By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

I vaguely recall the first time someone asked me what it means to be a feminist. I was still a kid, freshly baptized in the blaze of radical feminism. Or so it seemed, as our consciousness-raising group met in Anita’s living room. She was into her middle years, a professional woman returned to college, and the group was a school project. Its existence in our small town was a damn miracle for us and a disturbing mystery for the men, who didn’t understand why a gaggle of gals would get together for no better purpose than to talk — just talk — to each other! — what the hell? — and we weren’t too sure ourselves, at first, although their reactions were reason enough, and enlightenment shortly followed.

Ensconced in pastoral adornment — brocade throw pillows, hand-tatted antimacassars, ceramic tchotchkes — we spoke of goddesses and orgasms, of Shulamith Firestone and her Dialectic of Sex. We gasped and caressed the images of female genitalia in Our Bodies, Ourselves. We dreamt of Feminist Revolution amid fiery Redstockings. And we strode boldly forth to spread the good word of equality of the sexes.

That’s when one of the boys on the farm asked me about feminism (yes, there literally was a dairy farm, with a lot of eager boys on it). But the acrid sarcasm in his inflection neutralized the need for a serious response, along with his chances. Were it not for my oh-so proper upbringing — the gendered training that turns Southern females into well-coiffed boot scrapers and males, into manure-crusted boots — I’d have asked him what it means to be a teeny sexist turd.

Of course, I didn’t. As one of the elite white males who has claimed the exclusive U.S. leadership mantle said years later, “Wouldn’t be prudent”[1] — no matter that belittling my passions annoyed me. But, alas, back then I still clasped the remnants of ladylikeness as a virgin bride clutches the coverlet to her chin on her wedding night.

Hmmm, that image might be a tad sexist. Blame it on the South, the South and the more generic sublimation of female anger. We were not allowed to be angry; it would interfere with our being gracious, accommodating, acquiescent — boot scrapers.

But I changed — with the seasons, with the years, with the geography — and by the 1990s I took to slinging the Oxford English Dictionary definition of feminism at California’s political candidates, who proudly proclaimed their befuddled disaffection for the moniker by answering “No” to the question “Are you a feminist?” and “Yes” to the question “Do you support granting women the same rights as men?”

“Ahem, sir,” I’d say, “that is feminism.” And the hapless hucksters would stumble over their reassurances that they both advocated for women’s equality and abjured feminism.

Go figure.

Now, thirty-five years removed from my feminist birthing, I am asked yet again what it means to be a feminist, a feminist in an anti-feminist culture, a culture as far removed from the feminism of the 1960s and 70s as we were then from the suffragists of the previous century’s turning. But there is a difference. This time, the query is posed without sarcasm. It comes from a women’s studies professor, a smart woman with wild hair and more books than her institution deems seemly. She’s been plunked into a new office with shelves enough for half her books. When I saw this, I couldn’t help but imagine the architect wondering how many words women really need to pack into their pretty little heads. Idiot.

Do I seem angry? I’m not supposed to be. But after thirty-five years of surveilling our patriarchal system, I am.

Or no, I’m not angry. I’m thinking, thinking of that classic Southern aphorism — that horses sweat, gentlemen perspire and ladies glow. I recall telling Mother, once, that I was sweating like a stuck pig. I don’t recall that she laughed, but I hope she would laugh at my suggestion now — that ladies clench their sphincters and remain silent, women become understandably yet politely angry, and feminists get mad. Because I am mad. I am a mad feminist. And I get mad better than most. Because mad is a tool for change. Silent acquiescence and clenched sphincters, polite anger, they are not tools for change — not at the turn of the century, not in the 60s and 70s, and not today.

What does it mean to be a feminist today, a mad feminist? I think it means a lot of things, some I’m still learning.

But I do know it means seeing people roll their eyes at the mention of consciousness-raising groups, those silly little things that turned on our voices, that aroused our sexuality, that confirmed our personhood.

It means a persistent gendered wage gap that in 2009 paid women a median wage equating to about 80¢ to each $1.00 men earned.[2]

It means fuming as women’s bodies serve as capitalism’s primary tools, our breasts selling beer, our genitalia pitching the latest fashions, our undeveloped hands assembling the endless stream of consumer goods from Third World countries that keep the elite in power around the globe.

It means mourning the loss of Congresswoman Bella Abzug’s trailblazing path to the United State’s lackluster ranking of 70^th of 186 nations in the percentage of females in national legislatures[3] — behind such countries as Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.

It means gasping as young women succumb to the fallacy that fellatio is not sex and their bodies, themselves are not worthy of respect — their own or their partner’s.

It means flinching as nearly one in every four women in the United States reports experiencing violence at the hands of a current or former intimate partner.[4]

It means wailing as each of more than 500 women per day reports being raped or sexually assaulted.[5]

And still — still! — we blame them for their abuse. Perhaps this is why experts suggest the actual numbers for domestic violence, rape and sexual assault are double or triple what is reported — or more.

It means that the U.S. government has barely begun to collect comparable data for lesbians and bisexual and transgender women.

It means — all of this means — that we need to do something about it, something to declare that this is how it is and that how it is, is not right, is not sane, cannot continue.

And that means we need to be activists for equality all the time, everywhere we go, always insisting on having difficult conversations we might rather avoid, the kind we would have shied from before our do-it-yourself-home-inspection-speculum days, when it was easier to fake an orgasm than to talk about it, to explore what it would take to achieve it, to tell a partner to try this instead of that. It’s not that different from equality. Seriously. Female orgasms and equality require the recognition that they are absent when they shouldn’t be, the desire for them, and the commitment to talk about them for the purpose of obtaining them. Orgasms are just a lot easier.

Equality, equality is a toughy. Which brings me back to the question of what it means to be a feminist today. Although I’m still working on the answer, I’m certain it means I have to be mad. I’ll let you know what else I figure out. And then I’ll call Anita, to thank her.

Love,
K-B

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag, The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

Southern colloquialisms are so darn charming — with those well-honed nasty edges! Growing up, my family had particular fun with them, as we were wont to play with most words, great fodder that they were for what we considered erudite scoffery (a perfectly good word, if only the Oxford English Dictionary would admit it!).

We could take a nattily nasty little idiom — That fellow’s been hit with the ugly stick — and turn it into a folksy yet classist slur — Far worse, my dear, he’s been hit with the uncouth stick. Of course, we failed to acknowledge that criticizing someone’s social station was as lacking in good manners, refinement and grace as the poor schmuck at the unhappy end of the stick.

However, after years of navel contemplative therapy, fond re-reading of Emily Post, and pragmatic acceptance of Miss Manners’ heartfelt but faulty contemporization of traditional social graces, I had rid myself of such unbecoming behavior. I deemed my time better spent on serious injustices than on sniping at folk who wouldn’t waste their time at the Maryland Hunt Cup, something I now avoid myself, given the inclination of the fans to wear jeans — jeans! — to the horse race on My Lady’s Manor. (My Lady would be horrified!)

Oh, dear. Having written that last bit, I realize that perhaps I’ve more work to do on my classist self.

Frankly, though, something much more disturbing has sent me sidling back to my Southern hierarchical roots, something that suggests that maybe some people are, well, some people are sort of— kind of— rather like— oh— better than others.

I know, I know, it’s an unseemly thought, but first let’s be clear on terms: I do not mean “better” in the biblical sense, as in the better folks will transcend life’s earthly bonds to soar into their heavenly and glorious reward, while those who are betterness impaired will descend into the stinking ignoble fires of hell’s perpetual torment.

Aw, jeez, stop right there. I mean, take a gander at what I just wrote. I don’t believe in all that Southern Baptistism, but it is acutely obvious that I’d like to propel some folks downward with a swift kick hindward. Ignoble fires, perpetual torment? Jumping Jehoshaphat!

So, what has given me the vapors? Is it the devolution of my social conscience? What’s got my dander up into a blizzard of judgment?

Welp, I devoted my spring break to a media content analysis — counting the incidence of indecent words and references to rape, racism, homophobia, violence and picking on sick kids — and, although the exercise appealed to my left cerebral hemisphere, it didn’t do much for my psyche. The experience elicited some rather powerful reactions just hankering to be heard.

In fact, if I were not a lady I’d use some very strong language, and, actually, I am not and, because I’m not, I’ll be clear and direct: People who spew hate in rancid tabloids, in deceitfully bigoted organizations, in unexpurgated online comments, in the prurient pages of glossy misogyny, in massively heinous hatemails — all you all suck.

And what did I learn during spring break— dare I put the thought to words?

Hmmm, indeed I dare: When it comes right down to it, chillun, people who choose to hate, people who hate anonymously, people who lie about hating, people who humorize hate to render it invisible, these people who hate are just not as good as the rest of us.

There. I wrote it. I own it. And I gladly acknowledge that particular prejudice. Because there are folks out there who have been hit with the hate stick — their poor mamas must be spinning in their graves! — and, although our Constitution might protect their vile vomitus, they deserve to be pilloried for it.

Perhaps this conclusion is a remnant of my Southern Baptist heritage; I am ever recovering. But you know what? I’m OK with that. I’ll just set a spell and think on it while I calm my fevered brow with a cool mint julep.

Love,
K-B

Notes: I no longer fancy the races; they are damnably uncivilized for the horse.

Stock image from Library of Congress, originally published in Puck, February 3, 1909.

Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag, the Progressive Post and San Diego Gay and Lesbian News.

At Café des Artistes

1. I dated this girl once. She said, “You’re an enigma: You waft between deep spirituality and potty humor.”

2. I wonder, did any of your parents’ children survive?

On writing

Natasha,

My courtship with writing has, alas, left her a spinster. Gone is the flower of her youth, barren is her womb. She longs for my attention, sighing as I whisk by, racing from one random pedestrian act to another. I look on her and see the unfulfilled dreams she, a virgin, has carried; the futile burden she has borne interrupted by only an occasional exercise of haiku, a silly trivial limerick, a more promising letter to a friend. Then a tortuous tease of real hope for her via the execution of a carefully crafted and poignant eulogy of a parent or friend causes her to pause, breathless, hoping for her lover to fully engage; knowing what promise lurks, what fecund riches hang nearing the angle of incidence … But alas, her lover, distracted by a trifle, abandons her again for another.

Scott

At Major Market

Shopper 1: What brought you to Fallbrook?
Shopper 2, with a Lithuanian accent: The Communists.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you,” he said. After his briefcase hit the empty seat.

I looked up from my book and was not surprised by what I found: older white male, expensive suit, assumptive bearing, and a physique to match the sonorous voice — he was too large even for the exit row. But upon a second, sneaky glance, while he stowed his luggage and adjusted himself into his seat, I noticed the faint hand tremor, the thinning hair approaching white, the hint of a stoop revealing his seventy, maybe seventy-five years.

I let a sigh slip. It was the damn tremor that swayed me, forcing me to close my book — Sue Townsend’s cruelly hilarious spoof of the British royals — and exercise the social graces Mother taught me. Besides, if he’d offered a question rather than a declarative before tossing his briefcase, I wouldn’t have thought twice about his claiming the seat. So I turned to him and said, “Of course not — please join me.”

He looked down at me without making eye contact and nodded a suitable smile in my direction as he unfurled his Financial Times, and I thought I caught disappointment flit across his visage. If only he had boarded a little faster, he might have landed next to the babe who’d sashayed down the aisle before me. She had a caboose even I noticed — as did the hungry hunter who snagged the seat next to her, licking his chops in anticipation of getting a mouthful of those sweet cheeks. So the poor old fellow was stuck with me — baggy jeans and sweatshirt (Father always said I dressed like an old boot) and a befuckled mood (I’d lost the joy of flying when the airlines stopped providing those cool little salt and pepper shakers in coach).

A flight attendant distracted our minimalist encounter when she requested verbal affirmatives from those of us in the exit row, thereby committing us to assisting in the event of an emergency. With the threat of terrorists misbehaving on planes, I took this responsibility quite seriously, but checking out my fellow prospective heroes, I had to question the legitimacy of the airline’s process.

There was one brooding skateboarder, who, upon declaring “Yes” that he was ready and willing to assist, reinserted his iPod earbuds, despite having obediently turned off the contraption, and pulled his baseball cap over his eyes, assuring neither social interaction nor emergency readiness. He was probably dreaming about the sashaying caboose.

Next to him was a gal who appeared to be on her first solo flight post aerophobia treatment. With clenched knees and jaws, her wild-eyed stare boring into the seatback in front of her and barf bag in her lap, she clutched the armrests as beads of sweat grew on her blanched face and nervous snot flicked from her nose.

Clearly neither she nor the kid could be counted on, which lent a new appreciation for my presumptuous seatmate. He looked as though he might still be strong enough to help me hoist the 70-pound door and I, having worked in social services, had proved my crisis-management abilities manyfold. In fact, the aerophobic’s nose reminded me of one such incident at the program I once directed for multi-handicapped blind adults.

I’d received a frantic call to my office from the nurse’s station one sunny California afternoon. “Conrad bit Nadine!” the shift supervisor shrieked.

“Is she OK? Did you isolate Conrad?”

“He bit her! He bit her!”

“Yes, I got that. Take a breath. Is Nadine OK?”

“He bit her! He bit her nose! In her room! There’s blood everywhere!”

“Bring bandages and an icepack to her room.” I ran from my office and met the supervisor at Nadine’s door, where Nadine stood silent and still, hands covering her face and blood drenching her blouse.

“Conrad bit my nose,” she said, dropping her hands to reveal a bloody void where her nose once was.

“Shit. Where’s the nose?” I asked the supervisor. “Did he swallow it?”

She was busy tossing her lunch in Nadine’s trashcan, so I had Nadine press a bandage to her new facial concavity, and I dropped to the floor. There I was, in my tidy little business suit and pumps, crawling across the institutional carpet in pursuit of a nose — which I found under the bed, right where Conrad had spit it.

Later, when I asked him why he did it, he said, “She was rude to me, so I felt for her nose and I bit it.”

So, yep, pushing people down the inflatable slide seemed manageable, as long as the old fellow could indeed help me lift the door out of the way. This thought shifted my predisposition from dislike to acceptance of the man.

Except then he blew it. After folding his newspaper and tucking it in the seat pocket, he settled his elbow on our shared armrest. Now, this alone is an annoying but common maneuver on a plane. Men do it to women without a thought, although bold women preempt it by getting there first. But it was the subsequent pressure of his upper arm against mine that set me off. I shifted every body part that I could toward the empty space between my seat and the emergency exit door, but it was not enough. Still his arm pressed to mine. It was surely an intrusion, and it was unbelievable that he couldn’t feel it.

Now, my Southern upbringing precluded my saying what I was thinking — that he move his fucking arm — so out of desperate discomfort, I leaned forward and buried my face in my book, determined to disregard him the rest of the flight.

But he had other plans. Having consumed his Financial Times, he proceeded to interpret it for the rest of us. “Obama Bin Laden,” he chuckled, “he is doing everything he possibly can to slow down our financial recovery.” My hackles began to rise, and I pretended to continue reading.

“People of wealth will never vote for him again,” he continued, “and the young derelicts who did in 08 might actually acquire the discernment to think twice in 2012, particularly the trust fund kids. I have one client whose offspring have probably voted away their inheritance.”

My pretense shattered and I turned to him, preparing to challenge him for likening the President to Osama Bin Laden.

But he prattled on: “Thankfully, it doesn’t much affect me. I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime — of course, I am bragging — but, yes, I’ve made a lot of money in my lifetime. It’s long gone, now.” And then he paused, looked at me directly, and laughed a melancholy little laugh. “Most of my colleagues invested in commercial properties, things like that, but I didn’t. I saw the world instead.”

This time, it was that little laugh that swayed me. If nothing else, he deserved some consideration for his regrets, whatever they were. And there was that pesky Southern thing again. So I listened to his stories and nodded, oohed and ahhed in all the right places, and learned that as a young man he’d ridden his motorcycle across Europe; he was divorced years ago and never remarried; he didn’t usually reveal that he was an attorney, but he was; the district attorney and he barely tolerated each other, but he was friendly with a lot of the judges; he had no children he owned up to; he smoked fine Cuban cigars, but of course, he said, he was bragging again.

I patted his arm. “You’re entitled, Honey.” And he regaled me with his stories for the rest of the flight, while the skateboarder snored under his baseball cap and the aerophobic came to her senses and demanded to be moved from the exit row.

•     •     •     •     •     •     •     •     •

The lawyer was on my mind as I drove home from the airport. When I arrived, I Googled his particulars and found his name in an attorney directory, where he mugged with one of his spiffy cigars. I searched for more and found an article. “Sweetie,” I called to my husband. “Look at this. I chatted with this fellow on the plane. In the 80s, he got into a wee-wee contest with a judge over wearing a turban in court.”

“Was he packing explosives in his underwear?”

“I think that’s probably racist, Sweetie. Besides, you joke like that and I’ll have to frisk you.”

“OK, then I’m packing explosives in my underwear.”

“Funny boy.” I kissed him. “Seriously. He refused to explain why he wore the turban, and the judge insisted that he couldn’t wear it without stating a ‘legitimate’ reason. He prevailed eventually.”

“Was he wearing it when you met him?”

“No. I suppose he’d made his point when he won.”

“Hmmm. So, what’s your point?”

“Oh, I’m not sure. It’s just interesting. Nothing, I suppose.” I went back to reading the case, amused by his eccentricities and disappointed I hadn’t been a little nicer. But I don’t know, maybe it was just that Southern thing again.

©2010 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

*Oh the times! Oh the customs! – Cicero, 63 BC

(NOTE: Photograph by Nathan Rupert via a Creative Commons license.)

Writers

Want to submit your work to Excuse Me, I’m Writing for the sheer joy of having an audience? Email your original fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry — 2,500 words maximum — in an MS Word document or in RTF to kb@kbgressitt.com. If we publish your work, you keep all rights, including bragging.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

Whenever we have Chinese food, I wait for the last fortune cookie, my passive destiny. Fellow diners have encouraged me to go first, thrusting the dish of Cellophane-wrapped futures in my direction, but I’ve always politely deferred to those bold enough to claim their fates, accepting whatever’s leftover. It’s a throwback to my Southern rearing — good things come to good girls who wait for everyone else to go first. Yet I yearn to spurn that demure thing, that what-may-I-do-for-you accommodation. Of course, I also have a Scarlett temper, so I vacillate between scolding myself for being volatile and for being putridly nice. I am a secret feminist failure, and I’m reminded of it regularly.

I recently received a phone call from a former colleague, definitively foe, not friend. When he announced himself, I shifted into automatic Southern manners mode, something we are taught from our earliest days of cotillion: Cover the effrontery of any boy’s faux pas with the proper accessories of a lady, a gracious gesture, a superficially personal question, if necessary, a short discourse on the bane of the 17-year locust; do anything but overtly acknowledge his indiscretion. Our white cotton gloves protected us from the testosterone-laden perspiration dripping from our adolescent dance partners’ palms. Our feigned stumbles concealed the swift brush of dandruff shards from their shoulders. Our averted eyes and cookie commentary shielded us from the ripe and ready pimples on their fuzzy chins.

And my “What may I do for you?” masked my rage at the impudence of the fellow’s contacting me.

He emitted a weighty “Ahhh,” and launched into a boring story about a seminar he’d attended with other very important people where he’d learned that the words I just uttered are the mark of a superior professional, a serious leader who succeeds by actively seeking to serve others, to give of himself in search of solutions. I silently noted the continuation of the caller’s insensitivity to gender inclusiveness, but he was, as always, oblivious as he prattled on. He was so grateful to have worked with me, he reminisced wistfully, allowing us a moment to savor choice morsels of collaborative success. There were none, as far as I could recall, so my moment was spent gazing through the porch door to the hummingbirds dancing with the hibiscus. Although, I did recall his previously finding me such a valuable colleague that he helped usher me out the corporate door, albeit not wearing but, at a very minimum, lacing up the steel-toed clodhopper that left the bruise on my curriculum vitae.

Yes, he continued, I was such a serious, effective person, he said with emphasis, speaking of which, he needed to move on himself and he’d like to pick my brain, my being such a fabulous writer, and his, as inspiration would now have it, wanting to be a writer of sorts himself.

I could have suggested he take a long and uncomfortable ride on the corporate carpetbag he rode in on, but I did not. Instead, I succumbed to my ladylike roots and offered up my best guidance for nearly an hour. I responded to his ill-defined, unreasoned objectives with Kindergartenly kind words of acknowledgement, then redirected him to reflection and examination. I threw in a little internal and external analysis, because I’d been taught to always offer more, without actually using that word. I was, for one brief hour, the good girl, the serious person he wanted me to be in order to access my goodies.

And when we hung up, he surely walked away with warm and rising hopes, and I stepped outside to bellow to the hummingbirds and citrus trees what I thought of the man in the most gutturally obscene terms, dredged from the dankest bars in which I’d ever swilled the Devil’s juices.

So, with the mores of a Southern belle and the mouth of a mud wrestler, I guess I’m really not such a serious person. Sure, I can be sardonic, occasionally touching, sometimes clever. Serious, though? Not if I won’t even call a jerk a jerk.

Maybe I need to consider the mud wrestler. I could be more like her, I suppose — I wish! I could be like her, if I weren’t who I am, so genteel, so uncertain, so stubborn, so angry, so foolishly waiting for that last fortune cookie. And it always tastes like shit.

I wonder what Scarlett would do?

Love,
K-B

©2009 Kit-Bacon Gressitt

(Photo by ZZeller via Creative Commons License.)