I’ve been abusive. I’m addicted to sex and porn. Thank the gods I have not raped anyone, but I know I could have. When I was fourteen I went to a Primus concert and purposely positioned myself behind women in the pit so I would be pushed into them. It’s just a matter of degrees. I’ve denied the self-hood of women. I’ve been a bully. Though mostly, I’ve just been silent while abuse was happening all around me and I was too afraid to risk becoming a target myself.
I remember once bringing up some problem related to being a woman in an activist boy’s club and being told, "You’re confusing issues." As if I could pick and choose, work on forestry one day and feminism the next. As if feminism was just another issue and not my life. As if it didn’t matter. Another member of the boy’s club told me "You don’t present a personal side at all. It’s all political with you." Accused me. Which is it, I want to yell at them now, which was it that you wanted me to be? And why did I care?
I hate the monster that’s been created out of me. It really is that bad. Don’t try to cheer me up. Don’t you dare attempt to convince me that I’m good. Don’t explain the ways I’m better than the other pieces of shit – that doesn’t give me much solace. Keep your fingers out of my fucking armpit. You can try to avoid your pain, but leave me with mine. I need mine.
Please don’t declare my case terminal, either. Don’t condemn me to that hopeless pit of typical assholes. I’ve always kept some humanness, and I’m retrieving more. I feel sick. I didn’t used to feel like this. There was a time when I hardly felt anything at all. I’ve been feeling more and more this last year. I’ve even begun to feel something that to me is miraculous: at times, I feel like myself.
I’m not sure I like it. It hurts, but it has also felt better than I ever knew was possible. Occasionally, joy explodes. The quality of the pain has changed. It’s more acute, but also more tolerable –more like a stretch than the cancerous ache of being eaten from the inside. I’m less frantic; it sits inside me now. Maybe I’ve grown to hold it.
This is hard, and I’m tired. It was far easier to be who they wanted me to be. It was safer to act like a man, but it hurt more. Denying the pain hurt more. Does that make any sense?
"Your pain? What pain do you have, oppressor man?"
That’s right. I forgot. I don’t have any thing to complain about. I’m the Marlboro man, only even more independent. I do my own laundry and pack my own lunches. I don’t need nothing from nobody. I suck it up. I tough it out. I rise to the occasion. I take any dare. There’s nothing I‘m afraid of. Nothing I can’t do. I can walk a hundred miles barefoot, bike a thousand self-contained, light a match off my face. I can sleep on the ground in the winter with no blankets. I can live fat out of dumpsters, or grow my own veggies and grain. Or I can make a sack of cash and eat out every night. I don’t care. Nothing matters. I’ll never complain, never flinch, never say ouch, never ask for anything, but I’ll still be there for you when you need me.
Yeah, right.
"A bit full of himself, isn't he?"
I’ll take all your criticism with a nod and a smile. I’ll listen while you scream at me, and never raise my voice in return. I’ll agree that I’m fucked up. Everything’s my fault. I really was trying to hurt you because I’m just another jerk. But I can suck it up. I’ll deal with it. I’ll just get over it. I will figure it out on my own and never burden you with my issues. I’ll support you unconditionally. I’ll listen when you speak (but agree when you tell me that I can never understand. ) I’ll never get angered or hurt by you, and if I do, I will get over it on my own. I’ll try harder and somehow, by sheer will alone, I will give you what you want.
"Now yer talkin'. What are you doing after this?"
I’ll be your tender bodyguard. I’ll never burp when we are kissing. I’m always eager to help, to work, to clean your toilet, cook you dinner, and listen to your day. I’ve got it all figured out. You don’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll never burden you with my problems, because I don’t have any. I will serve and save you. I’ll hold you, provide for you, make you happy, keep you safe, and make you cum.
"I think I’m going to puke."
Me too. I know I’ll never pull it off, but I still believe that my only option is to try. I’ll never be acceptable unless I do. I know love is not possible unless I can be myself, but this seems like my only chance at not being alone.
I don’t want to bring this up again. Please, don’t come so close. There’s too much. How can I be sure you won’t stop me, look me up and down but never in the eye, and tell me I’m confusing things?
It gets so tangled that I never know from which side the attack will come. From men desperate to maintain the privilege that imprisons them, or from wimmin who will attack me as a gender traitor for still wanting to spell it "women"? From the side of myself that likes to wear a dress sometimes or the side that avoids anything like perceived feminine weakness? I am silent in a whirlwind of voices, and I’m the only one in the room.
Until only a year ago, I was convinced that there was nothing I feared. I honestly couldn’t think of anything. I learned to experience fear only as a tingle of excitement, all the more reason to jump off the cliff or stay and fight. I learned to never say ouch, never let anyone know they got me with a punch or an insult. If I show pain, I may as well paint a target on the bruise so they’ll know where to aim their next shot. Likewise, I trained myself not to laugh when I was tickled, nor ask for anything I really need. I learned to feign courage and confidence and never admit that I was wrong. Well, I was wrong. I have been afraid of something. I’ve been terrified of letting my true self show.
The earliest memory I have of my gender is lying in bed at night, exploring, and wishing with all my heart that my clit would continue its obviously stunted development and grow into a penis. I think I was in kindergarten then, because about the same time I was begging my parents for a stuffed animal like the one the alpha male in the class had brought for show and tell. I didn’t just want him to like me. I wanted to be him. I already had it figured out – who had power in the system I saw, who could do the things I wanted to do, what I thought I needed to become them.
In recent years I’ve wondered if these were signs of a true transgender identity coming through. I don’t think that’s it. I think it was a girl who already found her body lacking because of the twisted messages she was getting about power and freedom. Heroes were men and they had big adventures. Women supported them. Their adventures were the exception, worthy of posters on the classroom wall for one month out of the year. The language I was learning to read excluded me: where could I be in the history of mankind?
How can I explain this, when I don’t really believe that you want to understand? I reckon I may be a member of the last social class that it is politically correct to hate. I can relate. I’ve certainly spent enough years despising myself for what I am. Why should you care about my experience when it’s so much simpler to see me as the enemy? After all, I have been socialized as a man, and I still act like it, especially when I feel threatened. In a world full of rape (and rapists who resemble me), white male experts who ramble endless nonsense while holding everyone at gunpoint forcing them to nod in agreement, and fat dads who take up too much room on the couch, I’ve tried to compensate by curling up into a tiny ball. Can you have any compassion for someone with every social privilege? Is there an extra morsel of empathy around anywhere for me?
I got a lot of things confused as I grew up in this patriarchy. I wanted to belong to that exclusive boy’s club. I didn’t think about the high membership dues; I just wanted in. In my brief religious phase I campaigned to become an altar girl – not usually allowed in the catholic church -- and got so angry when the bishop ignored my demands. Later our priest was convicted of molesting altar boys. But I never considered that I might have been lucky to be excluded from the club. Over and over again I tried to be just one of the guys, until my "weakness" would show and I would be rejected. Even worse, I’d keep hanging out with them, so low in their hierarchy that I was invisible.
I began to envy the guys for what looked like their easy connections with each other. Sure, there were put-downs and insults all the time, but it didn’t seem like any of them were in danger of dropping out of sight like me. They seemed to start with a basic level of respect, while I had to prove that I existed.
To try and earn respect, I did things that were hard on my body and my spirit. I learned to communicate in insults and laugh at racist jokes. One night my friend said, "Girls don’t have the strength to do graffiti." Later that night when he handed me the marker I looked up at the lamppost I was expected to climb, terrified and completely torn. If I didn’t do it, I proved his point. If I did it and fell, it would prove his point better and break my bones. I felt like I was carrying the weight of all womankind. With that weight I was bound to fall. I handed the marker back and walked away.
I would walk away if I had anywhere to go. I hate the games I have to play to be one of the guys, but I am not accepted or respected by the radical wimmin I know. There is no political movement that advocates for people like me. Even the gruesome scars of my genital mutilation are so common that I can expect no sympathy, understanding, or even interest from anybody. My pain is invisible. I’ve been conditioned not to show it. Everyone else has been trained not to expect it, and to shove me back when I step out of line. Any understanding of my abuse and oppression I’ve largely had to figure out on my own. On my own. In some ways, I feel like I’ve been alone my entire life.
I guess you might call it rape. I never do. It’s my own mind that holds me down with the threat that I’ll never be loved, that says I owe this to him, that I’m lucky to get this much attention. It silences my voice that wants to say no and paralyzes my arms that want to fight. It happened when I was fourteen and it happened last fall. I can’t imagine a sexuality that is not shaped by this experience.
Writing about this for the first time, I felt so stupid, as if I missed Feminism 101 and should go back to Remedial Self-Esteem. I wanted me to tear the page up and start over. But if I didn’t write it… silence is the problem. I might look like a woman who has her shit together in a lot of ways and I still have this going on. It seems unlikely I’m alone.
I wasn’t going to share what I wrote with anyone. Wouldn’t it just devalue the pain of people who have survived "real" abuse? The question woke me up early one morning. After I decided to keep my story to myself, I fell into a dream. I was standing in a checkout line holding my pain in my hands (it looked like dried figs). There was a woman and her child in front of me carrying garbage bags full of their own pain. They looked at me with sad, knowing smiles, and let me go ahead of them in the line. I felt a flood of relief when they acknowledged what I was carrying. The woman at the checkout counter took my pain and stuffed it into a paper bag, wrote "ME" on the side, and shoved it back into my hands. As I walked towards the automatic doors that shone with bright sunlight, I woke up, and decided to claim what I feel.
There’s no standard unit of measurement for pain. No scale to weigh it, no calibrated beaker to pour it into. We can’t compare wounds and know who hurts worse. I don’t believe it would be useful if we could. I don’t want to try to compare my experiences with someone who’s been raped. I can’t. They don’t compare. All I know is what I’ve felt, and the added pain from not believing I should feel anything at all. But by understanding my own pain, I believe I can understand those human emotions we share in common. I can even take responsibility for what injuries I have caused or old bruises I’ve accidentally bumped. But the more I listen and understand, the more I need the favor to be returned. If I can speak the truth of my experience (instead of talking about cars or sports), then I’ll have more strength to hold yours.
I ache. I’ve been hurting since long before I was even big enough to injure anyone else, so it’s not just guilt I feel. Even people raised to be middle class white men – even me – I have feelings besides anger, orgasm, and adrenaline. I do. I ache.
I was once a little baby that might have grown to be beautiful. I could have been a human, instead of this man –this weapon that they made of me. No matter how many hideous masks have been pulled over my face, no matter how hard and frightening it is for me to take them off, they are not me. When you see me that way, when you accidentally imply that my feelings don’t matter because I’m a man, or that I don’t have any feelings, or even when you just call me that word, man, you cast a spell. You make me what we both hate. It’s so hard for me to be other than what people expect. You help them trap me; you help keep me small and ugly. But if somehow you could look through the eyeholes, and see the frightened critter peeking out from underneath; if you could call to him, and believe that he can come, you could work another kind of magic. If you could stay vigilant not just for my mistakes, but also for my empty hand reaching out for help; if you could resist the temptation to hand me your bags to carry in that moment, and instead offer some aid or understanding, I could pay you back later. If, even when you can’t see him, you could trust that my heart is still in there hiding - even if you could pretend that I’m a human - you might love me back to life.
There were some amazing women who came along and helped me figure a few things out. We were loud and beautiful in our rage. We tried to set up a parallel subculture, starting a record label, booking shows, playing in bands. We traveled together, blocked logging roads together, sang and cried. Always talking. Slowly I started to find my voice.
I wasn’t completely confused when I moved out to the mountains. Still I carried my socialization and my own ways of dealing with it. My neighbors had all been socialized as men. I learned how to cut firewood, put on a roof, drive on twisting steep dirt roads, and have long conversations in which nothing real was said. The men defined me and I never questioned their right to do so. I grew again to occupy the space between: neither sex object nor human, not man or woman. They called me "girl". I was much younger than them, but from their mouths the word meant more than a designation of age and gender; it was an entirely new class of primate in those woods.
It wasn’t that I thought I would enjoy the abuse that Casey endured on a daily basis. I’m pretty sure that his life at home was as torturous (or worse) than what he experienced during school. Still, I would have switched places with him for a number of subtle reasons that I only now am trying to articulate. For one thing, his position was secure. He did not have to fight for a place in the ranks and then defend it in every encounter. He was at the bottom, and he seemed to be staying there. Part of me admired the way he would pick his nose and eat it, regardless of who might be watching. As much as he was punished for it, Casey was himself. What a relief that would be (at least, that’s what I imagined.) He was not the one causing harm, picking on others. He was somehow pure -innocent, still human.
All those people who have envied me - imagining my life was wonderful - they’ve been as foolish as I was about Casey. It’s a form of psychological torture to leave the prison unaccompanied during the day to work, under the condition that you return every night and lock yourself in the cell. Can you imagine what it’s like to see the torture around you every day, to sometimes even partake in the beatings, feeling your soul shrivel? Secretly you wish you were the one getting the stick, but you lack the courage to raise your hand and volunteer. Fear is a fog that blinds you everyday and the guilt grows on you like mildew. You taste it on your teeth. If you mentioned it, sympathy would be the last thing you could expect. You hate yourself for being so weak. Empty powerless all alone. Nothing has any meaning. Nothing matters. The nothingness can be temporarily warded off when you operate heavy machinery, or kick someone’s ass, or get wasted, or make another million, or fuck (whether you have to pay, or manipulate, or rape.)
But whatever you do, the gnawing emptiness returns. No one recognizes you. No one touches you. You’ve forgotten tenderness if you ever knew it. You’ve never had a conversation that wasn’t an argument. All your relationships are competitions. Like a goldfish born into a glass bowl, you are hopelessly confused. You only sense that you are not happy, but you couldn’t say why. Every day you swim circles around the same plastic plant as your bodily waste increases in concentration, gradually poisoning you. You are constantly told how good you’ve got it. You look around at the examples of what others endure, and you have to agree. People envy you. They want what you’ve got. You must be pretty lucky. Still...
On the top of tall buildings, or leaning over a cliff, you are excited by an almost sexual feeling in your groin. You think that those moments in the air would be the best of your life. You long to make that quick journey, but you back away, hating yourself for it. It’s not that you lack the courage to jump; you just don’t have the guts to disappoint the ones who think that they love you.
I hang on to my fears tightly because I believe they can protect me. They give me whole ways of seeing that I can hide inside, limiting my contact with unpredictable reality. I still see people split along a boy-girl gender line, even though the line runs right through me, because this way of ordering the world gives me an idea of what to expect. I see through a filter. I look for warning signs – which unfortunately include the appearance and traits of people I want to see clearly. I need this filter to navigate among socialized people in their cities and towns and intentional communities, for my physical and emotional safety. When I come home, the filter is still there, standing between friends, hurting us all. I want to abandon it, but first everything must change.
I know the real world is not like this, not a place of constant fear. I know it cannot be ordered or explained by any simple boy-girl line. I want to live with real people, run wild in unpredictable reality. My fear is a concession to the artificial world that allows me some safety at a very high cost. For now, I pay.
In such unsatisfying social situations, with no recourse to action, help, or tears, many men find inappropriate and abusive (though socially condoned) expressions for their rage and frustration. Never wanting to hurt or scare anyone, I’ve tried to deny myself even anger, the last approved male outlet of emotion. But all that energy can’t just go away. When I succeeded in averting an explosion, I imploded instead.
Want to know why objectification is such a hard concept for so many men to grasp? I reckon it might be that none of us can remember being treated like a person ourselves. I was told I could be anything I wanted when I grew up. I was confused when it started to become apparent that myself was not included among the acceptable options. Do you really think that anyone is permitted to keep their humanity in the patriarchy? Unlike women, who are most often accepted as a decoration or a toy (if they’re included at all), I could be a weapon, a worker, or a manager. But I have to leave my humanity at the gate. No one is respected inside the walls.
The reward for climbing up the ranks is more soul sucking power over those who dwell lower. A power trip is a rush that people with crippled hearts need in order to keep limping along. But those virtues that define our species – kindness, compassion, a sense of beauty, a capacity to love – these attributes are increasingly absent towards the top of the pyramid. If the patriarchy only dehumanized women the president would be a hell of a guy, instead of the inhuman monster that’s been created from his flesh.
I must be something unknown, something in between. I don’t live up to the expectations of the wimmin or down to those of men. I have sometimes claimed space for myself by refusing to see my oppression, abandoning others to challenge it for me. Other times I have challenged every oppression I could find only to find myself a caricature of rage, all political, nothing personal.
It’s never easy. It never stops. I started building my own house this year. Sometimes I can’t see through my tears but I keep hammering and I keep crying, trying to do it all. I explode with rage at the people who come to help me. From my ladder one day, I could hear a friend yelling abuse at herself while trying to fix her old truck. It’s never simple, I thought, it’s never just a bent nail or a stuck bolt. It’s everyone who ever told us we couldn’t do this. It’s every aching muscle betraying us when we have to be strong or be nothing, be "girls". It’s like we’re playing a game we don’t understand with weights strapped around our legs, and the penalties are taken out on our flesh and hearts.
It’s never simple. It’s never just you. The lover who says the wrong thing, the friend who tries to help. There are old wounds that you will touch. You can listen when I try to describe the places where I have been hurt. You can just be there while I cry and shake and can’t explain why. Please be there. When I surface from my depths I will be there for you and your wordless pain.
I used to play with an older neighbor, Tyler, beginning in second grade. He was three years ahead of me so I had to protect his image by saying I was his cousin if we ran into anyone he knew. I rarely had fun with Tyler, but I learned a lot. He showed me my first playboy magazine. Vanna White’s tits are still blazed onto the back of my eyeballs, inerasable.
Tyler always wanted to either wrestle or box. I hated it. Once I landed a solid punch and he fell off his mother’s bed. I think, finally, I hurt him a little bit. I was excited. But he didn’t get up. He just lay there faking unconsciousness. He wouldn’t look at me, or move, or answer. I was used to his psychological tricks. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was really hurt. "Tyler, are you ok?" "I know you’re faking. Come on, get up so we can do something else." Before too long I was begging. "Please get up, this isn’t funny anymore." "Just get up, I’ll give you a free punch, whatever you want." He just lay there on the beige carpet for what seemed like hours, but may have only been thirty minutes. Eventually, I walked home alone.
Maybe I was nine the summer Tyler invited me to go to camp with him. As soon as we got there, he ditched me. I learned why. Thankfully, I’ve avoided prison, so I can’t say with any authority that the metaphor holds, but that all-boy camp is the closest thing to it in my imagination. I found a bunk with a bare plastic mattress and tried to become invisible.
I didn’t get raped by a counselor at that camp. I didn’t even get beat up by the other kids. Will you believe me if I tell you that I was terrorized anyway? It was my first time away from home alone. Will you care if I tell you about the bigger kid who followed me around, pushing me and taunting me with his face so close I could smell his stinking breath? "Baby baby baby –what’s wrong, baby? You want your mom? Are you gonna cry, baby?" Then he pushed me hard.
I’m crying now, remembering him. Remembering how bad I wanted to cry then, but couldn’t.
I want to scream and break things, not just for what has been stolen from me, but for all the missing pieces of all the people that I love. Do you think that isn’t personal? Their pain lives inside of me, a tiny piece of it, and when I imagine it increased I can barely breathe. Do you think that isn’t political? I was never taught the words to describe what they feel, what I feel now.
What if I told you about the kid wearing red and blue underroos? The way that mass of boys laughed, surrounding him, sealing off any escape. He cried. He cried even before they pulled the panties that were supposed to make him into a super hero up hard between his little rosy cheeks.
Could you understand the strange and horrible mix of emotions I felt while I watched from my bunk if I told you I had that identical pair of underwear in my bag? I threw mine in the corner by the door when no one was looking, and I avoided that kid in the hope of escaping the stigma that marked him. I narrowly escaped the same treatment, but not the guilt of knowing that his sacrifice had saved me.
We were supposed to write a letter home half way through camp. I wrote a plea for help, but I couldn’t send it. I was afraid my dad would be ashamed and my mom would be hurt. I tore it up, and later lied and said it must have been lost in the mail.
I doubt camp was much like the Indian residential schools. I volunteered to go. No government agents came and tore me from my home, from parents and other family who appreciated who I was and honored who I was becoming. No one tore me up by the roots and took me away from all I knew and loved, shoved dicks and assimilation down my throat, and beat me for speaking my language.
I got to go home after only two weeks, and my home had not changed the way Indian kids’ must have after years of their absence. My home was the way I remembered it, but it was never much of a home. What’s worse, being torn from everything you know and love, or never really knowing love at all? Those are different kinds of pain. They can’t be compared.
Later I lied again and told my mom I had a good time. As we were leaving, she said, "Those look like your underwear over there in the corner."
"No Mom!" I pulled her out the door. "They’re not.
"Come on, let's go home."
I made my choices. My deals with the death culture. I chose to bury part of myself in order to live the life I needed to live. Now it’s coming up and I don’t know what to do except cry. My tears come up through cracks in the mask I have worn, the unknown in-between, the good "girl" who was almost one of the guys. I don’t want to be her, unknown even to myself. I don’t want to be defined by what I lack –external genitalia or supermodel measurements. Let me come through. Let me see who you are.
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(From Fire and Ice: Disturbing the Comfortable and Comforting the Disturbed while Tracking Our Wildest Dreams, 2004)