once escorted
May. 28th, 2009 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmThe first time I worked clinic defense was the month after I turned eighteen. Now, most people stood in a particular phalanx by the clinic door, especially during the worst of the protests. The phalanx was designed to make sure protesters couldn't crawl through our legs, that there would still be a barrier if they stuck us with pins, which, yes, they did. Then, there were the people stationed inside the clinic, if it had interior doors. Sometimes women would pose as patients and lock themselves to the interior doors, blocking them. Finally, there were the people who escorted the women in and out of the clinic.
I did all three of those jobs at various times, but mostly I either guarded the inside doors of the clinics or escorted patients.
Mostly, the women didn't talk. But sometimes they did, either about nothing in particular or dark humour. It was strange, responding to them, and always being so careful not to reveal any particular sentiment to them.
"I hate this," one woman said. I couldn't but nod, because "this" could have been anything.
She kept talking. "Always being escorted, like I can't go to the doctor by myself."
"I'm sorry, sometimes the protesters pose as patients; it's for everyone's safety."
"But I feel like a child."
*
A woman's life is like that. We are always escorted: by our friends to the ladies and by our fathers down the aisle. It is what is expected of us. My debutante friends had to choose escorts -- one civilian and one military -- for the coming out ball and my high school dates always had to pick me up and drop me off at home, even as I was often older and more equipped to handle the world without such boys.
When I was engaged at 24, every professional service I talked to about the wedding planning wanted to speak to my fiance or my parents. When I called my bank today to discuss an issue they asked -- merely as a matter of security, but I know how it felt -- if there was a cosigner on an account.
There's a reason it's women and children first. It's because in the eyes of history and habit, we've long been mostly the same.
At least married you get the force of your husband's authority, if not your own.
*
Gay rights are, among other things, a feminist issue. If we did not hate and infantilize women, would we so question the masculinity and competency of gay men on the grounds that they must somehow be feminized by their romantic and sexual preference for males? If we did not hate and infantilize women, would we so condemn women who are not available to men, because they'd rather be with each other?
*
In the mid-90s, I traveled to Ireland with that man I was engaged to. Because I made all the hotel reservations, I quickly became Mrs. Maltese and he was referred to as Mr. Maltese. We learned quickly not to question this.
A vote was going on in the country then about whether to legalize divorce. The posters that supported divorce availability showed a photo of a woman and asked, "doesn't she deserve a second chance?" The posters against divorce also showed a woman and asked, "doesn't a man have the right to a family?"
The point of this is not that I was outraged. The point of this is that I am outraged now because my dominant reaction at the time, beyond anger and incredulity, was simply the quiet recognition of what I had always known as a woman: to be property is to be loved; to be married is the closest you will ever be to becoming an adult.
*
I never got married.
*
I'm 37 now. I'm not supposed to tell people that. After all, as perpetual children, women are also supposed to look perpetually young. Maybe if I looked my age I'd be more careful about it. Maybe I just don't care anymore.
I've got a lot more sense than I used to. I'm less complicated now in some ways. And way more complicated in others.
And in the great gay marriage debate, I keep coming back to this feeling that in the end this whole clusterfuck national debate on my humanity is really a secret, subconscious referendum on whether women can ever be adults, can ever be unescorted, can ever look like something that wasn't designed for the male gaze, can ever possess their own desire. It is also, it seems for many people, a referendum on whether masculinity can exist without the perpetual female child present to confirm its existence.
*
I've been an adult since I left home, because I've had to be. That was twenty years ago. Sometimes I've succeeded. Often I've failed. But I've continued on, and I've tried to do better. I don't regret much, but there was certainly some stuff I could have done without; I just didn't know it at the time.
That the world has both changed and that I'm a little bit crazy is so clear to me the more I meet people who have never felt all this, who have never had to.
That's hope.
So is the way much of this is just a pretty far gone memory to me now, like the butcher shop we got our meat at when I was a child.
*
In the late '90s I had an abortion. There were no protesters. The doorman in the fancy building on the Upper West Side smiled at me, and the man involved in the matter came with me, as was appropriate.
Which means I was once escorted.
In this particular lexicon of being, I wish I didn't know what that means.
*
Prop 8 and its ilk are not referenda on me as a gay person or as a woman, although they are the first overtly and the second covertly.
These votes and discussions and debates and decisions are referenda on what we deem an adult human to be or not be.
It really is that simple.
*
Sometimes people ask me what it's like to be bisexual or gay or whatever word we're using today. They'll ask how I knew. Or what's going on with my genderqueer stuff. Or for advice on speaking to others about these same issues. And I'm mostly happy to answer, because, let's face it, I'll run my mouth about anything if I have the time.
But I have things I want to know too: what's it like not always having to connect the dots about what people really think of you before you even walk into the bloody room?
Sometimes, people ask why I'm so public on my journal or why I want so badly to be famous and successful. There are flip answers to that, that you've surely heard me give. Oh, you know, like everyone in this business, my mother never loved me enough or No secrets, no blackmail are two of my favorites.
But there's a third answer. A truer answer. With a female body and a queer heart, my life was always going to be public anyway.
I did all three of those jobs at various times, but mostly I either guarded the inside doors of the clinics or escorted patients.
Mostly, the women didn't talk. But sometimes they did, either about nothing in particular or dark humour. It was strange, responding to them, and always being so careful not to reveal any particular sentiment to them.
"I hate this," one woman said. I couldn't but nod, because "this" could have been anything.
She kept talking. "Always being escorted, like I can't go to the doctor by myself."
"I'm sorry, sometimes the protesters pose as patients; it's for everyone's safety."
"But I feel like a child."
*
A woman's life is like that. We are always escorted: by our friends to the ladies and by our fathers down the aisle. It is what is expected of us. My debutante friends had to choose escorts -- one civilian and one military -- for the coming out ball and my high school dates always had to pick me up and drop me off at home, even as I was often older and more equipped to handle the world without such boys.
When I was engaged at 24, every professional service I talked to about the wedding planning wanted to speak to my fiance or my parents. When I called my bank today to discuss an issue they asked -- merely as a matter of security, but I know how it felt -- if there was a cosigner on an account.
There's a reason it's women and children first. It's because in the eyes of history and habit, we've long been mostly the same.
At least married you get the force of your husband's authority, if not your own.
*
Gay rights are, among other things, a feminist issue. If we did not hate and infantilize women, would we so question the masculinity and competency of gay men on the grounds that they must somehow be feminized by their romantic and sexual preference for males? If we did not hate and infantilize women, would we so condemn women who are not available to men, because they'd rather be with each other?
*
In the mid-90s, I traveled to Ireland with that man I was engaged to. Because I made all the hotel reservations, I quickly became Mrs. Maltese and he was referred to as Mr. Maltese. We learned quickly not to question this.
A vote was going on in the country then about whether to legalize divorce. The posters that supported divorce availability showed a photo of a woman and asked, "doesn't she deserve a second chance?" The posters against divorce also showed a woman and asked, "doesn't a man have the right to a family?"
The point of this is not that I was outraged. The point of this is that I am outraged now because my dominant reaction at the time, beyond anger and incredulity, was simply the quiet recognition of what I had always known as a woman: to be property is to be loved; to be married is the closest you will ever be to becoming an adult.
*
I never got married.
*
I'm 37 now. I'm not supposed to tell people that. After all, as perpetual children, women are also supposed to look perpetually young. Maybe if I looked my age I'd be more careful about it. Maybe I just don't care anymore.
I've got a lot more sense than I used to. I'm less complicated now in some ways. And way more complicated in others.
And in the great gay marriage debate, I keep coming back to this feeling that in the end this whole clusterfuck national debate on my humanity is really a secret, subconscious referendum on whether women can ever be adults, can ever be unescorted, can ever look like something that wasn't designed for the male gaze, can ever possess their own desire. It is also, it seems for many people, a referendum on whether masculinity can exist without the perpetual female child present to confirm its existence.
*
I've been an adult since I left home, because I've had to be. That was twenty years ago. Sometimes I've succeeded. Often I've failed. But I've continued on, and I've tried to do better. I don't regret much, but there was certainly some stuff I could have done without; I just didn't know it at the time.
That the world has both changed and that I'm a little bit crazy is so clear to me the more I meet people who have never felt all this, who have never had to.
That's hope.
So is the way much of this is just a pretty far gone memory to me now, like the butcher shop we got our meat at when I was a child.
*
In the late '90s I had an abortion. There were no protesters. The doorman in the fancy building on the Upper West Side smiled at me, and the man involved in the matter came with me, as was appropriate.
Which means I was once escorted.
In this particular lexicon of being, I wish I didn't know what that means.
*
Prop 8 and its ilk are not referenda on me as a gay person or as a woman, although they are the first overtly and the second covertly.
These votes and discussions and debates and decisions are referenda on what we deem an adult human to be or not be.
It really is that simple.
*
Sometimes people ask me what it's like to be bisexual or gay or whatever word we're using today. They'll ask how I knew. Or what's going on with my genderqueer stuff. Or for advice on speaking to others about these same issues. And I'm mostly happy to answer, because, let's face it, I'll run my mouth about anything if I have the time.
But I have things I want to know too: what's it like not always having to connect the dots about what people really think of you before you even walk into the bloody room?
Sometimes, people ask why I'm so public on my journal or why I want so badly to be famous and successful. There are flip answers to that, that you've surely heard me give. Oh, you know, like everyone in this business, my mother never loved me enough or No secrets, no blackmail are two of my favorites.
But there's a third answer. A truer answer. With a female body and a queer heart, my life was always going to be public anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:36 pm (UTC)I'm trying to work out my thoughts. I suspect I'll be thinking over this post all evening. Because I'm an "old maid" -- a single woman, of middle age, living alone. Without escort.
I will be thinking all evening.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:39 pm (UTC)My struggles haven't taken the same face as yours but the core issues are the same.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:39 pm (UTC)I tried to write it down, but it just depresses me to a point that I have take a step back.
Thank you for writing this.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-28 11:46 pm (UTC)And, yes. Even women who are never looked at are never permitted to be invisible.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-30 07:04 am (UTC)To the OP: BRILLIANT post. Thank you for sharing this!
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:00 am (UTC)Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:04 am (UTC)Thank you. Just... thanks.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:28 am (UTC)Sort of related... I was having a conversation with someone earlier this week and said that, while I don't wear my wedding rings any more, I still don't wear any jewelry on my left hand. It is as if that hand belongs to my husband and the jewelry he gave me. I decided then that was going to stop. It's my hand and I can wear whatever I like on it. I've already been shopping for a ring that I like, for my very own left hand. Not exactly radical in a larger sense, but it was a little bit of a shock to realise what I had been doing.
This post is wonderful, btw. Brilliant.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:47 am (UTC)i went shopping for my first new car, and one of the trips i had a male friend w/ me as my car was dead an i needed a driver; at the dealership the salesman first addressed him, then when it was clear that i was the one shopping he started in on the "features" (auto windows, interior ammenities, etc) of the automatic version as i obviously wasn't interested in the sport/stick shift model or the performance specs since i was a girl
yeah - i was out of there almost immediately and his dealership and the mfg both got a very irate letter (which probably did nothing, although i did get an apology from the mfg at least)
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:32 am (UTC)I apologize for derailing the relevant post. I don't have much to say about it, though; my experiences have been different, coming from a middle-class liberal background on the West Coast. Some are similar, many simply do not connect to experiences I have had. But I've seen things like this so many times, and know so many others who have experienced things like this, that I can say "Yes, this is true."
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:34 am (UTC)I'm 40, married, with a child, and because I'm petite, chirpy, with a high pitched voice, people still think I'm a kid. There are no words to describe the simmering frustration I feel constantly, from all quarters because of it.
Edit: I deleted the rest as I realized it might be derailing the conversation and this is too important for that to happen. I appreciate your ability to write elegantly about things that often leave me shaking in incoherent rage.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:41 am (UTC)I would also like to link to this post if you don't mind.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:48 am (UTC)I don't know if I ever told you that I got into a huge argument with my mother because she refused to walk down the aisle with me at my wedding. I said that I wanted both of my parents or neither of them and she just couldn't understand that. I was NOT going to be "given away" by my father.
Yes!
Date: 2009-05-29 05:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:55 am (UTC)I also worked as a clinic escort. For years. It was a weekly suppression of rage at those who dared tell women how to live in their own bodies, who vilified them for being sexual, who made their private flesh public property. And that is precisely the rage I've felt in the past few days.
Escorting also put me shoulder to shoulder with gay men and women of all orientations who understood that, however they felt about abortion, the misogyny we were facing was a common enemy.
We should never have been needed, and it hurt to compound the loss of privacy, the very partial autonomy these women were exercising. But that is our world, in large ways and small, and it still matters to take what action we can -- all the more so if, as you say, we are public property to start with. We may have no control here, but we can still find agency, starting with our voices.
Again, thanks.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:56 am (UTC)If only he knew.
ETA: The women == public property, and the relationship between how people treat gay men and how people see women also get resounding "YES" from me. It's always good to see people say it, and say it clearly. It can't be said enough.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:00 am (UTC)There's a long fucked up story here about how I once got mistaken for the twink boyfriend of the guy I was dating who claimed to be straight and worked in a gay bar.
I get to live this shit in really odd ways.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:02 am (UTC)I don't feel like I've experienced the degree of sexism that some have, but I don't know if that's because I've been lucky or because I've been oblivious to it happening around me. I do know that I'm fortunate in that I don't remember ever being told I couldn't do something "because you're a girl", and I'm grateful for that at the same time I realize how horrid it is to have that feeling of gratitude for what is, at least, perceived equal treatment on some fronts. (Wow, long convoluted sentence night...)
Thank you again for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:12 am (UTC)(btw, just cause I notice these things ... in the second section, you don't mean "your finance.")
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:15 am (UTC)My experience tends to be weird for a lot of reasons, including my upbringing and being queer, but that the stuff follows us, no matter how atypical a female experience we might have, says a lot.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:18 am (UTC)I don't know really if that makes me genderqueer or just a garden variety feminist. It's a very confusing subject for me.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 04:38 am (UTC)But I am a person. I'm not submissive (except sometimes, in bed), and I'm not shy, and I'm not deferential. I speak my mind without hedges or apologies or "this is just my opinion" (as if it could be anything but) and a lot of people hate me for that.
You're damned if you do and damned if you don't.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:22 am (UTC)I didn't think about it enough the first time and I wonder about it now. I think about some of the things you said when we finally talked about my failure to communicate and my choices in those stupid years, about how I didn't acknowledge how much the lure of that authority existed in the background of the world around me.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:26 am (UTC)As women, if we're not private property of one man, we're considered the public property of all men (and sometimes both).
This post from Shakesville also does a really good job of elucidating the links between misogyny and homophobia.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 04:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:32 am (UTC)I'd never be able to describe it, but losing the ability to know how to do that or that it should be done was a way of coping with suicidal depression, in the same way turning off my internal compass keeps me from feeling nauseous in NC after growing up on a grid system.
And the escorting thing? For all I whinge about my dad, that's something he saw and forced himself to stop when I moved out, to make sure I was ok and could do without. I will always honor him for being able to see the way the world should be on human rights, even as he acknowledged aloud that he couldn't always change his own behavior to reflect that vision.
no subject
Date: 2009-05-29 01:36 am (UTC)