You ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like a Volcano
previously printed in Volcano Zine!!!
I’ve been writing a post (in my head) exploring my long-abiding interest in age-difference relationships, which feature prominently in my fiction. There are many steppingstones reflecting this interest in my life. The following personal essay, which I published in Local Smoke Press’s 2023 anthology Volcano Zine!!! highlights the one I was actually in, as a teenager. It also covers a brief history of vibrators, my life as a record collector, and ends with a weird moralizing bit on algorithms in music and dating apps, which I don’t even remember writing. It’s really all over the place! I have made some minor edits for rhythm and removed names.
Like a Volcano
In 1999, CDs sold for an average cost of $18.39 each. Minimum wage in the state of Washington was $5.70 an hour. I was sixteen and I’d never had a job; I wouldn’t have one for another year. You could scarcely preview music online at the time, so every CD purchase was a crapshoot. There was so much music I had read about but never actually heard, and I longed to hear it.
That summer, I sat on the couch with my boyfriend, five nights in a row, watching VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Rock series and taping it with the VCR. The show was five hours total, and I always taped with the lowest quality speed setting to allow six hours of recording. I had a fresh tape set aside for this event.
I knew their stories, their lineages, but I’d never heard their music. Nico and the Velvet Underground. X. Patti Smith. Siouxsie Sioux. P.J. Harvey. Sonic Youth. Yoko Ono. Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette. Big Mama Thornton. I knew her name because she had done a version of one of my favorite songs, “Ball and Chain” by Janis Joplin, who I expected to have the distinguished honor of being named the number one Woman In Rock.
I had read about Liz Phair in the 1996 book by Amy Raphael, Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, which I checked out from the library regularly. As a nostalgic adult, I would buy and sell it, then buy it again. Her segment on the VH1 series began with the sound of a camera advancing, stills of Phair skinny with wet hair and soaked through clothes, as if she’d been caught in a rainstorm or thrown in a swimming pool. The acoustic guitar came in low and dusky, and in a raspy voice that didn’t catch key in the first phrase, she sang, “You said things I would not say, straight to my face.” The clip cut to another music video, a different song. Phair walked backward, acting goofy, with an oversized football helmet on her head. She looked top-heavy, about to fall over. In this song, her voice swept over a pulsing, psychedelic guitar swirl, and she sounded more like a shouting teenager singing in the shower. “Your kisses are as wicked as an M-16. And you.” There, the sound blotted out for a moment. In the video, Phair shrugged at the viewer apologetically. “Like a volcano, and you’re everything to me.”
The word blotted out was, of course, “fuck.”
You fuck like a volcano. What an amazing thing that a woman in rock could, and would, say on a sound recording from 1994! I had never had sex and I was pretty sure at that point that I didn’t want to have sex with men. Even so, I knew that the lyric was a bold move, and I knew, from the feminist reading I had done, that it was important that women enjoy sex and talk about it. Liz Phair: one point for enjoying sex, another for talking about it.
I remember the living room in low lighting, but my parents would never have let my boyfriend and me sit in the dark, late into the night. Likely, the living room light was off, to prevent glare on the convex television screen, but the dining room light, behind us, and the kitchen light, to our right, were on.
My boyfriend was ten years older than me, twenty-six. We had met on the internet, and instead of flying in for a visit, he packed his car, a big old brown granny boat, and drove from Oklahoma to Olympia, Washington, to be with me, to stay. The first day he showed up, I rifled through his CDs and borrowed Poe and PJ Harvey and The Breeders.
I went garage sale shopping with him for second-hand furniture for his new apartment and came home with a long vintage Hawaiian dress that I cut off at the knees, and a copy of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. I wasn’t allowed to go to his apartment. I never violated that agreement with my parents because I didn’t really like him anymore, after meeting him in person. He always wore cargo pants instead of jeans. His aftershave stuck in my throat and made my eyes burn.
He came to Olympia a virgin in June, and he left a virgin in December.
The song was “Supernova,” from Phair’s album Whip-Smart. In early 2001, I scored a used CD copy. These days, I am startled when I get into the car and the music I’d been playing three days ago cuts in mid-song from the phone in my pocket, which is attached to nothing. Back then, the CD player in my car ran through the stereo with a cassette adapter and got power from the cigarette lighter.
I had seen a CD player for the first time nine years earlier, when I was in second grade. At a birthday party on the wealthier side of town, I asked, in astonishment, “Is that a CD player?” Maybe “Drift Away” by Michael Bolton was playing, or “Islands in the Stream” by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. Another little girl answered “Duh”, with the rudest sneer I had ever encountered. I immediately hated her. Come to think of it, thirty-two years later, I still do.
When my parents finally got a CD player a few years later, the CDs they bought to go with it, from Costco, were Pearl by Janis Joplin, The Doors’ Greatest Hits, Queen’s Greatest Hits, and the Beatles’ Past Masters. Shortly after that, they pulled their old turntable and a warped stack of records down from our attic. At thirteen, I proclaimed that records sounded better than compact discs. My parents laughed dismissively, but in a conversation with a young computer savvy employee, my mom learned that compression technology reduced the high end and low end of digital output. I was right!
In 2001, I was seventeen. I had accumulated a decent CD collection (some I’d surreptitiously kept after borrowing from my ex-boyfriend), and I’d had sex with three girls. The first time I had sex, the girl I was with asked me – in language I remember as sweet, not dirty – whether I had finished. It never crossed my mind to lie. I told her I didn’t know. I told her I’d never had sex before. She asked, didn’t I masturbate? I didn’t. I thought only boys could.
A few months later, I bought my first “personal massager” with my first paycheck from my first job. Vibrators are said to have originally been designed to cure hysteria (sexual desire was a diagnostic symptom) in wealthy Victorian women whose doctors had grown tired of manually stimulating them to orgasmic cure. By the beginning of the twentieth century, models were sold in women’s magazines with taglines that left little to the imagination as to the intentions of their use.
One of the most trusted vibrators, the Hitachi Magic Wand, has been sold for over fifty years. The Magic Wand is intended for external use and is only sexual in appearance due to its iconic status (which is to say: it is not shaped like a phallus). It now comes in four models: the Original, plug-in with two speeds, the Plus, with detachable cord and four speeds, the Rechargeable, cordless, with four speeds, and the Mini, back down to three speeds, for travel. Personally, I’ve been happy with the lowest speed on the Original for over twenty-one years, but clearly there was a demand for advanced power.
I’d met my first girlfriend while we were both performing in a small experimental theater production. The director, and the woman he called his ‘domestic partner’, each sometimes wore to rehearsals a T-shirt bearing the slogan Toys in Babeland. I’d soon learn that Toys in Babeland was a feminist-oriented, queer friendly sex shop on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Founded in 1993, the store subsequently grew into a mail order catalogue and online store, with three additional brick and mortar locations in New York City. Babeland demonstrated a model for independent retailers across the country to provide well-vetted, high-quality products, sexual wellness education, and a clean, friendly atmosphere, welcoming to women and queer patrons.
I went to the shop for the first time with my second girlfriend, whose Doc Marten boot had made a crack in my windshield when we were doing it in my car out on some dirt road near an amateur airstrip, hours away from where either of us lived. We enjoyed sex, and I talked about it. A lot. She and I were well known for having loud interludes in confined or virtually public spaces with our friends nearby. We did not care.
My favorite song on Whip-Smart was about a draft resister, and it was slow, languid, repetitive1. My girlfriend’s favorite song came next. She loved the line “I can’t imagine any better time than naked half awake about to shave and go to work,” Phair sexually ambushing a boyfriend and waylaying him from wage labor. Phair’s voice went from so low and deadpan it was almost guttural to careening around high notes she still couldn’t hit. It was less classically psychedelic than an unnerving, nonsensical whirl, but it was beautiful.
When I broke up with my girlfriend after an intense five months, she kept my Liz Phair CD. I don’t remember being mad about it. Several years later, we had contact over social media for a little while, in 2010. One of the first things she wrote to me was an apology for keeping Whip-Smart. I had since bought another copy. I told her I didn’t mind. I was surprised she remembered.
That same summer I married my partner, after living together for seven years. We were roommates when we first started hooking up. When we moved in together, his CD collection towered over mine. His first job had been at a record store, which seemed mythically impossible and incredibly sexy. My first job, where I still worked at that time, was McDonald’s. We had both come of age in the lesbian youth community that spanned the I-5 corridor from Bellingham to Eugene, listening to riot grrrl music, a distinctive form of lo-fi feminist punk rock that developed simultaneously in Olympia, Washington, Washington, DC, and Brighton, England. Our shared love of music, how it expanded in one another’s presence, was part of what drew us together. We began to consider ourselves record collectors.
The first half of the 2010s was overloaded with rare music compilations, as record collections were digitized, the best of the best tracks compressed and preserved for posterity, sometimes complete with the pop and hiss of old vinyl. “You’re the only people who don’t work here who buy this stuff,” Adam at Rainy Day Records told us. Early recordings of country, jazz, and popular music from all over the world; nineteen-sixties psychedelic obscurities; the lost music of women in any number of genres: garage rock, western, exotica; a fabulous disc called The Lavender Jungle, featuring singles from a makeshift studio in a mid-century LA gay bar.
By 2013, we were down to a single rack of CDs displayed in our living room. “I know you have more CDs,” said a friend who hadn’t visited us in a few years, accusingly. I ushered her into our bedroom and rolled out a Rubbermaid bin from under the bed, containing hundreds of discs. When we moved from Olympia, Washington, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, we sold CDs, and some LPs, to used music stores, at a record show, at a flea market. We made $400 altogether, and when we lament gaps in our collection, I counter that we couldn’t have come to the life we live now – having moved back from Albuquerque to Olympia, then to Vancouver, British Columbia, and Spokane, Washington – if we had been carrying all that weight with us.
Somewhere deep in an old laptop, and duplicated on an external hard drive, are thousands upon thousands of songs that we ripped from the CDs before we sold them. Whip-Smart by Liz Phair is listed among the albums. In Phair’s chapter in Grrrls: Viva Rock Divas, she talks about how her lyrics on Whip-Smart often aim to switch roles. She is singing from a man’s point of view in lines such as “I can’t believe they let you run around free / just putting your body wherever it seemed like a good idea.” Here, she gestures toward men’s sense of possession over women’s bodies, which results in constraint of women’s sexual agency.
In the 2015 documentary about Janis Joplin, Little Girl Blue, it becomes clear to the viewer that Joplin’s desire for, and insistence upon having, a satisfying sex life with both men and women contributed to her dismissal by her peers – both as a high schooler in Port Arthur, Texas, and as a musician in the San Francisco psychedelic scene. We might even go so far as to say that her insistence on owning her sexual agency cost her life, as she sought substances to obliterate the abjection she experienced. There are very old blues songs that stack up sexual euphemisms, but no one in the late sixties and early seventies was singing “you fuck like a volcano.” A historical thread could be followed through feminism – medical, literary, theoretical, pornographic, artistic – leading from what Joplin couldn’t say about the pleasure she experienced to what Phair did say, twenty-five years later. Janis Joplin was my first favorite woman artist, when I was a kid. I waited through four hours and forty-five minutes of VH1’s 100 Greatest Women in Rock until she turned up in slot number three.
When Liz Phair sings “you fuck like a volcano,” she’s not only owning her own pleasure and sexual agency, but she’s admitting to enjoyment of a man’s body. Today, when men’s bodies and sexual desires are demonized and feared as potential weapons, not wholly dissimilar to the fear of women’s bodies and sexuality throughout history, Jane Ward, author of The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, advocates for “deep heterosexuality” which makes space for “owning that identity and resolving to enact the best version of it.” When I recently attempted to tease out my feelings that arranged marriages were antithetical to romantic freedom, my partner pointed out that our peers who meet on dating apps are in a sense generating arranged marriages for themselves. In the same way that the general population now discovers music through privately licensed algorithms rather than taking a risk on a CD album or compilation, not collecting at all but paying for streaming services that dole out music in easily consumable units, sexual relationships and encounters with desire in media are homogenized, leaving little room for surprise. It is no wonder, then, that in a February 2023 op-ed in The New York Times, Magdalene J. Taylor declared Americans are “having less sex than they have at any point in at least the past three decades.” There was tactile pleasure in flipping through bins of records and CDs – I can still hear the click of the plastic cases in my mind, nag champa incense the somehow universal perfume of record stores – checking the endcaps for what the staff recommended. There was likewise an exciting, open possibility of getting to know and falling in love with someone you met at a party or a show, a friend of a friend or someone who loved the same bands you did. Today, experiences are heavily mediated by everything from crowdsourced restaurant reviews to streaming movies that autoplay one after another, resulting in aesthetic and practical passivity. Recognition and reclamation of sensory pleasures will be required to regain our collective enjoyment of one another’s bodies, and our own.
I don’t think I ever posted Volcano Zine!!! for sale on the Local Smoke Press Etsy site, but I have a few copies left, with writing from Elissa Ball, Fenrir Cerebellion, Chaya Grossberg, Kaden Jelsing, Jennifer Krasner, Kate Lebo, Sam Ligon, Brandon Van Buskirk, and Amber Ridenour Walker, and art from Brenden Fortescue and Heidi Jones. Hit me up if you want one!
“Shane,” which I put on my recent radio show, how does it feel like at the end of the day