the Shackle Report

“The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” by Maggie Cutler ran as a biweekly (and later a monthly) column from November, 1999 through January, 2002 in the Web-based literary magazine (and subsequent dating service) nerve.com. The column’s premise was that Kitty, like the rest of America, could not pry sex and politics apart.

It was the height of the dot.com bubble. Kitty was spending her days trading online in the loft she shared with her documentary filmmaking husband, Max. At lunchtime, while cruising news and gossip sites, she would get so excited, she’d have to lie down on her red plush couch and fantasize graphically about being as close to power as a girl can be, which was usually closer than girls who have all their clothes on can ever get.

The column also ran in Nerve Magazine, nerve.com’s shortlived foray into print. When HBO made a documentary pilot about nerve.com, it included a two minute animated short starring Kitty as drawn by Ward Sutton, whose strip, Sutton Impact, is now widely syndicated. His version of Kitty appears in her logos. HBO’s pilot aired under the title, “Downloading Sex,” and was played frequently during the hours of the night when children and snakes are presumed to be asleep.

Kitty began her career at the height of Monicagate. Republican hypocrisy on the subject of fucking underlings was either hilarious or spikes-in-your-head-like, depending on your own personal way of handlng government duplicity.

Many people thought the column was simply pornographic, only I was never one of them. Kitty got me hot, but not in that way. All 40 some-odd of the Kitty columns were extensively researched via Nexis, and a surprising amount of the erotic content in them was extracted or extrapolated from the way media were framing events. The image of Dick Cheney as an octopus, for example, a fleshopod with slimy, over-active tentacles, came straight off of CNN. John Ashcroft’s ties were big and phallic enough to frighten horses without any help from me, and women who had any proximity to powerful men — whether as wives, daughters or appointees, were treated to endless speculation as to their sexual preferences. I saw sex being used by the mass media as a distraction from serious issues, and I was trying to turn that around.

Then, after 9-11, many people called a moratorium on humor. Kitty’s fantasy about Osama bin Laden, for example, was decreed “offensive” — and was published carrying a disclaimer by several editors at nerve. It didn’t seem to matter that Kitty fantasized capturing Osama after she had her way with him; to them she had stepped over the enemy line just by imagining him as human. Clearly, the terrorists had won.

For that, and various other reasons, the “fit” for Ms. Lyons at nerve.com was no longer juicy, and, (although all the columns are archived there, still accessible to members) she went into exile, surfacing only briefly in a theatrical review entitled “No Exit Strategy,” directed by Steve Williford at Makor in the pre-election fall of 2004, in which Cynthia Mace brought Kitty’s Ashcroft fantasy to a nightly pitch of ecstasy.

I’m not entirely sure why I’m bringing Kitty back at this particular moment. These are not sexy times, although sex seems to remain at the top of the political agenda, albeit in the topmost half of the missionary position. But I think it’s because Kitty is so clever at turning her pain and her helplessness into her pleasure — however momentarily or foolishly— that I still find her touching and germane.

I will gradually put selected columns from my archive up online in clumps of three or four. I’m grouping them by the type of her imaginary playmates rather than by chronology. The new episodes in Kitty’s life will appear irregularly in the main pages of the Shackle Report under the banner “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa.”

— M. C.

Click here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive index

Click here for the new column, “Kitty Lyons Claws the Sofa”

Kitty Lyons, the political Wankette whose “Secret Life” ran bimonthly at www.nerve.com between Monicagate and the Dawn of the Age of Terror, gets back in touch with herself.

Despite his rugged features and rock-hard self-confidence, I’d never been turned on by my Secretary of Defense. People who lose wars by mistake or torture people on purpose tend to creep me out.

On the other hand, if there’s anything I adore in a hooker-upper, it’s staying power, and Donald H. Rumsfeld, no matter how many generals or experts attack him, just lasts and lasts— and lasts, beating his little drum long after all the toy soldiers have toppled over and been buried in tiny, flag-wrapped coffins.

“I’m going to call you Drummy,” I promise him, even though we haven’t yet met. I’m supposed to have lunch with my friend Xian, pronounced “Jane,” which her name used to be until she adopted a Chinese orphan and began studying Mandarin, marketing and masters of tai ch’i. But now that she’s got what I call the Tao jones, she’s been cancelling every other date with me to seek enlightenment, so forget her. I’m going to lunch with Drummy instead, and try to crack his rocky façade here in my very own fold-out interrogation room.

My plan of attack? When approaching a stony man, get stoned, I say. I drop half a tab of Ecstasy and drive my unarmored jeep over to a field office in the Green Zone where Drummy is phoning generals. “All we need to subdue a popular uprising or civil war is a small, light and flexible military — Right?” he asks, not at all rhetorically. He’s on his twentieth “No” response, but my man so thrives on the world’s contempt that he’s practically glowing, or maybe that’s the Ecstasy kicking in. Anyway, it is at this receptive moment that I burst into the room like a SCUD, wearing nothing but a pair of army boots and a smile that says, “Hello Sailor.”

I project the concept “sailor” because he started out as a Navy pilot; but he doesn’t get it.

He stands there, large, heavy and stiff. In every part.

“Small, light and flexible,” I cry, “That’s me! Show me your most stubborn and sectarian insurgency and I’ll quell it with my quagmire.”

I guess I was expecting him to say, as he has before, “Put your head down, do the best job possible, let the flak pass, and work towards those goals.” But instead he says, “Oh my goodness gracious,” and throws up his hands.

Recalling the expression of joy on his face last April in Dollywood when he shared a stage with the great mammarian I advance on his cupped palms and dock my suddenly very large and perfectly formed (yet silicone-free) breasts in them.

Left, right.

“Why don’t you tweak reality to suit your agenda?” I suggest, because I know that this is something he loves to do, and, surprise, surprise, he starts tweaking me like mad.

The feel of his make-believe fingers on my imaginary nipples is cruel, but he’s so helpless and pitiful in his obsessive need, that phantasmagoric rockets flare through my body.

He spreads his hands and pushes my flesh all together until neither of us can tell if these things in his hands are breasts, buttocks, thighs, piles of naked terrorist suspects or Shi’ite sand dunes towards which scads of tactical nukes are hurtling.

There’s definitely an invasion. This time, with massive force, as if he’d learned something. As if. But not. He’ll never!

Despair reduces me to a crack, a swell and a sigh, and another sigh, on and on, until I’m nothing but the moan of a girl who, dying in a losing war, thinks she sees paradise, because here I am, rutting a druggy night away in Dollywood or Iraq or even Iran with a man who likes to dissociate even more than I do.

And after, when I wonder aloud how my emotional life suddenly got so complicated, he recites a Taoist poem he wrote that makes all of Xian’s Tai Ch’i masters seem like amateurs:

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know, and how you got mixed up with me, Kitty, is one of those.”

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"Brownnosing Michael"

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(This is the current column)

Click here for the history of Kitty’s confessions of yesteryear, and here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive…

© Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.

Kitty Lyons, the political Wankette whose “Secret Life” ran bimonthly at www.nerve.com between Monicagate and the Dawn of the Age of Terror, gets back in touch with herself.

My girlfriend Mandy came by with her Blackberry. This was back when she thought that Blackberry’s parent company might lose its patent fight and go dark. She was so frantic, you’d have thought that the FDA had banned Ativan.

I hadn’t seen Mandy since she gave up performance art for public relations, and I’ve got to say corporate has done wonders for her wardrobe. If a girl is going to smear herself all over with something, IMHO Prada beats pudding. I was trying to deliver this compliment tactfully, but Mandy kept typing on her Device with her thumbs, so that my flattery fell on deaf eyes. I finally understood why they call them Crackberries.

Seeing how addicted she was, I insisted that she grant me custody of her toy for the rest of her visit. I stuck it in my pocket and we went to sit on my sofa. “Now we can really talk,” I said, which is the last thing I remember for the next half hour.

Because what happened was that (bzzzzz) her Crack-thing began to vibrate almost immediately against mine, and it felt so good that I started to want a job in public relations myself.

The person who would need my services, I realized, would be Michael Brown. He’s the guy who got appointed to head FEMA because he was friends of a friend of President Bush, who called him “Brownie” and thanked him for doing “a heckuva job” in New Orleans, once it was clear that he totally hadn’t. (Bzzzzzz.)

Brownie has recently started a disaster-preparedness consulting firm, “Michael D. Brown LLC,” based in Boulder., CO. For money, he’ll help you learn from his mistakes. I imagined that he has made so many mistakes that his lessons last for weeks, which will cost clients an arm and a leg, enabling him to buy me a Bzzzzzberry.

What I would do for Brownie, I decided, was to show the world that he wasn’t as incompetent as everyone first thought. He was just a little unfocused and easily intimidated by superiors and eager to pass the buck. And, you know, who isn’t? So I went to see him out in Boulder, wearing what Mandy had on, (only it fit even better on me), and, (bzzzzzz) I purred at him, “Browwwwwnie luv, everyone in D.C. saw the tape where you tell the President about the levees giving way during hurricane Katrina, proving that you were only following his lead when you responded to the flood with callow calm (bzzzzz), but millions of ordinary Americans may have missed that clip. So I’d like to package it into a porno DVD and get your vindication out to, like, well, everybody. Here, take a look.” And I pop my disc into his computer.

We lean back on his office couch and start taking notes in each other’s laps while the story unfolds. It is about a civil engineer who is hung like one of those Arabian steeds Brownie used to rep, and the sort of lady newscaster who knew that people were trapped in the Astrodome before the White House did (only this newscaster has implants). And the engineer is now demonstrating with his penis how the levees should have been reinforced with many big, pounding rivets.

The newscaster and I are panting in time to his demonstration and Brownie is starting to get that “Anything specific I should do or tweak?” look of his, when all of a sudden the newscaster cries “It’s giving way! The levee is giving waaaaay!” and we all thrash about screaming as if we’re washing out to sea in a toxic surge, surrounded by refrigerators and hapless pets, while the DVD cuts to the shot I inserted of the White House, and Brownie’s warning call.

“See?” I tell him afterwards. “Now every Christian family, Hasid and feminist sex scholar in America will know that your name has been cleared.”

And because I have done him such a big favor, and because, as a beneficiary of cronyism he believes so strongly in rewarding his intimates, he hires me on the spot.

Click here for previous column,
"The Supreme Courtship of Sammy Alito"

Click here for next column,
"Kitty Lyons Fires Rumsfeld…Up"

Click here for the history of Kitty’s confessions of yesteryear, and here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive…

© Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.

Kitty Lyons, the political Wankette whose “Secret Life” ran bimonthly at www.nerve.com between Monicagate and the Dawn of the Age of Terror, gets back in touch with herself and files this report. . .

I just wanked off to the video stream of the Alito hearings. Evidently, I, Kitty Lyons, am back in the figurative saddle.

As you may recall, I never had any trouble getting off on the news back in the Clinton years, or as they seem now in the midst of all this Bush, Bush, Bush, the Clinton MINUTES. News sex was so much better before politics started attacking sex pre-emptively.

Back then I was still married to Max, and he was still trying to become king of The New Documentary (in which, instead of being forced to admire how stoicly poor the poor are, you get to watch big companies you’re powerless to control being humiliated). Max would disagree, but I blame The New Documentary for ruining our marriage, because, in an effort to become nearly-famous like that guy who made “Super Size Me,” Max decided to drink nothing but Starbucks double lattes for a month. He not only blew up like a blimp, but also became mean. And my shrink wouldn’t let me blame either the abusiveness OR his affair with his camera-girl-woman-person on Starbucks. She (shrink) insisted that I hold him personally responsible, which, although it chewed up my heart like a dog toy, I eventually did.

The upshot of the divorce was that I got the loft, but without anything in it. So I had to get a new sofa and bid goodbye to the old red one that I used to wank off on while contemplating Frank Rich and Jesse Helms and Janet Reno . I went with a Lignet Rosset, because it looks very Wallpaper Magazine and folds out into a bed so I can subdivide, and live parasitically off the renters. Not exactly hard times, but the point is: My libido has been huddled in some undisclosed location ever since we re-attacked Iraq. It’s just so pathetic being divorced, American and old enough to remember Iran-Contra, my borders haven’t been feeling very open.

But there I was, C-Spanning Alito, wondering if I should go into business smuggling morning-after pills (I foresee numerous trips to France disguised as a tourist) when for reasons unclear to me, Mrs. Alito started to cry. I mean, she was crying HARD. Crying ON CAMERA, just like Walter Mondale did in ’72 or Pat Schroder in ’88. And then it hit me: Mrs. Alito is the sort of person who makes a lot of noise in bed.

Which means that if I slept with Sammy Alito, he’d let me make noise in bed too. He wouldn’t say “Shhhh, SHHH!!!” like that guy I dated just after the divorce. And he wouldn’t grab his camera and run out of the house like Max did whenever I started sniffling about his camera-girl-woman-person-twit-bitch. I could do so much more than cry with Sammy. I could sob and wail and beat the mattress, and touch myself under the duvet, and Sammy wouldn’t mind. He wouldn’t care if the reason I was crying was that his skin felt firm yet flabby at the same time. Or that I could taste the sweat on his Botoxic forhead. He wouldn’t care if I was crying because a bunch of judges were about to put women back in thrall to biology, or force me, Kitty Lyons, to get stuck raising Max’s baby if I had happened to have been pregnant when our marriage went South. No, here was a guy who would hold you, make love to you, say anything you wanted to hear, and just not care how hard you wept! He had a wall around him so thick I felt protected by it, sealed off, knowing he will never even try to understand what I feel. And I finally understood what total privacy really means, and I realized that with him, I will have it. And I came. And I cried.

Click here for next column,
"Brownnosing Michael"

Click here for the history of Kitty’s confessions of yesteryear, and here for “The Secret Life of Kitty Lyons” archive…

© Maggie Cutler all rights reserved.