There’s this breast augmentation ad on the subway where this woman’s holding oranges over her chest and looking sad in the lefthand picture and grapefruits over her chest and looking happy in the righthand picture. Is this what a woman needs to feel whole and happy? If only I’d known earlier. I could have gone to the fruit store. The image causes me to look sad without holding any fruit in front of my chest whatsoever. I tried writing something about this ad for the rest of my commute but felt riddled with a strange kind of stillness.
Why can’t we just be happy with our oranges, metaphorically speaking? I mean we’re not even allowed to just say thank you when given a compliment; see Amy Schumer’s skit where all the women kill themselves in various violent ways when one of them does so.
As I sat looking from the breast augmentation ad to my page—blank except for a few sentences filled with so many extra symbols—I wondered if anyone had ever done a study that decoded women’s grammar for signs of insecurity and hesitancy (perhaps linked to the sheer volume of augmentation suggestions they receive daily for one thing). The extra ellipses, commas, and parentheses in my writing (see this one and the one in the sentence before) are like tiny thought prisons standing in the way of my just saying whatever the heck it is I need to say.
Don’t even get me started on exclamation points in emails! It’s like shouting, I love you! Love me! Sorry for existing! every other sentence. And, yes, I use exclamation points like crazy. I’m also a big deferential smiler. It’s like that fabulous essay by Amy Cunningham, “Why Women Smile,” where she compares it to how monkeys draw their lips back to show they’re not going to attack. But what if I was finally ready to attack, creatively speaking?
Lately I’m getting the sense that I’m the Alyssa Milano character in the bad ’90s movie, just dying for some bad girl to coax me out of my glasses and into the raising of some hell. I guess I’m the fake good girl with revolution in her heart.
I tried to write about some of these sentiments in a novel recently but continued to feel paralyzed. What was it I was trying to say, goddammit? Sometimes I wonder if my paralysis when it comes to writing about certain parts of myself comes from an ingrained belief (that my whole career has been an effort to explode) that I can’t show all this as a woman because it’s not beautiful, not properly augmented. What can I say, it just seems easier for a man to force his reader to gorge upon his every lurid detail in his Great American Novel.
I grew up, like every other writer in my country, aching to pen the next Great American Novel, but I suspect that territory seemed further away to little girls. I remember sitting in history class feeling drawn to the spatial implications of the American frontier and equally full of desire to transgress its borders. In her Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldúa defines a border as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” I have been wanting to bust my way through whatever this “unnatural boundary” was for as long as I have existed. I can’t be sure, but this boundary seems to have something to do with breast augmentation ads.
I was born early enough in American history to still feel I could help construct it but also only some 60-ish years after women’s suffrage—dangerously close to a time when women had no rights. I marvel at how early I fall in the history of American women being able to make public decisions. It’s cool in a way that our country was written into being by our forefathers, but how and where to insert the foremother in all of this? Where was she anyway? Perhaps she was waxing her pioneer legs.
Not only are we pressured to maintain our looks, but we also manifest our sorrow through them—at least according to television. Apparently, according to televisual rules, our hair is a topiary shaped like our sadness. The TV show Scandal, for example, always illustrates Olivia’s tragedies by letting her carefully landscaped coif go natural. When her father checks up on her after she has murdered a man, Jake informs him she’s doing better; she’s even promised to do something about her hair. Which of course she hasn’t. She has stayed silent. But silence is so often registered as a form of consent.
I’ll tell you a secret now. My hair can write. It’s not something I brag about; it’s just something that happens when I’m backed against a wall for the last time. It’s just something my hair does when it’s forced to look a certain way, when it’s spoken for without even an attempt to ask how it’s feeling. My hair just gets so pissed off when that happens. Not me. I’m serene, but my hair just rages and rages. Maybe my hair can write that novel scene about the breast augmentation ad for me.