Protective Measures
Under dubious circumstances, I first watched Mitchell Lichtenstein’s 2007 horror-comedy Teeth at seventeen. I’ve rewatched it a dozen times since. The trailer opens with the tagline, There is something wrong with Dawn O’Keefe, followed by a spoken line from a pivotal moment near the conclusion of the movie: “Are you afraid?”
There is something wrong with me. Maybe an overproduction of some pheromone, or else the way I tilt my head when spoken to. I am afraid, and I wish others would be, too. For seven years, I have toiled with this wrong and with Teeth, and the only loosening of language has come from a generous acceptance that I can always return to this particular river and step afresh.
I was seventeen when something in protagonist Dawn locked eyes with something in me. Her name — Dawn O’Keefe — is an on-the-nose artistic rendering that spills red everywhere, like the morning sun across my bed sheets. Her name invokes the fresh breaking of an untouched day, and the artist best known for paintings of flowers and/or vulvas. Dawn and I, Halloween time 2017 in Upstate New York, were the same age, both blonde, both abstinent, both daughters of a consistently dying mom — both with something wrong. For her, it was an anatomical deviance: a full set of shark-like teeth in her vaginal canal. The nuclear smokestacks looming over her childhood home are to blame for that mutation. But for me and my wrong?
A man I was in love with once confessed that I terrified him. It was dark, and our air conditioner was on, and he had woken from another nightmare that I killed him, so I was scratching his back or his leg, and he wouldn’t look at me when he said,
“I love you so much, and you can leave me anyway.”
A love of this nature is more possession than anything else. And to my former lover, loving me was gazing straight at a lightbulb he had bought and grasping it — burning both eyes and hands. It was a hot August afternoon when I loved him so much that I put two hundred twenty-six miles between my body and his. I wonder whether his intuition that I would leave tempered some of his heartache; I wonder how much of his soul I bit off when I left; I wonder if he was terrified when he started dating the coworker I knew loved him desperately.
I don’t have teeth in my vagina, shark-like or otherwise.
Dawn discovers her deviance with a sickening crunch as her boyfriend rapes her. He dies screaming after his penis is removed from his body, either bleeding out or drowning in the lake he leaps into. All in all, Dawn’s second set of teeth bite off one fingertip, four fingers, and three penises, and the movie ends with Dawn poised to bite off another penis, having learned to use her deviance advantageously. A plunge into her is not an inevitable phallic loss: Dawn is capable of pleasurable, uneventful sex when she consents.
A toothed vagina is a protective measure only following penetration. No prevention, only a consequence.
I am capable of joyful and loving relationships, platonic and otherwise.
A consequence of the non-consensual was all I could dream of: seventeen, on the couch, headphones in, a feeling of confused rapture as I watched a girl my age discover her body was terrifying. I had to know if this experience was singular. Thus began a hyperlocal virality: I made my friends watch Teeth, they made their friends watch Teeth, and soon, primitive triangles were sprouting on classroom whiteboards in every orgasmic O and subdued e, turning handwritten loops into gaping holes with shark-like teeth.
It wasn’t until I was a year into therapy, twenty, and had exhausted the obvious things to talk about that I mentioned my close friendships with teachers and, like a large baby getting caught on the way out, my sentences halted, then spilled, then halted, then spilled. Alongside an abundance of lingering hugs, handholding, meeting up outside of school, texts, phone calls — the scavenger hunt to find one male teacher’s favorite movie to watch around Halloween time brought my therapist up short.
Maybe if looking at me inspired a tight fear in the tender space behind a belly button, then I could be, or could have been, a measure safer than I am now or was then. However, my pheromones or the way I tilt my head versus, for example, a lonely man whose wife may be busy or ex-wife may be “crazy” and is, by a young woman, listened to?
I feel the urge to count up bites, victims, losses, scars, or any related unit to articulate whatever spiritual analogy to Dawn’s sickening crunch I have to call my own.
Related or unrelated to this topic: I was a virgin when I first saw Teeth, though many assumed I was not. I was perceived as mature for my age, at every age I have ever been. My mother died a painful death that lasted from just before my twelfth birthday to just before my twenty-second — possibly caused by the improper handling of carcinogenic chemicals by her employer. Going away to college at eighteen severed the bonds I had with my teachers, although I lacked the words to describe why. I never had sex with any of my teachers, nor my professors, nor anyone in a position of authority over me, although others occasionally assume that I have. Whereas Dawn threw herself into purity culture to assure her mother of her eternal life, I threw myself into serious relationships to assure my mother that I would be pathologically stable, even after her passing.
To be clear: I desperately wish men would stop seeing the warm and wet inside of their own clenched fist when they look at my body. I wish an impending consequence would give people pause before they intrude on my ear, my heart, my body. I wish I could have, sometimes, bitten down.
Has loving me always been dangerous? Has my sexuality meant monstrosity this whole time?
Some friends understand Teeth better than others. Some walked out before the title scene. Some had nightmares, some laughed through the whole thing. High school friends, college friends, (ex-)boyfriends, and me, over and over again, me. I was seventeen when I first saw it, I was twenty-one when I first told someone I was writing a Teeth essay, I am twenty-four now, and I am sure this is not the last time Teeth will reverberate or center itself in something I write.
Among possible explanations for the seven-year toil:
Perfectionism;
Procrastination; and
A fundamental terror that I am not good enough.
Common misconceptions that are not helping me here:
Writing about something once means you shouldn’t write about it again, or else face scrutiny and judgment;
Writers who return to the same topics are immature, bad, or otherwise stuck; and
I am incapable of expressing a concept that feels foundational to my development and presentation as a person, woman, and sexual being.
I was in my undergrad at Bennington College when my thesis advisor — the effervescent Jenny Boully — encouraged me to keep chewing on the topics, themes, concepts, images, visions, dreams that refuse to leave me alone. Each attempt is another strike at perfection. Each iteration finds a stronger writer trying again.
As such, I encourage all writers in my workshops to collect a poetic toolkit and attempt, and attempt again, over and over. A future iteration, a later reverberation, may become the magnum opus. Or, a draft may actually come to fruition, in the face of some comfort that it need not be perfect this time around. A successful draft is a written one.
I was in my undergrad at Bennington College when I discovered that Mitchell Lichtenstein, writer and director of Teeth, was in the Class of 1978. The literary concept of vagina dentata, Latin for toothed vagina, entered Mitchell Lichtenstein’s poetic toolkit in his literature classes at Bennington, while he lived in the same houses, ate in the same dining hall, watched the same sun turn Mount Anthony dusky purple that I did, forty odd years later. Although I’m unsure of other attempts Mitchell Lichtenstein might have taken at vagina dentata, my seven years spent chewing on his work doesn’t feel too long in comparison to his decades. The synchronicity still catches in my throat.
At the emotional crux of Teeth, Dawn seeks comfort from her mother only to discover that her mother has died, leaving Dawn with no one on earth to rely on.
Dawn decides to scrap the life she had and set off on her bike in search of a new one, but first, she must seek vengeance. The negligence of Dawn’s stepbrother Brad caused the death of her mother. She prepares for battle: stares down her childhood home with the smokestacks behind, she dons a white dress, does her makeup. She seduces Brad.
“Why are you doing this now?” he asks, leaning back in his bed, her fingers on the soft skin below his belly button. If his monologue from earlier is to be believed, Brad has loved Dawn, or lusted after her, since before their parents married. He consents to Dawn’s seduction, stunned, but willing.
“Are you afraid?” She counters, then mounts him.
Blissful for moments, dread fills his features when he parts her lips with his scarred index finger, bitten in the movie’s opening scene — he realizes or remembers that his bite-scar couldn’t have come from this set of teeth in her mouth. What follows is a drawn out bite presented as a subversion of the shared orgasm. They tremble, muscles taut, and he groans into the side of her neck. When they part, Brad’s severed penis is expelled from Dawn’s vaginal teeth and falls to the floor. Brad’s dog, named Mother, eats what remains of his phallus.
Brad begs Dawn not to leave him. She closes the door when she leaves.
(I turned off all the lights in our apartment when I left. My diamond necklace was on the coffee table. The bookshelves were half empty.)
As soon as I see someone’s eyes drift past mine and their floodgates open in the hope of filling my wet and gaping ears, I ought to cut them off and ask, “Are you afraid?” Maybe at the prompting, they would take stock of their body, and notice a fear coiling tight behind their belly button. Maybe they would reassess the rewards of being listened to. Maybe it isn’t a mutual benefit to tell me about their childhood trauma, their relationship troubles, their medical history, when they are hardly speaking to me. What is desperately wrong with me that I am so easily confused for a sentient bucket, eagerly awaiting your monologue? Friends, family, teachers, coworkers, strangers on the street — all reach out and grasp at me.
Beware: if we get attached, I will bite off some of your soul in my leaving.
Leaving is my only protective measure. How much it hurts depends on how attached we have become, how far you have plunged into my spirit.
I have one set of teeth. I can be your favorite bucket to dump into. You can love me to death. I can leave anyway.
