The words leap out of the computer screen and hang in the air. Enlarging, colliding, rearranging:
EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.
Emily Weitzman Is a Fucking Huge Slut
Emily Weitzman Is Fucking A Huge Slut
Emily Is Weitzman Fucking A Slut
Weitzman A Fucking Slut
Huge Fucking, Emily:
SLUT.
When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me.I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed.I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage.Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.
The answer is simple: bread.
We call it: “The Bread Thread.” Lisle explains: “Everyone loves bread!” Maybe you don’t eat bread, but you likely don’t despise it either. The first post begins: I FUCKING LOVE BREAD! Soon someone adds: I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread! People get into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread.They post about white bread, wheat bread, flat bread, pita bread, rye bread, corn bread, banana bread, tortilla. “The Bread Thread” spreads across campus. Everyone writes of their love for the loaf.
How are certain people famous enough to be famous for being famous? And how do people famous for getting laughed at earn $28 million a year? For The Times Literary Supplement, Irina Dumitresculooks at three books about celebrity to examine the phenomenon of celebrity itself, now and throughout history. This is a fascinating example of the way a book review becomes an essay about a larger subject. Its intelligence also echoes one of the subject’s many facets: the inverse relationship between earnings and what we consider “ability.” It’s easy to dismiss famous people like the Kardashians because they didn’t get famous by producing artful films or performing music, but their ability to, as Dumitrescu puts it, “absorb the energy of the world’s criticism and translate it into cash,” is a well-honed skill that deserves its own kind of respectful recognition, because if celebs didn’t provide the public with something, then we wouldn’t engage with them the way we do. We may laugh at people like the Kardashians, but they’re laughing all the way to the bank, so the question is: What do celebrities give us?
People turn to celebrities to feel emotion, connection, even transcendence. The emotions a star provokes can be just as gratifying if they are negative. Disgust, scorn and outrage provide their own satisfactions. A celebrity who is good at her job gives the public the opportunity to experience unruly feelings. She also arouses in them a desire for her true, “authentic” self. Marcus convincingly argues that celebrities do so by crafting their image carefully. Bernhardt enchanted audiences through precisely controlled movements, deliberately modulated vocal intonation, and the careful choreography of her performances both on stage and off. This was a woman who had herself photographed sleeping in a coffin, was reported to keep a menagerie of exotic pets, and apparently drank from a skull and kept a skeleton in her bedroom….
Celebrities feed the eternal hunger for newness without ever being truly new. Cashmore reminds us that Kim Kardashian found her teachers in previous socialites, in Anna Nicole Smith’s willingness to self-destruct for reality television cameras and in Paris Hilton’s nightclub and TV ubiquity (in fact, Kim started out on Paris’s show The Simple Life as a friend and stylist). For Cashmore, Madonna’s erotic revelations in the documentary Truth or Dare (1991; released in the UK as In Bed with Madonna) tolled the death bell for privacy: “Sit still for a couple of hours watching … and you’ll turn into an inveterate voyeur and spend the rest of your days as a restless, tormented spirit wandering through the arid wastelands of other people’s lives”. The shape of criticism has not changed much either. In an interview with George Ezra last year, Elton John – subscribing to our first narrative about modern celebrity and overlooking the lessons of the second – railed against reality TV “celebrities”: “For me a celebrity is somebody who is top of their game, a top film star, in music, whatever. I hate the word celebrity … You’ve got to work for it and the people that don’t work for it and get it instantaneously are the ones that go pfft”. As Cashmore points out, there has always been someone who thinks the current crop of stars is different and not working hard enough. Indeed, it is a reliable way of telling a person’s age: your generation is determined by the last parvenu you consider a genius and the first you think is a trumped-up mediocrity. This is one clue to the strength of the Kardashian brand. Cashmore describes Paris Hilton in the early 2000s as a shiny new toy, thrown aside once the novelty wore off. The fertile Kardashian clan, however, can always counteract boredom by bringing out a new model: a younger sister with big dreams and the entrepreneurial touch, a baby with an Instagram handle ready to be monetized.
Dumitrescu is a writer whose sentences sparkle with multiple truths, and whose intelligence treats this familiar American pastime not as a simple guilty pleasure, but as a phenomenon worth studying. Yet like most writers, she’s not earning a fraction of the big bucks the Kardashians do. That’s another sad facet of this essay.
“Our perfect companions never have fewer than four feet.” — Colette
In place of an actual child, I have Birdie, a silver tabby cat covered in so much cute and cuddle it should be illegal.
Birdie came into my life almost three years ago after a messy divorce and she’s such a big part of my life now that I don’t know which one of us needs the other more. What I do know is that hardly a day goes by that I don’t think of losing her.
* * *
I was in elementary school when I had my first pet, a goldfish that died twice in one day.
While my family was on summer vacation, Nana was going to watch my fish. Before bringing it over to her house I decided to clean the bowl. It was only when I went to refill the bowl that I realized we were out of distilled water. When I asked my mom if we could go to the store, she told me to use tap water.
Ever the knowledgeable child goldfish owner, I knew you couldn’t just use tap water (the chemical balance is all wrong for their bodies). My mom insisted my fish would be fine for the 10-minute ride it would take to get to Nana and Poppa’s house.
“We’ll get distilled water when we get there.”
Oh, mother. I wish it were that simple. Not even halfway to their house I found myself with the bowl on my lap and my fish floating on the surface of the water.
“He’s dead! My fish is dead!”
* As an adult, I learned my mom just swirled the water around hoping we’d leave Nana’s house before my fish floated again.
At a stop sign, Mom reached around to the backseat for the bowl. I wanted to tell her “I told you so!” but I waited for a miracle instead. And then it came. When Mom handed the bowl back to me, my fish was swimming around.*
By the time we pulled into Nana and Poppa’s driveway, though, my fish was floating again.
I set the bowl on their kitchen counter when we got inside, and Mom asked Nana if she had any distilled water. (Oh, mother.) Nana took one look at my fish and lifted the bowl. I watched her walk with it to the bathroom at the end of the hallway. Flush.
She returned to the kitchen and set the empty bowl on the counter. I stared into the empty sphere while Mom and Nana agreed with each other that I could always get another fish. I wanted my fish.Read more…
Yvonne Renee Evans has been a nurse for more than 30 years, and she has spent most of them in the private sector. It was difficult to get ahead. “I put in multiple applications and never got a chance to advance,” she said. “The opportunities might be there, but I was always given a reason.” As a black woman, she wondered if it “could have been a racial issue.” But it was difficult to prove, even when people who had been there for less time or that she had even trained herself were promoted above her. And “they could remove you at any time,” she noted. Once when she managed operating room scheduling at a hospital with a young, white woman, the hospital decided it wanted to downsize the team to one person. Evans was the one removed from the role, demoted to a lower-level position with a pay cut. “I could have fought it, but it wasn’t worth it,” she said. “You pick your battles, and that wasn’t one I chose to pick.”
But then, after retiring from two different private sector jobs, she took a position at the John D. Dingell Veterans Administration Medical Center in Detroit in 2008. She didn’t need the work — she could have gone into full retirement — but her husband is ex-Army, and she wanted to serve veterans. She quickly found out it was also a rewarding place to work — very different than what she’d encountered in private hospitals. “The advancement here was wonderful,” she said. “You could move up the professional ladder in leaps and bounds as long as you did the work, you had the credentials. You could get to higher levels than you could in the private sector.”
She now runs a podiatry clinic. “Every year I get appreciation awards,” she noted. She’s also been awarded for being an exemplary employee at the VA. “I never would have gotten awarded like that in the private sector. Never.” The money doesn’t make her rich, she said, but it does allow her to save for retirement and help her grown children if they need it. “I am truly the middle class,” she said.
Evans wouldn’t have always found a welcoming workplace in the government. As late as the turn of the 20th century, letting black workers into the federal government was seen as “akin to bringing down the federal service,” explained Frederick W. Gooding, assistant professor of African American studies at Texas Christian University and author of American Dream Deferred. Under President Woodrow Wilson entire departments within the federal government were segregated, with literal barricades separating black and white workers in some agencies and extra bathrooms installed so they wouldn’t have to share the same facilities. But then World War II hit. The government needed a lot more employees — both for the war effort and to staff up President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vast expansion of the government. “Because there’s all these new positions, managers can hire people of color without displacing white workers,” said Jennifer Laird, assistant professor of sociology at Lehman College. By the 1960s, that expansion “gave African American workers a foothold in the public sector.” Black people were fleeing “vitriolic racism in the private sector,” Gooding noted. But the racism they once found in public employment was mediated by need. “It’s not because the federal government woke up one day and said, ‘I’m feeling quite altruistic, let’s give blacks opportunities,’” Gooding said. “They needed bodies, it’s simply a supply and demand equation.”
The Great Migration helped take care of the supply. As black families moved en masse from rural Southern areas to urban cities in the North, they found employment with the federal and local governments when they arrived. That movement from the private sector to the public sector built a black middle class across the country, one that to this day is sustained in large part by public sector employment like the job Evans was able to secure at the VA. Those gains, however, are tenuous, and they are particularly threatened as President Trump and his fellow Republicans strive to severely reduce the size of the federal government. Read more…
“Staff members of Marie Stopes International navigate wild bulls, treacherous singletrack, and rushing rivers to make long-term birth control accessible to some of the hardest-to-access places in Nepal.”
Soraya Roberts | Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,452 words)
The new release I most wanted to see during the Toronto International Film Festival was Unbelievable, the Netflix series that is neither a movie nor was it screening at TIFF. I was more taken by this miniseries, based on the ProPublica and Marshall Project investigation of a number of real rapes in Washington and Colorado, than by any of the movies I saw. But then, I have a particular affinity for this kind of mid-budget drama: real-looking people solving real problems in a real world, wading through the complications of humanity — “God shows up looking for someone to be of service, clean things up a bit, and he says, ‘Whom shall I send?’” — this is my shit. It’s the kind of thing you saw regularly at the cinema in the ’70s but that now tends to be relegated to streaming sites. I wonder how much of my affinity for Unbelievable — eight hours, three days —had to do with the fact that I could watch it at home. Alone. For free (well, Netflix-account free). Whether if all other things had been equal, but it had been playing at TIFF, I would have felt the same. Would I have felt the same had I chosen it over something else, doubt over my decision percolating in the background? Or if I were watching next to critics who liked it much more than I did, or much less? Or if I’d had an anxiety attack because I was assigned a middle seat (aisles only)? When the stakes are high, it’s harder to see past them.Read more…
Michael Musto | Longreads | September 2019 | 9 minutes (2,135 words)
We’ve heard it a million times: “I was nothing until I got this award, and now I’m everything. But this honor isn’t really for me. It’s for you — all the little people out there in the dark, who now have all the inspiration you need to know that someday you can be as great as I am. You just might be holding this trophy someday long into the future — though right now, it’s me! And I love it! Thank you to the Academy, CAA, and God — in that order!!!!”
Inspirational, right? Nope. That’s actually a tone deaf, self aggrandizing approach to an awards speech, and we usually end up loathing the winner for being so condescendingly grand about their big moment. It comes off extra phony because we sense that, deep down, the winner isn’t really thrilled with the idea that this honor may lead to millions of other wannabes yapping at their heels and trying to win one.
So what should an award winner say? Well, with the mass audience taking to social networks to dissect every moment of awards shows, speechmaking definitely makes a difference, to the point where a 90-second acceptance can make or break a career almost as much as the award itself can. Anne Hathaway seemed to become significantly less popular because of her breathless laundry lists of names (and by starting her Oscar speech with “It came true”), whereas Meryl Streep has become even more beloved because her speeches are invariably witty, pointed, and also touching. (They should let Meryl win every time, even when she’s not nominated, just so we can hear her talk.)
Meryl knows that an acceptance speech should be sincere yet entertaining, succinct yet somewhat comprehensive, and humble yet confident, and there should also be some real emotion involved. In another seeming contradiction, there needs to be serious thought put into what the winner is saying, but they should also make sure to brim with the spontaneity of the moment. Come on, folks, you’re actors — you can do it.
Glenn Close did brilliantly at the Golden Globes earlier this year, when she was a surprise Best Actress winner for The Wife. Glenn looked shocked when her name was called, yet she quickly composed herself to speak about the themes of the movie and to come off truly grateful and honored. And in framing The Wife as being about a talented woman living in someone else’s shadow, she seemed to herself be crawling out from behind Meryl Streep! It was such a terrific speech that I was sure it clinched Glenn the Oscar, but that instead went to The Favourite’s Olivia Colman, who wasn’t necessarily the favorite, but gave a lovably daffy acceptance that was eccentric and droll.
Alas, instead of speeches like those, we usually get Hathaway-like name checks (“I want to thank my accountant, Jim; my trainer, Joanne…”), speeches that leave out key names (In 2000, when Hilary Swank won her first Oscar, for Boy’s Don’t Cry, she forgot to thank then-hubby Chad Lowe; they eventually split), phony bouts of gushing, self-satisfied preening, fake-spontaneous recitations (“I didn’t plan anything”) that seem to have been rehearsed for months, and canned orations full of platitudes and advice, as if we schlepps out there want nothing more than to someday win Best Lighting in a Musical, and the winner knows just how we can get there. Read more…
A clatter at the door. A small package plops through our letterbox.
It’s come a long way. I can see that by the sticky labels, foreign postmarks, and scrawled scripts of postal workers around the world.
This was never in the parenting manual.
But back to the housework.
I enter my bedroom to find the area around the mirror overrun with her makeup, her dirty laundry in pools on the floor. That girl leaves a trail of destruction.
Admittedly, this is not a remarkable complaint for any mother of a teen. Where mine differs from the grumbles of parents through the ages is that among the detritus to be picked up and put away are:
In fact, when regarding my wayward, outrageously dressed girl, I find myself experiencing a peculiar combination of pride and envy.
Both may be a sin, but pride in one’s child is an acceptable part of parenthood.
Envy, while recognized in psychology and culture, most certainly isn’t.
Fine: I’m proud of this fierce individual that appears to have inherited my own peacock inclinations. Not so fine: I find myself envious that she has a period of wild experimentation ahead of her — and a figure that means she fits into pretty much every thrift store find.
So, uncomfortable with this disagreeable feeling, and at risk of falling into the parental cliché of “you’re not going out dressed like that!” I realize that there’s just one thing to do. I need to try and understand more about where the crazy looks are coming from. Instead of sighing heavily at the mess and fruitlessly asking, once again, for her to just try and keep it in check, I sit down and ask her to give me a beginner’s guide to her style. She is delighted to assist.
Her influences come from the internet, from fast-spreading pictures on Instagram, from crazy hairstyles on TikTok. Teens’ fashion inspiration is now global, grassroots led, with the commercial interests falling over themselves to catch up.
We scroll through her favorite accounts, and I meet the strangers whose fashion tips and product endorsements indirectly result in those Band-Aids in my bed:
These vloggers and Instagrammers, familiar friendly faces to their subscribers, set the fashion. All of them are from the U.K. or U.S., but they have something in common — they’re all looking to Japan.
I understand the appeal. I myself was responsible for introducing her to Japanese culture in toddlerhood, as we shared our enjoyment of Studio Ghibli and the adorable magic realism of Totoro and Ponyo.
Next came a wider exploration of anime and manga. She and her schoolmates swapped tips and learned from YouTubers who filmed themselves playing games like Doki Doki Literature Club and Danganronpa.
Then it was cosplay, the art of dressing like one’s favorite characters, whether with painstaking DIY costumery, or by buying outfits online, ready-made, from the Chinese kitchen table industries wise enough to surf the wave of this crazy fad as it hit the West — and able to do so thanks to global capitalism and the world wide web.
My daughter’s childhood environmental beliefs, despite my entreaties, were swept away. Her carbon footprint is forgotten in the desire to summon just the right hair clips or wig from the other side of the world.
Because then came the call of Harajuku. And that was just too strong to resist.
Since the 1980s, Japanese teens have flocked to this area of Tokyo to buy, and show off, their extreme fashions. It began with Rockabilly enthusiasts who came to dance, with music, moves, and outfits taken wholesale — ironically — from the West. Back then, fashion influences traveled in the other direction.
And then one day, as Shoichi Aoki, editor of the street photography magazine Fruits notes, something new emerged. Art school students, and girls in particular, were leaving behind the monochrome outfits that had previously been their norm. Now they were displaying a grassroots style that was completely unprecedented: yellow hair, platform shoes, ultra-bright color combos, and exciting, crazy mismatched clothing.
Thirty years on, the area of Harajuku has been taken over by big, multinational high-street stores, and true inventiveness is now to be found in its backstreets, Ura-Harajuku. But that hasn’t remotely dented its popularity abroad — which explains a lot about the state of my bedroom floor.
As with any long-lived subculture, Harajuku fashion has split into different genres, all of which my daughter explains to me with far more passion that she’ll ever apply to her school lessons:
As I learn of these styles, I understand so much more. It’s exciting to see my daughter with all these creative possibilities before her: the opportunity to take what she likes, mix and match, and add a little something to make it her own. And it’s something I recognize very well.
In the ’80s, while Harajuku style was in its infancy, over here in the U.K. I was a teen myself, entirely oblivious of Japanese culture.
In the West, our pop scene was setting the high-street fashion:
If the mainstream figures are already dressing in quite extreme fashions, those who want to show that they are different have to find another way to dress, different music to listen to, new ways to scandalize the elderly neighbors.
And here in the West, the various movements of the ’70s evolved, in the ’80s, into their own divided, intertwined subcultures. New romantic grew from glam rock, was shaped by the rise of the synth, and its forerunners paraded their outré looks at London’s Blitz and Wag nightclubs. This was the look that the high-street shops decided to mass-produce, and it was quite the norm to see big kitten bows, taffeta silks, and pearl necklaces on even the squarest kids. This was the default look by the time I was developing an interest in clothes.
Not far behind, goth was evolving from ’70s punk and post-punk, and also discovered the possibilities of electronic music machines. Its devotees favored the seminal Batcave club.
Now this was more like it. Far from the big city, in rural Devon in southwest England, my only option was to read of this from afar — in The Face, i-D, and Smash Hits magazines. Yet the minute I saw the goth bands, I knew that I had found my own look. It would help me express that I was different. Special. That I rejected the dull blandness of everyday life.
That spark in my daughter’s eye when she sees a new Harajuku look? This was the same impulse.
But for me, there was no internet, of course. No handy websites to allow me to piece together a goth look and pay for it in one go at checkout. Our looks were far more thrown together, with a mixture of ingenuity and serendipity.
Time passes. And now: Here I am at 50, my daughter 14.
At her age, it is fairly straightforward to dress differently, always assuming you can dodge the wrath of your school; but that’s far in the past for me.
Growing up and taking new roles, new responsibilities, means making decisions about how you present yourself. It boils down to this: Do you want to be the goth at the school gate? The outsider at that job interview?
My body has changed, too. Sagging flesh and a growing waistline have made me less inclined to let my clothes shout “look at me!” lest folk shout back, “We’ve looked, and we find you displeasing.”
I work from home: There’s little need and less time to spend hours on my hair or makeup. At the same time, I find it hard to give up the idea of dressing to display a sense of self.
Should I have stayed faithful to my gothic roots? It’s not unknown: You do see the occasional goth family with a pushchair and a kid in a Bauhaus onesie.
Fair play to them: Dealing with an infant and getting your look together each day — that can’t be easy. Myself? As a woman who came to motherhood relatively late in life, I had already set aside my more outrageous costumery as I navigated the first steps of a career in conservative office workplaces.
I graduated from the backcombed hair. I even spend good money at salons these days. My trousers have no rips. I’ve conformed — and find myself looking for other ways to express myself.
Meanwhile, age plays a part. As you enter the second half of life, it’s easy to feel that you’re not supposed to stand out. Just as you’re not supposed to show too much leg, or cleavage, it’s all part of the process of desexualization that the older woman is generally expected, in our society at least, to go through.
Because I had my daughter later in life — at age 36 — her blooming into a gorgeous, expressive experimental teenager has hit right at the same time as I’m staring into the barrel of menopause, and the attendant signs of aging that have traditionally been seen as unattractive. Let us not digress too far into the patriarchal belief that aging men become more attractive, while women must fight against white hair, wrinkles, and bingo wings.
After all, men face their challenges too. Aging male goths might have to contend with the loss of their teen pride and joy, the mane of hair — its decline hopefully not exacerbated by the crimpers and hairspray — and, like music journalist Simon Price, find more creative ways of still keeping the look alive.
Things just aren’t as clear as they were when I could take a sample from the goth rulebook, and anything went so long as it was black.
These days, one has to try and express individuality with style, maybe a soupçon of quirkiness. But not too much — that can be unbecoming for women of a certain age.
There’s no one more finely attuned to this than a teen regarding a parent: My husband was recently told, in no uncertain terms, that his striped rainbow T-shirt — colorful but well within the bounds of respectability to my eyes — was too embarrassing for my daughter to be seen beside.
She herself was dressed, that day, in full Harajuku style.
In 1945 psychoanalyst Helene Deutsch, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, painted a very gloomy picture of menopause as a “gradual loss of femininity,” claiming that:
At the time, she was 61 years old herself.
She had my attention: After all, the “organic decline” is just around the corner for me. Phrased like that, it sounds like a barrel of laughs.
So on I read … and found something that struck rather an unwelcome chord. Psychologist Terri Apter interprets Deutsch’s theories like this: “Women observe a daughter’s adolescent bloom as a sign of their own decline. In middle age, a woman is pushed out of the sexual limelight, and as she sees her daughter achieve the first blush of maturity, she grows envious.”
Whew — that was a bit too close to home.
But is this inevitable? Deutsch was writing in far more patriarchal times, when a woman was far more likely to be seen primarily as a wife and mother, and to have lost all purpose when those functions were no longer needed.
Let’s turn to today’s sociologists. I was delighted to come across the words of Julia Twigg, who studies embodiment and age, pointing out that our judgment of the aging woman is something decided by society itself:
That academics are pointing out the negative attitudes we have toward aging, and especially in women, is one sign of change. It also means that we can push against it if we don’t like it.
But older women also have another source of hope. Just as the internet is inspiring our children, it also lays out an alternative path for aging a little less gracefully.
A remarkable roster of role models has arisen, showing that there is no need for the older woman to succumb to societal pressure to fade into the background. In fact, these ladies do quite the opposite. Ari Seth Cohen’s photographs collected in the book and associated blog Advanced Style celebrate their exuberance. Some have risen to fame. Some were famous already for achievements in their field, and have declined to retire gracefully.
Deutsch might have dismissed these women thus:
But they refer to themselves quite differently:
So … there’s another option. A whole new subculture to explore. The subculture of the older, expressive, break-all-the-rules women.
Shall I try to out-outrageous my daughter?
For all I say I’m envious of my daughter’s freedoms, perhaps the older woman has more leeway, more agency.
My daughter still has to navigate the competing demands of her parents entreating her not to wear outfits that will show her knickers when she bends over, while learning, and assessing the legitimacy, of the anti slut-shaming movement.
At this moment in time she’s pulled between school’s rules on how she’s allowed to present herself, and her desire to be like the extreme dressers she sees on Instagram.
Then there’s a tension between the endless bounty to be found in thrift shops, and the limitations of restricted storage space and the frustrations that explode from me when she brings “just one more top” into the house.
I’m glad I’ve poked and prodded at this ugly feeling of jealousy and come to understand exactly where it’s come from — and that there are options other than sinking into a societally approved sea of beige.
Gaining a deeper understanding of the styles and influences that set my daughter alight has made me far more understanding about those stray fake eyelashes I keep finding around the house.
I won’t forget my own forays into extreme fashion. They may even make me, temporarily, a more favored parent: I can pass tips on about hair crimping and experimenting with scissors, stencils, and sewing machines.
While recognizing that squicking out people my age is part of the point, I’ll try to curb any harmful excesses on her part, like tattoos and tongue splitting, at least until she reaches adulthood.
And meanwhile, I’ll continue to tread my own line, expressing myself without embarrassing her during this sensitive teenage period. Since we’re in and out of charity shops so much, who knows what I’ll find in the larger sizes while she flits through the tiny ones?
For all my struggles with expressing myself, it feels like I’ll never be ready to give it up.
And the real answer is — of course — to find the joy in it all, both as a mum, and as a woman.
Thanks
To my daughter, for sharing her fashion knowledge.
To Professor Janet Sayers, for helping track down Helen Deutsch quotes.
* * *
Myfanwy Tristram is an illustrator with a special interest in graphic memoir. She lives in Brighton on the south coast of England, and has been recording her life through the medium of comic strips since the Eighties.
This month’s books newsletter is a bodily affair. In an interview with Laura Barcella about her new book Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers, Sady Doyle discusses the body horror of womanhood: “reproductive horrors,” of course, and “the horror of being in a body so heavily controlled, penalized, and stigmatized,” naturally, but also the horror of violence against women; the grim spectacle of dead American wives piling up like soldiers:
I return over and over to the metaphor of war. We’re allowed to say that war is hell, but what does it mean when we lose fewer U.S. soldiers between 2000 and 2012 than women killed by their own husbands?
Whereas in her interview with Jonny Auping about Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe presents an inverted vision of dead women: “so many of the murders that we consume in media — the murders that make up the bulk of our cultural imagination — are with female victims,” she says. However,
I ask people, “What percentage of murder is a male perpetrator and a female victim?” People invariably say 70 percent or 80 percent. It’s actually 25 percent. That’s shocking to a lot of people because so many of the murders that we consume in media…are with female victims.
Seen through this prism, our obsession with female death is politically out of joint. But that’s exactly Monroe’s point: women’s deaths — a specific kind of young, white woman’s death, that is — are depoliticized, and thus more easily consumable as media. Which actually does end up tying in neatly to Doyle’s thinking; in Dead Blondes, she analyzes how women are made monstrous in the cultural imagination — specifically she focuses on horror films — because of all the monstrous things that are done to them in real life. This kind of state of exception that swirls around the subject of women and death, in both authors’ view, seems to breed a unique sort of narrative monstrosity that bleeds back into real life. In fact, Monroe’s book, rather than focusing on horror films, centers around four women who have developed an obsessive relationship with true crime and murder.
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Bodies, of course, don’t just belong to the dead. In her review of two recent novels — Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Nicole Dennis-Benn’s Patsy — Morgan Jerkins writes, regarding the mother and son at the center of Vuong’s novel, that “survival, the physical endurance of their bodies, is what binds them no matter where their family settles.” The body becomes a very particular site of meaning for young people affected by migration and displacement — and for the literature of migration:
Survival is a steady theme throughout immigrant literature, but what is most striking in Vuong and Dennis-Benn’s work is that they concentrate on the intimacy of their subjects without bombarding the reader with cold and calcified historical detail; instead, we learn about their countries’ histories — and about the consequences of the characters’ movement across vast spaces — through the living, breathing reality of the protagonists’ bodies.
And not all bodies are the same. There are sick bodies and bodies with disabilities, both of which require their inhabitants to navigate different landscapes than the ones encountered by healthy or abled people. Anne Boyer talks about being a body circulated through space by the logic of cancer capitalism in an excerpt from her memoir-in-essays The Undying; Keah Brown talks about her committed loving relationships (and brief flings) with the chairs in her life in an essay from The Pretty One; and in an interview with Naomi Elias about her memoir I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying, Bassey Ikpi describes the different approach she had to take to writing about her memories since Bipolar II had affected how she experienced own life: there were periods where “I just didn’t feel connected to myself, where I didn’t feel like I was in my own body.”
In all this body-talk, I can’t believe I haven’t even touched yet on Erik Davis’ High Weirdness! It’s a deep dive into the strange experiences of the psychonauts — those fabled far-out white guys of the early seventies who took a lot of drugs, got into the occult, and connected with a higher being. As Terrence McKenna wrote regarding an incident involving his brother Dennis during the famous Experiment at La Chorrera,
Dennis gave forth, for a few seconds, a very machine-like, loud, dry buzz, during which his body became stiff. After a moment’s silence, he broke into a frightened series of excited questions. “What happened?” and, most memorably, “I don’t want to become a giant insect!”
There are all types of bodies to inhabit in the world: sick and ill, placed and displaced, about to turn into an insect or not, etc. May you and your body go on to read many good books this month!
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