Night Terrors

by Ashley Cardiff

  My identity as a tomboy was consistently reinforced and rewarded once junior high came around: other girls appeared jealous of the nonsexual attention I received from boys. Soon, I came to believe that having mostly male friends made me better. I’m not entirely sure how this certainty dominated my teen years so much; it had something to do with shame and disappointment at being a girl, though the actual sociological reasons behind this are a little too convoluted for me to chase after here. I’m sure I’d have a much greater understanding of that now had I been a women’s studies major, but I figure if you’re going to go into suffocating debt for a college education, you might as well learn something.

  Growing up, you encounter a lot of those callow girls who claim to have cool boy interests and go around saying provocative things like “I’m a misogynist” and “I don’t have female friends” and that women’s studies joke up there. What’s weird about that phenomenon is girls who go around boasting about how they have no female friends want you to think it’s because they have these robustly masculine brains and are too reasonable for the world of lady pettiness and are just super interesting and cool on almost manlike levels, but these women don’t realize they’re just advertising the fact that they’re cunts. Trying to distinguish yourself from other stupid women is just another strategy to seem more fuckable and, insofar as you are cultivating a persona to be more fuckable, you are engaged in the activity of every stupid, venal, petty, shallow, purse dog–toting woman in history from whom you are supposedly trying to distinguish yourself. This person was me.

  —

  By the time I got to college, my slowly cultivated isolation from my own gender was at the forefront of my ideas about myself; I proudly announced to anyone seemingly interested that I was a misogynist and a lot of men would hear that and nod really approvingly, as if to say, “Finally, a woman I can hate women with.” I thought this not only made me seem appealing because I was provocative and would say provocative things, but because I was trying to affect traditionally masculine qualities, like reasonableness and being annoyed by cupcakes and not watching romantic comedies. The irony lost on me, though, was that if you’re a woman congratulating yourself for being masculine, you are indeed participating in misogyny . . . by being the victim of it. Which totally defeats the purpose.

  Many women are instructed to see other women as rivals who can’t be trusted. However, one really unexpected twist of this social conditioning is others regard it as further reason to find women terrible: we talk about disagreements between women as catfights; we dismiss criticisms that women have of other women as symptoms of primitive envy; we view female friendship as a strategic, frivolous, volatile thing.

  Interestingly, women are capable of disliking each other for reasons other than superficiality and pettiness. Yes, every now and again a woman can be unlikeable for lack of intellect and integrity, and—miraculously—other women are able to claw themselves from their morass of vaginal jealousy, neurosis and poor self-esteem to recognize that. They can actually recognize that another woman sucks because she just does. For example, my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend is an idiot. This has nothing to do with feelings of inferiority or perceived competition; she’s actually an untalented moron. This should be totally fine to acknowledge—because she’s so terrible that it’s impossible not to—but she is thinner than me, which weakens my case. That’s why I’ve been on a diet; once I lose ten pounds, my derision for her is going to be completely unbiased.

  Even though I’m able to say she’s insufferable, I can still admit I’ve wasted a lot of my life cutting down others, especially women, to make myself feel better or appear more attractive. As a painfully awkward, insecure teenager uncomfortable with my female physiognomy, I dealt with my shame by blaming it on other women. Of course you’re going to resent good-looking, well-dressed, nice, hygienic ladies if you’ve spent most of your formative years worried your vagina smells like a duck pond. Or wet popcorn. Or a retirement center. Or gumbo seasoning.

  It all changed when one day, at a bar surrounded by male friends and after a lifetime of boasting that I had no female ones, someone made casual reference to this (“Well, Ashley, you don’t have any female friends”). Much to my surprise, I corrected him and explained that many of my oldest and most intimate friendships were with women, which was true. Although I’d always positioned myself as someone without female friends, the moment I heard someone say it back, it repulsed me. I insisted that my female friends were smart and interesting and funny (and shorter than me, mercifully) and that’s when I stopped pretending they didn’t exist to make men like me more.

  This is also when I kind of realized that everyone just needs to calm down and stop fretting that they’re not enough. There’s no point in pretending to be something you’re not, or throwing your female friends under the bus, or abusing your body to correspond to the tastes of some abstract person, or doing anything false because you want potential partners to view you as very special. When you calm down, someone will love you . . . because you’re not horrible. They’ll love you and your blue veins and your wonky eyebrow and your gross feet and your probably very normal-smelling genitals.

  —

  Or, you could just keep chugging along, being terrible. The only problem with that is if everyone sits back and becomes content with being shitty then we end up with a shitty world. Imagine that, a world where no one tried to be good: everyone has little yappy dogs they don’t pick up after, bread is always stale, no one ever dunks a basketball or opens doors for anyone else, Michael Jackson would never have moonwalked (or made Off the Wall!), while all songs are about how hard it is to be famous and we listen to them on Zunes.

  Unfortunately, telling people not to be shitty is kind of the problem, too. To my mind the solution is this: better oneself where possible, but don’t marginalize others for failing to do the same. That’s it. Try especially hard not to shame or judge people for their sexual proclivities even though adult babies are still extremely unsettling and I don’t know if I can get past it because I’m just not a saint.

  Then again, sex has become so overemphasized that maybe the only way we’ll improve as a species is if we all agree to put a moratorium on fucking and go off and read books and learn important shit and know about history and stop looking at people blankly when politics come up and maybe cultivate some actual ideas about our lives and go to museums and refrain from taking cell phone pictures of the art. Maybe then people will start having legitimate thoughts and will create stuff and then everyone will actually be better and smarter and we’ll be just like the ancient Greeks, who never had sex under any circumstances and just sat around thinking important thoughts and that’s why they went extinct, which is what The Iliad is about.

  It’s not completely our fault. Sex is everywhere and unavoidable—from the moment we hit puberty (or a little before, thanks to those fucked up dreams about Prince I kept having) we start assembling a collection of facts of what we think we know about sex. We learn about sex from strangers, who never have our best interests in mind (hence the appeal of “fucking in Paris”). We learn about sex from our peers (hence “shitting out your vagina”). We learn about sex from the the Internet (hence “SpaghettiOs”). We learn about sex from candlelit love scenes in movies, from casual violence in mainstream porn, from hundreds of hours reading racy fan fiction on the Internet about Wolverine and Jean Grey and their passionate forbidden love—and all of those sources offer wildly different, variously unrealistic ideas about sex itself. We’re so inundated with the idea of sex’s all-consuming importance that a lot of people care more about just having it than making it good. This probably has something to do with why sex makes us so awful sometimes, which in turn leads to people having so much shame about it.

  —

  I had a friend who worked in a porn shop outside Chicago for a few years. By “shop,” I really mean porn Walmart: a lone concrete fortress along a highway,
a self-sustaining strip mall hunched over the asphalt, inviting perverts, weirdos and regular people who hadn’t figured out the Internet in its lawless early days. My friend—we’ll call him Henry—worked there five days a week and so pretty quickly became acquainted with the shop’s regulars. It had never really occurred to me that porn shops have regulars the way bars or restaurants do but it’s exactly the same. There were all kinds, having manifold kinks and social tics and skin conditions. One smelled overpoweringly of broccoli and rented titles only from the Dirty Debutantes series. Another was a handsome, clean-cut corporate lawyer exclusively interested in water sports. Another would rent a stack of a dozen titles in the morning and bring them all back that afternoon. Part of Henry’s job was disinfecting the DVD cases.

  The regular who most fascinates me was also the most mundane of the bunch: plain-faced, middle-aged, just beginning to bald, no style to speak of, average height. He was an unremarkable man in every way, the sort of person whom you have to occasionally be reminded of even if you’re talking to him. He was also one of the most polite customers; he kept to himself, never caused any trouble, never acted weird. Every single week, without fail, he would come in on Wednesday around eight p.m. and spend an hour in the store, walking through the aisles. He would often appear to be agonizing over what to rent, shuffling back and forth through different sections, placing a hand to his chin thoughtfully while he stood in front of walls of gang-bang videos and spring break narratives. The minutes would tick by and closing time would loom and his agitation would increase.

  Then, every single Wednesday, an hour or two after he arrived and right before closing, the Regular would come up to the front desk with a stack of five to eight titles (porn shop patrons seldom rent just one, I’ve also learned) and put them on the counter. Every Wednesday, the man would set down his DVDs and they would all be the same thing: chicks with dicks. Shemale Fiesta stuff.

  The highlight of Henry’s day, however, would come when this mild-mannered patron set down the DVDs, casually leaned on the counter and looked at him sideways, affecting a pained air of casual cool.

  Then, every Wednesday, the Regular would say, “Yeee-up. Tryin’ somethin’ new this week.”

  The first time it happened, Henry wanted to shrug and explain that people rented far weirder titles all the time, but he refrained. The third or fourth time it happened, Henry thought the Regular was joking. By the time Henry was approaching two years of employment at this enormous porn complex, he realized the Regular liked only shemale porn and was extremely embarrassed by it.

  In addition to being fascinated by someone who (seemingly) got off to one thing only, I was pretty saddened by this story. No one should have to go through life, Wednesday in and Wednesday out, being embarrassed by liking what he likes. Nobody should have to live out his whole existence thinking there’s something really awful about what turns him on, especially when the fact is there’s just nothing wrong with an adult male wanting to watch adult trans-women with male genitalia fuck each other. Frankly, a lifetime of nothing but sober missionary in the dark is more fetishistic.

  —

  There are a lot of ways to have healthy, fun, uninhibited, great sex with someone—too many for anyone to go around feeling embarrassed about what gets him or her off. Though the easiest approach is probably solid communication and some chemistry, everything else is completely unique to the people having it and no one will ever learn anything meaningful about sex from stupid silly books about sex (especially ones where sex is conspicuously absent).

  In other words: be madly in love in a monogamous relationship or have sex with dozens of strangers—have whatever kind of sex you want with adults who want to have sex with you—just don’t be dark about it. Don’t cheat; don’t lie; don’t shame people. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do, don’t stifle your own enjoyment for the sake of someone else and be safe. And have empathy and compassion. Which is a pretty earnest message, considering all those abortion jokes I made earlier.

  Besides, maybe those videos were really wholesome too, like the shemales were Red Cross nurses aiding hurricane disaster victims with the help of their secret penises and rations. You don’t know.

  BREEDING

  I definitely want to have kids. Unfortunately, you can’t be middle class and college educated without a swell of guilt whenever you consider breeding. You also can’t ever, under any circumstances, complain about being middle class and college educated, or things pertaining to it.

  Up until about age twenty-one, I hated babies. I’d see them at playgrounds, appendages sagging helplessly through legholes in swings. In their finery. I developed a reputation among friends for being rude to babies at neighboring tables in restaurants. When I was a teenager, I was at a Chinese restaurant with my father and going on about how a nearby baby looked like Winston Churchill, melting. The baby’s steward (presumably dad) stood up in an act of intimidation and my father had to smooth things over. Another time, I was at a chain steakhouse in a roadside strip mall in the desert surrounding Albuquerque and I saw this one baby: the back of its head was flat enough to roll out a pie crust. I learned later that this is usually caused by parental negligence and babies with flat heads have to wear corrective helmets so they can enter adulthood with normal, human-shaped heads. I knew another baby once, he had a ball pit.

  Babies, if you consider it, are good at one thing: becoming adults. Which isn’t that impressive, honestly. If you or I were given eighteen years to perform a single task, we’d probably succeed. If not, we’d be no better than infants. Besides simply getting older, they’re also able to run around naked with aplomb, they have weird undeveloped little bodies and they carry a sling of their own excrement wherever they go. Then, of course, they present legitimate problems, such as overpopulation, deforestation, global warming and refusing to skateboard even when I put them on the board.

  Moreover, nothing beats the sanctimony of new parents for pure, raging awfulness. Having waited tables for years, I can tell you that new parents are the worst people alive: nowhere but in the mind of a new parent is it acceptable to engage in adult activities (like dining) but bring along a small, fleshy symbol of destruction, one able to shriek for hours on end at frequencies human beings are genetically hardwired to abhor. People would bring their infants to the nice enough restaurant where I worked, and the infants would sit at the table and do nothing but throw food for the entire meal. Then they’d leave, and it never occurred to them once that restaurant staff are only supposed to pick up after guests within reason. When you’re a busy waiter, nothing breaks your balls worse than having to get down under a table on all fours and pick up Cheerios, fruit snacks and individual corn kernels scattered over an eight-foot radius.

  By far the worst thing that I have ever experienced at a restaurant—excepting the two old swingers who would come in and tell me my hands “smelled of oranges” and insist I go to their apartment for Pernod after my shift—occurred while I worked at this Asian fusion place in Maryland. It happened at an outdoor table directly in front of the restaurant, beside a giant window looking onto the dining room. Two young parents finished their meal, moved aside their dishes and changed their baby right there. Right on the table. Where people dine. Immediately beside other people dining. Unsurprisingly, the kinds of assholes who’d change a baby on a table in a crowded dining area are exactly the kind of selfish, awful, entitled, thoughtless people who’d finish, get up and leave the dirty diaper.

  —

  Right about age twenty-one, though, something in me turned. I started waving to babies on the street. I started asking people with babies if I could hold them. I started babysitting on weekends so I could hang out with babies, like some weird junkie who needed to be around bad smells and coloring books.

  It probably goes without saying that I was never the sort of girl who thought about her wedding. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Well, obviously ther
e kind of is (which is the party line again?). I don’t really give a shit about marriage, essentially; I think it’s a nice institution and obviously I think everyone should be able to do it if they want. I’m not against it, but I won’t seek it out either and I certainly never dreamed about the dress or location or cake or napkin rings or any of the details that would surely drive me insane if I were burdened with caring about them. I guess I regard marriage with the same congenial indifference that I feel toward modern art and classical music and memoirs written by twentysomethings who haven’t lived in any discernible interesting way. Having and raising children, however, seems great. If you can sweep the guilt under the rug.

  The guilt is immense. It is immeasurable. It is a vast sea of self-loathing at the very thought of bringing another selfish, consumptive monster into a dying world. It’s almost like a science fiction story, it’s so appalling.

  But! If you’re neurotic enough to be suffocated under this guilt, you’re also probably a pretty shrewd sophist. You work around it by reminding yourself of all the shitty people out there who are breeding with abandon, just spilling babies from their distended guts as they heave back giant sodas during marathons of competition-based reality television. These people don’t consider the overwhelming consequences of rapid population growth, of diminishing land, of finite resources. It’s our duty, as the reasonable, the decent and the competent, to balance them out.

  —

  Since I’m not a respectable baby-having age—well, the modern equivalent of that; I’m actually pretty past my prime in terms of pure biological function—this penultimate story isn’t about me. It’s also a much, much better story about having children than I’ll ever have, unless in a few years I discover my womb is made of hummingbirds able to breathe in blood or something. Obviously that couldn’t be topped.