Speak the language that you know

Speak it fast or speak it slow

But do not ever bite your tongue

With words still begging

to be sung.

You are mighty — this you know —

Let your light shine — let it show!

No more waiting. No more goals.

Time, at last, to be

whole.

After being catcalled (or was I? They might have been yelling at the two other women on the street walking home alone at night. “Hey you! Yes you! Turn around!” and a couple of whistles didn’t really narrow it down, but was enough to make me check to see I wasn’t being followed home half a dozen times), I have decided to write a blog post on being fearsome, one of my ongoing projects. Suggestions welcome.

1. The look is not the important thing, but it is important. It is important because when you choose to be yourself you are committing an act of agency, and that makes you powerful.
   1. The most important part of the look is the walk. Walk straight and tall, or slouch — whatever you want. But here, I must be firm, because the way you walk is how people decide if you’re a victim or not. Stay in the center of the street, away from alleys. Walk with your purse slung across your shoulders. Walk with purpose, authority, and direction. Do not walk quickly; walk briskly. Do not show fear. You are the fearsome one, not them. You could be a psycho serial killer or an ex-marine, for all these men know. You don’t need to explain to them that you aren’t, much like you don’t have to explain anything else you damn well do.
   2. Fearsome women dye their hair or they don’t. They grow it long or they grow it short or they don’t grow it at all, but whatever they do, they don’t quibble about it. They do it because they like it. They don’t care if you like it. Weirder is better but nothing at all is a rebellion, too, if it’s authentic to you.
   3. Fearsome women wear makeup or they don’t. They might wear winged eyeliner and bloody red lips or they might wear subtle makeup, because they love the way it looks or because they like the illusory effect of it, the way it acknowledges that everyone, essentially, performs themselves; or they might wear nothing at all, because they like their face just as it is or hate the feel of cream on their skin.
   4. Fearsome women show lots of skin, or they don’t. Want to wear a hijab? Go for it. Want to have your tits out and a short short skirt and a transparent top? Go for it. Nothing is as important as what you are on the inside — confident, powerful, and in control. Wear color or wear black or wear a bright pretty white. You do you, girl.
2. How you say it is not as important as what you say, but it might as well be. 
   1. Speak your mind, but be kind — unless the people there are being dicks, then go ahead and let them have it. Examples below.
      1.  
      2. 
   2. Speak loudly or quietly, so long as you can make people listen. If your voice quakes, or you say something stupid, keep speaking until you communicate your point. It’s okay to stop and take a break. Don’t let yourself be shamed. There’s no point in shame if you haven’t done something wrong, and you haven’t.
   3. Swear or don’t. I prefer to switch depending on context, but I think you can be perfectly fucking eloquent with swearing involved.
3. You can’t fight the patriarchy (the world, self-doubt, homophobic BS, etc.) alone. Make friends. 
   1. It is okay to call your friends and ask them to walk with you. Having a posse is awesome. Being alone at night is tougher as a woman, but you can’t deal with people all the time, right?
   2. 
   3. ….and while anything bad that could happen would be on the perpetrator, our world is madly flawed and dangerous, we do have to live in it practically. It’s important to stay in crowded, well-lit areas, to go into stores if anyone is following you (as my roommate had to the other day), and to have a cell phone handy to call the cops or friends with. Do not go out alone if you’re planning on getting drunk. Have a buddy, and ideally an extra buddy if said buddy wants to get laid. Get each others’ numbers and check in every few hours at pre-set meeting spot. Part of being fearsome is taking care of yourself and each other. 
4. Be powerful. Knowledge + money = power. 
   1. More education = mo’ money. Mo’ money = mo’ problems the ability to support yourself without fear. Community college is a fantastic option if you’re having trouble paying the pills for university, and should be done without any shame. It really is the most fiscally intelligent option.
   2. Educate yourself about politics, feminism, your area, money, martial arts, legal rights, dancing, etc. Follow your passion but also learn the skills you’ll need to defend yourself if something goes wrong in your life. Preparing won’t make it happen, and bad things happen to everybody. Worse case scenario, your legal, martial, (mad sexy dancing skills, writing) or financial skills could help a friend!
5. Look in the mirror. Your face, your body, what others see, it’s just a part of who you are, and while often a wonderful part, it is not who you are. You are what is underneath the face — the history, the choices, the will that takes what it wants from nature and nurture and shapes your life. If someone fucks with you, what they’re fucking with is pure, unadulterated will. Divinity if you like, the part of you that is one with the God “I am.” If you prefer the devil to God, then call it a will as free as the devil’s, capable of shaking heaven. “Hecate,” the name of the witch goddess of ancient Greece, literally meant “will.” People are rude because they are insecure, ignorant, and less often because they are monstrous. They may look at you and say that you are less and deserve to be treated as less because of how you look, talk, or walk. But you are not these things, although these things are you. You are the burning bush, the wind that moves the sun and stars, an amalgam of the heat of the sun and the dust of exploding stars; meaty electric nanobots crackle and fire in your brain, and sometimes lightning flashes when you touch the world; the cells in your body date back to the first life, endlessly replicated and altered. As a human being, you have the ability to do terrible things. We are natural persistence hunters, and the most recent mass extinction began when we started to travel the world, eliminating each gigantic species of animal in turn. We have split the atom, altered genetic code, and we like to set gunpowder on fire and inebriate ourselves with toxic substances for fun. We are the most intelligent, adaptable, violent and creative species on this planet, and we are almost genetically identical to each other (99.5%). They tried to tell you you weren’t, because they feared you, but remember this:
6. You were born fearsome. Everyone who has come before you, every creature that became something that would become you, has survived for good reason, and so will you. When you die you will sit in the moment of space-time you lived through like an undiscovered island, bewildering and inspiring future generations, not gone at all but distant, removed, until we crack time like we did the atom. You matter, and the matter of your body takes up gravity, sitting in the universe like a petite bowling ball in space and time. If you weigh yourself regularly, think about that: my matter stretches the universe the same way a planet does. Isn’t that incredible? 
7. Aren’t you?

Certain seeds I’ll never sew
Though through the valley warm winds blow
For hereabout they will not grow
Not on the soil
Below
Below

Is it the truth? The men by the fire asked me.

It is what I remember, I replied.

But is it the truth? They asked.

Not at all, I answered. Just like your own. But I digress.

My mother the witch was once a woman, too, as fair as I am – do not tutt me. There is no crime in knowing one’s power, only in exercising it to ill end, or in ill company.

And was she no longer a woman, when she became a witch? What, if not a woman, could she be?

Why, Sir, would you burn a woman?

I’ve been burned by one before. Why not?

You have a sharp wit, Sir. But I mean only to say that they treated her as less than a woman when she became a witch, not that she changed in anything but action. Long before they wrote warts and wrinkles over her face, she was a woman, and my mother. For long hours we would sit together by the firelight, her hand brushing my hair, gently, until I fell asleep on her lap.

Before she was a witch. Before she had the power?

She always had the power.

Then wasn’t she always a witch?

Will you let me tell my story, damn it?

He apologizes. Go on.

My mother and I sat together for hours and hours before the fire. We let it soak into us, and sometimes she would take a piece of the flames and make it dance for me, like a little man. (I did not know then, of course, what they were.) I sat with her and sometimes she let me braid her long dark hair, so much more elegant than my coarse brown tangle, and for hours sometimes I would watch as she painted her lips the red of the bloody cherrry.

Why do you paint yourself, mother? I would ask. You are already so lovely.

Men are unkind to women who know that they are lovely, she would say. And to women who are unlovely. And to women who try to be lovely.

Are you trying to be lovely?

No, she would say, and finish the line of coal above her lashes. I am trying to look like death.

Is death lovely, mother? I ask.

No, she replied. But it is irresistible.

It was my eleventh birthday. And down my mother went from our hut, leaving me in rooms with furniture strangely small, the seven rooms so quaintly empty. Her cape fluttered behind her, a sky blue against the snow.

She did not return until the next night, and this time she came as an old woman knocking at the door. I knew it was her from her perfume – my father was a huntsman, after all – but all the same, I was scared.

Little girl, little girl, let me in, she called. I said nothing, watching the window with frightened eyes. I’ve apples to sell. You can’t know how good they’ll taste. Fresh, crunchy, sweet-smelling apples.

I ran up to the second story and peered out the window, my eyes narrowed.

Mom, those are off our own tree! I exclaimed, astounded, and the old woman looked to the second story window before throwing her head back and cackling.

Never could fool you, my mother said, her wrinkled flesh fading back to its usual cream. Never could.

The next time I met my mother in disguise she wore a better one – none of that vaudeville witchery, this time. This time she appeared as a student in my class on the first day of high school, sitting beside me on the bus to school, and offered me a smoking cigarette.

It keeps you thin, she’d said.

And smells like shit, I’d replied, and I pulled the better brand out of my coat, offering her one. These are much better.

My mother fell out of the seat, her glamour fading with her laughter.

Never could fool you, she’d said. Never could.

And yet you don’t stop trying, do you?

I sit by the window of my college dorm, brushing out my hair. It is still the first week, but my roommate has snapped at me and I think I may be in love with someone who may not – who does not – love me back. I am weeping, watching my face in the mirror. What doesn’t he see in me? My mother was so lovely, unreal in her loveliness, really. Every man who met her loved her. Even the woodsman sent to kill her loved her. How awful must I be, that not even a man who knows me, really knows me, can love me?

In the mirror the brush is in another woman’s hand. I watch it rise and fall, my mother’s hands, as she strokes my hair, begins to braid it, softly sings.

Mom, I say softly, but she shakes her head, still singing, brushing back my hair with what should be my own hands. Mom, is that you? Her eyes are too wide, and I realize my mistake. I turn to see the upraised knife, the brilliant flash of pearly teeth, and let myself fall backwards over my chair onto the floor, kicking the chair towards the – the thing – as I scramble backwards. I bump into the mirror and it begins to fall, quickly, so quickly it almost catches me but hits the the thing instead. I fall back against the wall, my eyes rolling upwards for a moment, as it shudders and spasms and writhes and stops, suddenly, the last seizing deathroe of a wildcat. I stagger upwards, my heart beating like a war drum. My roommate opens the door, stops in the doorway.

What is it? She asks, staring at the creature. She covers her mouth with her hand. Did she come out of the mirror?

I don’t know, I reply, breathing hard. I… I look at my roommate, frowning. Too acute. Mom? I asked, and she raised her eyebrows, her suddenly dark and delicate lashes overshadowing cornflower blue eyes. Mom, did you put that there?

No, she replied. But I couldn’t keep it out, could I?

Did… did I put it there? I asked.

No, she said quietly. No.

Then what was it? I asked. She looked at me, her perfect face as cold as her name.

A curse, she said.

What kind? I asked.

The inherited kind, she replied, and was gone as soon as she’d come, the only difference between her arrival and her parting my made bed and new-washed sheets, the body gone, of course – a witch for sure, my mother.

Is it the truth? The men ask. Did all that really happen?

Yes, I reply. It is the truth.

But what kind? They ask, suddenly cautious. For all stories can be called truth, in firelight, in the reflections on men’s eyes.

The inherited kind. Just like your own.

When asked how to make one’s children more intelligent, Einstein is credited as saying, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” An inspiring quote, since I find myself very late in life to be completely addicted to fairy tales. I read and reread the Little Red Riding Hood Story, consuming the conservative Perrault’s, which warns the young and impressionable young woman against dangerous men; the sublime Roald Dahl’s, in which Little Red “smiles… one eyelid flickers… / she whips a pistol from her knickers / she aims it at the creature’s head / And bang bang bang, she shoots him dead”, the 1997 short in which the wolf is played by a male ballerina, a Mexican version in which Little Red cuts her way out of the wolf, Angela Carter’s Company of Wolves. I search with the fervor and obsession of the truly religion, but cannot find what I am looking for — the feeling of recognition and revelation of truth we sometimes feel in art. In Perrault, I see the sexism of the story at its strongest, and realize, in the words of writer Theodora Goss, that “the hunter is also a wolf.” I find in the story a dependence on men that irks me and reminds me of my male friends’ words that a man’s duty was to protect a woman. “From who?” I resisted asking. “From other men?” The woodsman and the wolf seem in many ways the same, and the woodsman is not restricted from the woods the way Little Red is, is he? If anything, he is the one who builds the path that leads to the death and destruction Little Red finds at the end of the path. The terrorist creates the necessity of the law; the “representative” legislates; and they work together to punish those who break the laws they made together and keep the rest in fear. I remember one of my Iranian friends telling me in high school that the cops in her area used to rape women who didn’t wear their headscarves to teach them a lesson — wear these to protect yourselves against men? Wasn’t that the cops’ jobs? (Nothing against those who wear headscarves or hijabs, by the way — women should be able to wear what they damn well please.)

Too much is missing in these fairy tales. The originals, at least, contained the lurking violence of reality — the blood as wine, naked Red against the sheets. A warning against marrying outside the tribe, or a feminist cry: “look who you’re in bed with, women! You thought it was your grandmother, but it was the wolf, the enforcer of your grandmother’s law.” The originals were explicitly implicit, too disturbing to be simple and more easily understood because of it. Still, they need sequels. Little Red builds her own path, or is chopped up by the woodcutter; Snow White becomes the wicked queen’s successor, as she was always intended to do, challenged as she was with society’s imposing beauty — the poisoned comb, bodice, and apple all symbols of the corruption of womanhood; Cinderella oppresses as she was oppressed, or does not. I want to know more about the witch, especially. Was she, once, one of them? Why is she always wicked, the only powerful woman in these stories? (Besides the wicked stepmother, of course.) She tries to destroy Snow White as a queen, to eat Hansel and Gretel, steals Rapunzel, takes Ariel’s voice, and curses cruel men in Beauty and the Beast and The Frog Prince. Vain, hungry, lonely, vengeful, business-like, she not only foils our heroines but acts as a foil as to what they could be, if they fail their quests. All the same, they often show much greater agency, and are almost universally punished for it. The only powerful woman in any of these stories that comes to mind is the fairy godmother, but even she must be inhuman and bumbling, a powerplayer turned into a ditz. I find myself rooting for the witch as I reread the stories, reimagining Maleficent in the wake of the new movie and Wicked. I remember the lines the witch sings in Into the Woods, my favorite part of the musical: “You’re so nice. You’re not good, You’re not bad, You’re just nice. I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right. I’m the Witch. You’re the world!” The witch, in turn, reminds me of Shylock — owed a pound of flesh and never given one. As inhuman as the request was, mustn’t we pay our debts in the real world? And does not a witch bleed? I think of how the greats of our world started by feeling inferior, how Tina Fey says she learned comedy as a defense mechanism. How low must the witch have started, to have risen so high, become so powerful? Must she sacrifice her children, as so many of the stories seem to suggest? Is that what the writers sought to demonize, these “selfish” (to borrow from our feminist buddy Pope Francis) women who refuse to have children?

Perhaps that’s it, the fairy tale I’ve been looking for, and never found: “The Making of the Witch.” A fairy tale rendition of Zimbardo’s Lucifer Effect, but without Wicked’s moral padding. Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, but without the convenient, pseudo-sexual recovery to purity. What happens when the witch finally gets what she wanted? I don’t want victims, villains, or heroines, and the witch won’t bother me with them, because only she, of all these women, can protect herself.

She’s the only one who, at the end of the fairy tale, can be both whole and alone.

Some pieces by Dora Goss very well worth reading:
http://endicottstudio.typepad.com/poetrylist/what-her-mother-said-by-theodora-goss.html
http://theodoragoss.com/2015/06/29/snow-white-learns-witchcraft/