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Monday, September 14

Met with Dolores, she gave me a big list of business to take care of for Tracy. Had to sit with Tracy and register her for a whole new class schedule, shuffling through class lists to find things that more or less matched what she needed but didn't have people from her old house in them. Then I had to call all of the professors and explain that she had had a medical emergency and was excused from the first two weeks of work. I think most of them understood what was going on, but of course it was never stated explicitly. Some of them gave me long lectures about what she needed to pick up and read, etc., others were pretty much yeah, whatever, I'll see her in class. Then I had to fill out a bunch of forms. It was all kind of interesting, at least for the first time. I'm, like, a professional now, or something.

Tracy had some of her old edge of resignation back today, as we faced up to her going back out into the world, but I think she's had to open up to me and Monica and even Heather in a way that she hadn't done before. I think she knows there are resources out there for her, and that she can actually make waves and the world won't come to an end. Despite all our efforts she's bound to run into Frank or his friends now and then, and that's got to be mortifying. But I think she'll handle it. I just hope I can keep her talking, now that we're back to weekly meetings.

It's funny, Dolores and I had a long talk about Tracy but what happened on Saturday didn't really come up. But she asked me to have lunch with her on Friday, maybe that's supposed to be the debriefing.

The rest of the day was pretty normal, I just have so much stuff to catch up on, it's not hard keeping busy. It is still pretty creepy walking across campus. He could be around any corner. Plus every time I see a cop I feel sure they're looking for me.

Tuesday, September 15

Spent a lot of time looking at net porn today, perhaps the strangest assignment I've ever had. It's definitely more interesting at the fringes than in the middle. I mean, how much fake, leg-spread, smirk-on-the-face, hi-I'm-Candy-and-I-love-giving-head sensuality do you really need?

One thing that did get my heart fluttering a bit was the first few multiple-guys-on-one-girl sex scenes I came across. What a position to be in! What attention! I'll have to think about this one some more. But there are some real story line problems with this stuff. These are just some guys you meet walking down the hall of your apartment building. One of them has one of those half-mustaches, just a stripe of hair above his lip. Another is wearing his baseball cap sideways the whole time. Nobody is using a condom.

And they never touch each other, unless they're both shoving their dicks up the same orifice! If baseball cap gave mustache a really hot kiss and felt him up, I'd be more forgiving of the fashion faux pas. The homoeroticism is just so obvious, why deny it? Then on the other hand, it could be pretty amazing to have two guys channeling all their repressed homosexuality through you.

I thought I was a great actress the other day with Bennett but these women are a reality check. How do you smile and look sexy with one guy sticking it up your ass and another squirting a load all over your face? How do you prepare yourself for that? Liberal self-medication? Denial? The money better be damn good, but I somehow doubt that it is. I know there are a few women out there who would enjoy this, but it's gotta be desperation in most cases. I'm trying to imagine how the day goes. You get up, you take a shower, take a bus somewhere (where? some big warehouse behind a strip mall? A fading, weedy ranch house in some down-at-the-mouth suburb?) You get there and then what, you meet the guys and/or girls? "Hi, I'm Rusty and I'll be fucking you today." Do you wonder if any of these guys has had a blood test lately? Does somebody lay the scenario out for you? "OK, first you and Cindy sit on the couch and then Steve and Rusty come in with some wine and then Cindy unzips Steve's pants while Rusty sucks on your breasts and then Cindy licks your ass while you give Rusty a blow job..." Or do they give it to you blow by blow. "Ok, now Cindy, up on your knees, right, OK, now Candy, stick your tongue in her ass..." And when you're trying to smile through a load of cum, do you think about all the men getting off looking at your picture? worry about the pimple you saw on your nose this morning? regret the day you were born? hope you're going to get a fix real real soon? think about how the guy who hired you damn well better get you that lingeré modelling gig like he promised? And when it's done and you're going home are you as high as a kite, are you hating yourself, are you just wondering what to make your boyfriend for dinner, or are you rating the guys you worked with (Yeah, Rusty has an incredible cock but jesus I wish he'd use some mouthwash and Cindy's such a baby about licking me, like she thinks she tastes like an grape cool-aid or something)?

There's a morbid fascination that takes hold, I spent way too much time waiting for pictures to download just to see if I had really plumbed the depths, even though it got pretty monotonous after a while. The only real breaths of fresh air came from the "amateur" stuff. Most of that is fake, too, but every now and then there's something with some blurry, flabby personality. I'd love to ask some of these women what makes them want to do it.

But my assignment was to look into female domination--femdom--and that got me into stories instead of pictures. Here the sex act is still pretty much stripped of context or motivation--I guess that's a basic tenet of porn--and the stories rarely have the superficial polish of the pictures. But, at least based on what I saw coming from this particular subculture, the stories have way more personality. It's not that surprising to me to read a woman's fantasy of dominating a man, but I wasn't prepared for the men's fantasies of being dominated. Not just dominated but insulted, humiliated and more or less tortured. Stuff is stuck up their butts, they're alternately beaten and ignored, their mother's piss on them and they have to lick them clean (and then to orgasm, of course, because every pornographic sex act must by law lead to climaxxx). Of course there's no way to know for sure whether it was really men who wrote this stuff. But it seems too guileless to be faked, I'm inclined to believe that at least some times this represents a real man's fantasy (hopefully, for god's sake, only a fantasy).

I talked about it for a while with Kelly. She's really weirded out by the whole idea of the assignment, which surprises me. After all, she's obsessed by sex, and a lot of her life is about going out to gather data on exotic subcultures. I guess she thinks we're not distanced enough, or not ironic enough about it. But about the femdom stuff, she said, yeah, she used to have a boyfriend who wanted her to piss on him. One night when they were drunk they got in the bathtub and she did it. She never did it again because he was all over her right there in the bathtub and it was kind of gross fucking a guy who had her piss on him. So they broke up. I wanted to know if she had an explanation, whether there was anything else strange about him, but she said no, he seemed pretty normal. But that's her, when has she ever had a normal boyfriend?

Thursday, September 17

Intense class today with Dolores. I can't help wondering whether this approach is doing what she wants it to do. My impression was it's supposed to help us open up and bond, and drop our inhibitions. But it seems to mostly amplify the personality differences, the opinionated, intense people pounce on it (and on each other) and the more timid ones get kind of freaky. Annie was practically in tears and forced Dolores into a long digression trying to reassure us that she was starting with the most shocking stuff because we needed to be unshockable, but she would move on to more conventional material soon and, yes, Annie, love and tenderness and romance would have a place, too.

But Dolores isn't exactly at home with the language of tenderness and romance. What she comes back to over and over is power, both as the currency of erotic interactions and as erotic in and of itself. She's a powerful woman, so I guess this makes sense. Her economics of sexuality can be pretty convoluted, though--she's constantly warning us not to accept the superficial interpretation of a relationship, as, for instance, with the example of strippers. From one point of view they are exploited and degraded, from another they are successfully manipulating guys to cough up of wads of money with relatively little effort. So who's got the power? And, in general, according to her, one should be careful not to be fooled by apparently submissive postures that are in fact covers for manipulative stringpulling. It smacks a little of the gee-look-at-me-juggle-profound-paradoxes game that post-structuralist academics can get into, but maybe there's something to it, I'm not sure.

I pushed her a little bit about this when I talked about femdom. Is there any way that a man who wants to be ignored and humiliated by a woman is in fact exercising power? Is there any way that a woman who has a man lick her clean after she pisses is not exercising power? She said that getting anybody to perform an extreme act, even if it is pissing on you, involves an exercise of power. But she allowed that, in its more extreme forms, femdom fantasies sometimes reflect the effects of abuse or (especially if excretion is involved) pathologically unresolved infantile eroticism. But, on the other hand, powerlessness, as the mirror image of power, is just as erotically charged (there we go with the paradoxes again).

The most interesting thing that came up did pretty much play into her corner. I was complaining about the obvious latent, unexpressed homoeroticism in those three-guys-on-a-girl pictures, and John was running with that (as only he can) when Andrew chimed in that he didn't see it that way at all, that he thought the whole point of most pictures of guys fucking girls was that the girls had to do it, and when she has to do it with a bunch of guys she's even more abject and excitingly vulnerable. So however a man might feel about actually participating in simultaneous screwing, the charge from looking at the pictures is in imagining the woman who can't say no, whether she wants to or not. All the better if she doesn't want to, because it's all the more satisfying when the man's potency wins her over (as it always does). For me, it explains some things. Paige flipped out about it, though, and started attacking Andrew, asking if he really got excited by women being dominated and degraded and if so how could he, and he said yes, it didn't feel like a choice and she started in a tirade about how of course it was a choice until Dolores interrupted. She asked if Paige had ever had fantasies about doing anything really bad, like killing somebody or stealing a lot of money, and if so how would she like to be judged for having had the idea? No, but... Then Dolores asked what good Paige thought it would do to tell off somebody who had just admitted to something difficult or embarrassing, pretty much forcing out of her that all it would do is to make her feel better.

Paige was pretty mad, and I don't blame her, even though I mostly agree with Dolores's point. The problem is that Andrew was really just pulling this revelation out of the deep dark of his mind like some blunt instrument he could use to bludgeon the women in the class. Nothing could have been more satisfying for him than to have Dolores force his point of view down our throats (as he would presumably like to force something else down our throats). And Paige pretty much had to swallow it.

But here's a question. Why is it me that Andrew comes to after class with, "so, what did you think of that? That was a good point you made about that. Are you going to lunch?" Shouldn't he be browbeating Annie or fighting with Paige or hitting on sultry, moody little Maxie?

Friday, September 18

Lunch with Dolores. It was fun, at least until it got weird at the end. She took me to this great Italian place, god I don't know the last time I had such good food, and it was amazing talking to her. She's just such a strange combination. She has this totally therapist way of listening--open, supportive, nonjudgemental. But then she has this almost predatory side, too. I think it goes way deeper than just some Spanish cultural thing.

I met her at her office and she showed me some of the video from last weekend. She was very sweet and complementary about how I performed, she said Henry was genuinely impressed and he would never just say that. What an incredibly squirmy thing to have to watch, yourself trying to keep cool while some slimy old man paws over you! But the dance was still hilarious. I said it was too bad we couldn't show it to more people, it would be perfect for one of those TV shows where people send in outrageous videos. Dolores laughed, but then she worried a little bit about whether I truly understood how important it was to keep it an absolute secret. I assured her that, especially with my life as it is right now, being in my own little space a lot, it was fine. But then she showed me how she had taken a couple of stills, where you can't see his face, and put them up on usenet, and then sent anonymous notes to Bennett to tell him where to look. She can't resist tweaking him. I hope she knows what she's doing.

Over lunch we didn't talk much about Bennett, she spent a lot of time drawing me out, wanted to know about Sammy, about why I got my hair cut and the meaning of it. She had me drinking wine. I never drink wine! But she got a freaking bottle of it, she said, oh, you simply must try this. What was I supposed to do? And she was right, I've never had anything like it, it was dark red, almost brothy, the color of the lipstick of mysterious, dangerous women. So by the second glass my cup spilethed over with Sammy and Steve and Harvey and the whole Sammy=mind, me=body thing. God I hate it when I effuse like that (hate it always in retrospect, that is).

I got to feeling so happy and comfortable that I asked Dolores if it was true, what I heard, that she had worked as a prostitute. She said yes, yes, it's true. She smiled and asked if I was curious in a way that was too playful to call condescending but did say something like "ha, another sweet little American naif." I told her that I had thought about what it must be like while going through the Bennett encounter, and also looking at pictures for her class, but I couldn't quite imagine how... how one went through with it. She said I had to keep in mind that she had been very young and also that what it would be like to me, based on my age and my culture, was very different from what it was like to her as a young woman from a less puritanical culture who wanted desparately to break away from a stifling, domineering mother. In other words, it's not the mere fact of giving your body to a man for money, it's the meaning you make of it. She said I should remember this as I thought about the mind-body problem--experiences are not things that happen to your nerve endings, they're the meaning you make of them. I said I could see that, at least for a while, but at some point selling yourself to any man who comes along must get pretty rough no matter what meaning you give it. She said the trick is to be a little selective, but, yes, she grew out of it before very long.

I couldn't possibly have set myself up more completely. She suggested that I must be exploring my sexuality these days, coming out of such a long and stifling relationship. I said, I dunno, I guess, tee hee. She got very serious, said it's a very important thing for me to do, I'll never know myself unless I test the range and depth of my sexuality, I shouldn't be afraid to experiment, la di da, la di da. And, oh, by the way, here's an idea for you, why not have sex with this undergraduate that I'm treating?

No, no, of course she was much more oblique than that. Had I ever heard of sexual surrogates? Uh, huh. Well, I find them useful in my practice, sometimes, and in fact I'm seeing a kid right now who's an excellent candidate, and I was wondering if you would be interested in helping.

You want me to...?

Oh, no, not necessarily, that would be up to you, it could just be talking to him and some little role playing games. I'd like you to come to my office Monday to talk about it.

That was it for lunch, I got up with my head spinning (doubly spinning, now) and staggered out to the taxi. She talked about how refreshing it was that fall was coming. I wondered if it was really up to me.

I'm still all over the place about this. I'm flattered by her attention, I think she actually, genuinely likes me. I'm horrified. I'm reassured that "it's up to me." I'm trying not to think about it too much until Monday.

Saturday, September 19

Went bowling with Steve&Co. tonight. Why? I don't know. Have I ever bowled? Have I ever wanted to bowl? He's just such a goddamned enthusiast, and so dogged, and I guess I just couldn't say no again. Then again, maybe I'm lonely. Maybe I need some more wholesome company. Who knows.

I don't think there's any way it could have been a "fun" evening, but it could have been amusing, in a sort of anthropological way, if it weren't for my brother. Yes, my brother is now becoming a public figure, I'm sure it would thrill him to know that he's haunting my life. When Steve introduced my to Chip, the arch-Texan, boots, belt buckle and all (his daddy must have a couple of oil wells somewhere), my last name started some little balls rolling in his head. I didn't know it, but big bros lawsuit just hit the news. It took awhile for Chip to put it together. In the mean time I got the shoes and the anchor-weight ball and the run down of the rules and the pep talk and had proved my ineptitude by sending several balls bouncing down the gutter. I had had a chance to watch Trish ostentatiously brush her perfect, glossy blond hair over her shoulder, to watch the guys (Steve very much included) watching Trish do this, to watch Jan watching the guys watch Trish and tightening the corners of her mouth, to watch Pete go through a couple of cigarettes and a couple of beers, and nurse the scorecard with that peculiar fascination men have for the minutia of sport, and then the little bell went off in Chip's head--"Yeah, that's it. You have the same name as that guy who's suing the schools out in Glenoaks."

I don't know why I didn't just say, yeah, funny coincidence, huh? No, I said he's my brother. And Chip said he thought that was fantastic, he had just heard about it on the news and, what a great coincidence! I put on a smile and said "Mm-hmmm" with as much enthusiasm as I could. I really didn't want to get into it, I wasn't trying to pick a fight. But he was really psyched about being one degree separated from celebrity, and he wanted to know how it was going and what the strategy was and when decisions were going to be made and I just said I didn't know and that I hadn't really talked to my brother about it. He was looking kind of perplexed, so Jan chimed in something like, "Chip, I don't think she likes what her brother's doing." She somehow managed to simultaneously insult both Chip and me by implying that he had no clue and that I was not enough of a presence to speak for myself. Pete guffawed. He and Jan seem to go together, Mr. Slouch and Ms. Mouth (who me? hostile?). So I shrugged and said, yeah, I'm not very happy about it.

Then we were off. The liberal intruder had been identified and the immune system was called into action. No, actually, that's not fair, they tried to hold back, out of politeness I suppose, but that made it worse in a way because it just dragged it all out. They had to talk around everything, then do it some more because they didn't feel like they'd really said what they wanted to say. And of course they had to preface everything with a disclaimer they weren't racists or anything but, you know, there are hard cold facts. And it came down to the same tired litany, that if you can't discriminate one way you can't do it the other way, that it's basic fairness, it's in the constitution, etc., etc. Of course I got drawn in and shared my opinions that my nieces had all the advantages they needed and that the objectivity of test results is an illusion, and we sort of talked past each other for a while, with Trish surprising me by piping up every now and then "c'mon you guys, you're so, like, knee jerk!" But Jan had the last word, like it's her job, no, not just job but burden, to set all us idiots straight on things like this. She said that it didn't matter what was fair or legal or whatever, that affirmative action could never work because it was always stigmatizing, that it was insulting to her as a woman because whatever she accomplished would always be tarnished by the suspicion that she only got it because she was a woman.

She did succeed in shutting us up, really just by escalating the tone to the point where nobody wanted to push it. I certainly didn't. Of course for the rest of the evening I could feel the heat of her condescension rays every time she looked at me. And her point has some merit, I understand the fear of not being seen to have accomplished your own things but to be riding the coattails of preference. But the more I've thought about the madder it's made me. Because where does the stigmatization come from? Does it automatically come from giving somebody an opportunity to go to a prestigious school when, under previously accepted standards, they couldn't have gone? No, it's not automatic, somebody has to decide that it's stigmatizing. And who decides that? Well, what a coincidence, it's the people who might have to compromise and go to a slightly less prestigious school. Do all those lawyers and investment bankers and CEOs who went to private schools and had thousands of dollars to spend prepping for every test they took feel undeserving when they land the 6 or 7 figure job? No, because advantages bought with money are somehow fair. But giving somebody without money a break is not fair. It makes me sick.

Conspicuously absent from the debate was Steve, who I would think would have some thoughts about this given his involvement with actual black people. So, I'm a big girl, I should be able to take care of myself. But I do appreciate a guy who's willing to stand up for you. The only real support I had, such as it was, was from Trish. Of course, being beautiful, they don't take her seriously, but they do care what she thinks of them, so I think it made them squirm a little. And then, just as Jan was setting us straight and putting an end to it, Trish picked up a ball, brushed her hair back, rolled the first strike of the evening and twirled and punched the air, all with the poise of a woman used to being the center of attention. Then she said something like "Hey, you guys, what's up with Frank and Jenny this year?" and that was it for Jan's moment in the sun.

But for the rest of the evening everybody had to cater to my sensitivities, not that it kept them from joking about what a miserable castrating bitch Hillary Clinton was, but then they had to ostentatiously apologize to me. It didn't help when somebody asked me what I was studying and I admitted to being a therapist. "Oooh, better be careful what you say!" Chip wanted to know if I knew that sex woman (I guess it was another chance to be one degree away from celebrity, even if it's one in a black hat) and I fessed up to that, too. Jan guffawed (she was keeping pace with Pete and had put 4-5 beers away by this time) that it looked like Steve really was going to get lucky. God, I wanted to crawl under a table! Steve too, he turned amazingly red. But Trish, god bless her, was like, wow, how cool, she's an awesome lady, she's got this incredible apartment by the lake and her husband is a director, etc., etc. It's easy to be catty about her but by the end of the evening I was starting to like her.

When the whole thing was over and the shoes and ball were back in their little places and Steve and I got back to his car he seemed totally oblivious. It was probably 20 minutes to get home and he was telling me about what makes bowling balls different and how they're drilled. We got back to my apartment and the awkward ending moment of the date/not-date. He said how great it was to have me along and how great I had been for a beginner and, wow, he hoped it wouldn't be the last time I bowled. Did I have a good time? I tried not to be chilly, but I could only work up so much enthusiasm. I said I was sorry if I had offended his friends. Truth be told I wanted some sign from him that he knew what he'd just put me through.

Him: What could make you think that?

Me: Well, uh, gee, we're kind of on opposite sides politically and we spent a lot of the time arguing.

Him: Oh, that's OK, that's just talk. I mean, you didn't insult anybody, you just said how you, how you felt about... (most of his sentences trailed off into silence as he struggled for the right word).

Me: I felt like I caused a lot of tension, I'm just so different from the kind of person they like to hang out with, I could tell after we argued about my brother's thing that they were watching what they said.

Him: Nah, they were fine. Well, maybe trying to be a little nicer than usual, they get pretty foul. I mean, you are a little different, but, ah... (he wants to take this back and can't). You know, they were just thinking Steve has this girl and we shouldn't... I mean, we should be nice... (now he's turning red).

Me: No, no it wasn't just that. They didn't want to be mean, I know, but I still made them uncomfortable, it wasn't as fun for them with me around, they had to hold back on the Hillary bashing and all that... At least I felt uncomfortable, maybe I'm just projecting...

Him: (Emphatic now, trying to reassure me) But gosh, you were so, I dunno, so strong, so in control. It just seemed like you handled it...

Me: Well, I'm glad you think so, that's nice, but... but I was mad! And I felt like I was being set up to be this bitchy liberal killjoy. Like I'm some kind of Hillary stand-in for them, annoying and freaky.

(Silence. I'm thinking, speaking of bitchy, here I go.)

Him: (takes a deep breath) I, I didn't think you sounded mad. You just sounded really confident. I kind of liked it, to hear somebody call them on that stuff.

Me: (about to yell, pause for a deep breath instead) Hmmmm. That's interesting. You liked it. Uhhh. That's... nice to hear. It's just that, you know, you didn't say anything at the time. Not that you had to or anything, but, you know, it's kind of nice, when you're new in a group and people are attacking you, to have somebody on your side. Does that make sense to you? (the big red bitch light flashes again)

Him: Yeah, I guess if you put it that way. But you didn't seem uncomfortable, you just kept thinking stuff up, and I just couldn't... It just went so fast, and everybody was so sure, and I don't know... I mean, it's really complicated, everybody had some good points, and Chip would say one thing, and I'd think, yeah, that's right, and you'd say another and I'd think, oh, man, why didn't I think of that, and it felt kind of stupid to just say "yeah, good point" or something lame like that, and if I thought of something you guys would be long gone and it'd be too late to say it, and then... God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you... I mean, if I'd know...

He was wincing and shaking his head in little convulsive jerks and rapping on the steering wheel with his palms when he got stuck putting it into words. In a word, writhing. I had to laugh--he's so sincere. I said, "You don't like arguments much, do you?"

He laughed too. I'm sure it was a relief to him, because he definitely knew things hadn't gone well, but he wouldn't have been able to dredge the reasons up on his own. He's too conflict-averse. He would have just figured I didn't like bowling.

After we cleared that up we were there for a long time, in his dingy Toyota, as the evening grew quieter and colder. I suppose I was curious, otherwise I wouldn't have kept asking leading questions. Part of it was just that I couldn't ask things straight out, like "what's a nice guy like you doing hanging out with a bunch of right-wing jerks?" So it had to be "So, how did you meet Chip?" and then listen to a long explanation of these team projects that first year MBAs do and then "What did Chip think of your work with the Blues Shack?" and a little more prodding and he actually gets around to expressing some reservations about his friends' knee-jerk reactions. But he's not very reflective. He's a team player, a consensus builder, an enthusiast, and an optimist. He's a great believer in business and entrepreneurship as forces for good, and my own knee-jerk is to wince at that kind of stuff. But he makes a good case for it, not by thinking it but by doing it. He's not sure whether affirmative action is right or wrong, he's pretty much swayed by whatever argument he's heard most recently, but he's actually reaching out across the divide and trying to make a difference. So what good am I doing?

How many times does a girl get to keep a guy sitting in his little car in front of her apartment until the middle of the night until he's had enough? I was right on the edge of asking him upstairs. But I didn't. I still feel pretty protective of my space. We got to a pregnant silence, I was just thinking about how to say goodbye. I guess I was looking cold. I was cold, actually. So he slid over and put his arm around my shoulder. I leaned into his chest but kept my arms crossed. More silence. His hand started moving in circles over my back. He said, "Cheryl, I've never met anybody like you... You're... You're amazing." I rode the little ups and downs of his breath, pressed against the nubbly sweater that's not quite holding in his warmth and his vaguely musky aura. I let my hand drop to his thigh, his fingers brushed my scalp. Then I yawned and straightened up. He gave me a sad-eyed look so I turned coy and said "So, will you call me?"

He said, "Oh, sure. Oh, yeah, you know we're going to this baseball game on Wednesday and I wondered if..."

I asked him if he had ever been on a date and he furrowed his brow and said yeah, sure, and I asked him if he always brought his friends along and he said no, gave a sheepish look to the side. One more big smile and a peck on the cheek and I was outta there. I hope he gets the idea.