Our friend Leslie B. comments on our post The Fetishist Goes Cold Turkey and points out that my attempt at humor is misplaced. I wrote in the piece about a man who looked disarmingly like the elder Einstein who was fingering brassieres in the lingerie department of J.C. Penny’s. The narrative was designed to make all 3 characters look vaguely silly–the narrator is presented as being pompously and intrusively performative and his friend is adolescent. The old man resembling Einstein never gets his say and he is patronized and presented as a fetishist.
If I had stopped at the incongruity of a man who looked like Einstein among the push up bras I’d have been okay. If I had let him speak for himself there would have been a story. Instead I failed to find out what the man was doing there among the bras and I made up a story about him, even unto depicting a horrid latency fantasy from his childhood.
Leslie B’s larger point is that even if the man was a brassiere fetishist –“so what?” If I’m a human rights advocate then how can I konk a person who’s doing no harm with the same shallow brush strokes that so often are employed in bad representations of people with disabilities? (The Saturday Night Live skits about Gov. David Paterson come to mind.)
She is right. I presented Einstein’s doppelganger as a lurid and creepy figure and in so doing replicated the kind of thing Jerry Springer does. Springer displays men who wear baby clothing while his audience hoots and snarls. He pushes uncomprehending serial divorcers onto the stage and leaves out their personal stories of abuse and affliction.
Inviting cheap laughter is a low art. Knee jerk assumptions are employed against people with disabilities and I used the same trick.
I stand corrected and I’m taking my lumps.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
Hi Frida,
Thanks for sharing your honest thoughts on this topic. Individual rights, when any more than one person is involved, get tricky sometimes, and that’s why it’s helpful to explore the myriad nuances of one person’s rights vs. another’s. The back-and-forth gives us all a chance to explore and compare other’s unique perspectives. When all was said and done, it seems as if you, SK, Burdett and I all share an enormous amount of common ground on the subject whether we realized it or not at the outset.
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With adult relatives who have cognitive disabilities and severe visual disabilities, I’m pretty aware of how people react to them and am more apt to be defensive of someone with difference. I’m also alert to invisible disabilities since I’ve spent most of my time in that “category.” I’ve worried about my uncle’s safety as I see people bristle, not understanding why he seems different. I have no issues with sharing a restroom or dressing room or the lingerie department with a transgendered person.
The situation in question was really not questionable. I didn’t mean to dig myself a hole or upset people.
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As far as calling security on people, that was for genuinely inappropriate behavior towards others, not because of someone’s appearance or judgment about personal characteristics or preferences. And that’s all I will say about that.
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Oooh, SK, you said those words that I so treasure, “She is right.” Can you teach my husband to say that?
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Hi Burdett,
Nah, I wouldn’t necessarily rage at you for alerting security about someone who is making a shopping experience uncomfortable for you and your daughter. I was harrumphing at SK for reasons other than that. But it does get tricky. I have a friend who is trans-gendered, and, darn it, she still looks and sounds very much like a guy dressing up to look like a gal. Add to that the fact that she’s partially sighted, which means that she probably looks more like she’s sniffing bras in a store, rather than looking at them, and you might notify security about her, too. And she’s just trying to be who she is. She’d prefer it if she didn’t make people around her uncomfortable, but she’s not going to let their uncomfortable-ness stop her from doing what she has a right to do. Perhaps this is just my West Coast perspective? I am aghast when evangelical Christian women start talking loudly in a store about how a “proper” brassiere should look. But I would never think of alerting security about it. SK, your blog has really hit bottom. Whatever happened to all those long, philosopical discussions about poetry?
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I don’t disagree with you at all there and would be apt to find store security if someone was actually being creepy, and have done so once. Anything that interferes with another’s comfort or rights is not okay.
My husband and a friend learned fast to throw themselves in front of me when people pull out cameras or cell phone cameras because I’m either fodder for a devotee or going to be a joke on youtube. I started having problems in one particular place. But otherwise so far so good, as far as I know.
I have no tolerance for that kind of thing, infringing on the rights of others.
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I’m having a hard time with this: yes, Leslie’s post was focused on the idea that people find different ways to be human, and one of those that expresses desire and connectedness is to be a bra-fetishist. On the other hand, if I’m shopping for a bra, or if my teenage daughter is shopping for a bra, why should I or she need to share space with someone who finds fingering bras a turn-on. Let’s face it, for most women and older girls, bra-shopping is traumatic enough (akin to shopping for a bathing suit), without fetishists hanging around as well. Okay, let the rage of those who disagree descend upon me now…
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It’s always safest to say we shouldn’t assume the narrator and the writer are the same, though they do seem to bear a lot of similarities. 🙂
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I have to say it made me laugh to read about Georgia’s husband. My husband has to do some of my shopping in this regard because I can’t get the darn scooter, even the small one, between the umm, racks. It’s never a darn scooter except when it won’t fit. It should be darn racks.
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SK, you got spanked pretty hard by Leslie B for good reason. She was spot on and her comments made me think.
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