Predatory Behavior
“You get everything you want?”
A few weeks ago, a gal I follow on Facebook wrote some words that stuck with me:
The older I get, the less intentional I am about curating my digital presence.
Curating. Is it just me, or is that word particularly resonant these days?
On the surface, I think it implies careful, thoughtful selection. Arranging elements with deliberation and attention.
And yet there is also a layer of artifice and construction — a sort of editing.
Cutting and pasting. Clipping and arranging. Judging and critiquing, determining what to keep and what to toss, what merits display and what is to be hidden.
I am in the midst of “curating” my home. It is a process that has taken far longer than it should have, but I’m grateful for every step of this longer-than-expected journey because I’ve been forced to confront many things about myself that I’ve refused — is that fair? It’s active voice. Would passive voice perhaps be gentler and more accurate? — howzabout been unable — been unwilling? — to face.
A few weeks ago, I finally got Alligator Girl on the wall in my bedroom.
In the summer of 2024, Alligator Girl and Black Bear Girl hung side by side at Art in Gadsden.
BBG won a prize.
But AG won my heart.
Long ago, a neighbor was having happy hour with my mother; I can imagine I was pestering them and interrupting them. He told me I should practice running in a zig-zag line in case I ever got chased by an alligator. Diligently, I got to work.
I wrote an essay about my family’s friendship with that man many years ago.
Seeing Alligator Girl was like taking a step back in time. The artist had, I thought, perfectly captured our swampy, silky, prickly landscape; a fierce and tender heroine holding her pet or her catch, a visual jumble of predator and prey.
I was, at the time, in the midst of my major addition; I was adding a porch and carport to my home, and I was expanding the upstairs primary bathroom.
Alligator Girl would, I thought, be the perfect sentinel for this new space. Imagining her standing guard over the entrance to my innermost sanctum felt like ensuring that I did not betray my little girl self by allowing any unsafe men inside my bedroom.
I suppose the right words might be continue to betray my little girl self by continuing to allow unsafe men inside my bedroom.
The enhanced accuracy of that statement makes me want to shed a tear or two because it’s taken so long to get there.
Part of me has grown weary and wary of digital media in all its easy and accessible forms.
Part of me wants to quit posting, to quit sharing.
I no longer need or crave validation or attention in the ways I once did.
And yet I have also come to appreciate that I do enjoy writing and sharing my thoughts; the process gives me clarity, helps me find meaning. I have connected and reconnected with friends who take the time to read my rambling.
Here I sit, in my room, typing these words; I finally completed the wall this morning.
And yet…it is not complete.
My interactions with the artist are a longer tale, but she is talented and kind and generous. It took months for her to deliver the final prints I ordered to complete the collection (the Florida Girl series is on her website), and she gifted me two complementary prints to compensate for the delay. One is Yellow Bellied Girl:
I cannot seem to manage to separate those two images; I have gone back and forth between the app, which I am using, and the Chrome browser on my computer, which needs updating.
So, I shall roll with the rather hilarious and unintentional gift of the juxtaposition of those two images.
I do not, technically, have a “space” for Yellow Bellied Girl, and yet she so beautifully captures the awkwardness of adolescence — and the TURTLE, for heaven’s sake! #QuincyThing #BBSThing — that it feels cruel to exclude her.
(MB, if you are reading this, come by and see her in person, and let’s discuss!)
Julia Roberts emerged during my adolescence; I would say the holy trinity of Steel Magnolias, Mystic Pizza and Pretty Woman, but then I think of Sleeping With the Enemy and Dying Young, and whatever else Leigh Ann and Ranie and I zoomed over to Tallahassee to see in that era, smuggling our Rally’s hamburger combo meals into the theater inside our Dooney & Bourke handbags.
I was obsessed with Julia Roberts, and at tennis camp before tenth grade, one of the instructors said I looked just like her, which flattered me so much that here I am, repeating it, as if it were the truth, spoken by someone whose name and identity are utterly lost to me.
That does, I think, point to what is so delightful and tricky and slippery about “truth.”
About a month ago, I read that the Florida Board of Education adopted a conservative educational plan from the Heritage Foundation:
“The purpose of education is discovery of truth. There are objective truths our students need to understand,” State Board of Education Ryan Petty was quoted as saying. “Truth is not rooted in an ideology. It is what it is, and we shouldn’t allow ideologies to take over.”
Is that…true?
* * *
Something about the Jeffrey Epstein stuff has been bothering me.
A couple of weeks ago, I texted one of my best friends that I’d gone down the rabbit hole of watching 60 Minutes Australia coverage regarding Virginia Giuffre’s marriage.
Without getting into the details, which you can google for yourself, something about this woman and her story/stories did not sit right with me.
Trying to reconstruct the breadcrumbs of the precise details and my fascination would take more time/energy than I care to spend.
And yet there is something fascinating, and revealing, isn’t there, about the stories that suck us in?
Google AI says 60 Minutes Australia (which seems to be, may I note, a lot more tabloid-y than its American kin) “consistently presented Giuffre as a ‘fierce warrior’ and a symbol of strength whose bravery brought international attention to the issues of exploitation and corruption within powerful circles.”
“Fierce warrior.”
That is deep stuff for me, and I suspect it was for her as well.
I have spent, arguably, entirely too much time trying to make sense of both my confusing childhood and my own bad behavior.
And yet I feel sorry for people who cling to simple, childlike binaries of black and white, wrong and right, good and bad.
I guess I feel sorry for them because I used to be one of them, and life is so much better now that I am not.
I love the photograph of Julia Roberts and Sean Penn. They had a conversation about her latest film, AFTER THE HUNT.
I watched it a week or two ago. It’s messy and imperfectly executed — and yet, as I type those words — perhaps that was precisely the filmmaker’s point.
It skewers the egos and nonsense and condescension in academia right now in a way I think even the Heritage Foundation would applaud.
I happened to see a Facebook clip of the conversation in which Penn spoke about the value of shame:
Sean shared how he thought it was refreshing to see the 'provocative' film challenge the idea that no one should be made to feel uncomfortable, adding: 'I think shame is underrated these days. It's got a bad name this decade. Why shouldn't people be ashamed of things?’
(That’s from The Guardian; fighting my urge to Americanize that punctuation!)
I thought the movie was a rich feast of questions regarding accusations and victimization and the fuzzy boundaries of sexual abuse in situations where everyone’s egos and ideas are competing for status and position and validation and admiration.
This week, I watched the Netflix program The Beast In Me. It offered food for thought on the same theme that captivates me: do wealthy, powerful men actually victimize and destroy woman after woman, or are the women themselves also somehow complicit?
Last night, I watched the brilliant documentary Predators on Paramount+.
It ends with the question I pasted in the subtitle of this post: “You get everything you want?”
The New York Times review used that quote in its review in a way that I considered to be a spoiler. Using it here feels more like giving you an Easter egg; the movie ends with that line and a visual reveal that is pure perfection in its irony, timing and restraint.
There is a particular scene that was so piercing, I wrote down the words. The moment has to do with someone who has been sitting in the shame of his actions. The filmmakers have done — for me — a beautiful job of exposing the complexity of his “crime.”
Those quotes are intentional, and I stand behind them, because the compressed, edited, curated version of the tale that made it into the film convinced me.
Anyway, the culprit’s mother is being interviewed, and his pain — literally breaks through. It was beautiful and deeply affecting, and these were her words:
I don’t think that until right now he’s ever acknowledged, like, everything that was lost. And everything that was taken from him.
* * *
On Monday, I attended my writing group in Tallahassee. I am a new member of the group, and it was my first time being “workshopped” by the others.
I had submitted the scenes I wrote about working in my father‘s office at the tomato packing house.
Pam Houston’s brutally honest August 2022 critique of my so-called memoir (I took some fictional liberties that compromised the integrity of the narrator — a/k/a myself) included the declaration that “the farm scenes are far and away the best parts of the book.”
She also informed me I needed to STFU as the narrator. “You have tremendous power as the author, but you do not get to tell the reader what to think.”
One of the members of the critique group spoke about the ways the scene illustrated for her the universal, little girl longing for male attention. She talked about what the piece brought up for her, and I was, quite honestly, shocked, to hear her bring to my work beauty and insight that I didn’t even fully anticipate or understand.
That is the power of great art, isn’t it?
I shared some long feminist/critical rant recently about “the male gaze” and feminine beauty/vulnerability. A few years back, I bought a copy of Ways of Seeing. I felt as if I could not fully appreciate it or understand it when I studied it in college — or at least, I think, read some excerpts from it.
A day or two after the writing group on Monday, I wrote a fresh scene from middle school; my creation contained this:
Ever since Katie had joined us, as we’d moved from elementary school toward middle school, I’d felt my secure friendships with my old buddies slipping away. I was struggling to keep up.
Boys didn’t like me. Well—except sometimes they did. But then they would do dumb things like write me letters at summer camp saying things like, “I fell and hurt my but and it hurt!” And I would gleefully show off the evidence of such ignorance, giggling with my girlfriends over how on earth these dumb boys still did not know elementary facts like the difference between but and butt.
It is so strange to me that we live in a world that continues to deny the power of words to belittle and humiliate others.
It is so strange to me that we continue to live in a world in which young women are always seen as innocent victims.
Leigh Ann — perhaps rightly — questioned on Friday night whether my fascination with the Olivia Nuzzi/Ryan Lizza/RFK Jr. media/memoir nonsense is/was healthy, and yet I could not help getting sucked into it.
Olivia reminds me so much of myself, and I’m just grateful I dodged bullet after bullet and never created some sort of full-on public humiliation for myself. (Side note: that book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed was a great read a while back.)
My word claws are and have been, for longer than I care to admit, vicious; I can use my talons to rip my prey to shreds.
A friend of mine reminded me of that dangerous power in 2024, and yet she did it in such an unkind way — a sort of one-way, machine gun verbal assault — that I found myself disinterested in continuing to call her a friend.
Writing this reminds me how important collaboration is in the creative process; I love being able to speak freely without the shackles and restraints of an editor, and yet I am also deeply grateful for the insights that come from others who read my work and shed some light on it that I myself cannot see.
If you are here, you are, in all likelihood, one of those individuals, so thank you for reading this and caring about me enough to hang in there.
I love letting people inside the messy space of my mind.
I love descending my stairs under the watchful eye of the beautiful, innocent, brave, fierce Florida girls who live here with me, hanging out in this space, watching over me and protecting me from harm.