i cut my tongue
on the stem of a date and
the juicy sour of a kumquat explosion.
pink-green spines in fingers unpeeling, unwrapping spiral
and fingers bring an opal-white
globe to mouth and
lips wrap around a lychee.
Rosy nectarine on teeth
Strawberry fur sweet on tongue
plum, juicy plum juice drips down summer.
As a barely-employed young feminist I have a lot of time to think of things to spout angst about so I’m going to go ahead and go out on a limb of the generalization tree and say that not one woman I know has not thought some part of herself (body) to be too fat, too skinny, too hairy, too pale, too dark, too nappy, too curly, too wavy, too short, or too straight.
I’m going to go out another limb and say that not one woman I know has not thought something she has done with her body (self) to be too whore-y, too prudish, too traditional, too girly, too dyke-y, too submissive, too dominant, too provocative, or too virginal.
How many men do I know have to think about these things? How many men have to walk anywhere wondering what kind of sexual attention, wanted or unwanted, the the clothes they are wearing that day will attract? (How much of the sexual attention we “want” is really what we want, as opposed to what we have been trained and conditioned to give?)
It is a daily FIGHT to love ourselves and our bodies. It is a daily struggle not to focus on: my belly pudge. my tiny breasts. my squishy thighs. my shortness. my big feet. my dry skin. my chinky eyes. my fat lips. my dyke-y hair. my meaty arms. my bumpy knees. everything about me that does not conform to what music, movies, magazines, television, pornos, and MY FRIENDS tell me women should look like. It is a daily fight not to think of myself as “easy” or “desperate” (things I’ve been personally called) because of some of the things I’ve done in trying to negotiate my own spaces and reclaim my body from the patriarchal forces that have colonized it. (Does this sound too dramatic?? I hope so!)
It is a daily fight not to judge myself negatively based on these things, and it is a daily fight not to think of myself as crazy because I view myself as a woman at odds with a society that hates women. It is a daily fight not to buy into the prevailing lie that sexism does not exist. The prevailing lie that women own their own bodies and can make their own choices.
If I cry while I make my point, or if I rely on my own experiences/feelings or those of others, or if I need time to heal, or if I question myself, or if I do something that appears contradictory, am I being too emotional/flighty (read: too WOMANLY) to be taken seriously? Society, my professors, my friends, my family all tell me YES.
How many men, in this world that was given to them and made for them and is made by them, ever stop to consider if they are making assumptions? If they are being patronizing? If they are silencing someone? If they are threatening someone’s safety? If they are thinking of the women in their lives as objects that are there for their own ego boost or sexual gratification? Or as objects that need their protection or help or masculinity? How many men want to know that they are objectifying their own mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, friends, girlfriends, wives?
Not many men are willing to question their own male privilege. And women are taught, conditioned, and rewarded for doing our best to hide it from them. In the meantime, everything I do is questioned. From the clothes we wear, the sex we have, the people we have it with, the way we walk/talk, the sports we play, the places we hang out in, things we do/watch/read/listen to, judgments are made on us. Everything that surrounds us is male.
“Dignificada”
por Lila Downs
Allá en la noche un grito, y se escucha lejano.
Cuentan al sur, es la voz del silencio.
En este armario hay un gato encerrado,
Porque una mujer, porque una mujer defendió su derecho.
De la montaña se escucha la voz de un rayo,
Es el relámpago claro de la verdad.
En esta vida santa que nadie perdona nada,
Pero si una mujer, pero si una mujer pelea por su dignidad.
Ay, morena,
Morenita mía,
No te olvidaré.
Que me doy mi lugar porque yo soy mujer,
Y todo lo que me pasa no me lo puedo creer,
Tanto tú y la mentira y los cholos me ven,
Si lo quiero o no quiero es mi gusto querer.
De tu carne a mi carne, dame un taco de res,
Los prefiero y los quiero al que me dé de comer,
Ya probé el que es ajeno, es el pan que no quiero,
Que la voluntad del Cielo me mande al primero,
Que me quiera como soy, a ese sí que no lo quiero.
A ese sí que no quiero
A ese sí que no quiero.
Te seguí los pasos, niña,
Hasta llegar a la montaña,
Y seguí la ruta de Dios,
Que las animas acompañan.
Te seguí los pasos, niña, hasta llegar a la montaña,
Y seguí la ruta de Dios, que las ánimas acompañan.
I wrote this two and a half months ago for an “Modern Love” essay contest that I didn’t win.
Modern Portfolio Theory
I’m currently “taking a break” from a relationship that is simply adorable. I truly feel lucky and blessed to be with this person. This relationship has not been about playing games, power struggles, or even the slightly risqué fact that he is a first-year while I am a senior. He is sexy, sweet, respectful, and real. We communicate well on all levels, and I could not have asked for a better thing to happen for me so unexpectedly in my last semester here at college.
I am not an economics major or an aspiring banker, but I have had a habit of imagining affairs of the heart as “investments.” My investment portfolio ranges from low-risk, low-rate-of-return to high-risk, high-yield options. The rhetoric has included “diversifying my portfolio,” “managing my assets,” and “dominant strategy,” in the game-theory sense of the term. However, the relationship I am currently in has required little to no consumer behavioral research or analysis of market trends. It is simple, honest, loving and sharing. All signs point to yes, this one’s a keeper.
So why did I ask for this break? I must be honest with myself. My love life in college has been far too tumultuous for me to be able to accept such a drama-free and simple relationship after all the mishaps, mistrust, and mistakes of the last few years. It is hard to convince myself that I deserve this after all, and perhaps even harder to take myself off the market for this final stretch of a college career all too full of complications.
My college love life began nearly four years ago with a hookup during Orientation Week. It happened again a few days later with the same person, then again, and again until the interaction had outlasted its shelf life as a casual encounter. Unwilling to slip and settle into college-couple marital status within a matter of a few short weeks of exclusivity, I promptly took the wrong step in establishing independence by hooking up with another guy. And another. And another. College life at a small, suburban, residential liberal arts school made this pattern all too easy, in a social cess pool where alcohol irrigates as a social lubricant and almost every room contains at least one bed.
One of these hookups went wrong and unfortunately had a great impact on my sex life ever since. It hurts to be used against your will as a vessel, a tight and soft and pristine little orifice against and into which a man can push and force his cock and fuck, fuck, fuck, and pound until he comes in a shuddering, explosive, quivering minute in which all you feel is invaded and all he feels is damn fucking good. His face buried in the pillow behind you, not seeing you, only feeling the walls of your pussy around him, you feel like you could be any other girl, any other pussy, and he’d be feeling just as pleasured and powerful. No amount of drugs or alcohol can glamorize or numb the feelings that remain after something like this happens. When a man gives himself to a woman in bed he can feel like a true man flexing his sexual muscle, eliciting the moans and sighs of womanly pleasure that he tells himself only he has the power to do. When a woman is raped all she is is a warm, tight, moist hole that is fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked.
I was raped, and what did I do to cope? I fucked and fucked and fucked and fucked. I slept around for a couple years, rationalizing that if sex meant little to me, then what was taken from me by coercion also meant little to me. For three years, in an effort to devalue sex, I had a lot of it– in dorm room beds, on bathroom floors, on psychotropic drugs, in foreign countries. Very little of it was consistent, monogamous, healthy, or enjoyable.
One semester I had a few trysts with a man who lists his Facebook profile interests as “cars, blunts, and Asian ladies.” He also has an application called “Daily Babe” which features photographs of scantily-clad women that refresh automatically each day. Competing with soft-core porn stars on his profile to be his babe in real life made our status nothing short of “It’s Complicated,” and that relationship lasted little more than a few weeks.
Two other men I had sex with that year happened to be best friends. Within a short time after each encounter, they were in relationships with strong, beautiful women whom they were in love with and who were not me. That year I also hooked up with an old flame from freshman year, expecting to rekindle a relationship but meeting with rejection instead. I spent the following semester abroad, getting loved and left by an array of incarnations of the requisite Foreign Fling. I’ve been pursued by men who explicitly propositioned me for a one-night-stand, people of all genders who openly fetishize Asian women, seventeen-year-olds on MySpace, thirty-somethings on AsianAvenue.com, and male friends who would only let me into their LAN computer-gaming parties if I made out with another girl and let them watch.
I will reserve the topic of heterosexual male fetishization of lesbianism for a gender studies dissertation, not a personal essay on modern love. But in or out of the context of race, gender, and heteronormative dynamics, all the sex I’ve had has been unnecessarily complicated for its own reasons. As each of the men I was with proved uninterested in me as a partner, yet interested enough to continue doing the old in-and-out, the only thing I could do was keep separating sex from any emotional connection. The bedroom (and bathroom, and shower, and kitchen) was a playground; each partner and each experience was a box I checked off on a list of people to do and things to see. I wrote off intimacy in favor of investments, and completely missed the concept of both.
Outwardly, I thanked my feminist predecessors for making my “sexual liberation” possible. Inwardly, I suffered from depression related to rape and actively devaluing my own sexual self-worth. As a conscious investor in the market, I blame no one but myself for mismanaging my own asset allocation towards low-performing stock options. I made a few mid-level capital gains over time, but overall, the biggest return I got on my investments was a fear of my own sexuality, derived from throwing it around like a boomerang and expecting it to return to me in a prettier, more recognizable form.
Before I mix more metaphors, I want to say that I’ve realized that love can only be equated to itself. Love is not a battlefield nor a pursuit. It is not a game to be played dirty, or even to be played at all. Love is most definitely not the stock market. I’ve been wrong in conceptualizing love in terms of short-term options and long-term investments. In my search for a metaphor for love, the only ideal statement I could find on it has already been written in ancient texts. I find it in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 13:4-6: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
After four years of pursuits, options, and investments, it’s hard to convince myself that love this simple and clean does exist. It’s even harder to convince myself that I deserve it. I’ve made my love life far too complicated in the last few years, and though I am still young and far from settling, I’ve learned a lot from it. In the home stretch of my college career in love both sought and unsought, I’ve finally found something in which we support instead of manipulate each other, in which we love instead of strategize.
Love is no commodity to trade, no fire to kindle, no game to play, no prize for which to compete. Love is better than net value or capital gains. Love is what I’ve stumbled upon while looking for a preferred stock option. No matter how short-lived this turns out to be, love is what I’ve found now, and love is what I will enjoy as soon as I come to my senses, realize what is right in front of me, and end this break in order to allow myself to have what has taken me four years to learn that I deserve.
I just watched this video which features Derrick, Gregory, and Dimyah who were my students, plus Lamar who I taught math with last summer in Miami, and Kwan (!) in his Psycho Saiko Taiko outfit at Celebration. It brings a little smile to my heart.
I remember staying up late writing lesson plans and doing random things like gluing yarn to butcher paper to make a coordinate plane map, or printing out color pictures of flags of different countries to look for vertical, corresponding, and complementary angles. And when words like Bloom’s Taxonomy, the KWL chart, modes of learning, hook, drill, and check-for-understanding were part of my everyday vocabulary.
Should I be a teacher?
My summer so-called job has turned out to be all but a paid vacation in the sun-spackled Southern California resort that I thought I graduated from. I’m not complaining. When this honeymoon is over I probably won’t have the time to spend hours each day cooking and baking. But it might make the transition to real life that much harder.
We spent all day preparing Sunday night’s meal. We woke up lazily at 11:30 am and went to the farmers market, then the grocery store. We bought vegetables, sauces, spices, and rib-eye steaks. We started cooking at 3 pm.
I made dough for pie crust while he fixed the marinade of balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, brown sugar, rosemary, and cumin. I boiled the water for sweet tea while he prepared and stuffed the portabello mushrooms. I cut up zucchini, red onion, and bell pepper for the kebabs while he cut up apples from the Pomona farm for the pie. We cooked and baked in that kitchen until 7 pm, finally got the coals going at around 8, and grilled.
It was a delicious meal and a beautiful time. Southern California summers cool down in the evenings from sweltering 100 degree daytime heat to a pleasant 78-80, perfect weather for enjoying steak, kebabs, sweet potato fries, and apple pie in a palm-shaded courtyard.
So I’ve graduated and joined the ranks of full-time living examples of choose-your-own-narrative: unemployed liberal arts major; individualistic Gen Y-er too self-centered to settle for mere employment; unfortunate soul coming of age in what Martin Feldstein, president of “the Cambridge group that is considered the official word on economic cycles,” says could be the worst recession since World War II.
Somewhere in the most recent four years of my (mis)education I forgot that I am actually trying to help people. Before college convinced me that I was being systematically oppressed along intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality, I wanted to be a doctor. Part of this was because of the kind of parents and community I had growing up. They seemed to condone only professional and pre-approved career choices, systematically shooting down anything that deviated from doctor or engineer aspirations. (When I escaped to a college that encouraged personal growth, intellectual exploration, academic masturbation, etc., I was naturally kind of confused so I quit.)
Still, part of the reason why I wanted to become a doctor in the first place really was because of a genuine interest in helping people. But it seems that insurance, managed care, bureaucracy, and profit-hungry pharmaceutical giants are just a few of the things that clutter any good intentions that doctors may start out with, corrupting the profession into a money-making operation of profiteering, and a headache and liability for everyone else.
This is when I need to trust my own God-given intentions and motives. I feel that everything depends on God now more than ever. It is beyond my control. I can only apply myself to discovering and doing the work of whatever plan He may have for me, in areas of love and service. Love and Service!
(Why I continue to use such patriarchal language to describe God, why I have rejected and returned to and now continue to adhere to the God of a religion that has fucked over and fucked up, I may or may not try to explain in the future. Explaining– que hueva. All we know is what we feel. When will that be enough?)
I don’t even know how many of them there are, I thought there were just five or six, but apparently there are ten or fifteen of them now.
Despite the fact that commoditized Girl Power in my generation died when it began with the Spice Girls, I nonetheless love the Pussycat Dolls’ independent, kick-ass attitude. They’re proud to be girls in their own burlesque, parodic way; their pop-culture brand of feminism doesn’t contradict itself by promoting either the myth of equality or the elimination of the double standard as the cure to patriarchy.
Apart from the questionable feminist overtones, there’s something I love artistically about each of these singles: the trombone part in Don’Cha ft Busta Rhymes; the ironic and subtly-produced cheesy-sweetness of Stickwitu; the creative use of beeps, claps, and finger snaps in Beep ft. will.i.am.; the sexy Middle-Eastern-ish back melody of Buttons ft Snoop Dogg (I’ll take a problematic-language card; sorry, thanks); Timbaland’s typical (before it got old) percussion/orchestra-heavy style of production of Wait A Minute; and the brashness of their latest single, When I Grow Up.
Cold, comfortable jade looks so good on golden Chinese skin. Natural, not like the blues that are too cool, the reds that are too hot, the flesh-tones that are too pink for faces and bodies that are too ethnic.
You, my friend, look so good with me. Not because I make you look good (you know you damn fine sho nuff). Not because I make you look more open-minded, more cultured, less racist, less sexist. But because we just love each other.
When going to bed you are delighted by the sudden memory that tomorrow you get to wake up and think “Tomorrow!”
Not that I know what love is, but being in love must feel like a wonderful secret, one that makes you smile even when you are crying from fear of falling.
In theory, this sounds like a beautiful lifestyle.
