only women smoke

Of course the doctor asked me to quit smoking. And of course I had to lie and say that I wanted to quit, even though I have no intention of quitting. I nodded prettily but lied all over the place like she was a Catholic priest or a headshrinker (Although I told her I’d been smoking for 15 years, I’d actually been smoking since I was 15 years old). I went along with her assumption that my addiction to cigarettes was a chemical dependence on nicotine. This, I’m sure, is partly true (although I have no way of really knowing what lurks in the heart of my innards) but the truth I withheld from the doctor is that I will always smoke because I smoke because smoking is what women do.

In the great Korean film Yeo-baewoo-deul (Actresses), six famous Korean actresses play fictionalized versions of themselves, gathered together one Christmas Eve for a Korea Vogue photoshoot. I’ve become quite obsessed with this movie, and there is a particularly gorgeous scene I’ve been watching over and over: the youngest actress (Kim Ok-Bin, age 23) bums a smoke off of the eldest actress (Yoon Yeo-Jeung, in her 60s). As the actresses sit side-by-side smoking their slim cigs, the decades that separate them become pronounced and then rendered irrelevant. Not just through physicality, but the idiosyncratic femininity of each woman’s smoking.

Yoon Yeo-Jeung holds her cigarette like an old-school screen diva. She leans back comfortably in to her chair and yet her spine retains a stunning uprightness; it’s the confidence of accumulated experience. She holds her smoking arm slightly away from her torso to create a classically willowy silhouette. Cherrytopping that silhouette is her hand. The knuckle is arched back just barely enough to break a flat line. The fingers are curled and separated, the cigarette flowering out from the very tips of her index and middle finger. The open palm that faces her allows Yoon to create a downward gaze expression that elongates her body into a haughty coolness.

By contrast, Kim Ok-Bin is slumped over. Her smoking arm does not look arranged, it looks broken: held tight against her torso. Her smoking fingers are glued tightly together. Where Yoon’s classic smoking femininity creates a fluid openness that verges on a contrapposto, Kim’s smoking arm is a black hole which seems to suck in her entire body.

What’s fabulous about this scene is that after a few beats, Yoon notices this difference. She turns to Kim, watches her take a drag, and says: “You learned in the bathroom, didn’t you?”

I’ve been smoking since I was 15 years old, but I’ve been smoking like a 60-year old woman. My smoking stance is pretty much standard faggy but it is faggy it is also Yoon’s actressy one. I probably watched the same old movies that Yoon watched in order to learn smoking. But this scene was revelatory to me because I was struck by the utterly feminine beauty of Kim Ok-Bin’s adolescent smoking pose. I love how she holds her cigarette, not like a lady (gently between index and middle finger, palm turned inward) but also not like a pothead/ thug (pinched hard between thumb and index finger, rest of the fingers curled flagrantly and threateningly outward). Instead, Kim holds her cigarette as if it were a pencil: between the index and middle finger, and pinched between the thumb and index finger. I learned to smoke by watching middle-aged actresses in black-and-white films: learning to smoke was a solitary act and expression of my nascent faggotry through film diva-worship. Now, in my thirties, I want to have a renaissance of femme adolescence: I want to smoke as if I learned to smoke in the bathroom. From and with other girls. Kim’s smoking produces a femininity that is secretive, furtive. Her heavy hair acts like a hood and covers her face. Yoon’s smoking is a trophy of femme life lived. Kim’s smoking is a bare history of that life: shame, secrets, but also community and quiet rebellion. Smoking seems to add to natural gravity and pull Kim’s body down and gives its slimness a protective mass. She looks beautiful.

This I realize is an awful confession, to connect a carcinogenic health hazard to the allure of femininity. So lest you mistake this for a regressive Virginia Slims advertisement, here is my own Surgeon General’s Warning Label: CIAGRETTE SMOKING WILL NOT MAKE YOU MORE FEMININE. But if you are homosexual, living in Iowa City in the1980s, fifteen years old, covered with fresh pimples, nearsighted like blind, and in full-time depression, then a pack of Marlborough Menthols may do as well as anything to help will away that sad-sack male genitalia that is the cause of all your woes. Twenty years later, even though I’m more comfortable with my body and myself, I still need smoking to be that core girl that fought hard to break through my male skin. My increasingly obsessive running has naturally cut my cigarette intake. But a few times a day, I still need to make the movements that the cigarette forces out of my body in order to feel reassured of my femme self. In this way, the cigarette is a tool of my self-making as a true woman—which is not a static adherence to a specific idea of “woman,” but a softly and strongly evolving identification with femininity.

So I’ve been studying hard Kim Ok-Bin’s way of smoking into femininity: the way it forces you to break your wrist: palms down, knuckles get the featured role. When you hold the cigarette like a pencil it feels too close to joint-holding and also too masculine. Thus, you have to make sure the three free fingers (middle, ring, pinkie) are stowed underneath the cigarette at all times, in alignment with the index finger, especially making sure they don’t go flying up and out too much when you pinch and puff.

only doctors bleed

I was sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office. I was wearing my sensible jeans. A pair of soft black Levis that, instead of clinging to, tread around my hips: easier to zip them off when the doctor examines my rectum. All my life, I’ve been kind of preternaturally inclined to rectal bleeding. My little spotting had been diagnosed as nothing medically serious, merely the consequences of overzealous toiletry. So I’ve always shrugged off blood in the toilet with an ease that bordered on affection. Years ago, when I told my ex-husband about my spotted toilet paper, he replied: “You probably like that.” It wasn’t a recognition of my masochism (although he knew about my cutting past) but an affirmation of my desire to be a woman: mimesis of menstruation.

I went to the doctor this week though because my regular heavy flow days had gotten a little too heavy, a little too flowing, a little too regular. So I sat there waiting like a good little girl in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, reading magazines I’d never read (Newsweek: “Michelle Obama: My Fight Against Childhood Obesity”), being wan but aloof, waiting to hear my name called.

“Dr. Lee?”

Is that me? It is me. How strange it is to be called a “Doctor” in a doctor’s office. The young teenage girl with neon patent leather Nikes who was also being a good little girl, there with her mother or grandmother, looked a little surprised. But I was a little surprised too, though I shouldn’t have been. It was all my doing. I am a doctor (a Doctor of Philosophy) and I circled it as my title of choice on my patient survey.

The form asked me to choose: “Prefix: Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss Dr.” I am all of those things but since discussing excessive bloodletting into the toilet is not an academic matter, I feel that I have to choose a “Prefix” that reflects, if not the accuracy, the inevitable outlines, of my flesh. Thank God then, for the gender-neutral “Dr.”

But I’m not so sure that “Dr.” is a gender-neutral prefix. For me, anyway. Even on the medical survey, the category of “Prefix” is an odd one because there is a separate section for indicating gender. So “Prefix” seems to ask for some other, more social information, even though it is essentially that of gender: one way to say “male” and three different ways to say “female”....then one way to say “post-graduate degree.” Thus, in picking the post-graduate degree, am I not saying that my education bears the same weight upon my psyche and body as my sex and marital status? To push that even further: I wonder if being a Ph.D. is some kind of gender for me.

Is being hyper-educated a gender? Not “gendered” but “a gender.” What I mean by that differentiation is, I’m not interested in how hyper-education is represented along traditional lines of masculinity and femininity. For example: being a bookworm means you are less muscular and able-bodied thus more feminine than masculine; or being learned means you are not a housewife thus more masculine than feminine. No, what I mean is the functionality of hyper-education as a gender.

Gender marks the fleshly plugs and sockets we use to sexually and romantically connect with other human beings. If we apply this formulation to “Dr.” what we are essentially asking is: How does your identity as it is comprised by what and how you’ve learned dictate a specific mode by which you become sexual? Does my Ph.D. in American literature really shape my sexuality? Is it that my expertise with words and books gives me a special nubbin and/ or dent that can be petted to orgasm? Or that the ease and pleasure with which I dissect the prose of Mary Gaitskill or Anaïs Nin constitute a body part that longs for a specific kind of spit-and-stroke rhythm?

I think so. Even if I haven’t figured out exactly how, I think so. Being a doctor as a type of girl doesn’t mean that I’m looking for my twin in educational degree. This is not a match.com profile. Rather, I think of this boy I’ve recently been in love with. He is not a Ph.D. in literature. But when he talks about writing and reading he talks in a way that puts his entire body into it. His hands have been trained to hold tools other than books but when he talks about books I love that he talks in a way that feels soft and firm at once. His desire to love and find meaning in words I love and find meaningful is so palpable it’s fingertippy. And when he talks like this he’s talking to ME, the Doctor of Philosophy. This is who defines my gender. Someone who knows how to touch my body of knowledge and education in a way that makes me feel more like a girl and less like a human.

the pleasures and functionality of forgetting

Such an underrated, or perhaps more accurately, unfairly maligned process: forgetting. Maybe I’m wanting to twist forgetting into a valuable feeling because I’m in love and the boy whom I love might forget me in the summer months to come. I might not have any control over his forgetting about me. I want to forget him too. But not forgetting as obliteration.

One always assumes that to love, you constantly have to be thinking about the love object. You have to keep saying “I love you,” you have to keep phoning them, you have to keep texting them, you have to keep emailing them, you have to keep reminding them that you love them, you have to keep reminding them to remind you that they love you. These are what Roland Barthes, in A Lover’s Discourse, calls “the lunatic chores” of love. In order to love, you seem to have to maniacally guarantee against forgetting. It’s constantly bearing evidence of love. It’s burdensome.

Actually, what it may indicate is a kind of emotional misfit. You keep performing your love as a fight against forgetting because in the back of your mind, you might not really feel it.

So maybe forgetting your beloved can be a symptom of love. In forgetting the loved one, you integrate him into your emotionality, your material existence. The loved one is important enough to become a seamless part of your everyday life. Of course, this has to be a very specialized form of forgetting, because there is a thin but hard line of differentiation between this loving forgetting and taking for granted.

Which is why the above quote from Christophe Decarnin, the current designer for the French fashion house Balmain, is so resonant with me right now: “It’s a success when you forget what you have on.” The successful love is like a successful pair of jeans: in the morning, it makes your heart flutter when you see it, bunched up or folded up, but waiting, just waiting for you; it makes you jittery and charged when you’re out of the shower and naked and you touch it and hold it up and shake it out to prepare to put left leg in first; then you put it on and button it up close to your navel and get on with your day, and it is so beloved that even if it is not skin tight, its weft nevertheless fuses with that of your skin. And then you forget it as you’d forget that your muscles and bones and organs are covered by your skin; you forget it in such a way that if you ever lost it, you know you’d just die.