quarantine has led me to use youtube more. food videos for recipes, yoga videos for exercise. but i find myself unsettled by it all, even as i consume it. aside from things like music, it all feels like porn. call it educational, call it asmr, call it clickbait, but the structure is still pornographic. each video promises some specific relief, and the comments get mad if the uploader skimps on the money shot. you watch a single video and suddenly your home page is full of youtube trying to guess what gets you off. oh you liked that shit? don’t you want to see this food get made? this house remodeled? this pimple popped? this package opened? this car detailed? this knife restored? don’t you want to see this person laugh at the same part of a tv show that you did? don’t you want to see them rant about the same things that you’re mad about?
i highly doubt this is a new thing to observe. and it’s not that i have a problem with videos dedicated to some abstract gratification, per se. the unsettling part comes from the way that this pornographic behavior is not generally labeled as such. even jokes that a video is “like porn” or that the uploader left out the “good stuff” seem to miss the connection that…no it’s not “like” porn, it pretty much just is. which means that the uploaders themselves are in the business of being pornographers. they act like camgirls, they’re just selling a slightly more esoteric satisfaction. while doing yoga to a video i have to turn off the part of my brain that thinks a pretty girl talking gently about relaxation is probably getting someone off in a literally sexual way. and it’s not that i think that’s a yoga instructor’s goal. it’s more like, by virtue of existing within youtube’s norms their style was bound to converge on something ineffably sexual. i’m aware of the series “fake friends” that gets into the so-called parasocial nature of the relationship between youtube personalities and their audiences. though i’m not sure if that series makes the connection to camming (i’ve only seen part of it). or to the content structure of the videos themselves. not just the fact that youtube personalities act out a social relationship with their followers, but that the access to intimacy is in fact what the person is selling—literally so, often enough. not just intimacy either. sometimes authenticity, sometimes narrative, sometimes both. i wore the same shirt for thirty days! i bought my dream house! an apology to my followers… the point is that the person is turning themselves into a source of gratification, and this affects the structure and presentation of the videos.
it’s something beyond pure sensationalism too, although sensationalism is a factor. sensationalism hijacks a person’s attention by leaning on their feeling that something is important. it often takes advantage of the instinct to gawk, and the promised voyeurism of that can indeed feel like a pornhub thumbnail. BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE! etc. or say, a headline indicating that a minority demographic committed a crime might promise the validation of a bigoted mindset. but youtube also feels like walking through a market full of people hawking their wares. it’s a competition to sell you the thing that you want. but in that amateurishly unsubtle way that i associate with sexual content.
to the extent that i have a “problem” with the way that youtube, and really, so much of the internet, seems to encourage this sort of content, it’s probably that it prioritizes the audience instead of the creator. i don’t particularly care that people get off to things. so do i. i also admire the ability of internet content to get to the point, and therefore reward attention. but it does make me uncomfortable to see content become about satisfying an audience potentially to the exclusion of a creator’s own impulses. it’s the content-ification of content, in general. you don’t want a recipe, or a story, or a song, you want content. it’s the same reason that visiting netflix tends to nauseate me lately. because everything feels so calculated to appeal. there’s always been gratifying media. it’s the bread and butter of reality tv, hgtv, etc. “do you want to find out what happens, and will we make it worthwhile?” is a basic, understandable question to ask. as i’ve talked about before, almost all art has a relationship to attention and gratification, and so to some extent the label of “pornography” is just a matter of a work’s location on a spectrum. the difference between youtube and other red light districts, is that it’s at once more unsubtle than netflix, and less explicit than a cam site. and the difference between youtube and the average cooking show or blockbuster movie, is that it’s motivated to be more purely oriented around whether the viewer is satisfied along some very immediate axis. instead of something that rewards attention, but has concerns besides whether the content is moment-to-moment acceptable to some specific audience.
there are things that you say to make people feel thought of. things to make them feel loved. happy birthday. how’s your mother? it’s good to see you. that meant a lot to me.
i don’t know why i can’t do these things. i know what to do, and i do not do it. there’s a vulnerability to social gestures, but a fear of vulnerability doesn’t quite feel like the problem. it feels like being stuck.
thinking about emotional intensity. not specific to a kind of emotion. different people are differently prone to love, hate, fear, awe, obsession, disgust. i’m thinking about the feeling of being filled up with something, buzzing with something, bursting with something. the feeling that you’ll go insane if you don’t do something about it. true-cliche phrases like that.
something instinctive, reflexive about how it makes you react. the desire to hurt someone who’s made you angry. touching someone you love. possessing merchandise. speaking in tongues. intensity wants outlet. wants compression, perhaps. management. they say that’s why people can cry from any kind of strong emotion.
hard to explain how much time i spend feeling like that. like emotion, about everything, is water in the lifeboat of my mind that i’m constantly trying to remove. like every act is a leap from a precipice. medication didn’t stop me from being depressed so much as it stopped me from feeling so much, period.
which was a good thing. a relief. it’s easier to be happy or productive when you spend less time bailing out a lifeboat. easier than when there’s no ethical place for emotion to go so it just goes in circles and circles…until it doesn’t.
i can see the argument for mental illness leading to creativity. not because of romance. not because it makes someone have better ideas, let alone more ability to execute them, but because necessity is the mother of invention. the times i’ve been at my most creative, my most poetic, have been the times i was most full up with something. writing less out of creativity than sheer desperation. writing as emetic. as a spinning wheel. a way of getting emotion to take up less space.
creativity can flow from feeling a lot, is what i’m saying. whatever it is that one is feeling a lot about, and however it came about. why draw a horse if you’re not preoccupied with the idea of drawing that horse? i once said that you could think of sexual attraction as something more like sexual inspiration. the feeling of wanting to do something to someone, or have them do something to you. having ideas about it. even if the ideas are nothing more complicated than putting one body part into another.
talk about the word “process.” processing feelings. the same thing you’d do to a tree or a hunk of ore to make it useful. break it down, refine it. compartmentalization, refragmentation. the stuff you do to food not so much to make it palatable, but edible.
talk about why i’m drawn to the concept of compression in art. the idea of packing meanings and phenomena into a space that is small enough to look at. to use. taking death and beauty and betrayal and that way you felt on a rainy morning ten years ago and giving them names. not just to free your brain to think about other things, but also to expand its capacities. like learning new vocabulary. like reading a book and realizing that something you think about has been thought about before.
i think about why i get obsessed with things. it’s the feeling of trying and trying to squeeze a meaning down, and not being able to. sisyphus, tantalus, a dog chasing its tail. true-cliche metaphors like that.
(i sometimes think that if i were to ever truly be in love, it would feel like that. not obsession per se, but a feeling for a person so big and so compelling that i could spend a lifetime trying to process it and never be done. like a traumatic event, but with an opposite emotional polarity.)
isn’t it unfair how bigness leads to blockage as much as flow? something in the way versus something pushing from behind. my sister got married a couple years ago. at the wedding, people were asked to say something for the couple, a blessing of sorts, but as more and more people got up to speak the less i found myself able to. i loved her so much that the words wouldn’t even come. they just went around and around in my head, making me more and more emotional, and the end result was that i said nothing at all.
i care about things, and i do nothing, and it makes me furious with myself. or is the problem that i don’t care enough about the things i think i care about? or is it just that doing things is hard? is there too much in the way or is there not enough behind? how does one learn to tell the difference?
i’ve had trouble writing for months. for the whole last year, more like. if not more. but i couldn’t tell you why.
thinking about shame. about how my father retreated from my life when i was young, too ashamed of the failure of his marriage and business. about how he sublimates every strong emotion of his into politics and conspiracy and obsession because it’s somehow easier to sit with. your jewish wife divorces you? guess the holocaust must be fake.
thinking about insecurity. about how my mother believes so fundamentally that her emotions will not be accepted, that she cannot state them directly. how even her most basic expressions of opinion and thought must be couched in some way, armored with approval. she can’t just tell you about her day. she has to frame it as “i think we should go around and tell each other about our days.” this pressing need to narrativize, ritualize, because it adds order to something that otherwise feels precariously intense.
shame and insecurity as motivation versus shame and insecurity as obstruction. doing things because you don’t want to be loser. doing things because you don’t want to think about the fact that you’re a loser. doing nothing out of fear of being proven a loser. something in the way versus something pushing from behind.
i’m not so different from my parents. but i at least have the self-awareness to know that my lifeboat is full of water. and to practice emptying it in ways that don’t reek with pathology.
talk about why i’ve written this in a scattershot and pseudo-poetic manner. talk about why i don’t have a conclusion. when you try to encircle something big, there will be gaps. when you try to shift something big, sometimes you can only do so in pieces. the vague and figurative and obvious as levers that help you carjack unwieldy realities. to be a little less stuck than before.
In the last couple years, I’ve revisited a lot of the things that were meaningful to me when I was younger. I’m not exactly sure why I did that. Some nostalgia. Some curiosity about whether they held up. Some sense that maybe I could get some insight into myself. Why did I love the things I loved at a time when my id was more unfiltered? What did the younger version of myself need art about that maybe the adult version doesn’t?
A lot of the works are superficially goofy genre shit, but space ships, aliens and made-up words never really felt like it was what I loved about them. My taste was just as indiscriminate as a kid as it is now, which meant I read and watched and liked a wide variety of things. Proper literary things, even. I don’t think it’s an accident that I often connect(ed) with superficially goofy genre shit. Just like I don’t think it’s an accident that a different person might connect with musicals or period movies. But that’s an aspect of my personality to analyze another time.
No, what I realized was that all of these space-and-aliens-stories…on some level, were impotence stories. They’re stories about being manipulated by outside forces, or having shit stuck in you against your will. Stories about parasites. Stories about going insane. And while those might sound like “intense” themes for a child or teenager to be preoccupied with (as if children and teenagers don’t feel things intensely), I realized that it actually made complete and utter sense. When you’re young it feels like things are constantly just happening to you. Adults make decisions for you. Society makes demands of you. It’s hard to know what power you even have, let alone how to use it. Of course I’d relate to impotence.
I remember being obsessed with Ender’s Game. I don’t even know how many times I read it between the ages of 8 and 12. There was something in me that identified with being a pawn in an adult’s world, where your intelligence or your allegiance could be used to fight their wars and you’d have no control over it, no understanding of it. This sense that you were hurting others by proxy, fighting the wrong fights, because you didn’t understand how your power was being used. But that you had power. The feeling that if you were smart and special enough to be wanted, or to know that something was up, then you should have been smart enough to change the game.
Of course there’s arrogance in believing that you, a child, are so important that all of these adults want things from you. Arrogance in looking at a 6 year old military genius and going that speaks to me. But the truth is, adults do want things from children, even “unremarkable” children. They might want a child’s validation, obedience, affection, loyalty or even something as simple and benign as happiness. Being an unhappy child when you know your parents just want you to be all right? What a feeling of failure.
There was a sense that all of these adults—including but not limited to my parents—were invested in religion, or politics, or personal narratives, or some view of the world, and I had the power to reinforce it. I could grow up to be a good exemplar of their ideological beliefs, I could give them the feeling that I admired or needed them, I could pay them attention, I could tell them I believed them. But I couldn’t know whether doing those things was what I actually wanted. I couldn’t know if twenty years down the line I’d be yearning for an enemy’s forgiveness, and speaking for the dead.
*
Fast-forward to Farscape. Farscape is about a character who looks like he should be the hero. A character who knows the same hero stories we know, and thinks he should live up to them. But then the narrative makes him alien, and incompetent, and strips him of his every bit of cultural context and familiarity. In a narrative sense, it “feminizes” him. People want things from John Crichton, and it never has anything to do with him as a person (“Don’t be jealous Frau Blücher. He only loves me for my mind.”). Everyone is always hijacking his body and putting things into it. Microbes, needles, knowledge, chips. He spends most of the show with the villain literally living inside his head. An inescapable, macabre companion that aggressively dresses himself in the drag of Crichton’s psyche.
Language is a constant motif in Farscape, because language is how you communicate yourself. If you lack language, you’re impotent. You’re alien. It’s no coincidence that Crichton’s first moment of alien-ation is that he’s injected with translator microbes. It’s no coincidence that A Human Reaction flips repeatedly between how the alien characters sound to humans, and how they sound to Crichton. It’s no coincidence that the final horror of Die Me Dichotomy is that Crichton loses his power of speech. It’s no coincidence that Aeryn starts learning English, and Crichton starts quipping in Spanish. It’s no coincidence that Crichton starts the show speaking in incomprehensible human cultural references to aliens and ends up speaking in incomprehensible alien references to humans (“Fred Scarran. From the Gainesville Scarrans.”).
And not to be unbearably personal, but as a teenage girl who was going deaf, I responded to all of that. On a basic, physical level I felt like I was losing my ability to understand people, and by virtue of not understanding, becoming unable to make myself understood. A feeling of standing outside myself and watching myself become an alien. A feeling of invasion because I could no longer exist without technological augmentation. But there was also a gendered level. Being a girl and feeling like the world’s reaction to my physical form suddenly had consequences that it was up to me to either mitigate or capitalize upon. That sexuality was suddenly something I was supposed to be able to wield, and I had no idea how. This feeling that my body was betraying me both functionally and as my means of mediating between my Self and the world. In other words, a feeling that biology and social narratives were conspiring, like the universe in Farscape, to “feminize” me.
There was a cultural level too. I was aware of being in this American social moment that seemed grotesquely material and political. So are all moments in their own way, but I didn’t know that then. All I knew was that all these people cared about PT Cruisers and Super Size Me and Idiocracy and The Simple Life and Fahrenheit 911 and freedom fries and cartoons of Bush as a monkey. All these adults were begging for me to take a side about these things that felt stupid and ugly and profane. And none their interest in my side-taking had anything to do with me, anyway.
So at that time I wanted a hero’s journey that wasn’t a hero’s journey. I wanted a story about saying “fuck you” to the forces of the universe that were clutching at my hems and driving me insane, and going off to live as an alien and eking what joy I could from it. A story about saying “no” to the two equally evil sides of any evil, pointless war. I wanted a story about how maybe that made you a monster, or maybe that was a heroic thing to do. Maybe there was something horrible about it, but maybe there was something wonderful in it too.
*
Rewind to Animorphs. The whole concept of a Yeerk in your head using your body and speaking out your mouth. If my attraction to Ender’s Game was in part about the fear that adults and institutions were hijacking my abilities, then Animorphs was about the fear that the adults themselves were hijacked. There’s real horror in the idea that your mom isn’t your mom and your friends aren’t your friends, but prisoners trapped in their own minds, being piloted by an outside force. The fear that you’d have to re-interpret your every interaction with the people you admired or cared about, looking for ulterior motives. The feeling that say, your parent isn’t speaking their own beliefs, but rather acting as a mouthpiece for their country or their neuroses or an ad on TV.
One might rightfully observe, well isn’t that just They Live or Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Rhinoceros for kids? Yes, in part. But there’s the additional, crucial fact that these Yeerks only steal people’s bodies because they’re planet-bound slugs otherwise. The Yeerks aren’t an impersonal disease, and Controllers aren’t mindless zombies. The Yeerks are Pilots, just wanting to see the stars. Pilots that didn’t wait meekly for a Leviathan to take them or a PK to tempt them, but went and conquered an empire’s worth of sentient creatures themselves. Pilots we’re primed to see as disgusting instead of pitiable or majestic because they’re just slimy little slugs, right? The Yeerks are the antagonists because they’re the idea that powerlessness begets powerlessness. They’re the idea that you may feel impotent, but growing up to control others just makes you the villain.
It makes sense that the Animorphs are shapeshifters, and young, not just because whatever, these are technically books for children and turning into animals sounds cool. I like to imagine there’s some symbolism about flexibility there. It reminds me of His Dark Materials and the way that a child’s daemon has no settled form. An impossible circumstance? You morph. You don’t take and conquer; you change.
(I’m not reading too much into things when I say that. The books draw parallels between the Yeerks and the Animorphs from the very beginning. Marco pointing out in #1 The Invasion that Tobias wants to escape his life as badly as a voluntary Controller does. Cassie worrying in #4 The Message that they dominate the animals they morph the way the Yeerks dominate their hosts. Later in #16 The Warning they’ll debate the morality of morphing people. “Controlling” versus “morphing” is one of the most central dichotomies of Animorphs, one the Animorphs themselves do not always land on the right side of.)
Disability themes are rampant. Everyone is trapped: Tobias as a hawk, Ax on Earth, hosts in their heads, Yeerks in their pools, the Animorphs in their war. To say nothing of the times the books get explicit about it, like the Andalite taboos around vecols or that final arc when they give the ward of disabled kids the morphing power. And the question every time is, which of two non-ideal options for dealing with some limitation are you going to take? Do you live as a hawk, or do you give up? When the Animorphs give the Auxiliaries the morphing power, it isn’t a triumphant moment. They do it so the kids can fight, like the Animorphs themselves had to. They do it knowing that the kids will die.
That sort of thing was the appeal of Animorphs. They were exciting, funny, imaginative page-turners, sure. But half of the reason they were page-turners was because they centered these terrible ethical quandaries, and devastating emotional choices. That’s the kind of thing that makes you pay attention in fiction: situations where you don’t know the way out, so you don’t know what will happen. The same way you don’t know what will happen once you realize that the adults can’t be trusted, or your life isn’t entirely your own.
*
Here are some things I think are interesting.
I think it’s interesting that both the morphing power in Animorphs and Leviathans in Farscape are the things those works treat as something that can be profaned. Morphing may be described in gruesome, body horrific detail, but nonetheless an animal’s power is treated as something to be respected and used to fight. So David abusing morphing is profane. Visser Three morphing is profane. Similarly, forcing Moya to give birth to a gunship is profane. Cutting Pilot’s arms off is profane. The clones eating the walls of the ship in Eat Me is profane. And both of those, morphing and Moya, are symbols of transformation. Morphing in the obvious sense, and Moya in the sense of a guardian or shepherd or mother. The sacred instrument of your journey.
I think it’s interesting that the protagonists of all three stories change, but not necessarily for the better.
I think it’s interesting that all three stories involve loving and understanding the Other. Both Farscape and Animorphs are full of important interspecies relationships: Tobias and Rachel, Elfangor and Loren, Dak and Aldrea (it’s potentially relevant that Jake and Cassie are an interracial relationship too), or John and Aeryn, D’argo and Chiana (and Lolaan), Zhaan and Stark, Scorpius and Sikozu. Both Animorphs and Ender’s Game involve the protagonists—and the audience, by extension—learning “humanizing” things about the aliens that they’re fighting against. Aliens that have forms that they are not inclined to empathize with.
I think it’s interesting that Animorphs has a lot of the same parasitism versus symbiosis themes that Farscape does, but takes them in a direction that has less to do with sex and breeding (because as unbelievably dark as Animorphs gets they’re still books for kids) and more to do with authority. Where Farscape is full of half-breeds and genetic atrocities, Animorphs is full of gods and Galateas. In Farscape, parasitism versus symbiosis is about becoming alien in a positive way, or a self-directed way, versus being forced into alienation. Loving the Other versus being made Other. Birth imagery versus rape imagery. Whereas in Animorphs parasitism versus symbiosis is about control versus autonomy. How are people supposed to satisfy their competing desires without taking away other people’s agency? How much power should authorities have over the people they’re responsible for (and responsible to)?
#26 The Attack was always one of my favorite Animorphs books because of the way it drew parallels between all of these pseudo-children and their creators. The Pemalites made the Chee, Crayak made the Howlers, and Elfangor “made” the Animorphs. Then those children duke it out for the souls of the Iskoorts and the Yeerks. A literal war of symbiosis versus parasitism. The existence of the Pemalites and the Chee might lead one to think that creating children in your desired image is reasonable and ethical, because we all love dogs don’t we? And then you meet the Howlers, who are simultaneously pure innocents and terrifying killers. Creatures that think of killing as play, as a game of fetch, because that’s what they were made to be. The Howlers are dogs too. You realize that the Animorphs are their own kind of created beings. They were given powers to fight a war for someone else.
In other words, if you look at it a certain way, all of these children have been co-opted and controlled as much as Yeerks co-opt and control their hosts. Animorphs is deeply anti-war. And one of the main ways it’s anti-war is by painting war as something essentially parasitic. Something that chews people up. Something that traumatizes its protagonists from the word go. Something that forces you to make awful moral choices. Something that only happens when competing forces can’t resolve their needs in any other way. War is parasitic and parasitism leads to war.
I think it’s interesting that all of these stories involve war, and none of them are fond of it. They each question and deconstruct the genre of war story that they seem to belong to. Instead of telling a militaristic scifi story about crushing alien Others, and being led by nigh-mythological generals, Ender’s Game tells a militaristic scifi story about child soldiers, bureaucracy, misunderstanding the Other, and how although true genius and leadership exists, it can rarely outsmart the military apparatus that controls it. Instead of telling a campy Power Rangers tale about the wonders of friendship, Animorphs was intended, by the author’s own admission, to be a “grunts-eyed view” of combat that showed the “honest cost” of war. A group of guerrilla soldiers may form bonds and accomplish remarkable things, but their story will not end with medals or Ewok revelry. Instead of telling a utopic Star Trek story where humans are powerful and advanced and have near-imperial influence, Farscape tells a story about how humans are weak and clannish, and advanced imperial powers wage wars based on nothing better than conquest or mercenary interest. Crichton becomes a kind of warrior to defend himself, but he never becomes a soldier. He leads no armies or rebellions. He is nothing more than a bargaining chip in other people’s conflicts. The protagonists of all three stories wrestle with the guilt of having had to kill their enemies on a massive scale, and innocents along with them.
I think it’s interesting how embodied these stories are. There was something novel and arresting to my young brain, reading Peter’s jokes about pubic hair, or the descriptions of Ender smashing a boy’s nose. The feeling of a monitor in your neck, gravity and anti-gravity, the grappling shower fight. It feels uncomfortable and deliberate that these children are described in the “gross”, physical way that adults in boot-camp war stories normally are. There was something mesmerizing about all those descriptions of morphing. Every book there’d be paragraphs on paragraphs about teeth rearranging, legs sprouting, eyes popping, bones liquefying. Descriptions of the hunger and fear (and sometimes delight) of animals. Descriptions of horrifying battle wounds. Limbs removed, intestines spilling out, being eaten alive by ants. There was something affirming in how sexual, and how disgusting Farscape was. That even the puppets got horny, and John and Aeryn kissed like they meant it. That people ate and farted and were full of goo.
Change, symbiosis, bodies, war. I’m not going to overreach and claim that those themes necessarily go hand-in-hand with impotence, or that these three stories I happened to love indicate anything other than that they’re kind of story I happened to love. I recognize that I’ve glossed over potential interpretations or criticisms of these stories in order to draw the parallels that interest me. But I do think that war, i.e. super-personal conflict, and bodies are two of the most fundamental ways that power and selfhood get taken away. You lose yourself when you sign your will over to forces bigger than you, and you lose yourself when you die. Bodies are inextricable from mortality, and are a kind of shorthand for every natural circumstance you can’t control. Whereas change and symbiosis are the hopeful alternatives. Symbiosis means merging with something other, even bigger, than you, but in an inherently mutually beneficial way. You don’t get lost, because it wouldn’t be symbiosis if your needs weren’t being met, but you do become “more.” Change, in turn, implies agency. Nature and circumstance may transform you—transform you to the point of death—but you can also transform yourself. Change is a neutral force that anyone can potentially wield.
*
I don’t know that I need those stories anymore. I still love them, still find them meaningful (in fact I re-read some Animorphs to write this and I was taken aback by just how much I still honestly loved it). But I don’t recognize myself in them in quite the same way. Precisely, I think, because I do have power now. Not a lot. But I have a sense of what I’m good at, and what I can control. I dress how I like, think about what I like, talk to who I like. Having a body is a still a crock of shit, but that isn’t new information anymore. None of the ways I lack control over my life are new information anymore. And so there is less of a need to process the horror of it via fiction.
It was interesting rewatching Buffy, because Buffy was never something that I identified with when I was younger, despite the fact that it was a show about a teenage girl. Possibly because fundamentally, Buffy is a story about empowerment. Buffy has power. That’s the key thing about her. It’s true that like the characters in the other stories, she has been conscripted into a supernatural war against her will. She struggles with her agency, and is increasingly traumatized by the choices she has to make. But she wins. That is the point of her. She’s a classical hero. Her heroism is moving and satisfying because it’s never emotionally easy. It’s earned. But it’s still heroism.
So I was surprised that as an adult, I found myself relating to it. You might look at a season like season six, and think that that’s an impotence story, because a lot of it is about depression and when one is depressed one certainly feels impotent. But I see it more as a story about having agency and not knowing what the hell to do with it. The terror of “you have to make your own decisions now.” And most of the seasons are like that. They involve Buffy accepting some aspect of her power and growing up about it.
I notice a number of the stories I’ve been drawn to in my 20’s have had themes like that. I’ve found myself lingering on stories about women, and stories about confronting one’s agency. As a teenager, I loved Slings and Arrows, because Geoffrey Tennant was yet another character buffeted by outside forces (Art and Social Constraints On Art), with his own, art-related Harvey. But as an adult I was excited by Cayce Pollard instead. Someone who on the one hand is practically crippled by her responses to aesthetic stimuli, but on the other hand (a) uses this to practical effect, and (b) actually spends time examining to what extent her responses are disordered. I was similarly excited by Clarice Starling learning to pursue her taste in Hannibal.
It’s a weird shift, to realize you’re not powerless. It’s not necessarily a pleasant shift. It’s why I’ve never been compelled by empowerment stories that treat it as a triumphant, unambiguously positive thing. Stories that conflate having power with having the judgement or moral authority to use that power well. With great power comes great responsibility, but how do you know what the responsible thing to do even is? If you’re empowered by a story, all it really means is that it made you feel confident enough to make your own mistakes (or not-mistakes, of course) instead of someone else’s. Which can be quite a good and exciting thing. But it also means that if things go badly, it’s no-one’s fault but your own.
So I find that the stories about power that are most satisfying to me are actually stories about things like truth, judgment, and perseverance. Stories about solving problems. Stories about making decisions. Stories about fucking up and carrying on afterwards. Stories that treat self-possession as the hard work that it is.
*
I’m curious about what comes afterwards. Already I find myself itching for a new kind of story, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I’ll go back to needing the horror of powerlessness. Maybe I’ll find religion (the wonder of powerlessness). Maybe I’ll go full nihilism, or full hedonism. When I look at the next fifteen years of my life, I see work, but what stories does one need for that? Stories that explore the ideas that you want to explore yourself? It feels open-ended, in a way. For all that I’ve done all this talk about relating to stories, I’ve never actually explicitly gone looking for stories to relate to and identify with. That’s why I wrote this, really. It’s easy to see why I (or anyone) would be drawn to stories about people who looked me, or had the same experiences as me; less easy to see the deeper, more abstract concerns that speak to what one is preoccupied with. But even given that I’ve never had a very identitarian approach to art, I find myself caring less about relatability than ever. And maybe that’s a phase of development too. The phase at which you don’t so much need to process yourself as focus yourself. The phase at which your ego is secure enough that you can let your ego go, and be curious about other things.
I made a half-joking comment a couple Christmases ago that it seemed like every family had a certain genre of game that they would play together, if they ever happened to play games. And that you could probably infer something about the family culture as a result. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same principle applies to other groups as well as individuals, but the family-game dynamic is the one that’s most interesting to me. The genres were:
1. Luck. Bingo, Yahtzee, and many other things involving dice. Go Fish. Games that at their most advanced are a matter of playing odds, and at their least advanced involve no skill whatsoever.
2. Trivia. Trivial Pursuit, variations on Jeopardy. There’s some overlap with pattern-matching (below), but failure or success at these games depends most of all on whether you have a diverse and detailed knowledge base that you can easily bring to bear.
3. Pattern-matching. Set, boggle, scattergories, many other kinds of word games. Charades might count as well. There’s some overlap with trivia, but the competitive fulcrum is primarily about who can recognize a pattern or solve some clue.
4. Strategy. Chess, Monopoly, Othello, Stratego. Strategic thinking often requires the ability to notice patterns and think probabilistically, but it’s about doing so in an iterated way. If you’re playing Set you don’t need to think ahead to what might happen in the next round. You just need to match the shapes in front of you.
5. Skill. Many sports, video games, and games with a physical component. The skill in question varies--it can be a matter of strength, agility, finesse, or something else. But what the games have in common is that you can get better at them if you practice the game itself. If you build muscles and reflexes. To get better at a trivia game you’d need to study, and to get better at chess you’d need to learn a thousand different strategies, and possibly just become smarter. But to get better at Mario or football you’d mainly have to play a lot of Mario and football.
6. Social. Not sure if many families play social games, but it’s still a category. Things like Truth or Dare, Never Have I Ever or Two Truths And A Lie. Games where the point is about learning social information, and playing with personal dynamics. BS (or Bullshit, the card game) is a kind of social game, because the competitive, non-luck aspect has to do with whether you can read or trick people well.
Obviously, many games have overlapping qualities, and things like talent and skill can affect success at all kinds of things. Obviously, families might play a variety of games. But what’s interesting to me is the idea that what a family most often likes to play (or chooses to play) doesn’t merely or necessarily reflect what members of that family are good at, but also potentially what those families value.
For example, one family might play a lot of luck games or social games because they have young children who can’t compete very well at other kinds of games. Whereas other families (I’ve known multiple families like this) might throw their kids in the deep end of Monopoly or tennis because they want to cultivate business thinking or physical ability. In a family that contains people with very different sensibilities, the games they agree to play can reveal what sensibility tends to dominate. Or can be compromised upon.
(My family’s a pattern-matching family. We all have associative, apopheniac tendencies, and like the zing of cheap intellectual competition. But none of us have the kinds of knowledge bases that make trivia fun, and none of us have the patience for sustained strategic thinking. At least not when “having fun.” The fact that my family likes pattern-matching fits very well with the way that I was raised to value creativity and intellect, but rarely hard work.)
Fun is like humor. It’s individual, cultural. It reflects what’s interesting, important, difficult or unpredictable in someone’s world. Social faux pas are often funny to people preoccupied with social presentation, and luck might be fun to someone who finds the magic or danger of fate exciting. Or to someone who’s averse to competition or control. Strategy games might be fun to patient people, or people who think that wins should be “earned.” Trivia games might be fun to people who value knowledge, whether or not they know things themselves. Skill games might be fun to people who want a reprieve from more cerebral concerns.
My taxonomy is tongue-in-cheek, but the broader idea that “fun” is a complicated, revealing phenomenon is not.
I'm sometimes surprised by how often I talk about sex and/or things adjacent to it, because I actually find it to be a fundamentally boring topic. It's useful as a metaphor, or as a source of diverting puzzles ("What is going on in some dynamic between two people?"), but there just aren't that many things to say about it. It's one of those things that I talk about because I want to banish it. I resent it for tricking the animal parts of my brain into thinking that it is interesting.
It's cheating to say that without clarifying what does count as interesting. So I'm cheating, because I have no exact rubric. My sense of interesting/boring is a sort of mathy info-theory intuition, the way you can tell when something is well or badly compressed. Boring things feel like dead ends. Like you opened up a matryoshka and there wasn't anything inside.
Sex gives me that feeling, on the one hand, because it's so overexplored. Sex is, like, the obsession. There are things to say that haven't been said, because the universe is vast and bodies are under-understood, but there's nothing especially new about wanting to say them. Every generation thinking it's discovered sex, etc. But mostly sex as a topic feels boring because at bottom it's a simple biological instinct that's been gussied up beyond belief. You look at this treasure box filigreed with art and literature and fetish and theory and rivalry and centuries upon centuries of social negotiation and moral debate and your own stupid yearning and generally about a thousand different jumbotrons screaming IMPORTANT and you open up the box and all that's inside is this fortune cookie that says "your genes want to propagate."
But anyway. Saying things are boring is boring too. I was joking with a friend recently (I think it was his joke) that there are five things to say about sex. That was an arbitrary number, but I don't think it's wrong. If I were making a version of Tampopo that was about sex instead of food, I'd probably break the vignettes down into:
1. Sex as something spiritual. The idea of union. Vulnerability. Loss of ego.
2. Sex as something aesthetic. A material experience (pleasurable or otherwise) that can be used to express something abstract (if desired). Something you can have craft-level skill at. Dialog with a person or self-interpretation. Art form of bodies, akin to fashion or dance. Perhaps closer to theater, given the interactive nature of it. The erotic.
3. Sex as something economic. A resource to be negotiated for. Marriage, dowries, power. Something that can be given or taken.
4. Sex as something creative. The idea of reproduction. Self-propagation. Immortality. Similar to non-sexual forms of creativity (memetic reproduction of the self). Subcategories:
Sex as validation. Worth. Status. People wanting you to reproduce as a measure of social value.
Sex as defiance of death. Opposite of death. Sex also as beginning of death.
5. Sex as something biological. Bestial, even. The concept of the non-intellectual, non-rational. Pleasure of it. Disgust at it.
You know when you hesitate to post something because it feels a bit boring and obvious and you don’t think you’ve really arrived at the point? This is that.
The other day I was about to say that another person was "also a girl," when I realized that I was an adult and "also a woman" would be more appropriate. Except that "woman" felt weird as hell to say, and it wasn't a maturity thing, exactly. I feel like an adult to the extent that one ever does. But "woman" felt round and matronly. Put me in mind of beige pumps, blow-dried coifs and serious conversations about menstruation. Vibrator humor, divorce.
This isn't a unique or original feeling. I read it on tumblr, in comment sections, in mediocre thinkpieces. But the difference I sense between "girl" and "woman" is not the Louis CK difference ("girls gone wild" show their tits/"women gone wild" murder their families), although I suppose that difference exists. Nor is it the dissonance between feeling undeveloped or unrefined and a pressure to be wise or finished. It's more like the difference between the Wendy with children and the Wendy that's Peter Pan's friend.
When I was in college I learned about an interesting subgenre of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture: funerary statues of pre-pubescent girls. Ancient Roman portraits of grown women usually depicted their subjects as stationary and swaddled by their clothes, but pre-pubescent girls were often depicted as huntresses. In motion, and a little wild. Miniature versions of Diana/Artemis. See the pics above, for reference: a typical female portrait, a typical male portrait, and one of the funerary portraits.
This was notable to me, the idea that girls could defy gender roles, but women could not. The idea that girls could be multiple things but women could only be one. To me (though perhaps only to me), "girl" evokes a sense of scrappy striving, while "woman" evokes a refined endurance. I don’t need a gendered description of my age that retains a sense of effort and possibility in order to pursue those traits. Nor is this some kind of lament like “why do we have to grow up, man?” It’s more that I think it’s interesting that while there is a prototype for adult female neoteny, there is not for this other thing.
One of the more bizarre deaf experiences is that I lack a lot of knowledge of certain unpleasant phenomena. The other day I was walking down the street with coworkers and suddenly they all looked at me uncomfortably. At my “What?” the three men had what I’m sure was the enjoyable experience of explaining to a woman that she’d just been catcalled. For various reasons, I have a distinct impression that people attempted to be mean to me when I was growing up, but I have no knowledge of how. Friends sometimes translate the various sounds of human suffering in our environment. And these moments are unsettling mostly for the way they reveal how much I am unaware of most of the time.
I’m unaware of positive things too, but for some reason this feels less tragic. Friends have to inform me if someone we passed had sincerely complimented me on my outfit. I’ve been flirted with and not realized, physically, what was happening until it was over. I’ve been not-flirted with but behaved as if I had been because I read the person’s affect instead of their words. I’m unaware of both bad ambient music and cool coffee shop jams. I’m not subjected to the inane interactions of people around me, but I also miss any worthwhile eavesdropping. Et cetera.
It’s a humbling experience the way meeting an alien or a fourth-dimensional being would be. The way it makes you intuit your ignorance of huge portions of reality. Writing dialog sometimes feels to me like being fourteen and trying to write a sex scene. Which while frustrating, induces a certain humility about other things I might be tempted to authoritatively portray. The loss of positive information feels less tragic because the scope of nice things that can happen to me, or even nice things that can happen out of there in the world, seems smaller than the scope of things that can go wrong. Or a least: go strangely. It’s a matter of entropy. Order resembles itself. It feels somehow both predictable and providential. While disorder feels infinite. Every family unhappy in its own way, and all of that.
