Y’all are a well-adjusted group. In my brief but probing survey, the overwhelming majority – as in all but like two of you -- reported that your families taught you to use biologically accurate terms for genitalia, that your schools re-enforced this education, and that growing up you had an accepting, almost blasé understanding of that largely unseen spot between your legs. What’s more, most of you claimed to have healthy relationships with your genitalia now. In the surveys almost everyone claimed to be, if not grateful then at least unconcerned with this – the most taboo part of the body, one of the greatest taboos in our culture.

 

The results of the survey were, in a word: boring. I’m not trying to judge. That would be antithetical to everything this class is trying to accomplish. And I should say that not everyone returned a form to me, and more significantly, no one identifying as trans responded.

 

There’s so much you don’t know until you see yourself through another’s eyes. How can you know what other people are saying, thinking, doing unless you ask?

 

My response to the same survey would and could and one day might fill a book. I am fascinated by genitalia, and always have been. Think of all the people you know. No, think of every person you’ve ever met. Imagine their faces. Now think what number of those people whose genitals you have seen. But all of those people have genitals. All of us in this room have them. Look around you. Beneath your smiling, hopefully satisfied faces, beneath your clavicle and ribs and stomachs, between your hips and above your thighs is the very center of your body, the center of your being, the place where all life starts and yet is in our culture so seldomly seen or talked about unless something is really wrong.

 

I come from a dirty bunch. Growing up, I was allowed to swear as visciously as I wanted. Everyone around me had a foul mouth and I struggled to keep up. Swear words became abstractions, something divorced from the vulgar realities that were their referrants. I can’t remember the first time I was called a “cunt” nor who it was that first hurled it at me. It could have been anyone in my family. By the time I was ten I shrugged it off like anything else. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized that it was the Queen Mother of words, all Shock and Awe, that if you said it in the wrong or right place, people would stop dead, they would look at you differently. It was more powerful than delivering a cold slap across the face.

 

Of our actual genitals we said very little. If we did for some reason speak of these parts, it was always as a joke or an insult and was always in some weird Sicilian slang that I’m not sure is real or something my family made up. Peshota, we called it, and its opposite: the peshadelia. Of this opposite we had what seemed like a hundred different words. And we talked about them constantly. My mother and aunts were all fat Italian women who loved to eat and laugh and insult their husbands. They sang songs about penises. I thought every family was like this.

 

My cousins and I used to play dirty scrabble. We would make lists of synonyms for mostly male but sometimes female genitalia. (Guess which list was longer.) In all of our raunchy linguistic enterprises we came to the inevitable thesis, that all the best words in the world began the letter P. It was a back alley of Sesame Street kind of epiphany and we were thrilled.

 

Which brings me to my two favorite words that begin the letter P. Pasta and putana. Though all of you know what the first word means and I’m sure all of you can guess at the second – I will explain. Growing my Nona, or grandmother, called me by two names. Gugunella, which means littke chickpea, or putanna, which means whore. She didn’t call me one when I was good and the other when I was bad. They were both terms of endearment of equal affection and love. Nona lived next door to me my whole life until I was 18, away at college, and she died. We loved each other fiercely though I don’t remember ever saying those words: I love you. I do remember she fed me. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and discover that my mother wasn’t there. In a terror, I would run across the yard to Nona’s house. It could be three o’clock in the morning and she would be awake and probably cooking. She would open her door to me as though it were perfectly normal for an eight-year-old to be standing on her doorstep, in a nightgown and barefoot, at midnight. She never asked what was going on. She just served me something to eat.

 

Sometimes she would bite me. On the shoulder or the arm. Sometimes she would bite her own hand when she was lost in a fantasy of love or rage. Both came easily to her, as they do for me.

 

What is it about love that makes us want to eat? Biologically, the beginning of romantic love is attended by feelings of physical sickness. Your stomach aches, you shake, you’re queasy. The thought of food makes you nauseous. Thankfully this phase if brief and is followed by two most important parts of any romantic relationship: sex and food. Scientists have proven that once the flu-like symptoms of infatuation pass, that our metabolisms literally slow down as the business of real love sets in. This is because the body is preparing itself for struggles of breeding, parenting, building a home, foraging for survival. An evolutionary trick that remains with us today whether our love is headed towards to reproduction or not. Think about it. How many of you have discovered that in the first month of a new relationship you’ve lost weight only to discover six months later you’ve gained it back plus more.

 

We love and we eat together but it’s not simply about a hunger for food. Though breaking bread is certainly important. Ritualistic. Comforting. Nurturing. All that. But I’m talking about love making you want to consume someone else. Wanting another person in your mouth. Wanting to lick them. Wanting to bite them. Wanting to feel their flesh in between your teeth. Wanting to taste how warm or cool or wet or dry or salty or bitter or buttery or sweet  -- though, I have had my fair share of body parts in my mouth and not one of them has ever been sweet. I don’t how that trope got started, probably by poets, or some other fool going around romanticizing a thing that perfect as it is. My body, your body, our bodies, are salty. And salty tastes good.  

 

How’s the macaroni? Is it good? Good. I’m not going to be happy unless you’re all eating.

 

Where was I? Yes, the inherent cannibalism of intimacy. The ravenous dentata of love. Which brings me to our main course. Pasta Puttanesca. (notice the two P’s. Don’t worry. There’s one more.) So named by the raunchy, ribald, people, my people, the people I’ve been telling you about. The Italians. The legend has it, that the ladies of the evening were not in fact night workers but took their clients to their beds during the day while their husbands were at work. Fucking for a living can be exhausting and no doubt time consuming. But like all good Guinea wives since time immemorial, like my mother and step-mother and grandmother and aunts, it didn’t matter if you had a job, what job you had or how many hours you worked; it doesn’t matter if you work longer and harder than your husband. There is one and only one expectation of an Italian wife and that is to have a hot meal on the table waiting when the man comes home. The traditional tomato sauce takes over three hours to make not counting prep time, and who has time for that when there’s more important, more lucrative, or more stimulating work to be done? This pasta that you’re all eating now takes about an hour and half to make including prep. So the putans could whip it up quickly but pretend for their hungry husband’s sakes that they were slaving all day in the kitchen. Clever, eh?

 

That’s one theory. I have another.

 

The secret ingredient is sardines, a salty, oily little fish with a pungent odor and a distinctive taste. Notice the fusille. Any macaroni would be fine. Penne. Linguini. But the recipe always calls for the kinky curls of fusille. The connotation is as obvious. Bringing me to my last word of the day: can you guess what it is?