Macho Sluts (36 page)

I got more than one complaint about somebody in the history department, Professor Gregory. History is a politically suspect field, full of mavericks and oddballs. Whenever there were layoffs we lost part of our history faculty. They were expendable. They also served as banners of liberalism—you know, we have all these crazies and we allow them to keep on publishing their crazy stuff, we must have mondo-macro academic freedom if we tolerate something this dubious.

Anyway, the dish was this guy was into boys—was fucking his male students—and was misogynistic. Being queer is borderline, but hating women is as inexcusable as loving “women's clothes.” I happened to run into Gregory at my next placatory tea. He looked like a realman. He was big, he was muscular, he had a deep voice, he had these enormous hands and a beard. I decided to register for one of his classes and check him out. My mistake was that I told my little cronies at StudSolid what I was up to. So of course they wanted follow-up reports, and as long as I was in his class I had to feed them more information. I was so deeply ambivalent about this guy that I never really lied. I told them just enough to keep them interested in him and me. It was like telling them dirty bedtime stories. Why would they ever want to roll over and go to sleep?

Professor Gregory became a stock character in my masturbation fantasies. I was horrified and appalled, but I couldn't stop. Sitting in his class, I hated him. I could tell he really did like boys and loathe women. He was treading a very fine line. Most of the boys adored him. They had to be so frightfully clever to get into this program since they also had androgen-fed muscles and sturdy male backs that could have been put to work rebuilding our war-ravaged country. They didn't get shit for being that smart, nothing, no reward, no praise, just grudging acknowledgment that they could have a desk and buy their textbooks and pretend they belonged there while the serious students—women—drew a bead on the future and told old jokes about turkey-basters and Gomer Pyle.

You can't take that much abuse without it twisting you up a little and making you feel guilty. It makes you vulnerable to authority, especially someone who has a lot of power but also holds out a few crumbs of approval. Because you know the system can squash you anytime, would like to squash you if you gave it the slimmest pretext, and you desperately need protection, somewhere, anywhere. My intuition told me that Gregory enjoyed making his boys go through hoops for some of that approval, a totally illusory sense of comradeship—perhaps even male bonding. I couldn't image him fucking a man his own age, or a woman who could tell him whether he was any good or not. I was not his own age and I did not want him to be good to me. But I was female. I was the enemy.

He never spoke to any of the women students unless he had to. He spent all his time in class drawing out, encouraging, and praising the brighter and better-looking boys. I couldn't even get him to argue with me. He would call on me when my nuisance factor reached a certain level, let me talk as long as I wanted to, stare out the window, then take up where he had left off as soon as I shut up.

Coincidentally, Students for Solidarity was running short of targets. Everybody had pulled in and tightened up and battened down so carefully that we were in danger of becoming obsolete. Who needs cops in a law-abiding society? Everyone insisted we had to put this rogue professor up against the wall.

We had been assigned reading from the annotated version of Engels' “The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” When I walked into the classroom, I noticed that Roger, the only boy who dared sit in the front row, was not there. When the professor stood to begin his lecture, he seemed to have a cold. “I invite,” he said, “your predictable comments on this so-called piece of history.”

I was astonished, and gleefully stood to object. “It would seem to me that you are calling fundamental truths into question,” I said.

He actually, for a change, responded to me. He said, “Young lady, you do not know what you are talking about.” The insult was mind-ripping. My single cell of hatred fissioned, and I was hosting a colony of feverishly reproducing and breeding and multiplying rage. He then lambasted what he called the matriarchal “theory.” According to him, there was no evidence to support the belief that women had controlled all pre-industrial cultures. Nor was there any reason to believe that these societies, regardless of who ran them, were any more ecologically balanced, less violent, or more evolved than any other “community of homo sapiens.”

He was repeatedly interrupted by a chorus of hisses from all the students. Some of the more timid boys were sneaking out the back door. “Cite your sources!” I shouted at him. He had to answer me. I was the only one saying something instead of drumming my feet on the floor and making a noise like a rabid goose.

“If I were allowed to teach any anthropology in this benighted institution, I would!” he shouted back.

Was this man having a nervous breakdown? He could not be that stupid. “The very name of that pseudoscientific cult discredits it,” I yelled. “How dare you call yourself a historian?”

Another member of StudSolid, this girl who had ignored my tactful suggestion that one observer would attract less attention than two, was drowning us both out by shouting, “Boycott! Walk out! Boycott! Walk out!” And people were doing what she said. The small auditorium was emptying out. I was somehow going in the other direction, down to the front. It took forever to get there because of the contrary human traffic. By the time I was face to face with him, everyone else was gone.

“I think I should inform you that you've been under investigation,” I said, struggling to be dignified and keep the excitement out of my voice. His eyes looked red, as if he had been crying, but I told myself it was just a cold. He was wearing perfume. This typically male vanity, a stock reference in every cheap romance novel I had ever read, stung my nose and made my lungs ache, the way you feel when you really need to be held and no one knows.

His Adam's apple bobbed. “Indeed? By that rotten little group of NATO generals you run around with?”

“How dare you equate a grassroots organization of radicals that struggles to perpetuate the revolution with a bunch of collaborators who let the commies and the demmies turn Europe into rubble?”

“How dare you
investigate
me? Do the words ‘academic freedom' or ‘first amendment' mean anything to you?”

“There is a difference between the exercise of liberty and its abuse.”

Enraged, he grabbed at me. “You smug little fool,” he snapped. I stepped back, and the hands which had been reaching for my shoulders landed on my breasts. Before coming to class, I had carefully threaded the inside of my bra with straight pins. He yelped and said, “What's this?” His hands clamped down harder, and he got stuck again. Then he knew. “Oh-ho,” he said, “is this what they're teaching in self-defense classes these days?” He was reaching under my white student's gown. It was something I had dreamed about so often, I could not seem to stop him, I was just twisting in his hands. He was hurting me there, even though it must have hurt him, too, pressing up so that all the sharp points penetrated the delicate skin of my vulva. “Is this what you need?” he asked, reaching for the hem of his black professorial robes. I was terrified that he would make me look at his penis. I had never seen one, I didn't want to, and I was about to scream when Roger, the missing bright boy, came running into the auditorium via the door by the lectern and skidded to a halt a few feet from us.

“I came as soon as I heard—” he had time to say before he took in the tableau. “Rape!” he started to bellow. “Rape!” He took me by one shoulder, yanked me away from the professor, and started slapping and punching at him, crying hysterically. I had one of those rare moments of clarity that don't do you a damned bit of good when you can see the truth about anything you gaze upon. I saw that they were lovers, I saw that Roger separated us not to protect me, but because he could not bear to see his lover touch me, I saw that all of us were doomed. Still I could not weep as loudly as Roger, who had to be pulled off Professor Gregory by four campus cops.

The administration shook us off like so many dead fleas. Professor Gregory was prosecuted for rape, on Roger's testimony, and convicted. It took a lot of trouble for me to avoid finding out what his sentence was. I refused to testify because I did not want to describe, under oath, what happened when he grabbed me. I wasn't sure, then, exactly what rape was, but I knew this was not it. An assailant and victim have nothing in common. But I had recognized him, and then made use of him. I was culpable. They expelled me when I was charged with being an accessory to violence against women, and I think I sort of deserved it, even though the woman in question was myself. A judge remanded me to the penal farm for re-education, where I stayed until Jackie set a big version of one of her rabbit traps for the bed-check matron and we high-tailed it to the bright lights, city sights, and torrid nights. The indefensible behavior of one of its leaders provided an excuse to investigate other leaders of Students for Solidarity. When dormitory rooms were raided, they found the usual assortment of contraband—proscribed reading material, illicit drugs, and an unsafe birth control device. It was enough to discredit the group. Nobody objected when it was banned.

I'm out of the nice neighborhood now and walking through a sleazier part of town. There are more people on the street, but I feel safer because most of them are crooks and crazies. That says a lot for the flying buttresses of our Democratic Socialist Feminist Way of Life, don't it? I give a wide berth to a circle of kids, music victims holding a sidewalk autism contest. I know they can't hurt each other when they wear those helmets, but it creeps me out. Besides, they can't see where they're going, and I'm not wearing a crash-proof topper full of headbanging sounds. One of the helmets is defective, and I can hear snatches of music as I go by.

Now I'm in trouble again. Worse, maybe. Pretty soon I'm going to be walking by the very alley where I got busted. To keep from gnawing on myself, I slip into a little reverie about the poor jane who got busted with me. If I can believe her, it was the first time she'd paid for objectification. I wonder if she'll ever go out looking for it again. Sometimes it's easier to fake orgasms with somebody who loves you than it is to cruise the derelict parks and ripped-up, trash-clogged streets. After all, you don't find real pleasure all that often there, either—just the possibility.

I do not hustle out of bars. You have to pay off the bartenders, and all your janes will be drunk—if they aren't piss, uh, peace officers. Anyway, I don't want to bring any official attention down on the Labrys. They might not know what goes on there yet, and if that bar gets closed down, a lot of my friends are going to go crazy or just leave town. All I wanted was a drink and a night of raunchy storytelling with one of my pals.

I had just settled down with Lefty, this malechick who has only one ball. (Guess which one.) Lefty's specialty is TVs—janes who want to wear “women's clothes” or “men's clothes.” Sometimes (especially if they are beginners, who tend to be shy) they want to watch him dress up instead. I could tell Lefty was ready to party because he-she was wearing a cherry-red corset with a jockstrap underneath it, a black bowler hat, one elbow-length black silk glove, and one biker's leather glove with the fingers cut off. He-she had worn a big trench coat to cover all this finery up on his way to and from the Labrys. Lefty doesn't mix up his drag this way when he-she's on the stroll—it confuses the fish.

We were on our first drink and it hadn't gotten drunk under the table yet, but Lefty had enough money to keep our party going all night long, so I was feeling quite encouraged. Then this woman walked in, white-skinned, medium height, with big tits starting to go a little soft. She had dark hair and a nice-sized ass, the kind you can really work on. Everything she had on was new—a new denim skirt, new T-shirt, a new jacket so shiny it was probably plastic. And she had locked a collar around her neck, but it was the wrong kind of chain, one of those flimsy things with large links that they use to hide electrical cords. The lock was way too big; it looked clumsy. The whole effect was amateurish and too obvious.

Still, I had to admire her guts, making it so clear what she was looking for. She stared around the room, obviously frightened and on the brink of leaving. A group of executive types had brought in their new secretary to show him what a bunch of losers they all were. They had gotten the poor working boy all tipsy-wipsy and were teaching him how to play pool. When it wasn't his turn to flub a shot, they were handing him from lap to lap, playing with his tits, singing songs that were so bawdy Lefty was trying to jot the lyrics down on a cocktail napkin. One of them started to hint that if he couldn't learn to shoot a decent game of pool, they ought to teach him how to pick up dollar bills with his ass so he'd have another trade.

The newcomer did not like this at all. Then she shook herself like a wet dog and marched up to the bar. You can go a long way on middle-class rectitude and sheer ignorance. She and Annalies, the bartender, had a long conversation which finally resulted in the new kid being given a beer and a push in my direction. “Don't do me any favors, Annalies!” I yelled, and headed for the bathroom.

A bunch of ladies were combing out in the mirror, trying on each other's lipsticks and making catty comments about the runs in each other's stockings. All of them had at least one run. “Is that a boy or a girl?” one of them cried when he-she saw me.

“If I don't know, why should she?” said another.

“Oh—it's Noh! Noh, darlin', take me away from all this and buy me a drink.”

“I can't afford to keep
you
in liquor,” I said. “Why don't you try the big spenders at the pool table?”