Little Weirds

by Jenny Slate

  The woman is a smarty and she is very earnest. She also wears lipstick.

  This is what the British woman tells me in her documentary TV show, or at least this is what I can summarize:

  Patriarchy is not something that was inevitable. It is not what a God wants or ever wanted, even though that has been said by many men. It is also not what Nature intended (and now that must be clearer than ever, because look at what Patriarchy has done to our Planet Earth). Nature does not want to be tortured and raped and murdered. Nature does not want to be wholly exploited. Patriarchy is not ever going to be for Nature’s own good. Nature belongs to Nature, first and foremost. Nature wants to give to us, but that does not mean we should take more than we need. Nature wants to engage, but not fully submit.

  The British woman says: Patriarchy is not a human-biological inevitability. Patriarchy is not here because it “just makes sense” or is the product of a thoughtful rationale.

  There was a time before Patriarchy.

  We have a better origin story and it is not widely spoken about but it is the truth.

  This lady on my TV tells me that Patriarchy was constructed and implemented, and explains that humans originally lived as a community, in a group, and everyone used the tools and everyone took care of each other’s babies, and shared their foods and prayed to gods and goddesses that were equally powerful and holy.

  As the communities got larger and created more people, these people were able to accomplish more, to store food and make better shelters from the wildness out there, to live longer and have more children. And they did this for a very long time. It was natural. And it became bigger and bigger and there was especially one good spot, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and this was called the Fertile Crescent. It was called the “cradle of civilization” and you might have learned about it in the fourth grade and you might have become obsessed with it, like I did.

  You might have overfocused on the cosmic significance of this one spot that sort of seems like it is the Earth’s Vagina. And the civilization of people, in that spot between the two rivers, broke the banks and led the water out into the land. The people led the water far out and they created irrigation. They trained water to come farther and to new places. This allowed the people to have more crops. Then there was a surplus of crops.

  I did learn about this, in fourth grade, from the best teacher I have ever had, Mrs. Damp, who never shamed me and was teeny tiny and had a necklace that said her name in hieroglyphics.

  I would love to have a beer, and so I do get up and get one and my mind wanders into spots where these questions are shimmying: Would Teddy Roosevelt be a feminist? Would he like me or think I am a wimp? Were the Kennedys just really gross, like, with women? Yes, they were. It’s not great, when you think about it, what they were like with all of the actresses. It’s gross. Why are so many men so gross but still we say that they are heroes? And if we try to even talk about it with these men, they get incredibly upset and defensive and call us cruel or insecure, but really, you can’t have it both ways.

  You can’t do the thing but then not want to ever discuss it. If you want to hide it, maybe it’s not just because “it is private” but because you know, you really do know, that it is gross.

  This is what I think about as I crack a Miller High Life and vaguely decide that I should not continue to have cyclical relationships with gross men, and that I will be sort of an “aunt to the world” and begin to collect sex toys made by other feminists.

  Or maybe I will meet and fall in love with an actually good man, I think, as my stomach lurches with curry-fire and my nipples are randomly hard from the amount of spice in my body.

  In the room with the TV, the dog is sniffing for curry, but it is only a memory. I have removed the bowls. The TV goes right back on because I press the buttons and I’m the boss, and here’s my British gal, now wearing a headscarf while touring an archeological dig. Her mouth has a daytime lipstick on it and she wants me to know this:

  Civilizations (Sumer, Mesopotamia, etc.) flourished in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Some people must have ended up with more than other people, because of the surplus of crops after they invented irrigation, and so then there was not only a class system but also greed, a new toothy, fast-breathing, slick-thinking, not-sorry greed.

  This woman reminds me of this sequence of events that for some reason I have always been fascinated by ever since Mrs. Damp told us about it—that there was a surplus and the world changed.

  Where there should have simply been an equal distribution of goods and general dedication toward community satisfaction and safety, instead greed came in and took ahold of a few key players. And these key players who were cold enough to look past questions of whether or not what they were doing was humane were Men.

  “Men with penises and ballsacks,” I think, while looking down to see that I have somehow splattered my pajamas with curry and have only noticed it right now.

  Men did it. And they saw the Women having babies out of their bodies. And they saw the babies growing up into what could be a workforce, and they decided to take a crucial and revolting step, which was to make Women and children into property, and to condemn their own spirits and identities to be mostly defined by what happens to their property.

  I start to understand that before the “greed event,” lots of bad things had already occurred, killings and rapes and theft and abominations of all kinds, but these bad things were never harnessed into a system. And then, says this British woman, they were. I was made into a system. Somebody did it. He is not a mystery person—his name was Hammurabi and he was a real man and he did it. He said that he did it. It wasn’t an admission; it was a declaration. He was proud.

  My colon is now apparently filled with lava?

  What this man created is this: the Code of Hammurabi. It was etched onto an obsidian phallus. It is physically scratched into a big hard ancient dick. And to be fair (although why must I, after all of this, be fair?!), the Code of Hammurabi has many different laws etched into its dark knob. Some are laws that are meant to keep the peace, but they are all spoken in a deeply misogynist voice, and so, in my opinion, they are unjust and they are void.

  The Code of Hammurabi is one of the first examples of legalized patriarchy, and it instilled these violent and demented ideals: A woman is the property of a man. A woman does not deserve to have as much as a man and she should not ever have as much as a man ever again.

  It says that in order for the men to thrive, women must be kept in line and controlled. It says, This starts now. It says women are worth something great to us, and because of that we must say that they are less than us, and we must never let them know what it is about them that we are trying to take for ourselves. It says, Women can’t. They must not. It says, Women are property. Men decide what women can do with their bodies. Men own women. We are all separate and must stay divided. Women are beneath, less than, but also, watch out for them, really do watch out! But act like you are not “watching out” or scared—act like a good guy who is protecting the holy object.

  It says, Act like you are innocent. It suggests, Tell them they are crazy.

  It seems that I can’t finish the second beer. Suddenly I am exhausted, angry, and near faint. I am thinking of ancient men and ancient stones and granaries and bird-gods.

  After I walk the geriatric dog, who is my old friend, and after I wash my dear little face, I get into my bed, which could fit four of me. I lie in the bed and scratch my legs with my feet and feel morose and incredibly young. I get ready to sleep fitfully.

  I think about the Tigris and Euphrates and what they whisper to each other now when they meet, constantly, at their problematic delta. “Holy fucking shit, man,” says the Tigris. “This is not our fault,” says the Euphrates, reading the other river’s mind.

  It seems to me, as I lie here with my dog, who may very well have been born in Mesopotamia because he is so very old, that once you make it
permissible to look away, that is when you irrigate your spiritual landscape with something foul.

  The Code of Hammurabi is the first evidence of legalized patriarchy. Does that send a shiver through your bones? Does that make you feel like we are currently ruled by fucking mummies who hate our mommies? Because that is what it is.

  Does it not seem unnatural that the basis of the interactions between genders in our species is something that was created by a psycho who took too much from an already generous river, thousands of years ago? Does it make you sick to know that the same men benefiting from this code are also the duds who are adjusting their popped collars, fixing their necklaces, wearing a ton of deodorant, and confidently saying, Okay, babe, but…to play the devil’s advocate…like…think about hunter-gatherer stuff. Like, isn’t it just the way that nature works?

  Nature does not work that way. Nature does not give a shit about low thinking like that. Nature invited us to be more than apes, more than cave people. Nature pushed us to change. Instinct is real but so are the facts that we lived communally and that human remains have been found buried with tools, both genders buried with tools, buried with babies from the other humans who dwelled next door. We lived in groups, we acted in a friendly way toward each other. We partied together. That is what we were inclined to do.

  Me too, even though I currently live alone and do not want to really use tools and I don’t know how to change a diaper and I’m afraid of that thing that happens when sometimes a baby poops and the poop goes all the way up their little back like a bad backwards shit-dickey.

  The Code of Hammurabi’s Penis was put in the Louvre, where Mona Lisa is about to fully smile and most likely totally crack up any day now. Because this code thrust Patriarchy into that ancient world, it influenced the creation of every other piece of art in that museum. Every piece of art that was created after the Code was somehow affected, and also all of our clothes and food and politics and religion and marketplace and how we have sex and who we do it with and how we talk to each other and what colors we think we are allowed to connect to and wear and use in our work and put on our signs and see in our minds.

  I don’t care if it is ancient or has some good points. I don’t care anymore about tradition that represents many things but certainly the oppression of more than half of humanity.

  Call me a vandal but I am lying in my bed and I say, I think maybe we should throw it in the trash. Can something that is important enough to be in a museum go right to the trash now?

  Of course, I am just a woman lying in the dark, listening to my stomach squeal and counting the seconds before my midnight curry diarrhea extravaganza, but should we just throw this ancient statue of a choad into a French dumpster?

  Or sure, sure. Okay. The trash doesn’t feel exactly right, so, okay.

  What about: Keep it in the museum but say what it really is and what it has done, and make the museum visitors scream NOOOOOO at it, so that people on other floors of the museum are drawn to the spot of the shouting. People from Indiana and India and Iran—on vacation in France—say, What’s that exhibit where you get to scream at something?

  They look at their museum maps but they can’t find any information. So they just do what animals do and they follow the sound. They form a crowd around a glass case that holds a random old stone boner and they find themselves screaming NOOOOOO as well. It is refreshing and out of the ordinary to do this, and they like it because it feels good to make big noises as a group.

  And the sound waves are so forceful that they wash away the etching of the old, evil laws.

  And then when the etching is erased, let the sound waves of that universal NO bounce off that dusty dick-statue and into the bodies of the people screaming NOOOOOO. Let the sound waves wash the inside of the people too, washing out the misogyny, washing out the ingrained laws that cause all of us, any gender identity, to have anxiety and rage and sadness because of where we have been sent and kept. Blast away the deep ridges inside that create a feeling of unnameable dirtiness and shame.

  Let it wash the obsidian phallus until it feels naked without its code and it just shrinks down, puffs into black dust. Then, place what is left into a little vial. Put that vial in a boring part of the museum. And the label on the vial should read, “These are the crumbs of the code that choked humans for thousands of years. This used to live in our minds and hearts. Now it is here and it is nothing but dust. If I were you, I would check out the Mona Lisa, which is surprisingly small for such a famous painting, but still thrilling. Take in her mystery! What is she thinking?”

  Focus on this old painting of this woman who doesn’t care about serving you, who keeps her story to herself because you are not her boss and she is smiling first and foremost for herself and she’ll grin when she fucking feels like it.

  I finish the documentary eventually. I learn about ancient female warriors and poets, and quite a bit of new information about foot binding in China, and about St. Hildegard of Bingen, who was a mystic and a genius and who also really turns me on, intellectually speaking.

  But the Code of Hammurabi really sticks with me. When I encounter a proud misogynist or an unconscious one, or I see misogyny flare up in myself, I imagine this Code sitting in the museum, or sitting on a block, being created far back in the past, and I say to myself that this can all go another way.

  I lie in my bed and I say, There was a start and so there can be an end.

  Kinship

  I sit at the table in the afternoon in the part of the day when the air is warm still from hanging in a day of sun. I have a clock in my kitchen and the kitchen is a different room from the dining room, because this house is from before World War II and even before World War I, when people were smaller and lived shorter lives and didn’t know the term “great room” or “open concept.”

  I sit in a room that was built even before movies were made here in this city, which has been filled with movie people and people thinking about movies, with movie people’s shredded dreams, shreds of dreams left to moan in pieces all over this palm-tree-dotted patch at the edge of a whole country. I sit where people came like babies and zombies, drawn to an art form that is incredibly dangerous and decadent and astounding and represents stories in motion, represents life in a way that we find irresistible, and also is responsible for a massive amount of darkness and abuse.

  I sit in a chair in an old house at a table that is from Denmark and from someone else’s house in the 1960s on another part of the planet in a time that has rolled away behind us. I sit in the chair, which is probably as old as my friend’s young baby, who is crawling so fast and is startlingly robust and most likely currently holding a banana too hard and making it into a lint-y, silly pudding in his little baby hand.

  I sit here in the afternoon, which seems to be holding its breath, and I hear the day birds and their noises like necklaces shifting, like glass being tinkled, but I also hear the motors of the wings of the night bugs starting to rev up because they feel the sun glancing over its shoulder to leave. I sit here and I turn around to face the air coming through the window, and the air is so warm that I take it as a sign that it is all right to be alive as I am, just as I am, and to keep trying.

  I have recently clung to my very foundations and lasted many upsets, and I have had a muddled mind, even. But I see the light on the leaves and how it makes them seem filled up with green, not just flat with green on the flat. I see how they appear to be filled with air and how light and air are separate but make holy beauty out of nature that is already so sacred. I see it. I know it. That nature makes art and I am a creation and I make things. This is an expansive fact that I could never measure, and it calms me. The elemental companionship of light and air make it so beautiful on those leaves that when I turn in my chair to really look, the leaves are just there existing, and I feel my heart break down even more and I say, Good, let it fall away, and look, look, everything is always remaking itself and so are you. Everything is art and nature and so are yo
u.

  And I see the leaves turn a bit in the air, and the breeze coming in feels like the whole world is a pet that is breathing on me, and I think, Well, I am so sensitive and I am very fragile but so is everything else, and living with a dangerous amount of sensitivity is sort of what I have to do sometimes, and it is so very much better than living with no gusto at all. And I’d rather live with a tender heart, because that is the key to feeling the beat of all of the other hearts.

  And I do know that I have been drawn here, hooked through my spirit just like some woman was drawn here in 1937, 1959, 1976, looking for a break in this place, to be a part of the art of moving images, looking for someone to say, We should all watch you. Wanting to be watched but also wanting to be watched, like by a guardian, like that the whole world wants to watch you to make sure you are safe. If the whole world knows who you are then it is harder to get lost out there, although time and Hollywood have proven that many of the people get lost inside of themselves because of an unbalanced reaction to exposure outside, in the world of others.

  This is all romantic and degrading and interesting at the same time—nothing cancels another thing out.

  It is gross and great.

  I let myself stop holding everything so tightly, I let it all fall away and I feel the warmth of the sunbeams at this time of day and I feel deep pride and spiritual fortification in the fact, not even the idea, but the fact that the light shines on me just as it does on the leaves and that even though I came here to try to do the art that I want and I want to be seen and held safe by my world, truly, in my primary wish for experience, I am asking for nothing more than a kinship with the atmosphere.