It’s Martin Luther King Day today. I suspect that, when it rolls around each year, most of us don’t spend the day ruminating on Reverend King’s contributions to society or anything. We just look at the calendar and go, “Dude, the holidays just ended and I already need a vaca — sweeeeeet, Martin Luther King Day!” I certainly haven’t made a point of reflecting on King’s work in the past, primarily because I customarily spend the holiday that honors him with the covers pulled luxuriously over my head, but also because, frankly, I just don’t know that much about the man or his teachings. I know that he led marches, and I know that he gave the “I have a dream” speech, and I know that he got assassinated, and that’s about it. All this by way of saying that, yeah, we should all probably take a minute or two to remember what King wanted for this country, but that I never do it either. But I did it today.

See, I work at home now, and I don’t really observe a weekday/weekend schedule; I usually put in longer hours at my desk on a Sunday than I do on a Wednesday. And because I no longer work in an office, I no longer have people around me talking about their plans for the long weekend or saying “TGIF”-type things, and as a result, national holidays tend to sneak under my radar. Martin Luther King Day snuck up on me. I knew the date today, and I’d seen the signs in the post office reminding customers that they’d close for the day, but of course I didn’t put the two things together, so I got up at the regular weekday hour this morning, packed my messenger bag, and headed to the bank, and on my way to the bank, I began to fume about the bank and how the tellers take forever to process the simplest deposit because they all have those fake-ass “Lee Press-On Nails: Now In Maharishi Length” acrylic tips which make it impossible for them to pick up slips of paper — not that it’s their job to pick up slips of paper or anything. Oh, wait. That’s totally their job — and if I try to make friendly conversation about the nails by saying “wow, is that a Degas?” or something, they just stare at me, and then they hold up a check between two talons like an insect specimen or something and inform me, “You wrote this check to yourself,” like, duh, I know that, but the last time I tried to use the phone system to transfer funds from business checking to personal checking, I accidentally sent a thousand dollars to a random old man in Queens, which has forced me to write checks to myself in the suspicious manner of a money-laundering scheme, so could you just deposit the check, yes, I know I have to endorse it, which would explain why I did endorse it, as you can see by looking at the back of the check, which is currently facing you as you officiously flap said check at me, so if you wouldn’t mind just sliding your hand through the document slot so that I could stab myself in the eye with one of your ridiculous claws, I’d really appreciate it, thanks so much, and by the time I got to the front door of the bank, I’d managed to work myself up into a tizzy, and then I pulled on the front door and it wouldn’t open, and I saw the little sign reading, “This branch will close January 15, 2001, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.” And then I did my Yosemite Sam imitation, jumping up and down and yelling, “Ooooooh!” And then I walked home, thinking, “‘Violence is not the answer,’ my foot — in someone’s ass.”

After indulging in one of my favorite fantasies — the one in which I grab the dandruffy customer-service rep at the bank by the shirtfront and hiss into his face that he will post the wire transfers to my account the day they come in, and there is no “or” — I thought about the logical extension of acting out that fantasy. What good would it do, really, to cut off Dandruff McBadsuit’s respiratory functioning? No good at all. The security guard would come lumbering over and drag me off and subdue me, and then the cops would come, and then I’d probably get sent to jail for assault, and then I’d have to spend every weekend in one of those depressing fluorescent-lighted visiting rooms listening to my mother sob, “What did I do wrong? Tell me, I want to know!” and admiring my own ludicrously overdeveloped forearm muscles, and then I’d go back to my cell and comb my mullet, and then they’d let me out and I’d have to take a job at a loading dock or something, and Mr. McBadsuit wouldn’t have learned that maybe he shouldn’t tell customers that he’ll “look into” Canadian checks that get lost when he has no intention of doing anything of the kind, oh no — he’d just get a whopping case of PTSD and start shaking anytime a girl with a bob haircut and a nose ring walked into the branch. It’s not right, and it doesn’t work.

I don’t want to get into a whole rant about the nature of violence and how it never solves anything, because I’ve done it before, and I think we can all agree that violence just escalates into more violence and so on and so forth. But, speaking as a woman, I have a complicated relationship with acts of aggression. As a woman, I necessarily have to fear acts of aggression, because, as Xeney of Bad Hair Days put it so aptly in a recent entry, “when a woman walks the street at night, she’s carrying her most valuable asset with her, the one that everyone wants to steal, like a guy leaving the house with one leg in a cast and a VCR tucked under his arm.” And that simple fact — that, at night, in the city, walking alone, I become the sum of my parts, in particular the part between my legs and the parts in the bra — makes me incredibly angry. The fact that I can’t go where I like enrages me. Xeney also talked about the comments that get made to women, and the fact that, most times, we just have to swallow them, because there’s more than one man there, or because there’s nobody else around at all, and if I wheeled around and told the guy to cram it and he didn’t take it well and came after me and I screamed, I’d just scream for screaming’s sake and nobody would come to help me, and that goes back to the fact that I’d have to scream for help in the first place, which pisses me off — I just want to walk home, for god’s sake. I would prefer to not have to call a man to my rescue. It comes down to the fact that a man can call me “tasty” and talk about my ass for everyone else on the sidewalk to hear — that he can. That he’s not afraid. That he can croon, “Hey, baby — hey, Stretch, over here, want to sit with me awhile,” and then, when I don’t respond, that he can kick it up a notch and call me a dyke and call my mother a whore, and I’d like to spin around and grab him by the earlobe and hiss into his face, “Don’t FUCKING talk about my mother,” and then rip his earlobe clean off his head and throw it into the gutter and make him beg to keep the other one, but I can’t, because he could beat me down, and that’s why he says that shit in the first place, to remind me of my “place,” and that just makes me even angrier.

I imagine that anyone who gets harassed — other women, people of color, gay people, you name it — feel that same way. We’ve all seen too much violence against us to allow us to advocate violence in any real way. Too many women have gotten beaten up, harassed, and killed. There’s a thread on the Hissyfit forums right now about a woman whose sister’s boyfriend is getting in her face and threatening to beat her up himself, or hunt her down and have her beaten up, because she had the nerve to tell him some shit that he needed to hear and wouldn’t let him take advantage of her, and she’s trying to stand up for herself, but every time I go into the thread to check in, mostly to make sure that she’s still there and doing okay and hasn’t had to barricade herself in her bedroom, I feel afraid for her, but I also have the irrational urge to round up my cousin the one-percent-body-fat former wrestler and personal trainer, and my other cousin the loose cannon, and bring them over to the woman’s house and give her sister’s boyfriend a taste of his own medicine. Like, see? See how it feels? But of course he’ll never know how it feels, not really; he feels justified in bullying this woman, and he therefore pretty clearly doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand that you don’t do that, that just because you can open a can of whup-ass on someone doesn’t mean that you should. A lot of men don’t understand that. They can’t empathize. I don’t think they should have to. I don’t think anyone should have to. But a lot of us, a lot of us, heard that Lorena Bobbit sliced her abusive husband’s dick off and thought to ourselves, “Good for her.” A lot of us said it out loud. Please understand, I wouldn’t advocate cutting an abusive husband’s dick off, primarily because it’ll just make things worse for you in the long run. But please understand also that I can sympathize with the instinct. Please understand that I sympathize with all the anger that, most of the time, can’t go anywhere and can’t accomplish anything, because I have a lower upper-body mass than most men. Please understand that I have felt that fury, a fury made even more powerful by my own powerlessness, a fury that I have to eat, a fury that won’t make anything better for me unless I use it to defend myself, which I might not do successfully, which just feeds the fury until it tickles the back of my throat. Good girls do not daydream about planting a size-nine go-go boot in a man’s solar plexus, but good girls get raped and beaten up all the time. So do bad girls. It just isn’t fair.

So, I struggle with what King preached. The horrible injustices suffered by African-Americans in this country, still, to this day, aren’t the same as the injustices suffered by women, here and around the world, still, to this day, or the injustices suffered by gays and lesbians, and I’m not comparing them. I do remember reading The Autobiography Of Malcolm X and a bunch of Black Power movement literature in high school, and recalling that I could totally see Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael’s point of view on the whole rising-up thing back then. Like, lynch us now, assholes. No? No, we didn’t think so. Because you fear us now, as you should, because we’ve finally gotten angry enough to do some serious damage. But as I’ve gotten older, I don’t think that kind of rhetoric works, long-term. It’s like Valerie Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto: it’s a fantasia about declaring war on the male gender, and it’s a tempting one. Yeah, try to rape us now that we run things, o ye misogynistic thugs of the world. But war put into practice doesn’t tend to work out too well.

Xeney wrote another good piece recently that relates to this, about Buffy The Vampire Slayer and about why she loves the show, to wit: “[T]he lead character is a girl and she kicks ass.” I would elaborate on that to say that the lead character is a tiny little slip of a miniskirt-wearing girl, and that she kicks a whole truckload of ass, but — amen, sister. Buffy uses her ass-kicking powers for good, and that’s a wonderful thing for women and girls to see on television every Tuesday night at eight o’clock. Oh, here come the thugs. Oh, they’ve got her cornered in a dark alley. Oh, they outnumber her six to one and each of them outweighs her by a good fifty pounds. Oh, that isn’t good. Ohhhh, but she’s got a roundhouse kick, and a stake, and an attitude, and SHE FUCKING KICKED THEIR ASSES, and her hair? Looks great. Open a window this Tuesday night and stick your head out, and you’ll hear a low chorus of “hell YEEEAAAH” when Buffy head-butts a vampire and then dusts him with Mr. Pointy. That’s all the women in your neighborhood who got leered at today, or rubbed up against on the bus, or told to “lighten up” after a brute at work told a date-rape joke. Maybe that’s you, wishing you could work the nunchakus like Buffy.

Xeney goes on to talk about how the way the writers resolved the Riley storyline kind of sucks, and I have to agree. Riley, Buffy’s newly-minted ex, basically got his panties in a wad over the fact that Buffy could outfight him and didn’t need him to rush to her rescue all the time — or, really, ever — and started acting out as a result, and then he pretty much blamed her for the demise of their relationship, like, you don’t do the shrinking violet thing and that’s why I more or less cheated on you. And when she had the nerve to call him on that bullshit, he grabbed her arm and got all “talk to me, Buffy!” and aggressive with her, and I sat on the couch and grumbled, “Yeah, ‘talk’ to him, but use your left cross.” Xeney put it like so: “[Buffy used to be] like Clint Eastwood in knee boots and mini skirts. Now, she’s Bridget Jones with super powers. Who needs it?” Well, yeah. The old Buffy would have said, “Get your hands off me — your job is to love me the way I am, not to get your nose all out of joint when I don’t wail your name every time Snidely Whiplash comes along, so fucking grow up.” The old Buffy wouldn’t have tolerated that passive-aggressive, possessive crap. But should she have thumped Riley’s skull for him? I don’t know. It’s tempting to think about, but it wouldn’t have solved anything. The storyline as it played out didn’t really solve anything, either, except to make me think that the writers have lost sight of what makes Buffy Buffy, but still.

Again, it’s complicated. Where do we draw the line between not taking any crap and making things worse by fighting back? Should we get angry and force others to fear us as we have feared them in the past, or should we keep that anger inside and cling to the hope that, one day, we won’t have anything to fear ourselves? Martin Luther King once said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” It’s a wonderful sentiment, full of optimism and forbearance — and naiveté. And look what it got him in return. What should we take away from that? Does his murder disprove that point? Did his insistence on creating peace through peace cost him his life? Or do the race-related tragedies in this country since his death serve to prove his point even more strongly — that rioting and revenge don’t help, that war isn’t the answer? The man died young while trying to do good, and I know I’ve gotten all preachy in today’s essay, but that’s not my intent. I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if King’s martyrdom has a purpose, an answer to these questions that we’ve all somehow overlooked. Maybe I’ve had too much anger for too long, or held it in for too long, but I don’t know the answer and I don’t understand the purpose.

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