The movie, Community Action Center, is pretty great. You liked its frenzied variety and absurdity, though you felt perplexed by its banishment of cock, as you think the category of women should be capacious enough to include it—“like the blob that ate Detroit,” you say. I agreed, but wondered how to make space for the nonphallic if the phallic is always pushing its way back into the room. In whose world are these terms mutually exclusive? you said, justly agitated. In whose world is the morphological imaginary defined as that which is not real?
In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both of the Popsicles are melting off their sticks.
After the movie had finished, the screen flashed a parting dedication: “to the queerest of the queer.” The audience applauded, and I applauded too. But inside the dedication felt like a needle zigzagging off the record after a great song. Whatever happened to horizontality? Whatever happened to the difference is spreading? I tried to hold on to what I liked most about the movie, which was watching people hit each other during sex without it seeming violent, the scene of someone jerking off with a chunk of purple quartz down by the water, and the slow sewing of feathers onto a girl’s butt. Really that’s all I remember now. And that the girl having the feathers sewn onto her butt was pretty in an unusual way, and that her sexuality reminded me of mine in ways I couldn’t name but that moved me. Those parts made that little portal swing open for me: I think we have — and can have — a right to be free.
I collect these moments. I know they hold a key. It doesn’t matter to me if the key must remain perched in a lock, incipient. The key is in the window, the key is in the sunlight at the window … the key is in the bars, in the sunlight in the window.
Out in the lobby, a friend complains that the subtitle of the movie should have been “flip the butch” (presumably an insult), and is seriously grossed out by the sex. Ugh, why did we have to stare at so many hairy pussies? I drift off to the water fountain.
Like much of Catherine Opie’s work, Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993), which features the bloody stick figures cut into her back, gains meaning in series, in context. Its crude drawing is in conversation with the ornate script of the word Pervert, which Opie had carved into the front of her chest and photographed a year later. And both are in conversation with the heterogeneous lesbian households of Opie’s Domestic series (1995–98) — in which Harry appears, baby-faced — as well as with Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), taken a decade after Self-Portrait/Pervert. In Opie’s nursing self-portrait, she holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses, her Pervert scar still visible, albeit ghosted, across her chest. The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity: the pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se, but nor is adult sexuality foisted upon the child, made its burden.
This balance is admirable. It is also not always easy to maintain. In a recent interview, Opie says: “Between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play [SM style]…. Also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to ‘Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody’”
There is something profound here, which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder. As you ponder, however, note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.
Of course, there are a multitude of good reasons for adults to keep their bodies to themselves, one of which is the simple aesthetic fact that adult bodies can be hideous to children. Listen, for example, to Hervé Guibert’s description of his father’s penis:
I’m staring at his trousers as he opens his flies and that’s when I see something I’ve never seen again in all my life: a kind of threshing ringed beast, cork-screwed and blood-filled and raw, a pink sausage ending in a cone-shaped knob. At this moment I see my father’s prick as if it were skinless, as if my eyes had the power to see right through the flesh. I see something anatomically separate. It’s as if I see a superimposed and scaled-down version of the shiny cosh that he brought back from the slaughterhouse and puzzlingly places on his bedside table.
This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman.
To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn.
If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp, as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see—Fame, most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.
In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. The story blew through my penis-corn-addled mind and swept it clean. In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out: how the force of one’s adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalences can live on in an adult sexual life. Munro makes “Wild Swans” more tolerable and interesting by having its protagonist get jerked off by a male stranger on a train (a traveling priest, of course) without her consent or protest, but also without her being forced to do anything to his body. In lieu of genital description, Munro gives us landscape: the view outside as the train hurtles forth, which the girl beholds as she comes.
When Iggy was five months old, we took him with us to one of my best friends’ trapeze-burlesque shows, but were turned away at the door by a jovial Australian bouncer who told us that the show was 18+. I told him I wasn’t worried about exposing the five-month-old strapped to my chest, asleep, to my best friend’s foul mouth and naked body. He said the problem wasn’t my baby per se — it was that other people would see the baby, and thereby be reminded of the babies they might have left at home, and it wouldn’t feel to them like an adult night out. It would disrupt the cabaret atmosphere.