A.O.C. Wore Red
A.O.C. wore red the day she stood on the House floor and deftly dismembered Yoho for calling her a fucking bitch. Fucking bitch — the tritest of trite sobriquets for women — was Yoho’s grand finale of slanders hurled at A.O.C. three days earlier as she ascended, and he descended the steps of Capitol Hill. His prelude was just as tuneful and vapid: crazy, disgusting, dangerous; his pointed finger in her face a boring, weaponized redundancy of male chauvinism.
At first, it was all here-we-go-again — we women know better than to wait with bated breath for apologies. Until Yoho held up his wife and daughters as the bonneted handmaids of his decency, a poor filler for where regret should have been. A.O.C. rallied:
I could not allow my nieces, I could not allow the little girls that I go home to, I could not allow victims of verbal abuse, and worse, to see that — to see that excuse and to see our Congress accept it as legitimate and accept it as an apology and to accept silence as a form of apology. I could not allow that to stand.
On July 23, 2020, A.O.C. adorned herself in the color of armor. She wore powdered cinnabar on her heart like a breastplate and a shield of scarlet on her lips. She beseeched her colleagues to retire the sagging scaffolding of the good ‘ol boys club. For once and for all.
I stand ready to kick the patriarchy’s withering bedrock with rubied stiletto Miu Miu’s, torch in hand to set fire to their humidors.
In year four of my six-year stint with one of our nation’s unnecessarily large government contracting firms, I learned the secrets of the animus imprint. I attended an executive leadership class where I was taught to lower my voice one octave in order to ferment authority. I learned how to lean back from a table, like a man. I was taught which colors to wear and when: Blue to imbue trust. Green to show solidarity. Red to relay power.
I went thrift store shopping and purchased cherry, ruby and scarlet button-ups, along with a carmine blazer, a candy apple Oxford, and burgundy pants. Up until year four, my closet was filled with the drab black, navy blue and gray uniform of defense contractors who did well when they blended in with the upholstery. But now, it was all powder blues and vermilion.
The first time I intentionally wore red, I donned my carmine blazer with a black sleeveless sweater shell. The firm I worked for had just won a contract with the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Activity (CMA) and as the hastily appointed project manager of the new work, I was scheduled to meet with the lead client along with my company boss to introduce ourselves. The client’s reputation preceded him. He had a knack for sharp words, picked fights and told vulgar jokes about women. It was the kind of ruddy reputation that required red.
In addition to my red jacket, I was sporting a black eye at my first meeting with the CMA client. He entered our meeting room — a fishbowl in a glorified tiptop military trailer — five minutes late. His tardiness was a hyperbolic, overplayed power move that told me he’d simply read the Cliff Note’s for Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Before introducing himself, before taking his seat at the head of the conference table, and before extending a hand to shake, he took a step toward me, leaned in, loomed, and asked how the other guy looked. Less than 10 seconds into our meeting and I had him read like a sore queen at a Harlem ball. I told him the other guy looked like a sucker, skipped over the part about earning the shiner in a co-ed soccer game, and told him it was nothing that a frozen bag of peas and shot of bourbon couldn’t heal. Turning to my boss, a tiny, ferocious woman who taught me how to bite while saving face, my client said:
I like her already.
I hate how good it felt to hear those words.
Stop talking about women in the third person when they’re in the damn room. We can hear you.
From butterflyinsight.com on Red Butterfly Meaning:
“Some Native American tribes believe that a red butterfly signifies a powerful soul or spirit. Seeing a red butterfly flying near you often indicates that important news is on the way. The red butterfly is a symbol of instense [read: intense] romance and passion. In Scotland, a red butterfly was once believed to be a witch in disguise. Red or pink butterflies are said to promise many years of happiness to come. In some cultures, a red butterfly (or red admiral butterfly in particular) actually is as a symbol of evil or represents danger. According to a Korean superstition, these dainty creatures have quite an evil to them. Apparently, if you touch a red butterfly (or moth) and then touch your eyes, you will go blind or have vision problems. Seeing a red butterfly can bring excitement and can energize a person. To some, a red butterfly is associated with anger. Red butterflies seen within the home can often bring with them a special message for the person who sees them. Red butterfly sightings urge us to pay attention to something, or to be extra careful or cautious about something in their life at that time, or to be extra prepared for something that is about to come.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’ father is not here to see how Rep. Ted Yoho treated her. Sergio Ocasio died of lung cancer her sophomore year of college. But Alexandria’s mother is alive. In 2018, Blanca Ocasio-Cortez held the Bible that swore her daughter into office as Representative of New York’s 14th congressional district. Before that, Blanca mopped floors, drove school buses, answered phones and did what she could to support her children.
Blanca and Sergio are relatable parents. They are parents who learned to relinquish the notion that they are their offspring’s keepers yet toiled to soften their children’s landing in the world. Blanca can’t defend her daughter from the likes of Yoho, and Sergio’s grave rolls will never be enough to erase all of the barnyard epithets that have been and will be levied at his daughter. But their existence — Blanca’s life, Sergio’s death — offers a wedge of silence, a tiny, quiet pause for remembering A.O.C.’s humanity. Shush, Yoho. You are a father of convenience, she is a daughter of valor; you are a doomed caterpillar, she is a scarlet peacock butterfly.
The truth is, no one expected the defense contracting firm I worked for to win the CMA work. The incumbent contractor had the CMA contract for upwards of 15 years. Our win was as surprising as A.O.C.’s win against Rep. Joe Crowley in 2018.
If you didn’t see it coming.
Our win meant no more autopilot for my client, no more afternoon naps in his closed office. Until my team was up and running, I needed him to inform me on the archival status of our nation’s chemical stockpile records, who to contact for access to the Army Records Information Management System, and when to pay for the monthly watercooler delivery. It was unfortunate that I needed him. It is an exceptional state for consultants who are trained to avoid deference. The client should need us, not the other way around. It had to be red in my first meeting with the CMA client. Blue would come later, along with jokes about J-Lube, reports thrown in my face, condolences for my sick mother and graphs on the conference room white board that charted the unlikelihood of hot women being smart.
Days after A.O.C. flipped the levers of power to beat local party boss Joe Crowley, the New York Times reported that more than a half-dozen officials inside and close to Mr. Crowley’s 2018 campaign never saw his defeat coming. On the condition of anonymity, they said there was no single factor they could point to as the reason for the upset. They said it was the cumulative weight of demographics and generational changes, A.O.C.’s advantage as an outsider, and her ease with modern-age organizing as a digital native. If the patriarchy put as much creative effort into building equity across racial and gender lines as they do in justifying their disgraceful misses, oh what a world it would be. But instead, King Richard III’s pathetic lament echoes through the annals of history: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!
Due to COVID-19, Spain’s annual San Fermin ‘Running of the Bulls’ festival has been cancelled for the first time since the Spanish Civil War. The tradition started in the 14th Century, but was made popular by Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, a story about a crew of white, artsy Americans who summer in Pamplona during San Fermin, get drunk on Sangria, have decadent affairs with young waitstaff, and repine over the pace of one generation’s fade into another — “slowly, then suddenly.”
Each day of the eight-day San Fermin festival, six bulls are released into the streets at 8 a.m. Thousands of people charge the streets with them until they are herded into a stadium for bullfights where the animals are eventually killed. Each fight, known as a corrida, has three acts, or tercios:
Tercio de Varas: Lancers stab a mound of muscle on the bull’s neck and blood is drawn.
Tercio de Banderillas: The matador plants barbed sticks with flags on the ends into the bull’s shoulders. The bloodletting weakens the ridges of the neck and shoulder muscles and the bull becomes exhausted, more aggressive.
Tercio de Muerte (the part of death): The matador re-enters the ring with a muleta, a small red cape to hide his sword. The matador uses his muleta to lure the bull past him, ever so often landing a remante, “a finishing touch” with his sword. The final remante is made between the bull’s shoulder blades, through the aorta or heart.
Bulls are colorblind. Red capes are used in the final act to mask blood stains that streak across the muleta as the bull passes beneath it.
Tercio de Varas: Yoho denies calling A.O.C. a fucking bitch.
Tercio de Banderillas: Yoho declines to apologize to A.O.C. for his language.
Tercio de Muerte: Yoho invokes the Daughter Excuse saying, “Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of language.”
In her red suite coat, A.O.C.’s blood stains are invisible. This way, we can focus on her charge: “I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter, and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.”
My parents didn’t raise me to accept abuse from men, but I did. I didn’t tell them about any of the abuse until I was 30, and now I can’t seem to stop telling them.
When I was 30 years old, I told them how my now ex-husband was the first to call me a fucking bitch, but not the last. He was the only one that left me jacketless to walk three miles home in below-freezing temperatures because he didn’t like the way I shut the car door.
When I was 33 years old, I told my parents I’d taken a job ghostwriting for a man named Darwin in Tampa Bay. Six weeks later, when they phoned for an update, I told them I’d cut the contract because he sexually assaulted me when no one was looking. Darwin’s wing man made a point to tell me about their paramilitary backgrounds and how he’d burned tapes to cover Darwin’s tracks in the past. I didn’t press charges.
When I was 35 years old, while driving back from a pizza parlor in Indiana, I told my parents about an unfortunate sexual act done to me when I was five. I told them this from the backseat of their car, looking at them through the rearview mirror.
When I was 22 years old, I shared an incident of sexual harassment with my boyfriend. It was the boyfriend who became my husband, and then ex-husband. He responded by asking me, “What were you wearing?” I dutifully described my outfit, down to the colors I’d chosen to wear, a mix of black, blue and lavender. He suspected that I just wanted the attention.
When I was 22 years old, I met a man who was my father’s age for dinner at Carnivale, a restaurant in Chicago’s West Loop Fulton Market. The man was from Egypt and I was told he was well connected to journalists in the Middle East. At the time, I was serving toshka, coffee and hookah at a cafe in Chicago’s northside, but had dreams of slugging it across Jordan, Egypt and Morocco as a reporter with Kevlar. In college, I’d spent half of my sophomore year studying Arabic and peace and conflict resolution in Cairo. I spent my junior and senior years earning a second major in journalism. When I expressed my career interests to the owners of the hookah lounge, they said I should meet with this man. They made an introduction one day at the lounge while I balanced hot bricks of charcoal on his hookah’s tobacco burner. I don’t remember his name.
I do remember cobbling together some semblance of a black suite to wear for our dinner meeting. I lived in my parents’ basement at the time and an hour before the man was due to pick me up, I snuck upstairs to borrow a periwinkle blouse from my mother’s closet. He arrived in a gold Bentley with plush leather seats. He had the car valeted at Carnivale, a luxury I’d never known.
Growing up, I’d seen Carnivale’s large festive mural on its brick siding from I-90. It changed every few years, but its colorful composition stayed the same: a rainbow of pastel pink, aqua, peach, cobalt and amethyst, with playful block lettering and messages like “Live a colorful life.” The inside of the restaurant was a kaleidoscope of lights, music and pigment. The main dining hall’s walls were painted with thick, marbled stripes of the same colors on the mural. Lime green and neon pink lamp shades the size of my family’s kitchen table hung from the rafters with blue, orange and emerald polka dots. Portraits of whitewashed faces with bold hair and eye colors framed in gilded wood hung above dining tables dressed in white linen. In one of the frames, an enlarged Mona Lisa with a deep cleavage line, blush and brick red lipstick. In the center of the ceiling was a massive piece of stained glass painted like Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Red Blue and Yellow. Fluorescent white light illuminated the windowpanes, the only semblance of sunlight in the entire joint. We were sat in a private dining room with a red theme.
I also remember the dinner. Ceviche. Another delicacy of a life I’d never known. I sipped on a Diet Coke despite the man’s insistence that I try one of their signature cocktails. I remember all of this, but I don’t remember talking about my career interests over dinner. At the end of the meal, the man suggested we go to the Grande Lux Café on Michigan Avenue. I agreed and at the café ordered an Irish coffee in hopes of convincing the man that I was grown. I don’t remember any part of our conversation from the café either, except when he asked that I join him in his condo for “a bit of fun.”
I live just down the street and it’d be silly to drive you all the way back home now instead of in the morning. Don’t you agree?
I did not agree. My home was just a ten-minute drive north of downtown, straight up Lake Shore Drive. I declined his persistent invitation three times and let him know I was happy to take the Red Line home. Eventually, he drove me home. Instead of going down the steps to my basement entrance, I entered through the well-lit front door of my parents’ home.
Like most pockets of America’s overgrown defense sector, the CMA nook was historically managed by a few government employees and a slew of contractors. None of them expected for things to change. Maintaining homeostasis is a hallmark of the U.S. government; and the government’s willful ignorance to the inevitability of change helps to line the pockets of Beltway Bandits like the firm I worked for. Change happens, the government is surprised and subsequently at the mercy of consultants who are paid to poke holes.
Most of the workers at CMA had been doing the hard slog of demilitarizing and eliminating the nation’s declared chemical stockpile since 1997, the year I got my period. Also, the year of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The crimson tide was heavy back then. At the convention, 165 countries, including the U.S., entered an arms control treaty that prohibited the large-scale use, development, production, stockpiling and transfer of chemical weapons. It was one of many quiet, symbolic gestures over the course of two decades that signaled the dismantling of a quiet, symbolic Cold War. The convention also laid ground rules for how the stockpiled chemical agents were to be banished. No more tossing them into the ocean. No more burying them in the earth. In the U.S., the CMA — then called the Chemical Materials Agency — would take responsibility for managing the nine known stockpiles of our nation’s chemical weapons. I learned the names of the stockpile sites and recited them like lines of poetry:
Umatilla
Deseret
Pueblo
Johnston Atoll
Newport
Edgewood
Blue Grass
Anniston
Pine Bluff.
By the time my team started working for the CMA, the U.S. had declared that all chemical weapons were destroyed at seven of the nine U.S. stockpile sites and the CMA was demoted from a major subordinate command, to a reporting activity operating out of a double-wide trailer. Only Pueblo and Pine Bluff remain. The timing of my firm’s contractual takeover was one big joke. It felt like when my college soccer coach would put me in the game with ten minutes left on the clock and a five-goal lead. It didn’t matter what I did.
My attempts to earn the respect of my client and the legacy engineers who’d worked for decades to dismantle our nation’s arsenal of lethal chemical weaponry were at best cute. I laughed when they superglued my phone to my desk and detached my ethernet cord, the same way I laughed at their off-color shaggy-dog stories about mistresses and sexual harassment trainings. This, I calculated, would serve as deposits into their emotional bank account so that when I needed to make a withdrawal, I could. At worse, my closed-door conversations in offices with thin walls set a lousy example for my team of predominately young women.
After 15 years in the workforce, I finally understand that I can’t expect respect from a man who knows his existence no longer matters — not to his boss, and not to his second wife. What to do with such a delicate man who doles out ham-fisted slop in exchange for bottomless power?
A year into my work with the CMA, my client suggested I buy a bottle of gasoline and box of red-tipped matches and set fire to one of the last remaining warehouses of the U.S.’ chemical stockpile records.
Don’t forget the marshmallows, he said.
On July 23, 2020, over the course of her allotted hour to speak on the floor of the chamber during the Women’s Caucus, A.O.C. yielded her time to more than a dozen other House Democrats, three of which were men.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, shared how a male Republican lawmaker had once called her a “young lady” and told her that she did not know a “damn thing” during a debate on the House floor. Jayapal is 54 years old.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Democrat of Florida and the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said, “Few women here watching have not felt a man’s bullying breath or menacing finger in our face as we were told exactly where our place was at work.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts said, “I speak to our daughters. For they are watching and taking note of how we respond in this moment. So, in this moment I say to my Cora and all daughters, ‘You are powerful.’”
Later that day at a the House Speaker’s weekly briefing, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful woman in Washington, offered her own account and then backslid into a reversal of the Daughter Excuse, offering it up once more as a limp litmus test for morality: “I can tell you this firsthand, they called me names for at least 20 years of leadership. You’d say to them, ‘Do you not have a daughter? Do you not have a mother? Do you not have a sister? Do you not have a wife?’”
Dear Nancy, listen to what your sisters are saying. We’re not asking questions anymore. We make demands. We don’t care about the matriarchal lineage that men like Yoho are attached to because we all come from Gaia. Proximity to women and babies does not make you a feminist any more than having a Black friend makes you anti-racist.
Last year, 20,000 people, mostly men, ran with the bulls through the cobbled streets of Pamplona. Eight were gored. Aerial photography of the festival offers a bird’s eye view: thousands of men dressed in white with red kerchiefs around their necks consume the city like a bunch of spritely Leghorn chickens, their red wattles and rose combs flopping in the wind.
I walked Pamplona’s streets in 2016, bull-less, with a burgundy backpack given to me by a former female client, along with a loaf of freshly baked barra and bottle of rosado from the Navarra wine country. It was a weekday in June, I don’t remember which one, and the city was all air, tranquil. Weeks away from San Fermin, it was the calm before the storm. Gift shop owners sat on stools in the entryways of their shops fanning themselves, half-heartedly hawking red sashes, St. Peter the Martyr keepsakes, and yellow arrow pins — the iconic guiding symbol of Spain’s Camino de Santiago, a 500-kilometer pilgrimage I made after quitting my job at the defense contracting firm.
On one street, streamers made out of black and yellow caution tape poured out of a second-story window, an undulating curtain of plastic thrashing against the building’s Gothic 15th century walls. On each streamer were the words No mas corridas toros. No more bullfights. On another street, a black vinyl banner with the same canary yellow lettering read Bulls die a bloody death in Pamplona.
In July of 2019, days before the first slaughter of the bulls, 54 mostly female animal activists stripped down to black underwear and held signs over their bare chests with the same yellow words I’d seen during my stroll through Pamplona three years earlier. Then, they laid down on the hot cobble stone, curled up into the fetal position, and spooned the insides of white chalk lines that traced the figures of dead bulls.
So no one gets their panties in a wad: These are my views and my views only.
More about N. Clark Creative: nclarkcreative.com and nclarkcreativesolutions.com.
