my own core, my own opinions, my own experiences. The world does not present us with easy conclusions. Nothing is as it seems. I have hit a female, in fury, even tho I was only exchanging blow for blow. (See Shrike issue 1.5) I was not completely innocent, nor was I totally guilty. I was ridden & I rode.... I was attacked by a creature of extreme intelligence, a creature weighing over 120 lbs, standing nearly 6 ft. tall & easily capable of killing me. ( Tho this particular creature was only interested in kicking my ass, I think.)
The female is not a passive helpless beast: I have experienced the Bitch. I have seen the aggression that the female is capable of. It is as natural to the female as to the male, maybe even more so in some ways. Women have lived under a certain kind of suppression for millenia; During which, at least in certain societies, they have honed certain dubious skills.... The skill of the Manipulation, of the Bitch, of the Barb, the Trade, the Subtle Cue.
I, as I've said, have been reading the history of the suppression of women the world over. The nightmare qualities of it all are not a thing to forget. But I've also been reading 'Woman' by Natalie Angier, which will give you more information, in a single paragraph, than I could ever hope to in this entire essay. (I earnestly suggest you read it.) Still, this clear human, she talks of the female animal in a more accurate light than any hard-lining feminist twit, as such, lets just say, Andrea Dworkin, could ever hope to illuminate. The female is human, Angier says, & thus, an aggressive & incredibly bad-ass creature. The innocent little maiden role really, really, needs to be eliminated. That is not the way it is. It is an illusion, of media & of recent history. Yes, men dominate for the most part, for now, but what of relations within the society of women? What, exactly, occurs within that realm? Snowy white 'goo-girl' happiness? The perfect peace of the feminine? No. Fuck no. Here, too, is the human way: Intelligent but vicious.
Women are as much predator, as prey. We are born into this bitch of a world, all of us, male & female. Born of these genetics & of this history. We are in this together. Women prey on men, too. Women prey on women. Women, too, are omnivorous highly developed extremely social primates & fucking tough: As capable of handling a large gun as as a lovely baby. As capable of destroying someone verbally as of providing sisterly, motherly encouragement. Try & tell any sixth grader that this isn't true.
& I have never really seen it any other way. The girls I've become close to have never been helpless perpetually oppressed creatures. They have been incredibly powerful animals fighting, in not always the most beautiful of ways, to survive in this world. We are of the same species & none of us are born into an easy innocence....
But what of the Sexual? What of the Fuck & the glorious chase of the Fuck? Most humans, unless seriously damaged somehow, live in a world bursting with thoughts of sex. We whirl thru clouds of pheromones, ours & others. Our western culture is saturated with it. Images pound us. Music sketches certain elements of possible fuckery straight into our minds. Clothes are cut to reveal. Our lives are built around drawing mates, temporary or permanent. All of this... This is the wondrous pornography of simply being alive & unlike so many species, of our being in consistent & persistent rut.
Many, Left & Right, religious & secular, decry this sexualizing of our culture. They seem almost horrifically frightened by this increasingly possible prospect: That maybe, just maybe, humans love sex. That humans love images of it, love doing the dirty, love to fuck & fuck & think about fucking, beast that we are. & that maybe our popular culture is coming to reflect this, openly, after however many years... These critics, Left & Right, make strange but apt bed-fellows, so to speak.
Peter Marshall, author of 'The Light and the Glory', a Christian treatise of the up-most morality, writes " The most significant index of the extent of our moral decay is our very indifference to it. Pornography has insinuated itself into practically every level of our daily life, including our language." Then we have the uber-feminist Catharine MacKinnon who, among many many other things of interest, has said, "If your sexuality is pornographic, than you're not entitled to your sexuality." I can only wonder, who's sexuality isn't pornographic? When I think of sex, I don't, usually, think about something other than sex. What I think about might just get an NC-17 rating, or if I'm feeling really randy, maybe a rating of the triple-X variety. Hell, what I think about might only be available on the black market in Europe. What about you?
I'm not saying that the use of sex to sell cars, clothes, & perfume isn't annoying & often completely violently disgusting. Capitalism's manipulation of the sexual image in the name of profit is something I could do without. But the Sexual, in image, word, deed & thought, insinuating itself into our culture is not a concept that disturbs me. Quite the opposite. I desire the open sexualization of our world, especially considering the sexual repression that has been so prevalent in America since the first puritanical bible freaks jumped off the boat & managed to starve to death in New England.
The infinite taboos, censorship & denial found thru-out our history saddens, bores, & simultaneously enrages me. These were a people terrified of their own carnality, their own potential sensuality yet obviously the subject was never quite far off in their own minds, considering the amount of time & energy they spent trying to dispel such evil from the minds of others. All of that carries over into the Modern. Our current laws against showing a goddam tit in magazines, even as our culture is so obviously obsessed with sex, makes us somewhat of a laughing stock the world over. The amount of heated discussion over whether sex-ed should be taught in schools to this very day in 2002, makes me want to shake my dick, with a great fury, at our geriatric assemblage of lawmakers.
Sexuality. Pornography. What is the dividing line, the demarcation point between the two? What moves us, strokes our libidos, turns us on, is only that. Whether it be simple vanilla or happy pain or liberating bondage or gruesome images or hairy men or muscular women or dire romance or colorful wigs or bad make-up or stuffed animals, at what point does this desire become pornography? Is it because someone was paid to for a a highly revealing photo shoot? Or is it a simple designation provided by the moralist? A complex misunderstanding? What is pornography? What is sexuality? Is pornography simply oppression & sexuality what our hormones tell us to do? Seems a bit simplistic. What happens if what we desire is pornographic? What then? Again, what the hell is pornographic? Honestly, I'm confused. Sometimes, I think the entire argument can go fuck itself.
But wait... OK. What am I missing here? To speak of pornography, not in the concept, but in the actual Industry. I'm wondering at the internal workings of it. Exactly how much horror is to be found wandering around in the halls of it all? Probably plenty. I'm sure it has it's share of oppression & exploitation, yet I find myself wondering how good the money is. Is anybody ever salaried? Have contracts? I wonder if the better companies have health & dental insurance? What forms do you file for taxes exactly? Do porn actors usually file as independent contractors? I wonder about all of this. I think of the internal oppression of the porn industry & then I think of the oppression of lets say, working in a high-volume recycling factory with 10 hour shifts or maybe coal mining, assembling automobiles or making garments. These too are oppressive industries that exploit their workers as mere things. Some say that due to the nature of the sex industry (i.e. being sexual) then it must be much worse than other economic exploits. These arguments are usually made by people who have never worked in a factory of any sort.
I had a friend back when I was 19. More of a live-in girlfriend, actually & she stripped for a living. I thought I loved her & at the time, I thought that 'strip club' was just another spelling for 'the oppression of women'. Never-mind that she was a nominally happy, well-adjusted human, (for being 19, anyway) I kept urging her to quit, to Free Herself. Eventually, due only to my idealistic pestering, she did. She got a job at the corner mart, selling cigarettes & beer to college kids & putting up with all the shit of that... for $4.95 an hour. We broke up soon after & unsurprisingly, she immediately went back to stripping. 20 hours a week & pulling around $500. Oh, & she finally did quit, due to having saved a considerable sum of money....
& I have slowly, so slowly, learned to keep my mouth shut about what puts food on the table or pays one's rent.
& I've known so many females who live in a world of stunningly self-enabled sexual desire. They live in this world without shame or fear. They need not the moralist to approve their behavior. They have been responsible sluts, occasionally multi-partner orgasmic spinsters, exactingly feminist practitioners of hard-core sadism/masochism, lawyer exhibitionist, lesbian professors, zinesters who write pornographic novels .... All, comfortable with who they are. Not perverse, not down-trodden, but simply living their lives & having more fun at it than many.
& my final yet endless point? Please don't tell people what to love or how to fuck. Dworkin, Falwell, Robertson, MacKinnon, you are pigs of the same pen.
Quit it. I wish you would just fucking quit it.
So again: Go... Fuck... Yourselves.
& yet when I think of sex, I can only think that the dividing line between the male & the female is somehow so very thin, so very contested. Sometimes socially. Sometimes genetically. Androgyny & its prevalence in so many cultures, including its increasingly accepted presence within our own, indicates the slippery concept of the Third Sex. Hermaphrodites. Transexuals. Transvestites. Butch dykes. Effeminate fags. It raises questions of how our sexuality is denoted, distributed, disturbed, divulged. How much of our sexual behavior is biological? What are the parameters of our pure instinctual sexuality? What are we like & what do we desire before we are touched by the mores & the folkways of the social?
Instantly, I realize that this is a nearly meaningless question. Like asking what color one's face becomes in the dark. There is no such thing as a pure sexuality, there never has been & never will be, at least for the Human. There is only what we desire & where does this desire come from? From the un-mitigating influence of our environment & of our genes upon our constantly churning psyche, from the very day that we were born...
& no matter one's ideals, there is still only what we desire, in our deepest minds to guide us to.... What? The alleviation of our desire? The satisfaction thereof? I can only think it is about the culmination of what it is that resides in our minds & that which can only be attained in the physical reality of our world: It is always, finally, about crossing the borders of our skin to reach a separate place, another Being, an amalgamation of two creatures (or maybe three or maybe just one) in one state of existence thru the avatar of our sexuality....
& so, it seems, our purest distillation of the sexual is ultimately not about the male & the female. It is about the broaching of a certain place in our Mind, reaching out to the world around, thru all the senses & the tools available to us & finding a form of gorgeous union.... No matter the combination of biological genotypes.
I'm straying ever further & further from what I wanted to write about. The subject is huge, massive, leviathan... The sexes, sexuality, the contestion between, the sexes who find themselves between the sexes... To truly write of a tree means you must write about leaves, branches, roots, bark, the trunk, chlorophyll, reproduction, climate, soil ecology, various diseases.... Fuck! All I wanted to write about was a goddam tree.
Basically, folks, I'm sitting here, again, trying to finish this bitch & the subject entrances me still, it goes on & on.... The vast & subtle differences between the male & female are multitude & yet, nothing... Nothing at all.
I've tried to tear down the walls, both inside & outside of myself. To not be a sexist on any level while yet allowing for that something, that allure that is the female's shimmering wonder: Making me a fool chasing my own version of god, I suppose.
There is so much I could yet write of, badly maybe, but still... I would love to continue this. There are so many aspects, I didn't know what I was getting into. So I give up on this essay, dammit, I quit... & I'm off to the bar, hanging my mustachioed head in utter defeat. The female overwhelms again:
When it's me vs. the girls, I always fucking lose.
(Addendum: I wrote the majority of this essay nearly 9-12 months ago. Rachel & I are history, as they say. Dumped in her pursuit of some greater mystical plain... or is it plane? Anyway, looking back at this chunk of writing, (that I dredged out of the muck of my computer just the other day) I still see an essay that could go on, literally forever. The war of the sexes, the symbiosis of it all will never be completely sketched out, written, or complete. The frisson & the friction of our sexuality is here to stay.)
