Wednesday, September 14, 2005
How smut makes me feel beautiful and normal. As I attempted to post yesterday, I get crestfallen when I tell people stuff that I think is amusing or interesting, and they are disconcerted and think I am weird and perverted. Because I am not, you see; only curious, and eternally hopeful that others will find the same things wonderful that I do. I am often disappointed. Here are some pertinent examples:
On my birthday I was having coffee with Emah and Tash. We were talking about abortion, and when the waitress brought over my coffee, I observed that the pattern in the crema on a latte looked a bit like a foetus. (I had previously likened it to an arse with diarrhoea shooting out - it's true you know - check out the next latte you drink. Mmm, tasteful.)
Emah and Tash were all, "Oh Mel! That's terrible!"
Then the waitress came back and took the latte away, apologising for bringing me the wrong coffee. And I went, "They took my bay-bee!"
And Emah and Tash burst into horrified laughter.
Last year, over dinner, I mentioned that the stereotype of witches flying on broomsticks came about because they used to make a hallucinogenic poultice from deadly nightshade. It used to make them believe they were flying. And as any coke-snorter knows, drugs are absorbed more quickly through the mucous membranes, so the witches allegedly used to apply the poultice to a broomstick which they would then use as a dildo. I thought this was quite interesting, but my dinner companions were quite appalled, and I was only able to save the conversation by pointing out the window and going, "Ooh, look - sailors!"
A couple of weekends ago, I went to a Pirates vs Ninjas housewarming party, and Jess was dressed as a pirate, complete with an eyeliner moustache. Inexplicably, she also had a Sanchez brand ukelele, which one of her friends had wittily annotated "Dirty". I said, "Jess, maybe the moustache is not the best look, given your Dirty Sanchez guitar." Jess laughed; but when I was telling this anecdote to Indymedia Andrew last Wednesday, he just looked at me blankly. I had two sinking revelations: first, that I was going to have to tell him what a Dirty Sanchez is; and second, that he was going to think less of me for it. He looked kind of appalled, and then I decided to dig the hole deeper by asking if he knew what an Angry Dragon is. After that, he looked even more appalled.
It troubled me that Indymedia Andrew, whom I had taken for an unflappable Humpty kinda guy, might think I was a pervert. So when I saw him on Friday night, grazing on antipasto in the second gallery into which I had walked, drunkenly chuckling to myself (I'd had four beers with Elaine before even making it to the party), I decided to redeem myself by telling him the witch anecdote. He regarded it as interesting rather than shocking.
"See, a normal person like you doesn't freak out!" I said.
He looked thoughtful. "That's perhaps the first time someone's described me as normal," he said.
Damn. I can never speak to him again. The hole will just get bigger.
I was feeling very crestfallen indeed. Until Monday. I was browsing in the Melbourne University bookshop and bought, very inexpensively, The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. The blurb describes it as an "altogether morally confused piece of work". "My god; that's a dirty book!" said Jeremy when I said I was reading it. But I don't think it's dirty at all. Instead, so far I have found it a complete affirmation of my own desires and my own world view.
Basically, it's about a 35-year-old guy, Arno Strine, who has the power to pause time, an ability he uses to undress women and play unseen erotic roles in their lives that to them, appear serendipitous. What strikes me is Arno's attention to women. He observes in a way that I have always assumed most men - and most people in general - don't.
I found this incredibly heartening. I minutely scrutinise my own body and those of other people. I find them fascinating and beautiful and ugly. I could tell you small details I loved about you that you might never have noticed, or thought nobody did but yourself. Conversely, I feel my body betrays me in so many ways: not only by its aesthetic failings when subjected to the scrutiny of others; but in its invisibility in the ways women are supposed to be visible. I've felt as though it didn't matter whether I straightened my hair or left it messy; wore glasses or contacts; even bothered about what I was wearing, because nobody ever notices these things. And yesterday, after I had decided I looked much prettier with contact lenses and would wear them exclusively from now on, my friends all said I looked better with glasses. I can't tell you how this crushed me: that I look better with something obscuring my face; that there is such a disjuncture between my own judgment of the circumstances in which I look best and that of other people.
So anyway, I was reading The Fermata on Monday night and gradually filling with a slow, sweet, fragile feeling that, yes, people do notice and are affected by the physical presence of others in the same way I am, and yes, it's possible that I am an attractive woman and not just words on a computer screen or a mobile phone. But above all, I was pleased and relieved that someone else, even a fictional character, is full of 'inappropriate' thoughts and desires, and finds a way to put them in action (albeit magically). At one stage, Arno muses about the unromantic sight of his hairy balls:
On my birthday I was having coffee with Emah and Tash. We were talking about abortion, and when the waitress brought over my coffee, I observed that the pattern in the crema on a latte looked a bit like a foetus. (I had previously likened it to an arse with diarrhoea shooting out - it's true you know - check out the next latte you drink. Mmm, tasteful.)
Emah and Tash were all, "Oh Mel! That's terrible!"
Then the waitress came back and took the latte away, apologising for bringing me the wrong coffee. And I went, "They took my bay-bee!"
And Emah and Tash burst into horrified laughter.
Last year, over dinner, I mentioned that the stereotype of witches flying on broomsticks came about because they used to make a hallucinogenic poultice from deadly nightshade. It used to make them believe they were flying. And as any coke-snorter knows, drugs are absorbed more quickly through the mucous membranes, so the witches allegedly used to apply the poultice to a broomstick which they would then use as a dildo. I thought this was quite interesting, but my dinner companions were quite appalled, and I was only able to save the conversation by pointing out the window and going, "Ooh, look - sailors!"
A couple of weekends ago, I went to a Pirates vs Ninjas housewarming party, and Jess was dressed as a pirate, complete with an eyeliner moustache. Inexplicably, she also had a Sanchez brand ukelele, which one of her friends had wittily annotated "Dirty". I said, "Jess, maybe the moustache is not the best look, given your Dirty Sanchez guitar." Jess laughed; but when I was telling this anecdote to Indymedia Andrew last Wednesday, he just looked at me blankly. I had two sinking revelations: first, that I was going to have to tell him what a Dirty Sanchez is; and second, that he was going to think less of me for it. He looked kind of appalled, and then I decided to dig the hole deeper by asking if he knew what an Angry Dragon is. After that, he looked even more appalled.
It troubled me that Indymedia Andrew, whom I had taken for an unflappable Humpty kinda guy, might think I was a pervert. So when I saw him on Friday night, grazing on antipasto in the second gallery into which I had walked, drunkenly chuckling to myself (I'd had four beers with Elaine before even making it to the party), I decided to redeem myself by telling him the witch anecdote. He regarded it as interesting rather than shocking.
"See, a normal person like you doesn't freak out!" I said.
He looked thoughtful. "That's perhaps the first time someone's described me as normal," he said.
Damn. I can never speak to him again. The hole will just get bigger.
I was feeling very crestfallen indeed. Until Monday. I was browsing in the Melbourne University bookshop and bought, very inexpensively, The Fermata by Nicholson Baker. The blurb describes it as an "altogether morally confused piece of work". "My god; that's a dirty book!" said Jeremy when I said I was reading it. But I don't think it's dirty at all. Instead, so far I have found it a complete affirmation of my own desires and my own world view.
Basically, it's about a 35-year-old guy, Arno Strine, who has the power to pause time, an ability he uses to undress women and play unseen erotic roles in their lives that to them, appear serendipitous. What strikes me is Arno's attention to women. He observes in a way that I have always assumed most men - and most people in general - don't.
I think too, in all modesty, that I have an unusually good instinct for detecting when an average-looking woman senses herself entering a new phase of attractiveness. I can detect better than others when a woman feels that she is looking unusually good that day, or when something like a new haircut, or the discovery of a stor that has the kind of clothes that she looks best in, reminds her of the fact that romance and flirtation are part of life, too.But interestingly, Arno doesn't find women attractive in the same way they see themselves: he can find women attractive in as many ways as there are women. He has no fetish - each woman becomes her own fetish - because there is something uniquely alluring about her; something that she herself might not consider attractive. It might be her hair; the way she wears her clothes; the backs of her knees; the tone of her voice.
I found this incredibly heartening. I minutely scrutinise my own body and those of other people. I find them fascinating and beautiful and ugly. I could tell you small details I loved about you that you might never have noticed, or thought nobody did but yourself. Conversely, I feel my body betrays me in so many ways: not only by its aesthetic failings when subjected to the scrutiny of others; but in its invisibility in the ways women are supposed to be visible. I've felt as though it didn't matter whether I straightened my hair or left it messy; wore glasses or contacts; even bothered about what I was wearing, because nobody ever notices these things. And yesterday, after I had decided I looked much prettier with contact lenses and would wear them exclusively from now on, my friends all said I looked better with glasses. I can't tell you how this crushed me: that I look better with something obscuring my face; that there is such a disjuncture between my own judgment of the circumstances in which I look best and that of other people.
So anyway, I was reading The Fermata on Monday night and gradually filling with a slow, sweet, fragile feeling that, yes, people do notice and are affected by the physical presence of others in the same way I am, and yes, it's possible that I am an attractive woman and not just words on a computer screen or a mobile phone. But above all, I was pleased and relieved that someone else, even a fictional character, is full of 'inappropriate' thoughts and desires, and finds a way to put them in action (albeit magically). At one stage, Arno muses about the unromantic sight of his hairy balls:
I couldn't help noting to myself with some satisfaction how surprisingly spermatious the ball-hairs themselves appeared, with their long wispy tails and their ovoid follicle heads: hair-sperms surrounding the egg-like testicles, trying to fertilize them, as if my body were offering to anyone who cared to look its own magnified, three-dimensional representation of the task that my gonads were programming their product to perform.Is that not the most perfect image? I have so many similar thoughts that I feel unable to tell anyone: whether it's because it frightens away new acquaintances, alienates friends or freaks out potential sexual partners. And it was just so heartening that I am not alone in this. As Arno says, "So much depended, of course, on how you presented the information - a tone of self-surprised irrepresentability often worked best." And when he finds someone who isn't shocked by him, he says, "God, how I treasure those little flirtatious moments." Indeed.
