plans and action

i was thinking for some reason about this passage from The Middle Stories, this weird and wild collection of modern day fairy tales that Sheila Heti published with McSweeneys back in 2002. I remember the book being kind of hard to track down when I originally went looking for it but I think it was available through a reseller.

This is also, if you think about, a kind of political theory.

Some of the stories are more explicitly fairy tales with a twist, like one about a plumber obsessed with marrying a princess and his guru of a frog who discourages him, insisting that the city is full of other, more beautiful and more interested women. The plumber doesn’t want any other women. He tries making a complicated contraption, a real feat of engineering, to impress the princess. The frog tells him women don’t want gadgets, they want a man who they know is better than them, and that the world is going to shit anyway. The princess falls ill and dies. Love endures.

The rest of the stories are dark, offbeat McSweeney’s style flash fiction. A girl wakes up next to two boys she remembered dismissing the night before, one as “too ugly and ingratiating,” the other as “too pompously intellectual.” They all go to get the breakfast together. The boys are boring and humorless, one of them turns out to be vegan, to the girl’s horror. The girl walks home alone and thinks she is wasting her life. As are we all.

I have been thinking a lot about this very ugly trend among left type women where they suggest that any form of internalized misogyny is essentially a personal problem. It’s maybe just a progressive repackaging of choice feminism. To suggest that our horizons are constrained by the social systems we live in, that external forces may slowly grind you down seems obvious. Being too obviously smart is a trap, being too docile is a trap. There’s a conformist snobbery to bourgeois womanhood that is very tiresome. You dress like Joan Didion or like a Madewell ad, you wear no makeup makeup, your mind is on higher things. You are never overly feminine, overly glamorous, overly sexy, overly demanding.

Marlowe Granados explicitly links the archetype of the bimbo to class status in a piece for The Baffler: “the gold digger, dumb blonde, and the bimbo all walk the same line, concerning themselves with sexuality, beauty, and commerce—wielding all to their advantage.” To reduce them to stereotypes catering to men’s sexual desires, Granados argues, is to reduce femininity itself to pointless frivolity. “To define the aesthetic choices of femininity as a trap set by men feels deceivingly easy … men want women who fit into their lives neatly, without too much adjustment on their part. The bimbo, in all her glory, is a walking reminder that femininity is a process of making oneself.”

Kate Manne theorizes that misogyny may linger where sexism appears to have been eradicated (I am paraphrasing from Sophie Lewis here). To her, misogyny is like a “shock collar” that serves to uphold the patriarchal order. White, middle-class women in relatively progressive environments like me might forget that the shock collar exists all together until you cross a line and it is activated. Any kind of misstep can trigger it, you get too confident, someone is there to remind you that you are still just a woman.

When I read about this theory a few years ago, it felt crystallizing. Why, you might wonder, in book publishing, an industry almost entirely made up of women does enforcement of certain norms of femininity and respectability feel so stringent? Even when there are no men present, a regulatory system prevails. Where concrete examples of the wage gap and opportunities for advancement may be more elusive (because there may actually be no men around to compete with), there are still plenty of vibes. It’s so easy to be reduced, time after time, to just being a girl in a sea of hostility and pretentiousness.

Maybe this is on me, my insecurities, my obsession with male validation, my insufficient intellectualism. But I think the reality is that it is easy and very popular to pathologize or dismiss as internal things that are really external and material. You can work on your internalized misogyny all that you want (and you should!) but when you go out into the world, it will all still be there. There is no cocoon away from everyone else and if there was, I wouldn’t want to live in it. I don’t want to be protected from the world, I just want a better world.

I was followed home from the train the other night which is part of why I’ve been thinking about this maybe. I’m a city girl, I like being out late at night, and living places that are noisy and restless. I take the train at all hours, walk around alone at all hours. The bad experiences I’ve always ultimately been able to handle and most have happened in broad daylight with other people around. But this spooked me, as have the other times when similar things have happened, and it’s hard to shake off the feeling that you are fundamentally perceived as vulnerable, however you may see yourself. It’s like how sometimes I forget I really inhabit a body that is visible to anyone except for me, hyper aware of its flaws and its foibles and its inner workings, and then someone looks at or comments on my body in a kind of ruthlessly selfish way that has nothing to do with me, and I am reminded that I exist also as a thing in this world.

I keep thinking of buying this vinyl sticker from Sunshine Shop, which is literally $4, but which I keep deliberating on. I think it’s the idea of paying shipping for something that inexpensive to begin with, so I’ll have to wait until I want something else from Sunshine. Anyway, it’s very cool and is also how I feel most generously understood.

It’s spring in New York and I’ve been listening to Ha Vay, who’s kind of a Lana Del Rey type singer but who I like better than Lana, maybe because she’s from Northern California.

This article about landlords is still the best thing Sally Rooney has ever written. I rewatched Normal People after I read it, which I think isn’t mind-blowing but is very satisfying. Ever since I got bangs, I’ve been more sympathetic to Sally Rooney heroines. It’s a hard life, constantly having to style them, to flick them off of your eyes and then retreat back into them, to play up their quiet drama. I also respect Marianne for her ostensible taste in men (not her actual taste in men, which is abysmal).

You and me both, Marianne. You and me both.