White Chicks Shouldn’t

[Photo by Lisa Meehan Williams]

Most of my Facebook friends I know personally, but a couple of them are just vague internet acquaintances, if even that. It was one of these, a guy, who posted a link titled “White Chicks Shouldn’t,” and because this phrase caught my eye, I clicked. The link was to a three-minute video clip taken at an outdoor Jamaican dancehall.

The first shot shows a thick white woman—green shirt, denim mini, red skin—grabbing her ankles while a (presumably) Jamaican man grinds into her ass, his hand on her back, his leg eventually up over her shoulder, pressing her down deeper. They’re doing some seriously dirty dancing. It takes me aback, since those moves would definitely violate my safety-zone, especially if I were so visibly an outsider somewhere. But it looks like they’re both into it. The video quality isn’t good, but it looks like they’re having fun. The woman makes some theatrical faces, thrusts her butt rhythmically. The man takes her hat off her head, cocks it sideway it on his own, caps it back on her.

The next shot shows the woman dancing alone at the edge of the circle. She’s a good dancer, doing a sexy little booty dance, and the deejay invites her, orders her almost, to the middle of the floor. Now we see a different man approach, and the two become a dancing pair. I am transfixed, at this point, and I suddenly get the appeal of these live action clips, because there’s a sticky energy that comes from being off script, that comes from not being sure what you’re watching. I’m like: damn—suddenly they’re on the dusty ground, the man’s boots up by the woman’s face; he’s humping her in a sort of 69 position—does she WANT to be doing this? Now she’s face first on the ground. Is that a dance move she’s doing, sort of swimming with her arms, or is she trying to get away? It becomes clear, as clear as it can be in a grainy, quick-cut video: She’s trying to get him off of her. I start to feel queasy. She manages to stand up, but the guy is at her again. She pushes him, angry. They’re shoving each other up against the speakers. She turns to walk away again, and the first guy lunges at her, gets his hands around her waist from behind. She’s back on the ground, and he’s humping her. The crowd is watching indifferently—men, women, a couple kids. The video cuts. Now a few men are holding her; there’s a guy on each leg pulling her spread eagled. Another guy is jumping off the speakers to land between her legs. He has something white in his mouth. Is it her underwear? Cut. The video shows the guy leaping onto her again. Cut. Again. Cut. Again. Then we see the woman shaking herself off, red-faced, departing. Some jumbled footage of men speaking indecipherably. Cut. The end.

What the hell? What did I just see? Why was this posted on my Facebook newsfeed with nothing but a couple benign ha ha comments posted after it?

I turned to the internet for answers and found that indeed, as one commenter noted, annoyed that the clip was being presented as a new diversion, the video is all over the place. It’s from 2008, and it’s frequently titled “Dance Hall Tourist” and described as “tourist girl getting wild to dancehall.” Is that what I saw? A tourist girl getting wild? I’m a white chick myself, a white girl, or I used to be one. Now I’m a white middle-aged mom, and I’ve never spent much time in the recesses of the internet where the side bars are stacked with thumbnails for Pole Dance Fail and the World’s Boob Slapping Contest. I had forgotten. I had forgotten, if I’d ever exactly known, how common this perspective was, and I felt a muddled disbelief. But then I found a description for the video that I thought was accurate: “Dance hall tourist gets raped publicly.” Yes, that described what I thought I saw. I scrolled through dozens of comments on various sites to see how people were responding. Typically, they reacted as if to a funny joke: “hahahah.” “THAT WAS HILARIOUS.” “Ha. They ain’t got shit on me. I’m talking jumping outta planes and landing in the punanny.” “White girl got SCHOOLED. Did you see her face hahaha.”

There were also a few critical comments. One guy said he knew where he wouldn’t be spending his tourist dollars. Someone asked: “Why would they do that to her? Racism? Or was she rude?”

This is the stew I must have smelled in the title “White Chicks Shouldn’t”: the simmering mix of race, gender, tourist, local, sex, power, payback, dollars. The man who posted on the link on Facebook is from a poor, tropical country. Should I just ignore it? For a night, I tossed and turned on all the things it brought up for me as a white female, a former tourist chick, an author of a book about a white girl-brown boy romance. I commented on the link in my mind, wondering if I should say something like:

Maybe this clip should be titled “Jamaican dudes shouldn’t.”
or
“Black dudes shouldn’t”
or
“Guys shouldn’t”

“Men shoudn’t”

“People shouldn’t”

Or, the title being what it is, I wondered if I should pose some questions, like:

White girls shouldn’t what, exactly?

Dance in foreign countries?

Dance sexy?

Dance without a husband or male relative standing by?

Expect to move through the world unmolested?

Leave the all-inclusives?

Forget themselves? Forget for one minute that though they’re white, yes—and so might have some feelings of entitlement, might have some cash—they’re also female, and they can be raped.

In any case, when I next logged on to Facebook, the link had been taken down. Maybe someone else had given the poster a nudge. But since then, I’ve been walking around with the question in my mind: White chicks shouldn’t what? When I was traveling by myself, I probably asked myself some version of this everyday.

Girls shouldn’t what, and how much can they not do and still have autonomy, still have a full range of human responses, still travel, still live? I have a ramble about this half written out, but it will have to wait to be posted.

In the meantime, not long after I stumbled upon the Dancehall Tourist Facebook post, I read about the Richmond High School gang rape on Jezebel. (The story about a fifteen year-old girl who, upon leaving her home-coming dance, was gang-raped and beaten by a number of men for over two hours while a crowd of men and boys watched wasn’t covered widely by national msm.)

I don’t know with certainty the ethnicity of the survivor, but given the school’s demographic and the last names of family members, I assume she’s not white. White girls, of course, not being the only ones who shouldn’t. Whiteness, of course, being just one of a thousand perceived provocations.

It was another Facebook post (Danica’s) that alerted me to the conversation about the event on the SFGate web site, where commenters widely decried the act but where some also decried the proclivities of various races and the stupidity of a girl who would go into a darkened courtyard to drink with a boy she knew. One commenter, Lilypod, responded sharply to the implication that the girl could have saved herself if she’d been smarter, and Danica posted her excellent note, which I’m excerpting here:

“What do people seriously think women do every single day of their lives anyway? In various ways, to varying extents: they limit their movements and impose curfews on themselves; in subtle ways, often without realising, they rearrange their lives around the possibility of avoiding an attack; they avoid going places alone and curtail their independence; they come home earlier than they wish to; they have their keys ready in their hands when they’re walking up to their front doors; they double-check doors at night; they take taxis for short distances even if they’d rather walk and even if the expense is one they can ill afford; they walk the long route home rather than take a more convenient shortcut; they text each other to let it be known they’ve gotten home safely; they anxiously await friends’ texts for the same confirmation; they avoid jobs that finish late; they avoid certain jobs entirely; they pass up accommodation they might otherwise take because of poor street lighting.

“they avoid traveling alone; they change their jogging routes or stick to a treadmill indoors. Women take these attempts at avoiding attacks completely for granted and so does everybody else: it’s seen as completely normal, not as a sign of a damaged society. So what are we going to teach young girls from now on? To look around at the boys in their classes and see all their male schoolmates as potential rapists; to expect rape everywhere?”

That query hit a raw nerve for me, as it probably does for any woman who wants to move through the world independently, for any woman who has a daughter she hopes will be able to do the same.

Men shouldn’t. Boys shouldn’t. People shouldn’t.

But we know they sometimes, some of them, do.

How to know it and still live fully?

Strip Bars, Sex Workers, Here and Then and There

My novel CURRENCY is about a Thai man and American woman who have a hard time unraveling their genuine connection from sticky assumptions about money, gender, sex, and nationality. The book is set in Thailand, where the sex industry informs the way foreign and local men and women look at each other, but the protagonist is affected, too, by her dating experiences in the States.

The exchange of money and gender performance in all its various guises has fascinated me since I was a kid, and I can’t remember now if my interest was ignited or just fueled by one of my first jobs: As a teenager, I worked in a diner for a guy who also owned the only strip bar in town, which was located in an alley a couple blocks away from the restaurant. (This will be an entry in a future post that will be called something like: Were My Parents Smart or Crazy?) Most of the bar’s dancers were imported to our small, rust-belt town; they came in on the Greyhound for week or two stints, and when things were slow at the diner, as they often were, I’d sometimes be asked to use my parent’s Ford Fairmont station wagon to ferry them between the restaurant and the seedy hotel where they stayed. Some of them were nice, confiding or conspiratorial with me. Some of them were drugged and scuzzy. What stands out now is how pale most of them were; this was before tanning booths were ubiquitous, but just.

Of course, I was wide-eyed. Once I was invited into the hotel room to wait while the woman finished feathering and spraying her hair. She was chatty and plaintive: “I’m not going to meet a nice guy doing this,” she said. One of the dancers got pregnant, and Rob hired her at the diner once she began to show. She had thin, dishwater hair and dishwater skin and blue veins on her eyelids. She was tiny, even as her belly grew, and other denizens of the scene whispered to me that she was still doing drugs. Cocaine, supposedly, but I sure didn’t signs of any uppers. She was often listless and miserable. I remember nights when we were holding down the fort together, filling ketchup bottles and doing other prep work, and she’d perk up as she recounted nights of dancing in Jamestown or wherever, described the feeling of walking into the dawn with three hundred dollars in her purse. She had to watch out for patrons who’d linger outside and try to mug her, she said, then told of a particularly dramatic attempted purse-snatching. I didn’t say much, but I couldn’t get enough. I was fascinated.

It wasn’t hard to get grist for the mill. Were cities and towns just seedier then? While in college, I spent some time hanging out in Philadelphia, where some friends and acquaintances starting go-go dancing at the cheapy little bars in Center City. I felt comfortable enough to go hang out there for the afternoon shifts, and even though I was under 21, no one questioned me. Again, I was wide-eyed, drinking in the dynamics and the gossip along with the occasional beer a patron might buy me. And a few years later, there was another group of friends, middle-class grad students this time, almost a trend, doing stripping and lap dances and escorting, and another bunch of stories and impressions to process.

And then, of course, there was Southeast Asia. I landed first in Thailand, where the sex industry is hard to avoid. In Bangkok, I stayed with my friend Jillana, who was volunteering at Empower, an NGO that helped sex workers, well, empower themselves. Empower’s stated mission wasn’t necessarily to take women out of sex work, it was to give them the tools to make their lives better–English, skills, health advice. Their office was in Patpong, heart of the tourist-oriented red-light district, and I went there with Jillana a couple times and remember a cheerful scene: cute, bright offices; cute, bright, giggling young women. More than a couple of them came up to me and to whisper that they weren’t bar girls, that their friends were. Jillana contradicted this later, but it added to my discombobulation: What was I supposed to say when they denied this of themselves? I had thought we were in a no-judgment zone. The thing you sometimes hear about Thai culture is that prostitution plays a different role there, that it doesn’t have the same stigma, that Westerners can’t quite understand. No argument from me. Even more than at home, buying and selling sex, the influence of cash and other factors in the power dynamic, confused me. I wrote about it in Maxine (posted here), and I thought about it all the time in terms of my own feminism, sex positivity, and desire to see social justice.

And perhaps diffidence and confusion are not the worst lens through which to look at the sex industry. Recently, The Nation published a deeply-researched two-part series by Noy Thrupkaew on the crusade against sex trafficking. The first part focuses on the efforts by Western Christians to rescue sex workers in South and Southeast Asia, and some of the complexities involved.

The second part focuses on the stories of some prostitutes themselves. It’s wonderfully written. I find the last few paragraphs especially insightful and brilliant. The girl described there is 15, a year younger than I was when I started working at the diner. She seems so vulnerable and so brave. Now that my own teenage years are part of an historical era, now that I’m the mother of a daughter myself, the mother of friends whose daughters are getting breasts and boyfriends and dubious T-shirt from Abercombie, I don’t see the issue of sex work, of sexuality, getting any less fascinating, complicated, and confusing, but I guess it troubles me more.

Acknowledging

I just sent the copyedited manuscript of CURRENCY to Gina, my editor. The next time I see the novel, it will be in galleys, manuscript no more.

It’s been twelve years since I workshopped the experiment in voice that became the first chapter of the novel. I was 28 years old then, and I smoked cigarettes blithely in the apartment where Mark and I had just moved in together. Up to that point, I’d written only a handful or two of short stories, each page wrung out of me slowly, and writing a novel seemed an impossible thing. But Piv’s voice was a wind at my back, and the few years it took me to complete the first “finished” version were great ones; they’ll probably go down as some of the best in my life. The story unfolded inexorably in my mind, and I had the time and attention to give to writing. Then came kids, mortgages, money worries and increasingly demanding day-jobs; rejections and not-quite-rejections and agents who sent me back through the pages. I revised in the cracks of time I could find. And received more rejections. And then, after I’d abandoned all hope, eventual acceptance. (Thanks, OV Books!) And now here I am, writing acknowledgments.

Writing acknowledgments is making me nervous. I fear I’m not always gracious in thanking people, being myself sometimes off-put by gratitude that seems too gushingly produced to be sincere but also knowing, first-hand and through observation, how much a heartfelt thanks or the lack of one can mean. I’m feeling twin urges to be brutally honest and very thorough. To make sure I don’t leave out any key players, I’ve tried narrating to myself the story of my writing this novel, and what I’ve found is that the most important people and turning points happened before the characters even materialized for me, long ago as that was. There’s one person in particular I’ve realized I need to thank—Tuk, a Thai man—whose last name I don’t remember. It’s been driving me crazy. I know I had it somewhere! So the other night I unearthed the plastic bin in the basement where I’ve been storing all the books I used to research the novel and the journals I kept when I was backpacking.

I meant to be efficient, because like many people at my stage of life, I always have more things to do than hours to them in, and I was already stealing time. But as soon as I opened the box, the smell of old smoke discombobulated me. The burnt musk has been synonymous with my memories of youth ever since 1995, when a bad apartment fire singed all my possessions it didn’t destroy. Like a genie going back into a bottle—whoosh—I was back in the past, and nevermind the sleep that I really needed to get that night. When I came upstairs hours later, my fingertips were black with soot from paging through the journals. It became almost beside that point that I found names and addresses of people I had completely forgotten, but not Tuk’s.

Similarities between shoestring travel and life with a newborn

1. There are the similar physical humiliations— the diarrhea or leaking breasts, the forced doing of once unthinkable things, begging a bus driver to stop so you can relieving yourself in the weeds, baring your breast to nurse in a crowded subway train.

2. There’s the same dependence on a bible, The Lonely Planet, or Dr. Sears Baby Book or Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and the same frustration when the descriptions don’t match your reality.

3. There’s the discomfort and awkwardness of too much gear, the protrusion of a pack in a re-purposed school bus stuffed three-to-a-seat or of a stroller and bulging diaper bag in a shop aisle.

4. There is the feeling of all eyes on the potential disruption that is you, the lone white person in the village market, the sweating young mother with the baby who begins to cry in the quiet lobby.

5. But all eyes on you also in the other way, too. You’re a movie or rock star—the person with the eyes called beautiful and the blond arm hair others want to stroke, the madonna with the baby miracle, the newest bearer of the universe’s greatest gift.

6. You make the same thrown-together alliances, with the other backpacker getting off at dusk in the town, with the other mother looking to break silence in the park.

7. You have the same desire to do the right thing and the nagging fear that you’re probably doing it wrong—and that you’re being judged. What do you do with a fork in a Thai restaurant? What do you do when your baby’s only pacifier falls in the dirt?

8. You place a similar consequence on what you eat—the attempt to avoid ice or raw lettuce in Katmandu, to avoid dairy if you’re nursing. And there’s the same second-guessing: Was it the market-stall smoothie you gave in to that left you puking in the outdoor toilet at midnight? Was it the broccoli in that soup you ate that caused the horrific pre-dawn screams?

9. There’s the same urge to picture-take. You can’t believe how glorious the site, how far you’ve come. You can’t believe the perfection of the baby. If you capture it just right, will you always remember the ecstasy of this moment? Will others begin to understand that despite the dysentery, the battered body, the lack of freedom and privacy, of one’s own bed, the forbearance of mosquitoes and 4:00 AM feedings, you would never not be here? You would never have not made this trip.

10. And of course there’s the newness. Each stone and shadow and breeze is new, and particular. You sample the infinite variety, but you recognize the infinite connectedness, too. We all were born. So many have given birth. So many have tended babies, protected them from the world, showed it to them, smiled at them to elicit their smiles. It’s the humble and arrogant search of so many journeys: the world revealed, a mystery peered into. You are powerful and powerless, and everything seems both small and huge.

I’m sure there’s more.

Letter to Sari

For a chunk of my 20s, my focus was on traveling. If I wasn’t on the move, I was dreaming or writing about traveling. My mode was shoestring, solo. I was chasing the drug of discombobulation and the scrambled-for view, the circumstances where just getting to the post-office could be an eye-popping adventure made possible only by staggering vicissitudes. (You lost your bearings in Bangkok and now the street signs only appeared in Thai script. Amazingly, you found the water taxi port after all. More amazingly, you got on the right boat and off of it in time. You managed to pay the fare. You mailed your letters! You made it back to the guesthouse! This calls for a celebration! The combination of humility and confidence bordering on cockiness that was won in such battles was a potent brew.)

Then I met someone similarly minded, and after a joint trip or two we got steady jobs, a mortgage, and pregnant. Two weeks after the baby was born, Mark went back to work, leaving me in our Rogers Park condo, shattered with love for a son who screamed in raging pain more than he did just about anything else. My nerves were shot, day and night were turned upside down, and suctioned to my wrung-out body was a police siren that might go off at any moment and not stop for an hour or three. Life would have felt more familiar if I’d been dropped off in Timbuktu; at least I would have had a Lonely Planet to go by. I was grounded, humbled, and instead of calculating, say, whether I could pull off a quick trip to France, I factored the risks of leaving home for more than fifteen minutes at a time.

But soon my fear of being housebound outweighed all other fears. A determined hunger rose in me. We would get out, goddammit! We would walk! But getting out the door of a walk-up with a tetchy newborn is not easy, and on the second or third attempt, I managed to lock myself outside of the foyer where Tillio lay in his stroller crying. Thank God the neighbor was home to buzz me in. Thank God for the Baby Bjorn and the day Tillio weighed enough to ride in it. I gained confidence. We went farther. Mark and I had moved to Rogers Park when I was pregnant and working full-time, so I hadn’t explored the new neighborhood fully. Well, I would now.

I remember that first trip to the post-office with Tillio strapped to me. Standing on the corner of Devon and Clark with summer’s first heat cooking the asphalt, ripening the diesel fumes, and carrying the puff of an elote cart toward me, I felt a lift of familiar expectancy. A new lens slipped over my view. These were the smells of Guatemala City or Saigon. The rind of a mango at the curb, the window of a ragtag dollar store, the family parked around a red laundry cart gnawing on corn while they waited for the bus–I saw it all with the crystalline clarity that comes from everything being strange and new. And on that day I started writing a letter in my head to my friend Sari. She’d traveled too, she’d written too, and I knew the questions of how to keep doing that and more were ones she’d started asking, or would soon. I wanted to tell her that in the face of so much apparent loss (I’d cried to her on the phone in the first few weeks), so much was found: Having a baby was like traveling. I had comparison and after comparison to show how this was true.

I started the mental list of comparisons in 2001, and I’ve been meaning to write that letter ever since. If my intention flagged once I became more accustomed to parenting, it was renewed six years later when Sari had her baby. This time I would really do it! But I was always interrupted, or too tired, or too busy with other projects in my scant free time, or maybe just unwilling to pin the dreaminess down. It’s remained the case for me, though, that going anywhere with my kids—even just to the playground less visited—still feels exploratory. And with all that came before and that hopefully will come later, trekking the springtime sidewalks of Rogers Park with my new love Tillio was one of the greatest adventures I’ll ever have.