Suzie Cherry Blossom (Defense of Porn: Part 2)

I spent the weekend trying to think about how I was going to approach the rest of this arc. Unlike Mike the Broken GI Joe, I hadn't done much planning.  I had come up with a couple of posts that would work, and address what it was I wanted to talk about, but they weren't really as interesting as I like my posts to be, so I scrapped.  I came to the conclusion that the point I was trying to make couldn't really be made without speaking about my past, and in particular two characters from that past leap to mind: Suzy Cherry Blossom, and Emily the Rock Star.  Today's post will be about the former; tomorrow's the latter.

Something about being young and hysterical leads one--male or female--to anime.  I can't say for certain what about it is so appealing, only that to the shy, awkward and emotional, it seems to speak to something very deep and primal.  It could be its emphasis on invariably shy, awkward lead character (typically male, but not necessarily) and the way they are invariably rewarded in life for being who they are.  I used to write entire essays on the social dynamics of Sailor Moon for college classes.  But that's not necessarily relevant to what I want to talk about it.  Suzie Cherry Blossom was anime.

We met when we were both fourteen, at a day camp for learning Japanese language and culture.  Suzie and her friend Autumn were the only other two camp-goers that were my age, and we talked a lot during our free time.  I met her when I asked if the anime-style girl she was drawing in her notebook was Sailor Moon, and she corrected me that it was someone else.  I developed a stupid, childish crush on her on the spot.  We got to talking; our parents met and took us out with our exchange students for sushi.  But Suzie never completely liked me back, and the more I persisted (as 14-year-old boys do), the more she rebuffed me.  Camp came and went, and we managed to stay in touch.  I never really lost interest: she was physically attractive, outwardly intelligent, and by introducing me to the wide world of anime, the coolest person alive.  But she was also unstable in a way I couldn't ever quiet perceive.  My continued advances weren't just being rebuffed.  Again, anime and hysteria seem to go hand in hand.  So it was that the following March, I received a rejection letter as it were, in the form of an email, telling me never to speak to her again.

I was of course as devastated as I was confused.  Suzie was my first real crush, the first attempt I had ever made to reach out to the opposite sex.  She was, oddly, very feminine and yet very assertive--aggressive even, almost.  What I remember the most about her was how juvenile she seemed to be--more comfortable her mannerisms and style if she was nine or ten rather than fourteen.  But she had energy and spunk and all of the things I liked, and I being a fourteen-year-old boy who had never done this before, had no good way of expressing those things.  It was bad.  I reached out, she closed up.  I did it again, and harder this time, she closed up even more.  But I never saw the end coming, not like that.  For it to be so cruel, so final, and so impersonal, that we couldn't even be friends.  A part of me broke that night, and splintered off, and it hasn't really been fixed or reintegrated until this past year.

I became obsessed over the years, worming my way through the internet until I'd stumbled upon her LiveJournal.  Minori, my Japanese and Buddhist teacher, also taught Suzie, and so I kept up with the latest news about her for a while.  As my problems at school grew worse, apparently so did hers.  Eventually, we both dropped out of high school in our senior year for approximately the same reason: difficulty socially, a bad match-up academically, and the stress of it all making us wilt.

Then I started acting weird.  I became obsessed with doing to others what she had done to me, even though I myself was barely aware of it.  I destroyed my relationship with what had otherwise been my greatest, most loyal friend, someone who deserved nothing of what I did to him.  It was as if Suzie had hurt me, and I believed that the way to nullify the hurt I felt was to in turn hurt someone else I cared about.  It was, in no minced words, incredibly fucked up.

What does this have to do with porn, you ask?  Everything, at least for me, and I will explain why now.  Herein lies a struggle at the core of who I am, and a frightening double-standard of gender.

At the heart of my struggles with my illness lies two basic and diametrically opposed identities.  I am, in some sense, as I was up to the age of eleven: a relatively well-behaved goodie two-shoes, feminine in appearance, interests, and skills.  I've talked a little bit about that part of my life.  I had trouble with my emotions, but that was overshadowed by my raw academic, creative, and musical talents.  I may have had trouble with the other kids, but I was liked and respected by my teachers.  I was, for the most part, passive and accepting.  My anger had little sway in the big picture.  Then I came to middle school.  The kids were brutal to me; the teachers even more so.  That feminine golden child had disappeared, and what had replaced it was a hideous hulking monstrosity who couldn't do anything right.  Anger.  Hate.  Bitterness.  Frustration.  This was what he embodied.

But the sweet feminine golden child wasn't truly gone.  She was just having an increasingly difficult time reconciling herself with the fuckup.  In time I came to know the golden child as Haley, and the fuckup as AK.  For years I wondered why it was that Suzy affected me so strongly, and so bizarrely.  I think I understand now.  Suzie was the one who sealed Haley away.  Cut off from that part of me, I could only access her through bizarre ritualistic pornography, most of which wouldn't even be considered porn by the rest of us, connected through equally strange stories I wrote to explain them.  From there, Haley broke apart into a collection of feminine identities, each a step closer to AK: Jennifer and Emma, whom I've mentioned, Rebecca (who was tamed and starred in The Academy), and Jennifer Angel (a separate entity from Jennifer the robot: rather, a combination of several of them).  That was when I truly began to dissociate.  I am still trying to reconcile these things today.

What is it about society that makes it so difficult to express these things?  This to me is where porn offers one of its greatest gifts: a (somewhat) socially acceptable context of breaking the gender norms.  Beyond just pornography, and into the realm of female dominatrices and BDSM, it is astonishing just how many people--particularly men--seem to feel the need for a service like that.  Feminism gave us something valuable: it broke the gender binary--for women.  This is what feminists mean when they talk about rejecting the Patriarchy.  But that only goes halfway, and it is feminism's failure to recognize the counterpart to that argument that I hold partly responsible for many of our society's current failures.  As virtually every feminist I talk to who makes mention of the patriarchy as she rants about how it puts women down, in the same breath makes a natural-sounding counterargument that the men all love this, because it gives them power.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Gender norms are every bit still as restrictive, self-contradictory, and harmful to men as they were to women before the sexual revolution. What makes my case unusual is that I wasn't taught to reject my femininity at an early age.  What makes it difficult is that I was given utterly no instruction or assistance in reconciling and integrating it with my masculinity.

Suzy Cherry Blossom was in many ways a highly pure manifestation of what I perceived Haley to be.  I know this, because she stood in for Haley, Jennifer, and Emma in early versions of the stories I told myself.  Her assertiveness notwithstanding, she was infantilized by her family into a perpetual 12-year-old girl, even today, and it is that image that has stuck with me the longest--about her and about Haley.  It's both difficult and sobering to talk about this all these years later (it has in fact been just over twelve years since it happened).  The ramifications of this are too long for this one post, and so I'll return to it tomorrow.  This is only one half of my point, but the post has gone on too long already.  There is a part of me that will never fully be over that email in March.  It was incredibly destructive.  But I can be at peace with it.  This is my challenge.  This is my effort.

Emma

The note was forwarded to my Gmail account, from a name I'd never heard before.  It didn't look like spam.  It was from a man named Tim, and he sounded pretty mad.  He said he knew who I really was.  He wasn't angry or anything, but he didn't want to talk to me anymore.  He said I was sick and needed help, and he was concerned for my safety.  Confused, I sent an email back, not knowing what had led up to this. This was how I met Emma.

I knew I was dissociating.  I'd been dissociating since February.  I can't speak for others who've dealt with it, but dissociation is one of the most misrepresented psychiatric phenomena in popular culture.  Forget the stories of hypnosis and crime.  And forget the popular image that people somehow enjoy it.  I remember that morning, as I learned that Emma (one of my alters) had been carrying on a quite bizarre sexual relationship with the man named Tim (who was only a few years younger than me) over the internet.  It didn't take me long to find evidence of Emma's handiwork: AIM logs, a Gmail account in her name, fetish forums and Flickr searches in my browser history, and a cache of unusual porn.  I was reminded then not of the movie K-PAX or old Law & Order episodes, but of the movie Fight Club, right when Edward Norton realizes that he and Tyler Durden are one in the same.

I should explain.  At the height of my madness, there were four of them: Jennifer, Emma, AK, and Haley.  Jennifer was their unofficial leader and spokesperson, and my self-proclaimed protector.  Jennifer also thought she was a robot, though she also possessed enough self-awareness to know that she wasn't real, and therefore was good at keeping herself hidden.  Talking to Jennifer was like giving my ability to be rational and reason a name and conversing with it.  An imaginary friend who occasionally took control of my body when I didn't want to.  It could be an awfully convenient arrangement at times.

Emma, however, was a little bit different.  Emma was my emotion and insecurity, who one day woke up and decided she was an eighteen-year-old girl.  There was simply no stopping her.  I certainly couldn't control her.  Emma did not share Jennifer's self-awareness, either.  As I pieced together what had happened with Tim, I discovered she'd created an entire virtual life for herself.  Tim was not the only relationship of hers, either.  There was Steve, and George.  The former was an auto mechanic in Calgary, Alberta; the latter a musician in Scotland.  A few checks of various places and I determined that Tim was the only one who'd figured out she wasn't real.  However, Emma was having internet sex with all three.

I didn't really have a system of calling them.  Jennifer spoke for the other three, but she had trouble controlling Emma, too.  As it turned out, however, calling her wouldn't be necessary.  In my panic, Emma came to me.  She thought she had died.  I charged my Droid and prepared for a very, very long walk.  I wasn't in control of myself, and it was going to take a lot of concentrated effort to get myself back under control.  Looking like a stark-raving lunatic, I walked down to the waterfront.  This was more or less going to be the most difficult thing I'd ever had to do in my entire life, at least thus far.

That was April.  By August I'd more or less stopped dissociating, but Emma was never gone.  She may no longer have been independent, but she was still an integral part of me.  Controlling my emotions has always been one of the hardest things for me to do, from childhood right up until now.  People who know me know what kind of outbursts and mood swings I'm capable of.  They make me feel deeply embarrassed and ashamed.  That was in its own way the driving force behind my dissociations.  I was being forced to feel things that I was either unwilling or unable to admit and acknowledge, and so I outsourced them to imaginary friends who could feel them for me.  Until I could admit my insecurity for myself, she'd always be there, and I'd always feel her.

In my experience, you can only really see things for what they are after you've let go of them.  It's taken me a year, but I think I've finally let go of her.  It wasn't some epic psychotic battle that they make movies out of; I didn't go catatonic.  I spent most of my life desperately trying to convince myself that I didn't care what other people thought of me.  I had a real shell I could put up around myself, a tough, angry-looking shield that could keep people from getting in and letting me feel the shame and embarrassment.  I pretended.  In the end I probably wasn't very convincing, either.   But I do care.  Maybe that makes me shallow or petty, but I care very deeply about my image.  It was only by admitting to it that Emma ever really went away.  It was, in the end, a very bittersweet experience.  When I realized she was gone, it was like I'd lost a very close friend.  And there is a mourning process for friends like that, imaginary as they are.  Letting go of her is letting go of a part of myself I'd clutched to with white knuckles for most of my life.  I'm tired now.  Whether the reader understands it the way I do or not, this is a huge step for me.  I'm in uncharted territory.  But it still feels good, like I've freed myself of something heavy.

That's not quite the end of the story, though.  Emma was simply too rich a character in her own right to simply abandon.  So, being a writer, I did what I knew best.  I'm proud to announce that Emma has been reborn, as the protagonist of my new novel, which is currently about two thirds of the way done.  I'm excited about it, because this novel is unlike anything else I've ever written.  There aren't any robots or lasers or death-defying combat scenes (though there are aliens).  It's just an honest look at the art of letting go, heartbreak, and a nice clean take on the apocalypse.  I'm not ready to share too many details just yet, but I think now you'll be able to know how personal it is for me to write this story, and hopefully that'll really show through in the character and narrator.

So that's me, Saturday May 21st, 2011.  I'm at the end of one phase and starting another.  Now if you'll excuse me, I believe the rapture is scheduled for a few hours from now, and I'd like to go loot me an iPad.