In a cafe where I write, the staff are terrifically grumpy. One sometimes meets me with a finger propped under her chin, tipping her head: Is it almond milk? Soy? I say, It’s the honey that’s misleading you, by association, and she’ll say, mansplanatorily, “No, no… I don’t associate you with honey.” Today a large man came sloping in, one of those outsized softies whom I never used to see in Ghana, nor, for that matter, in Berlin: tall and stooping, strong but run to fat, crouching over his table as though he feared being forbidden to sit down. The same waitress came to him, scolding.
“You’re late! You’re usually here way earlier than this, what have you been up to?”
Meekly he explained whatever personal thing had altered his day. Doctor’s appointment, tenancy inspection. Once he had humbled himself to her aggression she softened, and patted him on the shoulder. “Well, you’re here now, no need to make a fuss about it.”
The double-whammy! I sat back, impressed. She went on waitressing, he went on crouching and mooning, I went on writing, and then when he got up to leave and he and I had exchanged a wry smile I put out my hand as he passed by my table. “Can I say something?”
Sure, he said, submissive to the death. In an undertone I told him, “You don’t have to explain yourself to the wait staff, you know.”
He looked startled, then submissive once more. There is manhood there, but it’s lurking underneath. “Oh,” is what he said, “it doesn’t bother me.” And as I watched him shambling out of the cafe into the rapidly clearing afternoon rain I thought: It’s going to bother your next girlfriend, though: I’ll tell you that right now. Having to stand up for you, having to do all that mothering. Having to nudge you towards the manly adulthood without which she is unprotected in your relationship. Unprotected from sassy wait staff who like to subtly keep their customers hopping. Unprotected from other men.
Tag: feminism
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a man of mouse
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how tis.
The courage… to get through life without this sense of home, without this refuge, whilst surviving a world which exploits our mothering kindness and assaults us for our femininity, is untold. But many many many women of my acquaintance will know exactly what I mean. I crave this home. Built with somebody who will not require that I mother and coach and be patient with him, that I endure his unkindness while he waits to work out whether he wants to grow. The difficulty, the sheer plain flat out arduous difficulty, of making our way through the years without this comfort, this kindness and safety, this home.
I don’t have any children and have nearly no family. I have never had a man who was as kind to me as I was to him. I have been transferring my energy to men, all my life, since I looked after my dear daffy immature dad when I was six. Men you don’t even know we are giants who walk among you, we are so secret in our courage and our eternal resilience and good favour, we are a lot of the time unsupported and alone, we are bold.
Respect women. Believe women. Support women. Listen to women.
.“Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house — home is a mythological concept. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.” ~ Dennis Lehane
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#NotAllLives
Thinking this afternoon about the insulting phrase All Lives Matter, and its to me clear and obvious translation: “Black Lives Do Not Matter to Me.” It seems to me we may need an alternative explanatory phrase for those who are unwilling to get it. Something like this:
White lives matter too much. White lives are going to have to be valued less, so that black lives can matter enough.
We cannot level the playing field without giving up privilege, if we have it.
It reminds me of the idea that All Life is Sacred, and other such phrases used by forced birthing advocates to render women into breeding boxes. This prefaces the life of the unborn foetus over the life of the labouring mother. “All Lives Matter” zooms out so far it is a sentimentalising sepia soft focus: if we keep telling ourselves we are practicing Universal Love, we can save ourselves the difficult and exacting work of again and again learning to love the individual and faceted real human next to us. -
stay with me
Once an Islander man stepped out onto the pavement as I was passing. We both stopped and stood facing one another. My heart was beating very fast. He had intricate ranking tattoos all over his face and his eyes were very dark. ‘Don’t go,’ he said, ‘stay with me for a while.’
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a trans man
Yesterday when he asked I told a trans-identified friend over coffee, No: you’re not a woman. I told him how male-privileged he sounded, to me, when he dreamily explained playing around with his prescribed hormones so as to reconstruct the experience of a menstrual cycle. He felt the reason he wasn’t experiencing it for real was to do with age – “at 54 if I had been born female my menstruation would have stopped by now, anyway.”
He is a kind man and would never intrude himself into female change rooms or bathrooms but has appeared in local films and performances about vulvas and about womanhood. I was nearly in tears, we both were. He explained how much it hurts him that I cannot accept that his dysphoria, with which I empathise, makes him female. And I explained how much it hurts me for him to think he knows what it is to be female better than I. I told him it made me feel like to him I’m invisible.
When he was telling me I surely don’t believe I get to define him, and I was dealing with the familiar, programmed feelings of feminine accommodation and trying to think clearly, it all of a sudden came to me: it’s not me sitting here telling you I know better than you do who you are.
It’s you. You are telling me, telling the world, telling yourself you know better than I do what makes someone a woman. You think you, born and raised male, a man whose very skeleton if dug up a thousand years after our lifetimes, whose dental records show you to be male, get to tell me, tell all women, what we are. And that we daren’t exclude you.
I told him all women experience dysphoria. All of us are told constantly our bodies are wrong. It was a very sad and painful conversation and I told him I admire his courage for living radically outside the masculine patriarchal role. Nevertheless he interrupted me repeatedly, grew angry when I disagreed with his pronouncements on reality, and claimed greater ownership of science. Male, male, male. And he seemed very preoccupied with the difficulties of living outside the male role and had not one thought to spare for the scorn and violence experienced by butch lesbians who eschew the performance of femininity.
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frat boys
A man I had been chatting with climbed on top of me as I was falling asleep after a party. It was at my friends’ friends’ place in the Hills so I had been offered a bed. I woke up to find him fondling and grinding on me. I have never been so tired and so alert at once. I knew there was only one chance. So I tried to reach him. As he reefed the blankets down I called him sweetheart and reminded him that he didn’t want to do this, we had been enjoying a real rapport, we liked each other, and he was not that kind of guy.
He may not remember this, but I do. He climbed off me, and said sorry, and went away. And I lay awake the rest of the night and fell asleep at dawn. So this guy toyed with the idea of becoming a rapist but decided not to. Every guy can decide that, too.
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transmisogyny
Transactivism has usurped the struggle of genuinely marginalised vulnerable people and become swollen with the entitlement of spoilt male narcissists.
Those people and their acolytes are now telling women to shut up. They are trying to ban lesbians from Pride march because lesbianism excludes the male. Men in frocks now regularly threaten violence and rape and have turned an oppressed marginal culture inside-out. It’s misogyny unmasked.
San Francisco Public Library last month held an ‘art exhibit’ featuring barbed wire baseball bats painting in trans colours and bloodied t shirts printed I PUNCH TERFS. In a women’s online group yesterday I watched in horror as a man calling himself Natalie laid about him threatening rape and boasting about the size of his penis in order to compel us to ‘respect his pronouns’: ‘she’ and ‘her.’ Womanhood is not a costume to be donned by men who are so entitled they want the one thing they cannot have: to be female.
Native American ‘two spirits’ culture, the Black civil rights struggle, the intersex community, and now lesbians have all complained in turn about the theft of their language and struggle by white males who now claim they are ‘lesbians’ because they sleep with women. The ‘cotton ceiling’, chillingly, is used to convey the crotch of lesbians’ underwear that, like a glass ceiling, must be forced. Small children are encouraged to believe they cannot play with non-conformist toys (dolls, if a boy, trucks if a girl) and still be a boy, or a girl. It’s ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians, and corrective homophobia, in pink.
This homophobic misogynist racist insanity has turned liberal communities upside down and ruined countless friendships between compassionate people as transactivists insist on framing themselves as the ultimate victims. It is happening at a time when more than ever in human history we need to pull together and stand up to the terrifying ecological and social damage wrought by narcissism and power hunger.
Every time I post about this I get emails from women thanking me for having the courage to speak up. I’ve seen black women told to stand down and check their privilege when they object to racism from white, upper class, trans-identified males. Meanwhile men are never called TERF. It is women who are silenced: same as it ever was.
I’ve been called Nazi, a bag of shit, bigoted, and phobic because I point out that women deserve our own spaces and that young women, Muslimas, and survivors of rape and sexual assault are unable to safely share changing rooms with men. Convicted rapists are now demanding they be called women and transferred to women’s prisons. It is seen as more important to respect Ian Huntley’s pronouns than to remember the two young girls he tortured and killed. Trans-identified men like Hope Lye, Jenn Smith, and Miranda Yardley who know they are not female are now routinely banned from Twitter and women are becoming too afraid to speak. Meanwhile women are expected to refer to ourselves as ‘vagina bearers’ who ‘chestfeed.’ If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
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kink shaming
On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.
As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.
I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?
It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.
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that I fight
The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to leave that first relationship, a year later – this struggle absorbs more of my energy than I can tell. In Ghana I am free and scintillate, I roam the countryside of this strange and wildly interesting city. People greet me and I call back. I am smiling from my soul. But even here my lover and I must attend constantly the vigil of ensuring that I never provide myself to him as a service.
Occasionally I do and he catches me out.
Are you sure, he asks, and I lie, Yes. Am I hurting you, as we press ourselves into each other like metal into sand and heat into metal. No, I lie, and he stops still to look at me narrowly. This narrow suspicious glance in my case is a necessary feeler of love.
When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dropped aside the pleading, exonorous letter serial rapist Larry Nassar had written to the Court, when she told him his self-pity was nothing compared with the pleasure he took in these immature women’s forming bodies, let alone the pain and anguish he has caused them which inhibits still their talent-stained lives – I could relate. I waited months, until yesterday, to expose myself to parts of the footage and reportage, waiting til I could bear it. I watched the testimony of a young Olympian who told him from the stand, “I will not take my life. I am taking it back.” And on the couch in our rental in Accra I crumpled forward and clutched my hand around my so long sore heart and cried out and cried.
These decades later, I still have no income. Having topped every class I took from the age of four to eighteen, when in the final semester of university and throes of this awful year of cumulative hell I dropped from my flock and barely passed, I have no career. The money I’ve lived on comes from waitressing, fifteen years of waitressing, which I was good at; and from sporadic coaching in which fellow writers tell me I have inspired them, and pay me for an hour; and from a stunning single purchase of property which I renovated and lived in, dividing the bank interest with a series of housemates I invariably chose for their resemblance to the abusive family who loved me as best as they could.
The waitressing was mostly in a fine Paddington BYO which required me to carry seven full plates of food at once, and taught me to open a bottle of Moet after I dropped the first one, and to carry out twenty-one champagne flutes between my fingers and lay them out on the table one by one, shining and polished. It exposed me to the old man who pressed his face up against my breasts when I stretched across the table to set down his friend’s plate. It put me in the path of the stranger who stuck a fork in my arse as I bent over the table as though I had been a bird in an oven. Was I done?
In Berlin, as a friend has only recently pointed out to me, I struggle some days to get myself off the couch. Leaving my apartment is a daily heroism. I am shy and exceedingly sensitive to start with. The performance instinct which is a lion dancing in me and roaring has been silenced externally for several years. Instead I practice dealing with bus drivers. If some random barkeep is rude to me I feel the talons of self-silence cage round me and I become a mouse, limp in the sailing claws of this bigger predator, playing dead lest he kill me, trapped in the freeze.
The amount of energy this perpetually renewed struggle costs me is mortifying to tell. The spectre in myself of being someone who is de facto preoccupied with her own past, or at least, stained by it, humiliates me when I long with all my heart only to face the day, this day – the only day, and build all its fruits.
My brother, who though he has three children mines coal, has told me when I tried to discuss this perennial battle, “There’s something wrong with your personality, that’s why you can’t sustain a decent relationship and you have no friends, that’s why you don’t have a job.” An aunt who discovered – or invented – God told me, when I timidly brought up the topic of her sister’s, my mother’s, rage, “It’s you. I sometimes think you are possessed by the devil.” I was so irritating as a child, that same brother assured me, that our parents had no choice to get violent with me.
My mother, who once called me ‘a failure as a human being’, also supports my daily life. Fear of publicly shaming her – a shame that seems unearnt – and of hurting my family has long kept me silent. Having run out of my own miracle earnings, much of which I spent on unnecessary medical procedures whose invasive humiliations I was convinced were crucial for my health, I am living outright upon her, in her seventies – how dare I? – while I labour to complete some saleable work, or to get some business started. Some days, the labour focuses still on finding the wellbeing to bother to feed myself. You see I have not always eaten every day. I find trouble keeping my little home clean and combing my own hair. Every now and then I have to take the nail scissors to it and cut out all the little knots.
Meanwhile I write and make photographs every day, I draw and make assemblage and small films. I give all my work away for free and the album I made, lassoing twenty-eight musicians in New York and Melbourne, is still unreleased except online. I play my album to the jazz impresario who in the 50s brought Shirley Bassey to Melbourne, and my heart clutches when he says, “In my opinion, you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” I finger the dusty piano I have lugged from Brisbane to Adelaide, and from Adelaide to Melbourne, and Melbourne back to Brisbane and now across the seas to Berlin. I cannot bring myself to touch it, I never sing, I have forgotten how to play my own songs on my own guitar. When I think about money, I panic and flail. It is almost not possible for me to believe my work has value, and that anyone would ever pay for it.