Barbara Kruger, 1987
Lately, I’ve been having some conversations with a friend who is in one of those “smart women, bad choices” relationships. Without actually using the word, she’s been describing how her long-term beau has been tormenting her, even though she’s smart, talented, witty, and reasonably attractive. Believe me. I don’t judge her because I’ve been there too. I know too well how despite your intelligence, position in the world, and even feminist politics, because of your deep-seated, underlying sense of unworthiness, you can learn to accept as normal a relationship that continuously and insidiously undermines your confidence in yourself, particularly your confidence in yourself as a woman.
This morning, while I was having my run, Lucinda Williams’s song, “Passionate Kisses” came on my IPOD, and I said out loud, using my friend’s name –this one’s for you! And I realized how this song is an anthem of women’s desire and empowerment. “Shouldn’t I have it?” That is, am I not entitled to have a life in which my basic, fundamental needs, my needs for expression and art, and also my need to be affirmed and appreciated as a woman are fulfilled? Of course this is a package that is still difficult for women to think they deserve, let alone to ask for and insist upon. For many years I couldn’t ask for it, and Williams’ song was introduced to me by one of my closest friends who is only now just beginning to be able to do so, herself. So on to the song….
“Is it too much too ask, I want a comfortable bed that won’t hurt my back. Food to fill me up and warm clothes and all that stuff.”
In this first part, Williams begins by posing a question: Is it really too much to ask to have the basic needs of life fulfilled? I’m not asking for much, she says, I’m not making any exceptional demands. Don’t I deserve to have those things that comprise the first levels on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: shelter, food, clothing. I want a place to sleep that’s safe and won’t cause me pain. I want clothes that will keep me warm, not fancy clothes, stylish clothes, but clothes that protect me from the elements. Likewise, I’m not asking for gourmet cuisine, five-star restaurants, I just don’t want to go hungry. A modest request.
“Is it to much to demand, I want a full house and a rock ‘n’ roll band. Pens that won’t run out of ink, and cool quiet and time to think.”
Williams again poses her needs as a question, as she moves on to a higher level of need, the needs related to creativity, to satisfying the soul. It’s interesting that according to Maslow, this is the highest level, possible only when the more fundamental human desires have been met. She wants to have access to her voice, to her creative expressiveness, and she wants to be heard. She wants to have effective tools with which to make her art, tools that won’t let her down, tools on which she can depend. And she wants time and space. She wants to be able to loaf and invite her soul, à la Whitman. She wants a room of her own, the sine qua non for a woman to actualize her creativity, according to Virginia Woolf.
“Do I want too much? Am I going overboard to want that touch?”
I want to be cherished, I want my womanly core to be respected, she says. But again, Williams poses this as a question: perhaps it is too much to expect, too much to ask for. Nonetheless, she boldly asserts that she wants passionate kisses; that is, she wants access to her sexual self. She wants that sexual self, her womanliness, to be valued and appreciated, as opposed to the ways in which it is so devalued and debased in this culture. How it is constantly being torn down and ridiculed. And like men, she doesn’t want to have to choose, to have to sacrifice her womanliness in order to satisfy her other needs.
“I shouted out to the night give me what I deserve cause it’s my right.”
“De profundis clamavi ad te.” As in the Psalm of David, “out of the depths I cry to You.” In other words, she is shouting from the depths of her being to the universe in all its fullness. And she is asserting that it is her right – to take up as much space as she needs, to have her fundamental creature comforts satisfied as well as her artistic ones, and she asserts that it’s also her right to exercise access to her sexuality and desires without being mistreated. To have *RESPECT* as Aretha Franklin demanded so many years ago, including the right to have her womanly core respected. To not be taunted, belittled, demeaned, ridiculed for her womanly nature.
In 1958, the writer Katherine Anne Porter wrote to a friend: “As a woman, I have a sexual pride quite the equal of any man’s I ever knew. Men are continually accusing women of trying to castrate them by insulting their maleness . . . but do you forget that all boys start this kind of thing with all girls very early, and they keep it up very late? I know that when a woman loves a man, she builds him up and supports him. . . . I never knew a man who loved a woman enough for this. He cannot help it, it is his deepest instinct to destroy, quite often subtly, insidiously, but constantly and endlessly, her very center of being, her confidence in herself as a woman.”
The attitude Porter describes is still alive and well in the schoolyards, sports arenas, and bedrooms of today: the worst insult to a boy is to call him a girl. Or, look at the revilement heaped upon Hillary Clinton in the recent primary contest, how many hateful epithets applied to her were related to her femininity: nagging wife, she-devil, nut-cracker, a naturalized and accepted undertone of commentary and description that totally sidestepped intelligent discussion of her ideas.
“No one can mistreat you without your permission.” Well – I beg to differ with that bit of common wisdom. But just as we can teach ourselves to be our own mothers, we can attempt to counteract our perniciously deep-seated feelings of unworthiness. We can demand the right to take up space and have our many levels of needs fulfilled. We can try to tune out the assaults of the playground jeers and demand it all.
On a lush picture surface crammed with phallic petit fours, the artist Barbara Kruger has written: “Give me all you’ve got.” I won’t suppress my appetite, I won’t hide my desire. Give me passionate kisses!
