In my Survey of British Literature class in college, I remember learning several new words reading Milton.
He’s credited with introducing several words to the English language, but I remember one he didn’t invent: amanuensis, “a literary or artistic assistant, in particular one who takes dictation or copies manuscripts.” The image is familiar – blind Milton, leaning back in his chair, surrounded by his daughters. There’s a painting in the New York Public Library that shows Anne, Mary, and Deborah, each engaged with their father’s work. Milton wrote Paradise Lost, and later works, with the help of a number of amanuenses. His daughters, a nephew, and some people paid to do the work. But I was most interested in his daughters then – and now.
The stories that make up our histories are ever shifting. One story is that the muse would visit Milton during the night, and he’d repeat lines over and over to himself, getting them right, committing them to memory, until someone arrived to write them down. He described his own process in several places. The youngest daughter, Deborah, worked with some biographers later in her life, so some of her impressions may have survived. Other biographers wrote of how the daughters hated their father: his demands, the tasks he set before them, his hypocrisy about the very notion of liberty, his re-marriages, the household where he kept them prisoner. Milton was a man of his time perhaps. Perhaps somewhere between the voice in blind Milton’s head, and the hand that wrote down the lines, some whiff of Anne, Mary, or Deborah survives.
Emily Bowles’s chapbook His Journal, My Stellaexplores a similar situation in some ways. The relationship between Esther Johnson and Jonathan Swift is introduced in a prefatory note to Section I. “Miss” establishes some basic parameters for their relationship. It is a fatherly, mentor relationship. She is eight. He is an “authority.” Later, perhaps, their relationship changes. The poems in Bowles’s collection traverse the grid of this shifting relationship, between powerful established man, and “pliant, pleasurable” Stella – who wants to be seen as “more than a child, better than a woman.” The deftness of these poems is the way they are sketched only, paired with modern-day experiences and relationships, stretched across the negative space of the page, leaving the reader more gaps than knowing. The repetition of “Miss” to signify young unmarried woman/girl, and “miss” to signify something lost, and the line-ending that splits “miss / take” recur over and over to fragment idea and thought and concept. Who can know what happened in Milton’s household? Who can know what was in Stella’s heart? Or Swift’s? The opening note makes clear: “This is and is not something we now refer to as grooming.”
Another classroom wells up at me in the poem “Misogyny in Rabelais.” The speaker has “missed / The Point.” The speaker has gone off topic, writing about something she shouldn’t have, questioning something outside of the poem. This is not an approved topic. “It is not valid,” the “[male] professor” points out. The final stanza of the poem is arranged in opposition to itself, a form that happens again and again here: “you” aligns itself with one margin, but the story occurs on the other margin, in the gutter of the page.
By the end of this poem, the speaker has become fragmented, both second-person (a person to see through) and an “I” still inhabited. She is two-personed, unable to withstand the weight of male authority, but uniquely situated to watch her failure and write it down.
While the story of Stella and Swift forms a framework for Bowles’s collection, the poems aren’t confined by that relationship. Many of the poems don’t reference that relationship explicitly but could be about it. Or not. They navigate the see-saw between specific and universal, but all traverse scaffolds of power, and specifically the power between men and women, that differential in romantic and sexual relationships, in marriage. Each poem calls forth “an act of sexual / textual / violence.” I said the poem “Misogyny in Rabelais” reminded me of a classroom – it does. A graduate school classroom where I asked if we could talk about a poet’s ethics, and the professor said that “wasn’t an interesting question.” An undergraduate classroom where a visiting poet told a round table of eager women poets that “no one wants to read about these things”; he told us, we earnest women-college students at our glossed wood table to “think about your audience.” We had been rapt.
In the article “Experts in the Field” published in Tin House, Bonnie Nadzam writes about abusive men in the writing world – and she touches on exploitive practices and the long-term effects they can have on students’ writing, careers, and voices. Power and authority can have long-reaching effects; power and authority can silence. As mentors, those who seek to harm can control their victims into their future. They are gate-keepers – they control access to jobs, residencies, contracts, networks. Most importantly, they can control access to our very selves, and the way we see ourselves. Through their reputations and classrooms and programs, they can “[teach] the rest of us how we should tell our stories.” In several poems, Bowles gives texts, criticism, judgement literal weight: “I wore the allusions, / those critical garments, / until they didn’t fit anymore.”
Bowles takes on structures beyond the classroom and criticism, exploring marriage and the home. In “Cedar Waxwing in Our House” the speaker finds kinship with a cat, noting the way we choose kitty litter and grain-free food to further divorce the creature from the wild – leaving us all “neutered.”
Domesticity
can feel like a form of
terrorism, and sometimes
a feral urge creeps in
on mouse feet or cedar
wax wings.
There’s that fragmentation again – separating words we expect to see together, perhaps the way the bird’s wings were separated by jaws and claws. In the short poem “I Went Missing,” Bowles makes of words fragments, so they can be read multiple ways. I like to imagine hearing this, as well as reading it, inserting a long pause at the line breaks, giving the page its due.
It was a miss
take
to
take
his name. I went
missing when I
miss
took
my
self
for his Mistress.
Perhaps the speaker of this poem is Stella, perhaps it’s the poet, perhaps it’s any married woman who regrets marrying. Or not regrets entirely, but just wonders about things lost in the joining. Things like names and the identities they signify. I appreciate the slight form, the symmetry of the lines.
The final section of Bowles’ book, Section IV, is titled “Missed.” The note describes how Stella fell ill, died. Swift lived on and mentions of Stella continued. Perhaps she lived on in his fiction, fictionalized. Perhaps she animated Gulliver’s Travels. A poem from this section complains “I am an envelope, sent back and forth / between men . . .” Perhaps whoever survives ensures their version of the story survives, but it isn’t that simple, not between women and men. Not when the context of history has its own rules, in its own places, and one party holds more cards than the others. Not when the negotiations take place behind closed doors in dimly-lit rooms. Witness Deborah, Milton’s surviving daughter, whose voice still wasn’t strong enough to trouble her father’s legacy much.
Portaging celebrates new writing from the Midwest with a particular focus on experimental and hybrid work from small presses.
C. Kubasta writes poetry, fiction, and hybrid forms. She lives, writes, & teaches in Wisconsin. Her most recent books include the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint Press) and the short story collection Abjectification (Apprentice House). Find her at ckubasta.com and follow her @CKubastathePoet.
We live in a dating world where the playing field has definitely changed. Gone are the days when someone would actually walk up to you, strike up a conversation, ask for your number, call you, engage in light banter, ask you out, plan a date, show up for the date, and things would progress after you and your date had actually spent time in each other’s presence.
In fact, dear reader, if you are currently dating, when was the last time you got to know someone in that manner?
The last time for me was over two years ago. The guy was Southern and new to Los Angeles. We met online, but he asked for my number after a few messages. He called me, we spoke a few times, and he asked me out. He initiated all of the calls and all of our contact. Our first date was not the requisite coffee meet and greet. Instead, we met at a restaurant and shared a lovely meal. He followed up with more dates, all of which he planned based on my responses to questions about the things I liked to do.
I enjoyed every one of those dates. I enjoyed being courted and treated well. In the end, we both determined we weren’t compatible for the long run, but I walked away from that experience believing that behind the screen, there were honest and genuine people really searching for the real thing. He restored my faith.
I walked away from that experience believing that behind the screen, there were honest and genuine people really searching for the real thing.
The more I speak to people on the subject, however, the more I hear that people are not really dating these days. Even scarier is the idea that most people don’t know how to date. We think that going out with someone, taking walks, showing up with flowers, calling just to “check in,” and being available to another person is too much like a commitment before the commitment.
Correct me if I am wrong, but dating is a commitment. You are committing to getting to know someone before making a decision about being in partnership or trying again with someone entirely new. My question is simply, how does one do that when so many people are scared to even show up as their true, authentic selves?
The more I speak to people on the subject, however, the more I hear that people are not really dating these days. Even scarier is the idea that most people don’t know how to date.
In today’s digital age, dating has a new script: You see a picture of someone, you swipe to the right / send a wink / send a “Hi there, you look fun. We should talk” or some version thereof, exchange some short-verse messages, maybe you exchange phone numbers (but even if you do, you’re still texting), agree to meet, meet and act shy and awkward because it’s a blind date, sort of, and then you decide pretty quickly if you want to see them again—mostly because you know how easy it would be to start all over with somebody new.
Correct me if I am wrong, but dating is a commitment.
The upside is that yes, there are plenty of fish in the sea. The downside is that you’ll never find your fish if you’re always throwing them back.
I’ll just say it: the digital age has messed up how we find and keep love flowing. We replace actual feelings with heart emojis. We break up via text. We get back together with each other via text. We stalk each other’s social media pages; we know the names of “friends” before we even meet them. Our dating lives are constructed online, and we dress the part by taking selfies and pictures of our food to show anyone following us on Instagram that we are, indeed, having a good time. We create personas, and I’m starting to believe that we care more about those personas than actually showing up, with all of our flaws and beauty, to present ourselves as worthy of love.
I’ll just say it: the digital age has messed up how we find and keep love flowing.
Maybe that’s the real issue. We don’t think we are worthy of love.
Or maybe some of us are ready—I like to think I am—but when we put ourselves out there, who is actually ready to meet us?
My last relationship lasted two years and ended when a woman sent me pictures of herself and the man I was dating frolicking in the city. He’d found her on eHarmony a few months earlier. According to the woman, he invited her to come see him over a weekend that he and I were “fighting.” She spent time in his apartment and felt like there was a female presence, so she went looking on his Facebook page, which led to his Pinterest page, which led to me. When she confronted him, he told her that I was his ex-girlfriend and she shouldn’t contact me, but she did.
When I confronted him, he made up an elaborate lie about why she only thought they were together. He told me I should trust him. But the pictures she sent me were taken inside his apartment, and I found his profile on eHarmony and Match, so he couldn’t deny what happened.
Maybe that’s the real issue. We don’t think we are worthy of love.
No matter how hard we try to create perfect online personas, who we are always shows up. The last relationship and the many others I have explored in this digital age have taught me that we all want the same thing: to be accepted. I believed at the end of my last relationship, and I still believe now, that love is a choice. We come into relationships as individuals. We partner with people based on shared goals, morals, and the vision to build something together that can be really special.
It takes a lot of patience to explore this dating field when you are faced with so many apparently empty people, but it’s worth it when you find yourself involved in something special and come to the heavy and deep love that happens when the masks are torn off and the flaws are exposed and beautiful. We all crave this type of love, yet it seems impossible to achieve when we forget that love is ALL faith, trust, hope, compassion, forgiveness and showing up for each other.
We all crave this type of love, yet it seems impossible to achieve when we forget that love is ALL faith, trust, hope, compassion, forgiveness and showing up for each other.
So many of us are afraid to explore the deep emotions—we show up in shallow forms just to attract something. But deep love can’t be nurtured in shallow pools. In order for us to truly find and savor such heavy love, we have to come into our relationships loving ourselves enough to risk being authentic.
I think about the passage of time a lot, and the difference time can make on our perspectives. There are moments when time doesn’t seem to make a difference at all, and there are moments when time changes our perspective completely.
In May 2012, I graduated Sarah Lawrence College on my dad’s fifty-fourth birthday. In 2012, I was bright-eyed, hopeful, and ready to attempt to make my way in a world I was unprepared for. I moved back home to Connecticut after graduation and took a job babysitting, followed by tutoring, two jobs writing, and finally another job babysitting. My goal: pay off my student loans as fast as possible.
Somehow, I managed to cobble all of these jobs together into a cohesive schedule. I was focused on work. I babysat three mornings a week, wrote in the afternoons, tutored twice weekly, and still wrote when I came home.
To decompress, I would lose myself in boxed sets of my favorite TV shows. I liked science fiction at the time. I’d been a big fan of 2003’s Battlestar Galactica and 2009’s Dollhouse; I was disappointed when Syfy cancelled Caprica, and reluctantly gave Warehouse 13 a shot.
I loved the imagination in these shows. I loved the questions they posed, and I liked thinking about where the story was going.
I loved the imagination in these shows. I loved the questions they posed, and I liked thinking about where the story was going. It was also a genre that is the epitome of shows cancelled before their time and so, in the spring of 2013, I reluctantly left my comfort zone for a new show called Defiance.
Defiance premiered on the Syfy Channel in April 2013.
Its premise was that in 2013 a group of different alien races known as the Votanus Collective arrived on Earth. The worlds that each race inhabited were dying, so they built arks that carried their people across the stars.
But this was all backstory. The series picked up thirty years later with Joshua Nolan hunting for “ark tech” with his daughter, an alien girl named Irisa, whom he saved from a cult. They run into trouble and are brought to the former city of St. Louis, which has been renamed Defiance.
As a 2013 viewer, I was drawn into the show by the complex narratives presented. Defiance was a place where both humans and Votans could live in peace, and where the different cultures were respected, but it still had its own social ecosystem which made for good stories.
I found myself coming back to Defiance each week for the complex characters with their own motivations and fallacies. No character in Defiance was just there, they all had a role to play that drove the story forward. Most importantly there was an array of women who weren’t only strong, but complex in their own right.
I found myself coming back to Defiance each week for the complex characters with their own motivations and fallacies…. There was an array of women who weren’t only strong, but complex in their own right.
There was Amanda Rosewater, the newly minted mayor who always had a plan and yet was insecure in times of stress. Then there was her sister Kenya, who ran the bar and brothel called the Need/Want. Irisa, Nolan’s daughter, was just starting to come into her own and push back against her father. Doc Yewll was a serious scientist who let nothing stand in the way of her doing her job, and still had a shady past. Christy McCawley was a young woman in love with an alien boy against her father’s wishes, and while her story was arguably the most like a teen movie, it still sucked me in.
Yet, the character that really drew me in was Stahma Tarr. Stahma’s a Castithan woman who was married to the town loan shark, Datak Tarr. Over Defiance’s three seasons the couple and their son Alak presented a story not unlike many immigrant narratives as Stahma struggled to break the bonds of their old world, while Datak held tight to them.
Looking back, it isn’t surprising that she was one of the first characters I gravitated towards. Stahma and Datak carried themselves in a way that reminded me of the Purebloods in Harry Potter. In 2012, I’d written an op-ed about Bellatrix Lestrange and how her manic tendencies were something I admired because she was unapologetic for who she was. The Black family quickly became my favorite Harry Potter characters because of their history and complexity. Stahma reminded me of Bellatrix’s sister, Narcissa Malfoy, who I was also drawn to because she walked the line of self-preservation. She wasn’t setting out to do the right thing, just to take care of her family.
Stahma had similar motivations. Throughout the first season, Stahma pulled strings and manipulated situations to serve her interests. It was selfish, but it was all for the good of her family, and she wasn’t afraid to do what was needed.
In season two of Defiance, with Datak in prison and her son running the family business, Stahma had to find a way to ensure her survival without breaking the edicts of the Castithan homeworld. On Casti, their home planet, women weren’t allowed to run businesses and they weren’t supposed to have opinions, but Stahma believed in the new world that Earth promised, and she wanted to break the cycle.
Her feminist narrative was one of the strongest of season two and one of the reasons that I kept watching the show. Yet, Stahma’s narrative always felt like she was in danger of being found out.
Defiance was cancelled in 2015 shortly after the Season 3 finale aired, but I hadn’t seen it.
I was neck deep in a redesign work project and cultivating a friendship with my brother’s girlfriend. Since moving back home in 2012, I had put up my own stasis nets. I had lived with a presumption that I could, and possibly would, move at any time, but that hadn’t happened.
I had put up my own stasis nets. I had lived with a presumption that I could, and possibly would, move at any time, but that hadn’t happened.
While I was living at home, Sunday dinners had become a ritual, with my brother and his girlfriend coming over every week—sometimes on short notice—and that meant I was often cooking dinner. Over the course of a year and a half I got to know his girlfriend and we became friends. I taught her to knit and we went to trunk shows in New York City and knitting circles together. I showed my mom and brother the sometimes-complicated world of buying yarn from independent dyers online for Christmas and her birthday, and often served as a fit guide for when my mom decided to buy her clothes.
I wanted to do it, I was happy to do it. I liked my brother’s girlfriend, but a nagging part of me thought to myself: “She’s currently my only friend. What happens if this doesn’t work out?”
Before Christmas 2015, they broke up. She disappeared from my life like a shadow in the corner of my eye. That’s when my mother looked at me and said, “She was your friend. I didn’t even think about that.”
“I did,” I replied.
Since then, the stasis nets went back up. This time, not because I was planning to move, but because I didn’t want to lose another friend that way.
When 2016 rolled around I vowed that I would start doing things for myself again. A big project at work had recently come to an end and suddenly I had free time and didn’t know what to do with myself.
I got back into reading and went to a book group at my local independent bookstore…. Yet, I also felt lonely, in the way that someone describes being alone in a crowd of people.
I started writing television reviews for Tell-Tale TV, and threw myself full-tilt into a blog. I got back into reading and went to a book group at my local independent bookstore, and I kept doing things like the weekly grocery run. Yet, I also felt lonely, in the way that someone describes being alone in a crowd of people.
It’s strange seeing a mirror of yourself when you don’t expect it.
In July 2018, I was working on an article for Tell-Tale TV. I’d been contributing to them regularly for over two years and I often credit the site with giving me an outlet to save my sanity. I had written an essay about the TV show Timeless and its place in the time travel genre, and was working on a list of shows with similarly rich narratives.
I was talking to a friend about the idea, and asking her if she knew about any other shows, when she said, “Defiance.”
I thought about it for a moment. Defiance had slipped away from me so slowly that it hadn’t even occurred to me when I made my list. I thought about it some more and searched for the show online. It had been five years since the premiere but the three seasons were on Amazon Prime.
I began to re-watch the pilot, and I came to the scene where Joshua Nolan walks into Defiance for the first time and sees Amanda Rosewater give a speech at a town celebration. Later, walking through town with the former mayor, Amanda says how she’s “genetically incapable of inspiring people.” Later, when the town is under attack, she’s struggling with how to address the citizens. She’s looking for the right words that will inspire them to take up arms against the Volge.
She compares herself to Mayor Nicky, and when she ultimately takes to the podium in front of a scared and confused town, she ditches her script and says plainly, “We’re all going do die!”
In those two scenes I started to realize that it wasn’t Stahma Tarr I should have been looking at, but Amanda. She was a newly minted mayor who was fighting for a town that she loved. In each season, the writers gave Amanda new challenges and she always approached it rationally. She didn’t have all the answers, but she always attempted to find the best way out of her situation.
In those two scenes I started to realize that it wasn’t Stahma Tarr I should have been looking at, but Amanda…. She didn’t have all the answers, but she always attempted to find the best way out of her situation.
My world is nothing like Amanda Rosewater’s. Her history and mine don’t mirror each other, but as the pilot progressed, I saw more of myself in Amanda. When Amanda is injured during the fight with the Volge she attempts to get up and keep fighting before Doc Yewll pushes her back down and tells her she’s on bed rest.
Around the time I fell behind on Defiance, I was working on an important project for work. The project was taking longer than expected and one day, I suddenly realized I hadn’t showered in three days or changed my clothes, because I was so focused on the task. Had I been Amanda, in her exact same situation, I would have tried to get up too. I would have pressed on and kept working.
Watching Amanda tend to Defiance also brought up a connection I never expected.
I moved back to Connecticut in the summer of 2012, and I was there when the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. I was home and ready to pursue the next stage of my life, but on December 14, 2012, it was like the town halted. There were memorials and services, and I was concerned about two of the kids I babysat.
“Ms. Lauren,” the older one asked me. “Do I have to talk about what happened?”
I was at the stove making macaroni and cheese. I turned and stooped down to his level. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “I know a lot of people are asking you questions. So, when I am here, if you want to talk about it, we can. If you don’t, that’s fine too.”
He smiled and went back to his snack. Going on six years, I remember how internally, I had promised myself that I would be there for these boys and my community. And I was, until the family ultimately moved, but I never did; I stayed in my town and watched the anniversaries pass.
Looking back, in the spring of 2013, Stahma gave me what I needed to survive. She gave me calculated exterior and the hope that I could affect change in some small way. But, in my actions, I was really Amanda. She put her own feelings and ambitions aside for the good of the town. She loved Defiance and the people in it.
In an interview, Julie Benz who played the role of Amanda broke down one of her final scenes in the season three finale, “Upon the March We Fittest Die.”
“For me, Amanda represents the heart of Defiance. She’s the only character who consistently puts aside her own feelings for the good of the town. She sacrificed her whole life for the survival of the town.”
A few weeks ago, I was conducting a phone interview with Jennifer Bartels from American Woman. We were discussing how the characters were each developed differently. Bartels, who plays Diana, said:
“I know, as a viewer and as a woman, I really look to align with different characteristics of different women. I have a little Bonnie in me, and I have a little Kathleen in me, and of course, I have quite a bit of Diana in me, so it’s nice that people can relate to different aspects of the characters.”
I’ve been thinking about both Stahma Tarr and Amanda Rosewater, and the different things I’ve liked about each of them…. Stahma gave me the armor I needed at a time when the community around me was raw and healing, but Amanda was who I was.
This quote stayed with me as I transcribed it, and finished Defiance all the way through for the first time. I’ve been thinking about both Stahma Tarr and Amanda Rosewater, and the different things I’ve liked about each of them, and I realized that I have aspects of both of them. Stahma gave me the armor I needed at a time when the community around me was raw and healing, but Amanda was who I was. I just had to take care not to lose myself in the service of others, and protect myself a little bit, like Stahma Tarr would.
For all her backstabbing, which made her a compelling character, Stahma always looked out for herself, and she valued those closest to her. Stahma might not be the best role model, but she definitely had a few personality traits that I can benefit from.
“Look,” said Ashley to Quinn, “you got the breasts. I want the belly part.”
“Fine,” said Quinn. “Fine, okay. So. ‘With his warm tongue, he found her navel again, and—’”
“Say David!”
“Right. So, ‘With his warm tongue, David found her navel again, and . . .’”
I pulled a flat, mildewy pillow over my head, giggling hard in hopes of drowning this out before I died from a heart attack. We were all thirteenish and at band camp, years before anyone came to believe that there was anything sexy about band camp whatsoever. Ashley and Quinn, however, brought the sexiness wherever they went, being jointly and severally obsessed with David Bowie. They were reading sex scenes out loud from a novel, swapping in their own names and Mr. Bowie’s respectively. And whose fault was this?
“‘David brought his hand back up her inner thigh, feeling the special softness there, and over the springy curls of her mound—’”
It was my fault. I had brought this novel to camp with me. I had disclosed to other human beings that I had a copy of The Plains of Passage—one of the sequels to Jean M. Auel’s The Valley of Horses. And now they knew, now everyone was going to know, that I had a dirty book—
“Okay, is this the actual sex? We should both get part of the actual sex.”
The other girls were laughing, yes. They were laughing and blushing, but—I moved my eye from beneath the pillow—none of them were laughing at me.
Everyone who forms a theory of prehistoric life must sooner or later base it on what they privately believe about human nature.
Marija Gimbutas was a pioneering twentieth-century archaeologist whose life was torn apart by war. When her native Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union, Gimbutas had to flee, carrying only her dissertation and her baby. After her years of struggle and gender discrimination, Gimbutas’s 1974 book The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe caught the zeitgeist like a spinnaker sail.
In the onrush of second-wave feminism and anti-war sentiment, Gimbutas’ theories had an immediate appeal to women inside and outside of the academy.
Gimbutas had studied prehistoric “Venus figurines” —small, anonymous, heavyset female statuettes, such as the Venus of Willendorf—as well as the warlike Indo-European cultures of the Bronze Age. According to Gimbutas, once upon a time, Paleolithic Europe had been inhabited by a race of peaceful goddess-worshipers. The Indo-Europeans swept in with their bronze, their chariots, and their patriarchy, breaking the scattered peoples of the Goddess and, in short, ruining everything. In the onrush of second-wave feminism and anti-war sentiment, Gimbutas’ theories had an immediate appeal to women inside and outside of the academy.
Around this time, Jean M. Auel, an accomplished Oregon businesswoman in her forties, sketched her first story about the prehistoric world. In 1980, she published her debut novel, Clan of the Cave Bear, in which an orphaned H. sapiens girl, Ayla, is raised by the Clan, a band of Neanderthals. The girl’s cleverness frightens and confuses the patriarchal Clan, who are genuinely incapable of learning anything new. Clan of the Cave Bear is now among the one hundred “best-loved books” listed by the PBS Great American Read, and it has become a minor classic of historical fiction.
Its sequel, The Valley of Horses, is not so much as a classic as a whisper among women, a shared secret in libraries and locker rooms. But it is this sequel, together with the subsequent books in the Earth’s Children series, that became legendary among female readers. In it, Ayla strikes out on her own and manages to make a living for herself until she meets another human for the first time, the comically handsome Jondalar. His people—as Gimbutas posited—worship the Great Earth Mother, Creator of all. Human cultures do not share a language, but because they share the Goddess, they live in peace throughout Europe. Ayla and Jondalar learn gingerly about each other’s worlds, culminating in Ayla’s detailed sexual awakening and Jondalar’s detailed falling in love.
The Valley of Horses is not so much as a classic as a whisper among women, a shared secret in libraries and locker rooms. But it is this sequel, together with the subsequent books in the Earth’s Children series, that became legendary among female readers.
And who could not love Ayla? She is the type specimen of the Canon Mary Sue—a flawless, feisty maiden, persecuted for her daring. At various points in the series, she invents horse-riding, fire-starting, the concept of sexual reproduction, and dogs. Jondalar has already invented having blue eyes and a large penis; Ayla helps him come up with the spear-thrower as well. They then take a leisurely three books to travel through Ice Age Europe to return to Jondalar’s people. Each book offers diminishing returns to the reader, and yet, taken together, they offered something that women of the 1980s apparently needed.
At that time, the hero of a romance novel was generally what modern authors call an “alpha-hole” —a cruel, self-absorbed rake. The heroine’s reward was that her persistence would unlock his heart and teach him to love. This is not a job that Ayla must do. Jondalar actually likes women; he accepts them as leaders and comrades, just as other men do. And, like all the Cro-Magnon peoples in Auel’s books, Jondalar views sex as a sacrament— “the Mother’s Gift of Pleasures.” The drawn-out sex scenes are repeated throughout the books, with as much tenderness on the fiftieth occasion as on the first.
The first time anyone else saw me naked, they laughed at me.
They were little boys who had threatened to hit my dog if I didn’t pull down my underwear. The association between taking off one’s clothes and being laughed at has remained strong in me ever since. I got more sex education on the fly from R. Crumb comics and dirty magazines. Sex, I gathered, was a nasty business, premised on one principle: make the joke or be the joke.
Sex, I gathered, was a nasty business, premised on one principle: make the joke or be the joke.
There are no jokes in the Earth’s Children series—at least, none that are funny. There is plenty of boisterous teasing, but nothing with actual bite. Something about this appealed to me. I did not exactly like the sex scenes. Even as a sheltered child, I suspected that the characters could not possibly bathe enough for all that. Yet the scenes depicted something I had never imagined: truly safe sex—respectful, reverent, healthy. Auel envisioned a world in which life was dangerous, but men were not, and a woman could lead a life of adventure with a partner, not for him or against him.
The scenes depicted something I had never imagined: truly safe sex—respectful, reverent, healthy… a world in which life was dangerous, but men were not.
Once, I found a heavily used paperback of The Valley of Horses at a jumble sale. In the margins, someone had written “Turn to page 41,” “Turn to page 150,” and so forth. These instructions resulted in a simple tale of one woman surviving in the wilderness and domesticating animals, then meeting a nice fellow. Who gave these instructions and to whom, I cannot say. But it was clearly someone who recognized that the book could give more than it was famous for. Stripped of its sex scenes, it still offered hope—the hope that one woman, alone with her broken heart, could build a full life.
Hope, however, is not the same as quality.
The paperback edition of Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s Reindeer Moon was stamped with FOR EVERYONE WHO LOVED THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR! It is decidedly not. Reindeer Moon is indeed a book about the adventures of a young woman thrown on her own resources in ancient Europe, but the heroine, Yanan, lives a grinding life of constant cold and hunger. Her clothes are ill-fitting; her companions are narrow and quarrelsome. Yanan too is passionate and defiant, but when it costs her dearly, fate does not reward her. Nor does struggle make her exceptional. When Yanan encounters a motherless wolf cub, her first instinct is to eat it.
Thomas, who spent some of her youth among modern hunter-gatherers, has more insight than Auel does into what truly motivates humans on the edge—not peace, love, and discovery, but warmth, blood, and fat. By the time I found Reindeer Moon, it reinforced what I understood then to be true: life is brutal, and any men who express interest in the ancient spirituality of the female body are trolling for tail.
It seemed unsafe to enjoy something like the Earth’s Children series. Women’s fantasies are used against them in a way that men’s never are. By the time I was in college, I had been sexually assaulted by someone who was, by all accounts, deeply in love with me, and I understood this to be my fault for being in love with him. I needed to prove two things—first, that I was to be taken seriously, and secondly, that I knew better to expect anything from men.
It seemed unsafe to enjoy something like the Earth’s Children series. Women’s fantasies are used against them in a way that men’s never are.
One way I have done this, over the years, is to make fun of the work of Jean M. Auel. I turned on the premise and the purple prose, mocking its sexiness and its ahistoricity. I wasn’t wrong, but I was also bridging a dark place—my own knowledge that sex, for me, had never been a joyful, celebratory, sacred act, and that I could not trust anyone who said it was.
I have, I think, been ungrateful. Auel offered me something that I once took gladly—a chance to imagine, free from the laughter of boys or men. Thousands of readers were able to enjoy the same peace, for a little while, and to learn a few things from Auel’s vast and diligent research. Every day, I struggle to imagine a simple story that is unclouded by discourse, by the weight of what I know the world to be. Auel could not only imagine such a story, she could write hundreds of thousands of words of it and cite her research. Auel depicted a world that was more than pain, and for this, I am glad.
I started stealing razors from my dad in the first grade. It was easy.
I watched my mom and older sisters do the same for as long as I could remember. As soon as I began sprouting hair in areas I didn’t want covered (i.e., not the top of my head), I slicked them off quickly and painlessly without telling a soul.
Although I began signaling sexual maturation sooner than most, I was sure that my very understanding mother wouldn’t approve of depilation at age six. I was right. Dr. Miles, my pediatrician, had forewarned her that I showed signs of precocious puberty. My mom vigilantly observed for the markers that I expertly hid.
When I began menstruating at age ten — I concealed that fact for months before an untimely trip to the mall forced me to reveal it — my mom, in shock, exclaimed that it had happened before any pubic hair growth. I sassily retorted that that was only because I handled the fuzzy inconvenience before she even noticed. The glare she darted my way warned me to tread carefully in my remarks.
I was often referred to as “mujercita sin tiempo” — little woman before her time. It began when I decided to put the dolls away and play instead with my little sister. Toys held my interest for a very short period of time. That was the most prominent feature of my precociousness until I opened my mouth. That mouth got me sent to the naughty table in the first grade. It was there that I formed a lifelong friendship with Miguel, the first and only person to know that I had “woman problems” at the time. Perhaps my smart aleck-y attitude should havve alerted my mother to the situation.
Merriam-Webster simply defines precociousness as having or showing the qualities or abilities of an adult an unusually early age, exceptionally early in development or occurrence (emphasis on early). The National Library of Medicine provides a more precise demarcation for precociousness. Precocious puberty is the development of sexual maturation in boys and girls at a chronological age that is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean age of onset of puberty in the general population.
I was often referred to as “mujercita sin tiempo” — little woman before her time.
The language is ominous. Precocious puberty is 2.5 times away from average. Average is typical. Two and a half standard deviations below normal naturally seems abnormal. But is it?
For me, it was a minor change. And if you take it from the perspective of pediatric endocrinologist Louise Greenspan, MD, coauthor of The New Puberty, a book geared toward guiding parents through early development and sexual maturation, it’s a minor change for a growing number of girls. In a study launched in 2005 that evaluated a controlled group of girls in three cities, nearly 10 percent of the participants developed signs of puberty before eight years of age.
Precocious puberty is the development of sexual maturation in boys and girls at a chronological age that is 2.5 standard deviations below the mean age of onset of puberty in the general population.
On a slow Saturday night, a Google search of “early puberty” returns approximately 1.3 million hits in 0.31 seconds. The right side of the search window shows a chart proclaiming precocious puberty a rare condition that is treatable by a medical professional.
Several headlines, some by prestigious news organizations, lament this ordinary change, a change that occurs in all (minus a sliver of a minority) sooner or later. Each publication parrots the others, rattling off a list of negative affects of early maturation — depression, eating disorders, substance abuse, early initiation of sexual activity, etc. — expounding the fears of clueless parents.
On a slow Saturday night, a Google search of “early puberty” returns approximately 1.3 million hits in 0.31 seconds.
I was the fourth born, the third girl in a family of five siblings. My home was a stable household steeped in femininity. I watched my two older sisters grow into their womanhood, and the lessons my mother instilled in them flowed unto me in seamless transition. While I didn’t comprehend everything that was happening, I did understand that puberty was a series of events that would occur over time. My mother explained these changes as they were presented to my sisters, as I was a witness to their evolving bodies. My turn would be next. I wasn’t sure when, but I did know it was coming.
Four years ago, writer Elizabeth Weil profiled a mother and daughter experiencing the onset of precocious puberty for a piece in the New York Times Magazine. The article chronicled how Tracee Sioux, mother and now author of The Year of Yes! fought for a “solution or treatment” to the “problem condition” her nonplussed daughter, Ainsley, was traversing. Doctor after doctor had deemed Ainsley advanced but normal, but that was not the answer Tracee sought. The big, ugly world was revealing itself much too soon. Momma bear had to protect and guard against it. A puritanical concept of innocence was at stake.
The big, ugly world was revealing itself much too soon.
The false sense of loss of innocence is the most pressing negative affect of early onset puberty. Society’s fixation on the sexualization of young girls — the famed Lolita Syndrome — should not dictate how we educate our daughters. Let’s divorce the idea of being wanted from that of being a woman and teach girls from the earliest moment possible that they are the owners of their own bodies, and that while they grow, those bodies will change. Girls need to be granted agency over their selves in order to successfully navigate the challenges that arise from childhood into adulthood. Womanhood does not begin with desirability.
In her “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain,” Leslie Jamison suggests that being a woman requires pain. Jamison goes as far as describing menstruation as “one kind of wound.” For such a central aspect of womanhood to be described as an affliction so casually is troubling. If everything ails, nothing will heal. Pain is not a gender.
Let’s divorce the idea of being wanted from that of being a woman and teach girls from the earliest moment possible that they are the owners of their own bodies, and that while they grow, those bodies will change.
Women need to lead the change to stop the stigmatization of our changing bodies. While it may seem preferable to be viewed as a victim rather than a whore, both perspectives are damaging. Our collective understanding of self should be the source of our bonding. The pains of our periods may indicate the possibility of fertility. There should be no shame in that potential. It’s potential: a maybe, but not a certainty. And if it does become a certainty, the reality is just another step in life.
For such a central aspect of womanhood to be described as an affliction so casually is troubling. If everything ails, nothing will heal. Pain is not a gender.
Puberty is a beginning and not an end. It’s a minor change that leads to another that will successively lead to more. It may be scary (or not) and weird at first, but it’s just another phase, like fallen teeth and lanky limbs. Our bodies are our own, and that personal space requires respect. Teach this to our girls and our boys.
Let’s not rob our girls of the beauty of transformation. It will happen whether you want it to or not. Womanhood is process. Revel in the process. Revel in self-care. Love being a woman. It is not unclean.
When I was a kid, I used my indoor voice a lot, even when I was outside. It didn’t feel natural to me to be loud, to yell. My mom taught me that I don’t need to be loud to get my point across.
My mom also taught me and my siblings that it’s important to call people out on their bullcrap. “I hate injustice,” she would say. Unfortunately, when you’re a woman—especially a woman of color—speaking your mind about things that are wrong is deemed a problem.
When you’re a woman—especially a woman of color—speaking your mind about things that are wrong is deemed a problem.
In Blythe Baird’s slam poem “Pocket Sized Feminism,” she says that she hates keeping her feminism in her pocket and only bringing it out at women’s studies classes or slam poetry events. “I want people to like me more than I want to change the world,” she writes. That is how our society tries to mold us: Go with the flow, even if you see that things are hitting the fan. If you dodge it, it will go away.
We hesitate to voice our opinions on subjects that are important to us because the media has put this idea in our heads that we should be “cool” girls or girlfriends who don’t bother guys with our “silly” issues—like feminism—or else we will be a downer. Discussing why we need to close the pay gap or why we need to stop the push of rape culture is burdening men with opinions and conversations that make them uncomfortable—that’s what we learn, and it’s a deeply problematic idea.
In an interview about the Black Lives Matter movement, how feminism has shaped her, and the importance of owning herself, Johnetta Elzie (@nettaaaaaaaa on Twitter) says of negative responses to her work, “I don’t live a fairytale life. I don’t live a celebrity life. There are people out there that want me dead.” Here’s a young woman who is making the necessary moves to bring attention to issues such as police brutality and racism, and people want her dead? I thought it was supposed to be important for every citizento fight against injustice. Or is that only true when you’re white and male?
We hesitate to voice our opinions on subjects that are important to us because the media has put this idea in our heads that we should be “cool” girls or girlfriends who don’t bother guys with our “silly” issues—like feminism.
But women who exchange indoor for outdoor voices must expect a lot of resistance, especially in the Internet age.
When Harvard professor Danielle Allen wrote a piece called “The Moment of Truth: We Must Stop Trump,” she received racist, sexist, and even anti-Semitic tweets from Donald Trump supporters. “It was a prompt for the trolls,” she said. While this kind of reaction would cause some people to log off of Twitter altogether, it didn’t deter Allen. For her, it was a chance to show others the dangerously ethno-nationalist views his supporters share.
Women who exchange indoor for outdoor voices must expect a lot of resistance, especially in the Internet age.
When seventeen-year-old Amandla Stenberg posted her project, “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows,” where she discussed the problems of cultural appropriation of black culture, comments about her being an “angry black girl,” “stupid,” and even “racist” went flying. Women of color who air their views on feminism, racism, and misogyny online are routinely bullied by those who would silence us.
In a world that preaches that it wants you to stand up for what you believe in, the fact that there are people who will harass you for doing so is perplexing. When I see the constant nonsense that women put up with online and in person for taking action in their beliefs, I feel exhausted for them. It can be mentally and emotionally draining trying to educate people and create a dialogue with them on important issues when they don’t want to make an effort. Being ignorant is much easier than being woke.
In an interview with Rookie Magazine, Rowan Blanchard talks about how she learned to stop apologizing for herself. “It has felt safer and less terrifying to silence myself to a degree … I have treated, specifically male feelings and ego, as superior and more fragile than my own.” I felt the same way growing up, and in some ways still do. I’ve had to learn how to stop myself from rethinking how I sound and how I act when I put someone in their place, especially when that person is a guy. If I don’t, I find myself pulling back and thinking that I sound kind of bitchy. I end up feeling bad, and I forget the reason why I told the other person off to begin with. There are times when I subconsciously try to keep my tone of voice low, even if I’m passionate about something, because I’m afraid of coming across as angry.
Women of color who air their views on feminism, racism, and misogyny online are routinely bullied by those who would silence us.
We’ve been taught to put our feelings on the back burner and to protect other people’s feelings, even when they are hurting us. We learn from this that what we have to say doesn’t matter—unless it benefits the majority. I’ve come to understand, though, that apologizing for how I feel doesn’t get me anywhere. If I genuinely hurt someone’s feelings, I’ll apologize. But if you’re intimidated by my opinion or presence, I’m not apologizing for it.
When you’re a woman of color, not only do you have to be conscious of possibly hurting a man’s feelings and ego, but you have to do the same with white people’s feelings. That’s why when we talk about the systemic effects of racism and sexism in our society, we are told to shut up and that we’re the reason racism still exists. Really? How can you say that we need to have an open and honest discussion about race, but when we bring it up, we’re the racists? It’s a move that favors those with power, who control the discussion by refusing to let it happen.
When I see women like Netta and Amandla on the covers of magazines, and young black women thanking them for being an inspiration, it makes me feel good. It reminds me that even when people try to stifle us with stereotypes like that of “Angry black woman,” call us derogatory names, and even threaten our wellbeing, we can’t let them win by keeping quiet.
Use your outdoor voice. Speak up. Get involved. Do what feels right to you. Why should we apologize for simply existing? We were brought into this world. The fact that we are here on this Earth is validation that we deserve our space.
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