A Dyke A Broad #113 Biceps edition
Of women's marches, Kouign-Amann, and LInda Hamilton's arms.
Hello from Paris where I didn’t realize there had been Women’s Marches all over the U.S. on Sunday—with thousands attending one in D.C.—until I’d scrolled down nearly the whole home page of the New York Times website to a section of tiny article listings called “More News.” Most of the headlines were understandably about the mass killings in California, but the women’s marches were also upstaged by the urgently featured “Many Lessons of Kouign-Amann: Our writer made this Breton-style cake at least half a dozen times to perfect it. Here’s what it taught her about grief.”
When the story finally appeared, it couldn’t have been listed with a more blasé style. “Women’s March Holds Nationwide Rallies on 50th Anniversary of Roe: The annual march, which was started in 2017 as a reaction to the election of former President Trump, focused on abortion rights this year.”
They might as well have been reporting that the hemline this year was short. The chic color of the season no longer grey, but green. “Last year’s daffodil theme has been replaced by abortion. Ladies, get out your white.” It flattened women’s distress at the election of “grab ‘em by the pussy” rapist-friendly Trump, the screechy rage of those idiotically obsessed with coat hangers and supreme courts, dead aunts, dead daughters bleeding to death in dorm rooms. Nothing to see here. Not worth screaming about or taking to the streets. Surely less important that someone’s lessons from an afternoon making French pastry.
At least it was there for a while. When I checked a few hours later, the article was downgraded further, the blurb entirely gone. Disappeared. Maybe in an act of sympathetic magic. Ignore them, they’ll go away.
Le plus ça change
I wish I had a better, broader grasp of history, especially my own. But that’s not the way most of us live. Growing up, kids read the funny pages, not the op-eds. Nobody around me popped a champagne cork when Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973, though my Southern Baptist mother later whispered how happy it made her after growing up with stories of women forced to bear six kids, eight, ten until they died in bloody beds— women nothing more than brood mares, breeding stock.
As for Title IX in ’72, I was only six when it took effect. And even now don’t understand how wide-reaching it was to state that,
no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
One thing this has had a great impact on is women’s health. You want adults to exercise? They have to pick up the habit as kids. It means something, too, that 1972 was the first year women were allowed—officially—to run in the Boston Marathon. Women had to spend years proving we weren’t too weak, it wouldn’t hurt us, our girlie bits wouldn’t fall right out in our pants and ruin our breeding futures.
All I knew was that by the time my oldest sister entered high school in 1974 or 75 there was a tennis team for her to join, field hockey—just like in fancy all girls’ schools. She was why I went out for the team in 1980, ended up playing goalie. These possibilities appeared in front of us like magic, like they’d always been there. Always would be. I couldn’t imagine anything but the present, but progress. Roe v. Wade eternal, like education and sport for women everywhere.
It took a long time to trickle up, trickle out, become normal to see images of physically strong women—at least sometimes. I remember when Terminator II came out in 1991, the dykes I knew in my new New York neighborhood absolutely raved about it. Mostly how buff Linda Hamilton was, “Did you see her arms?!” they marveled.
I rewatched the movie Saturday. And thought for a while about how different things were to be so excited about Hamilton’s biceps. Now we see strong female bodies every time we catch a women’s soccer match on TV, a basketball game. Still the movie holds up surprisingly well, is in some ways more relevant now than in 2000, 2010.
In the first Terminator, Sarah Connor managed to escape an attack by a cyborg. When the sequel opens, her attempt to warn people of what was coming has landed her in the looney bin where she’s at the mercy of perverse orderlies, a disbelieving doctor who sneers at her stories of terminators, how she believed she’d been attacked, pursued, had to escape somehow so she alone could protect the world from a nuclear catastrophe caused by machines run amuck. Who does she think she is? This self-important cow?
It’s really satisfying when two dueling terminators turn up at the facility in a hail of gunfire and special effects, one trying to save her, the other kill. They teach that doctor a thing or two about gaslighting and believing women. I was a little disappointed he survived.
In Other News
Brit Awards organisers are set to review gender-neutral prizes following backlash when no women at all were nominated.
Caroline Criado Perez, reminded readers of her newsletter that she’d addressed gender neutral language in her book Invisible Women, because, it doesn’t work. It just makes women even more invisible.
In 2012, a World Economic Forum analysis found that countries with gender-inflected languages, which have strong ideas of masculine and feminine present in almost every utterance, are the most unequal in terms of gender. But here’s an interesting quirk: countries with genderless languages (such as Hungarian and Finnish) are not the most equal. Instead, that honour belongs to a third group, countries with ‘natural gender languages’ such as English. These languages allow gender to be marked (female teacher, male nurse) but largely don’t encode it into the words themselves. The study authors suggested that if you can’t mark gender in any way you can’t ‘correct’ the hidden bias in a language by emphasising ‘women’s presence in the world’. In short: because men go without saying, it matters when women literally can’t get said at all. (IW, p.7)
Photos
Welp, that’s it for this time.
Stay tuned for the continuation of my serial memoir, essay, Chapter 3: A Lexicon of Lesbian, on Thursday or thereabouts.
xoxo K
i appreciate this so much, Kelly, esp your apt description of nyt priorities (lolsob) Merci Bien for this wonderful post.