*****EDIT! Apparently, Blogger has an algorithm, which I feared, as these are always bad (HUMAN MODERATION IS THE ONLY WAY!).
So this post got flagged. I'm not sure why.
This isn't the first time I've covered any of these subjects or to this level, and what's more, I post my own content warnings, thank you.
If you, my readers, ever need a warning I didn't list, please let me know, unless you're mocking the concept of content warnings, in which case go away and yell swear words down a drain.***
PLEASE REMEMBER I HAVE A FAQ POST NOW AND THANK YOU FOR LEAVING A COMMENT IF YOU'RE READING! LOVE AND THANKS TO ALL MY READERS!
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: We Were Witches by Ariel Gore
Details: Copyright 2017, Feminist Press
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap: "Caught in the crossfire of the culture wars and spurred on by nineties "family values" campaigns, teen mom Ariel is determined to better herself through education, taking on enormous debt to go to college.
Ariel wants more than survival. She wants to be a writer, but the overabundance of phallocentric narratives in college threatens to sink her dream. Amid trips to family court and messy encounters with her exes, Ariel seeks guidance from a multitude of "spirit feminists," from Tillie Olsen to Audre Lorde to Gloria Anzaldúa.
Wryly riffing on feminist and literary tropes, We Were Witches documents the life and times of a demonized single mother as she figures out her magic."
Why I Wanted to Read It: The past few years have been big ones for Witch books, for Witches of all kinds.
How I Liked It:
First, I'll break some news that's not really news. It's been over three years of this book project and I continue to learn lessons. One lesson I seem to keep learning is that it seems like the more a book shouldn't work on the surface, the almost better it is when it does. So what's all that mean for this particular book? Let's find out!
First, meet Ariel, or should I say "Ariel". This book is both fiction and non-fiction, a tactic I'll explain later. It's billed as a novel, but it closely follows in almost all aspects the life of acclaimed writer and one of the foremothers of Maternal Feminism, Hip Mama magazine founder Ariel Gore.
The book starts by jumping both backwards and forwards in time, with short (titled) essays. "Ariel's" mother didn't want a female daughter and wouldn't even name her for awhile, eventually settling on a "man's name" of Ariel.
A list of things the world taught "Ariel" to be ashamed of, all sexist.
Then, "Ariel's" creating writing class in college, where "Ariel" is shown what she feels is a very sexist way of story organizing (more on that later).
In that same essay, "Ariel" jumps backwards to herself as a teen in Italy with her much-older boyfriend, pregnant, unmarried, and unable to speak the language other than repeating "No farmaci, no droga" ("No drugs, no drugs") to the nurses and doctor in the rural, backwards Italian hospital where "Ariel" is cut open (with indeed, no drugs) from the side (!!!!!) to release her daughter. The doctor consults her boyfriend (not "Ariel") about giving her the husband stitch with the promise it'll make her tighter (ugh), to which her absentee and periodically drunken boyfriend agrees, and to which a mocking, chuckling nurse sews (again, with no medication, something that appears to really amuse the nurse). In the midst of her hideous pain and humiliation, "Ariel" receives a vision of the Goddess Artemis, who kills both the doctor and "Ariel's" boyfriend with pointed arrows.
Cut to seventeen and a half years later where "Ariel" is having her second child, this time with a midwife in Portland thanks to a sperm donor and the midwife is shocked at the "mediolateral episiotomy" so much that she shows her students (with "Ariel's" permission), telling them
"This is the routine genital mutilation you've read about in early to mid-twentieth century Western obstetrics. They cut to the side rather than downward through the perineum-- so the patient likely experienced excruciating pain and often tremendous blood loss. As you can see, it wasn't even stitched with dissolvable sutures.
"This.
May.
Actually.
Be.
Silk." (pg 19)
And the agape students stare in fascination.
Turns out the birth story relates back to the creative writing class in college, because her teacher is critiquing it. From there, we launch into a flashback of a very unconventional childhood with "Ariel" eating vulva cookies at a gathering her mother is having. Then a jump to her maternal grandmother who is scolding "Ariel" to her father (with whom she has limited contact as he is severely schizophrenic), calling her teenage pregnancy a shame and very irresponsible. The chapter concludes with "Ariel" talking about the fact the book is going to be non-linear (which we've already figured out) and so, onward!
One essay about getting out of Italy as a teen with her infant daughter. One essay about the horrible child abuse "Ariel" suffered at the hands of her mother (her stepfather, a kind man who left the priesthood to marry her mother, isn't so much her stepfather as her other father). From there, we get to how "Ariel" ended up pregnant and in a foreign country at eighteen with a much older man, and returning to the States with her baby and her family's almost universal disapproval on both sides.
From there, the story is more or less linear from then on as teen mom "Ariel" navigates the shame and indignity of teen motherhood in the early 1990s, from financial aid to counselors, to trying desperately to go to college (with stopovers in fairytales, mythology, history, and literature).
Along the way, girlfriends both past and present (an ex who lets "Ariel" and baby Maia crash with her and her new girlfriend) make appearances, as does the baby's father, an abusive alcoholic who routinely threatens their safety, and when "Ariel" tries to get a restraining order, the court finds that "every baby needs a father" and ensures her abusive alcoholic ex will get access to the toddler daughter he does not want. "Ariel" shakily moves forward and backward through college, navigating questions about her sexuality, getting involved with a Famous National Feminist Organization (more on them later), and learning lessons all along the way. She's threatened and shunned and harassed for being a single mother (a plastic baby doll is spray-painted red and "crucified" on her front door with two knives and the words "Die welfare slut" written behind it) but also finds unexpected allies along the way. Her writing takes off and she finally is able to graduate from college, an event that ends the book, along with the grim postscript of her cost of tuition that, despite her success, she was apparently still paying off at the time of the book's publication in 2017 (the essay is entitled "Just Because It's a Magic Apple Doesn't Mean There Isn't a Worm in It").
Themes of fairytales, Goddess mythology, and Witchcraft (the real thing) as well as witchcraft (the fantasy, fairytale version) run throughout the book.
I have to say when I started reading, I had a similar fear as I had when I first started reading Amanda Yates Garcia's memoir: please, please do not be a TERF. If you are blessedly unfamiliar with the concept, it means a transphobe who appropriates feminist cant to justify and recruit others to their transphobia (despite seeing women as walking vaginas and defining them by reproductive capacity being a pretty misogynist thing to do). The literal definition is "Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists" meaning "feminists" who exclude trans women from their feminism, but the initial description is more accurate, especially since TERF logic and slogans ("Women and girls are being erased!") find themselves in places that don't even pretend to be feminist, like tradwife culture, anti-choice Catholicism, and the current Republican party. But I digress. But where Amanda Yates Garcia made in clear in the text of the book the complexity of gender and the inclusion of trans people (especially trans women), I had to go digging to find out about Ariel Gore.
These were the passages that gave me pause:
Things the world has taught me to feel ashamed of:
1. Being born a female body. (pg 12)
(I'm glad we've evolved on what we mean when we say that since the early 1990s.)
My creative writing instructor stood up fast, nearly tripping over the ragged hem of her full-length purple skirt. She grabbed a piece of white chalk, drew a giant penis on the blackboard, tapped her heels on the floor, and said, "This is a pyramid." Her lipstick edged slightly over the boundaries of her lips, and I wondered if she'd tried to make them seem fuller with the edging or if she just didn't see very well.
I glanced at the other women in the workshop.
Was the illustration on the blackboard not obviously a penis?
I'd been allowed into the graduate workshop as an undergrad. Maybe best not to ask too many questions.
The instructor dragged the white chalk up one side of the penis. "You begin with the rising action," she explained. She drew a quick circle around the head of the penis. "It culminates in climax!"
The other women in the class nodded like they'd heard it all before, like they totally didn't see the penis.
I jotted a note, pushed it toward the poet sitting next to me: I'm gonna put a vagina in the middle of my story, not the head of a penis.
The poet glanced at my note, but didn't seem to read it. (pg 13)
When I started publishing, I thought my career would trace rising action like that creative writing instructor's chalk-drawn plot structure that looked like a penis- and culminating in an impressive climax--
But (pg 20)
maybe
you can't
expect your
career to form the
shape of a penis if you
don't actually have one.
This all kind of made me groan. All the examples of sexism, all the examples of white cis men as default for so many, many things, and this is the example you choose to use? Ooof.
Take me back to that graduate writing workshop, but this time with a voice. I have some questions for my instructor. I will raise my hand. I will speak when called on.
Professor, what is the true shape of experience?
What is the shape of successful failure, of vulnerability and humiliation, of inexplicable joy?
What is the shape of a story that maps the cultural tyranny of what it means to be a girl child and a woman mother and woman intellect and a woman creator in a world built from male paradigms?
Professor, my arc isn't rising.
The first urge is to shape the story into a vagina-- in opposition to the shape of a penis- because the first urge is fuck you, and that's who they taught us to fuck.(pg 21)
The Anaconda stack, 585 feet of phallocentric reality, still dominated the landscape of my grandparents' town, but the soil and rivers and topless mountains and strip-mine pits were contaminated with arsenic and acid and copper sulfate and god help the migrating snow geese that stop at the Berkeley Pit outside Butte, Montana, thinking that a round of bright blue is the international symbol for fresh water. (pgs 24 and 25)
Most of the time, if you hear someone using the term "phallocentric", run like hell.
I found the blue flyer at Markey's Cafe in Petaluma:
Womyn Helping Womyn
Free baby clothes.
Free toys.
Utility bill vouchers.
I showed the flyer to the girl who sat next to me in economics. She was named after a tree-- Birch, I think, or Ponderosa.
"I don't know why they spelled it like that," I told the tree-girl. "W-o-m-y-n."
Birch-- or Ponderosa-- sucked in her cheeks. She said, "Um, sister, they spelled it like that because we're trying to get the 'men' out of 'women.' It's called decolonization."
She raised her arched eyebrows, then reached back to collect her long hair in her fist and knot it into a bun.
I stared at her.
I'd been a girl for twenty-one years and I still didn't understand how other girls were so blase in their perfect femme sexuality.
"I mean," the girl said, "do you just think of yourself as a woah-man? We're our own people, you know? We're not just extensions of men. Can you believe that some womyn still call themselves girls?"
I studied the way the girl's stray locks of hair fell easily around her face. I wanted to tell her that I'd never thought of myself as a girl, but knew I was too bad a liar. (pgs 124 and 125)
I've never understood this argument in all my years as a feminist. For one, linguistically we have better battles, for two, by this logic, wouldn't "men" be a lesser form of "women" because they're missing the "wo"? That they're incomplete?
But moreover, it's just silly.
I admit the "girl" thing can rankle me (it's so often used as a pejorative) but a woman choosing to refer to herself that way is ultimately her choice.
I wanted to be a man-hater, but it had rarely been my fathers or my grandfathers who shamed me. That emotional work belonged first to the women's sphere. I wanted to blame violence solely on men, but it hadn't been my fathers who couldn't control their rage. Domestic violence in our home belonged first to my mother's sphere. I wished, some days, that I hadn't been born a female, but I could see that Lance and my fathers and my grandfathers were sometimes just as fucked by their own gendered blueprints for self-destruction. (pg 250)
Too much to unpack with there, so let's cut to the chase.
Ariel Gore is not a TERF or any kind of transphobe when you look at her other writings (including recent ones). These passages can be mostly chalked up to clumsy, dated language possibly used to evoke the feminism of the early 1990s which suffered from (among other flaws) a binary approach to gender that both eschewed intersectionality as well as erased trans and nonbinary people (who were not somehow magically invented in the 21st century but have always existed). Since this book was published in 2017 when awareness of trans and nonbinary people was considerably different than it was in the early 1990s and this review is being written in 2023, I feel it's worth remarking on, particularly given Gore's actual views.
So what's up with "Ariel" and Ariel Gore? Well, as I said, it's somewhat complicated, thus why I chose to give the Ariel described in the book the quotations to separate her from the author. This book is billed as novel, yet closely mirrors the life of its author. The few noticeable (at least, to my cursory search of the author) differences were a few dates and ages (and similar information) that in a straightforward memoir might be chalked up as just minor factual errors attributable to memory, and the fantastical aspects are, well, easily at home in magical realism and it's pretty obvious that the author is bending reality a bit (she gets visions from legendary feminists at a court hearing; when going to interview a real life local Witch, the Witch turns out to be a shapeshifter who takes "Ariel" on a soul journey, et cetera), or at least taking some artistic license.
Gore makes this note over two hundred pages in:
I remembered the witch book back in Sonoma County and the way she'd said, "If you don't like the fairy tales you've been handed, you don't have to conform to them. You can reauthor them. You can write your story however you choose." And now I understand what she meant in a shifting way.
I think about how "Ariel" in this story hardly ever had any agency over anything in her life, and how "Ariel Gore," the author, can write it any goddamn way she chooses. (pg 256)
To follow the story, I found myself having to look up Ariel Gore's biography to make some things make sense. But also since this isn't a straightforward memoir, I found myself puzzling over if some things actually happened. The mistreatment of "Ariel" for her unwed teenage pregnancy ventures over into "cartoon cruelty" territory, but if it actually happened as she said, it'd be hard to write it in a way that made it even-handed (hard but not impossible: Tara Westover pulled it off). Life before the Violence Against Women Act is also a great and relevant reminder for what many now take for granted. So much of the book is a snapshot of the times, and there's some pretty juicy gossip about famous people and famous institutions (more on that later) and it'd be even better if we knew whether or not that snapshot (and that gossip) really happened.
So this doesn't quite work as a memoir and it doesn't quite work as fiction. Does that mean the book doesn't work?
Thankfully, NO!
Oddly, while the book from my description so far seems like it should be a mess with its flaws preventing it from being even readable, let alone enjoyable, I found myself falling under the book's spell of youthful both bitterness and idealism and questing for something different, something better, something more. The juxtaposition of fairytales and myths and even classic literature all work together to form a fascinating whole of the 1990s cultural shifts, feminism, fairytales, shame, Witchcraft, Queer identity, and rebirth. It was honestly satisfying and excellent, and left me reeling for days afterward.
I honestly didn't think this book was going to work less than thirty pages in. As the high concept became clearer and the flaws inherent with that became more obvious, I was regretting my choice. But thankfully I stuck with it (that's why I never review a book I don't finish and you shouldn't either!) because it coalesced together and became amazing.
In theory, this book shouldn't work. It's too muddled of a concept. But in practice? It's a quirky kind of masterpiece that will haunt you.
Notable:
A scene from "Ariel's" elementary school experience when she gets home:
"Hi, Tiniest," my mother said as I set down my green backpack.
"Hi, Ariel," Roberta called from her easel.
I smiled awkward, unsure if I'd walked in on something or what.
"We're about to sit down to tea and oysters," my mother offered.
"Oh, all right." I said.
At our round dining-room table, the naked women sat silent, now wearing light-colored robes.
I stared at a raw oyster in its shell on the plate in front of me.
"Ariel, just eat the whole vagina," my mother admonished me.
And so I did.
It tasted good.
Salty and citrus.
"I brought vulva biscuits," Roberta announced, all singsongy as she rose up from her place at the table and glided into the kitchen and back out again carrying a red plate of cookies each shaped like the oysters. She pointed to the nuances of their form: "The outer labia, the inner labia, the clitoris... Ariel, try one!"
I reached for the plate. My fingernails were bitten down to their nubs. I brought the cookie to my mouth. It tasted like vanilla and maple, but I felt funny.
It was 1979 or 1980. Judy Chicago's epic vulva-plate installation, The Dinner Party, had just arrived at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (pgs 22 and 23)
I admit my own bias in thinking that a mother weird enough to do stuff like that wouldn't resort to such old-fashioned punishments (psychical and emotional abuse) and also be a homophobe (she literally instructed her daughter to "eat the whole vagina").
________________________________________
"Jesus Christ, Ariel. This is the baby's library?" My mother tossed through books. "You can't read Adrienne Rich to the baby. You'll scare her." She lifted Maia up from the carpet and marched her outside, buckled her into the car seat in the back of her old maroon Volvo, and drove off.
I made coffee, wrote book response papers at the dining-room table, read Rob Brezsny's Real Astrology in the local weekly paper:
This is how spells are broken...
By burning down the dream house
where your childhood keeps repeating itself.
I drew a picture of my childhood dream house on butcher paper and burned it in the kitchen sink. (pg 80)
That's actually a fascinating, chilling idea for a spell and for recovery.
________________________________________
Speaking of spells! What kind of Witchcraft are we talking about here? "Ariel" brushes up against the real thing quite a bit.
"You're in charge of this interview, of course," the witch said as she poured jasmine tea into our cups and placed the black ceramic pot back on the table. "But what I had in mind was a glimpse into the life of a modern-day witch. People think we're extinct, that we were all burned at the stake. If they don't think we're extinct, they imagine we're either doing destructive magic or we're spaced out and stoned or we're conjuring Satan who, by the way, we don't believe in so would never conjure. Satan is a Christian invention." She shook her head. "I'd like to demystify the profession." She pushed a xeroxed, stapled booklet across the table. The cover pictured a compass rose under the title Experimental Magick: The Secret Lives of Witches. (pg 133)
I'll allow the "burned at the stake" because it's talking about misconceptions, but Satan and "the devil" are a construct in Abrahamic religion as a whole, not just Christianity.
A cat purred against my leg. A small sign on the wall said:
Magick for Beginners
1. Focus on your desire.
2. Practice feeling as if your desire is already reality.
3. Engage physical props to represent the
manifestation of your desire.
(For example, you may light a candle.)
4. Give no fucks about the outcome.
The woman in the purple leotard pulled a large black stone out of her bra, set it on the counter. "All right," she said. "Take this jet stone and every night from the new moon until the full, you're going to speak to it and you're going to fill it with all your love and self-confidence for your sister." (pg 174)
I'm just going to say that I'm fairly certain "give no fucks" didn't enter the vernacular as a phrase until at least the new century, making it unlikely in the early 1990s. I could be wrong, though (but cite your source).
I picked up a green candle in a glass cylinder, crept up to the counter, and set it down.
"What would you like to manifest?" the woman asked.
And I said, "I want to go to Mills College in September."
She held up her hand, like stop, said, "Cancel, cancel. Repeat after me: I intend to go to Mills College in September."
"I intend to go to Mills College in September," I repeated. "That's what I said."
The woman smiled at me. "No, my dear, you said you wanted to go to Mills College in September. Want persists. Intention is swiftly fulfilled."
I nodded. "I intend to go to Mills College in September."
She lifted her arms up. "May we be protected in this circle." She took a deep, dramatic breath and exhaled. "To know, to will, to dare, to keep silent."
I thought about that: To know, to will, to dare-- those words sounded right and familiar. But to keep silent?
Didn't silence = oppression?
Didn't silence = literary oppression?
Didn't silence = suburban motherhood?
Didn't silence = death?
The woman reached into her bra again and pulled out a blue stone. "Lapis lazuli," she said. And I wondered how many different stones she kept in there.
She said, "I conjure the spirits of my ancestors who were locked in mental hospitals for being promiscuous. They want. They're mad as hell. And they're here now to provide protection for our bodies and our daughters' bodies. Strength and beauty." She glanced over at our daughters, still playing with the wooden blocks. She said, "Repeat after me: to know, to will, to dare, to keep silent."
And I nodded into that. "To know, to will, to dare, to keep silent."
Maybe sometimes silence = necessary stealth.
"We open the circle," she said softly.
Maia and I left the botanica with the cash from our checks, a spell kit, and a prayer card that pictured Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
The woman in purple had pointed to the meditation.
"Read it aloud to yourself every day."Artemis, sister, make my aim true.
Give me goals to seek and the
determination to achieve them.
Grant me communication with nature.
Allow me to live surrounded by plants,
animals, and children.
Allow me the strength and wisdom
to be my own mistress.
And empower my ongoing sexual liberation.
That night after Maia fell asleep in our closet, I took scissors and a Sharpie from the drafting table in Jamie's bedroom, cut the collar out of a white T-shirt, and wrote the word REJECT across the front. I cut the collar out of another T-shirt, too, wrote DIRTY. I would own all the words before Maia learned to read. I would impact our surroundings instead of always being impacted.
Then I did as the woman in the purple leotard had instructed me: I drizzled the green candle with wisdom oil, lit it, and set it on the window ledge inside our walk-in closet. I sprinkled Crown of Success powder on my Mills College application and folded it into a green envelope. I rubbed more wisdom oil onto my forehead and whispered, "I intend to go to Mills College in September." (pgs 175, 176, and 177)
All very on point to the real thing, more or less.
"Read to me, Mama," Maia called to me from our bed, sleepy, and as I crept out of the closet I knew she was expecting Audre Lorde or bell hooks, but I reached over and grabbed the copy of Rapunzel my mother had brought for us back in Petaluma.
I read to her, "Once upon a time..."
"Say 'Rapunzel,'" Maia laughed when I read.
I said, "Rapunzel!"
"Say 'Rapunzel' again!" She laughed, like the word itself delighted her.
"Rapunzel!"
Maia unfurled her hair like I might climb it.
And it occurred to me that fairy tales are a kind of grooming.
I played along, but I couldn't help crying, too, and I couldn't help covering my face to pretend I wasn't crying for all the ways I knew we would have to mold ourselves into princesses even though I knew perfectly well we were meant to be witches.
I kept reading from the book as Maia fell back asleep. When she closed her eyes I whispered, "Don't forget when we were witches."
And without opening her eyes, she whispered back,
"We were witches." (pg 217)
The fairytale variety this time, and we have a title!
________________________________________
In February of my senior year, Bill Clinton signed "Don't ask, don't tell."
It would be another couple of years before he dismantled welfare rights while he had sex with his intern and then tried to redefine sex to exclude cocksucking and rimming. (pg 207)
Now's a great reminder that Clinton was a terrible President and just because the one that came after was worse, that doesn't make him not a terrible President.
________________________________________
And some potential gossip about famous people!
"I know you think you're a lesbian, Ariel," my mother said gravely. But I've found the perfect man for you."
I sat down at my round table and, in the pink glow from the streetlight outside, started to roll a cigarette.
"Tiniest," my mother said, "I know you've had some bad experiences with men, but that doesn't mean the right one isn't out there. You're not that ugly."
I wasn't that ugly? I lit the cigarette. I never knew if my mother was kidding or what.
My mother said, "Tiniest, he's perfect. He's from the Midwest. He's a Taurus. He's overweight."
"Sounds like exactly my type." The cigarette smoke felt hot in my lungs. I practiced blowing it out my nose.
She said, "Tiniest, he's a journalist just like you want to be. And he's funny. I'm telling you, he's perfect for you. I'm sure he won't mind [that] you already have a baby. Like I said, he's overweight."
I started rolling another cigarette even though I hadn't finished the first one.
"Are you listening to me, Tiniest?"
I lit the second cigarette off the cherry of the first. "Yes, Mom. I'm listening."
My mother said, "His name is Michael Moore. He's made a film called Roger & Me. He's giving a talk at Stanford on Friday. Why don't you and the baby come down? John can watch the baby and you and I will go to the lecture, and there will certainly be a reception afterward where we can meet him. He's right in your league. You can get him."
"Get him?" I crushed the cigarette into my forearm.
The streetlight outside flickered and the moon winked at me.
My mother sighed. "He's sixteen years older than you are, Tiniest. I know that, but that still makes him younger than Lance. Just see if you can lighten your hair a little before Friday and come down."
"Lighten my hair?"
My mother cleared her throat.
I thought I could hear Pink Floyd in the background.
She said, "Tiniest, he's the perfect man. If you do decide to become a lesbian, my only revenge will be to know that you'll spend the rest of your life knowing that you could have had Michael Moore if you'd only listened to your mother."
If I'd only listened to my mother. (pgs 110 and 111)
A quick glance at Wikipedia tells us that Michael Moore is indeed sixteen years older than Ariel Gore, is the sun sign Taurus, and this could have plausibly been before he married his wife in October of 1991 (or "Ariel"'s mother was mistaken and thought he was still single). It'd be interesting to know if any of this is rooted in truth.
More interestingly, "Ariel" becomes involved with a Famous National Feminist Organization, and they do some real sketchy stuff:
My phone rang early. I picked it up, but it wasn't anyone calling from family court. It was an organizer from a famous national feminist organization-- let's call it Famous National Feminist Organization. She'd gotten my number from my editor at Sonoma County Women's Voices and she wanted to know if I'd be up for a demonstration that weekend.
Of course.
They already had another woman who'd agreed to do it. The two of us would wear wedding dresses and we'd stand out on the steps of the Alameda County court building and we'd have a faux gay wedding. We'd be pronounced wife and wife and we'd kiss and the press would take pictures and we'd all have a grand time.
"All right," I agreed.
I mean, Why not?
Maia and [friend's daughter] Leena could be the flower girls.
I met the organizer from Famous National Feminist Organization at a coffee shop in Berkeley. She wore a purple sweater. She handed me a hundred dollars cash "for costuming." So I spent fifty dollars on an over-the-top satin wedding dress at the Goodwill on Broadway in downtown Oakland, the other fifty on groceries.
[...]
The woman I married wasn't my type. She was wispy and straight, and she instinctively wiped her lips just after I kissed her.
Still, we were a pretty picture in the newspapers.
After our wedding ceremony was over and the press packed up their cameras and Maia and Leena played freeze tag on the cement expanse, a pretty butch woman in a tuxedo approached me. "You know," she said, "Famous National Feminist Organization wouldn't let me and my fiancée get married today." She motioned to a Latina woman wearing a leather jumpsuit. "They were totally femme-centric."
I thought about that.
There was an actual gay couple who wanted to get married.
I myself had vowed never to get married.
And I'd been hired as a stand-in with my fake wife because we were a prettier picture: two white women in virgin-white wedding dresses.
I covered my face with hands.
The butch crossed her arms against her flat chest, righteous in her tuxedo and her lavender bow tie. And she was right. Of course she was right.
What the straight girl and I had been a part of was staged and silly.
I didn't know what to say.
I stood there, inexplicably turned-on in my Goodwill satin wedding dress, my body hardwired by every media wedding fantasy I didn't even know I'd taken in.
My feet hurt.
The faint smell of jasmine.
"Honey," I finally said, then realized how condescending I must have sounded but didn't know how to fix it. How could I explain that handing your family over to the mercy of the government was no happy ending? Was in fact a patriarchal, capitalist trap? I pointed vaguely to the county building behind me, to family court. Our MISOGYNY: LOOK IT UP, STAMP IT OUT graffiti had been whitewashed again. I shook my head. "You don't really want access to that place."*
The court-appointed psychologist inched her glasses down her nose under the harsh florescent lights. "Ms. Gore, I understand you were once married to a woman."
I hesitated, then covered my mouth with a neatly manicured hand. "Oh, no," I demurred. "That was just a demonstration for Famous National Feminist Organization."
"Oh," the psychologist smiled. "I'm sorry," she said. "I just had to ask, you know?"
I kept my lips closed when I smiled.
"I do love the work of Famous National Feminist Organization," the psychologist assured me.
"Oh, I do too," I said, and I kept smiling even though my brain was punching through the walls of my skull with all kinds of violent language. (pgs 243, 244, 245, and 246)
A lot to unpack there, from Famous National Feminist Organization's homophobia to an actual same-gender couple, to their scorning gender non-conformity (the term "femme" here refers to a feminine-looking Queer woman; the term "femme" has multiple meanings including "female-presenting person" and "feminine-looking Queer man" so it's always good to get context; also here's a great place to note that femmes have their own struggles with homophobia/Queerphobia, including denials of "legitimacy" and other bigotry), to the Organization's racism (especially that racism).
Also worth noting that while "Ariel"'s points about marriage have some validity, the legal protections and social acceptance offered by legal marriage is nothing to sniff about and must be protected.
So who do we think Famous National Feminist Organization actually is? Maybe N.O.W? The National Organization for Women is the largest feminist organization in the US, so maybe?
________________________________________
While in family court, "Ariel" gets a truly horrifying question from the court psychologist.
The psychologist tilted her head to the side. "Ms. Gore, are you bisexual?"
My throat constricted.
Was I?
Bisexual?
I looked out the window, and I let my gaze follow the branch of a gnarled Australian tea tree. What would it mean to be bisexual? Would it mean I would lose my daughter or not lose my daughter? Would it mean they would cut my breast with hot irons? Would it mean they'd cut my hands and my arms? Would it mean I'd have to stand up in front of all the town shrews wearing a scarlet letter? Would it mean we could live by ourselves in a little thatched cottage by the sea?
Was I bisexual?
How would I know?
Behind the tea tree, a couple of middle-aged women played in a tire swing. When I squinted, I could see they were bell hooks and Adrienne Rich swinging around in that tire.
bell waved at me, and I started to smile in recognition.
I had the urge to tell the psychologist that I was half schizophrenic and perhaps therefore prone to hallucinations. Maybe I'd say, "I'm actually bi-psycheal. More than bisexual."
But Adrienne put her finger to her lips like, Shhh.
I thought of the woman in the purple leotard back at the botanica in San Francisco, who said, "To know, to will, to dare, to keep silent." I ran my fingers through my curls. "What?" I blurted to the psychologist. "Bisexual? No. I'm just focusing on school right now. Oh my god," I kind of giggled, "bisexual?" (pg 238)
This is where I'd love to know if that was truly asked, because hopefully that would be unthinkable today. Incidentally, "Ariel's" Queerness runs throughout the book: she checks out other women, has sex with other women, talks about and thinks about Queerness in general, and is friends with other Queer people, including a friend who is raising a daughter with a male couple.
________________________________________
At Mills College, I learned that even language could be violent.
The women in my sociology class said we shouldn't use the phrase "rule of thumb" because it referred to an old English law that allowed a man to beat his wife with a stick so long as it wasn't thicker than his thumb.
The women in the statistics class I taught for work-study said I shouldn't use the phrase "take a stab at it" when I wanted them to intuit an answer. I mean, was I trying to normalize knife violence?
The women in my communications class said we shouldn't refer to the dots on our lists as "bullet points."
I quite liked this strange new game.
I'd always been a slow talker because my own words echoed in my head and I wondered what they meant, so I appreciated this idea of everybody slowing down and considering their metaphors before they blurted out whatever sprang to mind.
But I also wanted to sharpen my words into weapons.
I wanted to sit shotgun.
I wanted to take a stab at it.
Would we have a conflict here?
Would nonviolent language mean continuing to deny my anger?
[...]
I could feel all of my blood pulsing through all my veins as we tagged the county court buildings, gently, with red spray paint:MISOGYNY: LOOK IT UP, STAMP IT OUT
The other women at Mills College would accuse us of perpetuating violent language with the "stamp it out" part of our graffiti-- we knew that-- but we wanted to perpetuate some violence.
[My friend] Lola, it turned out, had only been fourteen years old when she got pregnant with Leena by an Oakland cop. When her mother complained to the courts about statutory rape, the judge ordered Lola to take her daughter to the cop's apartment in Hayward every Wednesday and Saturday evening.
Tagging that county court building with MISOGYNY: LOOK IT UP, STAMP IT OUT was the only violence left to us. (pgs 241 and 242)
Interesting about language and why removing some language that might on the surface be a good idea is actually a terrible one.
________________________________________
Athena frowned. "I never thought of it that way."
She sipped her beer. "Did you hear about those rules they made at Antioch College? Where you have to get consent fro every little thing? Like, Can I kiss you?"
I actually knew a lot about that Antioch policy. I told Athena about my beautiful and excellent friend from high school who went to Antioch all hopeful and trying to do what they told us to do-- don't get pregnant, finish high school, go to college-- but her first date at Antioch was date rape and my friend knew she'd drop out, but she fought hard to get that consent policy in place before she left because who are we if we're not allowed [to] say no? But now Antioch was the laughingstock of the AM radio, and the talk-show hosts said that Antioch's consent rules would mean the death of romantic spontaneity.
As if rape were romantic.
As if rape were spontaneous. (pgs 267 and 268)
For those unfamiliar with this, given the skyrocketing rate of sexual assault in college (currently, the number stands that 1 in 4 women will be raped on a college campus), in the 1990s, Antioch College tried to combat this (after two notorious rapes on their campus) with better sexual education regarding consent, which is (or should be) laughably obvious today ("A person cannot give consent while sleeping", "At any and all times when consent is withdrawn or not verbally agreed to, the sexual activity must stop immediately") but was a huge source of scorn and controversy at the time, from the usual suspects, from the Right wing talking heads with sexual misconduct allegations to Saturday Night Live (interestingly, SNL's sketch about it aired less than a decade before a cast member allegedly repeatedly sexually assaulted an underage girl he was grooming in front of a staggering amount of cast and crew, including Lorne Michaels, so make of that what you will.
Similar policies and pushes for consent education have been made later by other colleges trying to combat the campus rape problem, and thankfully seem received better as we've evolved as a society, but were roundly mocked by SNL alum Tina Fey in a 2017 episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt about college campuses having aggressive "consent policies" which given the "one in four" stat was well-known by then, is even more unfortunate.
Consent isn't special and it isn't "sexy". Consent is necessary to prevent sex from turning into rape, and so is education about consent. If you find yourself either complaining about or mocking consent sexual education, you need to take a long hard look at your life and your values (and what you're enabling).
Final Grade: A
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