by Jill Soloway
The next year there’s a reality TV boom and half as many written shows, so your agent tells you everyone’s dropping a level or two just to work. You go back down to executive minnow. Then, a couple of years later, someone says “Desperate Housewives killed reality!” and you’re back up again. Now your gross income is over $200,000 a year and you can’t stand to see what’s being taken out for taxes. Besides, everyone says you really should incorporate after that amount, and all your friends have cute names for their corporations like Monkeys R Us Inc. and All Girls All Day Productions and you get jealous. You want to incorporate. You get high and make a list of twenty cute names, or you dig through your files and find that list of band names you and your friends made when you were high, and you pick one.
Now you need a business manager who can register this name with the state for you. He charges 5 percent and so although you’re making scads of money on paper, you’re still only seeing about two grand a week. Finally, the next year, you’ve got some breathing room. Whew.
But you realize now that you’re incorporated, what you’ve been getting lately are gross checks, and a ginormous tax bill is due. Your business manager puts aside the money and doesn’t let you touch it unless you want to go to jail with Martha Stewart. You’re back to just under two grand a week.
I’ve heard that when you become a showrunner, which means you created the show and it’s airing, you get extra money. Every time the show airs you get checks just for having been there when it was created, also known as Malibu money. I want Malibu money. I want that black American Express Card that Britney’s brother pulled out to pay for lunch when I met him last week to discuss projects. Also, Jessica Simpson has one. She even loses hers.
That’s not so much to ask, is it? A black American Express card, and maybe the chance to fly in a private jet with Sean Penn and talk about scripts, once before I die. And three $10,000 vacations a year. And a pool. Just a little pool. A teensey, tiny pool, like half spa, half pool. They call them spools out here. I’ll take just one.
Appendix 3 or
Oh, Yeah
Yes, I want to be in charge of everything. I’m completely spazzy and I won’t be able to calm down until I start my own land, incite feminist revolution, you know the drill. But if I can’t do that, I have a few more things I really, really want to say, because if this doesn’t sell more than 15,000 copies, these people are never going to let me write a book again. Lemme lay ’em on ya:
1) THE FOOD COURT TRAY RULE. People, from now on, no one gets a table until you have your food. It’s that simple. The current system is clearly discriminatory against single people. Just because YOU have a lunch date who can go grab the table while you go up to the counter and order the Chinese chicken salads means you can eat sitting down while I stand there holding my tray like the fat tuba player in the high school lunchroom? No. Not anymore.
2) E-DRESS. Isn’t it a great word? Take it, use it, spread it, hell, copyright it for all I care. Isn’t it much more fun to say than “What’s your e-mail address?” Wouldn’t you rather say “What’s your e-dress?”
3) NO FREQUENT ANYTHING CARDS. They shalt be illegal. No Coffee Bean cards that get punched each day nor frequent Barnes and Noble cards. Carrying a fraying card for fifteen weeks is simply not worth $3.85. Especially because you always lose the thing with one punch to go. Also, no airline mileage programs. Airline tickets don’t cost that much, nowhere near as much as the time spent trying to track down your miles and get them rolled over from the previous year. Get rid of them. Too much work. Never worth it. That’s what I say.
4) SINGLE LINES AT MULTIPLE ATMS. Even at ATMs where they don’t have a painted line on the sidewalk, it’s up to YOU to start the line. If you are the first one in line when there are patrons at more than one ATM, please, be responsible and stand in THE MIDDLE of all the potential lines. Encourage others to stand behind you. If you see them playing their luck and picking a favorite, loudly say, “One line!”
5) STOP THE EXPLOITATION OF SANDWICHES. Please, folks, no more of those giant-sub-sandwich mascots waving at cars in front of the Subway sandwich shop. In New York, I think you guys have waving hot dogs. It seems really hot in there. I can’t help searching the netting for the humiliated eyes, like a woman in a burka. If they keep it up, we should stop buying our sandwiches there, no matter how low they pretend their trans fat grams are. Similarly, the job where someone has to stand holding a plastic arrow pointing toward a new apartment complex, waving it up and down ten thousand times in one day, is wrong.
6) GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY. If you are coming through the gate at the airport and you see your loved one, please MOVE OFF to the side for your hug and embrace and face-squeezing “Oh my god, Cody is so big!” The rest of us are trying to get through. Also, friends, as you head onto the escalator, if you would like to stand, please do so on the right so that the rest of us might pass.
7) I KNOW THE REAL REASON MUSLIMS AND JEWS DON’T GET ALONG. I didn’t have room for this in my introduction when I discussed how religion divided women into chaste vs. whore as a tool to separate us from our power. But there’s yet another supersecret thing that I never hear anyone talk about.
To reduce a Bible passage to its most basic, and sorry, God, if I mangle it: Abraham was married to Sarah but she couldn’t beget him a kid, so she asked her personal assistant, Hagar, to sleep with her husband and make a baby for them. This is as bad an idea today as it was back then. Abraham not only enjoyed the sex with Hagar, but also had warm feelings toward her offspring, Ishmael. Then, Sarah got lucky and begat Isaac. But Ishmael’s teenage ways got on Sarah’s nerves. So Sarah sent Hagar and Ishmael into the desert to die. Isaac married Rebecca and they started breeding lots and lots of nearsighted Jews. Meanwhile, back in the desert, not only did Ishmael have the gall to NOT die, he actually started his own religion, Islam, and started breeding Muslims. That’s right—it is possible that all of the hatred between Muslims and Jews is a simple case of one family of kids hating Dad’s mistress’s kids. Underneath this current conflict that might end up blowing up the entire planet is the old Madonna–whore triangle, and the question of who Dad loved more. We hate them because their mom had an affair with our dad. They hate us back because our mom called their mom a whore. Dad didn’t follow their mom into the desert to save her. I can kind of see why they’re pissed. If he didn’t want to be with her, the least he could have done was make child support arrangements beyond bread and water. Interestingly, in the Muslim version of events, Hagar is the beloved wife and Sarah is the tainted concubine. Either way, there’s that triangle that polarizes women again.
8) YOUNG LADIES, PLEASE STOP LETTING WHITE BOYS CALL THEMSELVES PIMPS. What’s this “pimp” thing all those young guys are always going on about? Do any of these college girls who giggle know what a pimp is? Yes, a pimp wears a fine fancy hat and gets all the ladeez, which is admirable. But real pimps have four or five women who suck stranger’s dicks and then give their pimps 100 percent of the money or get the shit beaten out of them. That’s right, 100 percent. Is this as big news for you as it was for me? I figured most pimps took a 50 percent cut. It seemed only fair. But the industry standard is that the ho only gets the semen she’s swallowed and whatever apartment and clothes the pimp lets her keep.
Please, friends, stop these guys from even joshingly referring to themselves as Pimps, be it in their e-dress (à la [email protected]), in the way they “pimp” their rides by putting dubs on the wheels, or at the Pimp N’ Ho parties they host at their fraternities.
9) IF YOU DON’T WANT ME TO BE THE ANTICHRIST, use condoms. I don’t mean to yell at you. I thought I would be writing comedy essays. But my editor told me to write whatever I wanted. Oh, poor, poor Free Press. I pulled one over on them. This is what all of this adds up to: I’m just that lady who tours the country with a slide projector and a bag full of plastic cervix models, a campaigning, annoying, cajoling hygiene teacher.
Women are in a really p
recarious position, maybe because we are born with a limited number of potential ovulations and men are born with more sperm than there are grains of sand on the globe times a bajillion. Let that help you realize, young ladies, that you are guarding a precious resource—your future children. Men don’t have a precious resource; their sperm is a dime a bajillion.
I got my period when I was seventeen (another story, I know) and may enter menopause at, let’s say, forty-nine. With twelve periods a year, that’s 384 potential babes. Not so many when you think about it. It would be a lot of kids if I had to give birth to all of them, but, as chances throughout your life to make a child, decreasing each month as you ovulate, they are pretty special.
This might account for the diamonds. This could be the reason some women think of themselves as special gems, or even special jims—they are the guardian of 384 potential humans on this planet. Men can’t have children without them.
I know why people think family is the future. I know why Dr. Laura acts the way she does. I know why society gives promiscuous women a hard time. Because if all women waited for a big diamond ring and a promise of fidelity before they let men at their 384 sparkling, golden magic beans, things could be a lot easier and safer. It might increase the chance every child would have two parents. It would be nice if every child had two parents.
It might be nice. It could be nice. We have no idea because asking women to make men wait is a fairy tale, not reality. Reality is that many women have the urge to have sex just as much as some men do. Reality is that nobody realizes how precious their 384 are, like when we let somebody take us on a motorcycle ride, we don’t realize how precious this one life is. Reality is that if any of this sex-positive-feminist stuff is actually going to work, and if I’m going to leave all of you flat-ironed porno girls alone because all you’re doing is wearing the fashion, and who am I to stop fashion, you have to promise me one thing.
Use condoms. They were invented by humans who were invented by god, so they’re here for a reason, and everything happens for a reason. Condoms are the universe’s way of saying it’s okay to have sex without the rock. But you actually have to use them. It is no more likely a guy is going to open your purse to look for condoms than it is that the editor of The New Yorker was going to come to my house and look for pithy stories. In fact, the guys are more likely to say, over and over again: I don’t like condoms. I hate condoms. Condoms feel like taking a shower with a Ziploc bag on my head. Let me just put it in for a second. How about just a minute. Maybe just the head. I’ll pull out. I promise. I’m really good at pulling out.
They’re really bad at pulling out. The idea of not being allowed to come inside you excites them so much they come inside you. Then, they get up, towel off, then go downstairs to see who won the game.
Now you have their semen inside you. Let’s say you’re their partner and you want to get pregnant. This is the only instance in which still having their semen inside you is a good idea. For everyone else, all the time, it is a HORRIBLE IDEA. The worst idea you can think of.
When I was a teenager, it was a bad idea because you could get pregnant and you would have to get an abortion. Enough people got enough abortions under comfortable enough twilight sleep that getting another abortion was even a fair enough risk to take the next time a guy said “Let me just put it in for a second” and you didn’t want to be a dork and bring out a condom, or, even worse, argue and see how far they would push it.
But now it’s worse for so many reasons. Now there’s AIDS. A woman having sex with an HIV-positive man is seventy times more likely to contract the virus than a man having sex with a woman who is HIV positive. It’s obvious why. While the man is emptied of his fluids and is downstairs watching the halftime show, we’re lying around upstairs, a petri dish in our vaginas. Our internal sex organs are like an actual ooey, gooey medium. They’ve got the kind of sticky stuff going that scientists try to create when they want to see if they can make a virus grow. As the receptive partners, not only do we receive, but we also cultivate and breed, and not just humans.
Besides AIDS, there’s an epidemic right now called HPV. Turns out every single one of those dreaded abnormal Pap smears that we ever got were caused by a virus that was carried in some guy’s sperm. HPV is spreading like wildfire and if left untreated, it evolves into cervical cancer. It’s treatable, but the treatment involves literally slicing off the very ends of our cervixes, or possibly, cervices. After a few of these treatments, your cervix is shorter than it should be, so it can be hard to hold a pregnancy. This is also treatable, but none of this stuff bodes well.
All of it implies that it doesn’t matter how sex-positive we get as feminists—lots of sex with strangers or even good friends is not necessarily all that positive for our bodies and particularly, our 384. But this doesn’t mean women should be less familiar with sex. My solution is not to put women into burkas or white doily outfits or set up societal shame or cut off their clits. My solution is to know. To have knowledge and share knowledge and speak and write books and learn everything we can about our bodies.
Young women, listen to me: We have to know how to consent. We have to know how to make those pimps put on condoms or walk away if they don’t. We have to not be afraid of how it looks to behave as if we know a lot about sex. We cannot be so drunk and high when we do have sex that we can’t remember to use condoms. We can’t be so ashamed of wanting sex that we have to get drunk or high to have sex.
We have to feel like special prizes and treat our bodies like sacred flowers. And if, like some women, we employ the fantasy of having sex without our consent, we have to have a nice, dorky conversation about it first and make sure a condom is used. We cannot get drunk and just see what happens, then tell all our friends we were date-raped. There is such a thing as real date rape, when women take drugs they don’t know are hidden in their drink. There is such a thing as real rape, when women are alone and surprised in the night. Using the word “rape” to describe sex that happens when we’re too drunk to remember it is an appalling insult to the women who have had to endure real rape. What really did happen in the room between Kobe and the young woman? Who knows. But know that we rape ourselves when we give up the ability to meaningfully consent. Camille Paglia was right when she said men cannot be trusted. Most of them can’t. Know that.
We cannot, instead of asking for sex because it seems too wanton, just put ourselves in situations where sex happens. Particularly as high school and college women, but truly for all women, we must know for sure that what is happening is something we wanted to happen.
And if some of you want French manicures and to wear jeans where I can see the outline of your labia and that baby prostitute perfume and nipple piercings and you want to go to Cancún and make that devil party sign and show them your boobs, have at it. Just know what you want, know what you’ve had to drink, and remember that even though your whole life you have been told it’s your job to say no, it’s also okay if you say yes. And if you say yes, do so with your eyes open.
Don’t be the girl at the top of the telephone pole. Yes, they just want to see your panties. Come down from that pole, return the gaze, and make sure you have a condom in your Hello Kitty purse.
10) MY WOMEN’S STUDIES PROFESSOR WAS RIGHT. Yet again, I forgot that lesbians had feelings too, as evidenced by my sperm-specific sermonizing in number 9. All I can say is, I’m sorry.
11) HELP ME, WON’T YOU? I can’t do this alone. I know a lot of women have written books but there’s still a lot of catching up to do, if we’re ever going to get back to the sacred 50/50 balance intended when God or whatever made both of us, man and woman. So get started.
APPLICATION TO LIVE ON FEATHER CREST
_______________________________________
Name:___________________________________________
Address: _________________________________________
City, State, Zip: ____________________________________
Phone:__________
__________________________________
Alternate Address (where you can be reached if you and your partner get in a fight)__________________________________
How much money will you donate to the Feather Crest Foundation upon moving in?___________________________________
How many children do you have? ________________________
Are they well behaved? ________________________________
When they hit puberty, will they be willing to babysit the younguns? __________________________________________
If you have a boy, is he aware he will be chased into the woods when he turns eighteen?_____________________________
Have you ever been in a cult?____________________________
Are you susceptible to cults? ____________________________
Do you have anything against cults? ______________________
Name five women friends to whom we can send applications. Our movement is growing and word of mouth is our favorite advertising! __________________________________________
Hobbies you are willing to share with the other women by heading a workshop (circle all that apply):
beading
handiwork
journaling
improv
poetry
macrame
knitting
needlepoint
crewelwork
lanyards
god’s eyes
Web site design
veggie growing
herb growing
weed growing
cooking
cleaning
Pap smears
HPV treatment
midwifery
sushi chef
web site maintenance
guitar
high-pitched folksinging