Dear Elizabeth Wurtzel – you’re OK, really

elizabeth wurtzel

I read this recent piece by Elizabeth Wurtzel with a mixture of recognition, sympathy, fear and frustration. Wurtzel is constantly derided as a pointless narcissist, but she has a lot of texture. Yeah, she’s absorbed in herself, but she submerges beautifully. She gives us something to marvel at in the process. There’s a nakedness to her words that’s more naked than any picture of her out there.

When I think about Elizabeth Wurtzel I think about a woman with wind blowing up her skirt – but not in a cutesy way. She’s genuinely, darkly erotic. She makes me think of “Watchmen” and the Grimms.

I don’t always agree with everything she says – in fact, sometimes the things she says make me scream or else laugh with derision. I was appalled by her curt dismissal of the suffering in Gaza (but appreciated it when she said that she felt the anti-war demonstrations felt personal to her – it’s something few people on her level admit, and a good starting point for more discussion of the terrible conflict consuming my part of the Middle East). But I can’t get enough of her writing, either way.

I was particularly dismayed by the revelations in Wurtzel’s piece, because as much as she hates aging it’s plainly obvious that she’s getting better and better as a writer. We don’t often offer women like Wurtzel the space that we offer men who write in a similar style, about similar experiences – men writing about past hook-ups with regret are all troubadours composing elegies, and women are just trashy tarts who are being way selfish and shallow, right right right?

This is all the more a reason to rejoice as Wurtzel hones her craft, pares down her story into startling flashes of clarity: “…Bass players, editors, actors, waiters who wished they were actors, photographers,” she speaks of the men she cheated with when her relationship with a Nice Guy named Gregg failed to satisfy her. “Whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it’s more that maturity is wasted on the old,” she laments.

Continue reading “Dear Elizabeth Wurtzel – you’re OK, really”

Sexual Harassment: taking one for the team on Facebook

I’m friending back the strange men who add me on Facebook via the Jordan network, then having protracted conversations with them as to why they’re adding me, what they’re hoping to accomplish, etc. What immediately struck me is that they don’t try to make me interested in them – they assume I am interested right away, hot and bothered and ready to go (well, I added them back, so that would be a clue – although I tell them immediately that I thought I knew them, and now I’ve realized that I don’t, and hence am confused as to why they added me to begin with).

This is more fodder for an article I’m doing, hence “going out into the field,” so to speak. The funny thing is – the minute I ask them, in Arabic, if they’d like it if someone treated their sister this way after I’ve gotten all I need from them and the sleaze quota has been reached, they either up the level of insult or start insisting that they only wanted to be friends.

Poor boys. A blonde foreign woman added them back, then wasn’t interested in sleeping with them after all. And gave them a lecture on top of that. Tsk tsk.

I can’t deny that a part of me has been enjoying this.

Another part, however, is sad.

You know, I’d say that this entire Derek Walcott thing has left a bad taste in my mouth

…But then, some pervert might interpret it as a come-on. 

*haw haw*

As evil_fizz recently pointed out – most people are aware of Walcott’s reputation as, well, someone who doesn’t respect certain boundaries with women. As most of the recent defenses of Walcott attest, it isn’t that anyone is denying that improprities have occurred – instead, people are saying that we should have a different standard for Walcott than we do for other people. 

I am sympathetic to Ruth Padel, Walcott’s rival for the Professor of Poetry post at Oxford, who had to resign after it was alleged that she engaged in a “smear-campaign” that forced Walcott to withdraw his nomination for the post. I think she was being careless when she talked to the media, but what does it say about our priorities when Walcott only recently saw his inappropriate conduct affect his career, whereas women like Padel are automatically reduced to the status of evil trolls when they discuss information that’s already in the public domain? 

As a young female journalist and aspiring novelist, I am routinely warned to never, EVER criticize men like Walcott. If I want to have a writing career, I am told, I need to shut up and smile and allow the Great Men of Letters to bask in their Greatness. Perhaps then they’ll let me sit in their laps, or something. 

More importantly, we are taught to believe that certain men who Live the Life of the Mind can and should get away with demeaning women. Tom Wolfe can call young college women “sluts,” Derek Walcott can be the sort of man whom female undergraduates are explicitly warned against and not be the worse for wear, and so on. Not harassing or demeaning women is already seen as a tough business for your average man, but a man whose “brain is the size of a planet” cannot be held responsible as they are too distracted by their own brilliance to act as responsible residents of this sinful firmament – hell, poor guy was only thinking deep thoughts on Daniel Defoe when he accidentally stumbled into your pants, lady. 

Odd how these excuses are only extended to men wherein their conduct with women is concerned. If Walcott was prone to picking fellow academics’ pockets or abusing his cat, would we be even having this discussion? 

Continue reading “You know, I’d say that this entire Derek Walcott thing has left a bad taste in my mouth”

Monday Music: the Yaroslava Edition

I’ve been reading the excellent Phonogram. Thinking about music as a kind of amber that can preserve both the beautiful and the bloody.

In Kiev last week, I toook a break from Phonogramming away and met a friend for drinks comparatively late one night, then caught one of the newer marshrutkas home. Now this particular death-on-wheels (that’s how we call these little, overcrowded, squeaky mini-buses where you request your stop) took me on a route I haven’t traveled in some time, at least not after dark.

You can imagine the scraping and chafing against my heart, when I saw the bus stop that my cousin Yaroslava (1978 – 2005) used to walk me to whenever she saw me off in the evenings.

Continue reading “Monday Music: the Yaroslava Edition”

Being nearly 25, unmarried, female and from Kyiv

Being thus is a flashing green light for anyone who is dying to quote out loud that awesome thing they read this morning on the metro in a women’s magazine. 

Being thus is that pause in conversation.

Being thus is the following phrase: “Get married, you can always have affairs later!”

Being thus is remembering Yaroslava, whom someone else remembers with “…and for some reason, this beautiful girl just didn’t have a husband. And then she died.”

Being thus is a prickly blanket of loneliness even if you are not lonely. 

Being thus is comparing yourself to those wilting teabags that are saved in the little dish in the cupboard above the sink. 

Being thus is telling people that they sound as though they are from a village. 

Being thus is not telling people your whereabouts. 

Being thus is an intimacy. 

Being thus is being pitied and adored.

Being thus is a passing glance.

Being thus is whispers hanging in the air like cobwebs in the damp-stained corners of rooms with high ceilings.

Being thus is digging at a clump of frozen raspberries with a spoon.

Being thus is an invitation to the parties of your parents’ friends. 

Being thus is advice on how sex prevents cancer – “but I’m having it” – “but you’re an idiot.”

Being thus is a conversation that gets spread outward and outward, like butter.

Being thus is a reassuring smile from beneath a veil from a woman in a church. 

Being thus is the looks from your neighbours. 

Being thus is the quiet lassitude of the swallow-streaked evening skies, and the kettle boiling right as he calls. 

Loosely inspired by the infinitely superior Being Poor (in case you’re wondering).