Scribblings with Green Chalk

Guilt-ridden readers, shameful writers, printed pages on the couch: literature has always been a guilty pleasure. Think of boarding-school girls reading in secret, the little boys sneaking under their blankets with flashlights. Wasn’t fiction meant to blow minds?

The emergence of “therapeutic writing” has killed the pleasure. It has footnoted our experience of the text. We now have a wasteland of reading. It’s not at all like psychoanalysis with its stories of pen(is) envy, fathers, mothers, keyholes and vaginas, writing and sublimation. It’s much less funnier, much less story-bound. In fact, it’s counter-narrative. There is no story: in its place we now have a gaping whole of pointless explanation. All the articles about Coelho’s novels and poems in therapy have rendered writing ridiculous. As if it were a simple painkiller, a function of a tortured mind, a prozac pill filled with ink. This is how the text is explained away, its pleasure deflated.

But the guilt stays. Now reading and writing are not ways of turning away from violence, as romantic psychoanalysis would have us believe. Now they’ve become exercises assigned by the therapist. You read because you’ve experienced something painful, you write to put it into words, you like a piece of writing because it’s about a similar experience. These are simple, stupid lies. But don’t they make you feel guilty about reading?

Literature: a plate smashed by an angry citizen X on a Sunday morning. Literature: a winding road of frustration with no possibility of bliss.

I imagine Roland Barthes turning in his grave. Where’s the pleasure? Want to analyze this thought? After all, I’ve written about it.

Literature is always about experience of some kind. Yet the experience of the Word is by no means inferior to the experience of bare fact. People have turned to literature for advice, but also for beauty and for the flow of language. Why devalue that? A text is woven out of words. It’s not a tattooed body waiting for ointment to be put on its scars. The text is where the memory’s at, where the body’s at, where the fantasy’s at. It’s not the therapist’s office: you can’t close a deal with the text that by the time you reach the last letter you will have learned to manage your anger. You cannot get anything from it, you bring the weak flame of pleasure, it brings the dry sticks of words.

I needed this lengthy preface to introduce a piece of writing that runs the risk of being relegated to the therapy ghetto. While it does strike the reader on the level of intimate memories, it’s not literary wound-licking nor a frantic confession. It’s an essay — and the essay is, arguably, the most challenging genre — about waking up to our own and others’ sexuality and the silences around it. It talks about how these silences are learned and tries to unlearn them in the process of writing. Richard Jeffrey Newman’s “My Daughter’s Vagina” is a disciplined piece with a subtle associative logic and an intuition about words. A balancing act between the experience of the facts and the experience of the Word. Read it.

(You can also find it here along with readers’ comments.)

There is a point where relativity cracks: some things just aren’t funny. And if you still think they are, you should run a reality check, you might be dangerously disconnected from the world around you. Sense of humor just ends somewhere, it’s not about “different feelings and responses.”

I saw this pencil sharpener ad two days ago and couldn’t quite believe my eyes: sharpening a pencil as rape and that is supposed to be funny?! Please enlighten me what is amusing about a pencil sharpener in the shape of a woman exclaiming (yes, it’s got sound) “Help!” when you stick in a pencil into its… well, it’s the plastic woman’s vagina (sic!). Is that not rape in some alternative universe of misogynist logic?

Right here, right now it’s a representation and an attempt to satirize rape. It promotes misogyny (among men and women) and tries to condone sexual violence.

One of the comments on Feministing.com linked to the producer’s customer service, and I’ll do the same here. Please write to them, tell them what you think about the product.

It’s usually them, a distant, vaguely defined group of the abject. We know they’re there, but they don’t have faces. They come to embody the reverse of the norms we live by, clinging to the idea of romatic love, clinging to lust, clinging to the images of family, and clinging to disgust. Useful but useless. Always used.

There is still no language to talk about prostitution and not enough courage to talk about them as people with faces and personal stories. There is no way we could rationally talk about their rights, since most societies choose to pretend they do not exist.

This article about murders of prostitutes in Edmonton, Canada is a glimpse into the larger narrative of hypocrisy and violence, spanning centuries. The article links to the murdered women’s pictures and presents them as mothers, sisters, wives; individuals rather than mere bodies for rent.

I know that it’s a bigger question whether any perpetrator sees the victims of their crimes as persons in their own right. Given the fact that in this case the victims were chosen solely among sex-workers, it does seem like a misogynist crime, attacking a “safe” target: women rejected by society in principle, partly invisible, those no one would stand up for. The families of some of them strongly deny that they were prostitutes, probably some of the relatives only found out about this after they died. The story’s caught up in a spiral of shame. Many, perhaps all, of the families feel stigmatized by the publication of the photos. This is not a truth about their lives they would wish to reveal. Whatever the actual details were, however heinous the deed, there is the troubling connection between the womens’ profession and what happened to them. In a sick and insane way, the perpetrator(s) (?) channeled the desires to penalize the abject. The society left them a niche to operate in by denying sex-workers their rights. If you’re invisible, no one will hear your scream.

I remember watching a debate about sex-workers’ rights on French TV. Among the participants, there were several ex-prostitutes. Not hiding their names nor faces, they spoke openly about their situation and demanded legal recognition of their existence. I don’t know what that led to but I was stunned to see real people speaking up about real problems instead of the usual “experts” throwing theories and hypothesies at each other. And finally talking instead of blushing.

What do their relatives and neighbors feel when they look at the pictures of the dead women? What do you feel?

Remember Jane Eyre and the woman locked up in the little red room? The diagnosis was that sex blew her mind. The treatment: keep the poor dear away from decent people and treat her like an idiot child. The story comes from the times when, as Queen Victoria said, women didn’t have legs, so they couldn’t even mention anything that was underneath the layers of petticoats. What are our times?

The sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick believed that the Roman Empire never ended only we were living an illusion in which time feigned movement, but the world really stood still in 70 A.D. Dick had schizophrenia, but his theory doesn’t sound so crazy to me when I read about people such as Parker, Grossman, and Stepp and their brilliant [sic!] plans to “enlighten the weaker sex.”

Please read the discussion at Feministing.org along with the linked articles, comments, and responses to get a fuller picture of these grand initiatives aimed at reducing women to helpless idiots that need to be protected from themselves. And most importantly, from their sexuality which, as the Good Books out there say, is the source of unimaginable evil.

Are we stuck in the nineteenth century for good? The pseudo-theories in biology and evolutionary psychology’s explanations of every social aberration as result of human development could well have been penned by Charlotte Brontë, they bring nothing to our understanding of the world. They do, however, give us insight into the minds of their makers and the politics to which they subscribe. Is it boredom with historical materialism or some almost religious desire for positive essence in human cruelties throughout the ages that makes them come up with these ideas? Or again, is it the work of the specter of a glorious tradition that never really existed but is romanticized and fetishized into a set of rules imposing “order,” that is, oppression…?

What I find especially heinous is when women do it to women — when they assume the role of mother figures only to patronise and tell other women to “behave.” Where’s the breaking point? When will there be enough of spoonfeding shame and when will our brilliant scientists and reformers find that women have brains and are able to see through spurious claims intended to keep them in “their” place?

It was at a birthday party a few weeks ago. We were sipping our drinks and then a friend of the birthday girl who I had met only the day before suddenly said, “I have a list,” and smiled in a telling way.

I was curious how the conversation would develop, so I just listened.

“Oh, yeah, sure, everybody has one,” replied one of my two friends sitting at the same table.

“I mean,” he hesitated in spite of the reassurance, probably because I and the other friend didn’t say anything, “it’s just for the record. So that I know who I’d been with when I’m old. To have some sort of perspective.”

Interesting, I thought. Thinking ahead, in case you have Alzheimer. Or were we heading towards one of those aimless debates about cultural differences? The friend who backed him on the list issue was American like him. Pragmatically-minded America with her list of lovers versus old European forgetfulness of past sins and adventures?

“Just for the record, you say? So it’s not like you look at the list to boost your ego?” My other friend (my compatriot, by the way) asked. I just watched and listened.

“No, absolutely not. I don’t conceive of the women on the list in terms of sexual triumph. I do it just to remember who I had an intimate relationship with. That’s all.”

“But if you had to finish the sentence ‘the more names on the list…’” my friend insisted, “what would you add?”

“The more people I slept with,” he replied simply.

“Yes, but that’s redundant. That’s what we know from the first part of the sentence. But what does it imply for you? Would you say, ‘the more attractive it makes me,’ for instance?”

“No,” he denied.

“Come on. Isn’t it that the list is an assertion of your, um, virility?”

“No, absolutely not. But let’s not get into this. You” — he looked at me — “look appalled by the very idea. You think it’s morally wrong?”

“No, it’s not that…” I said but I didn’t finish the sentence. The birthday party didn’t seem to be the best context for the expression of my thoughts on the list. Even though what I wanted to say had nothing to do with moral judgment (that’s what he feared, I guess), I didn’t feel like examining my reactions there and then.

I took the time that elapsed since that memorable conversation to explore the issue in greater detail. Although none of the Europeans I asked particularly liked the idea of listing their past lovers, I don’t want to push the discussion into the shady realm of cultural differences. Furthermore, I am not connecting it to any idea of morality, religious or not. It’s not my intention to evaluate list-making and certainly not to vilify and ridicule anybody. Quite simply, if you’re a guy with a list, I am letting you know what I’m thinking. These are the thoughts rushing through my head as we sit there and you try to explain why you have a list.*

First of all, I don’t believe you when you say that it doesn’t make you feel better about yourself. I bet your list has numbered positions and every time you write down another name you add in your thoughts “and counting…” and feel contentment.

You probably don’t realize this, but the list is an absolute turn-off. Even if you look like a Greek god, even if there was a flicker of mutual interest between us, the list killed it like a fly swatter smoothly flattening a fly. Right now my imagination’s busy with images of you and your list –

…in a grocery shop, when you realize you took the wrong list and begin to wonder whether ‘Rachel’ could mean that you’re supposed to buy tomatoes and ‘Annie’ that cheese is out. And ‘Jim’ perhaps something as surprising as caviar…

…hopelessly searching for your to-do list and pulling out your I-did-list only to be struck by the lame pun…

…lying next to a lover and figuring out a way to turn the quiet moments ‘after’ into a spelling bee, because you want to be sure you get her name right…

…you, old and for some reason bitter, calling up the women on the list to hiss into the phone “I slept with you in 1999.”

The one good reason I can think of for having a list is if you’re diagnosed with VD and need to tell your partners they should get tested. And yet the list somehow implies that you’re constantly anticipating that, even though it’s not necessarily true.

The list, I feel, is like a leech draining it all of spontaneity. Without the risk of forgetting too easily or remembering too well, the passion’s half its worth. The night is placed within your major plan, I can almost see it inscribed on that sheet. There is this looming vision of the adventure turning into a number on a scrap of paper, too strongly reminiscent of a menu from a pizza place and that second before you order. A catalog of who, what, how, and not the haze of whatever happened.

Which is why I’m giving you that skeptical or, as you might see it, judging look. Your list has just annihilated our potential love affair and made you seem to me funny in your obsession of recording, cataloging, and so terribly missing the point.

*I wish to clarify that this is not addressed to the man I talked to that night. I don’t know him too well and also have no reason to criticize him personally. It’s the idea of the list that does not appeal to me.