by Negin Farsad
Conferences cut both ways. They’re great because some real intellectual work gets done. They may also be a superficial way for attendees to just feel better. But then they come around to being great again, because they are such an inviting setting for reaching white people. You don’t even need a real in, because you’re at the same conference—that’s your in! Their hearts are open, they can be convinced, moved, seduced, they’re wearing assless chaps.
And this is the best state in which to meet white people. So so so many white people. And you stuffed their cards in your free branded tote bag (next to and in between multitudinous free pens and logoed stress balls). You gave them your pitch every time “I do social justice comedy, my current project is blah blah blah, and oh my God isn’t it delightful talking to me?”5 Those white people listened, hopefully they’ll remember, and when you need a huge institutional force to support your work, or when you need the dude who invented Skype to invest money in your social justice project that will certainly not make a penny, you have a bunch of cards representing a bunch of white people you met at a conference where you both felt things. And maybe, just maybe, when the time is right, you can call on them for the proverbial social justice booty call.6 In my experience, they’ll be up for it.
CHAPTER 12
My Boyfriend Is Black and a Mini-Bout of Racism
I’ve done a lot of dating. Indeed, countless men have regarded these lady parts and have decided, “Yes, I would like to take this girl out for a sensible meal that does not cost more than $15 a plate and in which she hopefully doesn’t order more than one drink, because if I take her back to my place I can get her drunk cheaper on the six-pack of Coors I have in the fridge, unless my asshole roommate drank it, in which case, I’ll have to take out the vodka that I hide under my bed.” Ah, yes, I’ve inspired a lot of men into this kind of poetry.
I’m just one heterosexual gal in my own peculiar corner of the dating world. I can’t speak for anyone else with any authority, and I have only questionable authority when speaking about myself but, here’s my theory: It’s hard to date when you’re an ethnic lady. Women of color are like day-old sandwiches, you pick one if all the fresh sandwiches are taken. Or, you buy one if you’re short on cash and then you’re pleasantly surprised when the sandwich still tastes good.1 When it comes to Iranian-Americans, Indian-Americans, Moroccan-Americans, and what have you, my theory is just a theory. I can’t find any hard and fast numbers to prove it. Trust me—I researched like three pages into my Google results. I went deep. Of course part of the premise of this book is that racial and ethnic groupings outside of white, black, Latino, and occasionally Asian get ignored. It’s not surprising that I wasn’t able to find any real numbers, because again, we get short shrift, even statistically. No regular-sized shrift for us!
But alas, there was plenty of ancillary, extrapolation-y data to support my theory. Take, OkCupid, for example; it’s an online dating site that got popular by being free. So if you are really lonely and looking for love in your life, but totally unwilling to spend a dime on your happiness, OkCupid is the site for you! And me, and everyone I’ve known, because at some point, we have all been cheap fucks dating on OkCupid. It’s really great for people who value love as much as they value the free order of cheesy bread that comes with every large pizza order. The Cupes releases various data they’ve culled from their sad, cheap, and horny community. They’ll tell you stuff like “Exactly what to say in a first message” where you learn that netspeak like ur or luv do not get responses at the same rate as you’re or love.2 So take that additional three milliseconds and type out the extra letters.
But more to the point, OkCupid released data on race. The hard truth is that “82% of non-black men on Ok-Cupid show some bias against black women.”3 Among women, Latinas are the second most penalized group. Conversely Asian women do very well in the online ratings world. So, from this data we can maybe say that Asian ladies enjoy a weird exception—probably owing to some horrible fetishizing and stereotyping of these women as being meek and obedient. And by the way, I have a bunch of Asian lady friends who will crotch-punch anyone who says this to them.
But, generally, if you’re a woman of color, dating is harder. You’re just not as popular even to other minority groups who are in the person-of-color pile with you.
I always knew this intuitively, but I was struck with it very clearly in college. Dating in college was a whirlwind of confusion. As I mentioned, the frat boys decided I wasn’t white enough. Although the big get in making out with a frat boy was waking up on sheets stained with equal parts crusted jizz and peanut butter. So maybe it was okay.
There were the artsy types who believed making out with someone, anyone, was part of the experience of college. They might even write a journal entry or make a collage after a particularly insightful make-out sesh. Sexual experience quickly turned psychological for them. These were the kind of guys who could commit to building a set of origami genitals in their drafting studio, but they might not actually “get in a meaningful relationship” because that would keep them from “experiencing new people” and from “letting my origami collection really explore itself.” The free-thinking, hipstery, hippie-y, cooperative-living types on my campus were my bread and butter for an over-the-shirt-bra-still-on boob rub and nothing more.
For these guys, making out with an ethnic girl like myself was a badge of honor. It was the “Look, Ma! No hands!” of sexuality, because it proved just how multicultural everyone was. “I’m so multicultural…” “How multicultural are you???” “I’m so multicultural, I made out with a Persian chick.” Then you could up the ante by getting a tribal tattoo.
But between the frat boys and the diametrically opposed hipsters were all the very many men in between. These lads, mostly engineers and/or premed students and occasionally scholars of animal husbandry, were kinda nerdy, kinda cute, kinda nervous, kinda sweet, kinda emotionally shut down. I’m sure they had red-blooded American boners that yearned for the hiking-boot- and performance-fleece-clad ladeez of our wintry campus, but they weren’t bold enough to go out and get some.
If the sexually confused co-op bound were an appetizer, these kinda-somethings were my main course in college. They were numerous, they were scared, and they were very grateful for female attention. I somehow met them when they had “just got out of a calculus / organic chemistry / structural engineering” test and were giving themselves a whole night without studying. A few beers in, these boys could almost string together the elements of a conversation with beginner to intermediate levels of flirtation. “Dating” for me in college meant making out with one of them, and then never speaking to them again. I had a healthy attitude toward relationships in college.
I did manage one solid boyfriend in those four years. He was of an Iranian breed I had never met before: an Iranian Jew. Oh yes, for those of you who have never gone to Los Angeles, Jews definitely come in Persian form! It’s very exciting because they’ve got all the Farsi with all the Jewish guilt. They love Iran for all of its traditions but would also never live there again because of the historical beef with Israel. He was neurotic, and his all-time favorite filmmaker was Woody Allen, but like the Iranians, his default was gushing and overly earnest poetry. He was equal parts hysteria and quixotic idealist. I think we lasted about a semester.
But be still my little ethnic heart—to this point, I had only known the pleasures of people who couldn’t pronounce my name twelve to forty-three times after meeting me. To hold hands in public—and to make it to second and a half base—with someone for whom my entire heritage was understood, that needn’t be explained, that was lovely. Of course, as a nice Jewish boy, which in his case trumped being a nice Iranian boy, he would eventually be expected to marry a nice Jewish girl. Marriage wasn’t on the table when we were twenty, still somehow knowing this dampened the whole thing. To this day there is something that doesn’t sit well when people say, “I would date X-ian person but I wouldn’t marry one.”
It’s like a micro separate-but-equal policy that don’t smell right. Besides, I’ve long subscribed to the Dickinsonian notion that “the Heart wants what it wants—or else it does not care.” And most hearts don’t give a shit about someone’s religious background if that heart is also swooning and telling the loins to flare up.
I lost my V at the very old age of nineteen—or to be clear, the last day of my twentieth year, or to be way clearer, the eve of my twentieth birthday. I had a rule, which was that in order to have sex, I had to be older than voting age but younger than twenty. Anything older than twenty, and I would consider myself some kind of spinster handmaiden with an inevitable collection of doilies and a penchant for crocheting. (I hadn’t expressed any interest in crocheting or doilies but I knew, deep within, that if I didn’t hue very closely to that two-year V-loss window, doilies would emerge, and crocheting needles would miraculously appear in my spontaneously arthritic hands.)
Living in Paris the summer after my freshman year of college, I met the man who would not take but be generously gifted with not the burden but the wonderment of my V. We’ll call him Tom. Tom was all Sartre and red wine. He was not remotely French but he was a smarty-pants American from Brown and completely comfortable in his own skin. We spent the summer just chatting our faces off, discovering all the fun things that young college-aged kids on a language-learning program could discover. Mainly that if you drink two bottles of wine, and then eat a piece of bread, it doesn’t just “soak up” all the alcohol.
Of course, this story would be too perfect if the V loss happened in Paris—say, in a Left Bank bohemian boardinghouse with a view of the Seine and shabby Rococo velvet furnishings. No, that’s not how it went down. You know the old saying, “Meet a guy in Paris, lose your V to him in Boston.” That’s right, our whole posse of American students from that summer met in Boston for spring break. Boston in March is the pits, but we had free lodging, and all we really needed was a convenience store that sold cheap beer to be happy. The V was erased in a studio apartment, with four of our friends (hopefully) sleeping adjacent to the scene.
I walked around the next day as if I were wearing a scarlet letter V on my shirt. I definitely thought there was no way it wasn’t totally clear to everyone who saw me that I was no longer a virgin. I thought for sure everyone could see it, as if I wore my vagina on my sleeve. The barista would say, “Is whole milk okay?” and I would blush with the red of a thousand roses bursting out of my face—like She knows! How embarrassing! She knows! That feeling stayed with me for a few days. It would be another few years before I dared to have sex again. I kept that shit tucked away for reasons still unknown to me.
But when I graduated and moved to New York, that all changed.
Map of New York by Dating Type
There are so many men in New York. Tall men, short men, men who lack confidence, men who are overly confident, men who pretend they lost their cell phones, men who are overly in touch with their cell phones, men who send flowers, men who send animated GIFs, men who kick dirt up in your face, men who spend a lot of money on beard grooming, men who put four Splendas in their coffee, men who get a lot of “massages,” men who call their mothers every day, men who call their mothers “that bitch,” men who refuse to clean the mildew, men who can’t even see the mildew, middle-aged men who sleep on futons, twenty-something men who sleep on black leather sofas, men with ear hair trimmers, men with nose hair trimmers, men who use the same trimmer for both, men who deflect or project, men who stick and absorb, men who think it’s a jackhammer, men who play it like a dulcimer, men with shaved chests and censure, men with hairy backs and gratitude, and men with nut allergies.
I didn’t have a type on my end, but for some reason I managed to only attract white guys and Jews who were in a self-hating phase and/or feud with their mothers. For real. I looked at everyone, I yearned to make hot boning with an Indian dude, but none would look my way. I cast mad booty glances at Asians, but none requited. I looked endlessly upon Latinos and they looked endlessly away. I always found myself chatting with the nearest slightly nerdy white and/or Jewish guy, both anxious about where this bar-side chat would lead.
I wanted to be a cool interracial couple, me an Iranian-American, him a Belgo-Botswanan, or Franco–Sri Lankan or Tajik-Albanian. The possibilities of ethnic mixing were endless! This was New York! Surely I could make that happen. And yet, I was always the only one that didn’t need sunscreen at the beach. Whenever I was with a white guy and I saw an interracial couple, I had that same feeling you get as when you’re in an SUV, you drive up to the stoplight, and the person next to you is in an electric car. And you think to yourself, I get it, you’re cool and environmentally conscious and I’m a gas-guzzling trollop riding a dude named Fred. I get it, your dude’s wiener is locally sourced and mine jizzes trans fats. I get it.
One night in California, my mom decided to throw a singles party for my brother and my cousins, and I happened to be visiting. I would like to explicitly state the following: (1) I had nothing to do with this party, yet I was expected to help my mom clean. (2) My mom is a ridiculous person who somehow gets away with telling a bunch of Iranians twenty-five years her junior that they should come to her house for an Iranian singles party. (3) My cousins and my brother were the in-house team for this horribly embarrassing assemblage. And (4) There were young urban professional Iranians selected from all over Southern California who actually showed up.
So, there I was, setting out an array of hors d’oeuvres inspired from some French cookbook but all with an Iranian flare—like a puff pastry with some saffron snuck onto it, or bruschetta that had clearly been spiced up with turmeric, or chicken satay that was made with pomegranate molasses, shit like that. Iranians are incapable of taking a recipe and not Iranifying it. My brother and cousins came over, followed by the swarm of about thirty bonified Iranian singles.
At one point, my mother encouraged me to mix. While stifling a fresh vomit, I walked into the center of the action. A man approached. He made some pleasantries about my mom—yeah, great way to get your flirt on, talk about my mom. And then he asked the most common preflirt question, “What do you do?” I said, “I’m a comedian.”
He started laughing hysterically. Oh man, what a knee slapper! He caught his breath, let the wheezing subside, and said “No, seriously, what do you do? Are you like a pharmaceutical rep or something?” I broke it to him gently—I didn’t want to invite any more uncontrollable guffaws. “No, really, I’m a comedian.” The guy just said, “That’s nice.” And walked away. Yeah, he just walked away. Because for some Iranians—and maybe even many—being a comedian or anything in the arts is tantamount to being a total slutball.
For these Iranians, putting yourself onstage, making yourself heard, these are not considered “art”; they’re considered “exhibitionism.” Here’s a spectrum from good to bad of what particular Iranians have thought of my profession. Remember, I’m not trying to generalize. This is just my experience, and weirdly my experience takes precedence in this book:
There was no luck among my people especially the non–Third Thing ones. I needed someone who could understand the Americanness that drives me as well as the Iranianness as well as the love of honey mustard. But I did find lurve in other places. Remember I mentioned that time I had a corporate job? I used to put on business-casual outfits and sit in an office with no windows. It was the kind of office where you got excited for a trip to the bathroom. The kind of office where people made jokes about it almost being Friday.
I stuck out like a sore thumb because I was this Iranian-American girl who, despite the dress code, insisted on bearing cleavage. I was also the only person with comedy gigs at night. I kept this job mainly to use the printer, and everyone seemed to know it. They probably wished they had known it before they hired me for a career-track position in a fancy firm.
I was surrounded by white dudes as far as the eye could see. They were consultant types, loved their frequent-flier miles, a
nd treasured their rental cars. Todd was one of them. But he was somehow more self-aware. We were both based in the New York office but actually met on a business trip in Chicago, where we were instantly drawn to each other. The dude was unnecessarily tall and decently good-looking, but there was a heat wave in Chicago, the jazz bar was bumpin’, and we were throwing back the drinks with the zeal of twenty-somethings on an expense account. Because we were twenty-somethings on an expense account. That night, on the walk back to the hotel, as if we were trying to make the night acutely memorable, he decided to show me his swing-dancing moves. We danced on the streets of Chicago, to the music in our heads. Then, after the sidewalk dance party was the after party where, you guessed it, we boned.
Our relationship was immediate, and back in New York we spent almost all of our time together. I avoided using the term boyfriend, because comedians can’t have cutesy boyfriends and stupid, mushy feelings. I am the type of female comic who refers to my own dick. You can’t be in a loving, committed relationship and grab your phantom gonads on stage. It doesn’t fly.
I really thought that being in a relationship meant I wouldn’t have as much material. I was so worried about being seen as demure or girly that I engaged in a bizarre comedy backlash. I became even more ridiculous on stage. More dudely. More comedian-y. I was scared that love would change my comedy—I overcompensated, I wrote more about jizz and felching. At first Todd used to come to my shows, but I couldn’t handle him being there. I wanted him to be in a separate world where I wasn’t a girl in love but a crude comedian, all faux-masculine swagger.