If Power Is the Ultimate Aphrodisiac, Why Don’t You Wanna Bang Hillary Clinton?
This revolting headline is on the cover of the newest issue of Details magazine. After I saw it while standing at the checkout line in Food Emporium (spending the last five dollars in my wallet on organic fire-roasted tomatoes for a lentil/escarole soup, and tortilla chips to go with the salsa I made earlier), I promptly had to run home and put a cool cloth on the back of my neck, because I’m so angry about it that I’ve given myself a stress headache.
What the HELL. Let me be clear: I did not read the article. It might have gone on to say how wonderful she is. But I doubt it.
To begin with, let’s take “bang.” It is at once both dismissive and threatening. Bang because it’s slang and therefore not real English the way Hillary is not a real person. Bang like a gun. Bang like banging her head against a wall. Bang like smashing her flat.
It’s not like I’m super tuned in to political current events, but even I have become aware that Hil’s treading so carefully in her public commentary about the war that she is in fact pleasing neither Republicans nor Democrats. However, that isn’t the point.
This obvious attempt to shame and discredit one of our feminist hopefuls for a presidential candidacy espouses in essence everything I loathe about the male attitude toward female sexuality. In a word, narcissism. Which is the first stage of ego development. Which by syllogism proves that men who think this way are children. Children who happen to be the dominant voices in the culture at large. Little boys clumsily treading on sand castles in their self-absorbed, preening walk on the beach.
This headline illustrates that many men believe women’s sexuality is not their own, that in fact it does not exist independently of men. We have a word for that. It’s called phallocentrism.
The phrase “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” has nothing to do with power being a turn-on OBJECTIVELY, that is, for other people to become turned on by observing power. Ironically, this is what men have always believed, though, that women are aroused by displays of power and by “powerful” men. What does that even mean? The only power I respect is self-mastery. Period.
Power is an aphrodisiac subjectively. Meaning those who experience feeling powerful also feel hot and horny and happy. If men weren’t so threatened by female power, female pleasure, then power WOULD be an aphrodisiac to those who witness someone experiencing it, and men would strive to help women become empowered. Also, Hil would be a sex symbol, as would any woman who is functioning at the top of her game, whether her game is physics or volleyball or stripping.
Wasn’t there a news item this past week that, in a worldwide survey, Austrians were shown to have the hottest sex lives, because sexual pleasure is based on gender equity and there’s a lot of that going around in Austria?
Goddess, on this holiday that is all about sexual pleasure, to read a headline like that makes me feel as though someone has just spit in my mouth.
Hooray, hooray for Beltane! It is one of my fave pagan holidays. The first is Samhain, and I really love Candlemas too.
Today I devote entirely to pleasure. Just participated in a circle with my friend Kenwyn, during which we invoked prosperity and protection for us all. I was inspired to dance around using my brass zills. I later found out that brass is typically used magically in all the ways that gold is. Namely, it is solar and protective and brings money. Bells symbolize the element of air, and as such can be used in ceremonial magic to make sure that your thoughts are working for you, not against you. How many times have we impaled ourselves on the sword of our own mind, rather than using it like a scalpel to cut through all the bullshit and find the truth?
The truth is that love is the whole of the law. Joy radiates.
I’m going to spend today doing what I love best: writing, reading, dancing, cooking. Might take a walk to the library to get out a copy of Henry Miller’s _Tropic of Cancer_, about which I have been thinking almost constantly for the last few months. I haven’t read it in years.
Last night Rod and I met Rachel and Renny for dumplings at Sun Dou on Grand Street. It is right down the street from the Shiseido outlet. That could be a very expensive walk for me, having in the space of two blocks a place to buy lipstick and dumplings. We sampled steamed spinach dumplings, fried pork and chive dumplings, steamed pork and watercress dumplings, and some spring rolls. Everything was delicious!
Then we went to a party spearheaded by Vaginal Davis, a drag queen who was previously unknown to me. When we arrived I was the only one wearing cat’s-eye glasses, but by the time we left there were three more thirtyish women in hot boots and gorgeous eyeglasses. Glad to know I’ve found my context, my community, because it was getting depressing being around young whippersnappers in miniskirts.
Do you think I’m too old and fat to set up a webcam in my apartment and make money by letting people watch me concoct curried spinach lentil soup in the nude?
Although I am not technically on unemployment yet, I thought I’d taunt all you working stiffs by keeping an unemployment journal of all the wonderful things I’m doing!
Yesterday I found out on Oprah that the Gap “curvy” jeans in a dark wash really are a smart, under-$50 solution for big-butt people. Amen. Every item of clothing I’ve ever bought in the Gap has fitted me terribly, but I suppose I’ll give the curvies a try, if only for giggles.
Last night went to a writers’ group that meets at Ozzie’s in Park Slope. Because I am trying to be frugal, I brought a peanut butter, honey, and dried fig sandwich with me for dinner instead of purchasing one at the cafe.
Not only are these ladies excellent writers, they are similarly obsessed with Burt’s Bees lip shimmer, I discovered.
I was marginally employed for most of my twenties, so losing a cushy corporate job is not as panic-inducing for me as it might be for others. I have enormous faith in my own powers of making money, and also in my ability to live practically on thin air, as ten years ago I was clearing $11K per year and rounding it out by reading tarot cards in coffee houses a few nights a week.
What’s more, my sartorial obsession of the last few years was really all about attempting to succeed in corporate culture. I firmly believed that having an executive wardrobe in my closet would make an executive job appear. Since that didn’t happen, I can drop that particular activity and rest in the knowledge that I have all the clothing items I need. Same with makeup and perfume.
It’s like a game to see how little money you actually need, and it is pleasurable to test one’s powers of creativity in this way. I was a vegetarian for a long time, and still don’t eat much meat, so I can feed Rod and me on $30 a week, if I forget that such a thing as sushi exists. For example, here are the bean recipes I can think of just off the top of my head:
black beans and rice
red beans and yellow rice
pasta e fagioli
curried lentils and coconut rice
refried beans
hummus
falafel
black bean, corn, and jicama salad
edamame with whole wheat shells and lemon
miso soup with adzuki beans
three-bean chili
pinto bean burritos
zucchini (or tomatoes, bell peppers, or eggplant) stuffed with lentil pilaf
Caribbean pink beans and rice
Beltane is tomorrow, which is one of the Wiccan sabbaths that has to do with desire, and manifesting desire. Here is what I want:
I want to make money from writing
I want to make enough income to afford belly dance lessons, good food, the occasional entertainment, some travel, and some savings.
Soon I will be starting a commercial blog. I think its focus will be the map of my obsessions, with special emphasis on better living through poetry and the occult sciences. Because it occurs to me that a lot of people are curious about the Tarot. I have taught Tarot workshops and published Tarot essays, and I might try to hold onl ine Tarot workshops.
While I am on unemployment, I am of course going to be sending my resume to traditional publishing jobs, but there are a lot of things I’d like to try doing.
I might be happy being a food-cart vendor, a voice-over actor, a creative writing teacher, a fitness instructor, or a line cook, to name just a few careers I’ve always thought about trying on.
The hard part is over. I spent the past six years living out my own worst nightmare of being a corporate drone. I’m a grup, apparently, and am positively ecstatic about packing all that in to start my own business making pepper-jelly zeppole.
Holla Back!
How could I not have known about this Web site until today, when I read about it in the Voice? HollaBackNYC: http://www.hollabacknyc.blogspot.com/ is a site dedicated to eradicating street harassment in NYC.
Their method? Snap a pic of the offender on your camera phone. Then post it to the site with a note about the offending conduct. Justice is served.
The article in the Voice brought up the point that this cyber-vigilantism is at least as disturbing as the harassment itself. What do you think? I think that if a man harasses me on the street, that is not only a gross invasion of my privacy but also an agressive and hostile act, and that my taking/posting his picture, robbing him of his privacy, is poetic justice.
Naysayers to what the group is doing object to this on the grounds that even guilty parties are entitled to due process, and that by posting a picture of someone with, say, his jibblies in his hands while he’s leering at a woman on the street, essentially condemns him without trial.
All I know is, it never occurred to me to address the problem of street harassment in this way, but I have felt victimized by it for at least twenty-five years and so am ecstatic that this site exists. There’s going to be a reading at Bluestockings (on Allen street, Lower East Side) on May 19, at which the subject of street harassment will be addressed. I can’t wait.
When I was still living in New Brunswick but commuting to NYC for work, I had to walk a mile to the train station every morning, and there was a drunk (at 7 in the morning, people) sixtyish guy who consistently harassed me. One day I saw him in a neighborhood bodega, where he proceeded to speak to me AS THOUGH WE WERE ACQUAINTED.
I tried, very rationally for a person who felt like disemboweling him on the spot with my portable eyebrow tweezers, to explain that women do not like being yelled at on the street. He proceeded to abuse me in florid and barely coherent language, in essence calling me a tight-assed cunt because I couldn’t recognize a compliment. The store owner looked on and passively did nothing.
Even Rod, most excellent of men, kind of didn’t get why I was so upset about the incident. That is because this kind of harassment is so endemic that it has become invisible. Case in point: Those horrible plush toys of gorillas clutching stuffed satin hearts, that are movement-activated to WHISTLE AT YOU WHEN YOU WALK BY THEM. One of my former coworkers at the newspaper I worked at, around the same time as the abovementioned incident happened, had one of these on her desk, and everyone in the office but me thought it was adorable, and that I was a typical ballbusting feminazi.
I would write more, but I’m off to fulfill the unemployment cliche (which I started this morning by consuming potato chips for breakfast with my grilled cheese and avocado sandwich–next week I hope to graduate to ice cream cake and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer for brekkie) of watching Oprah, so that I may learn which jeans and panties (betcha they’re Spanx brand) will shrink my fanny. Because I desperately want Eva Longoria’s advice on the subject.
Believe It or Not
I’m Walking on Air. Remember this line from the theme song to “The Greatest American Hero”?
Two events made me think of this theme song. The first was seeing William Katt, who played the titular character on the early-eighties sitcom, on an episode of “House” the other night. (Damn you, UPN, for making me wait until Sunday for Veronica Mars while you broadcast asinine basketball games).
The other: Rod snuck onto my iPod a two-disc set of the greatest TV themes of all times, which I just discovered this morning as I was walking to the library. I have been scouring the Internet for an MP3 version of “The Greatest American Hero” theme, and now I’ve got it, in addition to many, many of my other faves, which have brought up surprisingly vivid and poignant remembrances, not the least of which is the George Costanza answering machine message based on “The Greatest American Hero,” which you can hear on a Web site called Seinfeld Sounds: http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/4094/sfldsnds.htm.
Enjoy!
I have been laid off, an event that I have been expecting for at least the last two months, but about which I couldn’t write freely on this blog because people at the office read it. Now I don’t have any such constraint, so I can write what I want.
Which is: Thank all the gods there are for this blessed release.
What I have to say about it all is summed up by this poem of Walt Whitman’s:
A NOISELESS, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.
p.s. just sat down and crocheted a ginchy set of spiderweb zill mufflers so I can practice my finger cymbals without inciting a riot of neighbors.
Happy Wondrous List for Today:
Silk pajamas
Chocolate-covered ginger (also known as Reason for Living)
Running balls to the wall at the gym and then stepping outside into a cool evening breeze
Barley/escarole pilaf with cannelllini beans and sausage (Got my cooking mojo back)
Richard Garcia’s poetry book _Rancho Notorious_
Tickle fight with Rod (He won)
George Abdo belly dance record (Gyrating around the apartment like I’m bathing in the Lord’s own cleansing fire)
Sauteed broccoli with preserved lemons and capers
Hugh Laurie
Blue cheese
Recharged after a lunchtime walk, during which I saw two clean-cut, bespectacled twentysomethings having a staring contest on a corner of Fifth Avenue.
I have a few friends who have recently quit smoking (congratulations you guys!), and I salute you. It is never easy to reexamine one’s coping skills. The behavior that I am trying to do without is buying stuff just because I’m bored. Never big stuff: a lipstick here, an essential oil or a book of poetry there. But Rod and I want to save up to buy a place of our own, so I have to keep that ultimate goal in mind and keep spending to a minimum, which is not easy because every day I am usually bored beyond endurance by 10:30 a.m.
What do I do besides window shop to comfort and/or mentally refresh myself?
1. Take a brisk walk.
This can backfire and be extremely frustrating if I walk through a crowded area. Also, I am running out of destinations. For the last week I have visited every health food store in a ten-block radius of my office, looking for Moosewood refrigerated soups. This is the pinnacle of existential despair, is it not?
2. Sit in a cafe and read.
Usually this is relaxing unless the cafe is too loud to permit reading, or if I happen to be craving a type of book that I don’t have in my purse. This is why I usually carry both a poetry book and a novel, and sometimes two novels: adult and young adult. The poetry that’s on my iPod will tank a bad mood from bad to suicidal, and is only used for when I want to sob myself into dehydration, or if I am in an insanely good mood and can therefore tolerate contemplating Sylvia Plath’s poetry in the middle of a workday. Today, two obscure online magazines rejected my poems, so today is not Dr. FeelGood Day.
3. Scope out people’s shoes and eavesdrop on their conversations if the cafe is too noisy to permit reading.
Today I saw a wide variety of metallic flats and beaded moccasins. Also overheard someone talking about a band called “Ball in the House,” the name of which they got from an old Brady Bunch episode: “Mom always said don’t play ball in the house!”
Also, I like to guess which shoes people will be wearing, based on their conversations. Today a learned, baritone gentlemen was talking serious business, the only word of which I understood was “portfolio.” I thought he’d be wearing some kind of heavy black leather loafer, but he was in fact rocking some metallic kicks with red racing stripes.
4. Read poetry at Poet’s House
Pros: One of the only places to get quiet midday in Manhattan.
Cons: Requires getting on the subway, and a walk through SoHo.
Things I don’t do on my lunch hour anymore:
1. Work out at the gym
It go to be too much of a pain in the carcass to drag my gym bag around, confine my workout to a half hour, and shower midday.
2. Sniff things in Bath and Bodyworks, Sephora, Jo Malone, and the Body Shop
Even if I leave my purse at the office, I will fixate on the new scents at these stores until I am convinced there will be no rest for me in this life if I don’t buy the entire line of, say, fig lotions. And then three or four days later I buy buy buy.
3. Go to thrift stores
After I looked in my closet and found not one, not two, but THREE turbans, one of which was paisley, I spoke sternly to myself. What I said was, “You are cut off from thrift shopping for at least the next six months.”
I wish I could find a drop-in lunchtime bellydance class. I have a lot of wishes, and also a lot of prosperity, when the worst thing in my life today is a bad hair day.
But Beltane is coming up this weekend, and that is a wonderful holiday on which to pray for inspiration. I’m having a hard time igniting my own imagination these days. It’s positively criminal to feel so bored and jaded all the time, when I’m living and working in such a stimulating city. Today when I was walking around I honestly wished for NATURE, thinking it would be more restorative to walk around in the woods at lunch than around Union Square with people stepping on my feet and jostling me at every turn.
Oh, but I remember working and living in the suburbs, when the only thing to do at lunch was read on a bench in some office park. No thank you.
That’ s what made me long for the Catskills or something. It is dangerous to pray for big change, but Great Goddess I need something to wake me up. I’m so sick to death of everything that lately I haven’t even felt like cooking. Sunday night we made grilled cheese sandwiches with tater tots on the side and tomato soup for veggie. Which for me represents almost the nadir of dining. The only thing worse would be microwaving a frozen dinner.
Things You Think Nobody Loves But You
We all have some obscure (or dorky) things that feed us. What are yours? In perusing my list, you might notice that the 1990s did not make a strong pop culture impression on me…
Here are some of the things that have enriched my life immeasurably, about which no one else seems to care:
1. Daddy Long-legs and Dear Enemy by Jean Webster
These are two great early twentieth century epistolary novels. I adore them. They are hilarious. Both are available as etexts from Project Gutenburg.
2. Sooner or Later by Bruce and Carole Hart
This was a 1979 made-for-TV movie starring Rex Smith, about a rock star and his jailbait girlfriend. Love the movie, love the novelization and its two sequels, love the soundtrack. Own them all.
3. Magister Ludi by Hermann Hesse
Does anyone read Hesse in high school anymore? It’s positively shocking how many people have never read him.
4. The Grammar Toolkit
This is a genius list of definitions of grammar terms, in the American Heritage Book of English Usage. No one thinks it’s as ginchy as I do, but it is indispensable if you want to pull the meaning of a term like “compound-complex sentence” out of your butt. Available online in the reference section of www.bartleby.com.
5. Burt’s Bees lip shimmer
Why haven’t we been experiencing a storm of media blitz about these? The watermelon and rhubarb shades have done more to plump up my (nonexistent) pout than Lip Venom and lip liner combined.
6. Two Norma Klein books: Mom, the Wolfman, and Me, AND Give Me One Good Reason.
The first of these was made into a 1980 TV movie, which was terrific. The second is an uproariously funny and smart book about an unwed mother. My own mother was none too pleased when she found this paperback stashed under my mattress, back in the day.
7. Streets of Fire soundtrack
The movie, starring Diane Lane and featuring Willem Dafoe in black vinyl pants, is memorable more for the eye candy than the plot or the script. But the music is glorious.
8. Casper the Friendly Ghost soundtrack.
I think this is a compilation of songs that were used in the TV cartoons that came out in the sixties. Anyway, it is now available at Wal-Mart!
9. The Right Preposition list in _Words into Type_.
Again, no one else is as excited about this as I am. It’s a gigantic list of which preposition goes with which verb. Native speakers of English know a lot of this just by having grown up with the language, but believe me it’s an invaluable list.
For example: Are you abashed “at” something, or abashed “before” something?
Answer: Both! These are both correct usages but the connotation is different. Do you see? Are you on the love train now?
10. Auric Blends essential oils.
My favorite is Night Queen. These oils are getting harder and harder to find, particularly as Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab corners the gothic fragrance market. In NYC, you can still get them at many Rickys stores.
Taste of Chinatown Spring 2006 featured one major improvement in the festival: A dining pavilion, bordered by inflatable plastic palm trees. Why, we wondered, include the palm trees? Because this spot was an oasis, or because they had been made in China and served as a beacon of Chinese manufactured ingenuity?
Mike was the only one who took me up on my offer to accompany me to Taste of Chinatown, so we met at the information kiosk, under a patchy sky, and dove into the crowd. Rod is fond of maps, and my previous attendance at Taste of Chinatown has been carefully orchestrated to avoid the bulk of the crowd by starting through the back streets. Mike, as untroubled as I am by the snares of moderation or strategy, plowed right in and approved the plan of ordering either a dumpling or some kind of roll at the first stall we saw, thereby priming our stomachs with grease enough to be able to withstand various noodle dishes and fried fish on sticks.
There was the usual ridiculously long line outside of Peking Duck House. I don’t like duck, so I have never sampled that particular delicacy. Some of the highlights we got were spring rolls at Moon House, scallion lo mein at Wo Hop, and fresh summer spring rolls at Doyers Vietnamese. To tell you the truth, I lost track of how many egg rolls/spring rolls we had, or where we got them from. Our appetites seemed unbounded because it is a contact sport to navigate Chinatown in the rain, so we got a lot of exercise and had to be fueled by ever more tastiness wrapped in wonton skins and then pan seared. Mike decided that he would wear goggles to the festival next time, so that would run a lesser risk of getting his eye gouged out by an overactive umbrella.
Jaya Malaysian, at 90 Baxter Street, has the most incredible stuffed tofu, but they were out of it by the time we got there. It started raining pretty heavily, so we caught about five seconds of the lion dance before it stopped on account of the downpour.
We popped into a place called Excellent Pork Chop House for a cup of tea and a few more dumpling dishes (dumplings in spicy oil, and a wonton soup featuring succulent chive dumplings), to wait out the rain. This is what I love so about Chinatown: Even restaurants that are not all about the dumpling serve scrumdiddlyumptious ones.
It was over the course of this meal that we decided the Chocolate Bar was kind of on the way home from Chinatown. This is one more thing that makes Mike my ideal dining companion: He didn’t scoff at my suggestion. He shrugged matter of factly and stated, “Of course it’s on the way. Let’s go!”
If I’d voiced such a wild idea to Rod, he would have promptly began clutching his stomach and rolling his eyes, making out like I was trying to poison him by suggesting we top off an obscene amount of Chinese food with a hot chocolate and maybe an Elvis confection or two.
So we hiked from Chinatown to Eighth Avenue near Jane Street. I could not have been dressed more inappropriately for the rain, wearing canvas Converse sneaks which were soaked, and long jeans trailing in the the water and filth of the streets. Only the promise of hot chocolate prevented me from having to go home immediately and rip off my soggy clothes in disgust, because I hate that sensation of wet denim on my calves, and usually try to wear skirts and boots when it rains.
Mike got the caramel hot chocolate and I went with the old standbye, the spicy hot chocolate. We also sampled one of their chocolate caramels, which cost $1 and was beautiful both texturally and tastewise, being creamy and rich without the grittiness caramel gets if it’s been hanging around for a while.
I also picked up a bag of chocolate ginger for the way home.
I’d spent such a long time out playing with my friends (went to belly dance with Heidi in the morning before Taste of Chinatown) that I barely had enough time to straighten up the house and cook up the Chinese broccoli I’d purchased in Chinatown with some garlic and oil and bell pepper and toss it with buttered pasta and top it with parmesan cheese, to make Rod feel loved and cared for.
Incidentally, serving pasta in this way really qualifies as some of the new American fusion cuisine, and it sat wrong on my palate. I love chinese broccoli, but only in Asian food, I decided.
In belly dance we have begun to learn the slower movements, or “taksim” portion of the dance, which feature undulations and hip rolls rather than shimmies. It’s a terrific teaching technique to alternate learning the slow and fast movements this way, as it provides imaginative counterpoint.
I finally finished _Concrete Island_ and am looking forward to spending a good chunk of today reading _Anno Dracula_ and practicing finger cymbals. I have little or no urge to cook or go food shopping when it rains. It’s such a nuisance lugging grocery bags around while the sky is heaving its spittle onto you.
For the umpteenth time I wish we did Fresh Direct. Also that we had cable TV, as a day like today simply cries out for a Planet of the Apes marathon on the SciFi channel, or reruns of the old Battlestar Galactica TV show, and it is such a laborious chore to have to try locating these things on DVD from the crowded Virgin megastore, rather than having them beamed into the living room through the magic of cable television.
