That's Empress to You

Truth Schmuth

I’m reading David Shields' Reality Hunger in preparation for our North 24^th Writing Group retreat on Monday, where I’m expected to write for hours on end without getting up and eating potato chips, one at a time, which requires numerous trips downstairs to the kitchen. Most everyone else is staying three days. I am staying one and a half.

I have gotten over my man-hating observation and subsequent irritation that only men write manifestos, although I think it’s both true and annoying. At first I compare Shields’ book unfavorably to Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse, because its form is similar – numbered little literary bullet points, and a surfeit of hyperbole. And because it’s the only book like that on my bookshelf.

But this particular manifesto does, like Barthes’, have some interesting parts and some beautiful parts. So even though Shields, like other manifesto-writing men includes many too many declarative statements that allow no room for disagreement or even much in the way of eyebrow-raising, he does address the reality conundrum, and writes stuff like (about poor James Frey who wrote a memoir that was not true in every exact detail or even very many of them, strictly speaking) “I’m disappointed not that Frey is a liar but that he isn’t a better one.”

I’ve always believed that a true memoir is impossible. Or if possible, impossibly dull.

I read this book while doing planks in a bikini. It’s a girl thing, having to do with trying on swimsuits to see which one looks least hideous – in anticipation of the sitting around by the lake part of the retreat – and then feeling like a big fat pig. The semi-true part of this is that I read four pages, tops, while in a plank wearing a bikini. The true and boring part is that I read most of it while sitting at the kitchen table, with sesame seeds scattered around me. Or on the sofa. Plus I‘m only on page 53.

 

 

Thanks but no thanks

David Berreby, in his Big Think column waxes forgiving (esque) about the fact that Anthony Weiner’s gaze strayed from his pregnant wife’s burgeoning belly and landed on the adoring Twitter feeds of total strangers. Berreby cites statistics indicating that men become less faithful as they face fatherhood, and posits that, even while men can be doting, devoted partners who look forward to raising a child with the woman they love, a wife’s pregnancy “… can also be the moment when the prospective father is most prey to a prickly, eager nostalgia for aspects of life that feel, somehow, incompatible with fatherly gravitas.”

So just when we’re puking and acquiring fat asses and our skin is getting all blotchy and we no longer have an arabesque (although we’re just as wildly happy as Anthony Weiner et al, don’t get us wrong), these people are trying to set up little ego tents in campgrounds in counties where they’ve never even set foot. 

That said, I completely agree with (my friend David) Berreby when he says that men can be both devoted husbands/fathers-to-be and twitchy unreliable douchebags. That makes total sense. Because seriously, you don’t think a pregnant woman would rather be having hot sex at the George V with a young Spanish intellectual than rubbing cocoa butter all over her stretch marks?

My question is unrelated to this.  What I want to know is what makes men think that women are interested in weird abstract images of penises. Or chests. Specifically their penises or chests. My kid tells me that a central tenet of the Vagina Monologues (which I truthfully never saw) is that men should simply find women’s genitalia beautiful. Alright, so unattached weird vaginas are supposed to be beautiful. No. Ew. I furthermore assert that weird immaterial penises, that are almost surely not going to be, you know, of particular proximity or use, are also kind of icky. Ditto chests. They’re just not that attractive, unless you’re attached to the owner. I’m not sure if this makes me a romantic or a pragmatist, or just a ho. In any case, sending photos of your parts to strange women is just asinine. And it belies an all too familiar testosterone-driven lunacy wherein powerful men think their things are so fucking cool.

I don’t think Weiner should resign because he did anything so egregious. But I do think we are at a point in our country’s history where we say that men in power ought to be stripped of the fantasy that everyone on planet earth is besotted with every part of their being. Because we’re not. They should know that they’re not that big – really, Anthony, seriously – and that their chest has weird bony protrusions. Just like most women know that we are not in every aspect universally attractive.

 

 

Thank you AP Chemistry

If you ever leave your hummingbird nectar - because you are the queen of hummingbirds, to whose feeder hummingbirds flock like pilgrims - boiling for like two hours while you sit in your office doing heinous work which you are professional enough not to name, and the alarm company calls to see if you are being consumed in a house fire, and the hummingbird nectar is now a hardened lava mass in your expensive saucepan, do not fear. Scrape out most of it, and then boil a mixture of baking soda and water. You will watch as the hopelessly hardened tar-like mass flakes off as if by magic.You will watch the black flakes form the image of the Virgin Mary, Jesus, and Lance Armstrong, one after the other. And you will thank your kid who told you to try this rather than to follow the bad Google advice which says to boil hydrogen peroxide, because while it may work, it may also explode, or catch on fire. You only have to nod and smile when the kid starts talking about carbon and oxygen and so on.