Stockholm

I. Initial Identification

Hope chests. Baby dolls. White ponies. Lace and dresses. A Barbie Dream House and a pink Corvette and Ken in the passenger seat in a powder-blue tuxedo. You can have this. You can have it all despite your yearning for Micro Machines and Captain America’s mask and everything else in the blue aisle. Or what else you sometimes imagine: a mustard aisle, a violet aisle, a clementine aisle. Goodbye to all that. Pink is beautiful. Pink is nothing but a color. Pink is plastic-wrapped plastic. Pink is clutched in your tiny fist.

Watch cartoons. Watch children’s movies. Watch television shows. Watch after-school specials. Watch a high school girl waiting to be noticed, her glasses falling away in a makeover once a boy finally sees her. Watch a mermaid give up her voice and her home to live on land with Prince Charming. Watch a young woman imprisoned in a castle fall in love with the beast who imprisons her, scored by the romance of swelling violins. Watch a woman fall off a yacht and suffer amnesia and believe a widower when he says she’s the mother of his kids. Free housekeeping and free daycare.

On the playground at recess, grab sidewalk chalk. Draw a circuit of boxes. Single boxes, pairs of boxes, a triple threat of boxes. Lay down the chalk and watch your friends hop through the circuit, the first box through the twelfth. Watch until they stop and look longingly across the playground at a group of boys sliding around on skateboards. Watch them drop their chalk for watching. Watch them watch so many skateboards from elementary school through junior high into high school until they know every kickflip and ollie without ever stepping foot on a wooden deck, the pleasure of accessory for accessory’s sake, of being so very close to a spotlight.

Remember the first time you hear it: dumb bitch. A group of boys around a Nintendo console playing Mario Kart. You’re sitting behind your high school boyfriend on the couch where you and another girl watch. There is one female racer, Princess Peach. No one has chosen her but she races regardless in the background on the track. When she cuts off your boyfriend’s Yoshi race car and scatters his coins across the pixelated pavement there it is: two words. Two syllables. Remember his friends laughing, but more clearly: remember the sound of your own laugh.

Bury two words. Bury your laugh. Prom is just around the corner. Stand before a trifecta of mirrors in the department store’s fitting room. Flamingo chiffon. Watermelon velvet. Rose taffeta. Hibiscus polyester. Plastic-wrapped plastic. Bury it all.

Wait for the limousine. Wait for the Corvette. Wait for the baby’s breath corsage. Wait for the heat of dance-floor lights and a disco ball’s prism raining glitter over everything. Wait for a hotel room booked by an older brother and a confetti of rose petals blanketing the sheets and a promise to your parents that you’re sleeping at a friend’s house and a solid maybe to your boyfriend that this might be the night and find yourself at an after-party instead, red Solo cups, beer pong in the basement, Miller Lite splashed across your dress. Find your boyfriend finding an unoccupied room on the second floor. Find yourself saying we should get back downstairs. Find your knees being pried apart by his knees. Find yourself in your own bathroom hours later looking in the mirror and wondering if you look different and seeing nothing altered at all. Remember the faint sandpaper of his chin, the inhaled scent of cologne. Awake in the morning and remember nothing but the build of his shoulders.

When you leave for college and he doesn’t, make a pact that high school relationships can last. Send him notes from your film classes, that you’re drawn to the jump cuts in Breathless, the glamour of Jean Seberg in a convertible. Don’t worry when he doesn’t respond. Worry only when he calls you at three a.m. that he’s just fucked someone else but knows now for sure that it’s you he loves. Worry when you say we’re done and slam down the receiver and after three days of eerie silence, he shows up at your dorm. Worry when he hangs around campus not for a day but for six whole months. Worry when he tries calling every day and when he leaves dried roses on your doorstep and when you hear he’s asked who you might be dating and seeks out one suspect and punches him in the face. Your friends say this is true love. The swell of violins. Never mind that you’ve called the police, that you feel unsafe on your own campus in a city where he doesn’t belong. But your friends are jealous. You’ve been noticed. Your glasses have fallen away. A boy has seen you at last.

II. Initiation

Wait tables after college. Pay your rent. Enter the restaurant’s storage room for takeout napkins and hear the door lock behind you and feel the heft of a busboy pushing you against the wall. Hear him say he won’t let you out until you kiss him. Fight the fear bubbling up your throat. Fight the fear but also remember what your friends have told you, that this is flattery, what it means to be seen.

Watch movies on your couch as a former film major. Watch every single entry of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 list. Watch a woman knifed to death in the shower, her body exposed in quick cuts. Watch a nurse doing her job portrayed as domineering and almost choked to death. Watch a middle-aged man fall in love with a seventeen-year-old girl. Watch a giant ape imprison a woman who can’t help but fall in love with him. Watch a serial killer throw a woman down a well and hope to make a dress from her skin.

Out of 100 films, watch none directed by anyone but a man, the kind of man you dated in high school. Remember the skateboards. Kickflips and ollies. The spotlighted gaze.

Go for jogs before work. Hear men shout things from car windows. Hear them wolf whistle. Hear them yell nice tits and fuck me. Rethink what you’re wearing. Rethink the routes you take and if they leave you exposed. Be grateful no one has yelled dumb bitch. Be grateful no one has made you laugh.

Enroll in graduate school for film studies. You can still have this. In your first semester, take an international cinema course and watch a film directed by a man where the central shot is a nine-minute rape scene. Watch a film directed by a man where a woman’s graduate thesis hypothesizes that all women are inherently evil. Watch a film directed by a man where a woman is raped by her masked neighbor and welcomes him back into her home to rape her again. Sit beside the professor in class discussion. Hear him ask not if but why female directors never making cutting-edge films.

Get angry for a brief moment. Make a short film for your production class that runs only two minutes about the female body. Create jump cuts of grabbed breasts, snapped bras. Women shoved against walls. Women chased on jogging paths. Create the glamour of Jean Seberg, no convertible. Wait for a new professor to recognize cutting edge. Watch as he screens sections of your film to the class on critique day. Watch him redline the shots as amateur. Hear him tell the class the female body is, at best, a concept.

Meet the boy you will marry in a seminar on film theory. Note his curls of hair, his baby face, that he is nothing like the stubble and cologne of high school. Hear him challenge the professor: Where is the theory on slapstick comedy? A boy who won’t take himself too seriously. Hear him make a joke of the male gaze, the theory that every shot makes viewers identify with men’s objectifications: What about ugly women? Surely they’re not the object we’re all looking at! He laughs. So does everyone else in the room. So do you.

III. Adaptive Attachment

Walk down an aisle. Shed your name. Earn twenty bucks in a dollar dance with twenty men. Lace and white dresses. Barbie’s Corvette, a man in blue. This dream house.

Watch comedies together. Laugh when a high school quarterback sends his passed-out-drunk girlfriend home from a party with a friend and with instructions for him to do whatever he wants to her. Laugh when a college woman mistakes a man in a Darth Vader costume for her boyfriend and has sex with the wrong person on a bouncing castle. Laugh when three grown men return to college and mudwrestle with blond twins half their age. Laugh when every stand-up comedian makes fun of their wives’ breasts, their girlfriends’ sex drive, their female audience members’ sour faces. Smile when your husband says to you: I’m so glad you have a good sense of humor.

The one time you don’t have a sense of humor: when he arrives home from work an hour late without the groceries he was supposed to pick up. He throws off his coat when you ask where the bags of apples and carrots and tortilla chips are. Isn’t that your job? he says. Don’t be such a cunt. A word that freeze-dries your blood. You retreat to the basement where you cleaned up his beer bottles last night but you tell yourself this isn’t that bad. At least he didn’t say dumb bitch.

Think about film sometimes. You were never that good at it anyway. Even still, when your husband is at work, watch what you want instead of comedies. Watch a show on television, some competition built from a hope chest. Watch one man date twenty-five women. Watch him take one woman on an individual date and anoint her with diamond earrings, glittered dresses, Louboutin shoes. Watch her watch herself in a mirror, a plastic-wrapped spotlight.

Host a Super Bowl party. Nacho dip. Spinach and artichokes. Carrots and celery, pizza bites, black bean dip in the shape of a football. Talk to wives in the kitchen. Watch men in the other room watching other men. The same as skateboards, the same as Nintendo. Somewhere in a walled-off storage bin within your chest you wonder if you will watch for your entire life this projection of the world that men have built for other men. You look around. You are surrounded by friends. One of them jokes that the dumb bitch in her office thinks she deserves a raise. Open your mouth. Hear yourself laugh.

Photo courtesy of Andrine Bauge. View more of her work on Flickr.