A Dyke A Broad #58
Women march in Paris. And I fight with the idiot doctor on the 1st Floor. Plus links. A Gen X Joke. Thanksgiving recipe.
Hello from Paris!
Welp, I had a rotten Saturday. While women in town took to the streets by the tens of thousands to protest sexist violence in France, I was downstairs in the entry to our building trying to break up some cardboard to fit into the recycling bin, and had a little spat with the doctor on the first floor.
You remember him. He’s the general practitioner with so many fancy connections he ends up on TV all the time as a Covid “expert”. He’s also the guy that uses the hallway as an extension of his waiting room. And who responded like a dick about two years ago, when, after weeks of watching bodies pile up in Italy during the first wave of Covid, and long before people were taking such precautions as wearing masks, I’d sent a very mild email to the building association expressing concern about his patients hanging out for long periods in the hallway coughing and sweating with obvious fevers. Perhaps some other solution could be found. His response? Leaving a very, VERY, long, shouty message on my phone accusing me of being a hysterical, germaphobic, xenophobic, and all around despicable human being.
This time, seeing me near the recycling bin, he accused me of being the person who has been leaving giant boxes in the bin for a week so the lid wouldn’t close. I politely told him it wasn’t me, because even as we spoke I was breaking down my boxes so they would fit. Obviously. As anybody could see. He was annoyed, grumbled for a minute. He had expected me to apologize. Kiss his illustrious ass. He stomped outside, then stomped back in to say, “Aren’t you the one who reported me that time? You should be ashamed of yourself.”
And I said, “Yes, that was me. And no, I’m not ashamed. You should be ashamed of the violently insulting message you left on my phone. You don’t know me. You’re a misogynist.”
“Me! A misogynist!? He was literally shaking with emotion. “I find you beyond the pale.”
“And I find you kinda stupid,” I said, as he stomped out the door again. You’d have to be an idiot, or demented, bringing that up after almost two years, and a mere 120,000 deaths in France. I was in the right, but back upstairs, I replayed the conversation over and over for a couple of hours, feeling humiliated and angry, trying to remember the zingers I came up with two years ago when he took up residence in my head for weeks and I wrote email after email that I never did send. What I hadn’t anticipated was that apparently my silence still lives in his head, even now.
At least this time, “he” only stuck around a few hours. Until I hopped on a train to visit some friends and put him out of my mind.
I’m only writing about it now because it happened in Real Life and continued into… that other real life that often gets dismissed because it happens “only in our heads.” Just the other day a friend told her doctor that she’d had a bad reaction to a Covid vaccine and the woman pretty much told her it was all in her head. Maybe it was. There’s a lot in there. Brain matter, nerves, veins, a continuous soup of hormones from endorphins to adrenaline. All of which are real. Of course there are ideas, too. And words. Are they real or not? What about emotions? What about the shame, the wrongness, which women are taught to feel all our lives, which make a congenial space for guilt and shame to thrive, encouraging submission and obedience. I’m pretty sure they’re real, too.
This matters as I continue thinking about attitudes towards gender. It’s tempting to give a lot of weight to generational differences, especially those provoked by technology. Lately, though, I’ve begun to wonder if these gaps are as big as we make out. The Gen X’ers I know, and Boomers, for that matter, are as much online as Millennials or Gen Y. And many of us use the internet in ways that are similar enough to each other to know it’s a lie when someone says Twitter doesn’t matter because it’s not Real Life.
And frankly, there’s not much difference between the doctor’s desire to shame and humiliate me, and that time I published a snarky article in Huffpost making fun of some men’s rights activists and one guy went to the trouble of googling images of me, found the saddest, most melancholy one he could, posted it online, along with the usual declaration that I was obviously a dyke because I was so goddamn ugly that I couldn’t get a man. And it must have gone viral in a small way. Because a couple months later, when my memoir was about to come out, I googled my name to see if reviewers would find my website, and no, no they wouldn’t. All the top hits, thousands of them, were that sad photo, and the phrase “ugly dyke.”
The main difference I see is the scale. Online, disgruntled exchanges often expand. Are renewed with every post. Grow larger as we invite others into them.
For a while, I blamed online viciousness on the anonymous, nonmaterial world which frees us from such things as politeness, and fear (I can say what I like without the mean dyke giving me lip or punching me in the nose!). Uninhibited, we return to our infancy.
The failure with that line of thought is that on a pretty regular basis, people like the doctor in my building behave just as badly in the flesh. Don’t need anonymity and distance to be assholes. I’ve been chased down the street—literally chased— in every city I’ve ever lived, and some that I’ve only visited, just for telling men harassing me on the street to shut up, go away, fuck off. Women, too, are killed by their partners all of the time.
What I’m trying to get at, is that we shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of the new. Which in many ways is often just the old on steroids. Even the idea of exaggeration is sometimes an exaggeration. Like when you look at all the dead women of all ages in France, killed by their partners. Think about it. Their murders aren’t a recent development, and you can’t go further than death.
In France, activists report that 220,000 women are victim of violence every year, and 94,000 are raped. Since January 1, more than one hundred women (101) have been killed by their husbands, boyfriends and exes.
Happy Thanksgiving.
In Other News…
Interesting thoughts on passing
And not just as a different race.
Midway through the new drama “Passing,” Irene Redfield (Tessa Thompson), the light-brown-skinned, upper-middle-class protagonist, offers a unique insight into her psyche when she says to her friend Hugh, “We’re, all of us, passing for something or the other,” and adds, “Aren’t we?”
Until now, Irene has successfully maintained her cover as both a respectable wife and proud African American woman. But when Hugh (Bill Camp) challenges her by asking why she does not pass for white like her biracial childhood friend, Clare Kendry (Ruth Negga), her response is a revelation, startling me almost as much as it did him.
“Who’s to say I am not?” she snaps back.
The Bad Guys are Winning
I’m always grateful to Anne Applebaum for trying to make abstract ideas like autocracy real.
I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.
How about a Gen X Joke?
Getting it done
Sex Ed, One Instagram Post at a Time
When Nour Emam decided to devote herself to educating Arab women about their bodies, the subject was so taboo that one of her first challenges was figuring out how to pronounce the word “clitoris” in Arabic.
Turkey Recipe
Want to impress your guests? Try this turkey recipe. (Works with any size bird.)
Marinate a bird overnight in your fridge in a mix of olive oil, soy sauce, citrus juice (I use a combination of both lemon and orange juice—fresh squeezed juices are best), citrus zest, Dijon mustard prepared from grains harvested on a full moon, an assortment of chives, sage, parsley and thyme, several handfuls of minced garlic, a salt, pepper, smoked paprika, sweet paprika, 1 pint bourbon, 1 liter of super-unleaded.
Ten minutes after your guests arrive, remove the bird from marinade and stuff the inside with an assortment of Roman candles and ground spinners.
Take the dirty bird outside.
Light a match, a very long match.
Set fire to the thing and run.
That’s it for this week,
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