round-up: 3/08
friendly advice, reading recs, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m reading
Quotations
Housekeeping:
Touched some grass yesterday and immediately felt better. Highly recommend.
What I’m reading:
Stunning Frescoes of Dionysian Cult Rituals Unearthed in Pompeii
A War Zone Pediatrician on What Comes After the Horrors of a Gaza Emergency Room
Psychological Thrillers Are Finally Giving Middle-Aged Women Their Due
Lyrically Speaking: Exploring the horror of ‘Strangers’ by Ethel Cain
Quotations:
I wonder sometimes if most great love stories aren’t also ghost stories, all the more so as we, temporarily still alive, speak unknowingly to our loved ones about the ways in which we’ll come to haunt them: the off-kilter joke; the snatch of song; the imprecation to go to bed, for God’s sake.
One of those things, as previously mentioned, is getting enough fibre. ‘Our gut bacteria live and thrive on it,’ insists Dr Leeming. ‘I’d say it’s the closest thing we have to a “superfood”—for every extra 5g of fibre you eat per day, it is associated with a 5% lower risk of depression. That’s the equivalent of just a third of a can of chickpeas.’ She adds: ‘In fact, the one thing I’d love for people to take away from my book is how interconnected mental and physical health is—what you eat is another part of your toolkit to feeling your best on a daily basis.’
And it doesn’t need to be desperately trying to meet the ‘30 plants per week’ recommendation. ‘We need to recognise that everyone is overloaded, with enough on their mental plate already,’ she points out. ‘It’s overcomplicating something, because it sounds sexy, without thinking through the practical implications and the cost and the potential food wastage.
I’ve never fucked a rich guy, but I thought about it once. He lived in a penthouse in a really nice building. His job was about watching numbers go up and down, or maybe it was about making them go up and down — I can’t remember. We’d met online. He was sort of funny (surprisingly). He was older than me (obviously). I was nineteen or maybe twenty, a virgin, and had literally never felt sexual attraction to a man, even the ones I’d made myself date — I sometimes tried halfheartedly to masturbate to straight porn, or to the idea of Dylan O’Brien or something, but it never worked. I had never reached orgasm or anything even close to it while thinking about a man.
The idea of fucking the rich guy, though, was exciting. I made about $23,000 (CAD!) a year and did not, at the time, feel particularly hopeful that I’d ever be making much more. He sent me pictures of the view from his panoramic windows, and I did not send him pictures of the black mold creeping up the wall next to my mattress. I thought about him buying me dinner, and what expensive sheets might feel like, and stepping out of the shower onto a marble floor, and the sharp, illicit thrill that might come with ignoring the ethical implications of how he made his money. The erotics of class ascendency flirted enticingly with a dream of heterosexual normalcy that had long been out of my reach. The first time a heterosexual fantasy ever helped me cum, I was thinking about him calling me poor.
To me, Anora is a film about a romance with mythology. It’s a story about stories, about the vast cultural narratives that enchant and delude and control us, and about how love, especially heterosexual love, can be propelled by an attachment to an imagined “good life” even more than it is an attachment to any specific person. Anora is a story about a girl so in love with an idea that she loosens her grip on material reality, until reality re-imposes itself with force. It’s like most love stories, this way.
The American Dream tells poor people and immigrants that everyone in the United States has the opportunity to attain for themselves a better life through hard work and sacrifice; heterosexual patriarchy tells women that the best and only way for them to secure their safety and prosperity is through attachment to men via the nuclear family. Love and happiness are a reward for the hard work of securing this union.
To put it frankly: smart, practical women take this deal all the time. I can barely unlock my phone without seeing another trad wife or a so-called “stay-at-home girlfriend” extolling the virtues of partnering rich and learning to cook, and more and more women I know are hearing them out. These women pitch their lifestyles as escape hatches out of the indignities of patriarchal capitalism: humiliated by the casual sexism of the dating market and frustrated by the alienation of the labour market, they aim to quit the markets altogether by committing themselves to a single buyer. Female dating strategy influencers, who encourage women to hetero-optimize by seducing high value men for personal gain, accept it as inevitable that women are for sale and push smart women to focus their energy on selling high. At their most self-aware, these women offer a simple idea: you’re going to be exploited anyway, so why not get what you can out of it while you’re still the type of girl men want to buy?
The most important scene from Anora, in my opinion, is in the middle of the film, when Ani and her captors are searching for a runaway Vanya in Brighton Beach. When Igor sees Ani shivering on the frigid walk down the shoreline, he offers her a red scarf to keep warm. It’s the same scarf that was used to bind her mouth a few hours earlier, the same scarf that kept her quiet after she was bent over, tied down, and restrained in her underwear on the lap of a strange man twice her size. She notes indignantly — and correctly — that he only brought the scarf in the first place in case he needed to gag her again. But she is freezing, and so she eventually accepts it. This is a familiar situation: Ani is far from the first woman to know that the thing that gags you can also be the thing that keeps you warm. Certainly it is insulting, undignified, to accept the warmth of the object that exists primarily to hurt you — but sometimes, when it gets cold enough, you start to think that it would be stupid to suffer twice. And the scarf would be there either way, so perhaps there is some feeling of liberation in the fact that you want it now, that you get to choose where it goes; you get to wrap it around your neck, gently this time, so that it cradles you rather than chokes. To deny the warmth of the scarf, Ani knows, wouldn’t change the fact that she’d been bound by it before, and it wouldn’t stop her from being bound by it again. But it would stop her from shivering on the beach, stuck chasing after a boy who abandoned her, surrounded by enemies and yet somehow also totally alone. There’s no dignity, surely, in accepting the comfort of the binds. But where would be the dignity in freezing?
There is a cruelty in this kind of symbolic representation: sex workers are a group so constantly projected upon, so often understood as ideas and images rather than as people, so frequently turned into moralized objects rather than complex subjects with individual stories. In many films, sex workers are morally punished for their participation in sexual labour; in Anora, it feels like Ani is more directly punished for her belief she can transcend it. Is that any better?
Where is the line between representing gendered suffering and reproducing it? Is the sadism involved in chronicling a woman’s endless abjection the price we pay for realism?
My friend
with a beautiful house insists that we call his pet
a companion animal, which I don’t think changes
very much, but I want nothing that I do to hurt him,
so I call his dog a companion animal, and then
I think Is that what my trees were? Not really
my trees, but companion trees, offering me
their flowers and then their leaves, offering me
their oxygen in exchange for my carbon dioxide.
For me, as they stand, they are: the anti-anti-racist abolitionist, the civilizer, the prohibitionist, the KKK feminist, the Blackshirt, the policewoman, the pornophobe, the girlboss, the femo-nationalist, the pro-life feminist, and the anti-trans feminist. One thick through-line that connects them is white supremacy, and I would refer everyone to the scholarship of Jessie Daniels, Vron Ware, Kyla Schuller, Ruby Hamad, Serene Khader, Alison Phipps, Terese Jonsson, Gloria Wekker, and others on this question of feminist whiteness.
How liberating it could be for our movements if feminists understood, once and for all, that a woman’s cry for women’s power is often part of a matrix of domination! It’s not about securing a greater slice of the pie, to borrow a phrase. Nor is it even enough to seize the bakery. Feminism, instead, could be about baking new and unthinkable cakes, if you will, by using recipes that haven’t been invented yet. Which is to say: I don’t know if we can save it from itself so much as explode it from below. A cream-spattered mixed metaphor.
Much contemporary thought treats these white-hooded and black-bloused examples of women’s rights history as non-feminisms. In this view, “fascist feminism” is an oxymoronic discourse that “instrumentalizes” or “wields” the language of feminism in order to dupe. And yet, the imperialist and white-supremacist aspects of canonical liberal legacies like Wollstonecraft’s or Anthony’s can be admitted to and apologized for without calling into question their status within feminism or, for that matter, feminism’s integrity. The literary world can talk all day about the racist sins of the suffragettes, never doubting for a moment that the feminism in question can be separated from the racism without losing its core shape. I think you can’t really tackle this incongruity with polemic; you have to get historiographical.
No body is uncontaminated; no one’s embodiment is simply given, unmodified.
All bodily pain begins with shock at the audacity of physical trespass, a kind of astonishment at the frankly unbelievable insinuation that one is not, in fact, the center of the universe.
The pussyhats were silly and cutesy and looked like your mom made them. For some that was a deal breaker; for others, a selling point — especially, it seemed, for the middle-aged suburban white women whom the defeat of Hillary Clinton had jolted into feminist consciousness. In this respect, the pussyhat came to signify youthfulness as distinct from biological age: a political youth whose identifying trait was a kind of embarrassing rhetorical childishness. The real problem with the pussyhats was that they offered up, with the winsome naivete of the recently radicalized, the promise of a universal category of womanhood, which feminism has long made a cardinal virtue of forgoing. It would not be fantastic to suppose that those feminists who criticized the pussyhat most fiercely did so in part because they saw in its blithe adopters a younger, warmer version of themselves, still ugly-sweet on the romance of political consciousness, not yet having learned to be frugal with their hopes.
All I had ever wanted was to become unrecognizable to myself.
The notion that trans people’s primary contribution to culture is to “tell our stories,” however nobly this mission is conceived, has left us open to cooptation and grift. Story, I think, should be the mortal enemy of the trans writer, who upon setting foot in the blast zone of literature will find herself irradiated with unwanted narrative energy. Everyone will ask what happened to her. No one will ask what she thinks.
Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to notify my teenage self, who had for years followed the goings-on at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with great interest, that the author of the best-selling book series in history would one day come to personally hate her.
The subject of faith is plagued by fear and trembling; the subject of love, by the threat of rejection and the even greater threat of acceptance; the subject of freedom, by the abyss of the decision.
I was still a symbol; I had not yet become a sentence.
If there is one idea that has unified my thinking as a trans person since I embarked on a career as a writer, it is that we must give up the dream of explaining ourselves.
A trans person is not a person whose gender does not “match” their sex; a trans person is quite simply a person who transitions. It is a thing one does, not a thing one is. This means that while trans identity has no cause, trans people will always have their reasons. Whether we share them is up to us.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
Instagram
Twitter
Website
Dyke Semiotics
Zines
Shirts