A Certain Hunger

You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway

Female psychopaths, researchers eventually realized, don't present like the males. To which I respond: No shit. We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood - or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It's not that women psychopaths don't exist; it's that we fake it better than men.

We talk about love like it's an involuntary act. We fall into love, like a hole, a puddle, an elevator shaft. We never step mindfully into love. Love we seem to think, requires a loss of control; love necessitates that vertiginous giving over to gravity; love wants you to have no choice.

I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalistic as a Big Mac. It's not important that it's real. It's only important that it's tasty.

What is heaven but the hope for righteous acknowledgment, and what is hell but the fear of discovery

Some men need to witness female anger to believe in that woman's love. Some women need to get angry to experience that love.

I knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit.

I read, I wrote, I learned, and I fucked—it was a classic liberal arts education.

We expect random acts of violence from men. Men are the people who brought us the golden hits of war, genocide, rape, drones, and foot-ball. We do not expect murder, pain, and sadism from women, but we are co-opted idiots. Our unshakeable belief in women's essential goodness is a wondrous, drooling thing... It's as if none of us ever had mothers who ever acted cruelly and we all did. Some more than others.

Junk food was rebellion, rebellion was femininity, femininity was junk.

You can't be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.

Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.

Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.

I knew that lust was a dangerous thing, but I wanted these men to lust for me because, even though I didn't know the precise shape and weight of lust, I knew that lust was power - and I wanted power even then.

Preverbal, love is the smell of a known body, the touch of a recognized hand, the blurred face in a haze of light. Words come, and love sharpens. Love becomes describable, narratable, relatable. Over time, one love comes to lay atop another, a mother's love, a father's love, a lover's love, a friend's love, an enemy's love. This promiscuous mixing of feelings and touches, of smiles and cries in the dark, of half-pushed pleasures and heart-cracking pain, of shared unutterable intimacies and guttural expressions, layer in embellished bricolage. One love coats another, like the clear pages of an anatomy textbook, drawing pictures of things we can only ever see in fractions. With the coming of words, love writes and is then overwritten; love is marginalia illegibly scrawled in your own illegible hand. In time, love becomes a dense manuscript, a palimpsest of inscrutable, epic proportions, one love is overlaying another, thick and hot and stinking of beds. It's an unreadable mess.

Love is the languid sigh of death, and no one will ever convince me otherwise.

We as an English-speaking people can't not eat our dead— our language loves a cannibal. We don't just win at sports, we kill the other team; we demolish them; we devour our opponents. To express a baby's cuteness, we say we could eat her up.

Judges and juries are notoriously brutal on violent female offenders, a category to which I belong without question. Nature abhors a vacuum; jurisprudence hates a violent woman. We can forgive any number of men murdering their wives and girlfriends. But we have a hard time extending the same compassion to women who kill their husbands and boyfriends, even though women have many more reasons to be driven to it. Culture refuses to see violence in women, and the law nurtures a special loathing for violent women.

My thinking has always been that if love, marriage, and family were intrinsically so meaningful, so exceptional, and so necessary, then we wouldn't need millennia of propaganda selling them to us.

Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone. Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.

In America, our girlfriends teach us what love, trust, and desire are; they hold our hands as we navigate the Scylla of sex and the Charybdis of culture. With them we are our truest, most essential selves. We don’t have to be pretty, but we heap praise upon one another when we are. We don’t have to be nice, and we forgive each other when we aren’t. With our friends, our guard tumbles like acrobats, falls like leaves, and swirls in glittery, dusty eddies. That face we keep up in front of everyone else—family, lovers, husbands, or children—we let slide. Our friends see the frailties, the insecurities, the unattractive bits that we have to keep hidden from the rest of the world because—and this is the meat of the matter—it’s hard work to be a woman.

Feminism comes to all things, it seems, but it comes to recognizing homicidal rage the slowest.

Americans adore systems. We want a system that obscures the system so that we feel comforted by there being both a system and a conspiracy system behind the system.

We were like an old married couple, Andrew and I, companionable in long silences and happy to be in each other’s company. Except, of course, that he was dead and I had eaten him.

It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death. Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.

The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame.

Eat what you love,' they say, and I have. But that's facile. It's not merely that I loved Giovanni, Andrew, Gil, and Marco; it's also that I lost them. And it's not merely that I loved and lost them; it's also that I hated them. As much as they were my lovers, they were my enemies, which is more or less all you can hope for from a person with whom you do not share DNA.

Don't believe the lies. Don't believe those lies, anyway. Believe others, if it makes you feel safe. Safety, too, is a lie.