Things men have said to me:
Lesbians! (while riding my bicycle with a friend in Florida),
You look even better wet (at a theme park, in Florida),
Get a job! (riding a bicycle, again, in Florida),
I’m hungry for pussy (at work in NYC, by my co-worker),
Cunt (on the sidewalk in Brattleboro, Vermont).
Honk if your body’s not yours appears on a Marlene McCarty bumper sticker from 1990. Marlene McCarty’s early work pulled found language off the street, and from media, to draw attention to sexism, homophobia, and gendered violence. “IF IT’S GOT TITS OR WHEELS IT’S GONNA GIVE YOU PROBLEMS” is from her series Crash and Burn, first shown in the 90s, where much of the language comes from car magazines. She moved on from slogans to create large-scale drawings of adolescent women who murdered their mothers, or were murdered by their mothers, or other caregivers, in a series called the Murder Girls. McCarty’s work is not quiet, not well behaved. I personally never know what to say when confronted by sexism, but Marlene McCarty keeps finding the language. Lately, it’s the language of plants and gardens. In AGAIN (an Into the Weeds project), in Buffalo, New York, she grew poisonous plants, as a way of exploring the duality of healing/harm. When an interviewer asks her what her favorite plant is, she answers: “I have some favorites. I really love datura, hellebore, aconitum, belladonna, henbane—these are all hallucinogenic plants. A few of them are deadly. And a number of them were used in one way or another in witches’ flying ointments. So I love the fact that they were used by women as a way to get out of this world.”
-Morgan English