Sexism: When Rad Brains Fail

Ingredients for this My Time: stupid idiots and their stupid faces, drinking, a gal pal to bitch with, pajamas that just say no, and a night or four in.

Oh Darlings, darlings, darlings. When was the last time you were "poked" on Facebook by some moron sent to the future from the early 2000s in his attack plan, and all 1950s in his head? Let's talk about SEXISM. Lately my gap pals and I have had a pile of bullshit loaded on our vagina carts, and YET, no payout of a hard penis to make amends for such trifling. Then again, we have closed our bank accounts to such payments because mixed metaphors make more fun than the men with brains and Facebook accounts. Here's some of what we're sick of.

Smart White Nerds in Academia.

Hey Assholes, all of you in the US who work in contemporary literature of the world? You use words like "neoliberal" and oppose racism, genocide, Republicans, Nafta, and support Occupy movements, political action, local farms, comic books to discuss world issues, radical left publication, and theoretically women's rights to the things you haven't ever had to discuss as a "right?"

Here's a fucking clue: don't try to fuck every single one of the women around you in your profession. BUT FOR WHY, you ask. Well, they're your colleagues. Sure, banging happens, but maybe you shouldn't send out one mass text to multiple women in your profession, hoping one bites, "poke" them on Facebook like some nerd, ask them all "so you want to go fuck?" as a PICK-UP LINE, or slam your body against theirs and grab an ass in a conference lobby. Guess what you are? A sexist. A man with great ideals who can't even HAVE A CONVERSATION WITH A WOMAN without objectifying her let alone befriend a woman or consider her a colleague. Good job having great morals that mean nothing in actual daily or yearly life. And we women you don't objectify? Well, that's worse. We don't get the benefit of at least a nasty look up and down to take home later to our vibrators because we're nothing. While the harem of women you try to bang laugh at your nasty face and/or bang you and talk about it later to all of the rest of us ladies, the ones you openly call UGLY or don't even mention are farther down the totem pole of the profession than the ones you give a second to because you want to bang or bang again. It's unclear: as sexual beings who like sex and sexy stuff, we don't even know what you find sexually attractive.

Go back to your nerd convention, you measly, sociopathic, never-fucked-in-my-teenage-years-so-making-up-for-lost-time-and-narrow-ideas-about-women piece of shit. You exist, and it needs to be okay at some point for all of us to talk about how you exist and ruin progressive intellectual and empathetic collaboration, mentorship, and art. Let the women who fuck you be condemned to fuck you.

Looked out at the publications you subscribe to, lately? New York Review of Books?

London Review of Books? Are you all competing for the absence of women as a way to somehow have your very own vagina, i.e. absence? Just because you read and teach Fun Home and Persepolis doesn't mean you have taken a long look in your nerd mirror to see how you treat your fellow female colleagues. Your equals.

What's just as bad is the women who sleep with you, don't tell anyone, then bring up how disgusting you are and say they would never sleep with you.

The shame you bring to their bodies, already clearly so fucked up that they can't say to themselves "I'm an adult woman and I'm allowed to sleep with adult men, whether they be creeps, studs, or people I have an actual emotional interest in." How is it that I've heard recently by adult women who pull this kind of strange, anti-feminist, lying to girlfriends in some convoluted way, sad shit and proclaim: "I'm so worried about what my father/my family/my siblings/my peers would think if I slept with someone [that you already did sleep with, Honey]." You are an adult woman and no Nerd Asshole you sleep with cares about what anyone thinks about him. You're his colleague, his student, his teacher, his peer, his something in the world because he does not exist in isolation even though his penis thinks he does. No one has told him that it's not okay to not think about these things. Give yourself a break. Think about them half as much if your desire for sex is paramount. Ladies: it's okay to have sex; it's not okay to lie to girlfriends about sex with men, or to punish yourself for what people might think about you for having sex.

Yes, we all have issues, yes, it's important to be generous with people over condemning, yes, it's important to understand that these issues are more complicated that a simple rant makes them. Wait. NO. No no no. Don't do that. Don't avoid actually engaging--simply and clearly--a real actual thing that happens to women every day (at least where I am and who I'm with--perhaps I'm in a vacuum, because certainly this can't happen elsewhere, right?!) because you have a rad brain. Rape, genocide, murder, war: these are men's burdens because they instigate and carry them out. It takes courage for a man to say that rape is their problem, sexual harassment is their problem, death at large and the destruction of many things are their problem. And it takes courage for a women to say that she has been a victim of men's simply made poor decisions. It takes courage for us all to speak up. Rant. Rant. Rant. Say it and don't look back. Save your life every declarative sentence at a time. Don't let anyone with a rad brain complicate an issue for you that is as simple as you wanting to have a good life.

A conversation I had with a male colleague:

Me: "you shouldn't tell women writers in our classes that their work would be better if they had more sex. That's sexist. We're your colleagues. Some of us your senior colleagues."

Him: "you're racist."

Me: "No, I asked to speak to you because of your sexism."

Him: "But I love women! What are you, one of them--them feminist things? A lesbian? You need to get out more."

Me: "No, I'm straight and I have a boyfriend. And I go out all the time."

Him: "Really?"

Then he cries. Of course he was given the best fellowship for money and prestige in my profession. Which was awarded by people far more established in the profession. And never once in any course, talk, reading have any of those established people addressed his sexism. So what do we do? We laugh about him. And we are told not to worry about such things, it's not productive. Be quiet. Don't rant. I have a rad brain and I can tell you that.

A Public Appearance. For the Fans.

Ingredients for this My Time: public appearances, looking and sounding fabulous no matter what.

Oh Honey, sometimes you just have to appear in public no matter how you're feeling. This is the price of being in the upper echelons of society and therefore being totally kind of famous. So this week your little Daggy gave a public interview on the famous (infamous?) Vile Jelly Radio show. It was for Valentine's Day. It was for crystal talk. It was for astrology. It was for satire as a means of artistic experimentation that leads to shedding skin like a nice chemical skin peel and coming out the other side starkly sober but knowing one does not have to be. It was for a mirror, it was for the heart, and Vile Jelly Radio is about the heart. It was for the person who isn't me. Which is me. I am Dagmar Ottenham.

Remember: you can always email me questions for The Advice Column or about anything else (but remember, a lady never tells her measurements!) at mytimebydagmar@gmail.com.

Dagmar's Public Interview on Vile Jelly Radio

Darlings, on Sunday Feb 12th, I will be giving an extraordinarily private and sessy interview on 88.1 FM, KCOU, for the show called Vile Jelly Radio, from 6-8 pm Central Time. This interview will include an old box of music that I couldn't sell (I made thousands off an ex-husband's other old records!) and advice on how to celebrate Valentine's Day properly. Obviously I'm the perfect person to hand out such advice. And I welcome the questions and guidance of the perfect host, Andrew Leland, recently married to a Polish spy named Lily. What a night of decadence it will be, Honey. Vodka, love, music, and "music," and "love."

Dagmar's Advice Column: poverty, trauma, and men edition

In this part of the blog readers ask me what ingredients are needed for their own My Time, and I provide a prescription that must be followed to the ends of the night.

I was sent this from a reader, recently:

"Dear Dagmar, I know you are not writing an advice column, but I am wondering how to turn insomnia into My Time.  Although I am warm in bed and all alone, my head gets filled with all the shit I need to do to please others, mostly men. If you can squeeze it in naturally, please suggest how a woman of distinction takes for herself those restless hours. Sign, Restless For Men."

Of course this is an advice column! I just thought I was advising myself and the world to understand the elegance of women. I had no idea that I could advise an individual. Or that I should (I probably shouldn't). In fact, I was told the other day by the homeless man I occasionally wake up next to under the overpass that I'm clearly "losing myself" and that makes him "sad," and want to "get together and talk," which makes it sound more like I shouldn't be advising someone, because I've lost my self somewhere, who knows where? I thought I was under the overpass but apparently I'm not even here, therefore I have no authority to speak my own mind let alone speak authoritatively to someone else. I'm a fun ghost! And, Honies, if a man really wants to talk to you, he doesn't start his reasoning with the fact that you are losing yourself. Although the experience of being able to be a non-person engaged in a conversation sounds ripe with possibilities...of course, in the end, I have avoided his underpass, and that's probably a mistake I'll regret in the future. Despite that, I've set up an email address that you can contact me at if you too would like to ask me a question: mytimebydagmar@gmail.com.

Now on to answering.

Dear Restless For Men,
                 Wait. There are men around worthy of pleasing? Where? Can I come with you next time?  Where have you found all these "men" one might "please?" Can you please advise me? Oh, I forgot, I'm pretending to care that this is about you. Ok, back to it. Poor Restless! A woman's work is never done, nor are her cliches. I'm shocked that you've found a way to have all this My Time that you're not using for personal gain--it just seems so natural that when one can't sleep, one would drink, shop online, or at least study ambiguous sex toys in order to confuse oneself long enough to stop thinking about pleasing other human beings and instead think about how they seem to pleasure themselves with things that look like Ikea table decorations. Now I don't want to be hard on you. It's clear that you weren't raised in the upper echelons of society, like I was, so you have the ability to empathize and speak from your own mouth phrases that don't begin, "I'm proud of myself for..." or "It's not my job to...". Even when asking me for advice you qualify yourself into not asking me what you need, but instead ask me to examine what I can do and then maybe, only if it's natural, address your needs and feelings. Qualifying is something women are taught to do from an early age by these men who need us to be their mothers and lovers and then fuck us over because its not in their life-job description to not fuck anyone over. Women, and especially women who have been traumatized, start apologizing as their go-to when they are feeling attacked. Of course I don't know what that's like because I hire people to apologize for me, called "lobbyists."

Oh, don't I sound like a bitter, salty, hostile vagina, something women, and more often women of color, are accused of feeling, THEREFORE APPARENTLY, being. Well, sometimes the truth is bitter, not the vagina. It seems like your want to be in proximity to a population of a species that you are inherently drawn to as a straightish woman (men: duh) makes you feel shame about wanting to do what people who were raised poor and traumatized are better at doing: adapting to situations that are out of their control, seeing others' needs and wants, and feeling your own feelings along with others. I wouldn't know what that's like because I have other things that are far more important to me, like top shelf vodka, pride, my self actualization/repression (how they can conflate!), and sophistication. It seems like you've been burned, and are aware of what loss is--not something to be proud of, but something to feel, whether that makes you look "bitter" or "crazy" to men or not, and THEREFORE wondering if you're actually crazy, believing your wondering about this until you can't sleep confirms something about who you are, absolutely. The scary part about thinking that way is that is cuts two ways--being called something, like "hostile," "volatile," OR "loving" "beautiful" makes it easier to feel that oneself is that thing, and then be that thing. In fact, it seems like you know that actually experiencing suffering makes you a better person, one that has been traumatized in the past but is currently in her warm bed knowing that she is safe in her post-traumatic growth. What a wonderful thing to know, isn't it? You are warm, safe, capable of feeling, capable of empathizing, capable of shame, capable of intimacy, capable of desire. You sound like an incredibly wonderful (remember, when we are called IT, it's easier to call ourselves IT, and then BE IT, so read "wonderful" and try to neglect the other things you've been called) human being, so give yourself a break. Oh, Honey, do it.

My prescription for Your My Time: a glass of Bourdeaux in bed, reading all the links I gave you when you can't sleep, cutting yourself some slack, and calling a girlfriend when you need to be reminded how amazing you really are. And you are your best girlfriend, Honey.

But don't call me. I'll be passed out drunk or have company known as "ambiguity" or "Rodrigo" without the shame, bitterness, self-humor, cadence, emotional freakouts, or recollection that only come with being a good person. Give yourself a pat on the back, and plan on taking care of me when I'm too old or broken to reach my own vodka bottles. Cuz once I get "found," we all know I'm headed toward an upper class sociopathy that is elegantly tragic (see: Joan Crawford).

Sincerely (just kidding, I'm not real, so I can't be sincere. But seriously, if anyone finds me can you please let me know?),
Dagmar