I booked my plane tickets to visit my family for Christmas. The last time I was home, I accidentally bro-hugged my uncle, so I’m clearly out of practice with being around family. I don’t know what December will look like well enough for me to assume that I’ll have time to write a December newsletter, so I thought I’d cobble together some failed drafts from throughout the year—to hell with through lines and developed ideas.
Literature after Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti’s Motherhood ends in a moment of bathos that’s hard to recover from. The narrator spends the novel ruminating on the question of whether to have a child. She consults tarots, engages in esoteric religious practices, interprets her dreams, digs into her childhood and her own mother, reflects on patriarchal notions of womanhood and the history of Judaic culture, etc. But this narrative fizzles out entirely when she decides to get on an SSRI to treat her depression:
Before the drugs, sadness and anxiety was all I knew. Everyone says if you can whisk away your anxieties, you should. I had wanted to whisk them away, but I wanted to do it by old-fashioned means—means that didn’t work—delving into my past, religion, spirituality, dreams—not by modern means, which are easy, and work. [...]
I think the drugs are the reason I am feeling less bad, not something I realized. All those years, when I had been leaning on epiphanies to make me feel better, the feeling would last for ten minutes, or a day, but it wouldn’t really change anything. [...]
What kind of story is it when a person goes down, down, down and down—but instead of breaking through and seeing the truth and ascending, they go down, then they take drugs, and then they go up? I don’t know what kind of story it is.
It’s a hard question to wrestle with. The supposed opposition between art and science has a centuries-long history, but what if science is the answer? What is literature after Lexapro? We invest these great fantasies into art, religion, literature, and philosophy—that they not only speak to our spiritual nature but can, in fact, transform it radically. Even if we give up on the supposed political force of art—always a hard sell—it’s difficult to abandon or curtail this spiritual fantasy, despite how seldom we ever approximate it. It’s part of the beauty of being alive, this pursuit of radical spiritual communion and change.
I’ve often said to myself that art saves your life even when your life isn’t at stake. Every book I’ve loved, whether a great novel or pop trash, has felt life-affirming in some fundamental way. And yet none of them has transformed me, restored me to myself, reenchanted my life as much as 20mg of Lexapro did.
Damn.
Free tweets
Solitaire is just sudoku for people who can count up to 10
The grandfather paradox but instead of killing him, you fuck him so good you turn him off from women forever
In the mood for some 🍆🧀 (eggplant parmesan)
I’m sort of the bad boy of the skincare community
A self-described communist I used to follow on Tumblr is now a findom on Twitter looking for moneyslaves
Doctor, I think I may be depressed. I’m losing interest in things I previously enjoyed, like dark, impenetrable irony.
A quick thesis on bisexuality
Contemporary notions of bisexuality emerged on Tumblr, and the concepts of bi erasure and biphobia were specifically developed as dimensions of media criticism within fandoms popular on the site.* Why did bisexuality matter so much? Girls and women had long fetishized gay male relationships in fandom communities before the rise of Tumblr (e.g., on FanFiction.net and LiveJournal). Tumblr, however, changed the game by folding feminism into its general culture.
Canon now presented fandoms with a hurdle, because fans could no longer dismiss canonically straight relationships in m/m fiction without slighting the woman (by saying that she got in the way of a gay couple or was a man’s romantic mistake, or by just pretending like she didn’t exist). Bisexuality offered the answer to this contradiction and now measured the halfway point between homosexuality and feminism—not homosexuality and heterosexuality. “Fake bisexuality,” similarly, is the halfway point between heterosexuality and feminism.
Routing bisexuality through feminism is why bisexuality today is touted by some as essentially a mark of sexual liberalism, which seeks to overcome all limits to desire perceived to be socially constructed (e.g., weight, race, genitalia, ability, etc., except age). As always, the rule of thumb is that everyone is bisexual until they’re asked to give head. Stay woke.
* An extended exploration of biphobia
Back when I was on TikTok, I saw a man explain how, if you think about it, biphobia is at the root of homophobia, not vice-versa. (Please sign my petition for an option to remove all front-facing camera videos from your feed.) Which is a wild claim, particularly because biphobia entered into the cultural lexicon because teenage girls on Tumblr were upset that The CW didn’t insert a hardcore gay porn episode into season 6 of Supernatural. This is truly the origin story of biphobia as a concept. Thanks to their efforts, biphobia is now the fundamental stratum of sexual oppression.
Having long heard that Freud alleged that everyone is fundamentally bisexual, I decided to look into Freud’s reasoning. It wasn’t what I expected. Freud often uses “bisexual” in a very specific way, better rendered as “monosexual.” In a strict sense, he means that all embryos develop the same sexual anatomical structures prior to sexual differentiation, in which, say, the proto–sex organs become either testes or ovaries. (This is why men have nipples.) In terms of sexuality, very young children are all homosexual, because, prior to exposure to the opposite sex’s genitals, they assume that everyone has the same genitals as they do. Their exposure to sexual difference prompts either castration anxiety in boys or penis envy in girls, setting off a series of sublimations and eroticisms that paves the way for mature heterosexuality. Bisexuality, in the contemporary sense, is arguably still present as sublimation—a sometimes imperfect process—but the broader claim that everyone is bisexual is fraught, though potentially kinda hot.
Interestingly, the “everyone is bisexual” claim comes under fire in Adrienne Rich’s famous essay on compulsory heterosexuality. Rich argues that, applied to lesbians, it has an undeniably patriarchal character. The claim assumes that it’s impossible to even fathom that some women can’t secretly, subconsciously be attracted to men. There is more than denying lesbians’ experience at stake in this assumption. At its most extreme, it provides the justification for “corrective rape.”
I see the threat, and yet I think I do believe that everyone, to a degree, has bisexual impulses, sublimated or no. Or maybe I believe that everyone would have an easier time if they did. Friendship between men, specifically, can get so polluted by the mimetic tensions of admiration and envy, compassion and competition, that I think at some point, you can’t talk it out like brothers, but must pound it out like step-brothers. But more seriously, I think that the reality of mimetic desire leaves you open to a sort of bisexual longing that you’re better off, and richer for, being conscious of than denying.
All that said, I am amused that, according to Pew Research, 62% of self-identified LGB people are bisexuals, but as of 2015, only 9 percent of bisexuals were currently in same-sex relationships. I had my twenties bookended by major “situationships” with closeted bisexual men—one of whom had lesbian parents(!!)—who liked playing fort-da with my heart, so I maintain my rule of thumb outlined above.
Best novels I read this year
Jerôme Ferrari, A Sermon on the Fall of Rome
Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel
Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity
Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Chatterley Mindset
“You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it.” — D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Early winter recs
Le Labo’s Another 13 (pear/musk/jasmine): Though very expensive and perhaps too popular, Another 13 is a captivating scent. It doesn’t have a strong gender profile, but it is very clean and intimate, perfect for soft boys like yours truly.
Local coffee beans as gifts: I spent my twenties living on a grad-student stipend, and local coffee beans were my go-to inexpensive gift. They have just enough personality to be thoughtful, and you can bulk them up with a t-shirt or a mug from the shop or a book. They’re also a great way of supporting local gentrification efforts.
Stretching: I seldom do long stretching routines, but I try to fit in a few rounds of stretches throughout the day, targeting specific muscle groups. But if your familiarity of stretching is limited to old gym class exercises, I do recommend trying out some follow-along videos to learn some better moves and proper techniques.
Happy December!
have you read Geoff Dyer's book on D H Lawrence? if not strong rec
Antidepressants don't work for everyone, baby! Some of us still need to have books.
Adrienne Rich had a lot of relationships with men before switching over to women; was she just relieved to not be faking it or was complete repudiation necessary for a legit identity back then? Just like bisexuality is more legit now as there are more established legal rights for homosexual relationships and social media encourages lots of identities and more fluid ones? Regardless, on a practical level most people will have to pick it and stick it on one side or another...