Mallory's Camera

Sunny yesterday, so after selfless TaxBawana-ing, I went tromping. Listened to podcasts.

By coincidence, the opening cadenza of the most recent This American Life featured a group of children being interviewed on their feelings about impending puberty.

None of them were fans!

When they notice that one of the books uses the word "enjoyable" to describe sex, one boy declares...
Student: I don't think so. That's disgusting.
Janah Boccio: Why are you saying that?
Student: Because it's disgusting.

Remembering back to when I was that age, I would have been inclined to agree with them.

There was no sex education at PS87, and, of course, it was something my insane mother wasn’t likely to talk to me about. So when I began menstruating at the age of 11, it was completely out of the blue. I thought I hadn’t wiped myself properly! I hid my dirty underpants! When my mother finally broke in on me in the bathroom and gingerly explained the whole thing to me, I was shocked and appalled.

I got sexual very shortly after that.

Getting sexual meant I got a lot of attention, something that had been in extremely short supply in my life up until that point, and, of course, certain aspects of it felt good.

But in my subsequent life, I’ve always thought, You peaked at twelve.

Before the relentless push of puberty gave me tunnel vision, programmed me to believe that True Love was the highest heart’s desire one could possibly aspire to.

If blocking puberty indefinitely had been an option back in the day, in other words, I would have said, Where do I sign up?

###

I don’t like labels.

Any label.

Never have.

This is one of the reasons why I’ve never really gotten behind LGBTQ as a political movement although, of course, one has to pay lip service else the label “right-wing creep” will be applied to you.

Don’t people understand that these are essentially marketing categories designed to turn you into an ever more efficient niche consumer?

Supplier-induced demand is most effective with niche consumer categories as Starbucks’ 255 permutations and variations on caffeinated beverages easily demonstrates.

As someone whose sexual preferences incline equally toward males and females, I could embrace LGBTQ as protective camouflage, I suppose.

But why would I?

Sex is always most thrilling when it has that clandestine element. Transgressive sex is good sex! Other sex is mostly boring. I suppose it’s that sacred prostitution thang.

Lois Lane wished me Happy New Year in January.

“Hey, I was just thinking about you,” I responded. “And wondering how it was that we stopped talking.”

There ensued three months of Radio Silence.

Interrupted yesterday when I picked up the phone only to hear Lois Lane’s voice: “Hey, we stopped talking because I am an emotional cripple who doesn’t want to leave the house and can’t maintain relationships much.”

She does make me laugh!

She called because she wanted my help with a client—woman from Jamaica, just left her abusive husband to go live at Grace Smith (local battered woman’s refuge), three-year-old son, no money. Is client eligible for the third stimulus check?

“That depends,” I said. “Does she have a social security number?”

“I don’t think so,” said Lois Lane. “But her son was born here—”

“Which means he’s eligible for a social security card. Which would make him eligible for the third stimulus check. More importantly, it would make him eligible for something called the Child Tax Credit, which Biden is setting up something like a universal basic income, to be disbursed monthly. But, of course, your client must have a social worker at Grace Smith who’s on top of all this—”

Lois Lane didn’t know.

“Well, my dear, I think you have to assume that she does. It’s the nature of battered women’s refuges,” I said kindly.

“I can’t get any information out of them,” she said.

“Of course not,” I said. “They would be committed to maintaining client confidentiality.”

“She’s just so shell-shocked,” Lois Lane said. “Right now, she is dealing with these debilitating headaches, the result of being punched in the head (literally) for years—”

“Ummmmm,” I said. “Well, you know, your role is as this woman’s literacy tutor. That’s a pretty defined role. I’m not sure what the overlap with helping her get her stimulus check may be there.”

“Fourteen hundred dollars could get her new bras and new shoes, both of which she needs—”

“Ri-i-ight,” I said. “Still, as I say, off the top of my head, I don’t see the overlap. You could create one, I suppose, by figuring out some pretext that would make it necessary for you to talk to her social worker—sorry, I don’t have a clue what that pretext might be—”

“She’s not easy to understand,” Lois Lane said. “She’s not easy to deal with at all. Somebody has her passport. I got no angle. I just want to see her succeed and flourish in this new world she’s found herself in, you know?”

“Well, I’d be happy to take a stab at her taxes if it comes to that,” I said. “But I think that invitation has to come through Grace Smith.”

And that’s where I left it.

I am very fond of Lois Lane. We speak the same language—which is a very rare thing for me; I am constantly having to translate the things in my head into Other-People-ese, and I’ve never had to do that with her.

But I’ve given up on any idea that I can maintain any kind of a friendship with her.

###

What else?

I was busy, busy, busy yesterday, but I did slip out in the afternoon for a six-mile tromp:









One intriguing thing about this time of year when it’s warm enough to be outside, but the trees are still six weeks away from leaving is that you can see all those abandoned old houses in the middle of the forest:



In the evening, we did Family Zoom where the conversation came round to the Millennial fixation on gender pronouns.

“My gender is male,” Ichabod explained helpfully. “My pronouns are ‘he’ and ‘they.’ But that doesn’t say anything about my sexual preferences.”

I rolled my eyes.

Ichabod said something sharp.

“No, you’re the one who doesn’t get it,” I replied. “So far as I can see, everyone is pansexual, capable of enormous numbers of gender roles. Defining yourself is limiting yourself, putting yourself in a box. You think that’s radical! I think you’re being played. All categories are marketing categories, so you’re just making it very easy to sell you a particular menu of consumer goods, political attitudes, and entertainment choices. Those consumer goods, political attitudes, and entertainment choices? They’re your identity!

"I don’t understand why people have such a hard time understanding that. What kind of liberation is it to make it easy for other people to put you in a box? Like Walt Whitman said, I contain multitudes—”

“So, you won’t use a person’s preferred gender pronouns?”

“Well, of course, I will. I call people whatever they like to be called. That’s just etiquette.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again.

But five minutes later, we kissed and made up.