On misogyny - Gina Abelkop
The late great lesbian-feminist writer Bertha Harris, in an interview with June Arnold, another lesbian-feminist genius, said, “The girl— the virgin— and the monster are a configuration of power. And it’s the girl’s last stand— both in literature and in life, too.” If, in this essay, I re-make myself as both the monster and the virgin, then who was the conjurer of big bad feelings? Must be what Harris called “getting phallicly socialized.” Which means getting fucked. I got fucked a lot and I liked it a great deal. Sometimes I loved it. But I don’t like it when I’m on my back and I look up and the face glaring down at me appears to want to throw me in a dumpster after its cut my head off, boiled my brains down to nothing and sliced up the bottom of my feet so my corpse can’t even crawl away to escape the stench. I do not want the choice of sex to mean the choice of death. Getting over my big bad feelings meant separating the two, for real this time. No more sex death. No more conceptualizing my own murder as a basis for pleasure. I am talking about real murder this time. I am talking about misogyny.
*
Gina Abelkop lives in San Francisco, where she writes poems about time travel and new wave women. She is also a Pisces. Read about her big feelings at themoonstop.blogspot.com.
