Femme or Feminista?

VB: You’re bisexual.

PS: Completely heterosexual.

VB: You talk as if you were bisexual.

PS: Most of my poems are written to women because women are most inspiring. Who are most artists? Men. Who do they get inspired by? Women. The masculinity in me gets inspired by female. I get, you know, I fall in love with men and they take me over. I ain’t no women’s-lib chick. So I can’t write about a man because I’m under his thumb, but a woman I can be male with. I can use her as my muse.

(From Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography, by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley, “Patti Smith’s First Interview,” conducted August 15, 1972, by Mr. Bockris.)

I am woman, hear me roar
In numbers too big to ignore
And I know too much to go back and pretend

In 1972 Helen Reddy tried to find a song to express how the women’s movement had changed her. She soon realized she would have to write it herself. “I am woman” spent a week at #1 on the Billboard charts but it seemed to occupy a recursive loop. Hearing it made me cringe—shoulders slumped forward, eyes on the floor. I wanted that big brassy voice, just slightly flat, to shut up before she blew my cover. When this weirdo from Australia sang “I am woman, hear me roar,” it made 16-year-old me implode. I felt like nothing but breasts and belly and butt. I would do anything to shed that cocoon of flesh and emerge as a boy. But Helen Reddy insisted: “too big to ignore.” DNA had fixed my fate as female: adult female: woman.

Woman. Say it to yourself. Feel the way that first syllable, the womb that defines you, gags as it falls down your throat. Your lips expel the “-man” part soundlessly, as if it had placed its hand over your mouth. Blank canvas beholds the incoming brush and blanches. The mind that guided the artist’s hand never paused to see what, if anything, was already there.