The BlueIris Semi-Nightly Poetry Break, 4/16/08

[BlueIris]

"Postfeminism"

There are two kinds of people, soldiers and women,
as Virginia Wolf said. Both for decoration only.

Now that is too kind. It's technical: virgins and wolves.
We have choices now. Two little girls walk into a bar,

one orders a shirley temple. Shirley Temple's pimp
comes over and says you won't be sorry. She's a fine

piece of work, but she don't come cheap. Myself, I'm
in less fear of predators than of walking around

in my mother's body. That's sneaky, that's more
than naked. Let's even it up: you go on fuming in your

gray room. I am voracious alone. Blank and loose,
metallic lingerie. And rare black-tipped cigarettes

in a handmade basket case. Which of us weaves
the world together with a quicker blue of armed

seduction: your war-on-thugs, my body stockings.
Ascetic or carnivore. Men will crack your glaze

even if you leave them before morning. Pigs
ride the sirens in packs. Ah, flesh, technoflesh,

there are two kinds of people. Hot with mixed
light, drunk with insult. You and me.

—Brenda Shaugnessy

[BlueIris]

1. In "The Best American Poetry 2000," Shaugnessy wrote of "Postfeminism":

"I use the term sarcastically, since I don’t believe for a minute that feminism is 'over.' It continues to evolve as a diasporic, shape-shifting, and simultaneous series of interrogations of society but also of souls. A lifelong exploration of how naked to be, how defensive, and with whom. What battles to pick and what to wear. I wanted to write about how feminism can be both menacing and humorous, dangerous and fun! A fraught ontological playground where the floor is a quicksand of self-doubt and inherited bullshit and the glass ceiling is mirrored. This poem is about feminism as a mostly interior struggle, with the carnal body linking that interiority to its equally complicated public existence, knowing that neither public nor private spaces are what they claim to be. The battle is not between men and women, but between self and other, a blurry distinction indeed. The two kinds of people in the world are 'you and me,' that is, personally defined and blurry. Who is predator and who is prey, yours or mine, subject or object, cop or perp, oscillates between any two people up for the feminist challenge of flummoxing power with eros."

[ismnotwasm]

2. That is an excellent poem

It is an interior struggle. Where do we draw our personal lines? Am I a failure as a feminist because I wear lip gloss? An I a success because I weight train? Or a failure because I'm proud of my body, or am I proud of it because men still look, or because I love the human body as-art? Does it matter? (To me it does, I do a lot of self checks)

The successful female sex workers I've known always have something of the pimp about them. In fact you almost have to be a pimp in some way to succeed, in my view.

Who is the predator? I read a study on German prostitution about that very thing, in the red light district. "Prostitution and predation" I think it was called. That the study written by a male just pissed me off, since HE wasn't out there selling his ass, he was observing the women who were trying to make a Goddam living, using an damaged and damaging infrastructure he was safely in control of.

I like feminist philosophy, I read as much as I can, some of it is so insightful it just blows me away, whether it's examining gender roles, ethnic roles, just war theory or reproductive rights or anything else. (I try to post some of it here now and again from Hypatia) These feminists philosophers aren't afraid of any topic, shy away from nothing. Push things as far as they can be pushed. These great minds are everything I want mine to be, and they acknowledge, freely the flux, the challenges. They persevere in a completely male dominated professional world, in a vocation that to this day says women haven't got the minds to do it, WHILE they're doing it anyway.

[BlueIris]

3. Yes, this is great. Has stuck with me for two years. And you're right that the heart of it

has to do with interiority. For so many of us, it is by our own actions that we judge whether or not feminism is alive and well or faltering.