Thanksgiving 2019: On Consumption and Feasts
Food and sex have always been illustrative metaphors of the process of creative genius (appetite, gorge, release), and both of them are heavily gendered fields. Women have always been purveyors of the kitchen, and have been involuntarily posed as the guardians of sex. There are numerous myths and legends surrounding this as well, tales and myths that offer explanation for the status quo but actually obscure the gendered power play going on in the background. In other words, women have always been contained, corralled into the realms of food and body, as illustrated in the myths that are told and then entrenched during the canonization of female saints. All women are the possibility of creation, and have been punished for their fertile potential.
Earlier this month I was invited by the lovely Lola Jean, hostess and squirter extraordinaire, to perform at Pass The Porn: Sploshing Edition. I have been a long time fan of consumption-related fetishes and chose to read the an abridged version of the following piece. This is a call to action, just in time for Thanksgiving—stand in the feminine domain and act counter to its rigid requirements.
Photo by Kareem Montes. Background video by Lanee Bird
On a Woman’s Right to Eat
One confessor ordered Veronica Giuliani to kneel while a novice of the order kicked her in the mouth. Another ordered her to clean the walls and floor of her cell with her tongue; but even he thought it was going too far when she swallowed the spiders and their webs.
At least 33% of women who have been canonized as saints died by means of starvation; anorexia mirabilis, the physical mortification and withholding of the flesh as a means to be closer to God. To be proper is to be holy. Shush yourself. Take up less space. Female asceticism has always been so intrinsically linked to food
“Therese of Lisieux died of TB in 1897, just short of her 25th birthday. As she lay dying, bleeding from her intestines and unable to keep down water, she was tormented by the thought of banquets.”
I dream of consumption so excessive that all that can be done is to nail down the tarps and prep for overflow. I dream of spilling. I dream of staining. I, too, dream of banquets, because I am obsessed with the mouth. There is no womb that is as fertile, so ungodly, as that of my throat, no gates quite as treacherous as my teeth.
“Galgani and her fellow female saints believed that suffering was not limited in time or space…their suffering could be an expiation for the sins of others; it could be a restitution, a substitution.”
I, woman, am the ultimate, simultaneous creatrix and destructor of the feast, gatekeeper of the bounty. Let me be dragged by the tongue down the path of virtueless salvation, indulging in sin to save my ascetic soul. I consume, I revel in, I luxuriate, I exceed on behalf of others. Pleasure is not limited in time or space. Desire is a gravitous force that pulls me so ferociously outside of myself that I release into, onto unto others. My essence expands and contracts and is pressurized into the eucharist.
For when the holy Palmer’s kiss is not enough, we have messy consumption. The experience of wanting someone, of holding such a deep ache for someone that skin-to-skin is not enough, that you want to exist inside of them, around them, to envelop, to surround and be surrounded. To make a mess of thyself for another is to glorify; the access to redemption is through being willing to be cleansed.
And what greater freedom in the world than the freedom to be unapologetically wrong?