overshare

Something I just realized, these are four of the songs that shaped my childhood sexuality:

"Cherish"
"Love Will Never Do Without You"
"If"
and "That's The Way Love Goes"

are by Madonna and Janet Jackson respectively, and there are probably others by them, I can think of "Like A Prayer," "Human Nature," and "Take A Bow" which always used to disturb and depress me, but those in particular. And the crazy thing is the resemblance between the first two that I knew subconsciously but did not think about until now due to the fact, as I just discovered, that they were both directed by Herb Ritts! Janet Jackson criticizes Madonna for her limited vocal range and use of scandals and yet uses her "preferred photographer" to produce a video to revamp her image as sexy and he churns out a video suspiciously like "Cherish." oneupmanship much? So it was Herb Ritts who made me doubt my sexuality because I thought I was supposed to be attracted to men who look like Chippendales and wasn't. (thank god for moving to a new middle school and the medium built to waifish trend that hit around that time and has apexed about now with the indie boys, seriously, plus my somewhat newfound appreciation for more aggressive male musculature since thanks to college I have an idea of what waify boys look like without their flattering shirts). And of course Herb Ritts is gay, which explains the butt exposure of muscular, naked men, because I believe that gay men have a butt obsession only equalled by the 40 year old, Fabio loving women who hire Chippendales at bachelorette parties. I think most of my peers dig their men slightly scrawnier (and paler?) and don't have as many preferences with regards to minor muscles, like how big a guy's latissimus dorsi ought to be. The Chippendale man rolling around under the sheets with Cindy Crawford is about the idea of sex I had in 4th and 5th grade even though I learned about it when I was 6 and friends with 13 year-old Olga who told me about menstruation and I responded "nah,"
aka I'm a spring chicken, when I first learned about sexual things:

penis: an elevator, the pale blond kid in preschool
before and after that, Greek statues. Boy was I surprised (and grossed out, actually) after my first experience with porn that they can be hard, or even big. I was particularly grossed out because I compared them to something I knew better, excrement. I had no idea what was so attractive about women mouthing long bloodshot poo or gargling white stuff in their mouths.

sex with women: One time my neighbor Stephanie and I covered our mouths and pretended to kiss under the covers of my bed. I was tortured by the idea that I had sex with a girl for a long time afterward.

hard on: a play called "Someone Who'll Watch Over Me" about three men locked up together in a cell in the Middle East. One guy had a dream with another man in it, the man did something and he said, he/it "gave him a hard on." And I thought that meant a guy gripping your penis hard while you give him a piggy back ride for the longest time.

porn: in 6th grade my parents and I were invited to the house of Michael K., a good guitar-playing boy with no tv.

semen: in 6th grade I was in the Westport YMCA after school program run in their upstairs daycare before it was transferred to Mahackeno, the Nilla Wafers and stale carrots snacks and "Sex and Candy," that Fastball song, and that Goo Goo Dolls song until I was about to puke.. are memories beside the point. Maureen was the caretaker who wore dowdy sweaters over turtlenecks and had huge hips over which she wore pleated slacks, played gin rummy with me, and lived in Seymour, CT as I recall, ironically. She had the habit of using the word seamen instead of sailors and the bitchy, advanced Westport kids used to laugh when she said it and I didn't know why. And I was similarly confused when Emily in 6th grade TAG laughed at the name Alan Cumming.
I know I must have learned something in middle school health other than Coach Simone's "Rearls of Wisdom" and coffee addiction, but the only time I fully understood or memorized the workings of the penis, the purpose of the testicles or that men even had them, sperm, and words like vas deferens was in high school health. I was asked the question "spit or swallow" way before I knew what it meant, maybe like in elementary school.

urinals: Fuck you, Marcel Duchamp. Though I've seen plenty of movies with guys peeing next to each other, I remember my surprise when I entered a men's bathroom by mistake (in Heimbold??) and realized that the urinals were backwards.

jacking off: thanks again, Michael K who went to Adventure Camp with me a while after our first meeting. Some boys ran out of their cabin and told us that they caught him jacking off with shampoo. Though I had no idea how this was done, I called him Jack for the rest of the summer.

cunnilingus:
my friend maxene's George Carlin poster

I just woke up to sounds of human wolf-crying and caterwhauling, maybe several people talking, maybe three youngsters homicidally drunk walking on the road arguing with each other, maybe people laughing, maybe, on closer inspection, it is the party advertised on the road across me by two signs near the road sign with a picture of a Ziggy looking man with a fedora opening his trenchcoat and a red arrow that said something like DSBB2 on it hiding his goods. When we walked by the house that was going to have it, there were a series of white round tables, some under a tent, and only one outside of the tent actually filled with four older men, one sitting on a cooler. They were blasting fifties music and it didn't look like we could come over and ask what party they were waiting for so my mom and I went on walking. Maybe it was a reunion of classmates in the fifties or people who like fifties music or a charity ball or a hobby convention. My house is on a main road and the house in question is on a road adjoining the main one that forms a loop.


This is what the road looks like, it appears between some trees. I come from the Ernest Shepard school of drawing.



This is what the loop as we call it would look like on a map.

I live in a small, very wooded suburb with two acre zoning (the "center" consists of several brick houses, a small market, a gas station, a post office, a gift shop, and a pharmacy) so the only noise I hear at night is typically cars rushing by, coyotes, other animals and I have no idea who my new "next-door" neighbors are who built a driveway separated from us by a large stone wall and live right in the woods, and who I am nervous can hear us arguing. And of course, though I walk around all the time, I have no idea who lives in any house I pass other than people who were once on my bus route (who I haven't seen since they were on my bus route) and get very excited to see someone my age or anyone walking at all because it happens so rarely.
So at night, I hear what I think is the barking laughter of men and a fifties song which isn't "In the Still of the Night." Maybe it was a reunion reel because the laughter was so measured? Maybe they were barking drunk? And my imagination, old and brittle as it is, went to the first movie media and pictured one of those giddy fifties outdoor parties with Christmas lights, bottles on the trees (Southern), and libidinal shy girls dancing with greasers. Why is it that I have these stereotypes about "when life was exciting?" Like cows fed on human growth hormone or the flesh of other cows, I am a girl fed on terrible commercial movies from the HBO2s, HBO familys, HBO cinemas, of the IO generation. Or maybe just some lonely person with no view past a failing academic life and shitty summer.

Theorists

Wow, on perusing the post below, I do go to college and ain't it obvious? The time when students are stimulated to put a padlock on their mouth and writing when realizing that someone's trying to help them climb up a giant. (In the sense that we suddenly realize that what we might write might be sophomoric, can't hope to be original, is merely us... the more we, as Faulkner says, "write write write, read read read"). Even that now I feel certain people, including myself, must shut up and not even make small chit chat about certain subjects (like personal philosophies, my pet peeve) unless they have a pHD. That's what it feels like. I have wanted to bone up on the greats, to devour them all, to "gird my loins," in my whole career at Sarah Lawrence College. I'm going to be a senior now.
The people in school, because it is such a crazy liberal one have been way against my 1950's history textbook reading, 101 mentality. Or at least, they have a different idea and I suspect think that my hungry ghost thing is stupid.
In college I also discovered academics with different opinions. Journal articles that sum up all the research that's been done before and variously dis it as stupid or inadequate or missing an avenue that the article will spend filling. Critics that denigrate maybe what I like or each other's work as vapid or missing something. At the core, I think, they think of themselves as people who make good judgment calls. And I've wanted to be that, to analytically piece something apart and realize why I'm the best judge. Or to be like Peter Abelard, the young academic whippersnapper who goes against all the other old opinions and proves they are right. Frequently these academics shift the perspective in a mind-boggling way. They make me realize something new, an alternative I've never seen before. And that's frightening. That's what a lot of revisionist historians, critics, theoreticians of race have done, pulled the ground from under us in a cocky, snobby way. A way that refuses to translate from ancient Greek and Latvian, sometimes (in the case of postcolonial theory) a way that fires off references we're supposed to know without explaining and simultaneously mind-fucking us, a way that sneers at the "undergraduate mentality" or "well, this is good enough for undergraduate students" in comparison to serious scholars. The word scholar, such a humbling one indicating continuing learning.
I'm afraid of these theorists who make the ground spin underneath me just when I thought I was getting it. Maybe they've been spoiled comparing too many greats or observing too much historical phenomena. But critics are mean. Telling us that, "No, you don't understand how things really are, they're much more complicated," and imply, "I understand, I'm right, let me show you, you dolt."
And us with our undergraduate papers, bumbling through various essays not quite at ease with casual academic talk and jargon. The best thing about honorable academic speak is at least it's trying to make things clear. Maybe underneath someone's reinterpretation of Henry James is a lot of heart.
But the thing is, I'm in no position to talk about this, I'm the worst procrastinator I know and barely read. Plus, the worst thing is to do some idiosyncrology (a term from the genius Hipster Handbook: http://www.foodcourtdruids.com/idio.html), or make fun defining generalizations about something you know nothing about. Something that less qualified Sarah Lawrence students than me do all the time.