DOROTHY ALLISON, Again

........and Revolutionary Sex.....

                

Puberty cost me my body. Until I was six or seven, my body had belonged to me, or at least it did in the summertime, when I did not have to wear shirts or shoes. When my mother said I must start wearing shirts because I was ‘developing,’ my body became foreign, someone else invaded my body, pushing herself out into breasts and widening hips and black hair growing where I felt most private. I was horrified. Frightened. Appalled. Who was this other person?

                  And listen, anyone who tries to make menstruation seem like a good thing is lying. Suddenly I was bleeding between my legs from a hole I hadn’t known about.  Menstrual blood stinks, menstrual blood smells a lot like rotting meat. Tampons, which are a fairly recent invention, muffle some of that reality, but the pads I was taught to wear introduced me not only to my own thick dark blood but to slippery red-black clots.

                  The first glimmer of sexual excitement I ever felt came from reading books, so it’s not surprising I’ve spent my life writing them. The emergence of sexual feelings meant that the fact that I would be forced to live inside this strange new Blanche possibly might be worth it. Maybe. Sometimes. Maybe not.

                  Most women know instinctively that we are prey. In any case, we learn it fast. Men are stronger than women, that’s just a fact, and sexual desire can lead to intercourse can lead to pregnancy, can lead to difficult moral choices and/or becoming responsible for another human being. For boys, pregnancy is more like a metaphor. You fuck, wow, something has left your body and creates a new something outside you, what a miracle. For girls, pregnancy is not metaphorical, though it is miraculous. How could another person grow inside me, intent on pushing her way out?

                  Like my friend Dorothy Allison, I knew I could never consent to having a child created inside my body. I could not bear the idea of my identity being divided. Then, like Dorothy, I discovered sex with women.

                  Dorothy discovered she was a lesbian when she was still a teenager. I realized I was a lesbian when I had been married to a man I loved for seven years. What a shock this was, for him and for me, because our sexual relationship had been relatively good, and we loved each other.

                  But women, the sexual beauty of women, I stepped through a mirror into a different reality. One of the characters in the novel I wrote about the radical feminist movement in the 1970s, Terminal Velocity, makes a case for revolutionary lesbian sex. Sexual excitement, Jordan claims, can be related to procreation for women, but orgasm is not. “The female orgasm is revolutionary because it is related to nothing!”

                  I hope you understand that I know this is a hilarious thing to say. But Jordan is not wrong. Most women know that orgasms are related to clitoral stimulation, whether direct or indirect, and are not related to pregnancy.  What, then, is the evolutionary purpose of the female orgasm?

(I am having a hilarious time with these questions, and I suggest you google “female orgasm evolutionary purpose.”  Really. Do that, and see those evolutionary theorists squirm about this question.)

                  The purpose of the female orgasm is pleasure. Release. And separated from the risk of pregnancy, it is pleasure and release on a scale that I, having been a functioning heterosexual wife on the safety of birth control pills, had not even imagined. I stepped through the mirror to a different reality that was worth all the risks. And the risks were many. Painful. Sometimes quite awful. But women seemed so sexually beautiful there was no going back.

                  Susie Bright, another sexual revolutionary and also a friend of Dorothy’s, wrote, “For the lesbian, the hand is the cock.”  Bright wrote that line long ago but I only read it recently, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it. The cock is a clumsy instrument, but the hand, the human hand, is a complex and subtle instrument. Hands write books, hands painted the Sistene Chapel, and mouths, mouths sing and speak and sing and speak.

                  I’ve never written directly about any of this. I did write a self-mocking piece, “What Is This Thing Called,” about my penchant for falling in love with women, and Jordan, in Terminal Velocity, is a tragic heroic figure I created, but, to honor Dorothy, I want to stand beside her right here, right now, and say this: We were sexual revolutionaries. And she was one of my heroes.

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                  POSTSCRIPT: Like Dorothy, I eventually ended up married to a woman. We’ve been together 27 years now. I don’t know if Alix and Dorothy got married, but, like them, Leslie and I chose to have children. Alix and Leslie were the birth mothers, of course, not Dorothy, not me. Perhaps ironically, having children turned out to be the greatest blessing of my life.