Frances Thomas
Against Pushpin Feminism
First Runner-Up in the American Literary Review Essays Contest, Judged by Dinty W. Moore
Disclaimer: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
For our last two years of college, Lily, Nicole, and I lived in a 250-square-foot apartment in Greenwich Village. Our downstairs neighbor was a 35-year-old raver who invited us to dungeon parties in Bushwick; our upstairs neighbor was a heroin addict who’d been living there rent-controlled since the 80’s. We paid an obscene amount of money—$4500 in monthly rent, divided three ways—to live close to our university and, as we found out on move-in day, across the street from Patti Smith. The walls were puckered by water damage, the floor was spiked in splinters. The rooms were bizarrely shaped—mine a backwards lowercase b, Nicole’s a trapeze, Lily’s a squiggly triangle—each, in its own way, thoroughly inhospitable to shelving units and conventional furniture in general (if there was a right angle in the apartment, I never saw it). It didn’t help that we never cleaned the place. By the end of our first semester there, every surface was layered with a vague stickiness that just kept building. The one time my father visited, near the end of our tenure, he refused to sit down at the table, or touch anything on the premises. Lily’s father called it a horse’s stall.
We called it The Litter Box. When I think back on the two years we spent there, I think of Nicole in her kangaroo onesie, zipped up just to her belly button, bursting into my room to tell me something stupidly hilarious. I think of spooning pesto on buttery noodles while we watched Sex and the City reruns on Lily’s laptop. I think of playing “Pin the Macho on the Man”—a bachelorette party gag we bought at a sex shop—at 9 in the morning on a school day and leaving the poster up above the garbage bin in perpetuity. I think of Lily stirring a pot of her famous lemon risotto on the stove, and Nicole making her gross daily smoothie of oatmeal, green peas, and peanut butter. I think of the three of us in Nicole’s bed on Sunday mornings, glugging Pedialyte and howling over the previous night’s debaucheries.
And, most of all, I think of The Fuck Map. It was a giant map of the world, printed in glossy sepia, that we’d pasted on the wall above our rickety kitchen table. Nicole’s Mom gave it to us as a housewarming gift, along with a box of pushpins to mark our travels. We took her sweet suggestion and warped it to accommodate our own salacious preoccupation: travel through bodies, not space.
It became a sort of game, pinning The Fuck Map. One pushpin equaled one body, and each new body triggered an impromptu roommate ceremony. We’d assemble around our sticky, rickety table, and hand the intrepid traveler a pin. She’d put the pin where the body was from, or where she fucked it, or, if she didn’t like either of those coordinates, she could put the body wherever she wanted. For example, I put the guy who post-coitally accused me of stealing his Dodgers cap smack-dab in the Bermuda Triangle. Maybe, I joked, his beloved hat was hidden somewhere among long-lost torpedo bombers and extraterrestrial monsters and Captain Crook.
We kept track of our body counts on the Notes app in our phones. Because I was often a little to a lot inebriated during these encounters, I would leave a smattering of superficial details with each line item to jog my memory for later, for the ceremony. A sampling from my iPhone scroll:
#3. Nicole’s friend from high school. Adam Lotman.
#8. Lives in Palladium 11th fl, pre-law sophomore I think. Dan Naqvi.
#10. Senior, from Jersey, dorms in Broome, soccer team. Malcolm Morris.
#17. Jack?
#29. 6’7” finance bro, lives in Murray Hill (ugh). Cole Sully.
We had a party for our collective 75th—the Facebook event was called “The Diamond Jubilee.” We invited our twenty closest friends, which precluded all straight men, of course. We weren’t friends with straight men. They went on the map, not to our parties.
The last time I saw number 29, Cole, he took me to a speakeasy in the East Village below a ramen restaurant next to a money laundering nail salon. The $18 drinks were “thoughtfully curated libations” of things like corn husk and rainwater. The food was, well … I never ate with dates.
Over a bottle of wine beforehand, Nicole and Lily had helped me role-play this particular date. The three of us saw an opportunity—the chance for an experiment. See, Cole and I hadn’t talked for months after I had gently cut him off, citing finals stress and my neuroses and that I needed time for myself and all the things you say when you’re bored of the guy but don’t want to say that. Now, months later, my friends and I were genuinely curious as to why he’d reached out. We thought maybe he liked me, like as a person. We decided I should ask him. The plan was for me to do it gently, subtly. To forge an opening for a new kind of honesty. Hell, maybe even a real kind of relationship. We imagined that he would say something like, “I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” and, “I want to hang out in the daytime.” We imagined me setting out on a newly grown-up arrangement of mutual respect and coffee the morning after and maybe, even, a bacon-egg-and-cheese. We were excited.
Coincidentally, Dr. Emily Nagoski, a sex educator and New York Times bestselling author, refers to sexual scripts as maps. These scripts are etched into our minds early, by family and culture and society and school. They inscribe messages like, “Women aren’t as sexual as men,” and, “Penetration is the only kind of sex that counts,” and, “Boys will be boys.” They tell us what to expect from our bodies, and what we can hope to say with them. But, as Nagoski writes in her book Come As You Are, “maps can be wrong.”
I went into my date with Cole thinking I could flip the script. He’d been my sex object, and now he would be my love interest. I didn’t see it then, but I see it now: the impossibility of this scenario. Nagoski distinguishes a map, “an abstract representation of something,” from the terrain: “an actual place that exists.” All too often, the two are irreconcilably different. I wanted to meet Cole out in the wild—the real terrain of my life—but it was too late. I’d already pinned him to the map.
Over the first round of mezcal and miso butter cocktails, I talked about my visit home for the holidays and he told me about his promotion and that now he has interns, plural.
Sometime during the second round, I found my hook. “You seem a lot happier than when I last saw you,” I said, “and that’s good. Which makes me, well, I have to ask …”
It came out sloppier than I had intended. Not as eloquent as we had designed it a few hours earlier, chugging coffee mugs of sour Chianti under our map of the world. Us well-traveled women.
“Maybe you’re down for something a little more serious?”
Cole looked surprised.
“I mean, I don’t know about you,” I said, digging myself deeper, “but I’m a little tired of the late-night booty calls.”
His brown eyes flared, then turned to black.
“You are tired? You want more? I have to say, you’re the last girl I’d ever assume wanted more.”
“Why do you say that?” I blubbered.
“Look at how sexually aggressive you are. You told me how you lost your virginity the very first time we met. Like it was a joke. And then your whole ‘feminism’ thing. That goddamn map! You have fucked yourself around the globe.”
My throat tightened. I wanted another drink, but the waiter was avoiding our corner of the room. My feminism thing. Cole saw my feminism and the map as one and the same. He was wrong. Wasn’t he?
“You know how small that map made me feel? And I’m 6’7”!” (He really said that.)
“Actually?” I asked, sarcastic as hell. “I hadn’t noticed.” I was getting mad, and bitter, and trying not to cry. When there is a disconnect between the map and the terrain, Nagoski explains, the traveler becomes disoriented. Soon, she is hopelessly afraid.
I tried to assemble a line of defense, tried to remember all those logos/pathos/ethos rhetorical strategies from my high school debate class. I wanted to explain the map, but I couldn’t find the words to defend it.
Cole took my silence as forfeit. He swept in for the kill: “If you ever want a man to take you seriously, the first thing you should do is go home and rip down that map.”
I couldn’t hold it down anymore—I began to cry. Such a fucking girl. Drunk-crying in a fight with a boy at a bar.
I was thinking about the map. I thought a bit about the men, but mostly, I thought about my friends. All our wine-fueled nights under that map; each ceremonious pinning and the accompanying story which was always hilarious, at turns incomprehensible, and sometimes upsetting, but never for too long. The one who could suck his own dick. The one who bragged about his ACT scores. The one who sent a Venmo request for condoms. The one who swallowed my earring. The one who left me swollen.
We made the men pushpins, and we made the pushpins funny stories. The funny stories made us sexy, brave, empowered, bad ass. Feminist fucking power. The map was our collective mission statement, our middle finger to age-old double standards: that men are sexual creatures who just can’t help themselves and women are their pleasure vessels; that men who screw around are studs and women who do the same are sluts; that it’s expected, even appropriate, for men to talk and joke about sex but women should be demure, private, doe-eyed, embarrassed. I listed all these truths to myself, but not to Cole. My voice was lost, buried somewhere beneath my tears.
“Sadly,” Nagoski writes, “most people’s sexual maps are hugely out of date. We’re like Brendan Fraser’s character in the movie Blast from the Past. His parents raise him in a bomb shelter, mistakenly believing that there was a nuclear attack in 1962, and when he finally goes out into the world thirty-five years later, he is navigating through a landscape that has almost nothing to do with what he has been taught.”
My friends and I needed The Fuck Map to feel like our bodies were ours, like our sex was ours. But sex isn’t about ownership. It’s a giving and a receiving, a movement animated by intertwining histories and hearts.
I wasn’t crying because Cole was being a bully. I wasn’t crying because of the hurtful things he said. I was crying because Cole—all 6 feet and 7 inches of him—was effectively ripping down the map for me. His anger and confusion and misunderstanding made me realize how the map wasn’t the revolutionary amulet I wanted it to be. It couldn’t take the men and transform them into pushpins; it couldn’t turn the pushpins into punchlines. The pins represented real people—Cole, Adam, Dan, Malcolm, the list goes on, I know—who I gave parts of myself to. They gave parts of themselves to me, too, but I didn’t want them. I tried to send them back: here, maybe Russia will want him; I’ll stick this one in New Zealand; pin that one down in Japan. Anywhere but here. Keep them far away from me. Keep me safe. Keep me mine.
I went home and cried some more, quietly and in the shower, so I wouldn’t wake Nicole and Lily. I didn’t rip down the map. I kept adding to it with them, not because I still believed in it, but because I didn’t know how else to find my way. I wasn’t ready to be lost, not yet.
The Fuck Map stayed on the wall until we graduated and the lease was up and we decided not to renew it again. We stripped the apartment, and Nicole rolled it into a tight baton. “What should we do with this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “I don’t want it.”
Lily didn’t want it, either. “I’ll put it in the time capsule,” Nicole said, referring to her childhood bedroom in Westchester, which was already the de facto storage locker for our most chaotic college memorabilia (the crown jewel of the collection: an engraved paddle we stole from the ΔΚΕ house).
I was relieved she wasn’t throwing it away. It felt important in the way a souvenir does: you buy it on vacation and imagine yourself, far into the future, turning it over in your hands, bringing it out at a party. But in reality, you get home, unpack, slot the tchotchke in whichever shelf still has room, and never look at it again.
“The first step toward joy,” Nagoski writes, “is recognizing a mismatch between the map and the terrain, with the knowledge that the terrain is always right.” My map told me to chase after a chimerical ideal: the dauntless sexual adventuress, the woman who fucks just like the boys. Samantha in Sex and the City. Nola Darling in She’s Gotta Have It. It was safer to follow the blueprint of a woman than to try to become my own.
The map was a safe haven, and then, it was a trap. I don’t regret ever following it; still, I’m sad that I needed to.
It’s scary out here in the backlands of my desire. I’m not sure where I am, or where I’m going. Slowly, I’m learning to be lost.
Frances Thomas is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York, and an MFA in Writing candidate at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Slate, The Longridge Review, Insider, Rebel Girls, and others. She writes to build safe spaces for hard conversations.