pussymouth

Only femmes bleed, and since there was a full moon last night, like a she-wolf or one of the cat people skinning herself into pussycat form, I began singing Mariah Carey’s “Can’t Let Go” again, all over again. But let me start at the beginning, about 24 hours ago...

...There I was, watching Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” for the 100^th time, when something new happened. Like the previous 99 viewings, I was bedazzled by the menacing cheerfulness of Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge; Kim Novak’s moonglow performance as Madeleine—all silver hair and spacealien-in-trance linereading; then Novak’s knockout transformation into Judy, the brassy brunette without a brassiere. But last night, during the film’s last few minutes, when Jimmy Stewart is sadistically dragging Novak up the belltower, I burst into tears, and couldn’t stop shaking.

I saw the close-up of Novak’s feet, bound in black patent stilettos, floating up the step ladder, as the rest of her--unseen--was being dragged up violently, and my usually vacuum-sealed tear ducts burst open and my body shook like Novak-as-Judy’s. Did I see myself as Novak to some sadistic male in my past? Probably. Still, what an embarrassing, illogical hysteria. Then I realized why I had been so weirdly depressed for the past week. Why I, who always preferred salt and vinegar to sugar, was eating Newman’s Oreo cookie after cookie. Why I had eaten a half jar of peanut butter in one sitting—with just a spoon. Why I gobbled up the Easter-pastel egg-lemon soup (courtesy of Greek Mama P) with its herb-and-rice meatballs (five of them), then proceeded to use the Barefoot Contessa Coconut Cake mix I’d had for almost two years to make a sheetcake with coconut glaze (no cream cheese in the house) and eat two big slices. I was having my period.

Of course, I didn’t literally have a period—I don’t have ovaries, even though most of the people in my life do. What I think about as a “period” is the way in which my emotional pain becomes cyclic, and ends up giving a necessary rhythm to my life. The emotional effect of being “female” is biologically mechanized: the day she starts bleeding, the physical body is no longer an organic part of a girl’s general sense of being, but becomes a “thing.” Suddenly, the girl realizes that there is a huge part of her body that does not have to answer to her consciousness; one that has a pulse and mind of its own. Menstruation underscores the fact that her body is not consonant with the idea of herself, but merely and importantly, her possession.

The vagina, with its pour of shocking blood, turns the body into a thing that resists you. Like a VCR you can’t program, like a computer that blips out at random, like a contact lens that has been worn too long, like a CD that skips inexplicably, like a book that won't get read and won’t fit in your purse, like the purse you love but whose handle keeps falling apart, like a pair of jeans that your ass can no longer fit into, like a sweater that is accidentally shrunken to doll-size in the dryer, your vagina FIGHTS BACK.

In contrast, the penis is not a thing, it’s not anything. The penis is a stupid organ that is easily pleased and integrated into the body’s instinctual lurch towards ease: you just have to rub for a few minutes, and ploop! The liquid is smelly but pale and unthreatening as VitaSoy. The vagina is difficult, resistant. The vagina fights your desire to live a life without crests and waves, it fights your utopian and unrealistic wish to live a smooth and uncurdled life of comfort. This is the proverbial curse and but also the blessing of the feminine condition, for the cream will rise. Without the valleys, how will you recognize the peaks? Bleeding monthly is a reminder, a regulator of this feminine condition.

I don’t have a vagina, but I have a mouth. I don’t menstruate in blood but in songs and a voice. In her novel Corregidora, Gayl Jones has her bluesinger protagonist Ursa equate her vagina with her singing mouth: talking of singing a “new world song,” she declares: “It ain’t a pussy down there, it’s a whole world.” The video above—the close-up of my lips, unlipsticked—is a portrait of my pussy, singing its song. It’s the inverse of lipsynching...maybe let’s call it “lipsticking.” The voice is not just not female but inadequate. Like the vagina that bleeds without checking in with its owner, the voice that pours out of my mouth fights my desire for a smooth, unwrinkled femininity. My voice is lumpy like the brown clotted-chocolate menses.

My lips in tight close-up are like the lips of an over-stimulated vulva. It’s an homage (via Marilyn Minter) to the very femininity telegraphed by the original video for “Can’t Let Go.” The song, released as a single in 1991, was the single that broke her chain of number one hits—she’d had her first five hits go to number one—and is often called her first “failure” song (it went "only" to number two). But I’ve always loved this one, this song of stalkery everlasting love. It’s not only my favorite Mariah song, it’s probably my favorite song of all time. The fact that it broke Mariah's winning streak on the Billboard charts makes the song itself a bit of a bleeding vagina. It’s the song that reminded the baby Mariah (then 21 years old!) that she could not be a capitalist “baby” all of her days. In this way, the song itself “fought” against Mariah as she knew herself to be at that time. Prophetically, the gorgeous video is all about her mouth. Shot in black and white, the video marks the first time that Mariah wears her hair straightened—and in a chic high beehive. She looks like a Robert Mapplethorpe portrait, and indeed, the soft-focus shots of Mariah singing are intercut with various still lifes—roses and orchids—that cites Mapplethorpe’s vulval orchids still lifes.

But above all, there's the mouth:

This is Mariah as Gayl Jones’s bluesinger heroine. This is the Mariah that became my mirror, the pre-Mrs. Nick Cannon (God bless her) who said that she could never be a “spokesperson for any kind of marriage” that she couldn’t imagine having children because her records were her “kids.” In 1991, when Mariah bled, she bled not blood-chocolate, but voice seared in liquid black blood vinyl.

I don’t have a vagina, but I do have a mouth. I don’t have tampons but I do have (writing) pads with which to sop up my inevitable blood-voice-chocolate. And you’re reading it right now...be careful not to get your hands too stained...

knit a sweater (,) girl!

I started knitting for the same reason I started smoking at age 16: I wanted to look like a chic bad girl. To this day, I still love the way my wrist moves around the cig dangling off extended fingers. I decided to teach myself how to knit a few years ago, not because there was a plethora of what I find to be kind of inane trendy knitting books (I won’t names or titles, but they seemed to be basically self-help books disguised as hipster guides) but because I learned that Joan Crawford used to knit compulsively on the sets of her movies. Crawford claimed that knitting calmed her nerves, but her friends suggested that she used the click-clacking of the needles as a strategy of bitchery: to annoy and distract co-stars she hated. I love this idea of conceptualizing a craft traditionally associated with grandmothers or grandmother-aged bachelorettes, as an aggro-femme act. Yarn reminds me of the slyness of clawing cats; the needles themselves are blatantly weapon-like. In Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” Madame Defarge knits up a hitlist of aristocrats headed for the guillotine. In her story “Devil Finds Work,” the British mystery writer Ruth Rendell creates a character who kills her annoying husband (who is annoyed by her obsessive knitting habit) with a sharpened steel knitting needle—driven straight into his skull. Knitting is a dangerous craft that creates dangerous girls.

When I knit for myself, I imagine that I am creating myself as a sweater girl. This doesn’t just refer to the fact that I am a girl who makes sweaters, but it refers to the specific feminine skin I am knitting for my body. “Sweater Girl” is an American sexual persona of the 1940s and 50s. It named saucy girls who wore tight sweaters that emphasized their breasts. The filmmaker Ed Wood famously fetishized the angora sweater as a major medium of his transvestite identification. The original sweater girl was most likely Lana Turner, who cemented her fame as a Hollywood sexpot and bad girl (Turner developed a penchant for fast and dangerous boys, one of whom was eventually murdered by her lesbian daughter). As a teenager, Turner appeared for a few minutes in the 1937 film, “They Won’t Forget," bouncing across the screen in stiletto heels and a tight sweater, her breasts bouncing up and down. Interestingly enough, “They Won’t Forget” was not a sex-comedy but a serious film about lynching: a girl (Turner’s character) is raped and killed and the suspects and potential lynching victims are...a Jewish teacher and an African-American janitor. The sexuality of the sweater girl originates from a crossroad of race and power.

Then there is my favorite sweater girl of all time: Kim Novak in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”



Novak famously plays a double role in the film—as the icy blonde Madeleine, and then, the earthy, raw Judy. Judy is a sweater girl: in contrast to the high-toned Madeleine, she’s a working-class girl who admits to a clueless Jimmy Stewart that she’s been “picked up” before (by guys). But the costume: Novak wears a tight sweater but clearly, no brassiere. It’s kind of amazing to see a film from 1958 in which the nipples of a major Hollywood star is on brave and reckless display—thanks to some blue-green wool. The feminine sexuality enabled by the sweater is a weird one, despite its obvious exploitive effects. Even though it allows male oglers to cop a peek at a woman’s nipples, the sweater itself is always totally opaque. Not only that, it is often opaque and prickly. If the knit is supposed to simulate a second skin for its feminine wearer, and if the sweater is made of angora or mohair (as it often is) then the vulnerability of the nipples have been given a kind of thorny, burry life. The sweater girl sweater is the unsupplicant cousin of the wet t-shirt. If ogling boys want to eroticize the nipples of a sweater girl beyond pure voyeurism, then they must brave a tongueful of itchy wool. The nipples of a sweater girl are simultaneously revealed and armored by the angora-mohair sweater.

So when I knit, I feel like a bad girl in the tradition of Madame Defarge and Kim Novak. Right now, I’m working on a cardigan that I spotted back in January: a Rodarte cardigan that is hand-knit out of multi-colored and tinsel-flanked mohair yarn. To achieve that huge, functionless weave I’ll use very thin yarn with a fat-ass needle (US 17).



This cardigan is actually not a traditional sweater girl sweater: it’s not tight, it’s not a pull-over. But I like that it is made out of mohair, and looks super-itchy: it’s a cross between a cobweb and a porcupine. And its designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy admit that they've been inspired by Japanese kawaii ("cute") culture and horror films. I find Asian cuteness and horror to be appropriate inspiration for a nouvelle-sweater girl. I went through a whole knitting phase of working only with milky cashmere blends, but I think I’m over it now. I’m totally loving the itchy bitchiness of angora and mohair. I imagine that rashy discomfort of the braless 50s sweater girls and would like to replicate it on my body—or at least cite it a bit. I would of course wear the cardigan with my standby t-shirts, but my arms at least would feel the prickly femininity of the yarn. But I’m so lazy: I haven’t actually begun knitting the thing yet. (I’ve made the swatches...) I’m still writing the pattern, which is my favorite activity of knitting: converting measurements of the garments into stitches. It’s rather like lo-fi pixilation. I’ve measured my favorite cardigan, and multiplied them by the stich/inch ratio of the yarn I’ll be using. To figure out the final size of the shoulder seam, I have to recall geometry--how do you figure out the hypontenuse of a triangle? And it’s kind of like reading: breaking down the thing I love, and then converting it into another language, and then building it up again, to be wrapped around my body. I’m going to try to finish the damn pattern this weekend, and hopefully I’ll be done with this sweater and be able to upload some pictures of your Joony Schecter actually wearing the thing...maybe by July? Oh, angora in the summertime...how masochistic is that? Feminine masochism can be romantic—provided that the girl in question is talented in brain, imagination, or handiwork. But because I am not Billie Holiday, Lauryn Hill, Judy Garland, Sylvia Plath, or even Amy Winehouse, my level of feminine masochism stays in a very small level: knitting in the summertime. (OK, so it’s not officially summer yet; but the temperature today is as if it wanted to be summer—warm and sunny and threatening balminess.) There is something self-flagellating about constructing a garment out of wooly stuff during a season of show-offy near-nudity. While others are scheming ways to strip off layers, I’ll be scheming ways to add layers on—layers that will give me sweater girl-nipples made out of itchy-witchy angora and mohair.