Caveat Lector

I am in a bad mood today. Partly because my coworkers can’t seem to stop nattering about their clothes closets. Partly because Terje’s article is getting enough exposure that I really feel I need to write a rebuttal, and I don’t especially want to. Partly because the Doc S thing really needs to die, and it won’t, and I want to hold up a great big sign in front of Mike Golby that says “DUDE, YOU ARE SO NOT HELPING.” Partly because the burns on the inside of my elbow from last weekend are starting to hurt like the blazes.

Ergo I will do what bad-mood bloggers do—inflict my bad mood on the world at large. I want to be rid of it by the time I go to my husband’s work farewell party this afternoon.

So I’ll pick on Mike Golby. He’s a big man, right? He can handle it the way a man ought to.

I hope those last two sentences bugged you folks. I intended them to. I just folded Mike inside a big nasty stereotype, will-he-nill-he. Which is exactly what he did to me when he called me “sexy.”

(I originally wrote more than two sentences. The additional ones addressed stereotypes of alcoholics, and were blatantly offensive. So I got rid of them, though they would have made my point better.)

For the record, I am not sexy. I am a scarred, size-16, 30-year-old, makeupless, shapeless, mousy-haired, plainly-clothed peasant drudge, all right? I do not think of myself as sexy, nor do people looking at me who categorize other people in that way.

I am sexual, though that fact does not loom particularly large in my life—and that is all you are going to hear on that subject from me. The difference between “sexual” and “sexy” to my mind is that the former comes from within and the latter is imposed (or withheld) from without.

Sometimes the imposition is not done with intent to harm. Golby didn’t mean to piss me off; he was trying to be funny. Sometimes it is, though. Sometimes it’s meant to shove me into a corner so that I can be dealt with as a “sexy thing” (you should forgive the expression) and not a fellow human being. Sometimes it shoves me into a corner so that I don’t have to be dealt with at all (which is part of what Burningbird was getting at—if the only alternatives are “man” and “sexy woman,” what are non-sexy women supposed to think and to do?). Sometimes it’s just plain predatory.

Withholding of “sexy” is nearly always done with intent to harm. Funny, that. No, not funny. Enormously terrible.

I haven’t always had the physique I now do. I used to get the same drooling sex-obsessed crap that women in the “sexy” cage get. The one time I saw my gentle, cerebral husband ready himself for threatening physical action was over a pair of bozos on a street corner who thought they had a perfect right to comment loudly on and reach for my breasts.

This happens to women a lot. Ain’t unusual at all. Not being sexy means I don’t have to deal with it any more. Unfortunately, it also often seems to mean I’m not worth regard. Great choice I’ve got there.

Consider, Mike, that you are putting yourself in the company of those two bozos, whether you know it or not (and perhaps you don’t), when you call women “sexy.” And, Jonathon, if it is doctrinaire, reductionist, and Pharisaical to point this out, then I will happily plead no contest. I think it’s important to (kindly, gently, and with humor and forgiveness—all the ways I’m not doing it in this post) show the good guys when they’re off-track, particularly when they don’t know they are. They’re decent chaps; they don’t want to hurt anyone, and if they know they’re doing it, they’ll stop.

Anyway. What has me almost trembling with suppressed rage right now (yeah, I am bloody well overreacting, and you can bloody well sue me for it) is the mere fact of the “sexy” cage. That the best way Doc and Mike and Frank (see his remarks about Gretchen Pirillo) can find to attract people to read the writing of women is to put them in that cage. (See apology, please.) That the only way women bloggers can attract readers, seems as if sometimes, is to live in that cage. That the best way Mike can find to talk me down from my “unsexy” posture (see comments to post linked above) is to say that hey, he was talkin’ about my mind. That Mike thinks he needs to talk me down from this posture at all.

Damn it to hell, I did not choose to be sexy! I do not want to be sexy! Let me out of this ridiculous damned cage you have built around me before I tear it apart with my bare hands, and you with it! Find some other way of relating to me, and do it now, please!

Oo. That felt good. It shouldn’t have, but it did.

Right. I am calmer now. Mike, Frank, Jonathon, Doc, I’m not mad at you, and I ask you to forgive me for using you in the rant I just ranted. I’m mad at the prevailing discourse structure in which we are all entwined whether we like it or not. It’s that, and certain unsavory practices reflected by it, that make being called “sexy” unwelcome. And—I might as well be completely honest—I’m still mad at those two bozos, years later; I can’t make myself wear the handsome and well-loved outfit they saw me in any more, because the incident involving them was so frightening and so ugly.

Cages, cages everywhere. I could try to escape this cage by joining Kalilily in Cronedom. Unfortunately, I see the whole “maiden, mother, crone” thing as just one more cage, albeit one constructed primarily by women themselves. It fits me and my life no better than does the “sexy” construct.

I’d rather escape the cages altogether, of course. The thing is, I can’t do that by myself, no matter how I scream or claw at the bars. I didn’t put myself in this cage; I was put there. I can’t stay free of it alone; I need people to refrain from locking me up.

Please. Help me be free. Please?