Instructions on how to Assemble and Destroy “Normalcy” using the coming out narrative in a teenage rebellion framework vis a vis riot grrrl.

by Lifeguard of Love

“...an uncontrollable past, the uncontrollability of the past, it’s inability to explain the present” (Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds)

Part 1 – Queer Kid Set Up:

1. At age 15, fall in love with your best friend, who’s been your best friend since you were 10. Tell her. She accepts your love, but rejects it soon after in favor of her other best girl friend.

2. Watch her and your other best friend kiss, touch, and hold hands. Let them spend the night at your house after they’re found out as lovers by their parents and aren’t allowed to spend the night alone together. Much, much later, it will occur to you that kisses don’t make those wet sounds, but finger-fucking does.

3. Come out to your mom and get sent to “counseling”, where you recount your life story with self-important glee to a woman who tells you you can “burn your bra later.”

Part 2 – Procurement of Straight Man:

1. Allow your best friend to procure a 26-year-old man from the internet, whom she met on Professional Women’s Gymnastics and Xena: Warrior Princess message boards, for AIM chatting (this is 1998-1999, after all), in order to deflect your continuing love for her.

        a. He is a virgin, and he says “set” instead of “sit” or “sat,” and “whenever” instead of “when.”

        b. He thinks Nirvana’s best song is “Aneurysm,” which is still true.

2. Some time later, type that you love him, and stand in your bedroom slapping yourself in the face. You know that saying you love him is leading somewhere outside of yourself, but are aware it is a path you have to follow.

3. Write to him in a phonetic language somewhere between baby talk and a southern accent.

4. Encourage him to visit; do not object when he decides to quit school and move to your town instead.

Part 3 – A Teenage Rebellion Primer via Riot Grrrl:

1. On the day of his arrival (a Sunday, in early June), purchase and listen to Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped for the first time. It is a short pop album*, recorded in a punk style that is alternately grinding and melodic, where women express embodiment, self-ownership and self-care, and inner conflicts uncovered during long looks between self and society.

2. Feel a little disappointed that your reaction is not to lay on the floor and kick and sob, like some girls’ testimonies you have read online. You were really hoping to break open in sacreligious ecstasy.

3. Use words like pussy and cunt and fuck lightly, because they have already been reclaimed for you.

4. Listen to Bikini Kill to learn how men and women relate. Nothing has happened to you yet, but you are about to make it happen, when this man arrives.

*This album was a dark place I had never been before; the feminine. This album sounded like going into a vagina; reverse birth; warm and dark. Moving through the dark, everything murky, feeling out to identify the things you come in contact with. This is an album about identifying body parts. Blood, heart, my pussy. My tits, my ass, my legs, heart brain lung gut. Siamese twins connected at the cunt. In my head, I’m on my knees. Sweat on hair/tears on face. Red lips, sharp nails, legs that grow back. I didn’t even know what Pussy Whipped meant, it just sounded cool.

I was 16 and growing up in a safe and loving home. I did not know my body. I had never had a serious illness or injury. I wasn’t athletic and I’d never touched myself for pleasure. I never even thought I was fat or ugly. I had lots of thoughts and feelings, but none of them related to my body.

I had never heard pussy or cunt used to describe a vagina or as an insult to a woman (or man). I didn’t know what “clit” referred to; I thought it meant “slit”, a euphemism for vagina.

I was a prude who had already had a boy suspended in 8^th grade for pretending a vacuum hose was his penis and tapping me with it. So riot grrrl was totally new. It did not resonate with me, but I could tap into the collective girl experience. I moved into it.

Part 4 – Rejection of Straight Man:  

1. Feel no sympathy, in fact feel nothing, when he causes the toilet in your parents’ house to overflow. (this is the first and only time the toilet ever overflows). He claims he only flushed “a tissue.”

2. Come to realize that he wears an “aftershave” that sticks bitter in the root of your nostrils. Notice he always wears dumpy cargo pants and never jeans.

3. Stroke his arm as you watch TV with your family. Later, your parents sternly reprimand:

        “You don’t understand that that kind of touch is exciting for a man.”

        “If you’ll do that in the presence of your parents, how far will you go when we’re not around?”

                a. Feel insulted/humilitiated by the idea that they think you’d have any interest in exciting this man.

4. Kiss him in the driveway, after dark. His tongue is thick and slug-like. At that moment, begin to hate him. Later he will say that he never thought you would want kiss until you were married.

Part 5 – End the Relationship using Teenage Rebellion:

1. Go to Illinois to visit your grandparents, and use the whole calling card he gave you to call your best friend every night.

2. Quit shaving your legs.

3. Break up with him around the time school starts; around the time you get your driver’s license.

        a.  Make fun of his disgusting “aftershave” with your friends when he shows up at the grocery store where you are having off-campus lunch.

4. Stop believing in God after he starts going to church with the Christian girls who are on the periphery of your social group, and tells you that a pastor said “Your relationship will be restored!”

4. Play strip poker with your friends in a half-built house. Tell him about it.

        a. “I thought you were already over your teenage rebellion, or that it had just skipped over you,” he explains. “But you just hadn’t started yet.”

Part 5 – Clean Up:

1. Lose your virginity to a hot butch girl in the fall.

        a. He moves to Texas with his virginity fully intact.

2. Answer the phone when he calls drunk to tell you he went to Pantera’s bar and saw a dancer with her entire labia shut with piercings.

3. Call him some time during your senior year of high school, to tell him you smoke pot every day.

        a. “You’ll only get stupid if you smoke pot every day for a year,” he says.

        b. Smoke pot every day for the next 7 years.