Sitting Pretty

by Rebekah Taussig

  One of the boyfriends asks, “If there was one thing you really wish men understood about this, what would it be?”

  Grace is quick to answer. “The thing men don’t understand is—this happens all the time.” The other women nod vigorously. “Every single woman I know could tell you countless stories just like these. Seriously, ask any woman.”

  “Mmm,” I affirm, the only woman in the circle who hasn’t added a story to the collection.

  And just like that, I’m eight-year-old Rebekah at the sleepover. The distance I feel between Them and Me isn’t intentional, and it isn’t just a result of staircases and narrow doorways to inaccessible bathrooms—it’s so much more complicated than overt hostility or tangible practicality.

  I know what it’s like to be yelled at across a parking lot, but my stories don’t seem to match with these catcalling anecdotes. If I were to tell my version of a man hollering at me—frantically yelling “DON’T FALL!” across a parking lot—the group would droop or scoff or laugh at the absurdity. They might go quiet, or ask questions, or even try to understand, but the circle of solidarity would disappear. Because this is a different conversation. It doesn’t seem to fit here. And I don’t want to disrupt this cathartic, healing moment they seem to be having.

  Micah and I don’t stay long at the party. Eventually I have to pee (see: mojitos), and I’m tired. As we drive away from the pretty loft, I swat away a painful, familiar question: Do I belong? I mean, in the fullest sense—do I fit in the circle of Women?

  I know, what a silly question. Plenty of signs point toward “yes,” right? Like, I use “she” and “her” pronouns. I express myself with props and gestures considered traditionally feminine (like dresses and mascara, crossing my legs and playing with my hair). I nursed my baby dolls when I was little and continued to play with dolls until I was worried my friends would find out (and even then, I kept putting them on my birthday wish list). But when it comes to fitting in with the group? Sharing the memories and feelings and quintessential plights that are said to belong to all women? The fears and joys that bind “us women” together? I often don’t relate.

  The representative Woman of the Twenty-First Century is tired of being sexually objectified and confined to a few narrow roles. She doesn’t want the world assuming she’s here only to become a man’s wife and have his babies. She wants options and her own storylines and every variety of autonomy and independence and equal pay! I want all of this, too. And also.

  I remember my parents’ constant battle to keep my sister in “modest” clothes, warning her that she didn’t know “how boys look at girls.” But they didn’t really worry about my wardrobe. I remember going shopping and admiring her body in the dressing room. The shape of her hips in a silky dress or her tiny waist taking up so little space between her crop top and the top of her jeans. I got it. My body didn’t tempt like hers or Jennifer Aniston’s or the magazine models taped to the inside of boys’ lockers. It didn’t need to be covered to avoid tantalizing. I didn’t have to worry about being modest. Why didn’t that feel like freedom?

  I remember the older guy at the bookstore approaching me and my sister. “Excuse me,” he said, looking at her, “I just can’t help but say, you really should be a model. You’re so thin, just stunning.” My gentle and exquisite sister, already well-acquainted with the male gaze at the age of sixteen, tried to deflect. “I think Bekah should be a model!” she said, stroking my hair. “She’s stunning.” I looked away. At the age of fourteen, I already knew what was coming next. The guy wasn’t deterred. “No, you’re thinner. You’re just gorgeous.” (I had to dig up my angsty teenage diary to fact-check this memory. I thought time had surely exaggerated the exchange. Turns out, the year 2000 had bold creeps, too.) Did I wish that man had aimed his attention at me? Not exactly. Did I cherish my escape from his attention? I didn’t. Did I envy his assessment of my sister? Absolutely. What does that mean?

  I remember sitting around a campfire at age fifteen with Sam, his brother, and the girl they both had a crush on. I’d grown my hair out long, because I’d heard Sam liked long hair. The girl had her guitar resting on her thigh, and she sang song after song at the bidding of the boys. The only song I remember is “Kiss Me” by Sixpence None the Richer. When she finished, she turned to me and said, “You know that feeling—when a boy looks at you, and you just know he wants to kiss you?” I stared back with a goofy grin. “No,” I said with a breathy giggle in front of the girl with the guitar and the two boys I was certain wanted to kiss her. I laughed, I think, because it felt better than pausing over the embarrassing fact she’d conjured into the circle—apparently, I was the only girl who didn’t know the look of a boy who wants to kiss her.

  As I’ve gotten older, more and more of the women in my life have transformed into mothers. I have two sisters and three sisters-in-law who each have between three and seven children. (Yeah, it’s a whole thing—Taussigs and their babies.) When my sisters talk about fighting morning sickness, whether to Pitocin or not to Pitocin, Ergobaby versus Babybjörn, weaning and baby weight, I find myself relating more to my twelve-year-old nephew and his dramatic retelling of seeing a coyote in his backyard last night than the women around me.

  For a long time, I’ve said I don’t want kids, but the more complicated truth is, I don’t know whether I can have kids; I can’t trace where my desires end and my coping mechanisms begin. When women have conversations about pregnancy, choice is so often at the center, as it should be. Choice is everything. I also don’t know how to begin to untangle the relationship between me, motherhood, and choice. Just how much of my childlessness comes down to something as intentional, precise, and definitive as a Yes or No choice? With the exception of nursing my baby dolls when I was a kid, I’ve never been able to picture myself as a mother. But is that because the examples of disabled mothers I’ve seen in my life have been few and recent? Or am I really not a very maternal person? I’ve never been with someone I’d want to parent with before Micah, but even if I can and we do (which feels pretty extraterrestrial at this point), my experience will be different from that of the women I know—it will exist outside the picture of pregnancy and labor and mothering that’s somehow touted as “standard.” My choices will be of a different set.

  To add to it all, there will be those who believe I’m not fit to be a parent as soon as they see my wheelchair, and just like people assume Micah is my caregiver or my sibling but rarely my partner, there will be those who don’t believe my children are my own. There are hundreds of other details I don’t know how to anticipate, because the women in my life have not been down this particular road. I love that my sisters have allowed me in on this part of their stories, but my body is always telling such different stories, and there doesn’t seem to be any obvious place for them in the canon.

  My perception of the certified picture of Womanhood and all the experiences, pains, and mile markers it entails doesn’t just grow from personal conversations with friends and sisters. The wild world of social media has done amazing work to bring women together, and thanks to algorithms and momentum, it also manages to highlight universal experiences—or so we think.

  Something as small and powerful as the unifying battle cry #StopTellingWomenToSmile highlights a gap between my experience and that of many nondisabled women. Countless women are rightfully fed up with men who tell them to smile, but what does it mean that I can’t think of a single time a man has ever told me to smile? I guess no one expects a disabled woman to smile? They see a wheelchair and anticipate drooping shoulders. A smile on a disabled woman is a feat, a wild victory, a triumph despite. When I smile, people stop to say, “Your smile is just beautiful.” They applaud. They shed tiny ableist teardrops from the corners of their eyes, so moved by any glimmer of happiness they see from me. But my smile isn’t some kind of tremendous accomplishment, some desperate, victorious climb to the top of a mountain. Sometimes it’s just a video of a cat. Riding a robot vacuum. Wearing a shark cos
tume.

  I have one memory of being catcalled. One dusky evening on my way to a bar with a few friends, I pushed myself along the sidewalk in my turquoise dress with the lace collar and gray cowboy boots, and a drunk guy hollered at me from a block away on the main drag of my college town, “You’re the hottest girl in a wheelchair I’ve ever seen!” I laughed as I kept rolling, but my friends were indignant. “Did he really just say that?” (In retrospect, I’m not sure whether they were annoyed that he catcalled me in general or whether they were upset because he’d added the wheelchair caveat to his call. Could they be mad about both? We didn’t unpack it.) But if I’m being real with you? In the secret corners of my heart, I treasured the validation that I too had been accosted with some form of sexual objectification in the street. Even if it had been shrouded in a disability caveat. (So much so that, apparently, I felt drawn to pick that very same dress for my first date with Micah. I mean, I’m just piecing this together for the first time, but did catcalling drunk guy help me make one of the most important clothing decisions of my life?! What do we do with that??) Honest to god, though, I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought fondly of that weird, drunken shout-out on the street.

  I feel guilty even typing out this secret, because I don’t want some misogynist using it as justification for future catcalls. (Not that I imagine a large population of misogynists will ever pick up this book, let alone make it to this chapter. But still! Imagine the one! Dear sole misogynist reading this book: you do not have permission to use my secret memory as justification for hollering at anyone in the street.)

  My experience just doesn’t match up with those I so often see touted as the Experiences of Women. In fact, there’s this weird way in which they can seem to sit head to head, occupying opposing force fields. When I move down a street or through a store or post something online, I’m not worried that men will sexually objectify me, because I’m used to my sexuality being automatically erased, ignored, and denied by default. Like Parks and Rec’s “Sewage Joe” expresses so beautifully as he shares his low-bar standards for a love interest: “She can’t be in a wheelchair, no cane, no gray hair.” Old people and mobility-aid users are Sewage Joe’s only discards, bodies that can’t tempt even his filthy palate. (Yes, there are those few who fetishize the paralyzed female body. I’ve talked to some and ignored a lot of them in my DMs. I’ve found this variety of fetishization to be wrapped up in a lot of shame and confusion, and, in my experience, it’s almost always relegated to the shielded secrecy of anonymous online spaces.) Current social norms seem to put me in the same category as grandmas—definitely off-limits for fucking but available to boost your Good Person points whenever you offer to carry their groceries.

  It’s not that I’ve never been afraid of men. Once when I was hanging out with a guy at his house late at night, his vibe changed abruptly, and I realized I wouldn’t be able to get out and down the front steps without his help—my mind started racing—What will I do if he decides he doesn’t want me to leave? In grad school, I started carrying pepper spray in my purse after the attention from a guy in my program started to feel less flattering and more alarming. I know what it’s like to be on alert around men, it’s just that, generally, when I’m out and about in the world—making my way home after a late dinner or finding my car after a movie—my mind is wrapped up in other, pressing concerns. When I’m moving down a street alone at night, I’m usually thinking about whether or not there’s an accessible path to the restaurant or my car. What will I do if I encounter stairs I can’t get up? What if I get trapped somewhere? Do I have enough battery left in my phone to call someone for help? My brain is focused on keeping people from seeing me as helpless so they won’t approach me from behind and grab my handlebars or try to grab a wheel from me when I’m putting my chair in my car. I’ve been catcalled on the street only once, but I’ve been stuck without a ramp or approached with unsolicited offers to help countless times. I can’t bring myself to use an Uber when I’m alone because it’s too scary to have my wheelchair disassembled in a car with a stranger; the ease with which they could keep my mobility from me, the helplessness of not being able to run if I need to—I feel too vulnerable. I don’t have nightmares about men following me home, but one of my most recurring dreams involves being separated from my wheelchair. I’m left trying to navigate the world on my hands and knees—straining and frantic. I always wake up from this dream in a gasping sweat.

  I don’t know whether you can tell, but I’m having a hard time trying to pinpoint this intersection between Disabled and Woman. I find myself worrying that these questions will be received as an attempt to quiet or poke holes in or take away from the powerful collection of women’s stories already gathered. This is not what I’m trying to do. Listen to women! Street harassment is real and shitty! Stop assuming women are here for your gratification! I admire women and the work they’re doing to lift each other up. (Also, do you notice that I’m still talking about women like I’m not one of them? What is this?)

  Maybe the tender center of what I’m trying to express is this: there’s something disorienting about being both a Woman and Disabled. Because I can rationally agree that I am technically a part of this big group “Women.” My closest friends are almost all women. I shop in the women’s section of clothing stores. I usually find myself instinctually identifying with the women characters in storylines. Something like 86 percent of my followers on Instagram are women. And yet, when I see women represented, when women have the microphone, when women talk about being women—my grip on my role as a card-carrying Woman feels less secure. Like I realize I’ve been mingling at the wrong party all night (don’t mind me—I’m just going to quietly back out of the room before anyone notices).

  I can feel myself straining to fit into a constructed notion of what it actually means to be a woman—the verified version. Womanhood means enduring harassment, men staring at your boobs in doctors’ offices and bars, getting hit on by your male boss or the group of guys ordering drinks at your table, working twice as hard to get that promotion. Womanhood means getting married and/or having babies, or making the decision not to get married and/or have babies, or having your relatives constantly asking when you’re getting married and/or having babies.

  So what does it mean if men stare at my wheelchair, rather than my boobs, in public? What does it mean if my biggest employment concerns are being hired at all, knowing how to disclose my body’s needs, asking for accommodations, or sacrificing my health to stay in a job just because it gets me good health insurance? If the default assumption is that, of course, no one wants to marry a disabled girl? If the choice to have or not have babies is infinitely more complicated than simply deciding what I want? If no one dares to ask me when I’m having babies, because they assume I can’t conceive or won’t be able to parent or shouldn’t reproduce? Where does my disabled body fit into this narrative about Women? I wonder, does my disability swallow my womanhood? When people look at me, is my disability so loud and alienating that my womanhood is unrecognizable? And, a much more pressing question, Why does it matter?

  In January 2017, women gathered under the mantle of feminism in cities all over the world to protest the inauguration of the “pussy-grabbing” Donald Trump to the office of US president. Right now, these organized marches have been recorded as the largest single-day protest in US history. I attended the Kansas City chapter of this protest with a homemade T-shirt and sign that said “Women’s Rights, Disability Rights, HUMAN RIGHTS.” (Everything I wanted to say took at least three hundred words and didn’t look great on a poster. The words “Rights,” “Women,” “Disability,” and “HUMAN” were about as simple as I could get.) Micah and I and two friends walked to the march. He helped me navigate the curbs and grass. There was an accessible port-a-potty that I was both grateful for and loath to use. There were pink pussy hats, “I’m With Her” signs, “Super Callous Fascist Racist Extra Braggadocios” signs, and “Love Is Love, Black Lives Matter,
Climate Change Is Real, Immigrants Make America Great, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights” signs. I didn’t see any other posters about disability or other women using mobility aids. (Only in retrospect do I consider how many disabled women protested from home simply because of limited access.)

  I left the march feeling love for every human who showed up. I felt amazed by the strength and grit of women, the stunning resistance of women, the boisterous defiance of women.

  I also felt embarrassed by my sign. Isn’t that crushing? I felt silly for trying to force disability into a conversation where it clearly seemed not to belong.

  I think the term we’d use for this is “internalized ableism”—the act of adopting the very ideology, absorbing the precise disdain, practicing the same disregard that is already harming me. It strikes me as a rather clinical description for such an intimate wound.

  * * *

  In the middle of writing this chapter and wrestling with the intersection of disability, womanhood, and feminism, I have dinner with two of my favorite women. Alyssa and Maren walked with me and Micah to that march in 2017, and last year they officiated at our wedding ceremony. Beautifully. In the most classy-ass jumpsuits. On this particular summer night, we sit around the table eating gooey nachos. We talk about Einstein’s brain and the hive minds of Navy Seals, and after the second round of margaritas, Alyssa says, “How’s the writing going?”

  I immediately drop my forehead to the table and groan. “It’s fiiiiiiiine.”

  “Oh, okay, not the right question.” She laughs.

  “I’m trying to come up with something worthwhile to say about being a disabled woman and feminism, and I have nothing! I mean, bleh. Who cares?”

  They laugh, which is what I want, but they also don’t agree, which surprises me. And, to make things very meta, I find myself surprised by my surprise. Did I really expect them to confirm that disabled women don’t have a place in feminism? Maybe a deep dark part of me did.