objectification – Writers Resist

She, I, You, We: Every Woman

By MM Schreier

FIFTEEN

She’s afraid her skirt’s too short, but gives it a little hip-swish, anyway. People are watching. If she owns it, maybe they won’t give her the side eye. Wishing she wore leggings, she considers tugging the skirt’s hem down, as if the sparse fabric could magically cover more of her legs, but knows if she does, it will just give them something else to gossip about.

Instead, she shifts the heavy calculus book that’s tucked under her arm so the title shows. She ignores imagined whispers of thunder thighs and decides it’s better to appear clever. Still, there’s a fine line between chic-smart and nerdy-smart. Her stomach clenches, and she struggles to keep the hint of a coy smile on her lips. She flips the book over and hugs it to her chest. Maybe everyone doesn’t need to know she’s in advanced placement math. She shimmies her hips again and swallows a sigh.

A broad-shouldered jock in a letterman’s jacket gives her a wolf whistle. It cuts across the throng of students. An unnatural hush falls over the crowd as too many eyes focus on her to see how she’ll react. She tosses her hair, blows the boy a kiss, then ducks into the bathroom before anyone can see her cheeks flush crimson.

While she waits for the halls to clear, she touches up her makeup in the mirror. Eyeliner, mascara, powder. A spritz of perfume, a swipe of blush. She digs around in her purse to find the smokey cranberry gloss that turns her lips into a sultry pout. It’s all camouflage. No––war paint.

The bell rings, and she saunters to class wrapped in the armor of feigned confidence. She might feel like an imposter, but at least she looks fantastic. She tells herself it’s all that matters.

TWENTY-SIX

I wake up every morning in my dingy studio apartment, take a deep breath, and repeat my favorite mantra. Visualize, materialize. It’s my habit to bolster myself with a series of pithy motivational quotes. Today is going to be an amazing day. The best is yet to come. Focus on the positive.

Leaning over the rusted fire escape, I take a snapshot of the sunrise and crop out the dumpster. #earlybirdgetstheworm. It’s important to curate my socials with meticulous attention. I tell myself it’s not deception; it’s the highlights reel of the life I want to have.

At lunch, if I turn the plate around and add the right filter, no one can tell that the #perfectsalad is disappointingly wilted. I post selfies from the woods, fresh-faced and smiling like the #trailgoddess I want to be. No one needs to see the hot mess that returns to the car, covered in bug bites and blisters. When the light’s just right, I get a shot of my #newtome Jeep that doesn’t show the rust spots or bald tires. I promise myself the next time I buy a car I’ll be able to afford a nicer one.

There are a million little photo tricks to upsell my reality. I order a second drink when the first is only half gone. After a few sips on the new one, I pose the glasses side-by-side so the solo excursion to the brewery turns into #girlsnight on Instagram. Framing and angles and perspective can make a budget trip to Portsmouth look like the glamor of Cancún. Haircuts, makeovers, vintage thrift store clothes, and suddenly #Iseeyourguylooking. He could be.

It’s exhausting work to fill my feeds with all the right tags––#livingthedream, #singleandkillingit, #mybestlife. If I get enough likes, maybe I’ll believe it’s true.

THIRTY-EIGHT

You power walk everywhere. Not because you’re in a hurry, but so everyone knows you have somewhere important to be. Running would make you look late and scatterbrained. Strolling is for receptionists with nothing better to do than ordering paperclips and making coffee. Not that there’s anything wrong with that—honest work, you know. You’re just driven to prove yourself as a career woman, so you stride with purpose.

Kitten heels clack on the tiles, not too high to be slutty, but still feminine. You must balance both. It’s difficult to speed walk in a pencil skirt and still look graceful. You feel like a drunken calf, hobbled by a cage of carefully pressed pinstripe cotton.

It’s tough being the only woman on the Leadership Team, and it looks bad if you are the last to show up to the meeting as if you’re Greta Garbo making an entrance. Keeping up with the men in their comfortable trousers and loafers requires twice as many steps, twice as fast. Somehow you do it, though it tests your extra-strength antiperspirant. You hope you’re not glistening. Ladies never sweat.

You round the corner to find That Guy from sales blocking the doorway to the conference room. You’re moving too fast. The damned heels skitter on the polished marble as you try not to collide with him. Surely, he’ll step back and give you space. You bounce off his shoulder when he doesn’t move.

Everyone laughs when a man almost a decade your junior says, Whoa there, little lady. You paste on a faux smile and pretend it doesn’t bother you. It appears you’ve made an entrance after all.

FIFTY

We dye our hair an unladylike purple. When asked if we’ve changed our look, we reply, Thanks! Glad you like it. That’s not what they said, but we don’t care. Once, we might have hedged and said it wasn’t exactly what we asked the hairdresser for while secretly loving it. But we no longer have the energy to be ashamed of who we are. Liking ourselves is an act of resistance.

When it’s hot, we wear tank tops and shorts, cellulite and knobby knees hanging out. When it’s cold, we cozy up in leggings paired with oversized hoodies. We have no patience for clothes that bind and pinch and squeeze. Some days, we pull on a slinky dress that hugs our curves and do our hair up in flowing waves. But only if we want to. It’s all on our own terms now. Either way, we remind each other at every opportunity we are beautiful.

We have hobbies, and we don’t hide them. Sure, we do typical middle-aged “women’s” activities like gardening and reading. We also scuba dive and play video games and forge armor and raise newts. We’ve stopped power walking and actually enjoy hiking. It’s peaceful in the woods, and we take our time on the trails. If we post #optoutside it is photos of cool mushrooms or fat toads we find along the way. We can’t remember the last time we took a selfie, but we’re head over heels for the toads.

Shagging is still a good time. We’re fifty, not dead. But we no longer accept being sexualized without our consent. Young, thin, and pretty do not hold the same value as generous, kind, and loyal. We no longer sacrifice our sense of self for love, because we have found it within.

For the first time, we know we are powerful; we are strong. We never truly needed to pretend to be all these things. It was who we were all along. We only wish we had realized we were enough at fifteen.

TOMORROW

She’ll tell her friend she’s more than just her clothes, her makeup, her hair. Her body is not for consumption. I’ll remind my niece that Internet people don’t care about her. She can stop fabricating an image and live beyond the lens. You’ll teach your daughter she has nothing to prove, freeing her to find success on her own terms. Together, we’ll forge a generation of women who know what they are worth, and that will be our legacy.

MM Schreier, the author of two speculative collections—Monstrosity, Humanity and Bruised, Resilient, is a classically trained vocalist who took up writing as therapy for a midlife crisis. In addition to creative pursuits, Schreier is on Leadership for a robotics company and tutors maths and science to at-risk youth.

Photo credit: sandra lansue on Unsplash.

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Lithium & High Heels

By Heather Dorn

Barbie’s feet come preformed for sexiness, but the rest of us must learn to curve our arches like a playground slide. We start young, even as babies, barely able to walk, staggering up church or pageant stage steps—sparkling quarter inch heels, lace dresses, makeup bruising our eyelids blue, punching our cheeks red. This for a trophy, some money, salvation, attention.

When I’m out with women friends, sometimes men will ask to buy me drinks. I usually say no because there is an implication that if I accept a drink, I owe him attention.

Even when I say no, they often still bother me: You should sell thrift store watches to Boscov’s, one man tried to convince me after I told him I was getting my Ph.D. Sometimes I say I’m married, or have a boyfriend, or have a girlfriend. Sometimes I let someone else’s ownership of me be a reason so a man will listen to my no, when I’m tired and my no is not standing on its own. Of course, I don’t always say no.

Once a friend asked how I got some pot lollipops I’d brought to a party. Someone gave them to me, I said.

But who? she repeated. How much did they cost?

I don’t know. Someone said, ‘Do you want these’ and I said ‘Yes’ and I took them.

I hate you, she pretended to hit me.

Beauty is subjective, except my mom says it isn’t and I can see her point. I don’t have any physical reaction to that music, that poem, that mountain, that man, that woman, but I know she is considered “beautiful.” That eye matches that other eye and this is beauty. I learned it from TV and magazines and movies and pageants, and the way my mother tilted her head in the mirror and knew her light. Sometimes an imperfection is called beautiful, when it accompanies matching eyes.

Beauty is subjective, except it isn’t—like sanity. Is sanity subjective? Is sleeping in a closed, dark closet as a teen a quirk or a sign of manic depression? If you ask my mother, it’s not normal. Is vacuuming at 3 a.m. insane? My mother says that’s normal. And my mother knows what is correct, true, normal, attractive. She tells me how to be these things. She once told me I had my Aunt Julia’s nose, thin and narrow, and she would help me get a nose job to fix it when I got old enough. To this day, I dislike my nose. I could not fix it now though because I have finally learned what I really look like and so it’s too late.

It’s hard for me to be attracted to someone who I don’t know. This chasm between my feelings of attraction and the objective standards I know I’m supposed to use to gauge attractiveness leave me feeling an outsider in conversations about beauty. When other girls were falling in love with boy bands and actors on the covers of magazines, I was pining after characters from Victorian novels or 80s teen movies. I didn’t want to kiss Molly Ringwald, I wanted to kiss Claire from The Breakfast Club. I didn’t feel like Ally Sheedy, but Allison Reynolds, right down to the makeover at the end. I didn’t want to date Judd Nelson, but John Bender, and I wanted to be and kiss Claire, and to wear one or both diamond earrings she so easily gave away to her one-day make out partner.

Girls like Claire always had the right everything. It’s not just clothes, or hair, or makeup, or nails, or shoes, or bras, or jewelry, or purses. It’s also the time and space and money to keep, use, and update these items. Makeup runs out, hair straighteners break, clothes go out of style.

When I first started making semi-regular money babysitting, I spent it on drug store makeup and the shampoo I wanted. Coconut smell. Back then I was still getting hand-me-down clothes, and curlers, and shoes. Now, almost all my shoes are new.

My ex-husband never minded me spending money on my hair, as long as I kept it long, but requested that I cut his hair so that he didn’t have to pay to get it done. More than saving money, I think he was trying to avoid people. He hated people. The small talk was probably annoying to him as well. Though he’s much better at small talk than I am.

Small talk is filling the air with noise when silence will do. He can talk to people for an hour about the weird Binghamton weather, get to know them slowly over a few years, and then still not really know them when they later move away. People will think he is a really nice guy and so cool for helping them move. They don’t know he helped them move to get them out of his life.

I will not help anyone move. It’s tedious and I’m weak and tired. I will not talk for an hour about the weather. I don’t check the weather or carry an umbrella. That’s so much planning, just to avoid water. And who remembers rain exists when the sun is out? Instead, I will run up to a new person, shake their hand, and launch a manic stream of words: My name is Heather! I’m bipolar and like Indian food! Years ago I was triggered by some PTSD and went through extensive therapy! I’m not close to my family! I’m so glad we will be teaching this course together this semester!

I want to know people all at once.

Or more correctly, I want them to know me all at once. It takes time to get to know someone—and I’ve got no time for that. But part of my bipolar brain can be not caring or caring so much that it stops me from interacting at all for fear of fucking up. Like saying fuck at the wrong time.

I was worried I was going to say fuck when I went to my ex-husband’s first work dinner. Most of the people he worked with, including his boss, are nice, respectable, Christian people. I doubted that they cared for all my facial piercings: an eyebrow ring, tongue ring, lip ring, and nose ring at the time. I was sure that I was going to fuck up, irrationally nervous that when we prayed before the meal I’d be called on to contribute: Hey Jesus, thanks for this high-fucking-class food, thanks for fucking dying for me and shit, p.s. I don’t think your mom was a virgin, A-fucking-men.

This would not work.

I was out of practice with my high heels too. The day before the dinner, I spent hours in the shoe section of Macy’s trying on heels. I was teaching at the university, going to school full time, and had toddlers at home. I didn’t feel at all connected to the person who had once worn heels. Her body was gone and wearing heels was different now. Three pregnancies had made my foot grow a half size. Size 9 heels looked huge when the clerk put the box next to me, a green pair nestled in the paper.

I put them on and stood up, balancing on the thin pegs.

They’re not even that tall, the saleswoman anticipated my complaint.

I don’t think I can walk in them, I staggered around the department like a newborn puppy.

You’re not going to find any shorter. It had been hours and she was done with me.

I was done with me too. I knew the dress needed heels. It was that kind of dress, the shoe lady told me, the dress lady told me, magazines told me, TV told me, movies told me, my mother told me. I knew I had to wear high heels with that dress and that dress to this event. I knew I had to go to this event and to not say fuck. I knew this is what was expected. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether to do an expected thing or whether to jump out the window, my brain always teetering on the window sill.

My ex didn’t go to my work events in uncomfortable clothes and painful shoes, but I’ve never driven him to the hospital when he wouldn’t stop throwing a training wheel down the driveway or listened to him worry for hours about a sent email.

Relationships are not equal. This is mathematically impossible.

Once, shortly after moving to Binghamton, he and I were walking through the mall with our kids and his parents in tow. His mother was getting on my nerves. She had a way of slapping me in the face and making it look like a caress. I was arguing with him, instead of his mother, because arguing with her wasn’t an option. Because he never stuck up for me. His parents were not the type of people to show emotion, especially not in public. The only acceptable emotion was laughter, and even then, let’s not be rude about it. I was growing angrier and louder as we argued, until he finally asked me to quiet down.

That was when I turned around, in the middle of the mall, my children and in-laws standing behind, and yelled, “Fuck off!”

Later, recalling the Fuck off incident, we would laugh. This was once I had been on a Depakote, Seroquel, Lithium cocktail for a few years and he probably didn’t feel the weight of my altered states any longer. Sanity is subjective—except it isn’t.

But not every part of mania is bad. Some people say they wouldn’t be bipolar, if they could choose, but it affects everyone differently and some days I feel I won the neurological lottery.

I remember the times when I had sex with my ex before he went to work, called him home for sex at lunch, and then begged for sex when he walked through the door that night. I remember wearing high heels all day, catching a glimpse of my legs in the full-length mirror, my brain buzzing at the sleek shimmer of glitter lotion that made me feel like magic. It was hard to think of anything other than sex and it was never enough. But this would only last a couple of weeks.

Usually followed by a crash.

And the crashes were low. Weeks in bed. Extreme physical pain, just from being. Crying daily, all day. It’s impossible for me to remember the way it felt because I can only feel that distorted when my perception is altered. I do remember many moments when I thought everyone I knew would be better off without me around.

I also thought about driving off an overpass.

And mania could be a problem too: feeling like a god was countered with the paranoia that everyone I knew was talking about me behind my back, hated me, that my husband of over twenty years was conspiring to leave me to be with an unattractive woman with uneven eyes and a perfect nose.

Hypomania is less intense. When I was hypomanic in my Masters program, I planned my semester in a weekend. Class plans for fifteen weeks in three days. When hypomanic, I paint, I write, I even clean. I don’t need to sleep. I love the way I feel—like being high but better because I’m high on me and I’m all throughout my veins.

The medication takes this away from me.

And the depression and the mania, it takes all these away from me. It makes me more level. More like myself or less like myself, whichever way you see it.

I also take pills for attention tremors, which are caused by the Lithium. The tremors occur anytime I’m trying not to shake, which makes putting on nail polish much harder than in the past.

I try to put on new nail polish once a week, but it has been every two to three weeks lately. When I’m putting on nail polish I can’t really do anything but put on nail polish. I can watch TV, or listen to music, or have a conversation, but that’s all I can do. And sometimes I do none of this. I do my nails in silence, in nothingness.

I’m trapped in a space of open blankness and I can’t leave until the paint dries.

Some people like my nails and tell me. My lovers. A colleague. A student. I’m glad they like my nails, even though I did my nails for the reflection time, for the moments I look down typing and think they look like candy, for licking them when I’m alone, for the pictures I get of them shining on a coffee mug that make me feel like I’m a hand model, for some feeling of accomplishment, for some discovery of art.

It’s been a few years since I started my current cocktail of medication, and I sometimes wonder if I take it to make myself more comfortable or to make everyone around me more comfortable. Of course, it does both, but I wonder what my goal is. Most days, I think I take it for me, so I can wake up in the morning and get to work, so I can go the day without telling a friend to fuck off, so I can think about something other than sex.

But some days I think I take it for everyone else. The world is set up for people who don’t need to take pills.

I wonder if I could ever be cured, though no one ever has been. I decide it’s not a disorder, being bipolar. Maybe it’s okay to feel like a god. Maybe it’s okay to see colors like flavors. Maybe it’s alright to stay up all night until I fall over asleep from exhaustion, a pen still in my fingers. I don’t want to take my medication. But I must work tomorrow, so I swallow my pills.

I’m always glad I did in the morning. I argue with myself every night.

Heather Dorn was born with a plastic spork in her mouth. As a child her mother took her to Taco Bell so she’s Taco Bell obsessed. She grew up mostly in California and Texas, knowing Taco Bell is not Mexican food, but nostalgia is yummy. Heather’s poetry, fiction, essays, and art can be found in journals like The American Poetry Review, Paterson Literary Review, Ragazine, and The Kentucky Review. She earned her Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton, where she is a lecturer. After work she goes home to watch true crime. On the weekends, she wishes she had a washing machine.

Photo credit: jon jordan via a Creative Commons license.

A note from Writers Resist

Thank you for reading! If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

2020 Summer Olympics: Tokyo Games Medal Count

By Tara Campbell

* as of July 13
** as of September 8

Tara Campbell is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction co-editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. In addition to Writers Resist, previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and four collections: Circe’s Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, Political AF: A Rage Collection, and Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection. Connect with her at www.taracampbell.com or on Twitter: @TaraCampbellCom or IG: @thetreevolution.

Photo by Sam Balye on Unsplash.

Note from Writers Resist: If you appreciate creative resistance and would like to support it, you can make a small, medium or large donation to Writers Resist from our Give a Sawbuck page.

Closet Rules

By Avra Margariti

The first rule of sex doll club is,
you get used to getting used.
The second rule is,
you will be forgotten by your human
before your super-realistic, horsehair-eyelash, colored-glass eyes
can blink.

And blink we did. Here in the storage closet:
slumped, folded, no longer expected to perform.
The darkness a reminder of the factory we once lived in,
the ship that ferried us in foam-stuffed crates
laid side-by-side, coffin-shaped twin beds for me and you.
Air runs out, yet our decorative lungs breathe at last.
Here, dust and lavender—a safe smell, don’t you think?

The coats and furs overhead don’t carry his scent
(small mercies, small mercies)
but that of a woman long gone.
Did he make us in her likeness, I wonder, face, hair, body selected
from a never-ending online catalogue?
Were her eyes the blue of our eyes,
her skin the cream of our skin, our bodies incapable of bruises
whereas hers would have bloomed black and blue
with how roughly it was handled?
We are silicon smoothness, us.
We are cornsilk hair and peach lips cracked open by bare hands.
Everything or nothing like her;
no matter the answer, now we, too, are forgotten.
(The second rule of sex doll club—
yes, yes, we remember.)

He used to arrange us across the coffee table
bed kitchen island carpet hanging from the chandelier, once.
Were you ever envious of the attention he was pouring
on me, and not on you?
You can tell me, I won’t ever judge you for it.
Did you ever feel like peeling your skin
right off your lightweight, hollow bones?
In the dusk of his bedroom where we flanked him in sleep,
two curled apostrophes facing each other over the bulk of him,
did you ever feel love drifting in the still air?
It was me.
I was trying to learn how to love myself
and accidentally encompassed you in the process.

This is no accident now, in the soothing bluedark,
no product of etiquette or factory settings,
a different function than the one we were made for.
We were never a she or he or singular they
but a possessive his, a sibilant hiss.
So I say, and forgive me if I’m being too forward,
why don’t we call ourselves an I, an each other’s?
Here, you can lean on my shoulder if you’d like,
stretch a bit until your precious head slots against my collarbone.
You can move fast or slow, or stay as you are.

It’s easy to forget sometimes
(believe me, I know)
but the only rule of the storage closet
is agency, is choice.

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Forge Literary, Longleaf Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

Photo by Daniel Clay on Unsplash.