round-up: 9/07
housekeeping, recommendations, quotations, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m buying
What I’m watching
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading1
Quotations
& 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.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
I have been living with my friend’s cat since June and she remains very sweet.
What I bought this week:
What I wanted to buy this week:
What I’m listening to:
What I’m watching:
Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
What I’m reading:
The X-Rated Furniture Of Catherine The Great Is Something You Need To See
10 Sexy Queer Summer Movies Full of Cruising, Fisting, and Armpit F**king
Is Affirmation Culture Sabotaging Our Friendships and Ourselves?
Australia is the latest country to give workers the 'right to disconnect' after hours
‘I think it’s natural’: why has sexual choking become so prevalent among young people?2
Quotations:
What does my body think when I don’t listen to its very clear “no”? Do I betray its already-tenuous trust in me? Does it get used to the violation and consequently endure or tolerate future violations from others? Does it scream louder at some later point to make sure its voice is heard?
To overlook the ways we teach our bodies that we are not going to listen to them is masochistic and a form of self-harm. We reject our bodies daily. We tell them that their insight is not welcome when we prioritize our intellect over our emotions. We tell them that their experience of gender and societal norms is dangerous and they should be quiet. We tell them that other people have it worse and they should stop complaining.
To what extent we are responsible for our suffocation is the larger question, really; what must be interrogated are the limits of female agency within the heterosexual contract.
For four weeks he and I were forced to go on living together, sleeping beside each other, disassembling and re-litigating every shared memory of our previous four years. That month is among the most difficult of my life: each day, every hour, all the minutes struggled up through a quite tangible muck of grief. It was a kind of death.
Meanwhile I watched every happiness I shared with the man I thought I’d marry curdle. Houses house emotion as they do bodies; I believe this implicitly. The atmosphere in our apartment grew thick with the bile of our breakup. My dog curled into herself. When uninterrupted by bouts of fury, silence fell over everything like a shroud. It often felt as if I couldn’t properly breathe. I would ride into the night on my bike, begging my chest to open, waiting for my lungs to expand, but there was nothing doing. The body at times refuses. I cried for hours every single one of those days. After two weeks it seemed improbable—ridiculous, really—that any tears might be left inside me, but I found in myself an endless well.
I had never before lived with a boyfriend, I had no idea how two lives could be gathered into such a strange, singular grammar. Ours was the longest and deepest relationship I’d been in. What’s worse, in its way, was that my decision to leave didn’t come from a place of hatred or fear. Other men were easy to witness as villains. I left them or they left me, but in the end, severance was simple. When a man you’re dating says all you’re good for is a blowjob, it’s fairly obvious who of the two of you has been wronged. When a man puts his hands on you, it might be difficult to get out but at least you know what the plan of action should be. Here, now, I had to reckon with ambivalence, complication, the escalating messes of history. Though we’d both failed our relationship (on this, at last, we agreed), it was I who’d snipped the umbilicus; I who shouldered that guilt; I the bitch, the cold one—I, the careerist.
Any care extended was just a signal flare, doomed to burn rapidly out, to sink ineluctably beneath the waves. Care offered was only care that would soon be withdrawn; it represented nothing more nor less than its future absence.
I’m relearning solitude, or something like—learning how to be alone with myself once more for the long hours.
I am relieved my grief doesn’t have to annihilate me anymore. I live beside it, I live with it.
The other day a man kissed me as the sun broke through the clouds into his loft and I felt my whole self sharpen to a single, dazzling point. Once I saw desire as a curse, but now I know it for what it is—a gift, a breath of life, a window.
When you go with love and you let love make your decisions for you as opposed to fear, you're always led in the right direction. You know, choosing to be with my husband when he got an HIV diagnosis, which was deadly at the time, and making the decision to stay with this man even though I was destined to bury him and he might kill me — that was a powerful choice. It was the most important decision of my life. It ended up transforming both of us. He’s still with us; he’s very fortunate to be a long-term non-progressor. That was really important and helped me come to understand myself.
My writing, people say, makes them feel seen. But I have not ever seen them. I have only seen myself, and the handfuls of subjects I’ve interviewed, whose experiences I can render in writing pretty well. My work creates the illusion that I am in the reader’s head, and for this I feel like a fraud. I’ve never been able to understand anyone’s head but my own.
People never realize that when they approach me, what they are doing is dragging me into work. It doesn’t matter whether I was at breakfast, or an orgy. I was just some guy standing there, enjoying his beer, but now they have made me the known scholar and author. And sure, my job might be meaningful, but that doesn’t mean I like to work.
I wanted this. I didn’t know what this was, this internet fame I was chasing, but I did all I could to make it mine. I thought that by writing so much, I would one day be able to escape myself, maybe really feel connected to other people. Instead it has meant never being able to stop thinking about myself: how I am seen, what I am working on, how it all fits together, what comes next. It has also meant being spoken about, theorized about, and criticized, and developing a firm exoskeleton of disdain between myself and the world.
I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to be understood. There is a power much older than social influence, and that is the power of mystery. I no longer want to be a leader, moving vast keyboard armies to enact my morals. I want to sink into the muck and let nature, in all its yawning indifference, overtake me.
A chipmunk hurries over to meet me, unafraid, seeking food. In the shade, at nightfall, men hold onto their cocks and look for one another. There is an animal wariness in all sets of eyes. Everything is wordless. In each living being there is a universal mystery of equally enormous size. If I move slowly, I don’t shift the ground too much, and I don’t scare any creature away. I am there for what unfolds, a participant in the great shared living, but never an author of it.
I believe now that it is impossible for a book to save a life. It is the reader, who makes meaning from the book and applies it to their own actions, who does that. I never had the power to do anything except what I was already doing: writing compulsively about whatever interested me.
I write because I have to, and because when I don’t do it, I get insane in less enjoyable ways. This work was always selfish, but I don’t say that to deride it. I mean that no matter how much I dressed it up and worried needlessly about what it might mean, or how it might be received, no matter how much I marketed it and strategized around it and tried to become a living symbol of what it was, writing was one of the only honest expressions of me.
I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen
from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible,
it begins to attack everything else I know.
I’ve never doubted love in my life, I’ve never held a narrative of being unlovable, and I’ve always been sure that I’m capable of loving. My fascination with making sense of love has never been because it’s felt out of reach, but because it’s felt so simultaneously present and also inexplicable…Because it takes so many different forms, because it can be so certain even while looking a thousand different ways. Love is a thing we know, it seems, in our bodies or minds or spirits (or all of them together), but in many ways is also undefinable. The poets, the musicians, and the theorists above still haven’t quite nailed it, and that’s probably the point. Love has to be ineffable—holy and unutterable, like awe.
The war, which I believe you refer to, if that is even the right word for it—seems horribly one-sided, and to have no strategy or goal beyond more war, maybe permanent war.
Sexually, I was always a caretaker first. And I think a lot of us are conditioned to be this way but I also think many girls realize very young that caretaking can be its own form of power move (until it isn’t).
I was actively pursuing partners that needed me. I think a lot of women do that because FEELING NEEDED has been our social currency – whether that need is sexual, or maternal, etc.
I think a lot of women treat motherhood similar to their sexuality – as subservient. Passive. As harbors as opposed to ships. Not because we don’t want to be ships. But because our partners and our children look to us for stability – for safety – for a place to rest their heads and hearts (and dicks) at the end of the day.
There is an art to letting go. It’s okay to break a contract. Or rather, to refuse to sign one. To change one's mind. Hell, it’s even okay to die! We are so hell-bent on keeping everything alive – physically but also emotionally, etc. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person and it’s certainly not the worst thing that can happen to a relationship.
The truth is, most connections are temporary and all love stories will end. Can you imagine building a relationship where both parties prioritize letting go? That’s what I want.
I don’t want to live in fear of loss. I know it’s coming. There is always an ending. I want to look it in the eyes from now on. Welcome it when it comes. I don’t want to ever put pressure on anyone – least of all myself – to stick anything out that doesn’t feel good or right or safe. I stayed in a marriage that I knew was wrong and unsafe for both me and my partner and I will never do that again. Our emotional attachments should not be bound, least of all legally.
I am one of many women who married even though I knew it wasn’t right for me. The fact that I married when I didn’t want to was exactly the kind of dishonesty (with myself and my husband) that became foundational in that relationship. I stayed in a marriage – as a wife – for thirteen years even though it never felt right to me. But the alternative was to admit that I was lying. That I had lied all along. That I didn’t want any of the things I tried very hard to need – even when it was against my will. I spent many years trying so hard to tell the right story. Shining light on the areas of my life that gave me joy and suppressing everything else under the guise of acceptance.
I spent many years separating my experiences to make a more palatable story. I’m not going to do that anymore.
Language is a form of spell-casting.
Work. Be relentless. All over the world, people are working harder than you.
I knew I needed to put the Midwest in there just because it’s so important to my project. It influences the music, my fashion, my lyrics, the energy around it. It’s important for me to capture the Midwestern aspect. I don’t want to lose that part of me. I thought I really did when I was younger, but now I don’t anymore.
I rose from the ashes of losing all my money and moving back in with my parents and working the drive-through — this beautiful project came to life from the deep pits of hell.
I’ve never thought of making art as a career. It’s certainly a job in a sense, but it’s just not a career. It’s a choice you make somewhere down the line about how you’re going to live your life.
It’s a necessity to confront your curiosity, confront the idea of mystery.
And when I’m trying to talk about gay men, or working at the sex store and learning about people’s sexuality, the positions that we put ourselves in sometimes to get some sort of need met, where you essentially are putting yourself in so much danger, or putting yourself in a terrible situation, that is like an intrinsic part of human nature under this system.
And then I started lifting, which was, doing a set of squats: up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down. You’re done. Sit there, for a whole minute. Do it again, then sit for another whole minute. Do it again, and you’re done with your squats. Do two more movements like that, and you’re done with your workout. Lifting was practically leisure. It was luxurious. I reclined upon my squat rack and whiled away my rest minutes in contentment, maybe scrolling my phone—something I could never do while running—or reading, or watching a video. Chef’s kiss. Bravissimo, to the format of the lifting workout. Why had I ever toiled at running, when there was lifting?
My therapist wanted me to make a Long COVID Wish List, bullet points of things I wish had been different, so I could look my loss in the face and move through the stages to acceptance. I did try. I wish the President of the United States hadn't hidden and lied about… everything. (I wish people I love hadn’t voted for that president.) I wish the CDC had been honest about the benefits of wearing masks. I wish being anti-science wasn't a religious and political way of life. I wish friends spent less time trying to make me feel guilty and more time using the supercomputer in their pocket to try to understand what was happening to me. I wish colleagues hadn't read my sickness as weakness and tried to exploit and punish me because of it. I wish doctors didn't think they were infallible.
The truth is that I lost my faith all at once. In the institutions that I'd trusted my entire life to keep me safe and healthy — or, bare minimum, to keep me informed with actual facts. In so many people I loved and had admired. In communities that had, at one time, been my salvation.
My brain is a swamp. Everything inside my head moves slower and disconnects.
I was thinking how long I'd known this friend, how much we'd lived through together, how we're not the same people we were when we met, how we have become something else. Better. Brighter. Broken in new ways too. How that is a kind of magic, and one I've hardly ever known. How they're alive and I'm alive and that's magic too. Alive, on a stoop, in the late afternoon sun, shade, a FedEx truck in front of us beeping and nudging a car out of the way with its bumper, people coming in and out of the building to put their empty pizza boxes in the recycling bin, my friend’s stories and my laughter and no words out of my mouth and still alive, alive, alive.
There's no end or return from some kinds of grief, no answer, no coming out of it.
That’s all for today!
-Despy Boutris
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I read a lot this week, so open this email in a new browser if you want to make it to the end!
On this note: I am a strong believer in people pursuing whatever sex they like consensually, but if one more person chokes me without asking, or without any discussion first, I’m going to start naming names.
Name names!