Part I
“The world is a worse place with you in it”
The driver ahead of me has pulled his car across the only exit to this parking lot and is screaming at me from the safety of his driver’s seat. I do my best to look nonplussed. I even manage to keep up the act when I remember that I live in America, there is a non-zero chance this man has a gun in his car and that I’m about to die in an Aldi parking lot. I internally joke that there are worse places to go but even I know that’s not funny.
You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation? This guy had backed into the parking spot next to me close enough that I could only just barely get into my own car. While I was pulling on my decades of experience watching anime to (unsuccessfully) become two-dimensional, the driver’s side door of my car tapped against his own — a perfectly normal point of friction one might expect in daily life in our car-centric hellworld. As if I’d touched the edge during a game of Operation, he immediately drops his tinted window and starts screaming. When my apologies only make him angrier, I try to remove myself from the situation. He peels out, blocks my only exit and now we’re at the present.
My self-appointed nemesis either gets bored or notices the crowd forming before peeling off. Once it’s clear he isn’t coming back, I start sobbing. Despite my best inclinations to blame myself, I realize this was probably a setup. For whatever reason, this person was looking to start a fight. I just happened to be someone they felt safe starting a fight with. This wasn’t always the case. If I was the man I was a decade ago, 50 pounds heavier and built like a Street Fighter character, I would have simply flexed my enormous trapezius muscles like one of those frilled dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the whole situation could have been avoided. The woman I am today may spit more venom but is notably less intimidating.
I promise I used to be more intimidating
I would bet most women have a story like this. The lucky ones only have one or two. Every time I’ve heard a woman share one of her own stories, I’ve always been taken aback by the matter-of-fact delivery. Often, these are stories about feeling insulted, objectified and even unsafe. Sometimes, there was even a moral at the end of the story about not being alone with certain people in our shared communities. I was already unmoored navigating life early in transition and these stories left me wondering if I even could navigate a situation like that — nevermind if I could sound so blasé about it.
Years later, I've found out on both accounts, you get used to it. All the public crashouts, jabs at your competence and even the guy following you through an unfamiliar city and very obviously masturbating melt into white noise. Eventually, it all starts to feel inevitable, as unremarkable as rain. If this were a movie, we would have already gone to The Hood™, space and had at least one critically acclaimed soft-reboot.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a movie. But if the lived experience of being a woman in the world were a movie, it would certainly be a horror. You don’t have to look very hard to see the experience of women reflected in the horror genre. The “final girl”, a lone surviving woman who pulls from a well of resilience to overcome an antagonist of the film, is a pillar of modern cinematic horror. The image of a woman fighting a supernatural threat with just her wits and one-liners is exciting and, importantly, sells tickets. It’s so ubiquitous that searching “final girl” will bring up all the projects using the name for marketing before an actual explanation of the term.
No one does it like the Animal Crossing community
There is an even longer tradition of horror pulling from the mundane experience of being a woman. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story The Yellow Wallpaper about a woman confined to a nursery is one of the most effective horror stories I’ve ever read. Oppression, misogyny and social inequality can be every bit as terrifying, every bit as monstrous, as any horror icon. In my humble onion, Rosemary's Baby, a story about a woman being gaslit about her own body, doesn’t even need the satanic twist. Your doctor refusing to believe you about your own experience is frightening enough already. From here, there are two works I want to focus on that key into the horror of being a woman in the world; Ursula K. LeGuin’s Tehanu and Stephen King’s Rose Madder.
Saying we wouldn’t have modern sci-fi and fantasy without LeGuin — even modern fiction as whole — might actually be underselling it. While many of her contemporaries seem “of another time”, (personally I can’t imagine noted airplane skeptic J.R.R. Tolkien seeing James Cameron’s Avatar), LeGuin had a massive impact during a formative time in modern fiction and remained engaged well into the age of the internet. She not only saw Avatar, she even wrote about how much she hated it!
Despite being positioned as the fourth book in the Earthsea series, Tehanu is both 20 years removed from the most recent prior entry and in many ways the literary equivalent of LeGuin making a callout post about her younger self. In the preceding trilogy, Tenar was introduced as a girl who was raised as a priestess of the (extremely cool) old gods of the earth. At the conclusion of the novel, Tenar, who was kidnapped as a child and raised in total darkness, understandably struggles to imagine a place for herself in the outside world. Ged, the novel’s deuteragonist, and seemingly LeGuin herself, can’t either so he feeds her a line about how she’ll be treated like a princess before dropping her off with his mentor Ogion and fucking off to do wizard stuff.
Tehanu is Le Guin’s attempt to take a second run at the question of what a woman’s place in thw world is. Tenar is repositioned as the protagonist of the series, having now grown into middle age. Her husband has since died and her children have moved on, leaving her social status precarious. Even though she lives on and manages the farm, it’s legally owned by her closest male relative, her absentee failson. She is neither a mother or a wife but a secret third thing: a woman over 40. Further complicating things, she’s also adopted a young girl, the namesake of the novel Tehanu, who has been disfigured by a failed attempt to burn her to death. Tenar’s attempts to find a place in the world for herself and this girl who already carries the irreparable markings of misogynistic violence forms the central throughline of the novel.
Tenar and Tehanu in the Earthsea movie that really wish was better
Whereas the previous Earthsea books were adventure fantasy stories about magic and dragons, Tehanu is a horror story. A new wizard, Aspen, has been assigned to the island Tenar calls home. He’s a self-important failson oblivious to the fact that he was assigned this island because he can only mess up so badly while the famous wizard Ogion is around. Aspen, who is so unremarkable I actually forgot his name, takes it personally that Ogion had the audacity to die before personally acknowledging him. That Tenar becomes the subject of his petty vengeance isn’t because of anything she did, Aspen just sees her as someone he can harm without consequence or conscience.
It’s perhaps even to the credit of the writing that I actually forgot Aspen’s name until looking it up. His motions are as subtle as they are malicious, blending seamlessly into the background misogyny of the world. Aspen’s curses isolate Tenar before gradually stripping her of language, memory and, ultimately, personhood. But you don’t need a spell for that. He is just making something fantastical out of a mundane unpersoning that was at work well before he arrived. The real horror here isn’t that there is an evil wizard –- it’s that there didn’t need to be.
Rose Madder does not have an evil wizard. It has something worse: a cop. It’s also a remarkably unremarkable book in Stephen King’s extensive body of work. The book finds itself overshadowed by the other two entities in King’s unofficial trilogy focusing on the experience of women; Dolores Claiborne and Gerald’s Game. Of the three, Rose Madder is the only one yet to receive any adaptations. I’d bet a glass of water that some readers have never heard of this book. Poking around online has shown that King’s readers sometimes even forget to rank it. King himself has called it a "stiff, trying-too-hard novel." Naturally, I think it’s one of, if not, the best things he’s written.
The novel follows Rosie who, after finding a spot of blood on a sheet that didn’t come out in the wash, experiences a moment of clarity; either her husband, Norman, will eventually kill her or, perhaps worse, she will continue to live with him. Facing death of body or spirit, she picks the third door and escapes to a legally distinct vision of Chicago. The subsequent chapters of Rosie trying to build a home for herself are juxtaposed with Norman’s efforts to tear it down, ideally crushing Rosie in the rubble. It’s not that he loves her or even wants to possess her; her departure has emasculated him and he needs to be made whole. Gradually, his pursuit of revenge wears away Norman’s monstrous persona to expose yet another monster underneath.
Of King’s villains, Norman is one of the most terrifying. He’s not a vampire, spooky clown or car; he’s just a guy. He’s a cop who knows the system will protect him and spends every minute of every day fantasizing about how to best weaponize that system against people he sees as his lessers. He’s the kind of guy with several flavors of punisher skull decals on his double-wide pickup. If this book were written twenty years later, there would be a chapter where he records a front-facing video in his car while wearing wraparound raybans. It's distressing how easy it is to picture him stepping out of the book and into a Nextdoor feed; he’s a little too real.
What if a painting was haunted a window into your best and worst self?
Social isolation has left Rosie without even an image of what an independent adult version of herself could look like. She finds one via a painting of a woman dressed in red facing away from the viewer to show her blonde hair in a plait. Rosie dyes her hair and starts to wear the same plait to emulate the woman, and in doing so finds the strength to build a life for herself. In fact, she’s so successful at channeling the woman in the painting that she eventually finds herself able to enter the world of the painting where she meets the two women who live there; Dorcas and the mysterious woman herself — Rose Madder.
Rose Madder wears many hats. True, she has been a medium through which Rosie has painted a future for herself. She is also a cosmic manifestation of a woman’s rage, an eldritch spider god and a danger to everyone and everything around her. She is a living scar on the world so much that to even look at her is to invite destruction. If the title didn’t clue you in, Rose Madder is a book about anger; a woman’s anger.
Rosie and her comically damseled boyfriend don’t survive Norman without Rosie’s anger, but they also don’t live to the end of the book with it. Rose Madder’s perspective on anger is what has kept it alive in my mind since turning the final page. Anger can be useful. It can even be emancipatory. However, you simply can’t afford to be angry all the time. When the only tool in your kit is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail. When the only tool in your kit is a knife, you get the idea. Anger is a tool that can be used for good and for ill. To be a woman in the world is to never want for reasons to be angry; often very good reasons. If I were to be angry at every catcall, condescension and slight, I would simply never stop being angry. Even the heat in your temples may feel good in the moment, it will burn your house down given time and attention.
The book further draws a metaphor between anger and rabies. It’s said that rabies kills male foxes quickly but that vixens can live with rabies for a very very long time. At different junctions in the novel, Rosie encounters the same vixen and experiences something; maybe just projection or maybe a cosmic ripple in the universe washing up on their respective shores. The closing of the novel where Rosie and the vixen meet again, both now grey and past their years of child-rearing, to feel some form of cross-species solidarity for the lives they have lived and what they have done to survive their traumas is some of the best shit Stephen King has ever written.
So after writing all of this down, I’ve come to realize two things. First, that misogyny has shaped my life in ways that I hadn’t realized before. Not the least of which being how I now avoid parking next to people when I go shopping. I don’t like that about myself. I can’t control the world but I can control myself. I don’t want to live my life always bracing for what might come next. Unfortunately, you might as well live your life to avoid getting rained on.
Second, I chose this life. For AFAB folks, watching your body uncontrollably become a woman's along with all the trauma that goes with it is a form of lived horror. I opted in. I had to become both the sculptor and the marble of my own self. Every day, I wake up, face a world that I played a part in making unsafe for me and go to bed knowing that it will probably get worse tomorrow. But the most damning thing of all — I think I can live with it. The horror that walks hand-in-hand with being a woman is a small price to pay for the profound self-actualization I’ve built for myself. If I played some part in making my life a horror story, I’ve also made myself the Final Girl. So I will learn to live with it...Because I can live with it...
All the gay people in my phone love DS9