Diary #2: Full Bloom

Summer’s ending, and my arms are going to soon get stashed back into sweaters and coats, and no, I won’t walk down the street any more easily for it, no more than I ever do, even in a supposedly liberal place. I am sick of shapeless clothes. I don’t remember when I decided that I felt less sexy in those oversized sweatshirts and baggy jeans that were fashionable back when my breasts and hips decided to make more than a guest appearance on my body. In the name of protecting myself, I felt like I was really just concealing my curves for the sake of other’s virgin eyes. No offending girlflesh could show. Not a hint of emerging sex, or else... or else... or else...

Sometimes walking I get a little auditory hallucination of anarchist kids chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” and I turn the phrase over and over in my mind, knowing it’s true, but not knowing how to claim a place inside its sentiment. My friend’s girlfriend spent a sizable chunk of her San Francisco summer wondering if her femme skirts were too short to wear in public after the daily barrage got to be too much. Part of me thought, “A ‘good feminist dyke’ can’t wear a plaid mini-skirt in SF without getting yelled at?” Then again, I’m not shocked at all. Safety is never that simple.

I’m engaged in a reluctant life-long project myself to collect an array of honestly bewildering tales of street harassment woe, from getting asked if I was a hooker when buying muffins (land having to explain in my response that there was nothing wrong with being a hooker, even if that’s not what I was up to at the convenience store), to the more typical what’s-your-name/what’s-your-major/what-time-is-it, to the truly creative (“Hey, what color is your dress? It’d look great next to my sheets!”). These stories just get harder to tell the closer I dance my wardrobe and the way I carry myself to glam-femme-from-hell. You know, as if I deserved it. I know I don’t. But I still sometimes... wonder...

No apologies. I want no apologies for doing what I want to where I want to wearing what I want to, and I want no apologies from those who want to leer appreciatively, either. What about us flashy plumed creatures who don’t care if we turn heads, or who are going to turn heads no matter what we do, cause no one knows why we’d wear that or what’s in our underwear or why on earth we ended up holding hands with that one we’re holding hands with? What would an appreciate leer look like anyway? Can you start with a stare and move to an understanding? I’m not talking about deploying that one perfect retort that makes them quake in their Hush Puppies - I mean, can you look at someone harassing you like a human being, and if you could, should you, if you should, would you?

(This is the land of pleasurable contradictions, and it’s called desire, desire for one’s beautiful self to be seen for what it is, and the desire that flits between us all. The desire for truth. The desire for connection. The desire for desire’s sake, too.)

I remember how precious every time a woman checks me out is, this total validation. How can I take that pleasure, if it feels right, from a man? And when does it feel right? And when does it feel like a compromise?

I want us all to stay safe doing our thing, but then again, I never liked the word safe in most of the ways I’d heard it. Mom trying to keep me ‘safe’ by telling me to act modestly at summer camp. The women’s center resource room was supposed to be ‘safe’ which for one staffer meant The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex should be hidden from sight. A church should be a safe house for children. A family home should be safe. Right.

Putting safety back in the eye and body of the beholder demands more of us. More responsibility to one another to stay safe, more self-examination to discern which of our boundaries are movable and which serve us just fine right now, thank you very much. The kind of safety I am wary of is the kind that just substitutes another set of boundaries and regulations for the sexist one’s I’ve already internalized. Does desire always have to feel safe to feel feminist?

When I’m in full bloom, at the top of my game is my voice is a honeyed purr that you can just tell from far off away that I feel radiant, no one can take that from me. There’s something blessedly intact about that state of Self-hood that is infectious and maddening. Bloom flowers, bloom, and take the whole garden with you. Fluff your feathers (and polish your leathers) without fear. Find the five people you can do it with. Find the mirror you can do it with. Find that place, and remember how to get back there once you do.