“
I could just never eat pussy,” a woman dressed as
Nicki Minaj for Halloween slurred to me and my girl-
friend. This was minutes after we had starting offi-
cially dating. The woman leaned in surreptitiously.
“I wish I could, because women are so much better. But
I just can’t.”
This approach, the “good for you, but I could never
ever, ever, ever,” creates a common disconnect between
queer and straight women. In “30 Rock,” after Jack
assumes Liz to be a lesbian, he sets her up with a woman,
Gretchen Thomas. After a brief interlude of sexless dat-
ing, Gretchen ends it. Liz tries to negotiate,
squirming while she says, “Even though I am
not into the sex stuff, if it helps you … I would
let you do stuff to me.” Gretchen responds,
“I can’t be around you anymore,” and leaves.
When I texted a female friend that I had start-
ed dating a woman, she responded, “omg! What
are vaginas like?” Instead of telling her to look
for the answer to such an asinine question in
her pants, I shut off my phone.
The body is a principle site of power in mod-
ern society. We quantify power and success
through our bodies — through weight, sexual
partners, inches of hair, numbers of orgasms.
But the female body is controlled in different
ways than the male. The female body is still
foreign, a misunderstood “other” that localizes
the anxieties of a misogynistic society. This is
despite the fact that now more than ever we
have forums and spaces to discuss the regula-
tion of bodies.
The discussion surrounding the female
body is reminiscent of Foucault’s rejection of
the repressive hypothesis in “The History of
Sexuality.” The hypothesis starts with the Vic-
torian age, as increasing repression developed
with the rise of capitalism, and ends with the
prudish Westerner. But Foucault subverts this
idea, positing that the social restriction placed
on sex leads to much more discussion of it;
if you’re told not to think of sex, it’s the first
thing on your mind. Now, in order to prove that we’re not
repressed, we have to talk about sex. Constantly.
Luckily, I was raised to communicate well. In my
house, speech — particularly observant speech — war-
ranted reward. I learned quickly as a child that when I got
in trouble, I could get out faster with information. I need-
ed to give up either a reason for my misconduct or some
other form of intelligence. My parents measure the qual-
ity of our relationship based on conversations — the fre-
quency, depth and duration. Whenever I’ve started dating
someone, I’ve always told my parents. When I speak to
my mother on the phone, she inevitably asks about them
— how they are, what they’re studying. But when I started
dating my girlfriend, those casual conversations never
took place. They were replaced with a few tense sentenc-
es about once a week that usually ended with my mother
saying, “I just hope you’re happy.”
This made little to no sense to me — my parents are
educated liberals. They have showered me with love and
support in every endeavor. My father cries every time he
plays me the song he wrote me, called “I Will Walk with
You.” When I was at the New England Literature Program
this summer, my mother wrote me at least one letter every
day for six weeks, declaring in each one how much she
loved and missed me.
But when I told her my older brother knew who I was
dating, there was a silence over the phone before she
responded.
“How did he take it?”
“Fine,” I said.
“I mean, it’s pretty shocking,” she said. “That’s the only
reason I’m asking.”
He didn’t care. He never liked any of the men I dated
and always encouraged me to break up with them imme-
diately.
“Well, you’ve dated such unsuitable men,” my mother
said bluntly while I opened the door to my house, trying
to hear her over the frat party raging next door. “And the
only reason you’re dating her is because you haven’t met
the right man.”
When I said that was hurtful, she apologized but didn’t
rescind the sentiment, ending with another well inten-
tioned “I just want you to be happy.”
When I went home, I brought it up with my father and
he looked at me with eyes tired from the spinal surgery
he’d just had a week earlier.
“Do you want honesty?” he asked. I didn’t. When peo-
ple ask that question, I almost never do.
“Yes, of course.”
“Your mother and I are just concerned because we
know that you don’t see yourself for all that you really are.
You’ve always seemed very heterosexual to me,” he said,
looking at me over his tea and bourbon. He paused to take
a sip. “And we don’t want you to settle.”
***
I saw my parents as collectively perfect for so long:
smart, successful, beautiful and endlessly in love. I’ve
always expected to have a relationship just like theirs,
and it’s nerve-wracking to be so invested in what seems
so far from that goal of a heterosexual relationship ending
in two children and continuous 12-year cycles of female
German shepherds. Every time I have an uneasy conver-
sation like this with my parents, distance is inserted into
my relationship. I become more conscious of how I act
with my girlfriend in public. I wonder how this could be
right if my parents, the people who know me better than
anyone, think it’s wrong. Their words create a barrier
between us, and for a while, I feel like I can barely see her
through this uncertain haze.
But then when I’m with her, I forget about it and I can
see clearly again. I laugh, loudly and from deep
in my chest, after barely smiling all day. The suf-
focating mystery ache on the right side of my
back goes away. I feel like myself, but a better,
smarter version of myself that’s not worried
about the puerile nonsense that I feel otherwise
consumed by. The first time we had sex, it felt
like lying in the sun in midsummer, every cell of
my body warming, relaxing and tensing at once.
I sleep better in her bed, in the dark of her win-
dowless room, than I have anywhere else for the
past eight years.
My parents don’t know any of this. I would
feel uncomfortable bringing it up and they seem
uncomfortable asking, all parties involved per-
petuating a vicious cycle of silence. My parents
subscribe, albeit unknowingly, to the “good for
you, not for me” approach of my Nicki Minaj-
clad friend. They’re very supportive of my gay
friends and genuinely wish the best for them.
They didn’t get upset when I unknowingly
chose “Blue is the Warmest Color” for our movie
night a few years ago, in what would go down as
one of the most cringe-worthy three hours and
seven minutes of my life. But I could talk to my
parents 14 times a week without discussing my
romantic relationship.
Foucault contends that there is nothing about
our sexual behaviors or sexualities themselves
that reveal our deeper selves. Rather, the con-
structed discourse around sex and sexualities
that indicate profound truth. Heterosexuality seems to
be the glue holding together many of my conversations.
When I’m with friends from home, we only talk about
relationships. When I had just started dating my last boy-
friend, I tested this by telling a friend about other aspects
of my life before mentioning that I was dating someone.
She smacked my arm, ignoring that I was driving on the
highway.
“Rebecca!” she said. “You have to tell me the important
stuff first!”
It seems inescapable that heterosexual relationships
are prioritized and a lack of normalized love stilts con-
versation. This discourse makes my relationship a per-
meable membrane, allowing other opinions to diffuse in,
making it terrifyingly susceptible. But it also reflects how
I’ve always felt — that I am made up of everything and
everyone I know, meaning even when I’m thousands of
miles away from my parents, they’re always with me. And
though their doubts put a strain on our relationship, it
is comforting to have at least parts of them, their good-
ness and intelligent beliefs, ingrained in me. Introducing
queerness into this dialogue warrants an inevitable awk-
ward pause now, but has the potential to reinvigorate a
later conversation — or start a new one.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016 // The Statement
7B
by Rebecca Lerner, Daily Film Editor
In Other Words
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA