Street Harassment and Freedom

I've been dealing with a nasty cold and feel generally gross in every way, so Monday, my husband and I decided to "go out" for a little while - just a quick walk around the mall - to get me out of the house and out of my bathrobe. 

Clothes and makeup have always been my armor - I've talked about that here, before. So even when I'm sick I try to pull myself together. On Monday, I put on a nice outfit, a little makeup, and tried to will myself to be confident, instead of a snotty mess. 

My ensemble - jeans, a nice sleeveless shirt with a high neckline, black boots. Earrings, a watch. A little black eyeliner, neutral eyeshadow and lipstick. Basically, just nice clothes, nothing fancy. 

Conservatives and all-around jerks talk about how women should dress modestly, because if we don't, we are "asking for it" - "it" being everything from street harassment to sexual assault. These are the same people who influence our culture so much that young women are policed daily by school dress codes, forced to be sexual objects through the lens of adult puritanical prudishness, forced to cover themselves up because of adult perversity. These are the same people who advocate abstinence in their (and everyone else's) daughters - one form of taking away a woman's sexual agency - but complete compliance in their wives - another truly tragic and harmful method for robbing women of their bodies and their power. 

I've worn some sexy outfits. I've worn clothes that capitalized on my curves. I've worn backless and low-cut tops, and I've enjoyed compliments, because I was dressing to feel beautiful and powerful, sexual, mysterious. And those jerks would tell me that those were the times I was "asking for it."

Well, jerks, was I asking to be cat called in a shirt and jeans? Was I asking to have a man call me hot and sexy, pretty much right in my ear, as I was walking at the mall with my husband?

Tell me, do you really think my clothes are the issue? Or are you the issue? Are you scared of my flesh? Are you scared of your own sexuality? Do you think of yourselves as powerless in the face of your own mindless need to possess women? Are you scared that I hold the power to say yes or no - and is that why you are so worried about campaigns to discuss and encourage affirmative and enthusiastic consent? 

Cat calling is just another way in which jerks like you try to beat women down. Make us less human. Own us. 

I pity all of you. It must be painful to be so frightened of a woman taking control of her own power, sexual agency, and flesh. You must have truly unsatifying lives. 

I wonder how much your wives and daughters resent you. 

A man in the mall - who was bigger than me, and definitely threatening - decided it was his right to speak low and thick in my ear and reduce me to an object, a plaything, an animal. If you, jerk faces, think I was asking for it, you're even more deluded than you appear. You'd like to blame your behavior on those slutty women who wear what they want, sleep with who they want, take birth control, are feminists - but the truth is, I was just a woman in jeans with a red nose and a hacking cough, holding hands with my husband. 

You are utterly transparent in your hatred of women. 

There are so many little tricks, little twists of language, that you employ to make you sound reasonable - or worse, Christian. You hide behind a text - the Old Testament - and completely ignore the messages of Christ. You talk about decency and family values and purity and all that bull which means only this: the only sexual expression which is acceptable to you is white, male, cis, hetero sexuality. 

You literally think that women who have sex (and enjoy it!) outside of marriage are going to hell. You think members of the LGBTQ community are going to hell (for two real reasons - we defy gender stereotypes and shockingly, enjoy sex!). You throw fire and brimstone at us and become more and more enraged, because we stand outside of a culture of fear and oppression and have a real chance to be happy. 

When we own our bodies, when we make choices, when we have power, we are free. 

You, jerks, are not. 

No wonder you grasp at the straws of power - cat calling, legislating our rights to choose. You want us back in the tight grip of your own prisons. 

Until you break out, until you sever the chains you forged yourselves, link by oppressive link - just stop. Just stop the cat calling and harassment, stop the hatred, stop the slurs, stop trying to force us to join you in your cells. We will not go. 

A man spoke in my ear and asked me to imprison myself in his own shame. He tried to make me dirty. 

But I am clean in my brilliant expression of love and sexuality, in my curving flesh. And in the joy I take in my womanhood and pleasure, I am free. 

A Letter from Exile

Dear God,

Yeah, it's me again. 

It's quarter to twelve, and as is usual in late winter, I can't sleep. We've met each other hereabouts before. It's just you, me, a blanket, the rush of central heating, the stars. Hey, how's it going, good to see you. Where have you been?

God, I don't know if I should be talking to you. It's late, and I'm scared, and so many times I've sworn off you for good. I've tried praying to everything else - a Goddess, a patron saint, my Grandpere. I think I'm done with you, because I'm a rational person with critical thinking skills and a solid grasp on all the science I believe in but don't fully understand. I'm done with you because I left my church and my martini afternoons behind. 

I tell people - by the way, this is how I phrase it - I tell people that believing in you was a hell of a lot harder after seeing my Grandpere's illness and death. If I'm in a slightly more honest mood, I tell people that my connection with you was mostly severed through my diagnosis and medications. No mixed mania, no conversations with the divine. 

But at the root of it all is me at eighteen. I was young. I didn't know if I could really afford college - hell, I had no idea how to handle living on my own. I needed to get away from the way I'd been brought up and my incredible loneliness. I was just a kid, and there was affection and there was incredible loss. And in all of that you decided to back out and let me handle this stuff without your spider webbing of grace. I was stupid and bipolar and I wanted something I had never felt before. 

Love. 

Maybe your love. 

Maybe not. 

I don't know how to believe in you, anymore. And it hurts me and it terrifies me that I still ask you for help when I'm in bed and feel eighteen and so completely lost. It's been ten years, and in those ten years life has unfolded - death, births, marriages, separations, reunions. I know there's a lot more to come. I'm twenty-eight and all I can think is God damn, I'm still a kid. 

What questions should I be asking you? What should I be praying about?

If I could imagine or believe in what your grace, your true presence, would do for me, it wouldn't be lying in bed, sleepless and furious. It would be so much more than that. Because I've felt you most in impossible situations, like standing on a mountain or singing in a pub in Ireland, or holding my baby sister, or making love, or dancing in a nightclub, or reading Shakespeare. I've felt you in the bitter dregs of my coffee and in the way light catches the crystal on my dining room table. You are the smell of pine in the fireplace and the pounding rain of Baltimore in the spring. You are the promise of life which begins, ends, and begins again. 

Where have you been all this time? Please, just answer back. I keep looking for you, even though I say I'm not. 

I see you in all the ugly parts of life, too, but I keep being told that all you are is beautiful. 

I want to escape the prison of your perfection. 

I just want you to hold me. 

I am angry with you, God, and I grind my teeth and I try to make things work. I try not to be too young, eighteen and lonely, and I try not to be too old, resigned. And I just keep being here, in bed, or on the couch, under blankets, naked, and I keep asking for you to tell me one damned thing you like about me. I keep hoping you'll give me your grace. Even if, most of the time, I'm not sure I can bring myself to really believe in you again. 

Oh, God. Just say something. Don't leave me here like this. 

It's a February morning, and as usual, I'm going to crawl back into bed and will probably fall asleep within an hour. If you're real, you'll be there while I'm awake and while I dream, and if you're not, I won't necessarily know the difference. But I do long for you, and in the frightened-child center of me I believe that you're there, here, somewhere. 

Because as angry as I am, I have the quick breath of summer on my neck. I have jazz and glam rock and I have buffalo mozzarella and basil. I have ridiculous recipes and I have all the damned rules for every board game there's ever been. I have a black and white cat who sleeps on my porch when it's raining and I have bonfires in my back yard. And I really, really hate you sometimes, but I see you within the beats of Yeats's poetry and Mozart's genius, precise madness. 

If you have any grace to give, just help me to see all that, appreciate it. Just let me live in love and never be numbed to it. Just hold me in your hand and cradle me at night and whisper, it's all good. 

Dear God, I'm still here. I'm twenty eight and I don't always know how to live without you. 

I'm doing my best. 

Loving

I've been in love so many times. 

I was in love with an adorable thin boy in first grade, and I was in love for far too long with a pre-teen crush, and I've loved my sister ever since her purple eyes opened and she gave me a reason to live. 

I've loved my mother, and my step-father, and I've loved my father in impossible, painful ways. I've loved my stepmother in her brilliant vulnerabilities, and I am coming to love my second stepmother and her son in their authenticity. I've loved my grandmother and all the ways I fear to tell her my weaknesses. I've loved the way she taught me to hear music and see light through blue glass. 

I loved my grandfather and the way he made me afraid to be anything other than the best version of myself. 

I've loved my country and the idea of equality. The idea of freedom. 

The most quoted phrase from my favorite novels is, "Love as thou wilt." Those few words have taken me from ages fifteen to twenty-eight, and they've taken me from high school crushes to adult relationships fraught with social norms and religious expectations. Jacqueline Carey, in writing a blend of fantasy and romance and historical whimsy, shaped a girl whose only purpose is to love. Love, unconditionally. Painfully, wholly, unreservedly, divinely. 

I don't know how to be, how to do anything else. I just love. 

Our world is massively complex. We've got, in the United States, a battle between liberal and conservative, democrat and republican, middle class and upper class, minimum wage and incredible wealth. We've got the narrative of economic opportunity and hard work and, to put it frankly, capitalist rubbish. We've got poor people and rich people and the people who might be rich and the people who will always be poor. We've got unequal access to education and we have the palliative of religion which makes our inequality easier to swallow. We have meanness, selfishness, guilt, racism, violence, apathy. 

So little of what we have is love. 

When did we lose it?

I woke up early this past Saturday to serve breakfast. My mother and I were setting up yogurt and bagels for a group of teenagers doing a sleepover for the Unitarian Univeralist youth group. We loosened the caps on the orange juice and opened boxes of doughnuts. It was mundane. It was quite early. It was raining. My mother and I sat at a distance from the kids and we talked about faith. 

It's very difficult to believe in anything when the world is this ugly and this divided. It's hard to have faith when the world seems so faithless. 

My mother taught me that God was love. I learned many, many lessons from her - we celebrated Advent, we sang in the bath, we discussed sermons. But she always drilled into me that God was love. Even saying, Amen, was an affirmation of love and compassion and acceptance. If I learned anything about the divine it was that divinity only existed if we approached it with love. 

It's difficult. Sometimes it seems obscene, to love in the face of pain, of agony, of human suffering. How can we say, Amen, when we know the world is full of strife and hatred? How can we do it? 

Again, I turn back to Jacqueline Carey and the words, "Love as thou wilt." Those words imply choice, agency, freedom. And they also imply that love is immutable - not in who or how we choose to love, but that love is. Love is who we are. All we can do is be human, and be loving. The words don't just say, Love. Because we do. Her words say, Love as we choose. Love as we are. Love, freely. 

Somehow, we've forgotten that. 

Love isn't just a marriage, or a religion, or a political party. Love is a way of living. Most of the people I know now aren't bound by the rules of monogamy or gender - and that can be difficult, of course, but it's built on the idea that love is boundless. It is not possessive, or selfish; it is not about ownership or about being right. Love is not a commodity to be traded or valued. It is a gift. 

Imagine if our country worked like that. Just think - we share in this together. We are loving. We are kind. 

Imagine if our faiths were so giving. If all our gods were what they purported to be. 

I've loved every sort of man and every sort of woman. I've loved history lessons and literature. I've swooned over good writing and over unscripted anger. I've got that clenching in my chest which is passion and compassion and platonic affection. I've loved as I have chosen to love, and I have been swept away by surprising glimpses of faith and patriotism. 

I'm not an example. I'm not perfect. I can be selfish. I can we wrong. 

But all I have ever done, all I ever want to do, is to love. Fully, foolishly, alarmingly. 

To give of oneself can be incredibly painful. I think about my conversations with my mother and the fear that faith cannot stand up to the suffering in the world. Where is God when so many people are hurt? Where is faith when we feel alone or when we feel we cannot help others? Where is our patriotism when all we can do is count the dollars in our wallets and realize we just don't have enough? Where, really, is love, when we consider affection to be an item to be traded and priced like an antique on the auction block? 

It hurts. It hurts us to our very core. It is an old pain like an ache in our joints. It is our faith and it is our curse. 

Love as thou wilt. 

I don't know how to do anything but love, and God knows, it hurts sometimes like a dagger to my heart. I've loved too many people and too many times, and I've loved the idea of God, and I've loved the ideals of my country. As much as that has hurt, apathy would hurt more. The concept of turning away love - looking down on my neighbor, or being angry about my tax bill, or degrading a faith other than my own - is far, far more painful than accepting the suffering of caring too much. I could be cold and removed; I could protect myself from compassion; I could pretend my callousness was not a black mark on my soul. 

But I love - I love everything, and I love too completely. And I choose that, again and again. 

It doesn't matter if we are talking about sex or God or country; about possession or righteousness or patriotism; about generosity or respect or the general welfare. At the end of the day we are talking about love. 

Love is a gift. Love is a choice. And love is what we will it to be. 

And as much as it hurts, I can't imagine anything better.