Tantrums

I love a good tantrum. There are few things I find so adorable or intriguing than a two-year-old child standing in a line somewhere, at a grocery store or a bank, flying into a screaming, quivering mess of rage. This scene rates up there with a robin lovingly placing a twig into a nest or a spider methodically immobilizing a fruit-fly or a seven-pound Chihuahua trying to pick a fight with an indifferent golden retriever.

It’s one of those moments when we witness nature in all of its beautiful, brutal illogic, and we can really enjoy it because we are only, in this moment, spectators, no more responsible for quieting this unknown child than we are for rescuing a fly from a spider.

Childless people aren’t supposed to think that tantrums are cute. I’ve seen my friends bristle. Can’t they control their child, they sneer? I’d be happy to discipline your son for you, ma’am.

I think I might feel similar annoyance if it were my child, or some child I was responsible for, who was disturbing everyone’s tranquil day at the bank. But if it’s not my job to make the child be quiet, I can really enjoy the beauty of the tantrum, a display of unchecked emotion the likes of which adults pay good money to see in melodramatic tearjerker films and action movies, because we so rarely get to see such a thing in our normal adult lives, and when we do it’s usually not pleasant.

Bored, tired, hungry two-year-olds don’t just cry. They wail. They sob until they shake and hiccup. Their faces crumple in utter, inconsolable anguish.

As adults, the only time we cry like that is when somebody dies or when we have our hearts very badly broken. We never allow ourselves to wail in agony simply because we are tired, because we are hungry, because we feel needs beyond what is possible or plausible or even rational. We tell ourselves that such behavior is self-pitying, self-indulgent, babyish.

I used to have a rule, when I was a teenager, that I was not allowed to cry. It was a rule that I broke a lot at first, but with practice, I got pretty good at complying. I associated crying with self-pity, and I felt that it was very important not to ever feel sorry for myself. Self-pity was a foolish, self-indulgent, wasted emotion. Crying was a sign of weakness and defeat.

As an adult, self-pity has become one of my favorite emotions. I find it sweet and nostalgic, like looking at old photographs of that teenager who was so determined never to feel the emotion that has now ironically come to be equated with her.

Perhaps my love of self-pity comes from the fact that, the older I get, the more convinced I am that my emotions come from my body. You can’t really stop yourself from feeling angry when you are treated unjustly, even if you know your anger is counterproductive, or from grieving when someone dies, even if you know it was the right time for them to go, or from falling in love, even when you know it’s a bad idea. The more I pay attention to it, the more self-pity seems to spring from that same carnal, physical place, that same cocktail of chemicals in the brain and blood. When I notice it, it tends to be a good sign, an effect of pushing myself and of feeling things fully.

For example, when I am working out, self-pity is a sign that I am training hard enough, just to the edge of running myself completely into the ground. I stumble into my kickboxing class, exhausted from the other kickboxing class and the running and weightlifting that I just did, and I think, a thought that is not expressed in words but in some more primal, pre-verbal language: I can’t. I catch clichéd, melodramatic phrases floating through my head, like Morrissey lyrics playing in the back of my brain: Why do I have to do this? Why is my life so hard? I’m so, so tired. I don't think it's possible to be this tired.

Once I become aware of these thoughts, I smile in pleasure. They are like old friends, and I know it’s a privilege to get to be pushed to the place where I feel those things. Their illogic is part of their beauty, because our emotions are so often illogical, and that is what makes us bodies and not just minds. It’s only when we try to align our emotions with logic that we evoke all the bad connotations of self-pity: self-centeredness, self-righteousness, lack of generosity, blame. To enjoy self-pity, we need to accept that we have bodies and emotions that make us feel bad sometimes, and that there is no one at fault for those bad feelings; they’re just a crappy part of being alive.

I had lunch a while ago with my friend Samantha and her two-year-old son. He told her that he didn’t want to eat anything. She ordered him some fruit and yogurt, telling him that if he didn’t want to eat it, she and I would.

When the food came, Sunny sat staring at his beautiful bowl of creamy yogurt and plump, ripe berries.

“Are you going to eat any?” Samantha asked him after twenty minutes had passed and he still had not touched his food.

“No!” he said, shaking his head decisively.

“Not even one little bite?” Samantha asked, holding a tantalizing red raspberry under his nose.

He clamped his mouth tight and shook his head again.

“If you don’t want any, we’re going to eat it,” said Samantha. “Karin, do you want some fruit?”

I grabbed a giant blackberry out of the bowl and put it in my mouth. “Mmm, yummy,” I said, trying to persuade Sunny to share my enthusiasm.

Instead, his face erupted into a rictus of utter despair. Like thunder following lightning, it took just a moment for the uncontrollable sobbing to break.

“What’s wrong?” Samantha asked him, seeming honestly perplexed, as the couple behind her turned to stare. “Why are you crying?”

Sunny was weeping so forcefully that he could barely talk. “Because…now…I can’t have it all!” he wailed.

This illogic is what makes tantrums so beautiful. They express some fundamental part of the human condition, pure want, pure dissatisfaction. When I see children screaming in a store, often their parents aren’t even trying to reason with them or appease them or punish them, because the tantrum has taken on a life of its own, disconnected from its original cause. They aren’t crying because Mom won’t buy them a stuffed animal or a candy bar, or because they have to stand in a boring line instead of going to the park right now. They are crying because the void of want is so vast and gaping that it is impossible to fill. Two-year-olds are realizing, for the first time, that once we get to the point of lamenting that void, it is too late to fill it, and all that is left to do is scream.

Lesbian Envy

Staring out the window of the coffee shop on Piedmont avenue in Oakland, I can’t help but notice the prevalence of what seems to me to be the predominant cultural group in a town known for its diversity: lesbians. They flood the sidewalks, walking purposefully or browsing casually, carrying book bags and wheeling baby carriages, drinking coffee, laughing, hugging and holding hands.

The lesbians are easy to spot, because they are the most stylish women on the street. Their clothes fit well, move comfortably over their bodies as they walk. Their haircuts are jaunty and well-kept-up and purposely asymmetrical. Their sneakers are ironic. Everyone admires their good looks as they pass by.

Or maybe it’s just me. I’m always jealous of the lesbians, especially the couples, in a way that I am not jealous of the many equivalent heterosexual couples passing by. When I see a man and a woman pushing a stroller down the street, I think, He’s restless, she’s bored, they love the baby but are also stressed out by him. I know logically that the lesbian couples must face the same realities and challenges of couplehood and parenthood. But somehow I imagine that, because these relationships do not represent the societal norm, that they aren’t subject to the same monotonies and ruts that typify heterosexual relationships. You don’t just wake up one day and find that you’ve fallen into a lesbian relationship: This is not my beautiful house! This is not my beautiful wife! No, a lesbian relationship is a conscious choice, and therefore it must always be well-thought-out and worthwhile.

I’ve always been jealous of lesbians. From my perspective, their sexuality seems so straightforward, because they are constantly in the position of having to assert it. If they want women to know they are available as partners, they must dress or behave in ways that communicate their sexual preference. If they want their coworkers to stop trying to set them up with annoying guys from the office, they can say, “Thanks, but I’m a lesbian.” If men want to date them, they can confidently say, “Sorry, I’m a lesbian.” I can only imagine how simple and satisfying that must be.

In contrast, while I’ve only dated men, I have a very hard time identifying myself as a heterosexual. I suppose I probably am one, mostly, but I don’t think I’m a very good one. I don’t find myself attracted to men very often, perhaps once a year or so. It takes me a lot of effort to get interested in men or decide I’d like to be in a relationship with one of them.

I imagine that if I were a lesbian, I would never be ambivalent about who I was attracted to, because it would be part of my declared identity: I am attracted to women, damn it! And I imagine that, since their sexuality is so central to their identity, lesbians get to exist in a permanent state of adolescent-style girl-craziness. Which many of them do, at least amongst my friends. But of course I’m only noticing the ones who are like that, because they are vocal about their lustiness, whereas I don’t tend to notice the ones who, like me, barely date, though I know one or two of those types of lesbians as well. But when I am sitting in the coffee shop envying the cute dykey women in their funky sneakers, I imagine that they are all accomplished daters, female Casanovas, confident ladies’ ladies.

If just the fact of being a lesbian isn’t affirming enough, there is a wide palate of lesbian subcategories to choose from. One young friend of mine used to fret over this decision for hours: “What kind of butch am I?” she would agonize, thumbing through a book about radical gender identity that was ten years older than she was. “Am I a stone butch? Or am I more of a soft butch?”

“I think I’m more like a stone butch,” she would speculate, “because everyone thinks I'm a boy. But the book says that stone butches don’t take their clothes off or let anyone do anything sexual to them. That’s definitely not me.” Finally, she read about a type of butch who was highly masculine but didn’t mind taking her clothes off or receiving sexual pleasure, and she happily took that on as her identity.

My friend Charlotte also describes herself as a butch (I presume her love of girly hobbies such as fashioning arm warmers out of tube socks or making clever little zines to entertain her friends would characterize her as a soft butch). She styles herself like a 1950s sitcom husband, with button-up shirts and sweater vests and a trim haircut that emphasizes her square jaw line. Charlotte’s girlfriend calls herself a femme. She likes to wear low-cut dresses, stiletto heels, and fancy lingerie.

The two of them often talk about butch/femme dynamics. They have one story where a carful of seemingly heterosexual young women gawk in envy as Charlotte walks around the car to open the door for her lady. Presumably, they have never experienced such an act of chivalry from the men that they have dated. In fact, those women might not even want their boyfriends to open the door for them, because it would suggest that, as women, they are helpless. But when both partners are women, then the traditional masculine and feminine courtship behaviors are a matter of choice, voluntary and arbitrary roles in a game of gender that everyone can agree is socially constructed. The roles that seem so limiting and obtrusive when they are imposed by nature, or tradition masquerading as nature, are suddenly creative and inspiring.

My friend Luke has a similar jealousy of gay men. He is an unwavering heterosexual, but he credits the development of his sexual persona to inspiration he found from gay men, especially the fictional characters on the television show Queer as Folk.

“The men on that show are so confident about their sexuality,” he would tell me. He was particularly inspired by the central character, a promiscuous playboy. “He has no reservations about going after whoever he wants. He’s completely self-assured and entitled. I used to watch that show and think to myself, that’s how I want to be.”

Functioning in a heterosexual world, Luke had always felt conflicted about pursuing women. He felt crass and objectifying for his tendency to want to have commitment-free sex with most of the women he encountered.

In contrast, the men on Queer as Folk never needed to worry about belittling or demeaning another gender. Since they were all men, they were all socially and biologically equals. There was no reason for remorse or ambivalence for objectifying someone who had an equal capacity for objectifying you right back.

Luke asked his gay roommate whether being a gay man was really the wild smorgasbord of anonymous sex that the TV show depicted.

The roommate nodded sagely. “It’s crazier than that,” he said. “It’s crazier than you could imagine. Think about it. We’re talking about sex that only involves two guys. Of course it is.”

When Luke told me the story years later, his eyes became wistful. “Can you imagine?” he asked. “Two people who could both appreciate the pleasure of anonymous sex, without it having to mean something?”

While our aims are different, ultimately Luke and I fantasize about the same thing: a sexual identity that is clear-cut, unproblematic, well-defined. Heterosexuals don’t get to define themselves by their sexuality; or at least, it is seen as uncouth to do so after the age of about nineteen. Our sexuality is the assumed norm, and we never feel the need to say, “As I heterosexual, I feel…” or “Perhaps it’s my heterosexuality that makes me perceive the world in this way.” And so we muck around in a hazy swamp of what is supposed to be normal, and therefore does not need to be examined, discussed, or defined.

Our envy is born of privilege. Just as Anglo-Saxon Americans avoid the stigma of being ethnic, but also the benefits and pleasures of having a recognized ethnicity—so heterosexuals, whose sexuality is supported by every American institution from marriage to taxation to health insurance to death, miss out on the pleasure of having to construct an identity around a renegade sexuality. What we give up in self-knowledge, we gain in the blissful pleasure of never really having to think about it.

Pesty

When I woke up on Saturday morning, my cat was already begging to go outside. “Meow,” she said, shooting a meaningful look towards the front door as I passed her on my way to the bathroom.

“Now?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

I live in an apartment building, so my cat can’t wander the halls unsupervised. I didn’t feel like following her around the building; I wanted to sit around, drink tea, and read things on the internet.

“Meow,” she said again, walking briskly from the door to my feet and then back to the door.

“Wait until I make tea,” I said.

A few minutes later, tea in hand, I grudgingly opened the door. Despite all of her expressed urgency, she hesitated to venture out into the hallway once the opportunity became available.

“Out,” I said, pushing her into the hall with the side of my foot.

She put on a little show of being indecisive about where to go, with so many options available. But I knew exactly where she was headed. Soon enough, she had turned towards the staircase. I followed her down the stairs and into the hallway below. She stopped briefly to sniff the crack under the second door before continuing to her ultimate destination, the one she had been visiting faithfully every day for the last two weeks.

It was a greasy-looking spot on the floor between the second and third doors. She stopped, sniffed it, then abruptly threw herself head first onto it, rolling nimbly onto her back as the side of her face hit the ground. She rolled around on the spot for a moment, then regained her composure. She seated herself at the side of the spot and proceeded to sniff it again, her expression contemplative. Her concentration remained unbroken as a large male neighbor came lumbering past her, something that normally would have sent her flying back up the stairs towards home.

“What’s so interesting?” I asked her, leaning against the wall and blowing on my steaming tea. “Did a dog pee there? Did someone’s garbage leak?”

She was too busy to answer me. She stayed in the spot for five minutes with no sign of growing bored, her nose to the ground, while I sipped my tea.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more.

“That’s plenty,” I said, scooping her up with my non-tea hand. I carried her back upstairs to the apartment, where she immediately began to meow again.

“No,” I said. “Too boring.”

I took my half cup of tea over to my desk and sat in front of my laptop. I sipped it as I replied to an email. Then I logged into Facebook, where I examined a series of photographs that a friend-of-a-friend took on a trip to Italy with her girlfriend. Her girlfriend is cute, I decided.

My cat sat on the floor next to my chair as I clicked through pictures of the cheerful couple riding in a gondola. I think I heard her sigh audibly as she watched me.

My cat Pesty died just before Thanksgiving this year. I wrote this piece about her in September, before I knew just how sick she was. I was lucky to have her for twelve years; she was a wonderful, lovely kitty.

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.

Facebook

Jennifer—Used to keep up with world news before I got on Facebook. Now I never look at the major news sites. I feel guilty!

Comments:
David—But I bet none of your friends write for the major news sites.

Karin Spirn's Note: Six Thoughts About Facebook
1. When I was growing up, I never got excited about looking at anything on a computer. The computer was for typing my homework and maybe playing a video game if there was nothing else to do. I never came home after a long day and planted myself in front of the computer to relax. I never looked at the computer every ten minutes while doing chores or talking on the phone. I never got out of bed during a 3 a.m. bout of insomnia and sat in front of the computer.

It seems like another world, looking back, a strange and incomprehensible place.

2. When I was sixteen, my father took me to his Silicon Valley office to look at something on the computer.

“I want to show you this new thing,” he said. “It’s called the Worldwide Web. Groups or businesses can have a page on here, and you can look at it.”

I tried to imagine what he was talking about: a sort of giant, computerized want ads.

“The colleges you want to apply to will all have sites on here,” he told me with excitement. He fiddled around, typing in something or other.

“See, like Berkeley has a site, right here.”

He showed me the U.C. Berkeley home page, which had some logos and pictures of the campus. It looked about as exciting as a brochure.

“Wow,” I said, giving the screen a cursory glance.

“You should play around on this site,” he said. “See, you can click on these buttons and it will tell you about the school.”

I sat down and did some polite clicking around. Admissions policies, campus map, photographs of a few buildings. I had seen most of this before, on paper or in person. The fact that it was now on a computer made it if anything less accessible, not more.

3. Click on the link for “almost twenty years later,” and you’ll find me checking my email and Facebook account any time there is a computer nearby. My students, most of them teenagers, as I was when I found the internet too boring to be bothered with, cannot stop staring at the computer screen. Teachers don’t want their classes scheduled in a classroom with computers because the students will compulsively check email, MySpace, Facebook.

The most obvious reason for this shift in the appeal of the computer is the vast wealth of information available on the internet. But when my students are screwing around online during class, they are not reading about current events or even celebrity gossip. They are on MySpace and Facebook, reading about themselves. They are looking at pictures of themselves and their friends. They are writing silly notes and reading their friends’ silly responses. They are scanning their friends’ pages, hoping to find some juicy bit of information to cheer up their depressing day of schoolwork, a photograph of the boy or girl they like, some hint that he or she likes them back.

That’s what makes the internet more than just a regular source of information, so much more exciting than a library, bookstore, or newsstand. It is filled with news not just about the outside world, but about ourselves, our friends, what our friends think about us. Large parts of our identity are housed online, on our homepages, our profiles, our blogs, and those of our friends. The computer has gone from being something utilitarian, as neutral as a stopwatch or a calculator, to become a part of ourselves.

Karin—should stop rambling on about Facebook and go to bed.

4. If your work involves sitting in front of a computer, Facebook is almost like having all your friends at work with you in a big, virtual room. It’s ingenious, really. We’re all sitting in front of our computers, stressed out and lonely, all day long. Why shouldn’t we be exchanging witty quips with our friends? Then we can almost pretend that we are not at work at all, that we are out at the bar, some strange sort of bar where our childhood best friend and that nice girl from our yoga class suddenly team up to advise us on our love lives or career choices.

5. I wonder if our need to create this bar scene as we work is an indication of our alienation as workers. Sitting in front of a computer is a lonely sort of work. Perhaps if we were out working on the farm or tending to the house with our herd of assorted children, we wouldn’t feel the need to be connected to the simulacra of friends who are miles and miles away.

Marie to Karin—you said you needed to go to bed. Why are you still on here?

6. Then again, I share an office with a friend, and we sometimes use Facebook to communicate. We have been known to write Facebook comments to each other while sitting in the room at the same time. We are both typing on computers, so sometimes it makes sense to continue communicating using that tool. Plus if we were to simply make our amusing comment aloud, it would not be on display to entertain the others in our online work-bar.

Karin—This reminds me of that joke we used to make about how our students take a walk.

Comments:
Marie—Two students take a walk wearing headphones, listening to their ipods, and texting each other for conversation.
Karin—We’re just like them.
Marie—Well, they are the future. Scary, isn’t it?