The A-Mazing Yamashita the Millennial Gold-diggers
 
This one-act play is staged as a magic show. Yamashita, the female magician, promises us an evening of entertainment, where she will personally escort her audience “through the secret tunnels and nubiferous passageways of a post-colonialist, global economic maze, more hidden than King Solomon’s Tomb, more baffling than the riddle of the Sphinx, and more impenetrable than the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
 
The play incorporates three stunts traditionally associated with the genre: levitating a woman, sawing a woman in half, and causing a woman to vanish inside a magic cabinet. These become explicit metaphors for the wholesale drugging of a generation of young women, the dissociation (splitting) of women through traumatic sexualization and objectification of our bodies, and the disappearing of millions of girls and women through trafficking. Professor Yessir, lending her authority to the proceedings, illustrates the intellectual idiocy and moral complicity of academic theorists, including Lacan, Foucault, Butler, and Kristeva. This is a harrowing play that shatters the fourth wall with a variety of audience plants.  The finale of the performance relies on an improvised recruitment of the audience to stage a protest strong enough to stop the escalating onstage atrocities.

Hermeneutic Circlejerk
Subtitled “The Founding of Post-Modern Theory,” this slapstick farce features two clowns, Michel-Henri and Jacques-Pierre. Few people are aware that Foucault and Derrida were pro-pedophilia activists who publicly lobbied the French Parliament to abolish (not just lower, but abolish!) the age-of-consent for children. In my farce, the two clown characters purport to found a school of knowledge with its own secret and self-referential language—a language that will effectively deconstruct everything except itself. The ultimate goal of all this initiation and deconstruction is the decriminalizing of their child rapes.

The Ladies’ Room
 
The Ladies Room enacts the collision of queer theory with radical feminism in the space of six minutes. This short-short play takes place outside a ladies’ room in a shopping mall. A teenage lesbian couple is struggling with the fact that someone has reported the butch for being in a women’s bathroom. The butch is on a rant about gender policing, while her girlfriend argues in support of vigilance about male presence in women’s spaces. During the course of the conflict, the girlfriend’s rape narrative emerges, radically altering the direction of the play.

Bite My Thumb
 
In the one-act, Bite My Thumb, the conflict between queer theory and lesbian feminism gets down and dirty with a series of on-stage sword fights. Two “gangs” from rival Off-Off Broadway productions of Romeo and Juliet meet in an alley to rumble, sixteenth-century style. A trans man from a mainstream theatre takes on a lesbian butch from an all-women theatre company, with the two combatants hurling accusations at each other, while the members of their respective companies end up firing them both for sex and gender non-conformity. The play ends with the protagonists’ begrudging acknowledgement of the need to forge an alliance.

Planchette
 
Planchette is a historical play about two fourteen-year old females in 1879. One of them is gender-conforming and attracted to women, while the other is non-conforming, with deep gender dysphoria. I wanted to explore issues of sexual orientation and gender identity in an era when there was no culture, language, or model for anything except heterosexuality and patriarchal gender representation and roles. In the play, Jude struggles to articulate an identity, settling on a fantastical description of girls who grow up to be men. The stage directions never apply gendered pronouns for Jude, leaving the actors and audience to speculate whether today Jude would be a trans man or a lesbian butch. In addition, both of the characters have survived traumatic events, which inform and complicate their identities.

 
Head in the Game
 
Head in the Game was inspired by an interview with prostitution survivor and abolitionist Rachel Moran. She gave a very simple analogy to help liberal feminists understand prostitution as abuse. She explained how paying someone money in exchange for their allowing themselves to be slapped in the face does not in any way keep the slap from hurting. She points out that there is harm every time a woman has sex that is unwelcome and unwanted, and the fact that money is exchanged for the act does not alter the fact that it is unwanted. As she says, “Money is not magic.”
 
I took her analogy and ran with it in the play, positing a franchise of “Boxing Girls Gyms,” where men pay money to “box” with “sparring partners”—except that the “sparring partners” (all female) are not allowed to hit back, and in fact, the only person “boxing” is the client. In the play, the batterer attempts to kill the “boxing girl,” who manages to call the police. What we see is the difficulty in naming abuse when the entire nature of the so-called enterprise is paid abuse.

Valerie Solanas at Matteawan
 
In this play, I wanted to call out both queer activists and radical feminists for their ignorance of trauma studies.
 
In the play, two radical lesbian feminists are visiting Solanas in the state mental hospital shortly after her shooting Andy Warhol. Enamored with her iconic SCUM Manifesto, they are hoping to recruit her as a spokeswoman for the rising Women’s Liberation Movement. The two activists are shocked and disillusioned to find that Solanas is only interested in performing her play Up Your Ass.
 
Up Your Ass, written in the 1960’s, is actually very post-modern in its reification of patriarchal butch-femme roles and its representation of prostitution as an ennobling act of resistance. Solanas frames her internalized misogyny as empowering, while her visitors frame it as an enemy action. I depict it as a testament of an unrecovered incest survivor, challenging the audience to consider whether trauma literacy might open up common ground between queer theorists and radical feminists.
 
I invite queer-identified artists to engage with this work, to move away from the blanket dismissal of butch identity, and especially to interrogate the lack of feminist archetypes of lesbian survivors in the canon of queer work.

It’s here. It’s called Niagra and it’s for Male Respectile Dysfunction… 

Niagra are shaped, colored and packaged to look exactly like Viagra, and, in fact, the instructions tell women to insert them into their partners’ Viagra boxes, replacing the actual Viagra.

What do they do? Nothing. Nothing at all.

And that’s the point. 

Because Male Respectile Dysfunction has been a living nightmare for billions of women for centuries. Refusing to accept that women’s lives and anatomies are not designed as extensions of their own agendas, men have continued to promote penetration as “the sex act,” in spite of the fact that women’s vaginas have only about 1000 nerve endings, most of which are non-erotogenic. The neuronal wiring of the vagina has, in fact, evolved not to accommodate the phallus, but the passage of the nine-month-old baby. In spite of the overwhelming personal testimony of countless women and a sea of medical statistics, men have stubbornly persisted in defining the primary act of sex in terms of their own desires. In fact, women who refused to fake orgasms were historically labeled “frigid,” and whole industries arose to treat this non-existent condition.

But all of this is terribly boring. Read Anne Koedt’s classic, “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” That should have laid the entire Viagra thing to rest four decades ago.

No, I didn’t watch the Oscars. Yes, I heard about the opening number, “We Saw Your Boobs.”  Yes, of course, it’s sexist, immature, offensive, disrespectful… and the fact that several of the so-called boob sightings are associated with rape scenes is disgusting. Of course.

And…  what about all the actresses and celebrities who were sitting in the audience having to listen to this dreck?

Well, what about them?

You mean the actresses who are, for the most part, wearing gowns specifically designed to show maximum cleavage of cleavage already maximized by underwires, padding, boob tape, and cosmetic surgery? The actresses whose efforts to maximize cleavage exposure has caused the Grammy Awards this year to issue a dress code banning “bare fleshy under curves of the buttocks and buttock crack,” “bare sides or under curvature of the breasts,” and “sheer see-through clothing that could  possibly expose female breast nipples.”

Was that really necessary? I mean, what kind of professional musician would need to be told not to expose her nipples? Um… Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Janet Jackson, Rihanna, Britney Spears...

Oh, but wait… That was the Grammys, and this is the Oscars. This is about actresses. We all know that musicians are paid to put on a show.

Okay… actresses. Actresses who have exposed their breasts off-duty. Let's see... Emma Watson. Penelope Cruz.  Elizabeth Hurley. Keira Knightly. Kirsten Dunst. Salma Hayek. And then there was Anne Hathaway at the premiere of Les Miz… the film for which she would win a Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA Award, and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Does any celebrity really not know that there will be a fleet of paparazzi hoping to get a crotch shot when a famous actress gets out of a car? Does any celebrity seriously think it’s not going to be an issue to go without underwear while making that maneuver?

And I am hearing it already… Don’t blame the victims! If Anne Hathaway wants to go commando, well, that’s her own damn business! If these celebrities are forced by their publicists and studios to show ever-more-daring décolletage, who can fault them for the inevitable wardrobe malfunctions.

Three words: Clothing. Reform. Movement. Ever hear of it? Well, it was part of that first wave of feminism, when women began to understand that women’s clothing was not just impractical, but downright dangerous. Try carrying a child up a dark staircase, with a lantern or candle, while trying to hold the floor-length hem high enough to avoid tripping. How many women broke their necks, killed their babies, and/or caught on fire because of Victorian dresses?

And what about those pioneer women on Oregon Trail crossing hundreds of rivers on makeshift rafts on their way from Kansas to the Pacific? Not even an Olympic swimmer could keep her head above the water with eight yards of fabric wrapping themselves around her legs. And what about those tight-laced corsets… 80 pounds of pressure per square inch causing miscarriages, displacing organs, increasing blood pressure and restricting breathing.

The Clothing Reform Movement was an organized attempt on the part of those First Wave Feminists to reject the traditional garments for women in favor of safety, practicality, and clothing that would actually allow for full range of human movement.  Because women are, you know... human.

It was an awesome movement. The women who had the courage to wear the bloomer costume—harem pants over a short skirt—were met with taunts and catcalls, barrages of excrement, and violence. Actually, “bloomer” was a dismissive and insulting term invented by the media. The activists who wore the outfit called it the “American Dress” or “Reform Costume.” They were deeply involved in abolition, temperance (which was a movement confronting domestic violence), and women’s rights. They were a real movement. Yeah, movement.

Lady Gaga recently had to cancel a tour because of a tear in the cartilage around the hip joint. Not too surprising, given how many times she falls down. In Atlanta, in Mexico, in New Zealand, in Houston, in New York, in Montreal. She falls off a piano, she falls off a runway, she falls at the VMA’s, at Heathrow Airport, at a photoshoot with Annie Liebovitz. And why is she falling so much? Take a guess.

What if there was a song about Lady Gaga called, “We Saw You Fall?” Would we be outraged at the callousness? So what if she likes sky-high heels? Isn’t that her business? What kind of feminist would want to suggest that maybe, just maybe, she has made herself a target of ridicule by wearing such obviously dysfunctional foot-hobblers… foot-hobblers that male performers would have more sense and self-esteem than to wear.

If the actresses don’t like a song that says, “We Saw Your Boobs,” then, I say, don’t show them.

Don't even think of telling me they have no choice. They have a choice. It's the same choice I had. Buy into it or opt out. And, yes, that is a real choice. A choice with steep consequences, but also ample compensations. A choice.

Choosing to show major cleavage contributes powerfully to the marginalization of the actresses who don’t have huge breasts, who aren’t willing to undergo surgery to enlarge them, who don't feel comfortable--for any number of reasons-- in dressing like a sex object. And choosing to show major cleavage, choosing to stage coy "nip slips" and oopsy commando photo ops may be great in terms of web hits and viral videos, but they wag the dog in terms of the stories these actors can be hired to tell and the characters they will be considered for portraying.

These are not the career moves that lend themselves to telling stories of women who have survived sexual abuse, who have organized in resistance to the patriarchy, who have recruited and healed other women. These are not stories of  liberation. Contrary to the dictates of faux feminism, conflating a woman’s complicity in her own oppression with empowerment is just plain stupid. It’s kind of like applauding the independence and initiative of the strikebreaker who crosses the picket line to work for a substandard wage, undermining and betraying the workers who are holding the line to improve conditions for all.

Yes, the isolated actress who refuses nudity in a scene, who refuses to sexualize her appearance is going to be punished. Of course. That’s how it works. Ask any union organizer.

But a movement... well, a movement moves things. And the Clothing Reform Movement never really died. There have always been women refusing to sexualize themselves, to compromise their health or their safety for a fashion industry dictated by mostly male designers and based on distorting, controlling, and exploiting women. There have always been women willing to disqualify themselves from the jobs that require a dress code intended to pit us against other women and to estrange us from our dignity. There have always been women who wouldn't want a job where they were expected to show more skin than the men (a primal display of submission), where they were expected to wear a mask or hobble their feet.

Movement. But for a movement to happen, you have to be able to move.

I’ve been getting daily invitations to participate in the One Billion Rising event locally, and I’m also hearing from folks all over the world. Thousands of  global flashmobs all dancing to end violence against women. What could be wrong with that?

I try to picture flashmobs of Native Americans doing a peppy dance number to protest the horrors of genocide, the Indian schools, the ongoing treaty violations. I try to imagine flashmobs of African Americans in choreographed upbeat numbers, bringing awareness to the fact that one out of nine Black males will be imprisoned in their lifetime. I consider the potential effectiveness of Pakistani flashmobs all over Youtube in a dance to protest the drones.

And you know what? I can’t see it. It wouldn’t happen. Because light-hearted, non-ritual dancing to draw attention to oppression actually sends a mixed message. If the drone warfare is that horrific, how could people be having such a good time doing a bouncy dance with sexy moves? If the legacy of the Indian schools has been so devastating, why would all these dancers having such a great time? See what I'm saying?

The medium does become the message. A flashmob about breast cancer awareness might work. A flashmob to rally volunteers for a national disaster might also work. But these are not situations that involve acts of war, of terrorism. These are not situations—dare I say it—that involve an enemy.

Two weeks ago, one of my greatest mentors Julia Penelope died. Julia was a linguist and a lesbian-feminist. She paid a lot of attention to language, and how language shapes perceptions and controls people. She paid attention to what was happening as women were becoming more vocal about violence against us. We were beginning to take back the language. “Date rape,” “marital rape,” “sexual harassment.” These were new terms for behaviors that had been “business as usual.” Suddenly women were naming them and getting laws passed to criminalize them. Incest was being named, and suddenly we were discovering that it was not some obscure crime among the inbred in isolated areas of rural poverty, but actually commonplace across all classes.

Julia noticed that, as women began to take back the language, there was a counter-movement to introduce the “agentless passive” into this discourse.  One went from saying “John beat Mary” to saying that “Mary is a battered woman.”  Rape victims and battered women… victims of domestic violence. The agent is removed. The phrase "domestic violence" is gender neutral, even though the overwhelming majority of the agents are men and the overwhelming majority of victims are women and children. “Violence against women” hides the agents. It’s a thing that happens to women. We must deal with that “thing.” People have become comfortable speaking about the atrocities perpetrated against women, because the agent has been removed. When one speaks of domestic violence or violence against women (now “VAW”) one does not have to defend oneself from charges of men-hating or men-bashing.

I read the site for One Billion Rising. If I were a Martian trying to figure it out, I would conclude that violence against women was some kind of viral infection affecting only women, and that One Billion Rising was a campaign to raise awareness that would further medical research about the virus and possibly help women understand that they were at risk. As a Martian, I would come away from the website with very little understanding of what this epidemic was about. There was not one thing on the site that would lead me to understand that I was reading about the male half of the global population colonizing and massacring the female half. How am I supposed to take seriously a campaign or a movement that contributes so powerfully to obscuring the issue it purports to address?

This “agentless passive” is what I am seeing reified with this joyous flashmob. Women just need to become aware, to rise, and to dance. The short film on their website does a good job depicting men raping, harassing, beating, torturing, and terrorizing women. And then the ground begins to shake… there is an environmental, deus-ex-machina intervention. The women come to their senses and get up off the floor, push the men away (pushing only, careful not to fight back… after all, we don’t want to be as bad as them), and…. Dance!

Actually, it’s not that simple. If the film had not morphed into Disney fantasy, we would see the rising and resisting women slapped down harder and further brutalized for their resistance. We would see that the earth is not coming to our rescue,  that there will be no supernatural intervention, and that the women need weapons and training in martial arts, organizations, underground networks for escape, organizations, political education about our oppression, and organizations.

What if One Billion Rising had been courageous enough to face the reality head-on that violence against women is actually a war situation, an oppression, and that it does indeed involve an enemy who is focused on owning and controlling women and who will not hesitate to use any means to enforce that ownership and control? What if One Billion Rising had involved global flash displays of women practicing and teaching each other self-defense? What if One Billion Rising passed out pepperspray on keychains, urging every woman to carry a weapon everywhere she went?  What if One Billion Rising put the emphasis on the agents of our oppression instead of the victims, with workshops about femicide, the failure of Congress to include women as a category in hate crime bills, the intentional depiction of rape and femicide by Hollywood, and so on?

Well, for starts, there would be an immediate understanding that this is nothing to dance about. There would also be an understanding that it’s going to be a long war that’s going to require strategy and resources, and no more pussy-footing around the fact that we have an enemy who is organized and who owns 99% of the resources in the world… in large part because of our colonization.

I am seeing internet memes of women without shirts with the graphic, “Still not asking for it” and women in tiny dresses with signs that say “How we dress does not mean yes.” Again, I see the work of the agentless passive. I can walk into the lion cage at the zoo and yell, “This does not mean I want to be attacked,” but it’s not going to protect me. Does it mean the lions are unclear about my consent or my legal rights? Well, that’s an odd way to frame a situation involving a predator. Rendering oneself vulnerable to a predator is foolish, not empowering.

Did I say “predator?” Yes, I did. I’ll say it again. Predator. Not all men are predators. Not all predators are predatory all the time. But these billions of women being victimized are being victimized by predators, by men. No amount of dancing is going to change that fact. What the dancing will do is increase the marginalization of those of us who are attempting to use language to put the focus on the agents of our oppression. The dancing is going to continue to frame the issue as one of women’s lack of awareness or so-called masochism. The dancing is going to present a scenario where the men just need to become aware of the harm they are doing.

I’m not dancing on February 14. It feels disrespectful to me and to the hundreds of women in my life who have been raped, harassed, mutilated, terrorized, and murdered by men. By men. If every woman dancing on February 14 was willing to take the actions and use the language that would render her vulnerable to charges of men-hating and men-bashing, that would constitute the foundation of an authentic movement.

Wow. A lot of confusion about rape in the news these days.

We have Congressman Todd Akin telling us that “legitimate rapes” don’t result in pregnancies. We have Senate candidate Tom Smith comparing pregnancy from rape to “having a baby out of wedlock.”  Last year, Paul Ryan co-sponsored a bill in Congress that would ban federal funding of abortions except in cases of “forcible rape,” a term which he has refused to define, because, as he insists, it’s “stock language.” We have all kinds of liberal folks (seriously… Noam Chomsky?) insisting that Julian Assange, the editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault, should not have to respond to Swedish police questioning, because—you know, he’s one of “our” guys. 

 Whoopi Goldberg has gone on record (never retracted) declaring that it was not a “rape-rape” when Roman Polanski drugged and vaginally, orally, and anally assaulted a thirteen-year-old who claimed, “I said, ‘No, no. I don't want to go in there. No, I don't want to do this. No!’, and then I didn't know what else to do.” This week the Guardian ran a story with this headline, “How do we teach young people what sexual consent really means?”

My sisters, this is a boatload of confusion. 

And, I would submit not just confusion on the part of the perpetrators and their allies. I remember teaching an Intro to Women’s Studies class not all that long ago, and I conducted an anonymous survey. Turns out that all of the women in the class (they were all under twenty-two) self-reported as sexually active and not having orgasms. When I attempted to teach a workshop on how to communicate with partners about what one enjoys in bed, I discovered to my chagrin that none of my students had the slightest interest in this. Apparently, what they were having was not really “sex-sex.” One had to wonder whether or not it might be “rape-rape.”

Later on, teaching at an elite private college, I began asking questions about the experiences of the young women I was teaching. When asked if they knew of cases of date rape on campus, they expressed uncertainty as to whether or not their experiences with men would qualify. Since studies have shown that one in four college women have either been raped or suffered attempted rape, and since studies have also shown that one in twelve male students surveyed had committed acts that met the legal definition of rape, and since studies have also shown that one third of males surveyed said that they would commit rape if they could escape detection, and since one fourth of men surveyed believed that rape was acceptable if the woman asks the man out, and the man pays for the date or the woman goes back to the man's room after the date… well, I don’t think it's going too far out on a limb to suggest that a significant number of these confused young women had, indeed, been date raped.

The problem here appears to run deeper than “No means no.” Looking for the source of the confusion, I believe that I may have found the culprit.

It’s the word “sex.” Check it out:

In the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sex is defined as “sexually motivated phenomena or behavior.” Not too helpful. Kind of like looking up “tennis” and reading that it is a  “tennis phenomenon or behavior.”

Looking up “sexual” is not much help either:  “having or involving sex"...  which of course leads us back to “sexual.”

Sex, like “forcible rape,” appears to be “stock language.” Nobody needs to define it, because we all know what it is.  But--see above--apparently not.

I am a writer, and like under-celebrated, African American  genius Toni Cade Bambara, I believe in “acts of language.” I’m going to commit one now. I’m going to suggest a new word for sex. And it’s going to be a gynocentric, subjective word, referencing the clitoris not the vagina.

I’m going to propose the words “cypriate” and “cypriation” for female genital activity initiated by the subject, for the primary intention of experiencing a pleasurable arousal of the clitoris. For example, “Last night, next to the waterfall,  I cypriated with my partner.” Or… “Cypriation at the full moon can be especially intense.” 

I admit, I am taking my cue from the late, great Monique Wittig, whose acts of language opened my eyes to wild possibility. In her Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, she and Sande Zeig coined the word “la cyprine” to refer to the vaginal secretions that signal sexual desire.  [“Sécrétion vaginale, signe physique du désir sexuel. Une agitation trouble l'écoulement de la cyprine.”]  The derivation for her neologism is the island of Cyprus, legendary birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

Obviously cypriation does not refer to many of the acts that are considered sex or sexual in the heteropatriarchal world. In fact, it probably refers to only a tiny minority.  But adopting the use of this word will require that the subject own her agency, and it will also validate her own pleasure as something of primary, defining significance.

In other words, these young women who are unclear about whether or not they are experiencing date rape will have absolute clarity as to whether or not they are experiencing cypriation. Furthermore it will facilitate their understanding that any interaction with their vulva that is not cypriation is a potential form of violation and not acceptable... unless, perhaps, the woman's primary incentive is achieving pregnancy.

There should never have been one word that could be used to refer to pleasurable, welcome sexual activity for women and, at the same time, any and all violations or torture of her genitals. There should never have been a word for sexual activity that confused an act designed for procreation with an act designed for a woman’s pleasure. There should never be a word that can be taken to assume that actions pleasing to men and their genitals are or should be pleasing to women and our genitals. Sex and rape are only synonymous for rapists. Vagina and vulva are only synonymous where the clit and the woman’s pleasure are incidental or irrelevant.

What has happened is that women’s experience and women’s anatomy and women's pleasure have been stolen in a linguistic equivalent of three-card monte.

Sisters, take back the clit! Occupy the dictionary! And as our great foremother Sappho would sing, “We shall enjoy it/ as for him who finds/ fault, may silliness/ and sorrow take him!”