I Read TATU Fanfiction, and It Didn’t Say Anything About Them Not Really Being Lesbians

I’ve read at least a dozen times about the mystical thing that tends to happens to girls’ confidence once they reach puberty—you know, that it completely disappears, and all those little girls who proudly proclaimed they could indeed become president and didn’t give a flying fuck how many Twinkies they ate suddenly become very concerned with vital issues—you know, being acceptable to their male peers. Now, before everyone starts jumping out of their seats yelling a variation of, “I didn’t do that! I know girls who did, though”, let me just add this: You probably did. You may not have realized it. You may not have even wanted to. It may not have even been that noticeable. The fact is, we all most likely compromised or inconvenienced (to keep things simple) ourselves to fit into the heterosexist paradigm for at least a few seconds at some point during adolescence, and I’m sure a lot of people haven’t stopped yet, if they even notice. My foray into this strange and awful world didn’t last very long. I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t really want to be. As arrogant as it may sound, I have no doubt I could have forced myself into the role expected of me and done exceptionally well there. 

I knew how to do it. I still know how to do it.  I just didn’t know why I should bother then, and I still don’t really know. There’s a difference between fitting in just enough to get by and partaking in any of the mind games which, based on my observations, are part of socializing. Anyway, I’m rather introverted, and so being socially isolated was, for the most part, not a problem, and when you combine that with thoughts about whether or not the fabric of daily life is just a series of agreed upon fictions, you get a middle school girl who doesn’t socialize and doesn’t really care to. 

Of course, that was simply unacceptable. 

To say our culture has a troubled relationship with adolescent girls is more than an understatement. I’m not going to go into a detailed discussion about it, but it’s clear we don’t know what to do with them. They’re not children, and they’re not grown women. They have the minds of children in a lot of ways, but they’re incredibly sexualized at every turn. Sure, there’s a lot of confusion about how to handle teenage boys as well, but I don’t know of a male equivalent for that disturbingly misused word “Lolita.”

You see, when I started making that wondrous transition from child to young adult everything in my life changed instantly. Suddenly it mattered that I didn’t obsessively tape glossy photos of pouting guys to my walls. It mattered that I didn’t get invited to the “cool” gatherings hosted by my classmates. It mattered that I Google’d the word “lesbian” and forgot to erase the browser history. 

Okay, that one I could have understood the adults in my life freaking out over a little had I actually been stupid enough to do it. Fortunately, I only did my research at school, on the computer in the back, and always erased the browser history. 

None of these things mattered to me, but rather, they mattered to the adults in my life. My mother is baffled by me now, so I’m not that surprised she was baffled by me then. Charismatic and extroverted, she was always the most popular person in the room. Everyone knew her, and everyone loved her, even the people she chased with a hammer just the day before. I’m sure that made me seem even stranger than I really am, but for all the “Why don’t you have a boyfriend?” and “What do you mean you weren’t invited?” she at least never found fault with my intelligence level. On the other hand, there was her husband, who, for reasons I’m still puzzling over, hated me from age 11, which, surprise, surprise, was the age puberty began. It was a lot of fun too. I was developing the body of a fertility goddess at a time when my female classmates wore padded bras over flat chests and hoped no-one called them on it, and you bet your shapely, Sheela-Na-Gig ass it was noticed. 

A current of tension had always run through our relationship, but it was nothing to the animosity that suddenly began simmering beneath the surface of our interactions. At the time I didn’t understand where any of it came from. I ignored the tension between us because it didn’t demand attention, and a part of me just didn’t want to think about it. It was easier to think about the nature of reality instead. 

You’re probably wondering where in the fuck I’m going with this, but don’t worry. We’re staying out of Dorothy Allison-Land today, though this post has quickly become far heavier than I originally intended. Someday I will destroy everything within me but the icy core of cynicism. 

 I digress. 

As this post evolved in my head I realized a certain amount of backstory was needed to round it out. Earlier this week I played Pretty on the Inside a few times in preparation for the second post in my Courtney Love series (obviously not this post), and it quickly became clear something wasn’t right. Something was missing. I heard the songs. I enjoyed them, but no connection was made. Is that a cause for panic? No, but it’s disconcerting given the role the first two Hole albums played in helping me learn to articulate my anger. 

The problem, I later realized, was actually rather absurd. Simply put, I can only connect to music if I’m completely alone. There can be no chance anyone else can hear it. I enjoy it just fine in the company of others, and I enjoy it when it plays in the background while I do daily tasks. I just don’t feel the same things I do when I’m alone in a room listening through headphones.

See? Absurd. 

There’s a story, though, which I think explains things somewhat. I always thought my preference for listening to music privately was the result of growing up in tiny, crowded spaces where everyone could just about always hear what you were saying and see what you were doing. Even during the few brief times I had a room to myself someone had a problem with the door being closed. The concept of introversion or even the basic need for private time was, apparently, just not something anyone around me was acquainted with, and I either ignored the horrible sense of intrusion or closed the door anyway, consequences be damned.

During the height of the pubescent turmoil I had two favorite bands: Evanescence and TATU. Yes, I realize that’s funny. At least I never got caught up in the boy band crazy of the late 90s, but then again, I’m not sure what appeal they would have had for a girl who tried to imagine what Prince Cornelius from Thumbelina would have looked like as a woman. So, it shouldn’t be too difficult to understand the appeal of the studio fabricated duo from Russia. It also didn’t hurt that one of them had red hair. Evanescence, on the other hand, allowed me to indulge my unhappiness without thinking about it. They were just melodramatic enough. My comfort book at this point was Wuthering Heights, after all. 

When I bought the first Evanescence album my mother stared at it for so long I wondered if she wasn’t trying to change the cover to a less offending photo using only the power of her mind. 

 Finally, she said, “Why don’t you ever listen to people who are pretty?” I found this somewhat ironic given how much she discouraged my love for the Spice Girls a few years earlier. Sure, they had a tendency to dress rather, shall we say, provocatively, especially for a band so obviously marketed to very young girls, but you can’t say they weren’t pretty. In fact, that was part of their appeal for me. Even at eight I wanted to be as attractive as they were. “Looks aren’t everything,” I replied. “It’s the music I want.” Secretly, though, I thought Any Lee was fucking gorgeous, and there’s no other way to describe it. I didn’t want to be her; I just wanted to be near her. 

 That little exchange mostly ended the discussion. When I got the TATU album my mother wasn’t around, so it took a few weeks for her to question the content of my new acquisition. That exchange carried a level of awkwardness I don’t know how to describe properly. If you haven’t seen the liner notes for the American 

 release of 200 Km/H in the Wrong Lane, well, you’re missing some great softcore porn for men.

 This is the best version I could find. 

  I could do a whole post just about the way these two were marketed during that brief period when people actually had a vague idea who they were. To be honest, it’s a little disturbing if you think about it, but at the time I didn’t see it that way. Burgeoning feminist sensibility be damned.  I wanted to see girls kissing other girls, and if they wanted to sing angsty songs about it, well, that was even better. I was unaware of the controversy surrounding them, the suspicions that their “relationship” was a publicity stunt, so it was easy to sit in the back of computer class, hide my headphones with my hair, and watch the “All the Things She Said” video over and over without a second thought. 

The only problem was, I inherited my father’s need to talk about things. It’s horrible. I’m like Anne Sexton without the talent. I also think I was just angry and tired of waiting for things to boil over on their own. I wanted something, anything, to happen. So, I started talking. Had I been honest with myself I would have realized the people I was telling things to couldn’t be trusted.

 I really wasn’t prepared for just how fast everything changed. I didn’t have control over the situation or even an idea of what to expect next. All I could do was my best imitation of an immovable object meeting an unstoppable force. Perhaps it would have made things easier if I’d toned down my eccentricities, made more of an effort to be the bubbly, conventionally pretty girl everyone wanted me to be, but I really don’t think it would have helped. For a while, I was sure I not only created the entire situation but could have diffused it if I’d just been less of a stubborn little bitch. Now, I’m not so sure. Something happened when I stopped being a child, and I don’t know if anything I did could have changed it. There’s nothing a woman can do to make her boyfriend stop hitting her, but odds are she’ll tell herself there is, at least until she can admit the truth. It was the same sort of situation. 

What does all of this have to do with my compulsion to use headphones? Well, my mother’s husband had a habit of taking my things. I don’t mean as a punishment. That would have required actually telling me. He preferred to take things while I was gone and pretend to know nothing about anything being missing while I frantically tore my room apart. It started small and eventually I found myself listening as my diary from sixth grade was read aloud by a divorce lawyer. There was a point when I didn’t know what to expect each time I walked into my room. The only incident I ever told my mother about was when I found my CDs missing. It was like a switch was flipped. I didn’t care if I got another talk from my mother about how better things would be if I would just start liking boys or stop wearing so much black. Taking the photos off the wall and leaving the tape used to hold them up behind was one things, but fucking taking my CDs was another. I didn’t care how trite the lyrics are, how painfully overwrought, how disgustingly marketed the acts were, those two albums and Emily Brontë made me happy damn it. 

That’s when I started only listening to things with headphones, even if it was just me in the house. Before when I spent time alone at home I played whatever I wanted as loud as I wanted, but after that I only played music when someone else wanted to. I made a copy of the TATU album, left it unlabeled, and gave the original to one of my few friends to hold onto for a while. Eventually, she got the honor of hiding my VHS copy of But I’m a Cheerleader, helpfully stolen from Blockbuster and given to me in the eighth grade by the first guy I pretended to date.

Story Time Vol. One: How I Almost Got Kidnapped

When I was a child every time I found myself subjected to yet another strange group of children the question always asked, once the perpetually popular “Where do you go to church?” had made the rounds, was “Who’s your father?” Now, I could probably spend five pages going on about the fact that almost no-one ever cared to ask who my mother was and why that’s significant, but since last weekend was Father’s Day, I’ll refrain. I always had a lot of trouble with this question because my answer was, “I don’t have one.” Obviously, I didn’t mean in the literal sense—though being an Athena-eqsue creature would have been rather cool—but the strange group of children tended to react as though I did. I’m not sure if they were all just that stupid or if they were intrigued thought incredulity would drag the Great Secret out of me.

Now that I think about it, I should have responded with something like: “Well, my father is actually Elvis. My mom found him wandering around in the desert mumbling about aliens, and he’s been living in our spare room ever since.”

Now, I understand I should have responded with at least my father’s name; it didn’t matter if I hadn’t seen him in years. If not, I was supposed to respond with my stepfather’s name, but really, I didn’t see any reason to do that. In my strange as all hell little child mind, that would have been lying, and if there’s one thing I really, really fucking hated as a child, it was lying. Strange, considering what an art the adults in my life made of it. Anyway, he wasn’t my father, and we all knew it. Depending on how old I was, he didn’t even like me that much, if at all, so why go around handing out fake titles? But I didn’t know how to articulate that at eight, so it became another entry on the list of reasons why I was socially isolated.

Anyway, I realized by saying, “I don’t have one”, I was also implying, “And I don’t need one.” To be honest, it never occurred to me that I might, or that some people end up spending their entire lives freaking out because their dads didn’t pay enough attention to them. I’m sure the same is true for mothers, but let’s be honest, no-one goes around talking about Mommy Issues with the same ease as they do Daddy Issues. I’m sure living in a patriarchal culture has absolutely nothing to do with that.

I realize I’m not going to help fight my reputation as cold and unfeeling by saying I didn’t feel a loss when my father stopped making the effort to occasionally show up and see me, but I really didn’t. The man was fucking crazy, and if I didn’t want to end up writing Dorothy Allison’s next book for her, I’d tell you about it. There were a few times when I got older, after he resurfaced and them disappeared again twice, when I wondered, “Is it me?”

That didn’t last long though. Why?

Because fuck him, that’s why.

Anyhow, I decided to commemorate the most recent round of, “What do you mean you don’t talk to your dad? Doesn’t that make you sad?” with a story. Dear readers, it’s time for My Trip to Michigan, or, as I prefer to call it, The Time I Almost Got Kidnapped.

It was the summer of 1994. My first sister had been born in January. I had just finished enduring my first round of hellish torture—known to some people as my first year of kindergarten. Yes, I spent two years in kindergarten. Why? Because the educational system fucks over introverts Who. Just. Want. To. Read.

I was really looking forward to summer, which is funny because after age 12 I never looked forward to summer again and hoped the school year would be extended at the last minute. At that point though, all I cared about was getting away from the other children, watching Daytime T.V., going on midnight junk food runs, and trips to the library with my mom, who, unlike my teacher, let me get whatever the hell I wanted and believed me when I said I could read it. When my father showed up talking about a trip to Michigan to spend some time with his family I don’t remember caring that much. He said there would be swimming though, and well, that excited me.

Given my father’s overall irresponsibility and, shall we say, unpredictability, my going hinged on one of his other children going. Mandy, my older sister who no longer speaks to me, was deemed competent enough to make sure I didn’t die or get left anywhere. So, we set off.

Along the way I drove my father crazy with my refusal to eat at Burger King. See, I had recently watched a show about Mad Cow disease and immediately responded by freaking the fuck out and trying to throw up the meatloaf I ate the day before. My mom and one of her friends calmed me down by telling me only beef from Australia could kill me, and the only place in America with such lethal meat was Burger King. Our town didn’t have one, and that was enough to temporarily reassure me. My father, of course, knew nothing about this incident, but he responded to my fear with complete maturity and intelligence by explaining to me that I had the option of eating chicken or even of just eating fries. Or, you know, by not insisting we eat at fucking Burger King.

Except he did none of those things, and in a rare moment of caring from Mandy, she added to my mom’s lie by telling me all the contaminated cows had been shot.

Seriously.

Once in Michigan things actually went well at first. My paternal grandfather responded to me with the same level of disinterest and suspicion as I responded to him. The other relatives didn’t seem to notice I was there. The promised swimming wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be, thanks to the fact that we were out on a lake, in a boat, and the smallest life jacket was still three sizes too big for me so I always felt like I was either about to drown or be strangled by the thing. Mandy introduced me to 90s MTV, which wasn’t that exciting. I spent a few days watching Beavis and Butthead with her, but I never really understood the appeal. If only Daria had existed or a Nirvana video had come on so my life could have changed. Considering it was the summer of 1994, I’m actually a little surprised I never saw a Nirvana video.

I’m digressing.

My father had a lot of friends in Michigan, and by friends I mean drug acquaintances. I doubt he’s ever had anything else. One set of acquaintances had two hellbeasts for children. I spent the duration of our visits to their house trying to avoid them and being bullied when I failed to do so. That’s not to say this should be read with an, “Aww, poor thing” attitude because until I was about seven and all my confidence started to get sucked out, I wasn’t daunted by bullies, no matter what size they came in. With a strong, “Oh yeah? Well, fuck you!” I’d rush at them, fist raised, ready to kick ass. Once the fray was over, I’d settle back into a corner and read, which is all I really wanted to do in the first place. And no, I didn’t know what the word “fuck” meant at that age. I got a lot of my vocabulary from context clues as a child, and that seemed like the strongest angry retort.

One night near the end of the trip, my father found out he had to go “pick up some stuff” right after we arrived at another acquaintance’s house. There were three adults and about a dozen unwashed children running around shrieking like hellbeasts, so I got the privilege of staying with some strange adults in one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever been had the misfortune of entering. I still don’t know what the hell happened. It could have been as simple as he got high and forgot or maybe there was some epic Gangland-style action that kept him busy, but whatever it was, my father didn’t show back up until the next morning.

I won’t say I didn’t freak out a little when the third hour struck and I was still in that hellhole, but by hour five I’d found a less-filthy corner and my fear settled into resignation. I was hungry, but I’d be damned if I asked those people for food. It was around ten at night, so I was getting tired, but again, I’d be damned if I fell asleep in that place. I’d finished my book, so I tentatively went in search of another one.

I didn’t find one. I did find a very sweet cat, though.

The day before we were supposed to go home, something happened to my father’s car. I still don’t know what, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that story was a lie. Leaving on schedule became impossible. It would be three or four days before we could head back. My sister took this pretty well; she went inside and turned on MTV.

I, however, did not.

When my mom called that night I told her what had happened. Her voice got really calm, in a way that usually signified she was about to jump into a moving car through the window or attack someone with a metal ruler. She asked to speak to me father. Knowing I had made some sort of mistake, I found him and handed over the phone.

The news that my father would be willing to run off into the woods with me to keep my mom from getting me back was not exactly something I wanted to hear. As her assurances that she would indeed be there by tomorrow grew more vehement, so did his that neither of us would be there.

I went into the other room, put my books in a bag, and changed into day clothes. There was $1 in quarters in my bag and a payphone two blocks away. As much as I trusted my mom, there was someone I trusted a little more, especially when it came to being dependable.

If necessary, I was prepared to call my grandfather.

It didn’t come to that. I’m a bit curious about what would have happened if it had. I found out years later there was a small army of quasi-hippies counting out gas money and searching for a map even before my mom hung up the phone. So, I guess that means I was pretty important to these people.

Or maybe they all just wanted to go on a road trip.

A Hole Lot of Fascination: Part 1—Why?

 I can’t stop talking about Courtney Love. Even when I fervently claimed to hate everything about her, I couldn’t stop talking about her. She was the worst thing to happen to music. She couldn’t sing. Hole was a sell-out band. All she cared about was money and making friends with celebrities. It was disgusting how she brought up Kurt’s name as if she had a right to talk about him. Remembering my hollow self-righteousness makes me cringe. The fact that in August I loved Hole and by October I was declaring I had never liked them, not even one song, not at all, just proves how strong—and sad—my desire to be liked had become by that point. I’d like to go back and shake 15-year-old me into understanding pretentious misogynists who think refusing to bathe earns them a badge of honor are not worth her time.

I didn’t yet understand part of my isolation was chosen. I avoided social situations because I naturally preferred to be alone, and generally speaking, my attempts to bond with my peers ended up sounding like Daria’s trip to the school counselor. At that point I just believed it was time to finally make a few friends. I was feeling an unprecedented level of confidence, taking my self-esteem from a dangerous -10 to a simply unhealthy 0.

Had my life been a poorly written teen movie things would have worked out. The guy with Robert Smith hair would actually have turned out to be a sensitive poet, with whom I would fall madly in love. His asshole friends would either have revealed themselves to be decent people shielding themselves from a cruel world or simply been dropped from the story by the end. The vapid girlfriends who hated other girls more than I thought possible would reform or, like the asshole friends, be written out by the end. Actually, if I could snag a writing credit for this thing I’d like the girls to be saved by feminism and a few buckets of cold water to get thrown on the guys—and eventually some feminist enlightenment for them too. Why not?

That didn’t happen, though. The guy with Robert Smith hair ended up being a pretentious asshole who needed to spend some time being honest with himself about his sexuality, and I don’t know what happened to the others. I lost track of them after I came to my sense and realized how much time I was wasting with them. They loved the idea of Nirvana. I loved Nirvana. They thought the world was a stupid, empty place out to make them miserable by sending them to Baptist church services on Wednesdays and keeping acid out of their unwashed hands. I thought reality was probably made up of a lot of social constructs than most people realized or admitted, and I wasn’t sure what to do with that thought. I thought the world was probably an awful place most of the time, but I still wanted to go on living in it, even if it was just to play “All Apologies” one more time. They thought the world sucked because thinking the world sucked was the most rebellious act they could think of that didn’t require moving. In hindsight, I see how my strangely sincere cynicism didn’t endear me to this crowd.

All that’s to say, when they mocked my collection of Hole albums, I should have told them to stop bitching about a band they admitted never listening to. I should have told them to go fuck themselves for relying on slut-shaming Courtney to discredit a band with three other people in it. Instead, I hid the albums and joined the ranks of Courtney haters. That lasted for a few years, and there were times when it was almost real. She’s such an unabashed spiteful trainwreck of a person most of the time it seems impossible not to hate her, if only because her near-constant histrionics have exasperated you into hating her. I want to grab her by the hair almost more than I want to grab Past Me and refuse to let go until she takes responsibility for herself at least some of the time.

The thing is, though, what can drive you to hate her is what keeps most fans coming back for more. Nirvana are always going to be That Band for me. I can’t put into words how I felt the first time I heard them or the (cliché alert) sense of being spoken to by the headless photo of Kurt Cobain on the back of their greatest hits album.

Not that I ended up tattooing that photo onto my arm or anything. Who would do something like that?

This post isn’t about Nirvana, though now that I think about it, I’ll have to do one (or eight) about them at some point. This exciting first post is also the first in a series on Courtney Love and Hole because, goddamnit, I can’t stop talking about them. Yes, Courtney is pretty much a terrible person. Yes, their last good album was in 1998, and Hole fans are divided over whether or not that one was good despite being their most successful. Yes, Courtney Love has humiliated herself enough for fifteen people with similar abandonment issues and addictive personalities over the past twenty years. And yet there’s something about her and about the band that’s impossible for me not to love.

Without further missing the point, when I heard Nirvana it was like finally meeting someone who understood me. Every ragged note that came out of Kurt Cobain’s mouth was a validation of what I thought and felt. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t too angry. I was just fucking frustrated. I was too smart and too sensitive for the people around me, and they got that. There were things they couldn’t express, though, and places they couldn’t go. Hole could. Until Courtney decided it would be fun to front a band of leather-clad guys, one of whom looks as though he’s wearing a bad Sid Vicious Halloween costume, Hole were a decidedly feminine band. As much as Courtney wanted to bitch about the lack of testosterone in music making it weak when she started out—a weird complaint for a self-proclaimed feminist—she fronted a band that expressed, more than anything else, a decidedly feminine rage. It was a kind of rage Nirvana could never tap into, and I’m okay with that. I’m not sure I want them being able to reach the same inner parts of me Hole can. I’m not sure if, as guys, they could even if they wanted to. Kurt Cobain may have become one of the most feminized men in music—if not the history of the world—but he could never have sang “Pretty on the Inside” and sounded convincing. He couldn’t have written “Good Sister/Bad Sister.” Sure, those are both songs from the same Hole-era, but I think early Hole wasn’t just the angriest; it was also the most feminine.

By now I’m sure you’ve realized my use of the world feminine has nothing to do with frills and dolls, unless those dolls have had their heads pulled off and their dresses cut up. What I’m talking about is something I’m still struggling to define. Hole was a sexy band, and not just because of that Rolling Stone photo shoot where Courtney looked like she could fuck you with her eyes. 

Their songs have a kind of unchecked emotional energy I can only imagine letting myself have. That’s part of the continuing fascination with them and with Courtney. She propped her leg on an amp, didn’t care if you could see up her skirt, and screamed out everything girls are supposed to repress. She’s every stereotype and misogynist belief about women—overwrought, illogical, vindictive, needy, promiscuous, et cetera. She’s an Emily Brontë character come to life, minus the British accent and eloquent speeches.

Yet she radiates a strange kind of power, or perhaps it’s charisma. I want to be like her, even if all I ever manage to do is stop holding back every time the words “Insipid fuck” beg to be snarled at someone.