The Lowdown on Down There

The supermarket checkout rag quoted, in pink, some woman yacking about her “vajay.” “Oh, it’s got a nick name now?” I thought, a tad disapprovingly. Then the girl in my head kicked my internal schoolmarm in the shins.

People are talking about vaginas! On the cover of supermarket magazines! And on TV. Tyra Banks, a glamorous African American talk show host who aims her show at the young and female, did an entire show last fall called “What’s Up Down There?” entirely about women’s privates—the vajay. Meanwhile Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan keep flashing theirs to the paparazzi, we learn on Yahoo “news.”

The world has fucking revolved, people.

Women’s privates have been so private for so long that many women never learned to talk about that part of their anatomy at all. As a girl, I only learned the vaguest terms--allusions to a neighborhood like “down there” (by the docks, probably) or that void “between your legs,” neither here nor there. And since then, we have only had those dirty words assigned by men for the double purpose of jacking off and insulting—pussy, cunt, snatch, cooch, and so on. Women have had mixed success in reclaiming these words. Educated white women have for a couple of decades been able to choke out the clinical word vagina in private circumstances—to a group of other women, a doctor, or a good-hearted boyfriend. But the vocabulary was carefully correct. And this kind of talk was not available at the supermarket checkout counter in big pink letters. The result has been that the freest women in the world have not felt free to talk about their sexuality, the very core of freedom and creativity. A little progress was made in recent years with the cute “girl parts,” the full equivalent of cute “boy parts.”

Now at last we have the gift of speech.

And we’re talking not just about breasts, women’s secondary sex characteristic, but the primary sexual attribute, and quite possibly a healthy, lusty one, too. What a concept. “My vajay.”

The schoolmarm claps her hands together one time. The girl dances a little dance and goes on to the next thing.

Who should we thank for this gift? The source is probably threefold.

Black women have long been less hung up about sexual matters than whites. They have known the female genitalia as a “chore girl.” The term is a joke that brings together the image of the steel wool scrubber of the same name, which shares its curly appearance with pubic hair, and the chore that women’s genitalia so often perform of keeping men sexually satisfied. I believe it was Woopie Goldberg who introduced the term “hoo-hoo” to the wider world in a major motion picture. I suppose--and I hope readers will send me their list—Black American women have a variety of other names for the vagina, too. Possibly, vajay was among those. Possibly not, before vagina went mainstream.

But how did vajay break into the mainstream press? Eve Ensler must get the lion’s share of the credit, for taking the Vagina Monologues national, and international. Never before the Monologues had the word vagina occupied so much public space in newspapers, marquees, and conversation. The power of the title alone is hard to overestimate.

And finally, a little credit to the men who own the media that carries the word. Men have always had words for male and female genitals—and more importantly, permission to use those words. By easing control over women’s public use of the word (albeit in full expectation of financial reward) they remove the final barrier to this freedom of speech. Naturally, vagina would get shortened to our intimate friend vajay.

Thanks, Eve.

Twelve Lies and a Truth

People have asked me which of my postings is fiction and which is opinion. In response I have written the following. I hope it clears up the confusion.

1. My whole life has been one long stasis.
2. I have been married since I was 16 to a short, stocky, Italian man who smells like testosterone.
3. Testosterone is not an Italian word.
4. I have never known disappointment, disillusionment, discouragement or crème de menthe.
5. I once slept with a call girl on her night off.
6. She had a squint, gold rings halfway up her arms, and wore jasmine perfume.
7. I have never smelled rotting leaves in the New Jersey rain or felt nostalgic for that smell.
8. At 10 o’clock every night, just as I’m about to go to bed, chimpanzees let themselves in my bedroom window and keep me up for hours, playing poker, fighting, and discussing advances in genomics.
9. A genome is a little bearded scientist, usually wearing a red knit cap.
10. It takes me several months to decide whether or not I want to sleep with someone.
11. Lesbian dating is very simple and straightforward; the rules are crystal clear.
12. I am usually the neatnik in a relationship.
13. If we wait long enough, the Twin Towers will rise again and Osama Bin Laden will turn himself in.

The Plan

I’ve spent my freshman year at Skidmore trying to identify any lesbian at all at this posh women’s college and failing utterly. I have worked up the courage to ask a student if she was gay, in as subtle a way as I could. I use the old lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis as a code word, further encrypting it down to “DOB.” “Do you know if there’s a DOB around here?” She looks at me as if I were speaking Greek—as, in a funny sense I am. It turns out she and her girlfriend go around hugging because they like each other and think it’s funny. She is neither unkind nor defensive, but, no, they’re not lesbians. I write this about the experience.

Polly and Pollyanna
It’s her own fault for walking
around kissing her
dark, cold, come under my
soft white wing
friend in public.
How was I supposed to know she was
straight?

I’ve been to the college psychologist to ask if she knows of other lesbians—yes—and if she could put us in touch with each other—no.

I’ve gotten it on with my only friend at Skidmore and she has dumped me just weeks later.

Now it is my sophomore year, and I am not going through another year like that. I formulate a desperate plan.

Since there is no lesbian organization around for me to join, and since the psychologist cannot or will not help, I will have to start my own organization. People post all kinds of notices in the mail room, and on the bulletin board by the cafeteria. I will post notices. We all have numbered campus post office boxes. I will use that as a way for people to contact me. I test it out. Will they deliver to my p.o. box without a name? Yes, my little envelope comes back to me in my box the next day.

This is before Xerox became a household verb, and Kinko’s is just a twinkle in its inventor’s eye. I will hand draw some signs and post them in the mailroom and by the cafeteria. I anticipate they will be torn down, so I make extras. I keep them rolled up in my desk.

I draw a cartoony closet door swung open a crack and three pairs of big cartoony eyes inside looking out. The text is about Skidmore Sapphics (lesbians seem to go for alliteration, I later learn) feeling all alone in the closet. My p.o. box number goes on there with encouragement to write.

Late at night, after 11pm, I take up skulking around in the mailroom with a couple of posters in my hand and some tacks in my pocket, waiting for an opening to post. This goes on periodically for several weeks.

I never hear from anyone.

Sitting with Grief

If life teaches us anything useful, it’s that pain happens and keeps happening. The disappointments of longtime love going cold, love dying in the bud, the heartaches of parting from longtime friends, watching parents lose their strength, loved ones fall ill—these are pains that accumulate as life goes on. They will continue accumulating and accelerating relentlessly until the very last breaths we breathe.

If life teaches us anything, it’s that a good attitude in the midst of grief is what makes the difference between subsisting and really living—and that no one should have to keep up a good attitude all the time.

It takes physical strength to survive heartache. When the metaphoric blows rain down on me, I bring the karate analogy into play. I go to the gym and build up my shoulders and arms, because rapid-fire misery is exactly like kumite, free fighting in karate. Your opponent is kicking and hitting at you, and you have to block the kicks with strong blocks, you have to block the hand strikes with fast blocks, and you have to strike back wherever the opportunity appears. It all happens very fast, and your arms absorb a lot of hits. You’ve got to have strong arms, padded with lots of good muscle. Your stomach and back have to be strong to keep you upright, to keep you from straining or exposing some part that should be covered.

So I go to the gym and build up my back, stomach and arms, so I can endure, and still snatch opportunities when they arise.

And when the waters of grief rise, I sit still and listen to them lapping around me, wondering what permanent erosion they might be causing. Today, as always, they whisper, wait, you know this; wait, your imagination fails you; wait, you’ll outlive this.

I’m impatient for better. I want it yesterday, all of it. The job, the lover, the house with the garden, the happy parents, the old, trusted friend, the pain to stop. But I’m up to my ass in grief and I will wait.

Minor Unsolved Mysteries

Why does a maple tree whose colors have turned in the fall seem to glow on a damp, cloudy day?

Why do we turn away from emotional pain in real life, but go to tear-jerker movies?

Why can we have documentable telepathic experiences, yet not be able to measure or predict them scientifically? And why do people who know that individual cells communicate with each other chemically doubt that humans can?

Why is violence so degrading to experience, but so much fun to watch?

Why, when we've made a mess of things, is it irresistable to make them worse?

Romeo is some other where

So often, when you’ve been living with a lover and the relationship ends, one of you, inevitably the one who can afford it less, ends up scrounging for some place to call home. Lesbians, independent types that we notoriously are, should know better than to get caught without a place to call home, indebted and impoverished. Certainly we should have been listening when the women’s movement tried to teach us the supreme importance of financial independence. And yet . . .

And yet, one understands so well the old adage, “A stone in the oven keeps the wolf from the door.” Or, in other words, What you don’t have, no one will steal.

After the love and the sex and the sharing of a home are over, it’s natural to feel ripped off. If nothing else, your expectations of the relationship and love itself have been dashed. You feel cheated. So often, you’re not ready to accept having screwed it up again.

And then, if you are the one scrounging for a place to live with too little wherewithal, finding yourself thinking, "Some trailer parks aren't so bad,” or "Wow, a lousy studio apartment in a converted garage is really expensive!” or finding yourself living with strangers, you may feel an impending sense of failure, panic, or doom.

Maybe you’ve lived in a lot of different places. On a good day, you feel like a world citizen. You’re bigger than any one town or culture. You are footloose. Should you stay? Should you return to some old haunt? Should you go somewhere you’ve always wanted to see?

Other times you are in danger of realizing that everywhere you go, you will always feel homesick for somewhere else. Stay or go, it won’t matter.

Because, immediately after a break-up, there is no home. You are a woman without a country. Your heart, where your home supposedly was, is a fist, or a fractured vessel leaking broken roses, or at best, a wonky pump shunting oxygen-poor blood along reluctant veins. Your sex has lost her lust. Or, she has detached from your TOTALLY LAME heart and is free-lancing. And she’s talking like some college boy or sports bar patron about every woman who looks like she’s never been through what you’ve just been through.

The fact that you’re about as appealing as road rash to those women only occurs to you later. They can see you’ve been through the mill, but your sex is a study in obliviousness.

Good for her.

Someday she’ll come straggling back, assuming your heart gets its act together.

Someday, maybe, you will make a home for yourself that can survive the bad weather of love.


Originally published in Weird Sisters.

Sprucing up for the Holidays

My Scottish ancestors allegedly cleaned house to celebrate the new year. What fun women they were, too. The jolly sloshing of cold, soapy water, the scratching of scrub brushes from attic to coal room, the sweeping of dust into festive clouds, and the merry snapping of bed linens as the fleas were thrown out. There’s little like it to get the blood up.

These were descendants of the Danes, who raped and plundered their southern neighbors for sport. To “scotch” something is to put an end to it. Many Scots immigrated to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. And surely the heritage of their no-nonsense attitude contributes something to our American obsessiveness about searching out and destroying germs, weeds, and most recently, foreigners.

This warlike attitude bears little relation to the gentle cleanliness of my Bavarian ancestors, which is perhaps best illustrated with a little story. I went to dinner at the home of a friend. The friend’s mother was visiting from Germany. I chatted with the mother as she set the table. Putting out the plates she stopped suddenly and examined one of them. “Ach! This is dirty!” she said. Angling the plate slightly, she blew on it and then, satisfied, set it neatly between fork and knife.

These genetic strains are always at war within me. Where other people have “dust bunnies” under beds and in corners, I used to let dog hair—when I had a dog—collect at the edges of a room until it formed “dust bears.”

On the other hand, ask my secretary-companion if I don’t take a perverse and almost scary satisfaction from scrubbing faucet scum with a Comet-laden toothbrush. And who delights in a bubbly bucket of Lysol and a mop when the bathroom floor gets really disgusting? Aye, lassie.

I try not to get too worried by this neat-or messy issue. People will take advantage of you if you show any weakness on this front.

After all, it’s obvious that in any couple there must be a neat one and a messy one, a compulsive cleaner and a slob. Wherever you fall on the Cosmic Continuum of Cleanliness, your partner is bound to fall to the right or left of you somewhere, and there’s your dichotomy. And the longer you’re together, the more apparent these differences will become. Still, the self-aware may notice they often find themselves on the same neat or messy side of a succession of partners. They should learn from this.

I had a brief, bad roommate situation while in graduate school. My roommate and her new lover decided they wanted the apartment to themselves. They started a campaign to persuade me to leave. It involved, among other things, moving a dog in unexpectedly and tying him to the kitchen cabinet where I could get to know him, and pressing me about why I thought I needed to study in graduate school instead of watching Twins games on TV like regular folks.

Finally one night the lover accused me of being anal compulsive. After 37 years of being the messy one, this struck me as a stunning, bald-faced invention. Clearly she’d gone off the deep end. Would the two of them stop at no twisting of reality to be rid of me? I packed as fast as I could.

But merely because neatness and organization are not your top priorities, that doesn’t mean you will be blind to their benefits. I am soul-weary of raging around the house looking for my sunglasses or my day-timer or, worse, the misplaced file folder containing the guts of the story that will, if published, make my career. The proper organizing system could change my life—if I could just find it.

I notice, too, that fresh sheets on the bed often have an aphrodisiac effect on both me—the messy one—and my neater secretary-companion. Now, here’s an area of my life where I think I might not mind being taken advantage of.

This piece was first published in Weird Sisters.