God forbid a woman wants

I left university with a published poetry collection, and I was pretty proud of what I had made. People seemed to enjoy it, too. My favourite review on Goodreads says: “No other poetry collection will ride you, spit on you, and penetrate you like Tonight We Slurp in Color will.”

The book found its audience mostly among women and queer readers. They seemed to get exactly what it was doing. The men, of course, were a different story.

Shortly after university, I started applying to national writers’ workshops, where I quickly learned that when a woman writes about desire, the poem becomes a site of surveillance. Desire is judged, policed and made to answer for itself.

In one workshop, an award-winning male panellist looked at my work and said, “How is this good poetry? Libog lang ’to ng burgis eh.” (“This is just bourgeois lust.”) I was 21 and only mildly embarrassed. It was not that bad. I was going to be fine. There were worse things happening to women, and to the world, every day. This was just one boomer saying something stupid in a workshop, as they are wont to do.

Still, I hated how quickly he had reduced me to an oversexed girl who could not possibly have anything relevant to say. Over the years, I think I got very good at treating that kind of humiliation as too small to count. If it did not destroy me, then surely it did not hurt. If I could laugh about it later, maybe there was nothing there worth grieving.

At another writers’ workshop, a male senior guest panellist cornered me after my session. He praised my work and then said, “Konti na lang ‘yung poets na katulad mo. Magaling magsulat, maganda, sexy. ‘Yung mga babaeng makata ngayon ang papangit na.” (“There are hardly any poets like you anymore. You write well, you’re beautiful, sexy. Female poets these days are getting uglier.”)

I was 22. I reported the panellist to the workshop coordinators, who were aghast. They thanked me for confiding in them and promised that he would be banned from future workshops. And yet, three years later, he was invited back as a guest panellist and has continued to be invited ever since.

Many of my erotic poems are charged with grotesque and violent imagery. At that same workshop, one panellist asked me, “How could YOU want this?” Another asked, “How old were YOU when this happened?”

Why was an erotic poem written by a woman so quickly treated as a confession? And even if it was, why should I have to explain myself? The distance between poet and speaker collapsed. So did any room for invention.

These are experiences I wish I had never had, and would never wish on anyone else. Before my book was published, I was introduced to a distinguished male writer nearly 20 years my senior. We became friends. He read early drafts of the manuscript, offered feedback and remained in my life through the book’s publication.

Over time, he began asking me for sexual favours and crossing boundaries I did not yet know how to name. It took me years to understand that what had happened was not normal, and that I had been groomed.

In an interview about her directorial debut, The Chronology of Water, Kristen Stewart said that “being a woman is a really violent experience” and later added, “We are secrets. We are walking secrets.” I keep coming back to that last line because erotic poetry had once felt like the opposite of secrecy to me. It was where I could drag desire into the light and let it take up as much space as it wanted.

So how did something that once made me feel divine suddenly make me feel exposed, vulnerable and unsafe? It happened so quickly, too.

In hindsight, none of this was entirely surprising, however deplorable it was. Women poets have long been punished for writing about desire too candidly. The Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, known for writing openly about female desire and sexuality, faced critics who fixated on her personal life and treated her work as evidence of promiscuity and transgression rather than giving the poetry the serious attention it deserved. Her poetry not only survived but continued to be celebrated, despite bans and censorship after the 1979 revolution (Milani).

Audre Lorde herself was hardly spared. In 1990, she joined other lesbian writers in protesting attempts to censor sexually explicit and homoerotic art amid the battles over National Endowment for the Arts funding (Lorde et al.). More than three decades later, women and queer writers are still being asked to justify what they want, how they say it and whether they should have said it at all.