by Jan Clausen
There were no such parables in my early training. I was never told that my most important task in life was to keep concealed what lived between my legs. Unlike the West Indian child in Jamaica Kincaid’s wonderful story “Girl,” I received no warnings against impending sluthood. I escaped the Catholic lessons on sexual morality that Chicana poet and playwright Cherríe Moraga, in her essay “A Long Line of Vendidas,” sums up in the chilling phrase “inocencia meant dying rather than being fucked.” I recall no equivalent to the harsh commands I sometimes hear in the subway—“Pull your skirt down!” “Keep your legs together!”—though I grew up in a skirt-wearing culture that forbade pants (or “slacks,” as my mother called them; “changing into slacks” signified great informality) for girls in public school classrooms.
I don’t mean to suggest that these parallel examples reflect precisely identical concerns. The friend who told the story of the modest seamstress believes that Orthodox Jewish anxieties about exposed female flesh have to do with what is assumed to be women’s strong erotic nature; in the Mexican Catholic tradition evoked by Moraga, sex appears as an external threat, a masculine force that corrupts the woman who sins by failing to preserve her virginal purity. A comparative study of various societies’ preoccupations with women’s modesty would no doubt prove as fascinating for the significant variations revealed as for the many parallels that signal control of the female body as an especially potent cross-cultural theme.
The fact that I heard neither parables nor detailed instructions concerning the modesty appropriate to my gender does not mean that my parents or my people lacked convictions on the subject. On the contrary, it indicates not only the sort of child I was, preternaturally quick to pick up wordless clues, but also something telling about my social station. We weren’t the kind of people who had to talk about it: that was crucial to the lesson I was learning. Unlike the girl in Kincaid’s story, for example, I had not been branded by histories of slavery and the racist legends invented to justify it as oversexed and highly available, a slut until proven otherwise. I was born a nice girl, and would have to work damn hard if I aspired to anything better.
How ironic that my Unitarian Sunday school training in global understanding actually offered me an account of my own acculturation process—though without, of course, ever really illuminating the peculiarity of our local folkways. I can still hear the quavery grandmother’s voice intoning, No, no, that is not the Hopi Way, on a record set entitled Ways of Mankind, which the fellowship’s Religious Education Committee had provided for my consumption, along with grape juice and soda crackers, while most of the grown-ups gathered on folding chairs to hash over the theology of Tibetan Buddhism, the strategy behind Adlai Stevenson’s campaign, or the sinister implications of the H-bomb.
Once I could read fluently, I often dipped into Dr. Spock, deriving a strange mixture of reassurance and titillation from learning about myself and my normal development. (Normal was a key word for the doctor, right up there with wholesome and the disastrous maladjusted.) Of course the normal is thought to be natural, unfolding inevitably unless interfered with, but in retrospect the whole process appears almost dizzyingly convoluted: Mother consulting Spock on how to produce healthy offspring (“You can say, for instance, ‘Mother doesn’t want you to do that again,’ or ‘That isn’t polite,’ and shoo the children out to some other activity. That’s usually enough to stop sex play for a long time in normal children”); then I (in truth too advanced in my verbal skills not to stir some unease about my normality) reading him for insight into who and what I was, and thereby becoming even more aware of the calculation that attended my production. Might my mother then have resorted once again to the book to reassure herself that my curiosity was wholesome, or at least not indicative of incipient maladjustment? Where would it end?
In a further irony, Spock’s detailed advice about how to manage children’s bodies without acknowledging the disturbing intensity of certain fleshly events served me as my first commercial pornography. I particularly savored the sections on taking a rectal temperature, giving an enema, and the changes of puberty: “When a girl is on the threshold of womanhood, it’s good for her to be looking forward to it happily, not feeling scared or resentful. The best thing to emphasize about menstruation is that the uterus is being prepared for the time she will be a mother.” I would characterize this passage now as a happy pornography of order: the forces of cheerful common sense and vigorous matter-of-factness accomplish painlessly what previous ages imposed through ruthless force, forestalling sexual anarchy, promoting feminine submission, guiding adolescent libido toward the safe harbor of marriage. (Not even the “extensively revised and enlarged” 1957 edition, by the way, mentions homosexuality explicitly; “sissiness,” however, rates a cautionary note: “If a boy of 3 or 4 or 5 is avoiding boys or is regularly preferring to take the part of a mother or girl in house play, he is probably afraid of being a boy and needs child-guidance help.”) Order appealed to me powerfully in those years, and except when I was racked by fears of hell and death and mayhem, the doctor’s tale seemed plausible enough, coexisting comfortably with my own disorderly impulses.
At school, when I “twirled” on the metal bar at recess (you sat atop the bar with one leg crooked over it and flung your body forward, hanging on with both hands, hoping that your dress wouldn’t hike up too much as you made the dizzying circuit and returned to an upright position), I might hear a taunting “I see London, I see France. . .” from some of the other girls. (Twirling, by the way, was strictly a girls’ activity.) From this mockery I gleaned a notion of decorum that linked up to my mother’s care and modesty in dressing. It’s only now as I write about it that I fully appreciate the perversely brilliant cultural logic that mandates apparel designed to expose precisely what is deemed most in need of concealment: the hoyden’s panties, the lady’s underskirt (I used to enjoy a regular Reader’s Digest column called “Pardon, Your Slip Is Showing”), the Jewish heroine’s vagina. The perversity is heightened by the fact that the unreliable garment of course gets assigned to those whose genitals are deemed more private, more vulnerable, more scandalous when viewed. The logic lies in the far-reaching effects of the habits inculcated by this threat of exposure. If hoop skirts and corsets used to impose mechanical restraint on the movements of upper-class females, then the short cotton dresses in which I was reared were a comprehensive course in unconscious self-control and the importance of incessant self-monitoring, all focused on that portion of the body synonymous with sex.
“Private parts.” The tender leaf-fold of little girls’ pudenda, familiar to me above any part of the body, as though I’d grown up in a baby female nudist camp. My sisters’, or my own? What perspective would I have had on my own, back then when my body was as supple as thought? Even now, when I see a small boy’s genitals, they strike me as alien, as somehow rudimentary.
Did I really get a look at my father’s penis in the bathroom? Unlikely as it sounds, I seem to remember it.
Recently I attended an exhibit of traditional African art and was amazed to find female figures carved complete with pendant labia and plump clitorises. I realized I’d expected a conventional Barbie blank, maybe a piggy bank slit at best. (Dr. Spock again, being clever: “I heard of a little girl who complained to her mother, ‘But he’s so fancy and I’m so plain.’”) I felt oddly moved to think any sculptor would take the trouble.
Sex is something private. I have heard my mother say so, perhaps by way of sending a merciful signal that, appearances to the contrary, she does not deny the power of arousal or the importance of satisfaction. If I had to articulate the core message I received about eros, it would be this axiom (really a commandment). Sex is private holds the key to my impression that my parents thought their world might fall apart if something happened to call too much attention to matters they kept claiming were not so important anyway. (Mother, what does motherfucker mean?) Sex is private was the given, the a priori, the “No, no, that is
not the Clausen way” that, figuratively speaking, was forever in my ears. And, much as any such oracular utterance seems to call for an explanation, it would be futile to request one from those whose lives it guided. For exegesis might subvert its power, much as sex itself, a salutary force when confined to the silence of the marriage bed, becomes a horror when advertised, paraded, spread around.
I thought about this value of sexual privacy when I viewed The Gay Agenda, a slickly made Christian Right video that was massively distributed during the 1992 campaign leading up to passage of Colorado’s infamous Amendment 2, which prohibited gay civil rights legislation. The purported “agenda” is largely represented through highly selective coverage of Gay Pride marches in several cities. These visuals predictably focus on the most sexually flamboyant or transgressive participants—the S/M contingents, the simulated sex acts, the echt drag queens, the members of the North American Man Boy Love Association—every so often cutting away to shots of gay and lesbian parents with small children, who are presumably being subjected to the same barrage of sexual theater that is delivered to the viewer via careful collation of clips from events on two coasts. The variety, humor, political seriousness, and sheer anarchic fun of Gay Pride disappear; homosexuality is rendered as the one-dimensional threat of people who parade their sex in public.
My parents are religious and political liberals who would abhor this video’s homophobic message. Yet its insidious appeal to those who value sexual privacy seems to me designed to tap into a deep vein of social conservatism that many otherwise liberal or moderate people hold in common with those politically far to their right. Sex is private may imply the wish to guard something too precious (like “one’s deepest feelings”) to be publicly exposed, insofar as it is embraced as a personal preference by people whose desire is socially tolerated or encouraged, and who can therefore be presumed to have freely chosen to be circumspect about their erotic lives. But the historical and continuing role of the closet, of enforced privacy, gives lesbians and gay men a rather different perspective on the matter. Because “the love that dare not speak its name” has been so stigmatized, even liberal heterosexuals’ insistence on maintaining a sharp distinction between public and private spaces and confining erotic expression to the latter may seem tantamount to saying, “We acknowledge your right to do those disgusting things, but please don’t tell us about it.”
The ideal of privacy also works to keep straight women in line. The notion of sexual propriety I was raised with was not a double standard in quite the same sense in which “inocencia meant dying” could be said to be one, given that modesty and marital fidelity were expected of men, too. However, women clearly had more of a stake in these virtues; exposure of our sex could do lasting damage. We could lose our reputations, we could get pregnant. Our sex was who we were, men’s simply something they did.
I can see now, as I couldn’t when I first rebelled against it, the class and racial implications of our gendered circumspection. There was a strong sense that erotic display is “cheap,” that women like us lower themselves when they adopt the styles of self-advertisement sometimes resorted to by poorer and darker people. This reaction was less a recoil from sex per se than a way of marking off our refined version thereof. If we flaunted our charms in revealing clothing, sported bright colors and fanciful adornments, the distinction would fade and “we” would be as “they” are (the sort of girls unlikely to be chosen to bear the children of educated men). If too many of us slid down that slippery slope, became promiscuous or had babies out of wedlock, social boundaries themselves would blur—and then who would we be? Would we still know how to recognize ourselves? Would we still be nice girls when bad girls had been abolished?
My parents taught the importance of balance, of healthful moderation and well-roundedness (that odd American virtue). I was tutored as patiently in math and science as in the feminine subjects, language arts and social studies. Father gave tips on diving and chess, led us into the wilderness on backpacking expeditions. My parents claimed, for they were asked about it, that they didn’t mind not having had a boy. I never doubted them. I didn’t mind being a girl (not in grade school, anyway). I was told, sincerely, “You can be anything.” (Yet “mannish” meant a woman who was deeply unattractive, while “effeminacy” in males was even more disturbing.)
Excellence was prized, erratic brilliance disapproved. Although difficult emotions sometimes had to be acknowledged, the point was to get beyond them, to be “rational,” my father’s top requirement.
In my mother’s view, extremes were always dangerous. The raw, the strong, the spicy or hot (in food), the loud (in voice or clothing or decor), the gaudy, the cheap, the pushy, the vulgar—these formed a constellation of negatives, foreboding real discomfort, an unspecified danger.
This is My Father’s world. We sang that in Sunday school. (It was a wild anachronism. Don’t even ask how it related to appreciating the Ways of Mankind.) And I did grow up in my father’s world, even more so in my mother’s. Yet for all that I absorbed “the Clausen Way,” I never could be convinced that our planet is happily ordered, that caution and obedience guarantee prosperity or even bare survival, that privileged safety amid the general wreckage is honorable even where it might be feasible.
My childhood was cradled in the dread of a fire that would end not just my life but everybody else’s. We practiced for it, starting the first month of kindergarten. With World War II barely a decade in the past, I related the dive-bomber games that boys played at recess to the famous threat of Soviet attack, imagining that each tiny airplane overhead was my signal to take cover. Suez, when I was six, was my first memorable global crisis, its theme music the fanfare and Teletype jangle that prefaced the familiar yet portentous announcement This is the CBS Radio Network, as Mother suspended her vacuuming or cooking to tune in to the headlines on the hour. Solemnly, for years, I spent all my little magic—first stars, wishbones, breath held in tunnels—trying to hold that final fire at bay.
The earth’s lush body was mortal as my own.
At an early age, I came by basic information that it seemed my world was anxious to conceal. This life (the one we’ve found, the one we’ve made) isn’t wholesome or well rounded. It is raw and loud and strong. It will kill you, yet it equips you with desires, those portents of contingent paradise.
Thus secret fears and pleasures secretly resonated. Thus I invented passion, in a world that seemed as inimical to passion as to gambling or ecstatic drunkenness, to anything that might endanger the safety of calm surfaces, the orderly pursuit of progress. Thus (in a world where progress made the Bomb) I started to be someone who would take a lot of chances. Who’d install the disorder of sex at the center of her life. Who’d make a habit of radical departures—including startling revisions of her sexual identity. Who’d even hope that identity might serve as a simple weapon against the rule of Fathers.
Once in recent years when I was visiting my parents, we got to talking about our old excursions to Hidden Springs, a state campground not far south of Eureka. I mentioned how I used to feel frightened when we girls were put to bed in the tent while Mother and Father sat out at the picnic table, using the Coleman lantern for a reading light. I would work myself up, vividly imagining how the two of them might sneak away, hop into the station wagon and zoom off to some new life, stranding me there, not merely orphaned but marooned in the wilderness.
To my astonishment, Father seemed disturbed, as though my fantasy reproached his parenting. “But why would you have imagined such a thing? We never gave you any reason to think we’d abandon you.”
I know he worked hard to give me a happy childhood, as far as possible unlike his own grimly Lutheran upbringing in a working-class neighborhood in Minneapolis. His German-American parents—a sometimes overbearing father, a mother in delicate health—had been beset by Depression money worries. He was the last child of five. It can’t have been very easy.
I am moved by the loving vigilance
of parents who want to believe there exists a formula whereby children can be spared the world’s devouring appetites. What I would tell my father, if I knew how to do it gently, begins with this sentence: Terror is private.
THREE
The Education of Desire
Keep the tone wholesome. . . . Of course, the child who is moving into adolescence should know how pregnancy takes place and that there is danger of disease in being promiscuous, but these disturbing aspects of sex shouldn’t come first. The adolescent should think of it as primarily wholesome and natural and beautiful . . . the happy, sensible, successful adolescent doesn’t get into trouble with sex just because he hasn’t been warned sternly enough. . . . The danger of scaring a sensitive child about sex is partly that you make him tense and apprehensive at the time, partly that you may destroy his or her ability to adjust to marriage later.
—Dr. Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care
WHEN DOES OFFICIAL sex begin? Let’s start with the first kiss.
One night in the fall of my sophomore year of high school (it was 1965, the sixties before The Sixties), I sat on the floor of a Sunday school classroom at Eastshore Unitarian Church in suburban Bellevue, Washington. With me was Sasha Grant, a boy my elder by a year, whom I badly wanted to take an interest in me, though I couldn’t have produced a good argument as to why he ought to do so. I was nobody, just a girl of fifteen who’d read some fancy books. I looked young for my age. My mind was much admired by adults, but I’d already recognized that the rapturous effect (an erotic buzz is what I’d call it now) that I sometimes experienced around the edges of an intellectual intimacy—with a stocky homeroom teacher named Miss Pease, for example, and also with my rival, the puny, sarcastic Clayton Early, who played “smartest boy” to my “smartest girl” through most of junior high—was not the sort of thrill often sought by adolescent males.