January Links Roundup: God’s Second Draft

Happy 2023, folks. My resolutions this year are to organize, downsize, and appreciate my resources.

Because even when I was a woman, I didn’t need this many handbags.

Caps for Sale!

R.L. Maizes’ satire piece at Electric Literature, “On the Eighth Day God Attended a Writing Workshop,” imagines giving feedback on Genesis:

Levi, flipping through pages: The beginning was a quite a slog. Does anyone honestly care about the firmament? (Workshop participants shake their heads no.) Maybe just start with the apple incident and give us information about the rest of creation when we need it.

Selena, looking up from her laptop: Is the book supposed to be nonfiction? Because I don’t get how a couple like Adam and Eve who are just starting out can afford to live in Eden when I can’t even make the rent on my Jackson Heights studio.

God: Can I just—

Jason: Sorry, Ya. The Author doesn’t get to talk during the discussion. You’ll have a chance later.

This fantastic erasure-poem from J I Kleinberg in the latest issue of DIAGRAM, “Joining the Academy: A Job-Match Game,” discovers gems in found text. Would you like to attend the “College of better odds” or visit “The Museum of jam”? Perhaps you are qualified to become a “professor of sweaty foot smell” or the “Prefect of Lips”.

Also in DIAGRAM 22.6, this set of illustrations from a 1975 ornithology textbook shows birds multi-tasking by eating a lizard during sex. Their facial expressions suggest they know you’re watching and they enjoy it.

In the Jan/Feb 2023 Harvard Magazine, Nancy Kathryn Walecki profiles happiness researcher Arthur Brooks.

The way Brooks sees it, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. The “four pillars” that support that trifecta are family, faith, friends, and work.

“Faith is anything transcendent that helps you escape the boring sitcom that is your life,” he says. It could be a meditation practice, time in nature, religious faith, or even playing music (he recommends fugues by his favorite composer, Bach). Work, on the other hand, is anything that helps a person sustain herself and her family. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a passion, but it should be something that makes a person feel useful in the world…

…Americans have an inalienable right to pursue happiness, Brooks says, but are not always good at the pursuit. Instead of putting their energy toward building their four pillars, they chase the four idols: money, power, pleasure, and the admiration of others. “Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy,” Brooks likes to say. “She cares if you reproduce. So, the things we crave are not always the things that are going to make us happy.”

…Most of Brooks’s [Harvard Business School] students have an incorrect definition of happiness when they start his “Leadership and Happiness” class, he says. They tell him happiness is a feeling. “That’s like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of your turkey. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness, not the whole thing,” he likes to say.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this December article from PsyPost reports that “People with unhappy childhoods are more likely to exhibit a fear of happiness, study finds”.

Aversion to happiness beliefs were stronger among people who were younger, more lonely, and more perfectionist. They were also more common among people who believed in collective happiness, believed in black magic or karma, and recalled an unhappy childhood.

“The results show that people from collectivistic cultures are more likely to show an aversion to happiness than people from individualistic cultures,” Joshanloo told PsyPost. “At the individual level, perfectionistic tendencies, loneliness, a childhood perceived as unhappy, belief in paranormal phenomena, and holding a collectivistic understanding of happiness are positively associated with aversion to happiness.”

Importantly, reporting an unhappy childhood predicted aversion to happiness even after controlling for current loneliness. As Joshanloo explains, “This suggests that traumatic experiences as a child may have a long-lasting impact on the person’s perception of happiness, independently of the individual’s satisfaction with current relationships in adulthood.”..

…“It is worth noting that happiness can be defined in different ways,” the researcher added. “People are far more likely to be averse to emotional definitions of happiness (based on pleasure, fun, and positive feelings) than virtue-based definitions (based on finding meaning in life and fulfillment).”

For myself, I am noticing a connection between my vast amounts of disorganized possessions and my trauma-habit of believing that fulfillment is exclusively located in the future. When you live in a constant state of emergency, pleasure can seem like an unaffordable luxury in the present. The affirmation “I have enough” risks reconciling you to an untenable situation. The line between equanimity and despair is hard to perceive.

Transgender historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s feature “Doctors Who?” in The Baffler (October 2022) finds present-day political lessons in the hidden history of transitioners who bypassed the medical gatekeepers.

Fifty years ago, a small group of women of color boarded a bus in Southern California bound for Tijuana, Mexico. They may or may not have stuck out in the crowd of Americans who crossed the border daily for the cheaper rates on goods and services. Once in Mexico, these women, who had journeyed all the way from San Francisco, walked into a pharmacy, bought out its entire stock of estrogen, and then carefully hid it inside their luggage. Back home, they made straight for the Tenderloin.

These women were trans—poor, many unhoused, and most sex workers who faced unending street harassment from the police, clients, and other Tenderloin residents. They were also the self-appointed doctors of their community. In hotel rooms, shared apartments, and sometimes the back bathrooms of quiet bars, they resold and administered the estrogen to their friends—other trans women who could pay in cash for injections. At the turn of the 1970s, this group of ad hoc smugglers and lay doctors were part of a vast and informal market in hormones that stretched along most of the West Coast…

…As the liberal principles of bodily autonomy and the right to privacy are eviscerated, the history of DIY transition offers one path out of the quagmire of zero-sum legal arguments and toward what might come after, or in the place of, state-sanctioned care.

Gill-Peterson describes how institutional trans health care “was explicitly designed to limit access to transition” to those patients who would pass as cisgender heterosexuals after treatment.

As feminists and trans activists struggle against the liquidation of the right to privacy, digging into the connections between DIY transition and DIY abortion is instructive. Both reject how medicalization and the state collude to restrict people’s autonomy. And DIY history suggests that one of the core lessons of trans feminism is that you can steal your body back from the state—not to hold it as private property, but because the state power that polices and punishes your body, just like the doctors who execute its arbitrary policies, is fundamentally illegitimate. DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people whose lives are most affected by resources and care, not from the abstract power of the state or medical gatekeepers.

The trans liberation activists of the 1970s who dreamed of free clinics were part of a political movement that wanted to depathologize transition, so it was no longer treated as a mental illness or a medical condition that required diagnosis and supervision from clinicians with no vested interest in trans people’s happiness…

…DIY has envisioned freedom in starkly different terms. Instead of pathologizing people to grant them access to medical resources, or relying on the state’s flimsy blessing, activists imagined community-run clinics where people to whom transition matters most would support one another and distribute the care they needed. In that framework, both abortion and gender transition would be something like resources for personal and collective autonomy—means to a life characterized by abundance, not dramatized medical procedures contingent on bizarre criteria of deservingness.

 

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2022

A highly eventful year on the Block!

Made My Bones: My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, was published in March by Little Red Tree, with cover and interior artwork by friend-of-the-Block Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. Solstice Lit Mag calls it “a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride.” The American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table says, “A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences.” Made Man was included in Q Spirit’s list of Top LGBTQ Christian Books for 2022 and was the subject of an essay on later-in-life transition by J Brooke at Electric Literature.

Persia Marie says, “The cover feels nice to rub my whiskers against.”

Reading from Made Man at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Shirt by RSVLTS; suit by Hart Schaffner & Marx; body by Valley Medical Group Endocrinology.

Big Pussy: I turned my home office into a cat AirBnB for my friends’ fur babies when they go on vacation. The shy and regal Persia Marie is the child of artist and writer Jane Morrison. Check out her website for sublime Greek landscapes, caricatures, portraits and more. Ginger rascals Lorca and Rilke belong to author Michael Bondhus and poet/photographer Kevin Hinkle. If you have a reasonably well-behaved cat that you are willing to deliver and pick up in Northampton, get in touch with Uncle Jendi!

Ginny Sack Is Having a 90-Pound Mole Taken Off Her Ass: The impossible has become possible. In March I had a consultation for top surgery. My surgery date is March 23, 2023. As soon as I can lift my arms again, expect this blog to show way too many pictures of my pepperoni nipples.

My Crew: I celebrated my 50th birthday this July by meeting a dear friend in person for the first time. Friend-of-the-Block Richard Jackson, a/k/a the poet “Conway” from my Prison Letters series, visited us with his loving partner Vanity. We were devastated to learn that Van passed away in a motorcycle accident over Thanksgiving weekend.

Nostradamus and Notre Dame: I graduated from Year One of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Year Two began this past September. My spellcraft is going a lot better, now that I figured out that I was trying to light the incense holder disk instead of the cone.

Waste Management: Why throw anything out when you can glue it together? I made a lot of collage greeting cards this year.

John Ollom and I will be teaching a multimedia workshop at TransHealth Northampton on May 7. We’ll use collage, bodywork, improvised movement, and journaling to guide participants on a journey of gender self-discovery.

You Know Who Had an Arc? Noah: An embarrassment of riches for best books of the year, as I read three novels that would have been #1 on my list, not just for the year, but in general.

Tara Isabella Burton’s sapphic boarding-school novel The World Cannot Give shows idealistic teens getting their crushes all mixed up with their yearnings for transcendence. The author understands, and eventually the protagonist does too, that sincere passions with life-and-death stakes can coexist with a highly performative, aestheticized selfhood. In other words, you might say it’s a Catholic (or Anglican) book, as well as a very queer one, in that ritual and artifice are the container for authenticity rather than its opposite.

Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind’s aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. On a deeper level, it’s a dramatization of different philosophies of consciousness, in which the impossibility of truly seeing through another’s eyes becomes an invitation to rekindle empathy and wonder.

GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot imagines what would happen if Baba Yaga, the witch of Eastern European folklore (and patron saint of this blog), had American Jewish descendants who inherited her chicken-legged hut. The Yaga siblings–a puppeteer with the power to bring objects to life, and a street performer and thief who can uncannily imitate anyone he meets–find themselves charged with the task of laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. Don’t miss the chance to see Nethercott perform a puppet show dramatizing sections from her book. Join her mailing list to find out tour dates.

Bro time with Shane at the Big E!

Poetry by Duane L. Herrmann: “Enlarging the Meadow”

Winning Writers subscriber Duane L. Herrmann emailed me with his latest poetry publications news for our newsletter, and we got to chatting about his Kansas farm and the chores he’s doing to prepare it for wintertime. When he used the phrase “enlarging the meadow,” I suggested it would be a good poem title. Now, here is the poem! Check out more of his work in the anthology Atelier of Healing and the online journals Soul-Lit and I Write Her, among many other venues. His eighth collection, Zephyrs of the Heart, was published this year by Cyberwit.

ENLARGING THE MEADOW

Low bushes invade,
creep into grass,
then additional forbs,
generally called “brush,”
quickly follow.
Their broad leaves,
larger than grass,
encourage tree seeds
to root and sprout,
all causing the edge
of the meadow to move.
After decades it
becomes forest.
To restore supremacy
of grass
all woody plants
must go–back breaking
under hot sun.

December Links Roundup: We Trans’ed Princess Di

Princess Diana and Prince Charles Fashion Paper Dolls in ...

In my misspent youth, Princess Diana epitomized fairy-tale feminine perfection. I still have my Charles and Di royal wedding paper dolls. Now, watching Season 5 of “The Crown,” I see the people’s princess as a role model of a different kind, the family member who breaks the code of silence about emotional abuse and neglect. The rules of the system let you get away with almost anything as long as you agree to maintain the façade. Honestly, the Windsors are just the Sopranos with posh accents.

Elizabeth Debicki is doing a great job as 1990s Diana, though the tall actress towers over her co-stars in a way that I don’t remember the real Diana doing. She has the mannerisms spot-on and she can show the princess’s immaturity and self-involvement without making us lose sympathy for her untenable position in the royal family. I wondered why they recast the role, since Emma Corrin was also perfect in Season 4.

Many factors go into casting decisions, of course, but something clicked when I discovered that Corrin recently came out as nonbinary. Maybe the ultra-feminine Diana was too dysphoric a role for them after that. I mean, this Mary Sue article from August 2021 shows them wearing a chest binder! This summer, they became Vogue’s first nonbinary cover model. This BBC article from November quotes them as advocating for an end to gendered categories at film and TV awards shows, following the lead of the Grammys: “It’s difficult for me at the moment trying to justify in my head being non-binary and being nominated in female categories.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m going to be Googling “Emma Corrin top surgery” all through 2023.

On a more sobering note, Politico released a report last month about families fleeing conservative states like Texas and Florida because of bans on transgender health care. The piece profiles a family whose nonbinary teen became suicidal after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed child protective services to investigate all parents of medically transitioning kids.

Over the last few years, multiple GOP-controlled state legislatures have advanced bills that would strip access for children and teens to undergo a gender transition. These pieces of legislation have largely been framed by their sponsors as efforts to protect children from “groomers,” pedophiles and doctors intent on doing irreversible harm to their bodies. Though the bills are focused on minors, they have also created fear and uncertainty among trans adults about whether their care, too, could soon be threatened, since many of the sponsors have rejected the idea that people’s gender identity can be anything other than the sex assigned at birth.

Arkansas, Arizona and Alabama have passed laws limiting or outright banning gender-affirming care for minors, while states including Texas and Florida are using executive actions to pursue similar goals. The Arkansas, Texas and Alabama measures have been blocked or partly blocked in court while legal battles continue. Advocates have also vowed to challenge Arizona’s less sweeping law.

Tennessee has a much narrower state law, enacted in 2021, which bars hormonal treatment for “prepubertal minors.” But since young children generally don’t receive that care, experts said, it doesn’t actually have an impact — although some lawmakers have pushed for more comprehensive legislation blocking gender-affirming care…

At least 15 other state legislatures are considering proposals for similar restrictions. At the federal level, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has introduced the “Protect Children’s Innocence Act” which would ban federal funding for health plans that cover gender-affirming treatment, prohibit U.S. academia from training doctors in how to provide such care and make it a felony for a doctor to give such care to a minor. It has 49 co-sponsors. It has not yet been heard in the House, but that could change as Republicans take control in that chamber next year.

Scaremongering in mainstream media (I’m looking at you, New York Times and The Atlantic) gives the public an inaccurate and overblown idea of the interventions most trans youth actually receive. Doctors interviewed by Politico noted that any kind of gender-affirming surgery is rare for patients under 18, and the most common treatment, puberty blockers, is reversible.

This haunting piece at the flash prose journal fractured lit depicts a different kind of gendered silencing. Tonally reminiscent of Carmen Maria Machado’s feminist horror tales, Grace Elliot’s “In the Closet” is told from the point of view of a mother seeking a private place to scream.

At Narrative Magazine, Emma Brankin’s hard-hitting story “The Red Dress” limns the thought processes of the daughter of a fictionalized Harvey Weinstein figure, as she goes from defending him to recognizing the truth. It’s an excellent dramatization of the selectiveness of memory, not to mention the interpretations we put on it. (You have to create a free account to read this story.)

Perhaps the cephalopods have a creative solution to our domestic woes? CB Anderson’s whimsical essay “On Octopus Sex and the Moon” captures the surreal feeling of late-night web surfing during COVID quarantine.

You link to a science site that confirms one of the male’s arms is like a penis. Called a hectocotylus, it’s capable of erections. Reddit was on the level here.

You learn the hectocotylus can deliver sperm from a distance, which evolved because females tend to kill and eat their partners. One octopus species even has a hectocotylus that functions as a detachable penis, swimming to the female on its own.

Ruminate, a journal of spirituality and literature, sadly closed up shop this autumn. On their website, the speaker in Sarah Damoff’s gorgeous flash fiction “The Naming” juxtaposes thoughts on Adam naming the beasts in Genesis with fragmented memories of a violation that she can’t bring herself to name until the perpetrator is long dead.

Another innovative and darkly funny fiction piece comes to us from DIAGRAM issue 22.5. Channeling the corporate dystopias of George Saunders, James Braun’s “Let Us Have This” depicts absurd and disturbing events at a superstore. The deadpan second-person plural voice, like a Greek chorus, describes a place where workers’ identities become subsumed into (or consumed by) the heart of the Hart-Mart: “we will always be here, even when we are not.”

I was stunned by this graphic memoir in Split Lip Mag by Coyote Shook. “The Young Harris Psalter” reconstructs memories and legends of a forbidding, fascinating great-grandmother who was a rural faith-healer in the Blue Ridge Mountains and died of “brain problems”. After public health clinics came to the region in the 1980s, Shook writes, “She retired unceremoniously and turned her attention to the autoharp, collecting terrifying oddities, and bemoaning the bitterness of her life to anyone who would sit still for it.” A plot worthy of Edward Gorey.

You’re read this far, you can have a little gabagool, as a treat: Saturday Night Live’s “Don Pauly” sketch imagines what would happen if the Jersey mob got “woke”. It’s a scream.

Indecent Magazine Supports This Thing of Ours

The Sopranos Memes and Gifs - Sopranos Blueprint

A big Noo Joisey thank-you to Ky Huddleston, editor of Indecent Magazine, for being the first to publish two poems from my Sopranos-themed manuscript in Issue #2 (October 2022). The blurb they wrote for me is better than a plate of gabagool: “Jendi Reiter really shows mastery of ‘wow, there’s a lot going on here,’ in this poem set.” Yeah, people have been saying that about me for a long time.

Please enjoy my poetic tribute to the consigliere, and visit their website for “Ouch, Maenads”, my ode to Ralph Cifaretto.

Silvio Dante Contemplates Puberty Blockers

Sweetheart, you’ve got a very short window.
And don’t you think I know from short?
My suits are like my enemies: I take them out,
a jacket from the boys’ department’s
got no room for a piece.

You can’t spell Bada Bing
without those double curves,
but don’t get hung
up by your own shirt. Time is the great
claw that mothers you back
just when you thought you were out
of the garment bag. I’ve got passages
you wouldn’t believe.

My grandparents from Calabria were spit on
when they came to this country
and sixty years later
they saved it up for me.
My enemies are like my tits:
I genuinely don’t think there’s anything to gain
by keeping them around.

Full Beaver Blood Moon!

This morning at 5:30 AM, Adam and I woke up to see the Full Beaver Blood Moon. No, it’s not the world’s worst menstrual cycle, it’s the combination of a full moon and a lunar eclipse that makes the moon turn a reddish-brown hue. Early November’s full moon is traditionally known as the Beaver Moon because it was the season when Native Americans and early settlers set beaver traps to procure warm furs for the coming winter. (So say NASA and People Magazine!)

The pre-dawn sky was a clear deep blue with a few sharply bright stars. The moon hung low in the black bare branches, a soft russet color that reminded me of a peach or plum. Just a small crescent of white light was visible at the right-hand edge.

Enjoy this poem I wrote in November 2020, which appears in my new book, Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022).

Full Beaver Moon

The names of moons are the names of the body.
Damp-swollen almanac
deems this the period
to be thick and trapped.
Scratching moon. Freezing moon.
Pages worn to wrinkles, soft hide.

The names of moons are out of season.
Older than milk, not yet the worm’s long night,
the almanac would say you’re no one
to glow
on that screen where supple globes
and thickets invite heated planting.

The names of moons call you otherwise.
Call you buck, hard and velveted
hunter, peeping strawberry nub.
Though the almanac on the cold bathroom shelf
sags under centerfolds stacked by men
who offer you murdered coats,
you bare your blue
and fullest phase in skies
winter-clean and dark.

November Links Roundup: Your Soap Is Gay

Happy transgender month of rage, national novel avoidance month, 60 shopping days till Yule, etc., etc. I am not participating in 30 Poems in November this year, since I am starting a new novel about butts and sadness, but I encourage everyone to sponsor our talented Western Massachusetts poets in fundraising for the Center for New Americans.

A fixture of my childhood was the Dr. Bronner’s shampoo bottle, every inch of the label covered in 4-point type that touted the “All-One-God-Faith” alongside inspirational quotes from Thomas Paine and “Man of La Mancha”. On National Coming-Out Day last month, David Bronner, the CEO (Cosmic Engagement Office) and grandson of the founder, published this delightful blog post, “My Journey to Embrace He/They as My Pronouns!”

I’ve considered myself “about 25% girl” for quite a while. I was in a fair amount of denial about this until a dramatic LSD and MDMA mediated initiation into spirit world in Amsterdam in a gay trance club called Mazzo, in the winter of ‘95, that was also the  main underground spot.

In that experience, I realized that I wasn’t “straight,” “gay,” or “man” or “woman”—but incarnate soul here to serve and get down, and that my toxic insecure aggressive masculinity was doing violence to my own feminine nature and soul…

David is rocking a fantastic purple feathered jacket in the accompanying photo. It inspired me to choose my most flamboyant shirt, rather than a more “masculine” business-casual, for my reading at Brattleboro Literary Festival the following weekend. Must have been a good choice because my books sold out!

“Pride” comes to Kansas: LiveScience reports that “Elderly female lion grows ‘awkward teenage mane,’ baffling zookeepers”. That transgender second adolescence can be a fashion dilemma, am I right?

Zuri began sprouting a mohawk-like tuft of fur not long after the zoo’s male died, [Topeka zoo curator Shanna] Simpson said. Her mane has since filled in, but isn’t as full as an adult male lion’s.

“She just basically looks like an awkward teenage male lion,” Simpson said.

Zuri seems more feisty since sprouting her furry new neck accessory, Simpson added, and has been growling, snarling, and roaring more often.

At eighteen years old, Zuri has well exceeded the lifespan of a lion in the wild, prompting Everatt to speculate that perhaps the lioness might be experiencing hormonal shifts due to extreme age.

Short king Harvey Guillén from “What We Do in the Shadows” is finally having his moment as the gay sex symbol I always thought he was. In The Advocate, he re-created Britney Spears’ 1999 Rolling Stone photo shoot, with adorable gender-bending results.

“I always had moments like that where … society would tell me, ‘You can’t do this because you’re fat. You can’t do this because you’re Mexican. You can’t, just because you’re queer.’ I just hated hearing those no[s],” Guillén says, adding that Hollywood tried unsuccessfully to pigeonhole him into those categories of his identity. “All those stripes were all my strengths. And I reversed it and put it into my character … if you don’t see yourself represented, then become the first.”

Guillén says he learned early in life to “do what makes you happy, and if someone gets in your way… then just go around them.”…

“It’s important for all of us to be able to tap into our feminine and masculine self and be comfortable in that space. There is both in each of us, both powerful and beautiful,” Guillén says. “I think when we let go of the fear of being too [much of] one or the other, is when we can breathe and just live.”

In River Raven’s Substack newsletter Liminal Legibility, the post “Haunted Masculinity” explores how the sins of patriarchy make it hard for us transmascs to envision healthy maleness, or even acknowledge that it’s something we want.

It’s a double bind often, being a transmasculine person. I am drawn to and desire to be masculine but the thought that this makes me a monster still slides into my thoughts on occasion. I want to be able to be a masculine person who is gentle and caring and loving. I like to think that I am, most of the time. It’s something I strive for. But that is also at odds with what masculinity is supposed to be, as understood by the wider culture that I live in.

When I am assertive or take up space I might be accused as being “toxic”. That particular accusation is new but it’s something I’ve always dealt with, being pushed to make myself as small as possible and to let other people determine who I am, to be accommodating. It’s hard to push against the way I’ve existed my whole life and it hurts when people accuse me of being the monster I have always deeply feared that I am. Yet, if I am to show myself as vulnerable then people will say that it is proof that I am really a woman. I don’t have the kind of power that many cishet men have, but I make an easier target for that anger. I know this is an experience I share with many trans people.

This stunning piece at CRAFT Literary weaves in excerpts of testimony from eleven anonymous sexual assault survivors in their lawsuit against Eastern Michigan University. Read “All the Women I Know (Sandra, Dani, Roma, Alex)” by Christine Hume and Laura Larson, a co-winner of CRAFT’s Hybrid Writing Contest.

…No woman I know hurrying across the street.

No woman I know accompanies me into the woods.

No woman I know could feel more lonely after.

No woman I know was alone on the swings when it happened.

No woman I know stages her own emergency. Not here. Not like that.

No woman I know needs to hear it today.

No woman I know wants to laugh along with the joke, but does anyway, a slight permanent hiss between her teeth.

No woman I know can read the writing on the wall or face it or find the wall behind the foliage.

No woman I know understands what she is up against.

No woman I know has an emergency greater than no-emergency, none greater than the normal emergency of her own body in the world.

Marissa Endicott’s feature article in Mother Jones, “Home Was a Nightmare, Then Home Was Prison. Finally Home Is Now a Refuge”, profiles a re-entry housing program in the San Francisco Bay Area for women who went to prison for killing their abusers. The piece details how the criminal justice system still fails to account for the factors that coerce women into committing crimes. Often the act for which they are punished occurs after years of unsuccessfully trying to protect themselves through legal means. The loss of bodily autonomy in prison then re-traumatizes them, making it even harder to establish a normal life when they’re released.

Not apropos of anything, but since I binged “BoJack Horseman” during the Great Lockdown and had no one to discuss it with, I’m always happy to discover some intelligent disk-horse (har har har) about it. Philosopher Adam Kotsko muses here about “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman, and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon”. (Watching TV as research is one of the perks of being a writer!)

“How does such emotionally wrenching material fit with an absurdist premise—especially with an absurdist premise that is taken so seriously?” Kotsko asks. He suggests that the classic sitcom format grew up alongside an economic and political order in which the white suburban nuclear family with male breadwinner was both possible and desirable. The next generation, exemplified by “The Simpsons”, no longer saw that arrangement as ideal but still considered it tragically inevitable. In the third iteration of the format, BoJack, an alcoholic has-been actor, compulsively re-lives his past as the star of a cheesy 1990s family sitcom. That genre’s predictable return to the status quo at the end of every episode has become a Sartre-like curse of repetition.

Two decades of watching serialized cable dramas have taught us what to expect from the story of a self-destructive anti-hero who is past his prime—even an anti-hero who happens to be a cartoon horse. When what we get instead is a weird kind of intensified sitcom, it opens up the possibility of more intense emotional effects than anyone would have any right to expect. In part, it’s because of the animated format, which creates the kind of distancing effect I’ve already discussed in connection with the early seasons of The Simpsons. In the case of BoJack, the writers put that effect to good use, as the nightmarish back-story of BoJack’s grandmother, who is lobotomized after grieving her brother’s death for what her demonic husband considered too long, would come across as almost farcically over the top in a live action format. We somehow need a story of cartoon horses to give us the space to consider the very real cruelties of America’s postwar patriarchal order…

…The question that remains, though, is why animals? Why not just stylized, animated humans? Though it is a unique premise in the context of contemporary TV, it is nonetheless the case that many cultures have imagined a past era when humans and animals interacted as equals. For the Greeks, this was the age of fable. For the Hebrews, it was the age of innocence—because surely it was not only the serpent who could talk. This latter example shows how dangerous and ambivalent that primal moment can be, how it can stand in for a loss that will stop haunting us.

I would propose that for Americans, that primal scene is precisely the sitcom, and by portraying it in the format of a fable, BoJack Horseman is providing us with space to process the loss of that postwar ideal, that nostalgia or “pain from an old wound” that is all the more intense for those—like me, and I suspect like you—who never really experienced that ideal in the first place, for whom those images on TV were at once fascinating and mocking. It invites us to take up a certain distance from that cultural formation, to allow ourselves to feel the emotions and hurts at stake in it in a new and candid way, to admit to ourselves how deeply we have been formed by this embarrassing dreck—and to begin taking inventory of what is promising and what is defeating, of what we can work with and what we might need to leave aside. It invites us to reflect on how we have been broken by the cultural expectations that shaped us—but without indulging the fantasies of either a clean break or a final attainment of the illusory “happiness” that ultimately amounts only to conformity.

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.