Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

What I find most interesting about the number of essays on Fifty Shades of Grey is that most of the reviewers have never been in a BDSM relationship, nor do they seem to have friends who are in/have been in BDSM relationships. You can’t theorize about and reduce the extremely complicated sexual and psychological feelings in a bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism relationship to something as simple as “his mother didn’t love him” or “women don’t really like having power” (and I’m talking to you, Katie Roiphe). Some of the people who are most in touch with their own psychology (and I won’t say they’re “psychologically healthy,” because I don’t think that exists; there is no norm) are into BDSM relationships.

Anyway. I just wanted to say what has, perhaps, already been said, but to echo it because I have more than one friend who is into BDSM. And you’d never know it by looking at these friends.

We’re going to have to stretch this to the last year plus a few months, because I need to tell you that despite the fact that in the last twelve/thirteen months I have read a terrible, terribly-written book (The Chocolate Cupid Killings) in a terrible mystery series—which, really, is so bad that I cannot remember whether I’ve read any of the books because they pass through me like White Castle—it does not compare to Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed and its sequel, Something Blue. Seriously. It’s not that Emily Giffin’s a terrible writer, or that her books are so terribly predictable that I knew they’d adapt them for a romantic comedy before I really knew. (This is true for the latter.) Her books are terrible because she continually hates on women’s bodies. Every single woman in these books is described not so much by her personality as by her body type, and how hard she works, but poor thing! she just can’t catch a break with her lumpy, cellulite-ridden body. And of course, this is why it is so surprising that the protagonist of the first book, Something Borrowed, manages to steal the guy away from her best friend—who has a perfect body. It’s not surprising or shocking that a friend would betray another. No! It’s surprising and shocking that a frumpy, slightly-overweight (but really, barely overweight in the grand scheme of things) friend would steal a guy/fiance from her really perfect, so-perfect-you-of-course-hate-her best friend. Anyway.

I’m sorry if my writing has gone to shit. I’ve been reading too much David Foster Wallace (and by “too much” I mean a lot, but there can never be enough), and he really makes these sort of sentences work for him, but stylistically, I can’t/don’t. And yet, I can’t stop myself right now because I don’t really care to try, nor will I rewrite these sentences because this is a blog and nobody will probably read them anyway.

Anyway. What I’m really trying to say here is that I used to not notice when women hated on other women’s bodies, and I used to take all of the judgment in, silently, and examine my own body for all its flaws and hate myself more and more. But now, I refuse to. I notice when women pick apart other women, and frankly, I don’t fucking appreciate it. Don’t read these books if you can help it. Read something else for fun.

(30-Day Book Challenge: Day #7)

structureandstyle:

My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.

I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.

A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
there is no either/or.
However.

I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.

Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.

A word after a word
after a word is power.

At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.

This is a metaphor.

How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.

—Margaret Atwood

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a woman and a writer, both. Either is an exhausting job, and to be both seems impossible. And I keep thinking about Adrienne Rich, who supposedly argued in Of Woman Born that until a woman can walk away from a pregnancy like a man can, we should be allowed reproductive rights. (I haven’t read Of Woman Born yet.) Or Judith Ortiz Cofer, who writes in “The Woman Who Slept with One Eye Open” that she started “going to bed when [her] daughter did and rising at 5:00 a.m.” every morning to write. Motherhood seems so impossible, especially if you’re a writer.

But here is Atwood, writing ”A child is not a poem,/a poem is not a child./there is no either/or.” She says everything I suspect but cannot articulate, and she says it beautifully. I think for me, I’ll have to make a decision eventually, and I’ll have to make it work: “there is no either/or.”

Again, poetry says what I cannot.

-R