Doorways

he only loves those things 
because he loves to see them break

-"Doll Parts"


god, sometimes

                    i think i'm done

feeling broken

                     like i told her, i'm healed now
 and so i was, now what's that damage you hand me
 
          put your mouth up to my ear and listen
 how my body crumbles

               do you know a recipe for best girl,  i was lapped
        to your grace, sit lil doggy in the wet spot               you

at the end of the line, been caught

  i been....nah, you know how inside me          ruptured light
     
       put me down                 if it's too much

             learn to run from what burns
                                                          & what else named is

 a seraphed thing          from cinder-storied-dreams of ever lovely rippled

      a ripping,     a tear in the hand worth a fist in the...

                  sweet honey drip, i wanna give you some ..... good, good 

       most days i'm writing to survive, but tell a truth

    some days
              i'm writing to seduce
                                                like language is: Build a bridge

between us in the room                     body across an ocean of past trespass
                       & what we catch on film
                                                              & what we forget to say out loud
                     

                       what is there to lose          loosened minutes unfurl
   
         time was wet      
                                we kept wiping it off the backs of our hands
         


     sometimes, god....

                                 i can barely piece it together 
                   


           


 

Cultural Misogyny Scrolls You on Tinder

I write a lot about the experience of desire, attachment and online dating both in poetry and in essays and in general online. I listen to a lot of men and women complain about the aspects of online dating, commitment, and relationships; and I read a lot of other writing (mostly geared towards women) about how to get a partner, keep a partner, play the game, etc. What I don't read or see a lot about is talk around the bigger picture of how our ideas of love shape attachment, shape relationships, shape our experience of sex and dating and how this translates to a world where we either choose to value and champion love or we don't.

When bell hooks writes in her book All About Love that we can't both have casual sex and casual relationships and want a world filled with love as well, that we can't engage in one act of treating people as though they are expendable and also want to have love in our lives: I believe this is true. But I also am a product of a culture that didn't raise me on love, a marriage that wasn't built on love, numerous relationships that did not hold love, and an addictive cycle of recreating abusive situations that mirror what my early attachment template named love. It took me a long time to even understand that what I thought was love, was in fact not love, and that what I wanted was something I didn't even know about, but I was keenly aware of the lack and not my fantasy and my fiction of what it would be when it arrived. I've been on Tinder watching and tracking abusive cycles of behavior around men and thinking about how that positioned me as a woman. This particular example involves a white hetero male- top of the food chain- and me, a bisexual white woman. But even within those narrow parameters, I want to show you how cultural misogyny is insidious and how it thrives on shame and anger and hatred, because if you've been paying attention, you know that the microcosm of what occurs in private between two people is a small stage of a macrocosm effect of how we treat humans. It is inside of our humanity, it is an infection inside of our species that is tearing us all apart. See we can't relate to the top of the food chain, the most powerful majority in this culture because they both hate and desire the same object: And it's killing all of us.

It is KILLING ALL OF US. And it is not our (read: any person of color or female identifying gender or nonconforming gender or sexual orientation not defined as exclusively straight or child or not identifying and passing as straight white man)  fucking job to fix this.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN:  THIS is your fucking job to fix. 

Context: I matched with this person, a straight white male, on Tinder on Monday. We texted a bit throughout the day and he told me he wanted to meet someone to fall in love with, he also wanted me to send him naked pictures, and he probably sent me about 40 texts or so throughout the day. He sent me an unsolicited picture of his penis during this, and I sent him no naked pictures in return, which is why probably, on Tuesday, he sent no texts until 8:30 at night. 

And I want to be really clear here before we begin that in no way am I framing him as bad and me as good, him as aggressor and me as victim, him as some lust rager and me as an angelic virgin: See we both lose. We are both losers in this game that we didn't sign on for called cultural misogyny. The game makes men feel powerful and women weak. It offers the illusion of safety and protection for an elite few under the guise of shaming and diminishing the rest of us. But it's a lie. 

We all lose. If you are a man and you desire what you hate, if you want to possess what also sickens you and makes you think "weak" and "vulnerable" or "sensitive" than you have already lost. 

If you drank the cultural misogyny kool-aid that tells you to "grab them by the pussy," you did so at the cost of your humanity. And maybe you don't realize it yet, but it was a high cost to pay. 

And if you are suffering, it's because you keep paying. Not because women won't fuck you or love you or listen to you or understand you. 

You paid the cost of your humanity to be on top in the game. 

"Come fuck me" is the battle cry of broken men. Cultural misogyny has created this chasm between "men" and "women," this binary reductive narrative between the have's and the have-not's. And it should come as no surprise that this is the root of resistance to any gender noncomformity. You can't have a top and a bottom without clear differentials of power. Am I right? 

The reality of blurring the lines between "male" and "female" classifications means cultural misogyny would have to up its game. Who holds the power, well clearly straight men still, but against whom. Against people you actually don't want to fuck. Against people you might want to fuck. Against people who don't want to fuck you.<------- p="">

See cultural misogyny is a lazy philosophy: it was created by men to oppress women. But if we don't know who the women are and if we have others we want to oppress who aren't women,  if we have men who won't be oppressors, who don't hold power in the economy of "straight male" then what? 

If you are a straight white men feeling really attacked right now, welcome to the bottom of the game. We've been waiting for you. 

Come fuck me

is the battle cry of a broken man. 

It holds the illusion of a demand. But it is begging. It is begging to be touched and seen and held and loved. But it doesn't know the language. It doesn't even know the definition of the emotion that is causing this lack: It's been told, it's sex. It's been told it's desire. 

Pornography has nailed into the mind: You don't want to connect with another. What you want is to obliterate another, to use another, to take from another. This what you want. This will make you feel good. This will satisfy you.

And none of it is true. 

Come fuck me. And the slipperiness of misogyny is that women answer the call. 

We have been sold the exact same message. We get none of the power but we get sold the exact same message. And whatever it is we want is lost in a sea of framing that objects us to this body we hold out hope for in finding some measure of humanity left within.  

It's a fool's errand. 

If we laugh and call them Fuckboys, it does not address the problem. If we get angry and call them Fuckboys and complain to our friends, it does not address the problem. 

They say Come fuck me. And a woman will come. 

Because she's been led to believe one of two things: 

This is as good as it will get and at least I'm not alone.

Or

Maybe I can change Come Fuck Me to Come Love Me. 

Cultural Misogyny makes us ALL fucking idiots. 

Connection is what makes us human. The ability to connect. The ability to celebrate each other. The ability to feel safe with one another. Love is the strongest, most powerful emotion in the world. It has the power to give us what we most need, to heal and create and be our best selves. And we are so afraid of it. Ask yourself, why are we shamed into being afraid to love? 

Who does that serve?

How are we framed if we say: Come Love Me.

We are framed as weak, vulnerable, needy, clinging, emotional, effeminate. 

Nothing could be further from the truth: Do you know the emotional bravery and resilience it takes to honestly say to another being: come love me. 

Pornography instills through imagery the idea that sex is power. That the ability to fuck and have a big dick somehow translates to having some power. 

Do you see how ridiculous this set up is? 

No one threatens another person with their ability to love. 

No one says on the offensive: I loved the shit out of the last girl I was with. I loved her so much she knew she was respected and cared for consistently. I have a big 9inch heart that I use to just love and respect all beings. 

That's not threatening. 

But a big dick is a weapon. The ability to fuck someone is a weapon. We say you're fucked when it's not good. See sex in this sense is not sex: It's violence and it's abuse.

And Cultural Misogyny is all about normalizing abuse. 

Cultural Misogyny protects men. And women shelter under the men who are protected by cultural misogyny because they've been told they will be protected too. That's how abuse works: It lies to you. 

It says: It's ok. Come here. I won't hurt you. See I want you. 

Then it rapes you. Then it beats you. Then it degrades you. Then it hates you.

Then it says: Come here. I won't hurt you. See I want you. 

Endlessly.

Being a bisexual woman is sexy when it feeds a man's fantasy of multiple women he can abuse for his pleasure. But he can also slip it off and use it to pin you to the floor. Because if you are not a straight white man in this scenario. You lose. 

It would be easy to dismiss this person as not very bright. As someone clearly struggling with some anger issues and rejection issues and basically acting out like a small child when not getting their way. And that's all true. But what is also true is that this is a man, not a child. 

This is a man who is a father to two sons. 

This is someone who is teaching future men how to treat women. 

This is a man who has a mother and who has sons who have a mother, and presumably some love was felt for one of these two, perhaps both at some point. 

So how do you love women and hate them. What does that do to a person? 

How do you raise your sons to hate the being who housed and birthed them. What does that do to a boy? 

It doesn't matter if it is a truth that this person is or is not with someone else. 

If they are, clearly what they feel is not love as their actions do not indicate love. 

If they are lying, they clearly do not understand love and so lack it in their life.

And at the end of the day, the person you are with is you.

That's the only person you are ever with.

And if you hate what you desire, then you hate part of you. If you abuse what you also want, you are abusive and you are in exact opposition to love.  The only truth in all of these statements is the bald faced lie of being able to be in love with anything in a state of cultural misogyny.

You cannot love truly what you cannot see clearly. 

And right now, men: You cannot see us. 

You are blinded by the hate fed to you as power, fed to you as privilege, fed you as safety and "locker room" talk and women being "so sensitive" and how strong you are and how you don't need to "feel" things or get too "attached" or talk about your "feelings."

ALL of these narratives are fucking stupid: STOP WASTING OUR TIME

Men: Is this the world you want? 

You have the power to stop this. It's the only power you have. 

I have two daughters and a son and this power game: It is not ok for any of them. 

I don't want my son to speak like this to women. 

I don't want a man to speak like this to my daughters. 

I don't want my daughters to speak this way to men. 

I don't want anyone who wants love and affection to use power and abuse to get them. 

I don't want sex to be violence and abuse when it is anything but that. 

But it will happen if we keep holding up the smallest messages we send to one another in private as ok when they really are abusive to all of us. 

Tell Me I'm A Bad Girl, Dick

Dear Chris:

Let's talk about voyeurism and how it relates to art and how it relates to sex and how it relates to being alive.

The astounding thing about pornography is the amount of repetition and how little variation is needed to stimulate response.

In Episode 2 of I Love Dick, there's a great sex scene right at the beginning that works on several levels to capture a "female" gaze from both within the scene and external to the scene. It's interesting that the word "scene" is often used in S&M play to delineate the borders around fantasy and reality. A scene has parameters, and it has a clear beginning and an ending with characters "acting" out their roles. This fact is crucial. Within the anatomy of the S&M scene, there is at once the person and the role played by the person, a duality from which pleasure is derived on a single body.

Take note: This is art. This is the body. This is the body. This is art.

We as viewers of the scene in I Love Dick interrupt. We have not been made privy to the rules of the scene. We know the players, but we don't know the guidelines. Film creates a heightened sense of the role of the voyeur more so than almost any other medium. Here we are in the bedroom while Chris and Sylvere fuck and while a fantasy Dick watches, and we watch. The artist aware always that the art we make is subject to an audience we will never meet. And so we watch the watcher watching and even here now, as you read this, find yourself the watcher watching me watching Dick watching Chris.... it's an endless gaze.

Not a male gaze.... an endless gaze. For what is sweeter than the thing itself is sometimes knowing the witness is there to absorb your pleasure, to record and take note of your experience. It's why children look to the gaze of the parent. I both experience the world and I experience the world through that which adores me... my experience witnessed. It's the appeal of social media, the root of all religion. The gaze. We are never alone. We are so precious as to elicit the desire of a constant gaze.

There is no couple that does not triangulate. Here the scene is literally made flesh through Chris' desire. It's the woman's fantasy, and yet it still pivots on the standard roles. Dick is bad daddy. Chris is the bad girl. Why does this get repeated so often? Role Play like pornography seems to be suspended in its own repetition, an ouroboros of caught langauge, a script from which we enact and reenact the Freudian theater of childhood abandonment and desire for total union. Dick, with Chris' letter in his hands is actually taking cues from Chris. She is calling the scene and it is as if Sylvere is not there at all.

Classic Cuckold S&M game: 

In 1966, Lenore Kandel wrote a small pamphlet of poems called "The Love Poems." It was seized as pornography and the book declared obscene.

from God/ Love Poem

I love you  / your cock in my hand
         stirs like a bird
in my fingers
as you swell and grow hard in my hand
forcing my fingers open

What is it about a woman's desire that is most monstrous? Most ob/scene?

Etymology of "obscene":

1590s, "offensive to the senses, or to taste and refinement," from Middle French obscène (16c.), from Latin obscenus "offensive," especially to modesty, originally "boding ill, inauspicious," of unknown origin; perhaps from ob "in front of" (see ob-) + caenum "filth." Meaning "offensive to modesty or decency" is attested from 1590s. Legally, in U.S., it hinged on "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to a prurient interest." [Justice William Brennan, "Roth v. United States," June 24, 1957]; refined in 1973 by "Miller v. California":

The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Who is the average person? Who decides if a work lacks literary or artistic value? Can we even allow for the average person to have any parameters for what constitutes artistic value?

Dick tells us when to CUM. His hairy chin is the average chin of an average man demanding a woman's pleasure be performed for him, and we are watching to see if language has that power. What can a word make you do? 

 From To Fuck with Love Phase 1

positions and pleasures of need my body
transforms into one enormous mouth
       between my legs
suckfucking oh that lovely cock

 When does pleasure turn to pain? When does desire make us suffer, and why can our bodies sometimes not distinguish the difference?


 From To Fuck with Love  Phase II

my cunt is honeycomb we are covered with come and honey

The best moment in this scene is when Chris throws Sylvere off of her to make herself cum. She takes over the whole scene. She is the sub and the dom/domme, she is the writer and the actor, the bad girl and the daddy, she is the alpha and the omega. That is the core of this scene.

From To Fuck With Love  Phase III

I kiss your shoulder and it reeks of lust
the lust of erotic angels fucking the stars.


There are just four poems in Kandel's obscene pamphlet The Love Book. While I think censorship is horrifying; I must admit to a kind of romantic notion that is fascinated that four poems about a woman extolling fucking and the pleasure it gives her as being seen as a threat to society. What did the average person find offensive then and what does the average person find offensive now? Are we post-obscene? Is violence the only obscenity left to us that we hunger to consume?

"There are no barriers to poetry and prophecy; by their nature they are barrier-breakers, bursts of perception, lines into infinity." L. Kandel, 1967

"...you eroticize what you''re not, secretly hoping that the other person knows what you're performing and that they're performing too." -C. Kraus, I Love Dick 

Does the artists know the space between making art and living? What is that space called? When does one begin and one end? What is the scene and what are the roles assigned?

I have nothing but questions tonight, Chris. 

M

 
Notes:
Collected Poems of Lenore Kandel by Lenore Kandel, (North Atlantic Books, 2012)
I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, (Semiotext(e), 1998)
Etymology:  http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=obscene

Sidenote: I could write a whole other blog post just on the spelling and usage of "cum" vs "come." I prefer cum when talking about sex, so that is what I always use.

"....orbiting around the Big Dicks..."

Dear Chris:

You said: as if sex can provide the missing clues….

I’ve been meditating for a long time now and the more stable I become I wonder if it is ruining my art. I mean, how does hysteria help us.. get there… how to embody that Kali energy… is there another side to come out on.

I stopped having sex a few months ago because I got tired of fucking strangers… and by tired, I don’t mean really tired, because I loved it. I never got bored fucking strangers, but it’s like eating chocolate cake with every meal. You don’t start hating chocolate-- it’s just you reach a point where you want something else for dessert.  And what’s the alternative to meaningless sex. Is it love?

Is it nothing. I thought maybe I’ll save all of that energy for my art. But my horoscope last week read that this was a bad idea. It literally said not having sex is bad for me … I’m an Aquarius with a rising Sagittarius and the tarot card reading I did last week-- to see if I would ever reunite with my ex-love-- came up 3 of swords, popping out of the deck before I even did the spread. How can you argue with that? So I stopped talking to him at all.

I don’t think you should ignore signs. It’s all signs isn’t it Chris? Like now it’s just you and me here.

Two girls. Two Women. Two Bodies with Holes. Two Body Suits talking about art.

I’m gonna try to not think about fucking you just yet. Because I want to take it slow.

I think about fucking almost everyone I meet. Is that normal? Is it because sex provides a clue (..... LOL to the fucking bank, Barthes...) ...we need to know how the other sees us? Do I even exist if no one wants to fuck me?

Let’s talk about hysteria and its aesthetic. Is it even necessary to say female here?

I saw a review online that described I Love Dick as vomiting on the page.

Proust isn’t vomiting on the page. DH Lawrence isn’t vomiting on the page. Fucking Milton is not a vomitorium of morality. Faulkner is certainly not vomiting and jerking off at the same time. Hemingway is never diarrhea. They are all the opposite of expulsion from the body. They are the insertion into the body. Only hysterics vomit it out, take it out of the body and put it on view.

The monster under the bed is only scary because we know

a) that the monster exists

b) we know the monster is in the room with us

c) currently we cannot see the monster, but at any moment it may come into view

Free from the Salpêtrière: where are the hysterics contained?

I read another review of I Love Dick where the reviewer seemed offended that at some point the author was performing “art” and not life. That at some point, Chris, you became self aware of your hysterics and decided to make it art. Decided to create something bigger than your self. Decided…. to shed the helplessness of female passivity and step into your person suit of autonomy shoving aside your role to be an emotional caretaker to those men whose lives you circled… you… you….. monster….You made something with your name on it. You are practically a real girl now.

“…anything that is repeated so emphatically must always be suspected of being a kind of denial or refusal of awareness…” – Luce Irigaray

When I wrote Basic Programming  I spent a year fucking strangers to learn about how attachment works inside me so I could write poetry. I used these men’s bodies to write poems because I’m a genius.

I used these men’s bodies to write poems because I am Genius. Just like you, Chris. Just like Augustine writhing under the gaze of a man thinking he was going to tell us what it means to be hysterical. Going to measure it out. Going to take a picture of it in practice. Going to note the symptoms and the treatments. Going to be left holding my limp "dick" in my hands when that bird called Augustine flies away… monster us all. Wait long enough, and I’ll write you an ending that really matters. Write enough letters to free us all.

That’s why I’m writing to you, Chris. There’s not enough written to counter the tide yet.

“… the less we see and recognize… the more powerful and insidious is the fiction at work…” –Luce Irigaray

So let’s see each other. Let’s see how we are hysteria and not how it is told to us. Can a woman create without a man? Can a woman create art without a man? Come into the menstrual hut with me. Our womb, our hystere…in the menstrual hut: we examine the “logos” outside the spectacle, we erase through repetition, the way a poem sings into existence a type of life forgotten. A poem rivets on the image, images seep into the gateways of our sensory perception and tell us how to structure the world. Hysteria is the counterpoint of control defined by the hegemony: image of what you are allowed to be and how you want to be perceived.

 We have been asleep.

But it’s all in there. It’s all inside there, under the “bed.” It’s 2017 and we are still waiting on a discourse on female anal eroticism… [how can it be, Eve?]

Where is our tree? My spirit animal is a snake. A fucking snake.... I wanted a wolf or a crow, but there we are, sexed in the clues all the way fucking down a rabbit hole of metaphors. I imagine you are soft. I imagine we lay together on the bed and look at plastic stars affixed to the roof of the hut, and the animals come in and we each take turns naming them. 

There's no getting away from the body. There's no getting away from the sex of the body. There's just far enough we can reach with our fingers. There's just far enough we can get inside. The contraction of the uterus when it bleeds, the contraction of the vagina as it cums, the beat of the heart and the poem:  a space waiting to be filled universes inside us... count me in words not yet delineated to square off the medium of what now communicates between... count off till I'm allowed to let go. 

Sex isn't at all like making art, is it? 

-M

Nonnormative Desire: NaPoMo Day 1

"Desire is the essence of a man, that is, the endeavor whereby a man endeavors to persist in his own body"   -Spinoza


desire in the sense of priority: behind what to what
relegate compartment the "prime" life outside
of much difficult for me, consolidate
or a how much allowed space
by extension how it manifests
by repression how it manifests
& if not privileged, channeled
a narrowing begins to shallow root
fistfuls of danger to the lip
exposed to trail in a mere human
skinned version of lovely
for me nothing, easy
& need, a bellowing reminder
could not come swiftly 
to think of ourselves formally
and foremost sexual absent of other
is the epicenter of rupture in representation




[ when we met three years ago, i said, i don't ever want to be in a monogamous relationship again. we agreed to live in each other lives open to the reality of our desires. and it was naive to think that would be the edge of it. that the negotiation of property isn't always happening. what we agree to is being here by choice and not ignoring what we need. or is it to privilege desire to need. is it hedonistic or pathological to submit. can't you be filled with the properties of worth by the work you do, the dailiness of survival threatening to trample. escape hatch we disappear into the normative spheres of distrust, how another pulls self into a void of expectation. i think distinctly about the holes blown open. shot through your life is the trauma played out on your body before you could even articulate the purpose of this vessel and it maps all the way down. to the deep core at which being filled means being a woman, being filled means i have to take it, that strangeness. embody the quick assault of intrusion & how the excision of control means i must be a kind of broken that can't heal lick its own wounds to satisfaction. the reason i often choose bodies other to mine is that i understand them less. what must occur in the mind of the intruder. the mind of the one who can't stay. here where i hold you, old familiar of how we began. once upon. a linking we were all mostly made from star dust. and it all shines the same. ]


"what is considered real and true is a question of power"  -Foucault

"Pussy like girls, damn, is my pussy gay?
It's a holiday- Play with my pussy day!
Pussy this, pussy that, pussy cakin'
Pussy ride dick like she a Jamaican
Pussy stay warm, pussy on vacation
You loose bitches need a pussy renovation
You can eat it with a pussy reservation
Pussy 'bout to get a standing ovation"

-Nicki Minaj

Day 14: Fantasea Gaze, babygirl

“babygirl got options, right?” –Azealia Banks

“In the pornographic scene, there is nothing for me to say” –Luce Irigaray

babygirl knows a type of owning

babygirl says you own it &  you do

babygirl silhouetted made rock hard

indigenous, a marbleized pressure, a sense

of urgency fissures: babygirl doesn’t blur

pain is a way of unhooking

babygirl to another this is a type of dissolving

when the strap, when forcing

babygirl knows a take is taking

neck taut, a gasping, babygirl

feminist porn is a fantasea, watering

under a gaze he makes her lick

the sweet pulse and called bitch she

when he meant receptacle, when he

intended stuck, cardboard a dolly

cascade of images if it pleases him

there are so many lines between what

you can do, think you can string

to string a phrasing

stuffing of words : a gagging

a throttle lip of panic

babygirl drips & drips, so good, so easy

there’s a hurting  then a hurt

babygirl calculates a breaking

she’s a hole of wreck & wonder

& then filled filling, he follows orders

it’s hard to forget what it is: babygirl