Allison Unfiltered

Someday, this quasifeminist pseudoparenting is gonna blow up in my face.

"Need Daddy," grunts L'il Red this morning as she struggles to open a new bottle of apple juice.

"...What did you say?"

She ignores my raised eyebrows, grabbing our rubberized gripper thingy from the utensils drawer instead.  Yanks again at the top.

"Ugh.  Need Daddy. He's really strong," she says.

I grab the bottle of juice from her.

"We do NOT need Daddy. WATCH."

And no matter how hard I try, my lungs about to explode, my biceps whining, the damn cap will not come off.

"Daddy's arms are really strong," she says, pointing at her arms to illustrate for her stupid mother. "And he's really tall."

"Well, I'm really strong too," I say quickly.  I give up and grab our cap-gripper gadget.

She giggles. The audacity. "No, Daddy's strong.  And big and tall."

"Well," I say, groaning now.  "You know who's taller? Mommy.  You just ask Daddy.  Mommy's taller."

"No you're not!  Daddy's tall and big and strong!"

"No, I'm taller.  You go ask him."  The cap is slowly giving way.

"You're silly."

"No! ASK YOUR FATHER!  I'm taller!  Really, I am."

I hand her the cap in a flourish of triumph, waiting for her to celebrate with gratitude and to see whether she'll yield to the idea that her mother is, indeed, self-sufficient in some ways and therefore does NOT need a guy around.

"This cup is dirty," she says.

When porn perverts sex...

Tristan Taormino has long been one of my favorite sex educators/writers, and pornographers.  She 
exemplifies -- to me, anyway -- the school of thought that the only way to figure out our own taboos and get over ourselves is to actually think about the things we do.  And that means really think, not just react.  I fell in love with her all over again after reading this multi-part interview over at Sexis. 

One of my favorite responses re: the way the internet is changing the way we look at sex, in part:

We still will not talk to kids in explicit terms about sex education. There’s the sense that that’s what fucking looks like or should look like, and women still don’t know how their clitoris works. Or women are 22 years old, and have gotten to college and never had an orgasm. There is all this: image, image, image, and no information, no education. So, in some ways, it’s like we still need to sit everyone down and show them naked people and actually how their bodies work.

But, really, does this come as any surprise?  In this day and age where web designers are actively discouraged from setting up flash intro pages, where people go to school to get a degree in designing layouts that scream for your attention and then keep you there, because people have the attention spans of gnats, is it any surprise that it's a challenge for us to understand ourselves when it comes to sex?

We get a brief flash of breast or two pelvises mashing themselves together and all of a sudden these unquestioned metamessages come through about how we're supposed to look, supposed to do, supposed to react, supposed to like, supposed to...

All this, anesthetizing a physical function of the body that's engineered to feel good? 

Dude.  Sometimes you just see somebody across the room and feel an attraction.  Sometimes you have an interesting conversation with someone and you want to spend a little time alone, bonking the host of that amazing brain. 

Shouldn't you be free to form your own manual to your body?  And shouldn't the internet be a tool for you to get the information/stimulation you need, not lessons that'll make you feel like you're doing something wrong?

Don't even get me started on the pubic hair discussion. 

It's freaking hair.  Hair that no one should be made to feel disgusted about.  Hair that apparently once served a vital purpose in human survival, okay?  Your opinion of what public pubic hair should look like is a result of so many layers of socialization, it's ridiculous to take your own ideas for granted.  It's objectively no more beautiful or ugly than a vagina or penis, and you certainly don't see anybody airbrushing those out.

I SAID, don't get me started.

Sexual innuendo meets broadway critic

In the eleventh hour, they rollick around the stage.  It's tougher to translate what works brilliantly in morbidly hilarious cartoons, however, to live theater.  The view is devilishly subversive as they reach their huge finish, boiling and slapping and tap-dancing.

Shelley Jackson, experimental writer extraordinaire (or, even better, conceptual artist of text) is one of this week's featured writers at school, and today I attended her workshop "Recycled Words."

Among other things, one of the things we dabbled in was taking the language from one source and re-purposing it.  And that's how I came to write the above -- I was given a review of a musical based on The Addams Family from the New York Times. 

It will never be published and verges on the unreadable, but who the hell cares?  It brought me back in touch with all the reasons language and writing and finding that odd but logical mix of words will forever drown me in ecstasy.

Illiteracy of a different kind.

I can't seem to dig myself out of my token deaf student mentality here at Goddard.  Found out one of my schoolmates didn't bother going to workshops, choosing instead to spend her day revising her work and her night attending faculty and student readings.

Readings?  Yeah, readings.  As in the THING to DO around here where people get up in front of the mic, stare down at their papers and "perform" their writing.  Everyone else sits back in the shadows and listens in rapture and lavishes everyone else with literary praise or criticism.  

It’s constructive, connecting, networking, trying out your work on other writers, a vital part of the process.   I avoid it as much as I can.

I could dust off my voice like the deaf student who came through the program before me.  Every time I consider doing that, though, it feels like a violation. It feels like capitulating to the pressures that have marginalized me since I arrived, letting the status quo dominate me.

I can attend readings.  I have attended readings -- I get print copies and just follow along with my hearing aid.  Which is okay, but redundant as I read the text.

The big events, the big draws, this week are the visiting writers.  We’ve got some cool people coming: Shelley Jackson, Christian Peet, Erik Davis.  And what do they do when they get here? Yep.  Readings. 

Graduating students do a special reading during their last week here.  Makes me very glad I haven't gotten to that stage yet.  I get into such a schizophrenic political snit anytime I forget I forbade myself to think about it the first week I came.

I have this fantasy about doing my graduate reading differently:

I convert my thesis into video, presenting in visual situ.  Their readings drone across sound waves; mine will sear into their corneas.  I'll recruit signing actors, superimpose text, emblazon images on a wall. 

I'll show them what they've been missing, stuck behind their podiums and chained to the mic, enslaved by the public address system in the theater.

They'll fall to their knees, their minds blown.  And they'll forget about their strictly larynx-and-eardrum readings.

Then I remember I am just one student out of many. A freak fighting the machine.  And the only battle plan (desperate tactics for a war I didn't choose) I can think of is to present myself not as a writer, but as an ersatz filmmaker.

Sigh.

Is it April yet?

Okay, so this obviously isn't an actual pic of the campus I'm on at the moment, but it's still freezing, and it's too dark all the damn time up here in Vermont, so this seems appropriate: