Empire Building

I never used to be able to stand A Prairie Home Companion. I would turn on the radio and there, like a cartoon hound dog with his mouth full of mud, would be the voice of Garrison Keillor, singing some old standard song that he had slightly rewritten the words to or telling some nonsensical rambling story about some mildly dysfunctional couple in Minnesota.

What is this, I would ask myself, quickly changing the channel. And why would anyone listen to it?

Then about a year or two ago, I suddenly became fascinated with the show. I would listen every week, waiting to hear what extremely similar thing would happen. Would a cowboy meet up with his old flame…again? Would a Midwestern expatriate writer have a guilt-ridden phone conversation with his provincial parents…yet again?

Once you embrace the logic of A Prairie Home Companion, it’s easy to get sucked in to the bizarre parallel universe it depicts. The show’s audience seems to love the predictability of it, the comforting if illogical repetition. They laugh hysterically at the same joke about Lutherans every week. They love the twisting personal narrative, often told in the second person (and right about then is when you realize…) that always ends up with the same song about rhubarb pie. They chuckle as Keillor inevitably finds himself romantically attached to a much younger, much more attractive woman, and even on the radio they can tell she’s out of his league. And when the show is over, they can even go on the show’s website if they want to delve more deeply in to this make-believe world where not only are all the children above average, but where the red states are full of old lefties and everyone loves gospel music and spoken word poetry and choirs performing the native folksongs of former Soviet Bloc countries.

Predictability like this brings a certain comfort with it. That’s why people enjoy sitcoms, or watching the same Saturday Night Live characters play out variations on the same gag week after week. The joke ceases to be funny and instead becomes soothing like a lullaby.

That’s how I found this alternate prairie reality, a strangely calming bizzaro-world. Each time I heard that Keillor had written an offensive article in a magazine (why gay people shouldn’t get married; why Jews shouldn’t write Christmas songs), I would go look it up, eager to see what new levels of curmudgeonry he had achieved. And because he existed in a half-reality where it was never clear whether Keillor spoke as himself or some sort of parody of himself, the ridiculous beliefs he espoused were more quaint than upsetting.

The more I read and the more I listened, the more I thought: I want an empire. Not a big, scary, hegemonic empire like Rome or the USSR or McDonald’s. Just a small, self-contained empire with a legion of devoted followers who are willing to celebrate my every bizarre whim as utter genius, to lovingly embrace my foibles, to delight at the same joke for years and decades on end.

I have been admiring a number of these small empires lately, and the one I really want isn’t Garrison Keillor’s, but Dan Savage’s. Like Keillor, the sex-advice columnist and gay rights activist has his own brand of logic and language, including a number of acronyms for concepts that are so fundamental to his reasoning that they require shorthands. A good lover is GGG, “good, giving, and game,” which means that you had better let your boyfriend suck on your toes if he enjoys it, no matter how boring or gross it seems to you. If you don’t, Savage will urge him to DTMFA, “dump the mother fucker already.” These abbreviations are so well-known to Savage’s audience that they often misuse them in incorrect and even disturbing ways, forgetting what they actually stand for:

I love my boyfriend but he’s moving out of the country in two months and we’re going to break up then. Should I stay with him for these last months or DTMFA?

I’m a mother of a twelve-year-old son, and I’m doing my best to raise him in a GGG manner.

As these terms suggest, Savage’s advice and opinions follow certain well-worn paths. Like Keillor’s audience, Savage’s devotees, including myself, know what to expect from him. Yet I read and listen to him with a voracious appetite that speaks to either the comfort of the familiar or perhaps some sort of subliminal brainwashing. And I have come to realize that many people I know are equally brainwashed.

For example, when I visited my sister recently, I started to mention something that Dan Savage had said on his podcast. I started summarizing a phone call that he had taken and responded to.

“To save time,” my sister interrupted me, “you can just assume I’m familiar with every episode of Dan Savage’s podcast.”

Sometimes I wonder if the men who rule the empires I admire ever get sick of them—sick of the routines, the predictable logic, the cute terms and sayings? Does Garrison Keillor ever wake up and think, I don’t ever want to sing that song about rhubarb pie again? Does Dan Savage ever get sick of having to talk about sex every single day? Does Ira Glass ever get sick of saying, And what happened next was truly bizarre, as though this is the first time he has ever narrated a bizarre occurence? As successful as they have been in building up their own recognizable brands and selling them to adoring audiences, do they ever get horribly, nauseatingly sick of themselves?

This is the reason that I would be a horrible emperor, not to mention a horrible CEO, middle-manager, public relations officer, or cheerleader; I would get horribly sick of myself. To be a representative of something, to be an unceasing champion, is a really draining job, one that requires a kind of confidence and perseverance that I don’t have a lot of. This is part of the reason I admire the people who are able to maintain an empire, because I appreciate how grueling it is to be the leader of a cult of personality.

I attend a number of schools that are run by a single person. Each of these schools reflects the vision and energy of its teacher: the flashy muay thai school with the blaring music and assertive display of clothing and equipment for sale; the tidy jiu jitsu school where there are specially designated spots for shoes and water bottles and sweaty students and dry guests; the yoga studio whose bare wooden floors are all business but whose ceiling is decorated with Christmas lights and flying monkey puppets; and the one I relate to most strongly, the kung-fu school treading so lightly in its rented gymnasium that it is only a school when we are practicing there.

Sometimes I see signs that my yoga teacher or my kung fu teacher are tired of their jobs, bored with us, their students, discouraged by the low energy of the class. Perhaps they are not really discouraged at all; perhaps I am projecting onto them the discouragement I feel as a student in a sluggish class, the discouragement I fear they feel because I would feel it in their place.

I know that if my suspicion is correct, if my teacher really is disheartened, bored, uninspired, that he can simply close the school. I have recurrent dreams that my kung fu teacher announces at the end of class one day that he is closing the school. I suppose this isn’t such an unreasonable fear, given that I joined his school after my previous kickboxing teacher closed his school in just that way, except he didn’t wait until the end of class: “This will be the last day,” he said casually, as his students jumped rope to warm up. “I’m cancelling the class. But go ahead and work out on your own today. See you later.” And he walked out the door.

This is the danger of a monarchy: it ceases to exist without the monarch. My uneasiness with devoting myself to a single school that could disappear at any moment must have something to do with why I feel more comfortable with a diversified portfolio of schools, even though my heart is fully invested in one of them.

But more, noting the empires created by my teachers, I often think: I am really glad I don’t have that power or that responsibility. I am a teacher, too. But I could quit my job tomorrow and my school would keep on going without me, just as they did before they ever knew I existed, unaware of me being born thousands of miles away the same year they were being founded, and just as they will after I retire and presumably long after I die.

If the only thing keeping the school alive was my own faith in it—if it ran on my energy alone—I don’t know if I could keep it open. Would I have given up during one of those semesters when all my students were disgruntled and bitter and I wondered what business I had being in charge of them? Would I persevere through those times? Or would I decide the entire enterprise was futile and go find some other way to spend half my waking hours?

Every time I walk into a class and my teacher is still there, I know he could have decided not to be, and I am grateful. My teachers might not be able to imagine how grateful, just as I often imagine my students would hardly notice if I were replaced with some other teacher or a t.v. screen or a robot. And I’m also grateful that, nice as an empire sounds sometimes, I have the security and freedom of not having to be an emperor.

Verbal Jiu-Jitsu

“Are you challenging me to a fight?”

The statement above is an official sample of verbal jiu-jitsu, as sanctioned and promoted by the Gracie Brazilian jiu-jitsu empire. In their Bullyproof instructional video, Ryron and Rener Gracie explain how kids can use the principles of Brazilian jiu-jitsu to stand up to bullies. Their program emphasizes respect, self-discipline and restraint, and the avoidance of physical force. Verbal jiu-jitsu is one tool a child can use to assert dominance over the bully without getting into a fight.

This question was not what I had expected from the “verbal jiu-jitsu” section of the curriculum. I had anticipated a statement that would allow the child to stand up for himself—something like, “I am not going to do what you tell me to”— not an invitation for the bully to take a swing at him.

The Gracies explain that this is a strategic question that might produce several outcomes. The bully might answer in the negative, in which case he or she has effectively backed down and can’t continue harassing the child (according to the Gracies, although I envisioned alternate scenarios, like, “No, I’m just going to carry on making your life a living hell, if that’s okay with you”). Or the bully might answer in the positive, in which case he or she will have to make the first move in the fight, at which point the child is justified in defending him or herself. That’s when the physical jiu-jitsu comes into play.

In this way the question truly does mimic Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which anticipates a range of outcomes and responses in reaction to any single move. A jiu-jitsu lesson often sounds something like: You will pull on your opponent’s right arm with your left arm. If he steps his left foot forward, you will put your right foot behind his knee. If he kicks his leg back for balance, you will put your foot behind his opposite ankle. If he falls to the side, follow him and take his back.

So I suppose the question about whether the bully is actually looking for a fight is a good example of verbal jiu-jitsu. Rather than waiting passively and without a strategy, the child asks a question that could provoke several predictable reactions, and then prepares for each possibility.

Whenever I hear the term verbal jiu-jitsu, I wonder to what degree it is possible, or advisable, to view a verbal interaction as a martial art. On the one hand, we often face situations where we are trying to use language to achieve some end, to gain power over a situation or get something we want, and strategic use of language could help us do that. On the other hand, all dialogue can be seen as trying to get our own interests met; so how do we know when to call off the battle and just talk?

Most of the time that I hear the term—and I hear it a lot, mostly on NPR—it seems to refer to a use of language that is misleading or tricky, either in a positive way. A common statement like, He is a master of verbal jiu-jitsu, might be a compliment or an insult.

When I hear the use of the term to mean trickery, I often wonder what the speaker thinks jiu-jitsu is. The word jiu-jitsu means “the way of yielding,” which refers to using an opponent’s force against him, usually to trap him into a technique that causes pain and damage without much force, such as a joint lock or choke.

I imagine that the concept of verbal jiu-jitsu came from someone who actually knew what jiu-jitsu entailed, someone who observed similar uses of deflection and submission in language. But now, the concept of jiu-jitsu is as blurry as the line we are toeing—or is it towing?—in that other dying metaphor. It reminds me of a recent complaint, sent in by an NPR listener, about the use of the word kabuki to refer to something that is a sham, a performance that is just for show. These Japanese terms may lend an air of worldliness to our critiques of our own culture, but not if we don’t know what the words actually mean.

Occasionally, though, I see verbal jiu-jitsu used to mean something related to the actual principles of jiu-jitsu. One good example is from a website critiquing an exchange between President Barack Obama and Senator John McCain:

MCCAIN: I would just make one comment. Why in the world, then, would we carve out 800,000 people in Florida that would not be—have their Medicare Advantage cut? Now, I proposed an amendment on the floor to say everybody would be treated the same. Mr. President, why should we carve out 800,000 people because they live in Florida to keep the Medicare Advantage program, and then want to do away with it?

OBAMA: I think you make a legitimate point.

MCCAIN: Well, maybe….

OBAMA: I think you do.

MCCAIN: Thank you very much.

Despite some typos and spelling errors on the website, the person who called this verbal jiu-jitsu was actually working with an idea of dialogue as a martial art. He writes, “When Obama does not meet rhetorical force with force of his own McCain quite simply does not know what to do next and so he just stops.”

In other words, Obama is using the force of McCain’s attack against him. McCain expects a disagreement, and when he is confronted instead with an agreement, he rotely disagrees with it, which leads him to disagree with his own initial statement: “Well, maybe [I make a legitimate point],” he says. This reflects a classic martial arts principle: if your opponent pushes, you should pull; if he pulls, you should push. McCain pushed Obama, expecting him to push back—when Obama pulled instead, McCain lost his balance and fell on his face.

One other place this metaphor gets fully teased out is in a Wall Street Journal interview with David Mamet. The article’s title, “Mamet’s Jiu-Jitsu Isn’t Just Verbal,” refers to the playwright and filmmaker’s six years studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which was the topic of his movie Redbelt.

In contrast to its title, the article spends quite a bit of time explaining how Mamet’s jiu-jitsu is verbal. Most obviously, as a playwright, he is known for his obsessive focus on the slipperiness and trickiness of language.

In the article, Mamet explains how he applies lessons from jiu-jitsu to conflicts in his regular life. For example, when Mamet was betrayed by a friend, he asked his teachers how he should handle the situation.

"My teacher Renato, of course, came back with 'Don't carry someone else's weight. Let him carry the weight; let it come back to haunt him.' This is one of the central tenets of jiu-jitsu. When you carry the other person's mass you tire yourself and so lose your ability to think clearly. That was the group's way of telling me to let the situation go, to walk away—which I did."

But when Mamet uses so-called verbal jiu-jitsu on the interviewer, he really just gives obnoxious, evasive answers to the interviewer’s questions. When the interviewer asks how Redbelt relates to Mamet’s other work, Mamet responds, “It’s later.” When the interviewer asks if there are differences between the use of language in this film from his earlier ones, Mamet responds, “None.”

The interviewer considers these deflections—which many people would just call rude—to be linguistic martial arts moves: “Mr. Mamet proved as slippery as a well-oiled grappler,” he writes, in preface to this section of the article.

This made me wonder, when we think we are being martial artists with our speech, how often are we just being rude and obnoxious?

Like Mamet, and perhaps like most people who study martial arts, I have tried at times to apply these arts to verbal interactions. I sometimes feel a thrill of power as I sit through a heated debate at a meeting at work and keep myself from engaging in the pointless bashing of conflicting ideas against one another. I sink into a kind of meditation, waiting until all of their respective punches have been thrown. Then, if there is still time, and if I think I have anything productive to add that will help resolve the problem, I will say it. If not, I don’t waste my energy countering force with force.

I know this strategy is working because it’s had the unfortunate side effect of getting me dragged to a lot of meetings—I’ve been told that I am seen as a good mediator. However, I am often also told that I freak people out when I am sitting, blank-faced and disengaged, waiting for the arguers to wear themselves out. Which makes me wonder—am I like Mamet? When I practice the martial art of discussion, am I being strategic, or am I just being an asshole?

Ultimately, the idea of showing off one’s clever wrestling moves in conversation is misguided. With the exception of some boxers and professional fighters, who like to use talk to bolster their confidence, real martial artists don’t talk a lot. They listen, and they speak selectively. That’s the real verbal jiu-jitsu, knowing when you need to assert your views and when you don’t. I’m not always so good at it, but I’m learning.

Roads

Every morning, I drive on the 580 freeway thirty miles southeast to my workplace in Livermore. I spend at least an hour every day on this freeway—speeding past all sorts of plants and walls and dead animals and garbage and cityscapes and views of the bay that I could barely begin to describe, if I’ve noticed them at all. The freeways are a bizarre no-man’s land, somewhere we go every day, but not anywhere that we think of as a place. In fact, we do all we can to pretend the giant roads don’t exist, building high walls to shelter our neighborhoods from their noise and dirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freeways lately. Like approximately twenty percent of people I know, I recently read Cormack McCarthy’s novel The Road. In case you’re one of the other eighty percent, The Road follows the story of a father and his young son as they navigate the perils of a post-apocalyptic world where almost all living creatures have died in some unnamed disaster. The father and son travel by foot down a state highway, pursuing the bleak hope that conditions will be better further south and closer to a coast.

Lots of stories use roads as symbols. In the hero’s journey, the structure described by Joseph Campbell that underlies legends and adventure stories from around the world, the road of trials is the central part of the story, the series of mystical challenges that the hero must overcome.

George Lakoff’s theory of conceptual metaphors helps explain why roads are found in so many narratives. Lakoff points out that almost any event that follows a progression can be symbolized as a journey. People tend to talk about their lives, their romantic relationships, their education, and their careers as journeys. And the metaphor, or perhaps the metonym, for a journey is often the path that it follows, the road itself. So if I ask you how things are going with your significant other, you might say:

We’re at a crossroads.
It’s been bumpy.
We’re encountering obstacles.
We’ve reached a dead end.

This metaphor of road as progress explains why so many stories center on roads. The road becomes a manifestation of the forward movement of the plot. Dorothy follows the yellow brick road as it leads her to every character and obstacle she is destined to encounter; and when she gets to the end of the road, the story reaches its climax. In fact, we might see the road as a symbol for narrative itself.

Roads are such a fundamental part of so many stories that they tend to become invisible, just like the actual freeways we hide out of sight. But the road in McCarthy’s novel is something different. It isn’t just a pathway for the stories and the characters to follow. It’s a thing. The characters walk along it, but they also sleep on it. They kick ash out of it, and climb over dead tree limbs and abandoned vehicles that litter it.

It reminds me of another novel, Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, which also depicts a journey down a road that has been largely abandoned by a fallen civilization. The two novels share a fascination with how one might use roads after the cars that they were built for are gone, along with all that went with those cars: the anonymity, the safe distance from one’s fellow travelers, the orderly rules. It is jarring to see a freeway as a place where people might walk, eat, sleep, fight, all the things that people usually do at their destinations, not on the roads that take us there.

Since the characters are not flying down the road at seventy miles per hour, readers can see it for what it really is: one of the last, most enduring signifiers of what it means to live in a society. Even after society has crumbled, the roads remain, providing an open path for travel and a promise that they will lead to a destination. When everything around has fallen into chaos and there is no promise of the food, shelter, protection that a society affords, the roads still provide a service, a trusted path, so that travelers don’t need to worry about navigating their journey.

Roads signify civilization because they assert mankind’s dominance over the mystery and disorderliness of nature. They take an uncharted territory and impose human ideas of logic and organization onto it. The Roman Empire was famous for its use of roads to signify their imperial, “civilizing” power. The roads reflected the logic of the empire, all of them leading from Rome to a conquered territory.

In America, roads symbolize social welfare and democracy. They are one amenity that Americans across the political spectrum can agree our government should provide. Conservatives want to limit government’s role in providing education or health care, but no one argues that we should privatize the roads. Roads are for everyone, the ultimate public service, shared equitably by rich and poor alike. Of course, roads in rich areas are better maintained than roads in poor areas, and poor people are often harassed when they drive on roads in affluent neighborhoods. That’s why freeways are the ultimate symbol of democracy, the connectors between places, taking us out of our own neighborhoods and cities and states and into any other place we wish to go.

During recent debates about nationalized health care, Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey wrote, “A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. That's because there isn't any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

I thought at the time: we don’t have a right to a lot of things. There is no constitutional right to public education, or transportation, or a fire department, or police or military protection, or roads. But I’m really glad we have all of those things, since they connect us to one another and shape us into a community.

Being Aggressive

A girl comes flying in at me, her arms whirling like a pinwheel, throwing punches and kicks all at the same time, a writhing ball of fury and rage.

What did I do to this girl again? I search my mind for some past offense. Did I make fun of her poor arithmetic skills back in fifth grade? Or did I unwittingly erect a shopping mall on top of her ancestral homeland? Did she think I was flirting with her boyfriend? Because I definitely wasn’t, but you know how some girls get. Or maybe she overheard me making a dismissive comment about her pink boxing gloves…

Oh right—this girl wants to beat me up because we are in a kickboxing tournament. So I suppose that’s her job. Come to think of it, wanting to beat her up is my job, too.

Why did I want this job again?

In the moments before this fight, I thought: I am going to lose, and I don’t care at all. Actually, that sentiment might be backwards. What I was really thinking was, I don’t care at all, and so I am going to lose.

I knew that’s a bad way to think, so I began saying a mantra to myself: Want to win, want to win. It wasn’t a statement but a command. You need to want to win.

I felt like I was faking wanting to win through the entire fight. I knew that body kicks were supposed to score the most points, so I thought, You want to win, so throw more body kicks. I made sure that every time my opponent threw any punch or kick, I would throw one or two body kicks in return.

That should be enough to win this thing, I thought, counting up the kicks. Because I want to win.

But this girl wasn’t counting her kicks. I’m not sure what she was thinking, actually. She was flying around so quickly that she never planted enough to hit me with anything that hurt at all. So I don’t know if she was really trying to hurt me—if that were her goal, she probably could have done it. (And I don't say that to dismiss her abilities, because I wasn't trying to hurt her, either). But she definitely wanted to win, wanted it with all her being; every movement manifested desire to dominate, to aggress, to be the best, to be on top.

This desire for dominance is perhaps something I just don’t have in me. I love “friendly” sparring, with my friends or with strangers. I love seeing if I can keep up with an opponent, seeing if I can withstand whatever that opponent throws at me, figuring out ways to trick that opponent into opening himself--or occasionally herself--up for a kick or punch.

I don’t know if those feelings will ever translate into me being a good competitor. I do get angry and competitive when I spar sometimes, usually when I feel like someone is hurting me. That never happened during my fight. I never felt scared, hurt, attacked, all the things I am used to feeling during my regular sparring with people who are bigger and stronger than me. I felt more annoyed, irritated, like being poked over and over by an annoying twelve-year-old playmate.

I had anticipated that once something hurt, my desire to hurt my opponent back would kick in. That’s what fighters always tell you: You think you don’t want to throw hard punches at this person, until he starts throwing hard punches at you.

I have experienced this enough times in my training, times when I was terrified, when I felt, with good reason, that someone was trying to hurt me. The thought that always comes into my head at these moments is: I am going to fucking kill you.

I've always thought I would be scared of my competitor in a tournament, and always expected that this desire to kill would be a central feature of any competition I did, for better or for worse. But that self-defensive rage never kicked in during my fight against this 106 pound ball of antagonism. I mean really, can’t we settle this in some more civilized manner? Why am I fighting you again? I felt completely calm, logical, aloof. That’s actually how I had wanted to feel, and I had worked very hard on being calm and collected as I approached the tournament. Unfortunately, being calm and collected may not actually be the best way to goad oneself into an irrational fury.

The worst part about my want to win mantra is that I then did feel angry and upset when I lost. But I was counting, I thought, indignantly. I threw like a million body kicks! If I just needed to look more aggressive to win, I wouldn’t have bothered throwing all those kicks.

Being disappointed that you lost is the most horrible part of not wanting to win enough, because then your not wanting to win seems like the most pitiful sort of sour grapes: well, I didn’t want to win anyway. So really, I am not sure if I did or didn’t. But I do know what I thought as I watched my opponent jumping up and down before each round began, barely able to contain herself, as I stood waiting quietly: Whatever she’s feeling over there that’s making her act that way, I can’t imagine feeling like that.

One of my teachers told me that I needed to do at least one more competition. “You need to do one more so that you can win,” he said.

“I won’t win,” I said. “If I’m doing it just to win, I’ll lose, and then I’ll have to keep doing them and it will just make me lose more and more.”

“Don’t think like that!” he chastised me.

But it’s true, or at least I can’t see any other truth at the moment. I know this is not a particularly objective or logical moment, a week after this fight, when I am trying to process what it meant and how to think about it. And I know that these conflicting feelings are part of the point of competing, that it is supposed to teach us deep lessons about who we are and what our place in the world is. Right now, I feel my place in the world is not in a competition or a performance, not testing myself in some formalized public way, or that if I do so, it’s only for what I got from this, which was some really helpful video footage that I can study to improve my sparring. Right now, I feel that I will always lose, because I just can’t imagine wanting to win enough to make it happen.

One of my favorite things I got from this fight are the photographs my friend Amy took of me, with perfect lighting for drawing. And yes, I did this one myself, with heavy coaching from Adam. I have been working on my coachability.

Woman as Sexual Dictator

So few women recognize the power that they hold over men. If women only realized how badly men wanted them, they would use their sexuality to get whatever they want.

A particular country-inflected pop star has been in the news as often for the fluctuations in her weight as for her musical successes. She was the darling of the entertainment magazines when she lost about ten pounds off of her already slim figure in order to have the tightest possible buttocks for a role in a movie that required her to wear tiny shorts. She was then chastised heartily by the same magazines when, several years later, she gained over ten pounds, bringing her five-foot three-inch frame from a svelte 110 pounds to a “chubby” 124 pounds.

She eventually lost that weight, but then recently made the cover of virtually every major entertainment magazine because, at a recent performance, she looked to have gained about twenty pounds. All of the photographs on the magazines were from the same single performance, as though she had only gained the weight for that one day. Now she has lost much of that weight, although one magazine recently noted that she was so distraught of the unexpected death of her dog that she had “stopped losing weight.”

Of course, by regular-people standards, this woman has never been close to overweight. Her low weight of 110 pounds, according to the body mass index (which is just a fancy name for a height/weight ratio), was at the low end of the “normal” range, while her gained-twenty-pounds weight of 135 puts her at 23, near the top of that normal range.

And BMI aside (it’s a poor judge of healthy weight at any rate), in the normal world, a 135-pound, five-foot-three-inch woman is what we would consider average.

I think of this woman, of her rise to hotness glory and her fall from hotness grace, whenever I hear people say that women have a deep, untapped source of power stemming from the fact that men want to have sex with them.

I’ve heard tell of this mystical power for as long as I can remember. I raged over it in my teenaged journals: this power that isn’t power at all, the power not to do something but of somebody wanting to do something to you, power that can turn on you at any moment and leave you ugly, undesirable and humiliated.

Now with more perspective, I’m still skeptical about my potential ability to lord despotically over men based on my chromosomes and anatomy.

As power goes, it’s a backwards sort of power, in the sense that it is conferred by the person who is supposed to be the subject of that power. When a dictator takes power over a nation, he does not need the approval of the people that he will lord over. If a Mafioso has the power to kill you and your family if you don’t seat him at the table he wants at your restaurant, your decision that this power is not real or valid will not change the reality of the situation.

So I suppose that sexual power is more like a democracy, where power is given willingly and can be taken away at will also. In a democracy, a leader must cater to the wishes and whims of his constituents, and that changes the kind of power that he has, which is why we more often call it service than power.

Likewise, the woman who wants to use her sexuality as power must cater to the whims of the men she seeks to dominate, in this case, maintaining her sexual desirability, which often lies in inverse proportion to her domineering nature. So for example, if a girlfriend wants to use her sexual power to make her boyfriend clean the apartment once in a while, he may just decide to cast his vote for a new challenger in place of the incumbent.

If a woman wants to wield her sexuality as power, and you decide that you don’t want to have sex with her to start with, her power is gone, instantly, and she is disgraced. Take the example of the famous pop star. As long as she weighs 110 pounds and wears tiny shorts, she is at the pinnacle of feminine power. But when she weighs 135 pounds and wears an unfortunate pair of unflattering jeans, she is humiliated, a laughing stock, she has let herself go, despite the fact that she is considerably slimmer than the average American woman.

When people talk about women’s sexual power, they are fantasizing that women could have dictator-like power over men, when in fact, at the very best, she is more like a civil servant.

This myth of woman as sexual dictator comes from the fantasy that male desire could be bottled and put to some use. I imagine the thought process, at least for men, goes something like this:

I am soooo attracted to Woman X and Woman Y and Woman Z. I don’t think those women could have any idea how much I desire them. But if they knew, they could use it against me in some way. And I wouldn’t even mind, because it would be erotically thrilling to have my desire used against me.

But of course, the power of Woman X, Woman Y, and Woman Z only comes from the fact that this fellow, Man XY, cannot be with them. The moment Woman X became the lover of Man XY, Woman Y and Woman Z’s power would skyrocket.

Not to mention Woman Q, who has been admiring man XY for years, but is not his type. She has no power over Man XY at all. Which is too bad, because she’s the only one who really wants it.

It reminds me of a scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Before Paul D. has sex with Sethe, he finds the web of scars on her back to be irresistibly compelling—a living, breathing tree growing on her back, calling to him with its powerful life force. But as soon as he has sex with her, it devolves into a grotesque, seething injury.

So as compelled as we are by the myth of the all-powerful pussy, this power is as ephemeral and undefined as the power of the British royalty, as unwieldy a weapon as those F-22 stealth jets whose production was halted because they couldn’t fly well in the rain. It is cotton-candy power, sweet and tempting until you put it in your mouth, at which point it disappears.

The Presidents

“I wanted a less prestigious job with a lower salary,” said the man on the radio.

He had left his job as a politician to become a pediatric nurse. He would be interviewed on a show coming up later tonight; this was just a promotional sound-bite.

“But seriously, he loves his new job,” said the radio announcer.

I was surprised, because I had assumed his comment was serious. Was it really so absurd that someone would want to escape the pressures of a prestigious, high-paying job? Wouldn’t lots of people want to switch to something with less stress, less responsibility, even less money? What about CEOs, movie stars, politicians? What about the president?

I have watched a number of people attempt to become president of a number of things during the last few years. The process that it takes to become a president would itself be enough to make most people wish for a less-prestigious and lower-paying position.

There was, of course, the race to become president of the United States. Lots of people wanted that job; they raised millions of dollars, campaigned day and night, hired speech writers and campaign managers to craft elaborate strategies for outsmarting the other people who also wanted to be president. This president was chosen democratically, and almost every adult citizen of the country was allowed to cast a vote for his or her choice. So the people who wanted to be president needed to try to please large numbers of citizens.

There was also the selection of the president of my college. While the people who wanted this job did not have to raise money or hire helpers to design their campaigns, they did go to great lengths to try to get the job. One flew all the way from Chicago to interview; another gave a speech to representatives of the entire college despite the fact that she had broken her leg the evening before. She must have really wanted the job.

This process gave the impression of some democratic overtones, in that members of the campus community got to submit their opinions about the job finalists. These opinions were passed on to the board of our college, who were free to read them, consider them, and then choose whichever candidate they wanted. The candidates’ job was to please the campus community but to please the board even more.

One other race that followed a democratic model was for the presidency of the college’s academic senate (which is like student government for teachers). All the teachers at my school had the opportunity to vote. The democratic integrity of this process was marred, however, by the fact that only one candidate chose to run, and only after some fairly intense coercion.

This last presidential election was the only one I could really relate to. I can’t imagine myself attempting to become president of anything—the country, a college, the campus book club—except under some pretty serious duress. I definitely wouldn’t be running against anybody, because if someone else wants the job, by all means, she can have it.

Sometimes I try to imagine wanting to be a president. It’s a stressful job, certainly. The president of my college needs to make crucial decisions about our budget and policies. She knows she will often face criticism for those decisions, and if her decisions aren’t good, she could damage or destroy the entire school. That seems pretty stressful.

On top of that, there is the stress of having to be the face and voice of the college. I don’t really feel that I represent my job when I am not there, at least not in an active way. If I decide to spend the weekends wandering around the local mall in ripped-up sweatpants, no one will say, “I can’t believe an English teacher from Las Pecinas College walks around dressed like a slob!” I am allowed to make negative comments about my school, if I so choose, without violating the specifications of my job description. But being the president of a college is a twenty-four-hour job. No matter what the president is doing, whether walking her dog or shopping at the store or, say, visiting a strip club, as long as she is publically viewable, she represents our college and is expected to act accordingly, which means that she should avoid strip clubs if she wants to be seen as doing her job properly.

Why would somebody want this job, I wondered, as I watched the candidates giving their speeches to the college. Sure, it pays a lot more than my job, but I don’t see that the added responsibility is worth the money. I would opt for the lower-paying, less-prestigious job any day.

Now imagine being president of this entire country. Think of all the things you could never be caught doing: making an insulting or critical comment about your own country. Making an off-color joke, an insensitive remark. Spacing out and forgetting what you were talking about mid-sentence. Forgetting the name of a country. Farting in public. Playing air guitar. Getting drunker than you meant to. Making obscene hand gestures. Buying pornography. Going to a sex shop or a swingers’ party, even with your spouse.

It’s like being a celebrity, except you make less money and are expected to maintain your dignity all the time.

Because I don’t want to be president—of my country, my college, my academic senate—I really appreciate those who are willing to do those jobs. I guess I think of them sort of like the person who cleans the toilets; it’s a dirty job, and I’m really glad somebody is doing it.