Rage in the cageA monster truck rally as portal into the long-ago before — when MMA was ‘hot’ and telling two men to kiss felt like power.
I’m sitting in the cafe where I wrote my first book—my sexual coming-of-age memoir. The cafe also shows up in the book. I write about coming here postpartum and awakening to a new sense of my body in the world. “I gestated a human. A baby was cut out of me. I survived. Now I’m sustaining that baby with my body,” I wrote. “I’d always associated sexiness with feeling powerful. That hadn’t changed, but now my sense of power came from a different place.” I remember the feeling I had when I wrote those words in this cafe, like my body thrummed with energy, aliveness, and pleasure. It was unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and despite—but really because of—having arrived at the supposed nadir of sexiness: motherhood. Remembering this, I’m brought back to this one night with two men in a bar in San Francisco in the long-ago before—in the midst of that coming-of-age. They were writers who had been part of a literary event earlier in the night. Both had zeroed in on me with my faux vintage button-up dress with polkadots and a Peter Pan collar. It was the late 2000s or so. One of them touched my wrist and remarked on the delicacy; he wrapped his thumb and forefinger around it as if to measure. The other one, who fashioned himself as a man of refined taste and erudition, said something like, “You are one-of-a-kind.” Something like: “Your elegance is unmatched.” Alright, I was listening. After a few more drinks and shots, one of them spoke aloud his wish to kiss me. Then the other said something like: “I think you should kiss me instead.” And I said, “I’ll kiss both of you, but first you have to kiss each other.” I hadn’t wanted to kiss either of them, but now here was an intriguing gambit. I’m not sure if I was seeking proof of their desire for me or if I truly just wanted to see them kiss. Maybe it was a test of their disposition or how they constructed themselves as men. I know I had the feeling that I held some small power in this moment, and that my power could evaporate so very easily. Instantly. Over the weekend, I went to the county fair for the first time. It’s like a temporary city filled with purveyors of custom airbrushing, old timey photo shoots, palm readings, and live blacksmith demonstrations. Every few steps a new snack: elote, churros, boba tea, dipping dots, corn dogs, mini donuts. The carnival games are $10 a pop and for $40 my kid walked away with two almost-as-big-as-him stuffed animals—a Husky and a Rottweiler that he keeps calling a Beagle. The whole reason we went was the monster truck show in the stadium at the back of the fair grounds. My kid has started collecting the Hot Wheels version, so we thought it would be a fun surprise to take him to see the real thing. Plus, it sounded like novelty, like camp. I ordered a beer. We put in earplugs and took our seats in the outdoor stadium, looking down on a track with two mounds of dirt topped with crushed cars. The trucks—these “monsters of destruction,” as the announcer put it—sat side by side on their big-boy wheels with tread so deep you could fit a whole fist inside. One was bright blue, another banana yellow, and a third was hot pink and belonged to a woman. A truck dubbed “Rage in the Cage” was just a metal frame on wheels with a man strapped inside. As the engines roared and purred, my body did the same—a long-ago feeling that I associate with the 2000s era of mainstream porn, back when I watched it to “figure out what men wanted,” before I started finding stuff to watch for myself, and before I started reporting on the industry as a journalist. I also associate the feeling with a man I saw ever-so-briefly in my 20s—an airplane pilot who shot guns for fun. In both those cases, the roaring, the purring, wasn’t about arousal or pleasure so much as power—feeling adjacent to it, wanting to conquer it, or at least survive it. Last week, my computer disc space was filling up and I had to go searching for large files to delete. I double-clicked a video file that I hadn’t looked at in 16 years but it had somehow traveled with me across multiple laptops. It was a video diary of mine shared with my then-boyfriend, a sweet, kind, and lovely man who lived in another country. It was filmed in the early hours of the morning and I sound like a comedian impersonating a drunk person—all rambling, circuitous, and slurred—but it’s not funny, it’s terribly sad and embarrassing. Watching it, I wanted to hop in my car, drive into the city, and swing by my old Hayes Valley apartment, as though I could still find her there, give her a glass of water, and drive her home into the future. In the video, I tell my then-boyfriend about my night out drinking and dancing, and how I met a friend of a friend, a man who was into MMA, and who was surprised when I declared that “MMA is like porn” and “so hot.” Writing that, oh my, I feel like a bad mom to myself. I should be tucking that girl into bed, not committing her to the page. But I commit her here because I think I know what she really meant. She was telling that man: Look, how I desire, how I love men, how I like to watch and admire their bodies. I think she meant to say to MMA man: Let me shock you with my desire, let me challenge your ideas about women, let me turn your source of macho power into my delight. I think she was drawn to sensation and intensity as a kind of pleasure, in part because other kinds felt so dangerous and hard to come by. I remembered those feelings sitting in the stadium, sipping my beer. Then the announcer said something about “America” and “the troops.” The internal purring turned to nausea so suddenly and intensely that I wondered if I had heatstroke. I thought of that meme: “screaming crying throwing up,” an expression of distress or excitement or both. I Google it now and am told:
The national anthem was played, the crowd clapped, and then a screaming snippet of a Metallica song played. “Give me fuel, give me fire, give me that which I desire.” The men and the one woman revved their engines again. That day in the bar in the long-ago before, the man who had wrapped his fingers around my wrist was game to kiss the other man. His vibe was: Yeah, who cares? This was attractive. Almost attractive enough to make me want to kiss him. The other man, the one who called me elegant, said: “Nope. No way. Not a chance.” And that was that. I didn’t kiss either of them. It’s an itchy memory. I know where I was coming from—this was in the wake of the era of the “girl-on-girl makeout,” where straight women kissing each other was often treated as casual entertainment for straight men. I loved a reversal back then. Now, though, I wonder if this gambit implicitly relied on homophobia, if I was trying to emasculate these men in a light hazing ritual. And for what? I wonder about these mirrored mazes of gendered power. Another memory. What a memory. Years after almost kissing those men in that bar, I was emailed a collective spreadsheet filled with the names of men accused of everything from creepiness to rape. It was a digital whisper network. A list of allegedly “shitty” men in media. Both of their names were on it.
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