Three Meditations on Impotence

(1) Going to capoeira with an ex-bf can amount to a lot of things. Like being lined up and ordered to kick each other. Like facing him while he taunts "come on you know you want to." Cue rapid milisecond progression at the speed of brain electricity, a jolt of 10,000 memories painbetrayalannoyanceragedespair and then face this boy, who is about 30 times stronger than you and has a blackbelt. Pretend to kick him but instead laugh and poke him in the stomach. When the line rotates again and now he is in the kicking line, snarl "come on, do it again." As per instructions he lays a clean kick on your chest, and you skitter across the floor. God's a real funnyman. Go on, brush your shoulders off.

(2) Spend 1.5 years in medical school. Memorize so hard the cardiac exam, all the vasculopathies, sting at all the red marks on your write ups. Stay up late into the night grunting over the minutia of the Review of Systems. Arrive primandproper at the clinic, so earnest about getting it right. Walk into a room where there is a sprightly tiny 73 year old woman. Discover on examination that she has no left carotid pulse. Listening to her heart, note that it goes glug glug gluuuuug glug--an arrhythmic squelcing. By your calculations instead of a cardiac pump she has some sort of bladder of viscous drain water in her chest. Also the entire left side of her brain is getting no blood whatsoever. however she is laughing and telling you about her grandchildren and the 47 blocks she walked today. You come to realize you have no fucking clue as to how the body works and are a miserable failure.

(3) Marry a man. Have him elected to the presidency. Undertake a powerful agenda as to your role as first lady to basically re-engineer the entire welfare state as we know it. Have it fail disasterously. Also your husband should engage in a sex scandal with a woman half your age. Ideally it incites a congressional hearing and the near impeachment of your husband. Accompany him as dutiful ashen faced wife at all press conferences. Some years later win the senate seat of a populous and powerful state. Eventually run a historical race to become the Democratic nominee to the presidency, with your husband as your bulldog. Have the subtext be: phoenix from the ashes of humiliation. Oh but have some sexy upstart whippersnapper undermine this entire plan. Also watch the entire political party you have devoted to crack in half beneath your feet.

There is nothing quite like the humiliation of a proud woman: that is the stuff of Shakespeare and Grecian tragedies: the fallen hero. Alas, I am neither Othello, nor Hillary Clinton, nor Britney Spears. I have incredibly little physical prowess, political power, or nationwide wide sex appeal. Alas, neither am I Shaw nor Mencken. Despite my hyper-education and bibliophilia, that normal respite of emasculated, nerdy wimps--the cruel wit and pen as laceration--fails me as much as my underdeveloped muffin top potbelly.

One way to understand this is to make sense of vulnerability, and that ancient business of fate. Because there is always (always) that possibility, to fall: we start, naked, screaming, dependent, and from which we struggle, rise, triumph, and then again, the final betrayals: loss, shitting ourselves while our kidneys fall out of our pants, death with a stupid expression on our face. Arguably, as women, or the disempowered rabble of various stripes, there are a myriad opportunities to feel frightened, suspicious, protective, angry, motivated to carry and/or discharge a handgun. Fear is powerful. Loss of dignity, is powerful. And to witness the humiliation of another--aversive, painful, like witnessing violence, the drops of blood that make cowboys weep. So one way to understand this is to go the way of the ancient Greeks, the Christians, Thic Nan Hanh: be humbled by our fragile existence, make peace with death, and develop the wisdom to fight the good fight, and let go the inevitable. And like the Christians, Thic Nan Hanh and Al Green, armed with this understanding, to face the suffering of others with courage, compassion, strength and friendship. We all need somebody to lean on.

Another way to understand this is with a knee in the groin call to arms. For example, in my troubles, I see there is a injustice that moves me to my new campaign: empowering the nerd girl. There are an inexcusable shortage of poetic resources from which the weirdo nerd girl may draw upon to feel sorry for herself. What sort of world is this, that the sort of role models these young women have are sports stars, nobel laureates, or Michelle Obama? Doesn't this culture realize voice-deprived minority of us just don't want intelligence, power, beauty, or strength of character? These are all tools of the capitalist system that rewards respectability. Fuck this oppression. And while the male* loser is celebrated in pop culture and positions of power (Jimmy Kimmel, Adam Sandler, George W. Bush, and a general public celebration of the peculiarly male fat deposition pattern in beer metabolism), the greatest height in female loser achievement is still Lisa Simpson. Who is to remain 8 years old for all perpetuity. That is fucking fucked up. And so on.

Yet another way is to note, that while rejection in love, failure in one's professed art, impotence to assert one's dignity, that all these hurt like hell, and that they connect one to the human narratives of many millenia, one can also hide behind obscenity, irony, and shopping sprees for overpriced skinny jeans.