by Ben Marcus
B.I. #72 08-98
North Miami Beach FL
‘I love women. I really do. I love them. Everything about them. I can’t even describe it. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, thin. From drop-dead to plain. To me, hey: all women are beautiful. Can’t get enough of them. Some of my best friends are women. I love to watch them move. I love how different they all are. I love how you can never understand them. I love love love them. I love to hear them giggle, the different little sounds. The way you just can’t keep them from shopping no matter what you do. I love it when they bat their eyes or pout or give you that little look. The way they look in heels. Their voice, their smell. Those teeny red bumps from shaving their legs. Their little dainty unmentionables and special little womanly products at the store. Everything about them drives me wild. When it comes to women I’m helpless. All they have to do is come into a room and I’m a goner. What would the world be without women? It’d—oh no not again behind you look out!’
B.I. #28 02-97
Ypsilanti MI [Simultaneous]
K——: ‘What does today’s woman want. That’s the big one.’
E——: ‘I agree. It’s the big one all right. It’s the what-do-you-call …’
K——: ‘Or put another way, what do today’s women think they want versus what do they really deep down want.’
E——: ‘Or what do they think they’re supposed to want.’
Q.
K——: ‘From a male.’
E——: ‘From a guy.’
K——: ‘Sexually.’
E——: ‘In terms of the old mating dance.’
K——: ‘Whether it sounds Neanderthal or not, I’m still going to argue it’s the big one. Because the whole question’s become such a mess.’
E——: ‘You can say that again.’
K——: ‘Because now the modern woman has an unprecedented amount of contradictory stuff laid on her about what it is she’s supposed to want and how she’s expected to conduct herself sexually.’
E——: ‘The modern woman’s a mess of contradictions that they lay on themselves that drives them nuts.’
K——: ‘It’s what makes it so difficult to know what they want. Difficult but not impossible.’
E——: ‘Like take your classic Madonna-versus-whore contradiction. Good girl versus slut. The girl you respect and take home to meet Mom versus the girl you just fuck.’
K——: ‘Yet let’s not forget that overlaid atop this is the new feminist-slash-postfeminist expectation that women are sexual agents, too, just as men are. That it’s OK to be sexual, that it’s OK to whistle at a man’s ass and be aggressive and go after what you want. That it’s OK to fuck around. That for today’s woman it’s almost mandatory to fuck around.’
E——: ‘With still, underneath, the old respectable-girl-versus-slut thing. It’s OK to fuck around if you’re a feminist but it’s also not OK to fuck around because most guys aren’t feminists and won’t respect you and won’t call you again if you fuck around.’
K——: ‘Do but don’t. A double bind.’
E——: ‘A paradox. Damned either way. The media perpetuates it.’
K——: ‘You can imagine the load of internal stress all this dumps on their psyches.’
E——: ‘Come a long way baby my ass.’
K——: ‘That’s why so many of them are nuts.’
E——: ‘Out of their minds with internal stress.’
K——: ‘It’s not even really their fault.’
E——: ‘Who wouldn’t be nuts with that kind of mess of contradictions laid on them all the time in today’s media culture?’
K——: ‘The point being that this is what makes it so difficult, when for example you’re sexually interested in one, to figure out what she really wants from a male.’
E——: ‘It’s a total mess. You can go nuts trying to figure out what tack to take. She might go for it, she might not. Today’s woman’s a total crapshoot. It’s like trying to figure out a Zen koan. Where what they want’s concerned, you pretty much have to just shut your eyes and leap.’
K——: ‘I disagree.’
E——: ‘I meant metaphorically.’
K——: ‘I disagree that it’s impossible to determine what it is they really want.’
E——: ‘I don’t think I said impossible.’
K——: ‘Though I do agree that in today’s postfeminist era it’s unprecedentedly difficult and takes some serious deductive firepower and imagination.’
E——: ‘I mean if it were really literally impossible then where would we be as a species?’
K——: ‘And I do agree that you can’t necessarily go just by what they say they want.’
E——: ‘Because are they only saying it because they think they’re supposed to?’
K——: ‘My position is that actually most of the time you can figure out what they want, I mean almost logically deduce it, if you’re willing to make the effort to understand them and to understand the impossible situation they’re in.’
E——: ‘But you can’t just go by what they say, is the big thing.’
K——: ‘There I’d have to agree. What modern feminists-slash-postfeminists will say they want is mutuality and respect of their individual autonomy. If sex is going to happen, they’ll say, it has to be by mutual consensus and desire between two autonomous equals who are each equally responsible for their own sexuality and its expression.’
E——: ‘That’s almost word for word what I’ve heard them say.’
K——: ‘And it’s total horseshit.’
E——: ‘They all sure have the empowerment-lingo down pat, that’s for sure.’
K——: ‘You can easily see what horseshit it is as long as you remember to start by recognizing the impossible double bind we already discussed.’
E——: ‘It’s not all that hard to see.’
Q.
K——: ‘That she’s expected to be both sexually liberated and autonomous and assertive, and yet at the same time she’s still conscious of the old respectable-girl-versus-slut dichotomy, and knows that some girls still let themselves be used sexually out of a basic lack of self-respect, and she still recoils at the idea of ever being seen as this kind of pathetic roundheel sort of woman.’
E——: ‘Plus remember the postfeminist girl now knows that the male sexual paradigm and the female’s are fundamentally different—’
K——: ‘Mars and Venus.’
E——: ‘Right, exactly, and she knows that as a woman she’s naturally programmed to be more high-minded and long-term about sex and to be thinking more in relationship terms than just fucking terms, so if she just immediately breaks down and fucks you she’s on some level still getting taken advantage of, she thinks.’
K——: ‘This, of course, is because today’s postfeminist era is also today’s postmodern era, in which supposedly everybody now knows everything about what’s really going on underneath all the semiotic codes and cultural conventions, and everybody supposedly knows what paradigms everybody is operating out of, and so we’re all as individuals held to be far more responsible for our sexuality, since everything we do is now unprecedentedly conscious and informed.’
E——: ‘While at the same time she’s still under this incredible sheer biological pressure to find a mate and settle down and nest and breed, for instance go read this thing The Rules and try to explain its popularity any other way.’
K——: ‘The point being that women today are now expected to be responsible both to modernity and to history.’
E——: ‘Not to mention sheer biology.’
K——: ‘Biology’s already included in the range of what I mean by history.’
E——: ‘So you’re using history more in a Foucaultvian sense.’
K——: ‘I’m talking about history being a set of conscious intentional human responses to a whole range of forces of which biology and evolution are a part.’
E——: ‘The point is it’s an intolerable burden on women.’
K——: ‘The real point is that in fact they’re just logically incompatible, these two responsibilities.’
E——: ‘Even if modernity itself is a historical phenomenon, Foucault would say.’
K——: ‘I’m just pointing out that nobody can honor two logically incompatible sets of perceived responsibilities. This has nothing to do with history, this is pure logic.’
E——: ‘Personally, I blame the media.’
K——: ‘So what’s the solution.’
E——: ‘Schizophrenic media discourse exemplified by like for example Cosmo—on one hand be liberated, on the other make sure you get a husband.’
K——: ‘The solution is to realize that today’s women are in an impossible situation in terms of what their perceived sexual responsibilities are.’
E——: ‘I can bring home the bacon mm mm mm mm fry it up in a pan mm mm mm mm.’
K——: ‘And that, as such, they’re naturally going to want what any human being faced with two irresolvably conflicting sets of responsibilities is going to want. Meaning that what they’re really going to want is some way out of these responsibilities.’
E——: ‘An escape hatch.’
K——: ‘Psychologically speaking.’
E——: ‘A back door.’
K——: ‘Hence the timeless importance of passion.’
E——: ‘They want to be both responsible and passionate.’
K——: ‘No, what they want is to experience a passion so huge, overwhelming, powerful, and irresistible that it obliterates any guilt or tension or culpability they might feel about betraying their perceived responsibilities.’
E——: ‘In other words what they want from a guy is passion.’
K——: ‘They want to be swept off their feet. Blown away. Carried off on the wings of. The logical conflict between their responsibilities can’t be resolved, but their postmodern awareness of this conflict can be.’
E——: ‘Escaped. Denied.’
K——: ‘Meaning that, deep down, they want a man who’s going to be so overwhelmingly passionate and powerful that they’ll feel they have no choice, that this thing is bigger than both of them, that they can forget there’s even such a thing as postfeminist responsibilities.’
E——: ‘Deep down, they want to be irresponsible.’
K——: ‘I suppose in a way I agree, though I don’t think they can really be faulted for it, because I don’t think it’s conscious.’
E——: ‘It dwells as a Lacanian cry in the infantile unconscious, the lingo would say.’
K——: ‘I mean it’s understandable, isn’t it? The more these logically incompatible responsibilities are forced on today’s females, the stronger their unconscious desire for an overwhelmingly powerful, passionate male who can render the whole double bind irrelevant by so totally overwhelming them with passion that they can allow themselves to believe they couldn’t help it, that the sex wasn’t a matter of conscious choice that they can be held responsible for, that ultimately if anyone was responsible it was the male.’
E——: ‘Which explains why the bigger the so-called feminist,the more she’ll hang on you and follow you around after you sleep with her.’
K——: ‘I’m not sure I’d go along with that.’
E——: ‘But it follows that the bigger the feminist, the more grateful and dependent she’s going to be after you’ve ridden in on your white charger and relieved her of responsibility.’
K——: ‘What I disagree with is the so-called. I don’t believe that today’s feminists are being consciously insincere in all their talk about autonomy. Just as I don’t believe they’re strictly to blame for the terrible bind they’ve found themselves in. Though deep down I suppose I do have to agree that women are historically ill-equipped for taking genuine responsibility for themselves.’
Q.
E——: ‘I don’t suppose either of you saw where the Little Wranglers’ room was in this place.’
K——: ‘I don’t mean that in any kind of just-another-Neanderthal-male-grad-student-putting-down-women-because-he’s-too-insecure-to-countenance-their-sexual-subjectivity way. And I’d go to the wall to defend them against scorn or culpability for a situation that is clearly not their fault.’
E——: ‘Because it’s getting to be time to answer nature’s page if you know what I mean.’
K——: ‘I mean, even simply looking at the evolutionary aspect, you have to agree that a certain lack of autonomy-slash-responsibility was an obvious genetic advantage as far as primitive human females went, since a weak sense of autonomy would drive a primitive female toward a primitive male to provide food and protection.’
E——: ‘While your more autonomous, butch-type female would be out hunting on her own, actually competing with the males for food.’
K——: ‘But the point is that it was the less self-sufficient, less autonomous females who found mates and bred.’
E——: ‘And raised offspring.’
K——: ‘And thus perpetuated the species.’
E——: ‘Natural selection favored the ones who found mates instead of going out hunting. I mean, how many cave-paintings of female hunters do you ever see?’
K——: ‘Historically, we should probably note that once the quote-unquote weak female has mated and bred, she shows an often spectacular sense of responsibility where her offspring are concerned. It’s not that females have no capacity for responsibility. That’s not what I’m talking about.’
E——: ‘They do make great moms.’
K——: ‘What we’re talking about here is single adult pre-primipara females, their genetic-slash-historical capacity for autonomy, for as it were self-responsibility, in their dealings with males.’
E——: ‘Evolution has bred it out of them. Look at the magazines. Look at romance novels.’
K——: ‘What today’s woman wants, in short, is a male with both the passionate sensitivity and the deductive firepower to discern that all her pronouncements about autonomy are actually desperate cries in the wilderness of the double bind.’
E——: ‘They all want it. They just can’t say it.’
K——: ‘Putting you, today’s interested male, in the paradoxical role of almost their therapist or priest.’
E——: ‘They want absolution.’
K——: ‘When they say “I am my own person,” “I do not need a man,” “I am responsible for my own sexuality,” they are actually telling you just what they want you to make them forget.’
E——: ‘They want to be rescued.’
K——: ‘They want you on one level to wholeheartedly agree and respect what they’re saying and on another, deeper level to recognize that it’s total horseshit and to gallop in on your white charger and overwhelm them with passion, just as males have been doing since time immemorial.’
E——: ‘That’s why you can’t take what they say at face value or it’ll drive you nuts.’
K——: ‘Basically it’s all still an elaborate semiotic code, with the new postmodern semions of autonomy and responsibility replacing the old premodern semions of chivalry and courtship.’
E——: ‘I really do have to see a man about a prancing pony.’
K——: ‘The only way not to get lost in the code is to approach the whole issue logically. What is she really saying?’
E——: ‘No doesn’t mean yes, but it doesn’t mean no, either.’
K——: ‘I mean, the capacity for logic is what distinguished us from animals to begin with.’
E——: ‘Which, no offense, but logic’s not exactly a woman’s strong suit.’
K——: ‘Although if the whole sexual situation is illogical, it hardly makes sense to blame today’s woman for being weak on logic or for giving off a constant barrage of paradoxical signals.’
E——: ‘In other words, they’re not responsible for not being responsibl
e, K——’s saying.’
K——: ‘I’m saying it’s tricky and difficult but that if you use your head it’s not impossible.’
E——: ‘Because think about it: if it was really impossible where would the whole species be?’
K——: ‘Life always finds a way.’
WHERE I WORK
ANN CUMMINS
It’s piecework that brings in the money. You get four bucks an hour or ten cents a pocket. The old-timers can sew two pockets a minute and make eighteen an hour. They’re a whiz. Most get between ten and fifteen. Me, I get four, today maybe five. This is my third day. You don’t worry if you’re no good at first. You catch on. You’re guaranteed the four bucks no matter if you can’t get one pocket on in an hour.
Sam Hunt with the measuring tape comes to my machine and measures the straightness of my stitching. He wears the tan vest, tan creased pants, brown polished shoes, white shirt. He has a perfectly formed nose, neither upturning nor downturning, and when he stands in front of my machine, I can smell a mysterious cologne coming from him. When he comes this close, I can see that the white shirt does not stick to any part of his skin because he does not sweat.
But the fat sisters from Galveston sweat like pigs. Turn up the air-conditioning! they’ll yell. Today at lunch, I sat with the fatties from Galveston, Texas. You can hear them all over the lunchroom, talking about our Oregon summers, complaining about the heat and rain. They say, My bones never ached like this in Texas, and they wish they could move back there. In Galveston, the fat sisters plopped their rumps on the beach and watched the hurricanes come in. I have never seen a hurricane. When I sit with the Texans they tell me all about it.
And they say, How’s your love life, darling? These women mull things over.
It is my duty to make them laugh. This is a social skill my brother, Michael, taught me. Make them laugh, he said, and you won’t get fired.
Make them laugh or compliment them. Don’t tell lies. Don’t say things like, “I’d like to tear her little twat out”; if you have to say something like this, say it approximately, not exactly, or you’ll scare people. He told me I scare people, and that’s one reason why I can’t hold a job—and because I tell lies. If you have to tell lies, tell little ones, he says. Try not to talk out loud when you’re not talking to anybody.