Growled internal monologue of your typical teenaged straight boy, including the well-bred and sensitive ones:
TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES WAAAGGAAHH TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES !!!
That’s not to say that boys and men are objectifying neanderthals. It’s simply how they’re wired. It’s physiological. It’s got to be some kind of delicious, confusing hell. It’s the male hormonal equivalent of the teenaged female internal monologue which is, of course, in falsetto, and more along the lines of:
WAAAGGAAHH I WANT I DON’T WANT I WANT I HATE MYSELF I LOVE MYSELF OH GOD OH NO WHAT WILL THEY THINK OH NOOOO (BITES KNUCKLE) OH MY JESUS CRAP I CAN’T STAND THE AGONY AARRGGH WHO THE HELL AM I ANYWAY I DUNNO WHO THE HELL SHOULD I BE ANYWAY AARGGGH I CAN’T TAKE IT OOHHH MY SKIN CRAWLS ALL OVER WAAAGGH (COVERS FACE WITH HANDS) OH YUMMY OH THIS SUUUCKS !!!
Needless to say, having had both very small titties and very uncomfortable skin, I don’t get sentimental about high school.
(Not that I wanted very big titties combined with very uncomfortable skin. In high school, when you're both stubborn and small-titted, the meatheads call you a lesbian and leave you alone. Which is handy.)
+++
George Washington said, "We are soldiers so that our sons can be farmers, and so that their sons can be poets." Maybe that’s what it is. We are poets now, on the backs of our founding mothers. And so we write poems about being soldiers.
Well. I don’t, but only because explicit statements about what it is to be a woman or struggle in being a woman or gnash teeth over being a woman or rejoice in being a woman don’t resonate for me.
My poetry is not of soldiery and battle, but of earnest indifference. I write about opportunists whose genders do not factor in how they’re measured. The individual women among them are indispensible, as are the individual men. Females that resonate for me go ahead and create what they want in life. Not because they’re trying to make a statement about a woman’s right to create.
Missy doesn’t know she’s a girl. She couldn’t care less. On her quietest day, Meena’s louder than you at your loudest. Gretchen wields a bale of stinging devil’s club, but never has to use it. Ewsula’s just fucking tougher than you are. But don’t take it personally. She’s a Viking from the wilds of Labrador.
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Female empowerment has most often manifested itself to me in one of two flavours.
- The Wounded Activists. We are unlikely, if ever, to feel ownership over our bodies. We are victims. We are used and abused. We are second-class citizens. We are unheard and angry. Because we are women, we must fight.
- The Romantic Activists. We are goddesses. We bleed! We bear fruit! We are divine and special and ancient. We cradle our own sex. We are blessed voodoo and pheromones. Because we are women, we must dance naked together in moonlight.
Both of these stories—because that’s what they are, after all, stories—are cotton candy. They are compelling, but they dissolve in my real life. Or they give me hot pink cavities. I keep thinking I ought to adopt one or the other. But, respectfully, I don’t want to.
Short of bad fortune (i.e. groper in crowded pub, giant Italian hockey player who gets off on coercion) and inherited socio-economic factors (i.e. repeated cycles of poverty or abuse, self- or otherwise), we are more poets now than we ever have been.
We can be, pretty much, whatever we want. We have autonomy. We choose our partners and our family life. Sometimes unwisely, but we choose all the same. The same goes for the way we get off and love and express ourselves and learn and seek justice and make money. Some of us are pathological. Some of us are serene and kind. Some of us employ crutches. But we are self-directed. We are no more subject to unhealthy or unfair influences as the next kid, male or female.
We are poets.
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In university—a womens’ college specializing in womens’ studies, and also, by chance, offering one of the only Bachelor of Public Relations degrees in Canada—a woman came into our sociology class to speak about her struggles with infertility and how it strained her concept of herself as a woman. The speaker was raw, thoughtful, generous. After she left, my classmates tore her to shreds.
Seething Feminist Mass: That woman was pathetic.
Kate: I thought she was nice. I liked her shoes.
Seething Feminist Mass: That woman has no self-worth whatsoever. How pathetic. God. We never want to be that way.
Kate: That’s pretty mean.
Seething Feminist Mass: Did you see her talking about how badly she wants to be (snorts in unison) a mother?!?!
Kate: Is that a bad thing?
Seething Feminist Mass: You’ve got to be kidding.
Kate: I’m looking forward to meeting someone and getting married someday. And when I do my dress is gonna be, you know, not too BIG. You’ve got to wear the dress. You can’t let the dress wear you. But it’s got to be extraordinary in some way, you know? It’s not like you get married every day. Maybe a little bit of pouf. Just a little.
Seething Feminist Mass: (snarls in unison)
Kate: I’ve always taken for granted that having kids would be a chapter in my life. I’ll have a career, I hope, and a husband, I hope, and babies, I hope. I think it’ll be, you know. Neat. I’d be pretty crushed if I tried to have babies and couldn’t. I’d figure something else out for my life, but I’d be sad for a while. Like that woman. I’d be sad.
Seething Feminist Mass: You’re brainwashed.
Kate: (stares blankly, breathing with mouth open)
Seething Feminist Mass: You’ve been socially conditioned to believe it’s your duty to breed. You’re so brainwashed you’re not even capable of having an informed discussion about the burden of your own womanhood. You are in shackles and you don’t even know it.
Kate: Okay. So. I’m gonna take my bagel and go and sit over there.
That’s what it was for four years, with the exception of my public relations courses.
The Marginalization of Women In Religion WS101
The Marginalization of Women In Film WS103
The Marginalization of Women In Birth WS104
The Marginalization of Women In Literature WS112
The Marginalization of Women In Art WS108
How to Gloss Over The Ethical Stumbles Of The Corporate Glitterati PR306
You know. That sort of thing.
I absorbed it all knowing it as a shared history, though not my history. At least, not the way I’ve ever told it, even with my own episodic misfortune. I nodded at our past. I acknowledged its cumulative effect. It just never felt like my present.
Then I probably took the bus home and hung out with my friend Daphne so we could make fun of chicks who watched Friends. While we watched Friends.
+++
My gender has never been anything but quietly irrelevant. I’ve never felt strong. But I’ve never felt not-strong. Except as it relates to telemark skiing, which has nothing to do with femaleness and everything to do with this here couch.
Women do not hold a monopoly on hurt. Nor vulnerability. Nor specialness. Nor disadvantage. Nor ancient sageness. Our bodies, when cooperative, can bleed and grow babies. So what? Men, when cooperative, plant those babies with performance art.
I am not a woman first. I’m not even a woman second. ‘Woman’ might even be fourth after person, writer, and Maritimer. Chances are better it’s fifth after Perpetually Dehydrated. Or sixth after Crap At Math.
+++
I am a feminist oaf. I wander in and shrug and wave and wander off and knee Snoop Dogg in the nuts—by accident—on my way out.
The only thing that matters is who we are. Not what we are.
I’m comfortable moving around in various shades of fog. Are you?
Monday, February 1, 2010 
