round-up: 2/16
reading recs, quotations, & tweets
Happy Friday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Housekeeping:
I’m getting back into granola. Highly recommend.
I am obsessed with this profile of Kristen Stewart. Put the link through here to read it for free.
If I had more money, I would buy these earrings, and also these, an these shorts, and this top, and this tea.
What I’m reading:
For the First Time in More Than 20 Years, Copyrighted Works Will Enter the Public Domain
Psst. Turns out 80% of books published in 1924-1963 are secretly in the public domain.
Everything published in “the greatest year for books ever” is now in the public domain.
Quotations:
How depraved the American population are to find any sense of community, closeness, or entertainment at bright-lit, plague-disease-ridden, feudalistic, corny sports event. I can’t see the light at the end, but I pray my children forge it out of fire. It’s dark, but I’ll still see it through.
There is something inherently enraging about a thin, white, cisgendered influencer who makes her money off occasional brand deals, embodying the hegemonic standard of beauty and trying to sell it to everyone else. It’s natural, and probably healthy, for people to release the pressure valve. Plus, no one is immune to the charms of shit-talking — finally meeting the person that everyone else is obsessed with and lamenting with your friend about how they’re actually kind of boring is a sacred moment I wouldn’t want to take from anyone.
And what if we stopped demonizing jealousy? What if it was okay to see a girl and be like, wow, I hate her for some reason I haven’t decided yet. What if we stopped making caricatures of each other, instead allowing our caveman brains to process their rage in spaces like the text thread with a close friend or a journal or a boxing class?
We expect so much from women. So few boundaries, especially when it comes to our pain and our personal lives. I do not owe the world every inch of my “truth”—i.e. all my psyche and my life—at every moment. Who expects this of their favorite male author?
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Overcoming pain
What is your greatest fear?
Pain
I don’t have any kids, but I imagine that “writing a book” is right up there with “having a kid” in the pantheon of things that have the biggest gap between how much you care about them and how much the rest of the world cares about them. To you, the person who has written the book, its publication feels like an epic event—the triumphant culmination of years of work! A landmark spectacle! Everyone gather round and celebrate this historic moment in intellectual history! And to everyone else in the world, it feels like Tuesday. “Hey—congrats,” the rest of the world might say, and then go get lunch.
When I was going through it, having people just reflect back to me what they were hearing from me, just really neutrally [meant a lot.] I remember complaining about a situation in a Facebook group and having a woman reply, “Oh, well, then he must also be controlling in these other ways.” I was like, “How did you know?” She’s like, “That’s a classic abuse cycle.” I had never thought of it like that because I was in a good marriage, and I was not being abused. I wasn’t, but there are still abusive cycles people can get into. just having that reflected back on me felt like cold water to the face in a way that made me reevaluate the stories I was telling myself.
I think you can still love a person and divorce them, you can still care for a person and divorce them. I don’t think they always have to be a narcissist. I hate it when people are like, “My ex is a narcissist.” I understand that making somebody into a villain can be helpful, but it’s also like you don’t have to make somebody into a villain to advocate for your own happiness. You can just say, “I love you and I deeply care for you, but you are not making me happy, and you are also not happy.” Because if you’re in a relationship and one person isn’t happy, that is not a happy relationship.
Of course you’re into the institution [of marriage], it benefits you and will always benefit you, even if your partner is miserable. But you need to ask yourself how much of your life is built on the misery of your partner. I think that that is a really hard question for cis/het men to ask themselves. Then they’re like, “Oh no, I’m the victim, and it’s so hard.” It’s like, “No, statistically you’re still doing fine, so take a breath, get a therapist, figure it out like the rest of us have.”
I am not afraid of pain and you know it. It is almost inherent to my being, although I confess that I suffered, and a great deal, when you cheated on me, every time you did it, not just with my sister but with so many other women. How did they let themselves be fooled by you? You believe I was furious about Cristina, but today I confess that it wasn’t because of her. It was because of me and you. First of all because of me, since I’ve never been able to understand what you looked and look for, what they give you that I couldn’t. Let’s not fool ourselves, Diego, I gave you everything that is humanly possible to offer and we both know that. But still, how the hell do you manage to seduce so many women when you’re such an ugly son of a bitch?
-Frida Kahlo
I’m writing to let you know I’m releasing you, I’m amputating you. Be happy and never seek me again. I don’t want to hear from you, I don’t want you to hear from me. If there is anything I’d enjoy before I die, it’d be not having to see your fucking horrible bastard face wandering around my garden.
-Frida Kahlo
We're just go, go, go, go, go. And that a lot of times, I mean, I think we should take downtime just to take downtime, not because it will make us more productive or make us do greater work, but it also will do that. And so I mean, I've experienced it. It really does make a difference.
Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.
-Milan Kundera
The fundamental misconception about sex in our era, I think, is that it lives in the arena of the self. We are so attached to the hard-won ownership of our bodies, the equivalence between our bodies and our sovereignty, that we imagine sex as something that our conception of our self provides for and feeds on, in turns. We think we need to feel great about ourselves to have sex. We think we need to feel sexy. We worship and enjoy those forms of sex that are grounded in independence and the bestowal of a private desire onto another person. We know that sex is a portal to intimacy and connection, but we imagine that this portal is structured like the proverbial oxygen mask: a situation in which we can only trust, love, connect with others once we have done all this (whatever that means) with ourselves.
I loved Poor Things, but I found in it an anemic version of feminism, one that suggests a glorious, sexy harmony of liberated women espousing the ideas of the men who made them.
[Poor Things] is a large social commentary on women’s liberation, which is a bit problematic in that they seem to equate sexual libration with female liberation and I’m not sure that’s right.
“Every story men love to tell,” Rebecca Solnit once told me in a whisper, before we did an event together, “is Pygmalion.” She was being quippy. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.
Friendship used to be seen as one of the most important parts of life. Going back to the sixth century, there were official church ceremonies to turn friends into sworn brothers, who might go on to be buried together instead of with their wives. In letters between same-sex friends in the 18th and 19th centuries, friends were utterly effusive about each other.
This kind of centering of friendship happened in periods of history when marriage was not the premier emotional relationship in a person’s life. The classics scholar Craig Williams writes that Romans didn’t use terms like “just friends” or “more than friends” to refer to spouses because “the implicit devaluation of friendly as opposed to romantic or married love would have struck most Romans as perverse.” At that time, he asks, “what could be more than friendship?”
People in the U.S. and Western Europe started internalizing the idea that friendship is a peripheral relationship when two historical trends converged around the turn of the 20th century: same-sex intimacy became suspect, and marriage started to consume people’s emotional lives. Once the identity category of homosexuality emerged—along with a stigma attached to it—it was no longer innocent for same-sex friends to swoon over each other. And around the same time, expectations for marriage ballooned.
A couple years ago, I’d attended a string of weddings and noticed that, again and again, the spouses-to-be referred to each other as best friends. Even the officiants would refer to the spouses as each other’s best friends. That might seem unremarkable—it’s so common today for romantic partners to refer to each other this (see the Obamas). But there was something striking about hearing people use that term at their weddings, when there was a maid of honor or best man standing right next to the couple. I felt like I was watching best friends get publicly demoted. If you have a spouse, they’re already assumed to be the most important person in your life, so I was curious about why many people feel compelled to have a spouse grab the top title in the friendship category, too.
As I alluded to in response to your first question, people have not always thought their spouse would also be the person they’re most emotionally connected to. Before the late 18th century, American and Western European marriages were pragmatic unions that brought together families and finances. Love was possible within marriage, but it definitely wasn’t a requirement. Marriage was also not between equals — wives were their husband’s property. It’s kind of hard to feel that someone you own or who owns you is your best friend. So it’s not much of a surprise that people found a great deal of intimacy from their same-sex friendships.
By the late 19th century, love was widely seen as a necessity to marry. In recent decades Americans have ratcheted up their expectations of marriage even further. We now demand not only love and companionship but also, we want a spouse to fulfill all of our deepest psychological needs. The consequence of all these expectations is that couples cocoon in their relationships and invest less in other areas of life and relationships, compared to those who are unmarried. Sociologists describe marriage as a “greedy institution” — it saps up people’s time and energy. Friendship loses out and is treated as a nice-to-have but not a need-to-have.
There’s good reason to think that these sorts of friendships must be a product of childhood. There are specific conditions that foster close relationships, and they’re pretty much effortless to get in kids’ friendships. These conditions, or three “magic ingredients,” as Lisa Diamond, who’s a psychology professor at the University of Utah, calls it, are: time, togetherness, and touch. As a kid, I spent whole days at my friends’ houses for sleepovers and in camp, would braid my friends’ hair or we’d sit on benches in a line to form a massage train. (Boys, I realize, don’t generally have the latitude to be so touchy, other than maybe rough-housing.) In college, my friends and I would shoot the shit in the grubby common space in our dorms.
When friends no longer see each other all day in school or live next door to each other but instead slot each other into little GCal openings, it’s hard to get time and togetherness. And whatever touch kids enjoyed in friendship, it tends to get channeled almost exclusively into romantic relationships. (I write about this shift as we age in a piece published last year for The Atlantic. It’s about what adults can learn from kids’ friendships.)
Boston marriages are a kind of relationship between women that came about in the late 19th century. These women would live together and support each other, and in doing so, were freed from marriage to a man. I write in the book about one of these pairs: Lucy Diggs Slowe, the dean of women at Howard University, and Mary Burrill, a teacher and playwright. The women lived together for 15 years. Slowe’s friends would write letters to her with a mention to send their “love to Ms. Burrill.” After Slowe’s death in 1937, Howard’s registrar directed an obituary writer to Burrill, noting that she “has been a lifetime friend and companion of Miss Slowe and I am sure that there is no one who knows her life better than she.”
Here's where the delicate part comes in: did women in Boston marriages like Slowe and Burrill have sex? There’s no doubt that some women in Boston marriages did. Scholars have found evidence of sexual relationships between some same-sex pairs. We should absolutely acknowledge these cases, especially because, for a long time, mentions of sex between people of the same gender were deliberately erased from the historical record.
It becomes clear that today’s discrete categories and hierarchies aren’t innate or universal. Marriage doesn’t have to rank above friendship. Love doesn’t automatically involve lust. Romantic and platonic feelings aren’t always easy to distinguish.
The idea of transitioning is endlessly seductive and endlessly terrifying.
I felt and continue to feel largely ambivalent about the size of my body. This feels like a major win after three decades of warfare waged on my self-worth by a world that actively hates the sight and existence of fat people.
I felt a version of the intense shame that often comes with a Type-2 diabetes diagnosis. A feeling of lousiness. A feeling of self-revulsion for having “made bad lifestyle choices.” As if your metabolic status were some sort of read-out of your virtue or your worthiness as a person. Many of these feelings come out of internalized fatphobia and the hostility of American Protestantism, where health is treated as a sign of the elect rather than a fluid and dynamic state. Your health is your health. We should not be stigmatizing or problematizing health, and yet we do. It’s almost as if with scientific advancement, we have somehow gotten around to blaming people for the ways that their bodies respond and react at a molecular level.
Something you may not know about me or that you probably already know about me is that I am a very anxious person. I am very prone to fear. And being startled. The other day, I saw a rat turn a corner in my building, and I gasped. I thought my heart was going to stop. And so I find myself in this odd position of being very afraid and also needing to be very calm despite being very afraid. And now I am waiting for a delivery of an item that I am going to use in order to exercise. So that I can maintain a degree of calm rationality. But of course I cannot use it because if I do, I could die.
How then does a person live—trying to avoid spikes in heart rate while also trying to be present and alive to what the world has to offer. Should I dig a hole and hop in? Should I just hope my heart holds out?
It’s just now occurring to me that any time a person has said something nice about my physical appearance, I’ve always assumed that there was some deeper, more brutal truth that they weren’t saying, and that the nice thing was always some half-truth or half-measure.
My credentials are, mainly, my mistakes.
What made me quit being a monster to myself wasn't that it made me feel terrible. It was that I was really freaking out my wife, and I hate seeing her upset. I'd do anything to keep her from ever experiencing any negative emotion if I could. So I decided to get to the bottom of it and stop, just like she asked me to.
Butch does not require penile proof, a fleshy monument to ‘real’ masculinity. Butch is a belief, a performance, a swagger in the walk; butch is an attitude, a tough line, a fiction, a way of dressing.
-Jack Halberstam
Desiring and being desired feel inextricably entangled to me. I read somewhere that a lot of women derive pleasure, narcissistically, from being desired. I think it’s more universal than that. Everyone wants to be wanted. But I have also learned to associate being desired in ways I can’t reciprocate with painful, embarrassing situations it’s hard to extricate myself from. Being desired feels cheap sometimes, easy to provoke in mindless ways. It’s kind of the negative of feeling, being looked at, being felt for, being made up in someone else’s imagination. I’d always choose desiring because I desire someone who is better than me, a sure route to disappointment, ok. But also because that feeling is the craziest thing in the world. There’s nothing I can say about desire that won’t sound really cliché, but there is absolutely nothing else that feels that good.
-Miriam Gordis
One option: Untold suffering. The other option: Flattering awareness that you represent a world of possibilities in the eyes of someone else. I think the choice is clear.
Marriage is just deeply informed by the idea that you get married and you stay married. And I think it’s also rooted in this idea that your happiness is frivolous, that you have to sacrifice for children, for family. It’s important to realize who’s being asked to sacrifice and whose misery is being put up on that cross.
I am not anti-relationship. I am so pro-relationship. But I am anti the legal structure of marriage, because it is founded on women’s inequality. Look at the history of marriage. Look at these laws of coverture. Look at the laws in America where marital rape wasn’t even illegal until the past 20 years. And that’s because wives are property, and that’s the way that our legal system views women. And I think a lot of well-meaning couples get into marriage and think it will be different.
But then you realize the whole system … Who gets paid more? Who takes the hit when you have the baby? Where is the child care? Why is it unaffordable? You get into this system and you realize that it’s not your well-meaning intentions that are bogging you down, but it’s this entire system that is built on the unpaid labor of a wife. And you can be the most well-meaning egalitarian couple, and you have one, two kids and you’re like, “What the fuck? Now I’m a tradwife because we can’t make it work anymore.” That’s the system that I’m critiquing. With women we’re like, “Oh, you’re miserable in your marriage? Well, I don’t know, try sexy night.” No, you feel miserable in your marriage because you never get a break because this whole system is packed on top of your shoulders and you can’t fricking breathe. And then the one time you get a moment to breathe, he’s like, “Hey, we haven’t had sex in two weeks.” There’s a whole capitalist system built on the misery of women.
I’m not saying you can’t be in love or you can’t have relationships, but I am saying those relationships should not be predicated on your misery.
I tend to feel uncomfortable as soon as anyone wants to categorize me as an artist or a writer. I like to inhabit the interstices between these fixed categories and disciplines, the blurry liminal spaces.
I don’t work from a narrative-driven place but rather try to anchor myself in a feeling.
When I was younger, I was very much drawn to a gay canon that, for historical reasons, was largely focused on narratives of coming out, and shame, and ostracization. Those books brought me a lot of comfort because that’s how I felt growing up. But—and I don’t know how much of this is owing to my personal trajectory or to the larger cultural trajectory—by the time I started writing fiction seriously I didn’t have any interest in writing those kinds of narratives.
It seems simplistic to say, Oh, we don’t need those stories, our society is more accepting now, because that’s not necessarily true. I think we’re in a moment of cultural regression when it comes to different sexualities and gender expressions. But I was more interested in seeing what you could do with a story about gay men in which those elements were not part of the central narrative. What would you be left with? Would there be anything inherently “gay” left? I found that there was. These characters may not be thinking about their sexuality, they may not be forming their identities primarily around it, but they’re still viewing the world through a specifically gay sensibility, and it’s molding their experience in surprising ways. I sometimes feel contemporary gay fiction finds increasingly creative ways to return to those original narratives, and I lose patience with that, because I think there are more interesting ways of activating a gay character in a novel.
Tweets:
Mood.
Lol.
That’s all for today!
As always, thanks for being here. Thanks to those of you who like reading this enough to pay me $5/month or more. And, if anyone ever wants to buy me a coffee just cus, you can do that here.