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The Girl Who

Juniper got uneasy whenever certain girls in the class went on about how the professor never listened to them. She thought to herself, If you had anything to say, he’d listen. People even listen to Ann Coulter, god damn her black soul, because she has something to say. It also bothered Juniper that they attacked Old Rex for being Eurocentric and phallocentric and an assortment of other intellectual crimes. They couldn’t seem to understand that gender isn’t a criteria in itself for literature, for teaching, or for anything at all, except whether or not to go to a gynaecologist. Hamlet went out on a epistemological limb when he said There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. He didn’t hurl himself from the tree into the Oresund Strait by saying There is nothing either good or bad, but gender makes it so.

There were three girls in particular who seemed to suspect men of being male, plus one girl named Mädchen, who refused to be called a girl. She had an absolute antipathy to the word girl, and renamed all sorts of things: she called little girls little females, which confused little girls no end; she renamed the Stone’s album Some Young Females; she called the book and movie The Young Female With the Dragon Tatoo, and she called Bille Eilish’s song “All the Good Young Females Go to Hell.” This not only ruined the rhythmic alliteration but gave young females the impression that they had alot more time to misbehave than they really had. Together, the three weird sisters and Mädchen made quite a display of themselves. Juniper called them, collectively, The Gang of Four.

The Gang of Four had a communal hatred for Lord Byron, perhaps because of his title and his confident, sarcastic tone. They saw him as a sexist entitled snob, while Juniper saw him as a champion of free speech and equality. They saw his poetry as superficial and stereotypical, while she saw it as satirical and studded with insight. So when it came time for her presentation, she took the opportunity to make a point or two.

She walked up to the front of the class, opened a Powerpoint file, and put on the screen some images from frescoes she saw in a Naples museum. The first was of Diana with a pen to her lips. The second was of a man splashing water over a woman.

Juniper then addressed the room:

“My presentation today is on “Byron & the Age of Revolution.” Allow me to start my presentation with a poem I wrote last night. 

The Girls

The only ones doing anything these days are the girls:

the girl with the nose-ring and the tattoo on her pinkie,

the girl with the candy red scar on her Barbie doll.

The girls are out there doing stuff, saving the biosphere with their super-powers,

their kick-ass attitude, and their spunky butterflies,

while the boys sit there, just like always, looking at the girls.

“I’ve heard a number of my classmates criticize Byron, calling him a sexist pig. According to them, he objectifies women, and thinks that they’re beautiful or etherial, or ruled by emotion, or blue-stockinged frauds. Yet his attitudes toward women are more subtle than that, as we see from the very beginning of Don Juan in his depiction of Donna Julia. In the space of fifty stanzas Julia traverses a wide range of emotional states, deceiving herself and undeceiving herself, pulling herself into love and then watching it grow from a distance; playing with her mental state until it becomes one, irresistibly, with her body. She’s less a walking contradiction than a complete person, a yogina even. A union of male and female, from gazing lovingly over her grammar text to fucking like a loving animal under the moon. A mistress of Yoga.

“I’ve also heard some of my classmates say [and here she quadrangulated her field of vision] that Byron was an elitist snob. Byron didn’t ask to be born the grandson of George Gordon of Gight, descendant of James I of Scotland. And yet Byron had an enormous sympathy for the lower classes. He argued in the House of Lords for the workers and for the Catholics. Sarcastically, he told the great lords of the land that the protesting workers were liable to conviction on the clearest evidence of the capital crime of poverty. And speaking on the inequality of Catholics before the law, he said in the King’s best English, better had it been for the country that the Catholics possessed at this moment their proportion of their privileges, that their nobles held their due weight in our councils, than that we should be assembled to discuss their claims.

“Now, I’m not a big fan of the nobility or the Pope, but Byron was neither mocking nor praising their privileges, their pretty purple robes, their Inquisition, or their objections to Galileo. He was simply trying to extend the rights of the nobility to the disenfranchised Catholics. We can look down on Byron and say this is a paltry thing compared to full democracy. Yet what he did was part of a larger democratization process that continued throughout the nineteenth century, to the Reform Bills of 1832, 1867, 1884, and yes, finally, to the suffrage of women — shock and awe! — in the Equal Franchise Act of 1928.

“Byron was a nobleman. He was privileged, white, male, and therefore guilty of all the usual crimes. He may also have been an insufferable egotist and a jerk who slept with his half-sister and liked Greek boys. No one’s perfect. If we assume that everybody’s perfect, then as Hamlet put it, who shall ‘scape whipping?

“I suggest that we judge Byron within the underdeveloped context of his own Age, and not by the overwrought one of our own. Allow me to conclude with a brief story.

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Three Girls Who

“Jane was a spunky girl who did stuff. She didn’t just sit around waiting for some boy to do stuff for her. Only last week she gave a kick-ass presentation for the White Girls Matter Society. On the screen above her she put caricatures of the girls who were obsessed with their clothes and make-up. She threw up the cutest little outfits onto the screen.

The girls in their cute little outfits were then knocked out by a spunky grrl-butterfly in shiny spandex with a glistening set of Spidergrrl knuckledusters on her outsized hands. The super-butterfly then painted spunky little butterflies all over their cute little bow ties and stupid little Pocahontas t-shirts. These butterflies weren’t ordinary butterflies that waited around for boy butterflies to do stuff for them. Instead, they laughed at the cocoons below them and lifted themselves up into the clear light of day.

“Irene was also a spunky girl who did stuff and who was invited to give a presentation at the White Girls Matter Society. Yet Irene took Spanish classes and watched alot of documentaries about organized violence in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. As she listened to Jane’s presentation, she struggled to see a connection between the plight of a women in Ciudad Juárez or San Pedro Sula and the discomfort Jane felt at “being called a girl.” At being told her feelings “weren’t as important as the laws men created to keep us down.” Irene understood her need to “take back the word girl,” but wondered if she wasn’t belabouring the point. After Jane’s presentation, an audience member told Jane, I love you, you’re such a spunky girl!

“Irene began her presentation by describing Dolores, who was also a spunky girl. But this was because her mouth was full of spunk. Her body was listless, having spent the last three months as an unpaid sex worker in a pleasure dungeon operated by Mexican drug lords. Her experience there inured her somewhat to the delicacies of the male genius. John Keats wasn’t an author she quoted much. The only thing that remotely resembled a Grecian urn was a bedpan in the corner of her windowless room.

“No nightingales serenaded Dolores to an easeful death. The account of her brief life in Ciudad Juárez was written with a nail file in the dust beneath her bed. The account was of more interest to forensic investigators than literary agents.

“As Irene finished her presentation, little blue and purple butterflies lifted upward from the body of Dolores, and a small cocoon appeared on the screen. Irene touched an icon on her iPad and the cocoon morphed into the swaddled baby of an Indian woman in Bolivia. The woman’s land had been polluted by a Canadian mining company and she was standing patiently in front of the parliament building in La Paz demanding her rights. From the white bundle on her back an enormous blue butterfly burst into the air.”

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