outies

Here we are in a grocery store, this is the beginning.

In line waiting to pay for my hippie chow, I drop my wallet. The guy in front of me picks it up: this is his excuse to flirt with me, which is fine. He’s chatty without being weird. He’s handsome. He’s buying fruit.

We talk about the fruit. He has picked out good apples. Automatically I slide into my standard safe little daydream, the way I do with any stranger who holds still in my line of vision. Habit. I am idly memorizing the excellent rectangle of his sideburn (this may come in handy) when I get shoved, hard. I turn around and there she is.

She says Sorry without looking at me, and heaves the biggest dead turkey I’ve ever seen onto the conveyor belt. It is not even close to November.

Her back pockets are crammed with what must be forty packets of Kool-Aid she is stealing. They’re poking out all over the place and a pink lemonade is about to fall. I say so, and she stuffs it back down, unconcerned. I look at her and I think, Pink Lemonade, and that makes me happy and I don’t know why.

It isn’t much of a conversation. We’re in a goddamn grocery store. I am scared stupid the whole time. Worse than being afraid I sound dumb, I know for a fact I sound like a total idiot maniac. I’m stuttering. It’s the best I can do. My brain is all Pink lemonade, clementine, I don't want to leave this place without you. I try not to say these things out loud, but one gets out, and she grins, and I’m tarzan smashing facefirst into a tree, full stop.

Because it is the biggest thing I can think of, and because I know it will work (because I have been wanting to do this forever), I look Alice in the eye, and I say, Come with me. And I walk away.

---

Or, here we are in a coffeeshop. This is the real beginning. (This is many months later. Our bodies have never touched. I am more aware of this every day. Except for one night when we were lying around on her living room floor and I was telling her about the scar where the doctor’s knife slipped when he was slicing me out of my mother’s belly, and Alice leaned over and traced the little vertical groove by my ear. A fingertip. This was so unexpected I blushed and hurried the rest of the story and turned on the tv. Note to assassins: it is easy to overpower me, touch me gently and I’ll do the job myself.)

Alice and I are sitting at a tiny table with our chairs pushed far back. I am careful to keep my feet in my own space. I don’t want to crowd her, ever. I know what that feels like. I can still smell her from here. It’s enough.

It’s a good morning, I have hot coffee and I’m calm. Sometimes it is that easy.

And out of nowhere, surprise: I start crying over this thing in the paper. It’s not even about a kid or a fireman or the things that usually get me. It’s these cabbies. It says that most of the city’s cabdrivers are immigrants from Africa, and most of them hang around the airport all day. Miraculously they do not have to eat at the stupid airport food court – their wives and families have set up a series of food wagons in a vacant parking lot. There is no mcdonalds or burger king garbage for sale here, only the foods they were raised with. They eat things like fufu, what is fufu? and spaghetti with bananas, and soup with white curls of cow skin floating in it. The guy in the photo is holding a paper plate loaded with things I do not recognize. He is grinning and pointing to a crusty brown lump and I think, Thanks, somebody, for planning this right. Thanks for not making this guy have to suffer through a shitty american prefab lunch every day. Thanks for the lizard ass stew, or whatever is making him so happy.

Shit. I try so hard to be a badass for Alice, and here I am whimpering over some human-interest fluff. It’s just, the world is a lot sometimes, things work out perfectly sometimes. I’m a fool sometimes. I try to explain but all I can get out is, Yam paste – these cabbies …

Alice whispers, Jesus Christ, with scorn, but also with tenderness. The tone you might use on your dumb little sister who you secretly love very much. Sometimes I find this attitude embarrassing but then again this is a tone of voice she seems to save just for me, and honestly I am not turning down anything that comes from Alice.

Yeah, I say. I know. Sorry. I laugh a little. I blot my eyes on the top edge of the classifieds. I ask if I have eyeliner running all over my face.

She says, Yeah, and newsprint. She leans over the table and kisses me quickly on the neck, then draws back a few inches and holds very still. I’ve gone paralyzed and hot. Her hand is on my shoulder, delicate. It’s a bird that might be gone any second. I am afraid to breathe or shut my eyes but I do both. I shut my eyes and I breathe in and I breathe out. I wait for her to decide. Like all nightmares, this takes a long time. I am sure she can hear my heart going crazy for her, but, I realize, that’s okay.

I smell the scent of suburbia: freshly cut grass and I think of you.

I remember how strange it was to kiss you. How my cheeks flushed a pink when you forced your tongue between my lips and into my mouth. I remember the grape popsicle taste of your mouth. You smiled, unabashed.

In your room we undressed each other to panties. I fumbled with your buttons and laughed. You laughed, smiling, as you always did when we were together. You still wore the panties of a grammar school girl, marked repetitively, Monday. I wore simple white cotton and you said you didn't care; kissing me again. You held my tits as if they were a crystal glass, just for a moment, savoring the sight of my modest nipples.

And then you devoured me, in your adolescent way. You were almost dog-like, hands and knees, tongue protruding, innocently lapping at my nipples. Rubbing my panties in the wrong place, but I was too embarrassed to tell you. Suddenly, the lapping turned to sucking and it hurt. You rolled the buds between your teeth and I wanted to scream, but I was too trapped. So I pulled your head up to mine and kissed you, but you tasted less like grapes. I sucked your nipples then, like a newborn sucks his mother's. You squeaked and whimpered and I wonder if it hurt you like it had hurt me.

Your mom came home and we giggled as we dressed hurriedly. I went home then, hands in pockets, kicking the pebbles with my shiny new boots. I went home and shaved my head. I kept a bit of hair and bound it in a red ribbon.

You vacationed in California and I daydreamed about you. I toyed with the thought of loving you, discarding the interested boys and embracing my inner dyke. I figured I was halfway there, shaved head and combat boots.

You returned to me, tanned and smiling. You took me up to your room and you told me about how fucking hot it was and how fucking great the clothes are in Cal-i-forn-i-a. You had gotten a new pair of boots and they were knee high. Two weeks away from me and you had gained a dirty mouth. You rubbed my head and told me I looked fucking awesome.

And then, when your parents had gone to sleep, you climbed under my blanket naked. A whisper escaped your soft cushions for lips and floated into my ear on a cloud. You had said, (and it sounded like you had rehearsed this a thousand times) "I want to fuck you.".

You covered my mouth with yours; you tasted of mouthwash and toothpaste; but I kissed you back. I wrapped my arms around you. We kissed forever, you and I, under a blanket sky. You toyed with my breasts and I toyed with your tiny tits. You licked and sucked, and it seemed you had gotten better at this.

I felt horny. I had never felt horny before. I had wanted you many times before; to touch you and kiss your lips, delight in your laughter, but I had never wanted to fuck you. I wished I had a cock so I could fuck you with it.

You were licking me sloppily; licking my tits, my belly, and nuzzling my crotch. I wanted you, passionately, insanely. You were wonderful, with your sloppy tongue. I was swimming in a sea of your saliva, but I didn't care. You pulled off my plain white cotton panties and rubbed two fingers all over my pussy. We really didn't know what we were doing, best friends, fucking in the middle of the night. You dove in then, probably holding your nose and hoping for the best. You licked me slowly and gently and I fell in love.

You and I spent the rest of the night playing with each other. But, you never let me lick you. You let me fingerfuck you, while you told me that all the girls were letting their boyfriends do it to them. I wished I could be your boyfriend, taking you to movies so I could make out with you in the back row. I wished I could take you to dances and buy you ice cream. I sucked your nipples to your giggles and squirms and you sucked mine to the sound of my laughter. We dressed and slept next to each other. When we awoke in the morning, we ate Lucky Charms and laughed our asses off at the table.

All of summer I thought I could never lose you.

I never told our friends, but they knew. They knew what kind of girl I was. We went anywhere and the kids our grade picked on us. Lesbians. Lesbians. Dyke. Dyke. Dyke. Dyke. Butch. Hey Butch. We were going to stay this way forever, in spite of the world. Silly Cinderellas giving Prince Charming the finger. But instead you fucked a boy or two and you stopped being my best friend.

You wrote me a letter and sent it through the mail and maybe I still have it, lying around somewhere. Pretty soon, it was me and the boys again, smoking pot and being an overall nuisance; and you were with those girls and guys that had called us dykes, painting your lips a crimson red and denying us. You stuffed letters in my mailbox and I threw them away with tears in my eyes.

You moved away at the end of the summer and didn't say goodbye.

American social expectations based on gender are reached by way of an unacknowledged, but very commonly understood logically valid argument roughly like this:

---

• Premise 1: Every human being is born with either a penis or a vagina.
• Premise 2: Those human beings with penises are males, starting life as 'boys', and upon reaching sexual maturity, becoming 'men'. We will call this set "men". Those with vaginas start life as girls, and upon reaching sexual maturity, become 'women'. We will call this set "women".
• Premise 3: In the set "men", certain innate emotional and behavioral characteristics are very common, among them: Sexual attraction to women, aggression, toughness, etc. In the set "female", certain other innate emotional and behavioral characteristics are very common, among them: Sexual attraction to men, a nurturing demeanor, tendency toward emotion, sensitivity, etc.
• Premise 4: People should behave in a way that is consistent with their gender-set’s common characteristics.

______________________________________________

• Conclusion: Adults with penises are "men", and should behave in the ways consistent with the rest of their gender set, i.e., consistent with masculinity. Adults with vaginas are "women", and should behave in the ways consistent with their gender set, i.e., consistent with femininity.

---

There are three problems with the valid argument above:

Premise 3 asserts that certain emotional and behavioral characteristics are very common in the gender sets. That much is not too difficult to accept. But are those characteristics innate? Well, they're certainly not innate for everyone; if they were, there'd be nothing to discuss here. While common gender-variegated behavior norms may be innate to some (or even most) members of a gender set, we should consider that behavior paradigms may actually cause themselves, through widespread a priori acceptance. That is, men turn to male society to establish their correct behavior, but that correct behavior is in the first place established by those men themselves, since collectively, they ARE male society!

I liken this circularity to an interesting phenomenon in modern language: the body of English-speakers consults dictionaries as guides for "correct" word usage and spelling; but lexicographers consult this same body of English speakers to determine the word usages and spellings which are very common, and therefore "correct." These systems of authority--in the examples of language and gender--are recursive and closed, because each entity regards the other as the authoritative standard, denying its own role in the matter.

Premise 4, that a person "should" behave in a gender-specific way has two problems. Besides being completely baseless, it has some unintended consequences. Paraphrased, Premise 4 says that anything that is common in a gender set is good, and anything that deviates from the most-common traits is bad. Notice that this Premise renounces effeminate behavior AND exceptionally-masculine behavior alike! It is no more 'normal' (i.e., common), for a man to be an excellent sharpshooter ("masculine") than it is for him to be a homemaker ("feminine"). Both are uncommon, and therefore, by this reasoning, 'abnormal'. Yes, perhaps the premise could be rephrased in a way that avoids that problem, but even so, the following question would remain: Why 'should' a male behave in a way that is common, even if such behavior is not natural for him? Says who?!

Finally, the most basic premise of the argument, Premise 1, is also the most provably false. I'm serious: it is very simply not true that every human being is born with either a penis or a vagina.

In her fascinating and commendable paper, "Indeterminate Biological Sex: An issue of Gender Determination," Tia Scagliarini of the University of Maryland, College Park, thoroughly and scientifically debunks the binary sex concept, demonstrating that biology exhibits no such thing. The incidence of "intersexuality" in an astounding 1.7 percent of American births (63) is alone enough to disprove the premise that "all humans have penises or vaginas." Intersexuality includes (but is not limited to) hermaphroditism, and refers to a set of medical conditions in which sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or the internal reproductive system are either gender-ambiguous or otherwise "non-standard" (Ibid.). Some of Scagliarini’s findings about the reactions of the American medical community to the intersexed were troubling:

The average length of a male penis at birth is between 1 and 1.5 inches. However, if a baby is born with a penis of 0.6 inches or less, the penis is generally removed along with the testes and a vaginal opening is created. (64) "In cases of intersexed children assigned the female gender, surgeons may carve a large phallus down into a clitoris attempting to make it appear invisible when standing, create a vagina using a piece of colon, and mold a labia out of the remnants of the penis" (Dreger, qtd. in Scagliarini, 64)

. . . It is extremely rare for . . . [a] sexually abnormal infant to be created a penis as penises are thought to require much more precision and accuracy to be believable while vaginas are less scrutinized (64).

. . . The only occasions when emergency gender alteration will favor a male sexual identity is in the case of true hermaphroditism, when both a physically perfect penis and vagina are present. In this instance, physicians will save the penis and attempt the elimination of the vagina through fusion of the labia (Ibid).

These findings lend weight to the comments of A. Fausto-Sterling, author of The Five Sexes, Revisited, who asserts that the disparity between social expectations of biological sex (i.e., unequivocally male or female), and the truth of biology, forces physicians to "explain otherwise natural biological variation as 'deformity' and hold[s] them responsible for imperative gender determination and assignment," (qtd. in Scagliarini, 63).

Here again is the interesting problem of recursion. Physicians assign gender in two categories because it is the expectation of society that all persons have either a penis or a vagina--that every person is either male or female by primary virtue of their genitals. It is only when viewed from this perspective that ambiguity necessarily equals deformity. But note that societal expectations are set (at least in part) by the behavior of physicians. So, just as in the example of dictionaries and speakers, surgeons perform genital modification to fulfill the expectations of society -- expectations which those surgeons themselves are partly responsible for establishing through surgeries!

Not only do I claim that gender is necessarily a social construction, but furthermore, sometimes, biological sex itself is too.

Source Cited:

Scagliarini, Tia. "Indeterminate Biological Sex: An Issue of Gender Determination." Maryland Essays in Human Biodiversity. Vol. 2, No. 1, Dec. 2003. University of Maryland. Ed. Benjamin Auerbach, Wendy Gilley, et al. 63-64.

Though many people consider this term to be interchangable with hermaphroditism, intersexuality actually includes much more. It is not limited to hermaphroditism, but it does include it. A person born with intersexuality is said to be an intersexed or intersex individual. Intersexuality refers to a set of many medical conditions in which sex chromosomes, external genitalia, or internal reproductive systems are either gender-ambiguous or otherwise "non-standard" (Scagliarini, 63). Using this broader definition, intersexuality occurs in an astounding 1.7 percent of American births (Ibid).

The incidence of intersexuality in the human population flies in the face of the ideas underlying the biological dichotic gender paradigm.

Source Cited:

Scagliarini, Tia. “Indeterminate Biological Sex: An Issue of Gender Determination.” Maryland Essays in Human Biodiversity. Vol. 2, No. 1, Dec. 2003. University of Maryland. Ed. Benjamin Auerbach, Wendy Gilley, et al. 63-64.

Crying and nudity are, in American culture, subjects which are very closely related, even though they may not seem like it. This is so much the case, in fact, that I studied the two subjects as part of an Independent Study course that I designed for myself, under the direction of a Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, in the American Studies department.

Here are some reasons supporting the connection between crying and nudity in America:

• Crying and being naked are both governed by strict, mostly-unwritten social rules which: are different for males and females; vary by country and culture; and are nonetheless sometimes overridden during times of crisis or intense intimacy.
• Tearfulness and nakedness are both regarded by American adults as highly private, even shameful personal states, and yet children require repeated ‘corrections’ before they learn that they are expected to keep their bodies and certain emotions hidden from the world.
• Being ‘caught’ naked invokes the same intense embarrassment that attends the involuntary display of tears at an ‘inappropriate’ time.
• When changing clothes in a locker room, many men attempt to keep all or part of their body hidden, using towels, bathroom stalls, or lightning speed. Even when walking nude from his locker to a shower, men tend to hold a towel in front of their genitals, as if to prevent observation. Similarly, people try to hide their faces when weeping, covering them with their hands, or seeking a more private location.
• Crying or being nude in front of other males can suggest unmanliness, or homosexuality.
• The biblical book of Genesis equates nudity with shame. Genesis’ author(s) find it necessary to point out that Adam and Eve “were both naked,” and that in spite of this, “they felt no shame” (Gen 2:25), until they were suddenly made aware of their nakedness and scramble to hide their bodies from God’s view (Gen 3:7). This implies, of course, that under most circumstances, someone would feel shame when naked. Genesis also seems to suggest that crying is an activity that a man should keep to himself: “Deeply moved at the sight of his brother, Joseph hurried out and looked for a place to weep. He went into his private room and wept there” (Gen 43:30). The fact that Joseph had to search for 'a place to weep' is telling.
• Most of all, crying and nudity are experienced together for the first time at the moment of nearly every human being's birth!

My study focused on the ways in which American attitudes toward crying and nudity both impose a sort of 'cloak' on American men, causing them to hide their true 'self' beneath a façade of some sort--a literal one in the case of clothes, and a figurative, emotional one in the case of crying.