#90swoman

it's not that i don't sympathize.

the summer after my sophomore year of college a guy i ran into in a hallway asked, "aren't you gideon's girlfriend?" i said no, i was his ex, but we were still friends, why? he wanted to know if i would give gideon back one of his short stories, something he had written for a class and passed around for other friends and professors to read as well. i said sure. i went back to the admissions office, where i worked, and flipped through it. the story turned out to be all about me. my name was changed to my mom's, but all other identifying details were the same. the descriptions of our sex life were pretty explicit. my college was really small. 

our senior year, right before graduation, dorothy allison spoke to a small group of the more serious writers about what it had been like to write bastard out of carolina and the perils of writing about people with whom you are intimate. all of these guys in the room started tittering until she finally asked what was going on. i said "they're laughing because gideon wrote a story about me" and she was all "who is gideon?" i would never be so lame as to point at him, so i think he had to raise his hand. 

it was an amazing pedagogical moment when dorothy allison looked back and forth at both of us and said something like, "the thing is, as a writer, you can write about whoever you want. you just have to be prepared for whatever their reaction is, because they don't have to like it." 

for years when i told this story i told it like i won some battle. see, gideon, there are consequences. i had called him after i read his piece and told him i would never speak to him again, which i basically haven't. (sadly, i will never see the velveteen rabbit tattoo he got after i gave him the book as a gift, nor the lloyd dobbler tattoo on his upper thigh. oh well.)  

but now when i tell the story--usually to myself--the emphasis is different. as sharon olds has said, in a poem, about the trauma inflicted on her by her parents: "do what you are going to do, and i will tell about it." 

that doesn't mean that the people being told about, in public, like it, and there are real material consequences to that. i get that telling "secrets" is not an ethics for everyone, certainly not for people who are better protected by secrets. 

for me, the renarrativization of my incarceration, and the surrounding events, is a political intervention and totally in keeping with my entire theoretico-life project. i am reminded of the time when jon asked the members of my 2010 emp panel a question in reference to each of our high school sex lives. in other words: this is not a surprise and it isn't like he has never colluded. i write about artists who use themselves in their work; i write about tumblr. and i always talked about him on this tumblr, even before we were dating. what i am saying is: why would i not do so now.

last night he told me he has tried to be ethical in the wake of our relationship; the implication being that i have not. i told him that earlier this week i found an email from him sent exactly a week after my miscarriage, when i was home alone with gynecological pains, with the all-caps subject line "YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO BE HURT." it proceeded to tell me that i was not proactively looking out for his post-miscarriage feelings (actually, i really was). he also refused to tell me when we could see each other that week and then accused me of not wanting to spend time with him when i replied that though i really wanted to be with him, if he couldn't tell me, i would make plans with other people, because i was feeling really fragile, not to mention i was scared about what was going on physically, and didn't want to be alone right then. what is unethical, to me, is his thinking it was okay to treat me this way ever, but especially after a fraught surgery. what is ethical is my talking about it. i didn't get to the psych ward all by myself and i'm not the only person who has been in a situation like this. as a feminist colleague of mine said, "you think you're smarter than this, but it can still happen to you." 

and anyway, as jane tompkins so eloquently put it, "the private-public dichotomy, which is to say the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression. i say to hell with it." 

kj: i don't think i've crafted since grade school.

as: you're such an adult. i aspire to be an adult like you.

so, over at 90swoman, i got gwen-stefani-style mad about some casually sexist stuff that some guys have said on tumblr about miss world, the real 90s, and a particularly female brand of 90s nostalgia.