Abstract
I feel fortunate to be someone who reads and writes about masculinity at a time when many of the old-boy gatekeepers of “men’s studies” have stepped (or been pushed) aside, creating some room for the rest of us. One blessed effect of this transformation is that the study of masculinity has moved beyond reiterating all those typologies and archetypes (hegemonic, complicit, etc., you know the list), instead treating masculinity much the way critical feminist scholars treat femininity: as a patriarchal sham with violent and devastating consequences, but also a pleasurable costume or sex toy, when handled with the right (queer feminist) sensibility. Chris Belcher’s Pretty Baby, a staggering memoir of girlhood sexuality and Belcher’s subsequent career as an academic and a professional dominatrix, tours us through both sides of masculinity. As a memoir, it’s perhaps unlikely to be used as a text in social science courses on men and masculinity–but it should be.
This book is, in part, a story about being a sex worker, but the most disillusioning stories about sex come not from Belcher’s descriptions of attending to her male clients’ desires, but from her account of simply being a girl growing up in a rural, working class American town. Included in Belcher’s cast of familiar and formative figures who shaped her and her friends’ introductions to heterosexuality: The sixth-grade boy who pulled girls’ shorts down at school to see whether they had pubic hair. The high school boys who determined who was, or wasn’t, a “cock tease” and loudly proclaimed as much; the boys who put their jagged, jabbing fingernails inside girls’ vaginas; the boys and grown men who cornered teen girls, finding ways to hover over them, touch and press against them. The boys who were once friends and now won’t stop getting too close, oozing with sexual entitlement and urgency. In college, the male coworkers at minimum wage jobs who took advantage of being in backrooms with young women, leaning in and pushing their erections against them. The managers who, when the behavior is reported to them, shrug and call it a compliment.
As a kid, Belcher thought sex meant power for women—the power to make men need something that women had—and she wanted that power, but she also wanted, like many girls, to get sex over with, to get this looming rite of passage out of the way. As a teenager, she had observed gender and power long enough to avoid “ruining” sex by saying something about the pain or pleasurelessness of being fucked by boys. Like girls and women have done for centuries, she sometimes gave in and let the boy fuck her so that he would finally leave her alone. Pretty Baby is a vivid account of the resignation, risk management, and transactional consent with which girls learn to respond to boys’ sexual entitlement. As if speaking to or about all teen girls who’ve ever dared to fuck boys and somehow evade the violence and stigma hurled at the girl marked a slut, Belcher reasons that by high school, “The fucking was no longer about you and your power. It became about boys and theirs” (p. 39).
Belcher comes out as a lesbian in high school, and one of the most interesting expressions of masculinity in the book is her own—and the way boys and men in her life respond to it with territorialism. Belcher’s father is angered by his lesbian daughters’ perversion, her interest in his Playboy magazines. A boy at school wants to fight her because “if you fuck girls like a man you can fight like a man.” Other boys responded to her coming out as a lesbian by standing too close and asking too many questions because, as she astutely notes, she had taken something of theirs that they wanted back.
Hence, by the time Belcher began working as a pro-domme, men’s swirl of need, desire, entitlement, and threat was nothing new. Male clients came to her to submit—to be fucked like a girl “with legs spread high and wide,” to eat dog food, to be ignored, insulted, and so on—but this submission had its limits. More than one client signaled their power over her with sudden acts of aggression or refusals to respond to Belcher’s safe word. In Belcher’s brilliant storytelling, readers can feel the precarity of her situation, the looming threat of clients’ boundary-crossing or violence, but we are also invited to see men’s needy bodies as she does, as their own awkward spectacle—their sweat, body hair, bad breath, dry mouths, and oddly-shaped penises all material for Belcher’s detached and almost scientific observation.
As a young college student, Belcher reads Montique Wittig’s The Straight Mind and is greatly impacted by Wittig’s claim that woman is a relational category defined by its association with men, and that consequently, lesbians aren’t “women.” In Pretty Baby, one cannot help but be struck by the reverse relationship—that straight boys and men are always clamoring at girls and women to sustain their own legibility and to meet their most basic of needs—raising the question: without girls and women, what is left of men?