round-up: 1/11
resources, recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
If you haven’t heard, LA is very much on fire. Here are some photos taken from a great distance.
There is information available everywhere, but here is some consolidated for other folks who live in the area:
Emergency Alerts / Fire Updates:
NotifyLA here
Alert LA County emergency alerts here
Local emergency alert systems for municipalities in LA County here
Download the app “Watch Duty”
General Information:
The Los Angeles County Emergency Incident Response website has been activated. This website provides a mapping tool and lists real-time evacuation, shelter, and other information/resources related to the Palisades, Eaton, Franklin, and Hurst wildfires.
The City of LA has compiled a comprehensive list of resources as part of its emergency preparedness and response efforts. You can view those resources here.
Mutual Aid:
List of resources on shelter for people and animals, personal protective equipment, food, etc.: https://tiny.cc/malan-fire (or here)
Emotional Support and Counseling:
Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health: Offers emotional support, counseling, and therapy resources.
Disaster Distress Helpline: Call (800) 985-5990
More:
Here’s what else I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
Housekeeping:
It has been a really weird week amid this literal climate disaster. That’s all there is to say, really. I also started Prozac. Yippee.
I hope you’re all staying safe and healthy and happy.
What I’m reading:
“Babygirl” Starts a Conversation Every Gen X Woman Needs to Have
Sunday Scaries: How to Deal With the Stress of Returning to Work or School
Doing Nothing With Your Favorite People Is Really, Really Good for You
Quotations:
Research has shown that the higher women climbed the career ladder, the slimmer they were—particularly in the upper echelons of medicine, law and business. ‘There is absolutely no doubt that to be fat in our current society is a disadvantage and particularly if you are female,’ Andrew Hill, professor of medical psychology at Leeds University, told The Times of the findings—which he suggested reflected how aware professional women were of the prejudice towards those who are overweight.
It’s clear that—to reference the aforementioned sign—not only does size matter, but we are most definitely still judging by appearances. And in an era in which physical assets in the form of property might be hard to come by for those of a certain age (*ahem* Gen Z, millennials…), a ‘hot’ body has become our most attainable, err, physical asset.
Dr Mackert explains that ‘bodies became something that people should work upon’ and ‘established the idea that people could take their body shape into their own hands.’ Weight, from here on, became inextricably linked to self-discipline—a quality prized by society—and has left us unable to rest easy ever since.
Empathy is the vehicle. The vehicle where all amazing art gets done. That place of looking at the world, feeling deeply, and creating. Empathy is the seed of any really good artistic endeavor. It shapes how we live in the world, how we speak, how we move—that’s rare and powerful medicine.
Being humble is really important, and we need that, but being too humble means putting yourself in a lower place. True humility is knowing exactly who you are—no more and no less.
I’m an African-American woman, first and foremost. And that alone holds so much purpose. Every choice I make and everything I do, whether I like it or not, is part of that lineage.
Any good artist’s art transcends the art form.
The deeper our love can really become, the deeper the love can grow, and the deeper the gifts are.
I want my legacy to be a legacy of care and devotion. It doesn’t necessarily have to be tied to music even though that’s my specific way of injecting care and devotion into the world. I want to inspire people to love each other intensely and with deep presence.
Care about it. Cry about it. Tell them how you feel. And let them in. Allow it. Because your love grows most when it’s warm. And it’s warmer when it is held, listened to, and understood.
The argument that cis men are fundamentally different and other than trans men is also used to justify the creation of things like “women & trans” spaces, and event policies that permit anyone but cis men to attend. It creates a fundamental asymmetry, this way viewing the world, because it holds that any person who was assigned female at birth is inherently more trustworthy by default, and belongs in all gender minority spaces, whereas any person who was assigned male at birth must disavow that identity repeatedly, and convincingly enough, if they are to be accepted as anything but a privileged oppressor.
The fundamental logic driving the idea is transmisogyny, in other words — and it endangers trans women immensely. It also has the side effect of completely invalidating the identities of all transgender men, and cutting us off from a large, diverse population of other men who suffer from the same tangled nexus of racism, body-shaming, fatphobia, anti-effeminacy, homophobia, ableism, and gender repression as we do.
If manhood is seen as impossible to separate from cisness, then there’s no room for trans men’s masculinity to be recognized at all — or for any other man’s marginalizations to be recognized for the ways they interplay with his gender. And that’s a big problem for anyone who believes in gender liberation.
Gender liberation, in the end, is not a war between the good group and the bad. It is a collective struggle against the laws, cultural norms, and repressive state actions that restrict all people, and uses rigid gendered categories to keep us so restricted.
Gender dysphoria is not caused by having the “wrong” gendered brain for one’s body (the notion of “male” and “female” brains is a myth), nor is it a mental illness afflicting only trans people. Rather, gender dysphoria is a pretty sensible trauma response to society’s unrelenting and coercive gendering. All people are categorized as a gender, assigned rules, and threatened with becoming less of a person should they fail to measure up. This means that even cisgender people can experience the terror of feeling that they’ve failed to enact their gender correctly and make themselves socially acceptable— a sensation that often gets called “gender dysphoria.”
Cis people feel ill-at-ease in their bodies, and fail to measure up to gender normative standards too. That’s how artificially constructed and harshly enforced these standards really are.
Every man, I believe, grapples with the disjoint between their actual, complex human selves and the strong, built, stoic, powerful, masculine image that has been pushed upon us. And we fear living up to that standard because the consequences of that failure can be so harsh — these norms are quite violently imposed.
Many of the reasons that trans men do feel out-of-place within men’s spaces can be traced back to simple racism. So many of the conventional standards of manhood are in fact only white (and typically wealthy white) male standards. The ideal man’s body — buff, tall, and bearded, but without too much hair or fat in the “wrong” places — is really only attainable to a subset of people of European ancestry. Nonwhite men can often relate to one another in finding this ideal unattainable, be they trans or cis.
In almost no other times or places in the world has the “Man,” as most of us now know him, existed. Throughout the world, men have been physically affectionate with one another, worn showy outfits and makeup, gestured foppishly, ornamented themselves with frilly garments, or cried — and been celebrated in their masculinity for doing so. And so, when trans men fear that they cannot perform masculinity correctly, they’re mostly insecure about not aligning themselves enough with wealthy white supremacy.
One reason that men are so inescapably lonely is that they’re not putting in the work of getting vulnerable with other people, or offering others social support. This is not the fault of women. Nor is it caused by men’s inherent evil or selfishness. No, the norms of masculinity are simply so restricting, and the range of acceptable male behavior so thin, that scores and scores of men have no concept of how to meaningfully connect.
Men have been conditioned to believe that catering to other people, anticipating their needs, providing service to them, and bearing their wounds to them is something they are not capable of, or should do. The emotional withdrawal and artificial displays of strength that protect their manhood are also what makes it impossible for anyone to get close. You can’t start a club because that would mean admitting you are lonely. You can’t be nice to someone, because then they’ll know you need them.
The only way out of this prison is mortifying — it’s by debasing yourself enough to admit you have needs, that you can never be the all-powerful, disconnected man society expected you to be.
Conventional masculinity asks that we hand over all of our weakness — and with it, everything that allows us to love or be loved. It eats away at our needs, our unique dreams, the quirks of our bodies, our greatest fears, our squeals of happiness, and our culture — so that we might crush anyone who is still possessed of such frivolous, feminine, altogether human faults.
Part of the way we discover what we like in sex is by encountering what doesn’t make sense to us. One of my childhood friends discovered that she was gay in the most archetypal way: the first time she slept with her boyfriend, the absolute clarity that this was not what she wanted from sex illuminated for her what she in fact did want but had never felt able to consider. It’s sometimes more tolerable to experience a moment of repulsion and differentiation than an unexpected and intense desire. Many of us learn to identify what we like by first articulating what we don’t like.
When Piper described to me the carefully planned experiments of the rope engineers, I said aloud, unthinkingly: “That isn’t sex.” A moment later I was ashamed. After all, it’s axiomatic for social progressives that sex encompasses many different activities and orientations, even those that seem incomprehensible to those who don’t partake in them. I don’t need to describe why it’s useless or even dangerous to go around pointing at other people’s sex lives and dismissing them as not-sex. Yet it does us no good to let that get in the way of acknowledging that in our own bedrooms we do immediately recognize what sex is for us—and what isn’t. These questions reminded me of a recent experience of my own, with a woman I was dating last year. After we’d been seeing each other for a few months, I mused to her that I’d noticed she usually only wanted sex spontaneously: desire came over her suddenly, at moments I couldn’t predict. “Of course it’s spontaneous,” she replied. “Sometimes I just suddenly feel like it, the same way I suddenly feel hungry or tired.” I was surprised; I had never conceived of the sex I was having in this way. Personally, I thought of sex as a form of consistent communication, a way I expected us to relate almost every time we saw each other. I knew in theory that arousal can be private and spontaneous, unprovoked by a direct desire or even a fantasy, but I suppose, because I seldom felt it that way, I forgot about this possibility. She was also surprised. For her, this spontaneous desire was not only normal but presumably universal, just the way that the hiking-lover had once presumed that other people enjoyed sex in the same way they enjoyed hiking or other shared pastimes. I felt so destabilized when she described this orientation toward sex that I had trouble making sense of my own reaction. Though I knew it was unfair, part of me protested her version of sex as impersonal; by instinct I worried that what she proposed wasn’t really sex for me.
I can’t control
the vanishing
of beesbut I can control
the honey I swallow
to soothe
the vocal cords
Bless me, O holy whoever, for I’d give
anything to be that battered melon
in all its shattered softness,
red and pulpy and giving to wherever,
whatever she wants, if she’d have me:
I’d be the piece, pinched and lifted
toward her mouth, I’d be the half-eaten
wedge next to the arch of her foot,
I’d be the pink juice puddling
the floor beneath her smooth, perfect knee—
whoever you are, if you’re out there,
make me the hole her thumb carves
in the fruit’s fibrous flesh, make me
that sacrosanct space, let me wet,
let me woman, let me be
broken open and devoured.
Persephone knew a thing or two about bitterness even before she was a dead girl walking. It’s one thing to be dragged into hell; it’s another to live with your mother humming in your blood and bone—to be born with a wound that her want shines through.
I started thinking about other ways we can lose the thread of our own stories. That’s a pretty universal feeling, the sense that the world doesn’t see us the way we want to be seen, and it can be tricky figuring out a way through that. At a minimum, this is something people tend to run into at times of major transitions, like when we graduate from college and are trying to figure out how to be an adult in the world. Midlife is another big time for this. At that point, a lot of people look around and see a chasm between where they are and where they expected to be.
Two of the most striking things I’ve learned about publishing while covering the business are a) how hard it is to get a book published in the first place, and b) if you do manage to get that far, how incredibly difficult it is to get a book to take off. The odds are long every step of the way. So when I sat down to write, I just tried to enjoy the process. That way, if the book never got further than my own laptop, I still would have had fun doing it.
Worrying is like wishing for something you don’t want to happen.
I think in LA, ‘f*ck’ is a verb. It’s a noun. It is an adjective. It’s natural in my language. Since having children, I’ve had to really watch myself. People like to say that Valley Girls say ‘like.’ I think we say ‘f*ck’ as much as ‘like.’
I’ve been a certified group fitness instructor and competitive powerlifter who lost a third of my body weight a decade ago in large part from the strength training, cardio, and yoga I still do multiple times per week, but I’ll still tell you: You don’t have to do all that to be An Exerciser. You do not have to do the shit I do or anyone does. You can just do something, anything, just a little bit, and it all counts.
If you’re just dipping your toes into the exercise waters again or for the first time, please do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Do not let the 75 Hard freaks make you feel like that’s what exercise is. Get off of fitness social media, honestly, at least for January. If the very idea of exercise stresses you out, just take it back to basics and think of the word movement instead. That’s all it is. Just rebrand it. There are no rules. Whatever works.
In a world where irony is king and it’s cool not to try, there are fewer acts more radical than unadulterated earnestness. Carelessness is on the rise, as seen in our situationships, unchecked shopping addictions, and sorry-not-sorry mentalities. There is a war on sincerity.
Along with weight loss usually comes the decision to completely quit and restrict a food or food group. How many people do you know that are trying to cut out sugar? Probably quite a few. And with this goal comes the inevitable binge that follows after a few days from throwing out all the desserts and snacks from the fridge, pantry, or freezer. I have also written about the Last Supper effect, which occurs before the diet begins, and many folks will often overeat or binge because they are anticipating a period of dietary restriction. There is also the scarcity effect, which occurs when you see something that is rare, desirable, or expensive, and your subconscious mind makes you think about having it more than if you saw something that was abundant.
We seem to be on a continuing hamster wheel. How many times have any of us gone to a fitness class or told ourselves we’re going to start running since everyone else seems to be doing it? Then, when we start, we realize that we don’t actually enjoy this, and we stop doing it altogether. We blame ourselves for the lack of discipline since the problem is clearly us, and we feel guilty about not getting in any movement. So, we will start our fitness journey in the new year. Endless wheel.
The good MFA programs will often pay you, not the other way around, so in such cases it's not a waste of money. For me it wasn't a waste of time either. It's nice to be around a cohort of people who are as delusional as you are and who believe in the importance of literary fiction. It's nice to win the approval of a few well-known authors, if possible. It's nice to be forced to be critical and to force others to be critical of you. Do many people still care about the MFAs? I think the general criticism of them is stuck in the 1980s, when Gordon Lish's MFA-inflected style had become de rigeur in all the big magazines and people were worried about the general influence of this style. But now no one reads fiction in the magazines anyway. When I got my MFA I didn't have the sense that there was a preferred way of writing among my professors or fellow students. If MFAs are in any way an impediment to the writing of good fiction, this is dwarfed a hundred times over by the problems of general illiteracy and the ideological tendencies of publishers and the reading public. So I don't think anyone should worry about MFAs.
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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