Cunt (21 page)
Authors: Betty Dodson Inga Muscio
I am thankful to Boaz Yakim, a gentleman who made a movie I will watch any time, any
place. It’s called
Fresh.
In light of its
phenomenal
importance, the injustice of
Fresh’s
poor distribution makes me almost pass out.
Fresh is an adolescent young man growing up in a situation rife with predators. His
environment is predatory, his inherited socioeconomic latitude is a predator and all
but one of his role models are predators. Fresh’s sole nonpredatory role model is
his father, played by the incomparable Mr. Samuel L. Jackson.
Fresh lives in a foster home. He isn’t supposed to see his father, but he does. Every
week, they play chess together in a park. I said Fresh’s father is not a predator,
but that’s not altogether true. He manifests his predatory traits on the chessboard,
in the game he lives and breathes by.
The story of Fresh unfolds around these weekly chess games with his father. Territory
being what it is, both on the chess board and in life, Fresh’s father routinely wins
the game. Meanwhile, in his day-to-day life (of which his father is completely ignorant),
Fresh faces responsibilites and situations that would cause chronic intestinal complications
to the heartiest CEO at IBM.
Fresh meets his father in the park every week and plays this very old game. It is
kind of a ritual. His father says things like, “What kind of player am I? Am I an
offensive player or a defensive player? Right, I’m neither.
I play my opponent.”
With all his heart, Fresh listens, looks, learns. The gift of chess and its lessons
in strategy may be all his estranged, alcoholic father has to offer him. It is also
more valuable than an eight-digit trust fund.
Fortified with nothing more than a psychology that assesses and undermines their
individual
ways of operating, Fresh pretty much mauls every predator in his life—without personally
committing a single act of violence. He learns how
to think like the predators
. You know who reigns supreme, or the movie wouldn’t be called
Fresh.
Fresh has become one of the biggest role models in my life. I constantly ask myself,
“How would Fresh deal with this situation?” When I’m reacting like a dork in response
to some damn stimuli or another, I say, “Fresh wouldn’t do that in a million years.”
Perhaps most significantly, Fresh reminds me to get off my ass and play chess every
chance I get.
My father taught me how to play chess when I was five. I played quite often with my
sparring partner—er, brother. Just as I had grown up and left my survival skills in
the hinterland, I likewise stopped playing chess at some obscure point in adolescence.
Whenever I had the opportunity to play chess as an adult, I met a fierce resistance
inside myself. I didn’t like the competetion, the cutthroat vibe.
After Fresh came into my life, I managed to shred this resistance asunder. However,
it turned out most of my opponents were of the male persuasion. With precious few
exceptions, my girl friends either never learned how to play or said the same thing
I always said, “I used to play when I was younger, but I haven’t played in a long
time.” As if not having played “in a long time” is somehow grounds for continuing
this trend. Throughout my non-chess-playing rehabilitation, this response started
sounding like, “I used to enjoy honing my strategy and getting what I want by employing
my vast intelligence, but that stuff just doesn’t interest me anymore.”
Chess is a psychological exercise. It whets the brain for every conceivable means
of self-protection.
When my pieces are threatened, my brain is presented with a puzzle. I must come up
with a way to counter—with a ruse, sacrifice or threat of my own. No apologies. My
A-1 priority is devising any plan in the whole wide world that does not involve retreat.
Unless it diverts my opponent’s attention from how devastatingly I plan to fuck them
over on my next coupla moves, retreat is an absolute anathema.
Each person I play chess with tells me about their way of surviving in the world.
If I piece together an overall view of their modus operandi, I win. When I sit across
the board from someone, I’m engaged in more than a game. I silently beseech, “Tell
me how you survive.” Each opponent I play offers yet another survival strategy for
my cerebral filing system.
Chess teaches how to deal with threatening situations and individuals
in the midst
of taking territory for oneself. The chances of being caught off guard have discernable
boundaries. Predators become opponents instead of scary monsters over whom one has
no control. When played on a regular basis, chess melds into one’s consciousness.
It becomes evident that one is never not playing this game.
Chess fortifies the psyche. When interwoven with physical and psychological training,
it keeps a lady on her self-protective toes.
This game matters.
Get good at it and then get better.
Play chess with your friends instead of watching the M TeeVee. Organize all-girl tournaments
at your school and all-women tournaments at your work. If you’re not kickin’ everybody’s
butt, then put a lot of thought into why they’re kickin’ yours. Play yourself. Play
your mom. Invite a woman you think you can’t stand to play a game with you. Play chess
at a coffee house with someone you would never otherwise interact with. Have email
chess challenges. Tell your boss if you beat her at chess she hasta give you a raise.
Get on down and get back up again.
Play chess every day.
I founded a direct-action anti-rape warfare group called Mobilizing Our Neighbors
and Sisters To Eradicate Rape (M.O.N.S.TE.R.). More accurately, I thought up a clever
acronym and organized a space for women to come together and address the issue of
rape as a cultural oppression tactic used to control women. The group of women involved
did all the founding.
M.O.N.S.T.E.R.’s objective, decided upon after much discussion and debate, was to
be a primarily nonviolent vigilante group that (more or less poetically) terrorized
known sexual predators in our community, educated people about rape and provided a
safe, supportive environment for women to devise and carry out nefarious plans of
poetic attack.
As with every activist group on the planet, M.O.N.S.T.E.R. consisted of a balance
of two creeds. One was of the passive leaflet-plastering, networking persuasion, while
the other had a much more aggressive, predatory nature.
For many weeks, I interacted with this group of bright, imaginative, angry women and
listened carefully to both systems of belief. While I was a subscriber to the predatory
creed, I came to have a deep understanding of the women who wanted to act out in a
more genteel manner. The argument ran along the lines of “We don’t want to act like
predators because then we are lowering ourselves to the level of a rapist,” which
is as valid an argument as can possibly be. This would invariably provoke the “nature
vs. nuture” argument and someone would cite the ferocity of a mother serengeti lion
or an arctic mama polar bear.
As is evidenced by M.O.N.S.T.E.R.’s eventual objectives, compromises were reached,
leaning towards the predatory.
What I learned from this experience was a pretty solid foundation for Cunt: When women
100 percent define anything—from simple words to complex institutions—the meaning
or outcome inherently serves us most satisfactorily. Period.
It is very simple, but a lot of work.
A predator, as defined by our society, is a bad man who will hurt you.
Ouch.
A predator, as defined by M.O.N.S.T.E.R., is a nice lady who pro-actively protects
herself and the women in her community.
Whee!
Both definitions are sound.
M.O.N.S.T.E.R.’s cuntlovin’ definition doesn’t attempt to make the former one null
and void. It sits right along next to it, happy as the day is long. Practically
the instant
we actually defined “predator” for ourselves, the group’s Kali the Destroyers piped
down a few notches, while nuestra Virgens de Guadalupe started baring teeth.
Fucken refreshing, you know?
Predators are important people. Why else would there be one in almost every movie
and story throughout history. Take away the predator, and where does that leave the
koran, bible, torah?
Nowhere, that’s where.
Predators are not the problem.
I, for one, don’t
feel
like going out into the world and making sure all the predators who focus on women
are put behind bars or executed or whatever. In this cuntfearing society, there’s
plenty more where that came from. Some Sisyphean tasks can be fun, but that’s not
one of them.
It is impossible to change the fact that sexual predators are a product of our society,
whether they are incarcerated or free to roam. And
damn,
it sucks that no incantation from heaven and hell combined will undo the deeply rooted
damage rape has already done to the collective consciousness of womankind.
Dang, that’s all impossible, so forget it.
Say goodbye to the impossible: toodle doo.
It is possible to change our way of reacting and dealing. Without silence, the
cycle,
the
livelihood
of violence towards women goes hectic. Women break the cycle and the situation then
belongs to us.
Our ball, our court, our move.
As I see it, the major problem facing us ladies is not all the horrible shit that’s
been happening to us for the past two thousand–odd years.
Nor is it the perpetrators of the horrible shit.
The problem is we don’t seem to think we have much of a predatory disposition. This
is heartily reinforced by our culture, which unduly punishes women who are caught
acting out in a violent, predatory way. It frightens people very, very much when women
do violent things. The United States legal and judicial systems are hardly exempt
from this fear. Jails are populated with women who murdered the lovers, friends or
male relatives who assaulted us or our children for years. If it is at all possible
to completely avoid contact with this sector of society, I suggest doing so with vigor.
Physical violence is something one resorts to only when it is the very, very, very
best way to safety. Violence is not a defining trait of a lady predator. It is certainly
imperative to know how, when, why and where to be violent. It is also imperative to
know how, when, why and where to get away before a situation has the chance to escalate.
Lady predators are cuntlovin’, imaginative women. We therefore manifest our predatory
stance in just such a manner. We’re not too shy to be highly visible. We’ll scream
“My Country ’Tis of Thee” to drown the voice of Loudmouth Asshole who is trying to
impress his friends by telling everyone on the street the effect we do/do not have
on his dick. We’re not too proud to be invisible, either. We know that for Mr. Obviously
Fucked Up in the Head, “Amazing Grace” sung soft ’n low under our breath miraculously
makes him forget we’re crossing his path.
Lady predators get all our friends to confront the dickwad who bugs us at work or
school. We ensure employers know which of their employees is a date rapist and picket
the place if the boss does not respond accordingly. We publicly humiliate the man
who rapes our daughter, sister, lover, mother. We organize into mama wolf packs with
a rabid sense of humor. We have Abusive Husband Treasure Hunts on Super Bowl Sunday.
We interrupt the game.
It
is
funner ’n shit.
If you would understand a people, look at them through the eyes of the poet, the musician
and the artist.
—Cynthia Pearl Maus,
The World’s Great
Madonnas
When I was ten, the Fam took a trip to L.A. to see the Treasures of King Tut exhibit.
At this time, my art world consisted of paintings, pictures, books, records and the
radio. (My father’s tyranny is in evidence here. We didn’t have a television set in
our house for
simply ages.)
Art was furthermore associated with making a huge mess that was magically sanctioned
by most all authority figures.
Art was a wonder to perceive, and I percieved it at complete and utter face value.
This is to say, I very much enjoyed art, but did not attach a symbolic interpretation
to either my own or other people’s.
The King Tut exhibit forever altered this tabula rasa.
I remember gold.
I remember gold, and I remember four women who guarded the box where King Tut’s body
lay. They were gold, of course, and stood with arms to their sides, hands outstretched
hip high, palms perfectly at my eye level, staring me down. Their eyes never left
anyone in the room. They saw all. They were impassable. Their gaze was searing and
irresistible, like licking a nine-volt battery.
My parents and siblings wandered off. I was not interested in anything else the King
Tut exhibit had to offer, and installed myself with the sentinels until it was time
to go.
I knew little of Christ, much less anything that went on Before Christ, but it was
quite obvious those sentinels were
obscenely
out of their element in a museum in Los Angeles, California, circa One Thousand Nine
Hundred and Seventy Whatever A.D. And yet—through what I later recognized as the wanton
pillage mentality of my culture—in this context, innocuously referred to as “archeology”—there
they irrefutably stood.
Magnificent overseers of an entire civilization, brought across oceans on a boat driven
by the victors of history’s present telling.
I felt incredibly minute and
of the flesh
in their presence. It was important to remain in contact with what was in the pocket
of my shorts: half a bag of M&M’s and two green plastic army men I’d fished out of
my little brother’s mouth on the drive to L.A. I think the contents of my pockets
comforted me, because fear was certainly present.
The sentinels possessed incomprehensible powers for thousands upon thousands of years.
They were
alive
under the desert sands of Egypt long before even my
grammy
was born. And now, standing in this weird museum room, they were not only alive,
but
pissed as hell
to be taken from their place.
I could not stop digging the amazement of this whole situation.
I was too young and impatient to understand what compelled people to create all that
gold stuff, and too uninterested in the museum itself to put much thought into the
little explanatory plaques affixed near each piece, but I knew God when I saw Her.
This, I understood.
This, I respected.
This was a whole new slant on art.
I grew up and found out three more things about art:
- The individual artist is
a medium
for making representational and deeply meaningful symbols of the community’s collective
consiousness, whether they are symbols of the community’s religion, love, hurt, power,
hate, hope, dreams, fables, foibles or on and on and on. - Some cultures know this, think it’s divine, and respect the importance of art and
artists as perfectly natural manifestations of innate human life, growth and expression—without
insanely glorifying huge, corporate-induced false images of individual superstars. - American culture is not one of them.
One kind of art occurs naturally in the course of everyday life, and does not generally
involve widespread cultural glorification. My mother’s Thanksgiving dinner is art.
The one Aunt Genie creates is of a completely different genre, though she utilizes
the same basic components. The dashboard of Liz’s car is art. Shells and goddesses
and pretty rocks are arranged in a specific way that holds meaning for anyone who
is privy to the need for protection when navigating an automobile. Grammy’s wildflower
and bird sanctuary garden is art. She designed it. It is a reflection of her and her
community. It is symbolic of the culture she lives in.
Another kind of art is the art people make and intend to be considered art as symbolic
representation. Art such as this moves you for certain very specific reasons directly
related to your history and experiences, and moves your girlfriend in a thousand and
one absolutely different ways.
This art includes paintings, metal work, sculptures, murals, photographs, dances,
poems, stories, storytelling, essays, plays, screenplays, movies, videos, ads, buildings,
fashion designs, performances, puppet shows, monuments, pornography, erotica, music,
spoken word and so on.
Both kinds of art represent a culture, a collective consciousness and the passions
of an individual. Grammy’s wildflower and bird sanctuary garden is as monumental as
Toni Morrison’s epic, Beloved.
On a scale that measured love and pain,
they’d proportionately weigh the same.
The difference between these two kinds of art is:
I know my grammy’s story and the average onlooker does not. I’ve developed an emotional
bond with my grammy since I was born. Therefore, I walk into her garden equipped with
a lifelong perception which is in continual evolution. I am thus able to identify
with her garden utilizing symbolism unavailable to most everyone else.
Beloved directly, out and out tells a story. The words of the story are arranged with
high regard for the common bond of human-ness that each and every reader shares. Everyone
who can read is equipped to identify with Beloved.
Beloved taps into the collective consciousness of a community that spans the entire
planet.
Grammy’s garden doesn’t echo out much farther than Sweet Home, Oregon.
Art imitates life as life imitates art. Art and the community are whirling dervishes
unto one other. Takes two to tango. It doesn’t matter which one causes and affects
the other, or when, or why, or how. This came first: the chicken or the egg.
There is, of course, a huge problem here.
Throughout the history of Western civilization—and by this term, I mean the destructive,
competitive, capitalist, patriarchal, filthy-rich, white, male social system which
threatens to consume every other culture on the planet—what is considered “art” has
been presented by and for far less than half of the human community: the white, male
portion. Art that our culture takes seriously, invests in and reflects upon was created
by men. Women do not belong to the “art” community, as it presently exists.
In what is considered the art community, the enormous contributions of artists such
as Yoko Ono and Octavia Butler are methodically and unquestionably overshadowed by
those of the Andy Warhol/Stephen King ilk.
In the early ’90s, I attended college at one of America’s most liberal, progressive
institutions. There, my friend Panacea turned me on to the surrealist painter, Remedios
Varo.
One quarter, Panacea took a course in “art history.” She asked her teacher numerous
times throughout the quarter to include Ms. Varo’s totally brilliant, fabulous and
inspiring work in the program. The teacher resolutely overruled this motion, time
and again. His argument was that there must be a solid reason why Ms. Varo’s work
was not “good enough” to be included in any of the art history books he had ever seen.
Since none of the sources this teacher deemed reputable recognized Remedios Varo,
why on earth should he?
Catch-22, deedle dee-doo.
In her second autobiography,
Beyond the Flower,
Judy Chicago provides a simple, astute answer:
Historically, women have either been excluded from the process of creating the definitions
of what is considered art or allowed to participate only if we accept and work within
existing mainstream designations. If women have no real role as women in the process
of defining art, then we are essentially prevented from helping to shape cultural
symbols. (Chicago, 1996, 72)
As I learned in a beautiful book entitled
Spider Woman’s Granddaughters,
there is a name for this: intellectual apartheid. In her brilliant introduction to
Spider Woman’s Granddaughters,
Paula Gunn Allen speaks as a Native artist working in the white-American literary
world, but her profound truth is applicable to many artists existing in many worlds:
Intellectual apartheid . . . helps create and maintain political apartheid; it tends
to manifest itself in the practical affairs of all societies that subscribe to it.
Contrary to popular and much scholarly opinion in Western intellectual circles, aesthetics
are not extraneous to politics. And because political conquest necessarily involves
intellectual conquest, educational institutions in this country have prevented people
from studying the great works of minority cultures in light of critical structures
that could illuminate and clarify those materials in their own contexts. The literatures
and arts of non-Western peoples have thus remained obscure to people educated in Western
intellectual modes. Moreover, non-Western literature and art appear quaint, primitive,
confused, and unworthy of serious critical attention largely because they are presented
that way. (Allen, 1989, 3)
Men forge merrily along, continuing to get 99.9 percent of the credit for doing pretty
much everything. When the glaringly obvious retardation of this situation is pointed
out, the ensuing rebuttal tends to be that men just unanimously happen to be the most
fabulously talented creators on earth. Thus, everyone who is not a man fails to get
due credit.
In order for women painters, for instance, to be included in the history of art in
modern civilization, it must first of all be established that we exist. This places
the art work
in the hinterland
of the artist’s gender. Women artists are required to explain our presence, to defend
our identity, to speak for our multitudes, and men are not.
Meanwhile, reproduction upon reproduction of women in various stages of undress litters
“art history.” Women artists are airbrushed out of art history and still endure alienation
and invalidation, yet images of women positively abound as the focal point of men’s
art work.
In this kind of setting, one learns that Salvador Dali is deemed an uncontested surrealist
Master (though he readily admitted his obsessive reliance on a woman named Galarina
for inspiration), while you probably don’t know who I am talking about when I name
a chapter for Remedios Varo, one of the most freaking genius surrealists of the twentieth
century, who relied on herself for just about everything.
In 1989, the Guerrilla Girls—a pro-activist group that will be discussed at length
in just a few short pages—addressed the question, “Do women have to be naked to get
into the Metropolitan Museum?” Here are their findings:
Asked to design a billboard for the Public Art Fund [PAF] in New York [City], we welcomed
the chance to do something that would appeal to a general audience. One Sunday morning
we conducted a “weenie count” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, comparing
the number of nude males to nude females in the artworks on display. The results were
very “revealing.” (Guerrilla Girls, 1995, 61)
They designed a billboard depicting a reproduction of Ingres’s reclining
Odalisque,
with a gorilla mask on her head and a dildo in the hand draped over her hip. Accompanying
this image was the following statement: “Less than 5 percent of the artists in the
Modern Art Sections are women, but 85 percent of the nudes are female.”
Alas, the Public Art Fund and the Guerrilla Girl’s Odalisque were not meant for each
other.
The PAF said our design wasn’t clear enough and rejected it. We then rented advertising
space on NYC busses and ran it ourselves, until the bus company canceled our lease,
saying the image . . . was too suggestive and that the figure appeared to have more
than a fan in her hand. (Guerrilla Girls, 1995, 61)