Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants Read online

  Praise for Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

  “Tiny Ladies is a stand-out memoir from Jill Soloway about the friction of assimilation and rebellion—a Jewish girl who’s raised “young, gifted, and black,” a sorority pledger who’s a take-no-prisoners feminist, and a celebrity groupie who searches for intimacy with the authentic and unprepossessing.”

  —Susie Bright, editor of Three Kinds of Asking for It

  “When Jill Soloway writes about sex, desire and politics, she does it in such an endearing, compelling and hilarious way that you not only want to listen, you must. Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants is a profound delight.”

  —Nancy Friday, author of My Secret Garden

  “You wish Jill Soloway were at your dinner party to impress your friends with an avalanche of raw, wildly funny, uncensored observations and opinions that inevitably rally you to her cause.”

  —Hillary Liftin, author of Candy and Me

  “I’m such a fan of everything Jill writes, and this is no exception. Each chapter is a funny and poignant treat. She’s not trying to preach, not trying to be feminist of the moment—she’s just figuring out her life in the context of our world, and it transcends.”

  —Sarah Silverman, comedienne, screenwriter, Funny Ladies, Saturday Night Live

  “I don’t lie when I say laughed out loud over and over again when I read Tiny Ladies. Jill Soloway somehow manages to be absolutely hilarious, like a David Sedaris for the girls, yet she adds in angles that make you think about feminism in a brand new, completely exciting way.”

  —Jane Lynch, actress, The L Word, Best in Show, and A Mighty Wind

  “Jill Soloway’s short essays are funny, crass, and observant. She’s like Erma Bombeck with a dirty mouth and feminist attitude.”

  —Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, authors of Manifesta and Grassroots

  “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants will make you laugh so hard, for so long, that you will finally have washboard abs. Fearless and candid, Jill Soloway offers wide-ranging criticisms of our culture that spare no one—least of all herself. Whether surveying the strange customs of summer camps, sororities, Chicago, Hollywood, feminists, or Jews, Soloway skewers incoherence and hypocrisy, and celebrates the messy exuberance of life.”

  —Michael Joseph Gross, author of Starstruck

  FREE PRESS

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  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2005 by Girl Thing, Inc.

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Soloway, Jill.

  Tiny Ladies in shiny pants / Jill Soloway.

  p. cm.

  1. Soloway, Jill. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 3. Television producers and directors—United States—Biography. 4. Theatrical producers and directors—United States—Biography. 5. Television writers—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3619.0439T56 2005

  813'.6—dc22

  [B] 2005048714

  ISBN 10: 0-7432-9004-6

  ISBN 13: 978-0-7432-9004-3

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For my family

  Contents

  Introduction A, or, The Porno-ization of America

  Introduction B, or, He Just Wants to See Your Panties

  Introduction C, or, Summer Needs to Come Already

  1 Coming Home (Early)

  2 Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

  3 Lotion Bag

  4 Monica, Chandra, and Me

  5 Please Don’t Try to Kill Me After You Read This

  6 Found My Way in LA

  7 Jill of Finland

  8 Shoemaker’s Daughters

  9 Blackwas Beautiful

  10 Everything Happens for a Reason

  11 Why Jews Go to the Bathroom with the Door Open

  12 Diamonds

  13 LesboIsland

  Appendix 1, or, Brain Pickin’s

  Appendix 2, or, More Pickin’

  Appendix 3, or, Oh, Yeah

  Application to live on Feather Crest

  Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants

  Introduction A or

  The Porno-ization of America

  I’m done writing about sex.

  If you bought this book because you thought there would be sex in it, get in your car, drive to your local bookstore, and throw it in the face of the cashier. You will find NO SEX here. None.

  Something happened to me the other night that changed everything. I was at a restaurant with a bunch of people and my friend Sarah asked, “Have you guys heard about these rainbow parties?”

  “What’s a rainbow party?” I asked.

  “Rainbow parties are these things fourteen-year-olds are doing.”

  “Oh, like a sleepover where for dessert you make Jell-O in different colors and stack it up with Cool Whip on top? Called a rainbow parfait, right?”

  “Noooooo,” she answered.

  “Oh, I know,” I offered. “We had them when we were little, my mom would be doing one of her activist mailings for the Rainbow Coalition? And we would all get together and lick stamps?”

  “You’ve got the licking part right,” Sarah said with the kind of smile that meant I was now the butt of the joke.

  “Um, everybody goes outside after a storm, and— look for the pot of gold at the—” I trailed off. Now everyone was laughing at me.

  “You, Jill Soloway, of all people, don’t know what a rainbow party is?” Sarah’s sister, Becky, asked.

  “A rainbow party,” Sarah said, digging her hard little piece of bread into the tapenade, “is a party where fourteen-year-olds get together and have lots and lots of oral sex. Each girl wears a different shade of lipstick, and after all the boys get their blow jobs, they’ve all got rainbows on their penises!”

  I felt the buffalo mozzarella coming up in my throat. Fourteen is too young for that many penises. And moreover, why, why why, if these children insist on having oral sex, must it be always be all about the guys? This couldn’t be true. But when I got home and googled, I found confirmation.

  Or maybe the world had already changed. I’ve noticed the Porno-ization of America everywhere—at the mall, on The Bachelorette and on both of my Girls Gone Wild tapes. All of the young modern women of the world look the same. Their hair is blond and flat-ironed, their eyebrows are waxed into inquisitive worms, and their skin is the tawny color of an apple fritter. Either they have implants or wear things in their bras that make them look like they do. With their glossy lips and sullen, black-lined eyes, every last one of them looks fresh from the set of Meet the Fuckers III. Lately, everyone I see looks like a hoor.

  What happened? When I was a kid in the early seventies, bra-less, gray-haired women appeared to have a lock on things. They had finally unshackled themselves from the shiny girdles, bullet bras, and flippedy hairdos—the Marilynization of America—and they were free. Billie Jean King was whuppin’ Bobby Riggs’ ass and my mom’s friends were marching in the street, calling out for change in deep voices. I believed in the Equal Rights Amendment, and that soon, the black and the white would live together in peace and harmony. I believed War Was Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things and that by the time I was an adult everyone would be biracial, gender-neutral, and tolerant.

  I was too young to know that eras moved in circles, not straight lines, and that once things progressed to a certain point, they would go around the bend and head back, bringing us to where we are today—slaves
to our plasmas and SUVs, disciples of our Royal White Family of George and Laura Bush with their Sexy White Offspring, Nick and Jessica Lachey-Simpson.

  How did we get back here? It doesn’t matter what the good people at Vogue and Jane have tried to do lately by suggesting that the homeless peasant look is nigh. Real fashion and mall fashion have never been so far-flung. Young girls simply refuse to stop dressing like hoors. Their tube tops and tank tops and jeans are the tightest I’ve ever seen, way tighter than we wore in the eighties. Ass cracks show, thongs show, as do pierced bellies and hip bones and camel toes, all leading down to a pair of stilettos. Yes, stilettos! Young women of today are wearing stilettos with their denim!

  I used to love me a hoor. I’ve got all manner of second- and third-wave feminist books on my shelves, even including Whores and Other Feminists. I was right there when activists switched from picketing sex workers to throwing brunches for Annie Sprinkle. I proudly counted strippers as my friends and touted the idea that the strongest feminist was one who was political and who knew how to shake her ass to take men for everything they’re worth.

  I was even known as a bit of a sex-writer myself, although it had happened without my noticing. I wrote a short story called Courteney Cox’s Asshole that you may have seen online, but it was dashed out in an hour for the sole purpose of making my friend Becky laugh. Susie Bright, feminist sex writer, just happened to think it was erotica and put it in an erotica collection. I wrote scenes for Six Feet Under that were dirty, but they were supposed to be because it’s not TV, it’s HBO. I just finished a novella that’s a sexy coming-of-age diary of a fourteen-year-old girl (in the eighties, no rainbows), but I only wrote it because Susie Bright forced me to.

  Indeed, sex as my specialty was a long time in the making, and it wasn’t always positive. A few different TV shows—including the MTV Movie Awards— wouldn’t hire me because, according to my agent, I had a reputation as “too blue.” Sex had always been one of my favorite comedic topics, right after explosive diarrhea. I loved putting dirty things in the titles of the plays I directed—The Miss Vagina Pageant, Not Without My Nipples, and Box—because I knew dirty words were an instant attention-grabber and publicity generator. And, after years of working on sitcom staffs filled with guys, I coolly prided myself on being able to top the dirtiest ass-fucking joke in the comedy writers’ room.

  Recently, people had even been coming to me, looking for the blue. A few months ago a woman asked me to write a chapter for her collection of essays by Jewish women, on guilt. When I asked her which chapter she wanted me to write, she answered, “Sex.”

  I suggested I do the Holocaust chapter instead. I told her I was sick of writing about sex and had a brand-new, burning curiosity as to whether I could craft an interesting paragraph without the word “labia” in it. I feared I was a cheap, literary hoor, my work fairly riddled with shiny zirconia piercings. We went back and forth until, finally, I dropped out of the project altogether, probably for the better. I’m sure there are all manner of Jewess begging to go on and on about “My Gigantic Jewish Bush.” They should have at it. Me, I’m done. There is nothing left to say about sex. Now, please enjoy my book.

  Introduction B or

  He Just Wants to see Your Panties

  Yes, I’m still in my introduction. I promise you there are adorable essays about being me, a mere twenty pages ahead. If the feminist underpinnings to the impending material don’t interest you, please move ahead, move ahead to Chapter 1!

  Anyway, just one thing before I stop writing about sex forever. I would like to submit to the imaginary court in my head that’s judging me constantly that when I started writing about sex, it wasn’t to be sexy. No sir-ree. For me, talking about sex in the TV shows and stories I wrote and the plays I produced wasn’t only to be shocking or inappropriate. My original intent was something much nobler: inciting feminist revolution.

  I have always been a campaigner for words. That’s all. More words, written by women, in more books. I was certain that women simply needed to write and contribute to the collection of all things written—as long as it’s not a cookbook—and they could change the world. That we would change the world, simply by changing the ratio of stuff made by guys to stuff made by girls. It is an imbalance that drives me, an imbalance I’ve been aware of since I was seven years old.

  On my first day of second grade I nearly had a heart attack when I walked into my classroom. Above me, in a halo around the top of the walls, were pictures of all the presidents. I looked up at the bad cartoony drawings, at the disastrous hairdos and grumpy chins, and knew something was off. Way off. I hoped it was a weird statistical coincidence, as I could tell I was the smartest person in the class, including the teacher. I was certainly smarter than all the boys. So why were there no women up there?

  It was clear that something was awry, and that it had been awry for a really long time. Women had been left out of the equation. Since forever. Maybe, I thought, these so-called men had taken it upon themselves to make up the rules of the world. Maybe it was their dumb idea that rooms should be square and buildings would be tall, and that books were in sentences made of lines. Everything was up for discussion, in my mind. Nothing could be trusted. As the daughter of a feminist, I felt a collective cry urging me on: You, Jill Soloway, set everything right! I decided I’d start by designing round rooms and writing in spirals on purple circular note paper, and not rest until my election as First Woman President of the United States.

  My plan to be the boss of everything flourished. It seems no one could tell me anything. Even my father, who wished to tell me how to ride a bike, couldn’t. He insists to this day that he wanted to teach me but I wouldn’t let him. Who cares, I thought, soon I’ll be president and just outlaw bike riding. Then somewhere during the fifth grade I got the unfortunate news that a lot of presidents had been in law. Shit. That meant passing the bar exam and the bar exam was supposed to be really hard. I guess I couldn’t be president after all. My career goals changed, but that didn’t stop me from seeing, and more important, feeling injustice everywhere.

  I was angry, yet queasily ambivalent. I wanted to prove that women could rule the world, yet I refused to stop watching Miss America. I’ve always loved me a beauty pageant and always will. My sister Faith and I would prepare for hours, making popcorn and cracking open fresh yellow legal pads where we would write down all fifty contestants before the show even started, so we wouldn’t get behind during the parade of states. Maybe I was participating in my very own, very early, Media Representation research project. Or maybe my fascination with ermine trumped my political meanderings. Seriously, do you remember ermine? On those red capes they used to wear, trimmed with that fur that looked like slugs crawling up a snow-covered highway?

  I had to watch. I couldn’t not watch. I enjoyed calling Miss Kansas fat and cheering on Miss Illinois, getting tears in my eyes when she accepted her scepter and crown and moved shakily down the runway. It didn’t matter to me that the pinnacle of a woman’s life was to be lined up, quantified, and chosen. Things would change soon, and I was going to watch pageants and get in on the action until it did.

  Yet watching those pageants aroused at my core an elemental nausea about the very fact of my gender. It gurgled somewhere below my belly and above my crotch, much like acid reflux of the uterus. It made me deeply uncomfortable about a truth I wanted to hide from: that being a woman meant being watched. I wanted to be a watcher, but watching was for the boys.

  “Mommy mommy! A boy just paid me a quarter to climb up the telephone pole and down!”

  “Silly girl! Don’t you know he just wants to see your panties?”

  “Mommy mommy! A boy just paid me a quarter to climb up the telephone pole and down!”

  “Silly girl! Didn’t I tell you? He just wants to see your panties!”

  “Mommy mommy! A boy just paid me a quarter to climb up the telephone pole and down!”

  “Silly girl! I already fucking told you, h
e just wants to see your panties!”

  “But Mommy! This time I fooled him—This time I didn’t wear any!”

  Do you remember that joke? Was it passed around your schoolyard too, along with that rhyme about the Chinaman going pee-pee in your coke? This joke had something extra in it that bothered me to my very soul. It went beyond the idea that females were for watching, and introduced the news that men like to watch without the woman’s knowledge. In fact, poor thing, to this day, I’d bet that pantyless star of the story has no idea the joke was even about her! The foolish pride, the unreturned gaze of the unaware object is what resided at the chewy center of that joke.

  Hearing that joke was probably my original scar. What a horrible feeling for someone who knew everything—that the unknowing girl was the true object of desire. The pink, sparkle-sugar coating of her unknowing was the same sugary coating on my most hated enemies—the gleeful, dress-wearing girls: The Princesses.

  As a child, I heard that other girls were called Princess by their fathers. And I hear shades of it today, particularly from my partner, who’s from a red state and another generation. He thinks it’s a compliment—in fact, a necessary politeness—to start any encounter with a little girl by proclaiming how beautiful she is.

  But here’s the worst part. There are some great little girls, kids I really love, the four-year-old down the street, for example, and my three-year-old niece, both of whom are being raised by forward-thinking crunchy liberals. And when my Southern Gentleman boyfriend—who raised two daughters, so isn’t open to hearing my opinion on this topic—starts coating these girls in his compliment syrup, something so unnatural happens that it must be instinctual.

  “Oh, what a pretty pink dress you have on!” he’ll say, and before I can get to the bathroom to vomit, the little girl lights up brighter than a Christmas tree. A giant grin comes over her face, and the inexplicable spinning starts. It doesn’t matter who she is, her hands go out at her sides and her chin tilts up and her eyes scwunch in joy and I feel like a fat fucking feminist grinch who’s pissed only because I never got that kind of adoration. I invariably close my mouth, deciding that just because my dad was more interested in anti-Semitism theory books than making little girls feel like princesses doesn’t mean I should take that away from the rest of the girl children of the world.