Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  But before I even felt comfortable teaching classes, before I felt comfortable calling myself a butcher, or, simply, even saying I knew how to butcher, I began to gain recognition and praise as a butcher. I wasn’t labeled an activist or an educator—titles that would have been more fitting at the time, and which are, perhaps coincidentally, titles more traditionally predictable for women. I was labeled a butcher—a much less likely label for a woman, and therefore, in an interesting modern twist, the more appealing label to those around me. It happened first at parties and other social situations—“Have you met my friend, Camas, the lady butcher I told you about?” Then, in a few news stories. Then the knife company came calling, and there I was posing in that little black dress with that cleaver trying to look like a butcher and not really feeling like one.

  When the ad campaign appeared in national food magazines across the country, when my mom called because she’d seen a huge poster of me in the window of a kitchen supply store in my hometown, when an old friend from my magazine days in New York texted me a photo of my drag queen face on a billboard in Times Square—“Looks like you finally made it in New York,” she’d joked—I felt sheepish. In the ad, the two men had been dubbed “The Rebel” and “The Believer,” respectively. I’d been dubbed “The Poet.” I found some comfort in this. I didn’t write poetry, but I felt I was more of a poet than a butcher, and they’d rightly picked up on the fact that my greatest strengths lay in my ability to write and speak about butchery and meat reform. Although they called me a butcher—nay, “a master butcher”—they also said this: “As a woman in a traditionally male dominated profession, Camas is challenging expectations, breaking stereotypes and bringing intellectual depth to the art of butchery.”

  They were right. It was a fair and good assessment, but at the time, all I could think about was that I was the only female poet-poseur-butcher in the whole world in a little black dress holding a cleaver even though I didn’t use cleavers and wasn’t a butcher, and not even really a poet. It was lonely, that fact.

  Whether I was right or not, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the spectacle of my gender, of my particular choice to study butchery, was the reason I was getting the attention, not my actual skill (or even my imagined skill). It was as if everyone had assumed that because I’d gone and done something so out of the ordinary as a woman, I was also extraordinary enough to master all of butchery in just over a year. I was simultaneously a spectacle and an imposter. I felt looked at but not seen. It’s not that I wasn’t searching for recognition—when any of us set out to master a skill, having others recognize, out loud, our own progress toward that mastery can be quite helpful. It’s that the recognition seemed premature, misguided, even empty. Increasingly, all I wanted was to be seen for who I really was: a woman who chose to learn butchery and wanted to continue to learn. I wanted to be seen as someone in the process of becoming. But where’s the sexy headline in that?

  At the same time, the sexy headlines are precisely what allowed me to do what I had set out to do: learn. They brought me into contact with teachers and mentors I might not have otherwise had access to. It would be false to say I was simply a victim of those headlines or to suggest that people should not have written about me. I knew exactly how the spectacle of my story benefited me and my cause. I could have refused the interviews, the knife ads, but I didn’t. Simultaneously, the attention felt largely unwarranted. I was afraid of being accused of hubris—in fact I was accused of hubris, mostly by male butchers who weren’t getting their own headlines—which is maybe a very female concern, or maybe it just reflects the way my parents raised me.

  Even as I improved as a butcher, and began teaching a few classes, as I began to cut meat in front of large groups of people, and in front of the camera, I never knew how to judge my own abilities. I recently read an article about what happens to children who are told they are great at something before they have been given the time to actually master the task they are being praised for. It makes them less likely to actually achieve mastery, because, regardless, they’ll still be praised. It makes them stop learning, essentially. This is what it felt like for me. Was I good at butchery? Was I terrible? Was it okay to remind people I was still learning? I couldn’t be sure.

  After the knife ad, more media outlets called. The New York Times. Martha Stewart. Bon Appétit. Food & Wine. Time. More requests for butchery demonstrations in front of hundreds of people. And on and on.

  “You can do this,” I kept telling myself. “Just run with it. Fake it until you make it.” Was I really faking it, though? At some point, didn’t I actually know what I was doing? Notice I say this in the form of questions, not answers.

  That I had, maybe, of my own volition, gotten myself here, that I was being recognized because I’d done something interesting and worthy of note did not occur to me. That I’d taken a risk, dropped everything familiar to me and set out to learn a totally new skill just for the sake of learning, that I’d been changed by that learning, and that my story of that transformation appealed to people, didn’t occur to me until quite recently. Nor did it occur to me that it was actually quite rare to find someone who knew how to butcher and could articulate the bigger picture, and that I was that kind of person. That it was maybe even acceptable to just be okay at butchery, to not yet have mastered the skill and receive attention didn’t sink into my brain either. The only thing that mattered to me for so many years was that I was not really a butcher, at least not the kind everyone wanted me to be, the kind that wielded a cleaver with confidence.

  It was meant to be flattering, this attention, this recognition, this modern, postfeminist, you-go-girl praise—I understood that—but ultimately it felt like a setup, like a rigged game. What I really wanted most was for someone to appreciate what I’d learned so far, what I’d actually mastered, and to help me figure out what I might still have left to improve upon. What I want still is to not be held to a standard of immediate perfection before I have actually had the time to perfect. It has occurred to me recently that maybe that standard of immediate perfection went both ways—that I held myself up to it as much as everyone else around me did.

  “I’m not really a butcher. I’m learning to butcher,” I often say to anyone who introduces me as a butcher.

  And the thing is, it’s true. I’m not lying. I’m not really a butcher. Not bona fide anyway. Not a professional one. I look back at some of the early videos of me roaming around online (with astoundingly insulting comments to boot), videos in which I’m cutting up a whole pig or a chicken, and I think, Wow, I wasn’t very good back then. I’m a lot better at butchery now. But I still don’t like to call myself a butcher. Maybe because unlike all the real butchers in the world, who work day in and day out, unrecognized, never photographed, whose profiles never appear next to a single headline, who spend their days stuffing pig intestines with ground pork shoulder or trimming the mold off of dry-aged rib eyes, I am the one who gets to pose with a cleaver for the camera. I get to pose as a butcher. I’m assuming there are at least a few butchers who are disgruntled by that fact. Should I care? Maybe not. But I do. Should they care? Maybe not. But they probably do. I know Mr. Sweaty Resentful Judgmental Butcher Man sure cares.

  A female friend recently said to me: “Why can’t you just own it? You’ve done something amazing.” Sure, I told her. I can do that—it’s the example I, of course, want to set for other women trying to break into the industry in whatever way they want to—but it doesn’t mean I’m ready to ignore everyone else who has also mastered butchery and not been recognized. “That’s very female of you,” my friend told me.

  Since I went to France and started the Portland Meat Collective and shook Martha Stewart’s hand and posed holding a pig head on a silver platter for the New York Times Magazine, there are several men and women who have also posed with cleavers for the camera. Whole animal butchery, knowing where your meat comes from, thinking more consciously about how much meat you eat, it’s a thing now,
a movement I helped start. Some of the people posing with pig heads and cleavers for the camera now are in Carhartts rubbed with oil and paint, made to look more worn than they actually are, some are in black dresses, some are in stark white chef jackets. They are men and women. I have often wondered if they also consider themselves butchers, or if they, like me, wish no one would ever call them that.

  Recently, at a conference about meat reform, I met a young woman who is the head meat cutter at a butcher shop in New York (there are so many more of these women now than there were when I first embarked on this journey) and asked, “So when people started referring to you as a butcher, did you feel like you actually were one? Or did you feel like people were just calling you a butcher because it made for a good story, you being a woman and all. . . .”

  “I don’t really understand what you’re asking,” she said. “I’m a butcher because I know how to cut meat.”

  I admired her confidence. I felt a little embarrassed for even asking. I too know how to cut meat, so why am I hesitant to call myself a butcher? Maybe because once I left France, no one ever bothered to fairly and squarely assess my skills out loud. My skills. Not the spectacle of my unusual story. My skills. Maybe someone did bother to assess hers.

  I recently did a butchery demonstration at a hunting and fishing convention. I stood behind a table covered with cutting boards surrounded by a sea of people who looked like the people I come from. Hunting caps. Wrangler jeans. Camouflage vests. Work boots. The organizers had wanted me to butcher venison. I’d never butchered venison, even though my father and grandfather had been deer hunters, but I knew that it would be just like butchering lamb and it was. I was nervous, but I did okay. I could have done better, which is usually how I feel after these things—I am always trying to improve, which maybe means I don’t actually believe in total mastery after all. But no one had stood up and left in the middle of my presentation—whether because of my being a woman, or because of my skill or knowledge, I can never be sure. People came up to me afterward and asked more questions. And as I was packing my knives, an older gentleman—square, stocky, with an intimidating perpetual scowl and the sort of thick, ham-like arms and legs that the French brothers had sported—approached me.

  “I used to run my own meat processing facility,” he told me in a gentle voice that contradicted his stern expression. “Worked it for fifty years. You did pretty darn good. A lot of great information. Next time, remember to keep your elbows in near your torso when you’re cutting. You’ll be less likely to get tendonitis that way.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said. And I’d meant it.

  “Pretty darn good,” he’d said. And he’d meant it.

  “Next time,” he’d said, with encouragement in his voice, because he believed there would be a next time. Because he recognized in me room for improvement. He did not seem fazed by my looks. He had not concerned himself with my headlines, my story, my anomalous narrative, my gender. It was a relief, however fleeting, to finally be seen.

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  ROBIN ROMM

  I’m fifteen weeks’ pregnant as I write this essay. On the ultrasounds, I have seen the baby move her hands, suck her thumb, and do a few early dance moves. It took me a long time to get pregnant—five years. I’m forty years old. I’ve published books, traveled, won awards, been a professor, fallen in love . . . but being pregnant with this baby is the best thing I have ever done. Is that regressive? Well, I don’t really care.

  When you are nearing forty and struggling to have a baby, people assume a lot of things about you. They think you put off having kids when nature intended, intent on having a career, and you made your own bed. They think you are a desperate woman, unable to find love until late, a sad cliché. It feels, anyway, that this is the ticker tape running at the bottom of the screen. There’s a pathetic quality to all of the intervention, to draining one’s life savings to buy hormones and surgeries, to create the late-in-life offspring. Doctor after doctor looked at me and said, in a voice hushed with either concern or condescension, “Women over thirty-five have diminished egg quality.” The takeaway: You should have had kids in your twenties.

  In my twenties, I had not been thinking about children. Who thought about children? My mother was a civil rights trial attorney who had an illegal abortion when she was eighteen. She was passionate about a woman’s right to choose, about a woman having a real career and making an impact on the world. She ran me around to political rallies and ballet class and museums, prepping me for this important life I was to have, a life with a fulfilling career, intellect, and purpose. Never mind that she was eternally stressed, working full time, then running back to cook dinner, do chores, help me with my homework, and finally collapse in front of the television, eating snacks and growing ill while my father tended to his own demanding career. I could have it all!

  At eighteen, I went to an Ivy League university where I never had a single conversation with a girlfriend about either marriage or children. We talked about Derrida and Greek mythology, feminism and literature, boys, our parents, where we wanted to live. I went directly from graduation to a job as a federal investigator, investigating discrimination complaints in San Francisco and beyond. I rose to the top, often the best investigator in my district. I loved the work—getting in the government car, traveling to prisons in northern California, to sweatshops in Saipan. I looked into racial layoffs and forced abortions and, once, the sexual mistreatment of corpses at a funeral home. I loved to learn, to work. Work gave me proximity to the heartbeat of the world. Kids felt like a distant reality, something I’d do later, much later, when I had done that abstract thing: figured myself out.

  And I was good at my job, sufficiently absorbed. My life in San Francisco felt thrilling. One quarter, I settled two very large cases—a disability case against a grocery chain for almost $100,000 and a class action gender bias case against a nonprofit for a quarter of a million. My boss, an ambitious woman herself who appreciated and mentored me, sent a note out to the head of the legal department about my accomplishments. That quarter I’d settled cases for more money than all the lawyers combined. I was twenty-four years old.

  The older white man who headed up the legal department wrote an email back, to which I was accidentally cc’d. “Obviously Robin’s numbers are very impressive. But she’s so aggressive when she’s on a case. Her assertiveness is off-putting.”

  My boss rolled her eyes. I marveled at the sexism of the email. Was I supposed to be soft-spoken and pretty while in the civil rights trenches? My mother was a hard-ass. She wore silk shirts and had a Brooklyn accent when she was mad. She won her cases and wept if she lost. And anyway, did this guy, this senior Equal Opportunity Employment Commission lawyer, even understand the spirit of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act? What a joke! Jesus. He was a chauvinistic fart with the self-awareness of a gnat. At least he’d be dead soon, my young self reasoned. I deleted the email.

  I thought it was water off a duck’s back, but actually, I still remember it with absolute clarity fifteen years later. The water hardened into a little prism.

  But I didn’t modify my behavior all that much. I worked. I continued to be the top investigator in the district. I wrote elaborate legal recommendations to my director.

  “You know, some people write a four-page outline of the case,” my attorney advisor told me. “You write thirty pages with dialogue and a plot climax that results in a legal argument. You’re a writer. You should leave this job and write.”

  In my MFA program, which I attended the following year, I earned a coveted teaching appointment and fell in love with my students. Getting people to think about things I deeply cared about, having them create art where moments ago they had only blank paper . . . it seemed like a magic trick. I marveled at the growth of my students—the punk rocker who fell hard for Gertrude Stein. The sorority blonde who finally, after weeks of writing terrible poems about her boyfriend, wrote a rage-filled play about her mother coming out a
s a lesbian. I loved teaching, I realized. I loved writing, too. The combination felt intoxicating. I wanted to be like the women professors I had had in college and graduate school—C. D. Wright with her quick use of metaphors and deadpan grace; Michelle Carter with her deep intelligence, warmth, and light editorial touch. I wanted to teach creative writing, and I wanted to write.

  I won a publication prize in graduate school and published a chapbook. Two years later, at thirty, I landed my first book deal. A year after that, I got my first tenure-track job at a small, funky college in Santa Fe. This was no small feat and involved hours upon hours of learning how to apply and interview for these positions. It required beating hundreds of applicants. It was a dream job—great colleagues, meaningful work. But it didn’t last. Two years later, due to a bad bond gamble, the college went out of business and the entire faculty lost their jobs.