childhood

Outside Neverland

Kyla — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:00:00 -0400

When the curtain rose at the London premiere of the play Peter Pan in 1904, it unveiled a drama of flying children, fairies, and pirates that would soon become a classic—and inspire countless spin-offs, adaptations, and reinterpretations. On the cinematic side, these began with the 1924 silent-film version of the play, starring Anna May Wong as Tiger Lily. Disney’s animated Peter Pan (1953) has been described as “ageless” (though one wonders if critics took note of the decidedly dated, stereotypical depiction of Native Americans), while Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991) told the story of a grown-up Peter’s transformation into a mature father. The films celebrating the centenary of J.M. Barrie’s tale include Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland (2004), another plot centered on a man’s maturity (this time, that of Barrie himself), and J.P. Hogan’s Peter Pan (2003), arguably the truest to the original with its sexualized undertones (in an early version of Barrie’s play, a seduction scene with Peter and Tiger Lily was deleted).

The cultural repackaging of Peter Pan doesn’t end with film: In the early 1980s, pop psychologist Dan Kiley coined the phrase “Peter Pan Syndrome” to describe the psychic disorder plaguing men who won’t grow up, and the lesser-known “Wendy Dilemma” to describe overly maternal women.

But over the years, it’s the literary world that has been most inspired by Peter, Wendy, and Neverland: A BarnesandNoble.com books search for “Peter Pan” results in over 500 titles. In the past decade, a significant number of female authors have revisited the story—from Jane Dentinger’s and Laurie Fox’s literary novels to the children’s books of Jane Yolen, Phyllis Shalant, and Mary Hoffman, to name a few—not only capturing a new literary zeitgeist, but encouraging a necessary evolution of the Peter Pan story.

Just as Barrie wrote his fairy tale of a play in response to a historical moment (England had recently buried her queen and been humiliated by the Boer War), contemporary authors are also writing in an age of uncertainty, as women continue to struggle to reconcile individual successes with the stereotypical images that pervade the culture. As England entered the turbulent 20th century, Barrie retreated into the preternatural sanctuary of Neverland and its most insouciant of rulers. In the contemporary female-penned inversions of the story, Neverland remains, but the heroine has become the hero as the various Wendys confront family chaos, racism, and an inability to escape simply by flying away. Barrie created a boy who would not grow up. Today’s authors create female characters who can’t afford that luxury.

Pan-Handlers

In her 1995 mystery novel Who Dropped Peter Pan?, Jane Dentinger writes of the “strains of misogyny in Barrie’s story,” and she’s not the only one who has described Peter Pan as less than female-friendly. Viewed in context, however, the criticism is arguable: While Barrie did create a female character (Wendy) who is wholly devoted to the domestic arts, this was a common characterization in early 20th-century children’s literature. We might also consider that Peter Pan, in its time, was not easily categorized along gender lines. It melds the domestic storyline of girls’ literature with the adventure narratives of boys’ literature, obscuring the borders between distinct male and female realms with a story that begins and ends in the nursery.

At the same time, there’s clearly something rotten in Neverland. In Barrie’s telling, Wendy has no conflicted feelings about her role as housekeeper, cook, and mother (in contrast to, say, the Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy, who adamantly refuses to wash dishes for the King of All Spiders). In fact, Wendy’s decision to leave Neverland hinges on Peter’s refusal to return her romantic feelings, effectively dead-ending her path to love and marriage. It’s also worth noting that none of Barrie’s female characters has a voice of her own: In the novelized version of the play, written in 1911, Tinkerbell does not speak, but rather makes the sound of bells; the crocodile (identified as “she”) simply, if ominously, ticks; Tiger Lily’s one instance of speech is a compliment to Peter delivered in broken English; the mermaids make “strange wailing cries.” And Wendy, whenever she speaks, obtusely mimics the übermaternal voice of her bourgeois mother.

The character of Wendy poses a dilemma for contemporary writers: Should an author lampoon it, as Jane Yolen does in her short story “Lost Girls”; approach it ambivalently, like Laurie Fox does in her novel Lost Girls; or assimilate it into one of the valid realities of a complicated modern heroine, as Karen Templeton does in Playing for Keeps? Whatever their approach, these writers have forged a number of reversals of the Peter Pan tale.

As Elizabeth Wanning Harries notes in Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale, women have been writing against the grain of patriarchal fairy tales since the days of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. Rejecting the morally absolute narrative style of their male counterparts, European women of the 17th and 18th centuries composed longer, digressive tales that were witty, ironic, and offered ambiguous conclusions. This tradition resurfaced in the 20th century with the ominous fairy-tale updates of Anne Sexton, Emma Donoghue, and Angela Carter, who subverted happy endings and introduced a wealth of female characters that defy the polarized categories of the past. In their stories, witches are not evil but vulnerable, and fair maidens realize dreams that don’t include marrying the prince. In the Barrie-inspired works discussed here, it’s the female correlate to Peter Pan who becomes central to the plot as a feminized Peter, a savvier Wendy, or a person external to Neverland—an au courant girl or woman whose main conflict arises when she is faced with some aspect of Barrie’s story.

Heroine Chic

Spin-offs of Peter Pan written, like the original, for children tend to present the kind of lucid dramatic drive that continues to draw adults to children’s fiction. Increasingly, children’s literature is penned with a feminist slant—nonracist, nonsexist, and with a wider range of roles and achievements for female and nonwhite characters. Storybooks like Phyllis Shalant’s When Pirates Came to Brooklyn (2002) and Mary Hoffman’s Amazing Grace (1991) are more sophisticated than the juvenile fiction of earlier eras, addressing injustice and isolation as well as a strong sense of heritage and a belief in oneself. In revisiting the Peter Pan story, neither author replaces a male hierarchy with a female one, but both embrace a democratic way of being and reinforce the idea of female friendships as a key source of inner strength.

These principles are also well illustrated in Jane Yolen’s wickedly humorous “Lost Girls,” a short story from her 1997 children’s collection, Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast. The Wendys, led by Wendy Darling, are a clonish tribe. Neverland is recast as a kind of Stepford, where the tribe goes about their dismal tasks of cleaning and cooking for the Lost Boys. Peter, though charming, is clearly a villain: In the windowless kitchen where the Wendys labor, he keeps an upholstered chair that they’re forbidden to sit in. He tells the Wendys that they are important, but can’t remember their real names and offers them no respite from their chores.

Protagonist Darla slides down a tree into Neverland, descending into what she soon enough recognizes as a reprehensible situation. She calls for a labor strike in Neverland to free the Lost Girls from their “yoke of oppression,” and rallies the Wendys to action. In the final twist of the story, the pirates wear the white hats—their ship is a model of democracy where housework is evenly distributed among captains and crew.

The chapter books by Karen Wallace and Phyllis Shalant similarly address political issues (women’s suffrage and racism, respectively). Karen Wallace’s Wendy (2003), a profile of Wendy Darling in the years before she meets Peter Pan, explains just why a middle-class Edwardian child would fly off to Neverland in the first place. We meet Wendy at a moment of growing insight into her family’s chaotic dynamic: She sees her father passionately kissing their neighbor, Lady Cunningham, and feels a building resentment toward her mother, who is selfish and slow to acknowledge the abusiveness of Wendy’s nanny Mrs. Holborn.

In Barrie’s story, Wendy thoroughly absorbs the values of her mother: She is overdomesticated and stoutly accepting of the patriarchal order. If Peter’s disregard for social strictures represents the power of the imagination, then Wendy ultimately rejects such nonconformity by leaving Neverland and returning home. But in Wallace’s vision, Wendy is more faceted and intuitive. She befriends a suffragist named Esther, who signifies a matrilineal heritage from which the Darlings are utterly disconnected, and who offers Wendy another way of thinking about the role of women in public space. And instead of being an emotionally buttoned-up duplicate of her parents, Wendy questions their sex roles and bourgeois aspirations.

Shalant, in her children’s novel When Pirates Came to Brooklyn, juxtaposes the freedom of Neverland with the bigoted reality of New York in the 1960s. A 10-year-old Jewish girl named Lee Bloom suddenly sees “the shadow of a boy with a feather in his pointed cap,” and thereafter her thoughts turn increasingly to Neverland, and, significantly, away from her own mother, who is a bitter racist.

Lee’s epiphany—the rejection of her mother’s beliefs—is dramatized through her flight across Brooklyn to her friend Polly’s house. Shortly after this scene, Lee finds the strength to tell her mother she will continue her friendship with Polly, whom she has been forbidden to see. As in many of the Peter Pan spin-offs, flight suggests the opposite of the escapism it offers in Barrie’s narrative. It means, rather, a rearrangement of values, a confrontation with reality, and a moment when the heroine takes ownership of her own story.

Mary Hoffman’s picture book Amazing Grace most succinctly represents this inversion. Hoffman tells the story of Grace, an African-American girl who wants the role of Peter Pan in the school play, but meets with protests from her class because she is black and a girl. Her grandmother reacts to the news with unflinching optimism: “You can be anything you want, Grace, if you put your mind to it”—and, in the end, Grace’s audition for Peter Pan is so impassioned, she wins the part hands-down.

Grace is guided by a matriarchal tradition, and her antagonists are the children destined to play Captain Hook and Wendy, who defend the status quo much like their predecessors defend the Edwardian world in Barrie’s original. Yet there is also a vital reversal of the story: Barrie’s Pan is a boy who never grows up, and therefore never fully engages in life. By taking on the role, Grace learns the lesson that will ensure her confident coming of age: Becoming Peter marks the apex of her participation in the world. This explosion of categories—in Grace’s case, those of race and gender—form the buoyant subtext of all these children’s books, where the heroines effectually turn their worlds upside down. The theme continues in the adult literature, albeit through narratives that are distinctly more ambivalent.

Lost Girls Found

In adult fiction, Peter Pan invariably represents elements of an adult psyche, and sexually, he’s either full of ulterior motives (using sex to create a superficial closeness or a false persona) or, as in Laurie Fox’s novel Lost Girls, exasperatingly asexual. The Wendys and female Peters likewise have their psychological reckonings to face, but when it comes to sex they are, more often than not, candid about their needs and unapologetically lusty. Karen Templeton’s romance novel Playing for Keeps (2003) is an example of the revisionist fairy tale, a new subgenre of the romance category. Her heroine, Joanna Swann, is mouthy and goes after what she wants; and she happens to want love in the end, with sex along the way.

Templeton’s male lead, Dale McConnaughy, is the stand-in for Peter Pan, and the owner of a toy shop–cum–ersatz Neverland, with “feathers, jewels [and] miniature drum sets.” Dale, like Peter, cannot keep track of time, has trouble remembering things, and is associated with the woods, where as a child he would go to escape from his abusive father; Joanna, like Wendy, is heart-swellingly maternal, even taking in the stray cats that are drawn to her house.

Reinventing the famous flight scene, Templeton leads Joanna and Dale to a rubber-tented trampoline. Dale uses it as a diversion when Joanna asks too many questions about his past. Joanna is unsure in her footing at first, but then she lets go and “takes flight,” exhilarated by the freedom of flying.

After this scene, Joanna’s conflict becomes more sharply defined: She is falling in love with Dale, knowing full well their relationship is temporary. But, being the grounded and assertive woman that she is, she successfully challenges Dale to face the tragedies of his past and to embark on a full adult life. The formula for the romance novel calls for a happy ending for the heroine—anywhere from married-with-baby-on-the-way to tacit commitment, from chaste kiss to mind-blowing orgasm. Given Templeton’s options, it’s disappointing that Joanna rather expediently marries Dale. In this respect—and perhaps in keeping with the built-in parameters of the romance genre—Playing for Keeps is the least subversive of the works discussed here.

Jane Dentinger’s Who Dropped Peter Pan? spotlights the theatrical tradition of casting a woman, rather than a man, to play Peter: In Barrie’s original 1904 production, Nina Boucicault played Peter; in the ’50s, when the stage musical was produced, the lineage famously continued with Mary Martin, and later, Sandy Duncan and Cathy Rigby.

In Dentinger’s narrative, the historically female role is usurped by Rich Rafelson, a brazen, gracelessly aging thespian who assumes the part mostly to indulge his narcissistic needs. He’s also homosexual, a fact that accentuates the naiveté of the Wendy he attempts, for the sake of his ego, to womanize. When Rich’s harness fatally breaks as he flies over the audience at the end of the play, Dentinger summons childhood events from the book’s star detective, Jocelyn O’Roarke. (After watching Mary Martin perform the role on stage, young Jocelyn jumps off the furniture for weeks, seeking out higher and higher points of lift-off, thinking if only she concentrates hard enough, she too can fly.)

The character of Amy St. Cyr, who plays Wendy, serves as a commentary on the original Wendy Darling. When the book begins, she is young, deferential, and nervous. Over the course of the novel, we see her evolve into a more complicated, ambitious woman, one who plays Rich’s games to advance her career.

Jocelyn herself resembles Peter Pan, for they are both stuck between worlds. Just as Barrie’s Peter chooses a suspended life, Dentinger’s heroine appears to yearn for the same. Her novel ends with Jocelyn going to the airport, not to catch a plane but to sit in the lounge, positioned at the verge of flight. Yet this doesn’t indicate failure—the scene is more introspective than defeating. Where Peter exists in the realm of absolutes (he really can’t grow up), Jocelyn is a character with a capacity for change. Dentinger also pens a metaphor for some of the hinges of modern times: Jocelyn won’t marry but nonetheless has fulfilling romantic relationships with two different men; Amy St. Cyr feels entitled to professional success, but still engages in age-old gender games. Both women value female solidarity, while other women in the story adhere to a competitive kill-or-be-killed mentality—reflecting a contemporary culture that gushes over women’s friendships even as it sensationalizes their rivalries.

A neurotic, bedraggled quest for self-acceptance emerges as a motif in Laurie Fox’s Lost Girls (2004). Barrie’s story ends with a legacy of “spring cleaning” in which Peter returns for the next Darling daughter to housekeep Neverland. In Fox’s novel, we zoom in on the ritual for four generations, from Wendy the Original to her great-great-granddaughter Berry, each of whom represents a distinct facet of the hypothetical woman who goes to Neverland. Great Nana is the Original Wendy, a quirky sage. Jane goes to Neverland never to return—until one of her descendants needs her. Margaret is seductive and intellectual. Wendy (the Second), our narrator, speaks of a lifelong struggle with mental illness and a fear of abandonment. Her life readily coalesces with fantasy as she’s haunted by the naive Peter, who cannot fathom her madness, and Jason Hook of the Hook clan, who reinforces her fears.

Like her fellow Pan revisionists, Fox explores themes like the female protagonist’s struggle to individuate from her mother; the experience of a reality mingled with otherworldly elements; and a character’s ability to create a healthy sense of self even in the midst of disconnects. When the time approaches for Peter to claim Wendy’s daughter Berry, our narrator becomes the anxious mother who will soon allow her daughter’s adventure while she herself is left behind. But the anticipated conflict does not come to pass. Berry becomes the only Darling girl who fails to fly to Neverland—she falls down after ascending “the symbolic inch.” (Peter, in his no-fault fashion, quickly leaves the scene.)

In many respects, Fox’s book is the most culturally entrenched of the Peter Pan works, mirroring both the psychological recovery described in women’s memoirs and the themes of fragmentation and healing of mother-daughter relationships popular in cinema. At the same time, the novel provides a smart model for romance fiction, offering us a love story without the tidy pill of romantic consummation.

Now or Neverland

In the context of literary history, these writers’ renditions of outspoken heroines and soulful alliances between women disrupt the patterns of withdrawal and inaction that have formed a narrative cage for female characters in the fairy tales and fantastical books of the past.

But they’re still just a bunch of fairy tales, right? So who cares? Well, recent research by behavioral psychologist Susan Darker-Smith, who has studied the developmental effects of classic fairy tales featuring passive protagonists, points to some interesting conclusions about the stories we grow up with. In a study conducted in England involving 161 subjects (men and women, both with and without a history as victims of domestic abuse), Darker-Smith discovered a subtle but provocative correlation between fairy tales and violence. Women who grew up reading such tales as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, she found, internalize unrealistic attitudes about romance, namely by manifesting submissive behavior and holding fast to the belief that love conquers all—even violence. Darker-Smith has her critics: Author Marina Warner notes that Darker-Smith misreads certain tales, such as Beauty and the Beast, in which the beast treats the heroine well, and the crux of the tale centers not on female thralldom, but on seeing past appearances. Likewise, others view the character of Rapunzel as resourceful instead of helpless. And Deborah Cameron, a language professor at Oxford University, declared that this is just another study that examines the psychology of victimized women rather than questioning why so many men think it’s okay to beat their mates.

But whether or not her study is truly conclusive, Darker-Smith’s research rings true on an intuitive level. After all, the classic texts she studied are rife with subservient princesses and self-abnegating maidens, who, like our Wendy, are passed down from father to husband. While such inflexible portrayals are symptoms of a larger cultural ailment that typecasts women, the revised fairy tale may likewise serve as a template in changing mindsets. We can, in our texts and subtexts, obliterate the notion of a blissfully submissive female reality, where “happily ever after” means little more than, to quote Anne Sexton, “a kind of coffin/A kind of blue funk.”

Michelle Humphrey lives and works in the New York area. She’s launching a zine called Beatrix, due out this fall.

Drawn from Memory

Colin Sagan — Sat, 02 Jan 1999 01:25:39 -0500

“I never intended this book to be published,” writes Phoebe Gloeckner in the introduction to her new collection, A Child’s Life and Other Stories. Perusing these finely drawn, mostly autobiographical comic works, which span twenty years, it’s not difficult to see why its creator might be wary of foisting her stories on a public whose idea of an enjoyable narrative is Titanic. Gloeckner’s unsparing memory and painstakingly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of family dysfunction, childhood cruelty, and queasy sex make for seriously disquieting reading. The book takes us through the years with Gloeckner’s alter ego Minnie, whose childhood is dominated by her overbearing, ogling stepfather and whose adolescence is spent on the streets of San Francisco in a morass of unsavory drugs and even less savory men. The unwelcome sexualization of young girls forms the center of every story in A Child’s Life, not to mention the book’s very introduction, in which cartoonist R. Crumb slobbers over the artist (“I’m just like all the other despicable males that appear in these comic stories…. I, too, desired to subject the beautiful, intense young girl to all sorts of degrading and perverse sexual acts…”). In Gloeckner’s hands, the disturbing subject matter translates into absorbing art that’s hard to wrap your eyes around, but unforgettable once you do.

Cheerful it’s not, and neither are the so-anatomically-correct-they’re-scary paintings and etchings reproduced at the end of the volume. Gloeckner’s aesthetic centers unflinchingly on disease and sex (she illustrated J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition), and, as we trekked up into the Oakland hills to visit Gloeckner at her home/ office, where she writes, draws, and clocks day-job hours as a medical illustrator, we couldn’t help wondering what kind of person would be waiting for us. We never thought to anticipate a glowing expectant mom cradling a tiny gray kitten, offering us tea, and busting out with a Hanson album, but there you go.

In the foreword to A Child’s Life, you write that a lot of the work is stuff you’d done just in the past five years. There’s a real thematic consistency to all the stories in that book.

Yeah, I guess I haven’t exhausted it yet [laughs]. I’ve never had my own book before. And I think that’s probably because…well, there are probably a lot of reasons, but one is that my dad was an artist. But he was also a drug addict and went downhill really quick, and I was so afraid of being like him that I never had the guts to just focus on the artwork. I was just always doing stuff, you know, “on the side.” But I didn’t want it to be that way. So recently I decided, “Well, I’ll do this book,” and someone wanted to publish it—and they actually wanted me to do two books, so I’m doing ’em, and I feel much happier.

You illustrate children’s books, too, right?

Yeah, I’ve done five now.

In A Child’s Life, the way you’re portraying the experience of being that age is kind of scary and disturbing; is it weird to then be doing kids’ books that are probably supposed to be more cheerful?

[The publishers] send back a lot of my pictures, because they say, “Oh, this is just too gross,” or “This looks too weird,” so I’m always having to redraw. The last book I illustrated was called Weird but True, and it had stories of, like, a baby with a tail. But the way I drew it, they said it looked too much like…you know, it looked too [dramatic whisper] suggestive or something. I mean, I was looking at this x-ray of this baby with this tail, and I drew it the way it was, with the tail as long as it seemed to be and everything, and they were like, “Oh, you’ve gotta make the tail shorter!”

It’s weird, but they don’t want it to be that weird.

Yeah, nothing gets by them; it’s like the great filter of Random House.

So these are other people’s books that you’re illustrating; have you thought about writing your own?

I’ve got one that I’ve written, and after I finish this next book I want to do that, and then I have an idea for another book. So it’s all these plans in the future, but, yeah, I’ve got one of my own that I want to do, which is very different than what I’ve been doing.

Let’s talk about the introduction that R. Crumb wrote for your book.

[Laughs.]

In the back-cover blurb he says, “She is one of the best, which is interesting, seeing as: A) She’s a cute girl, B) She’s not a very prolific artist…two factors which, one would assume, would be a hindrance to great art.” So the cute girl comment coupled with this salacious introduction—I know it’s very tongue-in-cheek, but I was wondering how you felt about that.

Well, it’s weird. I mean, I never thought I was a cute girl. I always felt ugly, especially when I was really young. And so, when he said that—I mean, first of all, he wrote me this letter a couple of years ago; he was commenting on some story that was in [the all-female comics anthology] Twisted Sisters, and he described how one day he was giving me a piggy-back ride on Polk Street and he ejaculated [laughs], and it’s like, he thought I was so beautiful, and he loved me, and all this stuff, and I just had no idea. In fact, if I look back on my teenage years, he was the most appropriate-acting male figure that I knew! And so when he said all this stuff, it just seemed like a joke to me. I don’t know why that would be a hindrance to doing one’s artwork. I guess if you thought you were really cute and that’s where you valued yourself, then maybe it would be.

If he had meant it in a “Well, society won’t take you seriously if you’re a cute girl” way, he might be right, but that wasn’t the way it sounded; he said it like a universal given, like cuteness and ability are mutually exclusive.

Ask him! “What the fuck did you mean?” [Laughs.]

You’ve talked in the past about, when you were younger, wanting to run away and live with Crumb and his wife [cartoonist Aline Kominsky-Crumb].

Oh, yeah. It’s true, I did. They seemed like the most normal people I’d ever met; they seemed like they were really doing something. And my mother was always gone all night—there was no center to our life at all, it was just chaos. I focused on the Crumbs as being productive, and they seemed to have a really good relationship, and I just thought, what better thing than to live with such people, and to learn from them? And plus, R. Crumb never ever gave any inkling that there was any sort of sexual feeling at all; even though he tries to sound like this bad boy, I think he has it all under wraps.

When you started doing comics, you were fairly young, but you mentioned that it was a surreptitious thing for you—you hid your comics, you were shy about them. When did you start publishing?

When I was about 18 or 19. I was always writing these comics about my mother’s boyfriend, who I was having an affair with. And I didn’t want anyone to know about that. But once I called Ron Turner [publisher of Last Gasp comics]—I was like 16—and said [tiny voice], “I have a story and I want to get it published.” And he led me into his office and sat me down and told me [gruff big-man voice] that I had to learn how to draw everything, and I had to learn how to draw cars, and all these things.

Did your mother or her boyfriend eventually see your stories?

My mother is constantly threatening to sue me. I think that’s another reason why I’ve always been kind of inhibited. Back then, she drank a lot and took drugs, and now she says, “Well, that was the times, you’ve just gotta get over it! You can’t blame me!” And it’s not even that I blame her, it’s just that it’s my story, my life, and she happens to be in it. I’m not saying that we can’t have a different relationship now, but am I not allowed to talk about myself?

So, at this point, it doesn’t affect the things that you’re willing or not willing to write about?

I figure that I don’t really have any choice. I have to get this book and the next book done, and they contain the things that disturb her, and that’s probably why I haven’t done them for so long. It took me a long time to build up the courage to be sued and murdered [laughs]. I constantly have these dreams that my mother is killing me. I just try to look at them with some humor and get on with it.

Do you think that you’ll want your own kids to read these stories? Because they’re very intense and childhood-oriented, but also super dark and disturbing.

Well, I have a daughter who’s 7, and she keeps wanting to read A Child’s Life. I tell her that it’s for grown-ups and she can read it later on. But I have let her read some of my stories that don’t have sex in them, and she always asks, “Why does this person do this?” and we sort of have a discussion about it. She always wonders why nobody is good. She says, “Even the kids aren’t good!” Kids are used to having a good and a bad person, so it’s kind of interesting to see her point of view.

A lot of your stories would seem to come from a sort of victim standpoint, in the sense that you’re relating a lot of terrible stuff that happened and ways in which you were taken advantage of, but ultimately they really don’t propose that kind of victim consciousness. I was wondering what kind of reactions to your comics you’ve gotten from other women, especially the ones that center on the young girl who’s in that area between being manipulated and doing the manipulating. Like the affair with the mother’s boyfriend—it’s a consensual thing, but it could be interpreted differently.

What do other women think? Some women don’t like [my stories] at all. One time I was doing a story for this comic book—it was called Choices and it was for a pro-choice benefit; [comic artist and historian] Trina Robbins asked me to do this story, because she was editing the book. And I told her I wanted to do a story about how difficult it is to make the decision to have an abortion, sometimes—about the fact that you could feel a million different ways, you could have all these conflicting feelings. That’s what was interesting to me. And she was just, like, irate. And she was screaming at me, “What do you mean, conflicting feelings? It’s just a blood clot!” It was, again, that she wanted to see a good guy and a bad guy. And in certain ways that works for her, it’s gone a long way, but for me, there’s never any good guy or bad guy, in anything. People are able to see things from different points of view, and it can be hard to come to decisions. And sometimes that’s just what my work is about.

I had an opening for my show at the Cartoon Art Museum, and there was one woman who was sooo shy and she came up to me and she said [overwrought young-girl voice], “I just wanted to tell you that I really like your book, and it really meant something to me.” And she could barely get the words out, and I was just so flattered by that, because that’s who my audience is. You know, you always hope that someone sort of like you will understand what you’re doing. So that made me happy. But some people get really pissed off. Men often don’t like it, they’re like [makes grumpy noise].

Because they feel like you’re pointing a finger? It doesn’t seem like you are, at all. The stories don’t come off as accusations—or if they do, you’re implicated in those accusations too.

Well, people will always have knee-jerk reactions. There were printers who wouldn’t print it. People see the pictures and they just think, “Oh, sex! Child abuse!” They don’t read the story and try to think about what’s happening. So I think a lot of men have that reaction, because they’ll look at the stories and think, “Oh, there’s a picture of someone getting his dick sucked,” and they get kind of turned on. And then they read further and think, “Oh, I’m not supposed to be turned on,” and then they get confused, and then they hate me [laughs].

Did you ever get feedback like, “You shouldn’t be drawing these kinds of things because you’re a girl?”

Yeah, but not from other cartoonists. People might say, “Why are you doing this?” Or, “Phoebe, you’re just a weirdo.” [Laughs.] But you know, I’ve done it since I was a little kid. I was the one in the class who knew how to draw, so the other kids would always ask me to draw penises.

The medical illustration–inspired art you do, the detailed paintings and etchings of things like cross-sectioned penises or cross-sections of women giving blow jobs—they’re very clinical, and yet they also make sex seem almost stupid. Like you’re poking fun at the physical aspect of what happens during sex.

That’s an interesting point of view. Of course, when you’re drawing a picture, you never quite know why you’re drawing it; that’s the problem with talking to artists. It is kind of a detached point of view, and it makes it all seem kind of silly. But at the same time, it’s what has fascinated me, what really goes on there—not so much in a sexual way, more in a biological way. Like that one of the cross-section of the penis juxtaposed with the cross-section of the whole body? It was just the similarity in how they’re made, in the anatomy, the tube-within-a-tube formation. I think some men have felt—well, I’ve gotten some comments like, “Is this about castrating males?” But it was never that, for me; it was always about looking at things.

Tell us more about the book that you’re working on now.

The new book is based on my diary from when I was a teenager, when I was 15, 16 years old. I’m not illustrating a narrative, I’m just going to set the actual diary text alongside illustrations. Because there are things I didn’t write about—you know how it is with a diary. If things are going well, you won’t write. You write when the dramatic stuff happens.

Is it weird to go back your diary? I know if I pulled out a diary from high school, I would just be so mortified by everything that’s in it. I don’t know if I could stand to read it.

It’s almost like it’s a different person. And I think that’s why I’m able to do the story now, because I think about the character as this really pissed-off little girl who’s not me [laughs]. It’s like some kind of schizophrenic thing—I want to give her a voice, and so I don’t really feel embarrassed about it. I do have to edit to make it readable. That’s a hard thing to do, because you don’t really want to change it, but you also don’t want it to be totally grammatically incorrect.

Obviously your work is very autobiographical, but do you ever change narrative situations or add other elements that aren’t autobiographical?

Definitely. I don’t really believe in pure autobiography; it can’t happen. If you’re writing about something, it’s always processed a thousand ways in your brain, so no matter how objective you try to be, you can’t be, entirely. And as far as trying to fit something to a narrative…nothing has a beginning and an end; there are always things that preceded it, that feed into it and influence it. So I guess you could call it autobiography. But if I do a story now, it’s very different than it would be if I did the same story ten years from now or ten years ago, because how you feel in the moment has a huge influence on what you’re doing. To a certain extent, I think everybody does what you could call autobiography, but it’s just their experience filtered or projected onto other characters or something else. In my case, I’ve used myself as a character. You shape your own past, whether you end up writing or drawing it eventually or not. Psychologists say that they listen to a person’s story, but they’re not thinking of it as, “This is the truth”; they’re thinking, “This is how the person feels.” About what they perceive happens to them. And I think that’s an important part of what I do. It’s not so much the story—it’s trying to figure out what it meant to me, or what it means in the larger sense.

[While Lisa amuses herself by engaging Phoebe’s cat in a one-sided conversation (“Who’s got a tiny head?”), Phoebe pulls a gigantic loose-leaf binder—which turns out to be the actual diary—from a shelf and begins flipping through the typewritten pages, then hands one over somewhat sheepishly.]

You typed your diary when you were younger?

I would carry it everywhere with me! I had this loose-leaf binder, the typed pages, and I was so afraid that someone would read it that I would have it in my backpack all the time.

This almost reads like an adult writing in the voice of a 15-year-old; I mean, it’s a lot more observant of outside things than maybe your average 15-year-old would be. When you write, “As soon as you give men the eye, they puff out their chests,” it sounds like a much older person.

Well, I really didn’t talk to anybody at that time [laughs]. I think I just totally funneled my energy into writing that. I guess that’s why when I look back at it, it seems like there’s so much I could do with it, because it was pretty descriptive. That’s why I decided I had to do this book; it was burning a hole in my brain.

I don’t necessarily want to be doing my childhood forever—I want to do other characters, not just someone who other people recognize as me. But I think I have to finish this, and then I’ll be done with that.

Do you feel like it’s helped you…I don’t want to say “come to terms with it,” but do you see doing these stories as a form of therapy or a means to think critically about the past?

No, I don’t at all. But the funny thing is, after I do a story, it no longer bothers me—if I think about the incident, it doesn’t bother me at all anymore. So I guess it has the effect of defusing it. I think I’ve always been pretty mad [laughs]. I could be mad at my stepfather, but then if I did a story about him, then it sort of…it gives you a power over the things that happened to you, so you feel like you have some control, even though you didn’t at the time have any real control or power. You can say something that you might not have said, or things you might have said, but you’re not sure if you remember saying them, but you put it in there anyway because it sounds good [laughs]. I never intended it as therapy, but I guess it does have that effect. I hope that’s a good thing. Some people tell me that my work is so negative—but I think my work is funny, you know? It feels positive to me.

Get A Child’s Life and Other Stories from Frog, Ltd. Publishers, P.O. Box 12327, Berkeley, CA 94712. Or stroll over to your local independent bookstore, bang your fist on the counter, and demand it immediately.

Scrambled Signals

Colin Sagan — Fri, 01 Jan 1999 02:00:00 -0500

When i was growing up in the ’60s and ’70s, it didn’t matter that my parents were some of the earliest feminist leaders on the East Coast, that I grew up watching their activism from up close, or that I saw them live (not just profess) equality between the sexes. It didn’t matter that I was a girl hooked on Ms. magazine from the very first year it was out, that I regularly flipped through my mom’s copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, or that I ravenously collected Wonder Woman comic books. Nope, none of that mattered. Not when it came to sex and male-female relations. When it came to that all-important thing, tv was my truth. At least, at first.

In place of children’s bedtime stories, my older sister and I got nightly doses of intense live drama depicting the struggles of people in pain, people pushing for change. While the United States was in the midst of great social upheaval—from the civil rights movement and anti-war protests to fights for gay and women’s rights—my parents’ theater and the plays they put on fiercely, heatedly enacted these struggles. Sucking our thumbs and dragging around our baby blankets, my sister and I got front-row seats night after night.

My mother and father were partners. Throughout my childhood there was never any expectation that it should be any other way. They jointly ran the theater. They jointly ran our home. My mother did half the playwriting, half the directing. My father did half the child care, half the housework. My mother discussed politics while she changed the car’s oil. My father discussed his feelings while he scrubbed the toilet. And they both initiated the cuddling that sometimes happened late at night when our living room was full of pretzels, beer, music, and artist-activists. This was my earliest and most intimate example of how men and women should relate: as respectful equals.

One of my parents’ plays ran for years. How to Make a Woman debuted in 1968. It dramatized how society shaped and limited women’s lives, and the role men played in the process. The right idea at the right time, the play received rave reviews and catapulted my parents, along with many others around the country, to the front lines of a relatively new initiative called the “female liberation movement.”

After each performance, the men and women in the audience sat in separate rooms, deeply absorbed in talking about what it was like to be female, what it was like to be male. In 1968, this was revolutionary. It was an era marked by the embryonic beginning of men’s and women’s consciousness-raising, the impetus behind one of the most important social change movements in U.S. history. And starting at age 5, I was privy to hearing—night after night—groundbreaking, honest, exploratory discussions of how oppressive gender roles and relations were in America.

Boy, was I bored.

my mom threw a fit whenever sexism was on.Even as a 7-year-old child I understood; it was her duty. A feminist leader could not be expected to stand idly by as her daughters watched bikini-clad women throw themselves at the well-dressed, not-a-hair-out-of-place James Bond. Even if—especially if—he had valiantly saved them from the evil villain.

But we loved 007. When his movies finally made it to tv it was like we had found religion.

“Oh, god, do you have to watch this sexist crap?” She’d reach for the off knob.

“Mom! That’s our tv show! Put it back on! We want it on! Put it back on!” If we went on long enough without pausing for a breath my mother would get exasperated and we’d be left alone again.

Somewhere in me, though, I knew my angry and scowling mom was onto something. Something wasn’t right in tv-land. To begin with, female skin was everywhere.

Short skirts, tiny shirts—tv women wore distractingly little. Over and over again the camera lingered, then zoomed in on where their clothes met flesh or were extra tight. The repetitious shots soon trained me to automatically focus on these special areas. I started looking for the plunge of a neckline, the length of a leg, the curve of a breast way before the camera went there.

And then there was that look. Those tv women, they’d stare straight at me, head tilted down, to the side, eyes fully opened. They looked like they wanted to say something that maybe they shouldn’t. Like they had something secretive and adventurous on their minds and were trying to tell me without speaking. I learned it as a facial expression that often came just before, or just after, the showing of skin, like that famous line made when breasts—housed in a low-cut shirt—were pushed up and together.

Television men, I noticed, never had that same expression. Instead, we’d see close-ups of their faces after a pretty woman passed by or after we’d zoomed in on that famous line. Those men looked happy—really, really happy—in a strange, pained kind of way.

when i was 8, ogling men and clueless women filled my life each Friday night.

I’d try to get out of going to the theater so I could stay home and watch Love, American Style. The theme never changed. Sneaky men tried to get blondes, brunettes, and redheads to smooch or unwittingly reveal themselves. And somehow, on a weekly basis, in a series of vignettes, countless women fell for it.

A boss might purposely drop a pen and then a secretary wearing a miniskirt would bend over: “Oooh, here, let me get it.” The man’s eyes would bulge at the sight of her straining behind. Amazingly, she wouldn’t notice—until he’d start chasing her around the desk, that is. In another skit a sunbather might rub oil on her body without seeing the three panting men hiding behind a toothpick-thin palm tree. Or a woman might coo: “Tsk, tsk. My clothes are all wet from the rain. Do you have something else I could change into?” Her date would hand her a skimpy robe and apologize with an excited grin, “This is all I have.” Then, with innocent, doe-like eyes, the woman would nod and take it, proving to all of us watching that she had no clue she’d be nearly naked—and quite vulnerable—in mere minutes.

These women were dumb.

They really bothered me.

And though I had never met anyone like them in real life, these tv women were, unfortunately, members of my tribe. Even if I didn’t want to, I had to acknowledge that they belonged with me in the Clan of Femalehood. How embarrassing.

But in spite of my hatred for them, regardless of my embarrassment, I was riveted. If I watched the show, I was sure to catch numerous glimpses of the womanly curves I was fast discovering I craved. I hated how dumb the tv women were, yet I also couldn’t wait to see the results of their stupidity: near nakedness. So I watched, and in the process I learned important things. Rules, lessons for life—basic and fundamental, like:

Certain things are naughty. Women are the keepers of these things. Men want these things. Women try to hold onto these things because they feel bad about themselves if they give them away. Men feel great about themselves if they get them.

Men persist, often with no results, and the longer they persist the greater their chance of getting these things from women. Often, women have to be tricked into giving them up. Men find all kinds of ways to trick them.

Certain female body parts are the naughtiest and thus most crucial, like chests and rear ends. Legs are important too, but not as stop-dead-in-your-tracks, have-a-hard-time-breathing as the others.

Exposed female skin, especially the crucial stuff, is good if you are male, but bad if you are female. (I’d seen more than one tv woman shriek and wildly hop about trying to cover her top and bottom with her insufficient hands.) To get around this good/bad contradiction, men will try to sneak glimpses without women noticing. (Even better than a glimpse is a touch!)

Those rules were easy enough. But there seemed to be more, and they were more complicated:

Women act like they do not want male attention. Acting like they do means they like giving away the naughty things, and that is bad.

Women really do want male attention. Badly. Not because they want to give up the naughty things but because of one simple fact: A woman’s worth is based on whether or not she gets this attention.

Women work to get male attention. They do this by trying to look attractive. Attractive means having a face, hair, and body men like. It means showing off skin or wearing tight clothes. Unattractive women are not worth the time of day. They lead lonely, sorry lives.

There. I was now prepared for womanhood.

What surprised me the most was that the things I heard in my parents’ men’s and women’s groups—things like how come we needed to say “woman” and not “lady,” and why husbands should change diapers, too—seemed so irrelevant. The groups never addressed the important rules from Love, American Style.

My parents were so out of touch with reality.

And anyway, even if my mother and father did manage to show or tell me something about male-female relations in that huge, sprawling theater they practically lived in, it all seemed so insignificant compared with what I was learning from the 14-by-16-inch screen in our living room.

I doodled on scraps of paper. women, always women. More and more they became what I thought prettiness was supposed be: ample breasts and hips; small waists; long, painted fingernails; heart-shaped lips; bikinis. I had the sense that I might have gotten this image of pretty from a warped and unfair world, yet I continued to enjoy the tingly feeling that swept through my 9-year-old body when I drew tiny bathing suits over curvy figures. The tingling was an unclear sensation, something I was both distinctly and yet barely aware of at the time. But one thing I knew for sure—all by themselves, drawing and the feelings it gave me were fully satisfying. Pages and pages of these bikinied women filled my scrapbooks.

I’d seen other cartoon women before, in Fritz the Cat and Zap, the comic books only adults read. I flipped through them at the house of a friend of my parents. The females in these comic books had big breasts with big points in the middle. As they walked, drops of something splashed out from between their legs (what, I didn’t know—but I felt sure it had to do with sex).

I was intrigued by these pictures of my gender. And also repulsed. Something wasn’t right, but I didn’t understand what. One thing was obvious though: A female was nothing but a thing for the mischievous, almost evil-looking males. With eyeballs bulging out of their cartoon sockets, they were always ready to bother her, to try to get something from her. I kept away from making doodles as naughty—as bad—as those scenes. Though sometimes, sometimes when I drew a picture of a pretty woman, before I knew it, right beside her there would be an evil-looking guy. I didn’t think I wanted him there, but I felt a strange compulsion to add him to the picture. Wasn’t he supposed to be there? He would spring out of my hand and push his way through my pencil onto the paper whether I liked it or not.

When i was 10, I had a friend who wanted to try some grown-up things. I did, too. It was unspoken but clear: We were not exploring our own sexuality; we were exploring that of the adults around us.

In our sex play we took characters from our favorite Saturday morning tv cartoons—like Josie and the Pussycats (all girls) and The Monkees (all boys)—and placed them in Love, American Style–type situations. But we loved those characters and didn’t like to see any of them suffer—or inflict pain. So when we really wanted to get down to business, we used anonymous nobodies. One nobody was the man, another nobody was the woman. The man would get lucky; the woman we pitied.

The stories were always the same. The woman would somehow lose her ability to say “no,” then lose her clothes. Maybe she got drunk, maybe she was too tired to resist. Maybe she got so tired, she fell asleep. That was when the one of us playing the man would jump into action. Eyes wide and fixed on “his” semiconscious prey, hands eager to touch, “he” would pretend to slip off “her” shirt to find full, swollen, enormous breasts. (No matter how big we had decided they should be at the start of the game, by the end it was hard to make them big enough. Nothing short of gargantuan satisfied us.) Then, silently, we’d both just stare at the imagined breasts—the imagined naked, humongo breasts—neither of us knowing what to do next. If only Love, American Style would one day go as far as we did, then maybe we’d know what to do. But it never did. So invariably we’d just stare for a bit at the nonexistent breasts and then start the game again, giving the other one a chance to play the man, the role we both wanted so badly.

I had a long list of make-believe stories I played out in my head, whole soap operas of people and animals that existed only for me, like the good-witch friend who lived in the clouds, or the family of penguins who lived in my belly. They kept me company when there was no one to play with. The characters evolved as I invented dilemmas for them to figure out. We held lengthy conversations about everything and nothing.

But one of my imagined stories did not evolve. The characters and I did not interact. The same scene repeated again and again. It was a story about a telephone call, sort of: A man phones a woman. She has just gotten out of the shower and has a towel wrapped around her head. Somehow she forgets to use another to cover her body. She also forgets the phone has a video screen. (My story took place in the future, and I figured all phones would have them.) The man calling can see her naked. He stares at her body. She doesn’t notice. He becomes eager to go to her house right away. The woman doesn’t have time to put clothes on before he’s at her door. He convinces her to let him in. Once in, he reaches for her. She avoids him. He tries to catch her. She rushes away. They run around and around a couch. Sometimes she is caught, sometimes not. I rarely got that far. The fun was in the staring at her body and the chase. The fantasy gave me a thrill I didn’t understand. I repeated it in my head about once a month.

Wonder woman was my heroine. i collected reissues of the ’40s comic books where she fought off the Nazis. She had muscles you could actually see. She jumped over buildings. She never acted dumb. She never tried to look pretty. And though her suitor, Steve, wanted her to be his, she never said that was what she wanted too. More important, she never ever stopped doing what she was doing in order to be with him. Her crew of girlfriends spent more time with her than he did. Poor Steve. But it was for the best. There were always those pesky Nazis to take care of.

My secret wish was to be Wonder Woman. I had a huge hand-painted picture of her on my bedroom door. It had been a prop in one of my mother’s plays. This Wonder Woman, my Wonder Woman, was nothing like the one on the new tv show. I hated the tv one. The tv one went against everything my Wonder Woman stood for: strength, intelligence, and independence. The tv Wonder Woman was a frightening mix of the strong woman from the old comics and the dumb, bubbly girlies from Love, American Style. But the bubbly girly part canceled out the strong woman part. How could I take my heroine seriously, even as she saved the world, if all I could see (and my eyes kept going there, even when I didn’t want them to) was pushed-up, heaving breasts and a long line where they met and mushed together? I rarely watched the tv show. It made me sad to see my heroine reduced to a body in a bathing suit.

One day, a new friend came over after school. It was 1973. We were 11 and I was introducing her to the women’s movement. If Marnie could be made to understand Wonder Woman, or, say, Ms. magazine, she could understand me.

“This is Ms. magazine. It’s written by women and it’s for women. It’s nothing like Seventeen or the other girl magazines. It’s more…more…”

What?

Real? Natural? All I knew was that it was what I wanted to be. And that Seventeen and the other girl magazines made me feel like I was way off base. It was like they thought they were right and I was wrong. I hated the Seventeen girls almost as much as I had hated the ones on Love, American Style a few years earlier. But I was older now and didn’t feel compelled to examine their every detail, to learn all I could from them, like I had with Love, American Style. In fact, I only looked through Seventeen when I was at the dentist’s office. And sometimes at my friends’ houses. And I guess also when I went to buy candy at the drug store—but that was only, like, every other day or something.

Anyway, Ms. had no flashy photos of dressed-up women, no fake smiles and lip gloss. It had pictures of women in skirts or pants, sometimes smiling and sometimes sad or even mad. There were also stories about women and girls who were dealing with important things, like how to stop your boss from touching you or how to keep the boys on the playground from pushing you off the monkey bars. And it had stories about gutsy girls, like those who wanted to be astronauts.

“Here, you can borrow this.” I put the magazine in Marnie’s bag and picked up my next teaching tool. “These are my Wonder Woman comics.” I held them to my heart for a brief second, I loved them so much. I placed the comics on top of the Ms. magazine already in Marnie’s bag.

“Pissa,” Marnie smiled. Our latest word for cool.

We walked downstairs and my new friend biked away with the homework I’d given her strapped to the rack on the back. As I waved goodbye, it dawned on me what had just happened. By teaching Marnie these things, I had changed. I was no longer simply the daughter of feminists: It appeared I had become a feminist in my own right.

I watched Marnie peddle away in the direction of the disappearing sun. My mother and her feminist friends were always struggling with important, heavy things—getting mad at this person or that institution, or feeling hurt by this magazine ad or that law.

A feminist. Me?

“I’m a feminist,” I said, testing it out loud. It was ok, but I still had my doubts.

When Marnie was out of sight, I headed into the house. A feminist. I wondered if I had a choice. Was it possible to go back once you’d reached a certain level of understanding? Once you’d done certain things?

I didn’t think so. Besides, I didn’t want to turn back. I began circulating Ms. magazine and Our Bodies, Ourselves among my new fifth-grade friends. I lectured students and teachers about their language (firefighters, not firemen). I enrolled both myself and Marnie—who I found out was being beaten at home—in a women’s self-defense course (at the time this was the cutting-edge thing in the women’s lib movement). When Marnie’s parents stopped beating her after our very first class, I knew I was on to something big.

Soon after realizing that I was a girl-feminist, something happened. One evening, while replaying my telephone story in my mind (take number 201), I identified with the woman for the first time. I had never once thought about seeing it through her eyes before. It was then that I realized: Hey, she doesn’t want to be touched!

Until then, whenever I had rehearsed the story, I never felt it was hurtful in any way. And why should I? I always identified with him. He—we—were so excited by what was happening. All that female skin: breasts, legs, and a chase around the couch! Wow! Great!

Upon reflection as an adult, I now understand. Love, American Style always identified with the man. James Bond movies did, too. Just about everything in the media was seen through the man’s eyes and the man’s attitude. I joined in, as I was expected to, ogling and rubbing my hands together greedily along with the rest of them.

But when I identified myself as a feminist, things changed.

“Why do I keep having him try to touch her and chase her when she doesn’t want that? What was she doing answering the videophone and the door naked anyway? No one is that dumb! Why do I have her do stupid things—again and again?” I thought.

Suddenly, I saw the story wasn’t right. It was wrong. It was…sexist. I had heard that word many times from my parents, but had never used it myself. I now felt sure, though, that the word could be applied to my story. A story I had chosen to rehearse over and over. Well, not anymore. Then and there I decided: Feminists don’t make up stories where women are dumb, where women get hurt. And I never did again.

I didn’t miss the fantasy. In fact, I never thought about it again. It was as if I’d found some way to pretend the awful thoughts never existed in my pure mind, as if I was too ashamed to remember that I was once the author of such anti-female stories. Interestingly, after purging the scenario from my life I never found another to replace it. Perhaps the woman-as-prey/man-as-vulture fantasy was the only one available to me, so by choosing not to use it I was left with nothing. Certainly, tv didn’t offer other options for how males and females could relate sexually, and, being a child, I didn’t know enough about sex to think up alternatives on my own. Thus, I was left fantasyless, which didn’t bother me—it’s actually something I never even thought about until I became an adult.

One more thing happened after I decided to stop my bedtime scenario: Essentially, I turned into the loud, constantly battling, constantly offended feminist I feared I could become. All things sexist became almost unbearable for me, especially media images that disrespected female sexuality. Throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, in the ’70s and ’80s, while soft-core porn pushed its way into the mainstream—into tv programs, advertising, movies, magazines, and MTV—I became hypersensitive to the hypersexualization of young women. Each new portrayal of my fellow females as a sex object/toy/tiger felt like a personal attack on my ability to define my own sexuality. Each new image sent me into a raging rant. God help the sexist jerks in my path; I had become my mother, only more so.

The dichotomy i experienced as a girl growing up—a world immersed in the idealism of second-wave feminism, yet filled with the realities of everyday sexism—was certainly confusing. But it was also enlightening, for it was this very dichotomy that helped foster my awareness of the difference between what was and what should be. It was what made me a girl-feminist dedicated to a world where women and girls were not victims of their sexuality or simply recipients in their sexual experiences, but rather where they were in charge as active participants, as respected equals—in fact, just the type of relationship my parents had shown me in both their work and personal lives.

So in the end, when I was a child, though my parents lost plenty of battles to the tv and other enticing media surrounding me, they ultimately—thank goodness—won the war.

And as time went by, I continued to embrace the feminist activism they had modeled for me. I jumped down people’s throats less and began to educate and organize more. I started an organization dedicated to replacing sexist and racist depictions of women in the media with positive images. I led workshops on female empowerment and offered training sessions on dismantling sexism (and assorted other -isms). But, to be sure, I still believe that one of the best ways to fight the way young girls (and boys, let’s not forget) get indoctrinated in our culture is to make a noisy stink. Loud, constantly offended feminists rule! Hell, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

Rivka Ketzel Solomon believes the best female role model on tv is the brainy, sax-playing Lisa Simpson. She is seeking submissions for a book-to-be: That Takes Ovaries! Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts. Send stories of anything you have ever done that was gutsy, audacious, or inspirational (plus a one-line bio). Deadline is January 15, 1999. E-mail submissions preferred. Redelson@gis.net; That Takes Ovaries!, 12 Fern Street, Lexington, MA 02421.

In Short

Kyla — Mon, 01 Jan 1996 00:00:00 -0500

Coffee Will Make You Black, by April Sinclair: A black girl in ‘60s Chicago grows up and into her sexuality. One of the funniest and best-written books I read last year. And the sequel just came out, so there’s no more waiting to hear what happens to Stevie.

Makes Me Wanna Holler, by Nathan McCall: Eloquent, unflinchingly honest, politically astute. This book has a lot to teach me, as a white girl, about the lived experience of a black man in racist America.

Schoolgirls, by Peggy Orenstein: You’ll see yourself and your middle school experience reflected in the girls she observes. Frustrating, because things aren’t changing; gratifying, because someone’s paying attention.