Elaine Miller
Piece written to be read aloud at Harry's Cafe on the occasion of the "Women on Wheels -Rolling Feminist Library" launch. (mid-nineties) Still untitled.
Women on Wheels Reading
As children... although not only as children... we are fascinated with measuring ourselves against others. We seek to define what makes us uniquely us and what makes us just, comfortingly, the same as everyone else; drawing lines - this is me, this is you.
We compare ourselves with other children, and form a detailed model of ouselves, almost a set of performance specs.
And our model is made up of many things:
Everything we can see or measure -
I'm 8 and 3/4 years old. I'm 4" tall! That's average for my age. I have brown hair and funny kind-of-greeny eyes. I can run faster than Stephanie and not as fast as Allison, and not nearly as fast as the older kids.
Our model is also everything we are told about ourselves:
I am scottish and canadian, too. I am really smart and I can spell well. Or maybe: I am selfish and I am far too wild and I don't listen. I am so spoiled.
And our model contains all the things we want to be. I'm going to be big, strong and confident. I can't wait to grow up so I'll know everything and never be afraid of the dark.
Using others as mirrors to see ourselves more clearly seems to me to be a necessary piece of growing up. It allows us to form our model of ourselves and with each new growth spurt, we use yesterday's model as the root system, the foundation on which we build ourselves anew.
I began to read for myself when I was three years old. From tests in high school, I know that my reading speed is in excess of 687 words per minute. That's way above average for my age. It works out to about a page every half minute, or a normal-sized paperback in three or four hours. Or a textbook in a day. That's my cruising speed - in a hurry I can scan for a word or a phrase on a page almost as fast as I can... turn over a new leaf.
You didn't need to know those numbers, but they might give you an idea of how many books I read, spending most of my childhood in a pink-carpeted suburban bedroom with mostly my library card for company.
I was a lonely child, and an odd one, and I looked through the pages of my books for an echo of myself, for a role model, for someone like... me.
In all the stories I read, there never was anyone quite like me. But I did know what I wanted to be, 'cos when I was really little, everyone told me that a good person was someone who was brave, strong, intelligent and funny. When you grew up you knew the right answer for every question.
But then only a few years later, I was found out that a woman, a young lady, a... girl... was soft-spoken, shy, self-effacing, and emotional. She cared for others in a gooey sort of way, and waited to be rescued when trouble happened. That was the only way a girl could possibly be.
Fuck that. I was never going to grow up to be a girl.
So my scottish, landed-immigrant, old-country parents were a little concerned at their wee lassie running aboot the hoose pretending to be a pirate. Or a thief. Or a woods-wise forest adventurer. Or a spaceship captain.
My sister, five years older, had dutifully grown into a real girl, loving frilly dresses, keeping doilies under decorative miniatures, and waiting for her shining knight on a doe-eyed unicorn to come knocking at the door of our middle class, single family dwelling.
(I think she was reading my mother's Harlequin romances...)
I slew knights like hers in fair combat a thousand times over. *And* I rode their unicorns. I imagined saving poor travellers from robber barons and in a gentlemanly way, returning them to their homes unharmed and thankful. I was Robin Hood, I was Errol Flynn, I was Peter Pan and I was the leader of the resistance and I fought for the downtrodden and the underdog.
And of course, there was always my fascination with the requisite fair maidens,... although.. I was not sure what one did with them after the rescue.
To my parent's dismay, I continued to be nothing like my sister. Her barbie dolls had fashion shows and smootched with ken dolls. I threw out the funky seventies clothing, threw out the Ken doll, made little leather outfits for my barbies, and they flew spacecraft, or rode horses and fought villains with swords. They had treasure and trading goods and adventure and when they caught the bad guys, they... well, they tied them up.
(I was starting to figure out what to do with the bad guys. I still didn't know for sure about the fair maidens.)
I didn't really know it then, but I was trying to set myself up with an identity to live up to. I wanted to be a hero, just like in my beloved books, and it was painful for me to learn that I was not strong or brave enough to be the hero I wanted to be. I tried really hard to become stronger and braver.
At the same time I was realising that perhaps the heroes I strove to be were not quite real enough to be adequate role models.
I couldn't imagine heroes writing letters to their aunties in scotland, for instance, thanking them for the dutiful long-distance birthday present of underwear. (A guess which was always wildly inaccurate both in size and fashion sense)
And the heroes never had a mother like mine, to whom the grass stain on a childish knee was the equal of wickedly defacing her neat and tidy ideals of girlishness and scottish motherhood.
"Your sister never gets covered in filth, why don't you take a leaf out of your her book?"
Take a leaf out of your sister's book... A scottish saying apparently meaning "Why can't you be more like her? She's a nice girl"
I never told my mother it was because *she'd* been reading Harlequin Romances and *I'd* rather be run through with my own sword.
I can't imagine - can't begin to count - the number of cities I've visited, the people I've met, the sights I've seen - in my mind's eye... When I began to read science fiction at the age of twelve, it got even better - now I ventured out of our solar system, into new worlds where there were races beyond my comprehension, new ways of getting along on a small planet... and grand vistas of What If. I inhaled a rarified whiff of hard science here and there too.
I had no basis of conversation with the people and other children I met every day. They were quite a bit more alien to me than the book-bound bug-eyed monsters I hurried back from school every day to meet.
I was a geek.
I dreamed the dreams of people I had never met. My first love was a fictional character by a grand master of science fiction. No one, then or since, has ever quite measured up to that gloriously three-dimensional, happily imperfect, vibrant character who sprung to life for me every time I picked up my well worn paperback.
And my heros....changed. Science fiction was years ahead of its time in gender equality (once you got past the Space Bimbos and their string-bikini-spacesuits) and I could identify with a woman, the heroine of a novel as she thought carefully, made descisions affecting whole planets, or races and acted with authority. restraint. And bravery. This was who I wanted to be...
As I grew older still, and my always present but never discussed sexuality came to the surface of my thoughts and actions, none of the people I had met in my books, none of the few friends I had, none of the people I had *been* as a child - were anything like the person I now felt I was. I had no-one to discuss it with, and even if I had, I had no words for me, or what got me off. I couldn't even say the words I knew. To mangle a common turn of phrase; I couldn't say the word cunt if my mouth was full of it.
At the age of fourteen, physically sexually mature, and woefully ignorant, I was as tightly a sexually-repressed child as my doting old-country parents could have wished. On the outside.
I was too shy to expose my body, even in underwear, in front of another person. I could not discuss sex, or breasts, or masturbatory daydreams and the area between my navel and my knees was somehow invisible. Years of my mother screwing up her face and whispering about "down there" when the subject became necessary had instilled in me a deep distrust of all things to do with my... what? I don't think I even had a word I could use in front of my parents. As if I would ever bring it up.
All I knew was what was inside my head made me the only person in the whole world who felt the things I did. No-one else could get hot and wet at the idea of power and sex games, of spanking, of tying up the bad guys... and of tying up the good guys. It was filthy, perverted... and invisible.
And so I did what I could, what I had always done - I did my research and looked for echoes of my sexual self in books.
I looked for years.
Along the way I learned, by trial and error... er, mostly error. I taught myself to open up, to love my body and not to be ashamed. I got that idea from books. Sex turned out to be great, a good physical feeling and a fun game. I got real good at it; books helped here, too. You'd be surprised what you can learn about what not to do from popular fiction.
By sixteen I had *finally* figured out what to do with a fair maiden.
But boy or girl or man or woman, there was always something missing from "normal" sex. I experimented with tying people down, endlessly teasing, or spanking them. My poor lovers. I don't think they knew what... hit them.
I kept catching a hint of myself in books - at people's houses, the paperbacks hidden under stacks of playboys in the back closet in the bedroom. Some of the characteristics were right: sadistic control freaks, sex that wasn't sweet and kind. But they were mostly just the stereotypical Real Man. And then still more princesses, victims, ravished heroines.
I couldn't identify with them. I wanted to be female, but by my definition, on my terms. I wanted to be My kind of woman. But I was still the only one I knew of.
You see, as a *female* intelligent sadistic caring aggressive warm cuddly non-monogamous dominant bisexual control freak nymphomaniac slut, there wasn't much in the way of role models or peers any more. Robin Hood fell way short.
I found lots of non-fiction about human sexuality. Learned and detailed, I *knew* these books must cover every little sexual quirk or identity in the history of humankind.
Well, I found out I didn't exist.
There is no such thing as a sadistic woman. Bisexuals are some kind of odd people who can't make up their minds and float from man to woman to man to woman. You can't, apparently, be powerful and sweet. Women are naturally monogamous. Women are not kinky, but forced into degrading roles by their mates. All women really want to be controlled, taken, freed of their guilt so they can find absolute pleasure in the arms of their strong, brave, (sometimes thrillingly cruel) male lover. (sigh)
Now, I don't knock the right to choose this path - my sister recently came out to me, told me she was and had been for years a devoted submissive, a fantasy fair maiden, the rescuee. But I always knew I wasn't her.
Just like I knew I hated Harlequin romances.
Finally, in the last five years I have met others like myself - strong women making choices about how they want to live, and love, and fuck. At the same time I read with awe books and stories and articles by Carol Queen, Robin Sweeney, Sallie Tisdale, Pat Califia and others. So many others... Strong, sexy, brave women thinkers. Now that I know where to look, there are magazines for everything... Anything That Moves, Black Sheets, Lezzie Smut, Lickerish, Bizarre, O, Boudoir Noir, BadAttitude, Brat Attack, Metropolitan Slave...
And of course... Diversity.
I started the magazine because I grew up in a book. And I have grown up. I can be strong and brave, and I try really hard to be funny... I'm not afraid of the dark, and I've come to terms with the fact that I have way too many questions to ever get the answers straight. I'm grown up and I want to give something back - to entertain and titillate and educate, and provoke sparks of thought... maybe there's someone out there like the younger me, wondering... if she is all alone inside her head.
I had many, many mentors through the medium of print, and I'll never forget that I am the product of the ideals and imagination of a thousand people I've never met. But I know I've come an epic journey through all those pages to end up here... and I can look around at all of you - not the same as me, but in some ways, just like me - and I know that I am home.
