An Anger-Hued Girlhood

Originally published on the LA Times

Art by Tracey Emin, Barbara Pollack

There’s not enough time. There’s not enough time to talk about all the things wrong with the world, every single fracture in this disastrous, puddled, broken hodgepodge of humans and brutalities, not enough time to fix all the brokenness, to soothe and seal all the wounds. There’s not enough time to be everything for everyone, to face every injustice at once. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try.

I’m writing about something here that makes me emotional. That word – emotional – is, in itself, a problem, according to the world I inhabit. To be an emotional teenage girl, to be emotional when discussing politics, is to lose logic, lose rationale, be blinded by personal experience and anger and feeling so big it represses our ability to be intelligent, fact-based, and pragmatic, which is all code for: like the men.

I’m writing about something that affects me everyday, that is a now fundamental layer of my identity, background noise to my existence, a hum of constant frustration but a familiar, now unremarkable tune. I’m going to write about sexual harassment. About sexual assault, about the Me Too movement and why no, it isn’t a witch hunt, it isn’t mass hysteria, it isn’t an antithesis to the sexual revolution. It’s about justice. It’s about recognizing the tumultuous, pervasive, poisonous wells of hurt that too many women, that too many people, experience again and again and again until there is no period to the suffering, no ending, only an indefinite existence of small sufferings here and there until we crack.

In class, I sit there with my nails dug into my palms and try to bite back the words festering under my tongue, afraid of my own anger, afraid to let it bleed out of me in the open in an academic space. I am told that this is not the place for emotions, for feeling all of this, for attaching my own baggage to the educational.

My experience, my everyday, is a theoretical conversation for most of the men in the room, and I am expected to adhere to this format of restraint, of intellectualizing and believing that there is any room to debate whether or not sexism, misogyny, sexual harassment, homophobia, even exists. This is not theoretical for me. It is not theoretical for a lot of us.

I am tired. I am tired of being known as the angry feminist at school. I am tired of feeling like the only person who will say something, feeling like I must be the endlessly eloquent, sharp-witted, impenetrable representative of feminism and women and queer people everywhere all the time.

I am tired of feeling so angry, so exhausted, so gut-wrenched by the people around me and the things they say and do. I am tired of explaining, of justifying, of having to rationalize and legitimize my personal experiences to boy after boy.

I am tired of feeling like a tiring thing to be around. I am tired of feeling every moment of injustice in every part of my being at once, at being unable to ignore it, to disregard it. I am tired of being a girl. I am tired of being everything all the time for everyone.

I’ve put this burden of being the bearer of justice on myself, undoubtedly, but I can’t help but think – what about all of the girls out there who have it so much unfathomably more difficult than I? I cannot stop being the angry feminist when there is so much to be angry about. When so many women cannot speak up for themselves. I examine this existence of mine and I cannot help my anger, cannot quiet or suppress anything. I look at the people around me and think, how aren’t you all as disturbed as I am?

The privilege I am so bathed in does not escape me. My half-whiteness. I’m cis. I’m physically able and I know where my next meal is coming from. Privilege is not to be denied, it is to be recognized, palpated, confronted.

I don’t believe, usually, that I have a right to feel this tired, this soul-drained, this achingly unmotivated to keep doing this whole activist, woman thing. I think that maybe, though, pushing and pushing is the worst thing we can do. Listening. Listening must be the priority now. If we shy away from the experiences of others, experiences and lives we cannot quite recognize, that we do not understand because we have never experienced, we perpetuate oppression, we ignore the hulking malignant tremors amongst us.

There is this thing I do. It is a thing most of the girls I know seem to do, something insidious, something small but brutal. I soothe male feelings whenever I speak about feminism. I try to be polite, to cater to the comfort of those who do not understand, who question whether sexism really exists, because even though millions of women, for centuries, have answered that question, that still isn’t enough for them.

I subdue the swellings inside of me, the bubbling bursting burning rage and the exhaustion and the desperation to scream until my voice goes raw, to make them understand me, make them listen to me, take me seriously. If I allow that messiness to bleed out, to slip for even a moment, any argument I have will be disqualified, invalidated by my unfortunate humanness.

I read a lot of feminist theory. In conversations about feminism, though, what I’ve come to recognize is that most men don’t. There is a deeply fractured mentality here: that it is on the oppressed to explain and legitimize their oppression. It’s not. It should not be a person of color’s responsibility to explain to a white person why reverse racism is not a thing.

I want men to do some introspection before they question things they don’t understand. I want it to be a norm to do your own research, to read some Angela Davis and This Bridge Called My Back and Audre Lorde and expose yourself to the material out there. It exists, and it is accessible.

There comes a point when merely existing becomes activism in itself in which getting out of bed is a miraculous, extraordinarily brave moment, a feat. The everyday thrums with self-possession, with the tenuous ferocity to keep on moving and living in this bruised universe, amongst so many aches, so many cuts, so many moments that have such a severe capacity to break us apart.

And if we do succumb, if we do collapse, we are not fighting hard enough, we are traitors to the cause, we are weaklings and should advocate for ourselves more. These are the truths we swallow even from our own peers.

Let me sit in a classroom and not have to speak up when someone complains about how we’re talking about sexual harassment too much. Let a boy do it, let him say, ‘this is important. When we have so many women who tell us it is important, so many people, it should be more than enough to justify talking about it.’

Let a person of color not be coerced into speaking about something controversial by a teacher, as the token minority kid. Let the conversations be messy and complex and difficult but let them embrace the nuance that our politics is so lacking. Let yourself listen instead of speak over anyone who has had an experience, an existence, you cannot understand. Let yourself try to grapple with your privilege and know that it does not negate your own suffering, but rather, that it is something we all must reckon with in order to live our lives with compassion and that is not so damn difficult to do.

To be listened to does not seem too much to ask. To have your personal experiences, your traumas, your identity unquestioned as valid and legitimate does not seem too much to ask. To feel safe at school, in a classroom, does not seem too much to ask. To be treated with (mutual, reciprocal) respect for your existence, and with compassion, does not seem too much to ask. None of this is asking too much.

The point of my feminism is not to demonize anyone, but the fact that I’ve had to explain that so many times is disheartening. It disturbs me deeply that men seem to think that equality means I must want to strip them of their rights and lock them all up. The Not All Men hashtag felt like a punch in the stomach. We know not all men. We know not all white people. The point is, though, all men benefit – whether they recognize it or not – from the systemic patriarchy and male hegemony that govern our world. All white people benefit from white supremacy, even if we don’t want to. This should not make you feel guilty; it should make you angry, because you want to change it, do something about it.

I must clarify time and time again that no, I do not hate all men. What I do hate is a society that makes me so adamantly, necessarily, fear them. What I hate is the everyday, every minute, every moment, walls-closing-in feeling that is my girlhood, when it should be a celebratory and unthreatened part of my identity.

What I hate is forcing myself to ask uncomfortable questions on college tours about sexual assault, about fraternities and blue light systems, rape culture and drinking on campus because I’m terrified of what happens in the backlights of what is supposed to be the landscape of my learning, of my growth.

What I hate is hearing every girl and woman I know apologize for speaking, for getting upset, for feeling feelings unapologetically. What I hate is sidewalk stares and gruff whistles and the intangible understanding that my body is public space, is a burden, a thing to be put away and hidden, a weight. What I hate is being touched by men everywhere simply because they feel entitled to grab and grope as much as they like.

What I hate is hearing the 15-year-old boys behind me in the bleachers at a school basketball game yell “cunt” and “pussy” and “gay” out into the court, hurling those words like they’re funny at the opposing team because these are the words that comprise humor, I guess, that comprise weakness, and the worst thing you can be is female or gay, apparently.

What I hate is reading a graphic rape scene in class, always taught by a male teacher, without any forewarning, any acknowledgement of the reality here, of how many girls (and students) might feel sickened and uncomfortable in that room, that might be reliving their traumas, something that could’ve so easily been prepared for, but wasn’t, was thrown out at us without any thought on the matter.

What I hate is listening to boys I know, boys who I consider my friends, laugh about a Snapchat video of a drunk 14-year-old girl giving a blowjob, saying “what a stupid girl, stupid decision, what an idiot” instead of the words that ache and brim to my head: “sexual assault, sexual assault, sexual assault.”

What I hate is watching the news every day and watching men make decisions about things they’ll never experience, never know as intimately and deeply as I will, as women will, as people suffering will, about my body, about my health. What I hate is hearing the rap my brother blasts in his bedroom, catchy and lyrical but plagued with “bitch” and “fuck that bitch” and endless other creative renditions of that word, that one simmering word.

What I hate is listening to my eight-year-old sister describe how the boys make fun of her and her best friend for playing soccer, for playing on the field, for being girls daring to do something that makes them feel alive, for having fun so unapologetically.

What I hate is having a male substitute teacher tell me no, you cannot go to the bathroom despite the fact that I have an A in the class and that we are doing nothing and that I am bleeding, bleeding, bleeding, that my lower half is in carnage. “Is it an emergency?“ Even in the bloodbath, no, you cannot go to the bathroom. What I hate is saying the word “period” and having my PE teacher say, “okay okay that’s enough, no need to be so graphic!”

What I hate is feeling like I must hide and clothe away and bury and scratch apart every part of myself because the female body is not supposed to be this way, be so human and incessantly messy and difficult and painful, because my body is only to look at and to touch but not to understand, because my body is dirty, something to hide away and not talk about.

What I hate is being the only girl in a room full of men debating without hesitation, without any attention to fact or reason or evidence, saying what they think without thinking, and “I wish I could do that, be that mediocre, be that abrasive and loud and not have to contemplate every word I say and get praised for it, get away with it.”

What I hate is this whole damn thing, feeling like I’m whining, I’m complaining endlessly, and feeling this insurmountable guilt rise up inside of me.

What I hate is being a girl.

If those words don’t unsettle you, they should. I love girlhood, I love my fellow women-identifying humans, I love feeling sisterly and connected and uniquely girl, but I cannot say that I really love being a girl in this country, in this world. The heaviness in my gut doesn’t just go away. It can’t.

To act like it isn’t there in order to console the people around me, the people who don’t get it, is a disservice to all of us. I am emotional, I am messy, I am complicated, I am a muddled dance of grey area, and we all are.

There comes a point when the personal cannot be separated from the political, and I don’t believe that it should be. Pieces of your fundamental self, your very identity, should not be up for political debate, but they are; your skin color, sexuality, gender, etc, all of it becomes not facets of who you are but the entirety. You become generalized and politicized and dehumanized.

My body should not be politicized; to have to fight to have control and ownership and autonomy over my own anatomy should not be a fight at all. Persecution of my sexuality should not something we discuss as a legitimate viewpoint, because it is not political, it is a part of me, of who I am. I wish my mere being wasn’t such a radical act.

If the experience isn’t yours, don’t claim it, but listen to it, absorb it, try to understand it, at least to validate it. Unity stems not from sugarcoating or forced reconciliation but from recognition of the past and present, of the darkest dark. We find our histories there and we should look them in the eye.

A Note Before December 12th.

My state went up in flames this week. Quite literally. The exceedingly dry climate made even dryer by climate change, conditions inherent to California exacerbated by the earth warming. I woke up on Tuesday morning after the Santa Ana winds tousled and tossed and turned all night, violently. The trees outside my window trembled and fluttered and peppered the street with papery leaves, like tender strands of hair ripped off of a head. I fell asleep to the wind. Morning came and I rubbed my eyes clean, opened my window to let some air into the warm room. A gust of smoke-thick air right at the back of my throat, unbearable. At school, ash littered the tables and cars, sad surgical-esque masks were handed out to somewhat protect our developing lungs. At least they tried.

School canceled for the next few days, our breathing rough, wheezing, pained.

The fires tore through cities, through houses, apartment complexes, bedrooms, nurseries, kitchens, stables. After, the charred, crackly limbs of all of these homes, all of the memories and rituals made there. I watched my state burn, felt an immeasurable guilt. The air by my house was clogged with smoke, but the fires didn’t touch us, were far enough away to keep us calm. Scrolling through the news, lives abruptly and unceremoniously split-ended, animals scraping through the burnt streets, the view from the 405: mountains ablaze, deep dark orange-red, like a preview of the apocalypse, shining above the blackness. Come to California to see how light can destroy. Looking up at the mountains, you’re reminded of the pure violence of the sun, if we were to travel to its core, heat so unimaginable we’d be dust long before we arrived. Fire keeps us warm, fire eats us alive.

All of this came at an ironic moment. The fire consumed my thoughts for the week, but still, I watched CNN, chewed on my cuticles, felt sweat bloom under my bangs. While California burned, Alabama self-destructed. Or rather, a certain political party did. Trump endorses Moore. Moore takes lead in polls. Doug Jones in a tough spot. Republican party a mess. Unbelievable. Moore supporters undeterred by sexual assault allegations.

Moore supporters

undeterred

Moore

supporters

undeterred

by sexual assault allegations.

Allegations.

The fragments I caught, I could not quite bring myself to bite down on. I didn’t want to think about it, still don’t, and the election is tomorrow. I wish I could be more active in this race, go out there and canvass for Doug Jones all day and night, but I can’t. Not because I don’t want to. Because of how much this race hurts. How much it aches.

I suppose I should not be surprised. We elected a President accused by countless women of sexual assault, a President who bragged about grabbing women by the - and I will not apologize for the vulgarity, because I’m not the one who should be -  pussy. We elected a man representative of the lifeblood of American masculinity: misogyny. Not quiet, implicit, subtextual murmurs of sexism; not something we can sigh off and shake our heads at, or shrug our shoulders uncomfortably, or justify as something else. There is nothing quiet or subtextual about Donald Trump. He may be a fan of dog-whistle politics, but his whistle is a shrieking, ear-covering one. Makes your ears bleed.

No, Donald Trump is explicit in his hatred of women - his hatred of most non-white, non-male people, really - and nonetheless, we saw him, really saw him, and said, we want that guy. Old news.

No. Not really, though. It’ll never be old news.

Roy Moore is most likely, very possibly, a pedophile. He has probably committed sexual assault and sexually harassed more women than he can count. It’s not even that he’s denying it- he’s rolling his eyes, really. Sure, he dated fourteen-year-old girls at the age of thirty, but, well, so what? Not that big of a deal. Or, my favorite - it’s good to date them young, so you can start reproducing right away and have a huge family. Or the million other bizarre justifications Moore and his spin-squad (essentially the whole GOP) have used when confronted. My ability to stomach Roy Moore’s candidacy was one thing, but to stomach his success? His potential victory? That is a lot to ask of a person with a conscience. A lot to ask someone who cares about women, and happens to be one.

Here’s the problem, amongst the many. The party’s support for Moore is much farther than a compromise of morality, more like an entire dismissal of it, and further reveals the undeniable moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream, elected Republican party.  But more so- his success is also a direct slap in the face to women, and really, to teenage girls. Those women that were teenagers when Moore harassed or assaulted them? How must this feel? To know, undeniably, that actual politicians, actual human beings meant to represent you and your country, are choosing to not look the other way, but instead, to look right at what happened to you and shrug their shoulders, unimpressed? And what does it feel like to be a teenage girl right now, in the midst of this mess? It feels like your stomach caving in, heart thudding and escaping you.

If the Republican party supports Moore, they support treating teenage girls like ignorable, unimportant creatures. If you’re sexually assaulted, but the assailant is good for the party, the only option to keep the majority, well, sorry, but you just have to bear it. I won’t deny that the Democratic party has a myriad of its own fractures and problems, but wait a minute. The Democrats, in the face of sexual assault and harassment allegations, get the accused to leave. They take those accusations seriously. This isn’t my opinion; this is the truth that all those accused Democrats have resigned, while the GOP continues to support sexual predators unflinchingly.

I can’t quite sleep right. The smoke from the fires has coated the insides of my throat, and I am coughing incessantly, aggressively, trying to get the remnants of the fire out of me. I am contaminated with it, will be for quite some time, like the whole state is. The firefighters, though, aren’t trying to fight the poison in the air- they’re fighting the origin of the pollutant itself. The fire must be put out before we can breathe clean again. The air is still unsteady, but the flames are dying out.

The Race

Originally written/published June 13, 2016 on my old blog. 

In a fluorescent-lit microcosm of the so uniquely American fast-and-easy brand of consumerism, a sixteen year old girl does the unspeakable: dare to exist, without apology nor demure self-suppression. Limbs long and tee shirt slightly small, the barest lining of soft belly peeking through, her feet tread restlessly against the scruffy, cheap carpeted floor of the neighborhood CVS. Into the cosmetics aisle, critical eyes squinting at the assorted inane manifestations of a societally-funded industry constructed upon the deliberate exploitation of sexist insecurity; doubts her self-control, fiddles absentmindedly with some torturous and highly unnecessary device called an eyebrow shaper.

If it makes you happy, if you actually want to, not because you feel you must.

She stops mindlessly browsing for a prolonged moment at that feeling, one not unfamiliar to her, one that hangs in the peripheral expectations embedded intrinsically into her female existence, apparently. That of the male gaze, the silly name rather fitting, rather apt. Eyes so unrelenting they destruct even her self-awareness; even the most ferocious of self-made strength. Eyes that follow, eyes that hunt, eyes that stalk the creature; the- yes, believe it, folks, because it truly is real- the Existing Teenage Girl, with an actual body. She stiffens, as she always does, as she always will no matter how much it disgusts her to do so. His gaze forces it, that stiffening. Not unlike a corpse, she thinks. As if I were ever more to him than a void; than a body lacking a person; a body lacking mind. As if I were prey.

Her uncomfortableness evident in the tilt of her head, a bumbling rush of clumsy feet frenzied to abscond the confinement of the aisle, the entrapment of the gaze.

It doesn’t matter, though, not really. Each path she takes, each aisle, despite its contents, he easily, almost ridiculously easily, can sweep by, casually, languidly, but that gaze, those eyes, that feeling, it follows her everywhere. How simply and unnoticeably he does it destroys her and yet she can do nothing but walk quickly to her mother sitting, awaiting her prescription. She can do nothing but escape. No fight is allowed or encouraged or even really tangible, for he simply looked at her. If gut feelings could present themselves as evidence, it’d be a much safer world, but that will never happen. The stiffening sensation and that feeling of utter and undeterrable smallness that devours her senses from a gaze, it cannot be destroyed because no man will ever admit to it, no society in this world will ever make the victim the victim.

If she were different, would her sense of self still persevere, in the end? Would each and every moment compiled into the perpetual cycle of these feelings not matter? Perhaps she could suffice on breadcrumbs of self-worth. Perhaps solace would be found in the idealistic, quixotic rationale that not all men are like that; sexism is over; etc, etc, in every unimaginable word uttered by every white man dictating what constitutes oppression, in every whistle, every catcall, every grope on public transport, everyday existing everyday being everyday seeing everyday holding back your tongue because your mouth was made to do one thing only, apparently.

And it isn’t to speak. Something they forgot to teach you in school.

Maybe, in another dimension, in another universe, things wouldn’t be what they were, and she wouldn’t be the girl she was. In this world, on this planet, though, her girlhood refuses to ignore itself. Her gender refuses to be something unrelated to her capabilities as a human being, or, completely detached from her interests and sexuality and self-importance. Perhaps she would be a person worth her own thoughts rather than succumbing to that goddamn gaze.

And maybe, there would seem no need to invest herself in the cause. Perhaps there would exist no cause to invest in, if binaries had never been constructed, if she were more than Girl, if things were started differently, if equality felt palpable.

As if a look could break her into pieces. She should be stronger than that, she’s told, mostly by boys meaning well, not quite comprehending why something as small and as imperceptible as a look could stain her entire understanding of herself, could make her feel all the things she did, or, rather, make her into a nothing rather than a someone.

The I’m fines and the it’s okays come like a first language nowadays. Each misunderstanding expected. A tactile agreement entrenched under years of accumulative accustoming that she’ll keep herself down, try not to be too much.

She sits in her classes at her liberal, progressive , diverse, tolerant high school and nods along to the deafening rhythm of the boys speaking over her and every other girl in the class just to hear their own voices. She wonders, admittedly, how they do not grow exhausted of their own voices, of talking so much, contemplates how their throats do not go raw and raspy with all of the talking and interrupting they do, but she does not ask. She coughs quietly. Each action is mild and calculated. But what is most interesting is how she holds herself as if to make the world forget her existence.

In trying to disappear, the anger begins to fester. Rage like a hidden maelstrom. Rage like thunder boiling patiently beneath her skin, awaiting the best moment to strike and execute itself onto the unlucky perpetrator. Thunderous as she may be, she feels like she has to apologize for it. Admittedly, the storm flares at the worst of times, onto the least deserving of people, and she knows it, hates it, allows that hatred of her thunder to infect, allows it to transform into self-loathing that has no cover or disguise.

But.

If she apologizes one more time for snapping, she doesn’t know what will happen to her. It hurts, deeply, inconsolably, after shaking her head or retorting an unsolicitedly bitter and sardonic response at a boy who truly meant to be helpful or kind. The flushing of cheeks, the mumbled sorry, that came out wrong. Not a hint of understanding of the people around her because she is too tired to understand any longer, and even the ones she wants to know are keeping away from her.

If likability is congruent to passivity, she doesn’t want to aspire for the trait.

The sea she sinks into, deeper and deeper every minute of every day, feels far too tempestuous and too thick to swim out of. Each time she tries, moving thin arms in desperate circles, kicking ankles as hard as possible, it rocks her back and forth until she is nauseated and lightheaded with the weight of its current.

A tally invisible, covering her entire body, each line shakily drawn by unstable fingers. The trick is to never allow the tally to be visible. If the marks become apparent, god knows what will happen to her

She will not stop.

This is the world; the undercurrents of self-doubt and self-disgust forming a cold sweat and an unshakable unease. This is what happens when you are sixteen, a female-identifying human, a body, an unsteady heartbeat, a clump of evolving, scarred, flawed matter. This is who you are, and this is hell.

There is another world, and it exists concealed underneath thousands and thousands of ruins. It hangs quietly in the stillness beneath the waves, at the bottom of the proverbial swimming pool, and no longer will she raise weak gnarled claws to swimming pool concrete walls, no longer will the mind ache with unresolvable disaster. There she is, and there is stillness.

Often, her body becomes absorbed by the crashing, violent maelstrom of life, of adolescence, and she cannot escape. Yet there will be solace, a burning, bright, haven of tranquil absolution, and to enter this transient peace she must understand not to combat cold unruly seas but rather, to coexist with them.

These waves break bodies. These waves carry. These waves swallow living beings whole and devour them into a lightless infinity, cold and flat and dark. These waves do not devour if there is no fight.

She finds herself in the fluorescent CVS, her body a prison, her skin awake with nerves, but she does not break his gaze this time. The awake and exhausted human girl does not live in hell. This human girl lives in stillness and storms, in cold and light.