Burn It Down Read online

  Shortly after settling on our towels, we noticed the canoe. It drifted close enough to shore for us to see that it was a man aboard and close enough for him to see us, which was obviously the point. As we began to wrap our towels around our bodies, Nadia strode across the sand, her long body rippling with muscles, breasts bouncing as she marched into the water.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” she shouted at the interloper. If he responded, I didn’t hear it. “You need to GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW,” she bellowed. His paddle dipped into the water and he glided away hastily. Nadia stood and watched until he was a speck in the middle of the lake. As she waded back to shore, her pubic hair a glistening black diamond below her taut belly, my heart pounded.

  “Goddamn fucking pervert men,” she cursed as she passed us, and then playfully shook a cascade of droplets from her shorn head onto our sunbaked shoulders. We squealed and laughed, giddy with nerves.

  Afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking of the way that Nadia had screamed at that man. There was no self-hatred in it, only the righteous fury of a woman who knows she is being wronged. It was the first time I’d ever seen a woman express such anger publicly. Nothing collapsed. No one shut her up. The man just went away. That she had been naked while she’d done it was the most unfathomable part. I couldn’t imagine a less empowered state than that of being seen nude. At thirteen, I believed in the sovereignty of women’s bodies, but abstractly. I did not feel free in my own body and freedom was not the experience I had known of it, especially in relation to men. But Nadia’s body could not have been mistaken for a liability in that moment. It had actually seemed fundamental to her power, the instrument of her power. For the rest of the day I replayed the scene over and over, thrilling silently to it like a song that names a feeling one thought unnamable.

  I was so obsessed with music that I’d developed an unpleasant ear condition by wearing my Walkman headphones even while sleeping, but it had always been a private obsession. In rural Cape Cod, I didn’t have access to many streams of popular culture outside the mainstream. Camp was where I came to understand music as a cultural shorthand, a way to instantly recognize one’s people. In the pre-internet days of music listening, cassette tapes were passed among teenagers like contraband. It was at camp that I first heard the Pixies, Nina Simone, The Ramones, The Cure, and Ani DiFranco—whose albums I would spend months scouring the record store catalogs for until I realized I was misspelling her name.

  Like Slaughter and Harriman, Rock ’n’ Roll Day was yet another tradition that upended a typical camp activity; in this case, the talent show. All day, teenagers plugged in on a tiny outdoor stage and played covers of their favorite songs. In the years that followed, I would come to recognize that someone always played, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” and someone else, “No Woman No Cry.” On the eve of my first, Julia handed me a cassette tape.

  “What’s this?” I asked her.

  “Bikini Kill. The song our band is going to play tomorrow.”

  “Our band? Like, us? On stage?”

  “Yeah. You need to memorize the lyrics. You’re the singer.”

  I didn’t want to be a rock star, like some of the other campers did. I didn’t want to be a movie star, like Julia. I wanted to be a writer, not a performer. Still, I didn’t argue. For the next eight hours, I locked myself in the Rec Hall restroom and listened to Kathleen Hanna sing “Feels Blind.” I didn’t know who the woman bellowing the song was, but listening to her I felt like I had watching Nadia scream at that man. Like I had playing Slaughter. It sounded as though the singer had gathered up all the energy it required to hate oneself and disowned it, flung it outside of her in the form of this beautiful noise. I already knew that art was a way to articulate one’s loneliness, but I hadn’t known it was also a way to articulate anger. Or that the roiling energy inside a woman’s body could be used to express her rage instead of poisoning her.

  Until I heard my own voice ricocheting off the tiled walls of that bathroom—what have you taught me, you’ve taught me fucking nothing—I hadn’t exactly known that I was angry. But those lyrics spewed from me like steam that had finally found an opening. I was furious. At my parents for getting divorced, at my father for reading my diary, at the boys who used my body and the girls who punished me for it, at myself for my own miserable innocence.

  On that stage in my torn jeans and borrowed Death to the Pixies T-shirt, I was so nervous that my voice cracked as I murmured, All the doves that fly past my eyes / have a stickiness to their wings. I glanced across the stage at Julia in her torn slip and black lipstick. She nodded at me and I kept going—In the doorway of my demise I stand / encased in the whisper you taught me. I made it through the first chorus. Then, in the second verse, something happened. I heard my own voice yell into the microphone If you could see but were always taught / What you saw wasn’t fuckin real yeah and it was so loud and strong that I swelled inside, as if a space had been cleared and some bright light shone through me. After that I didn’t stutter and I didn’t have to look at Julia or the handful of dirty teenagers who watched us from the grass. I closed my eyes, brought my lips to the cool microphone, and it was better than any boy who’d ever touch me, better than the crack of a ball on the sweet spot, better than slamming a door or smashing something I loved against a wall. It was like carrying a hammer for my whole life and finally realizing what it was good for.

  Almost twenty years later, I heard Kathleen Hanna, the lead singer of Bikini Kill, explain how when she was a college student performing feminist spoken word, the writer Kathy Acker had told her that if she wanted her voice to be heard, she should start a band instead.

  I didn’t want to start a band. But after camp, I started making my own feminist zine and distributing it around my school even after my nicest teacher suggested it might be a sign of mental unrest. I had decided to be a writer because it felt like the only thing I’d ever want to keep doing for the rest of my life. I had recognized it as a place where I could put my sadness, my thoughts, and create an archive of events that I didn’t yet comprehend. That was what I understood art to be. Bikini Kill taught me that it was also a place for my anger. That shame was sometimes just energy one had turned against oneself.

  Camp didn’t fix me. It didn’t cure my eating disorder or prevent me from becoming a drug addict or stop me from handing my body over to people who believed its purpose was to please them. But I did ask my mother to help me find a lesbian therapist when I got home. I started telling people that I was queer and found the courage to kiss my best friend the next year. I memorized the Bikini Kill catalog and awoke to a feminist movement that was more mine than my mother’s.

  I agreed with my teacher that I suffered from mental unrest, but not because anything was wrong with me. My anger was not a rash or an aberration or a failure of any kind. Like that of Bikini Kill or Nadia or Julia, my anger was a reasonable reaction to the experience of growing up in a country that hated women and encouraged women to hate each other. And my art was not only an appropriate public expression of it but a necessary one.

  Why We Cry When We’re Angry

  MARISSA KORBEL

  There is a tremor in my upper lip. It quivers, small shifting, plates adjusting. The top lip shimmering, moving my face in uncontrolled waves, unless I clamp my mouth shut, or press my lips together, smiling. An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor, or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the earth, resulting from the sudden release of energy in the lithosphere that creates seismic waves.

  I remember the burn of pure fury. I can hold moments of it in the tightening of my ribcage, the tingle at the back of my neck. Once, rage lived in the heart of me, once it breathed between my ribs.

  When I was nine years old, I kicked Colt Martin in the crotch. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I sunk my elementary-school-sized foot into the place where his legs met, and he dropped to the ground. Smell of bark chips and tears.

  I got in trouble. The teachers told me I could da
mage him for life, make it so he couldn’t have children. I didn’t see the problem. I thought Colt Martin was terrible. I remember this incident like a mantra, like proof that I have lived in a furious body; I have been so mad I wished to split myself apart.

  At home I slammed doors, screamed aloud. I pushed my whole weight into walls and floors. I knew how to rage without crying. I knew how to be explosively mad. Until one day I knew I shouldn’t do that anymore.

  Nobody sat me down and taught me that rage was ugly on a girl. My liberal, West Coast, free-spirited private elementary educators never would have said that I couldn’t show anger.

  The world taught me that rage was ugly on a girl.

  I curated my emotions to look the way they were supposed to: pretty. My anger pacifiable, easily calmed, all pink cheeks and dainty trembling. A whisper-rage that tremored through me. I wanted to behave. I wanted to fit into the mold of girl. And inside my body, alchemy began: when I got angry, truly, rumbling, seismic angry, I began to cry.

  The human body creates three types of tears: basal tears, which keep your eyes lubricated and functional; reflex tears, which are produced in response to a physical stimulus like dust in the eye in order to remove the irritant; and psychic tears, which are emotionally responsive tears. Other animals make the first two kinds; human beings are the only animal known to make psychic tears.

  Everything I’ve learned from the time I was born is essentially some form of control. Basic lessons: how to control my hands, my body. Advanced lessons: how to control my volume, my appearance. Having control over myself allows me to choose. I can present myself as loudly or as softly, as boldly or as meekly, as wildly or as calmly as you wish.

  At four years old, I taught myself to cry on command. I remember staring into the mirror in my bedroom, willing myself to cry. It took a long time, endless attempts, until one day, I managed to eke out a tear. I watched it, fat, crocodile, sliding down my cheek.

  I had a new control.

  My grandfather said that women only cried to get something. I knew some part of that was true: I had cried many times to get something that I wanted, as a device. It gave me a way over the wall of a no. It could be manipulative, but not always. Only when I controlled the flow, and often I did not.

  Crying on command was a neat trick, but it was an easy one. The greater challenge, the one I’m still trying to learn, is to stifle tears when I don’t want them.

  I’ve learned to warn people ahead of time: sometimes I cry when I’m angry. It’s like hiccups, but more infuriating. Sometimes the tears make me angrier than I was before they started. Unwelcome water, flying out of my eyes while my throat clenches harder.

  The signal to cry emotional tears comes from the limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion and stores our long- and short-term memories. People cry in response to many emotions, the most obvious one being sadness. But for over half of women, also anger.

  I once worked for a man who covered my drafts in red pen. He lashed disapproval on all of my pages. It was a kind of murder. He would call me into his office. I would sit in the leather chair across from his large desk. He would read through the draft I had given him, and he would tell me what he hated about it. He wrote notes like: “Are you sure you went to law school?” in the margins. After, he would hand my draft back, and I would drop my eyes and shuffle out of his office to my desk.

  Then: down the hallway, to the bathroom where I wouldn’t turn the lights on. Screaming into the crook of my arm. I hated that job, that man. I could never keep myself from crying, sometimes in front of him, and I hated myself for that, too.

  I have felt tears streaming from my eyes at the angriest moments of my life: while being critiqued, when my boyfriend and I fought, when my boss told me to “give him a spin.” Ear-burning fury in those moments, and also, wet eyes.

  I lack control.

  Whether produced in response to pain, sadness, or anger, the mechanism of emotional tears is the same. The lacrimal gland, located between the eyelid and the eyeball, creates the tear. The eyelid blinks reflexively and spreads the tear across the eye, creating a film. The tear is then channeled into the lacrimal punctum (a small drain that empties into the nose, which also explains why your nose runs when you cry). When the volume of the tears overwhelms the drain, tears spill over the bottom lid and down the cheek. That is the anatomy of crying.

  The problem with rage tears is that they’re not composed. They are decomposition, falling apart. I do not know how to unleash what’s in my throat some days, and I do not know how to keep it all inside. At the earth’s surface, earthquakes manifest themselves by shaking and displacing or disrupting the ground.

  Things that have made me cry in rage: waiting for late people; traffic; mansplaining; cleaning my room; getting my period; kissing a boy that I didn’t want to kiss because I didn’t know how to get out of it; broken mirrors; spilled breastmilk; my mother’s derision; my partner’s stubbornness; lines in supermarkets; the NICU nurse who threatened to keep my daughter; my broken foot; parenting; the 2016 election; my father; my best friend kissing my ex-boyfriend; hunger.

  While over 51 percent of women have experienced angry tears, under 2 percent of men have. Even as crying has become more socially acceptable for men, it is only acceptable in response to sadness or pain. When angry, men are much more likely to act out physically in aggressive ways. Women are more likely to cry.

  I asked on social media about rage tears. Almost every response I received was from a woman. Some of them talked about their shame in not being able to control themselves, in looking weak, in losing their power in an argument. One woman said she thought of them as a decelerator, something that kept her from going all the way off. Almost every woman said their rage tears made them avoid arguments or leave them once the tears came. Many, many women mentioned having to deal with their rage tears in professional settings. Crying at work is practically outlawed in employee handbooks. The filmmaker Deborah Kampmeier said that she’d recently embraced the power of her rage tears. “They can blow everyone out of a room if necessary.” I loved her regal take on what feels to me like an impossibly girlish problem.

  One study suggested that women’s tears carry a scent that slows testosterone production in men, deescalates aggression, and kills their sexual response. The limbic system is the same place that fight, flight, freeze, appease comes from. It is the part of us wired for survival. Does crying help women survive?

  “Depression is rage internalized,” my second therapist told me. I had squelched and winnowed and edited my rage down to something that looked like sadness. Something that didn’t shimmer like anger, but glistened with a dull, flat endlessness. I had stuck my burning so deep that I couldn’t feel it, not for years. I had to go down into the dark of me, where I’d shoved rage, and call her back up. I entered the labyrinth, walked without string. And when I found her, I let her breathe.

  I recovered my fury and I found my writing voice at the same time. You could say rage is the root of everything I’ve ever written. Rage is the fuel of my voice. Now I’m afraid to be soft. I’m afraid to stop yelling. I’m only comfortable growing hot behind the ears, prickling.

  I still cry all the time.

  My top lip vibrates. I clamp the lower in my teeth. Left side, small bite, a malformed pillow of pink flesh curling right. I dig my incisor into the fleshy bottom lip. I swallow the furious ball in my throat, but it does not go down. I feel like an electric line, snapped from the pole by the wind. A live wire. I spark against the ground.

  Earthquake size ranges from those that are so weak they cannot be felt to those violent enough to toss people around and destroy whole cities.

  I want to light the trees on fire with my eyes. I begged for powerful, to have some magic in me. I wanted to lift a house with my fury. I wanted a heart full of vengeance, but what I got was a handful of tears.

  But crying is our first language; it is the original sound. Before we know words and their meanin
gs, before we know consonants from vowels, a book from a ball. Before the before, on the first exhale, we cry. Lidia Yuknavitch says that crying is articulate, it is language. Then we have narrowed the language of the body, the ways we speak without words. Not all tears are sadness. Not all rage is yelling. Sometimes the wires between one thing and another get crossed, synaptic fizzles. Sometimes it comes out as a sigh, or a thud, or a whimper. Sometimes it looks like tears and tastes like fury.

  On Transfeminine Anger

  SAMANTHA RIEDEL

  I was about five years old the first time I wore a dress. Bored and eager for companionship with the girls who lived across the street, I gamely agreed to toss on a frilly, black-sequined monstrosity—the sort of thing you’d dress a baby princess’s corpse in for her untimely funeral. After hearing their shrieks of laughter, I certainly wanted to die. Running away, uncomfortably aware of how pleasant the dress felt around my hips, I resolved that this would be my most carefully guarded secret, never to be shared with anyone.

  Not long after this adventure, my parents noticed something different about me: I was becoming a bully. After multiple incidents of fighting, I was caught in the coat closet with a henchman shoving a classmate back and forth. Steaming with fury, my father made a rare visit to the school to take me home. In the car, he gave me an ultimatum: explain why I was acting out, or he’d give me a spanking I’d never forget.