Strong Verbs Are Just Better

The two women weren’t sure whether they would win. That’s also something I’ve heard often—these protesters aren’t the most optimistic group. No rose-colored glasses here. “But we cannot give up,” one insisted, “because if we do, there will be no future for us anyway. We might as well go down fighting.”

CdR: What I knew was that I wanted to write a book about liberation: what it means, what it costs us, why we need it, how we carve it from the world, how we get there. And perhaps this will sound radical, but I don’t think we’ll ever reach liberation—as women, or as queer people—without affirming our true erotic selves, or our right to joy. James Baldwin knew this; in Another Country, the most undersung masterpiece of the 20th century, he takes us deep into the connections between pleasure and agency, desire and survival. Audre Lorde knew it too, lying it out in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power.” I’m so glad you saw pleasure as a form of resistance in this book—along with all the other forms of resistance the women pursue.

I was interested in violence as part of masculine identity and so I read the book I mentioned earlier, Amateur by Thomas Page McBee. McBee is a journalist and a transman. The narrative starts when one night McBee is accosted by a man who is trying to pick a fight. McBee notices in himself his own aggression in response, his own fists clenching, his readiness to fight. This impulse confuses him, McBee himself was physically abused as a child by his stepfather. He considers himself a feminist. He doesn’t understand where this drive is coming from. In America, there is an established ‘tradition’ of charity boxing matches. Amateur boxers get in the ring for three rounds to raise money. McBee decides to train for one of these matches and pitches the accompanying story to his editors. He undergoes an immersive research experience. He works with a professional coach and ends up fighting someone way out of his weight class in front of a packed audience in Madison Square Garden. Through his relationship to his coaches, to his sparring partners (both male and female) and to the other men he encounters in change rooms, McBee investigates this male impulse for violence.
To reap the rewards of masculinity you have to pass as cis. I am not approaching masculinity from the same history as a cis man but if I ever have an appearance that passes as cis male, I will be afforded privilege and I never want to be someone who denies that privilege or manipulates it. However, this privilege is different from cis male privilege even if it comes from being seen as a cis male. This privilege relies on your capacity to pass and the knowledge that one is passing is often hand in hand with the knowledge that if you ever slip up the threat of violence worsens. Because you’ve been ‘deceitful’.
In the gym, McBee becomes a different sort of person as he passes.

Is there a grant I can get for working so hard, for being so willing to spray personal secrets like aesthetic vomit? My limbs feel like tightly coiled snakes. My brain is soggy spaghetti. The light jumps out of the sun and pours down like tequila sunrise, bounces off my skin like bouncy balls… no. I cannot write anything without imagining an audience. Hello…you. How many times can I write about myself before it gets old and ugly? How many times will I throw myself off the end of the pier before I will learn to swim? Just kidding, I’m swimming right now. Just kidding, I’m writing this.
Hello, you. Tell me I’m a good girl. Now: mean it.

Sometimes it felt like Sydney was a microcosm of the world, and the world was falling apart. One night, around 2am, I was on break getting a kebab when this guy walked in asking for scissors. Got any scissors? Need to get this thing out of my ear. Then he showed me his ear – there was a headphone jack pushed all the way in. It was like one side of him had sealed up, and I thought he looked like a doll. Stupid headphone jack, he kept saying. Then he grabbed a plastic fork someone had left on the counter and tried to fork the headphone jack out, but it wouldn’t come. Eventually he turned to me and asked me what I reckoned. I reckon you should go to hospital, I said. Yeah, hospital, he said. Naa. Maccas will have scissors. Then he threw the fork back on the container and walked away.
I didn’t have many friends at work, and this suited me fine. I wasn’t there to make friends – I was there to go around and around for as long as I needed to figure out my problems, and to work out if it might be possible to love myself again.