Let's see if you can bring the nasty out of me
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Let's see if you can bring the nasty out of me
24 January 2018
A couple of months ago, I moderated a panel discussion with three women working in the food industry about their career paths and the broad topic of "what it's like to be a woman in food." (Highlight: When I asked each of them if they thought the place they are at now—all three own their own businesses or brands—was the result of growing opportunities for women within the industry or their own ambition and creating opportunities, they all unequivocally gave themselves credit for their achievements.)
This was back in November, a month after the New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story, and, more relevant to our conversation, a few weeks after New Orleans celebrity chef John Besh stepped down from his company in the wake of an extensive Times-Picayune investigation detailing the decades-long culture of sexual harassment Besh perpetuated within his restaurant group. It was after Anthony Bourdain, for better or worse America's highest profile chefdude and vocal, verbose conscience of its culinary culture, said that male chefs, himself included, needed to hold themselves accountable for what happens in their industry—and listen to women's stories.
As I was putting together questions for the event, I debated whether or not to ask about this stuff. I knew there would be plenty to discuss. All of the panelists had worked closely with well-known male chefs in New York and Seattle. The audience, because this was an event organized by a networking group for women in the industry, would be filled with young women working in restaurant culture and kitchens. Everyone would have stories of inappropriate sexual behavior, talk, and harassment because, well, all women do. In the end, I decided not to go there—not because it's not important, but because I just couldn't stand the idea of turning an evening dedicated to women's accomplishments, in a space filled with women, into something even remotely about men.
I'm tired of talking about men. And I have been for, like, 20 years.
I understand we are having an extended public period of reckoning about the shit that men do to women sexually, and I am glad that more and more women feel they are able to speak out and share their stories. Telling our stories safely, without shame, is perhaps the most powerful thing we have. It is transformative.
But I can't shake the feeling that in the many conversations that follow women's disclosures—articles, op-eds, discussions—we are perpetuating our culture's underlying idea that hetero, cis sex is inherently defined and determined by men. What they can get away with. What we don't want them to do to us. What they do to us anyway. What they want. What's especially gross to me is that we aren't even talking about male desire, or anything particularly nuanced, mysterious, complex, or racy. We are talking about the generic flexing of power and male entitlement. Zzzzz.
Reading Jill Lepore's recent piece in the New Yorker, which is about the legal battle between the manufacturers of Barbie and Bratz dolls but also much more, drove this home for me in a new way: "Women have uncannily similar and all too often harrowing and even devastating stories about things that have happened to them at work because men do very similar things to women; leaning in doesn't help," she writes. "There's more copying going on, too: pornography and accounts of sexual harassment follow the same script. Nobody writes anything from scratch."
The Aziz Ansari story that emerged the other week sent me over a bit of an edge (also, you can argue that the way this woman's story was relayed to the public was far from safe). All the reactionary pieces, many written by women, asking the victim, "What did you expect?, "Why didn't you just leave?," and, most offensive, "You think that's bad?"
I can't speak for the woman at the center of the story, but as I tracked some of these conversations I kept coming back to a few things. First, that I understand how complicated and difficult it can be to extricate yourself from a situation like that, even when you know it's bad. But also, re: what she expected: Maybe she expected that she was going to hook up with Aziz Ansari? (That is why we go on dates with people, right?) That maybe she was DTF but not via the discomforting, gross way he was pursuing her? That maybe for a while, because of his feminist public image and good dude vibe, she thought things might turn around? Maybe she was holding out hope, even for just a few minutes, that, because she was cute and that he liked her (that is why we go on dates with people, right?), they might actually manage to have fun, consensual sex? I mean, is that so unreasonable?
What irks me is that what seems to be missing from all our current conversations about sex are precisely the things that, these days, interest me most about it—the specificity and particular excitement, energy, creativity, and surprises generated by people when they come together physically. Oh, and also: WHAT WOMEN WANT.
This passage from a Rebecca Traister piece, written in 2015, feels especially relevant: "Pleasure! Women want pleasure, or at least an equal shot at it. That doesn’t mean some prim quid-pro-quo sexual chore-chart. No one’s saying that sex can’t be complicated and perverse, its pleasures reliant—for some—on riffing on old power imbalances. But its complications can and should be mutually borne, offering comparable degrees of self-determination and satisfaction to women and men."
Female bodies are the only ones that come with an organ dedicated entirely to pleasure, so someone please tell me why sex always seems to discussed in terms of men drilling their bits and jackhammering their way to some conclusion that satisfies them.
*
I find that I am thinking a lot more (like, A LOT more) about sex right now. (Hi, Mom!) It may have something to do with pregnancy? (Everything out of the ordinary these days does.)
I am currently living in a body that is the undeniable result of sex—"successful," from a purely biological point of view. Pregnancy is a young body’s game for sure. (I have found being pregnant at 40 considerably more physically challenging than I did at the tender age of 36, back when I was still medically considered "elderly" and "geriatric.") But sex, I am increasingly convinced, not as much.
I suppose in the eleven years that Will and I have been together that I got used to sex being a certain way—not predictable, necessarily, but familiar (and comforting and hot for this reason), certainly. But there's really nothing that will blow up your body and sex life like having a child. Getting ripped open and swimming in a sea of hormones for 2+ years will change both your perspective and your reality, no matter what your desires are. You have to figure out new things because not having sex (at least for us) isn't an option. I wrote a bit about this in one of the chapters of my book (which, btw, I am happy to say is really REAL and coming out at the end of May!): the way postpartum stuff brings alienation from your body and sex specifically.
I am not pitting "young" sex vs. "old" sex or saying one is better. Better is relative anyway. But as we get older, we necessarily add more dimensions to our life. All I'm saying is that for me sex seems to reflect, and be more integral, to other identities, aspects, and parts of me as I get older. And that I never thought much about that until pretty recently: What I need and get and want from from sex, not just that I want it. (I look back and realize that I've found myself drawn to tv shows, books, and movies—Happy Valley, The Good Wife, Love & Trouble, A Round-Heeled Woman, Sage Femme—that explore desire from mid-life, post-child, women-centered point of view for the last few months.)
"In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn't how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them."
This is how "The Husband Stitch," the opening story in Carmen Maria Machado's book Her Body and Other Parties, starts. It's a story that, for many reasons, not the least of which is the narrator's ownership of her yearnings and sexuality, I am utterly obsessed with and haunted by.
"I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them," Machado's narrator goes on to tell us. "I moan and push back, and we rut in that clearing, groans of my pleasure and groans of his good fortune mingling and dissipating in to the night. We are learning, he and I."
"It is not normal that a girl teachers her boy, but I am only showing him what I want, what plays on the insides of my eyelids as I fall asleep. He comes to know the flicker of my expression as a desire pass through me, and I hold nothing back from him."
I could probably write a whole piece about how much I love this story (and the entire book, which is filled with all kinds of spooky, beautiful, queer, brown, possibly magical, and necessary sex), but you should really just go and read it. (Mild spoiler alert: The story is also about what men want, but not in the gross way that we are used to.)
I'm in California right now—a quick getaway before I hit 36 weeks and am no longer allowed to fly. I'm getting back on a plane to dark, wet Seattle in a few hours. I've had a huge light-filled, all-white room with a giant full-length mirror to myself. The first night I was here I stood in front of it in my underwear, feeling swollen and enormous as the baby moved around and my belly distended and turned momentarily rock hard. I turned on some music and started dancing (if I don't do daily hip circles, I become somewhat immobile, see my condition of "elderly multigravida"), weirdly hypnotized (and also sort of fascinated/in awe of/vaguely repulsed) by my body. It triggered something.
For the last two days, I've found myself mostly wanting to listen and dance to Missy Elliott. I started watching her old videos. The one where she's wearing the giant inflatable garbage bag suit and asking "Can we get kinky tonight?" The one where she's seducing a man by snapping her head off and having her headless body, in a bedazzled denim suit, bob around a motel room and tell him, "I'ma keep you up all night." The one where she hawks a lugey across a significant distance into a man's mouth (at 2:04, you're welcome)...and he likes it.
Her sexuality comes off as downright weird, questionably festooned, sometimes grotesque, wholly her own. Men who? I hit the replay button. I can't stop watching.
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