Posted on

Sensed

Sensed

Smell:

In 1993 I am leaning against the gray metallic filing cabinet in Mrs. Kurtz’s fourth grade classroom. The maroon carpet is doing nothing to soften my butt from the cement floor below. I don’t remember why my class is sitting in a circle on the ground. It must be for some sort of learning experience. As I readjust my butt to shake away the numb feeling, I get a whiff of some new smell coming from my armpits. It’s an embarrassing smell, one of musky pine trees and dirty clothes. It’s an earthy sort of smell, a smell like I was running around on the playground a bit too long during recess. I wonder if Kristen sitting next to me can smell my odor. I wonder if she’ll tease me for this later at lunch. Or maybe she’ll be jealous. Because, look!–now I have a body that smells. That means deodorant and then bras and then the period and then being a woman. Yes, I smell, and soon I’ll be a woman with an actual woman’s body. And that means something.

Mrs. Kurtz has a woman’s body, and she also has a mullet, and I think it’s cool. Her dirty blonde hair kinks around the square structure of her head. Cut closer to her ears and poofy on top, Mrs. Kurtz’s rectangular hair suits her body well. She is large and stocky, all broad shoulders and square hips. Muscular, solid. Butch if I had known what that meant in 1993.

I am in awe of her sturdy frame. The body is still a newly forming thing for me. I am anticipating growing into a woman’s body, but not because I want hips and lipstick, but because being a woman means being grown, mature. And it is my mind I want to grow. Being a woman means being old enough for homework, for three-ring Trapper Keeper binders bustling with notes for class projects, for plastic neon zippered bags full of red and blue mechanical pencils instead of the childish yellow #2 pencils they hand out on the first day of school. Mechanical pencils, binders, and homework, this is what will define me as a woman. I am not concerned with having a woman’s body yet, as the body is something I have only experienced as a vaguely growing thing. I am aware of my body, but what I have felt expanding is my mind. My mind as I learn new facts and subjects. Growth in my thoughts. Dinosaurs used to rule the earth. Numbers can play with each other to create larger numbers. There are right ways to spell complicated words. A woman knows these things, has this knowledge, and I see the apex of this growth, this becoming a woman, in my female teacher—her smarts pointing to what it means to me to be a woman. Instead of worrying about bras and high heels, I yearn to one day grow into using pens, having a calculator that acts like a small computer, and eventually see a screen full of my words instead of the blinking text on “Oregon Trail” that informs me Billy has died of a snake bite.

This is why I am fascinated with Mrs. Kurtz. She uses a pen, has knowledge about history, math, and books. She is a woman. She is strong and smart. As my butt continues to tingle with numbness, I bend my legs, shift around on my tailbone a bit more, and place my elbows on my knees. I get another whiff of this new odor rising up from the armpits of my bright green t-shirt, and I am reminded that a changing body means a changing mind. The scent is sour and musky. I stop thinking about Mrs. Kurtz and her mullet as I smile again at my new body odor. This becomes a sign of maturity I wasn’t expecting or thinking about. A whiff of something new is coming to me, and now my body is leading the way to a growing mind. With the sour smell, I am on my way towards womanhood. I excitedly wiggle my elbows around to get another whiff, and don’t care if Kristen sitting next to me can smell it. Because here I am, growing. I sense I am becoming something else now. Yes, a woman, perhaps.

 

 

Taste:

In 1995 the taste of pink lingers in my mouth. The sweet flavor of bubblegum ice cream curdles on my tongue, and the hard bubblegum pieces persist in my teeth as fat tear drops plop onto the cement beside my feet. My mother is berating me, her words pushing sternly from pressed lips. I have broken a bracket on my braces, again. It is an event that has happened once a month since the metal bits were first glued to my teeth and rubber banded together five months ago. First, it was hard chocolate chips, the sweet hidden morsels snapping my favorite colored bright green bands loose. Then, the plastic top of a full water bottle held between my teeth—a creative move (I thought) as my hands were full with softball equipment and I needed to somehow carry the bottle. Into my mouth it went. Crack. Shit. The water bottle thunked to the ground. The taste of a plastic mistake frozen in my terrified mouth.

Then more: crisp carrots, sweet apples, a gnawed on yellow #2 pencil as I tried to solve a division problem. And now, the hard sugary squares of actual bubblegum—it was actual bubblegum!–in my satisfying ice cream treat.

The lingering sweet turns metallic, the broken bracket scratching into the flesh of my mouth. A hint of iron seeps into my tongue, taste buds prickle to the swirl of ice cream and metal failure.

I am crying. I am trying not to cry. But it comes. My shame and guilt at having failed, again. Because my growing mouth is something over which I have no control. I throw the rest of the ice cream cone in the trashcan on the street corner as I feel my hands begin to freeze out of fear. Now empty, I cross those shivering hands behind my back. I give in to the tears, surrender to the drips of salty liquid now streaming down my cheeks. The ground becomes a collection plate of my shame.

I slip my upper lip under my teeth, my tongue parting ways as it licks at the tasteless slime shimmering from my nose. I retreat it back into my mouth, the hint of iron growing into a statement. My mind is stuck on my mouth, the focus of an intense conversation. I wish I could make it disappear, could swallow away the blend of sweet hitting metal, the crooked teeth that refuse to move, the thoughts as I can stop thinking about how the act of eating has corrupted me. I am embarrassed by my mouth, now intensely aware of everything that goes into it. I make a decision to never eat again, or at least as little as possible in order to avoid these terrifying situations. I do not care about restricting my growing body, I only want to halt the embarrassing situation of my mouth. My first taste of an eating disorder seeps into my brain, my mouth, my body.

As I slide my tongue over my metal-coated teeth, my stomach sinks as I know what will come next.

The silent drive to the orthodontist office, my mother taking each corner with jerks. The fact of my mouth smothering any casual conversation. The walk of shame from her slightly slammed car door to the heavy dark glass doors. Down the maroon carpeted hallway, and directly to the blue cushioned chair, where I will wait next to my mother’s glare, feet dangling. The florescent lights spotlighting my mistakes. 

The assistant opens the door leading into the dreaded line of large procedure chairs in the next room. I slovenly drag my ashamed body across the floor and slouch into a thick cushioned blue chair. I can feel my mother’s glare through the white door, hitting the fragility of my teeth. My body shivers with humiliation as I am leaned back to stare at the poster of fluffy white kittens as the orthodontist says Welcome back, Chelsey. You know the drill. Mouth open, tongue held down, the center of my growing guilt opens wide. I close my eyes against the kittens meant to distract, and mentally escape from my awkwardly forming mouth and my body that now wants to disappear. I try to shrink my body away, to practice not being there. Never again, I think. I will never, ever eat again.

After the green rubber bands are snapped into place, after I return home and skip lunch, then dinner, my mind continues to move into the space of my mouth, my shame. I am incessantly aware of its existence, of the space it takes up in my life. The next morning, starving and dizzy, I chew slowly on a piece of bread. I focus on what I’m putting into my mouth, on each morsel I must chew delicately in order to not break something. My mind continues to be obsessed, as the thought of breaking another bracket makes me nauseous with guilt. I put down the piece of half-eaten toast, my body shamefully aware of the fact that I need to eat in order to grow. I wish it would all just go away. Wish I did not need food, to just swallow my hunger through sips of water in order to simplify and control my mouth, my growling and growing body, my life.

 

 

Touch:

In 1997 shoe laces tickle the bottoms of my thighs as I curl up on top of the mountain of shoes and boots carpeting the base of my closet. When I eventually emerge from the closet, there will be U-shaped imprints from the tops of sneakers and boots bright and red on my legs, arms, and face. I am twelve years old as I lie in the almost dark. The folding doors of my closet are pulled together as tightly as I could manage. Since I can’t pull them all the way shut from the inside, a slant of stuttering violet light pierces my quiet space. It comes from the black light vibrating on the other side of my room. It hums. I am not humming. I am sobbing. Pushing tears and snot out of my face feels like the right thing to do. I am trying to express the dread that has been cracking my sternum lately. There is nothing specifically I can name that started the fissures. But the weight of it has been there, a pressing rage. So I cry. I sob. I let my body speak for the hormones I cannot control.

Perhaps I have also been listening to Hole too much during this awkward pre-teen state of rising anguish. I have made it a habit to sit on my bed and listen to Courtney Love’s shrieks bounce off the walls. There are glow-in-the-dark neon stars illuminating every inch of my white walls. I am dizzy from the glowing jumble of constellations, from the disorganization of my emotions.

My left arm itches from a forming scab of the word “HOLE.” I rubbed this word into my arm with a pencil eraser a few days ago. While it is true that I am a huge fan of the band, I embedded this word into my skin because, again, I did not know what else to do. I feel disquieted by my growing body. The hips as they begin to form, the breasts as they have started to hurt. The burn on my skin enunciates the corporeal howls. My retreat into the closet is at the end of a tiring day. At school, the counselor called me into her office to talk about the HOLE. I wanted to talk about the hole consuming what should be a sunny and happy California pre-teen, but I did not know how. Could not point to how the fact of my body growing against my command has turned my mind off, has swallowed my happiness whole. In her office, my brain turned mute, retreated as my body does now in my closet.

Slouched and sobbing in the closet, I think of how it felt to sit uncharacteristically erect in her office, trying to appear as a body unharmed, a mind unaffected by the numb body, and trying to hide the tears collecting in the corners of each eye. I refused to cry. I sat frozen, attempting to be stoic in this lumbering and growing body. To be unphased by the clumsy swirl of my shifting mind. She asked me why. Why HOLE? Why would you do this to your body?

I had no answer. I offered a shrug. I kept my head down to avoid her questioning eyes. I tucked chin into chest and suddenly became aware of my outfit. I was dressed in a Daffy Duck shirt and bright green cotton shorts. While my jaw did not drop, I inwardly gawked at the absurdity of the cartoon and bright colors as I continued to avoid her Why? I asked myself: Why did I think this was the appropriate outfit to wear when I feel so NOT like bright green cartoons? What the hell was I thinking? I suddenly no longer trusted my mind, and I retreated further into not speaking. She allowed silence to engulf the room until I could come up with a better answer to her Why? than a barely visible shrug. My second defense, a stubborn I don’t know. But I could not find the other words attempting to form in my throat as I was then distracted and baffled. Why would I wear a Daffy Duck shirt? It was absurd. It was white and dingy and I hated cartoons. Its silliness misrepresented the seriousness I felt. Note to self: start wearing black. I berated myself for not darkening and hiding my body to match my darkening and withdrawing mood, my discomfort with the fact of my body, my almost womanly body. Eventually, the counselor gave up and allowed me to leave.

Now, in my closet, I lift myself from the floor, hands bracing the top half of my body against the mess of shoes. I wipe snot from my chin as my body screams in silence, as my lack of comprehension at the situation of my awkwardly growing seventh grade body makes me want to slip away. I mentally yawp at myself, at what will soon be a woman’s body, not knowing where my woman’s mind has gone.

 

 

See:

In 2000 my ex-girlfriend is wearing an MIT shirt, the maroon letters printed on the soft gray cotton. My mind is in an uncontrollable state as I am certain the downward jut of the M is turning into a pencil, no, now it is a knife. I see this knife and I know it will soon make a downward jut into my head. I sob and sob and sob, unable to explain this thought. She thinks I am crying about her, about our recent breakup. I am slowly losing my mind as I can feel it slip away, feel it seep out of my hallucinating eyes, my eyes as they are adjusting to an unmedicated bipolar mind.

In 2003 my current girlfriend is wearing bright green flannel pajama pants with penguins on them, little black and white birds smiling from the solid green backdrop. The penguins start to twirl around and dance along the landscape of her legs. I see them do their little dance and I smile and smile and smile, unable to explain this thought, unable to utter that it is not her at which I am smiling, the possibility of grinning about our recent growth of love, but it is a widened smile on my face about the penguins as I hallucinate them tapping out their tango. I can feel my maniacal mind explode with awe at the dancing penguins, as I can feel the lines of rainbow prisms seep out of my hallucinating eyes.

In 2004 my best friend is driving and makes a right turn onto a country road. She does not see the car racing up behind us as we turn. The headlights blast into the back seat in which I am sitting, singing to myself a song with my own made up lyrics, a song about leprechauns that frolic in the bright green fields rolling by the window. A horn blares. I am distracted from my song, become aware of the situation speeding up behind us, and become certain we are hit from behind, that our car crashes into the ditch. I see the car rolling, tumbling into a jumble of crashed metal. In reality, we continue forward, but my unmedicated maniacal mind stays crashed into, believing I have died and I am now a spirit traveling out of my body, my body as my eyes float above it, stagger over the vision of a bloody body, a mess of my dead body. My mind rolls through the events of my body being found, of spirit seeping out of my hallucinating eyes. My mind becomes jangled, uncertain it is living in a body, continuing to grow with this flesh that now feels dead.

 

 

Hear:

In 2002  I am on the top of the highest cliff  in Austin, called Mt. Bonnell. It is a rocky cliff where my feet dangle, my skin drifting towards memories of her, the first love. Mt. Bonnell is a deceiving name for this large hill made of rock in Austin, TX, where there are no mountains, but just a high cliff called Mt. Bonnell. My legs swing over the edge of the cliff, and I am simply looking for a reason to not have my feet dangle. There is a need to put them on the ground before I fall down. I look up into a sky full of stars that won’t shine down. I stare into them, and they won’t shine down.

The sound of my sobs swirls with the humid Texas night air. I am thinking of the woman who I wanted to be mine, the woman who was never mine, the woman who now demands I silence my voice to her. I feel hurt, confused, heart-shattered. I quit my summer job so I could write more, so I could spend more time with her at night. She did not like my decision, called me childish for quitting my job. My sobs call out to the lake waves that crash against the docks poking out from each lakeside mansion below the cliff. A part of me drifts down to the silent streets, crashes against the scream of the pampered bright green topiary.

This is the sound of one woman breaking. A heart that is fractured and shattering. First love, a dangerous, fatal, inevitable crash.

I sit and I dangle and I think and I drown into the thrum-thrum of the last time I heard voice. It tickles, hoards the space of my ear.

You don’t deserve for things to get better.

Thrum-thrum.

The drum-drum of my silent sobbing, my choked response of nothing.

The sound of my fists now drum-drumming my thighs as I think of that, think of the void that screeched into my ears.

My first crush said this to me. She said it because she didn’t think I would ever make an improvement in my life, specifically in my relationship with my alcoholic father.

But I tried. I tried to flex towards her, bend my body more into her if I could. I grew myself towards her, towards the fact that she was fourteen years older than me, and so forced a maturation of the parts of me I thought she wanted to see flourish. A medicated mind, an exercised body. A pre-med major, a continuously studying brain. I tried to develop into that image of the smart woman, tried to uprise into a woman I thought she could fall in love with. But I fell out of myself, tripped over the temporary plateau where my growing mind had landed. I forced thinking when I should have held assured in my knowledge. I forced myself to grow for her, towards her.

And now I have slunk back into my sobs, my mind receding to a child-like state, scared and vulnerable, the sound of lost love in the tears that plunk on my thighs. A break between us formed as I decided to quit the job in order to pursue my writing. Or, the alternative motive, to have more time to see her to hear her voice speak to me. The conversations we could have drove my body, my decisions. But she thinks I am being irresponsible, that quitting a job to pursue a hobby is beneath me. She thought I was better than that, more mature. But now she sees me as a child who chose the desires of my mind over a possible career. She also thinks I am living off of my dad’s money. I despise him, his alcoholism, his absence in my life. He is a sick man with a sick unmedicated bipolar mind, and I hate him considerably. His unmanaged mood disorder has wrecked havoc on my ears as I cannot tune out his maniacal shrieks.

And yet, I use him. Use him to give me money so I can give into my passion for writing, for her.

My older crush despises my decision and decides to cut me off from her life, decides to silence her voice to me.

This is why I am on a cliff, considering my options. I am lost in sounds, engulfed by the reverberating shouts of the last words she said to  me, You don’t deserve for things to get better. The words crash through my ear drums, ricochet down my spine, bounce back up through my ribs, and crack into my heart. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. Thump, ______..

But my heart refuses to seep into silence.

I sit still with it as it still beats. Its steady rhythm begins to steady my sobs, makes me make a move.

On the soundless peak of Mt. Bonnell, I move.

The cliff remains where it is as I rise, jettison to standing. I am still.

Still standing, the stars begin their speech.

And this is what they say: move on. Get over it. Silence her words until you are ready to hear them, to face them, to know that she is wrong. Know that you are growing into yourself, not her.

Enough of your nightly sobs.

Her name continues to catch in my throat, so I write down a poem about it in hopes of tearing it out of me.I reach into my back pocket and fish out my pencil and folded up sheet of paper. I write a poem, the sound of the yellow #2 scratching the page brightens the dark, spotlights the stars that begin to shine.

 

 

Sense:

It is 2012 and I am at a writer’s conference in Chicago. I yearn to pay attention to all of the panels, to learn more about the art of writing, but I am distracted by love, by what a new lover will feel like on my body, by the possibility of finally letting my body expand into desire, by all of my senses feeling fully aroused. What will my body smell like as I come with a new lover? How will my breath sound as I heave out one more orgasm? What will this notion of “woman” as I have grown into her feel like in my body as I taste desire swell in my skin?

I am listening to a panel about how to help students with their writing beyond the space of a workshop, but I am distracted by my body as it wonders about this new sense of touch, about how it will feel on my body. My body becomes the focus of my mind. The sight of my arms dressed in their bright green sleeves, the legs that cross themselves at the knees, and my butt as it smashes its way towards numb in the hard maroon plastic chair all bring my attention to my body, to the sense of having a body. And yet this body keeps getting distracted by the images in my head of a lover’s touch, the language of love as it will spread across my skin. My body is fully present before my eyes, but my eyes roll backwards at thoughts of how this body will soon be caressed. I am too consumed with the body to think about writing, to even think about any kind of thinking. My educated mind falls into my body as it yearns to experience more. I cannot resist but to re-work the panel into my own needs, into my own sense of my body as I can’t stop experiencing it. The panel about workshopping a student’s body of work becomes a session full of metaphors about how we experience each other’s bodies, as in:

I workshop my body. I present to you a rough draft of myself, and turn the rawness of my thoughts onto you. And we will polish and edit, revise the drafts of my skin as we approach the work of this flesh with new meanings, a new sense of interpretation.

I crack open the pages of your spine, rustle through the roots of your verbs. We are newcomers to each other’s bodies. We bring with us what we know, our expectations for something new, revised. Give me the feedback of your touch, and I will learn more about myself.

For a moment, I was thinking about love.

As I pull out my yellow #2 pencil to jot these metaphors down, my thoughts turn towards the ever-pressing self-hatred that at times has ripped a hole in my chest, turn towards that discomfort in a body as it has awkwardly grown into this woman’s body. The growth has felt unsteady at times, unsure that the body is turning into a woman’s body as it should exist. And while I am no longer that pre-teen hiding away from her discomfort in her body while sulking in a closet full of shoes, my thoughts turn back to how I have judged my body as it grew — the teeth as they did not obey, the skin as it itched to be something else, the eyes that did not see reality. The metaphor for revising the skin as it meets a lover’s touch, turns into concerns about how I will relate to my body as it continues to change form.

Here is my body as I present it to you, as I want your hands to revise its malleable form. Give me the feedback of this touch, and I will strikeout the errors, will shape into something that you will want to read.

We will come to my body as a meeting ground in which we will build new drafts of me from the old ideas of my flesh. We will workshop my body, revise the drafts of my skin, polish the rough edges, and challenge myself to read it all differently. I will force the rewrites into something I want to see.

My body distracts my mind from being present in this panel, from learning about new ways to write. My body imprints metaphors onto my skin that search for meaning, for an understanding of its corporeal self.

As I have grown into this woman’s body, discovered the sense of a body growing against my will, I have feared I will never be satisfied with the drafts of my skin, will never submit a version of myself to the world which feels complete. My mind as it has grown with my body continues to be distracted by the sense of having to carry around this body each day. It is a constantly growing vessel that carries the brain as it tries to expand. But the body continuously shifts under the gaze of others’ judgments, of this unsteady mind, of not understanding where this body is headed. Nothing about this flesh is ever final, the work of my skin constantly under revision, constantly finding its sense of being a body, of having a body I can claim.

 

Chelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago. She has been published in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, The Coachella Review, Sleet and Make/shift among many others. She received the Nonfiction Editor’s Pick Award 2012 from both Revolution House and Cobalt for her essays “BodyHome” and “I Have Been Thinking About,” respectively.She is currently finishing up a collection of essays about finding the concept of home in the body. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.wordpress.com.

Posted on

Fembots Have More Fun by Sandi Sonnenfeld — eBook

Sandi Sonnenfeld

It all started eighteen months ago when I saw a new ad from a national anti-abortion group being promoted on the subway.  The ad featured a sad-looking woman hugging herself for comfort and a single sentence, “Abortion changes you forever.”

It was so simplistic a slogan, an affront to every woman who has ever agonized over her various choices.  It meanly implied that women who unexpectedly find themselves pregnant blithely rush out to get an abortion without giving any thought to the consequences, which directly contradicts my own personal experience and that of the other women I know who faced such a decision.  What made the ad particularly galling, however, was that it was sponsored by the same group that was egging on former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and others in Congress to defund Planned Parenthood, one of the few affordable places left for women to obtain reliable birth control that would help prevent the need for an abortion in the first place. 

It was the hypocrisy, then, that led me to do it.  I dug into my purse, pulled out a black pen and wrote over the sign in big thick lettering, “Not nearly as much as having a child—wanted or not—does.”

My heart raced as I publicly defaced private property in full view of one hundred and fifty or so other New Yorkers.  I never before had knowingly committed a crime. As is usual among my fellow urbanites, the subway passengers pretended not to see what I was doing.

I wish I could say that when I had finished my rage subsided, that I took immense satisfaction in my defiant act.  If anything, to my surprise and without a little shame, I felt only more infuriated.  So I sat on the subway fuming, replaying in my head all the statistics I’ve read over the past few years. Statistics like:   

  • American girls now enter the first stages of puberty at an all-time low of 10.4 years (nine years for African-Americans and nine and a half-years for Hispanic Americans), likely as a result of over-processed food which speeds up the activation of the hormone lepin.
  • Among the 18 million Americans who watch Internet porn, approximately two million are porn addicts, including 300,000 women, and therapists report a huge increase in the number of college-aged men who are opting for I-porn over developing in-person relationships with young women.
  • One hundred thousand children, the majority of them girls between 12 and 17, are involved in sex trafficking in the US each year; 70 percent of them are runaways from foster care. 
  • One in five females will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime, most of them between the ages of 14 and 25.
  • Though more American women now receive bachelor and master degrees than men, the percentage of women CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is just 3.6 percent and women still only account for 17 percent of all members of Congress.

 

Recalling such statistics kept me enraged until I arrived at my office, where my anger quickly dissipated as my workday got underway, sidetracked by my day job as a Director of Public Relations at a multi-office, five-hundred-attorney law firm.  Indeed, when I left my office at 8:30 pm and headed for home, I chastised myself for so foolishly tilting at windmills. As I exited from the Kings Highway subway station near where I lived in Brooklyn a huge delivery truck sat idling at a red traffic light.  The truck was emblazoned on both sides with a billboard ad for a premium vodka featuring three naked women sipping liquor out of martini glasses.

The women had no stomachs, necks, wrists, ankles, or genitals other than a metallic shield-like loin cloth where their vaginas should be. They did of course have breasts: large outlined breasts, bald heads, pink-lipped mouths and two slits for eyes that were framed with oversized pink and black eyelashes.  The slogan read, “Fembots have more fun.”

It hit me with full force, like a gale with 70 mile per hour winds, tossing me around emotionally that even now writing this several months later, I still feel cast adrift.  Why did this disturb me so, even more than the anti-abortion ad? We see thousands, even hundreds of thousands of similarly silly, senseless ads each year.  Before I moved in house to a law firm, I had worked at one of the largest advertising and PR agencies in the world, so in many ways I was more culpable than most when it came to the role media plays in helping to undermine feminism as a positive force for change.

In fifty years, we have gone from blondes having more fun to fembots do.  Why bother hanging out with a flesh and blood woman anymore, who possesses hair that requires grooming, a stomach that craves filling, a mind that hungers for ideas?  Just give us some breasts to stare at, put a glass of vodka in her hand and away we go.  Once men lusted after the Hollywood pinup, then the airbrushed women of Playboy; when that grew tiresome, they switched to watching pornography on the web, jacking off to electronic images of women generated by lines of code made entirely out of Xs and 0s.  Perhaps, however, even those images remind them too much of the smart-mouthed woman they share an office with or their ex-girlfriend who dared to fall in love with another guy, so let’s move on to fembots instead.  Fembots who can’t talk, and don’t ask anything more of us than a martini glass from which to drink.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to lay all the blame on men.  But the sad thing about the ads, which are produced for Swedish vodka company Svedka by Constellation Brands here in New York, is that they are aimed at women.

 “The Svedka image is playful, even naughty, featuring the sexy fembot symbolizing the brand’s fanciful futuristic achievement,” said Marina Hahn, senior vice president for marketing at Constellation Brands in a New York Times story by advertising columnist Stuart Elliott.  “Our vision of the future is very different from others. It’s ‘a lot like today, but better, more fun’ and Svedka [is] the vodka that lets you ‘be your fun, flirtatious self…at a price point you can afford.’”

The Times went on to report that the new campaign featuring the Svedka fembot includes print and online ads, signs in stores, billboards, events in bars and nightclubs, even plans to be on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

 “Maybe one day, ‘Svedka Girl, the Movie,’ ” Ms. Hahn said, laughing, at the close of the article.

I want to laugh too.  Yet how can we ever make true strides as women, not just politically or in the board room, but even more importantly in reducing those all too real statistics about the trafficking of teenage girls, childhoods cut way too short by early puberty, and the millions of people, men and women alike, who prefer to masturbate to porn than take the risk of actually interacting with a no doubt flawed, but nonetheless potentially attractive, compelling member of the opposite sex, when women themselves still feel the need to starve themselves to fit into a size four dress, buy self-esteem through breast implants, or simply fail to reach their full potential for fear that boys at school won’t like them if they are “too” smart? 

We all have grown so used to seeing fantastical images of women in advertising, film, television and on the web that even those of us with a profound awareness of the implausibility of such gorgeous, overly sexualized creatures existing in real life still regard such images as the standard far too many of us, myself included, aspire to.  

Maybe that is the true source of my rage—I’m mad at myself for not being able to dismiss the ad or others like it.  I’m mad at my fellow countrywomen for not only putting up with such messages that fundamentally tell us that, nearly 100 years after our great grandmothers chose to go on hunger strike rather than be denied the right to vote, and 40 years after Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan helped usher in the second wave of feminism, we still think of ourselves as sexualized beings rather than fully fledged, sensual individuals for whom our sex is just one defining factor of who we are.

I’m mad at Sarah Palin, who as former Governor of Alaska ordered that victims of sexual assault pay for their own rape kits to keep state costs down (though no victims of other crimes were required to pay for the costs of gathering police evidence to help find the perpetrators), for having the audacity to declare that she and Michele Bachmann represent the new face of feminism.  She said that the week Bachmann rallied Congress to strip all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, calling the top provider of breast and cervical cancer screenings for American women a criminal organization.

That Palin and Bachmann are the ones now shaping the discussion of what it means to be a feminist today is clearly a failure of our own making.  Too many of us have turned away from discourse, or perhaps have simply turned out, all too aware that we possess more choices than any other generation of American women. 

American women under fifty mostly take it for granted now that women have walked on the moon, climbed Everest, travelled alone to exotic countries to negotiate peace treaties.  We’re no longer wowed that women launch twice as many US businesses as men, or that women have invented everything from central heating to Kevlar, the material from which bullet proof vests are made.  Indeed, we rarely think about the battles won before us, and most of us have never been schooled in the hard-fought efforts of generations of women to be taken seriously as citizens of the world. We accept without question that we can adopt children without a partner, purchase property, regularly are depicted in movies and books as action heroes or spies.  Increasingly in many states, we can even marry each other if we want.  The fact that we have made so much progress has also made too many of us complacent. 

 Or perhaps we are just too distracted.  No one is more squeezed for time than those of us in the sandwich generation.  Women in our thirties and forties perpetually torn by the demands of our careers and our personal lives, many of us are caring for a child and an aging parent at the same time.  We squeeze our bellies and thighs into Spanx after squeezing out from the plastic bottle that last bit of ketchup for the French fries we ate at lunch. Our thoughts are squeezed into the 144 characters of a Tweet or compressed into a video download on YouTube.  We squeeze into the crowded noisy subways of New York and Boston or into traffic on the Interstate in Los Angeles or Seattle on our way to work.  We squeeze in yoga classes, painting courses and Thai-fusion cooking between the food shopping, picking up the kids from school, making that dental appointment for our husband, trying to stretch that salary for which we collectively still make eighty-five percent of what a man with comparable experience and education earns.  Thus many of us have also been squeezed into compromises that we once thought we would never make.

That we all pay a price for such compromises goes without saying, but I’ve started to wonder if the cost is just too much to bear.  Lately, I find myself in a state of near perpetual rage at what is happening in America. Perhaps it’s the angry rants of the Glenn Becks, Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters of this world that has brought out this fury in me, a mad desire to answer fire, as it were, with fire.  Or my sorrow and disappointment as I watch President Obama make concession after concession to the fringe right in the spirit of bipartisanship, wondering how he still cannot understand that the Tea Party-obsessed, Koch brothers-funded opposition not only has little interest in bipartisanship, it has no interest in governing at all.  Or perhaps I’m just simply out of patience, no longer able to hide behind the cloak of deference and respectability.

When Michele Obama became First Lady, her popularity soared.  Some admired her for trying to raise her girls as “normal” as possible despite the fact that they no longer lived a normal life.  Others admired her stance towards community service.  But mostly, we admired how chiseled her arms were, that her biceps were “cut,” that she looked so stunning in her white beaded Jason Wu inaugural ball gown.

Just as many of us women vilified Hilary Clinton as presidential candidate for her ugly haircut, love of pant suits, or simply staying married to a man who had convinced himself receiving a blow job by a young intern was not sex, and therefore not a betrayal of his wife. 

We still worry far too much about being “playful,” “likable,” “fun,” about not turning men off with our talk of inequity at the workplace or unfair division of labor at home, or worse, driving them into the arms of another woman.  And we care far too much about being perceived as chic, glamorous, or just plain sexy. 

“How do I look?” we ask our husbands, our friends, our lovers. “Is my ass too big?  My tits too small?  Do I look fat?” 

Perhaps that explains why, according to The Village Voice, the fourth most popular Halloween costume of 2011 for women was the Svedka Fembot.

So as autumn once again draws near, and in the hope of creating in the words of Marina Hahn, “a future a lot like today, but better,” here’s a list of 2012 Halloween costumes based on other female images that occasionally can be seen flickering across our digital screens:

  • Gabby Douglas – At age fourteen, she had the courage and determination to leave her family and home in Virginia Beach to train with top coach Liang Chow in West Des Moines, Iowa, a largely all white Mid-Western suburb. Less than two years later, Douglas became the first black American to win a gold medal in gymnastics and the only American to ever win gold in both the All-Around and the team competition during the same Olympics.
  • Jessica Jackley – Stanford MBA graduate and co-founder of Kiva, which has facilitated hundreds of millions in loans among individuals across 209 countries by enabling internet users to lend as little as $25 to individual entrepreneurs.  A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a 2011 World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader, Jackley serves on several boards of organizations championing women, microfinance, technology and the arts, and has worked in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with Village Enterprise Fund and Project Baobab.  Oh, yeah, she’s also a trained yoga instructor, avid surfer, wife and mother of twin boys.
  • Sylvia A. Earle – Known as “Her Deepness” or “The Sturgeon General,” Earle led the first team of women oceanographers in the Tektite Project in which they lived in an underwater chamber for fourteen days to study undersea habitats.  Author of more than 125 books and articles related to oceanography and protecting ocean habitats, she served as Chief Scientist of NOAA and led the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, a five-year program to study the United States National Marine Sanctuary from 1998-2002. At 76, she currently is National Geographic’s Explorer-in-Residence.
  • Tawakel Karman – Called the “Iron Woman” and “Mother of the Revolution” by her fellow Yemenis, Karman is a journalist and politician known as one of the public faces of the Arab Spring. Co-founder of Women Journalists Without Chains, she is co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Arab woman and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize and the youngest Nobel Peace Laureate to date.

 

As for me, come October 31, I will pay homage to that great, forgotten star of the silver screen, Hedy Lamarr, once described as the most beautiful actress in Hollywood.  During a Hollywood dinner party shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lamarr embarked on passionate conversation with an avant-garde composer named George Antheil about protecting US radio-guided torpedoes from enemy interference.  She scrawled her phone number in lipstick on the windshield of his car so they could explore their ideas further.  In 1942, the duo developed and secured a patent for a torpedo guidance system based on what Lamarr described as ‘frequency hopping,” which they then donated to the US government to assist in Hitler’s defeat. Though the US military didn’t take the invention seriously until more than a decade later, today frequency hopping is the basis for the technology we use in cell phones, pagers, wireless Internet, defense satellites, and a plethora of other spread-spectrum devices.  Pretty darn good for a five-time divorced, foreign-born actress who never attended college.

But mostly, I’m picking Hedy Lamarr because she is the ultimate anti-fembot, who once told the press, “Any girl can be glamorous. All she has to do is stand still and look stupid.”

A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Sandi Sonnenfeld holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Washington, where she studied under National Book Award winner Charles Johnson.  She is the author of the memoir This is How I Speak (2002: Impassio Press), for which she was named a Celebration Author by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association. Her short stories and personal essays have appeared in more than 30 literary magazines and anthologies, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sojourner, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, THIS, Raven Chronicles, Perigee, The Storyteller and Mr. Bellers’ Neighborhood.  For more, visit www.sandisonnenfeld.com.

Posted on

BBQ and the Supernatural

We were having dinner. I had the brisket, L half an Amish chicken, and my sister a mound of pulled pork piled high on her plate. There were five sauces lined up on the table for us to try: Spicy, Mustard, N.C., Apple, and Sweet.

L and my sister are close friends; they met in college and have stayed close in the years since. They’re relaxed with one another. They have similar taste buds, both preferring the Apple sauce with its warm cider flavor.  I was less relaxed. For the first time in years, I felt very little sister tagging along with the grown-ups.  Their relationship was built on college and adulthood. My relationship with my older sister is still tinged with childhood. The day before this, she had found a furry, black-and-white headpiece with a widow’s peak that she had worn to be a penguin in a dance routine. We’d bickered over how big her head was then vs. now (the headpiece fit her adult head and voluminous adult hair without strain) and whether human heads even grow.

 “Did I tell you that my mother-in-law went to a psychic?” L asked my sister.

The sweet sauce tasted off to me. It tasted too familiar, but with some extra spice or flavoring that was driving me nuts because I couldn’t identify it. I was too busy tasting it to respond.

 “No.” My sister said.

I am a magnet for people’s stories about the supernatural. Close friends, acquaintances, family members, talkative people on public transportation have talked to me about:

Being told they were on a journey;

Bird calls surrounding you means a deceased loved one is always near;

Psychics exist because they are only the ones who see the true pattern of the universe;

This card says you will be successful in your professional endeavors;

The fortune says, “You are always on my mind”;

An unknown voice whispering on an audio file encouraging them to leave;

Lights surrounding a house in photographs.

 

“She had her father contacted,” L said while cutting her chicken. 

“So, she got an earful.” My sister said. For a moment, I’d forgotten that she’d met L’s grandfather-in-law. She’d even visited him in the hospital last summer.

L laughed, but then grew serious. “She said that he said.”

“She?”

“The psychic.” L said. “She heard what he was saying and then passed it on.”

“The psychic said he kept saying the word, ‘meatloaf’ over and over again. She asked if the word meant anything special, but no one could remember him being that crazy about meatloaf. Here’s the weird thing.” L paused and took a sip of water. “My husband was over at his grandmother’s house at the exact same time—and this was all happening in the morning at like ten or eleven—and she decided to just make him meatloaf.”

“He was watching over his wife.” My sister said, her eyes tearing up behind her glasses. She tends toward being sentimental only about animals.  The first time we watched Casablanca together—I was thirteen and a bundle of red-shaped hearts and feelings, she was seventeen and willing to indulge me—I wept an embarrassing amount at the ending, she tossed a piece of popcorn up in the air and caught it in her mouth.

“Well, shit.” I said.

My sister asked, “What else?”

“The psychic said that within the next year there would be two children born into the family. And that he was talking to them and getting them ready to join our family. He was sure that one would be mine.”

My sister stopped picking at her pulled pork and looked at L. I could feel the weight of several heavy conversations between them. L smiled. “He especially liked the girls.”

I watched her face as my sister asked her more questions. She was happy—the food; anticipation of a trip coming up; the potential of a yearned for child and the idea of someone she loved being happy, rested, and omniscient after death all contributed to that happiness. But she was also a little uncomfortable.  Her doubts at the psychic’s extraordinariness, the idea that there was someone else out there who could see signs, interpret patterns, hear whispers of elsewhere made her uneasy.

The spicy sauce was good. It didn’t need to be slathered on anything. It would be good even if someone started demolishing a vat of it with a soup spoon.

L then told us how the psychic establishes her credentials. As a teenager, she attended a catholic school. Much like the Saints she learned about, she was beset by visions: the deceased walked among the living and whispered secrets only she could hear; stigmata seeped down statues’ arms; and crosses appeared against lights.  Eventually, the psychic approached her priest.

“Seeing spirits has happened, but it is very rare,” the Priest said.

The psychic paused for a moment and then told the priest that she saw his son in the room with them. He was a young boy and listening to them speak. The priest began weeping; he had told no one about his son. He had been young when the boy was born, unsure of his calling.

“Oh my God,” my sister said.

 We ate in silence for a few moments. My sister seemed focused on her sweet potatoes; L had her cell phone out.  A cover I didn’t recognize of “Baby Please Don’t Go” played over the loud speakers and I tapped my foot to the beat as I considered what I’d just heard.

Who would I focus on if I was writing the short story of that encounter: the priest, the psychic, or the dead boy listening in on all the confessions? 

And was the story real? The Gothic details, the fact that the word “weeping” appeared, made me more skeptical than usual. The psychic could employ several very talented private investigators skilled at observing her clients—she worked on a, I think, three month waiting list—and digging up details. She could Google search and find out details about her clients. Maybe the story changed each time based on the client’s religion. There could be an interchangeable line-up of rabbis, ministers, and Houngans weeping over their dead sons.

I tried the N.C. on my brisket. It reminded me of all the other times I had eaten a vinegar sauce. The moments crystal-clear, yet stacked upon each other. It could’ve been an accordion of me’s seated at tables, all remembering with happy excitement that I liked vinegar sauce. I imagined all the me’s past and future colliding in my taste buds and sharing their experiences, their histories, their selves in that moment. Maybe I knew everything about me in those moments of eating, but the knowledge only remained as long as I was eating barbeque.

 

Megan Giddings is a master’s student studying fiction at Miami University. Her work was most recently featured in > kill author. She is currently working on a novel.