A Dyke A Broad # 17
Fun with Covid in France, the shame of being an angry woman. An ode to homophobia. Plus lesbians in bed and pancakes. Delicious, fluffy pancakes.
Hello from Paris!
Fun with Covid continues in France. The vaccine program is in shambles, partly due to shortages in the EU. And the numbers are pretty bad and inching up every week with the new ultra contagious British strain already on French soil, though not exploding—yet.
Probably we should already be under total lockdown, but they’ve put it off because the government (I think) is afraid of the massive demonstrations the French are so good at—the polls show more than half the population oppose it. They already hate the muddled measures we have now, screaming about the curfew, and how restaurants and cafés are closed.
TV news doesn’t help. Instead of showing overflowing hospitals, or patients getting transferred from one region to another, they keep profiling college students sick of being stuck in front of their computers. Or angry merchants. Who truly are getting squeezed.
And in our own building, well…
This was the week in which we got replacement neighbor(s) for the young het couple with the little girl that I liked a lot until the pandemic hit, and friends in New York were dying, and she, the maskless young mother, started going on about how the government was using lockdown to see how obedient the sheeple would be.
The new one(s) isn’t much better. Move-in day was Saturday, and at some point The Girl and I wanted to go out, but the newbie’s door was open and an older man was out in the hallway blocking it with a bunch of oversized boxes, and filling the air with his germy breath because of course his mask was around his neck, and the younger woman he was talking to inside the open door wore none at all.
So we waited a couple minutes for them to finish and disappear, but they didn’t, and when we finally decided to leave, we blurted out that they needed to make a little room for us to get by, and they really should put their masks on. Unsurprisingly, it came out awkwardly, and the young woman made a show of rolling her eyes and muttering, “What luck.” Meaning, she thinks we’re the neighbors from hell, and hates us now. And I felt humiliated, but also furious at my humiliation.
Because it’s so backward. How her need for fucking politeness trumped our fear of dying. And probably the rest of our idiot maskless French neighbors would agree that we should have joyfully welcomed her to the building, then politely, ever so politely, suggested that perhaps she and her… (husband? father?) would be so kind as to put their masks on in the hallway.
But no, we’re harridans, bitches, biddies, dykes. And it will never occur to this young woman with her stupid, unlined face that we were and are afraid. And that not killing people through negligence should perhaps be considered top among the requirements of politesse.
Whatever.
It inspired me to spend the last couple of days thinking about women’s anger, and how it is often annoyingly screechy. And awkwardly phrased. Rather than graceful.
For me, anyway, it’s because I was trained to be silent, compliant, pleasant, polite, so the act of speaking up for myself is bound to come out weird, be sometimes disproportionate, perhaps with an undertone of rage. Because I am in conflict not just with the thing that pisses me off, but with myself, the internalized politeness that tells me as a woman I have no right to open my mouth. And be anything but agreeable. What could be worse than making someone mad? Offending them?
Hell, the whole politeness thing is such an effective form of social control that it makes it hard for women to scream if we are being raped. Or like me, walk away from extremely unwanted sexual encounters. It’s like I have a shock collar around my neck. I just can’t.
Not to mention the fact that when we do work up the nerve to express anger (or it just comes boiling out), we are almost immediately ridiculed (oh the eye-rolling), or marginalized, attacked.
Like the story I keep telling about last spring, when, after watching the bodies literally pile up in Italy and knowing Covid was already in France, I politely sent an email expressing concern to the co-op board about the doctor who used the hallway as an extended waiting room for his coughing, sweaty, infectious patients. Their response was a deafening silence, as if they were embarrassed on my behalf, and probably were, because someone ratted me out to the saintly (male) doctor who called me up and left an outraged message saying I was despicable, xenophobic, germaphobic, a hysteric. He was so upset he could barely choke out the words.
It’s like I had taken out a leather glove and slapped him with it, challenging him to a duel. Or dropped my pants and shat on his doorstep.
It was humiliating. But also puzzling. Because as Fran Lebowitz said in Pretend It’s A City, marveling at the outrage she attracts…
I could understand being angry at me when I say things like,”People should do this,” or “This should happen,”—if people thought that I could change it. But of course if I could change it, I wouldn’t be so angry. The anger is, I have no power, but I’m filled with opinions.
A pretty good description of me. Of half the older dykes I know.
The taboo of women’s anger has consequences. Not just the fact that it turns reasonable dykes like me into screechy awkward women when we have something difficult to say. But that we often hide our anger even from ourselves. Become incapable even of knowing when we, personally, have been wronged.
I’ve started to think that is why women always intervene on everybody else’s behalf. Are so aggressive in our self-gratifying elevation to secular sainthood: unselfish, self-sacrificing, self-denying, altruistic, and, lately, on the right side of history. Sure, much of it reflects our legitimate desire to right the wrongs we see, and help when we can, but our outrage in the service of others is also a way of displacing, and masking the fury at how are own lives are under attack, and there so much left to do.
A Little Pandemic Won’t Get in the Way of HOmOphobia
Despite Covid, it’s anti-gay marching season in France again. Taking to the streets is the enormous group Manif pour tous (Demo for all), originally founded to denounce the horrors of same-sex marriage and adoption in 2013, and now recycled for all-purpose homo-hating. This time they’re opposed to extending the right of artificial insemination to single women and those terrifying lesbians, a bill up for discussion soon in French parliament.
Le Monde newspaper is marking the occasion by featuring interviews with the kids that led the anti-gay charge in 2013, and turned out to be gay or bi, and pretty fucked up by the experience. (Whoopsie). Some of them didn’t even know what “gay” was when their parents sent them into the street with their signs. And when they did figure it out, were trapped in the closet by shame. At least for a while.
Don’t know what to do with your emotions? Why not eat them like normal people?
How to Make Surprisingly Fluffy Pancakes for Two Hungry Dykes
What you do is read a pretty interesting recipe for pancakes while lying in bed, because that’s what dykes do in bed on Sunday mornings, think about breakfast. Then get up, make a pot of coffee and drink a mug with hot milk, so you don’t fuck things up from grogginess, and then get to work.
I can’t remember what the recipe said exactly, but the important thing is the technique. What I did was whisk together 1 cup of flour with a pinch of salt, a little bit of sugar, (maybe one tablespoon), and one of those cute little pink packages of baking powder that they have here in France (around 3 teaspoons). I probably could have used less baking powder, but I didn’t feel like fussing. So I just dumped it in, mixed it, then set this mix of dry ingredients aside.
After that, I put a couple tablespoons butter in the skillet I was going to use to make the pancakes. And while that melted on the stove, I cracked an egg into a cup of milk mixed with a little vanilla that I had in a medium-sized bowl, and whisked the shit out of it until it was really foamy, and I was frankly too tired to whisk more. Then I added in the dry ingredients, and drizzled in the butter, and when the biggest lumps were gone declared the batter done.
The skillet was still reasonably hot, so I put it back on the fire and dumped in about ⅓ cup batter, and then sliced a little banana onto it, dropping on some walnuts, too, the whole thing cooking over medium heat. When it got bubbly around the edges, I turned it, as you do, making pancakes. And then yanked it out when that side was brown. And repeated. Putting a tiny, very small bit of butter in the pan before each new pancake.
The whole thing made six surprisingly fluffy pancakes which we gobbled down with warm maple syrup and more coffee.
That’s it until next time.
Disgruntledly yours,