The Sorority Row

I try to like new things. This is not the same as cool things, but seeing as I'm middle aged, drive a Prius and am cultivating exciting developments in the area of ear hair, I don't know that "cool" is anywhere on the menu I'm allowed to order from these days.

The time window for what constitutes "new" is getting smaller and smaller and harder to fit through anymore. Did I mention "middle aged"? The range of windows I fit through in any circumstance, real or metaphorical, is itself diminishing as I expand. There are no restaurant bathrooms I'm leaving without using the door anymore, for example. If I'm on a date so bad I have to consider escaping, I'm forced to confront the situation head-on like an adult: by feigning schizophrenia and threatening to murder the waiter and his family to stop them stealing my thoughts with mind waves sent through their gauged earlobes. It helps to sell the lie when the ear gauging thing really does make me want to harm them.

I still think of facebook as new. That's something I do. But apparently, that's already not only passe, but it's for geezers. Teenagers hate it. I was going to say "like MySpace" but go on, ask a teenager if they even know what that is. Take in that blank return stare, like looking down the barrel of an unloaded gun. Feel your bones go brittle and your prostate balloon on the spot.

I'm open to new things, but I'm learning I have to act between the time I hear of the thing and before it becomes completely and totally forgotten by everybody. Like right now I'm kind of mad I've never been slut-shamed. I hear the term all the time, but always shouted with righteous indignation (as it should be--you go, Sister!) and never at or from me. It's clear feminism is winning when the Gyno-Americans get to use their own code-talk, right out in the open in front of us and we are socially bound to cast our eyes away and wait for the signal that it's OK to be heard once more. We can't join in because we "can't know" what the female experience is like. Which sounds like a set-up for a critique, but is actually true. The point is this ship is sailing away without me and I'm stuck here on the dock, watching it course toward the horizon, left behind once again, just me and disqualifying penis.

I'm down with neologisms but I am interested in the context of the development. Slut-shaming didn't used to be called "slut-shaming," it used to be just called "conversation." I was raised by a single mother along with just two sisters and a giant passel of aunts. I grew up swimming in a medium of sticky, airborne, weaponized estrogen. I know what women sound like when they talk to each other. It's a subtle verbal knife fight, with the words as probing thrusts or parries. The words themselves varied less in inflection or intent and more in just deciding how many layers to mask the underlying--always underlying--pointy, murderous aggression.

I've never been slut-shamed, but just like my parents' divorce,* I've decided it's my fault. I was never slutty enough. Nor did I ever fall in with a circle of new-money white people friends who get together for things like wine tastings and candle parties, convening to build up, brick by brick, an utterly opaque wall between the illustrious now and the American-cheese-sandwiches yesterday of their upbringings, waiting in coil-tense anticipation for one person to expose a point of unrefined weakness--like random sex for pleasure!--so they can then pounce with ferocious passive-aggression, allowing everyone within demure and appropriate earshot to know just how much they disapprove of such uncouth, slippery barbarism. It only takes one person for the rest to all level their collective gaze and shout approbation with their arched eyebrows, sounding with klaxon clarity "Don't bother looking too closely at me, let's all stare at the clumsy dirty one!"

I don't know how I can get on board with this thing and I'm afraid time is passing me by. I'm getting old. I already don't get Skrillex.** And now society has this and a thousand thousand other things, rolling the old barrel forward, with or without me, just like it will when I'm ultimately dead. The only thing it really makes me want to do is care less. Youth culture doesn't want to count me in, fine. I'll get an SUV and take as much sweet crude with me as I can. Maybe in the meantime someone will deign to scold me about that at least.

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*Not my OWN divorce, no way. That was her fault, the skeezer.

**I mean, what is it even? Is it the guy, that person? Or a genre of music, like that dubstep or something? The genuine shame is I think I'm OK not ever knowing for sure.