Many of you have asked about the meaning of my name on here, it’s genesis or what specifically made me choose it. While I don’t consider myself a very private person, I have been considering this relationship I have to names; to naming myself as a writer, and how much do I want to blend or enmesh the rest of my authenticity and private life and self with Jezebel.
I am still considering it, still turning it around like a key in my pocket I don’t yet have a door for or a lock it fits with in its specific-grooved pattern. While much of Jezebel is “me”, she is also a sculpture, something of clay and scraps I have gathered in pieces since childhood while the animal in myself grappled and looked for ways out. She is redemption. She is unfettered curiosity. She is brazen and unashamed. She’s often the hand I wished to hold when I felt misunderstood or lost; like a match under glass. From ages 5-15 this played out like a broken record, until finally the systems that had wrapped around my limbs and constrained me, had to be sliced and cut through by my own body, my own awareness and and misery and trauma untangling itself towards freedom and knowing.
Initially, Jezebel was a learned enemy in name, a part of religious fear-mongering and a warning to all things feminist and empowering. This was led mostly by an archaic adage, often in the shape of grey-haired men in starchy suits that expected patriarchal moralism from women’s roots, from the ground up. They mimicked the same type of conditioning as the lace ruffled socks and patent buckled shoes that rose from the roots of my own body, the stifling dresses with collars that accentuated me to the other sex like a doll. I was taught to be a thing more than a person, something a man keeps on a shelf and learns when and how to pick up and put down, as it suited to elevate himself. In the confines of this system, things were expected of me before I could even speak, and once I could, languages were taught to me that were never my own, stifling a voice I had but wouldn’t be aware of til much later.
My toys were vacuum cleaners, tiny mop and broom sets, cartoon films in which the male counterpart was always the savior and the distress of the women near him always needed his help. Brainquest Bible trivia. Things found at Christian bookstores that reeked of innocence and a static stoicism that made my insides itch to break through.
So often in and around the Mennonite church culture I was a part of, I witnessed this amorphous thing through a lens of confusion, rebellion, anger. At social gatherings, women went straight to the kitchen, men stayed outside. Women sat and men stood. As adults, they were either nursemaids to their babies or their husbands, sewed their own clothes, rarely wore pants and their bodies were a thing to be hidden, cloistered underneath drab colors that lacked personality or autonomy.
As teens, they were expected second parents with the pre-responsibility of motherhood being projected onto them by their own mothers, who were drowning. Activities like church volleyball and softball and vacation Bible school in the Summer were up for grabs, Christian versions of Warped Tour concert festivals like Purple Door, CreationFest, camping and youth group retreats; everything calculatedly structured to keep them docile, isolated, soft spoken, and even infantilized via separatism from the “secular” world endured. All of this of course was part of the larger system built to keep the youth growing up to retain the future structure of the church, pressuring them to proselytize at school, the mall, our jobs and encouraged us the alienation of it was good; it meant we were good soldiers.
I didn’t learn about myself or the world at many of these church retreats, the banquet meals or church barbecues, the Bible studies hosted. I didn’t learn to ask questions or discern that I even could. I learned to peel potatoes, to bake pie crust, to sit around a quilting circle and put a patch of something into something bigger than myself and hope at the end, it fit. I was a part of a greater thing and never fully myself, and for that I should be grateful, and willing to be led.
I learned that children were to be managed and indoctrinated, not trusted or encouraged. I learned that all authority were automatically right and good and true, that all pastors were safe and when they had affairs with married women they counseled, they should be forgiven, time and time again.
I learned how to tie an apron right, how to recite Bible verses like they were some sort of armor we’d need and that being religious meant you were always a soldier in a battle for this an army you never signed up for, for an entity you hoped would hear you while you were crying on your knees before bed about a lie you’d told, because otherwise you were going to hell.
I learned anxiety. I learned paranoia. I learned my own sexuality was dangerous when I got a teen Bible for my 13th birthday and it condemned kissing and dating and encouraged going to church together instead. I learned that dating a Christian man was my only option and to not be “unequally yolked”. I learned that my own natural self, my desires, my cravings were all “wordly” and needed to constantly be kept in check and lessened.
To them, Jezebel came from dirt. She was a rabidly animalistic woman on her knees, in bare feet and tattered clothes that revealed her body, looking for answers from louder voices than her own, that spoke in rigid ways tinged with shame and judgment. She needed cleansing, not just saving. She needed to repent, nothing of her body mind or spirit were holy until a man decided she could be, but only if she became a follower. Jezebel was wicked, othered, designed to be a cautionary tale to not break the line.
Femininity was quiet. It was infantile, soft spoken, with its legs crossed and hands folded gently on a lap. She belonged in a wooden pew in a room with no air conditioning in the August of Pennsylvania where men’s white shirts were soaked with sweat in blob-like shapes and their women fanned themselves with this week’s church bulletin, daintily, open containers to be filled and non-sentient and silent.
I grew up in that room staring frustratedly at a 6×6 felt banner ending in gold tassels that frayed evenly at the bottom, the silhouette of a pregnant woman in purple and a cornucopia filled with grapes beside her, in calligraphy below it, three words that terrified me:
“Bear Much Fruit.”
Most families in the church had 5 or more children, and the congregation was less than 150 people. We’d go there on Sundays and split off into adult Sunday school for about 90 minutes, then come upstairs and have coffee or tea or juice together and convene in the sanctuary another two hours. After this, we’d go across the street to the fellowship hall and eat a meal together and after that, go visit with other families at their homes. Sunday’s were for devotion, introspection, unquestioning reverence and solemn worship in as many ways silence or action could find it. At home on those days going to the mall or a movie or watching “secular” things were out of the question. While my friends from school were at arcades or theme parks, my brother and I were on the couch watching Word of Wisdom vhs tapes, compilations of Christian music videos blaring while my Stepmom subserviently did all the household chores alone.
On family roadtrips before we even printed out directions on mapquest, the first order of business was to always find a church closest to the hotel for our “vacation worship spot”. Car rides were hours long and the radio buzzed low on our laps, eliciting Billy Graham sermons of contemporary gospel music while my Stepmom would raise her hands to the air with her eyes closed, singing off key while I sat nauseous in the backseat trying to disappear.
It was bizarre to be immersed in two worlds with divorced parents. In my Mother’s house, her helicopter parenting rested on one side, hovering too close often because I was chronically ill, but also allowing us to do whatever most “regular kids” did including not force religion on us. Week to week, we whiplashed back to the stringent mindset of my Father’s home where my Stepmom and the cultism of her family seemed to become the dominant personality of my Dad’s identity, bringing us along with it.
I got in trouble a lot as a kid. My brother was passive, obedient, introverted, easy to convince and steadfast in his convictions that mirrored authority. I was a challenge. I convinced other kids to break the rules, test the boundaries, ask questions they never thought or realized they could ask. I always had thoughts no one else seemed to have, I didn’t understand why others were so content and happy. I always felt like a rattling cage and could never just rest comfortably where I was, no matter who I was with.
I kept trying to force it, for myself, for the pleasure it seemed to bring my parents when I acquiesced, for the boulders expectations of the church that sat disproportionately on my small shoulders. Still, it all kept coming back up my throat with a bad taste, a masking I had learned to adopt expertly over the years until I was a shell of myself and felt like a film screen of everyone else’s thoughts and ideas, just moving my legs and my jaw for me.
I was relentlessly curious, loved to argue, hated authority, and the more I felt stifled the more I pushed back against it. All of this of course was from repression, and gendered oppression, being pushed into a world that didn’t suit my personality but it also didn’t suit my femininity, which to this day, still feels more fluid like a puddle of oil on a pavement that exists in waves of light that change minute to minute. Like many things, traditionally and societally constructed femininity hasn’t really ever felt an easy fit to me. While I am a woman who loves being a woman, I wish in that womanhood it didn’t mean that femininity means what the brand looks like. It isn’t aesthetic for me, hasn’t ever been. It’s soulful and powerful and subversive as all hell. It’s a stormy spirit, maelstrom, a voice that breaks glass and wild and untamed in its stallion-like strides.
I was however, very lucky to have a brother in those square-peg moments. I had access to toys I was more interested in, clothes I exuberantly appropriated via hand-me-downs (because it saved my mom financial burden and it would have happened anyway), and his room which always felt fascinating to me in its design and colors and shapes.
Things felt more sturdy, more respectable, well crafted. There was a reverence I think I had then, because it was intrinsically tied to the respect of his gender as power, which I craved, along with a voice that was invited to be received almost always.
I envied the khakis and button shirts he got to wear on Sundays, the ways he could sit in a chair, the enjoyment he had from shopping and how encouraged he was to just exist. I was critiqued constantly. Told I was “bossy” by my father when I expressed my antithesis of opinions, reminded constantly to diminish myself by my Stepmom, and alienated by my own peer groups where many of the children in those Mennonite families didn’t even have a television and played with mostly wooden toys. They had horses and chickens and ponds on their property and forests to explore, but their lens into the actual world may as well have been microscopic. I wanted out before I even understood I was being boxed in.
Jezebel has always been there, laying below the surface, sap on her hands and in her hair from climbing trees, scraped knees from trying to do tricks on her bike like the boys, dirt under her nails from being taken to a park for a church retreat and finding a grove and evergreens to build a fort and read alone in.
Jezebel is the girl who ditched Sunday school and got four of her classmates to walk 2 miles to Sunoco to get cherry cokes and candy and got screamed at for being an embarrassment. She’s the one who started writing queer erotica in 9th grade, finding an audience secretly on Buzzfeed who foamed at the mouth for new lascivious chapters. Jezebel is the one who started getting crushes on all the dominant women of authority around her, that were intellectual and competent, because they were every subversion of what disgusted her and were clearly thriving.
Jezebel is raw. Her sexuality is celebrated and lives loudly. She’s the one who locked herself in a janitors closet at a church retreat with her Gameboy to avoid being proselytized to by colonizing missionaries. She’s the Adventure Bible gathering dust under a bed, feigning it was lost. She’s the girl who read Anais Nin on her first IPhone, then as many kinky books from Cleis Press and Queer erotica she could get her eyes on.
She’s the one who learned to go to Philly on the weekends and submerge herself in first Friday gallery nights, concerts, theater, and started smoking pot with Drag Queens at 2am. She learned agency and intentionality, surrounded herself with poets and artists and queer elders who’s condemned voices felt like honey to her ears. She learned to dance and grind and flirt in sweaty rooms with bass reverberating through her body to music she couldn’t freely blare in her own home. She started dating women secretly, being picked up and dropped off down the street from her house, still hiding what she had to like the precious part of her that was growing needed to stay safe.
She watched queer porn. Read Patti Smith and Jeanette Winterson and Andrea Gibson and Sonia Sanchez. She bought her first strapon from a leather store her first girlfriend took her to, then sex shops to look for toys and cuffs (shoutout to Jake’s in Philly and Pashional). She joined fetlife and started going to goth clubs and fetish balls, eventually dungeons and in those spaces, those mirrors of her childhood that were cracked, shattered.
Jezebel is queer as fuck. Her choices are her own. Her words are mine. Her agency is a lighthouse. As for religion, you can still find me pinned to a St Andrews cross some Sunday’s, where my own body is the pulpit and the only fruit inside of me, are the rabid fingers of a Butch finding the back of my throat to keep me open, keep me holy.
Jezebel Jett 
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