Last December, my lover and I went to spend a day with her mother to celebrate Chanukah. When we got there, we rang the doorbell. Her mom opened the door while standing behind it, said, “Don’t be scared . . .” then stepped out. She looked like she’d been in some sort of horrible chemical accident or fire or car wreck. Her face was one huge burnt, peeling scab, with skin so tight I could see it pulling at her mouth and eyes. She was wearing dark sunglasses (in a dimly lit hallway), but even so I could see that her eyes were swollen and bruised. She was wearing a bandage around her face, from her chin to over her head. My lover and I must have looked completely stunned, because her mom immediately explained that she’d had a “chemical peel.” Seems she’d been concerned about some age spots on her face.
We didn’t talk about her face while we were there. Her mom was obviously disturbed by how she looked and very uncomfortable. She hadn’t eaten much for days because she couldn’t open her mouth wide enough. She hadn’t left the house either, and was planning on taking extra days off work because she looked so awful. I was really upset, trying to be polite through everything her appearance was triggering inside.
On the way home, my lover and I could finally talk. She was deeply shaken – after all, it was her mother’s face. I felt like I was losing it and I/we went on a long rant about sanity and insanity. Think about it – if I, as someone with a psych history who is diagnosed MPD, did something to myself that inflicted that much damage, I’d be locked up before I even began to feel the pain. For a woman to burn herself, even a little, is considered crazy, but if she pays a doctor a lot of money to burn her entire face, it’s supposed to be sane. Because I’m on SSI and “crazy,” the small violences I commit on myself – both the ones that are an act of survival to avoid or stave off larger violence and that ones that are sheerly expressions of the depth of my fear, pain, and rage – are evidence of my “disease.” Because my lover’s mother is wealthy (and a doctor herself), the very large violence she consented to have done to her own face, for no good reason at all, is considered normal. A lot of her woman friends have this “procedure” done.
But as I thought about myself and her mom, I realized that the issues of women and choice and violence and sanity are so complicated. I believe her mom sees the “chemical peel” as her own act of survival – as a divorced woman in her mid-fifties who is desperately lonely, she feels her appearance has to be perfect in order to “compete” with younger women for love. Think of all the other things women do/have done to themselves under social pressure to look thin and young and perfect. All of them are actually violence, and most of them are so socially sanctioned that women who refuse to do them are the ones who are considered “suspect” (such as many feminists who won’t diet, cover their grey, rip their body hair out, etc.).
So what is going on here? Which women are actually insane? Which acts of violence are the real problem? What are the unspoken rules guiding decisions about which acts of violence against the body are good and which are crazy? And just whose purposes are served by obscuring not only these answers but these questions?
. . . So. So what is actually going on here, so which women are actually insane? What’s going on is something complicated, with roots far back into the history of the west’s conception of gender. And I’ll tell you which women are considered insane – all of us. All of us, no matter what we do or how well we achieve in the world, all of us are suspect. The most calm, rational woman in the world could, after an entirely reasonable comment, be accused of being hysterical (read: “female”) by the most irrational man in the world and the accusation would be taken seriously by other men. That’s what it means to be female now, here, at the end of the twentieth century in all of western culture.
All of us are considered crazy, which is why women must understand SIV and stop being horrified by those of us who do it. Or, shall I say, those of use who do acts that are accused of being violent. Just as all women need our own definitions of ourselves, women living with SIV must also insist on our own meanings. I know that I need to put my SIV into the context of my life and insist that this be how it is understood. I know that people are appalled or deeply upset by seeing my arm with a large, bruised bite mark. I also know that, compared to the physical pain of my childhood and the emotional pain I live with now, that bite mark is inconsequential. That is, the bruise has no consequence for me in my life – it’s something that happened in a flash of not being able to deal, and I moved past that moment almost before I even felt the pain. Having bruises occasionally is part of being me and, in my context, only a small part.
We need new rules about women and violence. We need a rule that says all acts of violence committed against the female body are wrong. All of them, even the ones that make you look “pretty,” even the ones which turn someone on. We also need a rule that says that when pain is inflicted on the female body, it is not wrong or crazy for women to reflect that pain back. Those of us living with SIV need a rule saying we should have a righteous attitude about it; when someone looks at the bruises or scars on our arms, we should calmly point out that the scars carry no long term health risks and that we’d be in much worse shape if we had smoked a cigarette each time we felt the horror of our pasts rising. Ah, but that would shift the shape of the discussion! Since women, as therapists and nurses and social workers, are so often the enforcers of the rules as they now exist, we need for women to start acting on these new rules immediately. Act on the new rules, or at least consider them, before locking away another woman’s life. The committable offense must change, from wanting to hurt yourself to making someone want to hurt herself.
But now, still living under the old rules in which I am the crazy one, I plan to be outrageously crazy. If I’m considered the Bad Girl, out of control, committable, I plan to teach the world exactly what these labels mean. I plan, starting at the beginning of this essay, to show very clearly why I’d rather be out of control and crazy than so desperate to fit in that I would pay someone to burn away my skin, burn away my difference, burn away my life and my truth.
Elliott
Taken from The Cutting Edge archives