My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

  In 1970, the laws of the United States freely discriminated against women. From infancy to retirement, from Maine to Hawaii, the codes of American law treated women as fundamentally different from men, and it was all perfectly constitutional. Over the course of eight years, that changed, and while millions of women contributed to the social change that powered that revolution, the immediate technical work of making women in this country legally equal to men was disproportionately done by a small woman from Brooklyn whose friends call her “Kiki,” but whom we should probably call Ruth.

  But before we go any further than that, we need to establish that Ruth Bader Ginsburg does not sound like a cartoon mouse. She sounds like a furrier’s daughter from Brooklyn who’s trying to sound like a fancy lady. She sounds like a girl from the city who went to one of the two Ivy League schools that admitted women and didn’t have restrictive quotas on Jewish students. Mostly, she sounds like a person who knows exactly what she wants to say at all times.

  She was not always this. When she started at Harvard Law School, the dean invited the nine women in the 1L class to his home. He asked them why they deserved a spot that could have gone to a man. Ginsburg, flustered, stood up to answer and dropped an ashtray on the ground. After cleaning it up, she said she was in law school to understand her future husband’s career better. Ruth was not always brave and correct; there was a time when she hid.

  She hid in school. When her husband graduated a year before her and took a job in New York, she asked Harvard to let her finish her classes at Columbia and still get a Harvard degree. She was ranked first in her class. Harvard refused. She didn’t make a stink; she put her head down and accepted her fate and graduated with a degree from Columbia. She was first in her class there, too.

  She hid in her work. When she graduated from law school, she couldn’t get a job at any firm, so she did academic work, the tiniest, most niche, most nitpicky thing she could find, because that’s the only place a woman would be able to survive, right? She studied comparative civil procedure, with an emphasis on Swedish civil procedure. It’s the closest she could come to being a librarian without just being a law librarian.

  Then, one day, Ruth was in a courtroom in Sweden doing research for a book she was writing. The judge came in, and the judge was eight months pregnant. Kiki hadn’t known that could happen; she had never imagined a pregnant woman being in a courtroom, let alone running a courtroom. She realized those tiny ways she was defining herself out of professional importance without even realizing it.

  She came back and taught at Rutgers. She learned that the male faculty members doing the same job she was were making significantly more money. She and the other female faculty asked for raises and, when they didn’t get them, went on strike. Female students saw this young female professor getting militant about feminist issues and asked her to teach a class on gender in the law. Ginsburg realized there was no book that addressed gender issues in the law. No one thought of the disparate treatment of women as an issue, just as a fact.

  Then, in 1970, the ACLU asked her to head their women’s rights program, and she took the job and had one clear goal. In 1970, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not include women. The amendment was written in the wake of the Civil War and was clearly intended to protect freed slaves from discrimination. When it was written, women were not allowed to vote, hold office, create contracts, or own property. The law that made people equal in the United States didn’t think women were people. Ruth was going to change that.

  It wouldn’t be the first time that law was changed. For eighty years, the Equal Protection Clause was considered to allow for “separate but equal” treatment of the races through Jim Crow laws. Starting in the 1930s, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had used a highly organized, targeted strategy of litigation to challenge “separate but equal” in practice, then as an entire concept. Ruth was going to try to do the same thing, but for a group of people the law pretty clearly wasn’t intended to protect. She studied the work that NAACP attorneys like Thurgood Marshall and Constance Baker Motley had done to fight racial discrimination, and she used it as the framework for an attack on gender discrimination.

  Between 1973 and 1979, Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued six cases before the Supreme Court. In six years, in six cases, she changed America. When she was done, legally discriminating on the basis of gender was all but illegal. She took a constitution written by men who kept some women as figurative property and some as literal property, and she forced it to evolve to embrace people it didn’t imagine. That’s why you should love Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  There are audio recordings of her oral arguments. I listen to them sometimes. The first case she had before the Supreme Court, Reed v. Reed,13 she didn’t even argue, she just wrote a brief. She won. Then came Frontiero v. Richardson,14 and she showed up at the Supreme Court for the first time. The case was in the afternoon, and she didn’t eat all day long because she was scared she might vomit in the Supreme Court. She argued only after a male co-counsel made the bulk of the argument, and she was tentative and overly cautious. She didn’t believe in herself. She won.

  By the time Kahn v. Shevin15 came along, she knew what she was doing. She was confident, and she was aggressive in that Supreme Court chamber. She had every answer before the justices asked the question. The justices, all men, didn’t care for it. This was her single loss at the Supreme Court.

  But Ginsburg is about results, and she learned from that setback. In her remaining appearances before the court, Edwards v. Healy,16 Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld,17Califano v. Goldfarb,18 and Duren v. Missouri,19 she was resplendent. Confident, precise in her wording, and constantly positioning the questions to make it impossible for the justices to find gender discrimination benign. But she was deferential. She never let them feel threatened. She won all of them.

  You may say, “She shouldn’t have to be deferential.” She shouldn’t. But she did. She needed results, so she did what it took to get them, and the law evolved. After staring down Ruth Bader Ginsburg six times, the Supreme Court could no longer define women as second-class citizens because they’d been so resoundingly reminded that this woman was a sharper legal mind than any of them.

  Eventually, years later, Ruth would join the court, and when that court saw its first major gender discrimination case with Ginsburg as a member, U.S. v. Virginia,20 Justice Stevens, the ranking justice, tapped Ruth to write the decision. She got to write the gender equal protection decision she’d been asking for all those years.

  That’s why you should love Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

  You should listen to those recordings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s oral arguments. Her voice is full of clarity, understanding, authority, and urgency. She knows what she needs, and she’s fighting for it with every fiber of her being. I like listening to the cases because most of them have a good outcome that aligns with my politics and all that bullshit, but mostly, I listen because she is powerful. Powerful like Eddie Murphy in Delirious. She’s casting spells that changed America.

  Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have looked at the U.S. Constitution as a dead document. As a pile of chains intended to bind black Americans, Native Americans, women, and others into ignominy and slavery. She would have been right. She could have looked at a Fourteenth Amendment that no one thought protected her and agreed. She didn’t. She saw the potential in the rules and ideals that our nation’s founders so imperfectly built into the governing documents of the country. She imagined herself into the Constitution, then she made it real.

  A lot of people say the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are lies. I agree with them. Ideas like equal protection, freedom of speech, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have never been real. I also think the best thing about America is its lies. Like a declaration of intention, like a New Year’s resolution, those lies don’t describe the country as it is; they contemplate a future of what we wish could be. Those lies are words after words after words, and they ar
e powerful.

  So in my much lowlier, much lesser, much more frivolous situation, I could dismiss Eddie Murphy as a bigot and a homophobe. I could say stand-up comedy doesn’t want me and has never needed me. I could accept that many spells have been cast in this world of comedy to ensure that I am always the object of a joke, not a subject. But I won’t.

  Of all the things Eddie Murphy taught me, the power of my own perspective is the most important. The substance of his material may be dehumanizing to me, but the structures he used taught me to liberate myself from other people’s narratives. When Margaret Cho got her first comedy special in 1994, she came onstage in a leather suit, just like Eddie Murphy. His material may have been grossly misogynistic, homophobic, and dehumanizing to Asians. The Notorious C.H.O. didn’t care about that. She used the powers she learned from Eddie Murphy—perspective, swagger, and leather suits—to weave her female, Asian, queer narrative into stand-up. I learned that power from her.

  Gay men are terrified of our own perspective. We love perspective, other people’s perspectives, rarely our own. We write for other people, we act and use other people’s words, we lip-synch and use other people’s voices. We fear using our own perspective because it endangers us. It lays our desires and weaknesses bare. Camouflage is our defense. But defense isn’t enough. It is survival, nothing more. It is managing your status as an object. Perspective is power.

  That’s why I will continue to love Eddie Murphy: Delirious, and why I will continue to do stand-up comedy. To keep casting spells, to use the tools I learned from Eddie Murphy and Margaret Atwood and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to add my perspective to this art form, and maybe teach straight people to look through my eyes on occasion. I’m not doing it because it’s noble. I’m doing it because it’s fun. I’m doing it because I’ve wanted since childhood to feel the kind of confidence and certainty that Eddie Murphy slathered across that stage, the kind of precision and acuity Ginsburg had behind that podium at the Supreme Court. I’m doing it because I’ve always wanted to be a hero, and a hero’s got to have a monster to fight.

  * * *

  1. Okay, Carlin’s joke about global warming not being real kept me skeptical on the subject for far longer than is defensible.

  2. Black.

  3. In the 1990s, a human being looked at your ID when you entered the campus library, not some robot or automated eye. Why does no one ever talk about the deleterious effect of automation on the careers of state college students with a ten-hour-a-week work-study requirement?

  4. My parents, both from Arkansas, have a deep cultural aversion to wine. My father’s family, Baptists, do not drink at all. My mother’s family, a mix of Jews and alcoholic bootleggers, drink heavily. More heavily than probably any Jews you’ve ever experienced unless you knew Amy Winehouse during the end times. They drink only beer and hard liquor. I have tried really hard to find some academic work explaining the forces that so distanced my ancestors from wine culture, but all I end up finding are websites for shitty wineries in southern Missouri.

  5. This is a neighborhood of San Francisco which is neither nice nor not nice.

  6. The audience was nine aspiring stand-up comedians and a woman trying to drink her coffee.

  7. The scene was 80-plus percent male comics, and the paradigm of “person whose life is consumed by stand-up” was uniformly male in the popular imagination of the scene.

  8. Look, the lady’s great in a lot of ways. Let’s not behave as though people are only heroes or villains. Life is complex.

  9. For your records, here is the content of the first set I performed in my ongoing comedy career. Please note the complete absence of setups or punch lines.

  Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Guy Branum. Before I begin, I’d just like to say that I’m not here to entertain you; I’m not here for any sense of self-actualization. I’m here because I need to keep my personal monologue skills honed in case I’m ever on a reality television program.

  Now, I know you’re probably saying to yourself, “Guy, if the skill you’re looking to practice is simply talking about yourself incessantly in the fashion of a mid-nineties Real World cast member . . . Isn’t that what coffee dates are for?”

  Tragically, I am allergic to boring, which makes dating most people quite difficult.

  I’ve come to the opinion that between digital cable and online pornography, it’s possible that we, as a species, have simply evolved past dating. Scoff if you will, but the three p.m. showing of Private Benjamin on the USA Network is never going to tell me it finds me really interesting but just isn’t attracted to me.

  It’s difficult, try as I might, to wean myself from the milky teat of American popular culture; I just can’t break the cycle of dependence. I’ll spend weeks, months only watching independent films, only having sex with actual human beings, then BAM, I spend nine hours watching VH1 count down the hundred most sextastic moments in music video history. J-Lo, oh, how I missed you.

  I was still swept up in the . . . mediocrity of it all when three attractive women came on the screen and apprised me of the fact that I may not be ready for that “jelly.” I was confused but concerned. Ladies and gentlemen, what if I’m not ready for that jelly? What if their vibe is too vibalicious for AMERICA?

  I immediately started researching the subject and discovered that the women in question were actually the singing group Destiny’s Child, which is apparently French for En Vogue.

  I then decided that I needed to go down to my local Target, buy the Survivor CD, and confront them in one single, climactic, dare I say Tolkienesque battle. This did not occur, as Destiny’s Child is simply a bad pop group and not a dark lord of Mordor.

  Luckily, I enjoy bad pop, so I continued to listen to the CD as I went about my errands. . . . Then I heard the question: “Kelly, can you handle this?” I knew the answer was “No.” “Michelle, can you handle this?” Slightly better chance? Again, probably not. “Beyoncé, can you handle this?” And I knew, ladies and gentlemen, with a certainty rare in this crazy, mixed-up world, that if anyone could handle those fine mocha asses, it was Beyoncé. Simultaneously, somehow, I BECAME Beyoncé: my coppery-gold extensions flowing in the wind-machine-provided breeze, two entirely disposable backup singers by my side . . . and an ass more powerful than God MYself.

  Then I realized I was frightening the other shoppers at Trader Joe’s, so I stopped listening to Destiny’s Child.

  10. Eventually, I was there for one of those nights. Mr. Williams stood politely in the back with his son Zak, and watched every comic on the list. At the end, he got up and did a frenetic forty-five minutes of workout material. It was exactly what you’d expect from him. He did take a moment to talk about a few of the comics from the evening, and he said of me, “I never knew Jesse Ventura and Liza Minnelli had a child.” It felt pretty good.

  11. Audience control, pressure for punch lines, clarity of thought.

  12. Hot people.

  13. 404 U.S. 71 (1971): Idaho law presumed that, all things being equal, courts should prefer that men act as executors for the estates of the deceased. Teenager Richard Lynn Reed killed himself while in the abusive custody of his father. Both his father and mother applied to be executors, and the state was forced to prefer the father by law. Sally Reed challenged on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  14. 411 U.S. 677 (1973): Male Air Force officers were allowed to claim their wives as dependents for purposes of housing benefits, but female officers were allowed to only if they contributed over half of their husband’s support. Sharron Frontiero challenged on behalf of her husband, Joseph.

  15. 416 U.S. 351 (1974): Florida gave certain property tax deductions to widows that were not granted to widowers. Kahn, a widower, challenged.

  16. 421 U.S. 722 (1974): Challenging Louisiana’s presumptive exclusion of women from jury pools.

  17. 420 U.S. 636 (1975): Social security provided additional support to
widows who did not work because they provided care to dependent children, but not to widowers who did the same. Stephen Wiesenfeld, a freelance computer engineer, was primarily supported by his wife. When his wife died in labor, Wiesenfeld continued with his plan to be a stay-at-home dad and filed for survivor childcare benefits. He was refused.

  18. 430 U.S. 199 (1977): Surviving widows were allowed to apply for survivor’s social security benefits for a deceased husband, but widowers were allowed to apply only if they met a means test for dependency. Widower Leon Goldfarb challenged.

  19. 439 U.S. 357 (1979): Challenging Missouri’s law that offered women an automatic exemption from jury pools.

  20. 518 U.S. 515 (1996): Challenging the Virginia Military Academy’s male-only admissions policy.

  THREE WOMEN AND A MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION

  IN THE EARLIEST DAYS of 2004, I wanted a thing more intensely than I had ever wanted a thing before, more intensely than I have wanted a thing since. Impossible intangibles that I have desired—to be beautiful, to be immortal, perfect abs, the complete spiritual love of 2009 Chris Pine, telekinetic powers—however impossible these things are and however much I have futilely hoped for them, none was as deep as the longing of 2004.

  Let us step back to the middle of 2003. Two new comics had shown up on the San Francisco scene. They were attractive young women, so all the male comics descended upon them like hyenas on an impala carcass. I intervened and graciously extended an offering of my support and guidance to these callow new comedians. They gently humored me for a bit and then explained that they were experienced Los Angeles comedians who’d moved up to San Francisco to work for a small cable network. I, obviously, felt like an idiot.