I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (10 page)

I don't care.

I still love hip-hop.

There isn't the kind of unifying political message there once was, but there's unending beauty, which grows despite all the maleness, materialism, misogyny, malevolence toward homosexuals, mayhem,
murder and yachts. The rhymes are still rebellious, and the styles have become sophisticated beyond what anyone could have ever imagined. Nothing is perfect, but the first heady years, when Sundays were all about Chuck D. and the world that we, the freaks of all freaks, were bound to inherit and hopefully come to rule, but, unlike our predecessors, would do with truth, compassion, justice and generosity, gave us an enduring hope that keeps Public Enemy on my iPod to this day. Fight the power.

FEMINISM IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

"so if yon are not a feminist, kill yourself."

F
eminism is nonnegotiable
.

If you are not a feminist, you do not deserve to live.

Do you think you grew out of the ground? That the stork dropped you off? You fell from a tree? NO. You came out of a woman. And even if your mother was awful, abandoned you, abused you, ignored you, made you hate yourself, put you on a diet at age six so that, to this day, you still have a complex about your weight, molested you, competed with you, made you join a cult, was jealous of you, was nicer to your brother than you, sewed you matching outfits, made you eat liver or any other kind of organ meat (or, like my mom, dried fish!), gave you a Toni home perm, made you as crazy as she, did not love you—you still owe her your life. You would not be here if it were not for her. I'm not telling you that you have to do anything for your mom. I'm just saying we need to respect women for the fact that they are where the world begins. They are the reason we are still here, and will continue to be here. Forever.

So if you are not a feminist, kill yourself.

Normally, I do not advocate suicide, but this time you do not have a choice. You do not have the right to live on this planet, and you need to kill yourself and go to your misogynist heaven, which is much like the Playboy Mansion, where you can read all sorts of men's magazines like
Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Hustler, Gear
and, of course,
Playboy
, except . . . there will be no women there. No real T & A, just paper cuts and those annoying subscription cards that fall out all over the place, because since you did not appreciate the wonder of what T & A really is, and because you did not understand the importance of us being here, your exploitation of them makes you eligible for a hell where we are not there at all. Kind of like jail, but you do not get to make other inmates your bitch.

And then you have to read the articles. That is what I call Hades. Pussy, pussy, everywhere, but not a drop to . . .

What people need to understand is that the pussy is the Front Door of Life. Do you get that? Nobody really thinks about it like that up in the dusty ancient cabinet of old white men that think they know everything. Woman has the right to let someone in, or to tell them to come back another time, or even to have a sign that says
NO SOLICITORS.

Woman has the right to be exalted, cherished and respected.

Woman has the right to choose, to choose for herself, for her own body, for her own life.

Feminism is nonnegotiable. Word to your mother.

crazy eyes

B
ody dysmorphia has got to go. This is this ignant disease where you don't know what you look like. It's similar to another condition that I believe is called "crazy eyes"—not the way that other people see you ("Look at that fool Marty Feldman—he's got some crazy eyes!"), but the way you see yourself. The insanity, which we use as our vision, surfaces when we get dressed to go somewhere where we think people will be looking at us with the same crazy eyes that we have. There is a cure for this disease, but, sadly, people don't really think that it works. The cure is, nobody cares what you look like except you and your crazy eyes. It's a tough pill to swallow, like a horse pill you have to take with a gallon of Sparklett's to get the whole thing down, and even then it just sticks in your throat, creating a pharmaceutical Adam's apple. That's nasty, thinking that nobody cares what you look like except you, but that's because they're too busy looking at themselves, thinking about what's wrong with them and dealing with their own crazy eyes. And even if they do care about what you look like, it's only a momentary, fleeting thought, a brief overview and comparison between what you look like against what they think they look like, so the thought isn't really about you, it's about them and their crazy eyes, not you and your crazy eyes. So fuck it. You're both crazy, and that's final.

Crazy eyes is not fatal, but it can lead to other diseases that are. It is a gateway to other diseases, just like marijuana is a gateway to other drugs, and the "munchies," which is a gateway to crazy eyes. If left untreated, crazy eyes will get worse, and could develop into disordered eating, which leads to the wonderful world of Bulimarama (Try 'em all! Bulimarexia, Good Ol' Binge'n'Purge, Exercise Bulimia, Laxative Bulimia, "I'm starting my diet tomorrow so I have to get it all in before midnight" Bulimia, Honey Mustard Bulimia) and the Grim Reaper, Anorexia, coming to claim the lives of young women, much like consumption did in the Victorian era. She's a tall, gaunt figure, chic and wiry, draped in black muslin, but instead of a scythe this skeleton has a fork and spoon, because even death thinks you need a good hearty meal of macaroni and cheese to fortify you for your long journey into the afterlife.

And then, what if you die before you reach your goal weight of forty-five pounds? Perhaps your narrow-ass ghost will be condemned to roam the metropolitan shopping malls of your past, like the poor old prisoners who, even in death, refuse to leave their cells on Alcatraz. Will the dressing-room doors in Urban Outfitters creak open, then slam shut, for no reason? Supernatural shrieks coming from inside the slatted stalls, "I NEED A LARGER SIZE!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! HELPPPPPP MEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!" as clerks rush in and find nobody there, nothing but the lingering scent of almond vomit, a chill in the air and a size 0 pair of Frankie B. jeans turned inside out on the floor.

Or maybe you will find your way to heaven. God knows, you
deserve it, having put yourself through a correspondence course in hell, getting your GED in suffering in the precious few days of your tragic life, all the while maintaining a rigorous workout schedule and an insufficient caloric intake. Will the first thing you ask when you reach the Pearly Gates, which, thankfully for you, is atop an impossibly long flight of cement steps, be, "Where's the gym?"

Crazy eyes is wildly contagious. Everybody has some form of it. The people who pick and choose the images that we see daily on TV, in movies, in magazines and advertising—everywhere—have the craziest eyes of all, which is why this malady is worse than most other forms of biological warfare. Smallpox's got nothing on CE. Crazy eyes is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction because it works slowly, eroding the mind and the spirit and eventually the body, pound by pound, inch by inch, and it sets its crazy sights upon young women, who provide the gateway to future generations. If crazy eyes escalated to pandemic proportions, which is the next level up from the epidemic we have now, there would be a massive shortage of females capable of reproduction. Even if all of us didn't die right away from CE, and the diseases caused by CE infection, low body weight would make menstruation impossible, and procreation rare and difficult. This, along with the few remaining fertile women unwilling to become pregnant because they don't want to look "fat," would eventually kill off the human race altogether.

And today, with the advent of the Internet, and the crazy eyes of the media enforcing their crazy vision on the global optic nerve, as the world gets smaller through technology, becomes more and more
uniform in its tastes, customs, practices, beliefs, ideals, collective dreams and nightmares—as cultures homogenize and pasteurize and become one solid block of cheese nobody is going to eat—crazy eyes will spread faster than a wildfire in Granada Hills. Don't act like I'm some crackpot who is about to put this manifesto on a sandwich board and walk up and down the Third Street Promenade with a megaphone and those joke glasses with the eyeballs on springs popping out. You know crazy eyes is real. You have probably suffered from it at some time in your life. I'm a CE survivor, and I live in fear for others who may not have the strength or even the reason to save themselves.

There is hope. Crazy eyes is even easier to fix than astigmatism or glaucoma. You don't even need to get laser surgery on your retinas. Prevention is the best line of defense. When you look at yourself in the mirror, you can say only one thing: "I look fine." Do not think about what you ate today or yesterday—or ever. Do not change your outfit. Do not say anything about yourself to yourself. Do not think about the way you look again. Think instead about how nice it is that somebody loves you, or that your dog is so sweet when she follows the sunlight as it moves across the sky, napping at every window with such regularity that you could set your watch by her gentle snores and dog dreams, or that you miss someone and maybe you should call them, or if you can't call them because they are not around anymore think about how much you loved them and why, or how much you hated them and why, or about how the thoughts of love or hate can be
equally provocative and tantalizing, or that sometimes there really is an easy way to do things, or that popcorn is always a good thing to get at the movies, or that you can stay home and watch TV if you want to, not even committing to a specific show—just flipping for no reason except that you want to, or that it's weird that certain colors are called that, like why is blue called blue?—or whatever ignant or smart or sad or stupid or funny or brilliant or ridiculous thought to fill your mind with instead of "Do I look okay?"

Stop crazy eyes before it starts. You look fine.

why must i bleed alone?

I
take this new birth control pill where one of the side effects is having four menstrual periods a year. It's menopause in a pinch! I feel like an Olympic gymnast or some other kind of professional athlete, too muscular and stressed out for feminine luxuries such as menses and the prom. When it comes time for one of my quarterly sheds, it takes me by surprise, and I welcome it like a long lost friend. We have lots of euphemisms for menstruation, and we don't refer to it unless in the company of women—and rarely even then.

I had a friend who was absolutely intolerant of anyone complaining about her period. She'd never had cramps or heavy bleeding or stopping then mysteriously restarting or accidents or a missed period
in her life, and she staunchly believed that no one else should either. If it were mentioned in her presence, through clenched teeth she reminded one and all of her manageable monthly flow and freedom from pain, and change the subject.

Then there are the judgmental ones. I have been around the alternative-healing community for decades, and when confiding in friends/amateur healers/shamans about my woman's issues, they would almost always launch into a tirade against wheat or dairy or white sugar or caffeine. When doubled over and obsessing about banana chocolate chip muffins, the last thing on my mind is yoga. Lectures about my bad health and spiteful shaming usually greet any attempt on my part to have learned discourse about menstruation, and so the best way to get a grip on it was to get rid of it the best that I could.

It is strange how little talk there is about our periods, as if the subject, if not in a health and wellness context, were morally reprehensible. It is a dirty business that we women keep to ourselves. But why are we so secretive? Over half the world menstruates at one time or another, but you'd never know it. Isn't that strange?

I was thirteen when I first got my period. My mother was not overjoyed. She gave me big, foamy white Kotex pads that she had still left over from before her hysterectomy. They were old, so they had long tabs on either end for the sanitary belt that was supposed to keep it on. When I put the whole contraption on, I looked like a sumo wrestler. Usually, I couldn't be bothered putting the weird belt
together, so the pad, without its newfangled modern adhesive that was meant to secure the wad inside your pants, would slip and slide all around my area, creating something akin to a potato-print card. My mother showed me how to dispose of the pads. She folded them up, wrapped them in toilet paper, shoved them inside a paper bag, crumpled up the bag into a ball, then buried it deep inside the bathroom trash. She repeated the process twice for me, miming the steps the second time so as not to waste any of those gigantic pads. There was incredible shame in the whole business of bleeding, and she wanted me to be painfully aware of it. The shame could work to my benefit, because if ever I wanted to get out of doing something I could just cry "Period!" and it was an instant no-contest. It was like the magic word. Everybody left me alone.