the movement of everything



Years ago, I wrote a short story with the same title as this post,  about a girl named Laurel and her friends Emmy and Joel. It took place in the final moments of the summer before they leave for college. I think I let it be workshopped once, with a certain degree of peril. It seems like a relic now, as though it were a Polaroid or one of those folded up fortune-teller games from seventh grade. At the particular juncture of life, the title feels very relevant.

I’m leaving my job in May, going to Israel in June, and when I come back (July? August?), I have to figure out the next thing. Right now, it’s all unimaginable, but soon, I’ll be living a completely different life. It’s terrifying, I’ve been working in the Jewish community in some capacity since I graduated college, and the prospect of leaving it feels like swimming in the middle of a very deep, dark lake when you can’t see the bottom. I have pieces of a plan-grad school, travel, writing, of course, but there’s no definitive path-also a source of terror when, like me, you’re not a person of means.

The expectation is that when you’re thirty-one, you’ll have it together. I suppose some people do, as much as anyone ever can, but I’d prefer to think of myself as roughly edged instead of smooth. There is pretty solid evidence these days, though, to support the claim that over time I have lost faith in myself.

For a while I didn’t write. Anything. I might have kept a journal, but I can’t find it now. I remember why I stopped writing. It was because I’d convinced myself (and let other people convince me) that it was a waste of time, it would lead nowhere. I can’t believe I actually let myself believe that to the degree that I stopped. Writing is hard, scary and often demoralizing work, but as it turns out, Jewish communal service is not so different.

I have loved working for Hillel. It has allowed me to create community, make change, challenge myself, travel, learn about what I’m good at, build connections, and meet the people in my life who are the most amazing and important. And as much as it has been painful and frustrating, it has also become safe. I’ve stopped planning, instead, I’m running in place. The truth is that I don’t know anymore if Jewish communal service is what I actively want, or just where I’ve ended up.

Y is someone I love talking for many reasons, one of which is that she keeps me on my political toes. The other day, she said, “I’d love to see you get a PhD.” I think I hemmed and hawed during our conversation, which was basically about how I would love to get paid to talk about gender and sexuality and feminism all day. When she was gone, it occurred to me how much I had once wanted a PhD. I literally could not think of anything that would make me happier than being able to read and write through a feminist lens all day. When had I given up on that?

On one hand, I’m tired, and on the other, I feel like this is the time to take some risks I haven’t taken in a while, big risks, or at least, risks that feel big to me, like the PhD, or my temporarily abandoned goal of finishing my short story collection. The good news, of course, is that I’m my own boss, and I have been for years, and so the only person I’m really accountable to is myself. For that, I feel lucky

In my first draft of “The Movement of Everything,” Laurel and Joel watch Emmy leave for college, sitting in the passenger seat with her cello case propped up between her legs so she can keep track of it at all times. Since then, I’ve written a variation on this scene, with different people, in a different city. In this version, watching someone drive away is a beginning, not an end.

the one with all the body hair

I used to shave my legs. Badly. I still have a scar in my knee from a particularly nasty incident. I wear glasses and I have terrible eyesight without them, so shaving in the shower was dangerous. I’d nick myself and bleed, and then shave again, and bleed, and the results were pretty unpleasant. When I’d take a longer break than usual between shavings, my leg hair made me self-conscious.

I was tired of being a mess, and of participating in the consumerism around shaving-razors, lotion, shaving gel, all of which was pink. I thought about the consequences of not shaving-people staring, people calling me a lesbian (!). I thought about the beauty standards that call for women being smooth. Body hair is messy, cluttered, wayward and masculine. Women who don’t shave their legs are subverting a norm that at its heart is about the gender binary- they’re punished not just for not conforming, but for refusing to rid themselves of a quality that’s seen as specifically masculine instead of basically human.

And who else is smooth? Babies, little girls, pre pubescent boys-those who aren’t grown, who haven’t developed the thick skin that’s necessary to survive in this tough, ugly world. Demanding that women be and maintain hairlessness keeps us vulnerable, bare, childlike. Once I had that thought, I couldn’t do it anymore.

In her April 13^th piece in Salon, Tracy Clark-Flory discusses the recent debut of two hairy-legged female celebrities-Mo’Nique and Amanda Palmer, who both claim that their decisions not to shave were based on personal choices, and not because they were trying to make political statements.

I have some news for everyone involved in this situation: not shaving your legs is making a political statement, and being able to go out in public-as a celebrity no less-is a direct benefit of work done by feminists. Part of feminism is about exercising choice, being able to control your own body, life, actions, etc, but another part is about having an analysis around gender and power(and race, and class, and sexuality…). To pretend that subverting any norm is not about making a political statement isn’t doing anyone any favors, even if everyone sees your hairy lady legs.

I have some privilege in my situation I’m deeply confident in my politics, but I’ve worked in very casual environments. My leg hair isn’t thick or unwieldy. I spent four years in Oberlin, a community of strident anti-shavers. Of course, it’s not just about our legs (it’s not hard to imagine what my opinions are regarding the bikini wax). I certainly behave differently towards the hair on my face-a difficult reality for a lot of women-which I feel great shame and frustration around. I won’t even go into the lengths I’ve gone in order to remove it, and I’m sure a lot of readers would recognize themselves in my confessions. There are so many levels to this madness, but the most glaring for me is how we’re made to feel shame about our bodies, how hard it is to fight our way out of that, and to give credit when credit is due-to other women and our allies.

check me out

I’m on the Lilith Blog!  This is so exciting.

http://www.lilith.org/blog/?p=564

what to do with your secrets

**Trigger Warning**

What to Do with Your Secrets

1. Remember,one day as you walk down the street, the boy who sat behind you in English class in eighth grade. There was nothing extraordinary about him, except that he used to ask when you were going to let him get a piece of you.

2. Think about how your mother always told you to ignore people and they would go away. Remember that this advice worked in previous situations: the kids who teased you in third grade, the boy who used to kick the back of your seat on the bus.

3. Stare hard at your book when he whispers that he wants to fuck you.

4. When he  tries to unhook your bra  while you are writing an essay in class,  wiggle away, and hope that no one has noticed.

5. At night, in the shower, on the way to school, during homeroom and math, pray that today he leaves you alone.

6. Tell your friend, who sits across the room from you, about what’s been happening. Wonder if she’s right when she says you should be flattered.

7. On the day he and another friend trap you in a corner of the classroom and grab you between your legs, run into the hallway and pretend nothing  happened.

8. Think about telling your teacher.  Stand in front of his desk unable to form the words.

9. Much later, when eighth grade is over, find yourself holding the memory in your hands, like a crystal ball, turning it around and around, examining the cracks and cuts and edges.

10. Feel how hot and sharp your anger is. Let it stay awhile.

11.  Write it all down. Cut up the paper, rearrange it so you can’t read it anymore.

12. Decide how often you will visit it, how often you will let it visit you.

13. Stretch your legs. Shout.

Tomorrow is Take Back the Night, a march and speak out about reclaiming power around sexual violence, and  using our voices and communities to protest it and reclaim safe space.  I wrote “What to Do with Your Secrets” for a zine that’s going to be published by the Barnard Zine Library at the end of this month, another creation by the lovely and talented JH.

If you’ve never participated in TBTN, I can’t encourage you enough to do it, to support other folks whose lives have been impacted by sexual violence, and to think about your own power and what it means to be safe (or unsafe) in your own body.

(For those of you in the Columbia/Barnard community, the march begins on Thursday night at 8 at the Barnard gates, and the speak out is at 10 pm in LeFrak gym at Barnard.)

Word Association



There have probably been a million photographs taken of Butler Library the way it looks right now, stately, glowing pale yellow, black shapes of people going in and out.

For twenty four hours, we’ll be reading the names of our dead on the sundial. Drunk people will stumble past, laugh, look at the sign that explains what the reading is all about, gawk, maybe feel embarassed or confused. It’s a somber spectacle.

William Faulkner said,“the aim of every artist is to arrest motion.” In Oberlin, my friend Lily would read names every year for hours, and I still remember the care that she took in intoning every syllable. With the Yom Hashoah name reading, we try to achieve some modicum of justice by stopping time for the dead. What an insane idea. The dead, as far as I know, can’t hear us, so who is this for? The drunk,stressed out folks, the passersby, we don’t know what’s going on in their brains. So this is for us, to grieve people we never knew, to experience something that we don’t even understand, that we grow farther away from every year.

But what do I know, really? In an hour I’m going home. It’s cold out here.





The Eating Pasta at Two A.M. Post That is Also About Sex

Last night during Insomnia: Round 7,000, I read The Ethical Slut: A Guide to Infinite Sexual Possibilities, recommended to me in a fit of feminist joy by JH. There’s so much fascinating and important stuff in this book, so you should read it, but here are some of the highlights: a) reclaiming the word “slut” and thus unpacking what we’ve been taught about sex and intimacy, b) it’s okay (excellent, actually) to enjoy sex and have lots of it with lots of people, and c) most compelling and affirming to me: we, as individuals, are already whole people and while relationships certainly enhance our lives, they do not complete or fix them.

I found myself taking stock of the moments in the book where I recoiled or felt defensive, and then I thought about how ingrained I am with these traditional conceptions of sex (that monogamy is the highest form of relationship, for example), even though I find them repelling.

Here are some (carefully selected) moments from my relationship learning:

1. In seventh grade, all of my female friends become obsessed with boys and aspire to get felt up. I become obsessed with Anne Frank. My friends accuse me of being a lesbian. I have to look up “lesbian” in a dictionary.

2. The Biggest Episode of Beverly Hills 90210 Ever! (Also in seventh grade) When my friends talk about it incessantly, I pretend I understand and also care a lot. (Incidentally, I saw this episode the other day, again. It is pretty awesome.)

3. A boy manages to insert himself into my panicked junior high existence. I don’t want a boyfriend, and it freaks me out so much that I literally refuse to eat in front of him. He comes over to my house and we sit on the porch. I break up with him. My mother tells me I’ll regret it. I don’t.

4. High School: After two years of having an insane, consuming crush on a boy, we end up dating each other for 8 months. It’s all very chaste, so much so that my other friends who are in, shall we say, less chaste situations, wouldn’t tell me what they were doing and refuse to define certain key words in my presence. (I figured it all out eventually.)

I have other stories, of course, about relationships that were and are powerful and nourishing and important, but it’s this early stuff that I’m thinking about now, wondering what about it stuck in my brain and my guts.

I find myself often relearning the same lesson, namely that I should trust my instincts and my own sense of timing and of safety. We don’t let girls and women do this; we’re too busy trying to control them (and each other) and punishing those who don’t conform, who, to quote the authors of The Ethical Slut, “write our own script.”

What if the first thing, the primary thing, the most vital thing we taught our daughters was to listen to and to hear themselves? What if we didn’t teach women to be afraid or ashamed of their sexual selves, of what they want and who they want it from? What if we realized that paradigm breaking is an ethic?

the importance of having thin daughters

Thoughts of Late:

1. Oy, Passover. I’m always hungry, scouring the aisles of the grocery store looking for things that are okay to eat. It’s exhausting and insane. I was so close to not doing it this year,  but I needed some structure. The kind that comes with no high fructose corn syrup for eight days.

2.These weight loss commercials are on all the time. Is it me, or are they getting more aggressive? Did those two half naked people just tell me how great it is to be thin? Why are they always equating women losing weight with freedom? Are they trying to convince me that dieting is feminist?

3. If you’re thin, you can wear whatever you want, sort of, because you know that your skin and limbs will stay gathered, pulled tight, no excess, people won’t stare at you with disgust, you are hemmed in.

Body image has been a stumbling block for me for years, ever since I started staying up late at night writing (and snacking) the summer before my sophomore year of high school.

In college, I was informed by my roommate that I needed to lose “at least” 20 pounds. As I crossed the street in my neighbourhood last winter, someone in a passing car hollered that “If I weren’t so fat, maybe I could get across the street a little faster.” A homeless man I didn’t give change to told me he didn’t need money from a fat girl like me. My uncle asked my grandmother if she’s ever noticed how much I eat. These are just my stories, I could make a much longer list if I’d surveyed my friends.

For women, being dissatisfied with our bodies is a reflex, it’s practically mandatory. There’s no mythology about it, being a thin woman is more important than being a smart woman, an independent woman, a happy woman. Women who aren’t thin are constantly being reminded, whether subtly or otherwise, of our failure to be what we are supposed to be. We’re good at reminding ourselves of this, of course, but there also exists this powerful and disturbing culture of women keeping each other “in check” around weight-competing with each other to lose more, making every conversation about body image or clothing size, monitoring “healthy food” intake. Not only is this behavior incredibly triggering, it’s also a tragic picture of what women’s power looks like when it’s concentrated on hating our bodies as opposed to working for justice.

Men also suffer as a result of this body policing, it’s one of the many ways in which sexism hurts everyone.Women who have a body type closer to this crazy ideal also pay a price-they’re seen as constantly available sex objects. Nobody can win. I have no answers for solving this problem, other to say that even though it’s always important to listen ourselves, there are some voices that aren’t always important to hear.

edification

A few weeks ago, S and I went to an amazing panel at Housing Works, one of my favorite places in the city, called “That No So Fresh Feeling: Marketing Embarrassing Products to Women.” On the panel was Sarah Haskins, a brilliant and incisive  comedienne, Susan Kim and Allison Silverman. It was moderated by another of my feminist heroes, Hanna Rosin.

The panel was an insightful, disturbing and hilarious conversation about the past and present state of fem-care advertising. One of most compelling elements of the evening was a discussion of menstrual suppressing drugs, like Seasonique. The whole concept of these pills makes me insanely angry, since they treat the very concept of menstruation as optional, as though it weren’t totally normal to have your period. The aggressive peddling of these drugs based on the concept of choice is also  mocking of the ideals of the feminist movement by implying that stifling your natural body functions is the ultimate demonstration of liberation.

Recently, Bitch magazine interviewed Elizabeth Kissling, Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and of Communication at Eastern Washington University, the current president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and the author of Capitalizing On The Curse: The Business Of Menstruation. It’s a great interview, tackling not only the advertising of fem care, but also about the relationship between post-feminism and  neo-liberalism. You can read it here. Happy menstruating!