Buried Alive

Photograph of the Girl

The girl sits on the hard ground,

the dry pan of Russia, in the drought

of 1921, stunned

eyes closed, mouth open,

raw hot wind blowing

sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are

taking her together. She leans on a sack,

layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,

the new radius of her arm curved.

She cannot be not beautiful, but she is

starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones

grow longer, porous. The caption says

she is going to starve to death that winter

with millions of others. Deep in her body

the ovaries let out her first eggs,

golden as drops of grain.

*Sharon Olds from The Dead and The Living

(Trigger Warning: Satire to the point of disturbance)

Yes, while on bloggular sabbatical I met and fell in love with a bearded liberal dude named Zed at a locals only Power Play Bar*, found coupled bliss in a pricey studio apartment cooking him organic lunch (but he cooks dinner—we egals know how to rock a feminist relationship), learned a second language while backpacking through Europe on my parent’s dollar and became an I Can’t Help it Feminist. Life is glorious. Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.

Knowing full and well the confusion this recent conversion will cause, I should clarify a few points about my new found life as an I Can’t Help it Feminist.

Yes, I used to be one of those: a choice feminist. I used to believe women, upon examining their condition, could find it in themselves to make a different, less painful life.

Yes, I must come clean: I used to believe in choice and change.

I used to believe in autonomy, agency and freedom to move about in the spheres of feminist conscience whilst taking the most ingrained and damaging nuggets of patriarchal brainwashing and intellectually lobotomizing them.

Hell, I used to believe in feminist journeys.

I used to believe what we did in the bedroom, preferences for self-expression, the kind of people we are, were all part of a malleable feminist landscape—with bends, ebbs, flows, threads to be cut and re-sewn, again and again.

I used to believe in a feminism that could reject, resist, reform.

Oh how bigoted I was then!

(Granted, I was pallin’ around with those dogmatic radical feminists with all their talk of hope and words of encouragement and suggestions to get out of the hell hole.)

To all my new found allies: I’m SO SORRY I WILL NEVER SPOUT SUCH HATEFUL CRAP AGAIN!

Because, yes, now I know.

Whatever you do in the bedroom, you can’t help. No matter how many times you examine it, no matter how many times you think you might hate it so much you wanna go jump off a bridge while securing a chained noose to the perimeters of your neck and the scaffolding-whilst also aiming for the shark’s maw-no you can’t help it.

No matter how many times you’ve tried blocking thoughts about some older man insisting on you calling him Daddy while being orally serviced, it doesn’t matter. You can’t help it. You’ve had those thoughts for as long as you can remember!

If you feel you are a queer man trapped in a transgendered body with a hard-wired preference for paisley skirts and pin-striped business suits, then. you. are. It’s your biologically determined state!

If every time your mouth is without lipstick you find it neurologically impossible to emit serotonin then don’t fight your wiring! Your brain expects to find raspberry colored carcinogenic fecal matter lacquered to the outer extremities of your lips and when it doesn’t find it your brain gets VERY UPSET.

You are a feminist.

You.can’t.help.it!

I Can’t Help it Feminism is more than just a message of completely blind understanding, tolerance and acceptance. It’s the hopeful hopeless message that everything you are now is everything you have ever been and will always be.

And that, my friends, is a feminism ANYONE AND EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER HAD EVEN THE TINIEST INKLING WOMEN MIGHT BE GETTING SLIGHTED JUST A BIT can get behind.

*What, have you not been? Power Play Bars are about owning power. With play! Everyone gets a feather boa and black latex stick at admission. The rest of the evening is spent being randomly tickled by feathers and poked/slapped/prodded by The Stick. (Haught.) I was waiting in line at the restroom when I got three hard slaps to my ass. (Ouch!/Hot!) This was code for “Hey can me and my friend take turns c*nt torturing you with our steely pocket knives?” To which I responded by gently plucking two feathers from the boa and sticking one up each guy’s nostril (one was Zed’s!). This meant “Yeah but I’m a feminist so make sure you do it in a feminist kind of way.”