Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(19)
We went around the circle and stated our “intentions” for the coming moon cycle. Most of the women had intentions that I didn’t understand, that involved “manifesting” and “balance” and “rhythm.” One woman said that her intention was to “end rape.” I said I intended to organize my apartment, and felt mundane. The women totally approved. Total approval is the point of menses tent. The press release had promised “a place where young women can ask questions and find mentors in absolute acceptance,” and menses tent delivered.
“You look different today,” said one woman to another. “Oh, I know,” she replied. “It’s because I did the twenty-four-strand DNA activation yesterday. I feel like a completely new person.” The women around me tittered with excitement. I asked what that meant. She explained that in addition to our two physical DNA strands, we have twenty-two spiritual DNA strands, which can be “activated” by a specially trained lady with a crystal wand. The process took ten hours. “There’s also a golden gate that you can walk through,” she said, “but that’s more for larger groups.” Then another woman explained that DNA activation has something to do with the Mayan calendar. I still didn’t understand. My sister didn’t know anything about DNA activation, but she did tell me a story about the time she went to see a shaman and the shaman had a spirit jaguar eat a ghost off her back. That sounded cooler than the DNA thing.
Jenny and I thanked our hostesses and hobbled out to the car, thighs asleep and buzzing with pain after hours of sitting cross-legged on pillows. We ate some more jelly beans and talked about our feelings.
It’s true that I don’t believe in most of this stuff—and I suspect that believing is the secret ingredient that makes this stuff work. But it does work for the gracious ladies on the pillows under the red tent, and it was surprisingly nurturing to sit cross-legged in their world for a few hours. And even though I would never phrase it like this, I agree that women don’t always get a chance to “fill our own vessels.” My dad worked all day. My mom worked all day, then came home and made dinner. Women do a lot. Women are neat.
Back at the office, I knew my job was to make fun of menses tent, but I just didn’t want to. They were so nice and so earnest. What was the point of hurting them? Sincerity is an easy target, but I don’t want to excise sincerity from my life—that’s a lonely way to live.
I used to try to be cool. I said things that I didn’t believe about other people, and celebrities, and myself; I wrote mean jokes for cheap, “edgy” laughs; I neglected good friendships for shallow ones; I insisted I wasn’t a feminist; I nodded along with casual misogyny in hopes that shitty dudes would like me.
I thought I was immune to its woo-woo power, but if it hadn’t been for menses tent, how long would it have taken me to understand that I get to choose what kind of person to be? Open or closed? Generous or cruel? Spirit jaguar or clinging ghost? A lazy writer (it’s easy to hate things) or a versatile one? I don’t believe in an afterlife. We live and then we stop living. We exist and then we stop existing. That means I only get one chance to do a good job. I want to do a good job.
Hello, I Am Fat
In 2009, I’d been at the Stranger about five years (four as a freelancer, one on staff), and was casually dating a dude who refused to kiss me on the mouth. He’s a good person; he was good to me in other ways. They all were, really—even Sasquatch garage door guy—but, you know, we were all raised in the same fucking septic tank. No one teaches young men how to take care of fat girls.
The Stranger is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I got to learn how to write and run a newspaper from geniuses (David Schmader, Charles Mudede, Eli Sanders) I’d been obsessed with since I was a teen—we took chances, changed elections, ran our sections with nearly unfettered editorial freedom, and struck a balance between ethics and irreverence that I was always proud of. By the time I got on staff full-time, Dan Savage was already medium-famous and had orchestrated a more-power/less-responsibility promotion from editor in chief to editorial director, so he wasn’t in the office so much. Nonetheless, the culture of the place was all Dan, and even mostly in absentia he did the hell out of that job.
Dan would run a meeting every few weeks, always our most productive and most boisterous; be gone traveling for months and then show up at a candidate interview to grill local politicians with the acuity of a day-to-day city hall reporter; emerge from his office like a groundhog to drop an infuriatingly brilliant mandate about precisely how to tweak whatever delicate story was stumping us; and send insistent e-mails the morning after every office party to ensure surplus sheet cake was placed, uncovered, on his desk. (Dan has a thing about stale cake.) I was taught a mantra, my first week, to manage my expectations about Dan as an editor: “Silence is praise.” As long as you don’t know he exists, you’re killing it. I remember two editors improvising an extensive, Dan-themed Gilbert and Sullivan musical number over their cubicle walls: “I will laugh at you when you cry!” Dan, the great and terrible.
If his management approach is unique, Dan’s editorial sense—for clear-headed satire and gleeful, pointed disobedience, for where to aim and from what angle to drop the hammer—is unparalleled in my decade of writing experience. Dan knows how to land a point better than anyone I’ve ever worked with. That preternatural ability is what has made him famous (he is a magnificent pundit), and it’s also what gets him into trouble.