My Old Friend, Male Genius

I look at Frank Zappa's Valley Girl and Robert Weide's Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time and think about how weird it is to be a sometime-man who grew up in internalised misogyny's loving arms.

The Wikipedia page for Frank Zappa’s only Top 40 single, Valley Girl, describes how one night in 1982, Zappa woke up his daughter Moon and brought her into the studio to record her “Valspeak” monologue for the track.¹ The satirical monologue, which inadvertently popularised some of the phrases it sought to make fun of, including “gag me with a spoon”, was allegedly mostly Moon’s own creation. As ‘airheaded’ Val “Andrea Wilson” (Genius cites it as Ondrya Wolfson, but I’m not convinced), Moon offers snippets of dialogue based on phrases she’d heard at “parties, bar mitzvahs and the Galleria.”²

Lines spoken by Moon include:

Anyway, he goes are you into S&M? I go oh right, could you like just picture me in like, a leather teddy? Yeah right, hurt me, hurt me, I am sure, no way! He was like freaking me out. He called me a beastie, that’s ‘cause like he was totally blitzed. He goes like, bag your face, I’m sure!

When Moon wrote and recorded these lyrics she was fourteen years old.

The single cover for Valley Girl.

When I was fourteen, I was figuring out that I was gay (in a broad sense). My English teacher, one of the catalysts for my internal crisis, had reintroduced me to Radiohead, my now second-favourite band, and to Boards of Canada, my favourite. I was dazzled by the idea that we could look at Thom Yorke’s depressing lyrics in class not for anything to do with NCEA, but “just ‘cause.” The critiques of consumer capitalism and plastic surgery in Fake Plastic Trees made perfect sense to me. At the time, I was uncomfortable with every expected feature of femininity, including a confident relationship with clothing and the easy social skills required of mall rats. I couldn’t even walk into a dairy and buy milk at that age. Conspicuous consumption was beyond me.

My anger at the sheer unapproachability of the world was easy to convert to a hatred of the kind of femininity which surrounded me at an all-girls high school. This hatred, so I thought, was insightful and made me mature; my English teacher, whose red lipstick and sleek black outfits I adored, gave me an Excellence grade for a speech railing against pop music’s obsession with alcohol and drugs. I was superior to the girls who giggled at the back of classes about the best ways to give blowjobs. I was not one of them.

I can’t stop listening to Valley Girl.

I’ve known the song for a long time. My dad is a big Zappa fan. He used to have recurring dreams of the man showing him around his house.

Moon is the stand-out on the track but she’s only the cherry on top (yeah, I know, gross, but I’m using that metaphor deliberately!) of the rock tune Frank engineered. I learned drums for a year when I was twelve, quitting because I was too shy and cried too often in front of my very kind teacher; I can almost imagine how you’d play the drum fills in the background of various parts of the song, but not quite.

Frank provides snide rhymes to help flesh out our mental image of the Val:

On Ventura / there she goes / she just bought / some bitchin’ clothes
Tosses her head and flips her hair / she got a whole bunch of nothin’ in there

In carving out my identity as a teenager “not like the other girls”, I was right in one thing—I wasn’t a girl. I wouldn’t figure that out until I was eighteen, though, and in the meantime, I struggled to reconcile my interests in, quote-unquote, high culture, with aspects of softness and yes, femininity, that I actually would have liked to enjoy, thanks, had anyone left me alone long enough to enjoy them. On mufti days I sometimes painted my nails, feeling a small pride in their beauty, even as I smudged the polish as it dried and let it chip away in the coming weeks, pretending not to care.

Make-up was to be avoided: I didn’t understand how it worked and wasn’t about to try. I drew enough attention to myself as it was by being an easy crier, a source of frustration for me, in that it laid bare my emotional vulnerability in ways I could not control. It was a lot less difficult to latch on to the cynicism of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi short stories The Pedestrian and The Veldt, to stare in wonder at the mirror sequence of Banquo’s line of descendent kings in Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, and to obsess over someone who I thought had done femininity ‘right’ in the early seventies and was gorgeous, i.e., David Bowie.

Bowie and model Twiggy as seen on the front of Bowie’s 1973 covers album, Pin Ups. I didn’t see the hypocrisy of celebrating his femininity while rejecting others’.

A few weekends ago I put on my favourite “professor” blazer, rubbed a few spritzes of Bvlgari Man’s Wood Neroli cologne into my wrists and neck, and caught the number two bus out to the Roxy Cinema in Miramar, trying to look more confident than I felt. Alone, I watched Robert Weide’s documentary about the science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Unstuck in Time, a film about forty years in the making.

I really enjoyed the film. Here was a man who, in his writing, laughed about the existentialism that sits at the heart of me. He was a very clever man who did a lot of public speaking. He had a sharp wit. The clips Robert Weide took of him back in the eighties, or whenever it was, show him wheezing, doubling over, cracking up at whatever traumatic memory he was trying to convert into happiness.

Weide interviewed his daughters, Nanny and Edie, to paint a picture of their father when they were children. In the film, one mimics his terrible posture as he sat at his typewriter, writing and rewriting the manuscripts for his novels. “No, worse—more hunched over,” the other one laughs. They talk about Vonnegut as a funny, angry father, mercurial and often unapproachable. They talk about how he never talked about his war experiences. They talk about how his wife, who he left for a younger woman in New York when Slaughterhouse Five became a hit, was his number-one supporter, looking after their growing number of children and covering all the domestic work until his big break. (She took the split amicably, apparently, not seeming to mind too much, and was a fan of his work until the end.)

In Vonnegut’s 1973 book Breakfast of Champions, an irreverent doodle-studded satire of America I haven’t read, he includes this little rhyme:

Roses are red
And ready for plucking
You’re sixteen
And ready for high school

This is the kind of cognitive dissonance feminism I was starting to practice as an adolescent—a paternalistic standing up for women that didn’t necessarily translate to sympathy for the women around me. I began to notice in my final year of school that clique affiliation didn’t mean as much as I thought it did, and I was also, as a middle-class Pākehā, waking up to what class meant (it’s still a privilege that I get to reflect on this so comfortably now). There were girls planning on taking on extra shifts at Countdown instead of sitting the English scholarship exam, because it made more sense financially, who were brighter and had better hearts than those who were set on doing undergraduate degrees at overseas universities. But again, these realisations were a few years away.

It’s worth mentioning that whiteness undercut the kind of growing up I was doing. The men that I took cultural cues from when I was a teenager, and who still largely shape my relationship to masculinity, are white. (Zappa had an Italian-Greek-Arab background, but as far as I can tell, considered himself white). There is a special imperviousness to the Anglo-American male mind. It never doubts itself. If it does reflect on privilege, it often believes it knows better than others how to dismantle the hierarchies it upholds. My ability to speak up in class, to believe in the righteousness of my anger, even as I was intensely shy and self-conscious, was emboldened by a very similar kind of whiteness. Part of learning masculinity as a white trans person means learning that it is not the same as arrogance.

When I was twenty-one and flatting for the first time I became obsessed with RuPaul’s Drag Race. RuPaul himself can get in the bin, but I couldn’t look away from the ease with which these mostly cis gay queens slipped in and out of “she” and their chosen artistic echoes of womanhood. Theirs was a manhood of femininity. I’ve stopped watching Drag Race because it’s now a sea monster of indistinguishable spinoffs and seasons, but it was nice to see trans contestants start to get a foothold in the show before I left it alone. One of my favourites was Gottmik, the show’s first trans man contestant, who performed female drag the same as the other queens on Season 13. I think I saw something in him that showed a path forward for me: a way through gender driven less by fear and more by joy.

Gottmik out of drag: she’s giving transmasc swag but she’s still a Val.

Reclaiming femininity via queer sometime-manhood has felt like coming home on the long road. I’m the twinkiest in my gay flat of four: I wear the most hoodies and probably complain the most about women who don’t reply on Tinder but please don’t ask me to do anything butch, like fix the washing machine. When I go out dancing sometimes I put on a little tank top and pretend I’m one of the girls. I still hate how I often have no control over whether and how much I cry, “but no biggie,” as Andrea Wilson says. If anyone thinks me less masculine for it, that’s on them, not me. If I do end up undergoing hormone replacement therapy there’s a real chance testosterone will clam up my tear ducts, but don’t ask me how I feel about that yet.

The jury is out on whether the post-ironic rise of the “bimbo” over the past couple of years spells a bold new age or a distracting capitalist sleight-of-hand for 2020s feminism. This will be something for femmes to decide. My core beliefs remain the same. Power and capital are the problem. White supremacy is the problem. Processes which allow for the devaluation of human life, which dislodged Billy Pilgrim from linear time, are the problem. Oil is the problem. LMFAO’s 2011 hit “Party Rock Anthem”, while in some ways much more accessible for critique, if you are nearing fifteen, is not the problem. Queers (“Lord God King Bufu” if you’re Andrea) are not the problem. ‘Vapid’ teenagers are not the problem. Women are not the problem.

Thanks to my super-high-quality investigative journalism for this piece, including coming across one of the fun-fact notes tacked onto Valley Girl’s Spotify entry, and a reply by one “Dr. Herbical” to a comment on this YouTube video, I have an image of Moon pushing a note under the door to her dad’s studio asking if she could make music with him, because she had an idea for a song. I wonder if she ever felt afraid of men who were “totally blitzed”, like I have, or experienced that mix of frustration and admiration when encountering a fantastic work tinged by sexism, like I did when reading Slaughterhouse Five, and countless other novels (looking at you, Murakami). I wonder what we would have said to each other if we had met when we were both fourteen.

I can only hope she would have taught me how to paint my nails properly and told me to believe in myself. But in a more serious, we have nothing to lose but our chains kind of way (insofar as we would still have other forms of privilege to reflect on). I think that’s what we both deserved.

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¹Credit where credit is due to Kelly Fisher Lowe’s 2007 biography The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, as I think this is where the Wikipedia entry author took this anecdote from.

²Again according to Wikipedia, the source for this is a September 1982 article from The Palm Beach Post, very interestingly titled, “Valley Girl: No Way Rocker’s Daughter Talks Like the Record”. I’d like to know whether this means that Moon was quick to distance herself from the Val persona when talking about the song, or whether the reporter couldn’t believe she herself had come up with those lyrics. The link to the article on Wikipedia is unfortunately broken.