At fifteen, I had fallen in love with punk rock when it was first appearing on the U.S. scene. It gave form and voice to my own fury and explosive energy, in lyrics about defiance and indignation, in music that thumped and galloped. It was at first, in the late 1970s, music for outsiders and the participants were mostly scrawny, idealistic, experimental. Early slam dancing was people harmlessly bouncing into and off each other. Then the nerds were shoved aside for the jocks as a bunch of burly Southern California men’s bands came to dominate what had morphed into hardcore or thrash, and the front of the concert halls and clubs became a gladiatorial arena dominated by strong young men and the occasional woman who would knock you down and trample you if you couldn’t hold your own. It came to seem like another place I didn’t really belong.
But for a while, it spoke for me and to me and through me, and one day late in my teens I walked down the street chanting that song from John Cale’s most punk-influenced album. It was as though I had a choice between being fearless and powerful or being myself and I had no map for where those two things might intersect. They seemed like parallel lines that would run alongside each other forever.
2
Where do you stand? Where do you belong? Those are often questions about political stances or values, but sometimes the question is personal: Do you feel like you have ground to stand on? Is your existence justified in your own eyes, enough that you don’t have to retreat or attack? Do you have a right to be there, to participate, to take up space in the world, the room, the conversation, the historical record, the decision-making bodies, to have needs, wants, rights? Do you feel obliged to justify or apologize or excuse yourself to others? Do you fear the ground being pulled out from under you, the door slammed in your face? Do you not stake a claim to begin with, because you’ve already been defeated or expect to be if you show up? Can you state what you want or need without its being regarded, by yourself or those you address, as aggression or imposition?
What does it mean neither to advance, like a soldier waging a war, nor to retreat? What would it be like to feel that you have that right to be there, when there is nothing more or less than the space you inhabit? What does it mean to own some space and feel that it’s yours all the way down to your deepest reflexes and emotions? What does it mean to not live in wartime, to not have to be ready for war?
Some of it comes from your position in society, and all the usual factors of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and more that come into play, some from a quality for which confidence is too glib a word. Perhaps conviction or faith is better. Faith in yourself and your rights. Faith in your own versions and truth and in your own responses and needs. Faith that where you stand is your place. Faith that you matter. Those people who have it in full seem rare to me, and clear in a way the rest of us aren’t; they know who and where they are, how and when to respond, what they do and don’t owe others. Neither retreating nor attacking, they reside in a place that doesn’t exist for the rest of us, and it’s not where the overconfident who take up too much space and take space away from others reside.
Perhaps I will always live in questions more than answers. What’s yours? Where are you welcome, allowed? How much room is there for you; where do you get cut off, on the street or in the profession or the conversation? All our struggles can be imagined as turf battles, to defend or annex territory, and we can understand the differences between us as being, among other things, about how much space we are allowed or denied, to speak, to participate, to roam, to create, to define, to win.
One of the struggles I was engaged in when I was young was about whether the territory of my own body was under my jurisdiction or somebody else’s, anybody else’s, everybody else’s, whether I controlled its borders, whether it would be subject to hostile invasions, whether I was in charge of myself. What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body, and that her rights and jurisdiction do not cover even that territory that is herself? Those altercations on the street were about men asserting their sovereignty over me, asserting I was a subject nation. I tried to survive all that by being an unnoticeable nation, a shrinking nation, a stealth nation.
At the same time, I was toiling to appear by becoming a writer, to lay claim to having something to say, to deserve participation in the conversation that was culture, to have a voice, and that meant other contests in other territories. Those came a little after the years when menace on the street wracked me with fear and tension. And I was trying to have a life, including a love life, which meant appearing, attracting, being attracted, and sometimes I enjoyed men, enjoyed my body, my appearance, my time in public. But the war made it all more complicated.
Conversations are another territory where questions arise about who may take up space, who is interrupted or harassed into silence, that condition of occupying no verbal space. At its best, a conversation is a joy and a collaborative construction, building an idea, an insight, sharing experiences; at its worst it’s a battle for territory, and most women have experiences of being pushed out one way or another, or not let in in the first place, or being assumed not to be qualified to participate. Eventually that would become one of my subjects.
3
Sometimes having a body seemed to be the problem, having a body that exposed me to danger and potential harm and also to shame and shortcomings and the problems of how to connect and how to fit in, whatever that meant, whatever feeling I imagined people who were confident about their bodies and their movements and their memberships felt. Having a body of my gender was a vulnerability and shame so vast that I still find myself casting about for defenses, for versions of that armor I dreamed of in my twenties.
I was convinced that my body was a failure. It was a tall, thin, white body, which is supposed to be the best thing to be in terms of how the culture as a whole values and rates female bodies. But I saw my own version of this as a catalogue of wrongnesses and failures and confirmed and potential shame. The rules about women’s bodies were exacting, and you could always measure your distance from the ideal, even if it was not a great distance. And even if you got over your imperfections of form, the realities of biology, of bodily functions and fluids, were always at odds with the feminine ideal, and a host of products and jokes and sneers reminded you of that. Perhaps it’s that a woman exists in a perpetual state of wrongness, and the only way to triumph is to refuse the terms by which this is so.
No one is ever beautiful enough, and everyone is free to judge you. In her memoir Under My Skin, Doris Lessing describes how, when she was a young woman at a dance, a middle-aged stranger told her that she had an almost perfect body but one breast was a third of an inch too high or too low—I can’t remember which, just that a stranger thought her body was under his jurisdiction and announced what must have been a wholly imaginary fault to demonstrate his right and capacity to render judgment and her subjection to it.
Men were always telling me what to do and be; once in my emaciated youth I was walking through North Beach eating a pastry from one of the Italian bakeries when a portly middle-aged man chastised me for eating it because I should be watching my weight. Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.