Impromptu Manifesto

When I was sixteen, I went to visit my sister, who was 23 and living in San Francisco. I stayed there for three weeks, and it was one of the more important experiences of my adolescence; it was the first time I got a chance to explore a city other than the one I grew up in, and do it by myself. I remember a lot of things from that trip. I remember drinking coffee for the first time, I remember reading the newspaper, I remember getting my upper ear pierced on Market Street, I remember trying new food and taking the bus alone and sneaking cigarettes from my sister's roommates.

But mostly what I remember was thinking about sex. To me, San Francisco was teeming with sexuality. People dressed so much more provocatively than anywhere I'd ever been, making out in public, being fucking frank. I went to my first gay pride parade, I saw naked women on motorcycles, I walked around the Castro and gawked. And I was captivated.

I remember that I would pick up the SF weekly, the local alternative paper, but I wouldn't read anything except the personal ads; I found them compelling. The section was full of bizarre requests, bdsm, kinks, threesomes, homosexuality. I couldn't get enough of it. Thinking about all these people, with their depraved lives, their sexual freedom, their escapades and misadventures, made me feel that the world was a much more exciting place to live in than I had previously imagined. Now, when I look back on my secret inner sexual life as a teenager, it seems almost shocking.

The cultural portrayal of women, especially young and old women, as being sexless, or only responsive/aroused by/sustained by the sexual desires of men, always made me feel incredibly isolated, both then and now. This narrative, that boys were the ones interested in sex, seemed totally wrong. They didn't seem to want to have sex with me nearly enough, did they? They seemed more interested in asserting their masculinity by getting girls to be sexual with them, than the actual sex. It was sad.

I'm not a difference feminist. I really believe that men and women are much more similar than we are different. The closer I get to adult women of my acquaintance, the more I realize they're more like me and less like the caricature of feminine lack of desire we are presented with through countless cultural narratives.

They are human. They have powerful sexual desire that often clouds reason. More often than not, they wish they were having far more sex. They get angry, they are sexually selfish sometimes. They want to yell at their boyfriends, their bosses, their friends, their pets. They want to take and take and not always give.

I believe that part of seeing women as human beings means NO EXCEPTIONALISM for women. This is why Chesler's tsk-tsking about politeness and other "feminist" rhetoric about how women shouldn't stoop to the level of those evil men pisses me off so fucking much. Women are not somehow perfect and peace-loving, sweet and giving. We are no better or more noble or more pure than men; we are only more oppressed, more beaten down, poorer and with less political power. But we are not better, we do not live on a pedestal of long-suffering serenity.

Being human means being allowed to live the full range of human emotion. It means being able to express animal sexual desire, to express anger, to want to hurt the people we feel inhibit or insult us. We want power and when we get power, we fight like hell to keep it. Like men, we are capable of violence, of meanness, of selfishness.

Which is why I am sick and tired of the people who want to chastise me for yelling at a 12-year-old who felt it appropriate to comment on my tits. "Don't use profanity. You could be in danger! That won't work to teach the kid a lesson. Once he apologized, you shouldn't have rebuked him more." Fuck you. I happen to sometimes get angry, and when I'm angry, like every other goddamn person with any good sense, I show it.

I like to think I am a beast of a person. I have an immense capacity for anger, both righteous and totally petty. My anger at injustice has carried me really far, and in fact is what keeps me going and excited through the day at work. I am a beast of sexual desire. I think about sex, like, constantly, and I get pissed when the people I want to fuck don't want to fuck me back.

When I get emotional, whether it's sadness, anger, or exhilaration, its not because of PMS, or because I'm a woman. It's because I'm a human being, a complex and intelligent animal responding subtly to a thousand different stimuli.

I get to fuck up. I get to be rude, I get to be both selfless and selfish. I get to be sexually demanding. I get to want fame, and power, and money and love and to be really, really hot. I get to also want to take care of others, to fight for social change, to help the weak and create art. I get to feel it all, and do it all, because that's what it is to be human.