Every year, when the leaves start to fall, I think about applying for MFA programs. I watched Girls and read Bunny by Mona Awad at an impressionable time in my life and so have a vision of MFAs as cutthroat and dreary. This is despite much evidence to the contrary - I know plenty of people who liked their programs and found friends and communities in them. Still, it is hard to shake the feeling that putting your writing under a communal microscope in this way would expose its raw vulnerabilities. My fiction feels more fragile and personal to me than essay writing, which after all has an objective standard it must meet, unlike fiction, which beyond a certain point, is tremendously subjective.

The MFA fantasy for me, then, like for many people, is a fantasy about time. I imagine myself holed up in a little cabin somewhere doing nothing but writing. My life at the moment is not really like this at all. I live in New York City and work a lot. I have devoted professionalism and focus to my career, in order to make money, and have little will or energy to give such professionalism and focus to my creative work off the clock. None of this is to complain. I feel very lucky to have a good and interesting job and to be able to sustain myself. It is simply a reality of this kind of life.

Still, as the old adage goes, I figured that if I could not bring myself to a workshop, perhaps I could bring the workshop to me. So I have attempted to sacrifice everything at all dispensable in my life and the long and short of it is that I am writing a novel. I write mostly at night, both because of my schedule and because of my preferences, and so I am trying a monastic form of living where all I do is work and write essentially. My aim is to finish this novel before the end of the summer because I am a Virgo and it is good to have a timeline. Wish me luck!

In the spirit of workshopping, however (and this is the reason I am making this corny announcement), I am looking for fellow fiction or CNF writers who are interested in writing communally once a month or so. This could mean sharing pages, maintaining joint goals, or actively writing in the same space. If you are in New York City and working on a project and also looking for this, let me know! Feel free to reply to this with a little bit about what you’re working on, how much time you’d have to commit to this, and what you’d be looking to get out of it. I am restricting this to New York for now because the intent is to move it off the internet and bring it into the real world. There is no minimum requirement in terms of publications or experience, but I would be looking for seriousness, rigor, and follow-through (as well as kindness and respect for others, obviously).

As a side note, I will still be writing occasionally on this newsletter but for now am prioritizing the fiction project. My posts here will continue to be sporadic for now.

In Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders’ mind-bending 5-hour science fiction epic, the protagonist, Claire, wakes up amidst the remnants of a decadent party in Venice and decides to drive home to Paris. She soon hits traffic. The world is apparently ending. A nuclear satellite has gone rogue and may soon collide with the earth, ushering in the apocalypse. Claire realizes that there is opportunity in this impending crisis: she can wipe the slate clean—start her life over and make meaning for herself. This is 1991 and the end of history is upon us. Caught up in international intrigue, Claire soon hops effortlessly across the globe, from Moscow to San Francisco to the Australian desert. The world is her oyster until it catches up with her.

I thought of Claire while I was watching Sirât, Oliver Laxe’s 2025 Cannes Prix du Jury winning film. Although Sirât has mostly been described as a road movie, it is maybe more accurately a journey to nowhere. Like Claire, the characters in Sirât move blithely across contested borders and through unfamiliar landscapes, ignoring reports of global crisis, until everything comes crashing down on them.

Until the End of the World and Sirât share this blissful escapism and a fascination with remote, seemingly inhospitable landscapes, but they are very different genre-wise. I have seen Siråt compared to Mad Max, Wages of Fear/Sorcerer, and other such voyages through hell. But it contains a purposelessness and a sense of drifting that those films lack. It is more spiritual, in the kind of new age-y vein that its director emanates. “Sirat” is an Arabic word, apparently referring in Islamic theology to a very narrow bridge that leads souls to paradise. On either side of the bridge yawns the abyss of Hell. You must walk very carefully and straight ahead to reach the other side without falling. This imagery recurs in literal sequences during the film, although their meaning is not entirely straightforward. Where is hell in this movie? Is it in this collapsing world or in an escape from it? In the stunning opening sequence, during a freetekno rave in the desert, lasers form a glowing staircase leading up the sheer cliffs like a stairway to heaven. The thudding and minimalist beat in the background winds its way up to ecstasy. Dance becomes something ritualistic, religious even. It binds people and individuates them and exposes them to each other.

In the midst of this rave in the Moroccan desert, Luis (Sergí Lopez) appears with his young son. They are on a quest for his missing daughter, Mar, although it is unclear if she is really missing or has simply cut off contact with her family. Luis is preppy-looking and drives a minivan. He is clearly out of place in this scene. Still, he falls in with a group of ravers, convinced that they can lead him to his missing daughter. You get the sense that he recognizes something of her aura in them. But immediately after, the rave is shut down by a convoy of soldiers, who forcefully evacuate everyone. War has broken out, which the characters refer to ominously as “World War Three.” “It’s the end of the world,” quips Leo Goldsmith in his review for 4Columns, “and our children are at the rave.”

A few of the dancers are not deterred. A close-knit friend group of kind-hearted outcasts evade the soldiers and head out across the mountains, with Luis in tow, south towards “the Mauritania border.” Techno music ripples through the background, lending a hallucinatory quality to the gorgeous and bare mountain peaks and sandstorms. But this journey is a nightmare, pocked with extreme trauma and terror. It functions as a kind of ego death for Luis, who eventually wanders off in a numb fugue state and collapses beneath a blood-red sunset. He awakens stripped of everything—his belongings, his loved ones, his identity, like a modern-day Job, and is ultimately able to walk forward calmly, putting his faith in the unknown.

This final portion of the film, the section of it which most closely resembles a post-apocalyptic thriller, is seemingly set in the disputed territory of Western Sahara, which lies between Morocco and Mauritania. Laxe never explicitly mentions Western Sahara or the ongoing conflict between the Polisario Front and the government of Morocco and the geopolitical context is perhaps more readily legible to Spanish viewers. Most of the American reviews I read of the film barely mentioned it, instead seeing the violence that flares up as a far-off dystopian war.

Yet the context seems key to me to understanding the film, particularly its inclusion of land mines. Western Sahara has been a disputed territory since the 1970s, largely occupied by the Moroccan government, with the exception of a small breakaway zone. The UN has called it the last colony in Africa and much of its displaced population live in semi-permanent refugee camps in Algeria. Starting in the 1980s, the Moroccan government constructed a 1700 mile sand wall to form a buffer zone between Moroccan-controlled territory and the rest of Western Sahara (known as the Free Zone). Along this wall runs a nearly continuous minefield stretching out through the Sahara desert, sometimes for miles beyond the wall itself, and containing in total millions of buried land mines.

In Sirât, the characters will eventually stumble upon this minefield, while resting and grieving. They set up their own impromptu rave before realizing they are in a death trap. The whole film is crystallized, I think, in this moment. Suddenly, instead of Mad Max, the story and its delicate thumping soundtrack, resembles something like Zone of Interest. There is death all around but all they can do is dance. A.S. Hamrah sums it up pithily in his n+1 review, remarking that the characters “try to submerge themselves in a subculture in the middle of nowhere, but the world’s violence will catch up to them.”

Eliding this political context in favor of a vague symbolic war is frustrating and has been justifiably criticized, but it allows Laxe to leave open a symbolic reading of the film, overlaying the literal one. Luis and his companions walk through the valley of the shadow of death. They are stripped, rave-like, down to pure feeling and survival. They take psychoactive drugs which help speed up their ego death. The film offers a critique of its protagonists, a group of marginalized European punks who believe they can defeat nature and outrun global crisis, and who treat a contested colony as their playground. But it also empathizes with them. Raving will not save them, but it will bring them closer together, and maybe that is all they have left.

Claire too undergoes ego death in Until the End of the World. In Australia, on Arrernte Land, she becomes addicted to a device that can record your dreams and play them back for you in fuzzy abstract sequencing. In these recordings, she sees her past self, she sees her fantasies, she sees the faces of those who have died. Like the raves in Sirât, the dream recordings are a pastiche of spirituality and they blind Claire to the real world around her. She has escaped too far into the recesses of her own mind.

It has become very fashionable to talk about the end of the world as if it is imminent. This looming apocalypse is a putrid brew of the climate crisis, nuclear anxiety, techno-determinism, and millenarianism. Our current crop of dystopian film and fiction often hearken back to the mid-century, repurposing the fallout tropes of nuclear winter and sentient supercomputers to terrify audiences. In his 1993 book, Life under a cloud: American anxiety about the atom, Allan M. Winkler describes how difficult it was to spark and sustain public outrage and action around the Cold War nuclear arms race. “Unless issues become immediate […] most citizens of the United States have avoided thinking about vexing nuclear controversies in the naive hope that problems will simply disappear.” Instead, this anxiety was diverted into fiction. Winkler quotes Isaac Asimov who claimed that “atomic-doom science-fiction stories grew to be so numerous that editors began refusing them on sight.”

Part of the problem with dystopian stories, from climate fiction (cli-fi) to nuclear apocalypse to alien invasion to Black Mirror-esque social hell, is that they tend to take one of two narrative routes. Either, their protagonists languish in the knowledge of impending doom, trying to reckon with the smallness and insignificance of their lives and the magnitude of their feelings and their guilt around not having done more. Or, they improbably rise to the occasion and become heroes, averting catastrophe. A third way, humans trying to figure out how to adapt and survive through the destruction of their entire lifeworlds, is rarer but more interesting to my mind. In The Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina tries to rebuild her community in the face of intense destruction. In Station Eleven, the survivors of a flu pandemic form cooperatives and band together around art and theater, the only means of expression that is left to them. In Samuel Fisher’s novel, Migraine, set in a weather-ravaged London, a bookseller stays in his abandoned store, surrounded by now useless books, like some kind of latter-day Miss Havisham, until human connection pulls him out.

“The problem of the end of the world is always formulated as a separation or divergence,” write Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in their book The Ends of the World. On the one hand, we imagine a world where our species has been wiped out and only the most tenacious of animals persist; on the other, we imagine humans left to wander an unrecognizable landscape, our entire world vanished. This second scenario is more easily imaginable perhaps than the first. We cannot imagine a non-human world, one animated by other forms of consciousness. In stories where humans have been replaced, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Planet of the Apes, the animals are anthropomorphized or transformed into humanoid machines (Danowski, de Castro, pp. 65-66). In Western metaphysics, the natural world does not have consciousness. It waits passive, wild, untilled for the domination of Man.

Not all creation myths start at the beginning. De Castro and Danowski describe a series of Amerindian creation stories, notably that of the Yawanawa from the Western Amazon, in which humans are created before the rest of the natural world. However, these early humans engage in cruel and immoral behavior and squander their lives. Because of this, a great number of them change or are transformed into animals, plants, and the cosmos, thereby forcing the remaining humans into a kind of ontological relativity. Instead of a fall from grace or being granted dominion over the earth as in the Biblical tale, humans here exist in a world in which everything has consciousness and everything may endure after you are gone.

This upsets the Edenic story with its womb-like characteristics. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow question our ability to really understand the movement of history, as attached as we are to the linear mythology of the Garden of Eden. In the Biblical version of creation, humans used to live in a magical pastoral paradise, eating fruits from the trees and sharing harmony with nature, before they were forced into the yoke of civilization. This is a bittersweet tradeoff. They will gain knowledge, which will allow them to develop laws and technology and art and agriculture, but they will continue to yearn for this simpler past when they were free from responsibility and toil and pain.

The problem with the Eden story for Graeber and Wengrow is that it infantilizes our ancestors (and, by extension, cultures organized differently than our own). Indeed, Bruce Pascoe describes in his seminal book Dark Emu how early British colonists arriving in Australia misrecognized the culture before them, identifying built structures, dams, flour storage units and artistic works as natural formations. So committed were they to the idea of the Aboriginal people they encountered as wild hunter-gatherers with no civilization, living in permanent Stone Age state, that they literally could not see the culture before them.

Graeber and Wengrow argue that demystifying our prehistoric ancestors will open us up to alternative ways of organizing human society. Danowski and de Castro argue that we already live in a radically diminished world, one that, in some ways, has already ended. This offers us the opportunity to move backwards, against the relentless tide of historical progress towards a more sustainable way of life. Oliver Laxe expresses a similar idea in an interview with Interview Magazine: “We’re not at the end of the world. […] We are in a changing era. When an era changes, it’s not like a door—it’s a fade, two eras overlapping. That’s why sometimes the past appears inside the future.”

Is a rave the closest thing we have to transcendence? Some of the earliest recorded religious rituals involved dance, music, hallucinatory experiences, sometimes aided by psychoactive drugs. Techno emerged in Detroit out of Afrofuturist imagery and experimentation as well as the pared-back rhythms of funk and jazz. Drexciya famously invented an entire alternative history, one in which the unborn babies of enslaved Africans thrown overboard during the Middle Passage morphed into aquatic creatures and grew up to construct a magical underwater nation. This imaginary past also contains a more liberated future within it. It collapses time into a different scale, one both more intimate and more vast.

But this kind of music and this kind of dancing has a real political drive, as Aria Aber pointed out in a recent essay for The Yale Review. By contrast, raving now “increasingly seems like a space for Aristotelian catharsis, a space to briefly satisfy a desire for community and release before returning to normal life on Monday mornings, cleansed of the revolutionary impulse, utterly unchanged.” Sirât attempts to reconcile these two conflicting forms, the rave as party tourism and the rave as real spiritual transcendence. It falters along the way, particularly in its brutality. Several people I know who watched the film before me warned me that it was deeply upsetting and horrifying. I found it less nihilistic though than I expected. The shock stayed with me after I finished, but so did the expansive sense of yearning for meaning, for something larger than yourself, for a way forward.

Instead, everyone around me seems to be retreating. The dream devices Wim Wenders imagined in the ‘90s feel strangely prophetic. Now, thanks to AI, which is sucking up our clean water and polluting our air, each of us can cocoon into our own fantasy world, a choose-your-own-adventure version of reality. Anna Weiner wondered recently in The New Yorker if the limitless realities promised by AI are not a kind of magic show, offering what historian Michael Saler calls “secular enchantment.” They fulfill a human urge towards illusion and fantasy, towards the promise of something more out there, and offer us scripts to reconcile them with modernity. But like Claire’s dream recorder, what they really give you back is a distorted picture of your own desires. It is total wish fulfillment, total gratification, with no bottom except despair, psychosis, or even death. Is this not the end of the world? Or at least, an ending of a world?

At the tail end of a spate of Gothic-inspired films comes“Wuthering Heights” by the tony British socialite Emerald Fennell and Charli XCX (the real star of the film). This follows Poor Things, Nosferatu, Dracula by Luc Besson, and Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. They are all heavy on scientific horror, shadowy lighting, religious psychosis, modernity blooming out of decay, doomed romance, sexual exploitation, and orgasmic ecstasy that will invariably condemn you to suffering. None of them are very good. With the exception of Nosferatu, they are all pastiches on the Gothic, taking from its tropes and formulas without much respect for the underlying meaning.

“Wuthering Heights”, the film by Emerald Fennell, is not particularly Gothic. There are no ghosts in it, no real violence, no damnation, no terror. The ruined house is too scenic to inspire horror. The most famous scene from the novel, immortalized by Kate Bush, in which a ghost child scratches on the window begging to be let in from the cold, does not appear in the new film at all. In fact, almost nothing that happens in Emily Brontë’s novel makes it into the film. I was briefly disturbed by the joyless experience of watching the movie. But the more I thought about it, the more it came to seem like fanfiction. Fanfiction typically doesn’t imitate the original; instead, it provides something totally different, a fever dream that satisfies the captivating experience of reading.

Clearly, Emerald Fennell and I had different experiences of reading Wuthering Heights. I loved the book when I first read it. It is the first classic novel I remember loving like that. I could close my eyes and imagine the Yorkshire moors, buried deep in mountains of snow, or roughly blooming, old manors spread out across the countryside like mushroom patches, a world so totally different from my California childhood. Wuthering Heights was my introduction to the Gothic. It contained seeds of fairy tales, which I had always loved, but this was a grown-up version. As a teenager, I wrote my own Gothic pastiche, shamelessly copying the formulas of 19th century novels. Even after I outgrew the Gothic, it maintained its grip over me. I still find that thrill sometimes in horror, in romance, in stories about haunting, about decay, about the ruins of a vanished world.

I did not experience the same excitement when I watched Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, but I did find it morbidly fascinating. It is almost totally emptied of plot and of landscape and of context. Almost all the relationships are different. Instead of a twisty multi-generational story about inheritance, property, incest, and the lingering remnants of quasi-feudalism in rural England, Fennell serves a kind of rags to riches Cinderella story. Cathy, played by Margot Robbie as a sweet blonde, escapes her traumatic, poor childhood by marrying a rich man who is kind but whom she does not love. She wanders around his palatial mansion draped in gauze and velvet, like a discount version of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (she even wears a tiara in one scene). What she really yearns for though is to be picked up and thrown around by Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi in an inexplicable accent.

All of the women in “Wuthering Heights” yearn to be sexually submissive. The housekeeper at the old manor lets another servant put a bit in her mouth while he has sex with her from behind. Later on, Heathcliff breaks into Isabella’s room and undresses her while humiliating her in an explicitly consensual way. She loves this. Later on, she gets on all fours and barks like a dog as a part of their kinky roleplay (one of the few moments of levity in the film).

It is unsurprising that Emerald Fennell would not portray Heathcliff physically and emotionally abusing Isabella because she is so committed to his fundamental sexy romanticism. It is a startling artistic choice, though. Rather than fearing Heathcliff as a Byronic hero – moody, sexually appealing, self-destructive – who will ruin their lives, the women of “Wuthering Heights” fear their own desire to be degraded a little bit by a very tall man. I was reminded of Ayesha Siddiqi’s probing review of A Promising Young Woman, ostensibly a gory revenge fantasy against violent misogyny, but in practice “modern precedent appropriated, rinsed of its power to name abuse, and grafted onto a conservative ideology confidently being pushed onto the future.” In this sense, “Wuthering Heights” resembles nothing so much as one of those vertical shorts that are so popular online and are almost always about a young (often virginal) woman who ends up improbably subservient to a wealthy and attractive man with a personality disorder.

Of all the recent Gothic films, Nosferatu is the most interested in the sexual mores of the Gothic. Ellen (Lily Rose Depp) is so desperate to escape the extreme repression of her life that she ends up contacting a malevolent vampire. Possessed by this psychic demon, she shakes in something between a seizure and an orgasm. She is groomed, haunted, terrified, hunted down, but she is also trapped in the confines of a life without any spiritual or physical outlet. This is mirrored in the larger world in which she lives, where the occult uneasily rubs up against a new rational scientific world. The vampire still inhabits a feudal hangover, ruling over terrified villagers. Ellen and her husband are ruled by the market and the cold value of money.

The contemporary appeal of the Gothic is clear. We also live in a world rife with terror and superstition and mistrust of scientific logic. The American empire is decaying. A huge mass of the population is left dispossessed as the labor that provided their sustenance is made obsolete. The extreme violence, racism, exploitation, inequality, and abuses of power that form the bedrock of our social system are left bare and exposed, not even dressed up in the niceties of liberal democracy anymore. What is more curious than a fascination for the Gothic is how staid it all is. Our Gothic is largely confined to the limits of the distant past. It is depoliticized and sanitized, rendered palatable to a fan edit. Perhaps every generation gets the Gothic they deserve and perhaps, in that case, this is the best we can really hope for.

A young girl experiences classic symptoms of a nervous disorder. Her twin brother believes that her body will be exhumed when she dies and dissected or experimented upon for science. To prevent this, he buries her alive in the walls of his family’s crumbling estate. One night, he and his friend hear ghostlike noises. The sister is breaking out of her tomb and attacks her brother, who dies on the spot. The house collapses into pieces around them.

Both siblings are solitary, reclusive, and bound to their inheritance, which will inevitably drag them down into their tragic ending. Catalepsy, from which the sister, Madeline, suffers, also reportedly afflicted the 16th century Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila. The nun fell into a coma for three days and only woke up when her convent was preparing to bury her. She believed it was a divine miracle, God intervening at the moment of death to revive her. Madeline has no such faith to fall back upon. She lives in a modern, godless world, where even dissociation and death will not preserve her from the relentless march of history. This is the world of Frankenstein and Dracula, of scientific experimentation gone haywire and of old social orders upended. The ancient, neglected mansion, the House of Usher, must collapse at the end of Edgar Allen Poe’s story, not only because the bloodline that thrived in it has ended, but also because it cannot survive the collision of metaphysical and materialist worlds.

Modernity haunts the Victorian novel. The new, bright, technologically advanced world, full of steam engines, cholera, dusky factories, and imperial expansion with its attendant obsession about racial purity, intrudes upon the countryside, disturbing the ghosts of the past. In Silas Marner, George Eliot’s 1861 novel, the eponymous weaver leaves the large industrial city where he has spent his whole life, after being driven out of his religious community, and goes to live in a small village called Raveloe. Like a fairytale character, he lives in a small hut and works sixteen-hour days for sixteen years, without rest or creature comforts, trying to rebuild his life. The people in the village mistrust his customs and are put off by his wraith-like appearance, stooped and pale from constant labor. His life only transforms, again like a fairytale character, when he discovers an abandoned baby and adopts her as his own child.

At the end of the story, Silas Marner and his daughter, now grown up, travel back up north and visit the church where he grew up. The entire place has changed so much that he barely recognizes it. Susan Stewart, describing this scene in her essay “Genres of Work: The Folktale and ‘Silas Marner’” (New Literary History, vol. 34, no. 3, 2003), writes that, “The factory has devoured the entire space – even the graveyard has been destroyed; the dead and the sacred are grist, too, for the mills of industrialism.” Work is the only constant in Silas Marner. The rural people of Raveloe retreat into superstition, artisanal labor, and a deep-rooted fear of strangers. “Tradition and industrialism,” writes Stewart, offer “parallel treadmills” in the story. The weaver will not become reenchanted with the natural world when he leaves the city. How could he, working those sixteen-hour days to save up a little money? Only human connection can restore his dignity to him.

Although Silas Marner was written in the 1860s, it is set earlier, on the cusp of the 19th century. It reflects the anxieties of a rapidly transforming world, one in which wages are devalued, and rents sharply rising, thanks to a series of new land enclosure policies enacted over the course of several centuries. Charlotte Brontë would also write about this landscape, in her 1849 novel Shirley, which depicts the Luddite textile worker riots in Yorkshire between 1811 and 1812. Capitalism, Terry Eagleton points out in Myths of Power, his book about the Brontës, “denies the aristocratic, Romantic-conservative values” to which Charlotte is implicitly sympathetic. She attempts to thread a needle between a defense of tradition and a rejection of the kind of cold mercantilism that threatens the fabric of English social relations.

It is unsurprising that the Gothic flourished in England, a country that maintained its ruthless aristocratic hierarchy, even as it rapidly modernized. Over the course of the 19th century, industrial London exponentially expanded to become the world’s largest city, driven by urban migration, population growth, and industrialization. The working poor lived in such cramped quarters and under such abominable conditions that cholera quickly became endemic and devastating, killing thousands in a matter of days. Charles Dickens famously describes a city rife with crime, tuberculosis, starvation, pollution, forced prostitution, and child abuse. In the countryside, laborers put out of work by automation or driven off of grazing land might at least have the choice to starve less publicly and with slightly more dignity. Alongside them, the rural aristocracy were threatened and supplanted by new and relentless market forces that did not particularly care about their heritage.

Gothic novels juxtapose older, conservative values of king, country, and religion, with new and unsettling beliefs in science, progress, social equality, and atheism. In the tension of this clash and all its paradoxes, the Gothic projects a moody, tragic vision of the world, one in which all paths forward are doomed and dangerous. The Gothic seduces because it looks backwards toward a vanishing world that has already been swept away by the march of history.

In Jane Eyre, a young woman goes to live in a ruined mansion where a Byronic hero sulks and broods. His mad wife is hidden upstairs in the attic, but he tries to marry our heroine anyway. This transgression, according to narrative law, would end our heroine’s life, so she refuses to marry him until his wife dies and she can do so with a clear conscience. The wife comes from the British Caribbean and appears dark and spectral, in contrast to our heroine, who is pure and steadfast, but nonetheless tempted by the joys of extramarital romance.

In “The Mask of the Red Death,” a prince locks himself in a walled abbey with all his courtiers to escape a terrible plague. Outside the gates of the abbey, sealed shut, the land is ravaged by death and misery. Inside, the prince decides to hold a masquerade ball. One mysterious guest appears dressed up like a plague victim. But when the others tear off his mask, there is nothing underneath. He is the plague itself and they are all about to die.

Poe’s story is about the inevitability of mortality, but it is also about fear: the terror of uncleanliness and the indifferent masses of the world right outside your door, the terror that you too could one day be like them. Jane Eyre does not fear becoming like Bertha (i.e. mad) because she is of levelheaded English descent. But she does fear becoming like Bertha in the sense that Bertha is sexually charged, wanton, fallen. She fears contamination from a sensual and mystical world that she can only glimpse; the colony, with its shamanic magic and sexual permissiveness and racial mixing.

Gayatri Spivak reads the novel along similar lines. In her landmark essay “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” she claims that for Brontë, Bertha represents the limits of humanity and is written as such to reaffirm Jane’s own personhood, despite the fact that she is little, plain, poor etc. Class conflict, in Spivak’s intervention, can be subsumed precisely because of the specter of the racialized other. Jean Rhys, in her novel Wide Sargasso Sea, retells the story from the mad wife’s perspective, sympathetically reinterpreting her. It is commonplace to read this analysis of Jane Eyre as a critique of Charlotte Brontë. But it is perhaps less a moral or identitarian criticism and more a way of contextualizing Victorian literature. 19th century English novels are full of anxiety about class, about empire, about modernity, about decay. Stripped of this tension and conflict and murky morality, Jane Eyre is just a story about a woman who falls in love with her hot boss, who happens, in turn, to be unhappily married.

Wuthering Heights, too, is about class and wealth and inheritance and race. The contemporaneous action of the novel is mostly around a battle over a suppressed will and Heathcliff’s expropriation of both families’ land and money. The novel’s schema of nature vs. civilization, juxtaposed in the refined Lintons vs. the rough and wild Earnshaws, in Lockwood, the dandyish southerner, vs. the hostile and misanthropic people of Yorkshire, and in the moor, which encroaches upon the houses and also upon the wild corner of the churchyard where Catherine asks to be buried, thus also determines its social relationships. “Whereas in Charlotte [Brontë]’s novels, the love-relationship takes you into society,” writes Eagleton, “in Wuthering Heights, it drives you out of it.” This is, I think, the reason for the enduring popular appeal of the story, why it is considered a great romance, but also one of the hardest aspects to fully grasp for a contemporary reader. It is in some ways the cornerstone of the Gothic and of Byronic Romanticism, drawing on the subversive Medieval ideals of courtly love, which are in their essence incompatible with marriage, reproduction, or even, often, consommation.

But it is so difficult now, in our world saturated by ideas of romantic love, to convey these twinning visions of love relationships, one as socially productive and one as socially disruptive. One kind, the marriage kind, disciplines the couple into a socially productive unit. Romantic love, or its precursor, wrecks the fabric of social relations by prioritizing the individual over their family or society. Translating the concept of romance as a destructive force into contemporary terms is usually done through other forms of transgression. This is what Fennell does in her “Wuthering Heights” adaptation. Cathy has to marry for money, but she starts a passionate extramarital affair. Power, in the film, is stripped of its complex trappings of class (new money vs. old money), gendered inequality (inheritance automatically bypassing women), and race (about which much has been written and I have not much to add), and reduced to a series of oversexed BDSM dynamics. Cathy accuses Heathcliff of degrading her twice, once after he catches her masturbating and again after they have sex in her husband’s home at night. The servant who was sexing up the housekeeper in frisky, horse-inspired play remarks after she has gotten married and left the house that it would lower her now to acknowledge him. Finally, Heathcliff gestures to Isabella kneeling on the ground, chained up like a dog, and gloats that he has successfully brought her down to his own level.

Stripped of Victorian understandings of class, respectability, and patriarchal domination, power in the historical romance canon that inspired Fennell’s adaptation is nothing more than roleplay. The appeal of the genre is dresses, corseting, carriages, the delayed gratification of heaving bosoms and yearning glances. The unfortunate part of all of this is that we live in a world overshadowed by many of the same concerns that animate the Gothic. AI threatens to both eliminate human labor and, more existentially, the human soul (Dorian Grey style). Inheritance and real estate assets are the primary drivers of wealth for younger, disenfranchised generations. Sexual or gendered violence and exploitation are so central to the genre that they form the basis of Jane Austen’s famous parody in Northanger Abbey, where a young woman who is an avid reader of Gothic novels becomes convinced that the father of her suitor has murdered or imprisoned his dead wife. It is possible to imagine a Gothic that renders these concerns contemporary, urgent, and terrifying, that cleverly draws out parallels between past and present, or even shows the unbroken lineage from the dawn of the industrial revolution to its current decline. Our world has changed both more and less than we might think.

Dinner at Jeffrey Epstein’s house, writes Woody Allen, in a letter on the occasion of Epstein’s 63rd birthday in 2016, is often served “by several young women remding [sic] one of Castle Dracula where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place. Add to this that Jeffrey lives in a vast house alone, one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

Allen, himself, who groomed and married his step-daughter, in many ways resembles a Gothic father. Incest, or its suggestion, is everywhere in Gothic novels. Jenny DiPlacidi, in her study of Gothic incest, Gothic Incest: Gender, Sexuality and Transgression writes, that “In recognising these representations of father-daughter incest as aligned with the sociological model of incest as abuses of power encoded within the family and social structures, incest is revealed as a consequence of these structures of power.” Incest is both transgressive and non-transgressive, in other words. It both destabilizes and reaffirms traditional modes of patriarchal domination and control of women.

It is difficult to grasp the sheer scale of Epstein’s abuses, the reach of his influence, and the lawless impunity with which he operated. The fact that he has exerted such a long shadow beyond the grave and that some mystical version of his story seems to have entered conspiracy theory in the form of QAnon before it actually entered public consciousness all make him feel like a monstrous creature of mythology. It is hard to imagine that he lived on 71st Street and was friendly with many people you have heard of or perhaps have met. He is part Dracula, vampirically preying on young girls, and part Bluebeard, with rooms of his huge mansion devoted to creepy art, massage tables, and other sexual abuse rituals. In interviews with Maria Farmer, an art student who was recruited to Epstein’s service by Eileen Guggenheim, then-dean of the New York Academy of Art, she describes being locked inside Les Wexner’s Ohio estate, where she was relentlessly spied upon via CCTV, prevented from leaving the property, and starved in order to reduce her body to the willowy girlish proportions that Epstein liked. All of this, according to Farmer, was a tactic to force her to groom her then-16-year-old sister into Epstein’s trafficking ring. Maria Farmer contacted the FBI in 1996 who buried her allegations.

This story has a kind of fairy-tale logic to it. It is so horrifying and so totalizing, indicting every level of our sprawling political-economic system, that it is hard to find language to speak about it. Perhaps as a result, it has proven nearly impossible for anyone to talk or write about Epstein without indulging in prurience, conspiratorial thinking, or gossip (The New York Times recently found it fitting to run a subheading reading: “The disgraced financier’s recently released documents are steeped in a clubby world that is all but gone.”)

But Epstein’s glamorous social sphere is still here, and his abuses of power, while grotesque and extreme, are not really so unfamiliar to us. DiPlacidi points to This Sex Which is Not One, in which the philosopher Luce Irigaray claims that “the law that orders our society is the exclusive valorisation of men’s needs/desires, of exchanges among men … wives, daughters, and sisters have value only in that they serve as the possibility of, and potential benefit in, relations among men. The use of and traffic in women subtend and uphold the reign of masculine hom(m)o- sexuality.” Almost no one affiliated with Epstein has bothered to explain how or why they overlooked the constant stream of young girls and women in and out of his multiple properties. It is apparent that he did not bother to conceal much. Even in a fawning 2002 Vanity Fair article (from which mentions of sexual abuse allegations were excised by Graydon Carter), the journalist notes with a wink that Epstein liked his women young and beautiful. The simplest explanation is that it did not surprise many of the wealthy older men (and women) with whom Epstein was affiliated. They may have been titillated or shocked by the scale and cruelty of the operation, but not by the idea that the modeling or massage industries were feeder pipelines for rape, sex trafficking, and pedophilia, or that a wealthy man might spend his time excessively indulging his sadistic and violent fantasies.

Our captured media is incapable or unwilling to examine this. Our political class is silent and reticent, afraid to bring down the whole house of cards. Our financiers are defiant and self-righteous about their associations with the whole mess. Victoria’s Secret and the rest of the fashion industry has quietly moved on. Without taking refuge in metaphor, film and literature offer a mirror to our world, a way to process and analyze it. Too bad our art is frictionless, our Gothic defanged, our literature navel-gazing.

Early on in 3 Women by Robert Altman (1977), Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek decide to become roommates. They work together at a health spa and Pinky (Sissy Spacek) has developed a hopeless infatuation with Milly (Shelley Duvall). As Milly drives her home, Pinky wonders what it would be like to have a twin: would you know which one you are? What if you got confused? What if you woke up one day and decided to switch your identity the way you change your dress? Milly is annoyed by the line of questioning. When Pinky reveals that her real name, like Milly’s, is Mildred, Milly snaps at her as if she has committed an unimaginable sin. 

Milly seems to live in her own sheltered fantasy world. She reads lifestyle magazines religiously, dresses glamorously, and imparts breathless wisdom on how to do things like make a tuna melt. She is convinced that every man around her is in love with her even though they all mock her behind her back. Her life is studiously picture perfect, in its specific ‘70s Southern California, lower middle class kind of way. But she is socially awkward, impersonal, and hopelessly self-involved. She cannot break out of her shell long enough to really talk to anyone else, let alone listen.

Pinky idolizes Milly but she is in many ways her opposite. She is a pupil of other people, intimately attuned to their quirks and mannerisms and to what makes them likable. When she develops amnesia and takes on Milly’s identity, she instantly conquers the neighborhood in much the way Milly imagines herself doing. Much has been made in criticism about the film of the ways the women rotate through more submissive and more dominant roles, but perhaps the largest difference between Pinky and Milly is that Pinky models herself after other people while Milly models herself after magazines, their lifeless counterpart.

Milly’s particular kind of strangeness portends something about our present world. It is not especially rare anymore to meet someone who seems to have drawn all their ideas about how to be in the world from media consumption. It is a morbid symptom of our chronically online and disconnected world. A few weeks ago, crossing Houston Street in Manhattan, I saw an amateur photoshoot happening in the middle of the street, ignoring the repeated blare of an ambulance waiting to turn. On social media, cookie cutter fashion, uncanny valley plastic surgery, and ridiculous standards for interpersonal communication are generally a ticket to success. In the real world, they read more as bizarre and delusional, even embarrassing.

I thought about this, and about Milly, when I was watching Celine Song’s Materialists over the summer. It is a film that is so wholly drawn from an anxious TikTok scroll that it washed over me like a blurry, vaguely offensive haze. It seemed fitting that Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova was cast in it, in a totally unmemorable and unnecessary role, like a nod to the dating discourse obsessed viewer for whom it is intended. It feels like the artistic equivalent of a Milly, a piece of media that is entirely modeled off of things you might see in a glossy and that is strangely out of step with the actual world.

Most strikingly, all the class signifiers feel slightly off. John (Chris Evans), one part of the film’s central love triangle, is a struggling stage actor in his late ‘30s, with a crippling commitment to artistic purity and no seeming interest in actual paid work. He lives in a shared apartment with a series of disgusting male roommates and works part-time shifts as a cater waiter. He comes off less as a poor person struggling to make it in a rich person’s industry, but hampered by the time suck and constraints of making a living, and more like Adam from Girls, who is snobbish about the theater and who gets monthly checks from his grandmother.

John’s romantic rival is Harry (Pedro Pascal), the wealthy businessman so concerned about his short stature that he apparently opted for disabling leg-lengthening surgery. It has worked out well for him. He can now date a whole range of women who would apparently not have previously considered him for his charming personality, otherwise good looks, and obscene wealth.

I would have wanted Lucy (Dakota Johnson) to cut off both of these men and walk off into the sunset alone at the end of the film, except that she was also so profoundly unlikeable. Her only quirk, which was in the first trailer I saw for the movie, was drinking beer and coke mixed as her drink of choice. What distinguishes the 19th century heroines who agitate for love over money from their materialistic peers is that they really earnestly believe in inherent human dignity. ““Do you think,” Jane Eyre famously demands of Rochester, “because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless?” Elinor Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennett have no choice but to marry or to live ignominiously, forever financially dependent on relatives. It is impossible to recreate the stakes of this in our contemporary world, which does not resemble Victorian England in this particular way. Marriage may still be a woman’s easiest route to financial stability, to life-changing healthcare access, or to the freedom and comfort to pursue artistic dreams, but it is generally not her only route and it does not have the same prevailing valence that it once did.

Materialists then is less a work of social critique and more a film entirely built out of received perceptions of the world. It treads the same thin, tired ground as Bridgerton, as regurgitated Austen fare, as Fifty Shades of Grey. It asks the pointless question: what if a billionaire threw himself at you but he was kind of messed up in the head and you didn’t really love him? Does any of this actually matter?

Materialists is not alone in this treatment of its subject matter. In Lena Dunham’s new series Too Much, the other noted rom com of this summer, Meg Stalter’s heroine, Jessica, also floats around in an isolated and self-sabotaging bubble, brazenly out of touch with everyone around her. I wondered why neither Jessica nor Lucy seemed to have any friends. They did not debate the pros and cons of their romantic interests or their female romantic rivals with a confidant — one of the staples of a classic romantic comedy (think of the four-way phone call in When Harry Met Sally). Instead, both characters only interact with coworkers who they don’t seem to like very much. Both treat other women almost exclusively as threats to their prospects.

The lack of female friendships is particularly striking in Too Much because it is in such sharp contrast to Lena Dunham’s previous series, Girls, which is all about friendship. (Dunham recently told The New York Times that Girls was about sex and Too Much is about love, but this is blatantly false.) The titular girls are also famously socially inept and self-involved and self-sabotaging, but they always have each other to fall back on. Hannah flashes her boss, grifts off her parents, goes hot and cold on her love interest Adam, quits her magazine job in a self-righteous storm, drops out of her MFA, alienates everyone around her. At the end of the series, she moves in with her best friend Marnie upstate and they raise her baby together, messy, imperfect, but still forging ahead.

Put differently, Hannah’s problems, her low self-esteem, her solipsism, her directionlessness and inability to have the kind of artistic career she wants, drive her to engage with the world. She has friends because otherwise she would be alone. She yearns to be admired and validated and it is other people who offer her that. Ten years later, Jessica in Too Much turns to her phone. She obsesses over her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend (Emily Ratajkowski), a content creator who makes quirky knitwear videos. In one video, Ratajkowski asks her boyfriend if he would love her if she were a worm, echoing a TikTok trend. Of course, babe, he replies (or something). Jessica flashes back to when she asked him the same question only to get an impatient brush-off. This must be evidence of something, but who knows what?

Jessica finds her ultimate validation when her locked Instagram account, a series of filmed responses to the new girlfriend, which range from supplicating to hostile, accidentally goes viral. Suddenly, there is a chorus weighing in on her rights and her wrongs. Suddenly, her ex’s perfect new girlfriend, a girl’s girl, sees her side of the story and decides to be her friend instead of her rival.

Materialists almost scrupulously avoids phone use. Lucy has no friends in the film because she has no personality. No matter. The entire lexicon of the script is taken from the internet. What it replicates above all is the sense of a looping echo chamber, one in which your decisions fit neatly into predetermined categories. Everyone in Materialists is eaten alive with insecurity. It is the driving feature of the film. None of the matchmaking clients trying to be matched up can find love because none of them understand what they want. Lucy does not understand what she wants either. She wants to marry rich because she thinks she wants a life of luxury, although she can already afford a nice one bedroom in New York on her $80,000 a year salary. The guy she is in love with seems stuck and bitter and immune to attempts to improve his life conditions. The one she is dating but not in love with is obsessed with his height and with making money. All of this is structural because the film tells us it is structural and because in the real world, most people’s material conditions are structurally determined, but what is actually shown on screen is a series of individual choices that don’t really say anything about our world because also in the real world, no one acts this way.

What is this bleak and miserable vision of things? It may be an accurate representation of the current state of the world, but romantic comedies have never been especially concerned with the truth. The glut of recent writing about phones and atomization and loneliness tends to focus on the forms of psychosis allegedly induced by AI chatbots, fringe internet forums, and the far limits of internet addiction that lead to extreme isolation and aberrant behavior. Yet plenty of people across the social spectrum do leave their houses most days and go to drinks with coworkers and see their families at Christmas. They still go on the internet and receive most of their ideas about how to act and what constitutes healthy aspirations (in work, love, and life generally) from the desperate and embarrassing videos made by content creators seeking to capture the attention of a monetizable audience. Some of those people descend into a right-wing funhouse version of the world. Some go to Turkey for plastic surgery and die of blood clots. Some only want to date men who make 6 figures, are over 6 feet tall, and will provide them with the lifestyle they think influencers like Nara Smith and Hannah Neeleman are living.

All of this delusional aspiration is a kind of radicalization. It turns you not only into a consumer, the basic model of the internet, but also into a salesperson reproducing this economic (and ideological) scheme in your own right. It’s a kind of MLM for people with no friends. The internet rewards cruel, antisocial behavior with clicks and virality and attention. It’s not simply that the hit of dopamine is addictive or occasionally financially rewarding; it also alienates you from the norms of social life, which require collaboration, generosity, empathy, and an ability to, at times, reconcile the conflicting needs of others with your own.

Much of the criticism of Too Much has described it as Netflix slop (New York Magazine called it Lena Dunham forcing herself into “an Emily in Paris–shaped box.”) This is also indisputably true of Materialists, which is a much worse film than Song’s previous effort, Past Lives. Yet this genre of impoverished filmmaking is not simply representative of a lazy reliance on tropes. It is a low-effort, mass-produced way of making art, but it is not that alone. Too Much undoubtedly had a much higher budget than the first season of Girls, or Dunham’s first feature film (and best work, in my opinion), Tiny Furniture, which cost $25,000 to make in 2010. Materialists had star power and nearly twice the budget of Past Lives (20 million vs. 12).

But neither project feels generative or original or expansive. Neither offers anything personal or individualistic or strange, anything grounded in a perspective outside of this narrow and diminished worldview. Instead, both feel like regurgitations of existing videos and TV shows and content trends, passed through a series of distorting filters, and affixed into a depressing narrative framework. It is less that they espouse “harmful” views, morally or politically, and more that they tacitly accept harmful framings. They offer a fatalist world, constrained and unhappy, where everyone is staring into a selfie camera and watching themselves talk. There is no friendship, no desirable life path, and nothing to aspire towards. The most you can dream of is having some kind of mid-career job, falling in love with someone sort of likable, and endlessly working on yourself in the futile pursuit of self-optimization. No wonder the rom com is dead.

Lately, I keep having this recurring disembodied vision where I am floating in a large calm body of water, Ophelia style. It is both soothing and ominous. I am floating, I am drowning. It is not as dramatic as it sounds. The reason for this vision is that, lately, I keep having migraines that come on abruptly and that linger, like a bad hangover, overshadowing days and days. Headaches submerge you, fill your skull with pain. My brain burns while I am in it, feels like soggy paper afterwards. I experience nausea, cramps in my stomach and chest and hips, phantom pains in different limbs, relentless fatigue and sleeplessness, overwhelming crushing despair.

This rash of symptoms may be primarily psychological or physiological, it is hard to know. The last time I had terrible chronic headaches was in 2017, after my grandmother died. I lived with her when I was a young child, and I was devastated when she died. My grief seemed manic to me later, hallucinatory, inconsolable. This time around, no one has died.

My only way to explain this experience is linguistic, a kind of metaphysical reconstruction of where my spirit allegedly intercepts my body. The psychological does not live anywhere supposedly, except in the transient electrical impulses of your brain, but it can make you quite literally sick to your stomach. It can break your heart. In extreme cases, it can kill you. Although this is spiritual or intangible in nature, it is transmitted quite concretely through nerve pathways and through the parts of your brain that regulate hormones, that form long term memories, that govern sleep. Like all forms of pain, they are subjective, impossible to locate, and on the border between the mind and the body. But because migraines dwell in your head and produce a dizzyingly wide and complex range of physical symptoms, they typify the mind-body problem even more than other kinds of chronic pain.

Migraines have often been associated with weakness, with femininity, with nervous or hysterical personalities. In her 2019 social history of the condition, Migraine: A History, Katherine Foxhall quotes an influential neurologist’s book on the topic written in 1948, which details the personality type of a migrainous woman as sexually dysfunctional, “perfectionist, driving,” sickened by her “essential psychobiologic rigidity.” Similarly, in a 1952 book, physician Walter Alvarez describes migraine sufferers as nearly all women who are, “tense, perfectionist, hypersensitive, easily fatigued, and often depressed or disconnected.” He claims that although they are often sexually attractive, they invariably think coldly and dispassionately like a man. As recently as 2014, Sadie Stein claimed in a Paris Review essay that migraines are the “most glamorous” of headaches, boasting benign but sexy symptoms.

I have wondered at times, cocooned in my private suffering, if this pop typology, with its distinct flavor of 19th century medical misogyny, has some truth to it. If I am working too hard, if I am too sensitive to the freefalling world around me, if my womb is wandering, if I crave my biological destiny of a softer life. The onset of this season of headaches coincided with changing circumstances in my life, some of which have been stressful. When the first one came on, I was at work. I went to the pharmacy and got an Excedrin and went back to work. The headache did not recede.

Literature is full of headaches. Joan Didion suffered from migraines, which she called “a shameful secret, evidence not merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.” (“In Bed,” 1968). Hilary Mantel describes seeing “floating lacunae in the world, each shaped rather like a doughnut with a dazzle of light where the hole should be.” (So Much More Than a Headache). Sexual or physical abuse, especially during childhood, can increase the likelihood of migraine, a link that is poorly understood. Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea, who was sexually abused by her stepfather in childhood, suffered weekly migraines as an adult, which she eventually linked to her abuse according to The New Yorker. “It wasn’t until she had read Gerry’s letter that described her headache on the morning he first abused her that she connected the onset of the condition to what he’d done. Now she understood migraines as a “way to experience the intensity of my pain without inflicting it on anyone.” Hildegard Von Bingen’s shattering visions err close to a description of migraine symptoms. The line between the sublime and the devastating is too thin to be threaded. “All pain is simple,” writes Lisa Olstein at the opening of Pain Studies. “And all pain is complex. You’re in it and you want to get out. How can the ocean not be beautiful? The ocean is not beautiful today.”

Up to 50% of migraine sufferers are not diagnosed as such according to another migraine history by Esther Lardreau (La Migraine: Biographie d'une Maladie). Either because they do not acknowledge their own condition or because they have slipped through the porous cracks of the medical establishment. For this reason, theorists of migraines such as Katherine Foxhall and Esther Lardreau refer to migraines as a socially contingent illness, the provenance of a self-selecting group. Migraines were historically considered more of an existential or social complaint than a distinct illness as such. The Greeks treated them with herbs applied to the temples, the Victorians with leeches. In a Ming dynasty novel set a thousand years earlier, a famous physician called Hua Tao proposes cutting open an army commander’s skull with a cleaver to relieve the trapped air and fluid from a humor imbalance. He is imprisoned for his troubles. Migraines are often associated with imbalanced humors, with a bad personality type, with intellectuals, with women, with readers. Only in modern medical texts do migraines become an object of study in their own right, a form of chronic illness, something physically located in nerve pathways.

These days, western medicine tends to understand physical symptoms as biomedical, which is to say, purely located in the body. To suggest that my headaches are caused by stress or other psychological symptoms seems to remove them from the realm of medical reality. The first time I had chronic headaches in 2017, the doctor I went to see offered me Xanax for stress. The second time, my doctor suggested not skipping meals, sleeping well, exercising. So I did all of that, I stopped drinking, I stopped going out, I cut back on caffeine, I tried to work less, I tried to look at my phone less, I tried to stretch more, I tried to predict which foods or situations would incur the bouts of dizziness and nausea that presage the storms of my headaches. None of it worked.

A 2007 article in the American Migraine Society’s official journal, Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain, argues for a “biopsychosocial” model of headache, one that spans the gulf between psychological and physiological inquiry. The legacy of Cartesian dualism, the traditional mind-body separation of Western thought, has left not only doctors, but also migraine sufferers themselves unable to understand the locus of their pain. In other words, in disassociating the mind so completely from the body, we have also disassociated ourselves from our own corporeal experience.

This problem has given rise to ideas of somatic primacy such as Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, which Danielle Carr calls “traumatic literalism” because it totally rejects mind-body separation. Trauma and other psychiatric conditions thus are literally brain disorders that can be functionally mapped, diagnosed, and eventually, treated using neuroimaging techniques. Above all, Carr suggests, this framing offers a neat solution to a sociopolitical problem. It provides a concrete, visual proof of injury for suffering, something that is otherwise invisible. It also offers medical legitimacy. If your pain can be seen and described, it can be documented and covered by profit-driven medical systems and insurance companies. The problem with traumatic literalism is that it imposes blunt categories on things that are complex and delicate. It insists that things that are subjective and personal and impossible to impart, like pain and grief and the long shadow of their memories, must be real in the legal sense, which is to say, describable in a graph or a chart or a scan or a scale.

It is tempting to imagine ourselves as the only reliable narrators of our own bodies, especially faced with the indifference, cruelty, and discrimination of the medical industry. But understanding your own somatic experience is different than being able to accurately convey it. Eula Biss describes seeking a diagnosis for her chronic pain in “The Pain Scale” and agonizing over how to rate her pain. Is this compared to the worst pain she personally has ever felt? Is it compared to the potential suffering of anyone anywhere in the world at any given time? Children, she notes, often look at the series of smiling and frowning faces on child-friendly pain scales and mistake fear with pain or conflate feeling with pain.

I have often heard that menstrual cramps are as painful as a heart attack, and have often thought, in the midst of my own agony, that that was probably true, but I have never thought of my cramps as an emergency. I know that I will not die of them. They will come and they will go. This perspective may be partially the result of medical sexism (the point of the comparison), but regardless, that framework influences my entire worldview and my own relationship to my body. It is not only doctors who might look at you and underestimate or misunderstand your pain. Many of us also wildly misunderstand our own physical experience in different ways because of how we have been trained to exist in the world. This is partly due to the way that many able-bodied people imagine their relationship to health. It is mystifying to imagine that your body may not be able to function the way it has generally functioned. Sickness is inconceivable when you are healthy and yet, almost everyone, at some point in their life, will get sick and watch parts of their body start to fail.

“I wanted to write about exhaustion the way I used to write about love,” writes Anne Boyer in her cancer memoir, The Undying. “Like love, exhaustion both requires language and baffles it, and like love, it is not as if exhaustion will kill you, no matter how many times you might declare that you are dying of it.” Boyer, who was treated for a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer in her 40s, was forced to continue working throughout her illness because she was poor, precariously employed, and a single parent. She describes being evicted from the hospital a few hours after a double mastectomy, which is now considered an “outpatient procedure” and teaching with surgical drainage bags sewed to her chest a few days later. At the end of her treatment, while she is being evaluated for chemotherapy-induced heart failure, she stages an elaborate masquerade, putting on makeup and propping herself up in a chair, to convince a doctor to let her leave and go to work. “If exhaustion as a subject has become newly popular,” writes Boyer, “it is because a once-proletarian feeling has now become a feeling of the proletarianized all.”

Under these conditions, acceding to fatigue, illness, and pain is a symptom of defeat. In times like these, it is increasingly easy to transmute clear physical symptoms into imagined mental symptoms that can be overcome by the sheer power of clean eating, manifestation, prayer, a vitamin regime, good habits, or other kinds of “biohacking.” When I scroll through TikTok, a series of impossibly beautiful young women promise cures for bloating, fatigue, depression, stress, back pain, acne, and other such ailments that include going off birth control, eating red meat, eating chia seeds, drinking gallons of water, not drinking water, walking for hours a day, doing pilates exercises, and getting B12 shots. Sometimes, the symptoms spill over into other kinds of complaints. “Cortisol belly”, a faddish term describing abdominal bloating, can allegedly be cured by cleanses that are functionally indistinguishable from disordered eating weight loss advice.

In one recent trend, young women contrast sloppy pictures of themselves from past relationships, wearing sweatpants and eating junk food with their boyfriends, with post-breakup pictures, where they are invariably slimmer, more dressed up, hair done, makeup done. This convergence of pop feminism and pseudo-health advice advertises appearances above all else. Would you rather be a thin, popular influencer, devoting all your energy to your followers and fans and to raking in money, or be in a relationship and get ugly? After scrolling through too many of these, I started to wonder if I had the wrong priorities. I looked back at photos of myself from a few years ago, when I was heartbroken, in so much pain I thought I had a stomach ulcer, and subsisting on a diet of black coffee, gin, and late-night pizza slices. I look gaunt and beautiful in the pictures. It was then that my online writing career had really taken off.

I have an argument with my boyfriend at a restaurant over something stupid and petty. Afterwards, I experience sudden stomach cramps so severe I think I am dying. I weep on the street in SoHo, clutching my stomach. A drunk young woman comes up to me and asks me to take her photo before she sees my tears and shifts to concern. I tell her I can take her photo if she wants and she explains that her friends had all declined to do the requested photoshoot, which would be in the middle of Crosby Street between red lights because she lives in the neighborhood, and because it is fundamentally a cringey activity. I do not take her photo, but the encounter cheers me up enough that I drag myself and my painful belly home.

Later, in bed I scroll through articles on my phone about Crohn’s Disease, which several members of my extended family have, and then about IBS and gastritis and gluten allergies, and remember a time when I was 20 and living in Eastern Europe and had gastric symptoms so severe I could barely keep food down for almost a month. At the clinic I went to, the doctor, who spoke no English, diagnosed me on sight with “gastroenteritis” and dismissed me. I lost nearly 20 pounds over the course of that period and everyone I saw after told me how good I looked. I wonder if I can trick my body into repeating the experience. The cramps linger for days. I cannot tell what is responsible, my mind, my body, my diet, my faulty ideas about things.

In Greek mythology, the god Zeus swallows his pregnant wife Metis, after hearing a prophecy about how she will have a son who will kill him. She gestates in his head, and he later endures a splitting headache that drives him mad with pain. When he finally convinces one of the other gods to break open his head with an axe, Athena emerges fully formed from his mind, carrying her spear and shield. Birthed in brain fluid, she will become the goddess of wisdom.

I imagine that inside each of my headaches there is a revelation waiting to be born, a tiny goddess of wisdom ready to spring forth. I secretly think that if I can write about headaches, if I can untangle the complex tangle of stress, sadness, lifestyle factors, the cluster of physical and psychological symptoms surrounding them, that I will be able to solve them. I secretly think my headaches, my stomach aches, my extreme fatigue, my joint pain are a symptom of laziness, of discontent, of a refusal to participate in this world with its spectacular violence and abandonment. It feels cheap, as Eula Biss worries, to try to measure your own pain against the pain of people living in war zones, undergoing the worst deprivations imaginable. It feels frivolous to wallow in the diffuse pain in my body, to be too tired to get up. It demands an impossible metric of proof. “We can’t measure spirit,” writes Anne Boyer. “This because it isn’t real, or at least because it is not material, but it feels real when we become acutely aware of our own aridity. But no matter how potentially unalive or indistinct an exhausted person feels inside of herself, her body will look like a body, discreet, alive and animate, and capable of trying more, of trying harder, of improving or remedying or aspiring or producing.”

Yet the notion that you can cure your physical ailments, however superfluous they may be, with the power of positive thinking has long been an American credo. It is costly, even deadly, to peer inside yourself and figure out what’s wrong. Americans cumulatively owe $220 billion in medical debt alone. The uninsured are routinely turned away from hospitals. Even the insured rack up bills and unpaid leave that can easily spiral into a life-ruining crisis. It seems easier to just ignore it and hope it goes away. I can’t tell if my ability to continue functioning during my migraine crises is a sign they’re not really that serious or a sign that I am inured to working through different kinds of suffering. I used to go to work sick all the time, until I would be told, Devil Wears Prada style, to go home. At a previous job, when I told my employer my mother had been diagnosed with cancer, she first suggested I quit sooner rather than later and then lashed me verbally for slacking off. Nearly everyone I know has kept working through some kind of personal or health crisis, be it psychological or physical, because there simply is no other option.

What frightens me the most about fatigue and pain and depression is how indifferent it makes you, how absorbed in your own internal suffering, how it alienates you from the world and from everyone around you. This is difficult to articulate, but Hanif Abdurraqib said it very beautifully in a recent essay about despair and suicidal ideation for The New Yorker, where he writes, “I am no longer wired to catalogue and sift through only my own internal horrors, and so, by the mercy of simply looking up and looking around, I can see that there are people willing to love me, and that I am willing to love them.”

In this sense, love is and is not like exhaustion. It is true that love can feel like it will kill you, but love can also feel like it will save your life. It makes you beholden to other people and to the world. Like pain, it is almost impossible to remember what it feels like when you are not inside it, but the trace of it lingers in your muscle memory long after it is gone. “Love is action,” writes Marie Howe in her poem After the Movie. “[…] Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at / someone you want to eat and not eat them. / Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.”

There is a scene in the underrated 2000s rom com Confessions of a Shopaholic where the titular shopaholic, Rebecca Bloomwood, squints at a credit card bill (mailed to her at work in paper form), trying to figure out how she spent so much money. Finally, she spins her chair around happily to declare that somebody has stolen her credit card. “I’ve never been to Outdoor World,” she explains. “I’ve never even seen a tent.” Her coworker helpfully intervenes to let her know that she has, in fact, been to Outdoor World to purchase a collective going away gift for a former colleague. No arguing with such infallible logic. Later on, in an implausible series of twists, Rebecca becomes a financial advice columnist.

I only look at my credit card statement when I am alone. It is an agonizing activity. I always, like Rebecca, cycle through disbelief, looking for proof that my card has been stolen. It never has been. But more and more, as I scroll through my statement, I do find evidence that I am being defrauded. There are indeed charges on my bank account that I did not authorize. But instead of someone else’s shopping spree, they are something more insidious: recurring charges.

It is notoriously difficult to cancel a subscription right now. Lina Khan, when she was chair of the FTC, passed new regulations about it last year, specifically targeting “negative option” features. In other words, tools by which a company will enroll you in a paid subscription without your explicit consent or proceed automatically from a free trial to a paid subscription if you do not take any action. Apparently, the volume of complaints the FTC was receiving about this had nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024. With all due respect to Lina Khan, these new regulations do not seem to have had any effect.

Some of these recurrent charges are egregious. I canceled my ClassPass account in November 2024, mainly because they had steadily increased the number of credits required to take a class each month, trying, I assume, to goad me into upping my membership level. They started billing me again, I recently discovered, in February. There is no apparent impetus for this. In a truly shocking Reddit thread I read about ClassPass’s shady business practices, the poster claimed they realized after *18 months* that there were unauthorized charges on their account and reached out to ClassPass for an explanation. ClassPass responded explaining that another account shared the same payment method as this user and due to privacy laws, they could not disclose who this other person was and so could not stop charging the card.

This obviously is why you must look at your credit card statement and more often than once every 18 months. I have attempted unsuccessfully in the past few months to cancel subscriptions from Paramount+ (the home of Couple’s Therapy), a scammy resume builder website I used (I probably get what I deserve for that), and Google Workspace, which I purchased through an email address that Google immediately afterwards locked me out of for the better part of a year. They continued to charge me for Workspace though. When they finally gave me my access back, it still proved nearly impossible to cancel my Workspace subscription. You cannot do it on a mobile phone. When I tried to do it on my computer, it demanded 2 step verification from the Gmail app on my phone. When I tried to log into this email account on the Gmail app, it demanded the same 2 step verification process, which was impossible, given that I was already using the phone app. I have also been charged by a Telehealth company which promised me in writing a $200 refund I have yet to receive for months where they inexplicably halted my prescription. I recently discovered I somehow had a Mubi subscription I do not recall ever signing up for. My mother, who grudgingly pays for Netflix, has not been able to access her account for weeks if not months since Netflix claims she is logged in on another device. They will not tell her where the device is located or how to log out of it.

As the manager of a business, I think I can say with confidence that this is a totally inexplicable way of running a business to me. I assume it is not all sheer dishonesty, but some part incompetence, a slashing of customer service jobs and replacing them with AI or emails that lead nowhere. Companies seem to be black holes. No one on the bottom, you can assume, really knows what is going on. The information you are seeking is mystified and out of reach. Adlan Jackson wrote at length in Hell Gate about trying to get OMNY (New York’s new contactless transit payment system contractor) to let him update the expired card on his account. I refuse to use OMNY for this reason, although sometimes when I swipe my outré metro card, the OMNY system detects my phone in my pocket or purse and charges it anyway. I cannot dispute these charges because my bank told me I would have to call OMNY and I do not have the fortitude to wait on hold for hours over two dollars and ninety cents.

I am fully aware it can be worse. I once had my bank account frozen because I moved money around too much and JP Morgan suspected me of money laundering (they later apologized for this). Charlotte Cowles, the Cut’s financial advice columnist (and a Rebecca Bloomwood if there ever was one), wrote a viral article about falling for an Amazon scam and paying out $50,000 in cash to a man in a white Mercedes who claimed to be in the CIA. Reader, he was not. Large-scale, life-ruining scams seem to be popping up everywhere, targeting the elderly, the technologically illiterate, the vulnerable, the poor.

The low-level grifting of ClassPass or Google Workspace or my Telehealth company are obviously not at this level. But what it does offer is a roadmap to what everything is going to be like very shortly. Bill Gates claimed in February that in 20 years AI will replace teachers, doctors, and mental health professionals. This is obviously preposterous. But it provides a kind of logic for the precipitous decline of basically everything, how easy it is to gut things that basically function and turn them into slop that can be ravaged over by private equity companies. Examples are everywhere: the Trump administration used a formulation that was apparently calculated in Chat GPT to set their now suspended tariff rates; Andrew Cuomo used Chat GPT to write part of his incoherent 29 page housing plan and left the citation in (he blames an “aide” for this); Duolingo started laying off translators en masse last year to rely on AI for its language lessons. The phrases I was offered last time I used the app included garden variety sexism and fatphobia.

This slash and burn approach has characterized the first few months of DOGE, the new semi-governmental agency tasked with destroying the government. Elon Musk and other members of the administration have repeatedly made false claims about social security fraud, based on algorithmic “find on this page” kind of data. (These include flagging multiple different benefits paid out to people as fraudulent duplicates and claiming children receiving social security benefits for dead parents were committing fraud). It is easy to dismiss this as sheer incompetence and it certainly is that. But it is also real, unmitigated contempt for the population, who are all cast as unwilling consumers in this mode of operation, swimming upwards in a choked river of corporate fraud, malfeasance, pollution, poison, and theft.

In this grifter era, we are governed by the logic of government-as-corporation that owes you nothing and that can bully, defraud, and terrorize you as it pleases. If you, the consumer, do not like it, you cannot opt out. There is nowhere else to go. In Atlas of AI, Kate Crawford counters the idea that human workers will be widely “replaced” by robots by asserting that humans are increasingly treated like robots already under the influence of productivity algorithms, surveillance tools, and other technological data metric systems. “Rather than representing a radical shift from established forms of work, the encroachment of AI into the workplace should properly be understood as a return to older practices of industrial labor exploitation that were well established in the 1900s and the early twentieth century.” This is the meaning of industrial capitalism, subsuming workers to a rhythm and logic of mechanical productivity that destroys their minds, bodies, and communities, and that often makes for worse work all around. Crawford describes how many seemingly automated systems have simply rerouted labor, forcing humans to do endless repetitive back-end tasks to update and maintain them. If a future of increasing automatization offers us anything, it is undoubtedly this.

In this context, it is hard to say if the proliferation of uncancellable subscriptions is really because of increasingly hubristic attempts to hustle people out of their money or if it is simply the result of rapidly multiplying errors in systems that are under-maintained, require manual data entry work, and are not designed to function in service of customers. All this seeming automation really does is render low-wage labor invisible to the consumer.

I rewatched Confessions of a Shopaholic recently for the first time I think since I was a teenager. So much of it was burned into my memory and I still found Isla Fisher charming in it, the irresistible allure of mannequins waving at her from store windows, her belief that inevitably she will find a way through her disastrous life, her meteoric rise to journalistic success after seemingly writing one single column, and her disgust at the creepy, nefarious debt collector who hounds her. But it was strange to consider that the film was released in 2009, at the height of a recession. Its feel-good ending (Rebecca pays off her debt through a yard sale) and lavish materialism were greeted as in poor taste at its release. Undoubtedly, they are, but what struck me as tasteless, plunging into a new recession, was more its bootstraps messaging; the idea, implicit throughout, that if Rebecca, a journalist at a series of low-rent magazines, just managed her money well and worked hard, she too could buy a house, that credit card debt is just a personal problem you get from buying too many shoes, that there is no overarching flaw in this system.

In the most uncomfortable scene in the film, Rebecca goes to see her parents, planning to ask them for a loan to help pay her ballooning debt. Her parents have their own announcement to make: they have taken all the money they saved while making good financial choices their whole lives and bought an RV. Rebecca feels too guilty to blame them. She assumes by the end when she has miraculously fixed her finances that she too will grow old, make good choices, and splurge on an RV. Little does she know what is coming for her. It is 2009, the billionaire playboy funded finance magazine she goes to work for will probably soon shutter, the apartment she slums in will soon charge skyrocketing rent, her life has been foreclosed.

This summer, my sister is having a baby, which means that for the first time, I will be an aunt. The idea of a generation after me, which feels abstractly represented to me right now, will come sharply into focus. In this moment of heightened pessimism, it makes me feel optimistic that the world goes on, that people will keep being born and dying and making the best of what they have. I am excited to meet this baby, to watch it become a person. 

 Still, I have wondered over past months what kind of world this child will grow up to inherit. It will undoubtedly be almost unrecognizably different than the world in which I grew up. This is true for almost every generation in some way. It is a common form of malaise that tends towards conservatism. But the government services, career trajectories, civil rights, and global economic dynamics that shaped the world in which I grew up have been rapidly unwinding over the course of my lifetime. I grew up in a leaner America than my parents did. By the time I was seven, I had fewer rights to speech, to privacy, to gathering, to collective action, to travel, to imagine a different future. 

Birth rates are ostensibly on the decline. More women in their 30s currently give birth in America than women in their 20s. Hispanic women give birth the most, followed by Black women, with white women third (these demographics are drawn from aggregated US government data and therefore necessarily limited). Much has been made of these two statistics. The first seems to represent a historical demographical shift, a kind of triumph of suffragism or a total corruption of the function of womanhood, depending on who you ask. The second has stoked the phantom fear of “replacement,” otherwise styled as white genocide. Our decadent enlightenment of civil rights and secularism, so acolytes of this story such as Vice President J.D. Vance would tell you, has been so fully accomplished that it has succeeded in devastating the settler population of the United States. In a short generation from now, they will be eclipsed. 

 It has proved to be nearly impossible to reverse this trend. Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote a long, bemused essay in The New Yorker in February about the apparent futility of pro-natalist measures. Although governments from Korea to Finland have attempted welfare policies to encourage their population to reproduce and although others, such as Hungary and Russia have made it a matter of oppressive patriotism, none have succeeded. “The only overarching explanation for the global fertility decline,” concludes Lewis-Kraus, “is that once childbearing is no longer seen as something special—as an obligation to God, to one’s ancestors, or to the future—people will do less of it.” Similarly, Elizabeth Bruenig in a recent Atlantic article on the subject writes that “if you believe the human race should have a future, you’re pronatalist with respect to somebody.”

Bruenig, a true proponent of the traditional male breadwinner Fordist family, proposes giving money, tax credits, and other welfare incentives to young people to entice them to start families. She throws out a challenge to the Trump administration, noting that since the ostensibly pro-family right now has power in the government, they are free to instate such policies anytime. Instead, in their first few months in office, Trump’s government has aimed at slashing social welfare programs from Medicaid, food assistance programs, and social security to student loan relief, libraries, and labor protections (which often include parental leave policies). They have also crashed the stock market and belligerently alienated America’s traditional allies, raising looming fears of recession, mass layoffs, war, and other kinds of terrifying and uncertain futures. If this administration intends to raise the birth rate, it seems fairly clear they propose to do it by fear and intimidation rather than by reconstructing a paternalistic social safety net. In recent weeks, Kansas legislators overrode a veto to push through a new bit of pronatalist law, enabling pregnant women to seek child support payments from the moment of conception.

The bill has mainly been interpreted as an attempt to push through a new basis for fetal personhood, but it is also consistent with the historical structure of Anglo-American welfare systems, which often focused above all on the punishing of non-normative family arrangements. In Family Values, Melinda Cooper describes how aggressive child support laws were introduced at various historical moments in history in order to reduce the dependence of women and children on government aid and to force working-class men to participate in the labor force. Until it was outlawed in 1969, unmarried or widowed women with dependent children in the United States could be denied welfare benefits if they were having a sexual relationship with another man, who was then by default held responsible for supporting them. In the 1990s, as a part of Bill Clinton’s massive welfare reform program, states were required to divert much of their family welfare benefits to tracking down and penalizing biological fathers in order to force them to pay child support and to sanctioning women who refused to name or help with the search for said fathers. “By diverting a substantial portion of the federal welfare budget to the task of extracting child support from fathers,” writes Cooper, “welfare reform served to remind women that an individual man, not the state, was ultimately responsible for their economic security.”

 It is a strange time to be pregnant. Natalism is on the rise, preached from the pulpit of the White House. Pregnancy-related deaths increased 27% between 2018 and 2022, particularly among Black and Native American people. Multiple states have disbanded their maternal mortality committees or suppressed their findings. Rates of sepsis associated with miscarriage almost doubled in Texas after the state’s near total abortion ban in 2021. Recent cuts to scientific and medical research programs threaten to set back efforts to make childbearing safer. News stories have proliferated about people arrested and prosecuted for miscarriages or left to bleed out in hospital beds rather than administered abortion care. 

This violent disregard and even contempt for the lives and health of pregnant people seems contradictory at a glance to the radical pronatalism espoused by a loose coalition of Christian conservative nationalists and paranoid libertarian feudalists. It is perhaps strange that no one committed to banning abortions seems particularly concerned with the problem of making childbirth safer.  This paradox is partly because abortion has been so successfully boxed into a moral-religious framework which compares abortion variously to mass disenfranchisement, chattel slavery, genocide. Fetal personhood is the most persistent node in this framing. If an in-utero embryo is a human like any other, you are necessarily obligated to recognize its positive rights and civil liberties. This framework also inevitably pits the carrier of the fetus against the fetus itself in a kind of zero-sum gestation war. The fetus’s right to life must prevail even in the case of an ectopic pregnancy, where there is no life present, or of a nonviable pregnancy which cannot survive outside the womb. If the pregnant person dies, these pregnancies will also inevitably cease to be, but the symbiosis of their relationship is concealed by this philosophical battle for existence. 

Melinda Cooper locates the shift towards this framework within the context of the broader liberalization of the United States. While early 20th century American abortion activism was often associated with middle-class eugenicist figureheads like Margaret Sanger, who were interested in family planning as a matter of social hygiene and (in her telling) largely supported by mainstream Protestants, its adoption in the ‘60s by advocates of sexual liberation, feminism, and social democratic welfare policies gave rise to a newly fervent anti-abortion Evangelical right, who were drafted into the “New” Reaganist right coalition. “What united them was a shared hostility to the new jurisprudence of privacy, which they understood as creating a positive constitutional right to sexual freedom. [...] they feared that the right to sexual privacy would have dramatic transformative effects on the public life of the nation, and as such should be opposed at all costs.”

It is impossible then to dislocate abortion from the nexus of the traditional family. Even many of abortion’s ostensible supporters on the left are squeamish about its real implications. It is not uncommon to hear arguments about how you should have the means to support a child before having one and about being at a point in your life where you are unable to mother well, or feel good stories about having an abortion when you were young and unstable and then going on later in life to form a traditional two-parent household with wanted and well-loved children. 

To be clear, all of these reasons are valid reasons to have an abortion, and in a landscape of ever-shrinking abortion access, their validity often needs defending. But the choice to couch abortion in indirect terminology, to deny its real radicalism and potential to disrupt the normative structures of the heterosexual family, and to yield to the framework of the right has been nothing short of disastrous for the understanding of abortion in America. If you implicitly portray abortion as a necessarily evil, as a bad thing that must happen for the cause of personal self-determination or “choice,” if you restrict it to the domestic realm of “privacy,” you can only cede ground from there. “[T]he distinction between making fetuses killable and making it easy and stigma-free for people to take the decision to kill a fetus,” wrote Sophie Lewis in The Nation in 2022 after Roe v. Wade was overturned, “is significant. The former refers to casting something (a lab rat, for example) out of the sphere of the grievable, thanks to a tidy and final verdict on the permissibility of systematically sacrificing its life to a greater cause. The latter, while expanding access to the means of feticide, does not necessarily require any such sanitization of violence.”     

This sanitization of violence, argues Lewis, also sanitizes the real brutality of gestation. Welfare will never be a sufficient measure to compensate people for forced gestation. There is no amount of tax credits or baby boxes or parental leave or food assistance that could offset such an intimate violation. Nor is abortion really a matter of privacy, neatly tucked away to enable us to keep living our respectable public lives. Instead, it exposes the seams in the reproductive labor system, how grotesque and unchallenged the business of childbearing and childrearing is. By tucking abortion away, as Lewis points out in a searing critique of The Handmaid’s Tale in her brilliant manifesto Full Surrogacy Now, we have also relegated it back to the eugenicist realm, to the idea that population control is an ugly business but needed to keep the surplus population in check.

Pronatalist welfare ideas tend to conceal similar ideological roots to the right-wing conspiracy theories of poor women of color or immigrant women having babies to become eligible for government support (“welfare queens” and “anchor babies”). Liberal pronatalism tends to obfuscate its core discomfort with the denaturalizing of gestation. Gideon Lewis-Kraus in his New Yorker essay referenced above acknowledges the dehumanizing stakes of natalism, but goes on to question the bankrupt ethics of a society that “weighs children against expensive dinners or vacations to Venice—as matters of mere preference in a logic of consumption.”

If Lewis-Kraus, like Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman who recently published a much debated book called What Are Children For?, limits his analysis of reproductive choice to the upper middle classes — those who might legitimately be choosing between a vacation-filled lifestyle and a baby — this is consistent with his rhetorical argument. He claims that fertility rates are sub-replacement nearly everywhere in the world and only mentions in one throwaway sentence, bracketed off by em-dashes, that there are notable exceptions in Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. He does not treat these places as worthy of further analysis, focused as he is on the idea of children as faltering investments for the global rich. But Jason Smith, in a long and dense essay for The Brooklyn Rail on demographics, focuses almost entirely on those places where the population is rising and where the high birth rate coupled with a rapidly rising standard of living has created an exploding youth population. Smith attributes this phenomenon to an economic transitional phase of semi-proletarianization: that is, a society that is no longer agrarian but where much of the population has no consistent access to stable waged labor. In such an informal economy, children are more of an economic guarantee than an economic investment since they are also able to bring in income as soon as they reach adolescence. “In 1900,” writes Smith, “just nine percent of the world’s population was African. By 2100, two in five humans will live on the continent.”

 It is startling that such a massive demographic shift goes so unacknowledged by liberal commentators. The liberal enthusiasm for natalism is instead variously expressed as musings about what we were put on earth to do (about choice, in other words) or as a project of individualism subsumed to the economic collective. Underlying the dream of a free market, be it libertarian or social democratic, is the root structure of the family, resilient enough to absorb care, unpaid gestational and reproductive labor, and the expenses of raising, feeding, educating, and training the next generation in the ethos of work. Lewis-Kraus invokes a dreary vision of wealthy nations treating their children as human capital, conditioned to study long hours at prestigious schools, to gain rarefied skills and talents, to fill out their resumes early on, and to endlessly war for opportunities in an embattled elite ecosystem, while their parents funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars into college and retirement funds or various kinds of trusts. All this stands against a backdrop, as Kiara Barrow pointed out in a sharp essay for The Drift on the asset economy, of soaring wealth inequality, one where income is increasingly eclipsed by inheritance as a metric for how your life will turn out.

There is a tension then between natalism, an ideology to renaturalize the business of having children and to return it to the sanctified domestic sphere, and the looming fear of downward mobility that infects the American middle class. You wish to have a child who will be extraordinary, who will live a sheltered and precious existence, who will die richer than she came into the world. Your desire for a child is thoughtful and responsible. It takes into account all the different strains of sociopolitical theory around childbearing: climate change, resource scarcity, growing illiberalism, demographic decline. Your child will be loved. This project of reproduction has nothing in common with the poor, the uneducated, those living far away in vast cities whose names you do not know who continue, perversely, to have children despite their conditions. That the two kinds of reproduction are actually identical in their most basic form, that all gestational labor is brutal and potentially deadly, that you cannot predict or plan for someone else’s life, that children of all social classes are harmed by the world, that poverty and disease and violence seem to be encroaching on America, is the unspeakable truth underpinning natalism — unspeakable because it is painful to its adherents to acknowledge. 

What would a radical ethics of gestation and care really look like? What would it mean to totally overhaul our inherited system of reproductive labor and normative nuclear family structures? Feminists puzzled over this in the second half of the 20th century, when the question of reproductive labor seemed somehow easier to question than it is now. In her landmark essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers rebukes the infamous Moynihan report with its recommendations for how to cure the “pathology” of Black American kinship structures by disciplining them into normative family relationships (a male breadwinner bound to virtuous hard labor to support his dependents). She wonders, movingly, how to denaturalize reproduction away from its economic and gendered hierarchies. Donna Haraway distinguishes between parenting and reproduction, calling the first a practice of caring for future generations, a kind of tending to the earth and its beings, and the second a practice of making more of yourself. This second thing has been variously interpreted, legally and socially, as a process of cellular division and as an ethics of stewardship, responsibility, and accountability. The progression, in the American welfare system, from considering any men involved with a mother to be the de facto legally responsible parent of her children, to holding any biological father of a child financially responsible for its upbringing, to holding the biological father of a fertilized embryo to the same social contract is instructive in how elastic this definition can be. 

Sophie Lewis further elasticizes it in her case study of surrogacy. In Full Surrogacy Now, she runs through the incredibly exploitative, racist, and dehumanizing practices of the contemporary paid surrogacy industry which is often offshored, its obsession with the purity of biological parenthood, and its contempt for the surrogate as a vessel. Lewis does not propose to outlaw surrogacy; instead, she proposes to regulate it, even to expand it. Within the practice, she finds a kernel of something radical, an unmaking of the natural relationship we perceive between gestator and fetus or between mother and baby. It contains not only a powerful feminist demand, along the line of Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework (“Every miscarriage is a work accident”), but also a radicalizing reframing of labor. In Lewis’s words: “[W]hat if we faced up to the possibility that a far, far wider range of social labors than we might previously have thought is fundamentally akin to gestatedness, gestatingness, miscarriage, abortion? What if we really felt the politics of uterine work to be comparable to other labors?”

This flip, a theory of labor that starts from reproductive labor rather than incorporating it under the aegis of waged capitalist labor, holds remarkable possibility. What could a world look like where pregnant and parenting people were unalienated, unburdened by the naturalization of their work to the domestic sphere? What would it mean to actually cherish and dignify children, not only those biologically or ethnically in proximity to you, but all children? What would a radical ethics of care look like, one in which everyone learned how to parent in the Haraway sense?

People often compare pregnancy to various kinds of intellectual work, for creative and artistic production, for thinking and writing, and I have always found this arrogant and solipsistic. Gestation is not a labor of the mind. It is risky, bloody, profoundly intimate, potentially deadly. It is a process of giving salts and blood and cells and nutrition to bind together something that will become a human. It seems to re-relegate it to the home to compare it to intellectual work. But it is useful perhaps in trying to understand how it is and is not like other kinds of labor. Of course, it is not exactly like anything else. It is its own sort of work and also like other forms of work just as creative work is. It feels tainting to associate it with money, with labor, like you are losing some essential purity, but that purity is the thing we have to do away with after all, that idea that this is a labor of love, that it is our biological destiny, that it used to be as natural as breathing, and that only modernity has corrupted it. 

Abortion then is a node not only to a different vision of reproductive labor, but also to a different vision of what gestation means, one that requires us to confront the messiness of it. If pregnancy is work, then abortion is a voluntary termination of that work. It is ceasing to do the labor that makes a life. That labor, like all other forms of life-saving labor that we practice, must always and invariably be a voluntary contract. 

The professor was a beautiful gentle long-haired man, with faraway eyes, your wet dream of an English professor. It was the only time I ever saw him get annoyed. “That’s not what we’re here to talk about,” he said sharply. “That is not relevant.”

I had a vague crush on him and a terrible, burning crush on the TA, and I was embarrassed. It was unsophisticated after all to be thinking about the gas chambers and the burning crematoria and the starving Soviet citizens and the American soldiers landing in Normandy when you were supposed to be engaging with something as highbrow as the literary canon. I still thought I was in the right though, and I slowly lost respect for my professor and developed a burning hatred of T.S. Eliot in the weeks that followed. I came to see it as the epitome of everything that was wrong with my rarefied humanities degree, obsessed as it was with close reading, with text over context, with apolitical art for art’s sake. The world was all around me and I wanted to be inside it.

Eliot, it is well-known, was a traditionalist. “The problem with all such political strictures, however," writes Terry Eagleton in The London Review of Books on Eliot’s uneasy dance with European fascism, “is that conservatives do not regard their beliefs as political. Politics is the sphere of utility, and therefore inimical to conservative values.” Like most of Eliot’s other writing, both poetry and prose, “What is a Classic?” reflects this kind of tension. Eliot was decidedly not a classicist and his writing, formally, represents a shattering break with the classics. If the classics are dying, surely Eliot the Modernist is the problem. But the argument he is making is less about literary form and more about sociopolitics. He is arch about this point. Politics, after all, do not belong in art in this formulation. But towards the end of the essay, he offers nonetheless some clarity:

“We need to remind ourselves that, as Europe is a whole (and still, in its progressive mutilation and disfigurement, the organism out of which any greater world harmony must develop), so European literature is a whole, the several members of which cannot flourish, if the same blood-stream does not circulate throughout the whole body. […] No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.”

The metaphor, blood circulation and racial purity, feels strikingly connected to its moment. Although Eliot does not deign to acknowledge geopolitical crisis or the war in which England was engaged, it creeps out in his language. He watches Europe, the historical beating heart of civilization, tearing itself apart over such a small thing as politics with dismay. The unstable flux of his language, for which he is so famous, is an attempt to upend the staid constraints of modern life. I willingly admit that his probing and experimentation is at times very beautiful. “The fact,” concludes Eagleton of the Modernists, “that so many of these writers responded to the historical crisis with apocalyptic pleas for absolute authority and the violent exclusion of subversive elements is the price we have to pay for such art, if we should choose to do so.”

All these arguments, as arcane as they are, may seem very contemporary. The anxiety about classicism as a means of shared cultural heritage, the pretended disdain for explicit politics, the swirling melange of right wing intellectual bedfellows (the monarchists, the libertarians, the Christian traditionalists). “He continually provokes the public he addresses,” writes Michael Levinson of Eliot’s criticism in T.S. Eliot in Context, “placing readers in uneasy positions, forced to choose between initiation into a cultural elite or acceptance of benighted ignorance.” This cultural elite was reactionary, priggish, upper middle class, genteelly critical of democracy and secularism and feminism and any tolerance of religious or ethnic diversity, but too averse to the power of wartime censorship and the possibility of backlash to be really explicit about it.

It is this quality that fascinates me about Eliot, this refusal to really say what he means, even when it hovers near the surface of his writing. Of course there were times when he did — in an infamous lecture at the University of Virginia where he held forth on the dangers of “free-thinking Jews” and praised the Jim Crow System for instance, as well as in some of his other earlier prose writing. That he stopped making such explicit pronouncements later on may be taken as a sign of maturing to subtlety or perhaps as a side effect of his growing fame, the rise of fascism in Europe, and public outrage about his comments. “The flurry,” says Levinson, “over his anti-Semitic remark in After Strange Gods taught at least this lesson: that radical opinions, if they were to be placed before the public, required the most studied presentation.”

Eliot could probably have worried less about his legacy. Ezra Pound and Louis-Ferdinand Céline publicly collaborated with Axis governments, openly supported the Holocaust, and published racist and anti-semitic screeds before and during the war, yet both were rehabilitated by their literary peers as early as the late 1940s. By the 1950s, their books were back in print.

Over the past few years, as the liberal consensus has shifted slowly back rightward, a more explicit far right ideological line has emerged clearly among writers and journalists. Gradually, this messaging has honed into something sharper and cruder: a libidinal charge, a gleeful appreciation of accelerationism, of the thuggish power grab underway, of the rolling back of established human rights that we have come to take for granted, of the wanton destruction of human life.

There are lots of ways you could periodize this. “Something has changed in America; something is still pulsing beneath the carapace of party politics,” wrote Tobi Haslett for n+1 in 2021 of the Black Lives Matter protests. The change is not only a reaction to the riots, in Haslett’s telling, but also part and parcel of the conditions that enabled them in the first place. It is a response to the Covid pandemic, a mass death and disabling event attended by organized state abandonment and by a massive upward transfer of wealth. It is a response to economic desperation, to inflation, to historic rent prices and grocery prices.

For a while, if you picked up any respectable liberal newspaper, its headlines resembled the New York Post: crime runs rampant in America, and so on. This law and order consensus was not only a defensive reaction to the call for abolition (after all, police departments were never defunded anywhere in America with the sort of exception of Minneapolis), but a reaction to the opportunity it presented to shore up exceptional levels of public surveillance and property protection. Recently, a band of New York City police, the most bloated and overstuffed police department in the country, were dispatched into the subway to arrest and harass homeless people sleeping on trains. This announcement was made in the dead of a brutal winter, when the average temperature in New York was around 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime.

And there are lots of ways you could periodize the new brazenness. It did not originate with Trump’s reelection, although that has spurred it. Rather, it came likely from the same place as everything else, an elite capture of the means of media production, the rapid consolidating and shuttering of news outlets, the tight control over ideological lines. These splintered most decisively over Gaza and over the expectation that writers would stay silent on the question of mass murder enthusiastically funded and defended by our government. The new media that emerged out of this vacuum, such as The Free Press, hosted on Substack, traffics in victimhood but is in reality incredibly lucrative — much more lucrative than a staff job writing at a newspaper would be. The brand new Metropolitan Review, founded by Ross Barkan on Substack, (which the writer Teddy Brown called the “Free Press Literary Supplement”) could not be especially lucrative, but allows writers to air their polemical writing with the self-seriousness of the LRB or another real critical outlet. Since it started publishing a few weeks ago, Lillian Fishman (who wrote a #MeToo novel a few years ago) has mounted a defense of traditional marriage, and Jessa Crispin, the Bookslut editor, opined about wokeness. Both pieces have a strong reactionary tone, but both writers are grounded enough in liberal norms to nonetheless couch their language carefully.

Because of this persistent archness displayed by those flirting with the far right, similar to T.S. Eliot’s, it is hard to say how sincere all these new converts are. The thing about writing now is that there are so few pathways to success. Or, there are more than ever, anyone can be a writer, but they lead nowhere. There is no money, no power, no glory. In order for a freelance writer to sell a book, the apex of success for her, she must become an expert in her field, whatever that field may be. She must develop a new catchy turn of phrase (such as enshittification) or a pop frame of analysis. She must become the person magazine editors will call up to write an op-ed when her topic comes up and later on, she will list all of those editors in her book proposal as people who would market her book when the time comes for that.

This is obviously to some extent how knowledge acquisition works. You slowly build a body of work demonstrating a comprehensive understanding of something and are in turn rewarded with respect. But the problem with the decimated writing landscape is that it generally does not offer either the time or the stability or the rigor needed for expertise. Writers write for pennies on the dollar for magazines hungry for virality and wildly understaffed. This encourages a kind of damning myopia. Say you are a writer who has some knowledge of trains and you write an essay about trains that is more successful than usual. Now, you can launch a career around trains. Everything in your writing going forward will come back to trains, they are a metaphor and a microcosm for the world. Even if this is true — trains are significant and integral to society — they are not so much drivers of social dynamics and politics as they are in turn shaped by those things. If you are trying to jam everything in your one grand developing theory of trains, you are liable to miss the forest for the trees. This method encourages a kind of grift which inevitably drifts rightwards, ever grasping towards controversy.

This may sound silly but if you substitute “sex” or “burnout” or “millennial parenthood” or any other Big Idea concepts, you will start to see what I mean. This relationship between parts and a whole always functions rustily. It is the entire tension of nonfiction writing. How far can individual experience be extended? What does one thing (trains) have to do with another (say, communication)? The job of the writer is to link what Frederic Jameson calls in The Political Unconscious “the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life.” What do phones have to do with the state of government? What does porn have to do with sexual violence? What does feminism have to do with the economy? If you are a person who writes about phones and their destructive influence on the human mind and psyche, you might be right in principle, but consider what historical conditions in the world have led to this kind of human dependence on phones, this fragmentation, this distrust. “Such momentary reunification would remain purely symbolic," writes Jameson, “a mere methodological fiction, were it not understood that social life is in its fundamental reality one and indivisible, a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another.”

The blitz of right and right-liberal journalism in recent months suffers from this blight of particularism. It is not a critical error, I think, as it is for many young untrained personal essayists. Instead, it is a manipulation. Instead of presenting the world as a web, made up of unifying particulars, they instead present the world as a universal whole, dissolved into fragments, waiting to be made whole again by homogeny and traditionalism. If you do not understand why two things are linked, for example, loneliness and the housing crisis, a recent Atlantic cover story by Derek Thompson will not illuminate the problem. Instead, it will leave you with the vague sense that people used to be happy and fulfilled and prosperous before our social bonds were severed. They used to live in family units and rarely spent time alone. Instead of looking at screens in their spare hours, they did domestic labor or socialized with their neighbors or raised their children. Thompson is ostensibly a liberal so he dances around the question of gender, but his vision is closer to that of J.D. Vance’s than that of FDR’s. He will not tell you that your rent has gone up because of algorithmic pricing, hedge fund speculation, and monopolies on property ownership and development. He will not tell you that the home is the primary site of physical abuse for many women and children. He will not tell you that American workers work longer hours under worse conditions for less money than ever before or that personal debt has skyrocketed. Instead, he advocates for overcoming personal differences (his example is a disagreement about the importance of affirmative action) to focus on what you have in common (your children), and for adopting the Amish approach to technology.

Although it is different in its form and its content, the method of Thompson’s story is similar to two other much-derided pieces of right-wing longform journalism. Dean Kissick, in a Harper’s cover story, bemoaned the fall of art to the influence of leftwing identitarian politics. He finds this new art both too sanctimonious and too traditional. The kind of art he praises, like Eliot’s poetry, is not formally recognizable as traditionalist, but shares the same assumptions about universality, the same yearning nostalgia, and the same apparent transcendence of politics. Like Thompson, Kissick says very little that is concretely analytic about the financial systems underpinning the art world, about why institutions run by billionaires and weapons dealers and government hawks are willing to launder this kind of (often) faux-radical protest art. You will learn nothing about art reading his essay and leave only with the vague sense that things used to be better before all this nonsense.

This is basically the conclusion also of Brock Colyar’s New York cover story, which has been written about to death, so I will only point out that Colyar finishes on a similar note. They claim conservatism has crept into their social circle, washing away the scourge of political correctness. They get a thrill from saying r——d, from making fat jokes, from offering “tacky” commentary about Gaza to their group chats (not reprinted in the magazine, perhaps because it was too tacky). When a white nationalist tells Colyar at the end that America has become too puritanical and is no fun anymore, they nod in agreement. “It felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you’re in middle school.”

Like all the other writers in this space, Colyar eschews specifics to focus on feeling. The vibes in America feel puritanical. People feel unsafe even if crime rates are down. Men feel emasculated. Writers feel censored. Rich people feel embattled by the encroaching poor. Thomas Chatterton Williams summed it up in an Atlantic article complaining about the Trump administration’s crackdown on freedom of speech, notably in their policing of NEA and NSF grants, by comparing it to left cancel culture. He admits that the “government itself determining the limits of acceptable speech is undeniably far more chilling and pernicious—and potentially unconstitutional—than private actors attempting to do so,” but goes on to blame the “left” for setting the terms of illiberal censorship all the same.

If you really think about it, it starts to look weirder. The endless complaints about having to use the right gender pronouns for people and how it is an assault on your freedom and individuality even as trans people’s identification documents have been revoked or suspended or their gender markers changed without their consent. Complaining about how you can’t say slurs in Brooklyn while Medicare is slashed. Claiming that young women are so pressured to participate in hookup culture and aggressive cat lady feminism and lesbianism that they cannot do what they truly want, which is settle down at 22 with a benevolent man and have babies. Promoting the idea that the emancipation of women, who were allowed to open their own fully independent bank accounts in the US in 1972 (during my mother’s lifetime), or the enfranchisement of Black people, who were subject to Jim Crow laws until 1965 across much of the country and who were enslaved under an unbreakable racial caste until a few generations ago, or the abolition of the police, which as I said above simply never happened, has gone too far, and that, even if there were some good ideas in there, that the pendulum has overcorrected.

I always think of that Tobi Haslett quote from an interview he did with The Point that circulates every so often on my social media feed:

“But even today certain kinds of critics—sometimes very established—are invested in displaying their exhaustion with politically inflected art. And I think: What are you exhausted with? Where did this twee McCarthyism come from? You’re an American. You’ve barely ever consumed any left-wing cultural production. You grew up middle-class in the most philistine capitalist state there has ever been, but you’re acting like you were raised on a diet of socialist realism and state radio broadcasts. Your closest experience to agitprop is Sesame Street. Your fatigue is so unearned, I can’t stand it.”

I think sometimes this fatigue is sincere, although not always. Conservatism, as Eagleton points out, does not view itself as political. We live in such a hegemonic sea of conservative values that when left aesthetics encroach upon them, it can be disorienting. It seems to infuse politics into things that are otherwise stable aspects of our society. It lends truth to the cliche that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. Things like gender or marriage or eugenics or corporate greed or wealth inequality or the financialization of everything in our system, from housing to healthcare to incarceration to warmongering, are naturalized to the degree of being outside politics. A theory of common sense and normalcy, often touted by the Biden administration, helps to smear a liberal veneer onto this. Anyone who strays from this normalcy, who tries to strip away the glaze, can then be tarnished as political, as “free-thinking,” as a problem.

I went to see the film Universal Language earlier this week and it made me feel all these feelings. It’s nearly impossible to describe without sounding crazy. Hyperallergic called it “an absurdist comedy about the Great Replacement Theory.” Inspired by Iranian New Wave films, it’s set in a surrealist and frozen Winnipeg where everyone speaks Farsi. Vendors sell hot tea in the street and Tim Horton’s is transformed into a lowlit tea room with a huge samovar. A turkey steals a child’s glasses, a tour guide takes a group of visitors to random desolate sites in the city, including an empty water fountain and an abandoned briefcase on a city bench that has been designated a UNESCO world heritage site for “inter-human solidarity” because no one ever touched it, a “lacrimotologist” offers Kleenex to mourners at an icy cemetery surrounded by freeway lanes. The characters move in and out of this strange and magical landscape, intersecting in various unexpected ways. Two girls try to get a bill out of the frozen ice, a plotline that recalls The White Balloon by Jafar Pahani but also apparently draws on Rankin’s own grandmother’s Canadian childhood. The currency they are after is called a “Riel” after the indigenous revolutionary leader Louis Riel who led an uprising in Manitoba in the 19th century to defend Métis rights.

Rankin called his movie “a very gentle film that defies the oppositional modes we’ve been led to understand how the world works” in Interview. The film offers no excuse or explanation for its borderless world so unlike the one where we actually dwell. This reliance on poetics may be read as gentle, but to me it is also a rejection of our hegemonic assumptions, of the sharpening of human solidarity, kindness, love, welcome, into polemics or politics. It welcomes us into an unfamiliar universe where everything impossible, the transposition of New Wave Tehran onto Winnipeg, becomes plausible. Moze Halperin perhaps puts it more clearly in 4Columns, writing:

While cultural discourse slowly moves beyond the era of authenticity and identity essentialism—in which art often reified and exalted the individual—the project of right-wing nationalism that leveraged counter-discourse into global power fortifies its own fanatical identitarianism. Are these external realities in part the source of the mournful feeling in Universal Language that seeps into whimsy like cold trying to freeze a dream solid?

Even if racism and xenophobia do not exist in this version of Canada, crisis still rears its head. At the emptied fountain, the tour group is forbidden to “loiter” for more than 30 seconds. The tour guide works three jobs, trying to support his family. In one of the sharpest scenes in the film, a Québecois government administrator, conducting an exit interview (in French – even in fantasy, the Québecois still speak French), insists that his departing employee must speak positively, or at least neutrally, about his experience. “People are losing faith in the government,” he explains.

What astonished me about Universal Language was how fully it committed to its vision of the world. How little art offers this kind of unblunted optimism, this sense that things could be better, that solidarity could exist among all of us. The desolate brutalist cityscape is shot through with moments of hope and warmth and desire. In one of the most beautiful scenes in the film to me, which happens almost in passing, a skater dressed in sparkly silver executes a flawless camel spin, while a hammered dulcimer plays in the background. Her face, as she finishes, is radiant, a dream come true.

I went to see Babygirl on Christmas Day. I don’t know why they released it then. I was too embarrassed to say the title in front of my parents, who I was staying with, so I told them I had gone to see Nosferatu, the Robert Eggers vampire remake. About 15 minutes into my screening, which was half empty, an older woman got up and walked out, protesting vocally that she was in the wrong movie. I was evidently not the only one who was embarrassed.

For the uninitiated (this contains spoilers), Babygirl, directed by Halina Reijn, is the story of a high-powered corporate CEO, Romy (played by Nicole Kidman), who gets the hots for one of her new interns, Samuel (Harris Dickinson) after seeing him calm an aggressive dog on the street. In Kidman’s fantasies, she becomes the dog herself, tamed and brought to heel. Her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, is disgusted by her sexual desires and refuses to engage in practices like fingering her from behind. He thinks female masochism is “a male fantasy” and that Romy has been hoodwinked by traditional gender roles into wanting to get pushed around a bit. When she sits at the breakfast table with her family after cooking breakfast for her teenage daughters, he seems shocked and put off to see her wearing an apron. Profoundly unfulfilled, Romy embarks on an affair with Samuel, where they act out some mild kink. After they are found out by one of Romy’s subordinates (who, bizarrely, is also sleeping with Samuel), Romy comes clean to her husband and her marriage nearly disintegrates. From there, the movie is basically a feel-good story about cheating and forgiveness.

Babygirl has been billed as an erotic thriller for some reason in its promotional material. It is neither really but it is fun and smutty and enjoyable at times. Its sexual politics left me cold as did its feminism. It had a kind of bland, self-indulgent quality that reminded me, in its cuts between Kidman’s earnest striving for an orgasm and the promotional advertisements for her fully automated supply logistics company, loosely of associative Trick Mirror style personal essay writing. There is some connection drawn between the incredibly disciplined robotics world Kidman inhabits and her desire to be mildly degraded by an inappropriate sexual partner, but the film seems unsure exactly what that connection is or what it means.

Naomi Fry, reviewing the movie for The New Yorker, remarks that although the protagonist Romy’s fantasies ostensibly revolve around wild loss of control, “the submission that Romy seeks is not really out of control nor animalistic but, instead, suggests an even more committed embrace of robotic optimization.” This is perhaps not incidental or a flaw in the film’s design, nor is it, as Fry concludes, a statement about the punishing self-optimization routines that have come to dominate the world of the wealthy. Instead, it is the ticking mechanism at the core of the movie. Despite its billing, Babygirl is not really a movie about sex, much less an erotic thriller, but a movie about work. Its tidy resolution is the result of its anodyne labor politics. In this sense, it mirrors the organized #MeToo movement and replicates its fallible individualism. It obsesses over grey areas of consent and manipulation and what degree of transgression is permissible in the personal pursuit of sexual gratification.

Along the way, it gestures at broad feminist niceties. Various characters keep repeating that Romy could lose it all with “one phone call” — a line that is by turns sanctimonious and horny. Romy seems aroused by the idea. Elsewhere, her assistant, Esme, keeps begging her for a promotion and to pay more attention to the corporate advancement of women, including in one scene at a happy hour where Samuel anonymously orders a glass of milk for Romy. While Esme tries to pitch a DEI program to ensure that women are given equal opportunity, the camera, and Romy’s attention, are entirely focused on Samuel, who is standing across the room. After she gets the glass of milk and chugs it (a scene that AV Club calls an “infamous act of sadomasochism”), Esme and the corporate happy hour all fade and blur into the backdrop of Romy’s wild arousal.

This is the most clear-cut juxtaposition of Romy’s real failure, although other such cuts appear throughout. (In another scene, Samuel’s intern class watches a corporate training video about sexual harassment in the workplace, while Romy wanders by the glass-windowed office while they are huddled, eyeing Samuel’s back). Amia Srinivisan argues in The Right to Sex that the real problem with professors having sex with their students, even when it is nominally consensual and desired by both parties, is that pedagogy and sex are fundamentally incompatible. You cannot both teach someone and fuck them. Later on in Babygirl, when Esme confronts her boss with the reproach that she thought “women in power would act differently,” it is hard not to see this thorough-line as an indictment of Romy’s desires. She has been so focused on her own needs and on her tortured relationship to power that she has failed to foster a safe and empowering workplace.

In its first half, the film seems poised to indict Romy, Lydia Tár style. But it shifts unexpectedly in the second half. This is Romy’s fantasy, after all, and it never fully breaks through her bubble to the real world. In a final confrontation, Romy’s husband tells Samuel that Romy has been abusing and exploiting him to fulfill her own suppressed sexual urges. Samuel insists that that’s not the case and repeats some truisms about sexual liberation. This seemingly is sufficient enlightenment for all three to patch up the ending. Romy’s husband starts lightly dominating her during sex, finally giving her an elusive orgasm, and Samuel disappears entirely, after Romy apparently sets him up with an offer he can’t refuse at a rival company in faraway Tokyo. We do not know how Samuel feels about this job offer or how it is presented to him since none of that happens on screen. Instead, he vanishes cleanly from the film, leaving Romy behind to scrap her life back together.

Babygirl’s director, Halina Reijn, has named the erotic thrillers of the 90s and 2000s, such as Basic Instinct and 9 1/2 Weeks, as her main source of inspiration. In its depiction of an affair between an older woman and a younger man, the movie seems to echo earlier cult classics like The Graduate or The Piano Teacher or Fatal Attraction. But what it reminded me of most of all was the the feminist porn director Erika Lust’s elevated hardcore videos. Lust works on a series called “X-Confessions,” where viewers anonymously submit their sexual fantasies and they are dramatized into short porn films that are shot like music videos. One of her first films, The Good Girl, for which she became known, follows a young woman who decides to explore her repressed sexual desires and ends up hitting on a pizza delivery man by dropping her towel and asking him to have sex with her.

Babygirl operates in the same kind of suspended reality. One where you could reasonably get naked in front of your Doordash driver and there would be no negative consequences to it. What troubles Reijn is not if it is wrong for Romy to have sex with her intern or to play along with the illusion that he is in power in their dynamic or the psychological consequences he might potentially experience, but whether her responsibilities stand in the way of her sexual fulfillment.

Labor is an HR question in Babygirl. The problem with workplace violations is not their ethical basis but how hard it is to get away with them without being caught. The nuances of the robotic supply chain logistics company that Romy runs are left deliberately vague. Her warehouse is tidy and emptied of low-wage workers, who might conceivably be overseeing the work. In her gleaming office, she presides benevolently over upper management whose actual jobs appear to be mostly HR related. Similarly, the film sweeps aside questions of sexual ethics in favor of a fantasy of complete freedom. If there is a specificity to the desire to have sex with your employee, if it gratifies a certain kind of hierarchal urge and reproduces an existing labor relationship, Babygirl reduces it flatly to “kink.”

In 2002, Steven Shainberg adapted Mary Gaitskill’s short story “Secretary” into a movie by the same name. The differences between the short story and the film have been detailed elsewhere, not least by Gaitskill herself in a 2017 essay called “Victims and Losers: A Love Story,” which was included in her collection Somebody With a Little Hammer. The basic plot of both is that a young woman named Lee, depressed and adrift in the world and living at her parents house, learns how to type and gets a secretarial job for a domineering lawyer. When she starts making typing mistakes, he punishes her by making her bend over his desk while he spanks her, among other ritualized forms of sexual humiliation. Lee is upset and embarrassed by the experience, but she also compulsively masturbates to it. He has recognized something inside her, a tendency towards masochism and self-abnegation, that he exploits. The problem, in the short story, is that he only sees her as a fetish object. He gets off on her real fear and shame and humiliation. There is no fantasy, no consent, no third wall to be broken. She ends up quitting her job and receives hush money from the lawyer. When a probing journalist calls, she hangs up the phone.

“This is an almost impossible story to make a movie of,” writes Gaitskill in “Victims and Losers.” “Its drama is internal, rendered in language very nearly like code and meant to be sensed rather than explicitly seen.” In the film, Gaitskill remarks, the secretary never seems to experience real humiliation. She is eager and accepting of her boss’s transgressions. Instead, he experiences ambivalence and, ultimately, regret. His ambivalence, Gaitskill writes, comes at the expense of Lee’s. His complexity offers him enough redemption that the way can be cleared for the film’s happy ending: he will come to really see her and fall in love with her and marry her. Like Christian Grey, he becomes capable of regular love and his cruel and degrading predilections are transformed into regular heterosexual domination. Secretary has become a romantic comedy.

In an essay on the two versions entitled “Watching Secretary 20 Years Later, Post-#MeToo,” Emily Kenway wondered how the story would have been adapted in the 2020s. “Would a short story about workplace sexual abuse be translated into a kinky rom-com with a happy ending?” Gaitskill herself revisited the story again in March 2023, when she wrote a kind of sequel to it called “Minority Report” for The New Yorker. It is an expanded version of the “Secretary” story, describing the aftermath of Lee’s life into her old age. She does not understand what has happened to her, the degradation, the shame, the arousal, and cannot fully process the experience until she starts reading a wave of stories about workplace abuse, sexual harassment, assault. She tries to speak to a journalist but too long has passed and she cannot bring herself to describe what actually happened. Eventually, she goes to see the lawyer, who is still working. He tells her he has been “punished” for his transgressions, that another secretary wrecked his life and his marriage, that he’s lucky he didn’t end up “cancelled.” As she turns to leave, he invokes a specific memory: the first time he made her undress and spanked her, he saw that she was shaking at the end so he put his hand over hers and she, in his telling, put her pinkie finger over his index, holding it there. In this small gesture of intimacy, he both accuses her of collusion and begs her to exonerate him.

“Sex’s threat is objectively indistinguishable from its capacity to confirm,” writes Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism. The difference between a sexual act that is desired and one that is not desired is located less in the act and more in the relation itself. In Lacanian terms, all desire is the byproduct of demand minus need. A demand for your needs to be fulfilled carries with it a layer of desire — to be affirmed, to be loved, to be seen, and to have concrete material proof of it. Because this desire is per se unsatisfiable — love cannot be materially given — desirers turn to the realm of fantasy, which allows both for them to envision satisfaction and to for them to really fully understand the desires of others. Other people are unknowable. You can never really inhabit someone else’s imagination, their psyche, their fantasy worlds.

“To have sex erotically—and ethically—,” writes Becca Rothfeld in her essay, “All Good Sex is Body Horror,” “is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her.” What would sexual liberation have looked like for Lee, freed from the punishing constraints of the systems that surround her? She is vulnerable to her boss because of the strict hierarchies of the workplace, the labor relationship that is explicitly replicated in her boss’s sadism, and the gendered expectations of submissiveness and heterosexual deference inculcated into her. Out in the world, when she tries to experiment with BDSM, it rarely goes well. She is afraid of being judged, of being the wrong kind of woman, of inviting something she won’t end up wanting. When she starts reading #MeToo stories in her 50s, her first reaction is that the women are complaining about being attractive and frequently hit on, that the grievances are in a way a brag. Later, she quietly changes her mind.

By reversing the normative gender roles and power dynamics of Secretary, Babygirl attempts to upend the script of abuse, desire, and fantasy. Romy is asked to redo an ad she appears in for her company so that she comes off as softer and more feminine. She dresses in long skirts and filmy blouses. Her hair cascades into messy updos. She is caught in the messy trap of modern womanhood, doing gendered labor at home (cooking, mothering, faking orgasms) and formal labor in the workplace. No wonder she wants to be told what to do for once. But her desire is not only, or maybe not really, for kink. Her relationship with Samuel is not particularly kinky in the end. Half of what turns her on is the transgression. He has chosen her as his mentor in an internship mentoring program. They sit in meeting rooms with the shades down and tussle over their sexual relationship. When he is sent to her vacation home to bring her her laptop, she is furious with him for crossing boundaries and threatening her marriage. After he tries to end it, she pleads with him and stalks him at his other job, trying, like Lee’s boss in “Minority Report,” to get him to reassure her that he will not ruin her life, that he enjoyed himself, that he wanted her, still wants her.

Babygirl never exits the realm of fantasy. It stitches itself up neatly at the end. Romy keeps her perfect job, her perfect life, her perfect marriage, and she also gets to orgasm. Samuel is swept out of the way. He becomes a vehicle, curiously, for Romy and her husband to understand one another. Above all, he is a tool in their relationship. Romy can be forgiven for her indiscretion because she is a woman and because she will now dedicate herself to the advancement of women in corporate management. Everything else is noise.

In this reading, Babygirl is pure wish fulfillment. It leans on a kind of reactionary sex positivity which posits all sexual desire as uncomplicated as long as it is nominally consensual. The pursuit of individual gratification in Babygirl trumps even the formalistic exploration of real BDSM. When Samuel asks for a safe word, Romy offers her husband’s name. Whenever he appears in a non-sexual context, at work or at her home, she turns on him. He tells her that he and Esme don’t practice the same dominant/submissive kink because Esme isn’t into it. It’s unclear if Samuel is really into it or if he too just likes the power games. Perhaps, like Lee, he is also a little bit of a masochist himself. Romy humiliates him routinely. When he tries to end their professional relationship, she refuses, and when he tries to end their sexual relationship, she pursues him aggressively. He cannot get the upper hand.

Babygirl has largely been received as a story about sexual liberation. The New York Times described it as a story about “two people who have briefly slipped off the restraints of everyday life.” AP claims that it offers a more “female point of view” than traditional erotic thrillers. Autostraddle claims that the “discomfort” of Romy’s seniority cancels out the “discomfort” of Samuel’s dominance and “all that’s left is eroticism.” Another Substack essay that was sent to me in an algorithmic recommendations roundup described it as “beauty and orgasms.”

Reading this chorus, I wondered if I really was too fixated on the workplace transgression. Perhaps it is fine to sleep with your intern if he seems to really want it or to drag your colleagues into your sexual dynamics. Perhaps it is empowering for women to behave like men in power or somehow transgressing heterosexual norms to want to be sexually submissive to a man. I felt prudish and ideologically rigid, a feminist scold.

But I think if Babygirl had had any real interest in breaking out of the realm of fantasy, in exploring the real actual consequences of what Romy does, it would have been a better film. It is fashionable now to claim that good politics often make for bad art, but what generally actually makes for bad art is a refusal to examine the political and messy dimensions of interpersonal relationships. Sanitizing uncomfortable sexual desires into something clean and normative and uncomplicated keeps art solidly palatable, unpolitical, and profoundly vapid.

My thing with gift guides though is that they almost never feature like gifts that I feel like I could realistically offer to people. Half of them are exercises in curation, a way of showing how chic your taste in lamps and spices and Alaïa jackets is. The other half are the trusty under twenty five dollar thing you can buy on Amazon that will be thrown out by New Year’s. What they often lack is taste, which is not contingent upon spending a lot of money or being very fashionable. Maybe my loved ones are simply less avant-garde than everyone else’s. I went to a very trendy boutique in Manhattan earlier this year looking for a birthday present for my sister. I thought maybe some jewelry or tchotchkes of some kind. They tried to sell me those opaque patterned legging-like tights that are in now and that sort of make you look like you have measles. Almost no one wants that.

My favorite gift guide that I have seen so far is the Fran Magazine gift guide for esoteric boyfriends. Boyfriends are not gendered here. You can be your own esoteric boyfriend. What I like about this gift guide is not that I would want to receive any of this, but that it starts with the fundamental premise that all the people around you are probably freaks and weirdos in their own particular way and that you must adapt your gift giving to their cultural compass. There’s this part in The Hundreds (that I quoted in my year end book list from last year but I will shamelessly quote again) where Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart write:

I don’t hate all my friends a little even a little. There’s the tender one with dark black hair who is fighting to stay attached to things on the verge of dead. There’s the person who calls us cartoon names and judges the funny-bad. There’s the person who gets irritated if I get anxious. There’s the one who is clueless that her face is a maniacal gif. There’s the Marxist candy eater. There’s the one who is an amazing mother and you like watching her go at it. There’s the one who is developing a sense of humor after a life- time of devoted seriousness, and it’s sweet to watch her loosen up and crack up. There’s the one who is happy to see you. There’s the one who likes, really likes, the way you think. Most people only kind of like, but when someone really likes, that’s nice. There’s the one who taught me the phrase “that’s nice.” There’s the one who jumps in hard and has to leave in an hour. There’s the one who you respect so much your heart hurts. There’s the one who has you in mind, then calls you up. There’s the one who lifts your chin on contact. There is the one who just starts in without even so much as a hello. Then there are all the good conversationalists. Then there are all the grinners.

The Hundreds would be a beautiful gift for almost anyone.

Also in books, Overshare, the catalog from the Sophie Calle Walker Center exhibition is more casual than a typical coffee table book. It’s soft and floppy and buttery yellow and sort of feels like a very luxurious magazine. Sophie Calle is a compulsive oversharer, all about neurosis and poor boundaries and obsessive behavior. I gifted this to myself because I am a bookseller and get a retail discount. You could gift it to a neurotic woman in your life. Alternatively, Magali Lara made a really good artist book called Los zapatos de tacón, which is risograph printed and mixes drawing and text.

For real readers, you could get a Copper Canyon Press poetry book like Popular Longing by Natalie Shapero, for the yearners, or Deluge by Leila Chatti for the mystics out there. Leonor Grave from The Graveyard Review put out a beautifully designed zine about horror movies that might still be available and is only $15.

You can get a sweatshirt from The Ones We Love that says “Caution: swan is aggressive” for only $48. You can make someone feel very seen that way. You could get these really thick wool socks from L.L. Bean. Whenever I feel bad, I put on really warm socks and it makes everything better because my feet are always cold. You could get someone Hot Hands hand warmers, which are kind of a throwaway Amazon gift, but which mean a lot to me personally because I have cold hands. You could get someone a sauna day, which is literally the secret to everything. You could get one of these hand-knitted balaclavas with a little bow on it from this Depop girl (they are 50% cheaper than the Paloma Wool ones and around 80% cheaper than the Sandy Liang ones). You could get this Kiehl’s hand cream that is like magic or you could make your own whipped moisturizer and give it to a friend, like my friend did for me.

You could get these funky glass cups from a ceramicist I know. Or you could DIY your own Margiela kiss shirt by embroidering on a white button down, like my brother did. You could get a pair of smart bracelets that vibrates when you tap it so you can send little hellos all day long to someone you love (I got these and they’re kind of cringe and also definitely steal your data but I love them). You could go to any antique store or estate sale outside of a major city and get really kitschy decor on the cheap. Or you can go on Etsy, if you want your apartment to look like my grandmother’s and order some vintage fish wall plaques from New Jersey or this stainless steel fish jello salad mold or this ‘70s pink Murano glass mushroom lamp. You could dry some flowers and gift them along with The Language of Flowers by Sheila Pickles, if you’re feeling really Victorian about it.

You could get one of Malak Mattar’s gorgeous paintings or a Gabrielle Rul print if you can get your hands on one before they sell out. You could get the Esther Perel relationship card game for people who are really emotionally slutty. You could get a CSA subscription for someone who is a creative cook or these glass storage containers for someone who is worried about microplastics. Or you could get an entire case of Hapi Hot Wasabi Peas—probably just for me and literally no one else.

I have earrings from Daisy Chains that I always get compliments on. You could get this vintage beaded gold heart evening bag which Susan Alexandra wishes she had made. For someone you really love, you could get these sheer Helsa voile shorts, which, I am ashamed to say, I saw a video of Nara Smith wearing on her birthday. They are extremely flattering. You could get these really slouchy cotton socks to wear around the house or some Marland Backus jewelry if you have a lot of money to spend.

You could subscribe, for just $5-10 a month, to my friend Rawan’s newsletter, Refaat Writes Back, for writers from Gaza (you can also subscribe for free). You could gift a subscription to Lux, one of my favorite magazines. Someone I used to work with gifted me a Lux subscription a couple years ago and this year I was published in Lux so sometimes gifts can take you far. You could subscribe someone to the New Directions New Classics Club for $160 a year and they will have 12 New Directions books delivered to them.

Or if you really want to show someone you cherish them, you could cook them a nice meal and kiss them on the cheek and tell them how valued and amazing and loved they are and that you don’t hate them a little, not even a little. That would be enough for most people. I know it would be enough for me.

What is clever about Borges’s story is that it flips our assumptions. You think of the Minotaur is lurking in the darkness, a monstrous center of gravity waiting to devour his prey. Instead, he is passive here. Like a captive princess, he waits and waits and waits for his redeemer. His loneliness is terrifying and self-replicating. Isolation reproduces itself, hardens over time into an impenetrable shell. Reviled by the world, the Minotaur’s withdrawal from it is taken as confirmation of his misanthropy.

“When I feared my own loneliness,” writes Laura Marris in The Age of Loneliness, “I suspect, it was partly because this hunger had spooked me when I’d encountered it in others. ” Marris weaves human atomization and disconnection into our increasing loneliness as a species in a time of extreme ecological collapse. She points out that the Greek word eremos can be used not only to speak of a lonely person, but also of a “desolated” place. “There’s a doubleness to this lens, a reciprocity: when people monopolize a place, we often deprive ourselves of sharing it with the abundance of other living beings.”

For much of written history, physical solitude was distinguished from the more psychic condition of loneliness. We have all experienced loneliness in a crowd, after all, on public transportation or in a crowded bar. Airports, as Marris points out, are often profoundly lonely places by design. She details the hours and hours of isolating and exhausting air travel she undertook to maintain a long-distance relationship between Boston and California. When her boyfriend tries to break up with her on one trip, she resists. She diagnoses her stubbornness partly as a fear of loneliness, which lingers at the edge of her vision during her relationship like a subtle threat. Physical proximity to a beloved staves off the existential fear of erasure, of one day ceasing to exist. Marris quotes Hanif Abdurraqib who says that “to sleep next to someone is to ‘fall into the space that is mine and they fall into the space that is theirs and for a minute, there is a kingdom that we are keeping briefly warm and even if it is not love, it is love.’ I wanted a kingdom of warmth, even if it was a place I could only visit. I felt a loyalty to that kingdom, to that person, to our temporary country of non-loneliness. ”

We do not know if animals are lonely. In zoos, they seem to suffer from depression and unhappiness. Bereaved, some species grieve like humans. It is hard to access the psychic life of animals without anthropomorphizing them. But Marris describes how horseshoe crabs amass a whole parasitic community of sea snails and barnacles and seaweed that attach to their bodies and eventually overrun them until they die, half converted into fauna for the ecosystem already. This is not companionship as most of us would understand it, but it is spatial belonging and comfort in an environment well adapted to your thriving. Today, the population of horseshoe crabs in the American northeast is on the decline.

In the months leading up to the presidential election, several rounds of essays about “male loneliness” swept through the media. Ruth Whippman (the author of Boymom) argued in the New York Times opinion section this summer that boys have been abandoned and silenced both by the patriarchal norms of the right and by the scolding feminists on the left who accuse them of taking up too much space. “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Out on the Pickleball Court?” wondered Michelle Cottle also in the Times opinion section. Is the cure to male loneliness alternative country singer Zach Bryan, wonders Spencer Kornhaber for The Atlantic in response. “Boys with progressive views of manhood feel the least purpose in life,” claims Jean Guerrero in an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times about male loneliness, citing one study. “Is the Cure to Male Loneliness Being a Contestant on ‘The Golden Bachelorette’?” asks Jezebel, tongue-in-cheek but maybe not far off.

It is not only men who are lonely. Vox cites studies finding that men and women are lonely at about the same levels. Poor people (with incomes under $24,000) are lonelier than their wealthier peers. White people are lonelier than people of color. New mothers are lonelier than non-parents. LGBTQ adults often feel lonely (several times a week).

But the uproar about men is that men, so the argument goes, get radicalized by loneliness. In a slew of post-election think pieces, journalists and pundits argued that Trump’s second victory was at least in part due to a massive rightward shift among young men who found a balm for their loneliness from far-right influencers like Andrew Tate. Caught between an aggrieved identitarian left that paints them as violent and evil and an unsympathetic neoliberal right establishment that has disenfranchised them and that encourages them to man up in response, it is no wonder that they find Trump appealing. He encourages them to be men again. Within the slogan “Make America Great Again,” there is also the red-blooded promise of traditional masculinity. It is a masculinity that is obsessed with sex, with the pliancy and subservience of women, with the virgin-whore dichotomy.

It’s impossible to really say for sure that young men are further to the right or more misogynist than their fathers and grandfathers. Older generations grew up in a very different world. They had different political choices presented to them, wrapped up in slightly different packages. They did not have access to the internet. Political polling or polls on cultural perspectives or emotions are famously flawed. The fear of young men, as a mass, seems mostly like a distraction to me from the oppressive forces of government, the lobbying pull of corporations, the extreme heights of class exploitation at work in this country. Progressive abortion bills passed in several states where people had a chance to vote on them. Most studies indicate that legal abortion is widely popular. The rollback of Roe was not voted on and happened under Biden, making it difficult to pin the election’s outcome to that, even if it is a critical question at its heart.

For many liberal commentators speculating about male loneliness, the fear seems not to be that boys are isolated in comparison to their female peers, but that their vulnerability has been exposed. These boys are discouraged from being boys, forced to comply with feminist niceties, discouraged by the mechanisms of consent and the bullishness of modern young women from even wanting to have sex. Instead, they stew in their rooms, watch “manosphere” videos and porn. They emerge weird, deadened to the world, unable, like Borges’s Minotaur, to bridge the gap of sociability.

If this is more true for men than it is for women, it is largely because of norms of masculinity. An entire cultural system was built to preserve and sustain this kind of rugged masculine individualism and in its ruins, it has left viciousness and chaos. It is telling to me that a lot of contemporary writing about the so-called “gender wars” seem to call for a return to an imagined golden era post sexual liberation but before the advent of angry puritanism and isolated sexlessness. What is frightening about the right wing young men of now is precisely that they are impotent. “Incels,” writes Amia Srinivisan in The Right to Sex, “as I have said already, aren’t angry about their lack of sex, but about their perceived lack of sexual status.” Incels are mockable and ridiculous cultural figures because they can’t get sex and because their entitlement to women’s bodies mostly expresses itself in online rants or, at times, in bursts of extreme violence. If they were better initiated into masculinity, better able to assimilate to the ideal American norm (often implicitly the white American norm), if they were just less weird overall, they would be fuckable and then they would just be boys again. Boys will be boys.

“For me it is masculinity out of control – masculinity in a panic – that is most likely to turn ugly, “writes Jacqueline Rose in On Violence and On Violence Against Women. Masculinity is frightening when its fragility is laid bare, in the way that a wounded animal is frightening. It becomes ugly. In its proper place, attractive, dominant, easily able to cajole women into sex, it is venerated. Sophie Kemp, writing about the radicalization of young men in America for The Los Angeles Review of Books, describes how tempting it can feel to just give in and submit to power. “And how could that not be seductive, to an extent? To be told what to do. If young men crave hierarchy, it would only be natural that women would too.”

It is seductive. Not least of all because we have been raised with punishing gender norms and because they dictate so much about how our bodies move, how we desire, about our self-image and introspection. But the language we use around our desires also risks naturalizing masculine power and enshrining it into violence. This kind of latent submissiveness is not the same as compliance, as surrender, as love. Freud argued that fascism works by stoking libidinal attachment to a leader, who fills in, in an Oedipal sense, for a strict authoritarian father. It awakens a kind of passive masochism in response, a sense of helplessness that is deeply gratifying. It lowers your regular moral values, your sense of responsibility to the world, your capacity for empathy. It makes you grotesque.

“When you’re lonely,” writes Laura Marris, “it’s hard to see yourself in the language of others.” She quotes biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer who works on the grammar of animacy — types of linguistic constructions that grant subjectivity to the natural world. Instead of water being a noun, it is a verb that can act as a subject with free will. “The arrogance of English,” Kimmerer points out in Marris’s quote, “is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human.”

How many categories of people are dehumanized by our language? Kimmerer’s own Potawatomi ancestors were rounded up by American militia in the 1830s and sent on a 660 mile death march from Indiana to Kansas where nearly 30 children perished. This foundational violence lives in the bedrock of American society. I recently heard a talk with a middle-aged American writer who described a moment in the 2010s when Obama’s victory over John McCain radicalized a whole generation of young white men and ushered in the Trump era. I assume she was drawing upon personal experience but I thought it was a strange periodization. I would have looked further back to the Bush era, with its extreme violence and authoritarianism. Or maybe even further back, as Jacqueline Rose does, to Reagan and Thatcher, the deregulation of social services, the rise of corporate globalism, the never ending warfare waged on the Global South. Or you could go further back to Jim Crow laws, to Japanese internment camps, to the kidnapping and enslavement of millions of people over centuries, to the doctrine of replacement, of Manifest Destiny, of settler colonialism that infected our original social structure, that permeates everything left.

It’s not so simple once you start to really look. Everything recedes into violence. To this extent, the Minotaur’s refusal to fight back is not only a signal of defeat, succumbing to his social exclusion, but also a commitment to his own humanity. It is we who have made a monster of him. It is we who will pay the price.

The first great divorce novel doesn’t actually feature a divorce at all. In Anna Karenina, published in conservative 1870s Russia, the eponymous protagonist begs her older, neglectful husband for a divorce so that she can marry her lover. He refuses. Divorce is scandalous, complicated, and unnecessary, and he is not inclined to grant Anna any favors. In rebellion, she elopes with her lover but their affair is blighted by the complicated legal circumstances, and by her indefinite separation from her son, who she worries she might never see again. Shunned from society and terrified that her lover will abandon her, she jumps in front of a train and dies.

Tolstoy started writing a very different novel, one in which Anna was an unlikable and shameless adultress, and her husband was a sort of victimized saint. The final novel is very different from this original outline. Anna is complex and willful; persecuted by society, yet trapped in a gilded cage that is partly of her own making. She sees where her missteps will lead her but she cannot prevent them. Or maybe it is simply that living as she is, in her cold and loveless marriage, is unbearable. 

This was the original contour of the divorce novel and its prototypes: Madame Bovary, Hard Times, Jane Eyre, The Age of Innocence. In these works, marriage is a kind of prison, and escaping from it entails ruinous social and legal consequences. When Ursula Parrott published Ex-Wife in 1929, divorce was commonplace (if still frowned upon), and the protagonist—young, broke, pregnant, and abandoned by her husband for a newer model—wonders if this new world, with its recent liberalization towards marriage, has served women the raw end of the stick. Parrott, like her protagonist, underwent at least four illicit abortions after her early divorce and was blacklisted from the journalism industry by her ex-husband. The heroine of Ex-Wife is freed from the constraints of the stringent social role of wife and mother prescribed in the 19th century, but she is not freed from misogyny. In a 2023 New Yorker review of the novel upon its recent re-release, Jessica Winter diagnosed Parrott with a case of “false consciousness,” pointing out that Parrott seems to believe women had above all won “the freedom to be harmed.” 

The afterlife of this idea—that divorce represents a paradoxical setback to the cause of women’s liberation—lingers heavily in the contemporary divorce novel. Rachel Cusk finds the “broken mechanism of feminism” laid bare in the failed marriage of Aftermath. In Liars, Sarah Manguso imagines the woman for whom the protagonist husband leaves her as “a feminist heroine, [...] living for herself alone, grinding her boot into the face of another woman.” The restless main character of Miranda July’s All Fours initiates a fight with her husband, and afterwards muses that “setting up some sort of new, unleashed life as a divorced mom sounded like a punishment, someone else’s story.”

The pessimism of these novels, their persistent narrative arc which describes relationships with men as inevitably rife with drudgery and humiliation, derives in no small part from their boundless optimism about marriage. Perhaps reflecting a generational tilt (July and Manguso were born in the mid 70s and Cusk in the late 60s), marriage is presented as an opportunity for equal partnership, a new and reinvented institution co-opted for a feminist present. The shock of reality then is a specific kind of letdown, a betrayal, not only by the men who were supposed to love them better, but also by the dominant cultural narrative which promised them they could transcend the staid conventionalism of traditional middle class marriage. Manguso wonders if the problem is simply that “men hate women.” In All Fours, a younger woman in her 20s, newly engaged, explains to the unnamed protagonist that “Marriage is a vestige of the slavery mindset, people as property.” She wants to be married to her fiancé for her entire life, an idea she finds romantic, but she also wants to keep having sex with other people, an idea she finds exciting. The protagonist, seemingly on the brink of divorce, has no retort. She too will come to explore something like an open marriage. 

But to reduce the oppressive dynamics of marriage to sexual exclusivity is strangely blinkered. Anna Karenina’s tyrannical husband refuses to grant her a divorce, even after she reveals her love affair to him, preferring to maintain a legal stranglehold over her and prevent her from rebuilding her life. The stakes in these contemporary divorce novels are more existential than urgent: they wonder less whether their protagonists should get divorced and more about what the point and purpose of their lives should be in the first place. Their answers to the latter question reveal above all a deep class anxiety, one that is inextricable from the institution of marriage and all its attendant disappointments. 

In A Frozen Woman, Annie Ernaux’s 1981 novel about her marriage, divorce is a looming but unrealized cloud on the horizon. In reality, Ernaux separated from her husband, Philippe, after publishing the book, and described it later as a foreshadowing of her divorce. But the marriage it portrays is so staid and miserable, slowly transforming her into the eponymous “frozen woman” that it is hard to imagine it turning out otherwise. It ends on a note of despair. Ernaux imagines a wrinkled face looking back at her, that she will age without even noticing it, moving through her domestic routines as if sleepwalking. 

A Frozen Woman opens during Ernaux’s childhood, describing the women she grew up around in her working class Normandy upbringing, almost none of whom were “good fairies of the home” or “mute, submissive women.” Instead, they have “untidy” bodies and loud voices. They barely cook, rarely dust. They work in factories or on farms or in shops that are open all day and come home at night tired like the men. From her mother, Ernaux learns that girls are on equal footing with boys and that they will have to pull their own weight in the world. Her parents are focused on social mobility and they discourage her from marrying too young or devoting her time to housework. The lessons on beauty and docility come later, drummed into her by the romance novels she reads, by her classmates, by her teachers. One of her friends teaches her the right way to dress, the right way to move, the right way to speak, endlessly critiquing in a way that Ernaux is later able to recognize as deep shame. The classmate, like Ernaux, has grown up working class and she is desperate to conceal her roots and to marry up in life. Femininity is mostly a vehicle, in The Frozen Woman, for class mobility. 

Ernaux marries well. Her marriage is a modern one. Her husband likes that she is smart and sophisticated, that she has good taste in furniture and in books and that she wants to write and to work. But he also increasingly assumes that she will fulfill the archetypal domestic role and support his intellectual ambitions to the detriment of her own. His own mother is a model of femininity, so sweet and inoffensive it is impossible to imagine her annoying anyone. Ernaux begins to see herself as an “obedient cog in an asepticized, harmonious system that revolves around him.” She cares for the baby so he can play with it at the end of the day. She cleans the apartment so he will come home to it sparkling. She cooks, she brushes his suit. She gets a job teaching and continues to do all the domestic labor when she comes home at night, taking on the duplicate roles expected of modern, progressive women. 

Much later, in The Young Man (2022), Ernaux details an affair she had in her 50s with a man in his 20s. She sees signs of her own working class roots in him, in his occasional poor manners, in the lengths to which he goes to save money, and in his apathy about society. She realizes, with a dizzying sense of estrangement from her past self, that their roles have reversed. “With my husband, I had felt like a working-class girl; with A., I was a bourge.” 

On its surface, All Fours by Miranda July hits similar notes as The Young Man. Like Ernaux, the unnamed protagonist of All Fours develops an all-consuming obsession with a much younger man named Davey, who works at a Hertz car rental service. His desire reassures her that she is still lithe and fuckable, a fear that plagues the novel. But he also stirs up memories and forces her to confront her younger self. She does not experience the shock of recognition and then of alienation that Ernaux does when she recognizes her lover’s working class roots. Instead, she is both embarrassed and turned on by his lack of sophistication. When Davey tells her he is a dancer, she initially assumes that he must be bad at it. She slyly hires his wife, an interior designer, to remodel the motel room where she is staying. She pays $20,000 for the project, an amount that (she says repeatedly) she earned for writing one sentence, and that Davey has told her he is working overtime to save up. After the remodel, she is surprised to find out that his wife has good taste—unpleasantly surprised, the reader senses. 

She does not consummate her relationship with Davey because he wants to stay sexually faithful to his wife. Instead, he pees in front of her and then changes her tampon. Later on, she initiates a meeting with Audra, the older woman who took his virginity years earlier and they end up having sex in a sequence that borders on the grotesque. Although much of the book is threaded around menopause and aging, the protagonist is disgusted by Audra’s body, which is described in graphic terms as overweight and unattractive. Emma Copley Eisenberg succinctly indicts July’s blatant fatphobia, which is clearly bound up here with intense snobbery. The protagonist not only ridicules Audra’s actual physical appearance, but also her sexual desire, which she finds greedy, debased, and unseemly on such an unappealing body. She is jarred even by a fleeting coy expression on Audra’s face, which appears bizarre and incongruous on an older woman. “I made a mental note,” she remarks, “to stop looking coy in the next three to five years.”

Writing for The Drift, Oscar Schwartz diagnosed the contemporary divorce plot as a gender swap, one that borrows all of its beats from mid-century novels about men’s midlife crises. It fails to really break down gender norms, Schwartz argues, because it tends to focus on the same narrow solipsistic questions about freedom and aging as its self-indulgent predecessors: is it possible to be both a wife and an artist? Is it more important to be a good woman or an interesting woman? Can you really work out your issues by having an affair with a younger person?  

But gender has a deeper and more pernicious role in July’s book. She experiments self-consciously with gender swapping, both during her experiences with queer sex and in her marriage. These experiments are, however, confined within the tight limits of her social class. Her encounters with other people who do not conform to this—Audra, Davey, and the various service workers who appear in the novel—are punctuated by voyeurism. She is a tourist in their world, dropping $20,000 out of lust and boredom, hooking up with a woman who repulses her just to prove a point. In her real life, she exercises maniacally and obsesses over her desirability and femininity in ways that feel tiredly reminiscent of Ernaux’s high school age classmates. When she and her husband try to reconcile, they do so by roleplaying. She plays herself; he plays a lower class telephotographer who indulges in crudely stereotypical misogyny and dominance in ways that she finds exciting. They play, in other words, not so much with gender or with kink, but with class. 

All Fours circles around the deeper question of what marriage is actually for. Like Liars by Sarah Manguso, it questions if women can ever be psychologically liberated within a marriage, but it does not question the fundamental underpinnings of marriage as an institution. July sees sexual exploration as a way out of her stale and traditional life. Manguso sees her future potential sex life as destructive and patriarchal, another dead end.

In Liars, Jane, whose husband has pressured her into the role of a stay at home mother, ostensibly in support of her writing career, finds out that he is having a secret affair with a friend of his. Although she started dating her husband before he was fully out of his last relationship, and although he smeared his ex-girlfriend as crazy, she is blindsided by this pattern when it resurfaces. She is able to see the profound inequality in her own relationship, how her husband forced her to shrink intellectually, how he stigmatized her as emotionally hysterical, how he isolated her and made her financially dependent, and she connects her marriage abstractly to a long lineage of mistreated women. But she is unable to really empathize with most of the other women who appear in the book or to see their experiences as interwoven. She only apologizes to the girlfriend her husband left her for after he has abandoned her in turn. The babysitter she fights to hire in order to shoulder some of her reproductive labor is nameless and faceless, a silent woman who tends to her child. And her husband’s affair partner, Victoria, is portrayed as an oversexed homewrecker, both calculating and naive, blissfully unconcerned with her own family. Jane tells the shocked mediator early on in her divorce proceedings that Victoria has abandoned her children for her own gratification. During a tense email exchange with her husband in the same period, she pictures Victoria sitting on the couch next to him, coaching him on what to say in her “slimy panties.” 

Liars is resolutely fatalistic. Jane marries her husband in the first place because she feels herself on the cusp of aging out of the dating market. Marriage is an inevitability in the novel and its unhappiness is equally inevitable. All heterosexual relationships are enclosed in this cage of suburban isolation and domestic submissiveness. When Jane herself experiences a flicker of sexual desire after her divorce, she sees it as a horrifying confirmation of her servitude to what she deems emotional labor. “When an entire civilization tells you that you owe that cock a good suck and fuck, it isn’t a personal failure when you give in. You’ve been coerced.” Wanting sex is an embarrassing biological impulse; it resigns you to abject womanhood. 

Liars wrestles with at times with the inherent difficulty in writing about a process of victimization. To understand yourself as a victim of another person or of an experience is to understand yourself as acted upon, as passive. Narrative fiction on the other hand demands agency at its core and not passivity. Manguso wrote the book, according to interviews she has done, in the heat of betrayal, while she was going through a divorce with her own husband who had cheated on her. In the book, the wife is wronged, virtuous, endlessly patient. It is tempting to wonder how differently it might have turned out if Manguso had waited five or ten years to write it.

July also separated from her husband recently. She announced in July 2022 that she and the filmmaker Mike Mills were no longer romantically involved, although they continued to share a house and co-parent, and that they were each dating other people, much like the couple in All Fours. Rachel Cusk likewise publicly separated from her husband, a photographer, and published a divorce memoir the next year. Perhaps this is why all three books feel similarly undernourished, the result of personal upheaval more than anything else. All three see marriage above all as a personal problem and divorce as a compounding problem. They worry about maintaining their respectability, their attractiveness, their wealth. They worry about ending up as the untidy women of Ernaux’s youth, women who are ultimately perhaps defined less by their gender and more by their position in life.

Ernaux often writes looking backwards, mixing her current knowledge with her past consciousness. In A Frozen Woman, published when she was nearing 40, she too worries about ending up old and unsexed. By her later work, she is more interested in the ephemerality of pleasure, in the power of tenderness, in the distance that exists between her past and present after decades of rising up the social ladder. 

In The Uses of Photography, her most recent book to appear in English (the original was published in 2005), she describes a relationship she had while she was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. When she and her lover have sex, her medicalized aging body, made hairless by chemotherapy and fitted with a pump near her armpit, becomes something beautiful and desirable, a vehicle for her own pleasure in the face of her suffering. Her lover calls her his “mermaid-woman” because of her sleek hairlessness. When she sees elderly women in the supermarket, instead of experiencing her youthful fear of wrinkling, she now feels a sad certainty that she will die before she ever reaches old age. 

She and her lover start a ritual where they photograph their clothes strewn on the floor after sex, their unmade bed, their coffee cups. In the book, she describes the relationship in hindsight, and her relationships with men more broadly, as a way of acquiring knowledge. Through these encounters, she learns how to differentiate herself, her wishes, her desires, her intimacy, the boundaries of her self.

Towards the end of the book, she writes a short essay to accompany a photograph of her bed. This bed, she explains, was one she bought with her husband. They looked high and low for it because they wanted it to look like Brigitte Bardot’s. They ended up ordering a custom one and by the time it came, they had stopped having sex. Three years later they broke up. The bed is reinvented here, no longer a symbol of bourgeois marriage, of tidiness and chastity and devotion. Instead, it is a symbol of her self-determination and of her rejection of the wifely role she chased for so long. She does not view her divorce as a failure. Rather, it is her marriage that was an incongruous misstep in the first place. 

As you have seen from this post, I have decided to move my newsletter back to Substack. This is mainly logistical: the other platform where it was hosted has a limit on the number of subscribers for a free account. Paying for an account would have made it financially impossible for me to keep this newsletter free. I still intend to primarily send out free essays. I am grateful to everyone who has continued to financially support me here and you are welcome to choose a paid subscription starting at $5 if you would like to offer support.

Toute une nuit (1982)

“I have loved in her the image of the beauty of the world,” wrote James Joyce of his beloved Nora, “the mystery and beauty of life itself.” Joyce was a fierce advocate of desire. There have been few in the literary canon of the English language as genuinely enthusiastic about sex, or even about love. Ulysses famously ends with a graphic and unpunctuated soliloquy by Molly Bloom, where she details first meeting her husband, whom she has since cheated on, and teasing him until he asked her to marry him:

“the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath [.]”

Much earlier on in the book, her husband also remembers this day and this intimate exchange of chewed up food in rapturous and explicit terms:

“Ravished over her I lay, full lips full open, kissed her mouth. Yum. Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle.”

“Love, soppy as it may seem, is the novel’s great subject,” wrote Merve Emre in The New Yorker. Everything is bound up in love, God, history, disillusionment, the foundational wandering myth from which the novel derives its name and basic structure. Love grounds you, connects you to the world. It is the first and most fundamental kind of bond, that between parent and child. Its harnessing into the pious structural stability of the family does not really occlude its messiness or fluidity. It continues to morph, feverish and monstrous, suffused with desire, a sticky, unquenchable thing that could make the world’s greatest modernist write breathless and formally inventive odes to kissing.

There’s a part in the Chantal Akerman film Toute une nuit (1982) where a woman dancing with one man muses aloud about the other one she really loves. The man dancing with her is totally focused on her. He holds her tightly, he does not react to anything she is saying. Why does she love this other man, the woman wonders. Is it his mouth? No, it’s not his mouth. Maybe its the way he looks at her. At the end of the film, she answers the phone and sits rapt and still listening, answering “yes” over and over again. She is dressed in a fawny pink, suffused in light in the foreground, framed against the drawn white curtains. Behind her, the man slumps on the bed. His shirt matches the bedspread. He almost blends in with it, an accessory to this more remarkable love story.

Toute une nuit is a series of tableaux about love, set over the course of a single hot and stormy night in Belgium. The lovers are nondescript and anonymous. They act out familiar and relatable scenes of passion and jealousy and abandonment and heartbreak. They spend a lot of time waiting, pacing back and forth, sitting by the phone, lying sleepless listening to the sounds from the street below. Akerman had a consummate eye for interiors. The film is full of dreamy blue light and deep shadows like a Vermeer painting. Streetlights reflect off of beautifully framed glass doors and windows. Crumpled white sheets suggest sensuality or the torment of insomnia. One couple runs around very early in the morning closing the windows as a thunderstorm starts. Their curtains billow in the wind, reflecting the sudden melodrama of their fraught interactions. We don’t love each other anymore, the woman tells him earlier on in the night. Later, he sits almost washed out by darkness near the window, while she pretends to sleep, the light angled across her thick teased hair. In the morning, she collapses on top of him in a wordless embrace.

Writing for e-flux, Dominiek Hoens describes how the personal and impersonal are constantly staged against each other in Toute une nuit. Each intimate sequence is recognizable above all as a cliché, a scene with its own referential lexicon in romantic media. Thus the private is subsumed to “generic repetition, with something that always threatens to disappear in a love story but thanks to Akerman’s genius can appear as an encounter in its almost speechless, incomprehensible ‘stupidity.’” Hoens turns to the Lacanian axiom that to love is to give what we do not have, that desire is based on irreparable, structural lack. Everyone is groping in the dark, to put it crudely, trying to be desired and thus to be made static, a moving thing in the world, freed from the staid tableau of the love story.

Lacan reappears in a later film of Akerman’s, Un divan à New York (1996), which is something like an arthouse version of The Holiday. William Hurt is a hotshot but depressed analyst living in a toney apartment off Central Park, trying to dodge his demanding patients, who never seem to get better, and his overbearing ex-fiancée. He puts an ad in a Paris newspaper to do an apartment swap and ends up trading places with Juliette Binoche. She is apparently a dancer in the film, but she never dances. Instead, she schemes and lies around making messes and unwittingly seduces everyone around her with her natural charm and emotional intelligence. She starts seeing Hurt’s clients and cures them all, along with his depressive dog. A friend explains to her what transference is over breakfast. In Paris, Hurt has to toil up the stairs, clean up after her, and fend off her jilted lovers. After a plumbing incident, he gives up on Paris and goes back to his creature comforts. But when he realizes that Binoche is posing as an analyst, he decides to pose as a patient and she heals him too. Of course. He chases her to the airport, they miss each other in a comedy of errors, and finally find each other in Paris, where they kiss among her untended plants. I have a lot of issues, Binoche tells Hurt (I’m paraphrasing) — Do you think you could fix me?

Transference comes full circle in Un divan à New York. Hurt falls in love with Binoche as his analyst and then as a woman before stepping back into his own role of analyst. Both characters narcissistically pursue their own personal growth more than anything else. Lacan gives an example he lifted from a linguist in his seminar on love of an arranged tryst between two lovers which is signified by a drawn curtain at five o’clock — indicating that the girl is alone. The linguist fixates on the curtain and how it acquires new heavy significance from this new meaning assigned to it, but Lacan is more interested in the idea of being alone. The girl is alone here as a pretext to be with her lover, in other words, not alone. She imagines herself as the object of his desire and a person who desires and is therefore subject to someone else’s tyranny. She is not alone in the subject sense because is not autonomous. Her aloneness simply exists to be filled up by her lover.

All the brooding, waiting lovers in Toute une nuit seem to exist in this kind of contingent solitude. They are never really alone. They are acting out a script that is shaped by desire and that holds them captive to it. It’s like the whole movie was Akerman working towards a theory of love, my boyfriend said as we left the theater.

Un divan à New York (1996)

I wondered, watching Toute une nuit, if I had gotten soppy. There is no shame in that. To some extent, the whole point of art is to be received sentimentally. It speaks to our emotions and our memories, deep, primal feelings. If sentimentality, to be moved by something, feels like a banal interpretation of creative work, it is also an incredibly powerful one. I wondered the same thing though while I was reading Intermezzo, the new Sally Rooney novel. Although I have admired Sally Rooney and liked Sally Rooney at times, I have never really been deeply moved by her books until this point. Normal People, which had so much success, mostly inspired polite enjoyment for me.

But I was moved by Intermezzo. Rapturously moved. I was not the only one. Andrea Long Chu wrote a gorgeous review of it for New York Magazine, which ends by mentioning on an offhand note that she is engaged and therefore has also become soppy. Jo Hamya called the novel “sublime” in The Independent. “On finishing, I reflected: what would it be to hold a book with a soul? I felt I had.” Rooney is also working towards a theory of love. The prickly, emotionally stunted brothers of the novel are brought closer to the world by love. They learn how to care about something. Their love is all mixed up with grief. Their father has just died. They loved him in the same kind of conflicted, impersonal masculine way in which they love each other, mainly demonstrated through actions. They are softer with the women. They can assert dominance over their bodies and so surrender to them psychologically. Through this surrender, they lay themselves bare.

If this all sounds kind of archetypical, the basic shape of a love story, that is also Intermezzo’s argument. The characters act out their plots and in doing so, reveal themselves. Their specificity, their individualism, their walled off interiors, become accessible through the very genericness of the love plot. Both brothers constantly worry they are participating in the worst kind of clichés. Peter, older and more successful, is dating Naomi, a 22 year old squatter whose beauty and lack of inhibition hypnotizes him. He is also entangled with Sylvia, his most serious ex-girlfriend, a brilliant academic, who has been left disabled as the result of an unspecified accident. He feels ashamed, in front of the older woman, of his affair with the younger one, who he partially supports and babies and dominates in bed. He knows it looks like an early onset midlife crisis.

Ivan, the younger brother, is a competitive chess player who is barely staying afloat. He might be neurodivergent and has grown up on a toxic mixture of anime porn and antisocial tendencies. But at 22, he meets Margaret, a 36 year old woman, who is separated from her alcoholic and controlling husband, and whose life, for all intents and purposes, is over. She is surveilled by her small town, who side with her husband, and criticized by her friends and relatives. She keeps her relationship with Ivan secret at first, deeply ashamed of herself for sleeping with a younger and inappropriate man. In one passage from the novel, she starts to see how easily your life can spin out of control.

“You are lying to almost everyone you know. You have come to care too passionately, too fully and completely, for an unsuitable person. You can no longer visualise your own future: not only five years from now, but five months, even five weeks. Everything is in disarray. All this for one person, for the relation that exists between you. Your fidelity to the idea of that relation. In the light of that, you have come to hold too loosely many other important things: the respect of your family, the admiration of your colleagues and acquaintances, even the understanding of your closest friends. Life, after all, has not slipped free of its netting.”

Peter also fantasizes about dissolving all of his attachments, about being able to effortlessly disappear from someone’s life so seamlessly that it would be as if he had never been there in the first place. This idea of a clean break serves, among other things, to absolve his guilt about his indecisiveness, his sense that he has led Naomi on although she is unsuitable for him. That he is still clinging to Sylvia although they broke up years ago. His Oedipal feelings resurge with the death of his father. He vies with his brother, puts him down. He feels simultaneously responsible for and put upon by the needs and desires of everyone around him. He feels hurt and humiliated and small. He drinks to the point of blacking out and wakes up contrite.

Some critics have been put off by the earnestness of the book and by how its characters always seem to be striving for grace. Love is effortless in its mechanics in Intermezzo. Sex is transcendent, desire warm and redemptive. The staged out dramas are mainly a result of fear and hurt and defensive reflexes, a blind groping for the correct path. Ann Manov called it sneeringly a “young adult” novel in her TLS review and criticized Rooney for the moral purity of her supposedly “problematic” men. James Marriott echoed this idea in The Times, remarking that Rooney’s characters (and especially her men) would be more interesting altogether if they were worse people. “The reader is never quite able to shake the suspicion that Rooney’s characters have all been made to sign contracts holding them to high standards of personal conduct before they are permitted to appear on the page.”

What is this preoccupation with unlikable men? It is a strange refrain, one that seems blissfully unaware of the whole ponderous history of the novel and its parade of grotesque protagonists. Naomi Kanakia devoted a whole substack essay to it, arguing that men in literature can be acceptably nice and wholesome or exceptionally aberrant and evil, but nowhere in between. She asserts that any realistic portrayal of masculinity would generally fall in the middle, in the space of a kind of pathetic, low level aberrance. The desire to use and exploit women for sexual gratification, narcissism, stupidity, dominance, the thin veneer of socialization that prevents men from raping and pillaging and murdering and convinces them to instead wistfully fantasize about it.

But this is such a bleak view of masculinity and ultimately such a dehumanizing one. Do men not have principles and ideals and romantic fantasies? Do they not unexpectedly fall in love and devote themselves to that love? If they are taught to be cruel and domineering and careless of the humanity of others, is that really the deep psychological state of half the world’s population? I am puzzled by this thirst for nihilism, which feels like perverse wish fulfillment. It is a cynical view of literature, one where sophistication is constituted of misery, of bad behavior, of joyless sex and debased lives, of narcissistic men masturbating furiously and hatefully to women they despise. A sad vision of our humanity.

Does being a romantic therefore make Rooney less of a literary writer? Intermezzo is one of the more serious and formally innovative novels to have come out in the English language in recent years. And yet, even its defenders have compared it to a “Harlequin romance,” as if writing about tenderness and idealism and ending on a note of hope should doom you to the mass market aisle.

Intermezzo is perhaps more reminiscent in its theory of love of Akerman’s 1991 Nuit et Jour. In this film, rich with color and set against the backdrop of a dreamy nocturnal Paris, a couple attempts to hermetically seal themselves off from the world. They have no friends, they won’t get a phone, they try to avoid their neighbors, they barely eat or sleep. At night, he drives a cab and she wanders around the city, reading and enjoying her solitude. During the day, they stay in bed and have endless sex. Eventually, she meets another cab driver, physically similar to her boyfriend, who works during the day instead, so she strikes up an affair with him at night. In the end, she leaves both of them, electing to be alone rather than getting in any deeper.

“Nuit et Jour,” writes Marion Schmid in her study of Akerman, “is, arguably, Akerman’s most poetic film, a painterly homage to youth, the innocence of a love uncorrupted by jealousy and possessiveness, and the pleasures of a Parisian summer that, like in a modern-day fairy tale, will never end.”

Intermezzo is also a sealed-off world in some ways. The realities of life intrude harshly upon it. Naomi is evicted from her squat, Ivan gets behind on rent, Margaret’s mother ostracizes her for daring to be happy. But it is still a world suffused by warmth and by grace. It asks sincerely, and with deep spiritual conviction, how we are meant to love each other and to live well. The questions a novel should ask, really.

Nuit et Jour (1991)

1  Chantal Akerman, Schmid, M., 2010, Manchester University Press

Harry was widely mocked for admitting that he got his epigraph off of BrainyQuote.com, but perhaps the main difference between him and most of his critics is simply that he was willing to reveal his sources. The main problem with criticism now, wrote n+1’s editorial board in a 2021 diagnostic called “Critical Attrition” is that “the contemporary American book review is first and foremost an audition — for another job.” Critics are mostly aspiring novelists or at least aspiring staff writers in the ever growing pool of untethered magazine wannabees. They teach or they write marketing copy or they churn out their own books to make ends meet. In order to beef up a book review into something more profitable and more likely to capture the fickle attention of literary audiences, the essay speculates, critics often end up writing about something entirely different than their ostensible subject. In an imaginary book review of a new release, “The failures, offenses, and excesses of Rooney, Lerner, and Cusk occupy the bulk of the piece — until the final fourth, which seems to be about Christopher Lasch, as well as cancel culture.” The reader walks away as unenlightened as they arrived.

The failure of criticism, in other words, is a failure of labor. Critics not only are gig workers of sorts, cobbling together their arguments piecemeal at odd hours of the day for pennies, but they are also employed by the same literary establishment they are ostensibly objectively assessing. Hence, argues n+1, the decline in negative reviews. Instead of going negative on a book that may sour future editors and defensive fellow writers on your own work, it’s easier to go negative on the culture on large. 

The n+1 piece garnered pushback, notably from Christian Lorentzen who accused it of “anti-intellectualism” for its focus on a generic everyman reader who goes on Goodreads.com. It is true that algorithmic recommendation and the cratering of print media has made criticism a kind of desperate attention grab. On review aggregate sites like Goodreads, Letterboxd, or Yelp, consumers assess products or experiences using their own unpredictable and mysterious metrics. A book is just as likely to get 2 stars for having an ugly jacket or a printing error as for being dull or confusing. A restaurant might get 2 stars for making you wait for a table, for the server failing to smile, for the food being salty and overpriced, or for there being a rat in the bathroom. On TikTok, a young woman complained (cleverly) that a book she had attempted to read had “too many words.” I have often felt the same way but I usually keep it to myself. 

It is helpful to think of say reviews of a store and reviews of a film as suffering from the same cultural malaise. A series of Google reviews complain about the bookstore where I work, calling the staff rude, the hours unpredictable, the merchandise overpriced, and the administrative procedures byzantine. Mixed in with these complaints is a more fundamental one: the books are all in French. Why, wonder some reviewers, would you have a bookstore where the books are all in a language they cannot read? How did they end up trying to bravely shop in such a place?

This complaint is not a valid one if you see the purpose of reviews as addressing a targeted audience that is already in the know. It is sort of like going to a vegan restaurant and complaining that they will not serve you steak. The problem with literary criticism is perhaps that its audience is often undefined, for reasons that have as much to do with literary culture as they have to do with labor. Reviews are written for “readers” broadly, but who are readers? Lorentzen does not want to have to bother with the ordinary reader, the one who wants a pleasant rundown of the book in order to decide whether or not to read it (no spoilers, please). But even within the cloistered space of devoted readers, there is a wide range of diets, so to speak. You could easily write a critique of Sally Rooney, as some critics have, on the grounds that her books are mundane or overly concerned with the interior lives of young Irish women or that her characters talk about Marxism too much and too vaguely. Rooney’s popularity does not discount these critiques as such, but the point is obviously subjective. Underlying this imagined review is not only a personal distaste for Rooney’s novels, but also a broader dislike of her politics, of her project, of the realist women’s fiction tradition in which she writes. It is, at least on some level, the culture war piece to which n+1 alludes.

Luckily for everyone, participating in the culture wars is the absolute easiest way to garner clicks. It can turn a mildly polemical and overwritten article in an obscure intellectual journal into a viral internet sensation, particularly if it is wrapped up with a bow of snark and cruelty. Hating is funny. It has shock value. It emboldens readers whose opinion no one would normally pay money for to let loose their own dislike, either because they actually hate something too or because they simply want to be a part of things. It is a base and libidinal form of engagement. It taps into the same frenzied pleasure that right wing pundits often draw upon. When JD Vance mocked childless women, he was tapping into a similar kind of culture war liminal space. It is one that suspends intellect and history and facts and truth to indulge infantile reasoning. Childless women seem weird and against nature, their vibes are off. The puerility of this logic, though, conceals its more robust foundation in a political project that aims at what Melinda Cooper calls “the sexual unconscious of economic life.” Underlying the warp of the culture war is not only actual culture, but also the political and economic vision to which it subscribes. There is no pure Platonic culture, no aesthetic form without ideological contamination. To believe in the primacy of an art that is unconcerned with power and the condition of human life and overly concerned with raw beauty and aesthetic pleasure is at best elitist: at worst, fascist. 

In her essay on the postwar rehabilitation of Nazi propagandist par excellence, Leni Riefenstahl, Susan Sontag wrote in 1975 that the “reason for the change in attitude towards Riefenstahl lies in a shift in taste which simply makes it impossible to reject art if it is ‘beautiful.’” Sontag describes how Riefenstahl was able to reposition herself as a defender of beauty and artistic freedom by capitalizing on a rising cultural narrative that to make art is inherently to struggle. Artists, by this logic, are repressed by the powerful hand of the state and their art represents a brave attempt to express a fundamental truth about the world in the face of adversity. 

Like the strange logic surrounding reviews that I described earlier, this logic about art has a curious flattening effect. All artists are suddenly on an equal plane and their desire to make art is equally worthy, whether they are workers crushed under the demands of American rentier capitalism, dissidents in authoritarian regimes documenting the stories of people written out of history, or literal propagandists for the Nazi state, trying to push the technical limits of what is possible in filmmaking with sometimes stunning results. Riefenstahl is also a victim of the Nazis, by this narrative, rather than their most shining success story. 

Casting art as inherently radical obfuscates the role it can play in propping up and sustaining oppressive systems. Art created under these conditions is usually described as struggling to free itself from the political. Contemporary assessments of Mikhail Kalatozov’s rediscovered groundbreaking agitprop film, Soy Cuba (1964), tend to juxtapose its avant-garde technical mastery with its actual subject. The cinematography is breathtaking: the cameraman was suspended from a pulley so the heavy cameras of the period could float upwards, as if they were drifting of their own accord. The lighting washes out fields of sugar cane, white, foam-capped waves, palm fronds, with the darkness of a perpetually stormy sky. Airborne shots render characters miniscule and insignificant next to huge columns and statues, the apparatus of power. Roger Ebert summed up the film as “naive and dated” in 1995 and argues that its gaze “betrays a certain interest in la dolce vita that is not entirely in keeping with the movie's revolutionary, agitprop stance.” Writing for Hyperallergic, Maggie Sivit called it “a hallucinatory, freewheeling work of communist kitsch.” Slant called its politics crude and transparent but poetically revealed.”

But the visuals of the film are neither separable from the material conditions which produced it, the government funding and collective vision which made it a worthwhile project for the USSR and Cuba, nor from the political history it undertakes to tell. It conveys “the mysterious beauty we associate with utopia,” argued Juan Antonio García Borrero earlier this year for Criterion “above all in its collective dimension. The film’s choreography puts forward its own intrinsic argument: the visual audacity communicates precisely that which is inaccessible to ordinary logic. Here reason gives way to faith, just as it did in the hearts of that motley band of revolutionaries who dreamed of transforming the world and ‘storming heaven.’”

The history of colonial Cuba, between the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and the 1959 revolution, is unjust on such a world historical scale that it is hard to fathom, let alone make art about. Writing of nearby Haiti in The Black Jacobins, CLR James described its French colonial society as “the very dregs of human civilization and moral standards.” Poetically, he envisioned a future where self-realization depends on the entire weight and progression of history being incorporated into the individual and their hopes and dreams and striving. “Freedom is creative universality, not utility.”

What is most depressing about the literary takedown as a form is its overall nihilism. It rarely has any generative power or real creative vision for what the future of literature, and by extension, the world, should look like. It defaults to cynicism because that is a way out of earnestness and a way out of solutions. Even where the critic is basically proven right by the fickle tide of public opinion (for instance, Lauren Oyler in her LRB takedown of Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino), she is almost proven right by chance. She has stumbled upon the most obvious problem with the novel, one that everyone can agree upon, and presented in the most obvious possible way to appeal to the widest number of haters. What she has failed at, philosophically, is the cause of advancing literature. What sort of novel should there be? The takedown tends to reach backwards, comfortingly, to a well-known canon. Writers used to be good at writing and novels used to be better. The problem with writers now is that they do not heed the lessons of their predecessors. This is generally an Alan Bloom argument about contemporary American literacy dressed up as a more substantive point. If arguing that everyone should write classic novels in classic forms and demonstrate their real substantiated labor is self-evidently conservative, it is also an irresistible bedrock of literary commentary. Somewhere between clickbait internet poetry, with its mind-numbing screenshottability, and the ponderous work of 19th century novel aficionado MFA graduates, there is a secret third way - but contemplating that is not a very catchy prospect. 

Even when takedowns do not yield to this kind of reactionary arc, as in the case of the very talented Andrea Long Chu’s vivisections for New York Magazine on beloved writers like Hanya Yanigihara, Zadie Smith, and Rachel Cusk, they still often default to a specific script. Rayne Fisher Quann famously wrote (after an Andrea Long Chu takedown of Ottessa Moshfegh in 2022) that women who ascend the cultural ladder tend to get “woman’d.” Her issue, Quann stressed in an article for I.D., was not with Long Chu’s very valid criticism of Moshfegh, but with the inevitable response to it. “The result is a widespread “vibes-based” hatred that frequently uses meaningful criticism as a crutch on which to hang preexisting resentment rather than as an instigator for earnest critical engagement.” 

Unfortunately, the production of criticism itself is inextricable from this response in that its raison d’etre often becomes its ability to garner this kind of mass reaction. Takedowns of this kind focus on women writers or writers of color, not simply because those writers are also flawed, but also because they seek to diverge from the liberal establishment. To take down a male writer, to accuse him of misogyny or of conservatism or of producing dull lit bro fodder, does not seem especially sophisticated these days. It tends to get an eye roll, an accusation of naivete. Surely there is something more interesting to say about a novel than that it “hates women.” The culture has processed and spat up this kind of critique. The dominant ideology has shifted. It is more significant now to say that something is not beautiful, that it is not coolly above ideology, that it is not art - if you are really going for the jugular. 

From Miriam by Kate Riley

I asked heaven, like Sade, to please send me someone to love, and heaven, in its infinite wisdom, sent me a man who lived in a different city. It seemed like a cruel joke to be playing. I was tempted for a while to demand a replacement. Then feelings won out over facts.

You rarely read happy love stories. For good reason maybe — they are not very interesting. In the third act of every romance novel or film, disaster swoops in to muddy the waters. The true romantics persevere, either because they believe in the total immovability of fate or because they cannot imagine a life after love or because they are terrified of the void. The reasoning does not matter very much; the outcome is ultimately the same. 

I am about to turn 30 and I wondered at times if my urgency to partner up was simply driven by a fear of getting old, by all the songs and all the movies and all the fairy tale romances you read about. It is very pleasant to be loved. You tend to forget when no one is loving you how it can shift your entire universe, subtly, but with the force of an earthquake. Still, this did not seem a good enough reason to partner up. I did not want a love that was contingent on all the things that traditional middle class partnership prioritizes: wealth, prestige, social standing, good temperate habits, ambition. I did not want a marriage of convenience in other words. I wanted someone who could share or at least sympathize with the way the world appeared to me, very cruel and very beautiful, who was driven by an unshakable desire to figure out how to live well, which is to say, while inflicting the least amount of harm possible, who was not shaken by my darkness and who could be moved by my joy, who also wanted very desperately to lead a happy little life but who could not turn away from the world.

Most of my dates felt like more filling out a resume. There’s a part in The Furrows by Namwali Serpell where the protagonist describes love as a rapture, as if it were obvious, as if love could be anything else. “As if there’s any correlation between this force, this feeling, and dating.” 

The distance seemed like a test of this principle. Despite myself, I started imagining it as an incalculable debt system, one that defied the conventions of human measurement. This man had come from far away for our first date and I went stupidly to the wrong place and kept him waiting for over forty minutes. In a cab on the way there, I decided that he would hate me from then on. I was thorny, on the defensive, trying to salvage something that seemed already ruined before it had even started. I had had some inkling that this might be a Thing. It seemed right and different in ways that I couldn’t really identify. My grandmother used to say that she knew as soon as she saw my grandfather that he would be her great love. Everyone was smoking and the air was so hazy, in her retelling, that she couldn’t even see his legs. I didn’t even know if he had legs, she would tell me when I was little, priming me for a belief in fate, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. 

My grandmother only stayed married to her great love for around a decade. He had affairs and they had terrible fights. It was not the kind of marriage you would hold up as an example of anything. A fated romance is not necessarily a happily ever after. The third act does not always resolve. Sometimes it decimates your life. 

Some of the purest love stories are the ones where that decimation happens and where everyone goes on living. In Anna Karenina, one of my favorite books, Levin asks Kitty early on to marry him. She says no. She thinks she will marry someone else, a narcissistic but simple man called Vronsky. With Vronsky, her future seems clear and simple and predetermined. With Levin, who is anxious and antisocial, who obsesses over philosophy and social liberation and Russia’s class politics, her future seems cloudy. She cannot imagine exactly what it will look like. It destroys Levin psychologically but he perseveres. Hundreds of pages later, sensing reciprocity, he asks her again. They play a mysterious game called secretaire, where each writes out the first letters of each word in a phrase and the other somehow deciphers the meaning. The phrases are very complicated, but somehow they get to the bottom of it and agree to marry.

Before they get married, Levin gives Kitty his diaries because he wants her to know him completely, thereby revealing that he is an atheist and also that he has had multiple sexual relationships. Kitty is horrified and ashamed by the revelations, but ultimately, she accepts him in completeness. They marry and mesh uneasily into each other’s lives. There are ups and downs. They keep loving each other.

For a long time, I thought I might die young. It was a comforting idea mostly, that I would not always have to get up and go to work, not always have to carry around my deep well of undefined sadness, not always have to negotiate with this world which is in many ways antagonistic to our thriving. The future seemed cloudy to me altogether. Although I had been exceptionally well set up for life overall, I came into adulthood saddled with student debt and worked a series of low-paying prestige jobs over the course of my 20s, for the privilege of which I took on more debt. This was a personal choice and so often seemed obscene to complain about. Many people are trapped in low-paying jobs with no possibility of upward mobility and no social safety net.

But on the other hand, it was not really a choice. I can do tedious or repetitive work pretty easily and daydream at it, but I could not really imagine doing something that conflicted explicitly with my personal values. A lot of the white collar, well-paying jobs that people I knew drifted into seemed like cynical forms of gambling, always tilted towards the worst possible outcomes. Betting, in other words, on our failure to thrive. There is a kind of necrotic frenzy around the acquisition of wealth that frightens and depresses me. You can feel it in the air in New York City sometimes. Everyone is measuring human life as value, time units as fungible, calculating their relative status and relative chances of success. It creates cruelty and scarcity everywhere. It exploits and eats away at the lives of people indentured to its rhythm. It is a ghostly system that intimately links melting permafrost, flood and wildfires, displacement, and abused workers into one upward flow of money.

This is a dramatic way of conceptualizing debt, but it also helps me understand my own personal situation. It is sometimes helpful to contextualize your private burdens as generational experiences. Money is so fraught, so shameful, it touches every aspect of your life. Dispassionately understanding how debt functions and how it compounds upon itself and how it is inherited across generations is a worthwhile project. It makes you feel better, or at least less alone. I first learned about how debt worked from my parents, whose debt seemed abstract and incomprehensible to me, and then from The Big Short probably, which I read as a teenager, and then from Capital, which I read in graduate school, and then from Debt: The First Five Thousand Years by the great humanist David Graeber. One of my favorite essays is about debt. It was written for The Baffler in 2018 by M.H. Miller and it describes a middle class family’s descent into a debt trap nightmare, resulting from predatory student loans, medical bills, and the intense downward mobility of the 2008 financial crisis. It is a surreal story, dry and humorous even though it’s so sad. At a certain point you have to laugh about it.

Miller’s situation is infinitely worse than mine. But there is a universality to the spiral he is drawn into. He finally refinances his debt so that his aging parents are not cosigners on it. “Sharing the burden of my debt with my spouse instead of my parents was a small, depressing victory,” he writes, “a milestone perhaps unique to members of my generation, one that must have carried a similar significance that purchasing a home and having a mortgage had to my parents.”

I am mostly resigned to my debt now. I have learned financial tools to manage it and keep it somewhat in check. It does not keep me awake at night anymore the way it used to. But my hope for the future is colored by it. Risky financial choices, like having a child or going back to school or uprooting my life somehow, often seem foreclosed. My life sometimes seems bounded by this logistical concern, and at other times, increasingly, it feels totally irrelevant to my life, so distant from my spiritual being that it might as well belong to another person entirely.

One of the most optimistic and hopeful stories I have read, strangely, is one about extreme repression. It’s a beautiful little book called (fittingly) Miriam by Kate Riley. It’s about a young woman called Miriam who grows up in a cult like anabaptist community, cut off from the world. She is not abused. She is mostly bored, chafing to make something of herself, to experience more, and more fully and more deeply than her structured everyday life of labor and prayer offers.

Miriam is a quiet story and its effect creeps up on you. You half expect this to descend into a Women Talking kind of nightmare, for Miriam to run away and try to start her life anew somewhere else. Instead, she gets married as a cure for her restlessness. It doesn’t really cure her restlessness but growing up does maybe. Or makes it more bearable. She finds pleasure in small things, in the routines of chores and agriculture and community service which she previously scorned.

So what is unusual about Miriam then is that it finds the sublime in everyday life. It is a story about growing into yourself and becoming happier not because your life circumstances have substantially changed in some wild and unrealistic way, but because you have learned to care about something, and that caring has given a shape and meaning to your life.

I was by the ocean earlier this year, on a small dark strip of land off the East Coast, and when I looked up at the sky, I, an incurable city girl, saw so many stars that I thought I must be dreaming. I wondered stupidly if the sky had always looked like that, although of course it does. It felt like an experience of glimpsing the divine, in the way that people sometimes describe it. This vast unknowable universe, full of light that is able to travel across unimaginable distances and unimaginable eras of time to shine on us. How small you are in such a universe, how ephemeral your worries.

Late in April, Miuccia Prada’s eponymous fashion line launched a literary club. Based out of Milan, like Miu Miu, the project started as a two day reading series with panels made up of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Sheila Heti, and Viola di Grado, and with poetry and music showcases. Later on, in early June, it spilled out into a series of PR pop-ups across cities in Europe and Asia, featuring book giveaways and little Miu Miu themed ice cream trucks. The books on offer were Quaderno Proibito [A Forbidden Notebook] by Alba de Céspedes (1952) and Una Donna [A Woman] by Sibilla Aleramo (1906). Both are classics of Italian feminist literature. They deal with women worn down by the stifling responsibilities of reproductive labor and by various forms of subtle or explicit cruelty. Both women rebel by writing: the protagonist of A Woman writes to her son, who she has been forced to abandon upon leaving her abusive husband; the second keeps a secret diary, where she records the details of a love affair and of her drudgery. 

The Miu Miu literary club, like a celebrity book club, was mostly received as a kind of status accessory. In a recent article for Elle, Aemelia Madden describes how literature has become “the ultimate luxury” and went on to compare it to other influencer driven reading lists and celebrity book clubs. In an aside, the piece mentions that Marilyn Monroe was famously photographed in a swimsuit reading Ulysses and widely mocked for trying to seem literate. But, like most of the other coverage of its kind, it reproduces this logic by largely ignoring the contents of the books in question. You would be forgiven for thinking they are “sad girl lit” for a “lit girl summer.” While young women dress up and take selfies with books they may or may not ever read, so the scaremongering media narrative goes, young men are shut out of the literary scene altogether by malicious gatekeepers - contributing to their overall loneliness and depression. Leave reading to the boys, this strange emerging consensus seems to suggest. What do girls need to read for? 

Sibilla Aleramo and Alba de Céspedes were not only novelists, known for defining Italy’s feminist literary canon. They were also communists. Aleramo worked at a socialist feminist newspaper, she would sign Benedetto Croce’s “Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals,” which was published on May 1st 1925,  and she would go on to join the Communist Party after the war. De Céspedes, who was younger and more politically engaged, was imprisoned in the 1930s for anti-fascist activity, and in the 40s for broadcasting on the resistance radio station Radio Partigiana. This political compass appears implicitly in both novels, but it comes through more clearly in some of their other work, and particularly in Dalla Parte Di Lei [Her Side of the Story], which Mondadori originally published in 1949, and which Astra House published in an English translation last year. 

Her Side of the Story is set during the war and fictionalizes some of de Céspedes’s own wartime activities. The protagonist, Alessandra, grows up poor and stifled, too similar in spirit and appearance to her depressive mother to turn out well. The mother, who dreams of being a concert pianist and of wearing colors and of being loved well, is ground down by her cruel and insidious husband and by the quotidian demands of housewifery until she decides to drown herself in the river. Alessandra is sent to the countryside to live with her father’s family. There, she too is ground down. She almost marries a farmer, nearly succumbing to the sheer pressure of custom and insistence. She almost gives up on her studies. War is coming to Italy, which is in the full thralls of fascism, and everyone is encouraging her to have a baby, to have a house, to be happy in her natural destiny as a woman. When she leaves, it’s like waking up from a dream. She goes back to Rome, where she works and studies and does all the housework for her cold and distant father. Her life is a flat horizon, stretching out unbearably into a bleak future, and then she meets Francesco. 

“Men do not have all the subtle reasons for unhappiness that we do[...]” Alessandra’s mother tells her when she is on the verge of adolescence. “My mother tried everything to get me to give up music, novels, poetry. She wanted me to enjoy myself, to be stronger than she was. When I was still young, she used to tell me gloomy and painful love stories, hoping to arouse an instinct for self-preservation.”

It does not work, of course, to dissuade Alessandra’s mother any more than it works to dissuade Alessandra. Francesco is a bad prospect on paper. He is a poor academic, deeply involved in anti-fascist organizing which will quickly get him fired from his job, blacklisted, and then eventually arrested as Mussolini’s regime cracks down on resistance. He is idealistic but conventional. His love for Alessandra cannot transcend his prosaic emotional life. Romance quickly is effaced by the hardship and misery of their married life. On their wedding night, he is careless and unkind to her. Alessandra daydreams about how it all used to feel. She dresses up in lingerie, she cooks, trying to get him to look at her. Although there are women in his resistance group, he refuses to let her join out of paternalistic and also real concern for her safety. Once he has been jailed, she starts smuggling weapons and at that point, something breaks open in her. A kind of floodgate released. 

Her Side of the Story has traces of heteropessimist instinct. But it is less absolute and more probing, probably because it is so explicitly and deeply political. Fascism saturates Alessandra and Francesco’s life and warps their blossoming intimacy. The longer and deeper-rooted structures of patriarchal marriage shape their dynamics and interactions. This love story, which feels so personal and so new and so extraordinary, like every love story does to those who are in love, is actually overdetermined. It is doomed to failure from the start. Francesco’s worst sin in his marriage perhaps is his refusal to believe that Alessandra’s mother died over love, or a lack of love. He thinks she was crazy. Crazy people kill themselves. He cannot access her world of feeling; it does not interest him. 

The novel is reminiscent of Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart. Although it is much longer and richer and more detailed, it evokes a similar core of rage and disenchantment. Ginzburg and de Céspedes knew each other. In 1948, Ginzburg published an essay titled “On Women” in the magazine Mercurio, which de Céspedes was editing at the time. In the essay, Ginzburg argued that women tend to “fall into a well,” to be “gripped by a terrible melancholy and drown in it.” Women distract themselves, in her description, with all kinds of self-loathing and despair and depression and obsessing over romance and beauty and aging and desirability. All of it is a smokescreen. They are alienated from their work; they cannot get free. De Céspedes responded to the essay in an open letter, which was published alongside it. She praises the beauty and sincerity of Ginzburg’s writing, but pushes back against the core claim. Falling into the well, for her, is a source of strength. There is power in abjection. “After all,” she writes, “is being free from pain, from human misery, really a privilege?” 

It has become fashionable to argue that novels should not be political. They can deal with politics, insofar as our lives and our times intersect with politics, but they should under no circumstances be ideological. This is not a new phenomenon. In the 1950s, lurching into the Cold War, American fiction turned inwards. It became introspective, suburban, weightless. This was the era of creative writing, of long and lovely sentences untroubled by social meaning or moral purpose. The realist novel reached a kind of apex in this time. It perfected its abiding convention of describing in excruciating detail the uneventful lives of not particularly likable people and their conflicted relationship to the bourgeoisie. Sex and god (or godlessness) are the main driving ids of these novels. The men have sex they feel bad about and despise themselves and their sexual partners who disgust them afterwards. They find modern life lacking in spirituality, masculinity, and purpose. They yearn for a return, although to what exactly, it is unclear. These days, those who dabble in such reactionary nostalgia generally turn to the 1950s, aesthetically, in search of their ideal vision. In midcentury fiction, the ‘50s emerge as anxious, loveless, and depressing. 

Would it be possible to write a version of Her Side of the Story that similarly subsumes politics to personal feeling? De Céspedes’s particular genius is in conveying the gut sensation of political systems, how the emotional strictures of fascism dictate and enforce our lives. She is writing about a war, about a dictatorship, about risking her life for solidarity and freedom. Love is at the center of all of that. Alessandra’s romantic travails may seem secondary, and she often herself finds them inconsequential next to the darkness of the world, but in reality, the two are inextricably intertwined. Another writer could have written a novel about an ordinary person living in Italy in that time, trying to keep their head down and avoid politics and go about their daily life as best as possible in wartime, but that novel would exist in a bubble, detached from its surroundings and utterly irrelevant. A creative, but also a moral failure.

A writer argued in The New York Times recently precisely on behalf of such a novel (in the abstract, at least). Klay fought in the Iraq War, where he was a public relations officer for the US military. He describes coming home from the war with a sense of obscene self-righteousness, which is slowly worn away by, among other things, writing fiction. Trying to describe his experiences hollowed them out. He became less certain of the truth, or at least, of his truth. This uncertainty saved his novel from the pitfall of ideology, which makes for bad and sanctimonious fiction. War is a personal growth experience for those lucky enough to survive it, a testing ground for moral gray areas. Ideology is a poisoned chalice, drunk enthusiastically by basically anyone who is not a white male US army veteran (Klay shouts out, among others, Viet Than Nguyen, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Sally Rooney, and the collective Writers Against the War on Gaza). 

Are those crushed by American bombs, then and now, allowed to speak of complexity? Is their personal growth interesting and meaningful, even if it does not necessarily chart in the direction Klay might prefer? He devotes a lot of space to the Jewish poet George Oppen, who, alarmed by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, joined the Communist party, organized for labor rights, and fought in the Second World War. He mostly gave up writing poetry, which Klay oddly interprets as his being unable to mesh his overbearing politics with the demands of his art. In his own description, Oppen seems more intent on conveying pure and urgent meaning and discouraged by his failure to do so, both in politics and in art. Leave art to the apolitical, Klay seems to suggest, before innocuously name dropping the famously fascist Ezra Pound — spared here from accusations of ideology. 

It is easy to claim, if you are not particularly well-versed in history, that novels used to ignore politics. But our era has produced some of the least political fiction in existence. Characters sit around and talk about politics, sure, in the novels of Jonathan Franzen, Nicole Krauss, Ben Lerner, and so on. But politics are curiously absent from their lives. Their emotional worlds are fragile and narcissistic. They shut themselves off from everything that is exterior, from the humdrum of death and despair and global realignment of power. They look inwards instead. Reading this generation of literature, the most prolific ever, you might be swayed to Alba de Céspedes’s view of things. You have to descend into the well, at least for a little bit, at least long enough for the scales to fall from your eyes and to be able to see things as they really are.

One of the cardinal laws of romance plots is that they must be forbidden. Romeo and Juliet’s families are deadly enemies, Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre fame has a secret wife in the attic, Anna Karenina has a not so secret husband, Mark Antony was considered a traitor for loving Cleopatra. There’s a practical dimension to this. It’s not very interesting to read about smooth, uninterrupted love affairs. In a talk I went to recently with the French writer Colombe Schneck, she remarked that she had tried to write a happy love story, eventually published as La Tendresse du Crawl or Swimming in Paris, simply because no one ever does. She was midway through a nine-month relationship and totally besotted. For once in her life, love seemed easy. After she sold the concept to her editor and started working on it, her boyfriend broke up with her abruptly. Suddenly the happy love story became a story about dashed hopes, obsession gone wrong, about Colombe stalking Gabriel at the pool hoping he’ll see her and fall back in love with her all over again. 

It used to be easier to create forbidden love stories when social relationships were more strictly governed by rules and taboos. Vivian Gornick argues at the conclusion of The End of the Novel of Love that novels have lower stakes now for this reason. Couples can just date, just have sex, just break up, just cheat, just divorce. Even if there are some social consequences, they are generally not ruinous. Raymond Radiguet’s The Devil in the Flesh, originally published in 1923, is entirely constructed around an illicit teenage love affair. The girl’s husband is away fighting in the First World War. The boy is still in high school, too young to fight. Left behind in the countryside, they start sneaking around. All the dramatic tension of the book comes from the thrill of secrecy, of jealousy, and the potential consequences of getting caught—all the elaborate architecture of adultery. To compensate for this, modern romance tends to invent problems: petty, interpersonal issues, social standing, poor communication, or diverging politics. 

It also perhaps accounts for the meteoric rise of historical romance. The book which is generally credited with the invention of the “bodice ripper” genre, The Flame and the Flower by Kathleen Woodiwiss, was published in 1972 and quickly became a bestseller. It remains in print today. The book is set in the early 19th century and features a poor but scrappy heroine who, while escaping from an attempted rape, is mistaken for a sex worker and abducted onto a ship. There, she is raped by the ship’s captain, who realizes afterwards that she was a virgin. He continues to rape her, although with a softer attitude, and eventually she falls in love with him. They have a baby, get married, and after some setbacks, live happily ever after. 

This trope is ubiquitous in historical romance, although generally in a more oblique form now. In Outlander, Claire Randall is transported back in time to the 18th century and the first person she comes across attempts to rape her. She has to be rescued by the brooding Scottish boy with whom she will go on to have a passionate love affair. What is charming about him partly is this frisson of danger. He could rape and subjugate her. It’s the 18th century and everyone thinks she’s a witch. But instead, he chooses chivalry. “I think there’s an appeal for self-styled feminists,” writes Emma Green on Outlander, “[...] to fantasize about “traditional” romantic and sexual roles. [...] For 18th-century women, who had no choice but to marry manly husbands and be charmed by their chivalry, this is patriarchy. For relatively liberated feminists, though, it’s a little… sexy. It’s transgressive.”

Unlike in “dark romance,” a growing genre of outlandish kink-driven novels that make 50 Shades of Grey look chaste by comparison, rape isn’t really a distinct fantasy in historical romance. Instead, its constant appearance functions more as a benchmark of patriarchy, a lazy shorthand to demonstrate what women are up against. The alternative is to find a man who will protect you. When rape is more explicitly fantasy,  as in The Flame and the Flower, it is justified theoretically by the sexual mores of the time. In a world where women are punished for premarital sex, punished for experiencing pleasure, or being too into it, the appeal of having someone else take the choice away from you is permission to enjoy it. If this seems like a bizarre reversal of real world patriarchal dynamics, it is just mass market genre fiction in the end. It plays to our libidinous desires. 

It is perhaps a sign of how vexed these romantic politics are that Bridgerton has emerged as the star of the genre. The novels by Julia Quinn are pretty traditional. They are peopled by young women in frippery searching for husbands, at once feisty and virginal, and by rakish womanizing men who actively resist being pinned down until it comes to that one special girl. But the show is a mashup of genres, sometimes more rom com than romance, cultivating minor characters, playing with eras and timelines. It’s spiritually most similar to Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, a lavish visual feast of historically inaccurate dresses and dances with some sort of steamy encounters along the way and some sort of feminism baked in. 

Bridgerton is unusual for its color-blind casting, where actors of all different racial and ethnic backgrounds mingle freely against an 18th century London backdrop. It has floated an upcoming queer storyline and romance plotlines for the older women in the show. The young women tend to be bluestockings. They sit around and think about feminism. The men support them unconditionally. The most recent season featured a young lord at a dance in a wheelchair and a Deaf debutante using sign language, albeit so vanishingly briefly that you could easily have missed it. It also featured Nicola Coughlan as the romantic lead, whose body type may not have been especially out of the ordinary as a bombshell in the 18th century but is certainly unusual in contemporary period drama.

If this world sounds progressive, it maintains a traditional and fundamental obsession with virginity as a plot point. Daphne of Season 1 has to marry her reluctant suitor after she was compromised by being alone with him and is so innocent on her wedding night that she doesn’t realize he is pulling out to prevent pregnancy. In Season 3, one of the Featherington sisters, months into her marriage, realizes that she and her husband haven’t been having sex at all, just kissing and dry humping. Meanwhile, Penelope, somehow more enlightened than her sisters, has premarital sex with her fiance, Colin, a reformed rake. He is shown earlier in the series having threesomes with sex workers before deciding he is in love with Penelope. She is so shy she covers her breasts with her hands. After they have finished the act, she asks him how she compares to the women in Paris. He laughs it off. 

Virginity functions as an obvious plot device in Bridgerton to maintain tension and drama. The couples can’t just easily pair off because they have to go through a whole courtship ritual first. But it also works on a deeper level as a fantasy about “fixing” a promiscuous man incapable of settling down, usually because of his deep psychic wounds, and about being inducted by fire as it were into the pinnacle of romantic and sexual bliss. Penelope and Colin kiss in a carriage, only the second time she has ever kissed anyone, he swiftly goes down on her and she finishes before the carriage stops. It’s a simple fantasy. This really sought after experienced man suddenly decides he’s madly in love with you and gets you off in a carriage before proposing to spend the rest of your lives together. Easy enough to understand. 

The problem in Bridgerton is that the stakes of virginity are so low as to feel negligible. Nothing bad ever really happens to anyone. The characters who transgress figure it all out. Marriage is a happily ever after salve. Marital rape, when it occurs, is played off as a gag or as kind of hot. One character remarks that all the rules of the aristocracy, all their social codes and policing of each other’s behavior and elaborate terms of engagement, have the sole purpose of keeping the marriage market churning. Once married, you are free to do as you please. This indirectly acknowledges the purpose of marriage in this society, shoring up power and property, but elides this definition in favor of a fluffier and more sanitized version, one in which pairing off with your perfect match is the ultimate purpose of the rich. 

The tradition from which Bridgerton derives, sprawling, gossipy, centered around the social and sexual lives of women, owes a lot to its real 18th century counterpart: Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. Published by Samuel Richardson in 1748, the novel was intended to be a “conduct book,” a didactic guide to morals and behavior. Richardson apparently fretted over whether the moral really landed. That it arguably didn’t fully land is perhaps one of the reasons Clarissa is considered an abiding classic in its own right. It’s a big epistolary novel, bringing in a polyphony of voices and gossip and perspectives which make it feel grounded in a buzzing social world.

The plot is basically this: Clarissa’s family tries to force her into an arranged marriage with a man she hates by isolating her. Trapped in her room, she starts a correspondence with another suitor of hers, a libertine named Lovelace, who seems like her only way out. She elopes with him but refuses to sleep with him since she is still suspicious of his motives. Her family disown her in response and she stays with Lovelace for months, resisting his increasingly machiavellian attempts to seduce her. Eventually, she tries to run away and in response, he drugs and rapes her. Clarissa falls into a manic state and becomes sick. Lovelace tries to rape her again but when she threatens to kill herself, he is fully convinced of and impressed by her moral purity, and decides that he does want to marry her. However, Clarissa is repelled by him and instead wastes away from stress and depression until she dies. Lovelace is killed in a duel shortly thereafter. 

What rescues the book from primness is Clarissa’s voice. She is staunchly committed to virtue, but not simply as an abstract. She reads conduct literature herself, devoted to being a good woman, but also a good person. She lights her own fire in the morning because she gets up before the servants. She shows a kind of self-reliance and authority that is not usually granted to women in writing of the era. Rita Goldberg writes in Sex and Enlightenment that Clarissa’s one misstep, running away with Lovelace, can be read either as a fatal lapse in judgment, or as the result of being a victim caught between a rock and a hard place. “Out of this essential ambiguity have arisen many of the readings and misreadings that have made Clarissa such an important document in the literary (and indeed moral) history of women).” 

In other words, this space for ambiguity, the space where Richardson may be said to have failed at spiritual didacticism, is where Clarissa becomes literature. The heroine comes to value her own self-determination, her own authority. Marriage is not only unwelcome because she dislikes the first suitor and distrusts the second. It also represents an intrusion into her life, a monopolization of it. In reclaiming her own voice and describing her numerous experiences of violation, she becomes not only a narrator but also an author. She is allowed to speak. 

This is also the point of Penelope’s arc more or less. She cannot give up her anonymous and wildly popular gossip pamphlet even when it threatens to destroy her life, because it is her only chance to be heard. When her secret is revealed, her fiance, whom she has already slept with, decides against calling off their engagement because he has too much respect for her and for proper conduct. He briefly ices her out but quickly reconciles, admitting his wild admiration for her success, bravery, and popularity, and his jealousy for her writing skill and wit. She is feted by high society and lives happily ever after. 

Penelope has no particular values and therefore no particular moral crisis. She routinely writes nice things about her friends and mean things about her enemies. When another young woman tries to come forward as the gossip columnist to escape a forced arranged marriage to a vicious and controlling elderly man, she is ostracized and treated as ridiculous. Penelope writes a quick rejoinder to her attempted column, making it clear that the other girl is nowhere near as talented. Maybe she should have gotten that arranged marriage. She has no brains after all. 

It’s not that I think Penelope should be abandoned by Colin and made to die of a mysterious wasting illness. It’s a romance story. The whole point is fluff and pointless tension that is easily and lovingly resolved. But the problem with setting up the structure of traditional sexual mores without any of their stakes is how appealing it makes it all seem. It’s patriarchy sugar-coated on a spoon. Why shouldn’t a man whisk you away to live in his huge palace and you can be pretty and wear dresses and have a million servants and a million babies and oh, by the way, he also loves your writing. It falls into the Outlander trap that Emma Green describes in the passage quoted above. It makes traditional gender roles seem romantic and sexy and transgressive because it grants the young women in the story the illusion of choice. They are choosing to be in love and get married and be impregnated a bunch of times and plan balls and stuff. 

The only intrusion upon this fantasy is in the second season when the most contrarian and least marriage-minded Bridgerton sister, Eloise, develops a crush on a printer’s assistant, who gives her a pamphlet he has written about the case for women’s liberation. Now here’s a real cause, he says. Eloise is reflexively defensive of her scene, critical of his approach. When he ends up being surveilled because of her and she ends up in the gossip papers for meeting with “political radicals,” the brief romance ends. Eloise however suddenly wants to fall in love. She does not develop class consciousness or any more political radicalism from of the encounter. Instead, she realizes that it can be kind of nice to talk to a man who gets her. 

Which, sure, it is. And valorizing that love and intelligence or love and radicalism or love and feminism are mutually nourishing is a worthwhile and comforting idea. But without any sustained consideration of what such a relationship could look like under the constraints of Regency gender roles, all such a vision does is expand the basket of patriarchal dominance, suggest that it can coexist with a little bit of liberation just as long as it’s not too much.

But in the face of all its other progressive casting and attempt to incorporate storylines and ideas that are uncommon in historical romance, the show’s obsession with virginity feels starkly regressive. George R. R. Martin was widely criticized, when asked about the ubiquity of rape in Game of Thrones, for claiming that he wanted to be historically accurate. Game of Thrones has dragons. Bridgerton has a string arrangement of Pitbull and no colonialism. That sexual violence (with which the vigilant guarding of virginity and refusal to offer sexual education forms a continuum) is a constant across fantasy worlds is dismaying. 

Ultimately, although much contemporary romance has gotten more flak, especially the recent dubiously consensual, kink adjacent type, in the end it is perhaps more honest about what it’s really trying to do, more honest about sex and desire and repression and patriarch. Perhaps the “bodice ripper” genre is not really salveagable into anything but retrograde fantasy.

“We are conditioned to be obsessed with people falling in love with us,” writes Marlowe Granados in Happy Hour. “Reaching that point is seen as a success. […] By the time you win them over, you don’t know how to really love them in return because we never ask ourselves enough about what we want.” Existing models for forming relationships do not encourage much reflection. A series of reality TV shows offer a kind of escapist fantasy: what if someone else could just make the choice for you? On Married at First Sight, couples meet at the altar and embark straight on a honeymoon where the cameras awkwardly follow them into their hotel suites. On Love is Blind, participants must propose, after several rounds of speed dating like conversation, without having seen the other person. The unveiling moment is always treated like high drama even though all the participants are reality TV attractive and fairly bland looking. The couples very rarely stay together.

The problem with these setups is perhaps not so much that they are gimmicks (which they are, but in a way every courting ritual is a gimmick), but that the purpose of going on reality TV is first and foremost stardom. Finding love is secondary and often incidental. On Love Island, which is perhaps both the simplest and most intricate of these dating shows, couples are often accused by the public of pairing up strategically to win the competition by garnering popularity and a reputation for consistency. This is a form of cheating, gaming the system to win. But then again the whole point of the competition is to win. It has the basic form of a gameshow, riddled with pitfalls and obstacles. At times couples pair up and one is then randomly bumped off the island in a routine culling process. In each season, the men and women (they call each other “girls” and “boys” or, Britishly, “lads") are separated late in the process and sent to separate villas where “bombshell” contestants are brought on with the sole purpose of wreaking havoc on existing pairs and testing their fidelity.

The setup of reality dating shows is generally so artificial as to feel removed from our own lived reality. But emotional politics also intrude upon them in visceral and unexpected ways. The participants are judged, rejected, led on, deceived by each other and often crumble and cry in front of the camera. Their working conditions are brutal. They are isolated from the world, lied to by producers, discouraged from sleeping, encouraged to consume substances and to pick arguments. Their emotional entanglements may at times be real or feel real, in the way that very intense sensory experiences can feel real in the moment, but above all they are offering themselves up to the camera and to the public for assessment. They really want to be found attractive, desirable, glamorous, and worthy of attention by a broad audience that, if they play their cards right, will become their audience for life.

These are obviously opposing and conflicting goals. They are not easy to reconcile. In a recent modestly viral TikTok video, a young woman named Anya (@anyahaas) described the endless disappointment and humiliation she has experienced trying to find a boyfriend. She is 33, pretty, heavily manicured. She tells her story, which is less a reflection on dating and more a kind of loose dark comedy routine, with tears welling up in her eyes. It would be easy to imagine her playing the story for laughs were she not so self-serious and brittle. It goes something like this: she is tired of dating apps and feels isolated. She decides to go to a comedy show to try and meet people, ideally men but also potential friends who could introduce her to men. She shows up early and is directed to sit in the front row. The comedians single her out, a woman alone in her 30s, the only person sitting right at the front. They praise her bravery, in what she maybe fairly experiences as a backhanded dig. They give her raffle prize to reward her. Upset and ashamed, she gets an Uber home and the driver is an elderly woman with several dogs. Anya stares down the barrel of her future. This, worst case scenario, will be her: old, alone, unattractive, a dog lady.

She was widely mocked for the video. A large contingent of right wing men who insist that it is easy for straight women to get a boyfriend at any time ridiculed her tears. A lot of other female content creators took umbrage at her cruelty towards the Uber driver. This is the way of the internet. If you make a video of yourself talking about your intimate life and crying on camera and it is seen by a wide cross section of the public, you will likely be insulted. Influencers are aware of this. They regularly produce viral videos that I cannot make it through without overwhelming secondhand embarrassment. It is a cynical but also thoroughly reasonable marketing tactic. As vulnerability, in the strictest sense, it fails. But as self-mythologizing, it clearly succeeds.

Anya is not an influencer in any real way. She only has 2,000 followers. Her previous videos are small inside jokes about her mother hiring a psychic to see if she would ever meet a man and manifesting being “taken off the market” (implying a certain kind of intense gendered and familial pressure that she does not bring up in the video). She is clearly trying to go viral. In multiple follow ups, she hits back at her critics, describing in cruel terms being hit on by an older man the same night, who “waddled” over to her, and whose belt, she shows with hand gestures, was down at his abdomen, because of his protruding stomach. She speaks in the flippant shorthand of TikTok influencers, most of whom treat dating as a zero sum game, if not an out and out war. They churn out advice about how to manipulate men by using “divine feminine” traits and withholding affection. The ones who regularly post dating stories, from the field as it were, treat their dates as content factories, Carrie Bradshaw like, but without any of her charm. If there isn’t much to say about any given date, as there isn’t about most dates in my experience, they will simply manufacture controversy like any good storyteller.

What I found strange about the video is how offended Anya was by having attention called to her. It seems like an easy route to meeting people, her ostensible goal. It’s easy to imagine people coming up to her after the show, asking what’s in her big raffle giveaway bag, asking what brought her there, offering to set her up, her riffing on her status as the last single woman alive or whatever. Online, she calls attention to herself, to her singleness, her feeling of being ridiculous and undesirable. She cries on camera. She is willing in other words to humiliate herself for the appetite of a public that will humor her. She is less willing to humiliate herself for the sake of human connection.

I think this is less an allergy to vulnerability than it is a fundamental disinterest in self-examination. Romance also becomes a narrative device in this front-facing rehearsal. It is a thing you get for being pretty and desirable to men. You will finally be picked in the end. You do not question the structures that make this ritual your singular purpose and desire. Although viewers were upset by her misogynist horror and disgust for the Uber driver, more disturbing to me was the prospect of a 75 year old woman forced to ferry people around late at night for pennies on the dollar. Growing old without a social safety net, perhaps a caretaker for a sick partner or dependent, or perhaps scorned by society as a woman aged out of fertility and a non-participant in motherhood, is a frightening prospect. It should be a frightening prospect.

There is another genre of viral video, many of them shot or promoted by right wing platforms, which show people sleeping rough, using drugs on the street, having psychotic episodes in public, brutalizing or harming themselves or other people in various ways. In a recent, particularly horrific video, released by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s office, an 82 year old man and his wife, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, were served with an eviction notice. In the video, the man pours gasoline all over the carpet and throws the canister at a cop before trying to light them both on fire. His wife, who cannot walk, had to be dragged out of the house. The man passed away.

My own grandmother suffered from a related illness, Lewy body disease. At the end of her life, she could barely remember how to feed herself. She confused the names and faces of her children and grandchildren. By some inexplicable grace, she was lucky enough to die in her home in peace. She was married for more than 50 years. I wonder if there is any story about romance that is not really at its core a story about welfare, about a safety net, about the conditions that enable us to fall in love and get old and live in dignity. It is easy to ascribe dating woes to phones, to political polarization, to changing social norms, to agoraphobia and laziness. There is an implied existential threat in a lot of these analyses, as if we were a species on the verge of extinction, one that could not remember how to do our natural mating rites.

But the reality is that we live in a world which is not set up for young people to thrive. They are burdened with debt before they even enter the workforce, set back by punitive systems such as credit scores and the maze of medical insurance. Endless legislation aimed at propping up corporations, dismantling welfare programs, criminalizing abortions and miscarriages, destroying labor and environmental protections, and conscripting us into perpetual wars, hamper and debilitate the futures of my generation and the ones after. It is not so much that it is difficult to remember how to fuck or how to feel something and more that it is increasingly difficult to imagine a future at all.

One of my favorite little jabs is from Joan Didion’s The White Album. It’s a wonderful description that’s intended, in its own way, to be an insult. In her 1972 essay, ‘The Women’s Movement,’ which was included in the collection, Didion writes: “To believe in “the greater good” is to operate, necessarily, in a certain ethical suspension. Ask any one committed to Marxist analysis how many angels dance on the head of a pin, and you will be asked in return to never mind the angels, tell me who controls the production of pins.”

Never mind the angels indeed. But looking into who controls production of pins is itself an ethical quandary. It brings up its own host of moral ambiguities, which Didion found so lacking in Marxism in general, and particularly in feminism. “That many women are victims of condescension and exploitation and sex-role stereotyping was scarcely news,” she writes, “but neither was it news that other women are not: nobody forces women to buy the package.”

In other words, victimhood is a choice. And an infantile one at that. In the essay, Didion criticizes the women’s movement for coddling women, for promising them something better or more romantic or gentler than the harsh realities of adult life and reproductive labor, as if they were children or “wounded birds” who could not handle the truth. In a letter to Didion, included in Lili Anolik’s forthcoming book Didion & Babitz, Eve Babitz implores her to read In a Room of One’s Own, suggesting it might have elucidated her views on the women’s movement. For a long time, she points out, women weren’t allowed their own money or their own time and weren’t allowed to “shine” like Didion. “It embarrasses me that you don’t read Virginia Woolf. I feel as though you think she’s a ‘woman’s novelist’ […] You prefer to be with the boys snickering at the silly women and writing accurate prose [.]”

It is one of the strange injustices of history that Didion is considered a more serious writer than Babitz. Even stranger that she is considered a more feminist one. There is lingering disdain for Babitz, the socialite who posed nude, who slept around, who was famously stacked, who wrote about her love affairs, who disdained the kind of snide pointed prose that characterizes Didion’s essays, who set herself on fire at the end of it all. She wasn’t up at the Haight Ashbury diagnosing the ills of societal decline. But from a totally different perspective, she is the quintessential and more enduring essayist. She does not write with reserve, from a distance. She gets inside things, she’s forensic, she believes in gossip, she’s read Virginia Woolf.

Why, you might ask, pit two talented women against each other? Well, for one thing, comparison is the basis of much literary critique. But there is also a nascent understanding that these are crudely two contemporary models for women writers. One, prudish, uptight, intellectual, desperate to be one of the boys; the other, a bubbly girl about town, beloved by all, admirers fall at her feet, she shrewdly and calculatedly markets herself. Both may be equally good at writing or equally bad at it. That isn’t the point. And if it seems obvious that this binary is a fairytale, a wet dream about women who have never really existed, that is also beside the point. Writing requires solitude, introspection, obsessive compulsions, the opposite of glamor. There is no literary it girl.

If you’re embroiled in social media, this debate may seem bewilderingly and suddenly omnipresent. I have gotten a whole slew of other newsletters about it, along with think pieces about girlhood, bows, Barbie, and other trendy topics that I have also covered here. But if you take a longer lens over the past decade, a more vexed trail emerges. It is the enduring problem of women, embodied in all their kinds and forms, trying to transcend their bodies to make art. For Didion, a professed anorexic, frequently photographed in loose, heavily draped clothing that has become iconic of the wasting white woman, the solution to embodiment was to deny and punish the body. If hedonism is compatible with an intellectual life, it is for men. And the further the woman strays from what is the acceptable profile of an upper-crust intellectual woman, the more she must struggle against her embodiment to prove her value.

“I got up and read the news of another public figure being accused of sexual harassment, like I did every day,” writes Natasha Stagg in a diary essay published in n+1 in the spring of 2018. “[…] reading stories of abuse and humiliation, like the big Bill Cosby exposé from a few years back, was as stupefying as a hangover. I didn’t feel empowered; I only felt more hopeless.”

In retrospect, and even at the time, it seems obvious that telling stories about abuse of power is not sufficient to curb abuse of power. The notion of exposing abuse, as a solution to abuse, and not simply a form of catharsis, relies either on a presumption of collective outrage or on a legal framework with punitive consequences. It suggests implicitly that the reason a powerful person can sexually coerce, harass, or abuse those with less power is because there is a shroud of silence around it. But what many of the #MeToo stories actually brought to light was that the behavior of the men in question was often relatively widely known. In the arts and media, where many of these stories were focused, gossip is a major social currency. Usually, by the time it is revealed that someone is a repeat offender, everyone knows. What public, you might be left asking, is left to pass judgment? Even if knowing who to avoid theoretically keeps other women safe (although many cannot or will not pass up opportunities for this reason, in my experience), it does not fundamentally disrupt power.

An NPR Morning Edition episode posited in 2018 that the reason the #MeToo movement took off in the way it did in 2017 was because of Trump. The first Women’s March had happened earlier that year around the time of his election. There was a sense of collective outrage about his crude soundbites (“grab them by the p*ssy”) that was acceptable even at the highest echelons of liberal society. The two movements, the #resistance and the #MeToo movement, seemed organically conjoined, most notably in the figure of Alyssa Milano, who made the second hashtag go viral in 2017 and who spoke at the 2018 Women’s March about democracy and voting, before leading a chant of “I believe that we will win.” Milano dropped out of the 2019 Women’s March over a refusal by the organizers to condemn Louis Farrakhan. Time’s Up, and the high profile women associated with it, would become embroiled in their own scandals over the following years as they came to the defense of liberal politicians like Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo. Sexual harassment, it increasingly appeared, was a thing of the Trump era. With his departure from power, feminist politics had been solved.

The moment seems to have left strangely little trace. With the lockdown of the pandemic and the retreat from the kinds of office interactions or wild parties that were heavily scrutinized in 2017, the culture industry has in many ways totally restructured. Those who lost their jobs, like Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, have been mostly rehabilitated into other positions. Their names and bylines and creative work still appear. As for the women, well, there is an increasing sense that no one wants to be the girl who cried misogyny. They are accused of prudishness, of immodesty, of flirtatiousness, of unseriousness. Underlying the accusations lurks a darker implication: maybe they were just never very good to begin with.

This was the thrust of Katie Roiphe’s infamous 2018 Harper’s article, “The Other Whisper Network,” which purports to be about how feminism has gone too far but is mostly really about Twitter. “I can see how the drama of this moment is enticing,” she writes. “[…] It justifies all our failings and setbacks and mediocrities; it wasn’t us, it was men, or the patriarchy, holding us back, objectifying us. It is easier to think, for instance, that we were discriminated against than that our story wasn’t good enough or original enough to be published in The Paris Review, or even that it did not meet the editor’s highly idiosyncratic yet widely revered tastes. Or that a man said something awful and sexual to us while we were working on a television show, and we got depressed and could never again achieve what we might have. And yet do we really in our hearts believe that is the whole story?”

It is an easy comeback to any kind of accusation of structural discrimination. How dare you assume that your work really merits that kind of consideration? Have you ever stopped to think that maybe you’re not that good? This line of thinking rests heavily not only on willful disregard of the existence of misogyny or racism or transphobia or other forms of exclusion, but also on a formulation of the subject at hand. You assess her critically: her hysteria, her narcissistic delusions of genius, her mediocrity concealed by some kind of sex appeal that has failed to really get her far enough. She thinks objectification has ruined her life, but it is really her standing in her own way, unable to surmount her debilitating femininity, her sensitivity to crude jokes, to being leered at, to being hit on. She is her own worst enemy. And why did she post a selfie online, by the way, if she is so concerned about being sexualized?

You might be forgiven for not being particularly sympathetic to this concern. The #MeToo movement so prominently and heavily featured middle class white women in professional jobs that it quickly became its own worst disclaimer. Sexual abuse, which is a clear structural abuse of power and not a “social” issue, could be relegated by critics of the movement to a privileged issue. The movement failed spectacularly to forge solidarity across lines of class and race and sexuality. Although immigrant women, sex workers, and other precariously employed workers are often both more vulnerable to sexual abuse and more vulnerable to retaliation or violence, their stories are curiously absent from the media narrative of 2017.

This is not to say that sexual abuse is less harmful when it happens to the wealthy or the famous or the white collar worker with supposed recourse to HR. It is impossible to measure harm in this way and also undesirable. But the movement encouraged this kind of gap. It did not offer a vocabulary to forge solidarity and the backlash against it was swift and vicious. Whatever feeble gains were made have been swept away by this aftermath. Pundits may still be wringing their hands over whether #MeToo made it impossible for men to hit on women and the supposedly ruined lives and careers of accused perpetrators, but almost everyone who was at some point named as an predator has staged a comeback. It is not so much forgiveness as cultural amnesia.

I moved to New York in the summer of 2017, a few months before a crowdsourced document known as the “Shitty Media Men” list was published online. It would be a strange and painful year. In graduate school, I tried to file a Title IX complaint. The woman who handled complaints made small talk about the torrential rain and her commute from Connecticut. I had the strong feeling that her job was really to handle me and not my complaint. She spoke softly the way that therapists do and asked goal-oriented questions like: What do you want to come out of this?

I don’t know and my complaint sprouts too many heads, ends up becoming diluted. There is a problem with climate. I am bored out of my mind. I am offended. I am offended that other people aren’t more offended. I keep hearing harrowing stories about abuse and discrimination that keep me awake at night. Can intuition be a complaint? I feel uptight even to myself, as if I am trying to box off experiment and intellectual freedom, the inevitable entanglement and erotics of intimate working relationships. I don’t want anyone to be prosecuted or fired even. If I am being honest, I have a naive desire for them to acknowledge that they are wrong, to hold space momentarily for the ways they have trodden on and harmed other people. Apologies feel insincere and insufficient.

Anthropologists like to tell stories about far-away tribes and how they lived before capitalism. I learn that Amazonian jaguars think they’re human. My EO wants to be clear from day 1 that we’re not the best anthropology program out there but this is what we’ve got. My first three months of graduate school, I have persistent migraines, headaches like thunderclaps. The subway drones in my ears. Eventually, I write my EO and tell him that I’m dropping out of graduate school. “That sounds like a good decision,” he writes back.

A few months later, a scandal will erupt at one of the undergraduate colleges linked to my graduate institution, involving sexual abuse, harassment, drugs, and a buried Title IX complaint. One of the men implicated in it, a professor who allegedly drugged and assaulted his undergraduates and employees, was a graduate of my PhD program. He did fieldwork about sex trafficking and the narcotics trade in what the media liked to describe as an ironic twist. Anthropologists might call him a native informant.

None of this is particularly novel. When I am an undergraduate, student/professor relationships are allowed if tacitly discouraged. I personally know several girls who have romantic or sexual relationships with their professors. One of them gets brutally ghosted and spirals into deep depression. Another professor, a star of the Classics department, is known for getting drunk and making suggestive comments to his undergraduates about their breasts. Higher ed, to me, is boys clubby, despite what they say in the news. I want so badly at this time to be taken seriously. I feel totally at odds with my body, unable to reconcile the ways I want to be desirable and the ways I want to be smart, how that has gotten all tangled up.

After I graduate, I intern briefly at a newspaper while I am au pairing. I develop an obsessive crush on my boss who is clearly attracted to me. He does things like sit behind me to review my copy edits and lean forward, arms around me, to make changes. Everyone notices, we’re in an open plan office, but they just roll their eyes. I try to make things happen, even though I am deeply intimidated by this world-wise man, who has worked in war zones. I invite him to a party at my apartment. He shows up but sits awkwardly the whole time unable to integrate. Everyone here is so young, he tells me. He has a moral conflict, it becomes clear to me. He’s flirting just enough that he doesn't have to feel bad about it. Depressed and humiliated, I quit the job and we silently watch each other’s Instagram stories for years and years.

Later on, when I tell stories like this to women I know, they become defensive, they comment things like, well at least you get attention, no one is sexually harassing me. Someone I used to work with, a partnered woman in her 30s, would say over and over again whenever the topic came up: why didn’t he hit on me?

If anyone is the real loser of this cultural morass and its rapid backslide, it is those who are already marginalized. While white women with bylines and book deals and industry jobs obsessively debate self-branding, “pretty privilege,” whether you have the right to call yourself a girl even if you don’t put “literary it” before it, the media industry has cratered. Journalists have been laid off in stunning numbers, whole sections and publications have been shut down at lightning speed, rates have lowered, further squeezing desperate freelance writers. Leftist politics have become increasingly taboo in reactionary legacy publications like The New York Times or The Atlantic. In this landscape, debates about whether it is classless to self-brand or self-promote or go to parties to network or seek opportunities feel like a vicious byproduct of scarcity. It is increasingly difficult to look compassionately and reasonably at a younger writer, striving, and to not feel threatened by the imagined comparison. By the idea that they might be cooler or shinier or more talented or more attractive.

Like every other kind of scarcity, this version breeds phantom enemies. Nobody forces women to buy the package, scolds Didion. But it seems like everyone these days is buying the package at least a little bit. The glory of opting out is fragile and unremarkable and no amount of opting out will unsettle structural power or ward off grotesque misogyny. In The Spectator last week, the magazine’s theater critic described going to a talk at Cambridge University, given by Lea Ypi, an academic and writer on political theory and revolution, who he called a “beautiful historian.” Sexually frustrated by his unfulfilled leering at Ypi, he went across town to see a sex worker. Most of the article is dedicated to describing his encounter with the sex worker, an Asian woman who he objectifies in the most patronizing and despicable terms.

Was Ypi not a serious enough writer, you might wonder? Did she buy into the package too much? She is a professor at LSE and has been awarded numerous high level research prizes. And yet, in one of Britain’s most widely circulated publications, she is explicitly named as the subject of a crude jerk off fantasy. It is not incidental that Evans acts out his desire on the body of another woman, an immigrant, working class, a woman of color, a sex worker, tacitly sexually available where Ypi is off limits.

There is very little meaningful debate to be had around the seriousness of a writer and the apparent suggestiveness of her appearance or sexualization. To critique a woman’s work through her embodiment is to further condemn her to immanence, to further dismiss her creative potential. Liberation is not a horizon in which women fully and permanently transcend their bodies in order to enjoy the freedom traditionally granted to men. Rather, it is a horizon where the body and the mind are allowed to peacefully coexist in tandem and to nourish each other without the burden of narrow stereotyped gender.

So if you worry about the aspiring writer who is objectifying herself, who seems to only be performing intellectual labor for the sake of looking sexy, perhaps spare a thought for those who are objectifying her. Objectification, after all, always starts somewhere. Power is vertical if you are willing to follow the pins upstream to the source of their production.

Attachment disorders are at their core a form of object impermanence. The insecurely attached babies experience their reliance on their caregiver as ephemeral. They do not trust it will continue. They do not trust she will return. They do not trust their needs will be met. When she leaves the room, she might as well cease to exist. Physical separation or emotional absence is experienced as total rupture.

The Strange Situation Procedure described above was designed by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth in 1965. It is one of the foundational studies of attachment theory. Early on, in the 1960s and ‘70s, attachment theory was mostly about mothers and babies, drawing on existing psychological conventions which dictated that all neuroses were formulated in early childhood. As such, it feels a little bit like a period piece. It dovetails neatly with anxiety about the collapse of the nuclear family and the encroachment of feminism, the decadent mores of the nascent hippie movement, the enforced social conservatism of the Cold War. It conjures up images of depressed housewives high on barbiturates and Valium or cold-hearted professional women lacking maternal instinct. Bad mothers, in other words. Mothers in this system are the only real caretakers. What would babies do, you are left wondering, if their fathers leave the room? What about babies that do not have mothers? Are they doomed to a lifetime of avoidance?

Later, attachment theory, like most things, becomes about love. Attached, the 2010 book on the subject, is so popular that once at a restaurant in Brooklyn the server, who was carrying it around in her pocket, had a long conversation with my dinner companion about it, comparing neglectful mothers. TikTok is flooded with analyses of dismissive avoidant men, how the anxiously attached and avoidantly attached attract and repel each other; skeptics counter that it is a comforting delusion to chalk up disinterest or bad behavior to childhood wounds. “What could be more appealing,” writes Danielle Carr in a scathing Gawker article on the topic, “than a theory that claims that the person leaving you on read is suffering from an indelible psychic wound at the core of their ability to relate to the world?”

Carr critiques attachment theory on scientific grounds. The unreplicability (or at least lack of replication) of its major studies, how vague and mobile its categories seem to be, how it functions as a self-fulfilling heuristic, a closed theoretical loop. But she also takes issue with how it seems to run along gender lines, reproducing gendered expectations about how heterosexual couples will attach to each other, but in pseudo-psychological terms. Women, prone to be more anxiously attached, will be clingier, more dependent on their partners, more fearful about being abandoned. Men, more prone to avoidance, will flee their partners, holding them at arm’s length, trying to avoid being trapped into commitment. Like much psychological theory, it both tries to explain and simultaneously reproduces existing tropes of behavior. Are men more prone to avoidance because of their relationships with their caretakers (mothers)? Or because of the state of masculinity, which punishes vulnerability? Or because of the state of romance, which is fucked up in too many myriad ways to list?

Attachment theory will not give you any answers. Carr calls it the “libidinal economy,” theorizing that women’s desirability plummets more rapidly than men’s and that they must cope and anxiously speculate more about why their love interest seems so indifferent. This is a common idea, although I think it is also a closed loop. It is such a prevalent cultural narrative that it reinforces itself. A heuristic where men wield power to give or withhold commitment and where women must desperately chase after it is perhaps also more appealing than interrogating where such a relationship will really get you, if you really want it in the first place.

Like all things, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. It does not seem very likely that anyone’s behavior is solely dictated by their emotional wounds, a trauma-driven world structure. It does not seem much more likely that anyone’s behavior is solely driven by the brutal logic of stock market like dating values. There are certainly people, including men, who appear to desperately crave intimacy and who struggle to form and maintain close relationships. Intimacy can burn at contact. It can feel like a kind of wound forming. Its end can feel like a small death. Mourning it is maybe more natural and healthier than pathologizing it. In an essay for 4Columns about SZA, Harmony Holiday calls her song “Kill Bill” “an upbeat tribute to the invigorating fantasy that when we’re done loving someone they’re done living. […] This is music that mourns the inadequacy of modern love without knowing what to do about it.”

It is starting to feel like spring in New York. The temperatures have risen, the trees are blossoming, the streets feel livelier, more libidinously charged. “I think that desire can rise and dissipate with the movement of seasons,” writes Hanif Abdurraqib in a 2019 Paris Review essay about crushing. He listens over and over to “How Will I Know” by Whitney Houston, finding comfort in her joyous and uncertain fantasizing. She is agonizing, crazy high on desire, asking her friends over and over all day long (as I have done and as my friends have done in my hearing): does he really love me? How will I know? Calling him on the phone and then taking it all back because she’s too shy. Hanif Abdurraqib, by his description, agonizes less than Whitney. He enjoys the act of silently yearning, is content to let it play out in peace. All he’s doing is manifesting or maybe just fantasizing. “There’s this old Kevin Durant tweet I love from 2010,” he writes in the crushing essay. “It reads: “#uever wake up n the middle of da night and think about a girl u like or startin to like and sit at da edge of the bed n say damn i want her.”

There was a time a couple years ago, it feels like, when everyone was writing or thinking about crushes. Kathryn Davis, also in The Paris Review, recalls an old teenage crush over the course of a school trip to the Cloisters in New York and experiencing, in the depths of her fantasy, the entire life cycle of a love affair from beginning to end. “It’s called a crush,” she concludes, “because it’s like something landed on top of you, making movement impossible. It isn’t the same as a love affair that—whether star-crossed or blessed—confers motion, ferrying you through time. […] And, truly, what is the point? In terms of the future of the planet, for example.”

A crush is unrequited, obsessive, totally personal. It exists in your own private world, reorienting time around desire. Clare Mao, in a tiny chapbook about crushing that I think is out of print, writes about how the best way to get to know your crush is to act normal around them, but if you can act normal around your crush, you are probably a cop. Annie Ernaux goes shopping, waits by the phone, wanders around Paris, thinking about her married lover who she cannot contact. Everything takes on new significance in this loopy universe. At best, it is a harmless kind of daydreaming. Often, it is more brutal and hungry, a kind of cruel optimism, the ultimate striving towards heartbreak for the really deluded. Tiana Reid writes on crushing in The New Inquiry that “In her 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Ms. Lauryn taught me the word ‘reciprocity,’ a practice of mutual and fair exchange, and 20 years later i have come up with this shitty corollary: unreciprocity.”

Crushers, the point is, indulge in a funny kind of transference of agency. They appear to prostrate themselves. They gift total power to their crush, invest them with celestial kinds of significance. Your crush, it is tempting to think, could fix you. But in reality, they hoard power. All this wanting exists in their desire. They are unwilling or uninterested in making the leap to be known, to be seen. Perhaps they realize, subliminally, that their crush will not fix them.

Of course people crush in many ways. Some do want to make themselves known. Like an adolescent, I tend to call a sometime lover or new romance a crush. The start of something is so fragile, so shaky, so undefined. But I have also had periods of crushing in a totally closed off and obsessive way, the kind of crushing that is predicated on unreciprocity. It gave me something to think about. It’s a relatively harmless pastime. But it can also feel like disordered object attachment, the fear that coming too close to something will wound you, that making it real will perversely make it vanish, that connection is bound up with abandonment.

I think of this as a parable about scarcity. Like most forms of scarcity, it is largely artificial. There is not a real shortage of love in the world, not an inherent shortage of connection. Time, which is relatively short for all of us, tends to feels long while you are experiencing it. But romantic fantasy is often predicated on imaginary scarcity. If you cannot simply approach your crush, if they are really or apparently unavailable, then it is easy to believe that they would rock your world, that everything would suddenly be different. Romance novels are full of absurd and artificial barriers to love. It is the whole thesis of the romance plot. In Bridgerton, and many similar stories of the genre, the romantic hero is estranged from the heroine not by any lack of desire but because of bizarre extenuating circumstances (usually surrounding an inheritance clause in the case of historical romance). Some heroes, wounded by a dead or deceptive lover, think themselves incapable of ever loving again. They can literally only be thawed by that one special girl. In Some Like It Hot, Tony Curtis, posing as a millionaire in order to seduce Marilyn Monroe, spoofs this trope, claiming that his broken heart has rendered him so incapable of feeling, he can’t even be turned on by a kiss. Marilyn Monroe outdoes herself to prove him wrong. Suddenly, he can feel again.

Maybe the most famous jilted lover in English literature is Miss Havisham from Dickens’s Great Expectations, whose fiancé steals her fortune and abandons her. For the rest of her life, she sits in her decaying home, still wearing her wedding dress, her rotting cake and decorations all in place. In most interpretations, she won’t take off her wedding dress because she is stuck in the moment of abandonment. But I think she is clinging onto the moment just before her abandonment, freezing time in a space where she was still happy and loved, where the world had boundless potential ahead of her. Disordered attachment, sure. But more hopefully delusional than vengefully crazy. Her yearning defies the logic of space and time, bends it to her desire. If she sits very still for long enough, her lover will come back. Arguably a romantic to outdo them all.