As some of you know, I have a difficult time passing as female. Well, I mean passing as female in sunny Los Angeles, where women take great pains to flaunt their boobies and shaved va-jay-jays in order to authenticate their gender, and men...are everyone else. I have been called "sir" while carrying a purse, wearing a dress, wearing lipstick, and/or sporting a pair of shoes with heels. While my slight mustache and unruly mop of hair do lend me a certain haggard-Jack White-who-has-developed-man-tits-from-eating-too many-glazed-donuts aspect, I would think that my inability to work things with gears would put any gender troubling rumors to rest. I guess not.
To wit: I love butch women. Nothing is hotter to me han a boyish dame who wears flannel shirts, puffy vests, and carries an enormous wrench in her back denim pocket. Women with mullets and bulging biceps to match make me avert my gaze and mutter quietly to myself. Well, most things make me do that, but you know what I mean.
I also can appreciate a femme woman. As my 8th grade Woodworking teacher used to remark, "I like to see a woman in a dress." (Mr. McKeon wasn't shy about sharing his views on most things, except maybe how to avoid slicing off your finger in the band saw). It's nice if it's a quirky sort of dress with Yodas and shit on it, but I'm not particular. I like pretty, sparkly nails and admire anyone who can keep from biting theirs down to the quick like I do. I even like really pointy high heeled shoes. I would wear them myself if I wasn't risking killing myself by falling down the library stairwell.
In other words, I may not be a girly-girl (and my un-manicured hands will always give this away) but I am not that majesty that is a butch woman, which is simply something I can't pull off, not something I scorn or I hate. But if I were, the "sirs" would make more sense. I can only assume that my relative gender neutrality translates to masculine in hyper lady land L.A. In Iowa, I am without question a woman (and relatively thin, even). In California, I am just one of the boys with a fashionably waxed chest and the droopy pectorals of the formerly fit and the currently elderly.
However, I've recently figured out what to wear in L.A. For years, I've gotten my Judith Butler on simply by wearing jeans and a t-shirt. My one concession to femininity has been to favor V-necks over round ones because they accentuate my smallish (but perfectly visible, damn it) breasts. But now I have a uniform, and it all came about quite by accident. Completely depressed to be back in Los Angeles after a year in Chicago, I spent about two weeks wearing my "work out" clothes, which consist of rump-caressing yoga pants and shiny tank tops with the bras built in. During that time, I was not called sir once, and believe me, I'd done nothing unorthodox with my hair, make up, or toes. In fact, my toes were in need of a shaving, but they were usually covered in my $150 running shoes.
And that was it! This particular "athletic" look I'd put together assembled some of the priciest items in my meager Midwestern wardrobe. I'd clearly spent money, and my tits were on prominent display. Also, I was apparently ready to drop whatever I was doing at any given moment and go exercise. These three components spell WOMAN, people. I had cracked L.A.'s gender code!
Until I throw on a ratty sweatshirt or other piece of lumberjack-wear. Then it's back to the "sirs" and weird looks when I enter the Ladies room and whatnot.
So where's my male privilege, damn it? It's just LIKE the patriarchy not to kick in when the man behind the boyish pose is a woman. I think I need to go even further, cut off all my hair, and stuff my pants with a foil-covered cucumber. As long as I don't have to go through any metal detectors or change a tire, I think my secret will be safe.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Antisocial Media
When I was back in Dubuque last month, I happened to be checking my Facebook when my mom asked whether or not Facebook had been keeping me from actually, you know, leaving the house and talking to people in Los Angeles. She didn't ask in a snarky or mean way, and quickly amended her point to opine that there probably weren't any people worth being friends with in L.A. anyway. Our move to the Left Coast in 2007 was unpopular with our Midwestern families of origin, and my mom remains an unabashed L.A. hater.
I don't hate L.A. exactly, but it's damn lonely. Or at least, that's been my experience, and I haven't bothered to make much of a secret of that. With the exception of one glorious (if frigid) year spent in Chicago, we've spent almost eight years here. In 2007, we knew nobody. In 2015, we know a few people, but they are (with one exception) all people we knew from other places that MOVED to Los Angeles. What gives?
It's true that I spend more time online with friends than out in the world with them, and I've tended to blame L.A. for that fact. And with Los Angeles being as vast and diverse as it is, I should qualify my remarks by limiting them to West Los Angeles, wherein we (as academics) constitute the unsavory element in the neighborhood. Whenever the kids make friends with a medical doctor's kids, I breathe a sigh of relief because I know they will at least "get" that academia is a legitimate (if impoverished) way to live in the world. Don't get me wrong...people are NICE here. It's just that no one has a lot of time, everyone has a lot of money, friends tend to live 45 minutes apart from each other, and there's not a lot of ways to meet people other than the fundraising activities at your kids' schools.
But here's the thing: my mom is right that my Facebook time makes it increasingly less likely that I will, for example, take a pottery class or go to a reading or join a flute choir or do anything else that is actually, honest to go social. I could be making a hell of a lot more effort, but instead I monitor how many likes and comments I have and worry about who didn't like something and/or who noticed that I didn't like THEIR post, etc. etc.
It reminds me of my bloggy days when I used to check Sitemeter obsessively to see where people were coming from to look at my blog, what my statistics were like, which posts people were reading, who those people were likely to be (based on their domain information) and who my obsessive fan was that kept coming back and rereading all my posts. When that fan turned out to be me, I knew that I had a problem.
I have a Facebook problem now, compounded by my real life loneliness, and it means even more dithering around online and less original writing. While the FB status update is a venerable genre in its own right, it is just not up to the standards of your regular blog post. Or at least, the blog posts that my bloggy friends and I wrote in the waning years of the Bush Jr. administration. We were writing about motherhood, graduate school, sex, death, drugs, alcohol (especially alcohol), our sordid pasts in Catholic school and elsewhere, and creating a community of writers that was (on some days) the only thing keeping me going.
A substitute for real life interaction? Well, I ended up meeting most of my online friends in real life, and not one of them pistol whipped me and left me for dead in a rusty culvert. They were all really nice, sometimes adorably socially awkward, and the conversations were every bit as awesome offline as they had been online. Most importantly, we were writers and women who supported one another in both capacities. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
And then...we quit. One by one. Some of us still post every month or so, but that vibrant community of women writers is gone. Now we are all FB friends and follow each others' posts and comments and links with the same avid attention of our bloggy days. But it's not the same. Not the same at all.
Still, the benefits of FB, particularly to a person in exile from her Midwest homeland, have been phenomenal. I love knowing what's going on with friends and having the most recent pics of my nieces and nephews. I love realizing that people I dismissed in high school are actually pretty cool and have unexpectedly lefty politics. Even the conservatives have cute babies. I don't de-friend anyone on the basis of politics because I think that, red state or blue state, we should all be forced to look at pictures of each others' kids. It's a divided nation without a doubt, but I refuse to participate in further divisions. FB is a big chaotic mess of links and comments and likes and stories and images and book reviews and chats and jokes, and I love it. I love it all.
But let's see what happens if I give it up for awhile. Lent will be here tomorrow, and I'm enough of a Catholic to take advantage of a six week hiatus from stuff I should be cutting back on anyway. It just so happens that Lent coincides with what will be one of the most intense writing periods of my life. The book manuscript, she will come due. And the first 100 pages need to be done by Easter.
I'm also going to try to stop eating ice cream straight from the container when I wake up at 3:00 a.m., but patience, grasshoppers.
The Sunday dispensation from Lenten resolutions is controversial in some circles, but I want to have it as an option. Other than Sunday, I'll be abstaining from the crackbook and writing whatever observations I can't bear not sharing on the Internet right here. Maybe I'll even get this blog up and running, who knows? In any case, I'll be posting about my progress and checking in once a week.
In addition to writing blog posts and writing book chapters, I will also try to hang out with some actual Angelenos. There are plenty of people that I would like to get to know better. Well OK, not plenty, but enough to occupy a shy type like me for six weeks. And if I keep bombing? More blog fodder, or Sunday FB fodder. But I'm counting on you to keep me honest.
See you at the poetry reading, bitches.
I don't hate L.A. exactly, but it's damn lonely. Or at least, that's been my experience, and I haven't bothered to make much of a secret of that. With the exception of one glorious (if frigid) year spent in Chicago, we've spent almost eight years here. In 2007, we knew nobody. In 2015, we know a few people, but they are (with one exception) all people we knew from other places that MOVED to Los Angeles. What gives?
It's true that I spend more time online with friends than out in the world with them, and I've tended to blame L.A. for that fact. And with Los Angeles being as vast and diverse as it is, I should qualify my remarks by limiting them to West Los Angeles, wherein we (as academics) constitute the unsavory element in the neighborhood. Whenever the kids make friends with a medical doctor's kids, I breathe a sigh of relief because I know they will at least "get" that academia is a legitimate (if impoverished) way to live in the world. Don't get me wrong...people are NICE here. It's just that no one has a lot of time, everyone has a lot of money, friends tend to live 45 minutes apart from each other, and there's not a lot of ways to meet people other than the fundraising activities at your kids' schools.
But here's the thing: my mom is right that my Facebook time makes it increasingly less likely that I will, for example, take a pottery class or go to a reading or join a flute choir or do anything else that is actually, honest to go social. I could be making a hell of a lot more effort, but instead I monitor how many likes and comments I have and worry about who didn't like something and/or who noticed that I didn't like THEIR post, etc. etc.
It reminds me of my bloggy days when I used to check Sitemeter obsessively to see where people were coming from to look at my blog, what my statistics were like, which posts people were reading, who those people were likely to be (based on their domain information) and who my obsessive fan was that kept coming back and rereading all my posts. When that fan turned out to be me, I knew that I had a problem.
I have a Facebook problem now, compounded by my real life loneliness, and it means even more dithering around online and less original writing. While the FB status update is a venerable genre in its own right, it is just not up to the standards of your regular blog post. Or at least, the blog posts that my bloggy friends and I wrote in the waning years of the Bush Jr. administration. We were writing about motherhood, graduate school, sex, death, drugs, alcohol (especially alcohol), our sordid pasts in Catholic school and elsewhere, and creating a community of writers that was (on some days) the only thing keeping me going.
A substitute for real life interaction? Well, I ended up meeting most of my online friends in real life, and not one of them pistol whipped me and left me for dead in a rusty culvert. They were all really nice, sometimes adorably socially awkward, and the conversations were every bit as awesome offline as they had been online. Most importantly, we were writers and women who supported one another in both capacities. It was one of the happiest times of my life.
And then...we quit. One by one. Some of us still post every month or so, but that vibrant community of women writers is gone. Now we are all FB friends and follow each others' posts and comments and links with the same avid attention of our bloggy days. But it's not the same. Not the same at all.
Still, the benefits of FB, particularly to a person in exile from her Midwest homeland, have been phenomenal. I love knowing what's going on with friends and having the most recent pics of my nieces and nephews. I love realizing that people I dismissed in high school are actually pretty cool and have unexpectedly lefty politics. Even the conservatives have cute babies. I don't de-friend anyone on the basis of politics because I think that, red state or blue state, we should all be forced to look at pictures of each others' kids. It's a divided nation without a doubt, but I refuse to participate in further divisions. FB is a big chaotic mess of links and comments and likes and stories and images and book reviews and chats and jokes, and I love it. I love it all.
But let's see what happens if I give it up for awhile. Lent will be here tomorrow, and I'm enough of a Catholic to take advantage of a six week hiatus from stuff I should be cutting back on anyway. It just so happens that Lent coincides with what will be one of the most intense writing periods of my life. The book manuscript, she will come due. And the first 100 pages need to be done by Easter.
I'm also going to try to stop eating ice cream straight from the container when I wake up at 3:00 a.m., but patience, grasshoppers.
The Sunday dispensation from Lenten resolutions is controversial in some circles, but I want to have it as an option. Other than Sunday, I'll be abstaining from the crackbook and writing whatever observations I can't bear not sharing on the Internet right here. Maybe I'll even get this blog up and running, who knows? In any case, I'll be posting about my progress and checking in once a week.
In addition to writing blog posts and writing book chapters, I will also try to hang out with some actual Angelenos. There are plenty of people that I would like to get to know better. Well OK, not plenty, but enough to occupy a shy type like me for six weeks. And if I keep bombing? More blog fodder, or Sunday FB fodder. But I'm counting on you to keep me honest.
See you at the poetry reading, bitches.
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