Free The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson Page B

series, in context. Its crude drawing is in conversation with the ornate script of the word Pervert , which Opie had carved into the front of her chest and photographed a year later. And both are in conversation with the heterogeneous lesbian households of Opie’s Domestic series (1995–98)—in which Harry appears, baby-faced—as well as with Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004), taken a decade after Self-Portrait/Pervert . In Opie’s nursing self-portrait, she holds and beholds her son Oliver while he nurses, her Pervert scar still visible, albeit ghosted, across her chest. The ghosted scar offers a rebus of sodomitical maternity: the pervert need not die or even go into hiding per se, but nor is adult sexuality foisted upon the child, made its burden.
    This balance is admirable. It is also not always easy to maintain. In a recent interview, Opie says: “Between being a full-time professor and an artist and a mom and a partner, it’s not like I get to have that much time to go and explore and play [SM style]…. Also, all of a sudden when you’re taking care of a child, your brain doesn’t easily switch to ‘Oh, now I’m going to hurt somebody’”
    There is something profound here, which I will but draw a circle around for you to ponder. As you ponder, however, note that a difficulty in shifting gears, or a struggle to find the time, is not the same thing as an ontological either/or.
    Of course, there are a multitude of good reasons for adults to keep their bodies to themselves, one of which is the simple aesthetic fact that adult bodies can be hideous to children. Listen, for example, to Hervé Guibert’s description of his father’s penis:
    I’m staring at his trousers as he opens his flies and that’s when I see something I’ve never seen again in all my life: a kind of threshing ringed beast, cork-screwed and blood-filled and raw, a pink sausage ending in a cone-shaped knob. At this moment I see my father’s prick as if it were skinless, as if my eyes had the power to see right through the flesh. I see something anatomically separate. It’s as if I see a superimposed and scaled-down version of the shiny cosh that he brought back from the slaughterhouse and puzzlingly places on his bedside table.
    This scene doesn’t forecast damage or violation per se, but most such literary scenes (the non-French ones?) do. Think of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings , by Maya Angelou, whose primal scene of violation I must have read a hundred times over as a young girl. Here is eight-year-old Maya, our narrator, reporting on the actions of her uncle: “Mr. Freeman pulled me to him, and put his hand between my legs…. He threw back the blankets and his ‘thing’ stood up like a brown ear of corn. He took my hand and said, ‘Feel it.’ It was mushy and squirmy like the inside of a freshly killed chicken. Then he dragged me on top of his chest.” This is but the opening salvo of the recurring sexual abuse of Maya at the hands of Mr. Freeman.
    To be honest, however, I didn’t remember that the abuse continued until I researched it just now. As a child I stuttered out on just this one scene, so startled was I by the penis-corn.
    If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations (all my favorite books in my preteen years: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Clan of the Cave Bear, The World According to Garp , as well as the few R-rated movies I was allowed to see— Fame , most notably, with its indelible scene of Irene Cara being asked to take her shirt off and suck her thumb by a skeezy photographer who promises to make her a star), then your sexuality will form around that fact. There is no control group. I don’t even want to talk about “female sexuality” until there is a control group. And there never will be.
    In high school, a wise teacher assigned the short story “Wild Swans” by Alice Munro. The story blew through