A Word of Our Own: Ch 10
"I’d heard of laughable bra-burning, man-hating feminists, but I’d never heard someone name their enemy. That’s really the whole key to the racket. How the Patriarchy points away from itself..."
A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
…Even when laws fall, it’s not enough. We’re up against so much. Sometimes ourselves. I can feel them there, the borders I track which are invisible, but fiercely guarded. Taboos implanted like shock collars. So effective I forget why I always stop at that shrub. That post. Here we can go, and no further. Here it’s safe. Though it never is…
10. The Hairy Truth
Nobody wants to see this, can’t, unless somebody opens their eyes, burns a bush in front of them. I’m not saying I blame you. How do we know what we don’t know, when we get so many perks for innocence? Are stunted in our imagination? Distracted as magpies by shiny objects? For years, my sisters and I saw only the flaming angel of my mother barring the way. And even once I understood, had been singed by the bush, I forgot. It’s so easy. Artificial ideas about what women are, what we’re good for, how we should behave have been so effectively grafted like a branch into, well, everything, that knowledge quickly fades. The poisoned fruit seems natural. Not the way things have been made but the way they are and should be, always have been.
Even so, we still sense it there, the artifice. A coercive barrier, the unspoken rules, that we sometimes bump up against. I remember being tiny as that little hat-stomping girl, and singing in a Wednesday night service in a little children’s choir. I had a skirt on. And underneath that, a pair of shorts, so I sat with my legs spread joyfully wide as any boy. I heard later how the crowd laughed at me. Like the neighbor ladies did when my mother told them. I was outraged. “But I had shorts on underneath. Nobody saw my panties. They couldn’t.” I didn’t understand that my little flowered panties weren’t the point, but what was underneath it. All I knew was that boys in shorts could sit how they wanted.
Then there was that time a decade later when my youth group went to a camp with some other Christian teenagers. We paired off as kids will, and a boy offered to buy me a milkshake, which I accepted gladly. I rarely had the money for treats. And I was so happy drinking it as we walked through the forest at dusk, talking and raising our eyes sometimes to gaze at the mysterious sky. I heard afterwards he mocked me, said he wanted to kiss me but I wouldn’t stop sucking on that straw. Stupid me. I didn’t realize what the price was for that strawberry milkshake in its white styrofoam cup. That a transaction had happened and that for a pittance he’d earned access to my body.
And why not? Hadn’t I shaped my body, prepared it for him? I’d been so proud when I began to pluck my eyebrows, shave my legs like my mother, and my older sisters. Even my grandmother had silky smooth calves interrupted only by the occasional cut. I remember how good it felt the first time I lathered up my hairy shin and pulled the razor over it leaving a naked trail. It was trickier under the arms where there were delicate curves. Nobody ever explained exactly why we did this. But I knew it had something to do both with beauty, and hygiene. Especially the pit hair which was dirty, now that we were almost adults. It made us stink, while too much hair on our eyebrows was merely ugly.
My sisters made fun of me for how thick mine were. I tweezed and tweezed until the two caterpillars were tamed. Shaved unthinkingly until I arrived at college at eighteen, went to a class in Women’s Lit, and my life itself caught fire.
It was fluke really. A coincidence. Some of the older girls on the floor of my dorm drug me along to the class I wasn’t even enrolled in. I have no idea why. I was pre-med, taking biology and calculus, so I could be a medical missionary, share the grace of God that saved me daily. Still, I wrote poetry, and probably they wanted to introduce me to the professor who was also a creative writing instructor. All I remember was how flamboyantly cool she was in her maxi skirt and dangling earrings, red lipstick, so different from my mother in her discrete homemade skirts, her blouses with pussy bows that she wore to the office, her lips insignificantly pale. And how nonchalantly, as the prof waved around the Joanna Russ hilarious book, How to Suppress Women’s Writing, she revealed that almost all of what I thought about women and girls was a scam, as artificial as the sweetener my grandmother put in her tea, the rouge I smeared on my cheeks.
There was even a name for it, the structure that benefited, that kept us from getting wise to the game. I still shudder to write it. The Patriarchy. The word itself made me uncomfortable. I wriggled in my seat when I heard it. I’d heard of laughable bra-burning, man-hating feminists, but I’d never heard someone name their enemy. That’s really the whole key to the racket. How the Patriarchy points away from itself, names crazy and hysterical the pigeons fighting it. Names us ridiculous. Names us bigoted claiming we all hate men. So it’s really us that are the bad ones indulging in such ugly emotions. Why can’t we just be understanding? Why can’t we just be kind?
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