Cunt (17 page)

And on and on.

In school we learn that one of the best survival strategies is being part of a clique.
With our friends, we create a little, tiny world with codes for conduct, morality,
dress, communication, ethnicity and sexuality. We then learn to judge everyone else
who is not part of our little world by the standards that are acceptable to us. This
is called “divide and conquer,” and happens to be exactly how male, white patriarchal
society operates. When you choose not to see how you, yourself, perpetuate this social
model, your world assuredly becomes—or remains—small, “safe,” persnickety, judgemental
and uninspiring.

How else could Bill Gates decide it was a good idea to build such a temporal item
as a sprawling multimillion-dollar house for his one-child nuclear family, in a society
where kids in schools hafta
share
textbooks published in 1987? In his little, tiny world, it is acceptable to squander
money and responsibility in this manner. I consider it an embarrassing display of
karmic retardation when someone invests so much money in something that could
burn to ashes in a fire,
while human beings continue to starve and go insane on the streets.

We learn to justify many preposterous actions within the small worlds we are encouraged
to create throughout life.

We are
all
raised under the influences of negative standards set by our culture. We naturally
fail to note that all the women around us are dealing with the exact same things,
in entirely different ways.

If you want to find out how your oppression infringes on your freedom, walk into the
bathroom, stare deeply into your eyes, and face your pain without blame. Don’t go
feeling sorry for them ladies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan until you do this first.
Don’t be dissin’ on übermodel-types with silicone titties until you do this first.
Don’t sneer at women from a class or ethnicity different from your own, at lesbians,
bi-women, straight women, fat women, skinny women, old women or young women until
you do this first.

There will remain much sadness in the world until people are willing to rise to the
task of facing the world’s pain in the bathroom mirror.

American culture is very, very, very, very, very beautiful.

I am thankful and happy to live in a society where so many perspectives and bounties
of educational resources are available. My society honors the public library system.
I have every opportunity to learn about things of which I was raised to be ignorant.

Wheee!

In one American afternoon, I might encounter Cibo Matto sounding out from a used bookstore,
a Peruvian band attracting a crowd on the street corner, Missy Elliott pulsating from
one of those cars that are really state-of-the-art sound systems on wheels, while
a queer Lithuanian-Basque Vietnam vet caterwauls Barbra Streisand songs in the doorway
of an office building.

Wheee!

I believe it is possible for women who live in this beautiful culture to access a
forsaken—but still inherent—love and respect for each other based on the sole criteria
of what our cunts have been through for the past few thousand years.

Which segues into a commandment the bible, koran and torah writers plumb done forgot
to include ...

While writing about orgasms at four o’clock in the morning, I ran out of soymilk for
my coffee. I was tired. I needed a bike ride and coffee to keep da pace. At 10 a.m.,
I would’ve encountered no internal deliberation. The wee-dawn hours, however, are
definitely past curfew time for women on solo ventures.

Still.

I didn’t want to drink my coffee black. I didn’t want to be afraid of going to the
grocery store just because I have a cunt.

So I:

1. Put a beanie on my head to camouflage my femaleness, at least from a distance.
   
2. Did the ol’ once over in the mirror to ascertain that my sweats were baggy enough
   to hide the contours of my fine, round, womanly ass.
   
3. Tied my running shoes nice and tight, in case I might have to kick or bolt.
   
4. Donned a loose, black, butchy-poo jacket.
   
5. Stuffed the five medium-sized rocks I keep on hand for excursions such as this into
   the pockets of said jacket.
   
6. Made sure the tires on my bike had enough air in them, in the event that I’d have
   to race to safety.
   

All six of these steps are part of a survival tactic I have incorporated into my lifestyle
because:
I can’t stand the fact that the danger of having a cunt is threatening enough to keep
me from doing as I please.

Though I’ve lived away from home for over a decade, my mother still has a tizz when
I go out by myself after 11 p.m. So I don’t tell her it drives me insane to allow
the possibility of being raped to dictate my will.

I Do the Best I Can.

My friend Esther, who lives in the same apartment building, gets off work at three
in the morning. She rarely goes to bed before eight. The last step in this particular
survival tactic is calling her.

“Esther, I’m going to the store. If I’m not home safe and sound in fourteen minutes
(we have it timed), come find me. I’ll be riding up Olive and down Broadway.”

“Okey-dokey. It’s 4:18. Go. Oh, wait. Pick me up a pack of smokes, will ya? Go.”

Esther and I have never discussed my motive for calling and letting her know I’m going
to the grocery store. One night, the need simply arose. How telling it is that
not once
did it occur to Esther to question me. As women raised in a violent, patriarchal
culture we inherently understand the risks one may encounter when one has a cunt.

I ride my bike to the grocery store. The cashiers are used to seeing me at unseemly
hours. They let me park my bike inside, by the greeting cards. I feel safe in the
grocery store, but at the same time, I know not to assume this to be a fact.

I go to great lengths to make it seem like I’m not fettered to the violence—and subsequent
injustice of the American legal system—that my cunt can potentially inspire.

But I ain’t foolin’ nobody.

Certainly not myself.

I’m fully privy to the reality that my cunt’s presence on my body can inspire people
with cocks to attempt to exert their power by attempting to humiliate me. I have no
illusions about what happens to women in “the wrong place at the wrong time.” I have
seen too many movies, read too many newspapers, watched too many episodes of
Unsolved Mysteries.

I know too many women who have been raped.

I do not pretend too realistically that I am free to go where I please. At least,
not without taking extreme precautionary measures.

Purchasing soymilk for my coffee at four o’clock in the morning, then, is an act of
rebellion.

A foolhardy and mundane one, perhaps.

Like I said, I Do the Best I Can.

When I was twenty, my mother told me she had been raped. Five years passed before
I mustered the courage to write about it.

It is highly distressing to learn the sacred, holy place where you lived during your
first nine months on this planet was ruthlessly pillaged long before you were conceived.

It makes you wonder if there exists a safe place.

She was nine.

She was nine.

My mother was nine.

Over a Christmas holiday, Mom and I were talking in the kitchen. I don’t remember
that we were discussing anything in particular. Liz popped her head in to say goodbye.
She was going to a party, dressed to the nines in a satin slipdress.

Our mother stopped in mid-innocuous-sentence and stared. Liz and I stared back. Mom
looked down at her hands. (Momspeak interpretation:
Something Is Up.
)

Big sigh.

“I really wish you wouldn’t go out dressed like that.”

In the past, my sister and I would have rolled our eyes at each other and made light
of it. Mom said things like this pretty much whenever she saw us dressed scantily
for a party. This exchange had taken place hundreds of times.

But we could tell from her voice that tears were welling up in her eyes. This wasn’t
something we could shrug off as Mom’s “overprotectiveness.” There was suddenly a
Big Problem
in the kitchen.

Liz put her purse on the table and felt for a chair.

Neither of us could tear our eyes from our mother.

“Mom ... ” my sister spluttered.

I whispered, “Mom, what’s wrong?”

Both of us were crying, but we had no idea why.

Nobody went to any party that night.

Two men saw her walking home from school in her Catholic girls’ school uniform. The
temptation was too much for them. The men pulled her into some bushes in Hyde Park
and raped her.

Our mother, our, our, our beautiful mother.

Two men did that to her.

She was nine, she was nine.

She had no words to correspond with the defilement. She didn’t come across sufficient
vocabulary for an entire decade. She walked home, changed her clothes and never breathed
a word to anyone until she was in college. In the meantime—that is, throughout her
adolescence—my mother relied solely on rape’s best pal, silence, to help her survive
this experience. She buried her silence deep because what else could she do.

When the Goddess eventually blessed her with two daughters, oh, how she watched us.

She said, “You two always thought I was paranoid, but how could I tell you why I was
like that, how could I hurt you when you were so little and free? Then as you got
older, I didn’t know when to tell you. I knew it would make you cry like this.”

We sobbed from the pits of our guts.

The whole time we were growing up, she attended seminars and clinics focused on rape
to help her deal with the pain she sequestered in a dark region of her heart when
she was a child. She had to learn how to control her fear that “something would happen”
to my sister or me.

Hawk, mother hawk.

A new panorama slammed into my heart. I remembered years and years of relentless warnings:
“Don’t take short-cuts,” “Come straight home from school,” “Never walk past vans,”
“If a car is following you, cross the street and run to a neighbor’s house. If you
aren’t near a neighbor’s house, run into the middle of the street and scream ‘FIRE!’
at the top of your lungs.”

A childhood memory assailed me.

I was eight. One morning, my friend Kit and I went to the mall to buy our moms’ gifts
for Mother’s Day. We ended up dawdling awfully long, and I didn’t get home until dinnertime.
My mother was standing in front of our house. There was no color in her face. Her
eyes were blind terror. She swept me into her arms and hugged all of the breath out
of me. Then she slapped me across the face.

It stung.

My father was cruising the neighborhood in a cop car. He came home and immediately
grounded me to my room for a week.

My mother didn’t utter a word.

That week I brooded in my room.

I thought they were overreacting.

In other words:

Because of the action of two completely unknown males in the year 1948, I was slapped
across the face and grounded to my room for a week in 1974.

A different way of looking at this is:

I was raised by a woman who was held down in a park and raped when she was a little
girl. While the consequences of this event became, for Liz and me, a Grand Duchess
Overtone in our upbringing, the two men who raped our mother have no idea either of
us exist on the planet to have been raised under the shadow of their action.

A further perspective might be:

A man could, feasibly, sacrifice his coffee break raping a woman.

That woman would then spend her entire life dealing with it.

So would her daughters.

So would theirs.

This distribution of power is not acceptable.

The Lakota believe a people cannot be vanquished unless the spirit of woman is broken.

Though rape is viewed merely as a crime, it is the fundamental, primal, most destructive
way to seize and maintain control in a patriarchal society.

When wars are declared, everyone involved in the declaration assumes women will be
raped. Invading soldiers do not necessarily rape women to hurt us, per se. Women are
raped to stymie the morale of husbands, fathers and sons. Women’s bodies are considered
solely in regard to how they affect men. In the context of war, rape literally plants
the seed of the invader in the body of a people. The secret weapon of war is spiritually
crippling an entire nation of human beings and generations to come by sexually assaulting
as many women and girls as possible.

Men use our bodies to bear witness to their power.

America was founded on the bodies of women: African women, Jewish women, Native women,
Latina women, Chicana women, Asian women, European women. Grandmother, grandmother,
grandmother, grandmother, grandmother, grandmother, grandmother.

Guatemalan, Bosnian, Vietnamese women know war.

Pretty much every nation in this world was established by war.

How many women do you think that is?

In 1993, a woman named Mia Zapata, the lead singer of a rock band called the Gits,
was found dead in Seattle, Washington. I lived in Seattle and wrote for a local weekly
newspaper at the time.

It sucked very hard.

I clung to the fact that newspaper and word-of-mouth accounts did not mention the
word “rape.” Strangled, murdered, killed. Those words were already quite unbearable.
No sooner would the word “rape” flit through my mind than I’d remind myself none of
the newscasters mentioned it.

I felt the world could still seem a halfway decent place, so long as Mia Zapata wasn’t
raped.

I never knew her, never went and saw her band. Never listened to her music, not even
after she died. But Seattle’s a small city, and we shared a number of friends. She
was generally associated with things like outspokeness, creativity, powerful expression,
talent and loving inspiration.

She was strong.

A Whore found

her body