Monthly Archives: October 2022

Binary Virtue and Transmasculine Confusion

Being transmasculine and a feminist is a confusing experience sometimes. I’m deliberately not using a blame-word like “erasure” because part of the confusion is not knowing how much space to occupy. Add my history of being rescued from abusive women by empathetic men, and the alignments get even more complicated.

What I’d like, first and foremost, is to decouple the fight against patriarchy from assertions about the relative virtuousness of “women” and “men”. When the discourse goes there, as it so often does, I get that feeling where the words stick in my throat and my skin doesn’t fit right.

My mom-of-choice streams lesbian movies for her friend group, which unsurprisingly includes many in her demographic of white butches over 70, as well as a few harder-to-categorize younger queers like me. I’ve seen some brilliant indie and foreign films in this series that wouldn’t have been on my radar otherwise. While folks are getting settled in, she likes to precede the main feature with a woman-centric short film or music video. One of those was Israeli protest singer Yael Deckelbaum‘s “War Is Not a Woman’s Game”.

I was stirred by the passionate music and message, yet faintly uncomfortable with the premise that anything (other than their lesser political power) made women inherently more peaceful than men. I wondered whether I should accept that this piece of media was simply not for me, and observe it with silent empathy, as an emotional release rather than a proposition I needed to agree or disagree with. But I did feel I belonged in the movement Deckelbaum was creating, and would have had no doubts about the invitation, had it not been for the gendered framing. That’s why I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw some men in the song circle in the video.

In the chat, four or five of the women watching the video with me became heated about the men’s presence. They said they were sick of men centering themselves in everything, and that there shouldn’t have been a man in the front row of the singing group. Nobody contradicted them. Now what could I do? To speak up as a trans man would have confirmed the very objection they were raising. So I’m taking up space on my own fucking blog instead.

The other day I heard an even better song on the car radio. The catchy melody, the clever rhymes, and the body-positive message gave me a physical boost of good energy. I’m talking about “Victoria’s Secret” by Jax. It’s an anthem to her younger self, and young girls today, to let them in on the real secret: stop starving yourself to comply with impossible “beauty” standards. “She’s an old man who lives in Ohio/Making money off of girls like me/Cashing in on body issues,” Jax sings. “I know Victoria’s secret/She was made up by a dude.”

Technically this is true–according to Wikipedia, Les Wexner of Columbus, OH (now chairman emeritus) bought Victoria’s Secret in 1982 and turned it into the sexpot brand we love to hate. The same entry, however, mentions a number of female CEOs and high-ranking executives throughout VS history.

More to the point, I’ve always seen it as a cop-out to blame the male gaze for women’s cruelty to each other, which is a primary mechanism by which these fatphobic and butch-phobic standards are enforced. In my adolescence, my failure to perform thin and sexually alluring femininity merely made me invisible to young men, but repulsive to my mother and my female doctor. Girls scrutinize each other’s bodies and style choices with forensic attention to detail, while boys are like, “Duh, is she wearing a bra?” Fashion industry editors and tastemakers are predominantly women, as are the consumers of these images.

As a contest judge and avid reader, I see no difference between male and other-gendered authors in using fatness as shorthand for telling us that a character is unlikeable or stupid. And after two years of weekly attendance at lesbian movie night, I can count on one hand the number of women-made films I’ve seen that don’t center thin, young, conventionally attractive femmes. (I especially recommend “Late Bloomers” and “Cloudburst”.)

At what point will we stop judging people’s virtue by their gender identity, rather than their allegiance or resistance to patriarchy?

Helen Leslie Sokolsky: “In the Company of Books”

Winning Writers subscriber Helen Leslie Sokolsky has just released a new poetry collection, When We Had Orchards When We Had Moonbeams. I favorably reviewed her earlier book Two Sides of a Ticket on this blog a few years ago. Helen has kindly allowed me to share a poem from her new book below. She says, “It was written for a dear friend of mine, an Auschwitz survivor. She and her two sisters were in the camps and her love of life for all the years I knew her was an inspiration to so many of us. Regina loved literature and poetry. That poem was on her night table when she died in her apartment a year ago last June. I was told by her neighbor next door that she had asked to hear it read shortly before she passed away.”

In the Company of Books

I sit on the other side of the table reading to her
she grasping the pages in a long good-bye
she who for so long has struggled to hold back an endless night.
Now with light beginning to abandon her as shadows move into her lens
she reaches for my hands to guide her back to a familiar landscape
that hallowed place she has created
a pyramid of nested books, many of them shelved in weathered jackets.

I look at myself in the lens of her glasses, featureless
trying to imagine what it is like in that sea of darkness
and continue reading to her believing in the power of language
letting the music of words flow into her hands
which she cups as if they were scattered butterflies.
Outside the window birdsong trill their scales across the field
the wind chases in and out of sycamore branches
like a cloud reshaping itself sounds become the new vista.

I pause for a moment, let that moment rest on my lap
nothing moves but my hand across the page.
Here in the company of books we share I keep turning the pages
applaud a smile that slides across her face
when she tilts her head to listen and inhale
the crickets just beginning their nightly crescendo
a welcome background chorus.
Sounds continue to magnify within her lens
leaving behind a filtered beam of light
as if someone had just lit a candle for her.

 

October Links Roundup: Farewell Divas

Happy Spooktober!

At the Naumkeag Pumpkin Show last weekend.

The entertainment world lost two legendary women this month, both of whom continued creating and performing well into old age. Country star Loretta Lynn died last week at age 90. Best known for her hardscrabble childhood anthem “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Lynn also used her music to take a stand against sexism, as in the 1973 hit “Rated X” about the unfair stigma of divorce for women and 1975’s “The Pill” about the liberating power of birth control.

Dame Angela Lansbury, whom we lost yesterday at age 96, was beloved for her role as crime-solving senior citizen Jessica Fletcher on “Murder, She Wrote,” a cozy TV series that our family watched religiously throughout the 1980s and 90s. But did you know she got her start as the maid in the 1944 film “Gaslight,” from which we get the popular term for reality-warping emotional manipulation? Lansbury was equally good at playing villains, winning a Tony Award for creating the role of Mrs. Lovett (seller of the cannibal meat pies) in “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway.

The Jewish Currents newsletter introduced me to the music of Ezra Furman, a mystical, anti-fascist indie rocker who recently released her ninth album, All of Us Flames. Interviewer Jael Goldfine describes it thus:

In the gritty world of the album, underground syndicates of Jews and queer people organize, traveling in gangs, speaking in code, and stockpiling weapons and intelligence while the powers that be are none the wiser. In a series of bluesy Dylanesque battle epics, love stories, and down-and-out road epics, Furman imagines the stories we might tell in the future about “the great transfiguration” that ended our current “brutal static order” and eulogizes those we lost to it.

The way she sings about revolution as inevitable can feel uncomfortable, like wishful thinking. But Furman, who recently completed her first semester of rabbinical school, takes seriously the idea of the messiah, and messianism’s point-blank insistence that the world can and will be improved.

Furman says, “I think I’m doing anti-despair work.” Listen to “Throne” from the album here.

A couple of good poems: At Frontier Poetry, Tyler Raso’s “Emotion Recognition Task” captures how children’s emotions are policed, doubted, and oversimplified by adults who don’t want to feel deeply themselves. At Palette Poetry, Mónica Gomery’s “Occupational Hazards” won the 2022 Sappho Prize. Interspersing fragments of a Talmudic gratitude prayer with troubling images from the news, this piece re-enacts the challenging practice of staying open to the wonders and sorrows of life.

The first Sunday of October is traditionally the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi. Kittredge Cherry at Q Spirit explores the saint’s gender-bending side:

His extravagant love crossed boundaries. Other Franciscan friars referred to Francis as “Mother” during his lifetime. He encouraged his friars to be mothers to each other when in hermitage together, and used other gender-challenging metaphors to describe the spiritual life.

He spoke of himself as a woman during his very first set of meetings with Pope Innocent III in 1210, when he was seeking permission to found a religious order.  “I am that poor woman who in God’s mercy is loved and honored.  God has begotten legitimate children through me,” Francis explained.  The Pope was impressed by this gender-shifting argument and gave Francis his blessing to establish the new Franciscan order.

He experienced a vision of an all-female Trinity, who in turn saluted him as “Lady Poverty,” a title that he welcomed. Francis allowed a widow to enter the male-only cloister, naming her “Brother Jacoba.” His partner in ministry was a woman, Clare of Assisi, and he cut her hair in a man’s tonsured style when she joined his male-only religious order. She had a queer dream of drinking sweet milk from the breast of Francis. Clare consistently communicated that she sought to imitate Jesus, while Francis compared himself to Mary.

My Sims Are Bisexual Communists

As I grow into the queer nerd boy I should have been, I’ve rediscovered an escapist pastime I last savored during the George W. Bush administration: The Sims. My 10-year-old tries in vain to teach me to play Minecraft together on our tablets. Invariably, after five minutes of hearing me exclaim “Why am I underwater?” or “Oops, I broke another wall!” he takes over both our iPads and plays our characters simultaneously, like Tom Cruise coordinating his array of touchscreens in “Minority Report”. Unlike most parents, I can’t wait till he gets his driver’s license. His spatial sense leaves mine in the dust. The car will be in better hands when he’s 16.

To stay in the gaming-together zone, I downloaded The Sims Freeplay to my tablet. I’m amused by the unintentionally radical things that can happen because the gameplay is so simple. In the full-blown game (The Sims 4) that you buy for desktop or gaming console, the characters have complex emotions and social relationships, which means they can feel jealousy and anger when someone else kisses or WooHoo’s (has sex) with their sweetie. Not so in the free iPad game. These innocent little creatures will “Be Romantic” with anyone they know well enough, but don’t fight about their polyamorous exploits unless you select the “Be Rude” interaction. Thus I was able to make a Sim woman fall in love with a man and a woman simultaneously, move in as a threesome and raise a baby together.

Another simplification of the free game is that your Simoleons (game money) go into a single account, whereas each household in the computer game has a separate budget. So in Freeplay I can send some characters to work, earn money, and spend it on building a house for other characters. Not to worry, though: iPad Sims live by the Marxist principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” They freely drop in on each other’s houses, eat their food, and fall asleep in their beds, whether or not the owner is home.

The free game is not all that interesting after awhile. Quest actions take too long unless you pay real dollars to speed them up. But it would open up some great possibilities if you could make your Sims 4 characters play in communist mode, or set possessiveness and monogamy as sliding-scale traits when you create a character, with some preferring more open-ended lifestyles than others.

Notably, all Sims are default bisexual. The Sims 4 lets you create custom pronouns, decide whether your character can become pregnant or impregnate others (“both” and “neither” are also options), and sort-of design transgender characters by dressing male-template bodies in female styles and vice versa.

One thing they will not let you do, unfortunately, is be a thot. Sims do not WooHoo on the first date, nor for some time thereafter. This fits the game’s structure of hierarchical goals, where putting in time on smaller interactions unlocks higher-stakes ones. To me as a fiction writer, however, it feels constraining and judgmental. A demisexual/slutty axis for character creation would be a lot of fun. The game developers have already put some thought into making it queer-friendly. Let’s go all the way!