Full Exposure: Opening Up to Sexual Creativity and Erotic Expression (5 page)

“I can still see you,” she said and lingered to stare at me a few more moments as if I might start a slow dissolve.

“You don’t have bug eyes,” I said, and strode out to the deep dead geranium area of my back deck to test out my new opaque presence. Something about my little girl’s serious consideration of my invisibility inspired me to slip into child-consciousness myself, to imagine myself truly unseen by insect and man alike. I was surprised that the first thing I felt was giddiness, even euphoria. A sentence floated across my mind like a cartoon balloon: “
Never be ugly again.
” Funny, I would have thought I’d be euphoric about the invisible ease of as-saulting the cookie jar or about all the spying I was going to be able to do, since those were early invisibility fantasies of mine. Instead,

I let this phrase float through my mind, relieved that no one could judge me by my looks.

“Ugly” is a pretty serious description. I can’t even tell you with a straight face that I am ugly, although I’ve shouted it in anger and helplessness, and I’ve felt guilty immediately afterward. I’m tall, clear-skinned, fair, and my toes and fingers are all where they ought to be. What if I were
really
ugly? Then I’d have something to cry about. There now, shut
up.
I shouldn’t trifle with ugliness because I just might have to face it someday, and where will my vanity be then?

My vanity is already brainwashed but good. In all my life as a media spectator, I have seen that in those pages and frames, only pretty people seem to convey erotic feelings and desires with any credibility. I know it’s not true. I can go to my local beach boardwalk anytime I want, where ordinary people cruise, and I see that sexual attraction is possible in every package. At the boardwalk last sum-mer, the fashion was to wear tight white pants, big hair—or no hair—and tattoos that disappeared down the cleavage. Not

everyone was “pretty,” but almost everyone was sexy. I could feel the fuck-me in the air. “Everything is beautiful in its own way”—and I find that easier to believe when I’m feeling brave. Bravery and beauty seem to go together.

I’ve learned that sometimes your sexual feelings alone can make you feel ugly. Your desires may repulse you, intimidate you. Feelings of ugliness make you not want to have sex anymore, not talk about it, not joke about it. Even though I’ve dissected my feelings of ugly-wrath, and I’ve cringed at all the ignorance and shame that lay be-neath them, I haven’t so easily turned them over. At first it seemed easy. The day I decided to reject all the traditional philosophies, religious teachings, and government propaganda, I felt like a shouter, a warrior, clean and ready for my own revolution. I did it, I said that God was Dead, Patriarchy Sucks, and I’d Rather Be Buttfucking. Nuances aside, it was exhilarating to deliver myself from the dom-inant paradigm.

Yet after writing and shouting so publicly for years, why would I get the “ugly” attacks? Why would I feel shame, when I’d already embraced its opposite so enthusiastically? I don’t think it’s shame I’m feeling anymore; I think my consciousness raising has been quite effective, if at first unsubtle. It’s something besides ugliness, a more constant companion—fear—that gives me this despair. When I say to myself, “You’re so ugly,” I have to reply, if only in a small whisper, “You’re not ugly, you’re afraid.”

Somehow saying, “I’m ugly,” takes less guts.
Ugly
is small and retreats and doesn’t even feel like licking its own wounds because they’re too unsightly. When you’re ugly, you not only don’t want to be looked at, you can hardly stand the sight of others yourself. Ugliness is misanthropy with a wardrobe.

I’ve wondered how much of a corner femininity has on ugliness and its attendant passivity. When we consider an ugly man,

we really have to reach for prominent examples, like Rumpelstiltskin. Ugliness in men is so extreme as to be pathetic, pitied. Quasimodo was ugly; he was even more self-conscious of his ugliness when he felt the power of his love for the dazzling Esmeralda. In the end, heroism was his beauty treatment.

I don’t think most men dwell on ugliness per se, unless they have unusual disabilities or deformities. To think of himself as “ugly” is childish, somehow, for the average guy. When men despair about their looks—whether it’s losing hair or getting a belly—their vanity is certainly wounded. But they don’t feel emasculated by the lack of a handsome face in the way that women feel their femininity, and thus their sexuality, is on the line with their appearance.

In fact, a man with especially ugly features is sometimes made out to be
more
sexual, more grotesquely lustful, than a man who’s more plain. I recently clipped a news article about a chilling kiddie-porn manufacturing circle in Europe, with details to turn your stomach. Yet the strangest detail that stood out in the list of nauseating behavior was that the circle’s members were described as “balding,” as if this was some kind of clue that they would rape babies. No other physical detail was mentioned. I put the paper down and said, “If there is some kind of anti-defamation league for hair loss, I’d think they’d wanna be all over this.”

Too little hair, too much hair, a big nose, a wide mouth, overly muscular, concave-chested—whatever it is, a man’s physical charac-teristics are used against him only as a sign of sexual perversity, not to prove a lack of sexual feeling. Many men do fear that their sexual interests will become too well known or publicly displayed. Now
that,
they tell you, would be ugly, an ugly spectacle—not the ugliness of appearance, but a wound to their character.

It may be masculine to be a sexual adventurer, but such a man must avoid the sort of scandal that turns him into a boy-toy, a joke. Women and gay men who have multiple lovers get insulted with the label “promiscuous,” whereas the “straight” man who holds his cards close to his vest can be screwing the whole town and nevertheless be thought of as a royal lion. Men hold on to their sexual secrets like Samson with his famous hair, fearful of being stripped of their power or made somehow effeminate by their intense desires. For a proud man to be called a “whore”—that’s what’s ugly for a man, not his clothes or complexion. He’s afraid of being made that small. In recent years, we’ve seen the sexual exposé of the century, in the case of President Clinton. Here’s a man with a sexual appetite who knew that, to appear strong and statesmanlike, he had to deny his erotic attractions. He had to make them seem little; and when exposed, he had to criticize himself for moral weakness and personal failing. “He was wrong.”—that’s what the headlines were obliged to say; after all, he had been caught in a lie, and caught in adultery. The American president and his family are supposed to be symbols of monogamy and propriety. Yet under our breath, the sexually experienced among us muttered to ourselves, “He was a
typical
man.” We expect kings and presidents to have big egos, appetites, libidos—those are perceived as attractive—but if the king gets sloppy about it, it diminishes his masculine authority. We turn up our noses at the disarray of his affairs. How can he rule the world with sex on his mind? A wiser culture would ask: How can you rule the world

without thinking about sex?

In another period of history, a male leader’s overt and even shameless lustiness was predictable, even evidence of his powerful status. Look at Henry VIII! But in the neopuritan age of

American sexual illiteracy, we can easily imagine such a man as Hapless Henry feeling ugly, feeling that he would like to erase this stain and everyone connected to it, for the shame with which it covers his career.

There seems to be no chance, in our modern political climate, that Clinton will ever wash his hands of any hypocrisy about his sexuality. That would be brave, it would be beautiful, it would be a page out of Oscar Wilde’s rebellious defense; but it never happens in the Ugly Story. Perhaps the president finally decided that lust and adultery are his Achilles’ heel; but it is repression and a vicious double standard that have kept his ugly motor running. It is harder for men than women to realize this, because after all—except when they’re exposed, which is quite rare—they get the privilege of the double standard.

On the other hand, there are so many ways to casually and fiercely label the ugly femme who offends: the slut, the bitch, the dyke, the hag, the cunt—she who openly desires, and she who is undesirable. Women—and the minority of men who identify with them—spend a lot of time wishing they were invisible, that their sex was invisible, because their burden of worthiness is so impossible. They want to be desirable yet innocent, fertile yet unaware—to inspire yet to submit. For the feminine-inclined, the ugly game
is
the double standard. The femme needs beauty to be valued as a woman, but if she succeeds as a beauty, then everything else about her is diminished. Of course, her looks must fade—that’s the rule at the beauty fountain. Not only can’t the girl help it, but ultimately she can’t win; she can only be degraded to a lower rung. She certainly can’t switch sides without facing the “dyke” accusation, that she’s abandoned her feminine roots.

A woman can’t escape the Beauty Trip without being reminded that, for most of the society around her, she’s never going to be

let off the hook. As John Berger wrote in
Ways of Seeing:
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”

I’m relieved and thankful to have personally gotten a divorce from the cult of self-surveillance, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not vul-nerable. The well-meaning lady at the corner store will greet me, “My, it looks like you’ve lost some weight lately,” as if that were a compliment instead of a fierce reminder of what I should be anxious about.

I’ll leave her store thinking, “I never knew she thought I was
over
weight in the first place.” Then I’ll angrily rebuke myself, “I don’t care what she thinks,” at the same time wondering what kind of zinger reply I could make to her girl-talk appraisals so that she’ll think twice about how to give another woman a compliment. I’m a little afraid of provoking her, though. I think about how she must scrutinize her own body, which is older than mine, or that of her daughter, who is ten years younger than I. I’m sure we all come up short compared to the cover girls on the magazines she sees every day. If she knew those models in person, she’d find out just how tenuous their own hold is on the perfect body, let alone the perfect self-image. What a tense little circle of fear!

For all the jokes that have been made about split-off movements like the notorious “lesbian separatist commune,” what female day-dreamer hasn’t for at least a minute thought it sounded like heaven? A place where you wouldn’t care what you looked like, where power grew with age, where wanting sex or not wanting it followed your own physical and creative cycles, instead of the demands of obliga-tion and making an impression.

I remember in the 1970s driving down a dirt road en route to my first visit to a separatist commune, where one of my best friends from high school had joined a whole group of women

living off their land. I idled the car for a minute before I reached the main house so I could apply some hot magenta lipstick. With
Cherries in the Snow
by Revlon all over my mouth, I’d quickly figure out who was a doctrinaire zealot, and who had a sense of humor and some appreciation for the color pink. After all, I didn’t want to escape from one beauty orthodoxy to another one with the same rules turned inside out. The point was never rejecting beauty or pleasure; the point was rejecting our fear of ugliness.

Men and women both fall short in the battle of sexual self-respect, because the courage it requires exacts a price—a price that, realistically, is hard to afford if you look it right in the eye. If we don’t have our ugly tradition of fear to hang on to, what are we going to put in its place? Even the folks who ran away to the woods to make their own Shangri-la found themselves still fighting over the same question of what makes a person worthy, desirable, or preferable.

From the view at the pinnacle of ugliness, it seems that equality is impossible, that it would tear us apart to change. I know I’m terrified when I take stock of my role models who have disappeared into obscurity, lost their reputations, or been punished because they wouldn’t wear the yoke and chain of proper appearances.

So if sexual honesty is impossible from the Peak of Ugly Percep-tions, then maybe we have to climb another mountain entirely. If status-clutching, pretty-power politics seems all that is possible now, then there is only one miraculous route for the radical erotic manifesto: a complete transformation! Let’s do a before-and-after culture makeover like they’ve never seen before.

I have never fallen to the ground to “believe in miracles,” as TV preacher Kathryn Kuhlman used to implore her audiences, so I have to laugh at myself for even using this description. It’s just

that things don’t always happen as you predict, or even because you strive for them to be so. Rather, change comes from the accumulated dreams and yearnings of the many who break out of the mold—not because they think they should, but because they can’t help it. We become visible because our parade is just too damn obvious to avoid, because fear is simply in the way, and we’re too big to go around it anymore. We become desirable as soon as we put away the ugly stick—and then we find real beauty, waiting for us, without com-plaint.

CHAPTER NINE
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WOMEN AND CHILDREN WORST

Both women and men are bisexual in the psychological sense; I shall conclude that you have decided in your own minds to make “active” coincide with “masculine” and “passive” with “feminine.” But I advise you against it.

Sigmund Freud

O
ne dry spring weekend I cajoled my daughter away from her Saturday TV cartoons, and we walked downtown to check out a city-sponsored art, jazz, and wine-tasting fair. Root beer floats were promised as well. It sounded like an event we could both enjoy, and it’s hard to go wrong with decent music played outside on a sunny day. I wondered what kind of art we would see.