I maintained my resistance to stripping even at the risk of appearing prissy, of not fitting in. I didn’t want my breasts to be rated by the same men I peacefully sat alongside at the strip club. I knew my comfort in my body would be mitigated by the judgment, and that the defenses I’d need to build up against it, and against monetized interest and stolen gropes, would alienate me from my newfound ability to see sexual energy as a fuel for anarchic revolution rather than a ball in the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match. Even at ten dollars an hour plus tips and street cred, it wasn’t worth it.
I take my son and daughter to my friend’s place to celebrate her forty-fifth birthday. Connie’s been separated from her husband for almost a year, and her life has settled into a new groove—new apartment, new friends, new man in her life. She’s been dating this guy for a while, but I’ve yet to meet him, I’ve only heard tell. I’m looking to collect some first-hand observations before I wholeheartedly give my approval.
He’s not there yet when we arrive, and we all settle into the living room—my daughter coloring with another little girl, my son playing video games with Connie’s son, me bantering with the grown-ups, three sharp, divorced moms, about men, and sex, and male strippers. I tell them the story of how I waitressed at a Chippendales-type show at the Italian Civic Club when I was in tenth grade. We laugh and riff off each other, mix confession with salt and humor, speak either sotto voce or in a code we believe can’t be read by the children—Chippendales, there’s no way they know what that is, even if the tone of our laughter draws an antennae away from the glow of the high definition screen. I’m conscious of how fresh the conversation seems in comparison to those I have with married women in my neighborhood and at school functions. I’m aware of how familiar and foreign it is, a diet I used to live on and seldom taste now. I want more. I don’t really want my friend’s new boyfriend to show up with his two sons and break the all-girl vibe.
But then Connie’s son starts asking her every few minutes: “Why aren’t they here? When are they coming? Shouldn’t they be here by now?” His anxiety gives voice to the rest of ours. He should be, shouldn’t he?
“Quit asking,” Connie finally snaps. “I don’t know where he is. He’s not answering his phone.” I feel the moms circling the wagons around our friend, some of us turning toward her, ready to offer any comfort, some of us facing outward, cocking our guns for an attack. Why aren’t you here, motherfucker? My desire to vet this guy goes from passive to active, the benefit of my doubt no longer assured.
But then the doorbell rings and the new gang troops in merrily, the boyfriend with his two growing sons, and he handles the situation so comfortably. Within a few sentences, I’m ready to like him. We share some room on the couch. Another of the moms and the man volley about the first date she’s going on later, what signals her clothing sends. The evening is just getting started, and I’m relieved to see it’s going to stay slightly ribald and fun.
It’s an Indian summer night, mid-October, deliciously warm. My daughter had insisted on wearing her new Halloween costume to the party, a furry bear suit, and I had said she could as long as she put on shorts underneath rather than the pants she’d been wearing, so that she wouldn’t get too hot. She gets too hot despite my forethought, and within an hour she wiggles out of the costume, the pelt of russet fluff and cheap sateen discarded on the floor. She vaults onto my lap. She’s a climby girl, squirmy, long-legged, and she twists from me to scale the back of the couch. She gets stuck for a moment with her head pointing to the ground and her little bottom lifted into the air, barely covered by the striped shorts that fit at the beginning of summer. My husband and I have oft remarked that one of the many details of parenthood that doesn’t get relayed clearly is how consistently one’s face will be put in close quarters with toddlers’ butts and genitals. Almost daily, at times both expected and not, you’ll be offered a full view of a winking asshole, a sticky scrotum, a stinky vulva. But at three and a half, in positions like the one she’s in, my daughter’s body is already becoming more like a girl’s, less like a genderless toddler’s. Next to me, the man says something like: “Whoa, I don’t want to get arrested.”
I know this can be a concern of men, a real one. My husband stayed home with the kids more than I did, and he’d mention times when he felt unwelcome on the playground because of his gender, get a dirty look from a mom if he tried to help a little one up the stairs of the slide. Another male friend talked about the awkwardness he’d felt when the little girl he’d been babysitting insisted he wipe her after she peed. Another friend had the police show up at his door because he had taken his daughter on a weekday afternoon into Walgreens to pick up the pictures that included some of her in the bathtub. I have sympathy for the fact that presumed sexual guilt is something men have to walk around with, something that complicates their taking on more public care-taking roles. Still, the comment from the boyfriend half-raised my hackles. Aren’t we all supposed to pretend we don’t see it when a kid’s butt suggests something about sexuality for a split second? Aren’t we supposed to swallow any discomfort if we can’t simply turn away? But these questions last no longer than a pulse.
As we are preparing to leave, my daughter puts back on her bear costume and admires it in the full-length mirror by the door. How fun to be a stuffed animal! The rounded ears, the extra soft padded oval of tummy, the stubby tail, which she points toward the mirror and then cranes around to see. “Shake your tail,” calls out the boyfriend from the couch. And perhaps any question formed never entirely dissolves. A mama bear rises up in me immediately, rears on hind legs, towering, teeth bared, claws slashing, roaring: I’ll rip your mouth off! In his comment, I see my daughter stripped bare, her body placed on the stage of femaleness, in front of the judging eyes. I will plow bloody rifts in those faces! I will scratch out those eyes! I see the multitude who will be watching her—my fear informed by my own awareness of how I’d found myself gazing at my ten-year-old son’s female friends—to see when they go into bud, how they swan out, to admire and imagine what they’ll look like later. Is it the self-implication that chains my mama bear’s ankle? The awareness that our sexuality is complex?
The cooing over my daughter’s costume extended to the ladies’ chorus: “Look at you!” and “Shake it!”
A couple of these women have known and adored my child since she was born. She’s always liked their kind attentions. She likes to dance. “Booty dance,” she’ll say sometimes, and she’ll push her butt out behind her and shake it. She likes the way it feels, I imagine, that basic human pleasure, exaggerating movements to match a beat. It’s clear that she also likes the attention doing it gets her.
“This was so much fun,” I say cheerfully, gathering up shoes, the mama bear still raging behind my skull, against my skin, but kept there while the cub wanders a wider circle. I want my daughter to have a fully developed sexuality, to be able to explore and play with sexuality. I want to remove shame from this process, and for her to escape the pressures of commodification and expectation. I want her to be free to find what gives her bodily pleasure. I have always wanted that for myself. I believe I’ve fought for that for myself.
But I feel in a flash a new sense, if not understanding, of the origins of the burka, the hijab, dress codes. Cover up, please.
The mama bear, claws slashing—how far is my reach? All the rest of you, shut up, avert your gaze, keep your hands to yourself.
“Thanks so much,” I say. “Happy birthday. Nice to meet you. We’ll see you soon.”
The female body, even at the age of three, the site of so much.
TWO MEMORIES I HAVE.
One, being with my brother at a rest stop and playing in the pebbles of the parking lot. We
