a tale of two sisters, part 3

My tough femme public defender sister and I had been waiting five months to see Darren Aronofsky’s film Black Swan, and we were not disappointed. Appropriately sandwiched by an opening title and credit sequence plated in Bodoni (the font that I would be were I a typeface), the film is not only an ode to femininity, it is a medium of femme-bonding. When I’ve talked to boys who’ve seen the film (OK I don’t know that many boys so it’s like three) there was a common denominator to their responses, whether they liked the film or not: they were grossed out by the scenes in which Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers tears into her bleeding fingernails and toenails to make them bleed more. Having been a cutter myself, these scenes were viscerally moving for me. But even my sister, who was far from a cutter as a teenager, did not find them “gross.” We understood as femme beings that tearing into the self is part of the pain with which the character creates herself as a specifically feminine artist. Funny that boys who usually have no qualms about blow-em-up action flick violence, were so disturbed by a close-up of a girl pulling at a loose skin of her finger till it snaps up like a fruit-roll up. This reaction to feminine self-mutilation is gendering in the same way in which Toni Morrison’s Sula powerfully separates her black girl self from white boys:

“She slashed off only the tip of her finger. The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood....Sula raised her eyes to them [the boys]. Her voice was quiet. ‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?’”

Similarly, Black Swan is a text of femininity that takes place at the very liminal regions of the female body. This is a film about girls, but not about their hair, their breasts, their hips, their reproductive organs, their heart, or even their face. This is a film about girls that is about their feet. Duh: it’s a film about ballet.

Early on in the film, Nina, superfrustrated by not being able to perform properly the role of Odile (a.k.a. the Black Swan Queen), turns to her security blanket of bulimia. The scene is blocked so that our view of Nina’s puking is blocked by the wall of the public toilet stall. We only see the base of the toilet, and the tattle-tale ballet-shoed feet: they face towards the toilet rather than away. After she retches, Nina flushes the toilet by stomping on the handle with one foot. This is one of my favorite moments in the movie. Kick-flushing the toilet is such a punk rock gesture, so there is a weird thrill in seeing the stomping foot covered in dirty pink satin rather than black Doc Martens: the pink doesn’t at all dampen the violence of the gesture. But at the same time, kick-flushing is also a gesture that arises from daintiness: you don’t want to touch with your hand the gross handle of the public restroom toilet so you touch it with your foot instead, because as a dainty being, you cannot leave a dirty toilet unflushed. The gesture, like the film, reveals the way in which femininity is a method of self-styling that combines blood-and-guts violence with balletic anal-retentiveness.

Which brings us to the real unsung supporting character of the film: knitted Ugg boots. From the beginning till the end, Nina bounds about, both on sidewalk pavement and backstage floor, in a pair of calf-length Ugg boots made of grey knit (I believe it’s their “Classic Cardy” style). I hate these Uggs, these socks masquerading as boots. I hate them for the same reason I hate flip-flops worn outside of a locker room. Because sloppiness is not the same as indifference. When you’re walking out the house with your hair teased and smashed for that just-rolled out of bed/ just-fucked look, that is not indifference; it is sloppiness. Putting on a dress with torn hems in homage to Baby Jane Hudson or 1991 Courtney Love is not indifference; it is sloppiness. Indifference is having such a big idea of yourself that you think the world ought to be your bedroom or bathroom: hence wearing your pajamas or house slippers outside the boundaries of your own home.

What shocked me about the knit Ugg boots in Black Swan was not so much that Nina wore them (I didn’t think that much about them at first) but that as we were leaving the theater, my sister, my platform-and-stiletto-heel loving lawyer sister, turned to me and said: “I gotta get a pair of those knitted Ugg boots.” I fought her (weakly) on her style decision but her reasons were simple and similar (I imagine) to Nina’s: preciousness about feet. My sister is not a ballerina. But in her work as a public defender, her feet have to have two personalities: sky-high heels for court appearances, but something cushier and kinder yet not trainers, for hoofing about the jails to interview her clients. So I understood her desire for them. Still, even as I agreed to buy her a pair (in black) for our Christmas “gift” trade, I was not convinced of their cuteness.

I’m still not convinced, although after my second viewing of the film last week, I might begrudge them a degree of cute respect. (WARNING SEMI SPOILER) Near the end of the film, when Nina discovers that she has stabbed herself rather than her rival, she slumps down on a chair in her dressing room, filled with the loud unutterable pain of regret. On her feet are those knit Ugg boots. But this time, the Uggs spoke to me in a different way. The boots’ soft knitted body reminded me of the army of stuffed dolls that lined Nina’s bedroom. And although she had just murdered those dolls just hours before, it’s as if they had wreaked vengeance upon her feet: the Ugg’s signature toe—round, hoof-like—renders Nina a kind of stuffed toy, and just as pathetic as that plush cow in tutu that was shoved down the trash chute. The pathetic little girlness of the boots made the scene even more wrenching to me, and actually pushed it to the brink of a classical kind of pathos, which is after all the etymological sister of “pathetic.”

I no longer thought of the knit Uggs as props of brazen, stupid indifference, but those of insulation. The insulation that Nina received as “Sweet Girl” not only of her suffocating mother, but that of her feminine art, which has always (and by “always” I mean historically) demanded a kind of imprisoning preciousness of its women. As much as that “Sweet Girl” persona—pre-lesbian experimentation, pre-masturbation discovery, pre-drug-addled sluttishness, pre-rebellious mother-beating—insulated her in a prison, we realize how its insulation was also protective. It allowed her to practice her craft, to aim towards that supposedly quixotic “perfection” of technique. And for all its apparent devaluing of “technique,” the film weirdly makes a case for the indispensability of technical perfection: because Nina is totally hungover on the day of her big opening, she would not have been able to physically perform the role were her body not trained to perfection. In other words: without her maligned obsession with technique that marked her as an underdeveloped “girl,” she actually wouldn’t have been able to perform in art the black womanhood she’d learned the night before.

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.

always on the run

You know how your mother always told you to wear clean underwear so that you won’t be ashamed if there’s a car accident and they have to cut away your pants? Well, my mother never imparted that nugget onto me so when my sister and I were rear-ended in her car on the Bay Bridge last week, the thought that flashed through my mind as my neck whiplashed was: “Shit my pantyhose is run!”

The thought was brief, but the feeling was definite: anticipation of shame. My sister and I were driving into San Francisco to see my dear friend Tara Jepsen perform in “Getting In On the Ground Floor and Staying There,” so we were in our theatre-going drag—SF style. My sister was in power-dyke mode in a white oxford shirt with asymmetrical darting paired with trousery Seven jeans and white basketball shoes. I was dressed like this:

This is a page from my diary, 8-1-08, at 3:18 pm. I had just gone for an invigorating 3-mile run and felt like Reneé Zellweger purportedly feels after pounding the pavement in running shoes. So while letting my hair dry, I acted like my own costumier and sketched up an outfit for me to go out in: Subversive "Sunken Treasure" necklace that weighs a ton, grey wool crewneck pull-over sweater that is slightly oversized, faded and worn Levi’s 501 cut-offs, and a pair of blue Cuban-seamed pantyhose.

Of course, I had ripped up the pantyhose when I bought it. Early this year, I started wearing, as an alternative to my usual uniform of leggingish jeans, the tag-team of denim cut-offs and ripped stockings. I don’t know why I suddenly thought of the combination, but it makes me feel like my idol Courtney Love. I’m not sure if Madame Love ever wore ripped stockings, but she must have. I love the way ripped stockings look: the smooth, contained femininity of silken gams that have been chewed and ravaged. I rip up my stockings with a pair of tiny but sharp scissors: put them on, pluck some holes, and stretch them out laterally and vertically to create those lovely ladders of runs around the torn up holes.

So I’d been using standard black opaque tights—a pair inherited from my sister, then for colder days, black Falke wool-blend—but last week, as I planned my evening ensemble, I wanted to use something more seductive, something a little less grunge diva and a little more Vargas Girl or Barbara Stanwyck in “The Lady Eve.” So I pulled out these sheer blue pantyhose I got from American Apparel, that has seams all up the back.

I’ve always wanted to ask someone (preferably a husband): “Are my seams straight?” The question is emblematic of the way in which femininity is a cyborgian achievement, in which the artificiality of textile is melded to the organic flesh. The seams of the stockings become “my seams,” as if lovely femmy legs were stitched up on a Singer. It speaks to maintenance, control, and a rigor which belies the traditional reception of femininity as fluffiness. So becoming the drawing in my diary and getting in my sister’s car, I felt pretty chippy.

Then, thirty minutes later, there I was, out on the Bay Bridge, waiting for the highway patrol, and the thought of state-ordained officials mixing with my run pantyhose suddenly seemed akin to paramedics looking at dirty panties. But as is usually the case with me, the feeling of shame didn’t take too long to dissipate. I remembered why I purposely ran my pantyhose in the first place: to wear feminine iconography on my body--but a renegade femininity. The run pantyhose is a sign of dissonance. It signals, like crooked Cuban seams, sloppy, unsuccessful femininity. A woman who keeps getting snagged on the corners of life, who can’t quite cut it being a perfectly maintained woman. But in true punkrock style, I want “dissonance” to mean not disability, failure, or wackness, but its pure form: broken sound. When thrashing becomes dance, shouting becomes singing, amelodic sounds become music—that is dissonance as a medium of rebellious creativity.

The run pantyhose may find visual expression in punkrock chicks, but its discourse finds a pretty powerful elaboration from an unexpected source: Terry McMillan’s über-novel of black femininity, Waiting to Exhale. In the opening chapter, thirtysomething SBF Savannah Jackson goes to meet a blind date at a New Year’s Eve party. Once there, she discovers that she has a run in her pantyhose: "I felt a wide run in my panty hose zip down my thigh." As the party drags on, Savannah keeps time to her processing of the situation by noting the incremental spread of the stocking-run. Savannah is a successful career woman who desperately wants a man to complete her life. But when she discovers that her handsome blind date has brought his girlfriend to the party, Savannah tosses off the feeling of single female desperation with weary gusto:

I had reached into my purse and lit a cigarette and forced myself to look in the other direction, because I couldn’t stand this. When I went to uncross my legs and the run zipped down to my ankle and I felt my heel pop through the hole and stick to the lining of my shoe, that was my cue. I put out my cigarette, picked my purse up off the table, and headed for the coatroom.

The run in Savannah’s pantyhose acts as if it were a nerve ending, its zip a bodily reminder of enough's being enough. If a run pantyhose indicates that you are somehow unladylike, the image of Savannah’s lonely but self-possessed stride to the coatroom reminds us that to be unladylike, you must first be a lady.