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8.17.04
You Are a Cliché
By Dorian Bensen
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Everyone knows you can’t use the cliches. Especially if you are feeling them. Especially if you really do feel like shit. Don’t dare tell anyone you miss the good old days when you really do. It’s sort of okay, at least not condemnable, to say such a thing if you feel it’s not true (but even then, if you really took the time, the things you may have come up with instead!). Don’t you even so much as think about making small talk about the weather in the elevator on the way up to our office, unless you’d like me to immediately dismiss you as one in the same as that lady down the hall who I KNOW FOR A FACT has not updated her wardrobe since 1998. Not that it’s even important to update your wardrobe. Not that I even care what the hell you are wearing. It’s just that with that lady’s clothes, you can tell that she bought those outfits in 1998 because she thought they would help her fit in. She bought them with nothing but conformity in mind!! And if you speak of the weather in the elevator. Please, let’s just ride up in silence, just this once. Just so for one goddamn day this week I can make it to my desk without regretting the very process of the act.
So how do I feel, then? If I feel the clichés and therefore I can’t use them, you want me to tell you how do I feel anyway? I’ll have to explain it a different way. Let’s try a story. Let’s try the time when I was fresh out of college and I’d just moved into my new apartment with four other clones of me, all fresh out of college. And the second day we lived there, a bat flew into the open window in clone number one’s room in the middle of the night and we all screamed and flailed and eventually huddled in my room with the door shut while the thing batted around all the other rooms and finally fell asleep hanging from the bottom of one of the shelves in the bookcase. And all of us clones being female, we called a boyfriend, at 8 a.m., to come shoo the thing away. It took him 45 minutes to get over to the apartment and 45 seconds to dismiss the bat.
Are you getting me yet? Are you understanding how terrified, as a female, I was when that bat came in and there was no man around to dismiss it? Are you getting the concept of me, born in 1976 and raised by loving, educated, encouraging parents? Taught to be independent at all costs. Taught to not need a man. The cliché we all learned, anything a boy can do a girl can do better. I sang that cliché to the skies my whole life. And I believed what I was saying!! I was the best! Nothing could stop me!
So given that, are you understanding that when the boyfriend came over to shoo that bat, I liked it!?! Are you understanding that I enjoyed having a male save me? That it made me feel more feminine than I would have if I had dismissed the bat myself! Do you understand what this means?
And you, you are no different, my friend. You stand there across from me and you imagine that for you it has been different. You have been a thinking person all your life, and clichés have not touched you. You broke down barriers. You shattered the glass ceiling. And you, like me, would never admit to that boyfriend that you enjoyed it when he saved you. But I’ll tell you, there’s a play I know of in which a man says to a woman, You don’t understand the territory, because you are the territory. And you cringe when you hear that, but you only have to replace a couple of words, and think about the topic I have been discussing, and it won’t take you long to figure out what you are.
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Dorian Bensen lives in New York City, where she works for a magazine she'd rather not name. She can be contacted here.
©
2004 Me Three