Salon.com > Laurie Essig

Fine diving

Mon, 10 Jun 2002 19:24:00 +0000

Normally I am a fun date. I like good restaurants that serve ridiculously vertical entrees and dry martinis. It doesn't hurt if the lighting is good and the servers are attractive. Cooking at home, I am a diva of fresh and perfect produce. I love slicing kumquats wafer thin into salads of freshly picked greens and concocting ever more exotic dressings. But lately I've been thinking a lot about the politics of food and, as we all know, thinking about fun always ruins it.

I'm not just speaking about the very scary genetically engineered potato on my plate, or the even scarier idea that we'll all die of mad cow disease in a few years, but the very premise of fine dining: conspicuous consumption and the waste that is central to its enjoyment. When I buy unblemished produce or eat at a restaurant, I am not just supporting a market that charges far too much money; I am part of an economy of excess and luxury that leaves far too much in the trash. Which brings me, albeit in an abrupt manner, to the topic at hand: dumpster diving.

Heteroflexibility

Wed, 15 Nov 2000 20:31:00 +0000

There is nothing like teaching college students to make a person feel hopelessly out-of-date. This fact first hit me at the tender age of 30. I was teaching what I thought was the hippest version of sociology imaginable. As part of my haute hipness, I had included readings on Elvis Presley. None of the students, however, had the faintest idea who Elvis Presley was. One thought that he might have been an actor. Another said she thought he had invented a diet because he had always been fat.

The generation gap between the students and me was bad enough, but then my teaching assistant, a nice man who was neither as young as they nor as old as I, decided to help me communicate more effectively the King's cultural significance. "Elvis Presley," he explained to the students, "was someone our parents used to listen to. He sang this stuff called rock 'n' roll. It came before rap music."

The students nodded their heads, as if they had just remembered that rap music did not always exist. I shook mine, having realized for the first time that Elvis really was dead. And in Elvis' death, I felt my own mortality.

Lesbian fingers

Mon, 16 Oct 2000 19:30:00 +0000

I am enjoying the feeling of warmth and unaccountable optimism that can only come on a Indian summer afternoon. My daughters are happily picking the few confused daffodils that came out early in our Brooklyn garden. And then I open the newspaper.

"Heterosexual Women Have Index and Middle Fingers of the Same Length, Lesbians Deviate From the Norm" is the first headline I see. I quickly glance at my fingers and feel a rush of relief. I have not been living a lie. My fingers conform to and confirm my true self. Then my relief turns to anger as I think about how one more shard of mean-spirited science has entered American culture as objective truth. And the truth of lesbian fingers is as sordid and as painful as any attempt to confine the imagination and creativity of human desire into a rigid and painful one-size-fits-all model.

The science of lesbian fingers is mean-spririted science for many reasons. First, this sort of study uses the existence of a statistical correlation to argue causation. Certain sorts of hands may be more likely to appear on the bodies of women who identify as lesbians, but isn't that a correlation as opposed to a cause? People with green eyes might be more likely to be accountants, but it is highly unlikely that there is a causal relationship between the two.

Hillary’s a dyke!

Tue, 01 Aug 2000 19:40:00 +0000

I am not always a good example for my children. I have tattoos, I drink a bit too much and, perhaps worst of all, I love to spread rumors. Oh, not so much about my friends. After all, there's little fun in taking delight in the downfall of mere mortals. Spreading the word that friends are breaking up or having affairs provides me with very little pleasure.

No, the rumors I like to spread are about famous people, especially politicians. There is something so luscious about hearing that some self-righteous politician who just came out for the "Defense of Marriage Act" was caught with his pants down in a whorehouse. And when the rumor moves from the tabloids to the mainstream press -- without actually gaining any more credibility -- I am filled with a devilish glee.

So when rumors about Hillary Rodham Clinton moved from the peripheral Post to the middle of the Times, I should have been dancing on air. After all, here was word that Hillary, that paragon of political sensitivity, had uttered an anti-Semitic remark. Here was a rumor, pure and simple, dancing through the most respectable of papers.

Same-sex marriage

Mon, 10 Jul 2000 19:30:00 +0000

Lately straight relatives and friends have been calling to talk about Vermont and the fact that same-sex "unions" are now legal in that state. They can barely contain their excitement as they ask: "Aren't you just thrilled? You and Liza will go and get married, won't you?"

I hate to disappoint them. They so desperately want us to be just like they are, to aspire to nothing more nor less than legal recognition till death do us part. I couch my rejection in subjunctives: "It would be nice if we could be recognized as a family. If we were married, we would save thousands of dollars in insurance bills alone."

But the reality is that I don't want to marry Liza (nor she me). In fact, I'm against same-sex marriage for the same reasons I'm against all marriage.

Although we like to pretend that marriage is natural and universal, it is an institution founded in historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women's oppression -- and everyone's disappointment. Monogamous, heterosexual marriages were an invention of the Industrial Revolution's emerging middle class. The Victorians created the domestic sphere in which middle-class women's labor could be confined and unpaid. At the same time, by infusing the patriarchal family with the romance of monogamy for both parties, the Victorians reduced sexual pleasure to sexual reproduction. All other forms of sex -- homosexuality, masturbation, nonreproductive sex -- were strictly forbidden.

The detachable phallus

Mon, 05 Jun 2000 19:17:00 +0000

I am sitting with two friends in a crowded cafe on a cold winter afternoon. We are all three academics. We are all three feminists. We are all three mothers. And we are all three laughing uproariously. Heads begin to turn. The other diners, mostly professors from the nearby university, do not see what could possibly be so amusing. If only they knew that the source of our mirth is so appropriately academic.

We have been discussing the rather dense theories of gender that have come out of France in the past couple of decades. (In the rarefied world of academe, examining theoretical models often passes for companionable dinner conversation.) My friend Genie is sputtering the phrase "detachable phallus" through bursts of laughter while Emily is repeating the seemingly incomprehensible phrase "It must be a dress sock" and emphasizing her pronouncement's truth by jabbing the air with her finger.

The three of us have just had a dramatic theoretical and personal breakthrough. We have long known that to be a woman in the university is to face a brick ceiling, a ceiling lowered by the advent of children. But we have just figured out a theoretical intervention that might just chip away at that ceiling. And the discovery has brought us to the point of hilarity and perhaps, ironically, hysteria.

I miss lesbian reproductive sex

Fri, 17 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I have two children. I will not be having any more. Not that I wouldn't like to, but my partner, a party pooper if ever there was one, has made it clear that if I have another child, I will be a single parent.

If I were my mother, I would just get pregnant anyway and then pretend it was an accident. But I am not my mother. For one thing, I am a bit less manipulative than she was. For another, I am a lesbian and it's very difficult to explain an accidental pregnancy in a lesbian relationship.

I could try the "Oh, darling, I'm so sorry. You see, I just happened to be in the sperm bank and the lights went out and I tripped and stumbled and somehow, I'm not even sure how, I got pregnant" line, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't fly. And so, now that my baby is no longer a baby, I am beginning to realize that I will never have another child.

This is sad in all the usual ways. I miss that baby smell and those little baby diapers and all that, but there's something else I miss too. I miss the reproductive sex.

I know, I know. Finding reproductive sex sexy is sick, perverse even. Reproductive sex is, by definition, the opposite of hot. There is something innately unattractive about the line "Honey, the stick is purple. We gotta do it, quick!!!" And yet, here I am, pining for reproductive sex.

Melissa, David and me

Fri, 28 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I am a nobody. I am an untenured professor, an author of one book of interest to few and the writer of columns no one reads. I am of average height and average looks and I am not rich. But recently I was touched by greatness, or the closest thing to greatness this culture has to offer: People magazine called. Yes, the People magazine wanted to know about me, Jane Nobody.

Why?

Because I am a lesbian mother and Melissa Etheridge is a lesbian mother and David Crosby donated the sperm for her baby and, and, and ... And what? Well, that's it. That's all. Melissa Etheridge reveals the identity of her sperm donor and, bingo, they need me to give the story, I don't know really, some weight, I guess.

But what sort of weight does a nobody lesbian mother give this story? After all, David Crosby did not donate the sperm for my children. (At least, I don't think he did. The thing about using an anonymous donor is you really don't know who the donor was. Perhaps it was someone even more famous than David Crosby. Perhaps it was someone much better looking, like Jude Law or Ralph Fiennes. Then again, I doubt that the men drawn to Repro Sperm Bank are of the terribly famous or even good-looking sort. But you never know.)