(group that comments on the action)
Dyann and Steph and Marie-Jeanne decided I would make a good roommate after all. The interview had more or less ended with Stick’s intrusion. Marie-Jeanne had asked me what the fraternity boys had thought of my hairy legs. “Airy,” she called them, and it had taken me an extra beat to make sense of what she’d said. I blurted, “This is the weirdest interview ever,” and they laughed and agreed with me.
“I think she is okay,” Marie-Jeanne said, and she stood up and started stacking books from the dining table into her bag. “I have to go to class. Yes?”
Dyann frowned. “That’s not exactly … We at least need to check in with Charla.”
“We need to choose someone, and the phone has not exactly been ringing. Karen is okay, I think. A fellow Canadian! C’est assez pour moi.” Marie-Jeanne smiled at me with her even white teeth, her red lips, her blue eyes.
And Steph had called me that same afternoon at Rachel’s to report that Charla too thought I’d be a great fit. “She said you spent all last year in the dorm hiding in a corner reading poetry, when you weren’t taking pictures. Which is enough for Charla apparently.” I assumed the hint of disapproval in her voice was for Charla, not for poetry or photographs. Steph had liked me from the start, I thought.
“What do you think of the name ‘Femhaven’?” she said.
It sounded like a menstrual pad company. “For what?”
“For the house. Charla wants ‘Moonmere,’ but MJ thinks that makes us sound flaky.”
“What does Dyann think?”
“She thinks naming the house is dumb. She keeps coming up with ‘Raghurst,’ sarcastic stuff like that.”
I laughed. I could picture it perfectly: all of them sitting around that gypsy-caravan of a living room debating the politics of various names for the house. The socio-discursive implications. And now they were letting me into the debates too. They’d picked me! “I like ‘Raghurst,’ actually,” I told Steph.
A few days after I moved in Dyann sent me next door to retrieve her thermos from someone named Jake—roommate of Stick—who’d borrowed it without her permission. “I would only say something I’ll regret,” Dyann said. “We may need to stay on the good side of those guys, but that doesn’t mean I have to put up with their shit.”
“Why do we need to stay on their good side?” I asked.
Dyann shrugged. “Marie-Jeanne and Stick go way back, from some engineering summer camp or something. That’s how we found this house. Through him.”
Stick and his housemates had built a skateboarding half-pipe in their living/dining room. I tried their bell, but the racket of wheels on plywood drowned it out, so I went in and waved and watched from the hall as they ollied and three-sixtied and crashed into each other. Their house had exactly the same layout as ours but no furniture, just piles of their belongings—clothing, books, stereo equipment, rock-climbing accessories—all over the floor. The ceiling above both ends of the half-pipe was dented and cracked and smudged.
A boy named Wheeler rinsed the thermos out for me. He had to keep pushing his glasses back up on his sweaty nose. “So you’re an Esterhazian?” he asked.
“What’s that?” I said.
“You’re telling me that you passed muster for roommate and you don’t even know who Sylvia Esterhazy is?”
“Oh, the professor?” I said. “Steph might try to get me into one of her courses.”
Wheeler wiped the thermos dry on his T-shirt and handed it to me.
“Um, are you an Esterhazian?” I asked.
He laughed. “My point exactly, man! I’m in computer science. Like, why would I even know that name, Sylvia Esterhazy? But you can’t even be their neighbor without drinking the Kool-Aid.
“I love those women, don’t get me wrong,” he said, toeing aside a pair of barbells in the hallway so I wouldn’t trip, “but they are intense.”
I smiled at the way he’d made “intense” into two words. I wanted intense. “Intense” was exactly what I wanted people like Wheeler to be saying about me.
I didn’t have class till the afternoon, so Dyann invited me to come hang out at the Women’s Center. We cycled to campus together. Her bike had a metal rack for a water bottle attached to the crossbar, and the thermos, filled with coffee, rattled back and forth as she pedaled. Her pants were rolled up over her knees. I spent the six-minute ride from Raghurst to the main campus watching the muscles of her calves bunch and stretch, bunch and stretch.
The Women’s Center shared a second-floor room in the Student Life Building with the Center for Students of Color and the Environmental Alliance. The Women’s Center only got Mondays and every second Thursday, Dyann told me, but many of the members also belonged to one or both of the other groups, too, so it worked out fine.
A powerfully familiar odor hit me when Dyann pushed open the door. In the dorms last year most of us had had a kettle to supplement our meal plans with ramen noodles and Cup-a-Soup. The scent of MSG-enhanced broth had had a way of lingering even in the washrooms where we rinsed out our mugs and spoons. I had been happy to leave it behind for tree-planting, where our camp food was of the from-scratch variety, and to have settled at Raghurst, where we seemed to share a common will, at least, toward healthier eating. But now here was the Women’s Center, where someone had obviously stayed late or skipped breakfast and had defaulted to dormitory habits, and to me the place smelled like the good old days. It was like coming home.
There was powdery linoleum tile and some chairs draped in batik fabrics. Placards and banners and xeroxed pamphlets covered every surface of the room. A handful of girls were gathered around a folding table under the windows. “Hey, Dyann,” one of them called, “come and look at these illustrations and tell us whether you think they’re serious enough.”
“That’s not the point, Melanie.” A girl with a messy French braid spoke with a tone of exhausted forbearance. “It’s our content that’s serious; we want the illustrations to counterpoint that, remember?”
Dyann and I peered over the girls’ shoulders. There were spidery cartoon figures with grimacing faces and waving legs. “We’ll reduce them when we photocopy, of course,” Melanie said. “Nestle them in there right among the blocks of text.”
“Is this the STD section?” Dyann said. “Are these supposed to be, like, ‘Hello, Mr. Gonorrhea? Hi, Ms. Genital Warts, want to go get a drink sometime?’“
“Is this for a zine?” I said. Dyann hadn’t introduced me, but I knew one of the girls. “Hey, Jen,” I said, and I nodded round the circle at the others. “Karen Huls.”
Jen Swinburn was the editor of the student newspaper, the Campus Eye. I’d taken a few pictures for her last year, including a front-page shot of a doe and fawn grazing in front of the campus war memorial. My parents had framed the clipping I’d sent them and displayed it on the bookshelf in the den.
“Janine. Hi,” said the girl with the braid. “This is Melanie. It’s sort of a zine, but we’re aiming for a glossy cover because we got funding from Health Services.”
“Cool. What’s it called?” I said.
“DIY Gynecology.”
“But we’ve been tossing around HOT PANTZ,” Jen Swinburn said. “All caps, with a ‘Z’ on ‘pants.’ You know, to signal the levity aspect right up front.”
Jen was a member of Kappa Sigma, the largest women’s sorority on campus. Last spring she’d badgered me to rush. She’d gone on and on about how great sorority membership looked on a resume. I wondered if the Women’s Center staff knew a sorority sister was helping publish their zine. Based on my recent experience, Greek life seemed sort of incompatible with feminism. Or maybe I had it backward. Maybe the Center wanted buy-in from the sororities for better distribution, and they’d sought Jen out specifically for that reason.
“Sure. Whatever else we do, let’s just make sure nobody takes us seriously,” said Dyann.
Janine put her fists on her hips. “Come on, Dyann. You said you were ready to leave that discussion behind.”
Dyann rolled her eyes and plunked herself into one of the chairs to unscrew the lid from her thermos.
I took the chair next to her. “What’s the matter?”
“They won’t include my herbal abortion recipe. The farthest they’ll go is ‘A Gentle Natural Way to Bring on a Late Period.’ They’re worried it would get the zine banned on campus.”
“Would it?”
“Probably. Which would actually get it some readers.” She raised her voice on this last comment, but none of the girls at the table responded. Dyann shook her head. Her feather earring dipped into the cup of her thermos as she drank.
She held the cup out to me, and I sipped the strong, bitter brew. “Does it work?” I said.
“Censorship? Sure. Look at 2 Live Crew.”
“No, the herbal abortion.”
She nodded. “If you’re not too far gone.”
“Why don’t you give the recipe to that pregnant girl who came in here,” I suggested.
“Susannah? Steph did. She was horrified.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Women are our own worst enemies, Karen. If you learn anything at all from Dr. Esterhazy, you’ll learn that. We play nice, and we play along, and so men just go ahead and write us into their fantasies exactly as they see fit.” Dyann jumped to her feet, stalked over to a wall-sized bulletin board, and began tearing off outdated posters and notices. “Give me a hand here, will you?”
Together we cleared the board, leaving only a row of information cards along the bottom displaying contact numbers for the campus meditation center, the Acquaintance Rape Task Force crisis line, and the local women’s shelter. There was a “No Means No” postcard too, the iconic black background with the purple script listing all the excuses girls give for not having sex: “I’m tired” means NO, and “Let’s just go to sleep” means NO.
In the dorm we’d played a drinking game called No Means No. Someone would give an excuse and the girls would decide whether it warranted a NO. “I’m on the rag means ___,” a girl would say, and the rest of us would yell “YES!” and she would have to drink. “I’ve got herpes” meant NO, the girls had generally agreed, as did “I’m an ugly dog” and “I’m your sister, you perv.” Most everything else meant YES.
I pulled down a clipping from the newspaper—not the Eye, the city paper—from last winter with a picture of Steph wearing a camera around her neck. Her brush cut and the saggy cords she wore made her look like a street urchin from Dickens. Turning the Lens Around, read the headline. Women’s Studies Students Stage ‘Operation Sex Shop.’ The article explained how she and Dyann waited outside the adult video store and snapped photos of the men emerging.
“‘It’s about accountability,’ claims sophomore Dyann Brooks-Morriss, aged 19. ‘Most of these men are here to purchase or rent pornographic images of women. They’re here to look, to get pleasure from looking. So we’re making the point that women can look too. We’re not only objects of the male gaze.’“
“This is awesome. I read about this,” I said. “So this was you and Steph?”
I read on: “Stephanie McNamara, 23, a PhD student in the Women’s Studies program, goes further: ‘Porn is the theory; rape is the practice,’ she says, quoting Women’s Studies professor Sylvia Esterhazy. ‘We want these perpetrators to know we have them on record, that we know who they are, even if it’s only an image of their faces.’“
“We talked about this in my Ethics class last year,” I told Dyann.
Dyann snorted. “Ethics? What, it’s unethical to return the gaze?”
“Well, the right to privacy, I guess.”
“And what was the classroom verdict?” She was taunting me, I knew. But she also wanted to hear my answer. After a few days of being Dyann Brooks-Morriss’s roommate I was starting to grasp how she worked in conversation. Silence, or mild politeness, meant she was bored. Sarcasm meant you’d piqued her interest, maybe irritated her. Head-on attack meant you’d hit close to the mark. The easiest way to disappoint Dyann was to back down, to tell her she was right and you were wrong.
“Well, it’s not illegal to photograph people unless you’re publishing the photos,” I said. “And the sidewalk is public property. I love the idea of using a camera as a weapon.” My Nikon F90 was one of the first things I’d unpacked in my new room at Raghurst. I wished I’d had it on me when I retrieved Dyann’s water bottle that morning from the boys next door—I couldn’t wait to shoot their living room skate park.
“That article’s full of inaccuracies anyhow. That’s a Catherine MacKinnon quote Steph gave them, not something Sylvia said. And Sylvia was pretty pissed we’d mentioned her at all; she hates anything to do with activism.”
“I thought you guys all loved Dr. Esterhazy,” I said.
Dyann was writing in a notebook with a black Sharpie. She tore out the page and pinned it at the top of the bulletin board. SHAME, it read. “Steph loves her. Don’t get me wrong, Sylvia’s a brilliant thinker. She’s great for learning the basics, where our fucked-up ideas about women actually come from.”
“But for you it’s about action,” I guessed.
“For me it’s about action.” Below the word “shame” Dyann pinned a picture of Bruce Comfort. She stood back to appraise the effect, grunted, and started writing again.
I stared openmouthed at the grainy image. The sleek golden head haloed by sunlight. The naked brown shoulders. Bruce was barefoot against the deep green of the main quad, cradling a football in his arms like a newborn baby. I’d seen the picture before—last spring in the Eye, some kind of campus life year-in-review spread. Dyann had made a color enlargement of it.
“What are you doing?” said Melanie, behind us. She had a wide, round face with fleshy cheeks that looked even puffier because she wore her fine hair tucked tight behind her ears with barrettes. “Where did you get that picture?”
“Just a sec,” said Dyann. She gnawed on the end of the marker and wrote some more.
Janine looked up from the craft table and gave a little groan. “Um, Dyann? I don’t think we want to …” She trailed off, pushed back her chair, and walked over to us. “Is that another fraternity thing? Why don’t you just put it in the frat file, then.”
“Our frat file is a file. Nobody ever sees it,” Dyann said. She pinned the second sheet of paper next to Bruce’s picture. Refused to use condom, it stated. GBC booze cruise, May 1995. Told Susannah her pregnancy wasn’t his problem.
A small, shared exhalation went around the circle of girls gathered at the bulletin board. We locked eyes with each other, one by one.
“Holy shit,” Jen Swinburn said.
There was surf-sound inside my ears, sudden sweat-sting in my armpits. Gossip was one thing. Gossip was a bunch of us feeling unhappy about the way we were treated and feeling temporarily better when we complained about it to one another, and then feeling worse, probably, afterward. But this was the opposite of gossip. It was declaration, accusation. It was visible and solid. It wasn’t about feeling better or worse; it leapt out ahead of our individual feelings into collective action. Right here on this ordinary weekday morning in this ordinary, homely room, Dyann was giving us permission for something we’d never even considered an option.
“Do any of you women want me to take this picture down?” said Dyann.
Janine cleared her throat. “I have a picture I want to stick up there, actually,” she said.
“Me too,” Melanie said, and she giggled.
Dyann’s feathers curtsied. Her hair lassoed itself. “Okay then,” she said. “Bring them in. Add them to our Wall of Shame.”
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The women of Raghurst hold forth amongst themselves on the subject of myth’s purpose:
Steph: The Greek myths—all myths, really—strive to answer the question, “What was it all for?” The myths ask, “Where are the gods amid all this carnage?” And the myths answer, “Here they are, down from Olympus, taking sides.”
Karen: Whose side are they on?
Dyann: The men’s side, of course. Greek mythology is one long excuse for the rape and murder of women. Just like all history.
Steph: Homer laments the bloodlust, though. “What greater monster is there than man?”
Dyann: “Man,” you see? It’s always men. The myths don’t have a clue what to do with women. They have nothing to say about us whatsoever. We need to build our own fucking mythology.
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