Sex Object

Jessica Valenti

• Editorial: Dey Street Books
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062435101
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaften
• Categoría: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

New York Times Bestseller - An NPR Best Bookof the Year

"Sharp and prescient… The appeal of Valenti's memoir lies in her ability to trace objectification through her own life, and to trace what was for a long time her own obliviousness to it… Sex Object is an antidote to the fun and flirty feminism of selfies and self-help." — New Republic

Author and Guardian US columnist Jessica Valenti has been leading the national conversation on gender and politics for over a decade. Now, in a darkly funny and bracing memoir, Valenti explores the toll that sexism takes from the every day to the existential.

Sex Object explores the painful, funny, embarrassing, and sometimes illegal moments that shaped Valenti's adolescence and young adulthood in New York City, revealing a much shakier inner life than the confident persona she has cultivated as one of the most recognizable feminists of her generation.

In the tradition of writers like Joan Didion and Mary Karr, this literary memoir is sure to shock those already familiar with Valenti's work and enthrall those who are just finding it.

PART I

She had an inside and an outside now and suddenly she knew how not to mix them.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

LINE VIOLENCE

IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME TO REALIZE I WAS NOT THE ONLY GIRL whose high school teacher asked her on a date. Not the only one who sat on the train across from a man who had “forgotten” to zip his fly on the day he “forgot” to wear underwear so that his penis, still tucked in his jeans, was fully visible. I remember joking about it with my father—the weirdo with his dick showing! He had to explain to me that it wasn’t an accident.

I am not the only one who had a boyfriend who called me stupid. Not the only one who grew up being told to be careful around groups of boys, even if they were my friends. When I was twelve—the same year I saw my first penis on a New York City subway platform, two years before I would lose my virginity to a guy from Park Slope who filled in his sideburn gaps with his mom’s eyeliner, and six years before I would fail out of college, tired of frat boys taping used condoms to my dorm room door—I started to have trouble sleeping. I felt sick all the time.

I KNOW IT’S CALLED THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE, BUT IN MY FAMILY, female suffering is linear: rape and abuse are passed down like the world’s worst birthright, largely skipping the men and marking the women with scars, night terrors, and fantastic senses of humor.

My mother told me about getting molested by a family friend as part of our “bad touch” talk. She called him her uncle. We were sitting on my twin bed in a room covered with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. She was eight when he came to the house with ice cream, and while her mother cooked dinner in the kitchen he told her to come sit on his lap if she wanted some. She doesn’t remember what he touched or how, just that it happened, and that she said nothing afterward. Some time later the neighborhood barber told my grandmother that if my mom would fold some towels for him, her haircut would be free. So my grandmother left while she worked, and he took my mother into the back room, where he rubbed his penis on her eight-year-old body.

When my grandmother was ten, her father died of alcoholism and she went to live with an aunt and uncle. When she was eleven, her uncle raped her. She told her aunt, and was sent to St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Brooklyn the next day.

It’s losing steam with each generation, so that’s something. My grandmother’s rape is my mother’s molestation is me getting off relatively easy with abusive boyfriends and strangers fondling me on subways—one time without my realizing until I went to put my hands in my jeans’ back pockets and there was semen all over them.

My aunts and mom joked about how often it happened to them when they were younger—the one man who flashed a jacket open and had a big red bow on his cock, the neighborhood pervert who masturbated visibly in his window as they walked to school as girls. (The cops told them the man could do whatever he wanted in his own house.) “Just point and laugh,” my aunt said. “That usually sends them running.”

Usually.

But worse than the violations themselves was the creeping understanding of what it meant to be female—that it’s not a matter of if something bad happens, but when and how bad.

Of course what feels like a matrilineal curse is not really ours. We don’t own it; the shame and disgust belong to the perpetrators. At least, that’s what the books say. But the frequency with which women in my family have been hurt or sexually assaulted starts to feel like a flashing message encoded in our DNA: Hurt. Me.

My daughter is five and I want to inoculate her against whatever it is that keeps happening to the women in my family. I want Layla to have her father’s lucky genes—genes that walk into a room and feel entitled to be there. Genes that feel safe. Not my out-of-place chromosomes that are fight-or-flight ready.

This is the one way in which I wish she was not mine.

When I was pregnant, I often joked about wanting a boy. A baby girl would turn into a teenage girl, and I remember the young asshole I was to my mother. But this is closer to the truth: having a girl means passing this thing on to her, this violence and violations without end.

Because while my daughter lives in a world that knows what happens to women is wrong, it has also accepted this wrongness as inevitable. When a rich man in Delaware was given probation for raping his three-year-old daughter, there was outrage. But it was the lack of punishment that seemed to offend, not the seemingly immovable fact that some men rape three-year-olds. Prison time we can measure and control; that some men do horrible things to little girls, however, is presented as a given.

Living in a place that has given up on the expectation of your safety means walking around in a permanently dissociative state. You watch these things happen to you, you walk through them on the subway and on the street, you see them on the television, you hear them in music, and it’s just the air you breathe, so you narrate the horror to yourself because to engage with it would be self-destruction.

I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don’t “speak from our power,” but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice—as if we had actual power to speak from.

Victimhood doesn’t need to be an identity, but it is a product of facts. Some women heal by rejecting victimhood, but in a world that regularly tells women they’re asking for it, I don’t know that laying claim to “victim” is such a terrible idea. Recognizing suffering is not giving up and it’s not weak.

“Something bad happened to me.” More accurately: “Someone did something bad to me.” This happened. This happens.

When this reality started to become more and more clear to me, as I grew breasts and took subways, watched movies and fucked boys, I didn’t make a conscious decision not to lie down and die. But do I know that my survival instinct took over and I became the loudest girl, the quickest with a sex joke, the one who laughed at old men coming on to her.

If I was going to be a sex object, I was going to be the best sex object I could be. Over twenty years later, I still feel sick. I still can’t sleep. But at least now I understand why.

WE KNOW THAT DIRECT VIOLENCE CAUSES TRAUMA—WE HAVE shelters for it, counselors, services. We know that children who live in violent neighborhoods are more likely to develop PTSD, the daily fear changing their brains and psychological makeup so drastically that flashbacks and disassociation become common. We know people who are bullied get depressed and sometimes commit suicide.

Yet despite all these thing we know to be true—despite the preponderance of evidence showing the mental and emotional distress people demonstrate in violent and harassing environments—we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that hates them.

We are sick people with no disease, given no explanation for our supposedly disconnected symptoms. When you catch a cold or a virus, your body has ways of letting you know that you are sick—you cough, you get a fever, your limbs literally hurt.

But what diagnosis do you give to the shaking hands you get after a stranger whispers “pussy” in your ear on your way to work? What medicine can you take to stop being afraid that the cabdriver is not actually taking you home? And what about those of us who walk through all this without feeling any of it—what does it say about the hoops our brain had to jump through to get to ambivalence? I don’t believe any of us walk away unscathed.

I do know, though, that a lot of us point and laugh. The strategy of my aunts and mother is now my default reaction when a fifteen-year-old on Instagram calls me a cunt or when a grown-up reporter writes something about my tits. Just keep pointing and laughing, rolling your eyes with the hope that someone will finally notice that this is not very funny.

Pretending these offenses roll off of our backs is strategic—don’t give them the fucking satisfaction—but it isn’t the truth. You lose something along the way. Mocking the men who hurt us—as mockable as they are—starts to feel like acquiescing to the most condescending of catcalls, You look better when you smile. Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we’re eating shit.

This sort of posturing is a performance that requires strength I do not have anymore. Rolling with the punches and giving as good as we’re getting requires that we subsume our pain under a veneer of I don’t give a shit. This inability to be vulnerable—the unwillingness to be victims, even if we are—doesn’t protect us, it just covers up the wreckage.

But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn’t end. Without a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we’re just complainers—downers who don’t realize how good we actually have it.

Men’s pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narratives that shape everything we do, but women’s pain is a backdrop—a plot development to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we’re needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters—as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too—but that we’re not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one.

Somewhere along the way, I started to care more about what men thought of me than my own health and happiness because doing so was just easier. I bought into the lie that the opposite of “victim” is “strong.” That pointing and laughing and making it easier on everybody was the best way to tell our stories.

But if you are sick and want to be well, you need to relay the details of your symptoms: glossing over them ensures a lifetime of illness.

My daughter is happy and brave. When she falls down or gets hurt, the first words out of her mouth are always: I’m all right, Mom. I’m okay. And she is. I want her to be okay always. So while my refusal to keep laughing or making you comfortable may seem like a real fucking downer, the truth is that this is what optimism looks like. Naming what is happening to us, telling the truth about it—as ugly and uncomfortable as it can be—means that we want it to change. That we know it is not inevitable.

I want the line of my mother and grandmother to stop here.

CANDY DISH

SCOOT DOWN.

The first time I had an abortion I was in this same room, on the same table. When I walked into the office, the receptionist offered me tea in the same way she had seven years earlier. I was the only patient there, an upside to paying over a thousand dollars for an early abortion in a private clinic that doesn’t accept insurance: you get to be alone and hold on to a shameful sense of superiority that you aren’t like other women who get later abortions.

As I lay down on the brown cushioned table, the rolled-out paper crunching beneath me, I noticed that the Jolly Ranchers on a nearby counter were in the same glass candy dish that had been there the first time I was here. Then, the candy was Starbursts.

That time I was in my late twenties. I had a job, money, and enough family support to have a baby. But I also had a shitty boyfriend, a lingering love for an even shittier ex-boyfriend, and was in the process of finishing my first book. I had always thought that should I find myself pregnant at that age, twenty-seven, I would just go through with it. But the minute I saw the word “pregnant” come up on that stick, I knew that I couldn’t be.

I was only a few weeks along, but most abortions can’t happen until eight or ten weeks and I couldn’t wait that long. A Google search on “early abortions” that same day led me to a clinic claiming to be midwifelike that used a method for ending the pregnancy that didn’t require machines, anesthesia, or a horrible sucking sound. Just a syringe and a nurse holding your hand. I made the appointment for the following week, even though the woman on the phone cautioned me not to come in too early—there would be nothing to take out if I didn’t wait.

My mother had an abortion when I was nine and my sister was seven but she didn’t tell me this until after I had mine. She hoped, I think, that it would be a bonding moment between us but the clear regret she had over ending her pregnancy—Your dad was so busy with his music, I felt I had to; it’s normal to feel depressed after—made my own ambivalence feel somehow criminal.

We were sitting in a restaurant in Astoria, Queens, when she told me—a new place on 34th Avenue that had opened near the Museum of the Moving Image. The café was cavernous on the inside—literally—with high ceilings and walls made to look like bumpy stone. I know she wanted me to tell her this was the hardest thing, and to find some commonality in our suffering, but it wasn’t hard and I wasn’t hurting.

My parents got married when my mother was only seventeen years old, and she tells me that on their wedding night she called her mother crying afterward. She was a virgin, brought up in Catholic school, and terrified of men—even my father, whom she had dated since she was twelve years old. Her tears that night set the stage for a relationship-long narrative between them: my father desperate for her love and she too scared of it.

They were married for thirteen years before having children, my mother enduring miscarriage after miscarriage before her pregnancy with me finally took. So when she got pregnant with my sister when I was little over a year old, it was a surprise. By the time the third pregnancy came, years later, my parents were working nonstop and my father had started a blues band that was doing relatively well—several gigs a week at bars and clubs downtown, like Manny’s Car Wash and the Bitter End.

When I was twelve or thirteen years old I started going to watch him play, thrilled that the bartenders would ask me for my drink order, ignoring their eye rolls when I told them my age. One night when I walked into the back room where the band was getting ready one of the men backstage made a comment about my low-slung jeans and how he could see my underwear. I became very aware, suddenly, that I was the only girl in that room and that my father wasn’t there.

It never occurred to me that those late nights he was gone playing music meant my mother was alone caring for us. Or that his rehearsals several nights a week meant the same thing. It’s difficult, when you are young, to imagine the time your parent spends with you as hard work.

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