this is me...then (Black Mistress Tina)

            I’ve been working out my body.  Not as in the 90s, when I believed that the thing to do with my femininity was to bury it under mounds of unnatural muscle.  No, these past twelve months have been about living in the 90s that I should have lived: working on getting my body to be the performative connector between my identity as girl and that as writer.  I am in the process of leaving Joony Schecter behind for a new identity that I’ve already begun building: A hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions: BLACK MISTRESS TINA.  

            Black Mistress Tina is a hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions.  The name is an homage to Debi Mazar’s character in Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Girl 6,” which is herself homage to Bettie Page and to the hard romantic pragmatism of a femme.  I have fallen in love with a man and we decided to cohabitate.  He is also a wonderful electronic musician.  One of his early gestures of winning me over was listing me as his “muse” in the description of a piece that he produced last summer.  But because my man Roddy is a modern man, he views “muse” as consonant with “partner.”  Historically, “muse” has been understood as a pure and passive body that exists solely to submit to the authoritative genius of the “artist.”  Of course, this history has been also used as a tool of the patriarchy, in which “muse” equals “woman” and “artist” is “man.”  From the beginning, Roddy saw me as a muse because he understood my femininity, but with a definite anti-patriarchal stance.  (This is partly why I love him.) 

I then worked as muse on his “Violets,” a nine-minute sound piece in which all the samples that Roddy used as raw material came from me.  I was a traditional muse insofar as I was literally objectified: Roddy recorded my grunts, whoops, hisses, wails, and even humming Culture Club’s “Miss Me Blind.”  This process made me feel simultaneously troubled and elated; I was cut up into voice samples, made into a thing.  It was cutting of a different kind.  I saw my body fluttering helplessly on the cutting board and watching Roddy transplant a different pulse into it made the heart still in my own body beat hard and happy.  A piece of my body—my voice—was ripped from me and snipped and pieced together like a rabbit fur coat. I just snuggled in the luxuriousness of it all.  And when it came for Roddy to present the piece, he insisted that I be given credit as a collaborator, and asked me to come up with a bodily performance to go with the piece.

            Which led to “The Rabbit Catcher.” This time, the work began with me: I’ve wanted to write a mourning piece for Whitney Houston ever since her untimely death last year.  But whenever I sat in front of my computer, all I could say was nothing.  I had the same reaction to her death as Mariah Carey: “I’m almost incapable of talking about it.”  So “Mourning and Melancholia: Whitney Houston” sat unfinished but for the quote from Mariah.  In the meantime, I got an idea to adapt one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” as a performance piece.  I became fixed with the gesture of singing a song while eating my own hair.  I wrote a score for it, and Roddy and I set about thinking about what sound should come out of me. My job was to again provide Roddy with a stockpile of sonic raw material.  Immediately, I felt that the sound should be a recording of me being possessed by Whitney Houston.  I decided that I would transcribe in textual form all the sounds—including not only Whitney’s voice but the instruments—in the epic 10 minute remix of Whitney’s cover of “I’m Every Woman.”  Roddy would record me doing a “flat” reading of those texts, which he would re-cut into what he calls an “aural bed” in which the audience—and I—can luxuriate.  As he played his sound piece, I would then perform live another version of the transcribed text.  We performed a sketch version of the piece this past December at the Apexart.  We’ll perform an expanded and fully formed version in May.  But in the meantime: enjoy my new body, al dente.  

The Rabbit Catcher from Roddy Schrock on Vimeo.

bobby

So I bobbed my hair Saturday night. I could say I “cut” my hair, but because I just hacked off twelve inches without any further shaping or layering, it really was a bobbing. I had many bobbed hair ideals swirling in my head: David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Gong Li in To Live (the female Maoist phase), Natalie Portman in Closer, Julia Fordham in the “Porcelain” video, the dancer Slam from Madonna: Truth or Dare, Louise Brooks, Renée Zellweger. So as the hacked braid sat on the table pulsating with its last breaths, I felt no sympathy for it and no remorse.

However, Sunday morning was a different story. I had a major crisis of regret because my hair suddenly felt too old lady: it felt less “bobbed” (as in flappers: Zelda Fitzgerald and Joan Crawford circa 1929), and more like “a bob.” Specifically, it was the hairstyle of my mother. When I want to look like my mother, I want to look like her when she was my age (in her 30s), not necessarily the age she is now (some years over her 30s). As it is with most girls, hair follicles are attached some major emotional circuits that are as yet unchartered by medical science. So near tears, I called my sister to wail: “I HATE MY HAIR! I HAVE MA’S HAIR!!”

But as soon as I started to tell her how depressed I was about this new hairstyle, I started cracking up and laughing. My sister joined in on my laughter, and after snorts and giggle tears, I hung up the phone no longer sad that I have my mother’s hair. Now I think: Jeez, there are worse things than having your mother’s haircut. After all, when Lenny Kravitz first cut off his dreads and looked in the mirror at his (chic) mini afro, did he think: “Do I have my middle-aged mother’s hairdo?” Which he does, by the way: in the years before she passed in 1995, his mother, the actress Roxie Roker (incidentally, I have the same birthday as her) also wore the mini-afro.

But even if he saw his mother’s middle-aged hairstyle in the mirror, I’m sure Kravitz was OK with it, because he’s an avowed Mother’s Child, which I am too. Is this not the ultimate achievement of an androgyne, when your mother possesses your head so that you may present a sleek, unexpectedly male physicality to the world? And while my mother may not be Roxie Roker, Jeung H. Kang is still a pretty chic lady. So why is it that Lenny Kravitz’s wearing the hairdo of his middle-aged mother looks automatically chic to me and my wearing the hairdo of my middle-aged mother makes me feel...like a middle-aged lady?

It has something to do with the inherent chic of blackness. The afro itself is an androgynous style, but it wasn’t always chicly androgynous. On the scalps of women, it was the mark of a certain working class of people too busy for lye and hot irons. It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the Black Power movement’s infection (some would say “dilution”) into mainstream African-American style, that the short afro became chic. The androgyny of the mini afro went chic because first, militant women adopted the hairstyle of their male comrades, and the resultant androgyny allowed “Black is Beautiful” to become “Black is Chic.” Thus, it took a bodily detour—men, Black Panthers, Black Panther women—for the middle-aged black women to rock the short afro as a carapace of femininity rather than the byproduct of work-weary bones. The men gave back to their mothers.

So maybe my bob, my bobby, is a similar opportunity to give back to my mother. As a fetus, I vampirically sucked energy from my mother from within, demanding strawberries in winter and raw white rice chewed through and through. Now, I have a chance to bare my neck so that she may construct a fun femininity for herself through the blood of mine.

The reason for cutting off my hair was, as Miranda Richardson’s IRA soldier declares of her own bobbed hair in the film The Crying Game: “I needed a tougher look.” Of course I miss my twelve inches, and the soft and intimidating aura I put out with hippy-dippy locks. But now I want to be something else. The long hair I had, a result of three years’ growth, had begun to feel slack and crumply. I wanted to be reconnected to my neck and shoulders, and the bobby does that: I’m stretching out my neck more, putting my chin up more, and my general slumpy posture feels slightly more balletic now. Monday morning, when I greased and my hair back and slung on my trusty biker jacket with my APC Petit Standard jeans, I felt feminine in a way I never did when I wore the same outfit with my long hair. I was somewhere between David Bowie and Wanda Jackson: I felt tough...and sweet.

In “How to Conceive (of) a Girl,” Luce Irigray writes: “mother-matter affords man the means to realize his form.” I want to do the reverse! Of course, not that my mother needs my help in realizing her form, but wearing the same hairstyle, I think of as gifting her with the aura of the Thin White Duke-meets-the Queen of Rockabilly. Maybe she can feel like she is turning into a slice of her androgynous son, and maybe it will make her feel unexpectedly tough, sweet, and ageless.

it’s not the weather

I’ve given up eating cow’s flesh but returned to wearing blackened cow’s skin. I’ve recently, and perhaps only temporarily, but then again, perhaps permanently, given up my cardigans for black leather biker jackets. I have almost as many of these black babies in leather as I do of the woollies, but they had been stowed away for a few years now. It is October in New England, so it may seem perfectly logical to throw on thick black leather over thin numb bones, but actually, I started wearing leather again this summer, in the Bay Area. Again, because it is Northern California, wearing leather in the summer is not so crazy. But I doggedly wore the black leather biker jackets, even through the intermittent days in the mid 70s, sweating against the padded lining and still refusing to trade it in for something thinner and circulation-friendly.

I’m wearing the leather jackets now as I wear my angora sweaters: to make me feel warm and feminine. But in both temperature and femininity, the warmth of a leather jacket is not the warmth of wool. The sweater warms you by cozying up to you: when yarn fibers drill into your pores, it’s like the sweater is a lover who wants to fuck you. The leather biker jacket doesn’t cling to you: it keeps you warm for sure, but it is a warmth that makes you feel more hollow. The padding separates your skin from the carapace of the jacket, and you feel more tender and forkable in your warmth. Wearing the leather stylizes the empty feeling I carry with me so it feels more like a hole rather than a void. What I am doing when I wrap myself in a tough black biker jacket is turning myself into a handbag.

When I’m surrounded by the laminated skin of something killed, my own skin melts away, my own flesh melts away, and all I am is not the squishiness of my sweetmeats but the steam that would rise from them should I ever be gutted for the sake of a small leathergood. But that is a heat of sorts, and a heat that makes me forget the vacancy of love foreclosed. The thick black leather that surrounds me turns my entire body into the black hole, the rabbit hole, the wishing well to kiss and tell. It is a place in my head where I long to suck in that boy I love. It isn’t forever, but then, it’s not the weather, either. It’s a way of drawing expensive hearts and flowers around the emptiness and calling it an ideal, a vulva in my brain, a dream:

I was in a big loud house party full of twentysomethings. I was at the party with the particular boy I’ve been in love with for the last year. The boy told me he wanted to spend the night with me and we snuggled together on the floor amid cushions and cheap throws. In the pit of my stomach, I felt 22 years old (instead of 36). We smoked up a bunch of mind-numbing stuff. Then amid the giddiness of fully-clothed cuddling, I blacked out. When I woke up, the party was over and the boy was gone. I wandered around the house and someone familiar was yelling at me about being irresponsible. I missed my boy but all I could do was worry about having blacked out. I walked up to the rooftop of the house and this familiar angry person accused me: “Look what you’ve done! Now they think it is OK to do this!” I looked up. I had thought it was morning but there were stars. The black tarred rooftop was covered with broken glass. Neighbors in a higher house next door were throwing bottles out their window onto our rooftop. The moment the bottles hit the roof they shattered into powder. I know glass doesn’t break like that but it was my dream, and bottles bypassing shard directly into sand made the whole idea of breaking seem not violent, not destructive, not a loss. But I still had a feeling of dread. So I hugged myself hard and I felt a bit better. The neighbors continued to launch bottles and the angry familiar person was still yelling at me, but all I wanted to do was take my shoes off and press my feet into the ground glass. But I didn’t because I woke up. It was 2:00 AM, September 8, 2010, and there were indeed stars out still.

big fat legs

I finally did something to make me feel completely woman: I ran my first half-marathon. I ran in the Providence Rhodes Races last Sunday, and I dressed carefully for my debut: strategically broken-in Nike Air Pegasus with “JOONY SCHECTER” embroidered on the tongues; 70s-style Adidas running shorts that flap out silkily like a half-slip; and my vintage Hole Live Through This t-shirt. Actually, the choice of the Hole t-shirt was a bit of thoughtful impulsiveness. Up until the night before the race, I had planned on wearing one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac Rumors shirt from the 70s, whose cotton was thinned out, as aerodynamic as any athletic microweave polyester. But suddenly, as I was going to bed, I thought: HOLE.

And so I got up the next morning and switched. This wasn’t a practical consideration. The Hole shirt, as thin as it is, is much larger than the Fleetwood Mac shirt, and would weigh more heavily on a running body. But I didn’t care. I’d bear the weight because I had to represent the team I was running for, which was that of grunge femininity: I’m Miss World. More than that, somewhere deep inside, I had an intuition that running the half-marathon was going to be a bodily operation that was going to give me the Hole, a physical, visceral feeling of the vulva in my brain. I took the photograph above the morning of the race, in the pose I’d carry in my brain even through the fierce desperation of swinging arms and pumping legs it’d take to power through the last couple miles of the race: GIRL.

I finished the 13.1 mile race. I was going to be happy if I finished under two hours, and joyful if I finished it in 1 hour 45 minutes. I was in ecstasy. I finished in 1 hour, 39 minutes, 26 seconds. Of course I was grateful that I had finished the race ahead of my goal, but I was ecstatic because “1:39:26” felt like a christening of my body as woman. The results page lists my name, age, sex, and finish time. But I feel like “1:39:26” should be placed under the heading “Sex.”

Running the race made me feel voluptuous. Not sexual: voluptuous. I’m not talking about being flooded by endorphins I didn’t know I had, nor the cheap dirty chuckling I got out of the pain in my inner thighs and butt the day after. Not sexual: voluptuous. The pain I was feeling in the lower half of my body was not really pain, but a signal of change. If it was pain I was feeling I didn’t know it, because what was more visceral was how exaggerated my legs and butt felt—and now feel—in relation to the rest of my body.

My legs have been feeling fat lately. The seams on my Bettie Page-y APC “Petite Standard” jeans (100 percent cotton, no elastin or polyester in the denim) have been stretched out close to popping. This was cause for alarm at first: MY LEGS ARE GETTING FAT!! But then I began to give into the fat leg feeling. Because isn’t that what voluptuousness is about? Converting an overextended, hyperbolized asymmetry into a sensuality of feeling and being? Pin-up girls with outsized breasts and hips; plus-size models with rolling thighs: “voluptuous” is the word that articulates their bodily asymmetry rendered in fat as sensual beauty. But why should useless corpulence—the fat of breasts and hips and thighs that don’t lift or carry anything—corner the market on voluptuousness? Why, for instance, aren’t ballet dancers, with their outsized equine flanks, never thought of as “voluptuous”? Because they use those thick legs to vault themselves into the air: their asymmetry is functional. Paul Newman once described Elizabeth Taylor as a “functioning voluptuary,” and I take inspiration from that, although in a different context. If these legs carry me through 13.1 miles are the very legs that feel fat, why can’t its very functionality make me voluptuous? I think it does.

I don’t gaze at myself naked very often. The last time I really made a habit of looking at my body in flesh was in my early twenties, when I was obsessed with building muscle to get a specifically masculine look in gender and sensuality: to get not just a hard body, but a hard and symmetrical body, in which the well-developed pecs and biceps and delts balanced out those of the thighs and calves. I stripped and looked at myself this week and I saw total asymmetry. My legs felt like they were huge tree trunks attached to teensy-weensy twig s of torso and arms. But quite unexpectedly, I was pleased. I liked the off-balanced picture I saw. I look in the mirror naked and this is what I see:

I was a skinny gal. Now I am a grown-ass woman with big fat legs. Of course my legs are not “big fat legs” in the strictly cellular sense. But thinking of my runner’s legs as big and fat, as the stilts of a functioning voluptuary, I am finally rejecting the remnants of the boy’s sense of body that equates perfect symmetry with beauty and sensuality. I have big fat legs, and for once, I like that, the feeling of bottom-heaviness. It’s my own version of a D-cup: when my claves force the seams of my jeans to stretch and burst, it’s my version of my cups running over. Looking in the mirror at my naked body, I feel kind of like a bulimic because I’m seeing that which is not there. But it is a kind of renegade, reverse-bulimia: looking in the mirror, seeing fatness that is only in your mind, but instead of hating it, just loooooving it.

a new me (not really)

OK, so, as a part of my sabbatical project in San Francisco this spring, I decided to become the little match.com girl. It has been a bit demoralizing. First, the medium of internet search engine does not stoke me erotically: I don’t really know what height/ weight/ income/ religion/ eye color I would like my man to have. As Barbara Stanwyck says in The Lady Eve, I’d like my future husband “to sort of...take me by surprise...like a burglar....” Then, this morning, as I rolled down to the bottom of the profile of some boy whose picture was kinda burglar-cute, I found something a smidge abusive to my self-esteem:

Turn-ons: Brainiacs, Dancing, Erotica, Flirting, Money, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

I know you’re not supposed to create a self-portrait based on the tickings of a match.com survey, but really, how can you not? What is this guy saying about me? That boys with long hair (like me) are dummies with no rhythm and no sexual or flirty or sarcastic sophistication who are on welfare and like to jump off naked into the Bay?

A bit dejected, I trolled a bit longer, eating my split ends between gulps of coffee and cigarettes. (Smoking is not popular also among internet daters, by the way.) Then I started encountering more and more of these long-hair-haters. The long-hair-phobic bachelors I’m going to share with you are actual profiles of gay men on match.com. I wish I made them up. There’s a lot more of them than four. But anyway, here’s Bachelor #2:

Turn-ons: Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Dancing, Flirting, Power.

Turn-offs: Body piercings, Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos.

And yet again, long-haired boys are dummies who can’t dance or flirt. What is it about long hair that signals automatic dumbness? With this guy, since I am tattooed, I am even less matched. For him, having long hair goes along with having tattoos and body piercings and kissing in public. Of course, this is another instance of gay men’s femmephobia. The femmeness of long hair is yoked to traditionally non-normative styles of body mutilation (piercing, tattos) and body exposure (PDA, skinny dipping--again). It’s no coincidence that out of the gazillion faggots on match.com, I’ve seen only a handful—OK make that three, including myself—with hair down past the ears. What’s crazy is how the simply physical aesthetic of femininity that is long hair is then set in conceptual opposition to these socially (over)valued qualities: “Boldness/ Assertiveness,” “Brainiacs,” “Power.” This is standard issue sexism operating as sexual preference among gay men. This is no surprise. Here is the surprise: Bachelor # 3:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Erotica, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm.

Gone are the traditionally masculinized qualities of power, brains, and assertiveness. In this guy, they have been replaced by the fetishized markers of marginalization that were a "turn-off" for Bachelor #2: body piercings, tattoos. (For good measure, this one adds “Thrills” and “Thunderstorms.”) But now even these historically marginalized qualities (including bad weather!) are set as erotic against long hair, which is still linked in erotic negativity with “Public displays of affection.” What is that about? That femmes want you to kiss them in public? (We do of course—you better prove your fucking love!!) This guy, while seeming to be a rough-and-tumble thrill-and-twister seeker, still has a closet in his brain: to be seen kissing another male in public is a turn-off for him, and one that is linked to male femininity. At least this time, I am granted sarcasm.

But lest I begin to feel more justified in myself as some symbol of renegade sexuality, I encounter Bachelor #4:

Turn-ons: Body piercings, Boldness/ Assertiveness, Brainiacs, Candlelight, Erotica, Flirting, Public displays of affection, Sarcasm, Skinny dipping, Tattoos, Thrills, Thunderstorms.

Turn-offs: Long hair.

This guy loves everything, in everyone...except faggots with long hair. At this point—having run through too many profiles whose “Turn-ons/ Turn-offs” were exactly like Bachelor #4, I thought, Shit, is growing my hair long really worth the trouble?

Well, fuck yeah! I love my hair! But then I thought: Well, since my sexuality is, after all, homosexual, maybe I should start compromising a teensy bit, right? So in that spirit, I’ve created (as you see above and below) my new look for the new year:

-Hair pulled back: I’m not going to cut my hair. But I will scrape some Kiehl’s Clean Hold Styling gel (it has silk powders and Vitamin E, and has no alcohol but still holds like Elmer’s glue) through my hair, tie it in a knot and call it a day. Besides, when you combine it with...

-White t-shirt and light blue jeans: ...it’s very inmate in a medium-security prison, no? The shirt is vintage Meatmen concert tee. I’m usually decked out in black tees worn with dark indigo or grey jeans, so it feels fresh to do a white and light combination. These jeans are Acne Hep in “Beyond,” but I also have been loving Earnest Sewn Harlan in “Morrissey.” I’ve really been feeling light denim these days, ever since I saw a great picture of my friend Jackie H. as a teenager in the late ‘80s, with crazy Kate Bush-y crimped hair and white t-shirt with high-waisted light jeans. So inspiring. I want my future to be the vast history of girlhood.

-New tattoo: Bettie Page memorial:

I just got this tattoo over at Everlasting Tattoo. It’s my own design of Bettie Page that I drew early last year. This month, I added the tiny “B.P.” in her pubic area to memorialize her recent passing. All my tattoos are of girls I feel myself to be, but this one is the first girl who is topless. It feels quite sailor-macho to have bare breasts on my bicep, but not macho in a male way. I just finished reading Thing of Beauty, Stephen Fried’s surprisingly well-researched biography of the 80s supermodel Gia Carangi, and it was quite a style inspiration. In the book, Gia, who was a dyke, is alternately described by friends on one hand as “androgynous” and “boy-girl,” then as “the perfect homosexual” and “the purest lesbian I ever met.” I want to be the purest lesbian you have ever met.

-Dark brown/ plum lipstick: Because after all, a girl can’t compromise her femininity that much. It will be hard to give up, or at least timeshare, my regular Bettie Red. But this new shade—Shu Uemura BR 798—is so perfect. It’s certainly very goth, but also almost the same shade of lipstick my little sister wore in the nineties (she lined her lips with almost black lip liner of course). I love the idea of being in my thirties and looking like my sister at age 18. More of my future as the history of girls. Also, I saw a beautiful series of photographs of my living idol, Lindsay Lohan in the upcoming February issue of Interview magazine, in which she is wearing the darkest, plummiest lipstick ever. The pictures are in black and white, and her lipsticked mouth reads as black. I wanted lips that read as black if I were rendered in black and white.

I want to look like I drank goat’s blood. I want to look as if I drank a whole bottle of a 2005 Reynolds Family Winery Merlot in one sitting. I want to look as if I’d been gorging on chocolate covered cherries...or really dark, pretty poop.

So here I am, my long hair tamed and tucked under! Maybe now I don’t look as sarcastic-rhythmless-skinny-dipper-homeless-airhead! Come and get me boys!!!!!!!

elegy for bettie page

For the past couple days, I’ve been hobbled by love for Bettie Page. And when I say “hobble,” I’m not being metaphorical: walking has been a tender experience. My toes, swollen, throbbed as if they had a heartbeat of their own. My calves hurt like I’ve been doing squats. I have a tiny perfect purple bruise at the Southern tip of each of my foot arch, punched in by the patent leather edge of the YSL Tribute pumps I wore Friday night. The bruise and the pain were a result of walking on those 5-inch heels the width of a tapestry needle for approximately six straight hours.

Friday night, December 12, 2008, I co-hostessed a party with my beloved co-pilot and RISD colleague, Jewelry and Metalsmithing professor Tracy Steepy, at her newly-purchased house. It was a belated official house-warming and end-of the semester celebration, but for me, it had a more somber undercoat. That morning, Bettie Page died after complications from a heart attack; she was 85.

Bettie Page was, for those of you who don’t know, THE pin-up queen of the 1950s. For me, she represents the 1950s. Fuck all of this fetishization of the 1950s as repressed suburban hotness (Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road; that AMC show Mad Men). Bettie Page was the orchidal opposite of that timid and boring feminine sexuality, which is only “hot” through boring nostalgic impulses. Bettie bared her body when the rest of the female population was caught up in looking like a lampshade or upside-down mixing bowl. Bettie Page is one of my prime personal idols of femmeness.

So dressing for the party, I also wanted to dress in tribute to Bettie: my version of “fifties” style is a hairy mohair cardigan, in dark purple, worn with a vintage Hole t-shirt and ripped back-seamed pantyhose. Before the guests arrived, I asked my friend Lori Talcott to take some Bettie Page-tribute pictures of me. I wanted to try to capture a smidgen of Bettie’s spirit in photo. This turned out to be quite difficult. I’m used to casting myself in self-portraits for this blog, and having another person photograph me unnerved me a bit. Asking Lori to take a Bettie photo of me, I felt less like Bettie than an actress playing Bettie—hopefully the great Gretchen Mol playing Bettie in the underrated biopic, The Notorious Bettie Page.

I’m quite shy, and when Lori played Bunny Yeager or Paula Klaw (two of Bettie’s great photographers who were incidentally also female) I found that I was not adequately Bettie. Lori arranged me on the sofa and as she got ready to push the button, she called out, “Make love to the camera!” As you can see in the above picture, I couldn’t. Unless you count the natural Korean alcohol-flush as sexy flush.

I was disappointed with myself. I felt like a femme-loser for not being able to replicate an iota of Bettie Page’s vibrancy and joy in the photo. But the night was young, and the pumps were on. Funnily enough, even before our party coincided with Bettie’s death, I had already planned on wearing my splurge for the semester, the said YSL pumps that I bought precisely because they reminded me of Bettie Page: black patent leather, peep-toed, mary-jane straps, 5-inch stiletto heels. Yes, they are YSL, but I will forever think of them as “Bettie Pumps.” I put the Bettie Pumps on around 7:30 pm, and didn’t take them off until the last guest left, around 1:30 am. I made a conscious decision to keep them on the whole night, as a tribute to Bettie’s passing.

I had tried on high heels before (I actually injured my foot once forcing it into a Chloe boot one size too small), but this was the first time I made a serious investment of my own. The shoes forced me to pick my body up and shake it down into a new form. I am and have always been a chronic sloucher—my mother used to threaten to bind a ruler to my spine if I didn’t stand up straight. I’m about 5’9”, and with those shoes, I’m sure it actually just compensated for the 5 inches lost by my usual slouch. But with this added height, one guest noted that I should push my chest out and stand up even taller. And I do admit that being 6 foot tall is quite fun. But that suggestion didn’t appeal to me somehow. I found myself slouching even more in those heels. I wasn’t wearing the pumps so I could tower over people; I was wearing them so I could feel like Bettie—or rather, to create what feeling like Bettie means.

Wearing these heels, the feeling that struck me more than height increase was the sheer pain in my feet. I’ve taken ballet before, so I know the specific pain of navigating a floor on your toes: this was not that pain. The pain of the Bettie Pumps was that I felt as though I had no feet: my feet felt as if they were chopped off, as if they were stumps. I wasn’t walking on my toes, I was walking on my ankles. The height of the heels forced my feet into a completely inhuman pose. Whereas a bare (or at least stiletto-less) foot forms a 90 degree angle with the ankle, the Bettie YSL pump forced the tops of my feet to create a smooth, straight line—a pefect 180 degrees—with my ankles. This was weird foot-binding: the heels of my feet were crushed right up against my Achilles’ tendon, which lengthened and slimmed out my legs but also made me feel as if I had no other body part but those legs.

Miracle of miracles after a few whiskeys: I didn’t once fall down the stairs while giving house-tours. In fact, I joked around with our guests as I hobbled and bobbled around: “It hurts so good,” and “You have to pay for beauty.” Yes, shamefully, all these clichés about the masochism of femininity. But the truth is, it really didn’t hurt so good. It just FUCKING HURT! But I didn’t kick the pumps off, I endured the pain, because I felt like Bettie. Pain is an inevitable part of any creative or creating process. A house-builder has to sweat to move lumber, a metalsmith has to hammer and anvil; I see femininity as just such a creative product.

This is NOT masochism. Masochism is a disorder by which the viscerality of pain is replaced with pleasure. A masochist who feels sensual pleasure at getting his or her bum whipped and says the pain is pleausurable is not actually feeling pain: “pain” as a visceral element loses meaning. Hobbling around in Bettie Pumps, I didn’t feel a warm glow of pleasure. This was pain. But the pain was in tribute to the passed Bettie, to create an elegiac gesture. When pain is used to accomplish something, to produce something, it is not masochism. That is simply process. So any tradition of thought that invokes masochism as a major tenet of femininity is sloppy theorizing. “Masochism” is just another way that men have used to denigrate the creative process that is femininity. What they say is: “Oh, women can’t possibly endure pain; they must actually and simply enjoy it.” Again and again, men want to naturalize women’s relationship with femininity as something simply sensual and orgasmic, rather than something calculated, aesthetic, designed, creative. When Bettie threw on her pumps and threw off her sweater, they figured she was simply “being herself.” Perhaps some of them gave her the credit of being “an actress.” But no: she was more universal that. Bettie Page was an ARTIST. She was an artist whose creative product was femininity. Bettie Page was a sculptor of XX genetics, a female fleshsmith.