tales from the wreckage: on love & survival

I can’t remember how old I was when I first read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. It had just been released in paperback, so I was probably in my mid-teens. But along with all those other semi-seminal teenage cultural encounters that make up my sapiophile scrapyard subconscious[*], elements of it have echoed throughout my subsequent misadventures, bobbing to the surface at inopportune moments and knocking hollowly against the fragile fencing of my mind. Top of the list is a scene somewhere in the middle where a mother returns to her two young children, who’ve been abused in her absence by the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man with whom she left them. The boy (iirc) has been rude to the Orangedrink Lemondrink Man, and his mother is angry: she says to him ‘every time you hurt somebody, they love you a little less.’

(In fact – I’ve just googled it, read the page if you can, Roy is genius[1] – the whole speech runs: “D’you know what happens when you hurt people?’ Ammu said. ‘When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.” But I think the particular inaccuracy of my remembered version is, in context, pretty telling. My words are rarely careless along axes I’ve considered, and I consider a fair bit.)

I struggled with that when I read it; I struggle with it now. Partly because the injustice and the misunderstanding and the blocked communication burn like acid behind my eyes. But also because for me, it’s not – and never has been – particularly true. For me, love sticks around. More than hope, faith, reason, certainly more than resentment or anger, possibly even more than my other two driving forces – curiosity and (the always imperfect drive toward) empathy/understanding – love stays as long as the person does. It changes, sure, changes tone and form and function, shifting like smoke around whatever difficulties or obstacles lie in its way and accommodating changes in circumstance and psyche effortlessly where reciprocated and inconveniently when otherwise. But also like smoke it clings, and it takes a bloody long reality shower to get the smell out of your hair. If it turns out my original sense of someone was faulty, which happens every now and again, then fair dos – I stand (or fall) by my judgement on a daily basis, and I’ll take that fall without a murmur. My bad. (What’s more common, and I suspect not only with me, is being aware of certain unpleasant aspects of a person without ever having them ranged against one, and then suddenly being brought up short when something that’s always been inexplicable and alien but irrelevant and thus acceptable becomes a hostile gulf, but I digress.)

It’s possible to map out the Freudian origins of this relentless, agonising, frustrating, triumphant ability to take it and take it and take it, to be beaten and banished and come back, bloodied and gasping, for more. My mother was loving and affectionate but conflicted about it, not least because my father often found her(/my)emotionality inexplicable and frustrating; both parents saw my ‘oversensitivity’ as (her)vulnerability; my rational father was in equal parts alienated and frustrated by it. Somewhere in between an unshakable sense of my own wrongness and unlovability, the conviction that love was inextricable from pain, rejection and inadequacy, was formed. And in some ways, it’s stood me in good stead. I’ve never expected anything to be perfect. I can recognise and deal with my faults and mistakes as they arise, mostly if not always without hiding or shame or unnecessary self-flagellation, because I’ve never been able to ignore my flaws, foibles and frailties. Loving and being loved by a person whom I feel knows me, romantically or otherwise,  makes me really, really happy. And it’s the flip side of the way I genuinely value the feelings of people I love above my own. I can’t ignore my own, I am incapable of denial, and these days I am just about capable of assessing degree, but when it comes to making life choices or relationship decisions I will go for the other person’s emotional wellbeing above my own almost.every.goddamn.time. (A tendency which has been known to infuriate my poor and very much beloved friends, less inclined to require self-abnegation than my inevitably intense relationships and unwilling, unendingly patient, unaskably wise witnesses to me spending more time in hell than out of it these last few years.)

In some ways, it’s got better. I have some barriers now, largely constructed around what it is reasonable to ask, and consistency, and deserving – but they’re pretty fragile, and subject to drastic relocation without notice. But still, somebody hurting me doesn’t make me love them less. Perhaps if they did so deliberately, with forethought and malice, or an unreasonable insensitivity or inconsideration. Perhaps if they did it without empathy, through thoughtlessness or assumption. Perhaps if they weren’t in pain themselves. But so much of the time, people hurt me because they too are broken. We’re all broken. Most of my loved ones, anyway, friends and lovers alike. We’re all scarred. It’s where the beauty lies. There’s a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in. I really wish, to all hell and every deity, that any kind of pain made me love people a little less, but it doesn’t. Not if I can understand it. Not if I know why. Not if I can recognise the pain they speak from because I know my own. Not if I love them. Which is the trouble, really.

There are consequences, of course. I find choosing to hurt others rather than oneself alien and unforgivable. I have nothing but contempt for those who can leave a trail of devastation in their wake without stopping to look at the damage they’ve caused, because their own path, their own pain is overwhelming. (Many people’s pain is always overwhelming. Mine is not infrequently so. Not everyone is a dick about it. And not everyone neglects to try clear up the mess.)

In the process of recent agonising breakup, beloved asked tentatively about my feelings for traumatic ex-beloved, who will himself admit that his behaviour toward me was horrific. To this day, I’m not sure he knows how much he broke me, or how hard it was to come back, and how different I am because of it. But to me, it wasn’t even a question. ‘Do you still love X?’ he asked. ‘Of course. Not like I did. But I’ll always have love for him. I don’t stop loving people.’

Which is my truth, my triumph and my tragedy.

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 [*] For the curious, other examples include: Stephen Fry’s discussions of love in Moab is my Washpot, Jarvis Cocker performing Pulp’s Acrylic Afternoons, falling for Doc – yes, the seventh dwarf – at the panto aged eight because he was skinny and dark with glasses, or the first time I saw Marlene Dietrich in a pinstripe suit or Brian Molko in eyeliner. Or the scene in High Fidelity where Laura leaves her father’s funeral to fuck her ex because she ‘just wants to feel something other than this.’ Some things just resonate.

[1] “The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.”
― Arundhati Roy

On sex, choices, consequences and compensations

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently discussing sex, and in particular my sexual choices and their implications. It’s something I find quite difficult, because sometimes it seems as if the way I make said choices is both relatively unusual and relatively unassimilable within any of the subcultures with which I associate myself. Namely, I’m NOT poly, despite that being the standard assumption by anyone outside the cultural mainstream. (tl;dr version = open is ok, but I can only be in love with/seriously commit to one person at once, and I find sharing Partners, capital P, difficult, as anyone unfortunate enough to be a close friend atm can testify.) Neither am I the culturally codified monogamous standard, exactly – although I’m generally pretty good at monogamy (when given the opportunity with someone I am or could be in love with, a strikingly rare occurrence), I certainly don’t necessarily limit sexual contact to within a single codified Relationship, and am probably a little too open to alternative relationship constructions for the Daily Mail’s comfort. And I’m not promiscuous, either, not that there’d be anything wrong with it if I was. I can’t do casual sex, or rather I can’t take sex casually – I can’t do one night stands with strangers, or with people I don’t already know and trust and respect (and probably in some sense love), or sex with people I feel casual about, or sex whose meaning for both of us isn’t discussed and openly consented to.

So. Where does that leave me? Well now. For me, sex is primarily and profoundly about connection. Obviously, I’m pretty appreciative of the sheer physical glory of it, my body’s pretty well wired that way. But more significantly, I’m an intimacy junkie, closeness to and understanding of others is one of my most fundamental driving forces, and sex is a unique and powerful means of achieving that. It’s a very quick way of getting under someone’s skin – finding out what they need, who they can be, whether you could love them, learning how to be with them in a fairly profound sense. And for my sins, I’m (mostly) entirely comfortable with people (or at least people I’ve decided I care about enough to want to share those aspects of myself with) having that knowledge of me – I’m at peace with my own emotional vulnerability, as  or at least as much as I’ll ever be. And I trust my own judgement.

That said, I don’t, and never have, navigated my way though life trying to avoid pain, because that’s impossible – life and pain are inextricable, you can’t defend against illness or accident or death or any of the myriad tragic coincidences that echo around us simply as a result of living in proximity to others. Life is suffering. There’ll always be pain. The trick is – and oh, how tricky it is – accepting that, and where you have a choice, choosing to be honest, and learn, and hope. And be kind. So, I’m totally with Bob Marley on finding the ones worth suffering for. People I choose to fuck (and we’re not talking big numbers here – except in cases of accident or genetic variation you have more digits than I’ve had lovers, although it depends somewhat on definition) are in some sense open door people – people whom I feel instinctively can teach me stuff about myself, about themselves, about the world. There has to be other stuff, too – physical attraction, and intellectual chemistry, and trust, and emotional resonance – but that sense of possibility is crucial. Desire itself is an open door. Of course, sometimes behind an open door there’s just a wardrobe – but sometimes there’s Narnia, and like I said, I trust my judgement.

And part of that judgement, whatever my acceptance of the possibility of pain, is by and large selecting people who will retain and act on respect for me, whatever may happen between us. Within or without a conventional ‘relationship’ situation. For my sins, I’m big enough and old enough and ugly enough by now to know that feelings and fucking are not in any way necessarily correlative; how I choose to relate them is just that, a choice. I’ve been passionately and later functionally in love with people whom for geographical/life reasons I couldn’t fuck, and slept with people I couldn’t be ‘in love’ with; in the latter case, sex wouldn’t change that, however close it brings us. My feelings for a person are what they are, and while mutual desire may open doors and/or expose lovable bits of someone it wd otherwise be very difficult to access (and these days I tend not to fuck people I couldn’t and/or don’t love in any sense, even the most diffuse) they’re not, baseline, going to change. I’m lucky enough to have a fairly if not infallibly accurate sense for how deep my feelings for someone could potentially run, regardless of whether emotional circumstances (and the inbuilt mutuality clause in my heart) allow them to do so.[1] It’s not always easy, but I know myself well enough to know that for me, self-knowledge, fleeting joy and genuine connection are often more than worth the pain of losing them. And I’ve been lucky enough to meet some amazing people who understand and empathise with my reluctance to let sexuality either define or limit the bounds of emotional intimacy, which has been incredibly rewarding in terms of love, insight and support.

Thing is, thinking and living thus comes with consequences. For a start, as my opening paragraph would imply, I don’t fit into any culturally defined categories – I’m not a serial monogamist, exactly, or poly, or promiscuous, or casual. I’ll have sex outside relationships, but with people I care about, and mostly as an expression of what for me is a genuine impulse towards sustained closeness of some kind, even if not a traditional ‘relationship’-bound one. See previous re. trusting judgement in such situations, but it’s unavoidable that I’m therefore open to, well, getting fucked over, as they say. Secondly, people make all sorts of inaccurate assumptions. Usually along the lines of I’m wilfully promiscuous so I’m ‘easy’ – I’m not – and relatedly that sex and/or my relationships with my partners are unimportant to me, but also (in relevant circles) that I’m poly so should perforce be cool with all manner of things I actually find quite difficult.  Regrettably, this sometimes includes potential lovers, although doing so tends to remove one from that category pretty quickly – but even outside that kind of emotional loading, it’s hard to explain, and I end up on the wrong end of a number of problematic cultural schisms. The divide between girls you fuck around with and girls you go out with in the cultural mainstream, for example, that dreadful why buy the cow when the milk comes free thing – easy to say I wdn’t want to be with anyone who thought like that, and that’s undoubtedly true, but it’s never pleasant finding out one’s entire emotional capacity has been summarily negated by the willingness to express desire. The assumption that either my body or my emotions – intense as they are if you know me, hah, in both cases – are somehow worth less because I share them on the basis of closeness rather than commitment. The loss of good girl privilege – I mostly lost that a long time ago, right about the time I started talking about sex and subbing and the erotics of violence on the internet, or publishing papers on hardcore BDSM porn, but nevertheless I’m very aware that should I, gods forbid, get raped, or more seriously sexually assaulted that I already have been, it’s going to be even more impossible/traumatic to exact any form of legal retribution. (The inevitable vicious interrogation and undermining of my sexual choices/morality/selfhood would hardly encourage me to try). Being an openly sexual subject in a culture where (female?) sexuality is relentlessly objectified was never going to be a stroll over Hampstead Heath, but it’s ten times more difficult if you’re doing so outside culturally codified boundaries.

I’m not complaining, exactly. My notes for this point consisted of ‘SO, IS IT WORTH IT?’ at the top of a notebook page; within half an hour said page was covered in tiny scribbled notations of things I felt I’d gained from doing things this way. Insight. A number of close and loving friendships. Understanding, both from others and of others. Forgiveness, awareness, acceptance. Joy, contact, connection. Support and reassurance. The delight of an instinctive bond with others, lovers or otherwise, who’ve also examined themselves and their needs and their desires closely and constructed their own ways and means of working amid and around and across the monolithic cultural categorisations of acceptable, ‘normal’ sexuality.

So, is it worth it? For me, for connection, for closeness, yes. But only just, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t come at a price. And sometimes a highly personal one. For every person who’s reached out, there’s been another who’s dismissed me, or disapproved, and sometimes they’ve been people I liked or respected or desired. For every person who’s shared themselves or their stories or their experiences there’s been someone else who’s shaken their head in dismay or raised an incredulous eyebrow. Certainly I can entirely and genuinely understand and sympathise with those friends who conduct themselves otherwise.

It’s not easy. But then, what ever is?

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[1] Essentially, more than I want *any* particular person I need to feel both wanted and able to give, so if neither of those exist, the feelings can’t either.

Just like A Woman – on feminism, sexuality, culture, violence, misogyny and hope.

trigger warnings for misogyny, violence, sexual violence, general kyrarcial bullshit

That I don’t know how to start this post is somehow part of its point. Prompted by recent online discussion of feminists covering or reinterpreting misogynist works of art, I wanted to talk about the multiple intersections between sexuality, (potentially gendered) violence in my head, and the artistic and cultural representations thereof. But those intersections are so various, the layers of influence and response and impulse and connection so intertwined, that it’s tricky toknow where to begin. Perhaps, in accordance with outdated tradition/hidebound convention, with my personal beginnings.

A lot of the art and music and visual media I grew up with, and formed my identity from and around and through, has problematic sociocultural constructions in there somewhere. Certainly I’m not the only one who finds a clash of ideals difficult sometimes , and I’m probably not even the only one who’s lost significant friends over pointing this out in feminist cultcrit (my first boyfriend is no longer speaking to me after the review I wrote of the Stardust movie. Some days, I’m actually quite proud of that.) I’m by no means blind to the issues of problematic art, and I do my level best to behave according to the eminently sensible guidelines for Being a Fan of Problematic Things. But the fact remains that one hell of a lot of the media I absorbed myself in growing up can be seen to fit into the category of ‘problematic’ in some way – everything, from my parents’ beloved Stones and Dylan records to Jane Eyre and LOTR, from Joss Whedon to my beloved historical novels. I’ve been devoted to the Earl of Rochester since age 11, ffs, and whilst my adult academic self can speak authoritatively about a multiplicity of voices, satirical distance, an infinitely frustrated idealist lost amid a cynical world, there’s no denying my younger self simply forgave him his occasional misogyny for the sake of his frequent vulnerability, accepting the former as a logical result of the latter (see also: John Donne, Shakespeare, T S Eliot.)

The thing is, while I think we can all agree that Misogyny and Misogynistic Violence are Bad ™, the vast majority if not all inhabitants of the contemporary West have formed their genders and sexualities in (dialogue with) a society with a hugely significant cultural inheritance of misogyny and (often if not always) gendered violence. Of course it’s in the art, because it was there in the world.

So what do we, as responsible 21st century feminists, do about that? Refute its significance? Refuse to engage? Reclaim, reinterpret, redefine? Personally, I’d regard the first as futile, the second as defeatist, and the third as an opportunity. As the mind-bendingly brilliant Angela Carter put it: ‘I’m all for pouring new wine into old bottles, particularly if the pressure of the new wine causes the old bottles to explode.’ Culture is a toolbox, as a wise man said to me of late, and to my mind there’s no point in using only a screwdriver when you have hammers, nails and a saw as well.

Trouble comes, I suppose, if a man’s using that hammer to threaten, or to bludgeon a woman to death. I’m going to consider mostly traditional misogyny and its intersection with gender and sexuality: partly because that’s my area of expertise, and partly because I don’t really feel myself qualified to comment on much else – I have all the white/cis/able-bodied/middle- class/educated/other privilege, so there are better folk than me to comment on – for example –trans misogyny and racial stereotyping. And a lot of what I’m going to say relates to very personal responses that are themselves conditional upon my possession of those characteristics, which needs to be borne in mind.

So. A couple of things. One, no cultural work is a monolith. People respond to the same material in vastly differing ways. Cross-readings happen all the time, in ways intended by their creators and otherwise.

Take Rochester’s notorious Regime de Vivre, for example. I can’t for the life of me find a decent online version, so here’s the version in Keith Walker’s edn:

I Rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two,

I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do,

I send for my Whore, when for fear of a Clap,

I Spend [come] in her hand, and I Spew in her Lap;

Then we quarrel and scold, till I fall fast asleep,

When the Bitch growing bold, to my Pocket does creep;

Then slyly she leaves me, and to revenge th’affront,

At once she bereaves me of Money, and Cunt.

If by chance then I wake, hot-headed, and drunk,

What a coyle do I make for the loss of my Punck! [whore]

I storm and I roar, and I fall in a rage,

And missing my Whore, I bugger my Page.

Then crop-sick all Morning I rail at my Men,

And in Bed I lye Yawning till Eleven again.

What is it – a celebration, an ironic condemnation, an outpouring of self-laceration or self-hatred, a defiantly wry acknowledgement of inadequacy, a careless assertion of success? A takeoff of some unknown other? A cry of despair? Who knows. On the surface, it’s all casual misogyny and sexual violence, but is the narrator endorsing the behaviour he claims as his own? are we meant to sympathise, criticise, congratulate, condemn? Maybe these ambiguities are the most interesting element, reflecting the reader’s own preconceptions back at them? I’ve read critics taking all these positions, and more.

Even cultural products depicting the most unpleasant and damaging ideologies (or realities) are open to reinterpretation and cross-reading. A piece the author intended as serious polemic can be reinterpreted by its audience as satire or comedy (just read some of the evangelical Christian stuff on the net.) There are even feminist Charles Bukowski fans. The world is an infinitely various place.

And not only can work be interpreted or read differently, but it can also be reinterpreted and performed by feminist artists to give an entirely different meaning, or at the very least to interrogate, problematise and question. As an example of this, I’d like (if I may) to take you on a strange journey.

Bob Dylan’s Just Like a Womanis one of the multifarious hugely significant background tracks to my life. My parents played Blonde on Blonde repeatedly during my childhood; I knew the words long before I had any idea what they meant, and lest the onset of a grunge-and-Britpop-fuelled adolescence enabled me to escape those formative influences, my First Proper Boyfriend was sufficiently into Dylan that I must’ve heard the latter play it live about three times, mostly from the front row. So it probably isn’t surprising that it’s always had a fair amount of significance for me. I *do* break like a little girl, still, or I feel very much like I do; and  moreover that I appear to and that kind of vulnerability is part of what I (re)present to the world. As for the bridge couplet about ‘this pain in here/ I can’t stay in here’, my response to that is so multivalent as to deserve an entire essay by itself (which I will write, if you ask, I dare you.) I am also, for my sins, very aware of its potential misogyny – all that taking and faking ‘like a woman’ all those curses, ribbons, bows, fog, amphetamine and pearls  - and problematic binaries. Dylan’s vocal on the album version of the song is not particularly emotional; he leaves the accompaniment to express whatever sorrow is missing from his voice. Covers, however, are a different matter. (And oh god, there are SO MANY covers. Obviously this is a song that resonates with a wide variety of people.) Jeff Buckley’s makes it a man’s tragedy, long-drawn-out and melodramatic, almost spitting the amphetamines line and slowly drawling the chorus. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s breathy, feminine version is softer, opener, more positive in the verses; more complex, sadder and softer in the choruses, which were probably the most positive part of Dylan’s. CN Lester’s gorgeous androgynous performance gives a sense of depth and understanding, an awareness, warmth and weight absent from the original. Both Gainsbourg’s and Lester’s address the emotions implied by the lyrics in their vocals, particularly their sadness, more than Dylan does; the latter’s ambiguous gender presentation also implicitly questions Dylan’s stark binaries, opening up the song in unexpected ways. No individual piece of work is unassailable – and certainly nothing can’t be subject to reinterpretation in challenging, undermining and revolutionary ways. Reinterpretation is all part of what Angela Carter (again! Sorry) called ‘the investigation of the social fictions that regulate our lives – what Blake called the ‘mind-forged manacles.’ (In her own such investigations, for the record, she ‘found most of her raw material in the lumber room of the Western European imagination.’)

Anyway. Probably one of the most troubling aspects of engaging with work i find problematic from a gender angle is the intersection of potential misogyny and sexuality. Like everyone else in the Western world, cultural products with problematic gender/sexuality ideologies have played a significant part in the formation both of my femininity and my sexuality.  Yes, a lot of Western cultural history is problematic according to the tenets of modern feminism, and SOME OF IT I FIND HOT. And that’s ok. [1]

(There are, of course, a vast range of artists of all genders whom I find sexy precisely because of the ways they inhabit or explore the gender binary or fraught issues of sexuality, oh hai Lou Reed Annie Lennox David Bowie kd lang Justine Frischmann Pearl Jam Amanda Palmer Pulp Brian Molko, but I’m less concerned right now with work whose ideologies I can actually make a feminist case for. I’m damn glad it exists, and I wish there was more of it, and will endeavour to support and facilitate its creation. But.

I’m not arguing so much about the fairly incontrovertible need for MOARR challenging feminist art, but that work manifesting problematic ideals can also still be valuable to feminists. To recap: even the most obviously problematic work is a) interpretable in a variety of ways, b) up for reinterpretation by other artists, and now c) a legitimate source of sexual or emotional or intellectual inspiration.)

Anyway.

Some music/art I find hot because it showcases a kind of young, brash, aggressive, domineering masculinity I only in practice find attractive when it coexists with things like intellect, sensitivity and usually androgyny; some I find hot actually *because of* an undertone of misogynist threat. Which is possibly the most challenging element of this. Sometimes, art that manifests the threat of misogynist violence I find sexy directly BECAUSE of the threat of misogynist violence.

Some personal background, as explanation not excuse (for none is needed): it’s just a fact of my size and shape, let alone the longterm consequences of a decade’s anorexia, that the vast majority of ppl I find attractive, whatever their gender, could probably cause me significant physical damage if they wanted. It’s just a given. I’m not quite as feeble as I look, due to all the swimming, but pretty much. So I associate being physically overpowered with sex in a way that interacts fruitfully with my submissiveness – surrendering to people, trusting them utterly to look after (and pleasure) me, trusting them not to force me to do anything I don’t want or do things that cause me significant damage or that I won’t like EVEN THOUGH THEY BLATANTLY COULD is hugely sexy for me. And the logical correlation is that i find a *lot* of artwork with overtones of misogynist threat *really fucking hot*.

Some examples (trigger warning for sexual violence, gore, and animal abuse in the videos):

Eels – Fresh Blood. This is from an album called Hombre Loco: 12 songs of desire, many of which are in some way problematic. Note the extent to which the video for this is actually *about* the threat of sexual violence; not so much an undertone as a TONE, RIGHT HERE, IN YOUR FACE, of sexual threat. This is the most overtly menacing track – the deep rumble of that bassline – and it’s also the one that makes me alternately want to wriggle seductively and stops me like a rabbit in headlights.

Same goes for NIN – Closer. It’s brutal (the first line is ‘you let me violate you’ ffs), it’s nasty, it’s lyrically and musically and visually violent – and oh god it works. It’s worth pointing out that in the (amazing, horrific, beautiful) video it’s Trent Reznor who’s perhaps made most physically vulnerable – he’s chained blindfold from the roof at 1.48 – and the visual associations between humanity and animal and insect and bones and gore run cross-gender. But still, it’s hard to argue with the potential for violence and misogyny in the lyrics - although Reznor’s use of physicalised iconography to convey emotional states (and vulnerabilities) should also be borne in mind (The latter being, for me, infinitely the dominant factor. I’m actually tempted to do a close reading of the lyrics, complete with detailed emotional exposition of what they mean to me, but I won’t. Honest.)

Almost anything Nick Cave ever did. It’s not that I fancy Nick Cave himself, particularly, although I probably wouldn’t say no if he offered, the man’s a genius (see also: Leonard Cohen). But the overt aggression of tracks like Mercy Seat, Loverman (‘there’s a devil waiting outside your door…with his straining sex in his hand..’) or Red Right Hand (note blindfold woman in bed in the video; another song less than notable for its subtlety) is a) pretty damn hot in itself if you’re me, and b) creates a sense of violence held in check on his more tender songs that’s incredibly powerful as far as i’m concerned. (Actually, Cave might belong with the deliberate explorers of these issues; my personal jury is out on that one. And I partly think he’s a genius because he begins love songs with lines containing words like ‘interventionist’ and produces highly emotional yet relatively complex relationship analyses like ‘we talked about it all night long/we defined our moral ground/but when i crawl into your arms/everything comes tumbling down’, but I digress.)

(You may have noticed that this entire section has been derailed by my spending two hours listening to music i find hot. So shoot me. You may also have noticed that i’m a child of the 90s, musically speaking – so shoot my bleeding body, to use an inappropriately apt metaphor. I’m sure younger feminists have very similar dilemmas about sexual aggression and misogyny in hiphop. In fact, I know that,  because some of them write books…)

The sexual attraction of potential violence is not necessarily gendered – some of Le Tigre and the Kills, both female vocalists (and the latter scribes of the immortal line ‘i’m gonna stab your kissy kissy mouth…’) have the same effect – but the non-misogynist examples are not necessarily less hot. They’re just different. And the thing is, i feel that to be asked to deny the sexual pull of the examples cited above is to be asked to deny a significant element of my sexuality – the sexuality formed and expressed in a culture full of precisely these issues. And i have *no* desire to apologise for that – or to construct myself as a victim, or deluded, or without agency, in that expression. An element of violence turns me on, for reasons I have examined and explored, and that’s ok. (It’s also worth gesturing here at the theraputic potential of controlled intersections of violence, sexuality and trauma etc, which folk like Pat Califia and Meg Barker et al know infintely more about than me.) And in responding sexually – or emotionally, or intellectually – to ideologically troubling work, i am not necessarily endorsing their problematic elements, but i *am* saying that arousal, or whatever this track (or book, or film, or picture) does for or gives to me is worthwhile, and welcome, and in itself nothing to be ashamed of, unless it violates my moral code in other, unrelated ways.

Either way, I don’t think that as long as I remain aware of ideological conflicts, my sexuality or anything else should have to be negated by the problematic cultural heritage that was the background for its formation. Anything i can find in or take from problematic work, be it inspiration or ideas or argument or resentment or arousal or encouragement or whatever, is a valid tool to use for creative expression, self-actualisation, and so on. And such appreciation certainly doesn’t inherently negate the premium i place on consideration for others’ wellbeing in terms of how i move through the world.

So. I can’t help thinking that a better approach to living happily in a ideoculturally problematic environment is precisely this: to acknowledge the troubling elements of our particular cultural lumber room, take from it what we will, and make *new* work (or lives, or ideas, or love, or whatever else). Whether the new takes inspiration from the old, ignores it entirely, consists of alternative, challenging, more complex interpretations, or simply takes the form of more thoughtful, interrogated responses. To quote Angela Carter again, because she puts this better than I ever could, maybe we should be trying to ‘transform…fictional [art] forms to both reflect and precipitate changes in the way people feel about themselves – putting new wine in old bottles and, in some cases, old wine in new bottles. Using fictional forms inherited from the colonial period [for example] to create a critique of that period’s consequences.’

Culture is a toolbox. And tools build worlds.

[1] Nb. For reasons that are personal and psychological as well as cultural (explored in more detail here, here and here; good luck with disentangling the impact of intrafamilial dynamics from wider cultural context, etc) I happen to be a bit kinky, largely but certainly not entirely submissive; I can’t emphasise enough that while some of the works and issues I discuss press those buttons, some of them don’t, and some non-kink-identified folk find these things sexy too. Which a) is ok too and b) by no means implies that they are secretly in denial. People’s sexualities are just different, both in conceptualisation and in practice, and that’s rather the point. I don’t get to call someone else a pervert because x turns them on, any more than they get to call me vanilla because I don’t like canes or fancy Marlene Dietrich in a top hat.

there are places I don’t go in case the world ends, and one of them is you

I wrote a book recently, for the irrationally compelling Edward Saperia, mastermind and madman behind Clockwork Quartet and the impractical number of Original Content London projects:  it’s called Cryptofloricon, and was probably the most fun I’ve ever been paid for. Anyway, for possibly the first time ever, I was told off for being insufficiently emotional, and this is what happened.

Be warned. There are more where these came from.

You’re beautiful I can’t quite breathe with you near. Like you’re gravity, like you’re god, everything begins and ends with you. At the corner of my eye, at the centre of my attention, your every move an earthquake, I am lost when your eyes find me.*

Desire I’d forgotten. The sudden breathless boneless longing that drags you momentarily from street or shop and melts you into the press and slide of skin and bone and weight and warmth, muscle and fingers and mouth and leaves you breathless, blinking, beached on the bare boards of your life.

Longing The sunlight is sharp and it cuts me, slices through flesh to the space where you’re not and hollows an ache I plaster over daily with the silt of a thousand compromises. The curve of your jaw, the set of your shoulders, the turn of your head, they echo against my eyelids as I reach blindly for reason to pretend that anything else is enough.

If only There are places I don’t go in case the world ends, and one of them is you. Still, some nights I dream of waking with your taste on my tongue and your touch on my skin and your warmth at my back and I can’t get away from the knowledge that there’d be nothing left to want.

Regret I’ll never undo it, never unhear, never unsee and yet I close my eyes and wrench my head from the thousand, thousand insistent echoes of all the things I could have said, should have done, all the ways I could have saved us.

Fear It’s already begun. The little losses, the slipping away – an absence, a hurry, a forgotten gesture and a careless word and the gradual, gentle erosion of an island shifting incrementally from idyll to prison. One day soon I’ll turn and see only your shadow in an empty room as the door drifts shut behind you.

I need you It’s not that words don’t make sense with you gone, it’s that there seems no sense in reading them. Nobody hears me like you do, nobody sees what I see, and so the world fades into outlines, a blur of grey generalities without the insistent bite and beat of your body and the myriad mysteries of your mind. I am lost without you, lost within you, lost where you are not. Whenever you leave, part of me goes too, and I am adrift, ripped loose, shaken and bleeding and branded with wounds only your tongue can heal.

Sorrow It never leaves. When I wake in the morning, I drag its heavy aching weight to breakfast, its dull depths drumming slowly at the back of my eyes. Wherever I look or move it follows, echoes, lover, loss, limit, life. It’s been years, and yet it’s still there, the desert, the desertion, every hollow heartbeat a heartbeat behind.

Despair It’s cold. Nothing now except the blank page, the accusing eyes, the empty hands and the last door, closing. Every breath is a body blow. I sink, searching, freezing streets and jagged skylines closing around me as the last flicker of hope snuffs out.

*Nb. ‘At the corner of my eye / at the centre of my attention’ refers to a poem by the infinitely more talented obandsoller, a sharpened diamond to my emotional bludgeon. Given the amusingly marked distinction in our styles, however, and his kind permission, I felt the theft was justified.

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It’s not what but who: the problems of desire

Nb: I’m aware that this is a post underscored by multiple privileges I have and bring to these issues. Eg, cis-privilege, racial privilege, often-heteronormative privilege, ‘pretty’privilege, or at least some version of being vaguely culturally assimilable as attractive, able-bodied privilege, etc. I’ve tried to write this without apologising every other word, because that just gets annoying, but do please call me on anything you find problematic.

There are two things underlying this post. The first is this brave and sensible article about ‘what do I want’ by the wonderful Holly Pervocracy (whose blog you should all read, on the offchance you don’t), and the second is Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose Bitch and Now, More, Again I read recently during my bedbound post-hospitalisation doze. I haven’t read Prozac Nation, but M,N,A expresses a sort of ruthless loathing self-excoriation I strongly identify with, for all that I’ve never snorted prescription drugs or gone on international TV fucked on coke. Particularly the way she talks about her body and her self.

‘I write books, I give lectures, I have good friends, I am a good listener and a better talker – I have an entire personality that is not entirely unappealing; but the only part of myself I really believe in, that I really think men care about, is my body.’

I read that, in More, Now, Again, and just thought ‘yes’. Unlike Elizabeth I certainly haven’t grown up knowing I was pretty; I was an ugly kid, blossomed a bit in late adolescence, but from ME at 18 onwards I spent the majority of my life starving and/or stressing about my fundamental undesirability (for which read unlovability and unacceptability, symbolised by what I felt – or feel, mood-dependent – to be my grotesque ugliness). Nevertheless, enough people over the last couple of years have made it clear that they consider me physically desirable for it to sink in, at least to the extent that Elizabeth’s statement above is very much where I live. At a pinch, now, I can consider myself a desirable object; my body as something with worth, not least because it conforms at least to a certain extent with contemporary cultural criteria for female attractiveness (smallish, boobs, proportionately long legs, long hair, etc). But this leaves me with two fundamental problems.

One, yes, I can see my body as an object of worth, but an object whose worth is ruthlessly, inexorably depreciating, with age, number of partners, and the number of times I sleep with any one person. You’ve had me once, why would you possibly want to again? I’m permanently waiting for lovers, potential and actual, to lose interest, to move on to someone new/else/better. (There is at least one possible exception to this, but frustratingly, in this instance the specific doesn’t seem to transfer to the general.) The fact that I look a good few years younger than I am bizarrely makes this worse: is whoever it is only interested because I look 23? Should I be careful not to talk too much in case I’m accidentally too mature? What if I’m having a fat day, or my IBS is bad, or I eat a lot? I warn people, obsessively and overanxiously, that I’m not good enough for them whatever they may think, just to offer them the chance to walk away before they decide to take it, to maintain some fragile illusion that maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe I don’t care. It must get really annoying.

And two, as per Elizabeth’s quote, I know how to be desired, but not how to desire, really. Desire fucks me up. I know how to be a desirable object, to respond to (mostly male, see later) desire, to be courteous and friendly where necessary. Well, not entirely: I still find others’ desire problematic, but I am at least familiar now with the concept of its existence, with how it feels. Saying ‘no’ is still difficult, especially when I care deeply about the person concerned, but even when that isn’t the case I’m aware that on some level I instinctively assume people deserve a yes just for deigning to want me, at the same time as I fiercely resent anyone who makes me feel they only want me for my body. I don’t, actually, have sex with that many people, and never have –  hitting on me has something like a >5-10% success rate – but I still, after all these years and all these feminist blogposts, angst whenever I turn someone down. As if just in case, if I’d put out, they would have been miraculously transformed into somebody I wanted. As if saying yes if I actually meant no would be reasonable or fair.

Far worse though, I have NO IDEA AT ALL, none whatsoever, how to cope with my own desire. None at all. So for me, Holly’s post is a bit offbeam. I’m mostly cheerfully open about *what* I want, the things I like doing in bed, my kinks and foibles. I can discuss *that* with strangers and friends as well as with lovers, although I too am susceptible to awkwardness in the heat of the, er, moment. But desire fucks me up. How to express wanting someone, even how to deal with those feelings and/or the possibility of rejection – I’m utterly lost.

All the more so given that my sexuality – and my social circles – have shifted over the last few years, from being almost entirely het to being quite frequently attracted to those of genders other than male. Anybody I find powerfully attractive, whatever their gender, I fall apart around. I’m a complete idiot. It is a source of constant wonder to me that anybody whom I’m drawn to ever actually reciprocates interest. (When they do, I tend to attribute it to aforementioned ‘desirable object’ theory, regardless of how unfair this may be.) In some ways it’s easier when the person in question is male, cis or otherwise, because I have some vague template now of how to respond sexually to men, the aforementioned knowing how to be desired but not to desire notwithstanding; and nevertheless God knows I am enough of a fool around men that I find overwhelmingly attractive. But when the person concerned is female or one of many glorious flavours of genderqueer, that effect is magnified, because I haven’t been raised with or absorbed any social templates for this. I’m much more just a(n inadequate) person. I fall apart. I flail. I have absolutely no idea of how to express myself, let alone express attraction; as someone who cheerfully and intent-freely flirts with a lot of the people a lot of the time, sometimes the best way of telling who I find attractive is who I’m being careful not to flirt with (THEY MIGHT NOTICE I WANT THEM, AND THEN WHAT? o.0 ) Just sometimes, I manage to do the flirting thing with someone I actually want, and it works, and then I still fall apart, because WHAT IF THEY WERE MISLEAD INTO THINKING I WAS SOMEBODY WORTH HAVING? You can see the problems here, yes? Even if I’m not *actually* being a twat at any given time, I generally feel like I am, and that I’m secretly not worth having, and this can apply as much with established lovers as it does with new people. (Love, that complicated and messy concept, might make a difference here, but by and large I don’t believe in it for myself anymore, so the question fails to arise.[1]) There is a stage, once people are friends or – occasionally – lovers, and we know where we stand, when I relax again, but even then flirting can feel painfully loaded, given the poly/open seas in which I swim, and that nobody is my partner.

This is bigger than sex, too, although sex is probably both the most important area in which it, ah, comes up. I’m useless at wanting things, particularly at wanting things from people (and you don’t get more personal than someone’s self, really.) I want like a child – fiercely, irrationally, passionately. I chase my passions like they’re running away, and I’m falling over my own feet trying to catch up with them. I don’t know whether it’s a female thing, although Susie Orbach’s piece about the two great female taboos, expressing dependency needs and initiating, is floating around the back of my head somewhere – I suspect a lot of people find desire, particularly unmet desire, complicated on some level. But because so much of the process of my growing up was essentially that of learning *not* to want, to put others’ needs or desires first, even now I can recognise that maybe my (being allowed to) have desires is a Good Thing, my relationship with my desires is stuck somewhere between ID (childlike, animal, raw) and superego (socioculturally mediated, the self in relation to others, what do they want or need) almost without passing through the coherence of ego first.

Maybe that’s not quite true. My notorious inability to do anything by halves is implicated here, too – bear in mind that even attempting to resolve ‘being an acceptable person’ and ‘wanting things’ comes off the back of years of anorexia, which is basically refusing to acknowledge even basic desires and needs because they’re so overwhelming and it’s easier to block the lot than look at them head on. And I’m aware that part of how I’ve been going about resolving ‘other people’s needs are paramount’ with ‘I have needs and desires too!’ has been to problematically correlate ‘other people desire me’ = ‘I am a desirable object’ = ‘*therefore* maybe I’m allowed to need’, a process whose complications don’t even bear thinking about. The key to all this goes right back to Elizabeth Wurtzel above; goes right back to a childhood that taught me emotional sensitivity is bad and others’ needs should be prioritised; right back to a culture that teaches me my function and value as a woman is always somehow based on other people. Namely, for all Elizabeth’s sense that men want her body, she’s still convinced of her own inner unacceptability and unloveability, and needs others to affirm otherwise. I’m not quite as bad as she is, I hope, but I’m close. Although I now have the capacity to believe myself worthwhile – and manage to do so in certain areas much of the time – at the end of the day, I need other people to validate my core self, the emotional drives and sensitivities and needs. I need other people – each themselves mired in their own struggles with or connections to this stuff – to give the self I still feel is inadequate (because if you want, or need, you’re not self-sufficient, therefore insufficient, right?)the right to exist.  I need other people to reassure me not just that they want me but that I’m acceptable. And that’s not a fair thing to ask of anyone, even if they ask it of you in return.

In summary: man, we’re fucked up.

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[1] So yes, the L-word: a note on personal history. My earlier adult relationships, after the adolescent disaster that fucked me up between the ages of 18 and 22, were basically formed outside any sense of personal desire. I fell for people because they fell for me, and luckily enough they were cute so physical desire came with; I never really dealt with desire outside love. That anyone could find my broken self not only acceptable but *needable* (is that a word?) was more than enough reason to love them. (Mysteriously, this doesn’t appear to’ve been that bad a filtration system; mad as they undoubtedly are, these gentlemen are thoroughly decent and charmingly eccentric chaps, and still friends.) Then there was the boy (I’m reverting to old nicknames again; if you don’t know who I’m on about, it doesn’t really matter), who just about blew every other concept or – sometimes it feels – possibility of love out of the water, simply by getting so thoroughly where I was coming from because we’d known each other so long. Devastating as the end of that was – ‘devastating’ being the best one-word summary of ‘it broke me for at least a couple of years and left me with scars that are still problematically apparent’ I have at my disposal – it left me with considerably more defences/barriers, a profound sense of what being loved could mean, the inability to trust anybody really (however close we are, I’m always really just waiting for you to walk away), and the firm conviction that I’d never really meet anybody I could love like that – or, more to the point, who would ever love *me* like that – again. These struggles are ongoing.